President Trump 2.0

Originally Posted by Pierre

I love these type of quotes, from highly educated experts in Geo-politics that can give highly assessed detailed forensic reports about the situations we face.

I sleep at night better.

As others have observed: we don’t know whether Trump is a Russian asset or not. But if he isn’t, he is nevertheless doing all the things the Russians could ever hope an asset in the White House would do.

[1andrew1]

Originally Posted by Pierre

I love these type of quotes, from highly educated experts in Geo-politics that can give highly assessed detailed forensic reports about the situations we face.

I sleep at night better.

I wish we could say the same about the Ukranians.

[1andrew1]

Trump's morals don't have a bottom!

Now he's trying to weaponise the rape and murder of someone to try and win the PR battle against someone whom the courts acknowledge was wrongly deported to El Salvador and had no connection to the murder.

https://news.sky.com/story/bereaved-...tters-13350297

https://www.reuters.com/business/aer...ld-2025-04-17/

Summary

- SpaceX is leading a bid to build Golden Dome with startups Anduril and Palantir, six people said
- The SpaceX-led group is pitching the Pentagon on a 'subscription model' for missile defense, sources said
- SpaceX proposes a constellation of 400 to more than 1,000 missile defense satellites, sources said

A "subscription model"?

What could possibly go wrong?

@steveparks.bsky.social

“Hello valued customer.

Given the outbreak of war, surge pricing means this year’s subscription will now be 10x the price.

Or you could opt for our new budget plan which blocks 10% of missiles, and plays ads to cities under attack.”

What could go wrong with a group of sociopathic broligarchs having control of a fleet of satellites armed with lasers?

[1andrew1]

Originally Posted by Hugh

https://www.reuters.com/business/aer...ld-2025-04-17/

A "subscription model"?

What could possibly go wrong?

@steveparks.bsky.social

What could go wrong with a group of sociopathic broligarchs having control of a fleet of satellites armed with lasers?

Shouldn't this be in the Black Mirror thread?

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/w...-b2735728.html

President Donald Trump has long claimed that South American governments are sending violent gang members to the U.S. as a justification for his mass deportation efforts. But U.S. intelligence has found that that isn’t the case.

The National Intelligence Council, using findings from the 18 intelligence agencies, found in a secret assessment earlier this month that the Venezuelan government isn’t sending members of the prison gang Tren de Aragua to the U.S., according to The Washington Post.

The findings go against Trump’s rationale for the use of the Alien Enemies Act of 1798 to deport those suspected of being gang members. The legislation was most recently used during World War II to detain more than 110,000 Japanese Americans.

Somebody obviously wasn’t visited by the Easter Bunny…

I think hes overdue a visit by Freddy Krueger.

[Stephen]

He is absolutely certifiable, a complete crackpot and a delusional old man. If anyone believes the bs in that post then they are just as bad.

[Pierre]

Originally Posted by Stephen

He is absolutely certifiable, a complete crackpot and a delusional old man. If anyone believes the bs in that post then they are just as bad.

You mean the last US administration didn’t have an open border policy in the South?

[1andrew1]

Originally Posted by Pierre

You mean the last US administration didn’t have an open border policy in the South?

Who's going to tell him that Father Christmas is not real, either?

Originally Posted by Pierre

You mean the last US administration didn’t have an open border policy in the South?

The Cato Institute*, a Right-Wing libertarian think-tank, doesn’t think so…

https://www.cato.org/blog/biden-didn...part-1-summary

Biden Didn’t Cause the Border Crisis, Part 1: Summary

During President Joe Biden’s term, Border Patrol arrested an unprecedented number of immigrants who crossed illegally into the United States. Many believe Biden caused this increase in migration by reducing border enforcement. However, data obtained by the Cato Institute through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) challenges this narrative. In fact, the border crisis began before Biden took office and ended before he left.

From his administration’s first day in January 2021, Biden actually increased border enforcement—arrests, detentions, and removals of border crossers all increased. The prevailing narrative that blames Biden overlooks the real causes of the crisis: America’s robust labor market and bad immigration policies that incentivized illegal entries. However, Trump, not Biden, mostly started those policies. Biden eventually phased out some of them; he increased legal migration, and as the labor market cooled, the problem dissipated.

Summary

The main takeaways are:

- Illegal immigration had already increased to a 21-year high before Biden entered office.
- Biden immediately started increasing expulsions from his first day in office.
- Biden tripled interior detention and increased border detention 12-fold.
- Biden increased air removal flights by 55 percent over 2020 levels.
- Biden negotiated broader expulsion deals with foreign countries than Trump.
- Biden got many foreign countries to carry out crackdowns on illegal and legal migration.
- Biden removed or expelled 3.3 million border crossers—three times as many as Trump.
- Biden even managed to remove a similar percentage of crossers as Trump’s four years.

About Cato

For more than 40 years, Cato has led the charge for liberty in our nation and around the world. The Cato Institute is a public policy research organization—or think tank—that creates a presence for and promotes libertarian ideas in policy debates.

Our mission is to keep the principles, ideas, and moral case for liberty alive for future generations, while moving public policy in the direction of individual liberty, limited government, free markets, and peace.

[Pierre]

It’s a moving target.

This stat is interesting though.

Between October 2019 and June 2024, US Customs and Border Protection (CBP) reported just under 11 million border encounters nationwide. That’s roughly equivalent to the current population of North Carolina, the ninth most populous state.

Monthly encounters peaked with over 370,000 people in December 2023. That month, CBP encountered nearly 12,000 people at the border every day. That's more than eight people every minute.

December 2023 encounters were approximately 70% of the total encounters in 2017 (which was around 527,000).

So one month in 2023 was 70% of the entire of 2017

https://usafacts.org/articles/what-c...d-immigration/

Add into that, that no one really knows the true number, but it’s almost certainly more, not less.

[1andrew1]

Originally Posted by Pierre

It’s a moving target.

This stat is interesting though.

So one month in 2023 was 70% of the entire of 2017

https://usafacts.org/articles/what-c...d-immigration/

Add into that, that no one really knows the true number, but it’s almost certainly more, not less.

What we do know is that Trump's assertion that Biden had an open border policy in the South is wrong.