Van Hollen told Rubio, “I have to tell you directly and personally that I regret voting for you for Secretary of State.”
Rubio responded, “Your regret for voting for me confirms I’m doing a good job.
Such a typical FU response from one of King Donald’s cronies.
According to Reuters, [South African President Cyril] Ramaphosa expected to mend diplomatic relations with the United States, after the Trump Administration decided to cut humanitarian aid, expelled the South African ambassador and offered refuge to white Afrikaners.
Instead, the US President confronted the South African leader with claims of white genocide and illegal land expropriations, which have been described by Reuters as patently false.
The BBC reports that Trump showed Ramaphosa a video, depicting several crosses along a road. The US President claimed that those were the burial sites of of murdered white farmers in South Africa.
According to the BBC, the video appears to be from a 2020 protest over a murdered farming couple in the Kwazulu-Natal province, with the crosses representing murdered farmers over the years.
Between a barrage of executive orders, foreign trips and norm-shattering proclamations, Donald Trump has also been busy raking in cash.
The president has amassed a war chest of at least $600 million in political donations heading into the midterm elections, according to three people familiar with the matter. It’s an unprecedented sum in modern politics, particularly for a lame-duck president who is barred by the U.S. Constitution from running again.
https://apnews.com/article/trump-fundraising-midterms-leverage-ccee4d19d5b41f08504370839fb36364
Prominent national security attorney Mark Zaid has filed a preliminary injunction request to restore his security clearance that the Trump administration revoked.
In late March, President Donald Trump rescinded the security clearance of Zaid and other well-known lawyers, politicians, and officials. Zaid sued the Trump administration in early May over this revocation, arguing the president’s executive order represented “dangerous, unconstitutional retaliation.”
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“We say enough of Trump taking away security clearances out of retaliation & with no basis,” attorney Norman Eisen added on social media, along with a photo of the motion.
The White House pushed back against statements from a reporter challenging statements from the Trump administration regarding the treatment of White South African farmers — after President Donald Trump showed a video allegedly depicting burial sites of them at the White House on Wednesday.
While hosting South African President Cyril Ramaphosa, Trump aired a video in the Oval Office that showed white crosses that Trump said were approximately 1,000 burial sites of White Afrikaner South African farmers. Trump has claimed these farmers are being forced off of their land.
But Yamiche Alcindor with NBC News questioned White House Press Secretary [& Bimbo #1] Karoline Leavitt on the credibility of the video, amid reports that the crosses were from a memorial demonstration following the murder of a White farming couple, not actual burial sites.
Trump never lets the truth get in the way of a good fib!
While speaking to press inside the Oval Office, President Donald Trump claimed international Harvard students are taking remedial math courses at the prestigious university.
On Friday, President Trump affirmed to a reporter that, while he wants the best and brightest from around the world to attend Harvard and other U.S. universities, many of the international students cannot do basic math.
“A lot of the people need remedial math. Did you see that? Where these students cant add two and two, and they go to Harvard?” Trump prompted. “They’re gonna teach remedial math at Harvard,” the president reiterated.
“Now, wait a minute, so why would they get in? How can somebody that can’t add or has very basic skills, how do they get into Harvard? Why are they there?” Trump continued before alleging the international students in remedial math are the same ones protesting on campus.
“You see those same people picketing and screaming at the United States and screaming. They’re antisemitic or they’re something,” he stated. “We don’t want troublemakers here… When Harvard comes out with a statement that they’re gonna teach some of their students remedial math, that’s basic math, uh, that’s not the deal,” Trump added.
What a bigoted moronic jerk!
Ordinarily, Donald Trump isn’t the kind of guy who’s overly concerned with evidence. The president relies on preconceived ideas, assorted conspiracy theories, rumors he’s heard via conservative media and routine assumptions he creates out of whole cloth, but he’s never shown any real interest in concepts such as proof and substantiation.
But when he sat down with South African President Cyril Ramaphosa, and Trump wanted to make a case against his guest’s home country, the Republican suddenly became deeply invested in evidence, holding a pile of printed articles that he offered as support for his baseless claims about South Africa. The American president even showed a video intended to bolster his “white genocide” conspiracy theories: It featured what Trump said were “burial sites” of “over 1,000” white farmers in South Africa.
But the evidence of racial persecution against white South Africans was not what Trump said it was. The New York Times reported:
A New York Times analysis found that the footage instead showed a memorial procession on Sept. 5, 2020, near Newcastle, South Africa. The event, according to a local news website, was for a white farming couple in the area who the police said had been murdered in late August of that year. The crosses were planted in the days ahead of the event and were later removed.
The Washington Post came to the same conclusion about the validity of the video shown in the Oval Office. (An NBC News report didn’t include a related analysis.)
“These are burial sites right here. Burial sites. Over a thousand of white farmers,” Trump declared as if he were certain that his evidence was real.
He was plainly and demonstrably wrong. The American president didn’t just peddle conspiracy theories more commonly found on fringe websites, he also aired “video evidence” that he brazenly misrepresented.
Last month, President Donald Trump shared an edited image of the knuckles of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, a Maryland resident with protected status wrongfully sent to a Salvadoran detention facility. The photo showed “MS13” apparently added above his knuckle tattoos, even though other photos of his hand did not have that text. Last week, I had a chance to ask Homeland Security Security Kristi [Bimbo #2] Noem if she had investigated how an edited image came into the president’s hands. Not only did she refuse to answer, she barely acknowledged that the image was edited.
Politics is hyperbole. I know that voters have become inured to politicians saying, “The opposing party is the end of the country as we know it!” But what we are witnessing today is like nothing we have seen since the founding of this country, almost 250 years ago. Every warning light on democracy’s dashboard now flashes red.
Since taking the Oval Office, Trump has never been coy about his ambitions to rule as a dictator rather than serve as a president, accountable to the people who put him there. In just the past few months, he’s laid out the groundwork to jail innocent people and silence his political enemies, all under the guise of “law and order.” Perhaps in just a few months, Trump’s authoritarian ambitions will be realized. And it will be like how Hemingway described how one grows broke: “Two ways. Gradually, then suddenly.”Just last week, Stephen Miller, Trump’s deputy chief of staff for policy and one of his longest-serving enablers, said the White House was “actively looking at” suspending habeas corpus for immigrants.
Let’s be clear: Suspending the constitutional right to challenge unlawful detention is not some academic exercise or abstract policy debate, as many on the right may claim. Miller is deadly serious. There is no ambiguity. Equally explicit is the United States Constitution: Only Congress can suspend habeas corpus, and only in cases of actual rebellion or invasion.
Suspending habeas corpus is the move of dictators and despots.
PRESIDENT Donald Trump confronted South Africa’s leader with a video he claimed supported his allegations of white persecution in the country.
Trump dimmed the lights and shushed President Cyril Ramaphosa in a bizarre moment where he showed the video that purported to show evidence of a genocide of white farmers in South Africa.
Trump hosted Ramaphosa at the White House on Wednesday to confront him about claims that South Africa’s government isn’t punishing people who kill white farmers.
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Ramaphosa tried to speak to Trump while the clip started to play, but Trump pointed at the video, telling him to pay attention.
Following the meeting, Trump said he wasn’t sure if there was a genocide happening in South Africa or not.
Trump has cut off foreign aid to South Africa based on the claims, which stem from a land reform law.
He accused the country’s government of taking land from white farmers and fuelling violence against them with “hateful rhetoric and government actions.”
https://www.the-sun.com/news/14291741/trump-south-africa-genocide-video-president-ramaphosa
In May 1988, Republican President Ronald Reagan spoke from the Oval Office in an address not targeted at the American people, but the citizens of Western Europe. The president was planning a trip to meet with Soviet Union General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev and wanted to make his commitment to Europe clear.
Staring directly at the camera, Reagan said: “Shared [moral] standards and beliefs tie us to Europe today. They are the essence of the community of free nations to which we belong.”
Thirty years later, in July 2018, while sitting for an interview with CBS at his Turnberry golf resort in Scotland, Republican President Donald Trump was asked to name America’s top global foe. “Well, I think we have a lot of foes,” Trump said. “I think the European Union is a foe, what they do to us in trade. Now you wouldn’t think of the European Union, but they’re a foe.”
https://www.newsweek.com/maga-republicans-donald-trump-jd-vance-europe-2071814
