While Donald Trump spent last night hosting a bargain-bin Kennedy Center ceremony for himself, complete with gold-paint monologues and Kiss cosplay, the rest of the country was busy doing something far less glamorous: falling apart. China just posted a trillion-dollar trade surplus because of Trump’s tariffs, public health is collapsing under anti-science autocracy, layoffs are surging past Great Recession levels, and Trump is preparing a $12B farm bailout to fix the crisis he personally created.

In other words, the morning coffee may be hot, but the country’s on an open flame.

We dive into the economic sabotage, the censorship-driven public health disaster, the surreal Kennedy Center spectacle, Trump’s ongoing push to turn the U.S. into a vassal state, and the trillion-dollar warning siren coming out of Beijing. Plenty of snark, plenty of receipts, and a preview of the major essay I’m finishing about how autocracy hollows a nation from the inside out.