Trump’s Mass Deportation Promise Just Got More Unhinged

Donald Trump pledged over the weekend to begin the “largest deportation operation in history” if elected president, before flying off the rails into one of his most berserk speaking engagements to date, full of promises that ranged from ridiculous to terrifying, and lame complaints about his media coverage. 

Trump’s speech at the Faith and Freedom Coalition’s “2024 Road to Majority” conference Saturday was a deluge of wild and inaccurate claims about immigrants aimed to stir the Christian conservative audience into a frenzy. But soon, things predictably descended into the kind of drivel for which the former president is known. 

While speaking about immigration, Trump interrupted himself, as he insisted that he knew there was a “slight difference” between “prisons and jails” and “mental institutions and insane asylums,” to once again talk about his favorite movie.  

“We have probably close to 20 million people that came in from all parts of the world. They’re gonna have to be gone,” Trump began, before abruptly changing topics.

“Whenever I say Silence of the Lambs, the fake news back there,” he said, pointing to the back of the room, “they say, ‘Oh, he’s talking about—he’s talking about Silence of the Lambs.’” 

So true. 

“When I say ‘the late, great Hannibal Lecter,’ they say, ‘Oh, he likes Hannibal Lecter.’ No, they’re crazy,” he continued. 

Trump has repeatedly mentioned the iconic horror villain as a gross generalization about people who have entered the United States through its southern border, many of whom, he baselessly claims, have escaped from the world’s prisons, mental institutions, and insane asylums, because of course, there is a “slight difference.” 

Unfortunately for Trump, who regularly blunders in his off-the-rails rants, what he described was straight reporting of him weirdly praising a fictional cannibal. Still, he continued to insist that the media is unfairly covering him. 

“When I imitate Joe Biden can’t get off the stage, I walk into a wall, purposely,” Trump said, brilliantly noting that “sometimes they don’t have a wall, you’re free-standing.”

“But I imitate him, and I walk into a wall, and the next day they write ‘Donald Trump Could Not Find His Way Off The Stage,’ no, no!” Trump insisted that the Biden campaign is pushing the narrative that their candidate is “improperly covered,” while whining that he had been improperly covered. 

Throughout his speech, Trump repeatedly lashed out against immigrants in the U.S., who he claimed are “getting comfortable now, they’re going to start hitting us very hard. These people are bad.” 

He even floated the idea of a “migrant league of fighters” in the Ultimate Fighting Championship, which UFC CEO Dana White quickly clarified was a joke. While it may have been a joke, it demonstrates that the former president does not really view immigrants as human. And as a result, his immigration policy is simultaneously unserious and bloodthirsty.

Lara Trump is happy about how her father-in-law, Donald Trump, overturned the landmark abortion rights decision of Roe v. Wade by appointing three conservative Supreme Court justices—and her reasoning is particularly strange.

The younger Trump told Ainsley Earhardt on Fox & Friends Monday morning how Trump’s preferred justices made the “right decision.”

“Well, look, Donald Trump obviously nominated three Supreme Court justices to the bench who made the right decision and actually set Roe v. Wade out and said, listen, this is up to the states,” Trump said. “It shouldn’t be up to a small group of people in Washington, D.C. The most democratic thing now has happened.”

Lara Trump’s words seem rather contradictory, as Donald Trump as well as Justices Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett are just a small group of people in Washington, D.C. who are going against overwhelming public support of abortion rights. A poll last month, for example, found that 63 percent of U.S. adults believe abortion should be legal in all or most cases, compared to 36 percent who believe that it should be illegal in all or most circumstances.

Monday is the two-year anniversary of Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, which overturned decades of precedent by removing the federal right to abortion. Ever since, red states have passed laws restricting and banning abortion, and in many cases have faced an electoral backlash. November will be the first post-Dobbs presidential election. Will Trump and the GOP face a backlash of their own?

Representative Ronny Jackson’s time leading the Trump administration’s in-house medical services appears to have colored his perspective on executive drug dependency.

Looking toward Donald Trump’s first match-up against President Joe Biden since he lost four years ago, the former White House physician speculated that Biden would need an extensive cocktail of drugs in order to keep up with his 78-year-old opponent.

“They have to treat his cognition, they have to give him something to think straighter. They have to give him something to wake him up, his alertness. And he’s been agitated, we see that all the time,” Jackson told Fox News Sunday. “That’s a common symptom, or sign of this cognitive disorder that he seems to be suffering from. So they’re probably going to be giving him something that will take the edge off of that as well.”

But that medical expertise comes after bombshell reports that the Trump White House was “awash in speed,” with staffers popping pills and washing them down with alcohol, in large part thanks to Jackson’s leadership as chief medical adviser. Common pill requests included modafinil, Adderall, fentanyl, morphine, and ketamine, according to a Pentagon report released in January. But other, unlisted drugs—such as Xanax—were equally easy to come by from the White House Medical Unit, according to sources that spoke to Rolling Stone.

Presidential prescriptions aren’t exactly unusual: John F. Kennedy Jr. used his White House doctors to fight off back pain, and Richard Nixon relied on his doctors to treat bad moods. But no previous administration has matched the level of debauchery of Trump’s, when in-office pharmacists unquestioningly handed out highly addictive substances to staffers who needed pick-me-ups or energy boosts—no doctor’s exam, referral, or prescription required.

But that wasn’t all Jackson had to say on the matter, instead continuing to deride White House doctors who “didn’t get” Biden’s drug cocktail “right last time,” during the State of the Union address.

“He came out, and he was obviously much more alert, but he was a yelling, angry old man and he still didn’t make a lot of sense,” Jackson said.

Trump’s debate strategies, meanwhile, including bashing CNN debate moderators Dana Bash and Jake Tapper, and accusing Biden of getting a “shot in the ass” to enhance his debate performance.

“He’ll come out all jacked up.… Whatever happened to all that cocaine that was missing a month ago?” Trump said on Saturday.

Who knows where he got that idea.

Donald Trump reportedly cracked jokes to his Jewish employees about Nazi “ovens,” according to a former executive at his organization.

Former Trump Organization Executive Vice President Barbara Res claimed Sunday that she and other employees had been mistreated by Trump, years before he’d become a belligerent politician. Res, an attorney and now author, worked at the Trump Organization for 18 years before leaving in 1998.

In an interview with MSNBC’s Ali Velshi, Res said that Trump’s recent rants reminded her of a time when he made a blatantly antisemitic comment to a group of Jewish employees.

Res said that Trump had recently hired a new German executive, and “was bragging to us executives about how great the guy was and he was a real German, and he was so neat and clean. And then he looked at a couple of our executives who happen to be Jewish, and he said, ‘You better watch out for this guy, he sort of remembers the ovens,’ and then smiled.

“Everybody was shocked,” she continued. “I couldn’t believe he said that, but he was making a joke about the Nazi ovens and killing people. And that’s the way he was.”

Velshi also asked Res what she made of Trump’s recent “embrace of religion” as he has continued to co-opt religious rhetoric on the campaign trail.

“His embrace of religion is absolute nonsense,” she said, adding that the Trump she knew “mocked religious people.”

It seems that in many ways, Trump is still the same. Trump has repeatedly said that any Jewish person who votes for President Joe Biden in November should be “ashamed,” have their “head examined,” and “does not love Israel.” Instead, Trump thinks people should vote for a guy who makes jokes about Nazi ovens and whose team is chock full of Christian nationalists and white supremacists.

Trump’s criticism of Biden on Israel is a sharp departure from reality, as the Biden administration has continued to fund weapons to Israel as it wages its brutal military campaign in Gaza, in the face of a crashing approval rate over Biden’s steadfast support of the mass killing and displacement of Palestinians.

Donald Trump reportedly took a “highly unusual” trip to Mar-a-Lago, just weeks before the FBI raided the Florida estate, to repossess thousands of sensitive documents.

But the “discreet,” previously unreported trip—which occurred between July 10 and 12 in the summer of 2022—has caught the interest of investigators, who believe it may have been another attempt to conceal the documents after being served a subpoena for their swift return, ABC News reported Monday.

Several witnesses who spoke with federal investigators explained that Trump’s visit to Mar-a-Lago was unexpected for a couple reasons: first, because Trump typically spends the entirety of his summers at his New Jersey residence in Bedminster; and second, because his private living quarters in Mar-a-Lago were under construction at the time of his visit. Staff were reportedly confused as to where the former president would even stay.

But behind the scenes, former Trump aide Walt Nauta was working to keep the Florida drop-in as covert as possible.

“I’m pretty sure [Trump] wants minimal people around on Monday,” Nauta texted one Trump employee the day before the former president arrived, reported ABC.

In another message, sent on July 8, Nauta told a Trump Organization employee to remain “discreet,” adding an emoji with a zipper over its mouth.

“They were keeping this one quiet … nobody knew about this trip,” one witness with direct knowledge of the trip told investigators, according to ABC News.

But some witnesses who spoke with special counsel Jack Smith’s team did have details on the purpose of the conveniently timed trip. At least one witness who worked closely with Trump told investigators that they believed Trump was “checking on the boxes.”

Trump faces 42 felony charges in the case related to willful retention of national security information, corruptly concealing documents, and conspiracy to obstruct justice. Smith’s case hinges on proving that Trump knew he was not allowed to keep the classified material. The revelation of his secret trip adds more fuel to Smith’s allegation—if the case ever makes it to trial.

The Trump-appointed judge overseeing the case has slow-walked the trial so aggressively that she has been accused by legal experts of attempting to postpone it indefinitely. Last week, Judge Aileen Cannon began hearing arguments not related to Trump’s actions—but instead on whether Smith’s appointment to the case was constitutional.