After we learned Trump dangled a pardon to DHS chief Kevin McAleenan, Judiciary Dems requested a list of people who attended that meeting, to flesh out the truth.
A senior administration official is now claiming that Trump "winks" when he offers pardons to underlings, after instructing them to skirt laws and rules.
House Rs are urging a focus only on criminals AT THE EXACT MOMENT that Stephen Miller is ordering ICE to scour Home Depot parking lots for noncriminals to pad the numbers. Miller is *choosing* to divert resources away from dangerous criminals. 3/
Awful: News orgs are credulously amplifying the idea that sending troops into LA is good politics for Trump. This gives his lawless abuses of power the aura of conventional politics, obscuring how extraordinarily dangerous this moment truly is. 1/
Over the last few days, Trump has goaded servicemembers into booing a sitting Dem governor, called for his arrest, needlessly sent troops into an American city, and spewed wildly absurd lies about that city. This shows political weakness, not strength. 2/
We just learned that two-bit fascist Stephen Miller told ICE officials to raid Home Depot parking lots for more people to deport. To boost removal numbers, Trump and Miller are diverting resources away from serious crimes like child exploitation. 3/
Stephen Miller is in a rage over deportation numbers he deems too low. So he's shifting huge amounts of law enforcement resources away from fighting serious crimes and into his immigration crackdown.
Miller recently erupted at ICE officials, demanding 3,000 deportations a day. He's now redeploying thousands of agents from other agencies like Homeland Security Investigations, FBI, and DEA.
This is already hampering other crime-fighting, per NBC. 2/
“Shifting that number of law enforcement agents from those types of agencies inevitably will mean fewer resources fighting transnational criminal organizations, drug smuggling, counter-terrorism, and child exploitation,” a former ICE official tells me. 3/
Unreal: To sustain his "genocide" of "white farmers" lie while meeting with the South African president, Trump used a photo of war deaths in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
I looked into this a bit more. It's worse than it first appeared. 1/
First, note that the printout Trump used to humiliate Ramaphosa came from a conservative blog post, which used an image from a Reuters video about DRC. Perhaps an aide Googled "white farmers" and "South Africa," found this, and gave it to Trump. 2/
But there's something darker here. Even as Trump used this image of the dead from the DRC war to push a fake "genocide," Trump has suspended foreign aid and refugee resettlement in ways that are hurting countless humanitarian victims of that REAL war! 3/
Amazing: Trump grew angry over a Biden-era program with the word "equity" in its name, so he ended it. But a key part of the program was sending money to red states to expand internet access in rural/MAGA country. Now they might not get it.
Trump saw the word "equity" in the name of this Biden-era program, so naturally he decided it must be serving undeserving minorities, giving him an opening to demagogue about it.
A funny thing about this saga: Many red state governments had submitted proposals in hopes of accessing this federal money. I looked at the proposals. They are in no small part about using this money to expand high speed internet into rural areas.
The dumbest thing about Trump's desire to manufacture dolls in the US is that many of the jobs would be bad ones: Connecting plastic body parts to torsos, attaching nylon hair, etc.
Everybody is talking about Trump's doll lunacy from the consumer side of the equation. But we should also talk about it from the labor side. Are doll manufacturing jobs something we want at massive scale? No, not really. Here's what this would look like:
If tariffs are designed to create high-quality US jobs, weakening unions and gutting regulatory oversight will work against that goal, especially in something like the doll industry, with its high-volume, repetitive tasks involving synthetic materials.