Tag: donald trump

Report: Netanyahu set to pitch Trump on renewed plans to strike Iran

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is reportedly set to pitch President Donald Trump on renewed plans to strike Iran, citing concerns over the country’s efforts to rebuild and expand its ballistic missile program, which was damaged during the Twelve-Day War earlier this year, according to an NBC News report.

In the upcoming meeting, scheduled for December 29th, Netanyahu is expected to discuss concerns about Iran rebuilding the production capabilities of its ballistic missile program and its nuclear enrichment program, both of which were damaged by Israeli and American strikes.

The concerns echo the reasoning behind Israel’s decision to launch preemptive military strikes against Iran in June, targeting its missile production capabilities and nuclear enrichment infrastructure.

The NBC report claimed that Israeli officials stated that Iran’s efforts to rebuild its destroyed air defenses and ballistic missile production infrastructure represent immediate concerns for the Israeli government, prompting Netanyahu to request a meeting with the president.

At the meeting, Netanyahu is reportedly expected to present President Trump with several options, including the possibility of the United States actively participating in or supporting the operation, according to the outlet.

“The nuclear weapons program is very concerning. There’s an attempt to reconstitute. [But] it’s not that immediate,” a source with knowledge of the Israeli government’s thinking told NBC.

“There is no real question after the last conflict that we can gain aerial superiority and can do far more damage to Iran than Iran can do to Israel,” another source added. “But the threat of the missiles is very real, and we weren’t able to prevent them all last time.”

During the Twelve-Day War, Iran launched over 500 ballistic missiles and roughly 1,100 drones at Israel, killing 32 and wounding over 3,000, according to health officials.

Meanwhile, White House spokeswoman Anna Kelly stated that the “International Atomic Energy Agency and Iranian government corroborated the United States government’s assessment that Operation Midnight Hammer totally obliterated Iran’s nuclear capabilities.”

“As President Trump has said, if Iran pursued a nuclear weapon, that site would be attacked and would be wiped out before they even got close,” she added.

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Trump-Appointed Judge Threatens Government With Contempt After ICE Detains Illegal Immigrant in Filthy Long Island Facility

A federal judge appointed by President Trump has delivered a blistering condemnation of U.S. immigration authorities, going so far as to threaten the government with contempt of court.

U.S. District Judge Gary Brown, appointed to the bench by Trump in 2019, issued a 24-page ruling excoriating the Department of Homeland Security for what he described as “putrid and cramped” conditions under which Immigration and Customs Enforcement detained an illegal immigrant on Long Island.

Brown warned that ICE could face contempt of court after repeatedly ignoring judicial orders and holding a detainee overnight in a cramped, filthy holding cell never designed for long-term confinement.

The case centers on Erron Anthony Clarke, a Jamaican national, who entered the United States legally in 2018 on an H-2B work visa. After overstaying the visa, which is illegal, Clarke married a U.S. citizen in 2023 and applied for permanent residency earlier this year.

Clarke was detained by ICE on December 5, along with eight other men, who were confined for days at a time in a small “hold room” at the Central Islip Federal Courthouse.

That cell, Judge Brown noted, was designed to hold one person briefly, not to warehouse nine men for days on end.

The conditions described were:

  • No beds, bunks, or mattresses
  • Detainees forced to sleep on a filthy concrete floor
  • An open toilet in the center of the room with no privacy
  • No showers, soap, toothbrushes, or clean clothing
  • Lights left on 24 hours a day
  • Freezing temperatures at night, with outside lows near 21 degrees

Judge Brown noted that the facility was explicitly barred by deed from housing detainees overnight. On December 11, Brown ruled Clarke’s detention violated due process and ordered his immediate release.

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Trump’s Expanded Drug War Will Make Overdose Crisis Worse, Experts Say

As President Donald Trump exploits fear about fentanyl to justify military aggression in Latin America, experts warn that his administration’s choice to slash federal support for public health programs threatens to erode progress in reducing fatal overdoses linked to synthetic opioids.

Trump issued an executive order on Monday declaring fentanyl a “weapon of mass destruction” that could be weaponized for “concentrated, large-scale terror attacks by organized adversaries.” Experts say fentanyl is not used as a weapon and dismissed the order as a public relations ploy as the administration struggles to explain its legal justification for waging a deadly international drug war without approval from Congress.

The order is the latest line in a series of massive escalations in Trump’s drug war. Trump and his “Secretary of War” Pete Hegseth are engaged military adventurism in the Caribbean Sea and Pacific Ocean, building up significant U.S. naval forces near Venezuela and blowing up boats the administration accuses of ferrying drugs in a campaign experts have classified as extrajudicial killings. Trump has ordered a naval blockade around Venezuela while threatening to oust President Nicolas Maduro.

The administration has spent months attempting to tie Maduro, and Venezuelans more broadly, to drug crimes in the U.S. while labeling such crimes as terrorism. After taking office, Trump declared the Venezuelan prison gang Tren de Aragua a “foreign terrorist organization” and called Maduro a “narco-terrorist” while rounding up Venezuelan immigrants and removing them to a notorious El Salvadoran prison. Most had no criminal convictions.

U.S. airstrikes have sunk at least 28 boats and killed more than 100 people since September, according to reports and to Zeteo’s strike tracker. The administration claims the boats are engaged in “narco-terrorist” activity, but the White House and Pentagon have not publicly released evidence that the victims are drug traffickers. The family of one man killed in a September 15 strike has said that the U.S. illegally murdered a law-abiding fisherman from Colombia, not a drug smuggler.

If any of the boats destroyed from the sky were ferrying drugs, it would most likely be cocaine, which is primarily produced in northwestern South America. Overdoses often involve multiple substances, but the overdose crisis is generally fueled by powerful synthetic stimulants, opioids, and tranquilizers — not cocaine, which is derived from the coca plant and is used by only a fragment of the population. Cocaine is typically more expensive than synthetics.

Maritza Perez Medina, director of federal affairs at the Drug Policy Alliance, said bullying Venezuela and attacking small boats will do nothing to prevent people from using fentanyl in the U.S. and could make the overdose crisis worse.

“This administration is not thinking in terms of solutions,” Medina said in an interview. “They are clearly using people’s fear of fentanyl as a pretext for implementing the president’s agenda, which includes taking away our civil liberties and actually putting us in more danger by potentially creating conflicts in other parts of the world.”

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How Washington’s Syrian Caper Debunks the Case for Empire

Sometimes a microcosm sheds a powerful light on large-scale macro issues. That was surely the case with respect to last weekend’s news that five US military personnel were involved in an ambush in Syria, which resulted in three deaths and three wounded. The incident apparently was caused by a member of the Syrian security forces, according to the Syrian Interior Ministry, who opened fire on a joint US-Syrian military patrol near the ancient ruins of Palmyra in central Syria (about 134 miles northeast of Damascus).

Needless to say, this news ignited a chorus of WTFs among the non-drinkers of the Deep State Kool Aid who post on X and elsewhere. After all, what other response was there when it became clear that these five servicemen were among more than 2,000 acknowledged US military personnel operating in the no count cipher of Syria; and that there are likely hundreds more covert forces working for the CIA and other US black operations there, as well.

And, yes, we do mean a spec of a country. After all, the tiny orange dot below is the essentially land-locked location of Syria on a representation of the global map. Relatively speaking, it has no economy, no technology, no military, no nukes, no oil, no minerals and, well, no nuthin’ that could possibly bear on the Homeland Security of America, way over here 6,000 miles away on the far side of the Atlantic.

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Nine US attorneys resign over Trump administration’s ‘fraudulent’ anti-Semitism probe

Nine US attorneys resigned after being pressured by the administration of President Donald Trump to conclude that campuses had violated the civil rights of Jewish students and staff, according to a Los Angeles Times investigation exposing what has been described as a politically driven and legally baseless campaign targeting pro-Palestinian activism at the University of California (UC).

In interviews with The Times, nine former Department of Justice (DoJ) attorneys said they were instructed to prepare lawsuits against UC campuses even before investigations had begun, a practice one attorney described as a “fraudulent and sham investigation.”

“Initially we were told we only had 30 days to come up with a reason to be ready to sue UC,” said Ejaz Baluch, a former senior trial attorney tasked with probing alleged anti-Semitism at UCLA. “It shows just how unserious this exercise was. It was not about trying to find out what really happened.”

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At least 16 files disappear from DOJ site for Epstein documents, including Trump photo

At least 16 files disappeared from the Justice Department’s public webpage for documents related to Jeffrey Epstein — including a photograph showing President Donald Trump — less than a day after they were posted, with no explanation from the government and no notice to the public.

The missing files, which were available Friday and no longer accessible by Saturday, included images of paintings depicting nude women, and one showing a series of photographs along a credenza and in drawers. In that image, inside a drawer among other photos, was a photograph of Trump, alongside Epstein, Melania Trump and Epstein’s longtime associate Ghislaine Maxwell.

The Justice Department did not say why the files were removed or whether their disappearance was intentional. A spokesperson for the department did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Online, the unexplained missing files fueled speculation about what was taken down and why the public was not notified, compounding long-standing intrigue about Epstein and the powerful figures who surrounded him. Democrats on the House Oversight Committee pointed to the missing image featuring a Trump photo in a post on X, writing: “What else is being covered up? We need transparency for the American public.”

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WMDs for a MIC in Need

In the closing days of 2025, the White House turned an opioid crisis into a national security drama. Standing in the Oval Office during a Mexican Border Defense Medal ceremony on December 15, President Donald Trump declared that he would sign an executive order to classify fentanyl as a “weapon of mass destruction,” calling the announcement “historic.” Treating a synthetic painkiller like a nuclear bomb says more about Washington’s mindset than about the drug. Though drug overdose deaths declined in 2024, 80,391 people still died and 54,743 of those deaths were from opioids. Those numbers mark a public‑health emergency. Rather than tackle fentanyl abuse as a medical or social problem, the administration reframed it as an existential threat requiring military tools. Labeling a narcotic a WMD creates a pretext for war and sidesteps due process. This move grows out of a political culture that uses fear of invisible enemies—terrorists, microbes, drugs—to justify extraordinary power.

Past and present administrations have blurred the line between law enforcement and warfare. Since September 2025 the United States has launched more than twenty strikes on boats in the Caribbean and Pacific suspected of carrying narcotics, killing over eighty people. Experts note that little proof has been made public that the vessels contained drugs or that blowing them out of the water was necessary. Yet the assaults continued, and on December 10 the U.S. Navy seized a sanctioned Venezuelan oil tanker off Venezuela’s coast, sending oil prices higher. Trump boasted it was the largest tanker ever seized and said, when asked about the cargo, “We keep it, I guess.” Caracas denounced the action as “blatant theft.” The administration justified the operation as part of its anti‑drug campaign, but the target was not an unmarked speedboat; it was a carrier of crude oil, the sanctioned state’s main revenue source. Calling fentanyl a WMD makes such seizures look like acts of defense and blurs war and policing.

For students of recent history, this conflation of domestic threats with existential danger is hauntingly familiar. After September 11, 2001, President George W. Bush and his advisers claimed Iraq was developing anthrax, nerve gas and nuclear weapons. Vice President Dick Cheney insisted there was “no doubt” Saddam Hussein possessed WMD and was amassing them for use against America and its allies. Those arguments resonated with a populace still traumatized by the attacks. Fear allowed hawks to portray preemptive war as the only way to prevent a “mushroom cloud,” and in March 2003 the United States invaded Iraq. Investigations later found no factual basis for the claims that Iraq possessed WMD or collaborated with al‑Qaida. The smoking gun was a phantom, but by the time the truth emerged, Baghdad had been captured and the region destabilized for a generation.

One of the most tragic figures in that saga was Secretary of State Colin Powell. On February 5, 2003, he sat before the United Nations Security Council holding a glass vial he said could contain anthrax. He described Iraq’s alleged weapons labs and insisted the case was based on “solid intelligence.” The performance helped clinch support for war. Years later it became clear the intelligence was false and cherry‑picked, and no WMD were found. Powell later admitted the presentation was wrong and had blotted his record. Using a decorated officer’s credibility to sell a war built on falsehoods shows how propaganda can override reason.

The consequences of the Iraq War were catastrophic. The Defense Department records 4,418 U.S. service members dead in Operation Iraqi Freedom, including 3,481 killed in hostile action. Brown University’s Costs of War Project estimates that the post‑9/11 wars have cost the United States around $8 trillion and killed more than 900,000 people. About $2.1 trillion of that went to the Iraq/Syria theater. These figures exclude indirect deaths and future costs for veterans’ care. Millions of Iraqis were killed, injured or displaced, fueling sectarian violence and extremism. The war enriched defense contractors and expanded the military‑industrial complex while leaving ordinary people to pay the bill.

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Trump signs order to put Americans on the moon by 2028. But is it feasible?

President Trump issued an executive order on Thursday urging NASA to put Americans on the moon by 2028, signing it the same day NASA’s new Senate-confirmed administrator Jared Isaacman took office. 

The order, titled “Ensuring American Space Superiority,” emphasizes the role of the upcoming Artemis missions for Americans to journey to the moon and Mars.

NASA has targeted April 2026 for the launch of Artemis II. It would take the American astronauts in orbit around the moon — the furthest mission into deep space in human history. 

Artemis III would put people on the surface of the moon for the first time in the 21st century. NASA’s website has listed a mid-2027 launch date. 

But former NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine told the Senate Commerce Committee in a September hearing he doesn’t think the U.S. will be able to land astronauts on the moon by that date, nor by China’s stated goal of landing astronauts on the moon by 2030. 

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DOJ Wins Motion to Unseal Documents on Investigation into Trump Shooter Thomas Crooks

The Department of Justice announced that it successfully moved to unseal documents related to the investigation into would-be Trump assassin Thomas Crooks. 

“The Department of Justice received court approval to disclose to Congress documents gathered as part of the FBI’s investigation of Thomas Crooks and his attempt to assassinate President Trump,” the Western District of Pennsylvania announced on X.

A copy of the motion and order can be found here.

On July 13, Thomas Matthew Crooks shot President Trump in the ear from a nearby rooftop as he was speaking in Butler, Pennsylvania. One rallygoer was killed in the shooting, and two were injured.

Questions still remain surrounding the failure by law enforcement and Secret Service to secure the area, as well as Crooks’s background.

Crooks used a range finder device and flew a drone at the Butler rally site between approximately 3:50 and 4:05 pm that day, during a period when the Secret Service was allegedly experiencing connectivity issues.

An eyewitness at the scene told the BBC that several people witnessed the shooter crawling on the roof of a local building with a rifle before Trump was shot, but they did not act until Trump was shot. According to later reports, a police officer encountered the shooter on the roof but let him go after he pointed the gun at him and before he shot Trump.

It seems unlikely we will get answers, as the FBI recently concluded that he acted alone.

The records sought by the DOJ, “such as telephone and internet service providers, email services, financial institutions, and others,” relate to the grand jury investigation and were obtained under a grand jury subpoena.

“The United States seeks to disclose pre-existing business records that were created for purposes independent of the Crooks grand jury investigation. Disclosure will reveal only the information contained in the documents, and will not reveal what, if anything, occurred before the grand jury,” the motion reads.

“By moving to unseal these documents, we hope to give the American people more answers about that fateful day in Butler, Pennsylvania,” Attorney General Pam Bondi wrote on X, touting the Trump Administration as “the most transparent administration in American history.”

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Trump’s Designation of Fentanyl As a ‘Weapon of Mass Destruction’ Is a Drug-Fueled Delusion

Although President Donald Trump frequently decries the threat that fentanyl poses to Americans, his comments about the drug reveal several misconceptions about it. He thinks Canada is an important source of illicit fentanyl, which it isn’t. He thinks the boats targeted by his deadly military campaign against suspected cocaine couriers in the Caribbean and the eastern Pacific are carrying fentanyl, which they aren’t. Even if they were, his oft-repeated claim that he saves “25,000 American lives” each time he blows up one of those boats—which implies that he has already prevented nine times more drug-related deaths than were recorded in the United States last year—would be patently preposterous.

Trump’s fentanyl fantasies reached a new level of absurdity this week, when he issued an executive order “designating fentanyl as a weapon of mass destruction.” As relevant here, federal law defines a “weapon of mass destruction” (WMD) to include “any weapon that is designed or intended to cause death or serious bodily injury through the release, dissemination, or impact of toxic or poisonous chemicals.”

The fentanyl implicated in U.S. drug deaths is not a “weapon.” It is a psychoactive substance that Americans voluntarily consume, either knowingly or because they thought they were buying a different drug. Nor is that fentanyl “designed or intended” to “cause death or serious bodily injury.” It is designed or intended to get people high, and to make drug traffickers rich in the process.

Trump nevertheless claims “illicit fentanyl is closer to a chemical weapon than a narcotic.” How so? “Two milligrams, an almost undetectable trace amount equivalent to 10 to 15 grains of table salt, constitutes a lethal dose,” he says. But that observation also applies to licit fentanyl, which medical practitioners routinely and safely use as an analgesic or sedative.

Dentists, for example, frequently use fentanyl combined with a benzodiazepine such as diazepam (Valium) or midazolam (Versed) for “conscious sedation.” On a couple of occasions, I have received that combo during dental surgery. I was not at all worried that I would die of a drug overdose, and I certainly did not think my dental surgeon was attacking me with a weapon, let alone a weapon of mass destruction.

Contrary to what Trump implies, the danger posed by fentanyl in illicit drug markets is only partly a function of its potency. The core problem is that the introduction of fentanyl—initially as a heroin booster or replacement, later as an adulterant in stimulants or as pills passed off as legally produced pharmaceuticals—made potency, which was already highly variable, even harder to predict. It therefore compounded a perennial problem with black-market drugs: Consumers generally don’t know exactly what they are getting.

That is not true in legal drug markets, whether you are buying booze at a liquor store or taking narcotic pain relievers prescribed by your doctor. The difference was dramatically illustrated by what happened after the government responded to rising opioid-related deaths by discouraging and restricting opioid prescriptions. Although those prescriptions fell dramatically, the upward trend in opioid-related deaths not only continued but accelerated. That result was not surprising, since the crackdown predictably pushed nonmedical users toward black-market substitutes that were much more dangerous because their composition was uncertain and unpredictable.

The concomitant rise of illicit fentanyl compounded that hazard, and that development likewise was driven by the prohibition policy that Trump is so keen to enforce. Prohibition favors especially potent drugs, which are easier to conceal and smuggle. Stepped-up enforcement of prohibition tends to magnify that effect. From the perspective of traffickers, fentanyl had additional advantages: As a synthetic drug, it did not require growing and processing of crops, making its production less conspicuous and much cheaper.

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