“Kilmar Abrego Garcia returned to the U.S. to appear in court on Friday, more than two months after being deported to a prison in El Salvador, the country of his birth. No matter how the trial shakes out, it’s just the latest example of the Trump administration playing fast and loose with both the facts and the law.”
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“Xinis “order[ed] that [the administration] return Abrego Garcia to the United States.” The Supreme Court intervened, staying Xinis’ order but otherwise affirming its finding to “facilitate…the return of [Abrego Garcia] to the United States by no later than 11:59 PM on Monday, April 7.”
But the administration refused, illogically claiming it had no right to do so. During an Oval Office meeting in April, both Trump and Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele mocked the idea of returning Abrego Garcia to the U.S. “I don’t have the power to return him to the United States,” Bukele said. In a legal filing that same day, DHS acting general counsel Joseph Mazzarra said the department “does not have authority to forcibly extract an alien from the domestic custody of a foreign sovereign nation.”
“He is not coming back to our country,” Attorney General Pam Bondi told Fox News. “President Bukele said he was not sending him back. That’s the end of the story.”
So, the news on Friday that Abrego Garcia was coming back—and at the Department of Justice’s direction, no less—was a bit stunning.”
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“even though the indictment could very well just be retroactive justification for deporting someone in violation of numerous court orders, it remains the case that a court of law is the ideal place to adjudicate allegations against Abrego Garcia—not unsourced allegations delivered in press conferences and on social media.”
Trump’s tariffs are costly, but if Trump takes over the financial power currently held by the Fed, that’s a much more dangerous threat to the prosperity and democracy of the United States. Especially when you combine this with Trump’s other potentially costly actions like limiting science and scientists, Trump’s constellation of bad economic policies could add up to a considerably weaker U.S. economy.
The best place to find fraud in the U.S. government is to look at Medicare providers cheating Medicare and at the IRS where taxpayers rip off the rest of America by cheating on their taxes.
If Musk is right, and the House and presidency would have been held by the Democrats without him, then that means one man decided the election by spending millions of dollars, including buying a media company and using it to boost certain ideas.
“big problem with Donald Trump’s signature plan to create a National Garden of American Heroes. And, for once, it has nothing to do with culture-war bickering about just who should be included in the national statue display.
Instead, artists, curators and critics who have reviewed the recent request for proposals have a more practical worry: America doesn’t have enough quality sculptors or museum-caliber foundries to make this happen on Trump’s speedy timeline.”
We do need a badass national statue garden, but Trump shouldn’t be in charge of it. It should be based on bipartisan agreed upon heroes.
““It’s been completely destructive to our lives,” Taylor said in an interview with POLITICO Magazine, adding that he and his family have faced increased security threats because of Trump’s order. “I don’t want to go out there and say this order achieved the president’s objective of destroying my personal life, but the reality is that I had to step away from work because I couldn’t do the work that I did anymore with this blacklisting in Washington.””
“Trump’s proclamation says the National Guard troops will play a supporting role by protecting ICE officers as they enforce the law, rather than having the troops perform law enforcement work.”
Trump inherited money and business from his dad, and made a lot of money through his celebrity, but as far as his actual businesses, he mostly spent a lot of money and then used courts to not pay debts he owed. He was a bad and dishonest businessman, and his image as a successful businessman is mostly false.
“Burns noted it’s important to counter Beijing’s increasingly aggressive economic, diplomatic and military global footprint — but warned that Trump is going about it all wrong, particularly by using tariffs as a cudgel against longtime partners who otherwise might have allied with the U.S. against China.”
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“The fact that we’ve had trouble convincing the Chinese it’s in our interest to have our senior military leaders talking. My nightmare scenario as ambassador was not an intentional conflict, but an accident.”
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” I think the fundamental mistake that was made was that when we imposed tariffs on China, we also imposed high tariffs on South Korea, Japan, the European Union, Canada and Mexico. All those countries are on our side in the big issues that separate us from China. All of them have the same economic issues and trade problems with China. If we had highlighted China as the major disruptor of global trade, which China has been for the last couple of decades, and formed a coalition with the EU and Japan and the U.S. — that’s 60 percent of global GDP — we would have had leverage for these negotiations.”
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“The Chinese have been saying every day for the last several weeks that the United States is being unfair, that we’re a bully, that we’re disrupting global trade. In fact, they’re the biggest problem in global trade. Intellectual property theft against American and other nations’ companies; forced technology transfer; dumping of EVs, lithium batteries, solar panels on the rest of the world below the cost of production; disrupting global markets; trying to kill the manufacturing industries in places like the United States and Europe.”
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“I think what the American people need to understand — our government and both parties — is that China is a worthy competitor. Their science and technology talent is prodigious. The level of scholarship, of patents, of research in some areas exceeds us, or is equal to us. In some critical areas of technology transformation, they are putting massive amounts of state-directed money into their national champions like Huawei, with companies that they want to succeed in the world. They’re doing it on a consistent basis, and they plan over decades, so they have that advantage.
When I was leaving in January, the Chinese announced $15 billion of state money going into quantum computing alone. They want to beat us to the punch there. That’s something that’s not as well understood in American society and even in our press — people have older, conventional views of China that are outdated.”
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“The destruction of USAID was a catastrophic mistake for the United States. That was our agency that said to the rest of the world, “We’ll help you on vaccines. We’ll help you with HIV. Will help you with polio.” Elon Musk and company destroyed USAID in one week and laid off 8,500 people. That helped China.
The Chinese then went out with a massive propaganda blitz the next day all over the world saying, “The United States is not interested in you any longer.” I watched the Chinese do this in February and March. The way the cuts were done, the fact that it was done with so little thought, so little information, and so little respect for our career civil servants was disgraceful.”
“President Donald Trump threatened on Friday morning to raise prices on iPhones sold in the United States, as he threatened to slap a 25 percent tariff on Apple smartphones that aren’t built in the United States.
“I have long ago informed Tim Cook of Apple that I expect their iPhone’s (sic) that will be sold in the United States of America will be manufactured and built in the United States, not India, or anyplace else,” Trump posted on Truth Social. “If that is not the case, a Tariff of at least 25% must be paid by Apple to the U.S.”
In either outcome, consumers will have to pay more. A 25 percent tariff on iPhones built in other countries would, of course, artificially inflate prices. On the other hand, an American-made iPhone would likely be even more expensive: one estimate pegs the cost of an American-made iPhone at around $3,500.”