MAGAt:  Rhymes with “maggot” — no offense intended to maggots, who serve a useful purpose.

President Volodymyr Zelensky is set to attend a NATO summit in The Hague next week, the European Council confirmed on June 20, while TACO may not show up.

European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen and NATO Secretary-General Mark Rutte are set to meet Zelensky on June 24.

Zelensky was reportedly reconsidering attending the NATO summit, as questions remain over U.S. President Donald Trump’s participation, the Guardian reported on June 17, citing unnamed Ukrainian officials.

A schedule released by the European Council on June 20 confirms Zelensky’s planned participation at the event.

A Ukrainian official told the Guardian that Kyiv is in a “permanent hazard” of becoming a victim of “Trump’s short attention span,” adding that Russia has exploited this uncertainty with fresh aerial attacks.

There were “all sorts of promises for this summit,” including U.S. arms, the source said.

Zelensky was scheduled to meet U.S. President Donald Trump at the Group of Seven (G7) Summit, held June 15-17.

Trump left that multilateral event early claiming he needed to deal with the renewed conflict between Israel and Iran.  IN FACT Trump was getting his ass kicked by every other member of the G7 so, in true Trump fashion, he CHICKENED OUT – TACO – “TRUMP ALWAYS CHICKENS OUT.”

 

Face-hidden goons in plain clothes claiming to be “federal officers” terrorizing American cities and towns — reminiscent of the KKK

Individuals in plain clothes with their faces covered and without badges or name tags are snatching people off the streets and taking them away. Todd Lyons, the acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), which is housed within the Department of Homeland Security, claimed that such measures for anonymity are imperative because “ICE officers have seen a staggering 413 percent increase in assaults against them.”

Philip Bump of the Washington Post looked into that claim and noted that by using a percentage, ICE avoids the question of just how many assaults there have actually been. He points out that year-to-date assaults against Customs and Border Protection are currently 20% lower than they were in 2024 and that at least one ICE news release blurred the distinction between “threatening to assault” and “assaulting.” ICE would not provide evidence for their claims.

Bump concludes: “[W]e should not and cannot take ICE’s representations about the need for its officers to obscure their identities at face value.” After Bump’s article appeared yesterday, the Department of Homeland Security posted on social media: “New data reveals that ICE law enforcement is now facing a 500% increase in assaults while carrying out enforcement operations.”

Bump noted that ICE “has been eager to level dubious charges against Democratic legislators,” and the message from Homeland Security bears that claim out. After claiming a 500% increase in assaults, it continued: “Make no mistake, sanctuary politicians are contributing to the surge in assaults of our ICE officers through their repeated vilification and demonization of ICE. This violence against ICE must end.”

The Department of Homeland Security appears to be trying to convince Americans that their agents must cover their faces because their opponents, especially Democrats, are dangerous.

On Tuesday, masked, plainclothes ICE agents assaulted and arrested New York City comptroller and mayoral candidate Brad Lander, the city’s chief financial officer. Lander was accompanying an immigrant to a scheduled court hearing to try to protect him from arrest in one of ICE’s sweeps of those showing up for their court hearings. Lander asked the agents to produce an arrest warrant for the man they were arresting, and was himself arrested.

Homeland Security said it would charge him with impeding a federal officer and “assaulting law enforcement.” As Bump notes, a video of the incident shows that Lander “assaulted the officers in the sense that a bully might accuse you of having gotten in the way of his fist.” Lander was later released, and New York governor Kathy Hochul said the charges against him had been dropped.

The same pattern occurred last month, when federal prosecutors charged Newark, New Jersey, mayor Ras Baraka with trespassing and interim U.S. attorney for the District of New Jersey, Alina Habba, broke the Department of Justice rule that it would not comment on ongoing investigations by posting that Baraka had “committed trespass and ignored multiple warnings from Homeland Security Investigations to remove himself from the ICE detention center in Newark, New Jersey this afternoon. He has willingly chosen to disregard the law. That will not stand in this state. He has been taken into custody. NO ONE IS ABOVE THE LAW.”

Ten days later, Habba quietly dropped the case and announced another one, this time against U.S. Representative LaMonica McIver (D-NJ), charging her with “assaulting, impeding and interfering with law enforcement” during Baraka’s arrest.

U.S. Magistrate Judge André Espinosa, a federal judge, rebuked the officials who had charged Baraka, warning them that their rush to charge the mayor suggests “a failure to adequately investigate, to carefully gather facts, and to thoughtfully consider the implications of your actions before wielding your immense power.”

The point is to spread the Big Lie

But the point of these arrests is almost certainly not an attempt to see justice done. They continue the longstanding Republican policy of seeding the media with a false narrative of bad behavior by their opponents—voter fraud, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s emails, and so on—in order to convince voters that their opponents are dangerous to America.

President Donald J. Trump relied on this political technique so thoroughly that in 2019 he tried to discredit his primary challenger for the 2020 presidential election, then former vice president Joe Biden, by getting Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky to announce an investigation into the Ukrainian company for which Biden’s son Hunter had worked.

Trump didn’t want an actual investigation; he wanted an announcement that an investigation was being launched. He could trust that media reports would carry the story and its suggestion of corruption from there, even in the absence of evidence, leaving behind his own administration’s deep involvement with Russia. Similarly, during Biden’s presidency, Republicans launched a sprawling investigation of what they insisted on calling the “Biden Crime Family” although there was never a Biden family business, their star witness went to prison after confessing to lying to the FBI, and they never produced any evidence that the president had taken foreign bribes. Now, though, with the Trump Organization—a family business—openly making deals with foreign governments, Republicans are silent.

Today, after a week of embarrassing news, Trump continued this pattern by announcing that he is calling for a special prosecutor to investigate claims that the Democrats stole the 2020 presidential election. There has never been any evidence of this Big Lie, and courts dismissed the many cases brought over it. But raising it now, when MAGA is deeply divided over U.S. involvement in the Israel-Iran conflict, could create a distraction and reinforce his loyalists’ support.

There was, of course, a special counsel appointed to look into Trump’s attempt to stay in power despite losing the 2020 presidential election. His name was Jack Smith, and after his investigation, in 2023 a grand jury, made up of American citizens, indicted Trump for engaging in “dishonesty, fraud and conceit” to obstruct American democracy by stopping the counting of votes by which citizens choose their government officials. “Despite having lost,” the indictment reads, Trump “was determined to remain in power.”

Trump — who barely won the 2024 election — sees his popularity disappearing

Now he is back in office, but he remains unpopular. A new Fox News poll released yesterday shows that only 38% of registered voters like the Republicans’ budget reconciliation omnibus bill, while 59% oppose it, a difference of 21 points. The poll also showed that 55% of registered voters are worried about the economy, 84% are worried about inflation, and 57% think tariffs hurt the economy. Only 46% of respondents approve of Trump’s job performance, while 54% disapprove.

This week’s Economist/YouGov poll shows that 52% of Americans disapprove of how Trump is handling deportations, while only 42% approve, and that Trump’s job approval rating among those from 18 to 29 years old has dropped 44 points since he took office. Many of Trump’s supporters believed he would be deporting only undocumented immigrants who had committed violent crimes, but an investigation by CNN reporters published on Monday showed that fewer than 10% of those taken into custody since October have been convicted of violent crimes.

So members of his administration are centering power in the White House while obscuring who, exactly, is giving orders that either are or might be violating the law. Administration lawyers are still hiding who was actually the head of the Department of Government Efficiency in its first months and who gave the order to send Maryland resident Kilmar Abrego Garcia to prison in El Salvador. Making lawbreaking opaque makes it harder to prosecute those doing the breaking. It is possible at least some of the drive to hide agents’ faces comes from that impulse, just as members of the Ku Klux Klan hid their faces in the 1860s and 1870s.

There is another important parallel to the Klan in the administration’s defense of masked agents who are terrorizing Americans even as they insist they are the ones under attack by dangerous Democrats. The Klan set out to “reform” governments elected by a majority of voters and take control themselves, permanently. In Wilmington, North Carolina, in 1898, about two thousand armed white Democrats overthrew a government of black Republicans and white Populists. The Democrats agreed that the town officials had been elected fairly, but they rejected the outcome of the election nonetheless, insisting that such people were “socialists” and had no idea how to run a government.

On June 12, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said in Los Angeles, “We are not going away. We are staying here to liberate the city from the socialists and the burdensome leadership that this governor and that this mayor have placed on this country and what they have tried to insert into the city.”

When California senator Alex Padilla, the senior Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee’s subcommittee on immigration, citizenship and border safety, tried to ask Noem a question, he was assaulted and handcuffed by agents from the Department of Homeland Security. Yesterday, he noted in a New York Times op-ed that “public safety is not the point; the spectacle is.” Trump “is testing the boundaries of his power,” Padilla wrote, “[a]nd he’s using the theatrics around his immigration policies to do it.”

“If federal troops can deploy to Los Angeles against the wishes of the governor, the mayor and even local law enforcement, they can do the same tomorrow in your hometown,” he wrote. “This is a fundamental threat to the rule of law nationwide.”

But Padilla noted that the attempt to force minority rule on the U.S. through violence shows that the administration is weak. “If the Trump administration was this afraid of one senator with a question,” he wrote, “imagine what the voices of tens of millions of Americans organizing will do.”

Today, at a news conference in Los Angeles, a reporter asked Vice President J.D. Vance if Trump’s administration is “cracking down on Democrats.” Vance, who served with Alex Padilla in the Senate, called his former colleague by the wrong name. Once again seeding the idea that a Democratic lawmaker must be a criminal, Vance called the California senator “José Padilla,” using the name of a man convicted in 2007 of conspiring to commit murder and fund terrorism.

The vice president’s press secretary said the vice president “must have mixed up two people who have broken the law.”

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

CNN — President Donald Trump said Friday that Harvard has “acted extremely appropriately” during negotiations that could soon result in a deal, signaling a possible major shift in his administration’s efforts to target the university.

“Many people have been asking what is going on with Harvard University and their largescale improprieties that we have been addressing, looking for a solution. We have been working closely with Harvard, and it is very possible that a Deal will be announced over the next week or so,” Trump said in a late afternoon post to social media.

“They have acted extremely appropriately during these negotiations, and appear to be committed to doing what is right. If a Settlement is made on the basis that is currently being discussed, it will be ‘mindbogglingly’ HISTORIC, and very good for our Country,” he added.

The White House, the Department of Education and Harvard did not immediately respond to CNN’s requests for comment.

TRANSLATION:  “Harvard kicked my ass so I’m going to slink away and hope no one notices.”

79-yr-old dementia patient

Trump: "They should give me the Nobel Prize for Rwanda and if you look, the Congo, or you could say Serbia, Kosovo, you could say a lot of them. The big one is India and Pakistan. I should've gotten it four or five times." pic.twitter.com/4sOl8evheN

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) June 20, 2025

And a lot of Trump supporters F’ed Around and now they are Finding Out — finding out that Trump does not give a damn about them, not at all.

Here’s one.

 

Store closures in the U.S. have led to a huge 274% spike in retail layoffs so far this year, a new report says. In the first five months of 2025, retailers announced 75,082 job cuts compared to 20,276 during the same period the year before, according to business and executive coaching firm, Challenger, Gray & Christmas Inc. The figures include major job losses at retail giants like Macy’s, which is set to close 150 stores across the U.S. after sales dropped by a staggering $21.3 billion.

Some 66 of the closures were confirmed in January. Macy’s is one of America’s most familiar brands but in total will be shuttering around one-third of its underperforming locations by the end of 2026. Earlier this year, fabric and crafts retailer Joann announced it was going out of business, following bankruptcy, and was forced to shut down all 800 of its stores. The Ohio-based retailer had been a destination for generations of quilters, knitters, and lovers of craft projects for 80 years.

And pharmacy giant CVS recently announced plans to close 270 stores nationwide in 2025. A spokesperson for the brand said several factors went into the decisions to close the locations, including “population shifts and consumer buying patterns.” JCPenney, Forever 21 and Walgreens are among the other high-profile chains that have announced store closures in 2025.

Retail is the second-leading industry to suffer job cuts this year, behind the federal government, which has seen over 270,000 jobs slashed, thanks to Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency.

I’m confused — Trump said the US economy would be booming under his administration