Iran wouldn’t capitulate, Netanyahu told him to pound sand. Putin and Zelensky aren’t doing what he tells them. He’s clueless about how anything actually works believing that the world is literally a playground where the biggest bully runs the show. He’s obviously confused and out of his depth.
Meanwhile, he has fired his national security staff, hired amateur fools to handle diplomacy, a talk show drunk is in charge of the military and a weird cult member runs the nation’s intelligence agencies. Oh, and he’s alienated all of our allies.
“I will end every single international crisis that the current administration has created, including the horrible war with Russia and Ukraine — which would have never happened if I was president — and the war caused by the attack on Israel, which would have never happened if I was president.”
Yeah, that’s working out very well.
Had he not done the following we wouldn’t be here today:
His only foreign policy has been to undo anything his predecessors did and throw his weight around to our allies and adversaries alike. They can all see that he’s out of his depth and that there’s very little to gained by appeasing him. So let the games begin.
President Donald Trump announced Thursday that “changes are coming” to protect farmers from losing workers to his aggressive deportation campaign, but no such policy changes are underway, according to three people with knowledge of the administration’s immigration policies.
Trump’s comments in a social media post sought to soothe industry leaders in the agriculture and hospitality fields, said a White House official, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss the president’s thinking, as many business leaders remain unnerved by the president’s sweeping deportation campaigns.
He also said it in a press avail:
Trump: We can't take farmers and take their people and send them back because they don't have what they are supposed to have… You are supposed to throw them out? You know what happens? They end up hiring the criminals that have come in, murderers pic.twitter.com/PAJ7J5NLYf
Unfortunately for our great farmers and people in the hotel and leisure business:
The official said there will be “no change” in the current approach to deportations, adding that no carveout exists currently for farm, hotel or other migrant workers who are in the country illegally. The administration previously directed U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement workers toavoid raiding farms, the person said, noting that agents have swept food production facilities. Immigration enforcement activity appeared to take place at two farms in California this week, however, asthe administration escalated deportation efforts.
They were chasing them through the fields:
Trump was torn and his people had no idea what he was talking about:
Trump’s public comments and follow-up remarks Thursday reflected a president pulled in two directions, with some business owners pointing out that whole sectors of the economy depend on the labor of people Trump is deporting, while influential MAGA commentators press him to deliver on the aggressive campaign promises that helped lift him to office. As the day wore on, Trump appeared to swing between the competing factions, explaining farmers’ predicament to reporters and saying he thought the White House would “have an order on that soon,” but also posting on social media Thursday afternoon that undocumented immigrants “have stolen American Jobs.”
Tom Homan, Trump’s border czar, said in an interview with The Washington Post that he has not discussed with the president any such changes to protect farm or hotel workers, and that he so far hasn’t been part of creating a policy to protect certain types of workers.
“I have not seen any instruction, anything that changes in the near future,” Homan said.
[…]
Some conservative influencers scrambled to respond, at times pleading with the president to walk back his plans. Stephen Miller, Trump’s deputy chief of staff for policy and an architect of his immigration policy, likewise voiced concerns Thursday about Trump’s comments, according to a person with knowledge of the discussions, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to talk about them publicly.
Several hours later, Trump’s tenor changed as he made a much more blistering post about undocumented immigrants, saying many had entered the country while Joe Biden was president “from some of the most dangerous and dysfunctional Nations on Earth — Many of them Rapists, Murderers, and Terrorists.”
“Those who are here illegally should either self deport using the CBP Home App or, ICE will find you and remove you,” Trump continued in thefollow-up post. “Saving America is not negotiable!”
Miller and Vice President JD Vance — another critic of the notion that immigrants should be allowed to stay in the country without authorization to work low-wage and low-skill jobs — both shared Trump’s second post, but not the first one.
Trump was clearly overwhelmed yesterday. ( He went back and forth on Israel and Iran the same way.) He doesn’t really understand any of the details of his policies so when it gets complicated his method of repeating whatever the last person told him doesn’t work very well. He was all over the place.
This carve out for “nice, hard-working immigrants” was so far out of policy that I’m sure Miller had an aneurysm when he heard Trump make that promise. Unless Trump gets rid of Miller, which I doubt will happen since he’s running the administration, nothing is going to change.
In March 2024, Donald Trumphosted Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán at Mar-a-Lago. After years of receiving praise and pilgrimages from the American right, the autocrat had begun appearing at conservative events in the U.S. Instead of visiting the White House to see then-President Joe Biden, Orbán spoke at the Heritage Foundation — the conservative think tank behind Project 2025 — before heading to Florida. “He’s a non-controversial figure,” Trump told a crowd at Mar-a-Lago upon Orbán’s arrival, “because he says, ‘This is the way it’s going to be,’ and that’s the end of it. Right? He’s the boss.”
Trump loves that.
Orbán’s Hungarian regime has often been characterized as modern authoritarianism or a “hybrid regime of electoral autocracy,” one in which power is accumulated by the ruling party over time through creative quasi-legal means. He focused on transforming institutions by changing election laws, allowing him to create legislative supermajorities while winning a mere plurality of the vote. He packed the courts with loyalists, found friendly oligarchs to buy up independent media and took over universities — or forced them to close down. He hammered on culture war issues of immigration, nationalism and family values.
Observers have seen these methods as the way to perpetuate a soft-authoritarianism, enacted smoothly without the violence that authoritarian governments have traditionally employed to quell opposition and consolidate power. The right-wing intelligentsia has seemed to see this as a kind of respectable fascism — without all the 20th century unpleasantness with which the term is associated.
But people around Trump have certainly scrutinized Orbán’s methods, and they seem to have convinced Trump to import the Hungarian model to the U.S.
I doubt that Donald Trump has studied Orbán’s strategy. He doesn’t study anything. Since his temperament is dictatorial by nature, much of his agenda is naturally autocratic. But people around Trump have certainly scrutinized Orbán’s methods, and they seem to have convinced Trump to import the Hungarian model to the U.S.
Over the past five months, the Trump administration has moved quickly, using “shock and awe” to stun the opposition and enact as much of their agenda as they can, as fast as they can. As Hungarian political scientist Peter Kreko told NPR, “I think Trump went further in two months than Orbán could in 15 years. In the United States, it reminds me of a constitutional coup, where everything happens very rapidly.”
The American right knows that Trump hasn’t got that kind of time, and it’s entirely possible that, once he’s gone, the MAGA coalition will break apart. It is, after all, as much a cult of personality as it is a political movement.
For his part, it appears Trump has no interest in “soft authoritarianism” or merely marginalizing his opposition. We have heard testimony from people in his first term who had to talk him down from shooting protesters and deploying the military in the streets of American cities. This time around, Stephen Miller, the architect of the administration’s draconian deportation plan, has found a way to let Trump be Trump — to use the massive police power at, and sometimes beyond, his disposal to force his opposition to its knees.
Trump has effectively turned the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency into a secret police force that abducts people off the streets and transports them to unknown locales, including at least one foreign black site prison. These kidnappings have been targeted in areas run by the president’s political opponents and rely on openly confrontational tactics designed to produce a backlash in order to justify militarizing American cities. And if that’s not enough to make his point, this weekend Trump is staging a military parade through the streets of Washington.
This week, his hand-picked U.S. Attorney (and former personal lawyer and assistant) in New Jersey indicted a sitting congresswoman for allegedly “impeding law enforcement” when she was attempting to conduct oversight at an immigration detention center. Yesterday, California’s senior senator, Alex Padilla, was tackled, pushed face-first to the ground and handcuffed for attempting to ask Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem a question during a press conference following her chilling declaration that the federal government would not be removing the National Guard and the Marines from Los Angeles.
“We are not going away,” Noem said. “We are staying here to liberate the city from the socialists and the burdensome leadership that this governor and that this mayor have placed on the country and what they have tried to insert into the city.”
Noem’s explanation for the crackdown defied logic. Despite Padilla announcing who he was, and despite the fact that Noem has testified before his Senate committee, she claimed nobody knew who he was and that she thought she was being threatened. Republican members of Congress, as well as right-wing media personalities and members of the administration, quickly took to parroting Noem.
“If this is how this administration responds to a senator with a question,” Padilla said afterwards, “you can only imagine what they’re doing to farmworkers, to cooks, to day laborers.”
What’s happening in Los Angeles — and now, in the rest of the country — is clearly not about protests. It’s not even simply about immigration and mass deportations. That would be horrible enough. Now, members of the opposition — duly elected Democratic politicians — are being brought to heel, arrested and roughed up. The administration has been so effective at flooding the zone, and we are becoming so anesthetized to its threats and violence, that we have seemingly moved on from this fact: The President of the United States publicly called for the arrest of Gov. Gavin Newsom.
Trump calling for the arrest of California Governor Gavin Newsom.
This isn’t Viktor Orbán’s modern autocracy, all clean and shiny. It’s something worse: good old-fashioned 20th-century fascism, as dirty and ugly as it ever was.
Let me translate: The Trump administration’s actions in L.A. are not about public safety, or even about enforcing immigration law. DHS and ICE, at the behest of the White House, are conducting a military-backed political putsch to topple local and California state government.
Kristi Noem is Stephen Miller With hair extensions and tons of filler
And guys with guns, don’t forget.
Kristi Noem: "We are not going away. We are staying here to liberate the city from the socialists and the burdensome leadership that this governor and that this mayor have placed on this country and what they have tried to insert into the city."Sen. Alex Padilla is then forcibly removed!
“This administration is in open rebellion against the Constitution, and the government of the United States, and the states, and the people,” posted ProTip (AKA alt_localgov) on Bluesky, if I wasn’t clear enough above. The United Police States of America are at war with you.
On Saturday, the president will force the military to conduct a taxpayer-funded celebration of his birthday.
This week should put to rest any doubt that America is being marched down a dark path toward authoritarianism.
Meantime, most members of Congress on the Democratic side insist on playing politics as cautiously as ever:
There are a litany of excuses for Democratic caution:
“Immigration is Trump’s best issue.”
“We don’t want to be seen as siding with violent protesters.”
“Trump is trying to distract us from his unpopular tax bill.”
“It’s a trap.”
If the Democratic consultant class had a family crest, it would be emblazoned with the creed: Paralysis by Analysis.
Once again, we are overcomplicating the simple. The president is deploying the military to manufacture a crisis, and his jackbooted thugs are roughing up a U.S. senator for doing his job. That is not a distraction from what matters — it is what matters. One lesson I’ve learned, often painfully, is that ignoring what truly matters out of political expedience is a surefire way to lose.
Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.) has been perhaps the loudest voice. He claims he’s stepping outside Democrat’s “next election” frame to raise money to send directly to younger activist groups on the ground. “We can’t be preparing for the 2026 election. It might not come,” Murphy told Jen Psaki Thursday night [timestamp 4:50]. “All of our focus right now has to be on protecting the democracy, about stopping the corruption …”
That was encouraging. But it looks to me as if he plans to send money to groups I’ve never heard of that are organizing around protecting health care and getting out the student vote for that election he said might not come. Not on direct opposition to our proximate threat.
Democrats focused on defeating Trump’s “morally bankrupt tax bill” are not wrong about the bill, says Pfeiffer. But the fight before us — on our streets and in our neighborhoods — is one we must win.
Even if the polls showed widespread support for Trump’s actions in L.A. [theydon’t], I’d still argue that Democrats must respond aggressively — as Gavin Newsom, Padilla, and others have done. Sometimes you just have to speak out, politics be damned. You meet force with force. Voters — especially cynical ones — can smell calculation and cowardice a mile away. Failing to speak out in moments like these reeks of both.
America’s split-screen moment
One of Trump’s few talents is for putting on an eye-catching show, preferably displaying “you’re fired” male-ish dominance. That’s what Trump’s military penis display is about on Saturday. Of course, to the world’s autocrats he hopes to impress, it will come off as one of Charlie the Tuna’s attempts to prove he’s got good taste. But it will get plenty of news coverage, especially on Trump-friendly cable.
The goal of the “No Kings” protests on Saturday is to provide counterprogramming that is such must-see TV that the major networks will not look away. They must be not just massive in large cities but widespread in small-town America where MAGAs will see their blue and independent neighbors unbowed. Resistance to Trump must come in overwhelming numbers. Not just tomorrow, but each week.
The right’s M.O. for years goes like this:
Find the line. Step over it. No pushback? New line. Lather, rinse, repeat.
We’re seeing that again in Trump 2.0, only the one-way ratchet is moving much faster. Yes, he/they are seeing pushback, and the courts are slowing them down (even if SCOTUS in the end grants them a judicial indulgence). But he/they mean to wear down public resistance.
While the last transgression works its way through the courts to whatever conclusion, they move on to the next step. They stay on offense. We stay on defense.
We also see their doubling down impulse at work in tandem with the ratchet. As we mobilize to stop the last line/Rubicon crossing, they move on to the next escalation. We get outrage fatigue. MAGA gets conditioned to living in a police state.
Tomorrow begins the pushback. This is serious. Please take it seriously. You are the guardrails! And you will have help.
The first U.S. bishop appointed by Pope Leo XIV—a refugee himself—is mobilizing priests to accompany migrants at immigration court on June 20.
“We don’t want this on our property,” Al Lopez, pastor of Downey Memorial Church, told the masked and armed men. The alleged ICE agents appeared in the church parking lot southeast of downtown Los Angeles on Wednesday (Spectrum News, note the boldface, mine):
The pastor of Downey Memorial Church Al Lopez said at least five men dressed in plain clothes with faces covered and bullet-proof vests swarmed a man in the parking lot. The pastor said he came out of his office and tried to find out what was happening when one agent drew a weapon and refused to identify themselves.
It is unclear if the agents had a warrant signed by a judge.
“We said we don’t want this on our property. This gentleman just shouted, ‘the whole country is our property,’” Lopez said. “When someone tells that to you, with a weapon in their hands, that was a very clear message. As a man of faith, that is not allowed, and that is not correct and that goes against everything that our country stands for.”
Overall, the White House announced it had arrested 330 undocumented immigrants since the ICE enforcement began last Friday. According to the Trump administration, 115 of those detained had a criminal history, but an overwhelming majority of them did not.
Connor Simon’s quote at the top remains the most trenchant observation I’ve heard about the upside-down nature of the expanding Trump-Miller-Noem police state.
The FBI arrested a California man early Thursday morning for allegedly handing out police-style face masks to a crowd of Los Angeles protesters earlier in the week.
Alejandro Theodoro Orellana is accused of conspiracy to commit civil disorder, U.S. Attorney Bill Essayli announced on X.
“We are moving quickly to identify and arrest those involved in organizing and/or supporting civil disorder in Los Angeles.” Essayli wrote.
The US Attorney is charging Alejandro Theodoro Orellana with conspiracy to commit civil disorder for handing out face mask at protest. The FBI did an early morning arrest at his home using flash bang grenades. www.independent.co.uk/news/world/a…
Orellana, who is 29, according to public records, has not yet appeared in federal court or jail records, and it is unclear if he has legal representation or how he plans to plead to the allegations.
A neighbor told KTLA that agents arrived in the early morning and arrested Orellana at his home, after deploying flash bang grenades and telling residents to stay indoors. They said they hadn’t heard anything negative about the 29-year-old before the arrest.
“No, nothing of the sort. Nothing at all. No one in this block have I heard any, you know, bad news from or any gossip,” the resident said.
You read that right: flashbang grenades deployed for a simple arrest. But these aren’t simple arrests, as pastor Lopez learned firsthand. They are messages to civilians that Trump-Miller-Noem’s shock troops are on the march and on your street. Comply or else.
The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) has rescinded the exemptions for certain consumer-style grenades (e.g., flashbang grenades, smoke grenades) as they have been determined by ATF to pose a risk to public safety.
So Trump’s shock troops have Joe Biden to thank for their not facing civilians armed with such devices.
Jon Stewart pointedly reminded Americans before the November election that the Trump pogrom won’t stop with Latinos and undocumented immigrants. He didn’t have to quote “First they came…”
Trump: "Russia fought with us in WWII and everybody hates them. And Germany and Japan, they're fine — some day somebody will explain that…Everybody hates Russia and they love Germany and Japan…It's a strange world."
It’s not hard to explain. Maybe someone should do that.
I think he sincerely believes this because he literally knows nothing about American history and seems to be very impressed with something he heard or watched recently that’s given him some very warped ideas about World War II. Maybe Melania should put on a History Channel documentary about the Cold War. He seems not to have heard of it.
I wouldn’t think this was hugely relevant — we know he’s stupid — except that he’s justifying completely re-ordering U.S alliances and the world economy by not only creating an alternate reality in the present, he’s now rewriting the past.
This is what happens when a narcissistic megalomaniac realizes that nothing and no one can ever hold him accountable for anything. He’s creating the world anew.
This is incoherent but I guess what he’s saying is that his rich buddies and farmers in red states are complaining about him deporting all their workers and so he’s now promising that they won’t bother those workers just the “bad” ones. But in the same breath he seems to be saying that the people “applying for the jobs” are bad ones they want to deport because they are criminals.
In the old days a president who was cracking down on immigration would at least have paid lip service to the illegality of hiring undocumented labor but not this one. People with money are immune from the rule of law — just like he is.
Meanwhile, Stephen Miller is telling ICE to arrest every person that looks like they might be foreign and deport them before the courts can do anything about it. So, I don’t know how this goes. I suspect that he’s going to issue an order to leave the strawberry pickers and the maids and gardeners alone (he employs a bunch of them himself) and just go after the others. But then the construction industry will complain and the factory owners will complain and the restaurant owners will complain. BECAUSE THEY ARE ALL DEPENDENT ON IMMIGRANT LABOR AND HAVE BEEN FOR DECADES!!!!
Everyone understood this tacit agreement that we have undocumented workers supporting our economy, with all the downsides and the upsides low wage pressure vs their payment of taxes and contributions to Medicare and Social Security benefiting the system (but not them) — but completely necessary to keep our country thriving. It’s always been push-pull and it rises in salience depending on the political atmosphere and the state of the economy.
This has been the way it is in America as long as I can remember. Trump however is using this as part of his plan to wreak vengeance on his political enemies and break blue America. I think he believes that the rest of us are too soft to really resist. I think it’s a tipping point and we’re now going to see if he is right.
By the way, there will no help from Republicans. It is up to us.
House Speaker Mike Johnson calls for the Senate to "censure" Alex Padilla after he was restrained and handcuffed by FBI agents at Kristi Noem's presser, adding that it is "wildly inappropriate behavior."So it looks like Republicans want to escalate this!
The new Q-Poll will come as a surprise if you’ve been watching the Mainstream Media’s take on current events. They seem to believe that Trump is winning the battle for public opinion. Maybe not so much:
As the Senate debates the GOP tax and spending bill titled One Big Beautiful Bill Act and President Donald Trump pushes for a July 4 deadline to sign it, voters 53 – 27 percent oppose the legislation, with 20 percent not offering an opinion, according to a Quinnipiac (KWIN-uh-pea-ack) University national poll of registered voters released today.
Republicans 67 – 10 percent support the bill, with 22 percent not offering an opinion.
Democrats 89 – 2 percent oppose the bill, with 10 percent not offering an opinion.
Independents 57 – 20 percent oppose the bill, with 23 percent not offering an opinion.
Nearly half of voters (47 percent) think federal funding for Medicaid should increase, 40 percent think it should stay about the same, and 10 percent think federal funding for Medicaid should decrease.
That 67 percent of Republicans will probably rise when the alleged Republican resistors in the Senate fold as they almost certainly will. That 10% represents the last dregs of “fiscal conservatives” in the MAGA party and they are all a bunch of cowards in the end.
But Trump is in trouble with the public although I’m not sure that translates into anything material. He doesn’t care about that. He does what he wants.
His overall approval rating stands at 38%. And he’s underwater on every issue:
Voters were asked about Trump’s handling of seven issues…
immigration issues: 43 percent approve, 54 percent disapprove, with 3 percent not offering an opinion;
deportations: 40 percent approve, 56 percent disapprove, with 4 percent not offering an opinion;
the economy: 40 percent approve, 56 percent disapprove, with 4 percent not offering an opinion;
trade: 38 percent approve, 57 percent disapprove, with 6 percent not offering an opinion;
universities: 37 percent approve, 54 percent disapprove, with 9 percent not offering an opinion;
the Israel – Hamas conflict: 35 percent approve, 52 percent disapprove, with 13 percent not offering an opinion;
the Russia – Ukraine war: 34 percent approve, 57 percent disapprove, with 10 percent not offering an opinion.
I know, I know. Why so high, you ask? Well, I’ll just issue my usual reminder: when FDR won his landslide victory in 1932 at the depth of the great depression, 38% voted for Herbert Hoover. It will never go lower than that.
Kristi Noem: "We are not going away. We are staying here to liberate the city from the socialists and the burdensome leadership that this governor and that this mayor have placed on this country and what they have tried to insert into the city."Sen. Alex Padilla is then forcibly removed!
