Trump: We lost 38,000 men — in those days it was men. I hate to say this, but mostly men. They didn't have a lot of women workers on the Panama canal. We lost 38,000 people. They died from malaria and snakebites — it was a combination of the vicious snake, one of the most… pic.twitter.com/lpgtxHtWAw
He keeps repeating this story for no apparent reason. Here he is three days ago in Detroit:
Trump to the Detroit Economic Club:
"We lost 36,000 people to the mosquito, you know that, right? To the mosquito, and a certain snake, which was not a very nice reptile. This was a brutal reptile. You got bit, it was over. It was just, say bye bye everybody." pic.twitter.com/fqAXW2MIzp
Over 25,000 workers died building the Panama Canal, with around 22,000 during the failed French attempt (1881-1889) and approximately 5,600 during the successful U.S. construction (1904-1914), primarily from diseases like malaria and yellow fever, as well as industrial accidents. The vast majority were Afro-Caribbean laborers, with far fewer American deaths than often misreported.
I can’t find any mention of the snake but there is this from the recent NY Times interview. While discussing his White House renovations this happened:
David E. Sanger: So would you do it on the West Wing? Would you do it on the arcade?
President Trump: I would do it here — arcade and over to here, to about here. Here’s the Oval.
David E. Sanger: Until you stop at the Oval.
Tyler Pager: Building office —
President Trump: I’ve got to show — I shouldn’t do this, but I have to do it. I’m sorry, Karoline. Here’s my son holding a snake.
[Mr. Trump stops midsentence, leans over and pulls out of his desk a printed Instagram photo of his son Donald Trump Jr., who is smiling and holding up a rattlesnake.]
Do you believe that? No, do you believe that? That’s a cottonmouth rattlesnake. He’s a great hunter, but I said, “You know, ultimately they win.” I don’t like it. Don. No boots, no nothing. He was — he was born for that.
[The reporters look at the photo, in which the president’s son is wearing flip-flops.]
Katie Rogers: Flip-flops around that.
President Trump: But I said, “Ultimately, they win.” You better be careful. So ready? Don’t take any pictures of this ’cause you’ll scare people. So I started off with a building half of the seats —
[Mr. Trump puts a model for a new White House ballroom on the table.]
This happened the other day too while Trump was meeting with oil executives about Venezuela:
That is a very disordered mind, which is evident throughout that interview. He’s all over the place.
A half hour later he was on his way to Mar-a-lago for a long weekend.
Aaron Rupar’s Public Notice has an interview with Simon Rosenberg who offered up this tasty quote:
“It’s all an issue of who he’s become — a vain autocrat who is building himself a gilded ballroom and falling asleep. He’s implicated in the Epstein affair by Epstein himself, right? It’s just too much. It’s grotesque. He’s become a grotesque figure. It’s similar to historical figures like Nero or Caligula. Their madness took over and they started doing wildly destructive things. Trump is in that place.”
Michelle Goldberg writes about the latest MAGA target today. (gift link)
If you read conservative media, you might have heard about a new danger stalking our besieged country.
This week, Fox News warned about “organized gangs of wine moms” using “antifa tactics” against ICE. According to a column in the right-wing PJ Media, the “greatest threat to our nation” is a “group of ‘unindicted domestic terrorists’ who are just AWFL: Affluent White Liberal Women.” (The acronym is wrong, but never mind.) The Canadian influencer Lauren Chen — who had to leave the United States in 2024 after the Department of Justice accused her of working for a Russian propaganda operation, but was allowed back in by the Trump administration — wrote that the ideology of women like Renee Good is “almost wholly responsible for the decline of Western civilization.”
It’s as if the right is speedrunning the Martin Niemöller poem that begins, “First they came for the Communists.” ICE’s invasion of Minneapolis started with the demonization of Somali immigrants. It took only weeks for conservative demagogues to direct their venom toward the middle-class women of the Resistance. We’re now seeing an outpouring of misogynist rage driven by both political expedience
I’m more of a tequila drinking, childless, cat lady but we’re all in this together. And we are pissed.
He’s flummoxed because he’s outsourced this policy completely to Miller and he knows it looks bad. Axios had this, this morning:
President Trump’s team recently reviewed private GOP polling that showed support for his immigration policies falling. The results, reflected in public surveys, bolstered internal concern about the administration’s confrontational enforcement tactics.
Now, as the chaotic scenes from Minnesota play out around the clock on TV and social media, Axios has learned that some Trump advisers quietly are talking about “recalibrating” the White House’s approach — though it’s unclear what changes Trump would embrace, if any.
Why it matters: The worries in part of Trump’s brain trust are the first signs of internal second-guessing of his controversial ICE enforcement tactics.
The private polling suggested a rupturing of the coalition of independent, moderate and minority voters who were key parts of Trump’s victory in 2024. Such voters will play a big role in determining whether Republicans keep their slim House majority in November’s midterms.
If Republicans lose the House, Trump will head into his final two years in office as a lame duck who, he acknowledges, could face a third impeachment.
To the degree they support a more constrained approach, some advisers are playing to the president’s occasional misgivings about the optics of some ICE tactics.
“I wouldn’t say he’s concerned about the policy,” a top Trump adviser told Axios. “He wants deportations. He wants mass deportations. What he doesn’t want is what people are seeing. He doesn’t like the way it looks. It looks bad, so he’s expressed some discomfort at that.”
“… [T]here’s the right way to do this. And this doesn’t look like the right way to a lot of people.”
Several Republicans in Congress have expressed concern to the White House about how the raids are playing out, according to a person familiar with the discussions.
ICE’s aggressive tactics are dominating the news and obscuring the White House’s work on cost-of-living issues that congressional Republicans, Trump and his team see as more important.
The internal GOP polling that alarmed some Trump insiders was completed at the end of December, days before an ICE agent fatally shot Renee Good in Minneapolis.
60% of independent voters and 58% of undecided voters said Trump was “too focused” on deporting illegal immigrants, the poll viewed by Trump’s team found.
33% said Trump was primarily deporting law-abiding people, as opposed to criminals.
You can tell by the way he’s answered questions in the recent interviews that he’s aware this looks bad. He personally loves the strong arm tactics, of course, he’s just leery of the optics which he knows a lot of people (not MAGA but others) really don’t like to see. He actually likes to see himself as a caring, empathetic person, which is absurd of course, but he’s
The polling out today from CNN, AP, and the rest are all showing him cratering on this issue. The MAGA faithful are fine with it, naturally. They are the folks who love to see their people getting violent, whether it’s the J6 insurrectionists or the ICE thugs. Apparently, the rest of the country still has a core of decency and doesn’t care for it.
By the way, the third impeachment is a must. I don’t see how the Democrats can not do it considering what he’s already done. No, he won’t be convicted but at this point I think that is an indictment of the GOP and it’s excellent politics. If we survive this, Trump’s legacy which is all he cares about now, will not be his ballroom or “the arch” or any of the things he’s slapped his hideous logo on. It will be that he was a criminal who almost destroyed the country and the world. He will instead join the pantheon of villainous leaders and Democrats should help that along by impeaching him a third time.
The NY Times has done a new forensic analysis of the various videos of the Good murder. Here’s a gift link. It’s worth watching.
In a video analysis, The Times focuses on some of the key contested moments of the agent’s cellphone video alongside other footage. More videos are likely to emerge, but the visual evidence shows no indication that the agent who fired the shots, Jonathan Ross, had been run over. The footage provides visibility into the positioning between the agent and Ms. Good’s S.U.V., and the key moments of escalation. It also establishes — millisecond by millisecond — how Mr. Ross put himself in a dangerous position near her vehicle in the first place.
It appears that there will be no criminal investigations and since they have qualified immunity, probably no lawsuits. But the truth still matters. They lied. The agent shot her in the head three times. And his actions show that he has no one to blame but himself.
Violent gangs of masked thugs are terrorizing American cities. It’s all on video. That would be fodder for weeks of breathless Fox News punditry if they weren’t issued badges and guns by the Trump administration, or if they were marching north in Mexico toward the U.S. border. Anti-ICE protesters set alight a Waymo in Los Angeles and the EXISTENTIAL THREAT claxons go off on the American right. But DHS Secretary Kristi Noem’s bumbling stormtroopers triple-tap a Minneapolis mother, killing her, or send a child who’s stopped breathing to the hospital, or put out a protester’s eye, and American fascists get all moist between the thighs.
“Politically idiosyncratic” bro-caster Joe Rogan has become a huge critic of the Trump administration’s ethnic cleansing/retribution efforts.
“You don’t want militarized people in the streets just roaming around, snatching up people, many of which turn out to be U.S. citizens that just don’t have their papers on them,” Rogan said. “Are we really gonna be the gestapo?” Rogan asked. “Where’s your papers—is that what we’ve come to?”
“In every situation, we are doing targeted enforcement. If we are on a target and doing an operation, there may be individuals surrounding that criminal that we may be asking who they are and why they’re there and validate their identity,” Noem claimed. “That’s what we’ve always done in asking people who they are so that we know who’s in those surroundings.”
She said if they are breaking the law, they will be detained them, “until we’ve run that processing.”
The least our American Gestapo can do is make the demand using the accent. (Yes, I know this guy is SS):
“Utterly dystopian. If I had accused Republicans of wanting this world 5 years ago, I’d have been accused of lying and exaggerating,” tweeted Cato’s David Bier.
Renee Good was not the first to die after an encounter with Noem’s secret police. Here is a slide show of others who died in ICE custody.
Holy Crap these were People that were detained by ICE & are now DEAD! These people are from all over the World & their families still don’t know why they died! Most of these people are young like in their 30’s so it wasn’t from natural causes or old age! Are they killing them too pic.twitter.com/SLmpXM0xs1
The death in Texas of one of those people, Geraldo Lunas Campos, 55, could soon be under investigation as a homicide (The Washington Post):
An employee of El Paso County’s Office of the Medical Examiner told Lunas Campos’s daughter this week that, subject to results of a toxicology report, the office is likely to classify the death as a homicide, according to a recording of the conversation.
In the recording, which the daughter shared with The Washington Post, the employee said a doctor there “is listing the preliminary cause of death as asphyxia due to neck and chest compression,” which means Lunas Campos did not get enough oxygen because of pressure on his neck and chest. Pending the results of a toxicology report, the staffer said on the recording, “our doctor is believing that we’re going to be listing the manner of death as homicide.”
A 55-year-old Cuban immigrant, Lunas Campos died following a struggle with detention staff, according to an eyewitness account and an internal ICE document reviewed by The Post.
Tricia McLaughlin, DHS spokesliar and Karoline Leavitt wannabe, claims…. What she claims is not worth repeating.
ICE detain 50-year-old permanent resident—threaten to arrest son when he tries to hand over legal documents.
"Even pointed a gun at me," he said. "For showing up with paperwork."
Mother was followed going to work and put in handcuffs.
Lunas Campos’s record is not clean, but did not merit a death sentence:
Court records show Lunas Campos was convicted of several crimes, including for aggravated assault with a weapon and, in 2003, first-degree sexual abuse involving a child under 11 years old. ICE arrested Lunas Campos in a “planned enforcement operation” in July, saying in a news release that his criminal record spanned from at least 1997 through 2015 and that “his luck has finally run out.
The Post indicates that recent events have “raised questions” about the recruitment and training of ICE agents. We’ve seen this week that their vetting efforts are slipshod at best. Virtually nonexistent. What’s more, ICE is explicitly targeting men who, put colloquially want to get their rocks off knocking heads (The Guardian):
“They’re aiming for that sweet spot of people who’ve got something to prove, who want to have that power, under the guise of patriotism,” Americus Reed, a marketing professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, told the Post.
ICE’s controversial ads have leaned heavily on American symbolism – Uncle Sam, George Washington, Lady Liberty – while casting immigrants as bad actors to convince potential deportation officers to apply.
Heidi Beirich, a co-founder of the Global Project Against Hate and Extremism, sees neo-Nazi and white supremacist memes and symbology in government recruitment materials (The Guardian):
“It’s absolutely shocking to see such images being deployed by this administration,” said Beirich. “The idea appeals to racists and white supremacists who think only white people should be in positions of power.”
Recently, DHS recruitment posters have been likened to Third Reich propaganda, while Elon Musk – a onetime government worker during his reign as the head of the so-called “department of government efficiency” – has outright race-baited Somali Americans, who are the main target of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids in the Twin Cities.
“I’m not sure if this is trolling or distraction, but there certainly have been more of them,” said Beirich, referring to the onslaught of Maga posting. “More worrisome, especially when it comes to DHS recruitment messages, is that they perhaps are trying to attract far-right extremists to join ICE.”
This is why this week I shifted from more anodyne messages to urging action … now.
“Stephen Miller was perhaps the most concerned about the portrait session. He asked me, “Should I smile or not smile?” and I said, “How would you want to be portrayed?” We agreed that we would do a bit of both. And then when we were finished, he comes up to me to shake my hand and say goodbye. And he says to me, “You know, you have a lot of power in the discretion you use to be kind to people.” And I looked at him and I said, “You know, you do too”. ~ Christopher Anderson, Vanity Fair
Shadow President Stephen Miller is itching to invoke the Insurrection Act his boss has fantasized about for years. Trump wants it now as part of his retribution campaign against anyone and everyone (“I am your retribution.”), but also as a way of suppressing the vote in fall congressional elections. Trump expects to lose control of the House, at a minimim, and face another inpeachment. Miller is just waiting for the right moment to yank Trump’s chain.
“If the corrupt politicians of Minnesota don’t obey the law and stop the professional agitators and insurrectionists from attacking the Patriots of I.C.E., who are only trying to do their job, I will institute the INSURRECTION ACT,” the president wrote Thursday on Truth Social.
Rep. Veronica Escobar(D) of Texas responds to the threat:
“We knew this was part of his plan all along, and my fear—and I think the fear of many members of Congress and communities across the country—is that he will use the Insurrection Act during the midterm elections to suppress the vote…”
.@PabloReports: Trump has now threatened to invoke the Insurrection Act in Minnesota. What’s your reaction to that?
Escobar: We knew this was part of his plan all along, and my fear—and I think the fear of many members of Congress and communities across the country—is that he… pic.twitter.com/zogCBp5k6C
Pritzker: The feds are supposed to be fighting to protect your civil rights, not to take them away. And the Insurrection Act is designed only for circumstances where your rights can’t be protected by local authorities or by whatever federal authorities are already there. Only then can federal troops be brought in to protect your civil rights. This is exactly the opposite. It’s like they’ve turned it on its head. Your civil rights are being infringed upon by CBP and ICE, and then they want to call in troops on top of that—not to protect your civil rights, but claiming that they’re protecting CBP and ICE. And it’s just false.
Pritzker: The feds are supposed to be fighting to protect your civil rights, not to take them away. And the Insurrection Act is designed only for circumstances where your rights can’t be protected by local authorities or by whatever federal authorities are already there. Only… pic.twitter.com/OyJ99os5jt
I don’t know if this can be stopped, or how widespread it could be. Trump cannot by law prevent elections, but the law seems of little concern to him, doesn’t it? And to Miller.
Interestingly, in the bad old days, the states were the ones terrorizing their citizens and the right wing defending states’ rights. Now it’s the federal government terrorizing the citizens of a state, the same threat the right wingers have been caterwauling about forever, and they’re all yelling “yeah!” This threat was the reason citizens needed to have all those guns, remember?
Yeah, it was always bullshit. They want guns to kill people like us whether they’re in the hands of the federal government or it’s some individual mowing down Black people in a grocery store. That’s what the second amendment really means to them.
By the way, 62 years ago yesterday, another Governor gave a speech:
Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. How different is that from what Trump and Miller are saying today?
In the days after American commandos raided Nicolás Maduro’s compound and whisked him out of Venezuela, Mike Lindell wasn’t ruminating about the dramatic military operation or oil prices—he was reviving a long-dead conspiracy theory.
Lindell, better known as the “MyPillow guy,” was celebrating because, in his telling, a possible witness to the theory that Venezuela conspired with election-equipment companies to rig the 2020 presidential election against Donald Trump was now in U.S. custody. “I’m hoping now that Maduro will actually come clean and tell us everything about the machines and how they steal the elections,” Lindell, who has long espoused election falsehoods, told me the day after the Venezuelan dictator’s arraignment.
The supposition boils down to this: Venezuela plotted with election-equipment and -technology companies to engineer Trump’s defeat in 2020. There is no credible evidence to support this. But with Maduro in U.S. custody months before the midterms and the Trump administration investigating the 2020 election, an idea that had been disproved by facts and debunked in lawsuits has been revived, with a newsy twist: Now Maduro will prove from a New York jail that Trump defeated Joe Biden.
Since Maduro’s capture, Trump has shared a raft of discredited election-fraud claims on his Truth Social site, including one tied to a company central to the Venezuela conspiracy. A top Justice Department official helped harden the narrative: Ed Martin, the United States pardon attorney (who also directs the Justice Department’s Weaponization Working Group, which pursues retribution against Trump’s perceived political enemies), promoted the idea that Maduro could offer crucial information to substantiate the stolen-election theory once and for all. Martin reposted on X a claim that Maduro could try “to plead to lesser charges by proffering evidence that the 2020 election was stolen,” adding “!”
The right-wing podcaster Benny Johnson, an extremely online Trump-administration ally, claimed that Maduro “is in possession” of evidence against election-equipment companies. “Maduro might be Trump’s final revenge for the election theft of 2020,” Johnson told his audience. “If he begins to sing like a canary—which he will; they always do—then who will he give up?” Johnson added: “This is why they took him alive.”
I mentioned this before but it really seems to be getting legs on the right. I’m sure you recall that this bs was the basis of the lawsuit that cost Fox New almost a billion dollars. But they just keep going.
I do wonder why Maduro wouldn’t just make some stuff up. He’s clearly being given a free shot at doing so and I’m quite sure he knows about it. Bondi and Blanche might even give him a plea deal or Trump could pardon him outright.
-Threatening to take over Greenland -Threatening to strike Iran -Wielding apparent control over Venezuela -Threatening the invoke the Insurrection Act to deploy troops in Minneapolis
Trump repeatedly dismissed concerns by the public, business leaders and even his fellow Republicans on issues ranging from the future of Greenland and the criminal investigation into Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell, to the state of the economy.
When told that a Reuters/Ipsos poll found tepid support among Americans for taking control of Greenland, Trump called the poll “fake.”
“I don’t care,” he responded when asked about the pushback by some Senate Republicans against the investigation into Powell. “I don’t care,” he said again, when reminded of JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon’s concerns that White House interference in the Fed could harm the economy.
When asked about Americans’ worries about high prices, Trump reiterated that the economy was the strongest “in history” and said he had to do a better job of promoting his achievements. (He referred to a specially prepared thick binder that listed his accomplishments in office.)
The president suggested that he follows his own compass. “A lot of times, you can’t convince a voter,” he said. “You have to just do what’s right. And then a lot of the things I did were not really politically popular. They turned out to be when it worked out so well.”
[…]
Despite his claim that he had brought peace to the Middle East, Trump conceded that Hamas had still not disarmed – a condition of the ceasefire agreement – and it was unclear whether they would. “They were born with a gun in the hand,” he said. “So, we’re gonna have to find out whether or not we’re gonna be able to get it done.”
What???? Did he actually admit that he’s a lying sack of shit? No, not really. But here he is admitting that his big victory lap in the middle east was bullshit. If only the people of America knew about this.
Here he is showing some squeamishness about what’s happening in Minneapolis. I think this could be a way in on this. Miller is way out of control and I’m not sure that DleepyDon is fully aware:
Trump appeared to express some sympathy for the death of Renee Nicole Good, after an ICE agent shot and killed her last week in Minneapolis, calling it “a very unfortunate incident.” Trump’s homeland security secretary, Kristi Noem, labeled Good a domestic terrorist.
But even so, he made clear he was standing behind his choice to send militarized officers into American cities.
“I know that it was a tough situation to be in. There was very little respect shown to the police, in this case, the ICE officers,” Trump said.
He said he would continue sending armed agents into cities, claiming that his efforts had taken “thousands of murderers out of our country.” There is no evidence to support that assertion.
And here you have him saying that we shouldn’t have an election this year:
The president expressed frustration that his Republican Party could lose control of the U.S. House of Representatives or the Senate in this year’s midterm elections, citing historical trends that have seen the party in power lose seats in the second year of a presidency.
“It’s some deep psychological thing, but when you win the presidency, you don’t win the midterms,” Trump said. He boasted that he had accomplished so much that “when you think of it, we shouldn’t even have an election.”
I doubt that means we won’t have one. He doesn’t yet have a way to do that. But if there’s a major terrorist attack or something else that’s truly catastrophic, who knows? More likely they will contest it and with the Supreme Court majority being what it is, it’s certainly possible that they will find a way to deny the Democrats the majority. That’s unlikely, however, and we have no choice but to assume otherwise.
He’s living in denial about his popularity and I think he’s fading so quickly that it’s only going to get worse.
🚨 BREAKING: Donald Trump just fell asleep again during a public meeting.
