The Pentagon’s acquisition system is being overhauled into a “Warfighting Acquisition System,” turbocharging weapons production, slashing bureaucracy, and empowering officials to deliver arms at “wartime speed.” Portfolio Acquisition Executives now wield sweeping authority, startups are courted like prom queens, and the defense industrial base is being rebranded as Silicon Valley with missiles.
So much for the “peace president”—Trump’s arsenal of freedom looks more like an IPO for war, where venture capital meets missile launchers and bureaucrats cosplay as battlefield commanders.
Hollywood production has been of particular interest to the president since he took office for his second term. In January, Trump named actors Jon Voight, Sylvester Stallone, and Mel Gibson as “special ambassadors” to Hollywood in order to crack what was apparently wrong with the business. According to Deadline, Voight has taken the title seriously, and recently met with studios and artistic guilds to better understand the issues plaguing production. The potential of a national incentive to bring more production back to the U.S. is a rare bipartisan issue in the industry, at least on the surface; since the wildfires that swept the Los Angeles area in early 2025, many in the film business have rallied the California and national government to incentive studios to shoot local.
Trump’s Hollywood Ambassadors: a dream team of cinematic patriotism, expertly trained in the fine art of Pentagon-approved storytelling. Each has worked closely with the Defense Department’s Entertainment Media Office, ensuring that military narratives get just the right heroic glow. Now, under Trump’s watchful eye, they’re promoted from script advisors to official cultural envoys—because nothing says diplomacy quite like a blockbuster-ready version of history. If reality ever gets messy, don’t worry—they’ve got years of experience cleaning up inconvenient details. /s
Tariffs are advertised in the name of helping American workers, but what do you know? They turn out to favor the powerful and politically connected. That’s the main message of President Trump’s decision to exempt smartphones and assorted electronic goods from his most onerous tariffs.
At the time Apple and Cook were applying a charm offensive to persuade then-President Trump to remove tariffs on certain components that came from China. Cook asked Trump if he could meet him in person to make Apple’s case, a gesture the former president found “impressive,” he told Bloomberg. Trump was particularly pleased at the time that Cook reached out, especially considering his acrimonious relationship with other tech CEOs.
Although the trade deal affects billions of dollars worth of goods, it’s a particular victory for Apple CEO Tim Cook, who has personally worked to keep communication open with the Trump administration. Cook’s charm offensive culminated last month when he gave Trump a tour of a Mac Pro assembly plant in Texas. That computer is assembled in the United States, and Apple was granted tariff waivers for several of its components.
One group noted who would actually complain: “Someone who depends on Social Security to buy groceries. Someone who depends on Social Security to pay rent. Someone who depends on Social Security to survive.”
The senior Trump allies held talks with Ukrainian opposition leader Yulia Tymoshenko, a remorselessly ambitious former prime minister, and senior members of the party of Petro Poroshenko, Zelenskyy’s immediate predecessor as president, according to three Ukrainian parliamentarians and a U.S. Republican foreign policy expert.
President-elect Donald J. Trump on Tuesday tapped Linda McMahon, a former professional wrestling executive who ran the Small Business Administration for much of his first term, to lead the Education Department, an agency he has routinely singled out for elimination in his upcoming term.
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In part because of her recent policy role and her experience as the small business administrator, Ms. McMahon had been discussed as a possible pick to lead the Commerce Department until the role was officially offered to Howard Lutnick, a Wall Street executive and a chairman of the Trump transition team, earlier in the day.
Ms. McMahon will be in charge of overseeing what is widely expected to be a thorough and determined dismantling of the department’s core functions, as Mr. Trump and many of those in his orbit have questioned the agency’s purpose and disparaged its work as overregulating schools on political and ideological terms.
Other than a brief appointment in 2009 to the Connecticut State Board of Education, where she served for just over a year, Ms. McMahon has no experience in overseeing education policy. She would assume the role at a time when school districts across the country are facing budget shortfalls, many students are not making up ground lost during the pandemic in reading and math, and many colleges and universities are shrinking and closing amid a larger loss of faith in the value of higher education.
But the America First Policy Institute has set out a more immediate list of changes it says could be achieved through vastly changing the department’s priorities. Those include stopping schools from “promoting inaccurate and unpatriotic concepts” about American history surrounding institutionalized racism, and expanding “school choice” programs that direct more public funds to parents to spend on home-schooling, online classes or at private and religious schools.
On October 14, China’s National Computer Virus Emergency Response Center revealed that the U.S. has established seven monitoring stations across the country to intercept data transmitted through undersea cables in both the Atlantic and Pacific.
When the trade war just started, Trump equated de-Sinicization with de-risking. However, the China’s latest sanction against US military companies will prove that after de-Sinicization, the only thing left for the US Air Force will be risk.
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Moving forward, we may observe further changes in the reliability of F-35s delivered after October 2020. However, as long as the Pentagon doesn’t replace the ejection seats with American-made ones, at least U.S. pilots should still be able to survive.
Significantly, the administration is justifying the rule on national security grounds. As Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo said, “Cars today have cameras, microphones, GPS tracking, and other technologies connected to the internet. It doesn’t take much imagination to understand how a foreign adversary with access to this information could pose a serious risk to both our national security and the privacy of U.S. citizens.”
All 25 car brands we researched earned our *Privacy Not Included warning label — making cars the official worst category of products for privacy that we have ever reviewed.
Ms. Cat’s Chronicles 
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