Trump’s Prison Swap Welcomed a Convicted Murderer Back to U.S.

The Trump administration’s massive prisoner swap last week, which saw 10 U.S. citizens and legal permanent residents imprisoned in Venezuela freed in exchange for about 250 Venezuelans deported and detained in El Salvador amid Trump’s immigration crackdown, has been framed as an effort to keep America safe.

But as part of that exchange, Trump freed one man convicted of a grisly murder. Dahud Hanid Ortiz, a naturalized U.S. citizen born in Venezuela, was not a political prisoner. Rather, he was convicted of brutally murdering three people at a law office in Spain in 2016, El País reported. Ortiz is exactly the kind of person Trump lies about every immigrant south of the border being, and yet he’s being welcomed back on American soil with open arms and warm smiles.

Ortiz, a former Marine, was convicted and jailed for a triple homicide in which he axed one man in the head, slashed a woman’s throat, and beat another woman to death before lighting the office on fire. Ortiz then fled to Venezuela, where he had dual citizenship and could not be extradited. He was arrested shortly thereafter and last year was sentenced to 30 years in prison. Thanks to Trump, the convicted murderer barely served his sentence. And even if you think the Venezuelan government’s conviction of Ortiz was unreliable, consider that the Spanish government tried to arrest him first.

Ortiz can be seen smiling for a picture on a State Department plane with the nine other freed prisoners, holding an American flag.

The Trump administration rounded up immigrants without due process and sent them to rot in one of the most inhumane prisons in the world, only to use them in a prison swap that freed a convicted murderer. Just as every other action he’s taken has proved, it isn’t actually about keeping violent, dangerous criminals out, it’s about making sure more people of color don’t come in. If the former were true, Ortiz would still be locked up in Venezuela right now.

Donald Trump’s approval rating has officially reached an all-time low—for his second term in the White House, that is.

“The USS Donald Trump is taking on a lot of water,” said CNN’s chief data analyst Harry Enten Wednesday. He reported that Trump’s net approval rating had sunk to -11 points.

“His net approval rating has dropped nearly 20 points in the aggregate since the beginning of his presidency,” Enten said. “The American people do not like what they’re seeing, and Donald Trump’s administration is in a ton of trouble at this point, in the minds of the American voters.”

Enten reported voters had come to disapprove of Trump on practically every single issue of the day. Trump had a net approval rating of -14 points on the economy and foreign policy, with his never-ending tariff negotiations earning him a -15 point approval rating on trade. On immigration, which is arguably Trump’s best issue, his net approval rating was only -5 points.

But Enten did have one piece of good news to offer.

“There is one other presidency that has a lower net approval rating at this point than this one,” Enten said. “The bad news is that it was Donald Trump’s other presidency, his first presidency.”

At this point in Trump’s first stint in the White House, Trump had a net approval rating of -16 points. Enten added that since 1953, the average U.S. president has had a net approval rating of 27 points, placing Trump laughably behind.

Unsurprisingly, the issue voters felt Trump was performing the worst on was Jeffrey Epstein, the alleged sex trafficker whose ties to the president have been resurfaced amid the Trump administration’s hapless flip-flopping on the release of materials related to Epstein’s crimes.

This is bad news for Republican lawmakers who have thrown their lot in with Trump. The House GOP is delaying, perhaps indefinitely, its own nonbinding resolution asking the Justice Department to release more Epstein documents, and previously blocked a Democratic attempt to force a vote on releasing the Epstein files, with zero Republicans supporting the measure.

CNN’s Poll of Polls, which tracks Trump’s average approval and disapproval rates in national polls, found that only 41 percent of voters approved of Trump, while 57 percent disapproved.

Last month, Enten analyzed five recent polls that cumulatively indicated that Trump’s “big beautiful bill” was historically unpopular, with 49 percent of the country believing it will hurt their families as opposed to the 23 percent who think it will help them.

In the government’s latest bid to distract from Donald Trump’s emerging ties to alleged sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard unveiled supposedly “new evidence” Wednesday that members of the Obama administration had pushed the “lie” that Russian President Vladimir Putin preferred Trump over Hillary Clinton. 

Gabbard declassified a September 2020 House Intelligence Committee report that found former President Barack Obama had pushed for an Intelligence Community Assessment to be released in January 2017, ahead of Trump’s presidency. The assessment produced by the CIA, FBI, and NSA determined that Putin had “aspired” to see Trump enter the White House, while the House Intelligence Committee had not previously been made aware of Putin’s preference for Trump, according to the report. 

The House report found that the Intelligence Committee assessment was prepared by only five CIA analysts and was “not properly coordinated within CIA or the IC, ensuring it would be published without significant challenges to its conclusions.” Some CIA officers expressed concerns that the expedited timeline meant the assessment did not meet publication standards.

Gabbard seems to think this is an incredibly damning revelation and that the report alleges Obama ordered a so-called “rewrite” of the intelligence assessments. Her office has the conspiracy-style infographics to prove it—even the White House shared a cringey meme depicting a “Russia Deep State Starter Pack.” 

Gabbard claimed on X that Obama had ordered the Intelligence Committee to produce an assessment that “they knew was false, promoting a contrived narrative, with the intent of undermining the legitimacy and power of a duly elected President of the United States, Donald Trump.”

But it’s not clear that Obama ordered any changes to the committee’s assessment at all, instead simply ordering it to review its work to date. 

The committee also found that former CIA Director John Brennan had ordered the publication of 15 supposedly “implausible” reports referring to Putin’s preference for Trump.

Maybe instead of all of the speculation over Putin’s hopes and dreams, someone should just ask the foreign dictator whether he wanted Trump to win the 2016 presidential election? Oh wait, someone did. 

“Yes, I did. Yes, I did. Because he talked about bringing the U.S.-Russia relationship back to normal,” Putin said during a 2018 press conference with Trump. Maybe that could help settle things? 

Last week, Gabbard released a declassified report alleging that members of the Obama administration had “manufactured and politicized” intelligence to create the narrative that Russia had interfered in the 2016 election. It’s also worth noting that shortly after the 2016 election, the Obama administration insisted that hackers had not affected the vote tallies.

This is the third week of fallout from the Justice Department’s memo announcing that Epstein kept no incriminating “client list,” even though Trump’s attorney general claimed one had been sitting on her desk, sparking widespread backlash among Trump’s conspiracy-addled following. Now Trump said he hopes to shift the attention away from his administration by setting the mob on a new political witch hunt.  

Louisiana Senator John Kennedy appeared to have a mental episode live on Larry Kudlow’s Fox Business show Tuesday, adding yet another entry to the long, bipartisan list of alarming age-related lowlights from our country’s leaders. 

“I’m sure Jesus loves him, but everybody else thinks—everybody else …” said Kennedy, 73, before trailing off. You can see it in his face—his eyes and mouth particularly—as he struggles to remember what he meant to say or where he is before ultimately giving up and freezing. 

The broadcast quickly got Kennedy off the screen while Kudlow blamed technical difficulties. 

What Kennedy meant to say was “Jesus loves him, but everyone else thinks he’s an idiot,” a phrase he’s repeated countless times over the years. Kennedy’s moment is reminiscent of Mitch McConnell freezing multiple times in 2023, and with the same dissociative look as Kennedy, simply trailing off mid-sentence, looking as if he forgot who or where he was. 

Gerontocracy has been an issue for some time now, as leaders with clear and obvious health issues often remain in office for far longer than they should, usually out of pride and denial.  Representative Gerry Connolly, Dianne Feinstein, and most famously President Joe Biden are other examples. 

The Department of Homeland Security is urging Americans to dish the dirt on their undocumented ex-lovers.

“From domestic abuser to deported loser,” the official X account for the agency posted Tuesday, sharing the contact number for Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s tip line.

The unsavory ploy was in response to Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier, who recounted a recent incident in which he said his office “got a tip from someone whose abusive ex overstayed a tourism visa.”

“He is now cued up for deportation,” Uthmeier wrote.

ICE handles more than 15,000 calls per month, according to the agency’s tip line FAQ.

Federal authorities have been tasked by White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller to arrest 3,000 undocumented immigrants per day—but actually doing so has forced the agency to seek out immigrants that the administration did not advertise targeting, such as noncriminals and even lawful temporary residents possessing visas or green cards.

But the new urgency behind deportations under the Trump administration has not brewed a happy scenario behind the scenes for federal immigration agents. Former Immigration and Customs Enforcement prosecutor Veronica Cardenas told MSNBC Sunday that many ICE agents are “unhappy” and experiencing “very low” morale at the moment.

Earlier this month, The Atlantic reported that ICE agents were considering quitting the agency altogether, calling the job “infuriating.”

“No drug cases, no human trafficking, no child exploitation,” one agent told the magazine, complaining that his focus had been redirected to “arresting gardeners.”

Adam Boyd, a former ICE attorney who had resigned from the agency’s legal department, told The Atlantic that the operation had become “a contest of how many deportations could be reported to Stephen Miller by December.” Miller was embroiled in another callous scandal last week when video footage of him as a teenager resurfaced in which he referred to the torture of Iraqis as a “celebration of human life and dignity.”

“We still need good attorneys at ICE,” Boyd said. “There are drug traffickers and national-security threats and human-rights violators in our country who need to be dealt with. But we are now focusing on numbers over all else.”

With the Jeffrey Epstein affair having now put President Trump in the rare defensive position for multiple weeks, the president is seething, per Politico’s conversations with unnamed sources within and close to the White House.

In recent days, the president has endeavored to draw national attention to anything other than his perceived bungling of the case of the late notorious sex criminal and his former friend.

But try as Trump might to bend the news cycle to his will, the public eye remains trained, for the time being, on the Epstein issue.

A source close to the White House reportedly told Politico that Trump “is clearly furious,” and it’s “the first time I’ve seen [the Trump camp] sort of paralyzed.”

A senior White House official reportedly said the president “feels there are way bigger stories that deserve attention.” Regarding Trump’s current mindset, the official said, “When you’re working 12 to 15 hours a day to solve real problems and you turn on the TV and see people talking about Jeffrey Epstein, that’s frustrating.”

The frustration is, in part, a recognition that the Epstein issue is “a vulnerability” for the Trump administration, added another source—this one a “White House ally,” who described the controversy as an unforced error on the part of Attorney General Pam Bondi and FBI Director Kash Patel, both notable (but far from the only) examples of Trump officials who previously stoked the Epstein flames now scorching the president.

“They’re the ones that opened the can of worms on the Epstein conversation. No one made them do this, which makes it sting even worse,” the source said. Trump’s team “would like to move on and talk about the things they think are Ws,” but remains bedeviled by this “overshadowing news cycle.”

Indeed, as congressional Democrats seize on the issue—with some Republican colleagues also joining the charge—the press is, seemingly by the minute, unearthing details about Trump’s relationship with the disgraced financier, and the president’s base is as fired up over the matter as ever. Epstein’s ghost isn’t going anywhere anytime soon.

Stewart Rhodes is as dyed-in-the-wool MAGA as it gets.

The Yale-educated founder of the far-right Oath Keepers militia group embraced Donald Trump in 2016—sharing his animus toward the supposed “deep state” cabal controlling Washington—then, naturally, took part in the January 6 Capitol attack in 2021. (“We should have brought rifles.… I’d hang fucking Pelosi from the lamppost,” he told fellow militia members days later.) Trump, in turn, commuted his 18-year sentence.

Now, Rhodes has joined the ranks of MAGA faithful urging the seemingly reluctant president to provide full transparency on the case of notorious sex criminal Jeffrey Epstein. Trump’s Justice Department and FBI earlier this month roiled his base with a memo dismissing conspiracy theories alleging that Epstein had kept a client list and did not commit suicide in prison. The president has, in recent days, taken to calling what was once a cause célèbre in Trumpworld a Democratic “hoax.”

At a meeting of the anti-government True Texas Project last week, per video obtained by The Daily Beast, Rhodes expressed his disappointment that Trump was, by his reckoning, being led astray by the deep state.

“I believe 90 percent of his own base understands that Epstein was up to something, and we know that’s the tip of the iceberg,” Rhodes said.

“It’s really disheartening to see President Trump just declare that to be a hoax. I don’t think it is. And I think it’s going to cause him trouble in his own base. It already is,” he continued, per the Beast. “Someone in his circle has convinced him that, ‘Oh this is like Hunter Biden’s laptop story.’ It’s not. This is the deep state’s dirty laundry in the deep state’s greatest Achilles’ heel.

“Their job now is to distract him, run the clock out until he’s gone without him actually going after the root of the deep state, the heart and soul of it,” Rhodes went on. “And I do believe the heart and soul of the deep state is all the dirty laundry that’s held in all those files in the FBI, CIA, NSA against all these political elites.”

Rhodes evidently maintains his faith in Trump as a noble crusader for the truth. In the comments reported by the Beast, he ignores the prospect that Trump’s foot-dragging on Epstein could, possibly, owe to the so-called Epstein files’ inclusion of embarrassing disclosures about the president—who, after all, had a storied relationship with the deceased financier that new reporting is bringing more clearly into view.

Attributing Trump’s survival of the July 2024 assassination attempt to divine intervention, Rhodes remarked, “God saved him for a purpose, and that purpose is to defeat the deep state. It’s not to make great trade deals. It’s not to have a great economy. It’s not any of that stuff. The real heart and soul of it is to defeat the deep state, because if he doesn’t do that, it’s going to be exponentially worse for all of us.”

He urged those in attendance to “keep pushing.”

Nearly three weeks of distraction and denial from President Trump have only raised more questions about his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein. On Tuesday, Epstein’s own brother Mark took to CNN to confirm what Trump wants everyone to forget: He and the pedophile financier were quite close.

“From what you know, from what you saw, how close was your brother to Donald Trump?” CNN’s Erin Burnett asked Mark Epstein on Tuesday. 

“They were very close. They were good friends,” Mark replied. “Jeffrey used to sometimes tell me things that Donald said that were funny. I know Donald was in Jeff’s office a lot back in the ’90s.… It’s documented that Jeff—Donald flew on Jeff’s plane a number of times. I don’t know if they ever checked, but I know Jeff flew in Donald’s plane also, I don’t know if they’ve ever looked at his flight logs. They were good friends.” 

This comes right as CNN released previously unseen images of Trump and Epstein from Trump’s 1993 wedding to Marla Maples, a connection that was not previously public knowledge. 

Mark Epstein went on to tell Burnett that he had actually taken a flight with his brother and Trump. 

“A couple weeks or a week before that flight I was talkin’ to Jeffrey, and he told me that he was talkin’ to Donald and that he asked Donald, ‘How can you sleep with so many married women?’ And Donald’s answer was ‘because it’s so wrong.’ Now amongst guys that was a funny line, and then when we were on the plane … Jeffrey asked Donald the same question … so that I could hear Donald say it.… For Jeffrey to ask him that question, number one: He would have to know that Donald slept with a lot of married women, and he probably got that information from Donald.” 

“It implies a confidence,” Burnett interjected. 

“That’s not the kind of question you ask a casual acquaintance.… That’s a question that you ask a good friend that you can get away with asking those kinds of questions.”

Mark later said Epstein went on to say that the president is just “trying to cover his butt.”

Just two weeks ago, Trump was acting like he’d only heard of Jeffrey Epstein in passing. “Are you still talking about Jeffrey … Epstein?” he said, pausing as if the name was unfamiliar to him. Now it’s all but obvious that Trump was a confidant of the man responsible for victimizing over a thousand women and girls for years. Feigning ignorance and throwing your base unrelated bones doesn’t work as well when the evidence saying otherwise grows more damning by the day.  

The president’s reportedly close history with Jeffrey Epstein is becoming harder to refute.

CNN published videos and little-known photographs Tuesday of Jeffrey Epstein at Trump’s 1993 wedding to Marla Maples, proving that the pedophilic sex trafficker was in attendance at Trump’s ceremony at the Plaza Hotel. It was previously not widely known that Epstein was a guest at the wedding.

The network also found video footage of the two men laughing and chatting together ahead of a 1999 Victoria’s Secret fashion event.

But when the network rang to inquire about the images, Trump exploded.

“We were not on the phone very long,” reporter Andrew Kaczynski told CNN host Erin Burnett. “I think our call was about 30 seconds or so. But when I asked him about the wedding photo, he said he sort of paused for a second and then said, ‘You’ve got to be kidding me’ before calling CNN ‘fake news’ and then hanging up on me.”

Steven Cheung, the White House communications director, ferociously spit back at the network, decrying the images as “nothing more than out-of-context frame grabs of innocuous videos and pictures of widely attended events.” He accused CNN of leveraging the images in its reporting to “disgustingly infer something nefarious.”

“The fact is that the president kicked him out of his club for being a creep. This is nothing more than a continuation of the fake news stories concocted by the Democrats and the liberal media,” Cheung told CNN.

But Trump has a well-documented history with the New York financier. Prior to his death, Epstein described himself as one of Trump’s “closest friends.” The socialites were named and photographed together several times, Trump allegedly penned a salacious letter to Epstein for the pedophile’s 50th birthday, the real estate mogul reportedly flew on Epstein’s jets between Palm Beach and New York at least seven times, and the first time that Trump slept with his now-wife Melania was reportedly aboard Epstein’s plane, nicknamed the “Lolita Express.”

In a 2002 New York magazine profile of Epstein, Trump said he knew Epstein for 15 years and referred to him as a “terrific guy.”

“It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side,” Trump said at the time.

Donald Trump won’t stop lying about his dangerous plan to decrease drug prices in the stupidest way possible.

“This is something that nobody else can do,” Trump said during a reception with members of Congress Tuesday night. “We’re gonna get the drug prices down. Not 30 or 40 percent, which would be great, not 50 or 60, no. We’re gonna get ’em down 1,000 percent, 600 percent, 500 percent, 1,500 percent.”

He bragged that he could use a “certain talent” to reach “numbers not even thought to be achievable.” If anything, the president’s certain talent is to offer hyperbole in place of actual policy.

Trump’s phony math didn’t stop there. “We will have reduced drug prices by 1,000 percent, by 1,100, 1,200, 1,300, 1,400, 700, 600; not 30 or 40 or 50 percent but numbers the likes of which you’ve never even dreamed of before,” he added later.

Is it all of those numbers? Is it any of them? In reality, the president’s disastrous tariff policies have threatened to send drug prices skyrocketing. A report commissioned in April by a group of pharmaceutical companies found that even a 25 percent tariff on pharmaceutical imports would raise drug costs by $51 billion annually. Trump’s latest proposal involves a 200 percent tariff on pharmaceuticals, with little concern for the Americans who need regular access to prescription medications.

On Tuesday, Trump also said that he would use import restrictions to force foreign drug suppliers to cut prices, which seems at odds with his own designs to boost domestic drug manufacturing.

The issue of prescription drug prices being nearly three times higher for Americans than consumers in the rest of the world is gravely serious, but the president has chosen to meet the moment with made-up statistics.

Trump has a penchant for inventing numbers to oversell his economic policies. He previously claimed that he’d already struck 200 trade deals—but he’s signed fewer than 10. And he won’t stop claiming that gas prices across the country have dipped under $2, when in reality, the lowest state average is $2.71 and the national average is over $3.