The Trump Administration: The Clusterfuck Continues

[Q.Q.Switcheroo]

There’s already a board game:

The Game of Life: DACA Edition - SNL

[dougrb]

I called it!

The Trump Administration: The Clusterfuck Continues

I’m envisioning a game show.

[Der_Trihs]

I wasn’t expecting The Running Man to turn into a documentary.

[Monty]

@Der_Trihs Here’s part of a post I made last week* in the Alcatraz thread.

@Monty

@purplehorseshoe

Throw enough debris into shallow waters and prisoners can hopscotch to freedom.

I guess they could televise it like “Hunger Games?”

Don’t we already have Trump’s version of Running Man going on already?

*Last week? Good Lord! It seems like so much longer in this, the Second Felonial Era.

[aurora_maire]

I can’t even imagine how it must be for people who have to listen to this with a straight face. I guess maybe they could tune it out and concentrate instead on how much more they can soak him for. The jokes behind the scenes must be brutal.

WTF is he talking about!?

[ekedolphin]

Jeez, I wish I could get my eggs at 97 or 98% off.

This is the same guy with the alleged 99% approval rating, right?

[Gatopescado]

Coincidentally, that was on tv today.

[Atamasama]

If eggs were $20 a dozen (they weren’t) at 98% off they’d be 40 cents a dozen now (they’re not).

How can anyone listen to anything he says and not conclude that he’ll just say anything crazy or impossible that makes him sound good in the moment. Then realize you can never trust him about anything. And he’s running the fucking country.

[Monty]

To be fair, he’s not running the country. He’s ruining the country. His closest sycophants are running the country.

[Love_Rhombus]

Just Kristi “Hunger Games” Noem playing her usual games to suck up to Trump. If only there was a transparent administration who was dedicated to rooting out corruption and cutting waste!

““But he said, ‘I want the first ad, I want you to thank me. I want you to thank me for closing the border.’ I said, ‘Yes, sir. I will thank you for closing the border.’”

How the White House launched its anti-migrant ad campaign | AP News

[Monty]

Let’s talk a tad about the outsourcing of American jobs to other countries. I mean deporting people to be imprisoned at US taxpayer expense to countries of which they are not citizens and in which they have not committed a crime.

I discovered this site today. It’s Prison Insider. The top two countries, IIRC, the felon’s sending people or wanting to send them are El Salvador and Libya.

Since the US is paying for this, what’s the purpose other than causing people misery? (Yes, that’s a rhetorical question.)

[eschereal]

Ransom?

[Guest-starring_Id]

@Monty

His closest sycophants are running the country.

Wrong. They’re ruining it too - in a simply less muddled fashion as Orange has been.

[Monty]

Oh, they’re running the country. Right into the ground.

[dasmoocher]

@aurora_maire

I can’t even imagine how it must be for people who have to listen to this with a straight face. I guess maybe they could tune it out and concentrate instead on how much more they can soak him for. The jokes behind the scenes must be brutal.

I know. Imagine weekly staff meetings if your boss was as dumb and inarticulate as Trump.

[Monty]

The Supremes gave a big ol’ Bronx cheer to the Second Felonial Era!

The Supreme Court on May 16 continued to block the Trump administration from using a 1798 wartime law to deport a group of Venezuelan migrants who said they had not been given a real chance to contest their removal.

In an unsigned opinion with two noted dissents, the court said the migrants haven’t had enough time or information to protect their rights. And that’s particularly important, the court said, because the administration asserts in another case that it’s not able to bring back a man who was mistakenly deported to El Salvador.

The detainees’ interests at stake are accordingly particularly weighty," the majority wrote.

And the felon’s response? (Same link)

President Donald Trump complained on Truth Social that the Supreme Court “is not allowing me to do what I was elected to do.”

They’re not allowing you to continue violating the constitution. It doesn’t matter if that’s what you platform in the election was. What matters is that your actions are unconstitutional.

And I’m thrilled a law professor is using the same term I did regarding the detainees. (Same link)

Stephen Vladeck, a law professor at Georgetown University, called the order “quietly significant.”

He said the Alien Enemies Act is now dead until the Supreme Court says otherwise. Plus, Vladeck said the order shows the court’s reluctance to take the Trump administration at their word, pointing to a “subtle but significant dig at the government for the shell games it’s been playing with AEA detainees.”

And why did he and I use that particular term? It’s because the shell game is a con.

The con sics his dogs on a real university.

The Department of Justice (DOJ) is investigating Harvard University’s admissions policies to ensure the measures comply with the 2023 Supreme Court affirmative action ruling, according to the university, in the latest investigation after Harvard defied the Trump administration.

“This investigation is yet another abusive and retaliatory action — the latest of many — that the administration has initiated against Harvard since the University was forced to defend itself from harmful overreach against higher education, including the freeze and termination of millions of dollars in funding for medical and scientific research, which will lead to devastating consequences for our nation’s health, economic prosperity, and scientific leadership,” a spokesperson for Harvard said in a statement.

The DOJ sent a letter, first reported by The New York Times, to Harvard on Monday informing the university of the investigation.

The felons (yes, plural; the whole lot of the administrationn is now actively committing felonies) announce they will not comply with upcoming court orders.

More than a month after the Supreme Court agreed that Donald Trump’s administration must be ordered to “facilitate” the release of a wrongfully deported Salvadoran immigrant, the government is refusing to do so — and arguing with a federal judge that they don’t have to.

The weeks-long court battle is leaving a judge’s head “spinning,” Maryland District Judge Paula Xinis told attorneys on Friday.

Last month, Supreme Court justices unanimously agreed that the government’s removal of Kilmar Abrego Garcia was “illegal.”

Now, government attorneys are sparring with Judge Xinis to try to conceal what, if anything, the administration is doing to return him, and why that information needs to be kept secret.

Meanwhile, administration officials are “shouting from the rooftops” in public about ensuring that Abrego Garcia never returns to the United States, according to his attorneys.

“He will never walk freely in the U.S.,” Department of Justice lawyer Jonathan Guynn told District Judge Paula Xinis in a Maryland courtroom on Friday.

“That sounds to me like an admission you will not take steps” to “facilitate” Abrego Garcia’s return,” Xinis replied.

But, hey, DOGE is taking care of business, right, so it’s all just peaches and cream? Did I say taking care of business? I meant DOGE is lying like their master,

[quote]
Elon Musk’s so-called Department of Government Efficiency is moving to overhaul Social Security on the pretext that the government’s premier safety-net program is losing massive amounts of money to fraud. Musk has claimed his engineers have found $100 billion a week in fraudulent entitlement payments, a situation the Tesla CEO called “utterly insane.”

DOGE made similar claims in an April interview with Fox News. DOGE engineer and Musk employee Aram Moghaddassi told Bret Baier that 40% of calls to Social Security trying to change direct-deposit information are from fraudsters.[/quote]

Later on in that article, the truth sneaks out.

But the true rate of phone fraud, according to a news outlet that covers government technology, is just a fraction of 1%.

Nextgov/FCW, which obtained an internal SSA document, reported that just two Social Security claims out of 110,000 had a high probability of being fraudulent. Fewer than 1% of claims had any potential for fraud at all, according to Nextgov.

“No significant fraud has been detected from the flagged cases,” the internal document said, according to the site.

You might recall that particular lie is at the heart of the new stricter rules on obtaining benefits.

Here’s some information regarding the United States citizen minors who were deported. And let’s make no mistake, deportation is exactly what happened to them.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement detained Denisse Parra Vargas’ three children — two of them American citizens and one born in Mexico — in Texas last week and, because authorities deported their mother, sent them out of the United States too.

The administration has responded to blowback from the children’s expulsions and those of other U.S. citizen minors, including a child with cancer and one recovering from a rare brain tumor, by saying the mothers were in the U.S. illegally and chose to take their children with them. The families and their attorneys vehemently disagree that the mothers had a choice.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio suggested in an interview April 27 on "Meet the Press" that the children’s situations are easily fixed.

“If those children are U.S. citizens,” he said, “they can come back into the United States if there’s their father or someone here who wants to assume them.”

While attorneys, advocates and researchers agree that U.S. citizens generally have the right to return, they said suggestions that the children can just easily come back to the U.S. gloss over the barriers and difficulties of what that would entail.

There are many hurdles that families would need to overcome for their U.S. citizen children to be able to return, according to Mich P. González, co-founder of Sanctuary of the South, an immigration and LGBTQ civil rights cooperative. His group and its member organizations has been assisting two families whose mothers were deported from Florida and their children, including three U.S. citizens, who were sent with them.

González said ICE often confiscates identification documents when deporting people. For example, the 2-year-old U.S. citizen daughter of the Honduran mother González represents had her passport taken away before she left, he said. That means the family would have to get the necessary paperwork from the U.S. to prove the child was born there.

Doesn’t this fit in with the idea of purposely putting someone into a horrible situation and then condemn them for being in that horrible situation? Oh, right. There’s a better term currently:

The cruelty is the point.

Back to the mini me dictator in real dictators’ pocket.

A series of federal court rulings across the country struck down Donald Trump’s attempt to strip citizenship from newborn Americans born to certain immigrant parents. But the government argues those decisions should be limited to the individual states — and pregnant mothers — who sued him and won.

During oral arguments on the issue at the Supreme Court on Thursday, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson called the administration’s position a “catch-me-if-you-can kind of regime,” where court orders would protect only the individuals in a case, not the millions of Americans who could be impacted.

Trump’s position argues that everyone would need a lawyer “to stop the government from violating anyone’s rights,” she said. “I don’t understand how that is remotely consistent with the rule of law.”

No doubt, the dictator wannabe will accept this and not have a tantrum. Hahahahaha!

President Donald Trump wrote in a social media rant that Democrats are “PLAYING THE REF” when it comes to the Supreme Court, and warned the justices not to “fall for the games they play.”

Go ahead. Convince me he didn’t post that nonsense on social media to rile up his fanatics and put the Supreme Court justices in fear of their lives. Go ahead. I dare you.

[Buck_Godot]

Just when I think that I can’t possibly be more appalled by the ideas being considered by this administration they go and up the ante.

DHS says it’s in beginning stages of ‘vetting process’ for immigrant reality...

[psychobunny]

I just have to give more details about this proposed show:

A description of the pitch for a show reads: “Contestants will represent a wide demographic of ages, ethnicities, and talents. We’ll join in the laughter, tears, frustration and joy — hearing their backstories — as we are reminded of how amazing it is to be American, through the eyes of 12 wonderful people who want nothing more than to have what we have — and what we often take for granted: the freedom, opportunity and honor of what it means to be American.”

Each episode would include a heritage challenge, an elimination challenge, a town-hall meeting and a final vote, according to the deck. Worsoff said the heritage challenge will be tailored to specific locations — a “gold rush” challenge in San Francisco, for example, or a “pizza” challenge in New York or a “NASA” challenge in Florida — to showcase “how cool America is.”

Worsoff told Collins on “The Source” that he envisions each episode ending with a town-hall meeting, “just like in a presidential election.”

“The people of Tennessee, let’s say, will get to vote on which one of our future Americans they would most like to represent the state of Tennessee,” Worsoff said.

[aurora_maire]

@from psychobunny's link

to showcase “how cool America is."

They had me at reality TV.

[Gyrate]

@dasmoocher

I know. Imagine weekly staff meetings if your boss was as dumb and inarticulate as Trump.

If there were a hell, their punishment would be an eternal meeting like this except that Trump would know how to use PowerPoint.