The Trump administration is discussing an executive order designed to force banks to collect citizenship data alongside other identification information from customers, according to multiple media reports.
The potential move would represent a significant new push in President Donald Trump’s effort to discourage undocumented migration to the US, and could impose substantial and unprecedented new mandates on financial institutions.
If you’ve been listening to Stephen Miller you know that he’s looking at all immigrants not just the undocumented. This would subject any non-citizen banking customer to special scrutiny and there are plenty of people who would rather not do that. After all, who knows what Trump will do next? Start seizing assets of foreigners? Don’t kid yourself. It could happen.
Foreigners should be very wary of using American banks if they do this. And that is a disaster for banks. I’ll be shocked if the banker boyz let this happen.
“This is a poll of speech watchers. So it is not a poll that is reflective of the population overall… What we know about people who tune into SOTU addresses is that they tend to be fans of whichever president is giving the speech. The polling universe here is about 13 points more Republican than the overall population.”
But, if Tuesday’s speech proved anything, it’s that it’s hard to explain how you are going to get America out of a mess that you do not believe exists. A year ago, a mere six weeks into his second term, Trump opened his address to Congress by claiming that he had done more in that time than any President ever did, George Washington included; this time, he boasted that “our nation is back, bigger, better, richer, and stronger than ever before.” He said that prices were down and that “affordability” was “a word—they just used it.” All those complaints about the high cost of living in Trump’s America were just “a dirty, rotten lie.” Prices are not really too high, he said. But, even if they were, everything was fine, because “soon you will see numbers that few people would think it possible to achieve just a short time ago.” That’s some case, Madam Press Secretary.
The problem for Trump at such a moment is that he’s not a persuader; he’s a pitchman, the kind of salesman who transmits in exclamation points all the fantastic, terrific, unbelievable features of the new car that he wants you to buy. “A short time ago, we were a dead country; now we are the hottest country anywhere in the world!” Trump said on Tuesday night. But the salesman is not who you want to talk to when you have the broken-down old jalopy towed back to the lot and demand a refund.
[…]
Trump’s default setting is triumphalism. He is never more animated than when he’s touting his own accomplishments, even if they are not actually his accomplishments. His eyes positively glowed as he launched into a long riff with an imagined interlocutor about how “our country is winning so much” under his leadership “that we really don’t know what to do about it.” A few seconds later, the doors to the visitor’s gallery above the House floor opened and the American men’s Olympic hockey team, wearing matching U.S.A. sweaters and gold medals, marched in. Chants of “U.S.A.! U.S.A.! U.S.A.!” rang through the hall.
It was both the most theatrical moment in Trump’s speech and the most revealing. Did he think that he personally was responsible for winning that gold? Probably.
If only he had ended his speech there. The rest of the address turned out to be a reprise of Trump’s “American carnage” greatest hits: a bloody mess of murderous illegal aliens (“And we’re getting them the hell out of here fast”), “Somali pirates who ransacked Minnesota,” and all the “stolen and rigged” bad things that Democrats had done to the country. This was Trump in dark mode, his only other setting for one of these speeches, which made a certain amount of sense. Who else but Trump’s most fervent supporters were still listening by this point, long into his speech? The President seemed almost relieved that there were enough Democrats who had not walked out of the room in disgust for him to taunt. “These people are crazy,” he said. “I’m telling you, they’re crazy.”
President Ronald Reagan, the “Great Communicator,” once managed to do the entire State of the Union address in 31 minutes; that’s because he could say important things efficiently and well. Tonight, however, was not about communication—it was about showmanship. Almost every line was a cue for applause from obedient Republicans; they even gave Jared Kushner a standing ovation. Every few minutes, Trump told a story and reached out into the audience like the host of The Price Is Right, telling people to come on down.
He started, of course, with the U.S. men’s Olympic hockey team. Just basking along with Team USA wasn’t enough. Trump soon announced that the goalie Connor Hellebuyck would receive the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Normally, this honor is bestowed for a lifetime of achievement, but this time it was given as if the young athlete had chosen the right door and found a new car.
And so it went, all night. Sometimes, the guests were meant to tug at the heartstrings, such as when Trump recognized Erika Kirk, the wife of the murdered activist Charlie Kirk. Others were presented as ornaments meant to illustrate Trump’s successes: Enrique Márquez, a Venezuelan political prisoner freed after U.S. forces deposed the strongman Nicolás Maduro, was given a round of well-deserved applause. Trump also gave a shout-out to a woman whose IVF medications were now, he claimed, cheaper because of him.
But no group received more attention than the U.S. military. Trump handed out two Purple Hearts (one posthumously), a Legion of Merit, and not one but two Congressional Medals of Honor. Military awards that should have been treated with dignity and respect were placed on men like prizes, including a moment when Trump’s co-host, the first lady, put one of the Medals of Honor around the neck of a 100-year-old fighter pilot.
It was a show. A very bad, boring one that demeaned everyone associated with it.
The”guest” that was the most dubious was the girl who alleged that a school tried to change her gender against her parents wishes. Someone should look into that one.
The Bulwark team’s approach to SOTU analysis sounds like the name of an early 1960s game show even I barely remember (and Donald Trump was never clever enough to play). They urge Americans studying Donald Trump’s speech from Tuesday night to pay close attention to what the con man didn’t say.
Bill Kristol didn’t watch the speech either. He doesn’t venture an analysis, but he skimmed a transcript of its one hour and 48 minutes. Here’s what he didn’t see mentioned: equality, rights, the rule of law, the Constitution, republic, democracy, immigrants (although he mentioned immigration), opportunity, and justice.
And of course, while he relished telling lurid, bloody tales of immigrant violence, Trump never mentioned Renee Good or Alex Pretti, both shot and killed by his civil-rights-blind immigrant-hunters in Minneapolis.
“Our president has no interest in elevating what is distinctive and admirable about America,” Kristol writes. “Nor does he have any interest in addressing instances of gross injustice in America. For now, those are our tasks, and our duty. It is, after all, our Union, not Donald Trump’s.”
The longest ever State of the Union speech. That’s the consensus. Donald John Trump likely won’t be Trumpeting his show’s ratings, at least not honestly. (I avoided the plague; Digby watched but couldn’t muster an analysis of the “drivel.”) He apparently stuck to his script. Like this:
And as time goes by, I believe the tariffs, paid for by foreign countries, will, like in the past, substantially replace the modern-day system of income tax, taking a great financial burden off the people that I love.
The convicted felon wants to take the country back over 100 years to the pre-New Deal days of the robber barons and the Ludlow Massacre. The people he loves are not people like you.
A collection of comments on Trump’s appearance Tuesday night.
Tom Nichols (The Atlantic): Trump “said little of substance, but substance wasn’t the point. This year, he intended to put on a show, with an array of guest stars and special appearances. He was happy because he was playing the roles he clearly loves: game-show host, ringmaster, emcee, beneficent granter of wishes—and, where the Democrats were concerned, a self-righteous inquisitor…. pity the fact-checkers”
Asawin Suebsaeng and Andrew Perez (The Ink): “It was a fascist rally peppered with flop-sweat one-liners, ring-led by a man who often sounded bored by his own teleprompted script…. For so much of Tuesday’s speech, Trump hectored the nation to just be grateful for a ruined economy that basically nobody believes is working for them anymore.”
Joyce Vance (Civil Discourse): “Trump continues to live in a magic fantasyland where stuff becomes true just because he says it is.”
National Review: “The problem is that talking people out of how they’re feeling about the economy tends to be very difficult for an elected official, and the inflation rate is, while down significantly, still too high…. [I]t often had the feel of a Trump rally inside the congressional chamber, with its over-the-top boastfulness, informal asides, dubious claims, pointed partisan jabs, and sheer length.”
Paul Krugman: “Well, that was exhausting — or would have been, if I had watched it.” [He waited for the transcript.] “[T]here are two big disconnects. First is the gap between what Trump promised — he was going to bring grocery prices down, cut energy prices in half — and what he has actually delivered. Second is the gap between his wild boasts about how great things are and the reality of a K-shaped economy that is leaving many Americans behind.”
Ed Kilgore (New York magazine): “For a while, you felt that the veteran TV star at the podium was channeling Oprah, showering awards on the worthiest people in his studio audience.”
Dan Pfeiffer (Message Box): “[F]rom a purely political perspective, Trump’s State of the Union was an epic disaster — political malpractice of the highest order.”
Navigator Research: “The dials dipped…when Trump touted the ‘golden age of America’ and his non-stop ‘winning,’ indicating a disconnect between the president and Americans on the economic state of our union.” Focus group member: “Why did he talk about nothing? What kind of speech was that? He said nothing.”
Oh, but the introduction modified by Jimmy Kimmel’s team was magnificent.
In between lurid, bloody tales of murder and mayhem that went on longer than your average Dateline episode, the following is how much time he spent talking about policy:
Affordability is the number one issue in the country.
Trump: "The same people in this chamber who voted for those disasters suddenly use the word 'affordability,' a word — they just used it. Somebody gave it to them. You caused that problem … we are doing really well. Those prices are plummeting downward. The price of eggs is… pic.twitter.com/kcj1XFQTzc
Trump after honoring a World War 2 veteran: "I've always wanted the Congressional Medal of Honor but I was informed I'm not allowed to give it to myself" pic.twitter.com/9yMIRDozTT
I’m spent too. We had to endure too many of these and I just don’t have it in me to do “analysis” of his drivel.
I’ll just let Sen. Warnock have the last word:
Warnock: "We heard tonight the rumblings of a desperate man who's trying to present case he can for the midterms. It was half lies, half grievances. He knows he is quickly losing power." pic.twitter.com/4OcQPeZAUj
Tonight he’s going the brag and whine, the only way he ever communicates. But it’s what’s taking him down. He can’t shut his pie hole about things the people do not like.
There has been a ton of polling out this week but I thought this one from Echelon was particularly interesting:
Every issue in double digits works against Trump.
I think that monument stuff is truly brutal. Aside from demanding the Nobel Peace Prize and tariffs, it’s the most important priority of his presidency. And even many of his own people obviously dislike it.
The Justice Department has withheld some Epstein files related to allegations that President Trump sexually abused a minor, an NPR investigation finds. It also removed some documents from the public database where accusations against Jeffrey Epstein also mention Trump.
Some files have not been made public despite a law mandating their release. These include what appear to be more than 50 pages of FBI interviews, as well as notes from conversations with a woman who accused Trump of sexual abuse decades ago when she was a minor.
NPR reviewed multiple sets of unique serial numbers appearing before and after the pages in question, stamped onto documents in the Epstein files database, FBI case records, emails and discovery document logs in the latest tranche of documents published at the end of January. NPR’s investigation found dozens of pages that appear to be catalogued by the Justice Department but not shared publicly.
The Justice Department declined to answer NPR’s questions on the record about these specific files, what’s in them and why they are not published. After publication, the Justice Department reached out to NPR, taking issue with how its responses to questions were framed. Department of Justice spokeswoman Natalie Baldassarre reiterated DOJ’s stance that any documents not published are privileged, are duplicates or relate to an ongoing federal investigation.
[…]
Other files scrubbed from public view pertain to a separate woman who was a key witness for the prosecution in the criminal trial of Epstein’s co-conspirator, Ghislaine Maxwell, who is serving a 20-year prison sentence for sex trafficking. Maxwell is seeking clemency from Trump.
Some of those documents were briefly taken down and put back online last week, while others remain hidden, according to NPR’s comparison of the initial dataset from Jan. 30 with document metadata of those files currently on the Justice Department website.
What is the allegation?
The woman who testified in the Maxwell trial testified that Epstein took her to meet Trump at Mar-a-Lago when she was 14 years old. There’s more to that but we don’t know what it is.
At least Bill White, Donald Trump’s ambassador to Brussels, showed up when summoned by the foreign ministry over some undiplomatic interventions into Belgian politics. His counterpart in Paris, Charles Kushner, on Monday snubbed a similar call from French officials, deepening a standoff that shows no signs of calming. France cut off his contact with government officials after the no-show.
The presidential envoys, traditionally thought of as builders of bridges, have instead been publicly picking fights with their hosts in service of a boss who has made contempt for the European Union a pillar of his foreign policy.
“We don’t accept that foreign countries can come and interfere, can invite themselves into the national political debate, whatever the circumstances,” French Foreign Minister Jean-Noel Barrot said on France Info radio on Tuesday. “There is nothing more normal than summoning an ambassador when an explanation is needed.”
The arena where the conflict between MAGA and Europe is playing out most routinely is on the ground. While disputes between countries, even allies, are a regular part of international relations, it’s noticeable that the complaints are concentrated in countries that have governments that define themselves in part in opposition to domestic populist movements, often viewed as natural political allies for the US administration.
Trump himself hasn’t shied away either. The US president affirmed his “complete and total” endorsement of Hungary Prime Minister Viktor Orban in Washington DC on Thursday. Orban faces a tight election on April 12. And it’s not the first run-in between the French and Kushner, the father of Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner. In August, Kushner sent his deputy to receive a dressing down after he sparked the French government’s ire with an editorial that accused President Emmanuel Macron of not doing enough to fight anti-semitism.
In Belgium, White, who only took up his post in November, also waded quickly into domestic politics in the notoriously politically fractious country.Last week the New Yorker was summoned by the country’s foreign minister after he accused the country of anti-semitism over a judicial investigation related to Jewish ritual circumcision in Antwerp, a city with a large orthodox Jewish community. White demanded that the case over whether three “mohels” — Jewish ritual circumcisers — were performing them without the required medical training be dropped. Foreign Minister Maxime Prévot accused White of peddling “dangerous disinformation that undermines the real fight against hatred.”
Who the hell do these people think they are??? Kushner is a convicted felon pardoned by Trump who is Trump’s worst choice for ambassador and is making that obvious every day.
This jerk in Belgium has gone after the EU Parliament, threatening visa restrictions against center left members who criticize American policies and has the temerity to call some ministers “rude.” Apparently, this a huge story in Belgium with the prime minister coming out yesterday saying, “it is not the role of an ambassador to sow discord in national politics.” No kidding.
The Trump envoy to Poland calls himself a “not-so-secret agent of MAGA Judeo-Christian Conspiracy” and has been threatening the Polish government if it decides to tax big tech and had a meltdown when the speaker of the parliament refused to sign a letter nominating Trump for a Nobel Peace Prize.
I’m still waiting to see what Kimberley Guilfoyle will do in Greece. You can bet it’s going to be a doozy.
We shouldn’t be surprised because Trump has named only crony loyalists to all appointments in this administration and that, by definition, means they are terrible people. Of course they’re causing diplomatic incidents all over the world.
For some reason this has not been a live subject even after the massive coverage of Biden’s age. But the people are noticing:
Six in ten Americans, including a significant slice of Republicans, think President Donald Trump has become erratic as he ages, according to a new Reuters/Ipsos poll.
The six-day poll concluded on Monday, the day before the 79-year-old president gives his annual State of the Union address to Congress following a month of angry reprimands of lawmakers and judges.
Overall, 61% of respondents in the poll said they would describe Trump as having “become erratic with age.” Some 89% of Democrats, 30% of Republicans and 64% of independents described him this way.
I would guess there are quite a few of those who think he’s always been erratic so the number of people who see him as unhinged is probably even higher.
The truth is that he has always been erratic but he was less sure of his instincts in the first term and is now convinced that he can literally do no wrong. No matter what, he always comes out on top and never suffered any consequences. In a way you can’t blame him. He never pays any price for anything he does.
Yesterday he said the polling was all fake but he also wondered aloud why he doesn’t get more support. Naturally he claimed that he has a silent majority, the last refuge of the scoundrel president.
Generic ballot: Democrats lead Republicans 52% to 42% among registered voters — a 10-point margin and the widest lead since we started this tracking poll
Presidential approval: 37% of U.S. adults approve of Trump’s job performance; 59% disapprove (net -22). Trump’s approval among political independents is just 20% in our data.
No positive issues left: Trump’s approval on border security — his one remaining bright spot — dropped from net +4 to net 0 over the last month. He is now underwater or even on every issue we test.
Trump approval on government funding collapses: Approval on government funding and social programs fell 7 points to net -26, the sharpest single-issue decline this month. Trump’s approval on health care also fell.
Spending priorities: Given a hypothetical $75 billion to spend on something, just 5% of Americans would spend it on immigration enforcement. 31% chose reducing grocery and housing costs.
Direction of country: Only 10% say things are going well in America. 52% say things are going poorly and major changes are needed.
Those are bad numbers.
I just watched a CNN segment in a Latino district in Texas that went heavily for Trump in 2024. Most of the Latino voters in the segment say they don’t like “the way he does things” but they think he’s doing a good job and will vote Republican in November. So, I don’t know. It’s possible that they were all just being tribal in front of the cameras and will vote differently or not vote at all. But it’s very hard for people to admit they messed up. I’m not sure they’re ever going to get there when it comes to Trump.
During the run-up to the Iraq War, one of the tropes that was passed around by the George W. Bush’s band of neoconservatives, who were at the height of their hubristic, premature victory celebration, was “Everybody wants to go to Bagdad, real men want to go to Tehran.” Twenty-three years later, at a time when he is reeling from collapsing poll numbers and a major economic and foreign policy setback from the Supreme Court, Donald Trump has taken the nation to the edge of war with Iran.
The U.S. has assembled a massive military force in the region. Two aircraft carriers are leading an armada of a dozen warships and what experts say is 40-50% of the country’s total global air power to threaten the Islamic Republic into — what we aren’t quite sure. The president, along with his Middle East envoys Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner, hasn’t exactly been forthcoming with a casus belli. In fact, no one knows precisely why the administration is threatening military action or what it wants Iran to do to stop it.
Some days, they say it’s about destroying Iran’s nuclear capability, which conflicts a bit with Trump’s declaration that he had “obliterated” it when U.S. and Israeli airstrikes hit nuclear facilities last summer. Last week he told reporters aboard Air Force One that he would send B-2 bombers to Iran “to knock out their nuclear potential” if they refused to agree to a nuclear deal. A few days later at the inaugural meeting of his Board of Peace, the president praised America’s “magnificent” B-2 bombers, saying they “went into Iran and it totally decimated the nuclear potential. When it decimated that, all of a sudden, we had peace in the Middle East.”
Only a few weeks ago, he was issuing bellicose threats to the regime that if they harmed any of the demonstrators who were taking to the streets in anti-government protests that he was willing to take military action. (So far, at least 7,000 have been verified dead by the Human Rights Activists News Agency, with other reports claiming upwards of 30,000 deaths.) Trump wrote on Truth Social that the government would “pay a big price” for the killings and urged people to “keep protesting.” He indicated that the U.S. was preparing to intervene on their behalf, bleating, “I have cancelled all meetings with Iranian Officials until the senseless killing of protesters STOPS. HELP IS ON ITS WAY. MIGA [Make Iran Great Again]!!!”
The president’s envoys are no more forthcoming with a rationale for the threatened military strikes. Needless to say, it’s difficult for them to make the demands for a halt to nuclear capability since the U.S. supposedly obliterated it. Nonetheless, Witkoff gamely claimed over the weekend that Iran could produce nuclear weapons in “less than a week.” Trump’s empathy and support for the country’s protesters, while commendable, is likewise hard to defend when the administration’s agents are shooting down its own citizens in the streets, so he appears to have gone quiet about that in recent days.
The president has not explicitly put regime change on the table as a desired outcome. But he has dropped cryptic hints, including a Truth Social post in the aftermath of the U.S.-Israeli airstrikes in June 2025 that referred to knowing the whereabouts of Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, and claimed he “would not let Israel…terminate his life.” After the capture of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro in January, such threats likely have more salience now.
War has a funny way of creeping up, and since we’ve had two long wars in the region in the past 20 years — and one short one in the previous decade — it’s quite easy to imagine how this could all hurtle out of control.
The bottom line is that nobody knows exactly why Trump has decided to threaten Iran now or what he hopes to achieve. When he took office in 2017, he inherited a formidable nuclear agreement with the country, which included an intrusive weapons inspection program, and he ripped it up solely because it was negotiated by Barack Obama’s administration. (Undoing everything his predecessors did was the only foreign policy he knew how to pursue, and he hasn’t learned much since then.) Whatever deal he might come up with will undoubtedly be much weaker.
The irony is that we find ourselves at this moment when Trump ran in 2016 as the anti-Iraq war crusader who blamed all the “stupid” leaders before him for getting the U.S. into the forever wars. His peacenik bonafides never seemed very believable considering his violent, hostile temperament, but they did become part of his brand. The neocons who promised that we would be greeted as liberators in Iraq were demeaned as hopeless romantics by the new America First faction, yet today we have Trump telling Iranian protesters that “help is on the way” — heartlessly raising expectations that America will intervene on their behalf in their internal battle for freedom.
Back in 2003, when those arrogant neocons were saying “real men want to go to Tehran,” the U.S. was in the throes of the reaction against 9/11. The devastation and fear that attack had caused throughout American society and around the world was extreme. People who had been angling to topple Iraqi President Saddam Hussein — followed by the Iranian regime, which was famously part of Bush’s “axis of evil” — saw an opening to remake the Middle East, and they used that emotional moment to push through their agenda. But at least they made an attempt, however fatuous, to persuade the American people and the country’s international allies that there was a reason for doing so.
Trump and his accomplices aren’t trying to persuade anyone. They don’t believe they need to.
Bush pushed hard for congressional support, which he got, and while he couldn’t get the United Nations to back his plan, he did manage to convince some European allies, mostly notably the United Kingdom, to join what he called “the coalition of the willing,” so he did go to war with a semblance of authorization and the support of the majority of the American people. But the administration had lied about Iraq’s nuclear weapons capability and its alleged ties to al Qaeda, and in the end that helped doom the war to failure.
Once again, we’re faced with a similar set of circumstances. As he has in the past, Trump may lose his nerve and back down by accepting some face-saving deal because he is pretty much out on a limb, serving only the interests of the Israeli government and a few Iran hawks in the GOP who are whispering furiously in his ear. Apparently, he didn’t think it would come to this.
The president apparently gambled that bringing in a massive military force would force the Iranians’ hands. As Witkoff told Fox News on Saturday:
I don’t want to use the word ‘frustrated’… because [Trump] understands he’s got plenty of alternatives, but he’s curious as to why they haven’t… I don’t want to use the word ‘capitulated’, but why they haven’t capitulated. Why, under this sort of pressure, with the amount of sea power and naval power that we have over there, why haven’t they come to us and said, ‘We profess that we don’t want a weapon, so here’s what we’re prepared to do? And yet it’s hard to sort of get them to that place.
Trump doesn’t understand that some people don’t readily respond to violent threats and blackmail, which is, unfortunately, the only kind of “negotiation” he knows how to do. We may be about to learn, in living color, what a mistake it is to put someone like that in a position of power. At this point, all we can hope is that his inherent cowardice will win out over his monstrous ego one more time. The stakes couldn’t be higher.
