A very Trumpy weekend
Colombia capitulates and why delaying Bondi as AG helps Trump
How good was Donald Trump’s first week? On the seventh day, Meghan McCain wanted to put him on Mount Rushmore. She tweeted:
If Trump deports Prince Harry they will put him on Mt. Rushmore.
The deportations have begun as child molesters and killers become America’s chief export. With Dr. Phil and a TV crew in tow, Tom Homan went to Chicago to ICE some illegal alien felons. End Wokeness tweeted with a video:
Border Czar Homan personally rounds up a chiId r-pist from Thailand in Chicago.
The optics are terrific. Instead of chasing down every illegal alien in sight, Homan is getting the worst first. He is deporting the people whom everyone but a pedophile agrees should be tossed out of the USA. His next set will be the people most of us believe should be booted. Gradually, he will kick out even more people.
Plus the pedo is a Thai, not a Hispanic. That kills the racism buzz.
The press was salivating for a mistake to pounce on. Trump is being careful. He is going after criminals.
Poor Martha Raddatz tried to lecture Homan in a taped interview. She said:
The estimates of those who have been convicted or arrested in the past is 700,000 to over a million. So after you do that, do you go after everybody who is here illegally?
Really? Wow. Up to a million immigrant illegals are criminals out of a population estimated at 25 million to 40 million.
Do you know how many criminals are actual Americans? 1.2 million.
The deportations will work. Resistance is futile. Trump is teaching that to heads of lesser states. The president of Colombia refused to allow a planeload of his exported criminals to land.
Not a problem. Trump told President Juan Valdez (or whatever his name is) that he would slap a 25% tariff on the coffee and other items we buy from him.
Cynical Publius explained in a tweet what happened next:
1. Colombia announces it will not take our repatriation flights.
2. After a par-5 third hole where he goes one under par, Trump uses his iPhone to post on social media as to how the USA will destroy Colombia’s economy if they do not do what the USA demands.
3. By the time Trump gets to the par-4 sixth hole, Colombia’s President has agreed to repatriate all the illegal Colombians in his own plane, which he will pay for.
4. Trump finishes three under par and goes to the clubhouse for a Diet Coke where he posts a gangsta AI image of himself and the new FAFO Doctrine.
That is today’s graphic.
Now for what originally was supposed to be today’s newsletter. My deadline for Monday posts is midnight on Saturday so I can enjoy the Sabbath. But breaking news means breaking opinion, right?
You will like the original. Here it is.
President Trump’s cabinet is a curious thing. He picked and recruited all his secretaries. He announced their appointments not at press conferences, which are aired at the whims of television networks. This time he used Truth Social, a social media site he owns in part. His supporters got the news directly without the spin of some admitted liar like Stephanopoulos at Disney’s ABC.
Trump announced his appointments early enough to have them go through confirmation hearings and have them ready to start on Day One.
That did not happen. I thought it would. I thought he would put the Senate in recess so he could have his Cabinet on the job Day One without needing confirmation. That did not happen. I thought Trump would be on Twitter and Truth Social tearing the senators a new one. That did not happen.
Aha! I found the dog did not bark, which Sherlock Holmes fans tell me is the signal that all is not as it appears to be.
We know what happened last time. Trump went in trusting Republicans. They set him up good. They vouched for Pence and General Mattis and later in his term Bill Barr. While awaiting his appointees to be confirmed, he just let Obama’s deputies run the show.
That cost him a month or more in trying to get his government started.
This time, President Trump is going forward with or without a Cabinet. He not only is prepared for this, he wants Senate Democrats to drag their feet because the slower they walk, the more he can get done. It is paradoxical but most things in Official Washington are counter-intuitive.
Rod D. Martin explained this on Twitter. Martin is a member of the PayPal Mafia that made money when X.com bought Paypal. They took the money and went on to found Yelp, YouTube and sundry other Internet businesses.
Inside the MASSIVE Trump DOJ shake-up you need to know about. A thread that will blow your mind. Let me tell you what's REALLY happening behind closed doors at DOJ right now. 20+ career officials SIDELINED overnight. This is just the beginning.
Well, I thought, Trump’s acting attorney general is just cleaning house, which Pam Bondi would do if she were attorney general.
Much to my surprise, she couldn’t.
Here's the GENIUS part: They found a LOOPHOLE to make this stick. Federal regulations generally protect career employees from being reassigned for at least 120 days after new leadership takes over.
But Pam Bondi hasn’t been confirmed yet. The firings come from the ACTING AG.
Federal rules are Democrat rules because the Democrats own most of the career employees—lifers—embedded in DOJ and elsewhere. Trump had to wait 11 weeks between the election and the inauguration to set up his government and then wait at least another 17 weeks (120 days) to re-assign lifers.
Democrats don’t care if their new president has to wait because they own most of the career employees anyway.
Trump learned the rules and used them against his enemies.
Also, he now knows who he can trust inside the deep state. The man behind all of Trump’s DOJ personnel changes is James R. McHenry III, the acting AG. In Trump’s first term, McHenry was director of the Executive Office for Immigration Review.
Garland had to wait until March 11, 2021, to be sworn in as AG. With luck, Bondi will have to wait until March 11.
Over at Homeland Security, the Senate was slow-walking Governor Kristi Noem’s appointment as secretary.
That was no problem because acting secretary Benjamine Huffman did a fine job reforming the department.
He entered federal service on February 3, 1985, when he joined the Border Patrol Academy. That tells me which side he is on in this border dispute with Democrats—the American side.
On his second day in office as the acting secretary, he issued a press release on two directives he issued, “The first directive rescinds the Biden Administration’s guidelines for Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and Customs and Border Protection (CBP) enforcement actions that thwart law enforcement in or near so-called ‘sensitive’ areas.
“The second directive ends the broad abuse of humanitarian parole and returns the program to a case-by-case basis. ICE and CBP will phase out any parole programs that are not in accordance with the law.”
The first week of deportations went slowly and smoothly as Trump’s government selected the worst offenders to send home. There will be no photos of crying babies this time.
Republican Senator Rick Scott ain’t happy with the pace. He tweeted on Friday morning:
President Trump has been in office for five days, & only TWO members of his cabinet have been confirmed.
In contrast, Obama had TWELVE members confirmed by this time.
Democrats are doing everything they can to stop Trump’s agenda. The Senate MUST confirm Trump’s cabinet NOW!
Martin explained why Scott’s wrong to panic.
On Friday night, Hegseth became the third appointee confirmed. On Saturday, the Senate confirmed Noem.
Trump is personally sweeping the floor and washing the windows as he cleans house.
Reuters reported, “President Donald Trump fired 17 independent watchdogs [inspectors general] at multiple government agencies on Friday, a person with knowledge of the matter said, eliminating a critical oversight component and clearing the way to replace them with loyalists.”
Replace with loyalists? Paragraph 8 said, “The Washington Post, which was first to report the dismissals, said most were appointees from Trump’s 2017-2021 first term.”
The nonsense from the Fourth Estate never stops.
The Constitution makes the president the chief of the executive branch. Trump learned the hard way that Congress protects the bureaucracy first, last and always. He has learned how to get around Congress.
So keep delaying the inevitable, Democrats, because Trump has figured out how to use delays to speed things up.
"President Juan Valdez (or whatever his name is)". Laugh out loud funny. What a great way to begin the morning.
The biggest reason Trump is so strong this time is, Biden's failures (and his handlers' failures) have convinced enough of the Public that the Dems are wrong and out of touch. As well, it seems to have given Trump time to learn from what went wrong the first time--and now he's acting on the basis of what he learned the hard way. That says a lot about Trump's mental capacity (and also implies a lot about Biden's lack of the same).