The stupendous response of Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent regarding the extreme tariffs imposed on our (formerly) #3 trading partner:
… so what?
As our stock markets collapse, retirement accounts dwindle, and recession beckons, all this arrogant fool can contribute to the discussion is:
… so what?
By placing migrants in Social Security’s “death master file,” the Trump administration is seeking to cut off their access to credit cards, bank accounts and other financial services.
People who have been here LEGALLY may soon discover that they are “dead”.
Since taking office, the Trump administration has moved aggressively to revoke the temporary legal status of hundreds of thousands of immigrants who were allowed into the country under President Joseph R. Biden Jr.
Now, the administration is taking drastic steps to pressure some of those immigrants and others who had legal status to “self-deport” by effectively canceling the Social Security numbers they had lawfully obtained, according to documents reviewed by The New York Times and interviews with six people familiar with the plans.
The goal is to cut those people off from using crucial financial services like bank accounts and credit cards, along with their access to government benefits.
The effort hinges on a surprising new tactic: repurposing Social Security’s “death master file,” which for years has been used to track dead people who should no longer receive benefits, to include the names of living people who the government believes should be treated as if they are dead.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/04/10/us/politics/migrants-deport-social-security-doge.html
Now there are multiple reports in multiple states of international students having their Student and Exchange Visitor Information System (SEVIS) records terminated by USCIS (U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services) with no notice to either the students or to the schools.
No notice, no hearing, just terminated, and presumably the students will soon be *poof* disappeared as well.
Why has Trump revoked hundreds of international student visas?
118 international students’ immigration statuses revoked across Texas universities
Federal officials are quietly terminating the legal residency of some international college students
!!!!!!!!!!
The Supreme Court on Monday unanimously agreed that alleged members of the Venezuelan gang Tren de Aragua have a due process right to challenge President Donald Trump’s use of the Alien Enemies Act (AEA) to summarily deport them.
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As the Court’s unsigned order in Trump v. J.G.G. notes, “‘it is well established that the Fifth Amendment entitles aliens to due process of law’ in the context of removal proceedings,” meaning “the detainees are entitled to notice and opportunity to be heard ‘appropriate to the nature of the case.'” Specifically, the majority says, “AEA detainees must receive notice after the date of this order that they are subject to removal under the Act. The notice must be afforded within a reasonable time and in such a manner as will allow them to actually seek habeas relief in the proper venue before such removal occurs.”
That order decisively rejects the Trump administration’s attempt to deport suspected gang members without judicial review.
President Donald Trump has announced his intention to shake up the pharmaceutical industry with an alarming new tariff plan.
At the National Republican Congressional Committee dinner on Tuesday night, having ignored the warnings from experts, Trump declared: “We’re gonna tariff our pharmaceuticals and once we do that they’re gonna come rushing back into our country, because we’re the big market.”
He confidently stated that such measures would drive companies back to the US and promised: “So we’re going to be announcing very shortly a major tariff on pharmaceuticals.”
In other words, we’ll treat the pharmaceutical industry like sh*t and they’ll rush back loving us. Fat chance of that!
https://www.themirror.com/news/us-news/donald-trump-slaps-tariffs-pharmaceuticals-1080697
The White House’s push for for expanded presidential power threatens US economic stability
Donald Trump is systematically purging every US government institution, a pattern familiar to anybody who has studied the caudillo regimes of Latin America, or the playbook of today’s Putin-Orbán-Erdoğan prototypes.
It is a racing certainty that he will soon do the same to the Federal Reserve, forcing the central bank to cut interest rates into the teeth of rising inflation, with epic consequences for the world’s dollarised financial system and for €39 trillion (£33 trillion) of offshore dollar debt contracts and swaps.
Late last week he fired the head of the National Security Agency and its top officials at the behest of Laura Loomer, a fringe conspiracy theorist, who whispered into Trump’s ear that they were disloyal to the Maga movement.
He has already fired the heads of the FBI’s intelligence division, its counterterrorism division and criminal investigations division, as well as the heads of the Washington and New York offices.
He has fired the top brass of the US military, starting with a preemptive strike on the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff. An earlier chairman – General Mark Milley – refused to ratify Trump’s attempted coup d’etat on Jan 6 2021.
“We don’t take an oath to a king, or to a tyrant or dictator, and we don’t take an oath to a wannabe dictator. We take an oath to the constitution,” said Milley in his parting shot.
But Trump also fired the three judge advocates general, who are legally independent by Congressional statute and have the authority to decide which military orders should be disobeyed – such as Trump’s order to “just shoot” American protesters, on American soil, during the Black Lives Matter saga.
That obstacle will not recur. Pete Hegseth, the defence secretary, said the three judges had been sacked to stop them posing any “roadblocks to orders given by the commander-in-chief”.
You can go through the list, agency by agency, extending to the universities and private law firms, and even to the muzzled editorials of some of America’s once great newspapers: the purge is Bolshevik in ambition.
Does anybody in their right mind think that Trump will spare the Fed’s Jerome Powell as the two men gear up for an almighty clash over US monetary policy? “CUT INTEREST RATES, JEROME, AND STOP PLAYING POLITICS!” bellowed Trump in capital letters on Truth Social on Friday.
These people came to the United States in search of a better life, as many millions have done over the past 250 years.
And their reward? Trump is forcibly exporting them to whatever third-world country will take them.
The Trump administration is pursuing agreements with several more countries to take migrants deported from the U.S., according to officials familiar with the matter.
Immigration officials are seeking more destinations where they can send immigrants the U.S. wants to deport, but whose countries are slow to take them back or refuse to. Their desired model builds on a one-time deal the administration struck with Panama in February, under which they sent a planeload of over 100 migrants, mostly from the Middle East, to the Central American nation. Panama then detained the migrants and worked to send them to their home countries.
The officials are in conversations with countries in Africa, Asia and Eastern Europe, but aren’t necessarily looking to sign formal agreements, the people said.
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Among the countries the U.S. has asked to take the deportees are Libya, Rwanda, Benin, Eswatini, Moldova, Mongolia and Kosovo.
Exclusive | U.S. Looks for More Countries to Take Migrants – WSJ
Families and activists say deportees signed documents to return to Venezuela but were sent to Salvadoran jail instead
Venezuelans deported from the US to El Salvador in a case that has become a legal flashpoint for Donald Trump’s US administration had signed documents agreeing to be returned to their home country, according to families of some of the deportees and a campaign group.
Two families of men on the now notorious Saturday flights to El Salvador told the Financial Times their relatives had signed what appeared to be voluntary deportation orders in exchange for returning to Venezuela sooner.
But their families later spotted them in videos posted by El Salvador’s President Nayib Bukele that showed them in his country in chains, claiming they were violent gang members.
Kelvi Zambrano, co-ordinator for the US-based Venezuelan non-profit Coalition for Human Rights and Democracy, said his organisation represented three more Venezuelans who signed agreements to return home and were now missing. Their names all appear on a US government list of deportees sent to El Salvador that was published by CBS News.
It is not clear how many of the 238 Venezuelans flown to a maximum-security prison in El Salvador from Texas on Saturday had signed the papers to return to their home country.
So they think they’re going home to Venezuela? And instead they get de facto one-year prison sentences in a Salvadoran jail with no hearing, no due process whatsoever?
Venezuelans sent by Trump to El Salvador had signed paperwork to go home
In reality, slapping taxes on car parts imported from Canada and Mexico will hurt U.S. automakers harder than their competitors offshore because U.S. automakers have extensive operations in Canada and Mexico.
U.S. auto dealers have warned the Trump regime that tariffs will make cars less affordable to American consumers at a time when many Americans remain concerned about inflation.
Trump has waved away such concerns, insisting his tariffs will raise revenue — enabling him to lower taxes. The White House calculates that his tariffs could raise $100 billion annually. But the mere threat of such tariffs has erased more than $100 billion from the largest carmakers’ market capitalization in recent weeks.
Plus, as I’ve shown, his tariffs are a regressive tax that will be paid mostly by lower-income Americans, while his planned tax cuts will mostly benefit higher-income Americans.
The result: a huge hidden upward redistribution.
Another dumb Trump move that’s not just a gross mistake | Opinion
Seriously, what country needs a visit from arrogant jerks that thinks they’re above the rest of the world?
“A Greenlandic tourism business has said it changed its mind about welcoming the vice president’s wife Usha Vance to their store.
“Tupilak Travel wrote on Facebook that it had informed the U.S. Consulate that it did not want Vance to visit because of the ‘underlying agenda.’ The post ended with a phrase meaning ‘Greenland belongs to the Greenlanders.'”
Greenland Tourism Business Accepts, Then Declines Usha Vance Visit – Newsweek
