Day: May 22, 2025

Racism and lying in the Oval. Having been subjected to the Trump clown show for too long, we all knew he had to be lying about the purported white genocide in South Africa. Now fact checkers at Reuters have uncovered the truth. “Trump’s image of dead ‘white farmers’ came from Reuters footage in Congo, not South Africa.” Trump ambushed South African President Cyril Ramaphosa in the office with photos of people handling body bags. He claimed the bodies in the bags were farmers who were massacred because they were white. In fact, Reuters learned, the photos showed humanitarian workers with bodies of victims of M23 rebels in the Congolese city of Goma in February 2025.

Best at being worst. Whether Trump will best presidents Andrew Johnson and James Buchanan to become the worst president in U.S. history remains to be seen. But four months into his second term, Trump takes the prize as the most brazenly corrupt chief executive the country has yet to produce.

According to Huffpost, “Trump is taking his efforts to use his office for personal enrichment — the very definition of corruption — selling face time to those who put money into his bank account by purchasing nearly $200 million worth of his branded souvenir crypto coins. Just four investors in the $TRUMP coin grift collectively own 2.7 million coins, worth a total of $38.3 million, based on the $14 price per coin that day.

In past presidencies, especially during the Warren G. Harding administration, the thieves were in the cabinet or the lower ranks. The current level of corruption is unprecedented, Heather Cox Richardson, a Boston College historian, tells HuffPost. “Interestingly,” she says, “the real financial corruption in an administration is around the president, not usually the president himself.”

It’s not ‘deporting.’ In the latest outrageous act of kidnapping people and renditioning them to foreign sites, Trump goon squads have seized Vietnamese and Burmese migrants and flown them to South Sudan, violating a court order in the process and likely committing criminal contempt.

Everybody hates Elon. Trump’s circle is not holding back about their heart-felt dislike for former Pres. Elon Musk. From The New Republic:

Musk’s unceremonious exit from government followed widespread reports that several senior Trump officials practically hated the tech billionaire, finding him abrasive, unfunny, and pompous — with some describing Musk as the “most irritating person” they’d “ever had to deal with.”

“I have been in the same room with Elon, and he always tries to be funny. And he’s not funny. Like, at all,” a senior Trump official told Rolling Stone last month. “He makes these jokes and little asides and smiles and then looks almost hurt if you don’t lap up his humor. I keep using the word ‘annoying’; a lot of people who have to deal with him do. But the word doesn’t do the situation justice. Elon just thinks he’s smarter than everyone else in the room and acts like it, even when it’s clear he doesn’t know what he’s talking about.”

No, you’re out of control. Reacting to the nearly 40 nationwide injunctions against the administration in the past four months, Trump’s solicitor general, John Sauer, complained to the U.S. Supreme Court last week that the federal judiciary is out of control. “But another explanation is also available,” Adam Server, writing in “Trump Is Tired of Courts Telling Him He’s Breaking the Law,” in The Atlantic. “An out-of-control executive who ignores constitutional restraints on his authority also results in a lot of injunctions. Even accepting the premise that there are too many nationwide injunctions, executive—not judicial—overreach seems like the actual problem here.”