Sitting here in Gilead, shaking my head and eyeing my shillelagh, where they’ve somehow managed to staple children’s healthcare to a voting bill like they’re decorating a cake with a staple gun.
Oh, my darlings. My loves. Come sit down.
I’ve been doing this long enough to know when they’re throwing things at the wall just to see what sticks, and I’ve been doing it long enough to know that sometimes “throwing things at the wall” means throwing kids at the wall. And that’s what we’ve got today.
Don Trumpleone, of the Metamucillini Crime Family has announced he will refuse to sign any legislation into law until Congress passes the SAVE America Act. All of it. Every bill. Held hostage. Government functions, foreign policy, disaster relief, the whole carnival, locked up until he gets his voter suppression bill. That’s the main event, and we covered it next door where 🔥EPISODE 10: THE DON MAKES AN OFFER 🔥 Unfugginbelievable does the forensic work, so go read that if you haven’t.
But then — and this is where Auntie puts down her tea and picks up her shillelagh — he added to his list of demands a ban on transgender women in sports and an end to gender-affirming care for children. Stapled right onto the voting bill. No connection. No logic. Just cruelty used as mortar to hold the bricks together.
Now. The experts on the Hill will tell you this is strategy — that he’s using trans kids as a bargaining chip because culture war provisions poll well with the base and might squeeze a few more Republican senators into line. That’s probably true. But I want to say something else underneath that, because the strategy analysis, as correct as it is, can make you forget that there are real children attached to this.
There are kids right now — your neighbors’ kids, your cousins’ kids, kids in your town — who are watching adults debate whether they deserve medical care. Whether they get to exist on terms they can live with. And this president has decided that those kids are useful. Not as people. As pressure. As leverage.
That’s not politics, my loves. That’s cruelty with a bow on it, and I will not normalize it by treating it as purely tactical.
Here is what I need you to hold onto: this maneuver is also a tell. You don’t staple a winning hand to a losing one unless you need the weight. The SAVE America Act is stalled in the Senate. Thune has said out loud there aren’t the votes. So Trump is in there throwing everything — trans kids, mail-in ballots, sports bans, the works — hoping something creates enough pressure that somebody flinches. That’s not strength. That’s a man rattling a cage because he doesn’t have the key.
The trans community has survived every single wave of this. They have been fighting longer and harder than most people realize, with more grace than anyone should have to muster. They are not a bargaining chip. They are people. Full stop.
And you — yes, you, reading this — you don’t get to be tired yet. I know you are. I’m tired too, my love. But tired is not the same as done, and done is not on the table. We are not done.
You know what you call a man who holds the whole government hostage so he can suppress votes and hurt kids at the same time? Congress has a few names for him. History has a few more. Auntie’s got one that’s not printable but deeply accurate.
So here’s what we do: we name it, we document it, we protect who we can protect, we vote every time we get the chance — with whatever documents they haven’t managed to take from us yet — and we do not let them make us feel like this is normal.
Because it isn’t, you soggy little crumpets. It isn’t normal and it isn’t inevitable and it isn’t the end.
May every senator who votes for this bill find their voter registration mysteriously flagged for review, their birth certificate trapped under a stack of forms, and their name inexplicably left off the rolls — just long enough to understand what they built.
Tits up, elbows out, babies. Auntie’s got the shillelagh and she’s not afraid to use it.
**Auntie Fah is broadcastin’ live, independent, and entirely reader-supported from somewhere in Gilead with a strong cup of tea and a list. Everything she says is fact-checked, even the parts that sound like she made them up — she didn’t. If you want to keep the lights on and the kettle hot, buy us a cuppa at buymeacoffee.com/unfugginbelievable. Stay ungovernable. 💙
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