A trip to the Sistine Chapel is near the top of the bucket list for most Americans making their first trip to Rome. Few visitors are able to do so in such grand style as JD Vance, who turned up at the Vatican on Saturday aboard a traffic-clogging motorcade of 40 black 4x4s.
Vance — a self-styled “baby Catholic” who was baptised in a private chapel in Cincinnati in 2019 — had talks with Pietro Parolin, the secretary of state, and other top officials from the Holy See.
He was accompanied to the Vatican by his wife, Usha, and their three young children. The second family was then given a private tour of the Sistine Chapel.
During the afternoon, they went on to visit the botanical garden in the Trastevere district, in the west of the city. Vance was dressed casually and wore a cap, as he strolled with his two sons, Ewan, seven, and Vivek, five. Ewan chose to sport gladiator armour to mark the occasion.
Later Usha enjoyed an evening visit to the Colosseum — which her husband had also been scheduled to attend before a last-minute change of plan — where she was given a personal tour of the arena, famous for its gladiatorial combats and naval battles, by Alfonsina Russo, the director.
Lesser mortals unlucky enough to have booked their own visit had to make do with a refund — but not all of them had got the message. There were chaotic scenes as some would-be visitors tried to open the gates surrounding the building, while others climbed over the fences, ticket in hand, trying to force their way in. Some chanted “shame” or anti-American slogans when they learnt the reason for the closure, Italian media reported.
Among the disappointed was Stephen Fishler, 58, a businessman from New York who arrived with his family in good time for his 6pm slot, but was turned away without explanation. “What does he think he is, special?” complained Fishler, himself a Trump voter. “JD should have waited until the Americans who had tickets had their visit and then gone in.” His wife, Anila, tried to calm him down and blamed the Italians.
Lol. Of course.
He really does think of himself as royalty:
The visits to Rome’s tourist spots came on the second day of a mixture of vacation and working trip that has inevitably been dubbed Vance’s “Roman Holiday” in a nod to Audrey Hepburn and Gregory Peck’s classic 1953 film. His arrival has meant huge extra security measures — including snipers, no-fly zones and road closures — adding to the disruption in a city packed with large crowds of tourists for the Easter holidays and pilgrims visiting the Vatican for what is a jubilee year.
Audrey Hepburn ran around Rome incognito on her Roman holiday. That was the whole story. JD wore his family like a Hermes bag and traipsed all over the city like he was a conquering hero. Everything he does is creepy.
He’s so mad. He’s also starting to make up words. “Tapping me along?” “Getting Yippy?” Not normal… [Ooops, I stand corrected. “yippy” is apparently a golf term.]
If President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia drafted a shopping list of what he wanted from Washington, it would be hard to beat what he was offered in the first 100 days of President Trump’s new term.
Pressure on Ukraine to surrender territory to Russia? Check.
The promise of sanctions relief? Check.
Absolution from invading Ukraine? Check.
Indeed, as Mr. Trump met with President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine on the sidelines of the funeral of Pope Francis on Saturday, the president’s vision for peace appeared notably one-sided, letting Russia keep the regions it had taken by force in violation of international law while forbidding Ukraine from ever joining NATO.
But that is not all that Mr. Putin has gotten out of Mr. Trump’s return to power. Intentionally or not, many of the president’s actions on other fronts also suit Moscow’s interests, including the rifts he has opened with America’s traditional allies and the changes he has made to the U.S. government itself.
Mr. Trump has been tearing down American institutions that have long aggravated Moscow, such as Voice of America and the National Endowment for Democracy. He has been disarming the nation in its netherworld battle against Russia by temporarily halting cyberoffensive operations and curbing programs to combat Russian disinformation, election interference, sanctions violations and war crimes.
He spared Russia from the tariffs that he is imposing on imports from nearly every other nation, arguing that it was already under sanctions. Yet he still applied the tariff on Ukraine, the other party he is negotiating with. And in a reversal from his first term, Politico reported that Mr. Trump’s team is reportedly discussing whether to lift sanctions on Russia’s Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline to Europe, a project he has repeatedly condemned.
I doubt he liked this very much either:
“Trump has played right into Putin’s hands. It’s hard to see how Trump would have acted any differently if he were a Russian asset than how he has acted in the first 100 days of his second term.”— Ivo Dalder
Everything Baker said is true. Trump’s confidence that all he had to do was crook his finger and Ukraine would surrender and Putin would play along hasn’t worked out. He’s flailing.
I suppose what he meant was that the cancer and Alzheimer’s research hasn’t cured the diseases? So he’s cutting it altogether? That’s insane.
I haven’t seen polling on this (maybe I missed it) but I would really like to see it. And I’d really like the Democrats to make a huge, huge deal out of it. I know there’s a lot to choose from but this is one of the most heinous actions he’s taken and even MAGA voters may not think it’s what they voted for.
A former landlady lived alone nextdoor. A sweet old lady, she rarely had visitors. Over the years she developed memory issues.
I’d regularly stop by after work to visit. I’d ask what Meals on Wheels brought her for lunch. She’d pause, smile, and say, “Oh … something.” She began repeating how someone or other had stolen her steak knives.
Time interviewed our autocrat-in-chief on April 22. Donald Trump seems to be having memory issues:
Your trade adviser, Peter Navarro, says 90 deals in 90 days is possible. We’re now 13 days into the point from when you lifted the reciprocal, the discounted reciprocal tariffs. There’s zero deals so far. Why is that?
No, there’s many deals.
When are they going to be announced?
You have to understand, I’m dealing with all the companies, very friendly countries. We’re meeting with China. We’re doing fine with everybody. But ultimately, I’ve made all the deals.
Not one has been announced yet. When are you going to announce them?
I’ve made 200 deals.
You’ve made 200 deals?
100%.
Trump wouldn’t name one. *
Trump implied in another rambling “weave” that it’s like he runs a department store and tells suppliers what he considers “a fair price, and they can pay it, or they don’t have to pay it.”
Also, everyone is stealing his steak knives.
“Everybody took advantage of us. What I’m doing is I will, at a certain point in the not too distant future, I will set a fair price of tariffs for different countries…. So I will set a price, and when I set the price, and I will set it fairly according to the statistics, and according to everything else,” Trump said.
He seemed to forget that he announced them using a chart on April 2 before pausing them for 90 days a week later.
Time prodded:
I’m just curious, why don’t you announce these deals that you’ve solidified?
I would say, over the next three to four weeks, and we’re finished, by the way.
You’re finished?
We’ll be finished.
Trump seems to have forgotten he said minutes earlier, “I’ve made 200 deals.”
On Friday, Trump told reporters that the trade deals he told Time days ago he’d already completed “are going very well.”
A friend who deals with a lot of seniors observed on Facebook:
I see a lot of cognitive decline and this is covering for cognitive decline. Any question, he’ll agree (or at least refuse to rule it out) and also one-up it, to hide that he’s not following very well, e.g.:
“Mr President, do you agree with GOP calls to invade Luxembourg?”
“Certainly that’s, uh, an idea. Why not? There are at least 7, 8 countries we really should invade.”
That’s his patter/pattern.
Someone ask the most powerful man on the planet, the man with access to the nuclear launch codes, what he ate for lunch.
There are 195 countries in the world today. This total comprises 193 countries that are member states of the United Nations and 2 countries that are non-member observer states: the Holy See and the State of Palestine.
“What alarmed Nicholas Reppucci, head of the Charlottesville Office of the Public Defender, is that the enforcers called in to detain the two men in the city Tuesday morning were wearing plain clothes and did not display badges or arrest warrants.” Charlottesville, VA Daily Progress.
Pam Bondi is not law enforcement. She’s Trump’s enforcer and gun moll.
Trump-Bondi police state
Trump is at war with you. Yes, you.
Show us your badges and a judicial warrant or this is a fucking kidnapping (Charlottesville, VA Daily Progress):
“What alarmed Nicholas Reppucci, head of the Charlottesville Office of the Public Defender, is that the enforcers called in to detain the two men in the city Tuesday morning were wearing plain clothes and did not display badges or arrest warrants.”
New Orleans, LA – Today, in the early hours of the morning, the New Orleans Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Field Office deported at least two families, including two mothers and their minor children – three of whom are U.S. citizen children aged 2, 4, and 7. One of the mothers is currently pregnant. The families, who had lived in the United States for years and had deep ties to their communities, were deported from the U.S. under deeply troubling circumstances that raise serious due process concerns.
ICE detained the first family on Tuesday, April 22, and the second family on Thursday, April 24. In both cases, ICE held the families incommunicado, refusing or failing to respond to multiple attempts by attorneys and family members to contact them. In one instance, a mother was granted less than one minute on the phone before the call was abruptly terminated when her spouse tried to provide legal counsel’s phone number.
[…]
Both families have possible immigration relief, but because ICE denied them access to their attorneys, legal counsel was unable to assist and advise them in time. With one family, government attorneys had assured legal counsel that a legal call would be arranged within 24-48 hours, as well as a call with a family member. Instead, just after close of business and after courts closed for the day, ICE suddenly reversed course and informed counsel that the family would be deported at 6am the next morning–before the court reopened.
That family filed a habeas corpus petition and motion for a temporary restraining order, which was never ruled on because of their rapid early-morning deportation.
In the case of the other family, a U.S. citizen child suffering from a rare form of metastatic cancer was deported without medication or the ability to consult with their treating physicians–despite ICE being notified in advance of the child’s urgent medical needs. In addition, one of the mothers who was deported is pregnant, and ICE proceeded with her deportation without ensuring any continuity of prenatal care or medical oversight.
Erin Hebert, Ware Immigration – “Deporting U.S. citizen children is illegal, unconstitutional, and immoral. The speed, brutality, and clandestine manner in which these children were deported is beyond unconscionable, and every official responsible for it should be held accountable.”
A federal judge is raising alarms that the Trump administration deported a two-year-old U.S. citizen to Honduras with “no meaningful process,” even as the child’s father was frantically petitioning the courts to keep her in the country.
U.S. District Judge Terry Doughty, a Trump appointee, said the child — identified in court papers by the initials “V.M.L.” — appeared to have been released in Honduras earlier Friday, along with her Honduran-born mother and sister, who had been detained by immigration officials earlier in the week.
The judge on Friday scheduled a hearing for May 16, which he said was “in the interest of dispelling our strong suspicion that the Government just deported a U.S. citizen with no meaningful process.”
“The goal here isn’t to get convictions, at least not yet,” [investigative journalist Radley Balko] wrote. “It’s to harass, intimidate, and incapacitate anyone with the power, money, or platform to thwart this administration’s aspiration for authoritarianism.”
Maryland Zoo today announced the birth of a Coquerel’s sifaka (Propithecus coquereli). This marks the first birth of a sifaka at the Zoo since the endangered lemur species returned to its collection in 2023.
The as yet unnamed lemur was born to first-time father, Terence, and 14 year-old mother, Arcadia. Arcadia is an experienced mom who was recommended to breed with Terence by the Association of Zoos and Aquariums (AZA) Sifaka Species Survival Plan – a population management initiative to grow the population and maintain its genetic diversity.
Maryland Zoo keepers who work with primates will name the baby in the coming days.
Sifaka, which is pronounced “shi-FOCK,” are named after their distinctive alarm call. They have a unique brown and white coloration and are distinguished from other lemurs by the way that they move, maintaining a very upright posture and using their back legs to leap through the treetops. They can easily leap more than 20 feet in a single bound. On the ground, they spring sideways off their back feet to cover distance while holding their forelimbs out for balance.
Coquerel’s sifaka are native only to the island of Madagascar off the southeastern coast of Africa. They spend most of their lives in the treetops in two protected areas in the sparse dry, deciduous forests on the northwestern side of the island. As with many species of lemur, Coquerel’s sifaka are endangered. Habitat loss due to deforestation is the leading threat to the species.
Here’s a video from the Cincinnati Zoo about these lemurs. They’re so wild looking!
You can’t believe a sentient adult much less a president could actually say this but here we are:
Your trade adviser, Peter Navarro, says 90 deals in 90 days is possible. We’re now 13 days into the point from when you lifted the reciprocal, the discounted reciprocal tariffs. There’s zero deals so far. Why is that?
No, there’s many deals.
When are they going to be announced?
You have to understand, I’m dealing with all the companies, very friendly countries. We’re meeting with China. We’re doing fine with everybody. But ultimately, I’ve made all the deals.
Not one has been announced yet. When are you going to announce them?
I’ve made 200 deals.
You’ve made 200 deals?
100%.
Can you share with whom?
Because the deal is a deal that I choose. View it differently: We are a department store, and we set the price. I meet with the companies, and then I set a fair price, what I consider to be a fair price, and they can pay it, or they don’t have to pay it. They don’t have to do business with the United States, but I set a tariff on countries. Some have been horrible to us. Some have been okay. Nobody’s been great. Nobody’s been great. Everybody took advantage of us.
What I’m doing is I will, at a certain point in the not too distant future, I will set a fair price of tariffs for different countries. These are countries—some of them have made hundreds of billions of dollars, and some of them have made just a lot of money. Very few of them have made nothing because the United States was being ripped off by every, almost every country in the world, in the entire world.
So I will set a price, and when I set the price, and I will set it fairly according to the statistics, and according to everything else. For instance, do they have the VAT system in play? Do they charge us tariffs? How much are they charging us? How much have they been charging us?
Many, many different factors, right. How are we being treated by that country? And then I will set a tariff. Are we paying for their military? You know, as an example, we have Korea. We pay billions of dollars for the military. Japan, billions for those and others. But that, I’m going to keep us a separate item, the paying of the military. Germany, we have 50,000 soldiers—
I’m just curious, why don’t you announce these deals that you’ve solidified?
I would say, over the next three to four weeks, and we’re finished, by the way.
You’re finished?
We’ll be finished.
Oh, you will be finished in three to four weeks.
I’ll be finished. Now, some countries may come back and ask for an adjustment, and I’ll consider that, but I’ll basically be, with great knowledge, setting—ready? We’re a department store, a giant department store, the biggest department store in history.
Everybody wants to come in and take from us. They’re going to come in and they’re going to pay a price for taking our treasure, for taking our jobs, for doing all of these things. But what I’m doing with the tariffs is people are coming in, and they’re building at levels you’ve never seen before.
We have $7 trillion of new plants, factories and other things, investment coming into the United States. And if you look back at past presidents, nobody was anywhere near that. And this is in three months.
Will you call President Xi if he doesn’t call you?
No.
You won’t?
Nope.
Has he called you yet?
Yep.
When did he call you?
He’s called. And I don’t think that’s a sign of weakness on his behalf.
But you would think it’s a sign of weakness if you called him?
I don’t–I just look—
Well, what did he say?
If people want to–well, we all want to make deals. But I am this giant store. It’s a giant, beautiful store, and everybody wants to go shopping there. And on behalf of the American people, I own the store, and I set prices, and I’ll say, if you want to shop here, this is what you have to pay.
That is incoherent gobbldygook, and he is so far out of his depth now that he makes Pete Hegseth look like Dwight D. Eisenhower.
That comes from his 100 day interview with TIME and it’s kind of terrifying. The people who complained about Biden should be hysterical about this guy. (I guess it’s the bronzer and hair dye?)
How about this?
Inflation remains pretty much the same. And the IMF is saying it’s going to go up.
No, Eric, you can’t say what they think, because so far what I thought is right. I’ve been right about—
401ks are down. The Atlanta Fed says our economy is contracting -2.2% during quarter one.
Well, they may have said that, but so far, they’ve been, I mean, I’ve been right. If you look at all of the years that I’ve been doing this, I’ve been right on things. You’re gonna—you’re gonna have the wealthiest country we’ve ever had, and you’re gonna have an explosion upward in the not-too-distant future. You know, I’ve been here now for three months, and I inherited eggs, I inherited groceries, I inherited energy. It was all going through the roof. And we had the highest inflation we’ve ever had as a country, or very close to it. And I believe it was the highest ever. Somebody said it’s the highest in only 48 years. That’s a lot, too, but I believe we had the highest inflation we’ve ever had. I’ve been here now for three months. And three months, we are taking in billions and billions of dollars from other countries that we never took in before. And that’s just the start.
Well let’s talk about the tariffs. You want companies to build and make goods here in America.
Not in all cases. There are some products I really don’t want to make here.
Like t-shirts?
I can’t–I can give you a list because I actually have a list, but if you want, I could give it to you.
I have only recently realized that a big part of Trump’s Vengeance Agenda is to prove that he has always been right about everything so he’s determined to press his “policy” ideas or at least pretend that they’ve been successful. He’s sending the whole world to perdition because he has to be right. But no one has ever been so wrong.
Bondi declares war on the courts: "What has happened to our judiciary is beyond me … they are deranged … we are sending a very strong message today … we will come after you and we will prosecute you. We will find you." pic.twitter.com/K4JjG7kvXt
Federal agents arrested a Wisconsin judge on Friday after she allegedly helped an undocumented immigrant evade arrest, FBI Director Kash Patel said.
Patel announced in an X post that Milwaukee Circuit Court Judge Hannah Dugan has been charged with obstruction.
The tweet was quickly deleted. The FBI did not immediately respond to requests for comment on why the post was removed.
But a senior law enforcement official confirmed to NBC News that Dugan was arrested at about 8:30 a.m. local time in the parking lot of her courthouse for allegedly assisting an undocumented immigrant in avoiding arrest after he appeared in her courtroom last week.
From what I understand judges do not commonly allow arrests in their courtrooms so it’s not surprising that she resisted. They are charging her with helping him evade the ICE agents in the hall by giving him the opportunity to leave by another door and they ended up chasing him down the street to arrest him.
You have to love this newfound concern for the safety of the public, when one of the first things they did was drop all pending charges in the January 6th cases and said that those who were pardoned should not be prosecuted even for unrelated gun charges and domestic violence. These people are so dangerous.
Apparently the Nazi FBI and DOJ think it’s important to arrest a judge to show that they will go after them, as Bondi explicitly says above. It’s pure intimidation, the kind of demonstration of police state power that we’ve historically seen in fascist regimes. That’s where we are.
G. Elliott Morris looks at the youth vote in light of the recent polling. He challenges the idea that they broke so heavily for Trump in the first place, citing a number of conflicting surveys. But there is no doubt that they are not Trump fans now:
Let’s start with the newsy data. According to a new poll published by the Pew Research Center on April 23, 2025, only 36% of adults between the ages of 18-29 approve of the job Trump is doing as president today, vs 63% who disapprove. That’s a net gap of 27 points against Trump, compared to an exit poll estimate in 2024 of Harris +4.
Comparing Trump’s approval directly to the results of the 2024 election, that’s a pretty huge (23-point!) shift. This means there’s a large group of young people out there who do not like Trump, but voted for him last year because either (a) they did like him then or (b) they liked Trump more than Harris. There are also a lot of young people who didn’t vote at all.
Pew’s poll also finds Black and Hispanic voters are more anti-Trump now than they were in 2024, so there’s some amount of overall shifting going on here. As you’d expect with a topline 60% disapproval and 40% approval.
But it’s not just Pew finding Trump doing poorly with the youths. I took all the polls conducted in April and averaged their age-level crosstabs together. That average for adults and voters under 30 is still Disapprove +27, though the other age crosstabs differ from Pew’s findings.
In the graph below, I show Trump’s average approval by age group now compared to his 2024 result with each bloc:
According to these polls, Trump is now about as unpopular as he was in 2020. According to the exit polls, Biden won young people by 25 points.
And young people are not particularly fond of Trump’s policies, either. Below, the latest Harvard Institute of Politics Youth Poll shows support for key proposals among 18-30 year olds adults:
These two charts certainly put things into perspective… But they’re confusing at the same time. The swing chart shows quite an enormous shift in public opinion in a very short period of time. Did young voters just dislike Harris that much? Are they souring on Trump now for any particular reason? Were they ever even that right-leaning to begin with? Or maybe voting Trump was a manifestation of something else?
Morris speculates that it’s because young voters are “particularly economically sensitive and anti-incumbent.” They’re not partisans, at least in the way we used to think about it. COVID-19, high housing prices and inflation have hit this generation hard. (Read my previous post for a look at what it was like to be a young person during the stagflation 70s… we were anti-establishment, anti-incumbent too.) Corrupt political leadership and revelations of abuse of power lead to cynicism in young people. It took me many years to shake off the reflexive pessimism and disdain for politics. Add to that the huge societal changes wrought by technology and the isolation it’s fostered and it’s understandable that young people would not find much to like about either political party or politics itself.
It’s not helping Trump, that’s for sure. But it may not help Democrats either:
For Democrats, the concern is that they need to win the trust of these young people back. 18- to 30- year olds tell Harvard they have an even worse impression of the Democratic Party than the Republican Party. That will matter in the next election, when the question will not be “do you like Trump?” but “who do you want to vote for?”
But equally, it’s easy to see how 4 more years of disastrous policy for young people could see the Republicans suffer the same fate Harris did in 2024. If young people are mostly just elastic, anti-system voters, then the young Trump converts in 2024 aren’t really MAGA Republicans so much as stressed-out, ideologically unaware, alienated young adults, in want of a party.
The Democrats really are the only viable party for young people and I hope they find a way to speak compellingly to their needs. It’s guaranteed that the Republicans won’t do it through anything tangible — their only message is hate. Unfortunately, if things get really tough that could be a message that resonates. It has in the past.
David Frum has written an interesting (and alarming) piece today about what we may be in for. He starts the piece with a little trip down memory lane that was very familiar to me:
In the 1970s, it cost much more to print a menu than it does today. Restaurants did not change them often. When prices rose, they’d retain their old menu—but affix little stickers with the new, handwritten prices atop the previous ones. When prices rose especially rapidly, the stickers accumulated in stubby columns rising up from the menu. A bored child might scratch off all the stickers with a fingernail—and, like a young archaeologist, reveal a lost world.
The term that came into use to describe the era was stagflation: stagnation plus inflation. Until recently, it seemed a relic of the disco era, but the economic chaos of Donald Trump’s second presidency has resurfaced the old word. Stock markets are warning of a recession. Bond markets are anticipating inflation. Perhaps one market is wrong, or the other, or both. More likely, they portend the return of a half-forgotten nightmare.
From 1969 to 1982—just 13 years—the United States suffered four recessions. Three were severe. Two were both severe and protracted. Recoveries were comparatively feeble. Even during the recessions, prices kept rising.
The era’s economic turmoil unnerved Americans. Mass-market best sellers such as The Late Great Planet Earth prophesied the imminent end of the world in a biblical apocalypse. Americans absorbed a secular version of the end-of-the-world obsession from books such as The Limits to Growth, which claimed that humankind was overconsuming almost every natural resource and had no choice but to strictly ration the pitiful remains.
In his famous 1979 speech, which came to be known as the “malaise” address, President Jimmy Carter warned: “The erosion of our confidence in the future is threatening to destroy the social and the political fabric of America.” Conversation everywhere, the historian Theodore White wrote, was “stained and drenched in money talk, by what it cost to live or what it cost to enjoy life.” Especially outside the upper classes, people “winced and ached. Some mysterious power was hollowing their hopes and dreams, their plans for a house or their children’s college education.” What could they do? How could they recover? “Faith in one’s own planning was dissolving—all across the nation,” White wrote. “The bedrock was heaving.”Trump’s tariffs are like a hundred self-inflicted oil shocks, all arriving at the same time.
The unease destabilized American politics. Carter lost his reelection bid in 1980; his predecessor, Gerald Ford, likewise had been voted out in 1976. Richard Nixon might well have survived Watergate (as Trump has survived his many scandals) had the investigation not unfolded during the most miserable American economy since the Great Depression. In House elections, the party of the president suffered unusually heavy losses: 49 seats in 1974; 26 in 1982.
Finally, the stagflation was choked to an end in the fourth and climactic recession of 1981–82. In late 1983 and ’84, the U.S. economy rebounded powerfully—and this time, the inflation did not return. Stagflation vanished into history. The economy has seen its share of tumult in the 21st century: the Great Recession, a recent bout of high inflation. But it’s been a very long time since Americans have felt recession and inflation at once.
This is why many of us of a certain age cringe a bit when we’re told that we had it so much better when we were young. As a member of a family that was anything but wealthy, that’s not how I remember it. I was young and resilient and, frankly, didn’t know any better, so it wasn’t something I thought too deeply about at the time. But the truth is that we didn’t have a lot of stuff or a lot of disposable income. We were fine but this idea that everyone was living a life of luxury and freedom is just wrong.
I’ve included a gift link to the whole article for you to read about why we might be facing another round of this and it’s depressing particularly since this time it’s entirely self-inflicted by Donald fucking Trump. We tried to warn them…
