But his numbers on the economy are at 43% approve and 56 disapprove. On inflation it’s even worse. Only 40% approve and 58% disapprove.
Considering those economic numbers you’d think he’d be much lower, wouldn’t you? I mean, I’ve been told in no uncertain terms over and over again that “it’s the economy stupid” and that nothing NOTHING matters more than the kitchen table issues.
Ah yes. It seems people do care about something other than money. 56% apparently LOVE the random cruelty and dystopian Sci-fi images that Trump and his minions send around for their S&M pleasure. That’s what’s keeping Trump’s approval ratings somewhat aloft (even though he’s a point underwater.)
The aggregated polls show that Trump is at about 47% which is similar to his first term numbers. This despite the fact that his “shock and awe” campaign makes his first administration look like nursery school. I don’t know if it’s that they don’t really know what he’s doing (aren’t paying attention or don’t understand the full scope of it) or if they genuinely like it. But it’s clear that so far at least, his cult and quite a few others are fine with all of it.
The Trump administration acknowledged in a court filing Monday that it had grabbed a Maryland father with protected legal status and mistakenly deported him to El Salvador, but said that U.S. courts lack jurisdiction to order his return from the megaprison where he’s now locked up.
The case appears to be the first time the Trump administration has admitted to errors when it sent three planeloads of Salvadoran and Venezuelan deportees to El Salvador’s grim “Terrorism Confinement Center” on March 15. Attorneys for several Venezuelan deportees have said that the Trump administration falsely labeled their clients as gang members because of their tattoos. Trump officials have disputed those claims.
But in Monday’s court filing, attorneys for the government admitted that the Salvadoran man, Kilmar Abrego Garcia, was deported accidentally. “Although ICE was aware of his protection from removal to El Salvador, Abrego Garcia was removed to El Salvador because of an administrative error,” the government told the court. Trump lawyers said the court has no ability to bring him back now that Abrego Garcia is in Salvadoran custody.
The reason he went to the U.S. in the first place was to escape the MS-13 gang with whom he’s now imprisoned in that gulag. If he manages to survive, I’d assume he will be required to join them now.
This is not the first “mistake” they’ve made but it’s the first they’ve admitted to. Not that it will make any difference. They’ll almost certainly claim that because he is a Salvadoran citizen they have no jurisdiction over him. It’s beyond a catch-22.
And then there’s this. He is the King, after all:
Trump administration attorneys told the court to dismiss the request on multiple grounds, including that Trump’s “primacy in foreign affairs” outweighs the interests of Abrego Garcia and his family.
This is your dangerous criminal:
Abrego Garcia, who is married to a U.S. citizen and has a 5-year-old disabled child who is also a U.S. citizen, has no criminal record in the United States, according to his attorney. The Trump administration does not claim he has a criminal record, but called him a “danger to the community” and an active member of MS-13, the Salvadoran gang that Trump has declared a Foreign Terrorist Organization.
That’s the “administrative error.”
This is getting so bad that even some of our country’s most important and revered leaders are speaking out:
Joe Rogan: “That’s horrific…Innocent gay hairdressers gettin’ lumped up with the gangs? Like, how long before that guy can get out? Can we figure out how to get him out? Is there any plan in place to alert the authorities that they made a horrible mistake, and correct it?” pic.twitter.com/kkCL7CxltW
“My comment is that according to the court document you apparently didn’t read, he was a convicted MS-13 gang member with no legal right to be here. My further comment is that it’s gross to get fired up about gang members getting deported while ignoring citizens they victimize.”
No he was not. But the right is all high fiving this supposed put-away shot and calling it all a fake news “sob-story.”
There are a whole bunch of these so-called “sob-stories” emerging because Kristi noem’s ICE is obviously just picking up any Venezuelan or Salvadoran male with a tattoo and calling them a gang member.
One of the documents contained in Friday’s filing titled Alien Enemies Act: Alien Enemy Validation Guide, provides a checklist of 20 observations divided into six categories. The categories include judicial outcomes, criminal conduct and information and symbolism.
Each observation has an assigned value ranging from two points, up to 10 points. According to the document, migrants who have a total score of eight points or higher “are validated as members of TDA,” and will be issued a “Notice and Warrant of Apprehension and Removal Under the Alien Enemies Act.”
“Aliens scoring 6 or 7 points may be validated as members of TDA; you should consult with a supervisor and (Office of the Principal Legal Advisor), reviewing the totality of the facts, before making that determination,” the checklist instructions state.
Homeland Security Investigations, and local law enforcement agencies such as the Texas Department of Public Safety, have said Tren de Aragua members have tattoos showing a variety of images, including AK-47s, trains, clocks, crowns, stars, and the Jumpman logo, used to promote the Air Jordan basketball sneakers.
You know who does have some very disturbing tattoos? The Secretary of Defense:
The AK 47 under the flag is very special message. And Deus Vult is a far-right extremist war cry, taken from the medieval Christian crusades.
But they’re sending people to a gulag for having a soccer ball tattoo.
NEW: China, Japan, and South Korea agree to “closely cooperate” in response to U.S. tariffs
Anyone with half a brain & a basic understanding of the world could see that Trump’s relentless attacks on our allies will only isolate America & strengthen China pic.twitter.com/BS3ppL6BTz
— Republicans against Trump (@RpsAgainstTrump) March 31, 2025
Democratic senator Cory Booker holds marathon speech to highlight ‘recklessness’ of Trump policies
Senator Cory Booker has been giving a marathon speech on the Senate floor that has lasted into the early hours of Tuesday morning, highlighting what he described as the “recklessness” of the Trump administration.
The New Jersey Democrat began his address on Monday night and said he would continue to speak for as long as he could “physically endure”. By 7.30am ET, Booker was still going.
The focus of his remarks are concerns over president Trump’s proposed cuts to programs like Medicaid.
At the start of his speech, Booker said:
I rise with the intention of disrupting the normal business of the United States Senate for as long as I am physically able. I rise tonight because I believe sincerely that our nation is in crisis.
He went on:
In just 71 days, the president of the United States has inflicted so much harm on Americans’ safety, financial stability, the core foundations of our democracy and even our aspirations as a people for – from our highest offices – a sense of common decency.
These are not normal times in America, and they should not be treated as such.
It’s now 10:30 a.m. ET and Booker is still going. His voice is getting ragged. His colleagues are spelling him by interrupting to ask v-e-r-y l-e-n-g-t-h-y questions to answer. Thank you. Teamwork.
Let’s get real. The complaints are ubiquitous. “Where are the Democrats?” Democrats in Congress have been slow to react to Donald Trump 2.0’s DOGE/Project 2025 predations. Yes, they are in the minority in both houses. But if Rep. John Lewis were still with us, he’d have led a U.S. House sit-in by now.
Thankfully, Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) and Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.) are showing more-stunned allies how it’s done in a string of packed rallies across the country. They are leading, a friend suggests. Booker is a weathervane. But he’s a weathervane with stamina, and that’s refreshing to see. Finally. Good on him.
But all of them are stepping up because millions of pissed-off Americans are voicing their fear and anger at seeing their institutions dismantled, their health and safety threatened, and the rule of law attacked by a criminal government-by-oligarch bent on turning this country into a dictatorship. Americans are turning up at packed town halls whether or not their elected representatives show up. Because an autocrat-friendly U.S. president with visions of imperialist expansion is telling the world and us that we are no longer the good guys. And we don’t like it one bit. And his Republican lackeys can’t find their values or their asses with two hands. We’re out in the streets ahead of our norms-bound leaders because Trump is attacking every check on his criminality from Congress to the courts to democratic elections. And when the people form a parade, politicians will hurry to position themselves in front of it. Good on you.
There are tools you’ll need if you mean to join the parade to save this nation from its 2024 folly. Some of them are below the asterisks. Actor John Lithgow invites you to attend to Timothy Snyder’s 20 Lessons on Tyranny.
Happy Warrior Entertainment is so proud to have produced this incredible project. Now, more than ever, we need the wisdom of our intellects, the patriotism of our citizens, and the passion and talents of those who still believe in the American experiment. I am deeply grateful to Timothy Snyder for his 20 Lessons On Tyranny and for talents of the brilliant John Lithgow for bringing them to life. Great thanks to David Bender for his vision, the support of Abigail Disney, Susan Disney Lord, and Timothy Disney, and the imagination and direction of Sean McGowan, the producer of the PoliticsGirl Project.
Donald Trump is a criminal. By 34 convictions, by temperament, and by the behaviors of a lifetime. Like Vladimir Putin, his man-crush, Trump believes he can take what he wants. Greenland, for example. Or Canada (though he’s quieted about Canada recently.)
Putin would like nothing better than for Trump to take Greenland. It would finish off the North Atlantic alliance and help Putin justify his taking Ukraine and maybe Poland.
Trump, Elon Musk and co. also believe they can take the United States Institute of Peace building. The think tank founded under Ronald Reagan is a congressionally established independent nonprofit. Congress gifted its site on the Mall to the institute. Its building was constructed with a mix of federal and private funds. But DOGE wants to hand it to the General Services Administration, presumably to sell off. So it means to take it.
Trump the criminal believes he can take land he wants, and buildings. And people.
NEW: In a court filing this evening, the Trump administration said that it had mistakenly deported a Maryland father to a notorious Salvadoran prison due to an "administrative error." www.theatlantic.com/politics/arc…
ICE took a Maryland man, a native of El Salvador living in the U.S. under protected status since 2011 (he was 16), and deported him to El Salvador’s “Terrorism Confinement Center,” Nick Miroff reveals in The Atlantic (emphasis mine):
But in Monday’s court filing, attorneys for the government admitted that the Salvadoran man, Kilmar Abrego Garcia, was deported accidentally. “Although ICE was aware of his protection from removal to El Salvador, Abrego Garcia was removed to El Salvador because of an administrative error,” the government told the court. Trump lawyers said the court has no ability to bring him back now that Abrego Garcia is in Salvadoran custody.
Simon Sandoval-Moshenberg, Abrego Garcia’s attorney, said he’s never seen a case in which the government knowingly deported someone who had already received protected legal status from an immigration judge. He is asking the court to order the Trump administration to ask for Abrego Garcia’s return and, if necessary, to withhold payment to the Salvadoran government, which says it’s charging the United States $6 million a year to jail U.S. deportees.
How much is the kickback from $6 million per year per prisoner?
“They claim that the court is powerless to order any relief,’’ Sandoval-Moshenberg told me. “If that’s true, the immigration laws are meaningless—all of them—because the government can deport whoever they want, wherever they want, whenever they want, and no court can do anything about it once it’s done.”
The Trump officials know deporting Abrego Garcia was their mistake and against the law, and they couldn’t care less. Trump has been saying he couldn’t care less a lot lately. Like about his tariff obsession. He wants his tariffs and couldn’t care less if they raise your cost of living.
It’s not as if Trump not caring less about you should be a surprise to anyone.
Miroff adds:
If the government wants to deport someone with protected status, the standard course would be to reopen the case and introduce new evidence arguing for deportation. The deportation of a protected status holder has even stunned some government attorneys I’ve been in touch with who are tracking the case, who declined to be named because they weren’t authorized to speak to the press. “What. The. Fuck,” one texted me.
What else is new? It’s been the M.O. of the extremist Republican Party for over a decade: find the lines, cross them, dare people to push them back (in this case, the courts). Trump’s MAGAs simply made policy of ignoring the law and the Constitution. Because his is a criminal regime and a criminal political movement fronted by a criminal.
“Show me a criminal who does care about the law,” asks a recent TikTok video.
What Americans not yet in Trump’s crosshairs and think themselves safe need to realize is that what happened to Abrego Garcia foreshadows what’s coming.
Abrego Garcia was not on the initial manifest of the deportation flight, but was listed “as an alternate,” the government attorneys explained. As other detainees were removed from the flight for various reasons, Abrego Garcia “moved up the list.’’
Trump’s criminal movement won’t stop at removing immigrants, because if the law is meaningless, as Sandoval-Moshenberg observed, they “can deport whoever they want, wherever they want, whenever they want.” They are already trying to strip the citizenships of native-born Americans whose parents were non-citizens. If the 14th Amendment is disposable, so are you. And we cannot count on the courts to hold under Trump 2.0’s relentless assault.
Fighting fascism is not how I expected to spend my retirement, but here we are. Still, we are not powerless. Defiance is an option. Rep. Pramila Jayapal is offering training.
This is what happens when you just shut your eyes and cross your fingers that larding the health system with nothing but conspiracy theorists and fringe weirdos in the medical profession doesn’t result in a catastrophe. Everyone with any sense is girding themselves for the inevitability:
Food and Drug Administration Commissioner Marty Makary signed off on the ouster of top vaccine official Peter Marks shortly after being quietly sworn in as the agency’s new leader late last week, four people familiar with the matter told POLITICO.
The forced removal was Makary’s first major act as commissioner and sent a powerful signal to a stunned Washington that was already anxious about the role vaccine skepticism would play under Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s Health and Human Services Department. Makary and Kennedy had previously agreed to push out Marks, who led the FDA’s vaccine division for more than eight years, as part of a broader overhaul of HHS leadership.
The decision has alarmed lawmakers and the pharmaceutical industry, who see it as an effort by Kennedy to lay the groundwork for remaking the government’s approach to vaccines after years of sowing doubts about the shots.
For some reason they kept Makary’s swearing in a secret. I wonder why?
Makary’s involvement in the decision was not widely known even within the FDA, which has yet to acknowledge that he’s already been sworn in as head of the agency. On the agency’s website, Sara Brenner is still listed as the acting commissioner of food and drugs.
Even Marks appeared unaware of Makary’s status on Friday, addressing his resignation letter to Brenner and using his parting words to take aim at Kennedy. Marks declined to comment.
“I was willing to work to address the Secretary’s concerns regarding vaccine safety and transparency,” Marks wrote. “However, it has become clear that truth and transparency are not desired by the Secretary, but rather he wishes subservient confirmation of his misinformation and lies.”
I’ve written about the hostility to the mRNA research by Luddite freaks like RFK Jr which will inevitably delay or completely stop progress into this incredibly important new field that looks as though it could be a lifesaving treatment for various cancers. It sure saved a lot of lives during the pandemic.
But Bobby thinks that if we had all been eating organic produce (which I do already) there would have been no problem fighting off COVID 19 so there’s that. Maybe after Trump is finished with his tariffs he’ll get the agriculture department to find a magic way to make organic fruits and vegetables available and affordable for everyone and we will only need the “cures” from the 19th century to keep us healthy. You know, like they did then when life expectancy was in the late 40s.
The visual was kind of hard to miss. The vice president of the United States, flanked by American soldiers in combat fatigues, talking about turning Greenland into an America possession.
And he did this from the ground in Greenland.
There’s no way to read this except as an act of belligerence. Perhaps not quite at the level of Vladimir Putin publishing “On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians” in 2021. But in the same basic category.
Putin argued that Ukraine had historic ties to Russia; was vital to the security needs of Russia; and had been compromised by an evil political leadership who forced Russia to act.
Vance argued that Greenland has historic ties to the United States; that Greenland was vital to the security needs of the United States; and that Greenland had been compromised by feckless political leadership in Denmark.
This is how expansionist powers talk. They don’t say, “We want it.” They say that they have historical claims; that the coveted territory is vital to their “security”; that they’re just trying to keep the peace. That someone else is forcing their hand.
That was literally Putin’s rationale for sending troops into Luhansk and Donetsk in February 2022: “peacekeeping duties.” A couple days later those peacekeeping duties became a full-scale invasion.
I’ve made this point before but it’s worth reiterating. Trump wants Greenland because it’s in North America and he wants to claim the hemisphere for America and put himself on Mt Rushmore. But he sees Putin’s move on Greenland as a model for how to do it. It’s exactly as Last says. He fatuously insists he is just trying to provide security and keep the peace, even though there is really no threat and even if there were there are many ways to deal with it other than annexation.
Trump wants Greenland (and Canada) for the same reason Putin wants Ukraine (and the rest of Eastern Europe.) They see themselves as conquerors who will go down in history as leaders who expanded their empires. They are both out of their minds.
Last makes a number of important points about the fact that Europe is required to take all this very seriously, arm up and expand their own nuclear umbrella. What could be better than having many more nukes all over the world? I’m sure nothing will go wrong.
China, Japan and South Korea agreed to jointly respond to U.S. tariffs, a social media account affiliated with Chinese state broadcaster CCTV said on Monday.
The comments came after the three countries held their first economic dialogue in five years on Sunday, seeking to facilitate regional trade as the Asian export powers brace against U.S. President Donald Trump’s tariffs.
Japan and South Korea are seeking to import semiconductor raw materials from China, and China is also interested in purchasing chip products from Japan and South Korea, the account, Yuyuan Tantian, said in a post on Weibo.
At this point, who could we consider an ally? I think North Korea, Hungary and Argentina might be the only ones. Well, Russia too as long as Putin has his puppet in the White House anyway.
But at least Donald Trump feels like a big strong man. That’s really all that matters.
Trump: I haven’t heard that term in years. I don’t know anything about it.. this country is going to boom. We’re going to have boomtown. We’re going to boom pic.twitter.com/Ajo5RUOoaa
Economic growth has flatlined so far this year. Inflation has picked up. And consumers expect both to get worse in the months ahead.
Why it matters: For the moment, it adds up to Wall Street’s least-favorite “s-word,” stagflation — stagnant growth mixed with elevated inflation.
That pattern, most vividly seen in the 1970s, is particularly painful because it means people experience pain from both lack of job opportunities and higher prices.
It also leaves the Fed and other economic policymakers with less ability to cushion the blow because a move that might address one side of the problem could worsen the other.
The big picture: The takeaway, from a slew of recent data, is that President Trump inherited a shakier economy than it seemed and is risking something worse with aggressive policy moves.
State of play:The backward-looking data lately has been distinctly stagflationary. Consumer spending in the first two months of 2025 has been soft, coming in 0.6% below its December rate (when adjusted for inflation).
A real-time estimate of GDP published by the Atlanta Fed is now pointing to economic activity shrinking at an 0.5% rate in Q1, which ends Monday (after adjusting for gold inflows that distort economic data).
Meanwhile, the inflation measure favored by the Fed has risen at a 4.1% annual rate in the first two months of 2025, the highest in a year.
That all helps explain why, following a steep selloff Friday, the S&P 500 is now 9% below its Feb. 19 high.
Reality check: The GDP number appears to be depressed by a one-time surge of imports as companies try to get ahead of tariffs. Inflation has been on a bumpy path for years
Gosh I wonder what happened about four months ago that collapsed the American economic trajectory? I can’t think of anything.
Trump truly believes that the tariffs are going to change everything “and it’ll happen so fast it’ll make our heads spin.” He’s right. But not in a good way. His nutty “adviser” who’s feeding his fantasy says that the tariffs are going to raise 6 trillion for the government, replacing something like a third of the budget. If that’s true then most of that 6 trillion is going to be borne by American consumers making it the biggest tax hike in world history.
Note that all that’s happening in that video is a handful of women yelling at a cybertruck driver who threatens to break the fingers of an elderly lady if she touches his precious Muskmobile.
Elon Musk, who is leading Donald Trump’s unprecedented purge of the federal workforce, claimed it doesn’t make sense that people dislike him because he’s only ever “done productive things” and has “never done anything harmful.”
Americans — to an ever increasing proportion — disagree. .. A slew of recent polling has found that an increasing majority of Americans view the billionaire and his hack-and-slash treatment of the government negatively, even if they support major reforms.
After a judge found that DOGE and Musk “violated the Constitution” in a number of different ways, he went on Fox News and whined, claiming that the only people who are complaining are criminals:
Musk appeared on Fox News and discussed a recent string of protests as well as attacks and vandalism against Tesla vehicles and dealerships — claiming it’s happening because he and DOGE are uncovering fraud.
“It turns out, when you take away people’s, you know, the money they’re receiving fraudulently, they get very upset, and they basically want to kill me because I’m stopping their fraud, and they want to hurt Tesla because we’re stopping this, this terrible waste and corruption in the government,” Musk said, adding: “Bad people will do bad things.” […]
“Tesla is a peaceful company. We’ve never done anything harmful. I’ve never done anything harmful. I’ve only done productive things. So I think we just have a deranged — there’s some kind of mental illness thing going on here, because this doesn’t make any sense.”
Waaaaah!!! And naturally, it’s a conspiracy because Musk is a creature of the far right now, totally red-pilled by Twitter bullshit:
“There are larger forces at work as well,” he told Hannity on Tuesday, speaking about the Tesla attacks and protests. “I don’t know who’s funding it and who’s coordinating it, because this is, this is crazy. I’ve never seen anything like this.”
Right. Those little old ladies and protesters chanting “shame” are all Soros-paid Antifa warriors.
Musk: I mean, have you Tim Walz, who is a huge jerk, running on stage with the Tesla stock price.. What an evil thing to do. What a creep, what a jerk. Like who derives joy from that? pic.twitter.com/essN7FUZkn
🚨ELON MUSK: "It's disadvantageous for me to be in the govt, not advantageous. If I wasn't in the govt, I could push for things that are advantageous to my company.
Everything I do is under extreme scrutiny. Every DOGE action is public. It's most amount of transparency ever" pic.twitter.com/zweadXUfCU
That’s a lie. Nobody knows what the hell Big Balls and the rest are doing but from what we can tell they are slashing and burning everything in their wake without even the slightest concern about the harm it’s doing.
The genius last night in Wisconsin trying to buy an election for a fascist:
Musk: End the fed! Oh, yeah, I always wanted to say that. I think there are 20,000 people who work at the fed. Why do we have so many people at the fed and what do they do? pic.twitter.com/rUn1lpueV7
The man standing on a stage literally handing out million dollar checks to people for voting for his candidate is blubbering about George Soros:
Musk responds to being heckled: it was inevitable at least a few Soros operatives would be in the audience. Give my regards to George. Say hi to George for me. pic.twitter.com/2sGiaDfwTm
Musk: Is it the same people who organized and funded you know the infiltrators you know who, the hecklers, whoever they are.. what is their goal, like, what is their aim? Is it communism? pic.twitter.com/RutauhOTsA
Musk: So the thing that has Democrats losing their mind, the real reason for these attacks and the burnings of the cars is we are turning off the payments to illegals. pic.twitter.com/fas7bpziyZ
He goes on and on and on. His Twitter feed is full of this petulant caterwauling. He’s right up there with Trump crying about how unfair it is that people are being mean to him, they must all be paid to do it because everyone knows he is really universally beloved.
Wealthy man-children all think they are worshipped because everyone around them is always licking their boots. They are unaware that most of us either don’t care about them or actively loathe them for being the entitled jerks they are. That knowledge exposes their fragile little psyches.
The rich techno-nerds are especially living in a fantasy world in so many ways and are shocked to find out that the rest of us aren’t particularly impressed with their visions. And then they get mad, like the spoiled little princess they are.
Much of what Trump is doing, whether he knows it or not, is modeled on Viktor Orban’s Hungary, the right’s favorite modern authoritarian state. This is what we have to look forward to.
Flashy hotels and upmarket restaurants now dominate the center of Budapest, a city once better known for its shabby facades. New monuments have sprung up in the center of town too. One of them, a pastiche of the Vietnam War memorial in Washington, D.C., mourns Hungary’s lost 19th-century empire. Instead of war dead, the names of formerly “Hungarian” places—cities and villages that are now in Romania, Slovakia, Ukraine, Poland—are engraved in long granite walls, solemnly memorialized with an eternal flame.
But the nationalist kitsch and tourist traps hide a different reality. Once widely perceived to be the wealthiest country in Central Europe (“the happiest barrack in the socialist camp,” as it was known during the Cold War), and later the Central European country that foreign investors liked most, Hungary is now one of the poorest countries, and possibly the poorest, in the European Union. Industrial production is falling year-over-year. Productivity is close to the lowest in the region. Unemployment is creeping upward.
Despite the ruling party’s loud talk about traditional values, the population is shrinking. Perhaps that’s because young people don’t want to have children in a place where two-thirds of the citizens describe the national education system as “bad,” and where hospital departments are closing because so many doctors have moved abroad. Maybe talented people don’t want to stay in a country perceived as the most corrupt in the EU for three years in a row. Even the Index of Economic Freedom—which is published by the Heritage Foundation, the MAGA-affiliated think tank that produced Project 2025—puts Hungary at the bottom of the EU in its rankings of government integrity.
I think there’s no escaping this. Trump and his enablers and exploiters want the culture war victory that Orban’s model would give them. The rich guys don’t care because their wealth insulates them. The rest of us are stuck if they have their way.
I would just add that the world’s military superpower being in this condition is a recipe for serious disaster.
