Even MAGA Is Disgusted by Trump’s “Kim Jong Il–Style” Cabinet Meeting

President Trump’s all-hands Cabinet meeting Wednesday to mark his 100 days in office was such a shameless display of fealty that even commentators on the far right felt compelled to criticize it.

Trump hosted a two-hour-long televised meeting starring each of his Cabinet appointees. They all took turns going around the table talking about how awesome and wondrous Trump is, and how honored they were to even be in his presence.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth spoke of a “recruiting renaissance” and said that Trump “ripped wokeness out of the military.” National security adviser Mike Waltz said the world was “far better, far safer” because of Trump. And perhaps most notably, Attorney General Pam Bondi claimed that Trump has somehow saved 258 million Americans from overdosing on fentanyl in just 100 days.

“Since you have been in office President Trump, your DOJ agencies have seized more than 22 million fentanyl pills, 3,400 kilos of fentanyl … which saved—are you ready for this, media?—258 million lives,” Bondi claimed, turning directly to the camera when she said “media.” “Kids are dying every day because they’re taking this junk laced with something else. They don’t know what they’re taking. They think they’re buying a Tylenol, or an Adderall, and a Xanax. And it’s laced with fentanyl and they’re dropping dead. And no longer, because of you.”

This elicited an eye roll from even Richard Hanania, a right-wing commentator whose history of white supremacist writings directly influenced Project 2025.

“Yesterday, Pam Bondi claimed Trump saved 119 million lives. Today she has upped it to 258 million as she yells at the press for not wanting to accept it,” he wrote on X. “Seriously, we are in deep trouble. You really can’t be on the fence anymore about what we’re seeing.”

Infamous bigot Ann Coulter also chimed in.

“Would it be possible to have a cabinet meeting without the Kim Jong il-style tributes?” she wrote.

The Vermont judge who on Wednesday ordered the release of a Columbia University student arrested by Immigration and Customs Enforcement gave a grave warning about the Trump administration’s McCarthyist crackdown on free speech.

In his sharply worded 29-page decision ordering Mohsen Mahdawi’s release, Judge Geoffrey Crawford wrote that in addition to the fact that the graduate student was not a flight risk and presented no danger to his community, the judge had also considered the “extraordinary setting” in which his arrest was made in the ruling.

Legal residents—not charged with crimes or misconduct—are being arrested and threatened with deportation for stating their views on the political issues of the day,” Crawford wrote. “Our nation has seen times like this before, especially during the Red Scare and Palmer Raids of 1919-1920 that led to the deportation of hundreds of people suspected of anarchist or communist views.”

He referred to judicial decisions that had helped bring “an end to the moral panic that gripped the nation and its officials.”

“Similar themes were sounded during the McCarthy period in the 1950s when thousands of non-citizens were targeted for deportation due to their political views,” he said, referring to a 1950 Supreme Court dissent that condemned the “menace to free institutions” presented by such cases.

“The wheel of history has come around again, but as before these times of excess will pass. In the meantime, this case … is extraordinary in the sense that it calls upon the ancient remedy of habeas to address a persistent modern wrong.”

Crawford presented a strong defense for Mahdawi’s speech, writing that “even if he were a firebrand, his conduct is protected by the First Amendment.

“The court is aware that he has offended his political opponents and apparently given rise to concerns at the State Department that he is an obstacle to American foreign policy. Such conduct is insufficient to support a finding that he is in any way a danger as we use that term in the context of detention and release,” Crawford added.

Mahdawi, who had committed the heinous crime of activism and founded Columbia University’s Palestinian Student Union, offered a sharp condemnation of the very kind of antisemitism of which he stood accused, during an interview on CBS News’s 60 Minutes in December 2023. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has repeatedly invoked vague “antisemitic activities” as justification for the arrests of several students who have committed no crimes and whom the government hopes to deport.

Green card holder Mahmoud Khalil, who missed the birth of his child while being detained in Louisiana; Tufts University student Rumeysa Ozturk, who was detained over an op-ed, even though the State Department determined that the Trump administration had no evidence linking her to antisemitic activity; and Georgetown scholar Badar Khan Suri, who is now held in a Texas detention center, all remain in custody.

Just one day after his commerce secretary claimed that the American dream is a return to multigenerational factory serfdom, President Trump stated that parents might have to buy fewer toys for their kids while his destructive tariffs on China take effect.

“[China] made a trillion dollars with Biden, a trillion dollars, even a trillion and one with Biden, selling us stuff,” Trump said, referring to the gargantuan Chinese import market in the United States. “Much of it we don’t need. Ya’ know, somebody said, ‘Oh the shelves are gonna be open.’ Well, maybe the children will have two dolls instead of 30 dolls. And maybe the two dolls will cost a couple of bucks more than they would normally.”

The Trump administration has been trying for weeks now to gaslight Americans into thinking these tariffs will only be a temporary rough spot, that each country we’ve levied them on will fold, and that the man who penned The Art of the Deal will work his magic once again.

The reality of the situation is bleaker than they can imagine. The country’s gross domestic product fell by 0.3 percent in the first three months of the year, the first time in years that the economy has shrunk, while Trump blamed it entirely on former President Joe Biden.

Meanwhile, the whole world is bracing for impact, Americans who were already struggling are feeling deeply anxious, and Trump—whose very name is associated with opulence—has the nerve to tell the populace to buy fewer toys for their kids. Who is buying 30 toys at once?

The U.S. Postal Service is now helping the Trump administration with its mass deportation efforts.  

The Washington Post reports that the U.S. Postal Inspection Service, the law enforcement division of the postal agency, is cooperating with immigration agencies to help locate people suspected of being in the U.S. illegally by investigating data from mail and packages. The USPS officers have joined a Department of Homeland Security task force that focuses on finding, detaining, and deporting undocumented immigrants.

Thanks to the USPS’s cooperation, immigration officials now have access to photographs of the outside of envelopes and packages, as well as the postal service’s surveillance systems, including mail tracking, IP addresses, online account information, credit card data, and other financial information. 

While DHS has partnered with other agencies in areas such as taxes, housing, and public health, enlisting the USPS means that mail delivery is now part of immigration enforcement. The postal service has 1,700 law enforcement officers, whose main tasks in the past were to keep the mail system safe, investigate threats and attacks on postal facilities and workers, and keep illegal items out of the mail. 

The Postal Inspection Service’s leaders signed on to immigration efforts in part because of fears that the White House could tighten its control of the postal service. President Trump issued an executive order that includes all federal law enforcement agencies in the administration’s deportation efforts. 

“We want to play well in the sandbox” is how an Inspection Service email described a recent meeting with immigration officers, according to the Post. The service is now even participating in immigration raids and arrests. 

Aside from focusing more and more of the federal government on deportations, the move is another way that the White House is turning government services necessary to daily life into a trap. Immigrants have to use the mail and pay taxes like anyone else living in America, and now that could get them deported. 

“The Inspection Service is very, very nervous about this,” an unnamed source told the Post. “They seem to be trying to placate Trump by getting involved with things they think he’d like. But it’s complete overreach. This is the Postal Service. Why are they involved in deporting people?”

Secretary of State Marco Rubio outright bragged Wednesday about his unwillingness to comply with court orders. 

During an especially effusive Cabinet meeting, Rubio balked at a question about complying with the Supreme Court’s ruling upholding an order to facilitate the return of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, whom the government mistakenly deported last month. 

“Have you been in touch with El Salvador about returning Abrego Garcia, has a formal request from this administration been made?” a reporter asked.

“Well, I’ll never tell you that. And you know who else I’ll never tell? A judge,” Rubio said. “Because the conduct of our foreign policy belongs to the president of the United States and the executive branch, not some judge.” 

“So we will conduct foreign policy appropriately, if we need to. But I’ll never discuss it, and no one will ever make us discuss it, because that’s how foreign policy works,” Rubio said. 

But Rubio’s claims that the administration’s unlawful deportations are issues of “foreign policy” are just a blatant excuse not to comply with orders to turn over information about Abrego Garcia’s case. The Trump administration has fought hard against the efforts of U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis to receive information about the government’s work to return the Maryland resident.  

Xinis denied the government’s motion for a stay on discovery in the Abrego Garcia case Wednesday, after she granted a week-long pause in discovery last week that would have expired at 5:00 pm. It appears that Xinis heard arguments for the motion in a proceeding that was placed under seal. 

In a new order, Xinis said that expedited discovery must be completed by no later than May 12, and the government would be forced to respond by May 14. Discovery would include a deposition from ICE official Robert Cerna, who gave the initial sworn statement that Abrego Garcia’s removal had been the result of an “administrative error.”

But evidence is mounting that Rubio, and the rest of the Trump administration, are simply making excuses about a horrific situation that has spiralled out of control.

The New York Times reported Wednesday that Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele had outright rejected a diplomatic request from the U.S. government to return Abrego Garcia, after having received $6 million from the U.S. government to hold 239 Venezuelan deportees, as well as the return of several high-ranking MS-13 members Bukele personally requested. Some believe the U.S. government’s request was not made in good faith, and simply an excuse to say they tried to get him back and failed. 

In an interview on ABC News Tuesday night, Trump claimed that he could get Abrego Garcia back with just a phone call, but then said he wouldn’t because he was “not the one making this decision, we have lawyers who don’t want to do this.”

Donald Trump has happily taken credit for the stock market’s success in the past but suddenly can’t explain the market’s current second-quarter downturn, weeks after his roller-coaster tariff proposals rattled the economy.

“You frequently took credit for the stock market highs, you said it was a reflection of how well you were doing in the polls,” said The Independent’s Andrew Feinberg at a White House Cabinet meeting Wednesday. “And then after you were elected, you said the stock market highs were a reflection of how well the transition was going and the American people’s confidence in your upcoming administration.”

“Now the stock markets are not doing so well, and you’re saying it’s the Biden stock market. Yet you are the president. Can you explain that?” asked Feinberg.

But Trump couldn’t.

“I’m not taking credit or discredit for the stock market,” Trump said, before again diverting blame toward the Biden administration.

“I’m just saying that we inherited a mess,” he said, referring to immigration as an example.

“You can look at every single one of the people here, and no matter who it is, they are doing better and they are far superior to what took place four years before us,” Trump continued, surrounded by his Cabinet members—several of whom have already found themselves at the center of seismic scandals just a handful of months into the term.

Unfortunately for Trump, former President Joe Biden’s economy was fruitful by a number of metrics. His tenure in the White House saw historic job gains, curated business development, and decreased unemployment. Biden’s stability in office also aided the market’s steady growth, helping it repeatedly defy negative forecasts and grow gross domestic product by 12.6 percent, which the last administration celebrated as a “historically robust expansion.”

Meanwhile, a 100-day report on Trump’s economy found that GDP in the first quarter decreased by 0.3 percent, a startling drop from 2024’s fourth quarter, which saw GDP increase by 2.4 percent.

“Compared to the fourth quarter, the downturn in real GDP in the first quarter reflected an upturn in imports, a deceleration in consumer spending, and a downturn in government spending that were partly offset by upturns in investment and exports,” the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis reported Wednesday.

That’s in large part thanks to Trump’s machinations in the White House, including releasing (and stalling) a sweeping and vindictive tariff proposal plan that economists argue will crush U.S. businesses, the majority of which depend on global supply chains. Experts observed (and the White House eventually confirmed) the tariffs were developed using bad math.

Earlier this month, the White House promised to make 90 deals in 90 days to drive down predicted costs and erase the trade war, a pledge that economists argue is no less than a monumental task. An unidentified White House official confirmed to Politico that the administration is scheduled to speak with 18 different nations over the next three weeks to coordinate possible deals.

But that hasn’t stopped Trump from hyperbolizing his metrics to thwart negative press: Last week, Trump claimed that he had already cut deals with 200 nations around the world—five more countries than actually exist.

Hakeem Jeffries actually wants his party to be less courageous in the face of executive abuse and constitutional crisis, according to reporting from The Bulwark.

The House minority leader was asked about the trips Democrats like Senator Chris Van Hollen and Representatives Robert Garcia, Yassamin Ansari, Maxwell Frost, and Maxine Dexter have made to El Salvador’s CECOT prison on behalf of Kilmar Abrego Garcia and other men extrajudiciously deported by the Trump administration.

Rather than offer any kind of support for the initiative taken by his party members, Jeffries took a page out of the party’s neoliberal leadership handbook and played dead. “Our reaction [to the trips] is that Donald Trump has the lowest approval rating of any president in modern American history,” Jeffries responded, avoiding the question entirely to focus on Trump having bad polling numbers. But bad polling numbers won’t stop Trump from doing anything, much less stop him from deporting innocent people just for having tattoos or expressing solidarity with Palestine.

Jeffries’s disdain toward Democrats’ trips to El Salvador was corroborated by two sources who told The Bulwark that he is actually dissuading any future visits. “They want to let the El Salvador stuff slow down,” one staffer said. After initially refusing to respond, Jeffries’s office denied these claims, with a spokesperson stating that “Jeffries has repeatedly said, House Democrats will never stop fighting for the release of Mr. Abrego Garcia.”

This tiff over Jeffries’s nonanswer is a microcosm of the party’s current inability to acquiesce around a particular strategy or message. More moderate Democrats like Chuck Schumer and Jeffries seem content to stay mostly sedentary, betting on Trump running himself into the ground before he runs the country into the ground. Others—like Van Hollen, Representative Jamie Raskin, and all the others who are packing their bags for CECOT—don’t feel the need to wait for the obvious crisis to become an even bigger one.

House Republicans are trying to massively expand Donald Trump’s executive powers with a bill that is ostensibly about taxes and border security.

The House Judiciary Committee released a draft bill Monday that would move antitrust enforcement away from the independent Federal Trade Commission into the Justice Department. The bill would also require congressional approval for all new regulations, giving Republicans greater power over virtually the entire federal government.

Under the bill, federal agencies would have to submit portions of their rules to Congress, which would have to approve them within five years. If the rules aren’t approved, they would be gone, giving Republicans the ability to easily gut regulations they don’t like.

The committee is set to adopt the legislative draft at its meeting Wednesday and then include it in the House’s larger domestic policy bill, which Republicans plan to pass in the Senate via the reconciliation process. This would require a simple majority vote and is being used because the bill likely wouldn’t have enough votes otherwise.

“You’re having Congress basically involved in every agency decision,” said Republican Representative Kevin Hern of Oklahoma. “It’s somewhat controversial, and if you look at it historically, I think that’s probably why it hasn’t passed.”

The FTC would be gutted by the bill, and if it passes, Trump, or any other future president, would be able to control antitrust enforcement simply by issuing orders to the Justice Department.

“If you want to gut the agency who has shown itself willing to confront billionaire monopolists—and win—vote for this bill,” wrote Alvaro Bedoya on X Monday. Trump fired Bedoya as an FTC commissioner earlier this year, and Bedoya is challenging his firing in court.

The bill is another example of how Congress under Speaker Mike Johnson is abrogating its duty of checking the executive branch and instead is trying to give authoritarian President Trump even more power. Johnson is already trying to block House Democrats from opening up inquiries into the Trump administration, and if this draft bill goes through, Trump and his party would have considerable control over regulations and antitrust enforcement.

President Donald Trump got swindled as part of an ill-advised prisoner swap in return for El Salvador taking Venezuelan deportees with no criminal record, The New York Times reported Wednesday.  

At first, Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele was reluctant to take noncriminal immigrants and was doubtful he could convince his constituents that doing so was within the country’s national interests. While the Trump administration has repeatedly claimed that all 238 Venezuelans who were deported in March were members of Tren de Aragua, few of them actually had criminal records, and the criteria used to identify them as gang members were questionable. 

But Bukele saw an opportunity to get something he wanted. In return for taking Venezuelan detainees, he requested a list of high-ranking MS-13 members to be released into his custody. This immediately raised red flags for U.S. law enforcement officials, concerned over collaboration between Bukele’s government and MS-13.

Douglas Farah, an expert on El Salvador who previously collaborated with the Department of Justice on a task force targeting MS-13, told the Times that the Salvadoran government was trying to save its own skin. 

“What Bukele is desperate for is to get these guys back in El Salvador before they talk in U.S. court,” Farah said. 

The U.S. Treasury Department reported in 2021 that Bukele’s government had provided financial incentives to gangs to keep homicide numbers low, and said that gang members received special privileges in prisons, such as access to sex workers and mobile phones. The Justice Department has made similar allegations. 

Still, the Trump administration agreed to Bukele’s terms, convinced it was getting a great deal for the scale of its massive deportation undertaking. 

In addition to the $6 million the Trump administration paid to hold deportees at CECOT, the prison notorious for human rights abuses, U.S. officials agreed to send a dozen senior members of MS-13. This included César Humberto López-Larios, who was arrested in June and had been awaiting trial on several terrorism charges. Bukele has not yet received his complete list of MS-13 members, but U.S. officials said there were plans to send more, according to the Times. 

The Times separately reported Wednesday that Bukele had outright rejected a diplomatic request from the U.S. government to return Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the Maryland man who was wrongly deported to El Salvador in March as the result of an “administrative error.” In an interview on ABC News Tuesday night, Trump claimed that he could get Abrego Garcia back with just a phone call but that he wouldn’t because he was “not the one making this decision; we have lawyers who don’t want to do this.”

Donald Trump’s performance numbers may be down, but his head is right where it should be: ruminating over last September, when former Vice President Kamala Harris sat down with 60 Minutes.

Since the interview aired, the president has insisted that the network had selectively edited Harris’s answers to a question regarding Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu—a detail made all the more confusing since CBS’s 60 Minutes and Face the Nation cut and aired different portions of her 21-second response on different days. An independent review by the Federal Communications Commission showed that the two answers were in fact cut from the same longer response. As odd as the discrepancy was for viewers, editing answers for time is considered general practice in television news.

But as of this week, Trump has seemingly decided to rope The New York Times into the alleged offense, claiming that the newspaper’s reporting that the case is “baseless” is tantamount to “tortious interference” and, apparently, worth its own lawsuit.

Trump sued CBS for $10 billion after the interview, claiming that the different clips amounted to “election interference” and merited the network losing its broadcast license. He also argued, at the time, that Harris should drop out of the presidential race over the GOP-baked scandal.

“The case we have against 60 Minutes, CBS, and Paramount is a true WINNER,” Trump posted on Truth Social Wednesday. “They cheated and defrauded the American People at levels never seen before in the Political Arena. Kamala Harris, during Early Voting and, immediately before Election Day, was asked a question, and gave an answer, that was so bad and incompetent that it would have cost her many of the Votes that she ended up getting. It was a disastrous answer!”

Against evidence, Trump further claimed that Harris’s real answer was “removed and deleted”—“every word of it,” he wrote—and “replaced” with a response to a completely different question.

“In other words, 60 Minutes perpetrated a Giant FRAUD against the American People, the Federal Elections Commission, and the Federal Communications System,” the president continued.

He then accused the Times—an entirely separate media organization—of being in on the scandal, claiming that the newspaper’s “noncurable case of TRUMP DERANGEMENT SYNDROME” makes it “liable for tortious interference.”

“Nothing like this, the illegal creation of an answer for a Presidential Candidate, has ever been done before, they have to pay a price for it, and the Times should also be on the hook for their likely unlawful behavior,” Trump wrote. “It is vital to hold these Liars and Fraudsters accountable!”

CBS’s parent company, Paramount, is reportedly moving to settle the lawsuit—much to the dismay of network staff—so that Paramount’s controlling shareholder Shari Redstone can close a business deal that would require Trump’s sign-off.