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.
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.
Now that Trump has openly admitted he could bring back Abrego Garcia whenever he wants, his lawyer tells me he will use discovery to determine which officials are advising Trump to defy the Supreme Court.
“[Trump] has now said...he could easily bring Abrego Garcia back...but he’s been told not to...we’re going to...find out exactly which government officials gave him that instruction."
Another attorney for the Abrego Garcia family says Trump's lawyers "appear to be obeying Stephen Miller and not the Supreme Court. Miller himself should be deposed under oath in federal court to determine his role in this ongoing affront to due process.”
Trump is trying to bludgeon us into accepting the tactics and imagery of fascism: Forced disappearances, renditions to foreign gulags, the ritual humiliation of hated enemies within.
That's why it's so crucial that the middle is rejecting it.
Anyone watching Stephen Miller on TV for 5 seconds can see that he and Trump are trying to acclimate voters into accepting rampant lawlessness as a fundamental feature of American life. That's why it's so good to see independents/moderates rebelling:
I looked at a lot of polling and found that independents are tilting in particular against the lawless stuff from Trump that involves basic questions of fundamental fairness, due process, and the rule of law.
What's crucial here is that Trump is bleeding independents on immigration *both* in terms of generalized disapproval *and* on the lawless specifics. Look at these numbers:
Note that all these issues turning independents against Trump involve questions of fundamental fairness, due process, and the rule of law. The imagery of rampant lawlessness tends to be the sort of thing that alienates those voters.