The United States is now facing the greatest threat to our free way of life in our history. Even the US Civil War was not the danger that is Donald Trump. In the Civil War, the South wanted to separate from the rest of the Union. Today, Trump does not want to separate from the US, he seeks to destroy the fundamental functions and purpose of the US. He seeks to destroy the Constitution, replacing the Judiciary and Legislative Branches with puppets of the Executive. Plainly stated, Trump seeks to establish himself as a dictator . . . and as of May 2025, he may succeed.
Attorney General Pam Bondi and Interior Secretary Doug Burgum will reportedly be in San Francisco on Thursday to announce plans to reopen Alcatraz.
President Donald Trump mentioned in May wanting to reopen the federal penitentiary “to house America’s most ruthless and violent offenders.”
The former notorious prison, nicknamed “The Rock,” was closed in 1963 due to crumbling infrastructure and the high costs of repairing and supplying the island facility. It has been a National Park Service site since the 70s.
The planned announcement to reopen Alcatraz as a federal penitentiary is the Trump Administration’s stupidest initiative yet. It should concern us all that clearly the only intellectual resources the Administration has drawn upon for this foolish notion are decades-old fictional Hollywood movies.
President Donald Trump’s budget is gutting Medicaid—and rural America is on the front lines of the damage. And big shocker: Most of Trump’s fervent supporters refuse to accept reality.
A health clinic in McCook, Nebraska, which has a population of 7,446, recently made national headlines after announcing that it’s shutting its doors, unable to survive the massive GOP Medicaid cuts.
“Anyone who’s saying that Medicaid cuts is why they’re closing is a liar,” a resident of nearby Curtis, which has a population of 806, told the Washington Post.
Another resident brushed it off as people just “trying to blame everything on Trump,” calling it “horse feathers.” Must be a Nebraska thing.
And the town’s mayor, who proudly displays an Obama punching bag labeled “Obama stress reliever” on his desk, insisted, “I don’t think the signing of the ‘Big Beautiful Bill’ had one thing to do with the closure of this clinic.”
Okay then.
For years, Trump and the Republican Party have sold rural white voters a story: that the real problem with government isn’t that it fails people like them—it’s that it helps the wrong people. Benefits aren’t going to “deserving” Americans like them but to immigrants, big cities, Black and brown people, and coastal elites. It’s a lie, but a potent one. And it still works.
Right-wing message boards are full of people claiming that the only health care being cut is for “illegals” or freeloaders. So when the cuts hit them instead—the “hard-working, God-fearing patriots”—they short circuit. The media must be lying. There has to be another explanation. It can’t be Trump.
Their political identity is built around the idea that Trump is their champion, even when it’s crystal clear that he’s the one twisting the knife into them.
(1) There are far more photos of Jeffrey Epstein hanging out with Donald Trump in obviously dubious social settings than there are trans women athletes in the entire world of American college sports. Somehow, it’s considered vaguely improper on the part of the liberal left to scream from the rooftops 24/7 that Donald Trump’s best friend for many years — not in any sense an exaggeration — ran a sex slave ring of underage girls, who were raped by men exactly like Donald Trump, who is currently the president of the United States.
(2) Jeffrey Epstein died in federal government custody under the most suspicious circumstances imaginable. If something like this had happened in a third world (LOL) country, everybody would simply take it for granted that he had been murdered, or at a minimum coerced into and allowed to commit an extraordinarily convenient suicide. But as soon as this incredibly predicable thing happened, it was like you were arguing that the government was controlled by lizard people if you were so tactless as to point this out.
The Democrats should be doing nothing but holding press conferences about this, with lurid photos and quotations etc. They should turn the fact that they’re talking about it non-stop in public into a meta-story: Why has the Epstein scandal become such a huge deal? Oh right, here’s why: Because the past and present president of the United States was an enthusiastic regular participant in a a sex slave ring of underage girls, along with dozens if not hundreds of other extremely powerful and influential men in America and across the world, and the pimp who ran this operation was murdered or “allowed” to commit suicide, in order to help the whole thing go away (again). Or at least it sure looks like that!
I mean under the circumstances, it really WOULD be irresponsible not to speculate.
There’s an incorrect belief that the Epstein case is somehow separate from the real concerns facing America, a conspiracist concoction untethered to reality. But it’s actually about the policy issue: Which is — the two-tiered system of justice and accountability in America, and the impunity we afford the nation’s elites.
For a scandal that’s supposed to be shrouded in mystery, the details of the Epstein case are pretty well known.
With the help of associate Ghislaine Maxwell, Epstein procured young girls as high-class prostitutes for a fairly broad cross section of U.S. and global elites.
We have Epstein’s black book, which includes nearly 2,000 names of associates and clients.
We have the flight logs of his private jet and its passengers.
And we know that among Epstein’s associates was his neighbor Donald Trump. There are pictures and videos from parties, seven trips on Epstein’s private jet, numerous comments by Trump on how fun it was to hang out with Epstein and his coterie of young girls, connections between girls allegedly put into service by Epstein and their employment at Mar-a-Lago, and even direct testimony from Epstein himself. Audiotape released last year reveals Epstein saying that he was Donald’s “closest friend for 10 years.”
Even things we supposedly don’t know, like the source of Epstein’s wealth, are also pretty clear: He obtained power of attorney over the estate of The Limited and Victoria’s Secret founder Les Wexner in the late 1980s, from which he appropriated bunches of money for himself. He was paid hundreds of millions more by Apollo’s Leon Black.
In other words, a set of crimes perpetrated by a wealthy guy reached into the heights of the political and economic stratosphere, and went largely unpunished for decades. Yet another Trump connection, his original labor secretary in the first term, Alex Acosta, issued a secret non-prosecution agreement to Epstein in 2008 when he was a U.S. attorney, which allowed Epstein to enter guilty pleas for state charges and avoid federal charges or jail time.
Not nearly enough has been made of Trump rewarding — with a cabinet position — the prosecutor who gave a ridiculously lenient plea/immunity deal to Epstein and his cronies.
Trump Claims His Uncle Taught the Unabomber at MIT – But There’s One Small Problem
President Donald Trump claimed on Tuesday that his uncle taught Ted Kaczynski at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology before Kaczynski became the Unabomber.However, Kaczynski did not attend MIT.
Trump attended the Pennsylvania Energy and Innovation Summit in Pittsburgh, where attendees praised his leadership. During his remarks, Trump took a detour to talk about artificial intelligence and his late uncle, John G. Trump, who designed generators and was a professor at MIT. The president has occasionally invoked his uncle to try to burnish his family’s intellectual bona fides, and did so again on Tuesday:
QUOTE
I have to brag just for a second because when I first heard about AI, you know, it’s not my thing, although my uncle was at MIT. One of the great professors, 51 years, whatever, longest-serving professor in the history of MIT. Three degrees in nuclear, chemical, and math. That’s a smart man. Kaczynski was one of his students. Do you know who Kaczynski was? There’s very little difference between a madman and a genius.
But Kaczynski, I said, “What kind of a student was he, Uncle John, Dr. John Trump?” He said, “What kind of a student?” And he said, “Seriously good. He said he’d go around correcting everybody.”
But it didn’t work out too well for him. Didn’t work out too well. But it’s interesting in life.
The Huffman family moved to Russia from Texas in early 2025, admiring “traditional values” and “life without Western propaganda.” The family has been documenting their experience on social media and doing interviews with the Russian media outlets.
Recently, Derek Huffman was sent to the war in Ukraine. He was promised Russian citizenship and service in the rear. And just several weeks after signing the contract, he was sent to the front lines.
His wife complained that Derek’s unit is being taught in Russian although he doesn’t speak Russian well, so he’s barely getting any training. She added that he hasn’t received any payments, as well.
On July 13, Trump went to New Jersey for the FIFA (soccer) world cup championship. A team from Great Britain — Chelsea – won. Then the shitstorm started.
President Donald Trump showed up at the FIFA Club World Cup Finals in New Jersey on Sunday, and it was just embarrassing all around. From the stadium booing him to his comically try-hard attempt to insert himself into the victory celebration, the whole thing made him look like the grasping buffoon he is.
After Chelsea FC pulled off an upset, beating Paris Saint-Germain FC, the expected winners, 3-0, they took to the pitch for the award ceremony. Enter Trump, who decided he should hand out medals and shove himself into the middle of the Chelsea squad as they gathered to receive the trophy for winning the Club Cup.
FIFA President Gianni Infantino eventually had to pull him back so the players could celebrate without Trump. Chelsea’s Cole Palmer, named the top player of the tournament after scoring two of Chelsea’s three goals, was as perplexed as everyone else about this, the Associated Press reported. “I knew he was going to be here, but I didn’t know he was going to be on the stand when we lifted the trophy, so I was a bit confused.”
You know what else is confusing? That the trophy Chelsea was hoisting may be a replica, because according to Trump, Infantino gave him the real trophy during a March White House visit and told him he could keep it. Sure, seems fine.
Trump was booed when he walked onto the pitch. He was booed when he was shown on the Jumbotron. He was booed during the national anthem. Despite this, wannabe state media outlet the New York Post ran with a piece saying Trump was greeted by huge applause.
This isn’t the first time Trump’s insertion of himself into the world of sports was equal parts comical and gross. Who can forget his trip to the 2025 Super Bowl, where he apparently left, pouting, at halftime?
And last month, at the start of the FIFA Club World Cup, Italian soccer powerhouse team Juventus visited the White House, where Trump buttonholed them about trans athletes, asking whether a woman could make their team. When the team’s general manager explained that Juventus also had a very good women’s team, Trump responded: “But they should be playing with women, right? You know, one of those things.”
Trump showing up at the FIFA Club World Cup was pretty rich after his administration declared that Customs and Border Patrol agents would act as security for the first Cup game in Miami; An Immigration and Customs Enforcement official told the media that non-Americans should bring papers documenting their immigration status. Or that federal agents tried to bully their way into Dodger Stadium before a scheduled game while in the midst of terrorizing Los Angeles. Or that the administration insists that soccer-related tattoos are proof of membership in the notorious MS-13 gang and justifies deporting people.
Trump’s immigration crackdown means that even American sports teams now have to warn their non-American players to carry papers documenting their status. Who doesn’t love their sports events with a side of “papers, please?” and the continual looming threat of deportation?
When your entire administration is focused on eradicating dark-skinned people and making white supremacy the law of the land, showing up at sporting events that celebrate that very thing is ridiculous. Stay the hell home, man.
So — what did Chelsea do? As soon as the hoopla was over, they photoshopped Trump out of their official team photos.
Here’s the first photo.
Here’s the photo from Chelsea’s website.
The United States is set to play host to the 2026 FIFA World Cup, so we should be seeing more of Trump acting his usual asshole self at big-time games moving forward.
We Warned About the First China Shock. The Next One Will Be Worse.
July 14, 2025, 5:01 a.m. ET
By David Autor and Gordon Hanson
David Autor is an economics professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Gordon Hanson is an economics professor at Harvard University’s Kennedy School. They are both known for their research into how globalization, and especially the rise of China, reshaped the American labor market.
The first time China upended the U.S. economy, between 1999 and 2007, it helped erase nearly a quarter of all U.S. manufacturing jobs. Known as the China Shock, it was driven by a singular process — China’s late-1970s transition from Maoist central planning to a market economy, which rapidly moved the country’s labor and capital from collective rural farms to capitalist urban factories. Waves of inexpensive goods from China imploded the economic foundations of places where manufacturing was the main game in town, such as Martinsville, Va., and High Point, N.C., formerly the self-titled sweatshirt and furniture capitals of the world. Twenty years later, those workers haven’t recovered from those job losses. Although places like these are growing again, most job gains are in low-wage industries. A similar story played out in dozens of labor-intensive industries simultaneously: textiles, toys, sporting goods, electronics, plastics and auto parts.
Yet once China’s Mao-to-manufacturing transition was complete, sometime around 2015, the shock stopped building. Since then, U.S. manufacturing employment has rebounded, growing under President Barack Obama, the first Trump term and President Biden.
So why, you might ask, are we still talking about the China Shock? We wish we weren’t. We published the research in 2013, 2014 and 2016, along with our collaborator David Dorn of the University of Zurich, which detailed for the first time how Chinese import competition was devastating parts of America, through permanent declines in employment and earnings. We are here to argue now that policymakers are spending far too much time looking backward, fighting the last war. They should be spending much more time examining what’s emerging as a new China Shock.
China Shock 1.0 was a one-time event. In essence, China figured out how to do what it should have been doing decades earlier. In the United States, that led to unnecessarily painfully job losses. But America was never going to be selling tennis sneakers on Temu or assembling AirPods. China’s manufacturing work force is thought to be well in excess of 100 million, compared with America’s 13 million. It’s bordering on delusional to think the United States can — or should even want to — simultaneously compete with China in semiconductors and tennis sneakers alike.
China Shock 2.0, the one that’s fast approaching, is where China goes from underdog to favorite. Today, it is aggressively contesting the innovative sectors where the United States has long been the unquestioned leader: aviation, A.I., telecommunications, microprocessors, robotics, nuclear and fusion power, quantum computing, biotech and pharma, solar, batteries.Owning these sectors yields dividends: economic spoils from high profits and high-wage jobs; geopolitical heft from shaping the technological frontier; and military prowess from controlling the battlefield. General Motors, Boeing and Intel are American national champions, but they’ve all seen better days and we’re going to miss them if they’re gone. China’s technological vision is already reordering governments and markets in Africa, Latin America, Southeast Asia and increasingly Eastern Europe. Expect this influence to grow as the United States retreats into an isolationist MAGAsphere.
President Donald Trump promised the largest mass deportation operation in U.S. history. But halfway through his first year back in office, he’s not even matching the numbers under former President Barack Obama, let alone fulfilling his own pledge.
New figures obtained by NBC News show that while Immigration and Customs Enforcement is arresting immigrants at the fastest pace in at least five years, deportations are lagging significantly.
In June, ICE detained around 30,000 people—the highest monthly total since data began being released in late 2020. However, deportations that month barely exceeded 18,000. May showed a similar trend: 24,000 arrests but only about 15,000 deportations.
It’s becoming a hallmark of Trump’s second term: performative crackdowns, legal overreach, and a deportation bottleneck that stalls the scheme—even with him having the full power of federal agencies.
Since February, Trump’s administration has averaged 14,700 deportations per month. That’s less than half of the former Obama administration’s 2013 average—36,000 per month—and only slightly above Biden’s early 2024 pace of around 12,660 per month (including border removals handled by U.S. Customs and Border Protection).
The data supports what immigration advocates have long said: Trump’s goals were unrealistic. There simply aren’t enough eligible people to deport quickly enough to reach that number legally. And when legal barriers arise, Trump seems eager to bypass due process to maintain appearances.
Legal safeguards are slowing things down—thankfully and for good reason. Immigration attorneys told NBC that many detainees are still waiting on asylum decisions or have court orders preventing deportation. These delays are part of the process. But Trump’s team views them as obstacles.
That impatience has already led to serious mistakes. ICE has wrongfully deported at least four immigrants recently, including Kilmar Abrego Garcia and Jordin Alexander Melgar-Salmeron, who were later ordered to be returned by judges.
Sister RoseAnn Castilleja, center, holds a Rosary and sign as she marches with other immigration advocates as they protest recent detentions by ICE, in San Antonio, Texas, on July 1.
Meanwhile, ICE detention centers are overwhelmed. NBC reports that more than 60,000 people are being detained, far exceeding the 41,500 beds funded by Congress. Overcrowding, poor hygiene, and medical neglect are reportedly widespread, even if Department of Homeland Security spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin dismissed those claims as “categorically false.”
She also claimed ICE is working “diligently” to expand detention capacity.
That expansion may happen soon. Congress recently passed Trump’s vicious budget law, which allocates $45 billion to immigration enforcement and potentially tripling ICE’s detention capacity. Critics argue it won’t improve outcomes—just worsen dysfunction.
But as Trump’s team doubles down on dehumanizing rhetoric, they’re now stuck with a problem of their own making: trying to justify the threat they’ve spent years exaggerating.
After all, if the crisis were truly as severe as Trump and his allies claim, he wouldn’t be struggling to deliver on his biggest campaign promise. Instead, we’re watching his signature policy stumble against legal limits, logistical failures, and cold hard reality.
