Donald Trump has said that he will pardon the former president of Honduras, Juan Orlando Hernández, who was convicted of drug trafficking charges in a US court last year.
The US president said Hernández had been “treated very harshly and unfairly” in a social media post announcing the move on Friday.
Hernández was found guilty in March 2024 of conspiring to import cocaine into the US, and of possessing machine guns. He was sentenced to 45 years in prison.
The head of the Republican-led Senate Armed Services Committee has pledged “vigorous oversight” after a Washington Post report that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth gave a spoken order to kill all crew members during the first U.S. strike against suspected drug smugglers in the Caribbean earlier this year.
A live drone feed showed two survivors from the original crew of 11 clinging to the wreckage of their boat following the initial missile attack on Sept. 2, The Post reported on Friday afternoon. The Special Operations commander overseeing the operation then ordered a second strike to comply with Hegseth’s directive, according to two people with direct knowledge of the operation, killing both survivors. Those people, along with five others in the original report, spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the matter’s sensitivity.
US President Donald Trump declares the airspace above and surrounding Venezuela should be considered “closed in its entirety” in the latest escalation of tensions between the two countries.
The US president’s statement comes as Trump’s administration piles pressure on Venezuela with a major military deployment in the Caribbean that includes the world’s largest aircraft carrier.
He really wants that Nobel Peace Prize, doesn’t he? Somebody get the net!
If you’re more upset about Democrats reminding members of the military NOT to commit war crimes than you are about Republicans using the military TO commit war crimes, then congratulations, because you are an idiot, an asshole, and you’re in a fucking cult.
By Grand Canyon National Park – Naturalization Ceremony Grand Canyon 20100923mq_0555, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=43347142 (Public domain).
Pod Save America’s Jon Favreau on Friday spent more time on Friday on one item I mentioned in passing from Donald Trump’s Thanksgiving night rants: denaturalization.
People aren’t focused enough on the word “denaturalize” here
The President says that he will revoke the *citizenship* of Americans who weren’t born here if he and @StephenM determine decide they need to go.
Denaturalization is a rare and legally difficult process that Miller and white nationalists like Nick Fuentes have been pushing to “supercharge” the process for years now.
But as Trump makes clear by citing the number 53 million – which includes foreign-born CITIZENS – any American who wasn’t born here is now, at least in the eyes of the government, at risk of deportation.
Xenophobia on steroids
Yes, Trump, Stephen Miller, and their Project 2025 accomplices want to “adjust” the U.S. population through mass deportations. They mean to keep the “wrong” people from diluting the political strength of the shrinking white-Christian majority. Mark Steyn’s “It’s the Demography, Stupid” sounded this alarm in the Wall Street Journal back in 2006. He wrote of how the Muslim birthrate in Europe threatened western civilization and let white-Christian America read between the lines for what demographic change would mean here.
As slippery slopes go, this one is motor oil on teflon. America was still in its post-September 11 moral panic over Islam in 2006. Mexicans and other brown-skinned immigrants were only temporarily eclipsed as the demographic bogeymen. Not to worry, Lou Dobbs was already mentioning illegal immigration in most of his shows, backed up on Fox News by Bill O’Reilly and by Glenn Beck on CNN. Xenophobia had an audience among Real Americans™.
Trump began his first term trying to ban Muslim visitors and immigrants from the U.S. He has since taken his xenophobia beyond brown-skinned Latinos and Muslims. The gilded fan of racehorse theory now want so declare any non-native-born Americans not to be real citizens. (Tough break for Ted Cruz, notes one X user.) Trump means to ethnically cleanse the country of them too:
Trump declared his intent to “remove anyone who is not a net asset to the United States” (including the stray European), to “denaturalize migrants who undermine domestic tranquility,” and to “deport any foreign national who is a public charge, security risk, or non-compatible” with Western (read: white) civilization. Trump declared a program of “REVERSE MIGRATION” (read: ethnic cleansing).
Per @pewresearch 46% of US foreign born are naturalized citizens. They are 13% of workforce & per @AP Votecast were 7% of voters (which would translate into 11 [million] voters) Trump not only threatens to denaturalize them but says they’re mostly on welfare or criminals, mentally ill
This represents a kind of “patriotic” fundamentalism. (It’s not enough for Christian fundies that you accept Jesus as your savior. If you don’t subscribe to their sect’s particular set of beliefs, you go to hell on a technicality, heathen.) Trump not only wants to eliminate the birthright citizenship guarantee in “All persons born or naturalized in the United States,” he now wants to eliminate the naturalized part as well. Under Trump and Miller, America will be purged and purified.
Give them time and they’ll try to abolish the 15th Amendment too.
When Shabana Mahmood, Britain’s Home Secretary, announced restrictive new measures last week aimed at cracking down on legal immigration, she used dire language to bolster her case.
“The pace and scale of migration in this country has been destabilizing,” she said in a speech to Parliament. She warned of “unprecedented levels of migration in recent years” and vowed that with her new policies: “That will now change.”
In fact, it already has.
Official data released Thursday showed that net migration to Britain fell sharply in the 12 months leading up to June, to 204,000 people, down from the previous year’s total of 649,000.
Those numbers continue a downward trend in Britain. Net migration — the number of people who arrived, minus the number of people who left — almost halved in 2024, the result of tougher rules announced at the end of the previous Conservative government, and of changes in global migration patterns.
Overall, net migration to Britain has now plunged by almost 80 percent since its peak of nearly a million people in 2023.
I guess it takes a while for change to sink in. But the result is that everyone reacting to something that’s already over and the policies are counterproductive. The UK may end up getting that clown Nigel Farage as a PM which is almost as bad as electing Trump.
The longer the U.S. surveillance aircraftfollowed the boat, the more confident intelligenceanalysts watching from command centers became that the 11 people on board were ferrying drugs. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth gave a spoken directive,according to two people with direct knowledge of the operation. “The order was to kill everybody,” one of them said.
A missile screamed off the Trinidad coast, striking the vessel and igniting a blaze from bow to stern. For minutes, commanders watched the boat burning on a live drone feed. As the smoke cleared, they got a jolt: Two survivors were clinging to the smoldering wreck.
The Special Operations commander overseeing the Sept. 2 attack — the opening salvo in the Trump administration’s war on suspected drug traffickers in the Western Hemisphere — ordered a second strike to comply with Hegseth’s instructions, two people familiar with the matter said. The two men were blown apart in the water.
The alleged traffickers pose no imminent threat of attack against the United States and are not, as the Trump administration has tried to argue, in an “armed conflict” with the U.S., these officials and experts say. Because there is no legitimate war between the two sides, killing any ofthe men in the boats “amounts to murder,” said Todd Huntley, a former military lawyer who advised Special Operations forces for seven years at the height of the U.S. counterterrorism campaign.
Even if the U.S. were at war with the traffickers, an order to kill all the boat’s occupants if they were no longer able to fight “would in essence be an order to show no quarter, which would be a war crime,” said Huntley, now director of the national security law program at Georgetown Law.
Hegseth has always been a huge fan of war crimes. He’s the guy who persuaded Trump to pardon war criminals in his first term. (He did it eagerly.)
I guess enough Americans think murderous sociopaths are fine leaders as long as they don’t have to pay a few more cents for eggs that they wanted to put them back in power. No one should be surprised by any of this.
We’ve never been perfect, far from it. Slavery, Jim Crow, all of it should have been a clue. But I think we’re seeing now that it’s such an indelible part of our national character that any progress we think we have made will be erased once we get a taste of blood. And we are so powerful now that I wonder if the only answer will be for the entire world to band together in opposition. That possibility seems very remote right now.
The American people can stop it. But it’s going to take courage and commitment similar to what the original revolutionaries mustered to extricate themselves from their king. They’ll have to see that there’s even more at stake than “affordability.” I’m still hopeful that they will. What choice do we have?
On Sept. 15, 2008 Lehman Brothers failed. Within weeks the whole U.S. financial system was caught in the downward spiral of a massive bank run, on a scale not seen since the 1930s. Yet there was an important difference from the 1930s bank runs: in 2008, the panic mainly resulted in flight from “shadow banks,” nonbank institutions that performed bank-like functions. Conventional banks were largely immune from the 2008 panic because deposit insurance and federal regulations – a consequence of the 1930s bank runs – protected them.
While the U.S. economy was already in recession when Lehman fell, the financial crisis pushed it off a cliff into a deep recession. Despite frantic efforts to stabilize the financial markets, including large bailouts and huge lending by the Federal Reserve, America lost 6 million jobs in the year following Lehman’s fall. Total employment didn’t return to pre-recession levels until 2014. The share of prime-working-age adults with jobs remained depressed until the late 2010s:
The clear lesson of 2008 is that effective financial regulation is essential. For three generations after the great bank runs of 1930-31, America avoided “systemic” banking crises — crises that threaten the whole financial system, as opposed to individual institutions. This era, which Yale’s Gary Gorton calls the Quiet Period, was the result of New-Deal-era protections — especially deposit insurance — and regulations that limited banks’ risk-taking.
But post 1980, finance was increasingly deregulated. In particular, the government failed to extend bank-type regulation to shadow banks that posed systemic bank-type risks. And the crisis came.
In a way, the laxity that made the 2008 crisis possible was understandable. By the 2000s nobody in government or the financial markets remembered what a real financial crisis was like. And no, watching “It’s a Wonderful Life” on Christmas Day doesn’t count.
But here we are in 2025, and 2008 wasn’t that long ago. Many of us still have vivid memories of the gut-wrenching panic that gripped the world when Lehman fell. Yet Donald Trump’s allies and cronies are now moving rapidly to dismantle the precautionary regulations introduced after 2008 to reduce the risk of future financial crises. I say “allies and cronies” advisedly. There’s no indication that Trump himself has any idea what’s happening on his watch. But key players in Congress, within the administration, and, alas, at the Federal Reserve, are apparently determined to make a 2008 rerun possible.
The MAGA war on financial stability is being waged largely on two fronts. First, there’s an ongoing effort within some parts of the Federal Reserve to drastically weaken bank supervision — oversight of banks to prevent them from taking risks that could threaten the financial system.
The Fed has multiple roles: in addition to setting interest rates, it also has primary responsibility for bank supervision.
The Fed is supposed to be quasi-independent, and so far it has preserved its interest-rate-setting independence in the face of intense pressure by Trump to cut rates. Yet a Trumpian agenda is attempting to overtake the Fed’s bank supervision operations. In June, Michelle Bowman, a Trump appointee, became the Fed’s vice-chair of supervision. She is in the process of reducing staffing at the Fed’s supervisory and regulatory unit by 30 percent, while hiring new staffers drawn from the banking industry.
Bowman is expected to substantially loosen capital requirements. Capital requirements – requirements that a bank’s shareholders put a significant amount of their own money at risk to fund loans, and not just depositors’ money – are a critical component of reducing risk throughout the banking sector. Bowman has also sent out a memo sharply curtailing the ability of Fed staff to issue warnings about what they consider risky bank practices.
While it’s impossible to predict the precise effect of any of these moves, Bowman’s actions will clearly increase the banking industry’s profits in the short run while increasing the risk of another financial crisis – a risk that will inevitably fall on taxpayers’ shoulders, as they did in 2008.
The second front of MAGA’s war on financial stability is on behalf of the crypto industry. The Trump administration and its allies in Congress — including, I’m sorry to say, a number of Democrats in this case — are moving to promote wider use of crypto. In particular, the GENIUS Act (gag me with an acronym), passed in July, aims to promote stablecoins. And the fact is that stablecoins are effectively an alternative, weakly regulated and poorly supervised form of banking.
What are stablecoins? They’re privately issued tokens supposedly fixed in value at one dollar. They are, in effect, sort of a digital version of the bank notes that circulated during America’s private banking era in the 19thcentury — an era in which gold coins were the only official U.S. currency, with paper money consisting of notes issued by private banks that promised to redeem these notes for gold or silver on demand. The most famous of these bank notes was the $10 “Dix” note issued by the Citizens’ Bank of Louisiana, which may have given the South its nickname:
Private banking had many serious problems: private banks frequently collapsed, thereby losing depositors’ money. Without effective government supervision, private banks could issue notes without the resources to honor their promise to redeem those notes on demand. Indeed, there was a proliferation of “wildcat banking” — establishing banks in remote locations “where the wildcats roamed,” thus making it difficult for noteholders to present their notes for redemption.
How do stablecoins compare with 19th century private banking? One fact rarely mentioned about the stablecoin industry is that it’s dominated by two big issuers, Tether and USDC, with the rest consisting of a grab-bag of minor coins that collectively are much smaller than either:
Tether has attracted the most scrutiny, in large part because it has, as The Economist puts it, become “money launderers’ dream currency.”
Leaving aside its role in facilitating global crime and viewing it as in effect a bank, how sound is Tether? On Wednesday S&P Global Ratings issued a scathing report, questioning the quality of Tether’s assets and noting that the company is highly secretive, giving outsiders no good way to assess its claims to be financially stable.
But aren’t government regulators keeping an eye on Tether? Um, no. Tether isn’t a U.S. company. It’s headquartered in and overseen by El Salvador, whose authoritarian ruler Nayib Bukele is best known in financial circles for his expensive, failing attempt to force Salvadorans to use Bitcoin as currency. El Salvador’s prudential guidelines for Tether are very lax, and how much faith do we have that even these weak rules are being enforced?
How did Tether respond to S&P’s assessment? With conspiracy theories, accusing S&P of being a tool of the “traditional finance propaganda machine.”
In short, as far as I can tell, Tether is a 21st century version of a wildcat bank, issuing tokens while deliberately making it hard for anyone to know whether it has the resources to honor them. And it’s not an outlier — it’s most of the industry.
Does Tether satisfy the rules of the GENIUS Act? No. This means that in principle, once the act is fully implemented, Tether won’t be able to issue its coins in the United States. The company has floated the idea of issuing a separate coin that does obey GENIUS rules, but that hasn’t happened yet.
Maybe other stablecoins will emerge that do honor U.S. rules. But there are worrisome loopholes in those rules that are likely to make stablecoins risky. And anyway, with resources and staff for financial supervision being slashed, how will these rules be enforced? A special source of concern is the worry that stablecoins will draw money out of conventional bank deposits into institutions that will, at best, be less well regulated.
Why are Trump and his allies undermining financial stability? There may be an element of free-market dogma. But as always with this administration, you shouldn’t underestimate the importance of simple corruption. Tether is closely connected with the financial firm Cantor Fitzgerald, formerly run by Howard Lutnick, Trump’s secretary of commerce. On joining the government, Lutnick left his role at Cantor Fitzgerald — and handed it over to his sons.
This post is already long, so I’ll stop with a warning: Along with its many other sins, the Trump administration is doing its best to make a future financial crisis more likely. I hope the Democrats are paying attention and won’t let themselves be seduced by Wall Street and, worse, the blandishments of the crypto bros. Because if they don’t, they could set themselves for a 2008-type crash during a Democratic administration. And we can guess who will get the blame.
It’s the corruption. We are awash in it and it’s getting worse every day.
Thanksgiving 2024 was one of the most dreary holidays we’ve had for many a year. It may have even been worse than the 2016 holiday, when half the country was in a state of stunned disbelief that Donald Trump had won the presidency. This time, though, we knew what we were in for — and that made it even worse.
Trump had been impeached twice, inspired an insurrection, convicted of 34 felonies, found liable for sexual abuse of journalist E. Jean Carroll and guilty of massive fraud. He was indicted for conspiring to overturn the results of the 2020 election in Georgia, and then he was indicted again for stealing classified documents. And yet Americans voted him back into the presidency? The turkey, dressing and pumpkin pie all tasted like dust that no amount of wine or cider could wash away.
When Republicans lose an election nowadays, they just say it was rigged and pretend they won anyway. Somehow, they apparently find that soothing. Democrats, on the other hand, don hair shirts and self-flagellate for months, ensuring that voters of all political stripes see they loathe themselves even more than the GOP does.
The good news is that after three seasons of remorse and penance, over the past month or so Democrats have broken out of their funk and are coming to grips with the reality of another three years of Trump.
Like the president himself, the Trump train, which looked like high-speed rail during the first few months of his second term, is slowing down. And it’s a much more rickety machine than it first appeared.
Over the past few weeks the Republicans have lost the argument — if not the process — on the government shutdown. Despite the best efforts of Trump, House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., and Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., Congress voted almost unanimously for the Justice Department to release the Epstein files. Trump failed to persuade the Senate to eliminate the filibuster and his “health care plan” has been rejected by the House’s MAGA caucus. Now, a contingent of congressional Republicans are rebelling against his proposed sell-out to Russia and his staunch ally, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, R-Ga., defied him and then announced her resignation, prompting whispers that she’s just the first of many House Republicans who are considering leaving Congress before the 2026 midterms — and possibly even prompting a shift in the majority.
For months, the media was mesmerized by Trump’s theatricality. Democrats in Washington, obsessed as they were with their compulsive navel gazing, were paralyzed. But that seems to be over now — and it’s largely due to ordinary Americans seeing the threats posed by Trump more clearly than the party’s leadership and successfully pushing back.
The latest polling breaks down along typical lines, with Republicans mostly backing Trump and Democrats pretty much unanimously rejecting him. But instead of the similar breakdown you usually find among Independents, who generally lean 50-50, a substantial majority of them are now siding with the Democrats. A recent CBS/YouGov poll found that a whopping 76% disapprove of Trump’s handling of the economy, while 24% approve.
Those numbers reflect a very serious erosion in support for Trump and Republicans, and it’s doubtless contributed to his approval rating sinking below 40%. This decline has occurred despite a massive propaganda effort by the White House to present the president’s first year as successful on every front — including this week’s ludicrous claim that he has the highest poll numbers of his career. He is actually at the weakest point in his presidency.
Americans are rejecting Trump’s policies across the board. He’s drastically underwater on the economy, immigration, inflation and trade, all supposedly his strong suits, and people are blaming him — and not former President Joe Biden — for all of it. While most Republicans love the cruel ICE raids in Democratic-led cities, large majorities of Democrats and Independents disapprove, and it’s personal to many of them. Most people, too, are well aware that Trump is using law enforcement to target his political enemies.
But we don’t have to read the polls to know that Democrats and Independents see what’s happening. In June, the “No Kings” protests brought out five million people nationwide, and the subsequent marches and rallies on Oct. 18 saw 7 million turn out in the largest protest in U.S. history.
As anyone who perused the many clever protest signs could see, there were many reasons why Americans turned out. But the common message was contained in the name of the protest itself: People don’t like the authoritarian methods Trump and the GOP are employing to get their way. The protests demonstrated that millions see the president as a clear and present threat to American democracy and our system of government.
These aren’t the only signs that the stakes are setting in for people. As historian Heather Cox Richardson wrote in her newsletter this week, there is a burgeoning consumer protest movement as well. In response to Trump’s appointment of Tesla CEO Elon Musk to take his famous chainsaw to the federal government, average folks organized “Tesla Takedowns” at the company’s showrooms to persuade people not to buy his cars. The results were major brand damage and sinking stock prices. ABC’s suspension of Jimmy Kimmel, following pressure from Federal Communications Commission chairman Brendan Carr and Trump himself, proved that consumers have the kind of clout that can move a giant corporation — Disney in this case — to defy the administration’s attempts to crackdown on free speech. The loss of subscribers and again, brand damage, was substantial.
Richardson recounted the history of successful consumer movements, particularly those run by women in the years before they were allowed to vote. Her conclusion? These movements have teeth — and they work. Richardson mentioned the upcoming “We Ain’t Buyin’ It!” campaign scheduled for Black Friday through Cyber Monday. Its organizers are urging people to pause their shopping at Target, Amazon and Home Depot from Nov. 27 to Dec. 1 in an effort to protest what they call “corporations enabling the Trump Administration’s abuses of power.”
Finally, there were the overwhelming victories of Democrats in the recent elections. In a normal political environment, off-year elections have limited value in predicting the following year’s midterms. But this year, in this abnormal time, something interesting happened. Young people and Latinos who had voted for Trump in 2024 swung back to Democrats in droves, from the big marquee races to local school boards.
This comes as a huge relief. The most disorienting and disheartening aspect of the Trump restoration has been the idea that so many of our allies would support Donald Trump after all we knew about him. Today, I think we can see that many of them realize they made a mistake and are prepared to help save America from the creeping authoritarianism we are witnessing.
Just as it should be in a democracy, the people are inspiring the Democratic establishment to follow them. And that’s something to be thankful for.
“The MAGA crack-up has begun,” declares Michael Tomasky. I’m here for it. Tomasky offers some bullet points:
• Trump tried to sell Ukraine down the river to Putin. The howls of outrage were instant, loud, and bipartisan to some extent….
Who knew “Which Side Are You On?” predicted Trump?
• Trump, bumbling around on domestic policy because he knows nothing, desperately said he was considering extending the Obamacare coverage subsidies on Monday. Congressional Republicans were up in arms….
They’d just shut down the government for 43 days to prevent that.
• Trump and Pentagon chief Pete Hegseth’s push to reinstate Senator Mark Kelly as an active-duty soldier (he’s 61!) so they can court-martial him is quickly turning into one of the leading disasters of this administration. There is no chance they’re going to convince a majority of Americans that a guy who flew 30-something combat missions is a disloyal American.
Does that old line about men wearing their brains between their legs apply to getting revenge?
• It was a disastrous week for Attorney General Pam Bondi as she stood there watching a federal judge dismiss the laughable indictments she directed against James Comey and Letitia James. And she stood up there, in perfect East German Communist Party circa 1957 fashion, repeating the assertion that everyone knows to be a lie, that Lindsey Halligan is “an excellent U.S. attorney.”
So it goes for FBI Director Kash Patel who looks to be headed out the door. Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem defied a court order to halt a deportation flight to El Salvador. She could face a contempt of court charge and jail time. Don’t expect her to get access to a puppy in prison.
There’s more, Tomasky offers, from a “whole murderers’ row of Trump’s awful appointments.”
Everywhere you look, in other words, Trump and his people are wrecking the country. He doesn’t know what to do about the economy. Presidents don’t have a ton of power to lower prices in the first place, and people are now understanding that fact, and that Trump swindled them last year. He’s going to give Putin most of what he wants. His pursuit of his perceived political enemies is going to be massively unpopular and drive his numbers down into the mid-30s before too long if he keeps it up. And all these incompetent and corrupt henchpeople aren’t helping. The movement is collapsing.
I can dream, can’t I?
I’m of an age that I remember the late “king of deadpan” comedy, Jackie Vernon, from “The Ed Sullivan Show.” One of his signature bits involved calmly describing his (imaginary) vacation slides he “advanced” using a hand clicker. Imagine this with Trump administration officials:
“Here I am touring the Everglades. That’s my guide. Guido the Guide.”
“[CLICK!] Here’s Guido leading me around a bed of quicksand…”
“[CLICK!] Here’s Guido from the waist up…”
“[CLICK!] There’s his hat.”
There’s a rescue party … and more hats. Trump 2.0 won’t get a rescue party.
From the cover of “Alt America: The Rise of the Radical Right in the Age of Trump,” by David Neiwert (2017). Dave previewed the cover for me in Atlanta the night of the Charlottesville car attack that killed Heather Heyer.
Donald Trump could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot an immigrant and not lose any voters. You know he believes it. You know he wants to. Killing Venezuelans in small boats is just previews. Threats to execute Democrats are pure, Trumpish id. Listen to the howls of outrage from the right over six elected Democrats reminding service members that the Universal Code of Military Justice (UCMJ) requires them to uphold the Constitution and not to follow orders that are clearly criminal.
Trump’s antipathy toward, well, pretty much everyone is well established in speech and in practice. He’s long ascribed to racehorse theory, even alluding to it in a 2020 presidential debate. “You could never have done the job we did,” Trump said to former Vice President Joe Biden. “You don’t have it in your blood.” Trump believes in the superiority of his genes. And thus, in the inferiority of others’.
Project 2025’s plans for closing the borders, eliminating asylum, and a program of mass deportation may be driven primarily by the authors’ desire to solidify political power in the hands of a shrinking white, Christian majority. But for Trump it is more visceral. As Trump’s mind and body have visibly declined, he’s simply more prone to let his beast out in public. He did late on Thanksgiving in a series of Truth Social posts. In the wake of the shootings of two National Guard members in D.C. this week by an immigrant, Trump is itching for some collective punishment.
Trump described immigrants and refugees as unproductive parasites and criminals, the source of high crime, urban decay, housing shortages, etc. And backward. Especially Somalis like Rep. Ilhan Omar (D) of Minnesota.
Trump declared his intent to “remove anyone who is not a net asset to the United States” (including the stray European), to “denaturalize migrants who undermine domestic tranquility,” and to “deport any foreign national who is a public charge, security risk, or non-compatible” with Western (read: white) civilization. Trump declared a program of “REVERSE MIGRATION” (read: ethnic cleansing).
Trump has already declared his interest in remaking the Gaza Strip into “the Riviera of the Middle East” with a program to relocate the entire population. Say it: ethnic cleansing.
The United Nations advises that ethnic cleansing is not an independent crime under international law. Its 1993 report on genocide in the former Yugoslavia nevertheless defined ethnic cleansing as “rendering an area ethnically homogeneous by using force or intimidation to remove persons of given groups from the area” and contrary to international law.
Whatever dry technical immigration reforms Project 2025 proposed, Trump just declared that his goal is a purge of the non-native born population through mass deportation to render the United States more ethnically homogeneous. Forget all that talk about enforcing immigration law. Trump means to enforce with extreme prejudice a whiter United States.
Customs and Border Patrol (CBP) and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents had best look in the mirror and reconsider just what they are really engaged in. History will not be kind to them. If there is any justice left in this world, neither will juries.
It’s been reported that the person who shot the national Guard soldiers in DC yesterday was an Afghan national who worked with the CIA and came to the U.S. as part of the evacuation in 2021 and was granted asylum in 2025 by Trump’s DHS.
Republicans are dramatically ramping up their anti-immigration rhetoric after the shooting of two National Guard members in D.C. by a suspect who is an Afghan national, with some calling to end Muslim immigration entirely and “deport every single Islamist.”
The Trump administration is already taking steps in that direction by suspending all immigration applications from Afghan nationals — a move even some Republican moderates aren’t fully dismissing.
[…]
Trump said Wednesday the shooting “underscores the single greatest national security threat facing our nation,” and that the U.S. “must now reexamine every single alien from Afghanistan who has entered our country under Biden.”
He added that the administration “must take all necessary measures to ensure the removal of any alien from any country who does not belong here or add benefit to our country.”
Some Republicans in Congress want to go much further that just suspending Afghan immigration.
“We must IMMEDIATELY BAN all ISLAM immigrants and DEPORT every single Islamist who is living among us just waiting to attack,” Sen. Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.) said Wednesday in a post on X. The sentiment was similar among House members, with Rep. Mary Miller (R-Ill.) writing: “Deport them all. Now. “We know the solution,” Rep. Chip Roy (R-Texas) posted. “Stop importing Islamists. Deport Islamists.”
[…]
Sen. Rick Scott (R-Fla.) is pushing for a vote on his bill to require “recurrent and periodic vetting” of Afghan refugees who came to the U.S. in 2021 and 2022 without certain documentation. He wrote on X: “We must pass my Afghan Vetting Accountability Act to identify and conduct recurrent vetting of evacuees from Afghanistan found not to be properly vetted before entering the United States, so this NEVER HAPPENS AGAIN!”
I’m pretty sure they’ve just been looking for an excuse to deport Muslims. And now it’s going to happen. At the moment the only people Trump is welcoming to the United States are racist white South Africans and foreigners to do manual labor at his properties.
The assessment by the majority on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, released late on Sunday, said the Biden administration chose “optics over security” as it oversaw a withdrawal agreement reached by former President Donald Trump and the Taliban in 2020.
Democrats, meanwhile, released their own minority report on the 18-month investigation on Monday, accusing Republicans of shutting them out of the probe and choosing partisan politics over the pursuit of truth.
The Republican report said the Biden administration “had the information and opportunity to take necessary steps to plan for the inevitable collapse of the Afghan government”. Such planning would have allowed Washington to “safely evacuate US personnel, American citizens, green card holders, and our brave Afghan allies”, said the more than 350-page report, titled Willful Blindness.
Now, of course, they are in another Charlie Kirk fugue state looking for blood anywhere they can find it. Sadly, I suspect this is going to be their reflexive response to any violence they can portray as left/foreign/Muslim violence. They have a taste for it now.
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