I think we know that but it’s good to see the White House acknowledge it. Recall this on the day after Charlie Kirk died:
Q: My condolences on the loss of your friend Charlie Kirk. How are you holding up?
TRUMP: I think very good. And by the way, right there you see all the trucks. They just started construction of the new ballroom for the White House, which is something they've been trying to get… pic.twitter.com/Jrw4j2fnVZ
Q: My condolences on the loss of your friend Charlie Kirk. How are you holding up?
TRUMP: I think very good. And by the way, right there you see all the trucks. They just started construction of the new ballroom for the White House, which is something they’ve been trying to get for about 150 years. And it’s gonna be a beauty. It’ll be an absolutely magnificent structure.
It’s as close to a temple for God Trump as he can get:
Vice President JD Vance said on Thursday before leaving Israel that he was “insulted” by the Knesset vote on annexing the occupied West Bank, which took place while he was visiting the country this week.
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has control over the majority in the Knesset and could have stopped the vote by taking it off the agenda or ordering the members of his party to vote against it. He chose not to in order to avoid a confrontation with his ultranationalist coalition partners.
[…]
Speaking with reporters at the airport before departing Israel, Vance was asked about the vote, and he called it “weird.” He said he was confused by it and that he was told it was only “symbolic” and part of a “political stunt with no practical significance.”
“If it was a political stunt, it was a stupid one, and I take some insult to it,” Vance said.He stressed that the Trump administration’s policy is that “the West Bank is not going to be annexed by Israel.”
U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio said on Wednesday ahead of his trip to Israel that the Trump administration thinks annexation of the West Bank will be “potentially threatening to the peace deal” in Gaza. “So, they’re a democracy, they’re going to have their votes, people are going to take these positions, but at this time, it’s something that especially we think it might be counterproductive. … We’re concerned about anything that threatens to destabilize what we’ve worked on,” he said.
Imagine that. The right wingers of the Knesset don’t do whatever Trump tells them to do? What kind of empire is this?
The Netanyahu government considered annexing large portions of the West Bank in response to the recognition of a Palestinian state by several Western countries in September.
I know this will shock you, but Trump’s buddies in the Arab states aren’t on board with Israeli annexation of the West Bank or Gaza. It’s kind of a problem, wouldn’t you say?
The United Arab Emirates told the Trump administration that Israeli annexations would harm the Abraham Accords.
Trump held a meeting last month with leaders and senior officials from Saudi Arabia, the UAE, Qatar, Egypt, Jordan, Turkey, Indonesia and Pakistan and asked them to support his plan for ending the war in Gaza.
The Arab leaders presented Trump with several conditions for supporting his plan, including a commitment that Israel won’t annex parts of the West Bank or Gaza.
Trump made it clear to the leaders that he’d block such a step. Three days later, he told reporters that he won’t allow Netanyahu to annex parts of the occupied West Bank.
He won’t? Well, ok then. I guess that means he’ll stop arms shipments and use his tariff threats and all that if Netanyahu and his extremists don’t go along. Sure, sure he will.
I will never get over the fact that the U.S. media gave Trump that ecstatic extravaganza in the middle east when it was obvious that whatever cease fire they had was very fragile and the “peace agreement” was little more than a rough outline that hadn’t actually been signed off on by all the parties that are necessary to make it work. But that’s how Trump gets over. He makes some grandiose announcement and everyone runs toward the big, beautiful sound in order to flatter him and make him happy for that day. It’s almost always total bullshit.
MSNBC interviewed a Trump voting rancher and showed him that tweet. He was surprised, saying he agreed with Trump on a lot of things but he disagrees that he could do anything to lower the price of beef because his costs are way up too — because of the tariffs. Unfortunately, I’m not sure it dawned on him that maybe, just maybe, the president is a fucking moron who doesn’t understand anything at all.
It appears that the administration does have a plan to help the ranchers, though. They’re going to force Americans to eat more beef. Which is only right.
Brooke Rollins says the administration is working to "put beef back at the center of the American diet" pic.twitter.com/TZQC4q4SWY
Sarah Palin brought 200 cookies to a Pennsylvania Christian school Tuesday, a hostess gift that would not be notable if Palin had not declared the move a stunt to mock anti-childhood obesity campaigns in public schools.
Fresh on the heels of Rush Limbaugh’s pro-Twinkie tirade against Michelle Obama’s health initiative, Palin explained to the audience, “I wanted these kids to bring home the idea to their parents for discussion. Who should be deciding what I eat? Should it be government or should it be parents? It should be the parents.”
The crowd roared. Palin was reacting to an incorrect report that Pennsylvania was considering banning sweet treats at school parties. She followed up with this tweet: “2 PA school speech; I’ll intro kids 2 beauty of laissez-faire via serving them cookies amidst school cookie ban debate;Nanny state run amok!” (Is it odd to decry the “Nanny State” to the very people who actually have nannies?)
That was completely different, of course. Michelle Obama is a Black woman and a Democrat. Donald Trump is our King.
Enten: "Trump is doing absolutely awful in the minds of the American people. We're talking about new lows. CNBC, -13 net approval on the economy. It's -19 among Quinnipiac … Trump is at his lowest point ever in either of his terms. He's not just beating himself with record lows… pic.twitter.com/c8dzAaFdGQ
Enten: “Trump is doing absolutely awful in the minds of the American people. We’re talking about new lows. CNBC, -13 net approval on the economy. It’s -19 among Quinnipiac … Trump is at his lowest point ever in either of his terms. He’s not just beating himself with record lows — this is the lowest for any president ever at this point in either a presidency or for a second term.”
He doesn’t know this because he’s living in a bubble and even if he did, he wouldn’t care. Either he’s a demented, old, lame duck who’s just deep into YOLO or he he doesn’t plan on leaving any time soon and figures he can do whatever he wants as long as he’s in power.
Read this and then just think about how they tortured Hillary Clinton for alleged corruption because her husband ran an international charity:
President Trump has pardoned Changpeng Zhao, the convicted founder of the crypto exchange Binance, according to people familiar with the matter, following months of efforts by Zhao to boost the Trump family’s own crypto company.
The president signed the pardon on Wednesday, the people said. Trump recently indicated to advisers that he was sympathetic to arguments of political persecution related to Zhao and others, one of the people said.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said that Trump had “exercised his constitutional authority by issuing a pardon for Mr. Zhao, who was prosecuted by the Biden Administration in their war on cryptocurrency.” She added: “The Biden Administration’s war on crypto is over.”
Binance didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
A pardon will likely pave the way for Binance, the world’s largest crypto exchange, to return to the U.S. after the company pleaded guilty in 2023 to violating U.S. anti-money-laundering requirements and was barred from operating in the country.
The company has spent nearly a year pursuing a pardon for Zhao, who left prison in September 2024 after serving a four-month sentence for related charges. Earlier this year, the company hired lobbyist Ches McDowell to help pursue a pardon, the Journal previously reported.
The Justice Department imposed a record $4.3 billion fine and burdensome oversight on Binance, which the department said had become a colossal money-laundering hub through which sanctioned groups and criminal organizations laundered billions of dollars in illicit funds.
The pardon may also prematurely end the Justice Department’s three-year Binance monitorship, set up to ensure the company complies with U.S. financial crime laws. However, it likely won’t end a separate monitorship established by the Treasury Department without the additional approval of Trump or the Treasury secretary.
[…]
Binance first reached out to allies of Trump last year, offering to strike a business deal with the family as part of a plan to return the company to the U.S., the Journal reported earlier this year. Representatives of the Trump family have held talks to take a financial stake in the U.S. arm of Binance.
Binance has been one of the main drivers of the growth of World Liberty’s dollar-pegged cryptocurrency, called USD1. It delivered World Liberty’s first big break this spring when it accepted a $2 billion investment from an outside investor paid in USD1. Binance has also incentivized trading in USD1 across platforms it controls.
It was just an outright bribe. A massive one. And it’s just a-ok.
I dream of the day when the crypto market implodes and all these assholes get their due. Of course they’re working hard to make it too big to fail so we the taxpayers will have to bail them out. Uday and Qusay will probably end up winners in the end anyway.
I guess the scale of Trump’s corruption in this term is just so overwhelming that we aren’t even gong to talk much about it. Nobody knows what to do since there’s no oversight anywhere and certainly no law enforcement capability in the federal government to hold him accountable.
I don’t know if we even have the tools to set this right. But if we are able to remove these people from power massive reform is going to be required. I wish I was more confident that it will happen. But, first things first. Putting an end to this misbegotten reign is job one.
Most of America first took notice of Marco Rubio when he gave one of the most-cringe prime-time performances of all time, the official Republican rebuttal to Barack Obama’s 2013 State of the Union address. No one who watched is likely to forget Rubio’s awkward stare as he furtively reached for a water bottle, cementing his reputation as the thirstiest man in the U.S. Senate. It’s a testament to his limitless ambition that he came back from that and is now one of the most powerful people in the world.
Rubio rode into national politics on the Tea Party wave in 2010, after having served for a decade in Florida state politics, rising to become majority leader and ultimately speaker of the state’s House of Representatives. Although he was a staunch conservative from the beginning, Rubio showed early on an aptitude for sensing which way the wind was blowing. Over the years he held both moderate and conservative positions on most issues. For instance, at first he rejected the scientific consensus on climate change and then, a few years later, decided it was true. He was once one of the Republican Party’s most vocial advocates for comprehensive immigration reform and even sponsored the DREAM Act. Now he energetically supports Donald Trump on the most draconian deportation program in American history. He broke with the GOP on more than one occasion when it came to budget battles, at times striking a pose as populist defender of the little guy, but overall he was a standard-issue right-wing conservative on taxes and spending.
With the exception of the ill-fated “Gang of Eight” attempt to overhaul immigration policy, Rubio has never been much associated with domestic politics. His focus has always been on national security and foreign policy. He was an unreconstructed hawk in the Senate, supporting the war in Iraq and taking a hard line on Iran. But he’s often used the language of human rights in condemning China, Turkey and Venezuela for crimes against minority populations or suppression of dissent.
And in what looks in retrospect like one of Rubio’s most independent moves, as co-chair of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence with Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., he led a three-year investigation that found clear evidence of Russian interference on Trump’s behalf in the 2016 election, exactly as Robert Mueller’s investigation had established. Trump and other Republican officials are still spreading the claim that the investigation was a hoax, despite the fact that the current secretary of state personally validated its findings. (You have to wonder if anyone has ever explained that to Trump; logically, it should have been a deal breaker.)
Trump and other Republican officials are still spreading the claim that the Mueller investigation was a hoax, despite the fact that Marco Rubio, Trump’s current secretary of state, personally validated its findings.
Then again, Trump also overlooked the fact that as an opposing GOP presidential candidate in 2016, Rubio once said, “He’s like 6’2”, which is why I don’t understand why his hands are the size of someone who is 5’2″… You know what they say about men with small hands.” That line got back to Trump, creating an infamous primary debate moment when Trump insisted on national TV, “I guarantee you there’s no problem.” For a man who carries around grudges like precious offspring, it’s odd that Trump has apparently decided to overlook all that, but Rubio worked hard to abase himself and get into the inner circle.
The political establishment, including many Democrats, were relieved when Rubio was chosen for the State Department job, reassured that a supposedly serious fellow with Senate credentials would keep Trump foreign policy from going off the rails. The hope was that Rubio might stop the president from doing something silly, like bailing out of NATO or invading Greenland. Little did they know that Rubio had happily made a deal with the devil and now seems to relish the idea of ripping up the world order in Trump’s image.
They certainly couldn’t have anticipated how eagerly Rubio would join in the deportation crusade by targeting foreign students for visa violations, as well as for unauthorized opinions about Israel and Charlie Kirk. Considering his years of support for the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), it came a something of a shock when Rubio cavalierly endorsed the administration’s shutdown of vital medical and food programs, which is likely to mean sickness and death for millions. He even agreed to betray informants under U.S. protection to Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele in exchange for an agreement to lock up purported Venezuelan gang members in El Salvador’s gruesome gulag.
When Russia invaded Ukraine, Rubio was one of the first to condemn President Vladimir Putin’s aggression, calling him a killer and suggesting that he was suffering from some kind of mental decline. But it didn’t take long for Rubio to change his tune, voting against military aid early on and adopting the Trump line that a negotiated settlement was the only way out. In the Senate, Rubio backed Israel’s brutal assault on Palestinian civilians, although at one point he voted against more military aid, saying the U.S. needed more money for border enforcement. As secretary of state, Rubio has mostly taken a back seat on those big issues to Trump’s special envoy Steve Witkoff and, more recently, to freelance adviser and son-in-law Jared Kushner. But that has just given him time to pursue his own special interests.
When Trump tapped Rubio as acting national security adviser after a clash with the more establishment oriented Mike Waltz — since banished to Siberia, aka the United Nations — Rubio got some runway to move on his own priorities in Latin America. Coming as he does from the anti-Castro Cuban-American community of South Florida, Rubio has a strong strain of anti-left ideology which has made him especially obsessed with Nicolás Maduro, Venezuela’s socialist authoritarian president.
According to recent reports in the Wall Street Journal, the extrajudicial killings, CIA covert actions and pending war plans against Venezuela are all being driven by Rubio. After some back-and-forth between him and special envoy Richard Grenell, along with oil companies who’d welcome a deal to exploit Venezuela’s enormous reserves, Rubio and deputy White House chief of staff Stephen Miller have carried the day with a full-fledged plan to pressure and perhaps depose the Venezuelan leader. Other countries in the region are expected to take notice.
As a former White House official told The New Yorker, “If you’re Panama, you think this is about you. If you’re Colombia, you think it’s about you… if you think it’s a signal, it is a signal.” And that signal isn’t just directed at other countries. The same official pointed out that this has a domestic dimension as well, by reinforcing the idea that Latino gang members and drug cartels, are enemies of America. “This is happening while you have the deployment of National Guardsmen to cities,” the official said. “You’re getting people used to these kinds of actions. This is expanding the definition of the use of force.”
Marco Rubio almost certainly intends to run for president in 2028 and sees his service in that cause as the best way to fulfill his own agenda and expand both his power and his political profile. He’s certainly not the only person in the Trump administration with that idea, but he stands out in that many observers still view him as an “adult in the room” with establishment credibility. That’s entirely wrong. He’s a fully paid-up MAGA fanatic now, and no one should think otherwise.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement has placed new recruits into its training program before they have completed the agency’s vetting process, an unusual sequence of events as the agency rushes to hire federal immigration officers to carry out President Donald Trump’s mass deportation policy, one current and two former Homeland Security Department officials told NBC News.
ICE officials only later discovered that some of these recruits failed drug testing, have disqualifying criminal backgrounds or don’t meet the physical or academic requirements to serve, the sources said.
Staff at ICE’s training academy in Brunswick, Georgia, recently discovered one recruit had previously been charged with strong arm robbery and battery stemming from a domestic violence incident, the current DHS official said. They’ve also found as recently as this month that some recruits going through the six-week training course had not submitted fingerprints for background checks, as ICE’s hiring process requires, the current and former DHS officials said
In whose mind are the behaviors we’ve seen representative of professional policing? How many serious law enforcement professionals would welcome these physically, temperamentally, and criminally unfit people on their teams?
I can’t help but wonder how many of these men are pardoned January 6 convicts, Proud Boys, Oath Keepers, Three Percenters, Patriot Front, etc. How convenient that masks make it difficult to identify them by facial recognition.
The White House belongs to the people of the United States and is administered as a national treasure. Donald Trump treats it like just another of his shitty golf resorts. His demolition of the East Wing is hitting nerves even among Americans numbed by years of Trumpism.
Some Americans are expressing shock and outrage as President Donald Trump demolishes the entire East Wing of the White House to make room for a lavish ballroom. The administration has bypassed concerns raised by preservationists and so far stopped short of seeking approval from the commission overseeing construction on federal buildings. Trump on Wednesday said the ballroom is expected to cost $300 million — up from a previously estimated $200 million — suggesting it could be a larger structure than initially planned. The White House on Wednesday released a list of donors for the project, which Trump has repeatedly said is privately funded. For decades, the East Wing has housed offices for the first lady, and its foyer has been the main point of entry for visitors attending social events and tours.
Do not let MAGA get away with repeating excuses for this Trumpish “monument to bribery.” “Privately funded” is beside the point, even if true. The White House is not Trump’s to do with as he pleases. He is a temporary resident (fingers crossed). Obama did some White House renovations too? Also beside the point. Obama went through a review and approval process, but those are Executive Branch functions in this case, and he controls the Executive Branch. The White House is not Trump’s to do with as he pleases. But who is going to tell him?
Obama went through the National Capital Planning Commission as the law requires. Plans were submitted, reviewed, revised. Open bids were made/considered. If you can’t see the difference between that and what Trump is doing, you are beyond help. https://t.co/GZUahS6M3W
“Our hands are tied,” Rebecca Miller, executive director of the D.C. Preservation League, told the Washington Post. Normally such projects first get input from preservationists. “It’s very frustrating that there’s nothing that the organization can do from a legal or advocacy perspective.”
The Post adds, “The next stage of the project is also likely to proceed with few restraints: The key panel slated to review the president’s construction plans is now stocked with Trump allies ready to approve them.”
The project has left historians and architects deeply alarmed. The National Trust for Historic Preservation on Wednesday urged officials to pause until it could go through the “legally required public review process.” Last week, Trump seemed to suggest to donors that “no approvals” were required for the project.
The emperor may have no clothes but he has a backhoe. He’s thumbing his nose at the nation. At you.
FWIW, here’s what I’ve gleaned from anecdotal experience. I was out at rush hour on Wednesday with the sign above. There were the usual horn toots, waves, and thumbs-up I’ve come to expect from doing this now for months (and now five days a week at different major intersections). Yesterday was different. I heard more shouts of “Fuck Trump” than ever before from passing cars, and they were angrier. People may not have noticed how Trump is steadily demolishing the U.S. Constitution and their Bill of Rights protections. But this demolition is visual. It registers. People feel it. It’s an open cut over Trump’s other eye.
Your job now is to make sure everyone you know and every online place you visit sees it. Work. The. Other. Eye.
John Ganz is one of the best essayists around and I highly recommend his Substack if this is the sort of thing that gives you sustenance. It does me and I’m grateful for it. Nearly every time I read his site I come away thinking, “damn, that’s good, I wish I’d thought of it.”
I’m sure by this point we’ve all seen some horrific videos of ICE abductions of migrants. Something looks off about those guys: They don’t look like feds or even cops; they look more like Proud Boys or Jan 6ers. That makes sense, since DHS is using white nationalist propaganda in their hiring drive. Proud Boys in Ohio publicly brag about being “high on the hog” because of the new hiring spree. Many of the videos portray them not just as menacing thugs, but also as incompetents, clearly unprofessional, out of shape, and sometimes unable to make arrests. Commentator Adam Johnson had a sharp tweet about it: “There are many ways of looking at ICE’s recent terror campaign, but probably the most salient is a bunch of people who can’t get real jobs harassing and kidnapping people with real jobs.”
Another way to put this is that ICE is a central part of the Trump regime’s overall organization of the mob. They are drawn from what Marx called the “scum, offal, refuse of all classes,” Engels called “the depraved elements of all classes,” and what Arendt identified as “declassés of all classes.” In fact, a great deal of Trump’s political apparatus is drawn from those ranks. Arendt summed up the lives of mob leaders as characterized by “failure in professional and social life, perversion and disaster in private life.” Semi or even open criminality and the adoption of mob attitudes and behaviors are practically job requirements for service in the administration. Just look at Paul Ingrassia, White House employee and, until some hours ago, Trump’s nominee to lead the Office of Special Counsel, whose leaked texts revealed a “Nazi streak.” He’s represented accused rapist and pimp Andrew Tate and had connections to the antisemitic demagogue Nick Fuentes.
If you needed any additional evidence that MAGA is more of a kleptocratic demimonde or criminal racket than a political movement, look at how Steve Bannon gravitated to Jeffrey Epstein just as the stench of disgrace became unbearable for most others. Or look at Trump’s otherwise inexplicable commutation of the sentence of fraudster George Santos. Marx wrote that the mob was drawn partially from “discharged jailbirds”—in Santos’s case, it’s literally true. The message there is clearly: “Support me, and I’ll take care of you.”
When Trump nominated Paul Ingrassia to the Office of Special Counsel at the DOJ (someone that I’d written about over the last few years) my first words were, “wow, he’s really scraping the bottom of the barrel.” Ingrassia’s a nasty piece of work and the idea that he would even be allowed to set foot in the Department of Justice is an insult to very American.
But loyalist low lives like him are all Trump has left to hire. He can’t get most of the confirmed even by the GOP potted plants in the senate so he’s doubling and tripling up on jobs, such as making reality show star Sean Duffy Transportation Secreta as well as the NASA Director and Marco Rubio as Secretary of State and National Security Adviser. It’s just too hard to vet the dregs of humanity that are still available to staff his administration.
I suspect Trump will take care of Paul Ingrassia. Look for him to land somewhere in the administration where he doesn’t require confirmation.
My decision was a long time coming. Earlier this year, the chief content officer for our parent company, e.Republic, stated in a meeting that we should not run articles that could draw the attention of the Trump White House and have them try to shut us down.
At the time, her position struck me as wrong in a couple of ways. Chiefly, there was the obvious betrayal of journalistic ethics. Secondly, however, Governing is such a small (although I’d like to say prestigious) publication that the idea anyone in the current White House was reading it, let alone preparing to hammer it, struck me as dubious.
Governing was started nearly 40 years ago by editors from Congressional Quarterly who thought state policy should get more news coverage. Even after it was bought in 2009 by e.Republic, Governing remained one of the few outlets to pay continuous attention to governments outside of Washington. It often receives compliments such as being called “the Rolling Stone of state of the state addresses.” It’s a wonky publication, and it’s not huge, but it has a sterling reputation for covering a crucial niche.
[…]
That’s one of the saddest parts of Trump’s anti-media drive. After the government has gone after the big guys — Trump has engaged in court fights this year with CBS, ABC, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and the Associated Press, not to mention defunding NPR, my former employer — the little guys too often decide they lack the resources to stand up. Capitulation becomes the easier course.
We’ve seen this happen in other countries. Self-censorship is particularly damaging because it takes place in private; in the absence of photos of reporters walking out of the Pentagon, no one even knows it’s happened. And individuals and institutions do a more thorough job of stifling themselves than governments ever could. Not knowing where the line might be, they grow hyper-cautious and shy away from publishing anything that might cause offense.
In my role as editor of Governing, I received edicts from above throughout this year warning me to stay away from a variety of topics. For example, I was told that an article about attitudes toward vaccines caused “consternation” among the higher ups because that issue has become partisan. I warned my boss that if we weren’t going to reflect reality — if we weren’t going to do journalism — I’d have to quit.
Vaccines are partisan. Jesus H. Christ.
I don’t know how many other publications are doing this but I would expect that even if it isn’t as blatant, it’s happening everywhere. Anyone who is a public critic of Trump and his henchmen at least thinks about it. You wouldn’t be human if you didn’t. But if the country is so far gone that we’re all afraid to criticize our leaders, much less the alleged free press, we have much bigger problems.
