Hungry like a war pig…
Tag: donald trump
U.S. State Department Cuts Fee to Renounce American Citizenship
It is now 80 percent cheaper for Americans who choose to renounce their U.S. citizenship to make it official.
The U.S. State Department on Friday published a rule that cut the cost from $2,350 to $450 after it was promised in 2023. However, the rule did not take effect until now, the Associated Press (AP) reported.
“The Department of State (‘Department’) is proposing to amend the Schedule of Fees for Consular Services (‘Schedule’) to reduce the current fee for Administrative Processing of a Request for a Certificate of Loss of Nationality of the United States (CLN) from $2,350 to $450,” the rule on the Federal Register website read.
The cost is once again what it was in 2010 when federal officials began charging a fee for the action, the AP report said.
“The fee was raised from $450 to $2,350 in 2015 to cover the administrative expenses as the number of people wanting to renounce their citizenship surged in part due to new U.S. tax reporting requirements for American expatriates that angered many,” the article noted, adding the process to renounce one’s U.S. citizenship is not always easy.
“Applicants must repeatedly confirm in multiple written and verbal attestations to a State Department consular officer that they understand the implications of the step before being allowed to take a formal oath of renunciation. It must then be reviewed by the department,” the AP stated.
In July, President Donald Trump told legalized immigrants they were accepting the “highest responsibility” in becoming citizens, according to Breitbart News.
The president then emphasized how special the moment was for them.
Ghislaine Maxwell’s Lawyer Says She Is Still Seeking a Trump Pardon, as the Epstein’s Accomplice Serves Her 20-Year Sex-Trafficking Sentence
Gmax is still looking for a pardon.
While all around the world the ‘Epstein files’ are causing ripples that affected the life of the rich and powerful, causing from reputational harm to criminal prosecutions, one woman continues to serve her sentence and dream of a pardon.
Jeffrey Epstein’s accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell was convicted of sex-trafficking and sentenced to 20 years in prison.
But after she collaborated with the DOJ by giving two days of testimony, she was transferred from the hard FCI Tallahassee in Florida to a ‘Club-Fed’ Camp Bryan in Texas.
But she wants more.
She has been trying to overturn her conviction and sentence by filing various appeals, and she is also still seeking a pardon from President Donald J. Trump, according to her lawyer.
Trump Says, ‘We Don’t Need Ukraine’s Help,’ Rejects Zelensky Offer of Assistance With Drone Defense
Quite the Trump dismissal of Zelensky’s offers.
Now that a much bigger crisis is ongoing in the Middle East, the Ukrainian regime is trying to remain in the spotlight of the world’s media and in the thoughts of world leaders who have, for years, paid for its war effort.
But to do that and manage a losing war at once seems to be too much for Kiev regime leader Volodymyr Zelensky, who has reportedly become more and more aggressive in his criticism of Russia, the Europeans, and, of course, of the US.
As of late, unsurprisingly, Zelensky is decrying Donald J. Trump’s administration decision to temporarily lift sanctions on Russian oil ‘already at sea’.
At the same time that he is super cranky, the Ukrainian embattled leader has been trying to flatter Trump for his operation against Iran, and also offering help with his ‘drone defenses’ against the Iranian Shahed drones.
But the fact is: If their drone defenses were so good, they’d not be begging for Patriot missiles all the time, and also, they would not be in the dark because of Russian combined missile-drone attacks on almost all the power generation facilities.
Pro-War Republican Senator Apologizes For Iran Girls’ School Massacre After Trump Blames Tehran
A Republican senator apologized this week for what US military investigators have reportedly determined was an American missile strike on a girls’ school in southern Iran that killed around 175 people—mostly children—amid continued sidestepping by President Donald Trump, who has blamed Tehran for the massacre.
Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.)—who supports the US-Israeli war on Iran—first apologized for the attack on the Shajareh Tayyebeh girls’ elementary school in Minab during a Monday interview with NBC News senior national political reporter Sahil Kapur. “It was terrible,” Kennedy said. “We made a mistake… I’m just so sorry it happened.”
Kennedy repeated his apology Tuesday on CNN, telling political correspondent Kasie Hunt: “The investigation may prove me wrong. I hope so. The kids are still dead, but I think it was a horrible, horrible mistake. I wish it hadn’t happened. I’m sorry it happened.”
Reuters first reported last week that US military investigators believe American forces carried out the school strike, a preliminary conclusion that came on the heels of a New York Times analysis that found the US was “most likely to have carried out the strike” due to its near-simultaneous bombing of a nearby Iranian naval base.
This week, Iranian officials displayed fragments from what is believed to be the Tomahawk missile used in the school bombing. The remnants were marked with the names of two US arms companies, a Pentagon contract number, and the words “Made in USA”.
On Wednesday, the New York Times reported that the ongoing military probe has determined that the US launched the Tomahawk strike, which paramedics and victims’ relatives said was a so-called “double-tap,” in which the attacker bombs a target and then follows up with a second strike meant to kill survivors and first responders. Investigators attribute the strike to a “targeting error,” according to the Times.
This, as Trump—who warned as his illegal war started that “bombs will be dropping everywhere”—continued sidestepping blame for the attack. On Saturday, Trump said aboard Air Force One that “based on what I’ve seen, that was done by Iran.“
Two days later, the president falsely claimed that Iran has “some” Tomahawk missiles and may have used one of them to bomb the school. Iran has no Tomahawks—which are highly restricted and sold only to a handful of close allies—and the US does not sell weapons to the Iranian government, with the notable exception of the Iran-Contra Affair, when the Reagan administration secretly sold arms to Tehran in order to fund anti-communist Contra terrorists in Nicaragua.
Other senior Trump administration officials including Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and US Ambassador to the United Nations Michael Waltz have declined to back the president’s claims and have instead deferred to the ongoing military investigation. Kennedy told NBC News and CNN that the school bombing was unintentional.
“Other countries do that sort of thing intentionally, like Russia,” he told Kapur. “We would never do that intentionally.”
Breaking the Nuclear Taboo
President Trump has been on quite a roll. Since just the beginning of the year, he has kidnapped the Venezuela president, threatened to invade Greenland and Colombia, and has in just the last week dragged the U.S. – and seemingly much of the Middle East – into a new war by joining with Israel to attack Iran, something that even the biggest hawks among recent U.S. presidents have managed to avoid. That’s on top of bombing seven countries in 2025.
The 2024 campaign promises of a peace president who will end the forever wars have evaporated, only to be replaced by unrestrained use of military force and a seeming disdain for diplomacy. As the U.S. comedy show Saturday Night Live put it, Trump, along with his UN-replacing Board of Peace, got “bored of peace.”
Breaking international law seems to be a feature, and not a bug, of Trump’s actions, consistent with his admission that he is expressly not guided by international law, norms, traditions, or common decency, but by “My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.”
Trump’s power-drunk top advisors are just as out of control. Secretary of War Pete “kill them all” Hegseth stated that his goal is to “unleash overwhelming and punishing violence on the enemy” and to “untie the hands of our warfighters to intimidate, demoralize, hunt, and kill the enemies of our country.” At the Munich Security Conference, Secretary of State “little Marco” Rubio bemoaned the end of the era of colonialism and called for returning to “the West’s age of dominance.” Deputy chief of staff Stephen “Genghis” Miller declared, “We live in a world… that is governed by force, that is governed by power.”
In addition to hegemonic actions in the conventional military realm, Trump has been escalating when it comes to nuclear weapons. He rejected President Putin’s invitation to extend the New START treaty for another year, making possible an unconstrained nuclear arms race alongside an ongoing modernization race. He has also announced that the U.S. will resume nuclear testing. Even without the wars in Ukraine and the Middle East and tensions with China, these actions and threats would be destabilizing and dangerous.
Trump is the mean and out-of-control bully on the global playground. Except that this bully has the sole authority to launch thousands of nuclear warheads.
It would be the ultimate expression of Trump’s unbounded power for him to break the one remaining international taboo – which, despite far too many close calls, has persisted for more than 80 years – detonating a nuclear weapon. There are many indications that, despite the U.S. and Israel’s ability to bomb Iran at will, this war may not be going well for them. But that need not be the pretext for using a nuclear weapon. In Trump’s mind, the more unprovoked, outrageous, and unnecessary something is, the better. Given his fragile ego and rapidly deteriorating mental powers – going off on bizarre rants about poisonous snakes in Peru or the White House drapes – the more unhinged he is, the more he thinks it demonstrates his dominance.
First Iran, Then Cuba: Trump Has Dropped the Peace-President Mask
Donald Trump did not merely let slip a reckless aside when he said he wanted to “finish this one first” – meaning Iran – before turning to Cuba. He revealed a governing mindset. Countries become items in a queue. War becomes a scheduling matter. One theater before the next, one pressure campaign before the next, one performance of toughness before the cameras move on. That is not strategic restraint. It is imperial casualness masquerading as command. Reuters reported on March 5 that Trump said he wanted to finish the war in Iran first and that it would then be only “a question of time” before attention shifted to Cuba; two days later, Reuters reported him saying Cuba was already negotiating with him and Marco Rubio.
What makes the remark more damning is the promise it betrays. Trump sold himself to voters as the man who would stop wars, not start them. In his inauguration address, he said his “proudest legacy” would be that of a “peacemaker and unifier,” and that America’s success should be measured not only by the battles it wins but by the wars it ends and the wars it never gets into. Even in late February, the White House was still branding him the “President of Peace.” Yet the administration is now openly talking about winning the war with Iran, rejecting negotiations, and even asserting a right to shape Iran’s political future.
You do not have to praise the Iranian state to recognize the danger in that. The issue is not whether one approves of Tehran. The issue is whether an American president who campaigned against endless war is now normalizing the oldest and most discredited habits of Washington foreign policy: regime-change rhetoric, contempt for diplomacy, and the fantasy that bombing can substitute for strategy. When Trump says he is not interested in negotiating and muses that there may be nobody left to say “we surrender,” he is not sounding like a dealmaker. He is sounding like every hawk who has ever confused devastation with victory.
The Cuba remark matters for another reason as well. It suggests that Iran is not being treated as a singular emergency but as one stop in a broader politics of coercion. That is how permanent interventionism works. Every crisis is packaged as exceptional, urgent, and morally self-evident – until the language starts to slide. First this country, then that one. First “finish” Iran, then move on. First present force as a necessity, then sell the next confrontation as inevitable. Trump’s words make that rhythm impossible to miss. The vocabulary may shift from threat to negotiation to triumphalism, but the premise remains the same: Washington decides, others adjust.
Congress, meanwhile, is doing what Congress so often does when presidents discover a taste for undeclared war: almost nothing. On March 4, a Senate majority voted to block a bipartisan war-powers resolution that would have required congressional authorization for hostilities against Iran. That abdication is not a procedural footnote. It is one of the great mechanisms by which American wars become easier to start, harder to stop, and almost impossible to own. Presidents escalate. Legislators grumble. Then the war machine keeps moving.
And it is moving fast. Reuters reported this weekend that the administration used emergency authority to bypass Congress and expedite the sale of more than 20,000 bombs to Israel, just as the joint U.S.-Israeli air war against Iran entered its second week. This is what “peace through strength” usually means in practice: fewer restraints, more munitions, and a shorter distance between rhetoric and rubble. The slogan is designed to comfort Americans into believing that force is a form of stability. More often, it is simply the marketing language of escalation.
Missile Fragment From Iran School Massacre Marked ‘Made in USA’ – But Trump Keeps Lying
As Iranian officials displayed US-marked fragments of a missile believed to have been used in Saturday’s massacre of around 175 mostly school children in Minab, President Donald Trump on Monday doubled down on his unfounded claim that Iran carried out the strike.
The president suggested during a press conference at his Trump National Doral Miami resort that Iran may have used a US Tomahawk missile to carry out the February 28 attack on the Shajareh Tayyebeh girls’ elementary school in Minab.
Trump falsely claimed that Iran has “some” of the highly restricted cruise missiles after one of them was recorded hitting an Iranian military facility near the school just after Saturday’s strike there.
“A Tomahawk is very generic,” Trump added. “It’s sold to other countries.”
New York Times reporter Shawn McCreesh pressed Trump on his claim, asking, “You just suggested that Iran somehow got its hands on a Tomahawk and bombed its own elementary school on the first day of the war… Why are you the only person saying this?”
Trump replied: “Because I just don’t know enough about it. I think it’s something that I was told is under investigation, but Tomahawks are, are used by others. As you know, numerous other nations have Tomahawks. They buy them from us.”
Iran has no Tomahawks, which are not “generic.” Originally developed by General Dynamics and now manufactured by Raytheon, the BGM‑109 Tomahawk is a specific long-range cruise missile designed and produced in the United States. Only two other countries – Australia and the United Kingdom—are known to have Tomahawks in their arsenals, although Japan and the Netherlands have also agreed to buy them.
The US also does not sell weaponry to the Iranian government – with the extraordinary exception of the Iran-Contra Affair, in which the Reagan administration secretly sold arms to Iran in order to fund anti-communist Contra terrorists in Nicaragua.
Trump’s Monday remarks followed his Saturday comments to reporters aboard Air Force One, where he said that the bombing “was done by Iran.”
However, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who was accompanying Trump, notably declined to back Trump’s claim, saying only that “we’re certainly investigating” the strike.
US Ambassador to the United Nations Michael Waltz also did not endorse the president’s assertion, telling ABC News’ Martha Raddatz Sunday that he would “leave that to the investigators to determine.”
Waltz – a former Army Special Forces officer who served in Afghanistan – also told NBC News’ Meet the Press Sunday that “we never deliberately attack civilians.”
More than 400,000 civilians in over half a dozen countries have been killed in US-led wars since 9/11, according to the Costs of War Project at Brown University’s Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs.
Hundreds of Iranian civilians have been killed by US and Israeli bombing since February 28. Israeli airstrikes have also killed hundreds of Lebanese civilians during the same period.
And the Next President of Venezuela Will Be…
On Monday, after hosting the historic first Shield of the Americas Summit in Doral, Fla., Donald Trump stopped by a Venezuelan restaurant, El Arepazo, on his way to the airport to fly back to Washington, D.C. He was greeted with cheers and applause and chants of “Trump!” and “USA!” The crowd loved him, as they often do during these types of appearances, but this one was, potentially, a bit more meaningful.
Sometimes referred to as “Dorazuela,” the city of Doral has one of the largest Venezuelan diaspora communities in the United States. The president owns a hotel here — it’s where the summit, which was focused largely on rallying like-minded Latin American leaders to come together in the name of regional security and combating the cartels that plague every country in the Western Hemisphere, took place just days before.
At the restaurant, Trump shook hands, chatted with staff and patrons, and even took some Venezuelan food back on the plane for his staff. Those who were there said it was one of the warmest political appearances they’ve ever seen, which doesn’t surprise me. Whether they live in Doral or Caracas or somewhere else in the world, the Venezuelan people love Donald Trump. On January 3, he did more for that country than almost anyone else probably ever has.
But the language he uses leaves many wary and understandably so. The constant praise of Delcy Rodríguez and saying she’s doing a good job is tough to hear when you know that she’s just as bad and every bit as much as corrupt as Nicolás Maduro was. She’s a communist by birth and was radicalized even further when her Marxist father died in police custody after being arrested for kidnapping a business executive from the United States. After his death, she vowed to go into politics as her own form of personal vengeance.
“Delcy Rodríguez knows how to present herself as a ‘moderate,'” Venezuelan opposition-aligned lawyer Estrella Infante told me earlier this year. “That is why she has always handled international negotiations. She has extensive global connections, and many actors prefer her continuity because it protects their interests. That is her power.” (For what it’s worth, those global connections are largely our adversaries — Iran, China, Russia, Cuba, etc.)
The thing is, Delcy has a little help with maintaining her “moderate” reputation, and it comes from the United States. If it’s not the New York Times literally calling her a “moderate” and writing a glowing review of what a great leader she’d be, it’s what Venezuelan lawyer and writer Emmanuel Rincón calls the “hidden lobby war against Venezuela’s democratic transition.”
In a recent op-ed in the Washington Times, Rincón asserts, “Alongside the brave men and women who genuinely fight to end the socialist dictatorship, there has emerged a growing ecosystem of false opposition figures, fake activists, opportunistic lobbyists and self-proclaimed ‘conservatives’ who have found a way to profit from Venezuela’s tragedy.”
Trump’s lies reveal the real story about the Iran war
A recent poll in the U.S. concluded that Donald Trump tells the truth only about 3 percent of the time during his public announcements at press conferences. Perhaps it was his stint at being a celebrity on TV that taught him how gullible people in America are when fed the most fanciful, moronic lies a leading figure can tell, through the American media. Of course, it’s also about the journalists as well, and if there’s one thing that the Trump administrations have taught us, it is how poor the general level of journalism is in America these days. American journalists are not afraid to ask difficult questions or disbelieve what they are told. They simply don’t know how to do this in the first place.
Covering the Iran war, it is breathtaking, some of the brazen lies he tells while being questioned by journalists who are complicit in his dirty work. The mere idea that Iran, for example, acquired a Tomahawk missile and used it to kill its own schoolgirls is beyond absurd. How could journalists not question such a reply when it is so clear that Trump is lying through his teeth?
Because of this lying, we can see how Trump works, though. Unlike other U.S. presidents who have some shame and discomfort in lying to the press, Trump suffers no such handicap and so can take on bolder, more daring ventures on the global stage. In this environment, there is no respect for international law or even due process within the political framework of how Congress works. Trump hasn’t worked out how to defeat Iran, but he has all the contingent narratives to lay out afterwards to explain why everything that goes wrong is not his fault. We see that he is already preparing himself for the day of judgement by the press pack in the coming days and weeks by telling them that it was Jared Kushner, Marco Rubio and Steve Witkoff who told him to hit Iran.
The direction towards these three is revealing. Of course, we have learned the simple rule of Trump when it comes to decisions. When things go well, everything was his decision; when things go badly, blame others.
Hellbound and Down 
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