DAME Magazine

11/12/2025

Donald Trump’s influence has reshaped far more than American politics — it has warped the country’s core values, our shared reality, and even the way power itself is understood. But with Trump aging and increasingly detached from his own movement, Republicans are quietly preparing for what comes next.

In a new piece, Max Burns examines the man poised to inherit MAGA: JD Vance.

Once a self-styled truth-teller about the dangers of Trumpism, Vance has reinvented himself as its future — backed by Silicon Valley billionaires, anti-democracy ideologues, and the emerging “New Right.”

This is a story about power, ideology, and the machinery being built behind the scenes.

Read the piece in the first link in comments.

02/12/2025

The Trump administration says its military strikes on Venezuela are targeting “narcotraffickers", but the people being killed are likely fishermen. Meanwhile, Trump pardoned a former Honduran president convicted of trafficking 400 tons of co***ne into the U.S.

So what’s really going on?

This looks less like a drug war and more like a return to a familiar U.S. strategy: using military force and political pressure to control Latin America.

From the Roosevelt Corollary in the early 1900s to Cold War coups backed by the CIA, the U.S. has a long history of intervening in the region whenever it claims a country is engaged in “wrongdoing.”

Trump’s actions fit that pattern — and Venezuelan civilians are paying the price.

The polycrisis that is the Trump administration can be difficult to fully keep track of: As Steve Bannon once said, the goal is to “flood the zone with sh*t” and paralyze us from being able to respond to everything. But buried amid the PR exercises and the deliberately offensive speeches are ver...

13/11/2025

There’s a lot of debate right now about Trump’s health, focus, and overall capacity — but the conversation we aren’t having is just as important: What happens to presidential power when the president himself fades into the background?

We're looking at the growing influence of Trump’s inner circle — people like Stephen Miller, J.D. Vance, Russell Vought, and others who are quietly guiding major decisions and shaping the direction of the White House. These are not elected officials, and they’re not accountable to the public, yet they’re increasingly the ones driving policy, messaging, and long-term strategy.

History shows that when a leader weakens, power doesn’t disappear — it moves. And too often, it moves into the hands of ideologues and loyalists operating out of the spotlight.

Read the rest here.

Donald Trump has never been a leader who is particularly concerned with details or even specific issues day-to-day. In 2016, he allegedly offered control of both domestic and foreign policy to former GOP Ohio governor John Kasich if he would accept the nomination of VP. What would Trump’s job have...

21/10/2025

More than just erasing legal protections or rolling back laws, the administration is trying to revive the white nationalism that was baked into the Jim Crow worldview.

Republicans and Trumpers haven’t been subtle about their attacks on the Civil Rights Movement and its legacies. One of the talking points of the late Charlie Kirk was that the 1964 Civil Rights Act had been a mistake. But Kirk, a notorious racist, was just one person among many hoping to tear down...

16/10/2025

The president has declared war on Chicago, sending in masked ICE agents and National Guard troops to incite violence, hoping protestors will take the bait. Under Pritzker and Mayor Johnson's leadership, Chicagoans know just what to do.

“I encourage them to do exactly what we’re doing in Illinois,” Pritzker told DAME. “We’re standing up, we’re speaking out, and we are totally unafraid to do so. This is a situation that has no parallel in my lifetime and we must hold the administration accountable in every way we can.”

07/10/2025

What does reproductive freedom actually look like? For millions, it looks like a pill that arrives in the mail.

While the Trump administration questions its safety, mifepristone has already changed the conversation around reproductive rights forever. How one medication rewrote the rules on bodily autonomy—and why there's no going back.

Twenty-five years ago, as September 2000 drew to a close, the FDA made a controversial announcement: A French medication that had been developed in the 1980s, then called RU-486 but now more commonly known as mifepristone, would finally be legally available in the U.S. Depending on your point of vie...

23/09/2025

Entropy is a scientific concept that measures the probability of disorder.

When applied to the history of dictatorial regimes, it can often reveal that eventually autocrats overplay their hand to their detriment — and our relief.

“And now we must act in complete unity, strongly against anyone who is trying to shut down our strength, the unity of our nation!” The crowd of thousands gathered, against the backdrop of a grey sky in late December, to listen to their president’s declaration. Though they had heard all of this...

16/09/2025

Making America “healthy again” with wellness wearables could be seen as less about encouraging robust research and more about increased governmental control of individual bodies, with potentially devastating consequences.

It’s six a.m., and the birds are chirping as sun streams through the slatted blinds of your bedroom window. An alarm sounds. You roll to your side, reach to hit snooze — but not before you consider your performance in bed the night before. No, not that kind of performance. You’re thinking abou...

09/09/2025

The Double Standard Is Glaring

When Biden stumbled over words, the media called it a "national crisis." When Hillary Clinton had pneumonia for 3 days, it was a "major campaign moment" that could "upend the race."

But when Trump appears with bruised hands, swollen ankles, and increasingly rare public appearances? Crickets from the press.

Our latest media column exposes the blatant media hypocrisy around presidential health coverage. The same outlets that scrutinized every Biden slip are now dismissing concerns about Trump as "conspiracy theories."

Why the double standard? And what does this tell us about how power and accountability really work in America?

There is something physically wrong with President Donald Trump. He walks haltingly, speaks incoherently, forgets names and places and mixes up dates and statistics, making up numbers where none exist. Lately, Trump’s public appearances have become increasingly rare: Whereas now he is only availab...

28/08/2025

In addition to Covid prevention, medical researchers were this close to discovering ways mRNAs could treat various cancers, HIV, and sickle cell anemia.

But RFK Jr. and the Trump administration are doing everything they can to halt their efforts.

Read the rest at the link in comments.

26/08/2025

In the fun and s*xy second installation of Ethan Coen and Tricia Cooke’s “lesbian B-movie" trilogy, the filmmakers subvert pulpy noir tropes to reveal the narrative convention's reliance on Big D Energy.

Toward the end of the Honey Don’t — the new film by Ethan Coen and Tricia Cooke — the title character Honey O’Donahue (Margaret Qualley) is sitting at a stoplight in Bakersfield, California, in her battered, boat-size vintage turquoise Chevrolet convertible, when a woman (Lera Abova) pulls u...

21/08/2025

The Right's attempts to diminish the truth of the horrors of slavery in the U.S. and Trump's most recent attempts to control the Smithsonian make clear their authoritarian goals.

There is a fundamental choice between democratic truth-telling and fascist mythology in American politics.

Last week, the White House sent this "Letter to the Smithsonian," their latest missive addressed to one of our cultural institutions with their demands to whitewash history. It is likely not going to be Trump’s final word on trying to promote a shiny, happy, mythological vision of our past, in thi...