Here's what happened this week.— While the FAA was collapsing, the Transportation Secretary was filming a reality show. Former B-lister reality TV and Fox star Sean Duffy revealed Friday on Fox & Friends — the same way he announces most things — that he and his wife, Fox host Rachel Campos-Duffy, spent seven months shooting a road-trip reality program called The Great American Road Trip while he was, in theory, running the Department of Transportation. The corporate sponsors are a Cabinet ethics nightmare laid out in a press kit: Boeing, Toyota, Shell, Google, Comcast, and United Airlines, meaning the airlines and defense contractors he’s supposed to regulate were paying him to bring their cameras on family vacations. This is the same Sean Duffy who presided over historic air traffic controller shortages and a government shutdown that forced 13,000 controllers to work without pay, with 10-percent flight reductions at the country’s 40 busiest airports. People nearly died this winter because his agency couldn’t keep towers staffed while he spent more than half his Cabinet tenure shooting infomercials for the industries he’s supposed to be regulating. In any functioning government, this would be a forced resignation by Monday morning. In Trump’s America, it’s a Friday Fox segment with the kids.— Donald Trump just openly threatened to nuke Iran on national television. Asked Thursday whether the ceasefire with Tehran still held, our stable genius president told reporters that, without one, you’d just see “one big glow coming out of Iran.” That isn’t a slip: that’s a sitting U.S. president casually musing about committing a massive war crime involving nuclear weapons. The National Iranian-American Council asked the obvious follow-up: whether this man is mentally fit to make decisions affecting millions of lives. Meanwhile, a confidential CIA assessment delivered to the White House this week concludes that Iran can outlast Trump’s Hormuz blockade for 90 to 120 days at a minimum, has retained roughly 70 percent of its prewar missile inventory, and has reopened almost all of its underground weapons storage. Iranian retaliatory strikes have damaged or destroyed at least 228 structures at U.S. military sites across the Middle East, far more than Trump or Pete Hegseth have publicly admitted. And as ex-Undersecretary Richard Stengel pointed out on MS NOW, the bombshell wasn’t the report itself but the fact that it blindsided Trump’s own White House. Forty-five years of Reaganomics and grievance politics have produced a Republican Party that confuses chest-thumping with strategy. Now its Dear Leader is hurtling toward an oil-crisis cliff at the end of the month with one hand on a nuclear threat button he doesn’t even begin to understand and the other on a phone tweeting about butterflies falling beautifully into the sea. Vladimir Putin, watching Trump rattle nuclear threats while his own CIA reports the war is already lost, must be sleeping like a baby.— GOP-dominated courts have decided that “voting” is now optional. This is the start of the fascist/Republican takeover of America. On Friday, the Virginia Supreme Court ruled 4-3 to throw out a voter-approved congressional redistricting referendum on procedural grounds after voters had already passed the thing. Trump celebrated. Democracy Docket called it a terrifying moment: a court canceling an election after the fact. Republican-led states like Texas, Florida, Missouri, North Carolina, Ohio, and Tennessee now are perfectly free — just like during Jim Crow — to gerrymander aggressively at Trump’s personal request, but when Virginia’s voters tried to fight back, four state justices invented a paperwork problem to stop them. Two of those four are up for reappointment by the legislature within two years. Religious-violence scholar Thomas Lecaque didn’t mince words: he warned this trajectory could lead us to a second civil war. And in Tennessee, GOP Gov. Bill Lee just signed a map dismantling the state’s only majority-Black congressional district, prompting the NAACP to file an emergency petition calling it a direct attack on democracy. The new rule of American politics, based on the cruel, racist politics of six corrupt members of the Supreme Court is now simple: Republicans are free to do whatever they want, and Democrats are free to do whatever Republicans permit. Having gutted the middle class, the GOP is unable to win on policy so they’ve stopped pretending to try.— Sam Alito’s voting-rights ruling was based on data Pam Bondi’s DOJ apparently cooked. When the Supreme Court gutted Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act in Louisiana v. Callais last week, Justice Alito assured America that Black voter turnout had exceeded white turnout in two of the five most recent presidential elections, both nationally and in Louisiana. This was proof, he claimed, that the discrimination the VRA was designed to fight had finally evaporated.