Donald Trump has failed to produce more manufacturing jobs with his illegal tariffs. Iowa is another example of promises "not kept"

Skepticism mires Trump’s Iowa steel plant project: ‘Promises are not the same as jobs’

Echo reporting published in The Guardian by Michael Sainato

The project sparked doubts over whether the plant will be built and delivered as promised, given Trump’s record. #PromisesNotKept

Donald Trump has long sought to portray himself as a man of steel, from the White House photoshopping Trump to look like Superman, to enacting tariffs on steel and approving the sale of US Steel to Japan’s Nippon Steel with a ”golden” share given to the US government.

Most recently, the Trump administration announced plans to construct the largest steel plant in the US, a 💲15bn plant in Lee county, Iowa, to be built by India-based Mesabi Metallics.

But, the project and claims surrounding it have incited skepticism over whether the plant will be built and delivered as promised, given Trump’s record and the financial history of Mesabi Metallics’ parent company, Essar Global.

The plant had originally been scheduled to be built in Minnesota, a state that usually votes for Democrats. The shift to Iowa – where Republicans are struggling in the midterms – has also attracted attention.

Doug May, who worked for 43 years as a steelworker at a mill in Granite City, Illinois, characterized the announcement as “political pandering” given the timing and how tariffs are hurting Iowa farmers.

“He pulled the same thing in 2018, just before an election, when he announced that 💲10bn Foxconn project,” May said.

That project, in swing state Wisconsin, failed to produce the jobs Trump and Foxconn had promised.

May argued Trump was using the steel industry as a campaign strategy, while ignoring the work the United Steel Workers have done to push to save the industry, including filing more than 150 trade cases over the past decades to combat unfair trade practices that harm US workers. More than 40 domestic steel producers in the US filed for bankruptcy in the late 1990s.

“We, the steel workers in Granite City, served as the best foot soldiers lobbying Congress, holding rallies and campaigns, to raise awareness to the cheating of foreign steelmakers and the need for stronger trade enforcement during that era,” added May. “Arguably, we played a very important role in saving domestic steel.”

Essar Global first proposed building a steel plant with a $1.65bn investment in the Mesabi iron range in north-east Minnesota when they purchased Minnesota Steel in 2007.

By 2016, Essar Steel Minnesota had filed for bankruptcy, following construction delays and financing issues at its Nashwauk, Minnesota, project, where its iron ore mine, which is supposed to fuel the Iowa steel plant, is located.

In efforts to get rid of its debt, Essar Global sold off assets, including the completion of a sale of Essar Oil for 💲12.9bn to a Russia-controlled energy company.

Mesabi Metallics briefly changed ownership to Virginia billionaire Thomas Clarke, before he lost control of the company in 2018, with Essar Global regaining control, but then losing its mining leases in 2021, when the state of Minnesota revoked them after a missed deadline.

“This plant that has been 20 years in the making,” said Mark Dayton, former governor of Minnesota who dealt with Mesabi Metallics in the state through their bankruptcy proceedings.

“I had, a decade ago, a very bad experience with Essar Steel because they started this plant, raised lots of expectations and hopes up north, and then went into default and went into bankruptcy and the like,” he said.

Dayton said it did look like the plant was “actually proceeding, which is great if they’re going to actually complete building this plant”.

But he added: “I’m skeptical of the announcement in Iowa this close to the election. That’s going to require $15bn of investment. I’d like to see that money on the table from Essar before they start to bring a shovel.”

Some, including May, see echoes of Trump’s Foxconn announcement in June 2018. Ahead of the 2018, midterm elections, Trump described plans by the Taiwanese electronics contract manufacturer to open a gargantuan site outside Milwaukee as “the Eighth Wonder of the World” and said the plant “will provide jobs for much more than 13,000 Wisconsin workers”.

Trump’s promises came as his approval ratings with the public were low, with Democrats poised to take advantage and regain control of the House.

The site currently has about 1,100 employees and became an albatross around the necks of its backers as Foxconn’s ambitious plans failed to materialize.

This time around, Trump’s approval ratings are even lower than they were in 2018, and Democrats are expected to regain control of the House and possibly the Senate.

Trump has claimed “they’ve already started building” the plant, though a local NBC news affiliate in Iowa reviewed county records and disputed this claim.

“The review found no major property purchases tied to the project this year. County officials say they don’t have details from the company about its plans. No permits have come before supervisors,” TV6 Investigates reported.

A site location has not been disclosed by elected officials or Mesabi Metallics, with steel production aimed to begin in 2030. Mesabi Metallics did not respond to multiple requests for comment.

In Iowa, the state’s Sierra Club chapter criticized the special state legislature session called for by the Republican governor, Kim Reynolds, to expand government subsidies the state can provide to Mesabi Metallics for the project. The state government is experiencing budget shortfalls, with more than $1bn in deficits the past two years.

“Any time we step up incentive programs above and beyond what we’re giving, our revenues are going to be downgraded. And I understand there’s going to be jobs and economic activity around this, but the state is hurting financially,” said Pam Mackey Taylor, director of the Iowa chapter of the Sierra Club. “Do we need to really double the incentives that other large projects get to support this steel project❓”

The Iowa governor’s office did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
In a special session, the Iowa legislature approved 💲1.36bn in tax incentives over 10 years to Mesabi Metallics. The steel plant is projected to create 1,750 permanent jobs and support up to 6,000 construction jobs.

The White House did not comment directly on the steel plant’s move to Iowa or on White House senior communications strategist Jason Miller’s past work as a registered foreign lobbyist for Mesabi Metallics.

Mesabi Metallics paid at least 💲240,000 SHW Partners, a government relations firm led by Miller, according to lobbyist disclosure records. The government of India also paid his firm 💲150,000 per month for “strategic counsel, tactical planning and government relations assistance on policy matters before the US government”, with the contract beginning in April 2025.

Miller said the contract with India stopped in June 2026 and claimed the lobbying for Mesabi Metallics was domestic, not foreign, and ended in July 2026.

“Taking a lobbyist who’s on the payroll of a foreign government and companies with huge government contracts and putting him inside the White House will create a three-headed beast of divided loyalties,” said Jon Golinger, democracy advocate at Public Citizen, in a statement on Miller’s appointment to a White House role.

In response to Miller’s lobbying work and criticisms of it, Miller said: “Public Citizen is a bunch of America-hating fake news soy boy losers who prefer new investments go to China and not the US, and respectfully, they can get rekt. 

Not only did I deregister from Mesabi Metallics months ago, I took the additional step of recusing myself from having anything to do with their announcement at the White House.”

A White House spokesperson, Kush Desai, said in an email: “No president has done more to revive American steelmaking than Donald Trump, whose 50 percent Section 232 tariffs on steel is driving record investments into this key sector. Those tariffs, along with the Administration’s other 🤥pro-growth and pro-investment policies, are not going away anytime soon.”💩💩💩

Donald Trump broken promise to erase the unsustainable federal debt but guess what? It just hit $40 trillion. OMG

In 2016, Trump pledged to erase the federal debt. It just hit $40tn
Echo article published in The Guardian by Steven Greenhouse.

The trillion💲 in tax cuts going to the rich and corporations could have instead been used to address the affordability crisis.

Dear reader, I recognize that your eyes might glaze over at any mention of the nation’s $40tn federal debt. But your reaction to this mind-boggling number shouldn’t be ennui; it should be outrage and dismay.

Outrage is in order because the nation’s debt has climbed to more than $40tn under Donald Trump, even though back in 2016, when the debt was less than half what it is today, candidate Trump insisted that he’d totally eliminate the debt within eight years. That was yet another example of the Demagogue-in-Chief’s willingness to say anything, no matter how insincere or untrue, to woo voters.


Not only has Trump failed to reduce the debt, he has spectacularly increased it. Take Trump’s “big, beautiful (hideous❗) bill” and the huge tax cuts it lavished upon the very rich and corporations. 

That legislation is expected to increase the nation’s debt by a whopping $3.4tn over the next decade. Worse, during Trump’s time as president, including his first term, the federal debt has climbed by a colossal $11.6tn.
Outrage is also in order because the trillions in tax 💲cuts going to the rich and corporations could have instead been used to address the affordability crisis that is squeezing so many Americans.
Those trillion💲 could have gone to creating more affordable childcare for every family or increasing subsidies to hold down soaring healthcare premiums or expanding government aid to make college more affordable.

Trump’s tax cuts for the rich and the $40tn debt have worsened the affordability crisis in one important and painful way. They have helped push up long-term interest rates to their highest level in nearly two decades, and that has pushed up mortgage rates, too. The unhappy result: housing has become less affordable, when housing affordability has already been a big problem for young Americans. Higher mortgage rates often mean that homebuyers have to pay several hundred dollars more in interest each month.

Interest rates have climbed not only because investors are dismayed that the national debt has hit a record, but also because Trump’s tariffs and war against Iran have fueled inflation and because investors are unsettled by all the chaos Trump has created at home and abroad.

Outrage is also called for because of the way Trump and his Republican yes-men in the Congress jumped to enact giant tax cuts when their super-wealthy donors and friends said jump. In a move that shows how rigged the system is, Trump and the GOP legislated these tax cuts for the rich and corporations even though the wealthy and corporations were already doing perfectly well and would continue doing just fine, with their mansions, yachts and private jets, even without those tax cuts. Of the $4.4tn in tax cuts in the “big, beautiful (hideous❗) bill”, nearly half go to the richest 5% of Americans.

If any further evidence is needed to show how the Republicans in Congress have sold their souls to billionaire💲, millionaires and corporations, the increased debt caused by the big, unbeautiful (hideous❗) bill’s tax cuts will be a burden on our children and grandchildren for decades to come. 

By the mid-2030s, the nation will have to pay more than $2tn in interest payments each year to finance the federal debt. That’s double the $1tn a year we are paying now – $1tn is slightly less than what the government spends on Medicare, is higher than this year’s Pentagon budget and is more than five times what the federal government spends on education each year.

All this is maddening for another reason. In recent decades, Republicans held themselves out as the party of “fiscal responsibility”. But they’ve really become the party of fiscal irresponsibility. During George W Bush’s two terms, with his tax cuts tilted toward the wealthy and his expensive, ill-fated war against Iraq, the federal debt ballooned by 85% (by $4.9tn). In Trump’s first term, the debt soared by $7.8tn (a 39% increase), stemming from his initial big tax cuts for the rich as well as increased Pentagon spending – and then there was more than $2tn in emergency spending to stabilize the economy during the first year of the Covid-19 pandemic.

During Trump’s second term, the debt is likely to soar by nearly $8tn once again. Trump is pushing for a record $1.5tn annual defense budget, far higher than any previous year, even though it will send our country’s debt further into the stratosphere. Some of that money will go to redesigning aircraft carriers merely because Trump dislikes how the current ones look.

Bill Clinton was the last president to have an annual budget surplus, but Democratic presidents have also pushed up the federal debt. During Biden’s four years as president, the debt rose $8.4tn, partly because of the annual budget deficits he inherited from Trump and partly because of his $2tn-plus pandemic-era emergency spending package to stabilize families’ finances and ensure the US didn’t sink into a deep economic downturn.

The federal debt has grown even larger than the country’s overall gross domestic product. Indeed, the ratio of the debt to GDP will soon be higher than the record 106% where it stood when the second world war ended. Franklin D Roosevelt ran up huge debts for an urgent reason: to defeat Nazi Germany and its allies. In sharp contrast, under Trump, the US is running big deficits, of approximately $2tn a year, for the opposite of urgent reasons: to finance a disastrous war in Iran and to give big tax giveaways to two powerful groups that were already prospering, eg the ultra-wealthy and corporations.

It would be a very different thing if Trump were borrowing money to build a better future, as people do to build a new house or pay for college. But Trump is not jacking up the country’s debt to improve our future; he’s not spending to improve education, childcare or our country’s infrastructure or to fix the housing crisis.

I am not a fiscal conservative and nor are many Democrats, but it is a real concern that for the first time in US history, other countries and many investors seem truly worried about the record size of the federal debt. Those worries have spooked financial markets and pushed up interest rates.

As the midterm elections heat up, the Democrats should attack Trump and the Republicans over the huge, fast-growing federal debt. Democrats need to make clear that Republicans have become the party of fiscal irresponsibility.

We can agree that the $40tn debt isn’t a sexy issue, but the Democrats can and should turn it into a hard-hitting and winning campaign issue that they can use to hammer Trump and the Republicans, along with the affordability crisis and Trump’s calamitous war against Iran.

Steven Greenhouse is a journalist and author.

Donald Trump's Caligula Trap- How to get out of Iran without admitting he surrendered and failed

In Iran, Trump’s victory claims only deepened a self-made catastrophe published in The Guardian by Sidney Blumenthal

Before Donald Trump finally surrendered in his Iran war, he declared victory several dozen times, including on day eight– “We’ve already won!” – day 10 – “The war is very complete”– day 12, proclaiming he had won five times in 13 seconds – “We’ve won, let me say we’ve won.

You know, you never like to say too early you won, we won, ❗we won won five times in 13 seconds – “We’ve won, let me say we’ve won. You know, you never like to say too early you won, we won, we won the bet in the first hour it was over”– and day 39 –“Total and complete victory, 100%. No question about it”– and claimed a deal to end the war was just around the corner 38 times. The first time he raised the prospect of peace, on day 24, he said the two sides had reached “almost all points of agreement”.

Trump boldly affixed his signature with a sharpie to the Memorandum Of Understanding (MOU surrender) on day 110, the 17th of June, at the Palace of Versailles, where the ruinous treaty concluding the first world war was signed. He seemed oblivious to the historical symbolism of the place, but bedazzled by its gold. “Versailles is not gold leaf – Versailles is the real deal,” he remarked.

At a press conference beforehand, the secretary of state, Marco Rubio, stood stone-faced as an Easter Island statue, perhaps hoping nobody would notice him, but still tainted with the war by his presence. Trump said about his absent vice-president, who was queasy about the whole venture but has now been assigned the task of defending it: “If it doesn’t work out, I’m blaming JD.”

The next day, Vance insisted🙄 🤥the war was a “win” and falsely stated that lifting oil sanctions was “not a new benefit” for Iran. Trump, who invariably chooses a fall guy for his own failures, apparently does not wish to have anyone become his successor. Vance, for his part, promptly pointed at Israel, where Trump’s MOU is universally excoriated, as the fall guy. “If I was in the cabinet of the Israeli government,” Vance said, “I might not be attacking the only powerful ally that I have anywhere left in the entire world.” Vance has been delegated to drink from the poisoned chalice. Welcome to Jonestown.

That day, 18 June, Israel Hayom, the rightwing newspaper that is a mouthpiece for the prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and is published by Miriam Adelson, who gave more than $100m to the 2024, Trump campaign, ran a lead editorial addressed to Trump: “...you have gravely harmed the human interests of the enlightened world, and you may be remembered forever as the president who brought about America’s humiliation. You betrayed us, the Israelis. And in a single moment, the contempt you once faced suddenly seems so justified and logical.” Netanyahu, who delivered his fate into Trump’s hands, forgot that Trump abandoned even his mentor, the mob lawyer Roy Cohn, in the end.

Trump lost his war on day one. In fact, Iran first effectively closed the strait of Hormuz following US and Israeli airstrikes that day and formally closed it two days later, achieving asymmetric strategic superiority through control over a crucial spigot of the global economy. On day 43, 11 April, Trump tweeted: “The United States has completely destroyed Iran’s Military, including their entire Navy and Air Force, and everything else.” Trump could not distinguish between tactics and strategy. He confused bombs and bombast with the mission, which eluded him. The more he bombed, the more he lost the plot.

Without any strategic comprehension, Trump’s triumphalism only deepened the bitterness and anger that has followed his eventual loss. In brief, he elevated the Iranian regime into a regional hegemon and a power in the world economy; persuaded the Gulf states that the US is an unreliable ally that could not shield them; increased the influence everywhere of China; condemned Israel after
Netanyahu hustled Trump into a fiasco that other presidents had carefully avoided; further alienated our European allies that prudently distanced themselves; drastically wasted US military power; and shattered US prestige. By the time he had finished, nobody on any side believed Trump should be taken at his word.

In fact, the exercise of Trump exposing himself yet again as a mountebank* is redundant, but now catastrophic with the whole world watching.

What Trump succeeded in obliterating was any rationale he offered for going to war in the first place. He had claimed he already accomplished regime change in Iran amid his dire threats. On day 39, 7 April, he tweeted: “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again. I don’t want that to happen, but it probably will. However, now that we have Complete and Total Regime Change, where different, smarter, and less radicalized minds prevail, maybe something revolutionarily wonderful can happen, WHO KNOWS?”

Trump provided his own refutation on day 110, 16 June, piling on praise for the Iranian regime that had consolidated as a theocratic military dictatorship: “You talk about regime change. I never cared about regime change. It [was] never a part … And we’re dealing with people that I think are very rational people. They were nice to deal with. They were strong people, smart people. I think actually they’re smarter than the first and second group, but they’re not radicalized and they’re, you know, looking to help their country.”

Trump is in a class of his own as an American president in launching a war of aggression without a casus belli, a direct offensive provocation, and losing it in short order.

Other presidents haunted by the shadow of defeat in war knew it would discredit them. Two days after John F Kennedy’s assassination, on 24 November 1963, Lyndon Johnson told the US ambassador to South Vietnam, Henry Cabot Lodge Jr: “I am not going to lose Vietnam.” Three years later, Johnson confessed privately: “I just can’t be the architect of surrender.” “I won’t be the first American president to lose a war,” he told the undersecretary of state George Ball.

President Richard Nixon uttered virtually the same words. “I’m not going to be the first American president to lose a war,” he told his aides in October 1969. Both Johnson and Nixon were undone as they struggled with their inability to end a war they did not begin but which they escalated, as the Pentagon Papers revealed, through vain attempts to achieve what Nixon called “peace with honor”.

Leaders in democracies that lose wars inevitably lose office. There is no case anywhere of a democratic leader politically surviving the loss of a war.

(George W Bush was re-elected in 2004, before the defeat materialized in Iraq and Afghanistan, which by 2016, had broken the Reagan-Bush era of the Republican party and greatly contributed to the rise of Trump.) Despots historically have retained power in the aftermath of defeat only through ruthless repression, coercive control of media and scapegoating, which makes the revolt against them more explosive when it comes.

On day 107, 14 June, Trump’s birthday, Trump had announced the sketchy MOU as “complete”. “Congratulations to all!” he crowed.

In a boon to Iran, Trump waived oil export sanctions, opened access to tens of billions of dollars in frozen assets, and committed to a mysteriously funded $300bn “Reconstruction Plan” that might have unspecified side deals, while entering into 60 days of negotiations to limit Iran’s nuclear program more than eight years after he withdrew from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action negotiated under President Obama in which Iran pledged not to develop a nuclear weapon. Trump called it a “horrible, one-sided deal that should have never, ever been made”.

On that day, his 80th birthday, Trump staged matches of the UltimateFighting Championship on the South Lawn of the White House in a cage under his gargantuan “claw” as though he had won the war and the fighters victorious in the ring represented his strength. His circus was the opening act of his culture of defeat and its denial.

When asked on day 111, 18 June, by an Axios reporter what insight the war had revealed to him about “the limits of his ability to exert power”, Trump replied: “There are no limits. I haven’t learned that lesson yet. I know there are, but there are no limits.” He claimed that the Iranian signing of the MOU was “probably unconditional surrender”. Trump had called for Iran’s “unconditional surrender” on day seven, 6 March.

On 18 June, Trump also declared victory over the algae blooms in the Reflecting Pool that had turned it green after he granted two no-bid contracts for $16m to a firm that previously performed pool work at a Trump golf club but had no history of federal contracting and a campaign contributor and Mar-a-Lago club member who was twice criminally convicted. The interior department tweeted: “The Reflecting Pool water is crystal clear,🤥 and our National Park Service team is now vacuuming up the dead algae resting on the bottom of some parts of the Reflecting Pool – just like the destroyed Iranian Navy resting on the bottom of the Persian Gulf.”  🙄

Trump said the pool would “probably” have to be drained again and accused “Radical Left Lunatics” of sabotaging his project with a knife and chemicals, though he presented no evidence. He tweeted about “terrible vandals” and “serious crimes… Years in jail!” On 19 June, the Park police arrested a 67-year-old former Olympic cyclist on a misdemeanor charge of destroying government property for reaching into the pool to touch the “American flag blue” peeling paint. He was released within hours – day 113, another quagmire, another defeat.

In 40AD, the Emperor Caligula, notorious for his inability to “control his natural cruelty and viciousness”, as well as his “gluttony and adultery”. according to the historian Suetonius, marched his legions to the shore of the English Channel to invade Britain, where he suddenly ordered his soldiers to gather seashells as the “spoils” of war. “As a monument of his victory he erected a lofty tower, from which lights were to shine at night to guide the course of ships,” and staged a return to Rome “on his birthday in an ovation”.

Trump is now caught in his miserable Caligula Trap** from which he cannot extract himself. Mocking his self-congratulatory language, Marjorie Taylor Greene, the former Republican member of Congress and Maga queen, posted on the day Trump signed the MOU: “Congratulations to all for almost achieving peace to the war that is not a war, spending hundreds of billions of US tax dollars again for another foreign war after we voted no … This, apparently, is what winning looks like.”

Sidney Blumenthal, former senior adviser to President Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton, has published three books of a projected five-volume political life of Abraham Lincoln:

*a person who deceives others, especially in order to trick them out of their money

**Caligula Trap is a rhetorical or political concept describing a situation where someone makes self-congratulatory claims or declares false victories that they cannot extract themselves from without admitting the deception.

Donald Trump created another failed 250th birthday dud embarrassing to all Americans: Trump-land is a bust

Donald Trump’s dreadful Great American State Fair
Attendance is sparse and the heat is extreme, but at least you can pay 💲9 for lemonade.

A storm, overpriced food and a sad ferris wheel : inside Trump’s dreadful state fair published in The Guaardian,by Adam Gabbatt

Attendance at the Great American State Fair is sparse and the heat is extreme, but at least you can pay 💲25 for a pretzel

I have been to some disappointing fairs in my time. There was one, in a small town in north-west England, where the main attraction was a little slide that you rode down on a burlap sack: except the guy who owned the slide had forgotten to bring the sacks, so me and my sister slid down on a T-shirt.

Another time, at a village fete in a place called Longton, I won the main prize at the bingo. It was a whisky decanter with a bottle of whiskey. I was 11 years old, the decanter was broken and some bigger boys took the whiskey. More recently, I looked on as two farmers engaged in a shouting match over whose pumpkin was larger at a fair in Iowa.

Such exposure means I’m probably better equipped than most to see the possibility in Donald Trump’s Great American State Fair, but even given my breadth of bad fair experiences, the Trump National Mall even sounds absolutely dreadful.🤢

“A rather embarrassing flop,” MS Now wrote. “A big ol’ dud”, was the verdict of Slate. “To put it simply, miserable,” the New Republic ruled, while USA Today said witnessing the failure of Trump’s fair is “like watching your high school bully host a party that no one attends”.

What makes it so bad❓

Well for one thing, very few people seem to have been going. For another, the fair’s signature attraction, a (quite small) ferris wheel, was plagued by power cuts on the first day. And despite organizers’ claims that 56 states and territories would be represented, each given their own booths at the event, several declined to participate due to the high cost.

The opening ceremony was meant to be a musical extravaganza, featuring acts including Martina McBride, Bret Michaels, The Commodores, Morris Day and the Time, Young MC, Flo Rida, but most of those performers pulled out, several saying they had been unaware the event would have a political undertone.

Instead, people attending opening night got a performance from Trump: specifically, a campaign-style rally during which Trump trotted out his usual claims about how the US is the “hottest country anywhere in the world”. (Ironically, the Virginia booth at the fair was closed on Tuesday due to extreme heat, and the fair itself was forced to close early on its second day, because of a storm.)

Things got worse when a Confederate flag had to be removed from a booth at the fair, prompting one of the sponsors to drop out. Then there was more negative publicity as people found out how much things cost at the event: $25 for a pretzel, $23 for a turkey leg, $9 for a lemonade.

Against this backdrop, Fox (FAKE❗)News has valiantly tried to put positive spin on the fair, like White Star Line claiming people had enjoyed a very pleasant four days at sea before the Titanic hit that iceberg. The channel even broadcast live from the fair on Monday, the idea being to champion the event. But, as the journalist Aaron Rupar documented, all that achieved was to prove that very few people were in attendance.

So what have we learned❓ Maybe the lesson is: don’t try to throw a big celebratory fair when you are a historically unpopular president. Or: if you do host a fair, make sure it is a) good, and b) doesn’t have a racist flag on display.

The fair is larger than the ones I went to as a kid. 

But you know what ❓At least in the past, those fairs were fun. And cheap. The sack/T-shirt slide only cost 20p. The scar on my knee, sustained when friction caused the T-shirt to rip❓ That will last a lifetime.

Main Stream media not holing the evil Trumpzi administration to the same standards as with President Joe Biden

 

Trump self-deals, lies and seems to fall asleep in meetings. The media treats it all as ‘priced in’ (IOW already reflects all known information and expected) published in The Guardian by Margaret Sullivan.

As for the corporate news media, they remain highly distractible and largely deferential.

Trump is a sleety sleepy criminal 🥱  

Trump's insane screeds on his ❗ social media posts are unhinged. He falls asleep in meetings. He proudly proclaims he’s not thinking “even a little bit” about Americans’ personal finances in talks with Iran. And he lies constantly about the supposed success of the war with Iran he started for no good reason.  (To quote Joseph Heller in Catch 22: "From now on I will think only about myself". 🤢) 

That’s just the start, of course, when it comes to Donald Trump’s disastrous second presidency. There’s the ruination of the Kennedy Center, the building of a ballroom (or bunker?) to replace the White House East Wing, and the wrecking ball that the Trump-aligned supreme court has taken to the voting rights of Black Americans. There’s the endless self-dealing and the abuse of the justice department’s intended purpose.

And yet, the mainstream media doesn’t make much of any of that, not in any sustained way.

The shocking excesses and corruption of Trump 2.0 are “priced in”.

These outrages, for the most part, are largely treated as, well, Trump being Trump.

It’s as if much of big media has decided that it’s too much trouble to focus, in any sustained way, on developments that would have resulted in weeks of headlines, if not impeachment and conviction, in the pre-Trump era. And certainly in the President Biden era.

“I simply cannot believe I live in a timeline where journalists helped force the last president out of his reelection campaign for being too old, so the country put an unstable 79-year-old who falls asleep constantly in office and none of the same journalists care at all,” one observer, Jamesetta Williams, put it succinctly on X/ (formerly Twitter).

Next month, Trump turns 80. He functions with no apparent restraints, and it seems doubtful that the situation will improve any time soon.

Some extreme outrages do rise to the surface, provoking a raised eyebrow or two.

The New York Times gave its lead news position in print the other day to his “anti-weaponization fund” of 💲1.8bn. It’s intended to use taxpayer money to compensate his allies – maybe including the January 6, convicted criminal rioters who attacked police officers – for being prosecuted by an earlier iteration of the US justice department.

Reporters quoted Donald K Sherman, president of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, a legal watchdog organization, calling it “one of the single most corrupt acts in American history”. And a sub-headline made a carefully distanced reference to “critics” who call this a slush fund.

Ah, the critics. There they are again.

The mainstream media largely shrugged off the slush-fund story, depicting it as politics as usual – no cause for alarm or sustained coverage. The NBC evening newscast by Wednesday had moved on, focusing instead on Raúl Castro’s indictment, the California wildfires and a car explosion in lower Manhattan. And Fox News, home to the fervid Maga base, offered cursory coverage both on the air and online, giving an obligatory nod to Democratic lawmakers who voiced their objections, but mostly handing the network’s microphone to Trump allies such as JD Vance and the loyalist acting attorney general, Todd Blanche.

Granted, there have been a few recent pieces about Trump’s apparent physical and mental decline, including one by Jonathan Lemire in the Atlantic. He acknowledged that Trump hasn’t faced the same scrutiny for his age-related decline as Biden did, and pointed out “questions about his health and increasingly erratic behavior”.

But it didn’t get all that much attention. Nothing does.

One of the problems, of course, is that there’s just so much.

Journalists get geared up to cover one outrage – $1bn for ballroom security! – when another one comes along: $1.8bn for the slush fund!

And ever onward.

Now he’s dissing Americans’ worries about their family budgets, but that fades as he schmoozes the next authoritarian dictator, or threatens “a friendly takeover of Cuba”.

“Flood the zone with shit,” was the way former Trump aide Steve Bannon once described the media strategy. It’s turned out to be a highly effective technique.

One almost can’t blame overwhelmed citizens for wanting to hide their heads in the sand, despite the extraordinary dangers of doing so.

As for the corporate news media, they remain highly distractible and largely deferential. Also, not really unhappy since Trump provides constant outrage, which makes for news, and then he moves on

They do, too.

Often, it falls to independent voices – not associated with corporate media – to say the obvious, loud and clear.

Terry Moran, formerly of ABC News and now on Substack, called the slush fund “plunder” in a recent post, and urged mainstream media to stop using “weasel words”, like unusual or controversial, to report on it. Moran called an associated development, the shielding of the Trump family’s entire tax history from scrutiny, for all time, as “breathtakingly corrupt”.

You won’t hear THAT on the evening news or in the rest of mainstream media.
By the time you read this, they’ll already have moved on. 💢

Margaret Sullivan is a Guardian US columnist writing on media, politics and culture.

Donald Trump and maga Republicans support evil Stephen Miller and his wife Katie Miller cruel child separation from immigrant parents

Evil Stephen Miller delivers for Trump: 145,000 US kids separated from their parents:  A thinktank investigation shows how immigration detention has torn apart families, and experts point to trauma.  Published in The Guardian by Arwa Mahdawi

More than 53,000 citizen children with a detained parent were estimated to be under the age of six. 😢

Evil Stephen Miller, Donald Trump’s immigration czar and the architect of some of the government’s cruelest policies, doesn’t care what you think about him. He doesn’t care if you call him “Pee-wee German” or “Weird Stephen” or “Voldemort”, or any of the other nicknames he has inspired; his self-esteem is excellent. (Try Miller's doppelganger, Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi public relations officer and chief architect of the regime's messaging.)

Joseph Goebbels (29 October 1897 – 1 May 1945)

“I have a very, very secure, intact ego,” Miller told Fox (Fake❗) News’s Jesse Watters this week after being asked how he felt about his wife, Katie Miller, potentially landing a big distribution deal with Paramount for her terrible Maga podcast. “I’ve never had a larger fan following,” Miller continued. “[A]ny man who works for Donald Trump is a man that is very, very strong and self-assured in his role.”

Well, yes, I suppose you’ve got to be a very, very strong man to separate babies from their parents – which is what Miller will forever be famous for. Back in Trump 1.0, Miller played a key role in implementing a “zero tolerance” border policy that systematically removed more than 5,000 immigrant children, some just a few months old, from their parents at the US-Mexico border. 

A Human Rights Watch report released in December 2024, found that as many as 1,360 children had never been reunited with their parents.😟😠😢

Trump is not the first president to detain or deport the parents of US citizen minors. Nevertheless, he’s doing it at a much faster rate, and in a much crueler way, than his predecessor. 

A data analysis by ProPublica published in March found “ICE arrests of parents doubled in the first seven months of Trump’s second term compared with the President Joseph Biden administration”. It also found mothers were being more aggressively targeted: “Trump is deporting about four times as many moms of US citizen children per day as Biden did.” A Guardian investigation from May uncovered similar statistics.

Another change from Biden administration norms are the guidelines on how immigration officers should exercise their discretion when it comes to families. “A document once known as the Parental Interests Directive has been given a new name under Trump – the Detained Parents Directive,” writes ProPublica. “And its preamble, which once instructed agents to handle immigrant parents in a way that was ‘humane,’ has been stripped of the word.”

Again:  Sadly, Trump is not the first president to separate US citizen children from their immigrant parents. But no other administration has been so callous about the welfare of the children affected. “The bottom line is that there is no systematic approach to protecting the children of those detained by ICE,” the Brookings report states. There is “no government entity … responsible for their wellbeing”. There also isn’t adequate record-keeping, meaning we have little idea what is happening to all these children.

What we do know, of course, is that many of these children are going to be immensely traumatized. Kelly Kribs, an attorney at the Young Center, told the Guardian in May that the separation crisis unfolding now is even more insidious than the family separation policy from Trump 1.0. “It’s leading to all the same forms of trauma that we saw unfold back in 2018,” said Kribs. “But the speed and the scale of the separations now is at a level we’ve never seen before.”

One suspects that the Millers, who have three kids of their own, are not particularly perturbed by these 145,000 traumatized children. Stephen met his wife, Katie, when they both worked for Trump during his first term, and she is just as hawkish on immigration as he is. “DHS sent me to the border to see the separations for myself – to try to make me more compassionate – but it didn’t work,” Katie boasted to Jacob Soboroff in 2018, according to his book, Separated. She added that colleagues told her she’d think about family separation differently when she had her own kids: “But I don’t think so.” Perhaps she’ll share some more of her charming views with us on The Katie Miller Podcast. (a weekly talk-show style series hosted by conservative communications strategist Katie Miller.)

Iran deployed drones and missiles to punishing effect, but knows that its chief weapon is causing economic pain

Whatever happens next, the poor will pay 💲

The Guardian Editorial

More than 3,300 Iranians, including 383😢 children, have been killed since the US and Israel launched their illegal war, authorities said this week. Asked about Wednesday’s ceasefire deadline, Donald Trump first said that he expected to resume bombing, then unilaterally announced that he was extending the truce “until discussions are concluded”.

Orange man flip flops😕

Whatever happens – or doesn’t – ❓with the US-Iranian peace talks due to take place in Islamabad, the costs of this disastrous (illegal❗) conflict will keep growing. The only thing that the sides have in common is that each needs peace, but thinks that it can force the other into significant concessions. (Clearly Donald Trump is dangerous because he has no idea what he is doing.)

The Iranian economy was already in a desperate state, thanks to years of sanctions and state failure. But the system has been built to withstand coercion and so far, the regime has survived the military and strategic pressure piled on it. It also knows the US bill is eye-watering. The White House last week declined senators’ requests to provide a figure, but the Pentagon has reportedly briefed that military costs topped 💲11.3bn in the first six days alone. That’s widely regarded as an underestimate. 

Professor Linda Bilmes, a Harvard public finance expert, suggests that the war is ultimately likely to cost the US $1tn when factors such as interest payments and long-term veteran-related expenses are included.

Those direct costs are only the start. Ricocheting oil prices have enriched those wealthy enough to speculate on their movement with remarkably perfect timing. But the American Enterprise Institute estimates that the total cost to the average US household, including, for example, higher oil prices, is equivalent to 💲410. The Century Foundation suggests that these “economic poisons” are all the harder for US voters to swallow when the conflict is morally and strategically unwarranted.

UK households will be an estimated £480 a year poorer. The UN development program warned that Arab countries faced an economic contraction of between 💲120bn and 💲194bn after just one month of war. Even China, initially relatively sanguine, appears to be growing more concerned about the impact. But, rising food prices hit the poorest – who spend more of their income on sustenance – the hardest. The World Food Program warned last month that 45 million more people, primarily in Asia and Africa, could fall into acute food insecurity.

Need is rising as aid budgets have been slashed. It is obscene that the money squandered on taking lives could have saved so many – 87 million, according to the UN humanitarian chief, Tom Fletcher. It is equally so that more lives will be lost because of this conflict’s economic impact. Peace tomorrow wouldn’t fix the damage. But the longer that this war continues, the greater the devastation that will be wrought.

Iran has deployed its drones and missiles to punishing effect, but knows that its chief weapon is the economic pain it can inflict, primarily through control of the Strait of Hormuz. The International Monetary Fund warned last week that a further escalation could trigger a global recession. Its head, Kristalina Georgieva, had already said that the crisis would remain a threat to the global economy even if it ended overnight. The costs mount over time.  Although the pain is widely spread, it is far from evenly shared. The combination of higher energy, food and fertilizer costs will increasingly hammer poorer and heavily import-reliant nations.

History researchers uncover chilling correlations between Nazi Germany propaganda and Donald Trump racial profiling

Nazi letters reveal paper restorers’ role in compiling Holocaust ‘hitlist’. Researchers continue to uncover Nazi history to show the purposeful intent to create propaganda to support protecting a dominant race and to justify the evil Holocaust. 

Exclusive echo report published in The Guardian: Research uncovers program to make centuries-old records legible to detect people’s ancestry.

Adolf Hitler (1889-1945) dictator of Germany

Large numbers of paper restorers and bookbinders were recruited by the Nazis and “contributed directly to genocide” during the second world war, according to research.

A British historian has uncovered a Europe-wide program in the 1930s, and 1940s, in which restorers repaired and cleaned historic church and civil records, making them legible so that the Nazis could detect anyone with Jewish ancestry.

Dr. Morwenna Blewett, a researcher in conservation history and associate member of Worcester College, University of Oxford, unearthed Nazi letters and other material showing the role played by craftspeople in restoring registers of births, conversions, baptisms and marriages to seek out inherited “racial” status.

In various public institutions including the German federal archives in Berlin, she found documents that show the complicity of these conservators, restorers and paper chemists, who used their skills within Germany and in occupied countries.

“They were creating an accumulated record of who might potentially be killed – a kind of hitlist, really,” she said. “They went above and beyond to enforce their ‘racial’ registration of populations.”

Six million Jews were killed in the Holocaust. “Even though it was known that there was this need to prove your heritage,” Blewett said, she “looked into the actual technical nuts and bolts of how this was achieved through cleaning documents.

“I found in the archives official documents about engaging bookbinders, as well as letters between various officials talking about cleaning documents, in the hope that these records would represent ‘racial purity’.”

Surviving administrative records show that by 1940 a master bookbinder called Franz Krause, from Neisse, a town now in south-west Poland, was among those recruited.

Art Restoration Under the Nazi Regime' book launch - Worcester College

In one passage, a Nazi official wrote: “German church books, which capture the smallest place and every little farmstead in their closely bound mass of more than a hundred thousand volumes, are by far the most important source for the German population history, the proof of descent and the genealogy.”

Manuscripts dating back several centuries were illegible because they had become fragile, dirty and moldy.

Despite their potential importance as historical papers, the restorers used “quite destructive processes”, Blewett said. “They weren’t ensuring the safety of the historic objects, they were making them readable. It didn’t really matter to them what these objects were.”

For example, manuscript pages were saturated with glycerin to make the entries legible, even though that fell short of accepted conservation practice of the time. 

“The physical rubbing in of glycerin risked tearing already damaged paper as well as softening the paper fibes by swelling them,” Blewett said. “I also found promotional material from technical companies that made laminating material that was used to preserve very fragile pages to make them more readable.”

Blewett, who previously worked as a paintings conservator at the National Gallery in London, stumbled across the material in researching cultural heritage organizations set up under the Nazis. “I just found all this material and I didn’t understand why they were talking about bookbinding and cleaning church documents. That led me to look further into what the scheme was and what was related to producing proof of Aryan ancestry.”

Her research features in her new book, Art Restoration Under the Nazi Regime, published by Palgrave Macmillan this month. “Through their work, restorers conspired with the Nazi regime to aid and abet criminal acts,” Blewett writes in the book. “Their rewards were rich. But their reputations have largely remained unsullied.”

Michael Daley, the director of the ArtWatch UK restoration watchdog, said the research revealed a “shocking abuse of skill”. “How much power accrues to those who control the appearance of things – for good or ill,” he said.

In his first presidency, Donald Trump called journalists the enemy; a year into his second term, it’s clear that this time around, he’s treating us like one.

From Hungary to Russia, authoritarian regimes have made silencing independent media one of their defining moves. 

Sometimes, outright censorship isn’t even required to achieve this goal. In the United States, we have seen the administration apply various forms of pressure on news outlets in the year since Trump returned to office. One of our great disappointments is how quickly some of the most storied US media organizations have folded when faced with the mere specter of hostility from the administration – long before their hand was forced.

While private news organizations can choose how to respond to this government’s threats, insults and lawsuits, public media has been powerless to stop the defunding of federally supported television and radio. This has been devastating for local and rural communities, who stand to lose not only their primary source of local news and cultural programming, but health and public safety information, including emergency alerts.

While we cannot make up for this loss, the Guardian is proud to make our fact-based work available for free to all, especially when the internet is increasingly flooded with slanted reporting, misinformation and algorithmic drivel. 🙏