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South Park won an Emmy and used the moment to remind Trump of the one award he’s never been able to win. Canada’s revenge tariffs are deliberately targeting red states, and in Iowa, it’s working. Trump wants to rename New Mexico “New America.” And Trump has reportedly been sticking the Secret Service with the bill for the hot dogs he loves to hand out at his own golf club.
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South Park took home its fifth Emmy on Sunday night, winning Outstanding Animated Program for the first time since 2013, and immediately used the moment to torment Trump.
The show won for “Sermon on the Mount,” the debut of a season built almost entirely around a caricature of the president, including scenes of Trump in bed with Satan. To celebrate, the show’s official accounts posted a graphic of Trump, pants down, clutching the very Emmy he’s spent years complaining he was robbed of.
The 80-year-old former reality star has never won an Emmy, and he can’t let it go. “I got screwed out of an Emmy!” he once declared, insisting the process is “all politics” and that The Apprentice should have won “many times over.” Trey Parker and Matt Stone know exactly which button they’re pushing, and they pushed it in front of the entire industry.
Trump started a trade war with Canada. Canada figured out how to make Republicans pay for it.
Ontario Premier Doug Ford has laid out a strategy of aiming retaliatory tariffs squarely at states full of Trump voters. In a letter to Prime Minister Mark Carney, Ford named Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Iowa, Missouri, Montana, Texas, and Wisconsin as targets precisely because they’re “politically significant states to the current administration’s base of support.” The idea is simple: make the pain of Trump’s trade war land on the voters most responsible for it, and let them take it up with their politicians.
In Iowa, it’s already working. A new Emerson College poll found seven in 10 Iowa voters are worried about Canada’s retaliatory tariffs, and 58 percent oppose the U.S. slapping tariffs on Canadian goods in the first place. Canada’s largest newspaper, the Globe and Mail, said the economic case for the tariffs was “zilch, nada, zero,” and argued there was a political case for reminding American voters exactly who started this.
It’s not just tariffs souring red-state Trump voters on the president. His insistence on renaming Lake Ontario “Lake America” isn’t landing either.
“I don’t think the lake’s name should be changed because it’s history,” one New York liquidation-store owner who voted for Trump in 2024 told the Washington Post. “And I don’t like changing history.”
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435 House seats are up for election in November, and the president is spending his weekend renaming a state that isn’t asking to be renamed.
On Sunday, Trump suggested rechristening New Mexico as “New America,” calling it “one of the great vote cheating states of all time” and pairing the post with an AI-generated video of himself changing a roadside billboard and dancing. Another post showed a map of New Mexico with “Mexico” crossed out and swapped for “America.” It was, apparently, prompted by nothing.
It’s the latest chapter in his second-term hobby of renaming anything that shares a name with another country. He’s already ordered the Gulf of Mexico rebranded the “Gulf of America,” and last month declared Lake Ontario would become “Lake America” during a standoff with Canada.
A president can rename a body of water by executive fiat, but he has no authority to rename a state. That takes the state and Congress, and New Mexico’s governorship and all five of its congressional seats are held by Democrats.
They were not amused. Congresswoman Melanie Stansbury asked why the president is making memes and harassing her constituents “while inflation is through the roof, gas prices are sky high, people cannot afford food, healthcare, and housing,” and while he’s dragged the country into an illegal war. Senator Ben Ray Luján put it more simply: it’s New Mexico, always has been, always will be.
The renaming post was one of more than 60 on Sunday, a flood that included Trump as Hulk Hogan, Trump hosting George Washington in the Oval Office, and Trump taunting Canada’s prime minister as “governor.” Even Republican Senator Mike Lee compared it all to a band playing as the ship goes down.
We close with a grift so small and so strange it could only belong to this president.
Trump, according to a new Forbes report, is obsessed with the hot dogs sold at a snack shack by the 11th tee at his golf club outside Washington.
“He has this weird, very odd pride about how good the hot dogs are,” a former club employee said, describing how Trump orders the chef to hand one to everyone around him, his Secret Service detail included.
Generous, until you learn who pays. Forbes senior editor Dan Alexander reported that after Trump plays host, the club turns around and bills the Secret Service for the hot dogs.
The agents guarding the president with their lives get treated to a wiener, and taxpayers get the tab. Forbes wrote that on Trump’s personal scale of human achievement, the hot dogs rank somewhere between the discovery of gold and the construction of Trump Tower. The generosity, it turns out, is somebody else’s money, which is the through-line of this entire administration.
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—Ryan Rose, Founder, AlterNet America
