HOW WE GOT HERE: President Biden should go off and die?

THURSDAY, MAY 8, 2025

What the Times said may have been worse: As of Tuesday afternoon, The Economist / YouGov survey was out with its latest results

It was reporting results from almost two thousand respondents. ("U.S. adult citizens.") 

How many respondents approved of President Trump's job performance? Here's what the survey said:

Approval of Donald Trump, recession fears, financial anxiety, and grading universities: May 2-5, 2025 Economist/YouGov Poll

[...]

42% of Americans approve of Donald Trump's job as president, while 52% disapprove, for a net approval of -10 

This is the second weekly Economist / YouGov Poll in a row in which Trump's net approval did not fall, after four straight weeks of declines.

Forty-two percent of respondents said they approve! Like the sympathetic characters at the end of Chekhov's Lady with Lapdog, we Blues may tend to wonder where we go from here.

What keeps his rating even that high? Why aren't his approvals much lower? 

We Blues may be inclined to ask such questions. There may be several answers:

In part, as we noted on Tuesday, we have an entrenched two-party system. Within that system, tribal loyalties tend to linger.

That said, there may be other factors at play—factors we Blue Americans may have trouble spotting. We'll start today with a pair of reports from the New York Times.

Shades of the immortal Mark Twain! It has now been twenty days since the president posed with that alleged photograph of a certain detainee's knuckles. What the president said that evening was a fairly obvious fraud, and it was so right from the start.

That was Friday, April 18! This very morning, at long last, the New York Times has responded:

Trump Has Made Claims About Abrego Garcia’s Tattoos. Here’s a Closer Look.
Gang experts say the tattoos on Kilmar Abrego Garcia’s knuckles are unlikely to signify gang membership. The president says otherwise.

That's the dual headline above Juliet Macur's detailed report. The laborious effort appeared online at 5:01 this morning. 

That long delay isn't Macur's fault. It does recall what Twain was the first person not to say.

We refer to what he actually didn't say about how long it can take for the truth—remember the truth?—to catch up with a howling misstatement.

The New York Times didn't rush to address that latest groaner. Neither did the Washington Post. Neither did MSNBC.

It has become almost wholly normalized—for whatever reason, the sitting president makes constant howling misstatements! The New York times also took it in stride when he went on and on, then on and on, about all the 150-year-olds who were maybe receiving Social Security checks—an endless, ridiculous presentation he made before a joint session of Congress!

Major groups are afraid of Trump. They've chosen to pull their punches with increasing alacrity.

Has that behavior, by major Blue orgs, helped maintain Trump's approvals? We can't necessarily say that it has, but we also can't say that it hasn't.

The Times was slow to respond to April 18 misstatement. Also, the Times is reporting this today, right there in its print editions:

Biden Blasts Trump in BBC Interview: ‘That’s Not Who We Are’

Six months after his party lost the presidential election, former President Joseph R. Biden Jr. is stepping back into the public spotlight with a scathing condemnation of his successor and his handling of international affairs.

In his first broadcast interview since leaving the White House, Mr. Biden attacked President Trump’s management of the war in Ukraine and his dealings with global allies. Speaking to the BBC, Mr. Biden also defended the timing of his own withdrawal from the 2024 presidential campaign.

[...]

In his halting speaking style, Mr. Biden boasted of being “so successful on our agenda.” He again defended his decision to seek re-election last year despite polling that, even before he began his campaign, showed that many Democrats did not want him to run for a second term. 

"In his halting speaking style?" Lerer and Kwai's editor waited until paragraph 8 to insert that minor piece of theater criticism. 

Yesterday afternoon, on the Fox News Channel, the reviews of this "halting" performance were perhaps a bit more aggressive. Such comments were also perhaps a bit less courteous in tone:

MARSHALL (5/7/25): ...You know, a lot of people who are older, they don't want to just sit home or be "put out to pasture," so to speak. They want to be active and involved, and I think that is what it's more about.

JUDGE JEANINE: So, Greg, because he wants to be more active and involved, would you go listen?

GUTFELD: Fine! Do it on his time, don't do it on our time. Go out literally to a pasture and pass away! He chose BBC because it stands for "Biden—Bury or Cremate?" 

[...]

As long as Joe emerges from the crypt with his old man smell—nobody is listening to what he's saying. They're just looking at it and going, "Christ! This actually was president?"

WATTERS: [Snickering]

Full disclosure! Because this was The Five, not the 10 p.m. Gutfeld! show, the co-host didn't offer any of his ubiquitous images of President Biden pooping or [BLEEP]ing in his pants. Still, so said the furious Master Gutfeld, who may be the strangest person ever encountered in the annals of "cable news." 

Just this once, there was no allusion to President Biden soiling himself! Instead, we heard about his "old man smell," and we heard that he should literally go off in a pasture and die:

Yesterday afternoon, Leslie Marshall sat in this program's one "liberal" chair. Marshall is a sensible, intelligent, centrist Democrat. She's a long-time Fox News Channel contributor. Also, she's the long-time host of a nationally syndicated radio show.

Marshall rarely appears on The Five. Yesterday, there she was!

Marshall may not be fully aware of what transpires on this "cable news" channel. It seemed to us that we heard her gasp at several points during Gutfeld's commentary.

Fuller disclosure! The New York Times doesn't report or discuss what happens on Fox News Channel programs. Neither does the Washington Post. Neither do the stars on MSNBC.

(Mediaite avoids discussing Gutfeld's behavior as it might avoid the plague. The site may have accepted the absurd idea that his work is just a form of "political satire.")

No one reports on Fox! People like Gutfeld and Judge Jeanine thereby receive a total pass for the highly consequential ways they've broken with journalistic traditions. 

Meanwhile, the latest numbers are in, and this is what they tell us:

Week of April 28 Cable News Ratings...

[...]

Fox News held 14 out of the Top 15 spots of the most-watched cable news shows of the week among total viewers. The Five (3.687 million viewers at 5 p.m. ET) led the way as usual. MSNBC's The Rachel Maddow Show (1.997 million viewers) claimed the No. 8 position.  

The Five led the way as usual! For the record—in the course of what was once (admiringly) called "her performance of the Rachel figure," Maddow doesn't report or discuss what happens on Fox programs either.

Gutfeld discussed the former president's smell. He said the former president should go to out to a pasture and die.

To her credit, we thought we heard Marshall gasp on those occasions. Like most denizens of Blue America, she may not be fully aware of the ways the times, they've been a-changin'.

Gutfeld engaged in his familiar advocacy of death. There are very few places where this termagant won't go.

How nutty is this 60-year-old harridan? On his 10 o'clock, primetime program, his misogyny is undisguised. His obsession with human waste material surpasses all understanding. 

In this recent Facebook post, you can see him telling his fans about his new, poop-themed coffee mug. What's wrong with this very juvenile person? We have no idea.

That said, if you watch Gutfeld's full statement about President Biden's "halting delivery," you'll be seeing something which takes us beyond his characteristic lack of restraint.

Alas! You'll be seeing an angry indictment of the Democratic Party and the mainstream press corps. In our view, his indictment can't be dismissed out of hand. In our view, it's hard to say that his indictment might not be basically right.

You'll be seeing one of the reasons why we've said, for quite a while, that no matter how hard they try, it's almost impossible for Fox News Channel propagandists to be totally wrong.

Sad! According to the New York Times, President Biden displayed "his halting speaking style" when he spoke to the BBC. We'd call that description a major whitewash. Ugly comments to the side, we'd say the descriptions which littered the Fox News Channel yesterday came closer to the apparent truth.

With this, we arrive at one of the ways Blue America has enabled President Trump, and Candidate Trump before that. In his recent interview with Mediaite, Charlie Sykes mentioned this part of a larger problem.

We continue to use the original headline on this report. We enter Sykes' discussion in progress:

Is ‘Never Trump’ Dead? Charlie Sykes On The One Thing That Could Actually Restrain Trump

[,,,]

SYKES: Simply saying "These are fake issues, don’t pay any attention to them" means that you shut yourself off from things that voters are talking about. 

The Joe Biden age story was very frustrating for a lot of folks, because you could not engage in a conversation with a voter anywhere in the country without his age coming up. 

And yet, if you brought this up in progressive media or on certain Never Trump sites, you got flooded with what we began to call "Blue MAGA," which was, "Don’t talk about it, don’t bring it up. It’s not relevant."

I do think that if you’re going to confront the enemy, you need to understand your enemy’s strengths as well as his weaknesses. And I think that this is one of those moments. 

Even Sykes was engaging in euphemism there. As messaging agents like Gutfeld endlessly noted on Fox News Channel shows, the issue wasn't Candidate Biden's age.  The actual issue was his apparent cognitive decline.

Greg Gutfeld is one of the strangest people who has ever appeared on "cable news." His lack of restraint—and his endless focus on human waste, along with his undisguised misogyny—are his distinguishing characteristics.

That said, he was much more right than Blue America's tribunes concerning Candidate Biden's apparent cognitive issues. Everyone knew it but us! Those of us in Blue America just kept saying this:

"Don’t talk about it. Don’t bring it up."

This topic remains an extremely safe space for Fox News Channel employees. Any time the going gets tough with respect to President Trump's behavior, they're strongly inclined to default to discussions of matters like this.

President Biden's re-emergence on the scene will be the gift that won't stop giving to these tribunes of Red America. Over here in Blue America, we Blues will continue to refuse to deal with what our leadership cadres did—with what they will continue to do—with respect to this unfortunate state of affairs.

Many other such failures exist in Blue America, serving Red American interests. We Blues continue to traffic in denial about the way this syndrome works.

President Trump is holding steady at 42 percent! Our question would be this:

Despite our legendary intellectual greatness, do we intellectually brilliant Blues just keep propping him up?

Tomorrow: The teenage student's tale

WEDNESDAY: Dishonest, stupid, "disconnected from reality?"

WEDNESDAY, MAY 7, 2025

Adeventures in using our words: This past Monday, we were pleased to see Andrew Weissmann skillfully using his words.

We spotted him that afternoon on MSNBC's Deadline: White House. He was discussing the "due process" rights of the several hundred non-citizens who were shipped off to El Salvador's CECOT.

As he discussed the Supreme Court's ruling concerning that matter, he drew an important distinction:

WEISSMANN (5/5/25): The people who were—you can't say "deported"—who were forcibly extracted and put in a foreign prison, where they are today, were denied due process, according to nine sitting Justices.

Those people weren't "deported," Weissmann said. In reality, they were "forcibly extracted and put in a foreign prison." 

Admittedly, that second locution is clumsy. At this site, we've tended to go with the simpler term, "renditioned." But if you simply say that those men were "deported," you may be creating a false impression about what has really occurred.

The analysts cheered when they saw Weissmann explicitly choosing his words. You can't say "deported," he said. Many writers of headlines have.

That very night, we watched Lawrence O'Donnell as he employed a contradictory bundle of words in a lengthy discussion of President Trump. 

As he started, he was savaging President Trump for one of the things he had said to Kristen Welker on Sunday's Meet the Press. He went on to author a lengthy diatribe. This is the way his characterization of the president's performance started:

O'DONNELL (5/5/25): It was a standard Trump dishonest interview from start to finish, with Donald Trump lying at every turn. And with Donald Trump proving, once again, that he is, to use his words, a stupid person—a very stupid person.

Uh oh! Already, it seemed to us that O'Donnell was blending a pair of terms which may not go together real well. To show you what he was talking about in particular, here's what he said next:

O'DONNELL (continuing directly): Donald Trump talks repeatedly in the interview about how much money we were losing because of international trade. We have never lost a penny because of international trade. 

Donald Trump said, quote, "We were losing hundreds of billions of dollars with China." Now think about how very stupid and dishonest that statement is...   

As he continued, O'Donnell explained what he thinks is wrong with what Trump said. According to O'Donnell, Trump's statement about international trade was "very stupid and dishonest." 

He said it was stupid and dishonest—but can it clearly be both?

Let's assume that President Trump made a wildly inaccurate statement. He may have done so because he's "very stupid"—but that would suggest that he believes his wildly inaccurate statement, which would seem to suggest that he wasn't lying or being dishonest when he (dumbly) made it.

Is President Trump amazingly dumb, or is he wildly dishonest? Is there a sensible way to say that he's both? We aren't real sure about that.

What exactly was O'Donnell actually saying about this highly unusual person? As O'Donnell's diatribe started, the answer didn't seem entirely clear to us. Eventually, his position seemed to become that much more scattered.

By 10:19, Lawrence had moved beyond "stupid" and "dishonest." He had now thrown in an additional term: "crazy."

He might have mean that term to be merely colloquial. But as he neared the end of his long presentation, he was describing Trump as "the man who displays economic dementia every time he talks about tariffs." 

That may have been colloquial too. Moments earlier, though, he had said this, referring to a photo of Trump picturing him as a pope:

O'DONNELL: That is not a picture of a man with bad taste. Donald Trump has been a vulgarian with bad taste his entire life. That is a picture that the 25th Amendment was created to deal with—a disabled president unable to carry out his duties because of physical or mental disability.

Is he very dishonest or very stupid? Or is he mentally disabled in some unspecified way?

O'Donnell was raging all through this presentation. That said, what was he actually trying to say? 

The president's niece, a clinical psychologist, has said that he could likely be diagnosed as a sociopath. We thought of that when the raging O'Donnell finally mentioned this:

O'DONNELL: Donald Trump has hurt a lot of people. Donald Trump and Elon Musk literally, literally have taken food away from starving children in the middle of a famine in Sudan. 

They have taken life-saving medicine away from people around the world, especially people in poverty in Africa. They have sent people who have committed no crimes to a prison in El Salvador. Donald Trump is doing all of this, heaping cruelty on top of cruelty, without really knowing what he is doing.

He doesn't really know what he's doing? That doesn't exactly sound like "stupid." That might almost sound like some of the things Mary Trump said, rightly or wrongly, in her best-selling book.

Lawrence is inclined to rage against Donald Trump. But what exactly was his claim as his long presentation unfolded?

Would it be better if he conducted careful interviews with carefully selected medical specialists—with people who might be able to offer ideas, based on detailed experience, about the behaviors which have O'Donnell in a slightly muddled rage?

Imprisonment isn't deportation. But also, very stupid isn't dishonest, and neither one is "mental disability." With respect to President Trump, what might the most carefully chosen word or words be?

Of course, there's a journalistic rule against speaking to medical specialists! Nor would our journalists be likely to know how to do so.

Under these unusual circumstances, what's the best word for that?

HOW WE GOT HERE: "Are we [Blues] just talking to ourselves?"

WEDNESDAY, MAY 7, 2025

Are we helping President Trump? At the time, it probably seemed like a good idea. We can't say we recall.

We the people would now be blessed with a 24-hour "news" channel! At the time, it may have seemed like a good idea. The overview goes like this:

CNN

Cable News Network (CNN) is a multinational news organization operating, most notably, a website and a TV channel headquartered in Atlanta. Founded in 1980 by American media proprietor Ted Turner and Reese Schonfeld as a 24-hour cable news channel, CNN was the first television channel to provide 24-hour news coverage and the first all-news television channel in the United States.

[...]

The Cable News Network launched at 5:00 p.m. Eastern Time on June 1, 1980. After an introduction by Ted Turner, the husband and wife team of David Walker and Lois Hart anchored the channel's first newscast. Burt Reinhardt, the executive vice president of CNN, hired most of the channel's first 200 employees, including the network's first news anchor, former ABC News Capitol Hill senior correspondent Bernard Shaw.

It probably seemed like a good idea. Fifteen years later, CNN was joined by MSNBC and by the Fox News Channel. 

In certain quarters, the performance on these channels got worse, and then got even worse than that. Last Tuesday night, in prime time, one oration on one of these "cable news" channel went on and on like this:

COMPAGNO (4/29/25): ...This person [Kilmar Abrego Garcia] was someone who was already deported and then came back against—again, he was a recidivist illegal enterer in the country. And what I don't understand is this sort of wiping the slate clean that the Dems do when they are blurring out the signs on the White House and levying this guy, lifting him up as the "Maryland father." 

I don't quite understand why—it's as if their memory has only started from like two seconds in, so the conversation is just administrative. But the point was that this guy was a wife beating, violent, gang-affiliated asshole that kept coming into our country multiple times. 

For fuller context, see yesterday's report.

"How did it ever get this far?" Don Corleone once asked. A sensible person might ask the same question after watching Emily Compagno bungle her way through a longer oration on last Tuesday night's Gutfeld! debacle.

For the record, Kilmar Abrego Garcia had not "kept coming into our country multiple times." He was not "a recidivist illegal enterer." He had not already been deported on one or more prior occasions.

Compagno didn't seem to know what she was proselytizing about. By now, what may have seemed like a good idea had deteriorated to the point where an array of utterly clueless droogs were filling the air with bogus claims about an array of high-profile topics.

These performances lie at the heart of the rapidly failing American imitation of discourse. 

For all we know, Compagno may be the world's nicest person. But as she continued to speak that night, she was soon saying this:

COMPAGNO: ...Here are the stats that matter: Ninety-six percent of Trump voters are glad they did. They know it was the right thing to do. Eighty-six percent know that his economic policies will make us stronger. ...

So the media on the left— Hair on fire, their hundred days is, "Everything is blowing up. We tried 'constitutional crisis.' We tried everything. Now we'll try impeachment, since the lawfare didn't work, since illegal voting didn't work."  

That's where they are now. But the rest of the Americans are glad they are on the ship that has finally been righted thanks to President Trump.

[CHEERING, HOOTING, APPLAUSE]

For the record, "the media on the left" have not been pushing impeachment.  That claim is simply absurd.

Meanwhile, is it true that "the rest of the Americans" are glad that they're on the ship that's been righted by President Trump? As Compagno broadcast that claim, the latest poll by her own employer, the Fox News Channel, showed that only 44 percent of "the Americans" approved of Trump's job performance. 

To appearances, Compagno was rattling propaganda on what identifies as a "cable news" channel.

That's the way "the news" is now presented to viewers of this flailing nation's most watched "cable news" channel. A studio audience cheered and applauded as the co-host of a daily "cable news" program offered this bizarro picture of reality. 

It may have seemed like a good idea, but "cable news" has been transformed by the practice of "segregation by viewpoint." However it may have been intended, Compagno's oration was corporate propaganda, delivered on one of the messaging programs on this 24-hour "news" channel.

How in the world does President Trump maintain his current degree of job approval? It's true that his job approval is low by historical standard, but it remains high enough—especially among Republican voters—to keep Republican senators in line.

In part, the president retains his current levels of approval because millions of voters in Red America are exposed to corporate messaging on an unbroken, round-the-clock basis. That said, those of us in Blue America tend to have a very hard time coming to terms with the way our own behaviors and assessments may have helped Candidate Trump get elected, and may be helping to keep his approvals from going even lower.

Candidate Trump won last year's election by a bit less than 1.5 points. He managed to attain that narrow win over an accidental opponent who didn't enter the race until last July, following the withdrawal of the Democratic Party's presumptive nominee.

Even in the face of that chaos, the president only managed to fashion a narrow win. As a general matter, he simply isn't well-regarded, as these things get scored.

Still, he managed to squeeze out that win, and he has managed to maintain approvals in the low 40s. How did any of this come to pass? Last week, Charlie Sykes stated his view about this important matter in an interview with Mediaite.

Sykes said that some of the blame rests over here with us Blues! In our own view, we Blues have had a very hard time coming to terms with some of things Sykes said.

Why did "swing voters: vote for Trump? Why do some such people still linger in his camp?

In part, relentless misinformation campaigns help provide the answer to such questions—but Sykes offered a different type of explanation:

According to Sykes, those of us in NeverTrump and Blue America have enabled this president too.

"I'll be specific," the gentleman said. Then he rattled a list:

Is ‘Never Trump’ Dead? Charlie Sykes On The One Thing That Could Actually Restrain Trump

[,,,]

SYKES: I mean, the reality is there are a lot of swing voters that actually were concerned about inflation. So simply denying that inflation was a problem was a mistake. 

There are swing voters that were concerned about crime, and simply telling them that crime is a myth is basically says we don’t care about what you think. 

The border was a real problem during the Biden years, and that needs to be addressed. 

There was a reason why the Trump campaign spent more than a hundred million dollars on one ad, one ad involving transgender surgeries and athletes. And yet, if you listen to Democrats and folks on the left, that issue didn’t exist at all.

So simply saying "These are fake issues, don’t pay any attention to them" means that you shut yourself off from things that voters are talking about. 

The Joe Biden age story was very frustrating for a lot of folks because you could not engage in a conversation with a voter anywhere in the country without his age coming up. 

And yet, if you brought this up in progressive media or on certain Never Trump sites, you got flooded with what we began to call "Blue MAGA," which was, "Don’t talk about it, don’t bring it up. It’s not relevant."

I do think that if you’re going to confront the enemy, you need to understand your enemy’s strengths as well as his weaknesses. And I think that this is one of those moments. 

You know, are we going to confront Trumpism by denying Trumpism’s appeal?...Are we serious about confronting it? Or are we just talking to ourselves? 

"Are we just talking to ourselves?" According to us, all too often in recent years the answer has seemed to be yes.

Sykes provided a list of the ways we Blues may have enabled Candidate Trump. The southern border was an obvious unexplained problem. We kept pretending it wasn't.

President Biden's apparent problem with aging was widely visible to voters. We kept pretending the situation didn't exist.

Inflation was a topic of great concern to voters. According to Sykes, we responded by simply denying that it was a problem.

Sykes also mentioned "transgender surgeries and athletes." More on that topic tomorrow, with a related piece of videotape thrown in.

How does President Trump maintain his level of support? What keeps his job approval at (maybe) 42%? Why hasn't it dropped to 35? We hasn't it gone even lower?

It sems to us that we the people of Blue America still don't understand the role we played in getting President Trump elected again, and in keeping his level of support where it is. 

The Fox News Channel keeps pimping the delusional propaganda. As it does, the people we trust in Blue America insist on averting their gaze.

Those of us in the Blue rank and file accept this institutional cowardice. It's one of the ways we denizens on Blue America may have helped keep President Trump afloat.

We Blues! With respect to the southern border; with respect to the southern border and crime; with respect to those "transgender surgeries," those of us in Blue America have a whole lot of splainin' to do. 

Sykes didn't mention another way we may have enabled Candidate Trump. We devoted ourselves to locking him up all through the last campaign. As we focused on that impossible dream, we kept refusing to talk about the issues which many swing voters confronted.

In our view, we Blues have a whole lot of splainin' to do. It isn't altogether clear how such splainin' should, even could, be done.

Tomorrow, we'll offer a few examples. But even on the Fox News Channel, it's almost impossible for people like Compagno to be completely wrong in the claims they make. 

It's easy to be one of Red America's talkers. In the end, all you really have to do is make accurate claims about us! 

Tomorrow: An accurate statement to Welker

TUESDAY: Judge Jeanine perused the text!

TUESDAY, MAY 6, 2025

"Cut the crap," she thoughtfully said: The ridiculous clowning never stops on the Fox News program, The Five.

It's the most watched program in "cable news!" Beyond that, it may be the dumbest.

Yesterday, the usual suspects were in their spots, prepared to engage in some messaging.  When the question of "due process" arose, it turned out that Judge Jeanine had done a bit of sleuthing.

On Sunday's Meet the Press, Kristen Welker had told Donald Trump that the Fifth Amendment includes the right to due process. 

Judge Jeanine had decided to check. On yesterday's program, she described the nature of her search:

JUDGE JEANINE (5/5/25): OK, a couple of thoughts. She [Welker] says that the Fifth Amendment requires it [due process]. So of course, I pull out—I carry this in my purse all the time.

[Displays miniature copy of the U.S. Constitution]

 I don't know why. In case some day I [unintelligible], I'll take it out.

The judge had perused the actual text of the amendment in question! Here's what she said she had found:

JUDGE JEANINE (continuing directly, glancing at text): The Fifth Amendment is about a grand jury, it's about double jeopardy, it's about a person not being compelled to be a witness against himself, and you cannot be deprived of life, liberty or property without due process.

It says nothing about illegals. So cut the crap, Kristen Welker! You're a good person, but you're wrong on this.

The day's tutorial ended right there. Inevitably, we turned to the text ourselves.

It's true! It's true that the Fifth Amendment doesn't mention "illegals." That said, it doesn't mention "citizens" either. The full complete text says this:

Amendment V

No person shall be held to answer for a capital, or otherwise infamous crime, unless on a presentment or indictment of a Grand Jury, except in cases arising in the land or naval forces, or in the Militia, when in actual service in time of War or public danger; nor shall any person be subject for the same offence to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb; nor shall be compelled in any criminal case to be a witness against himself, nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.

It's been explained a million times. The key point is said to be this:

It's true! the Fifth Amendment doesn't mention "illegals"—but it doesn't mention "citizens" either. Instead, the plain text of the Fifth Amendment confers its rights on "persons."

It says no person shall be deprived of liberty without due process. Given the deprivation of liberty conferred on hundreds of people shipped off to CECOT, this point has been noted a million times in just the past few weeks.

In what should that "due process" consist in various types of cases?  The framers didn't spell that out, but their text does seem to refer to all "persons."

It's routinely noted that the Fifth Amendment confers its guarantees on persons rather than citizens. Apparently, Judge Jeanine has never heard anyone make that point, though it could be that she was simply messaging on behalf of her corporate owners.

What will the Supreme Court end up saying if some version of this matter comes before them in the next year?

We don't have the slightest idea. But Judge Jeanine belongs on a major "cable news" show the same way Greg Gutfeld—he's sixty years old!—should be the starting center for the New York Knicks.

The Five is a corporate messaging / misinformation vehicle. Gutfeld and Watters do the towel snapping. Judge Jeanine fumes about "Tampon Tim," tells others to "cut the crap."

Still coming: What did President Trump seem to mean in his remarks to Welker about "due process?" In our view, his statement to Welker is being creatively paraphrased and interpreted, as several observers have said.

Blue America plays these games too! We'll show you why we'd say such a thing before the week is through.

At any rate, Judge Jeanine perused the text. "Cut the crap," she then thoughtfully said.

HOW WE GOT HERE: Compagno didn't have a clue!

TUESDAY, MAY 6, 2025

But then, there was what she said next: How in the world did President Trump ever get back to the White House? Why have his approval / favorability ratings stayed as high as they have?

His approval ratings may drop if The Attack of the Empty Shelves takes place. But for now, something like forty percent of respondents have said they approve of his first hundred days.

Those respondents have every right to their views. That said, numbers like those should be more than enough to keep Republican senators in line.

For those of us in Blue America, an obvious question arises. How in the world did we ever get here? More directly, why do so many people still support President Trump?

What keeps so many neighbors and friends supporting President Trump? For starters, it might be worth considering a basic fact about our politics:

Given the animal spirits which underlie our two-party system, it tends to be hard for presidents to drop below 40 percent.

It's possible to go lower than that, but it's fairly hard. As a rough approximation of what we mean, consider our presidential elections from 1900 on.

Franklin Roosevelt was elected four times. He won more 60 percent of the popular vote in just one of those elections

In 1936, deep in the Great Depression, he received 60.8 percent of the nationwide popular vote. In his next two elections, FDR was opposed by 44.8 and 45.9 percent of the people who turned out to vote.

In 1964, Lyndon Johnson got 61.1 percent of the nationwide vote. That's as high as any presidential candidate ever went. 

President Reagan never reached 60 percent, not even when it was "Morning in America." President Eisenhower never reached 60 percent in his two landslide wins—and he was running as the genial general who had won World War II. 

If the empty shelves attack, President Trump's approvals may drop below 40 percent. But why do so many voters still approve of his job performance at this point in time?

As we start to seek an answer, consider what the Fox News Channel's Emily Compagno said. With that, we return to what Compagno said on last Tuesday night's Gutfeld! show. 

As we skillfully noted last Friday, Gutfeld! is a nightly, prime time, propaganda program. No, it isn't a comedy show—and it isn't "political satire."

Each night, producers assemble a panel of four enablers who will agree with every part of the program's mandated messaging. There's no sign that these flyweight guests actually know what they're talking about—but they do know what the talking-points are, and they're more than willing to serve.

There sat Compagno on last Tuesday's show. Plainly, the former head cheerleader for the Oakland Raiders didn't know what she was talking about—but she was quite willing to talk.

In this instance, she was talking about Kilmar Abrego Garcia, who was renditioned to a Central American mega-prison in violation of a standing court order. Compagno didn't seem to know what she was talking about, but she knew what stance to adopt.

The fellow's an "asshole," she thoughtfully said. As before, we offer this advice—fight your way through the word salad:

GUTFELD (4/29/25): Emily, Emily, Emily...Have the Democrats done anything in a hundred days? I can't think of anything other than whine and sing horribly.

COMPAGNO: Yes. The hundred days to the Democrats is like a complete fiction of the rest of our hundred days. So let's take the example that you just talked about, where you talked about an administrative error that needs to sort of correct someone's process, and I assume that you are meaning due process. 

But this person [Abrego Garcia] was someone who was already deported and then came back against—again, he was a recidivist illegal enterer in the country. And what I don't understand is this sort of wiping the slate clean that the Dems do when they are blurring out the signs on the White House and levying this guy, lifting him up as the "Maryland father." 

I don't quite understand why—it's as if their memory has only started from like two seconds in, so the conversation is just administrative. But the point was that this guy was a wife beating, violent, gang-affiliated asshole that kept coming into our country multiple times. 

Compagno seemed to have Abrego Garcia confused with someone else. No one has ever said that Abrego Garcia had been deported multiple times and just "kept coming into our country," but Compagno kept saying it now. 

According to the official record, Abrego Garcia entered the country illegally in 2011, at the age of 16. He lived in Maryland until his recent rendition to that mega-prison. 

There were no previous deportations. There was no repeated instance of his "coming back."

Given the endless focus on this case, it's hard to believe that a major news org would put someone on the air who still wasn't clear about such elementary facts. But this is the gruesome Fox News Channel—and Gutfeld! is one of the most heavily watched programs in American "cable news."

(For the record, Compagno is a Fox News Channel employee. She's a co-host of a daily pseudo-discussion program, Outnumbered.)

No, Virginia! The Gutfeld! program isn't "political satire." This program is a corporate assault on this flailing nation's discourse, with people like the famously excitable Compagno playing their role each night.

Questions! Is or was Abrego Garcia ever "gang affiliated?" At this point, we'd say the answer isn't clear. Here's what Judge Wilkinson said, as noted in this recent report by the New York Times:

The Story of the ‘Mistakenly Deported Maryland Man’

[...]

Whether Mr. Abrego is an MS-13 gang member—as, with equal vehemence, the Trump administration insists and his family denies—remains unclear.

“Perhaps, but perhaps not,” wrote Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III, a conservative jurist on a federal appeals court in Virginia, pondering whether Mr. Abrego Garcia was a gang member.

Highly respected jurists aren't sure; performers on Gutfeld! are. Plainly. Compagno's grasp of the overall facts was virtually nonexistent—but she knew what the verdict must be, in line with corporate policy.

This sort of thing transpires each night as former cheerleaders, VJs and professional "wrestlers" collude with rotating waves of D-list comedians to affirm the channel's messaging agenda. Maurice Sendak knew "where the wild things are." These employees know who the assholes are—but also, of course, the gang members.

As this imitation of discourse emerges each night, lordly orgs like the New York Times agree to avert their gaze. So do the stars on MSNBC. The assault continues on programs aimed at Red America's voters. Blue America's journalists and academics have agreed to stay silent.

Why do so many neighbors and friends still support the president? In part, it's because the Fox News Channel broadcasts these waves of propaganda all through the day and the night. 

Viewers of this channel don't know that they're being schooled by clowns. They don't know that experts like Compagno don't have the first idea what they're talking about. Beyond that, they see Gutfeld cast in the role of the "the harmless imp" and yes, they are entertained.

Helped by the silence of us lambs, these messaging programs from Red America help explain why President Trump's approval rating may exceed 40 percent. Then too, there's what Compagno said next:

For us, what she said next brought "the eternal note of sadness in."  True fact:

Given some of things we Blues have done in the past however many years, it's hard for panelists on programs like Gutfeld! to ever be totally wrong.

Have we Blues contributed to this president's ongoing success? It's hard for us Blues to see this fact, but the answer, quite plainly, is yes.

Tomorrow: Easy to be hard. Hard to be totally wrong.

MONDAY: Is Stephen A. Smith prepared for the White House?

MONDAY, MAY 5, 2025

CNN wants to find out: Is anything dumber than conducting interviews—in early May 2025, no less—about who might run for president as part of Campaign 2028?

As it turns out, something is dumber! It's even dumber to conduct such discussions with ESPN's ebullient Stephen A. Smith:

Tapper Presses Stephen A. Smith About Whether He’s Qualified to Run for the White House

CNN’s Jake Tapper pressed ESPN’s Stephen A. Smith—who has been flirting with a run for president in 2028—about whether he’s truly qualified.

In an interview on CNN’s State of the Union Sunday (notably, Smith’s second recent appearance on the Sunday morning political talk shows), Tapper confronted the First Take host about whether he’s actually up for the job.

Sad! That's the way the report begins at Mediaite. At a complex, challenging time like this, it's hard to believe that a major news org like CNN would waste its time on a waste-of-time discussion like that—on its major Sunday interview showcase, no less.

Astonishing but true: Back in April, Jonathan Karl grilled Smith about the same topic on ABC's Sunday talk show, This Week.

Something similar seems to be happening on the daily Morning Joe program. For reasons which make no obvious sense. the program seems to be in the process of adopting sports talker Pablo Torre as its regular puppy / mascot.

This morning, the pattern unfolded again. For whatever reason, Torre was asked to sit all through the 6 o'clock hour. He was asked to speak by the host exactly once, at 6:17 a.m. 

For the rest of the hour, he was condemned to sit in silence and listen as vastly more experienced people conducted serious discussions about serious international issues.

Skillfully, let's be fair. Torre is a Harvard grad. Also, he's plainly quite bright. That said, the leading authority on such matters thumbnails him as shown:

Pablo S. Torre 

Pablo Sison Torre (born September 27, 1985) is an American sportswriter, podcaster, and television host. He hosts Pablo Torre Finds Out with Meadowlark Media. He previously hosted and contributed to various programs at ESPN, including the television program High Noon with Bomani Jones and the podcast ESPN Daily.

[..]

In March 2023, Torre joined Meadowlark Media, a new company founded by former colleague Dan Le Batard. It was reported that Torre was expected to continue contributions to the ESPN programs Around the Horn and Pardon the Interruption.

In September 2023, Torre launched a new podcast and webseries called Pablo Torre Finds Out.

Not that there's anything wrong with it! To our eye and ear, Torre tends to be a bit kitschy and shticky, even as a sports talker, possibly with a bit too much focus on brand promotion. 

That said, he's also plenty smart, and he seems like the world's nicest person. But why is he sitting around the Morning Joe table, not being asked to speak or opine, while highly experienced people talk about Gaza and Ukraine? 

Given the way he's forced to sit in silence, it looks like someone behind the scenes wants his presence on the show, while the host of the show maybe on balance doesn't. That of course is an unfounded guess.

This morning, Pablo sat there for the hour. He was asked to speak exactly once. Finally, at 7{02, he was asked to kill some time discussing the weekend's sports. 

This isn't the first time this pattern has played out in recent weeks. Torre has also been featured as a full-blown, hour-long guest on The Eleventh Hour with Stephanie Ruhle, with nothing but actual news events actually being discussed.

We like to pretend that these are fraught times. The suits at some of the major news orgs may have different ideas. They're cadging personalities from the world of cable sports and from the sports talk web.

We've mentioned CNN and MSNBC. At Fox, it does get worse. 

They're now using Smith as a guest on their primetime shows. For lowlife programs like Gutfeld!, they drag in "analysts" from such sports sites as Outkick:

Outkick

OutKick is an American sports and political commentary website owned by Fox Corporation. Founded by Clay Travis, the site features news, opinion pieces, and podcasts surrounding sports and popular culture, presented from a conservative perspective. Travis sold the company to Fox Corporation in 2021, with the site integrated into the Fox Sports division. The site also synergizes with Fox News.

Clueless guests are imported from Outkick, especially if they're conventionally attractive young women. In fairness, they do know how to recite script in this most intelligent and most sincere of all possible corporate worlds.

Is Stephen A Smith prepared for the White House? For reasons which come from the far side of Pluto, CNN wants to find out!

HOW WE GOT HERE: Could it be something we Blues have done?

MONDAY, MAY 5, 2025

In some ways, could the answer be yes? As almost everyone knows, Donald J. Trump is in the Oval Office again. 

Over here in Blue America, very few people are happy about that state of affairs. In our view, this lengthy report in the Washington Post describes conduct on the part of President Trump and Secretary of State Rubio which, as an ethical matter, rises to the level of an international war crime.

So it has gone in the first hundred days. Or at least, so it seems to us.

Elsewhere, the conduct of the sitting president is variously disordered, or so it seems to us. To cite one type of example, on yesterday's Meet the Press, there he went again:

PRESIDENT TRUMP (5/4/25): Prices are down for oil. Prices are down for all energy. Prices are down at tremendous numbers for gasoline. And let me tell you, when you have– 

The big thing, what he did, he spent like a stupid person, which he was. But he spent like a very stupid person. And that was bad for inflation. 

But what really killed us with inflation was the price of energy. It went up to $3.90, even $4. And in California, $5 and $6. Right? Okay. I have it down to $1.98 in many states right now. 

When you go that much lower on energy—which is ahead of my prediction because I really thought I could get it down into the $2.50s—we have it down at $1.98 in numerous places. But when you say costs are going up, even mortgage rates are going down. You know, we have mortgage rates—

WELKER: But let me give you some examples. These are—I mean, these are actual examples. So you're saying the prices that are going down. Some prices are going up. Tires, strollers, some clothing in the wake of your tariffs...

While saying, as he constantly does, how stupid President Biden was, President Trump recited claims about the price of gas which everyone (in Blue America) knows to be totally bogus. 

By now, this behavior on this president's part has been thoroughly normalized. It has been normalized to the extent that Kristen Welker simply proceeded as if the bogus claims hadn't been made. 

He made a crazy claim about gas. She responded by citing the price of strollers! 

(Moments later, he was mocking her for focusing on such a trivial product.)

It's now an established part of the way our society functions. The president will make absurdly inaccurate claims, as will high-profile agents such as Elon Musk. 

When they do, the most famous journalists in the land will act like nothing has happened. Given the chaos which ensues when such bogus claims do get challenged, this may even be the most sensible way for a journalist like Welker to proceed.

Over here in Blue America, we the people aren't happy about the prevailing state of play—and sure enough! In yesterday's New York Times, a gloomy report by Ana Swanson appeared beneath this dual headline:

A Tidal Wave of Change Is Headed for the U.S. Economy
American consumers are not yet seeing much evidence of the drastic changes President Trump has made on trade. But they are on their way.

In our view, that dual headline was deceptively anodyne. In print editions, a triple headline on page A1 sat atop that same report. In our view, those headlines came closer to capturing the drift of Swanson's gloomy essay:

THE U.S. ECONOMY GIRDS FOR A SHOCK IN THE TRADE WAR
SHIPPING SLOWS DOWN
Specter of Empty Shelves and a Recession as the Tariffs Land

A recession may be looming, those gloomy headlines said, thereby bringing in the "specter of empty shelves."

As noted, many voters in Blue America have a wide array of such concerns about this sitting president. In Blue America, fears about a mangled economy are only one part of the political moment.

For those reasons, President Trump's approval ratings are very low in Blue America. That said, a second report on the Times' front page outlined the views which prevail in a separate, far distant land. 

That second report came from the warrens of Red America, where assessments of President Trump reman strikingly positive. Headline included, this second report, by Robert Draper, started off like this:

For Trump Supporters, an ‘Exciting’ First 100 Days

For those tens of millions of Americans who regard President Trump’s bull-in-a-china-shop decade of political life as a waking nightmare, what may be hardest to fathom is that tens of millions of their fellow citizens have viewed the very same spectacle and have said, in effect, “We are fine with it.”

And so it continues. A hundred days into Mr. Trump’s tumultuous second term, 42 percent of those in a recent New York Times/Siena poll not only approve of the job he is doing as president but describe his time in the White House so far as “exciting.”

True, only 43 percent of voters in the poll view him favorably, compared to 56 percent who view him unfavorably. Mr. Trump is also faring worse in the polls than any other modern president in his first 100 days.

And yet in the midst of the second-term chaos, Mr. Trump has suffered only a modest decline from the 48 percent of voters who viewed him favorably in the final Times/Siena poll before the November election. The numbers underscore that the durability of his appeal for his base cannot be ignored any more than Mr. Trump himself.

So says Draper, reporting to readers in Blue America from a substantially different land.

Just for the record, it's true! According to an array of recent surveys, President Trump is "faring worse in the polls than any other modern president in his first 100 days." 

It's true! In that most recent New York Times / Siena survey, the president was viewed favorably by only 42 or 43 percent of respondents. In other surveys, the president's "job approval" number has dropped as low as 39 percent.

Something else is true. It's true that President Trump's "favorability / approval" ratings dropped during his first hundred days. But it's might also be said, as Draper explicitly does, that the decline has been "modest:"

Full disclosure! Tens of millions of American citizens approve of what President Trump has done in his first hundred days. Blue America's voters are angry, upset—but over in Red America, tens of millions of other Americans think his approach has been "awesome."

(So says one of the voters Draper quotes in his piece.)

Blue voters are disturbed by this president's conduct. That said, it seems to us that a basic question has never been asked or answered in the course of the past hundred days, or in the course of the past six months, dating to last November.

An extremely basic question hasn't yet been asked or answered. That question would go like this:

How in the world did we ever get here? How did this guy ever get re-elected? Why are so many fellow citizens "excited" by what they see? 

How in the world did we get here? That strikes us as an obvious question—but in our view, a related question might go something like this:

Are there things we Blues have done which helped return this man to power? Are there things we continue to do which help him maintain his level of support?

Are there things Blue America did which helped Candidate Trump get elected? Is Blue America still doing things which may be helping President Trump maintain his approval ratings?

In our view, the answer to those questions is yes. What could we mean by that?

In a scathing editorial in yesterday's print editions, the New York Times editorial board savaged President Trump's behaviors in his first hundred days. The editors voiced a long list of indictments, but they also offered this:

There Is a Way Forward: How to Defeat Trump’s Power Grab

[...]

The patriotic response to today’s threat is to oppose Mr. Trump. But it is to do so soberly and strategically, not reflexively or performatively. It is to build a coalition of Americans who disagree about many other subjects—who span conservative and progressive, internationalist and isolationist, religious and secular, business-friendly and labor-friendly, pro-immigration and restrictionist, laissez-faire and pro-government, pro-life and pro-choice—yet who believe that these subjects must be decided through democratic debate and constitutional processes rather than the dictates of a single man.

The building of this coalition should start with an acknowledgment that Mr. Trump is the legitimate president and many of his actions are legal. Some may even prove effective. He won the presidency fairly last year, by a narrow margin in the popular vote and a comfortable margin in the Electoral College. On several key issues, his views were closer to public opinion than those of Democrats. Since taking office, he has largely closed the southern border, and many of his immigration policies are both legal and popular. He has reoriented federal programs to focus less on race, which many voters support. He has pressured Western Europe to stop billing American taxpayers for its defense...

Oof! Large chunks of that editorial read like the long list of accusations aimed at King George III in the Declaration of Independence. But the editors also note a few of the ways president retains a significant amount of approval—and we think the editors were barely scratching the surface of this problem.

This president is entitled to his views and to his policy proposals. As the editors note, he did win the last election, possibly with a bit of help from those of us who aren't his political friends.

It's also true that American voters are entitled to their views concerning what he has proposed and done in his first hundred days. That said, those of us in Blue America have been very slow to come to terms with some basic realities:

We Blues aren't the infallible people we've sometimes seemed to think we are—and in our inevitable lack of perfect wisdom, we've done quite a few things which have helped this man regain (and retain) his current massive amount of power.

We did this too, President Lincoln once seemed to say. All this week, we'll explore the ways our own imperfect judgment as Blue Americans may help explain how we got here, and may help explain why the current state of affairs may be hard to escape.

We Blues sometimes seem puzzled by President Trump's ascent. How did we get here? we may sometimes ask:

Could it something we Blues have done? In some ways, could the answer be yes?

Tomorrow: Why it's hard for Fox News to be (totally) wrong

SATURDAY: From "suspected" to "obviously" MS-13!

SATURDAY, MAY 3, 2025

Transformation performed by The Five: Friend, was Kilmar Abrego Garcia ever an affiliate of MS-13?

At this site, we can't answer your question. Neither could Judge Wilkinson in his recent ruling. 

Yesterday, the New York Times published its first full-length attempt to ponder the basic facts of this widely debated case. The report hasn't appeared in print editions—but midway along, it says this:

The Story of the ‘Mistakenly Deported Maryland Man’

[...]

Whether Mr. Abrego is an MS-13 gang member—as, with equal vehemence, the Trump administration insists and his family denies—remains unclear.

“Perhaps, but perhaps not,” wrote Judge J. Harvie Wilkinson III, a conservative jurist on a federal appeals court in Virginia, pondering whether Mr. Abrego Garcia was a gang member.

“Regardless, he is still entitled to due process.” 

Judge Wilkinson didn't try to say whether Abrego Garcia is or was a gang affiliate. In his recent ruling, he said that isn't the legal/constitutional question at this point in time. 

At present, the legal/constitutional question involves the "mistaken deportation" cited in the New York Times headline. For the record, that "mistaken deportation" wasn't exactly a "deportation" at all.

It was actually a consignment to a brutal foreign prison, quite possibly for life. That isn't a standard "deportation," but we humans aren't good with our words. 

Imperfect headline to the side, the Times report includes new information about certain aspects of Abrego Garcia's years in the United States. 

For us, the report also raises new questions. We have no idea what a thorough examination might reveal in the end.

Question! According to the Times report, Abrego Garcia's older brother had already come to the United States before the younger brother did. 

According to the Times report, the older brother "is now an American citizen and a licensed electrician in Maryland." According to the Times report., the younger brother and his wife would join him for "the occasional outing on [the older brother's] boat."

Question! Why didn't the younger brother ever seek citizenship, as the older brother had successfully done? We don't have the slightest idea—and the Times report doesn't attempt to say. 

Along the way, the Times report includes an unexplained note about the occasion in 2022 when the younger brother came under suspicion for a possible act of human trafficking:

The Story of the ‘Mistakenly Deported Maryland Man’

[...] 

According to records released last month by the Department of Homeland Security, Mr. Abrego Garcia notified immigration officials in late October 2022 that he wanted to move to Houston to be closer to his parents. Just five weeks later, he was driving back to Maryland—with eight passengers—when a highway patrol officer in Tennessee pulled him over for speeding.

In Homeland Security’s version of the trooper’s account, Mr. Abrego Garcia explained that he had left Houston three days earlier and was transporting people in his boss’s car to work in construction in Maryland. But there was no luggage, and the passengers all gave Mr. Abrego Garcia’s home address as their own—leading one officer to suspect the possibility of human trafficking.

In the end, Mr. Abrego Garcia was let off with a warning citation for driving with an expired license.

The Times report doesn't mention the recent reports which say that Abrego Garcia was driving a vehicle which belonged to someone who had served time for human smuggling. Meanwhile, we're puzzled by the highlighted statement, which is attributed to the Department of Homeland Security:

Abrego Garcia said "he wanted to move to Houston to be closer to his parents." 

Aren't his parents still in El Salvador? How would moving to Houston have made him closer to them? 

The Times report doesn't attempt to speak to that question. That new bit of information simply sits there, unexplained, in the lengthy report.

The Times report includes some pieces of new information. It doesn't answer, or pretend to answer, the basic question which seems to lie at the heart of the current dispute:

Is Abrego Garcia a member of MS-13? Was he ever an affiliate of that violent gang? 

Judge Wilkinson didn't pretend to know, and neither does the New York Times. Within an organization like the Fox News Channel, other influential people will take a different approach.

Those other people will pretend that these questions have been settled! Yesterday, the propaganda program known as The Five opened with co-host Jesse Watters reading this from prompter. We highlight one key word:

WATTERS (5/2/25): ...It's 5 o'clock in New York City, and this is The Five.

The Democrats are looking dumber by the day as they refuse to admit they were dead wrong about their precious "Maryland man," no matter how many disturbing details we find about Kilmar Abrego Garcia's violent past as a suspected MS-13 member...

That was Watters, at 5 o'clock sharp. He continued along from there. 

But right there, at the start of the program, Abrego Garcia was described as a suspected gang member. That disclaimer may have been ordered by legal. We have no idea.

At the start of the program, at 5 o'clock sharp, Abrego Garcia was a suspected gang member. This being Fox, you know what happened next:

Just like that, with lightning seed, the disclaimer disappeared. 

By 5:04, co-host Greg Gutfeld was angrily describing Abrego Garcia as a "wife-beating gangbanger," full stop. "If you want to find a scumbag," Gutfeld said as he continued, "just look for the Democrat who is defending him." 

Democrats were scumbags—and Abrego Garcia was a gangbanger. Just like that, within four minutes, uncertainty had been disappeared. 

By 5:07, Judge Jeanine had launched her standard rant about the reason why Abrego Garcia had feared a return to El Salvador back in 2019.

In the face of withering criticism for her endless misrepresentations, the judge no longer claims that Abrego Garcia's fear was based upon his fear of "a rival gang," Barrio 18.

During the 2019 court hearing, Abrego Garcia did express fear about possible violence by Barrio 18. But he never described Barrio 18 as a rival gang, and he never said that he'd ever belonged any gang at all.

In his written opinion, Judge David Jones described what he'd been told by Abrego Garcia himself, but also by his family members in El Salvador. Judge Jones said he found Abrego Garcia's testimony to be credible and consistent. You will never learn such facts by watching Judge Jeanine as she angrily presents her endless misrepresentations.

Judge Jeanine has stopped using the term "rival gang." That said, she still proceeds without any mention of what Judge Jones was actually told and what he actually said. 

In her angry rants, Judge Jeanine routinely erases what actually happened at that hearing. In a more rational world, no one would dream of placing a person like Judge Jeanine on the nation's most-watched "cable news" TV show.

Full disclosure! Before she was done, the perpetually furious Judge Jeanine had broken in with this plea for the death of due process:

JUDGE JEANINE (5/2/25):  Barack Obama deported three million illegals. Eighty-seven percent of them didn't have a hearing. So all of a sudden, when it's Donald Trump, let's get some new rights out there.

We can't vouch for those numbers. But the vast majority of those deportations were, in fact, real deportations. They weren't renditions to a brutal foreign prison, quite possibly for life, on the basis of a set of claims which have never been examined or established in court.

The judge is happy to ship a suspected person off to such a fate—to do so in the face of a prevailing court order and without a hint of due process. She persistently misrepresents what happened in the hearing before Judge Jones.  

Before this TV show was done, the gorillas had sent the term "suspected" far off into the mist. By 5:08, Judge Jeanine was performing the clown show about the obvious meaning of the tattoos on the suspect's knuckles.

By now, though, Abrego Garcia was no longer "suspected." Here's what the children now said:

JUDGE JEANINE: He has all the tats for MS-13, whether it is marijuana, the skull, the smiley face or the cross. He is MS-13, all right? This guy...he's an MS-13 gangbanger!...This guy is a dirtbag, and if you take his side—you know, if you lie in the grass with dogs, you'll come up with fleas. And that's where the Democrats are.

WATTERS:  This guy...is obviously MS-13.

From "suspected" to "obviously" in only eight minutes! Transformation completed!

By now, it seems fairly clear that Abrego Garcia engaged in domestic violence on at least several occasions within the past five years. On a program like The Five, we're told by a tag-team of messaging agents that life imprisonment in a gulag is the appropriate punishment for that (apparent) conduct.

A standing court order can be ignored—in fact, the violation of that court order won't even be mentioned! Judge Wilkinson notwithstanding, due process should be left behind!

We humans aren't especially good with our words. We start by describing a rendition to a brutal prison as a "deportation." After disappearing the one judge, Fox News sends in the other.

Initially, the person in question was merely "suspected." With that possible bow to legality noted, the beasts came out to play.

THE HUNDRED DAYS: It actually isn't a comedy show!

FRIDAY, MAY 2, 2025

Compagno, wrong and right: The hundred days have come and gone, with a few more days thrown in.

Conceivably, several indications have surfaced concerning the president's inclinations. This first report comes from the New York Times:

Trump Says He Is Renaming Veterans Day as ‘Victory Day for World War I’

President Trump said Thursday that he would rename Veterans Day, on Nov. 11, as “Victory Day for World War I” and May 8, widely known as V-E Day, as “Victory Day for World War II,” so that the United States could celebrate its achievements in those conflicts.

“We won both Wars, nobody was close to us in terms of strength, bravery, or military brilliance, but we never celebrate anything,” Mr. Trump said in a late-night post on Truth Social. “We are going to start celebrating our victories again!

 And so on from there. This second report is by the previously banished people at the Associated Press:

Army plans for a potential parade on Trump’s birthday call for 6,600 soldiers, AP learns

Detailed Army plans for a potential military parade on President Donald Trump’s birthday in June call for more than 6,600 soldiers, at least 150 vehicles, 50 helicopters, seven bands and possibly a couple thousand civilians, The Associated Press has learned. 

The planning documents, obtained by the AP, are dated April 29 and 30 and have not been publicly released. They represent the Army’s most recent blueprint for its long-planned 250th anniversary festival on the National Mall and the newly added element—a large military parade that Trump has long wanted but is still being discussed.

The Army anniversary just happens to coincide with Trump’s 79th birthday on June 14.

To see the president's Truth Social post, you can just click this. 

An overview of those reports might go something like this:

The president is back to renaming things, celebrating our national greatness while expressing a bit of resentment at our (former?) allies and friends. 

Also, the desire for that parade may be back! It would happen to land on the president's birthday, much as it would have done back in 2017.

To us, those don't seem like encouraging signs. Tens of millions of fellow citizens will disagree with our reactions.

That said, where does the president stand at the end of the hundred days? We return to this overview from the Washington Post, back at the start of the week:

Trump approval sinks as Americans criticize his major policies, poll finds

[...] 

Trump’s overall approval rating is lower than it was only two months ago. The poll shows that 39 percent of adult Americans approve of the way Trump is handling his job, compared with 55 percent who disapprove, including 44 percent who disapprove strongly. In February, those numbers were 45 percent positive and 53 percent negative.

Among registered voters, the deterioration has been even larger. In February, 48 percent of registered voters gave him positive marks, compared with 51 percent negative. Today those numbers are 42 percent positive and 55 percent negative, a swing from net negative three percentage points to net negative 13 points.

Trump’s approval rating is lower than for any past president at the 100-day mark in their first or second terms. At a similar point in their first terms as president, 42 percent approved of Trump and 52 percent approved of President Joe Biden... 

Those were the results from the survey conducted by the Washington Post / ABC News / Ipsos. Overall, recent surveys seemed to place the president job approval rating at roughly 40 percent.

Given our personal druthers, that approval rating is still way too high. Tens of millions of neighbors and friends will take an opposite view.

As a general matter, is the president's current approval rating "lower than for any past president?" 

Presumably, yes, it is—and it could easily go lower in the next few months. That said, we exist at a time when approvals are low across the board—and as long as forty percent of American voters approve of the president's performance, Republicans senators will swallow hard and follow his lead, whatever they may think in private.

In our view, those dropping numbers are encouraging, but they remain stubbornly high. For us, those stubborn numbers call a certain question—a question which goes like this: 

What might we Blue Americans have done to help keep his numbers that high?

The bell has been tolling for President Trump. Has it also been tolling for us? We expect to explore that question next week. We'll take our cue from this new interview conducted by Mediaite.

Alex Griffing conducted the interview. He spoke with Charlie Sykes, a very familiar NeverTrumper from MSNBC's Deadline: White House.

The interview proceeds at some length. With apologies for the length of the excerpt, we were struck by two different aspects of this pregnant exchange:

Is ‘Never Trump’ Dead? Charlie Sykes On The One Thing That Could Actually Restrain Trump

[,,,]

GRIFFING: ...Fox News, some of their top-rated hosts are Jesse Waters, Greg Gutfeld, who do bring kind of more entertainment vibe to what they’re doing. I mean, Gutfeld’s show is political satire, it’s comedy in a way. You think CNN, MSNBC, your point about centering more personal stories, you know, if you listen to Fox News last six months, you hear Lake and Riley, you hear the names of individuals over and over and over. Is this kind of something you think CNN and MSNBC should shift toward, kind of emulate Fox in a way?

SYKES: Well, I never want to use the term they should emulate Fox. What I do think is that they need to, again, not get caught in the information loop. You have to ask yourself, okay, are we actually telling people something that they need to know or have we decided that we’re going to sort of become a warm bath where people can sort of soak in ideological confirmation of all their biases.

And I understand how hard that is. All of this is difficult, I think, because it’s so easily misunderstood. It is possible to understand what the other side is saying without necessarily validating it or going to both-sidesism. I mean, to understand, to take seriously issues that might affect swing voters that they actually care about. And I’ll be specific.

I mean the reality is there are a lot of swing voters that actually were concerned about inflation. So simply denying that inflation was a problem was a mistake. There are swing voters that were concerned about crime and simply telling them that crime is a myth is basically says we don’t care about what you think. The border was a real problem during the Biden years and that needs to be addressed. There was a reason why the Trump campaign spent more than a hundred million dollars on one ad, one ad involving transgender surgeries and athletes. And yet, if you listen to Democrats and folks on the left, that issue didn’t exist at all.

So simply saying these are fake issues, don’t pay any attention to them, means that you shut yourself off from things that voters are talking about. The Joe Biden age story was very frustrating for a lot of folks because you could not engage in a conversation with a voter anywhere in the country without his age coming up. And yet, if you brought this up in progressive media or on certain Never Trump sites, you got flooded with what we began to call "Blue MAGA," which was don’t talk about it, don’t bring it up. It’s not relevant.

I do think that if you’re going to confront the enemy, you need to understand your enemy’s strengths as well as his weaknesses. And I think that this is one of those moments. You know, are we going to confront Trumpism by denying Trumpism’s appeal? And then again, I hope that my record is clear enough what I think about Donald Trump and what I think about all of his works. So I am, I am not doing this both-sidesism thing. I’m just saying that, do we, are we serious about confronting it? Or are we just talking to ourselves? 

We'll start with what Griffing said.

Griffing does a lot of good work at Mediaite. But no, Virginia, a million times no—TV shows like those of Gutfeld and Watters are not "political satire...comedy in a way." That's not what they are at all.

Those nightly, primetime programs are corporate propaganda shows working through, and hiding behind, a misleading comedy vibe. In his disastrous misstatement, Griffing joins Variety in stepping aside from the role his site should be playing in challenging the pseudo-journalistic trash which spews from those TV shows.

Mediate gives those programs almost total berth. The New York Times refuses to discuss the work of the Fox News Channel all the freaking way down.

Something we were withholding made us weak, the poet once said. He was speaking of a different era in our nation's political history. We're speaking about an act of withholding which is being engaged in across the board right now.

In our view, Griffing makes an enormous mis-assessment in the passage we've quoted. In his response, Sykes suggests some of the rather obvious ways the bell should be tolling for us.

What have those of us in Blue America done to enable this president? Working from Sykes' list of horribles, we'll examine that topic next week.

That exploration will take us back to what Tom Homan constantly says. It will take us to a ridiculous statement, on the Gutfeld! program, by the remarkably misinformed Emily Compagno.

At the start of her statement last Tuesday night, the perpetually overexcited former Oakland Raiders cheerleader said this about Kilmar Abrego Garcia. Rather plainly, the Fox News Channel star didn't have the slightest idea what she was talking about.

Fight your way through the salad:

GUTFELD (4/29/25): Emily, Emily, Emily...Have the Democrats done anything in a hundred days? I can't think of anything other than whine and sing horribly.

COMPAGNO: Yes. The hundred days to the Democrats is like a complete fiction of the rest of our hundred days. So let's take the example that you just talked about, where you talked about an administrative error that needs to sort of correct someone's process, and I assume that you are meaning due process. 

But this person [Abrego Garcia] was someone who was already deported and then came back against—again, he was a recidivist illegal enterer in the country. And what I don't understand is this sort of wiping the slate clean that the Dems do when they are blurring out the signs on the White House and levying this guy, lifting him up as the "Maryland father." I don't quite understand why—it's as if their memory has only started from like two seconds in, so the conversation is just administrative.

But the point was that this guy was a wife beating, violent, gang affiliated asshole that kept coming into our country multiple times. Like, it should have stopped then. But here is the point of the hundred days...

Fight your way through the salad! As she orated on a heavily watched "cable news" program, Compagno mistakenly said that Abrego Garcia had been deported "multiple times" and had simply kept coming back in. 

She said he was "a recidivist illegal enterer in the country." Advancing to a wider assessment, she said he was "a violent, gang affiliated asshole that kept coming into our country multiple times."

Misstating the basic facts of the case, she thereby issued the wider assessment mandated on this program Millions of voters saw her angrily say that Abrego Garcia was "gang affiliated." And no, that wasn't some sort of "political satire." 

It wasn't "comedy in a way." It was pure, undisguised corporate messaging, performed by someone who seemed to have no idea what she was talking about. 

Were her obvious misstatements corrected? Fellow citizens, please!

Darlings, this was the Gutfeld! show! Every guest who appears on this program will endorse the ultimate mandated talking-points. It doesn't matter how they get there—and no, this isn't an "entertainment" program. 

Instead, the program is an assault on the human experiment, as is the way a wide array of alleged "news orgs" have agreed that they must never report or discuss what happens on such programs.

Compagno is co-host of the Fox News Channel's mid-day show, Outnumbered. When she's introduced on the Gutfeld! program, her high excitability factor is almost always mentioned.

With that high excitability, she delivers pure corporate messaging, like everyone else on this program. She isn't joking when she does that, and this isn't a comedy program.

News orgs like Mediaite and the New York Times have agreed that this aggressive corporate messaging must go undiscussed. The powers that be at MSNBC have made the same decision.

Fox News assails MSNBC's hosts; MSNBC cowers and hides. Clownishly, Variety bowed to the same ridiculous "comedy" dodge when it published its recent long, delusional profile of the bizarre Greg Gutfeld himself.

In her personal life, Compagno may be the world's nicest person. That said, she belongs on a "cable news" show the same way we belong up front in the Bolshoi Ballet. 

She misstated wildly last Tuesday night, leading to the mandated assessment. But as she continued, we'd have to say that she redeemed herself with a later statement.

She spoke about one of the ways we Blues have enabled President Trump.  We Blues have done that in various ways. At the end of this hundred days, should the bell be tolling for us? 

Does the president want to stage his parade? The AP's report doesn't attempt to settle that question.

Meanwhile, we Blues have enabled his rise in various ways. That forty percent should be good enough!

We'll start with that topic on Monday.

THURSDAY: We're sorry we included the AG today!

THURSDAY, MAY 1, 2025

The MAGA co-hosts are much worse: We're sorry we included Pam Bondi in this morning's report.

In fairness to ourselves, her statement at yesterday's "cabinet meeting" which wasn't a cabinet meeting was especially daft. 

That said, that one segment from yesterday's broadcast of The Five showcased the demonic nature of that corporate disinformation vehicle. We should have dumped the AG's strange statement and totally focused on that.

At any rate, President Trump's top appointees are providing especially striking anthropology lessons at these televised "cabinet meetings." In fairness, so is President Trump himself, in the way he's able to sit there and seem to bask in the glory of the North Korean style fluffing he seems to be keeping on speed dial.

True story! People have always behaved in such ways inside the world's royal courts. Everyone doesn't behave this way, but some people inevitably will.

Also, some people will behave in the manner of the MAGA-friendly co-hosts of The Five. That's especially true if you pay such people very large sums to deliver the corporate mail. 

Gutfeld, Pirro, Watters and Perino are paid very large corporate salaries. Presumably, they know what they're paid to do.

(Perino is there to create the impression that the four co-hosts aren't all totally nuts.)

In fairness, how often do the four MAGA co-hosts believe the things they say? There's no clear way to make that assessment.

Also, how often are their basic postures basically accurate, absurd misstatements and disinformation to the side? As the bells continues to toll, the awkward answer would have to be this:

Their basic postures are basically accurate with more frequency than we Blues are inclined to know or admit.

More on that awkward fact to come.

Advancing the anthropology lesson, here's what the AG said at yesterday's "cabinet meeting." For some reason, she always addresses President Trump as "President," full stop:

BONDI (4/30/25): President, your first hundred days has far exceeded that of any other presidency in. this. country. 

Ever. Ever. Never seen anything like it. Thank you.

Your directive to me was very simple: Make America safe.

[...]

I was at DEA yesterday, and they said to me [that] you, Donald Trump, have taken the handcuffs off of DEA agents. And as a result of— Since you have been in office, President Trump, your DOJ agencies have seized more than 22 million fentanyl pills, 34 hundred kilos of fentanyl.  Since you’ve been— 

Your last 100 days, which saved—Are you ready for this, media?—258 million lives!

President Trump has saved 258 million lives in this country—in just his first hundred days!

Where in the world does he find these people? For the record, here's what the AG said at the previous "cabinet meeting" in response to the sound of her master's prompt:

PRESIDENT TRUMP (4/10/25): Pam?

BONDI: President, we’ve got—had some great wins in the last few days. You know, you were overwhelmingly elected by the biggest majority. 

The U.S. Americans want you to be president because of your agenda. And the courts are ruling that you have the authority to determine how the money of this country will be spent. That’s what the American citizens wanted and that’s what they’re getting.

In fact, President Trump won last November's election by a bit less than 1.5 points. To Bondi, that means he was "overwhelmingly elected"—by the biggest majority, in fact!

(Question! By the biggest majority that week? By the biggest majority in what imaginable sense?)

The AG's statement that day didn't quite seem make sense. On the brighter side, "the U.S. Americans," whoever they are, did in fact get what they wanted!

That wasn't an actual "cabinet meeting." It was, in fact, a PR event. Also, it was part of what we'd call an ongoing anthropology lesson. 

Anthropologically, this is one of the ways we human beings are inclined to behave. This doesn't mean that we're bad people. Instead, it means that we're people people—and on occasion, that can even turn out to be true over here! 

That said, there's no excuse—none at all—for what the Fox News Channel does. There is also no excuse for Blue America's ongoing silence concerning that gruesome misconduct.

We're sorry we included the AG today. Absurd as yesterday's statement was, those MAGA co-hosts are much worse.

THE HUNDRED DAYS: At long last, the Times pipes up!

THURSDAY, MAY 1, 2025

But here's what happened on Fox: Wanda Petronski had a hundred dresses in her closet, all lined up. 

In his second bite at the apple, President Trump has now had a hundred days to advance his agenda. With respect to job approval, he continues to hang in there at roughly 40 percent. 

If that persists, it will almost surely be enough to keep the Republican Senate in line.

Meanwhile, thirteen days later, the timorous folk at the New York Times have finally dared to speak! Believe it or not, Blue America's paper of record has finally piped up with this:

Trump Would Not Concede ‘MS-13’ Letters Were Digitally Added

During an interview with Terry Moran of ABC News on Tuesday, President Trump insisted that the man his administration had mistakenly deported to El Salvador had a gang name tattooed on his hand.

“On his knuckles,” Mr. Trump said, “he had MS-13.”

Pause the tape. Rewind it to about a week earlier, when Mr. Trump in a social post held up a photograph of the man, Kilmar Abrego Garcia, showing him with four tattoos, one on each finger. There was a leaf, a smiley face, a cross and a skull. Above those symbols the alphanumeric term “MS13” had been superimposed onto the photo, essentially serving as a caption, decoding the tattoos. (Some gang experts have questioned whether they are truly MS-13 symbols.)

In the interview with Mr. Moran, the president appeared to believe that the characters that had been typed onto the photo he triumphantly held up in his social media post were in fact tattoos themselves. Mr. Moran gingerly tried to correct the record about that, but Mr. Trump was having none of it.

It had been his latest crazy claim. It was stated on April 18.

Finally, the timorous Times was telling its readers about the latest lunatic claim. For the record, we know of no way to say if the president believed what he said on April 18, even if he believes it still.

Th New York Times is a large, sprawling institution. It does a lot of highly important reporting. But in its own first hundred days, it has followed its earlier conduct:

The paper has refused to address a fairly obvious point of concern about the world's most powerful person.

To the newspaper's credit, it has now published an accurate account of what happened when the president sat with Moran:

During the interview, Moran said the letters and numbers M / S / 1 / 3 had been photoshopped onto a photograph of Abrego Garcia's hand. The president seemed to insist, again and again, that the M, the S, the 1 and the 3 were actually tattooed right onto his hand.

Back on April 18, this allegation had qualified as his latest crazy claim. When he sat with Moran, he kept insisting on the accuracy of this crazy claim.

Right up to that point, the Times had refused to report the fact that there he'd gone again. Once again, the Times was refusing to address an obvious fact:

Plainly, something seems to be wrong with the world's most powerful person.

That's a tragic loss of human potential. Now for a brief aside:

There also seems to be something wrong with the person he picked to run his assault-by-DOGE. Also, he has surrounded himself with people who are inclined to make bizarre statements like this:

AG Pam Bondi Makes Absurd Announcement in Cabinet Meeting Claiming Trump Saved Over 75% of Americans from Dying

Attorney General Pam Bondi made a mathematically questionable claim during a Cabinet meeting Wednesday, telling gathered reporters and the television audience that President Donald Trump deserved credit for saving “258 million lives.”

Trump gathered his Cabinet at the White House Wednesday afternoon for what has become a predictable round of compliments dished out from his appointees, who declare that their agencies have accomplished great things at the president’s direction...

Was Bondi's statement "mathematically questionable?"  Routinely, we human beings routinely have a hard time choosing and using our words!

People, a foreign imprisonment isn't the same thing as a "deportation." Also, a PR event isn't a "cabinet meeting." A misstatement may not be a "lie."

All too often, again and again, our journalists aren't real good with their words. Here's what Bondi actually said at yesterday's "cabinet meeting:"

BONDI (4/30/25): President, your first hundred days has far exceeded that of any other presidency in. this. country. Ever. Ever. Never seen anything like it. Thank you.

Your directive to me was very simple: Make America safe.

[...]

I was at DEA yesterday, and they said to me [that] you, Donald Trump, have taken the handcuffs off of DEA agents. And as a result of— Since you have been in office, President Trump, your DOJ agencies have seized more than 22 million fentanyl pills, 34 hundred kilos of fentanyl. 

Since you’ve been— Your last 100 days, which saved—are you ready for this, media?—258 million lives!

Are you ready for this, media? the AG defiantly said. She then proceeded to author a claim which makes no earthly sense.

You have to watch the videotape to appreciate the pre-human level of fawning. But as Mediaite noted, Bondi seems to have said that President Trump has already saved the lives of 75% of this nation's population—all in his first hundred days!

A statement like that isn't "mathematically questionable." In fairness to Mediaite, it's hard to find the appropriate language with which to describe such a claim. 

As was shown once again at this PR event, this president has surrounded himself with a stable of people like Bondi. The New York Times doesn't seem to have issued a report about Bondi's bewildering claim. Beyond that, though, a larger question looms:

When, if ever, will Blue America's paper of record address the obvious question at hand?

Let's return, at this point, to this president's claim about Abrego Garcia's tattoos. It has now been recognized, even by the Times, as the latest of his many extremely strange claims. 

By now, everyone knows that his original statement was (at best) "crazy adjacent." Also, everyone knows that the president doubled down on his original bogus claim when he spoke with Moran.

Everyone knows that his statement was crazy—everyone except the millions of people, in Red America, who watched yesterday's edition of The Five.

It's the most watched program in "cable news." Its audience dwarfs that of any program on CNN or MSNBC.

Yesterday, during its third segment, four of its co-hosts worked to establish some alternate facts. It started with the astonishing Greg Gutfeld, who now trashes Barack Obama for supposedly being gay pretty much every night of the week on his garbage can program, Gutfeld!, which at 10 p.m. nightly.

This strangely disordered man also co-hosts each day on The Five. And there he was, yesterday, turning the tables on Terry Moran, with the president going unmentioned. 

In this passage, the fellow is referring to the claim that the letters and numbers "M / S / 1 / 3" are tattooed right on Abrego Garcia's knuckles. In this passage, the simplest facts are turned on their head:

GUTFELD (4/30/25): Well, let's simplify it. The letters and the numbers are labels that translate the symbols on his knuckles. 

The reporter tried to say that the labels were the tattoo—an intentional deception to make you think he's a gang member.

[...]

Those—that label was added on as a translated [sic]. What the newscaster tried to do was make it sound like, "Oh my god, the whole thing was doctored." No, it wasn't.

Granted, that was a hopeless jumble. But clearly, Gutfeld was telling the Fox News Channel's millions of viewers that it was Moran who tried to say that the letters and numbers M / S / 1 / 3 were actually tattooed on Abrego Garcia's knuckles.

Plainly, it was Trump who had kept insisting on that claim as he spoke with Moran. But by the time the demons finished yesterday's segment, Red America's viewers had been treated to a massive jumble in which Trump's behavior had been disappeared, while Moran had somehow been involved in a deliberate deception.

Warning! If you watch that entire pseudo-discussion, you will see the Fox News Channel at its post-human worst. Along the way, you'll see liberal punching bag Jessica Tarlov try to clarify a whole set of topics, including the matter of the tattoos—and then, you'll see the post-human Jesse Watters say that everything she said was wrong. 

Needless to say, he reinvented her various statements. The gentleman started like this:

WATTERS (4/30/25): I'm sorry, Jessica. I love you, but I don't believe anything you say any more.

You're wrong about everything. Every time you come up with these things—

First, he's "a Maryland dad." Then actually, he does have tattoos that spell "MS-13!" Yeah, then there's this other tattoo expert that you have...

The apparent tool continued from there, at considerable length. To appearances, Tarlov is paid to just sit there and take it. 

(Fuller disclosure: Dana Perino is paid to convey the false impression that the four MAGA co-hosts aren't all totally nuts.)

Watters went on and on from there, thereby ending the segment. As you can see, he quickly turned the tables on reality. He pretended that Tarlov had said that Abrego Garcia really did have those tattoos! 

As with Gutfeld, so too here: Trump's insistence on this claim was totally disappeared. But so it goes on this demonic program, day after day, as the New York Times looks away.

Something plainly seems to be wrong with President Trump. Also, the Fox News Channel is a very important corporate assault on the human project.

The Times gives President Trump wide berth. It refuses to discuss the Fox News Channel at all. 

With his first hundred days now gone, the bell is tolling for President Trump. Is it also tolling for a Blue America whose tribunes keep running away, keep refusing to speak or to serve?

Tomorrow: Emily Compagno, fast and slow, plus Homan, flat and round