Mega-Thread: Trump Focused Discussion

[Mayhem]

And even he knows it. That's why nobody here is defending him.

Well, the only one who dared to defend this shit of an administration while criticizing them all the 5 times this year was apparently perma-banned.

And I can't stop grinning ever since.

[D Luniz]

https://www.opb.org/article/2025/11/...eral-response/



Bird flu is on the rise. Efforts to monitor and combat it are on the fall as the government remains closed.

Even if the government was open, Donnie dumdum's DOGE or RFK gutted the division in the CDC that monitors it.

[Breccia]

Even if the government was open, Donnie dumdum's DOGE or RFK gutted the division in the CDC that monitors it.

Somehow, I get the impression that the four people left on emergency staff don't feel a lot of pressure to help out all that much. Trump was prevented from mass firing during the shutdown. When he's finally forced to open it back up by a bipartisan bill, he'll throw a tantrum and fire tens of thousands immediately. Imagine working someplace where the boss tells you "I want to fire you without cause, and I will the second I am allowed". Would you put in the extra effort? Would you do anything at all?

[Edge-]

https://www.npr.org/2025/11/06/g-s1-...n-judges-fired

For three immigration judges, the day took a similar turn.

Kyra Lilien, who was hired in 2023, was presiding in a courtroom in Concord, Calif., in July when she paused the hearing of an immigrant seeking asylum to read an email.

"I told them that we were not going to have a hearing because I had just been fired," Lilien said. Present in the court was a court interpreter and an attorney for the Department of Homeland Security. "They asked me if I was joking."

Anam Petit, who was hired as an immigration judge in 2023 after a career in immigrant defense, was sitting on the bench in her courtroom in Virginia's Annandale Immigration Court in September. It was her two-year anniversary in the position and she was between hearings when she got the email.

"My voice was shaking. My hands were shaking. My mind was racing. And I gave the decision and I dismissed everyone without mentioning anything," Petit said. One decision that day was to deny asylum, and the other was a partial denial, each for a different member of one immigrant family, she recalled.

Tania Nemer was hired as a judge at the Cleveland immigration court in 2023. She had about 30 or 40 immigrants, a DHS attorney and staff in her court one morning in February. She had just finished explaining rights and responsibilities to the group when her door opened and her manager asked her to come with him. She was later escorted out of the building.

"I didn't know at all why I was being fired at the time. And I kept asking; no one had a reason," Nemer said.

Nemer was one of the first immigration judges fired by the Trump administration after a slew of dismissals of leaders at the Executive Office for Immigration Review (EOIR), the branch of the Justice Department that houses immigration courts. Later that month, the administration fired 12 judges — an entire incoming class that had just been trained and was about to take the bench.

Those dismissals come as the administration has ramped up mass deportations of those without legal status, and sometimes pointed to judges as obstacles in that effort.

The pattern has been consistent. Every few months this year, a new class of judges gets termination notices in the middle of the day, often while they are in the middle of immigration court proceedings. The notices often target those who have reached the end of their two-year probationary period, a trial period for federal workers before they are "converted" to permanent employees. It was previously common for these civil servants to be converted to permanent employees of the DOJ.

"None of us have been given an explanation, we are in the dark, but we've been trying to ascertain patterns," Lilien said, the former judge in northern California. She wonders if her past experience representing immigrants got her fired, even though she also worked at DHS as an asylum officer.

Her hunch has some correlation with the data. NPR has independently identified 70 immigration judges who received termination notices from the Trump administration between February and October. The number of judges who received termination letters matches the tally kept by the immigration judges' union. It also accords with NPR's past coverage of the terminations.

The count does not include assistant chief immigration judges (ACIJ), who are courthouse supervisors and also have their own dockets. The union has counted 11 ACIJs terminated.

An analysis of each of the 70 immigration judges' professional backgrounds found that judges with backgrounds defending immigrants, and no prior work history at DHS, made up about 44% of the firings — more than double the share of those who had only prior work history at DHS.

NPR also analyzed the classes of judges onboarded between February 2023 and November 2024, who would have neared the ends of their probationary periods this year or are still in the probationary period. Of those judges, those who had prior DHS experience, including working as asylum officers and as attorneys for Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, made up the largest share still on the bench.

DOJ sure seems like it's clearing house of immigration judges unless they have ICE/DHS backgrounds and are likely to be hostile to immigrants, including apparently targeting judges with defense backgrounds.

Now, of course, this is all "lawful" in theory as they're employees of the executive branch and all.

But it sure is telling what the administration and DOJ continues to focus on while letting drug kingpins and white collar criminals out of jail.

[Breccia]

But it sure is telling what the administration and DOJ continues to focus on while letting drug kingpins and white collar criminals out of jail.

I do hope the remaining judges start putting money away. Clearly it's legal to fire them if you don't agree with them, so, their job security is three years.

[PACOX]

Presidents can pardon criminal contempt of court.
Per the Supreme Court.

Wonder what the Founders would have said about checks and balances if they knew the other two branches would just give up. Now I personally think the Founders are heavily mythologized and didn't half a damn about the average person but what about the spirit of checks and balances. Surely modern politics goes against it.

[Malkiah]

what about the spirit of checks and balances. Surely modern politics goes against it.

so here's the thing:
it's not in any of the founding documents, but as many of the founders wrote correspondences that have been preserved there are records of many of them giving their opinion on the dangers of partisan politics.
at the very outset of the US things were getting decidedly hinky, as the federalist party formed before the ink on the constitution was dry.
the idea of political factions wasn't some mysterious "they couldn't have predicted this" problem that was just beyond them to address, they specifically acknowledged its existence (and even wrote about it being a fatal disease that would destroy democracy) and then chose to do absolutely nothing about it because any time any of them was in a position of power, using partisan politics was an effective bludgeon to use against others and they liked having access to it.

this whole "checks and balances" schtick is a bunch of after-the-fact nonsense invented to try to lionize these idiots who conned a bunch of rubes into supporting them founding their own libertarian utopia, it was part of the set-piece of lies that was sold to the general populace to scam them into going along with the formation of a country that benefited only the top.

this isn't a bug, it's a feature.

[PfeffermintShake]

TRUMP TAKE EGG

Even FOX is VERY CONCERNED and tired of the WH gaslighting people about prices.

[Odinfrost]

TRUMP TAKE EGG

Even FOX is VERY CONCERNED and tired of the WH gaslighting people about prices.

Oh no. Fox News is about to lose their White House press credentials

[DarkTZeratul]

Oh no. Fox News is about to lose their White House press credentials

I mean, they already refused to sign the Pentagon's "no press credentials unless you parrot our propaganda to the letter" agreement.

[PhaelixWW]

I mean, they already refused to sign the Pentagon's "no press credentials unless you parrot our propaganda to the letter" agreement.

So, like... it'll just be Mike Lindell publishing "news" from the White House, then?

[gondrin]

So, guess who has beef with Big Beef?

https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/comp...4e47a58b&ei=59

Donald Trump suddenly has a big beef with, well, Big Beef.

After days of being hammered over his failure to lower prices on everyday grocery staples — and just about an hour after being pressed on the matter while sitting next to Hungary’s strongman leader Viktor Orban in the White House — the president unleashed on U.S. meat producers Friday, accusing them of artificially inflating prices and saying he’s ordered a Justice Department probe into the beef industry.

Writing on Truth Social, Trump said he’d asked the Justice Department to “immediately begin an investigation into the Meat Packing Companies” who he claimed “are driving up the price of Beef through Illicit Collusion, Price Fixing, and Price Manipulation.”

The president went on to claim that American ranchers were unfairly taking blame for the actions of what he called “Majority Foreign Owned Meat Packers, who artificially inflate prices, and jeopardize the security of our Nation’s food supply.”

“Action must be taken immediately to protect Consumers, combat Illegal Monopolies, and ensure these Corporations are not criminally profiting at the expense of the American People. I am asking the DOJ to act expeditiously,” he added.

He subsequently claimed in a second post that something was “fishy” because “the price of Boxed Beef has gone up” even while cattle prices were stable or falling.

The president’s Friday afternoon rant came weeks after he floated — and quickly abandoned — a plan to have the government purchase Argentine beef in an effort to lower prices and also prop up the Argentine beef sector ahead of last month’s elections in the South American country.

“We would buy some beef from Argentina,” he told reporters during an October 20 media availability on Air Force One en route from Florida to Washington. “If we do that, that will bring our beef prices down.”

US beef prices have been stubbornly high for a variety of reasons, including drought and reduced imports from Mexico because of a flesh-eating pest in cattle herds there, as well as tariffs Trump has placed on beef imports from Brazil to punish the Brazilian government for imprisoning his friend, ex-president Jair Bolsonaro, for having attempted a coup to remain in power after losing an election.

But the plan met with swift opposition from the American beef industry as well as Republican senators from cattle-producing states.

One senator, Deb Fisher of Nebraska, said in a statement at the time that the Argentine beef proposal “wasn’t the way” to address high prices.

“Right now, government intervention in the beef market will hurt our cattle ranchers. The U.S. has safe, reliable beef, and it is the one bright spot in our struggling ag economy. Nebraska’s ranchers cannot afford to have the rug pulled out from under them when they’re just getting ahead or simply breaking even,” she said.

Vice President JD Vance was subsequently “bombarded” with questions about President Donald Trump’s new beef deal with Argentina during a lunch with Republican senators last week, leading the VP to reportedly ask if any senators had “questions NOT about beef” at one point.

Trump’s outburst over high beef prices also follows devastating losses for his party’s candidates in the New Jersey and Virginia gubernatorial races at the hands of voters who expressed anger over his administration's failure to address rising prices contributing to an ever-higher cost of living in the U.S.

Citing New Jersey Governor-elect Mikie Sherrill and Virginia Governor-elect Abigail Spanberger’s laser-focused campaigns which centered on “affordability” just one year after voters cited higher prices as the reason for returning him to the White House in the 2024 presidential election, Trump complained that the Democrats’ focus on “affordability” was “a con job.”

“The Democrats are good at a few things, cheating on elections and conning people with facts that aren’t true,” said Trump, who then proceeded to rattle off a list of baseless assertions about the prices of this year’s Thanksgiving dinner staples and gasoline, the latter of which he falsely claimed is available to Americans at $2 per gallon.

“Prices are down under the Trump administration, and they're down substantially ... gasoline is way down, and the other big thing is ... inflation is way down ... we did a great job on groceries and affordability. The only problem is the fake news. You people don't want to report it,” he said.

“The reason I don't want to talk about affordability is because everybody knows that it's far less expensive under Trump than it was under sleepy Joe Biden and the prices are way down.”

I remember there was a commercial back in the 80s that spoke about this.



Maybe we need an old lady to ask Trump that same question.

"Where's the beef?"

[Sunseeker]

I am laughing and crying and dying.

Like, dont get me wrong the meat packers ARE colluding, and this has been known for decades. Tyson is even suing over it.

But now its goddamn Trump'o'clock and the loon has stumbled on to an actual problem that he has only made worse.

[DarkTZeratul]

But now its goddamn Trump'o'clock and the loon has stumbled on to an actual problem that he has only made worse.

Plus I'm pretty sure he only thinks it's a problem because "someone is cheating" is the only explanation he can come up with for why tarriffing the shit out of everything and deporting half their workers hasn't somehow made prices go down like he says they did.

[PACOX]

Trump said he distributed Snap benef...

A few hours later
https://www.cnn.com/2025/11/07/polit...-snap-benefits

Lie could not keep people hopes up for the weekend.

[Fugus]

Asked someone on food stamps. They got theirs but was $100 less than their normal.

[RaoBurning]

This asshole...

Cargo Cult Politics. He sees the words, repeats the words, but does not understand the words.

[postman1782]

At this point I just assume the Epstein files contain actual sex tapes.

And I fully expect Trump to do everything in his power to destroy them before they can become public.

Well, they did get several hundred gigs of video.


https://www.justice.gov/ag/media/1391271/dl?inline
This is the evidence list, lots of computers and tablets listed.

[Paranoid Android]

Trump said he distributed Snap benef...

A few hours later
https://www.cnn.com/2025/11/07/polit...-snap-benefits

Lie could not keep people hopes up for the weekend.

BREAKING: Supreme Court temporarily blocks full SNAP food stamp payments after Trump appeal
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/w...-b2861189.html

https://bsky.app/profile/ericmgarcia.../3m53lgn23l223

Fuck this court

An emergency ruling on feeding people huh? Pieces of Shit.

Idk what the authority or ruling besides trump is king I guess l.

Edit: I will leave post up but this is a stay, meaning there will be a ruling next week what I rea.

Link Politico. https://www.politico.com/news/2025/1...medium=bluesky

Reading it's such a clusterfuck cause some states issued in this narrow time window so Idk what happens there.

Guess we will see.

[gondrin]

https://bsky.app/profile/ericmgarcia.../3m53lgn23l223

Fuck this court

An emergency ruling on feeding people huh? Pieces of Shit.

Idk what the authority or ruling besides trump is king I guess l.

I believe the SCOTUS is going with this argument.

But the Trump administration then filed an emergency request with a federal appeals court to freeze the judge’s order and block the courts from requiring the government to spend more money that goes beyond what’s left in a contingency fund to pay out partial benefits for the month.

They are temporarily blocking the ruling that would demand the USDA to fund SNAP past what it actually has in appropriated contingency funds.