Tag: donald trump

Trump orders removal of protest tent near WH

President Donald Trump has ordered that the long-standing blue tent in front of the White House be taken down.

Trump pledged to remove homeless encampments in Washington by the United States’ 250th Independence Day next year.

A reporter informed him in the Oval Office on Friday of the tent, which represents an ongoing protest, describing it as an “eyesore” supported by the “radical left.” The reporter explained that it had “morphed” from its original intent into something “anti-America,” and expressed concern that it could pose a threat to national security.

“I didn’t know that,” Trump said, immediately turning to his staff. “Take it down. Take it down today, right now.”

“We’re going to look into it right now. We have removed over 50 tent sites, not 50 tents, hundreds and hundreds, maybe 1,000, … but 50 sites,” he continued.

The blue tent, known as the peace vigil, in Lafayette Park is regarded widely as the longest continuous act of political protest in U.S. history.

Activist William Thomas erected the structure in 1981, facing the North Lawn of the White House, where dignitaries and world leaders arrive for meetings. Thomas remained at the vigil calling for an end to global conflict and nuclear disarmament until he died in 2016. The demonstration needs to be staffed constantly to maintain its spot across Pennsylvania Avenue.

Philipos Melaku-Bello took over the structure with a group of rotating volunteers.

The tent is covered with flags and banners that read, “War is not the answer,” “Ban all nuclear weapons or have a nice doomsday,” and “Live by the bomb, die by the bomb.”

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Trump Warns Any Venezuelan Plane Threatening US Ships Will Be Shot Down

On Friday, for the second time in just two days, a Venezuelan F-16 jet flew near a US warship in the southern Caribbean. At least eight American navel vessels have been deployed off the Latin American country which possesses the world’s largest proven crude oil reserves.

President Trump the same day warned that if Venezuelan jets fly over US naval ships and “put us in a dangerous position, they’ll be shot down.”

CBS late Friday cited Pentagon officials who said a Venezuelan plane flew over the US destroyer “Jason Dunham” for the second time.

Some observers have begun to question the circumstances behind the prior US strike on a “drug-carrying vessel from Venezuela” operated allegedly by a drug trafficking gang, which killed all eleven people on board. Assuming they weren’t military, it could be classified as an extrajudicial killing in international waters, with no warning issued or attempt at intercept.

The Commander-in-Chief has put US forces deployed there on a war footing, it appears:

When asked by reporters in the Oval Office on Friday what would happen if Venezuelan jets flew over US vessels again, Trump said Venezuela would be in “trouble”.

Trump told his general, standing beside him, that he could do anything he wanted if the situation escalated.

Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro has responded by rejecting the state-linked narcotrafficking allegations, and explained that current problems and differences between the nations do not justify a “military conflict”.

Maduro continued, “Venezuela has always been willing to talk, to engage in dialogue, but we demand respect.”

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BOMBSHELL: President Trump Was an FBI Informant Against Epstein

House Speaker Mike Johnson made a stunning revelation Thursday in response to questions from CNN’s Manu Raju about President Donald Trump’s use of the term “hoax” to describe the ongoing controversy surrounding the Epstein files. In defending the president, Johnson disclosed that Trump had once acted as an FBI informant against Jeffrey Epstein—a fact that has never before been publicly acknowledged by a sitting congressional leader.

“What Trump is referring to is the hoax that the Democrats are using to try to attack him,” Johnson said. “He has never said or suggested or implied—I’ve talked to him about this many times, many times. He is horrified. It’s been misrepresented. He’s not saying that what Epstein did is a hoax. It’s a terrible, unspeakable evil. He believes that himself.”

Johnson then dropped the bombshell revelation.

“When he first heard the rumor, he kicked him out of Mar-a-Lago. He was an FBI informant to try to take this stuff down,” Johnson said, appearing to confirm for the first time that Trump had assisted federal authorities in building a case against Epstein.

The speaker emphasized that Epstein’s crimes had long disgusted Trump. “The president knows and has great sympathy for the women who have suffered these unspeakable harms. It’s detestable to him. He and I have spoken about this as recently as 24 hours ago,” Johnson explained. “What he’s talking about is the Democrats who are doing this with impure motives. If they cared so much about this, why didn’t they do something during the four years of the Biden administration when the Biden DOJ had all the records? They didn’t say a word about it. Now, they’re doing it for political purposes. Not everybody, but a lot of them, and that’s what the President’s frustrated about.”

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Trump Says Justice Department Has Done Its Job On Epstein Case

President Donald Trump said in a lengthy social media post that the Department of Justice (DOJ) has “done its job” on releasing information connected to deceased convicted sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein.

“The now dying (after the DOJ gave thousands of pages of documents in full compliance with a very comprehensive and exacting Subpoena from Congress!) Epstein case was only brought back to life” in recent days for political purposes, not for the victims, Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social on Sept. 5.

Trump added that the Justice Department “has done its job,“ and ”they have given everything requested of them“ in the Epstein case, adding that it’s time for Democrats who are making Epstein-related demands to ”end“ what he called the ”Epstein hoax.”

In the post, he also said that the chatter around Epstein is designed to serve as a “hoax” to gain political points and an attempt “to deflect and distract from the great success of a Republican President.”

Democrats and some Republicans in the House have called for disclosures related to the case, about six years after Epstein was charged with sex trafficking counts before he was found dead in a Manhattan jail cell in August 2019. This week, lawmakers hosted a news conference with women who said they were victims of Epstein to call for more transparency.

On Tuesday, the House Oversight Committee, under Chair James Comer (R-Ky.), released a batch of Epstein-related files that it said it obtained from the DOJ in response to a subpoena for those records.

The records encompass 33,295 pages of material, which were uploaded onto Dropbox and Google Drive.

Speaking to reporters in the Capitol on Tuesday, House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) said that the document disclosure “is the beginning and not the end” and that “we want to bring justice to every single person who is involved in the Epstein evils and the cover up thereof, but we also want to be equally certain we protect the innocent victims.”

The materials include videos that were captured outside of Epstein’s jail cell, footage from his Florida home, audio files between his former associate Ghislaine Maxwell and Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche over the summer, and other documents.

Transcripts of the interview between Maxwell and Blanche were released last month.

Maxwell is currently serving out a 20-year prison term after she was convicted on charges in 2021 of conspiring with Epstein to sexually abuse minors over the course of a decade.

In the news conference, the women who said they were Epstein’s victims called on members of Congress to pass a bill requiring the release of more documents related to the case.

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Trump Says Youth Vaccine Mandate Rollback is a “Very Tough Position” – “They Just Pure and Simple Work… I Think Those Vaccines Should be Used”

President Trump on Friday expressed support for mandatory vaccines for school-aged children, amid Health and Human Services Secretary RFK Jr.’s push to end unnecessary vaccination. 

Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. testified Thursday before the Senate Finance Committee, where Democrats sought to grill him about his personnel and vaccine guidance shake-up at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). Per the Hill, “the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention stopped recommending the COVID-19 vaccine for those under 18. Kennedy, meanwhile, has fired all 17 sitting members of CDC’s vaccine advisory panel and also moved to oust the CDC head and other top HHS experts.”

During the Senate hearing, RFK revealed that in the early 2000s, a senior CDC scientist was ordered to destroy data from an internal study that showed a staggering link between the MMR (measles, mumps, rubella) vaccine and autism risk in young Black boys. The data showed that black boys, who got vaccinated before 24 months of age or 36 months of age, “had a 260% greater chance of getting an autism diagnosis than children who waited,” RFK said.

This also comes after Florida Surgeon General Joseph Ladapo announced earlier this week that the Florida Department of Health is planning to remove “every last” vaccine mandate from Florida law.

“All of them. Every last one of them,” Ladapo said to loud cheers and a standing ovation.

“Who am I, as the government, or anyone else, who am I as a man standing here now to tell you what you should put in your body? Who am I to tell you what your child should put in their body? I don’t have that right.”

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Senator Tammy Duckworth: Trump Vaporizing That Drug Cartel Vessel Means He’ll Use the Military to Interfere in Elections or Something

This week, Illinois Governor JB Pritzker said that the real reason Trump wants to bring National Guard troops into Chicago is so that he can ‘set the stage’ to use the U.S. Military to interfere in future elections like the 2026 midterms.

As insane as that sounds, it has apparently now become a talking point among Democrats.

While appearing on MSNBC, Illinois Senator Tammy Duckworth added another crazy dimension to this, suggesting that when Trump took out that cartel vessel this week, that was proof that he is going to use the U.S. Military to interfere in future elections.

If any of this makes sense to you, you might be a Democrat.

Breitbart News has details:

While discussing speaking with federal officials about possible immigration crackdowns in Illinois, Duckworth said, “Overall, the city of North Chicago and the surrounding communities have made it clear to their law enforcement officers that they will not cooperate with DHS and ICE unless there is a federal warrant, not one of these fake ICE warrants, but a federal warrant.

And that they’re not going to participate [in] and support ICE actions in basically harassing and intimidating everyday people on the streets of our cities.”

She added that “this President is setting the conditions so that he can actually unilaterally occupy the streets of our cities and interfere in the next election, do what he wants.”

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Trump’s Contronymal “Peace” with Russia

ith all the hullabaloo about President Donald Trump’s “peace” gestures toward Russia over Ukraine and the resetting of US-Russia bi-lateral relations, it is worth remembering the “pivot to Asia” announced by the Obama administration in 2011 and the coup d’état it carried out in Ukraine in 2014.

For those who might not remember, I would recommend two films: John Pilger’s The Coming War on China and Oliver Stone’s Ukraine on Fire.

They are two prongs of a long-term U.S. strategy to maintain American preeminence throughout the world by countering Russia and China simultaneously, if not equally at once. Such strategy is not determined by someone like President Donald Trump speaking or acting impulsively, as is his wont, but by bankers, financiers, éminences grises, and pale-faced scholarly guns-for-hire in stately buildings reserved for such deliberations.

Despite rhetoric to the contrary, there is a consistent foundational foreign policy strategy from one American presidential administration to the next with necessary little detours here and there, and arguments within the ruling class about tactics.

Long-term strategy is capacious enough to include sudden seeming shifts in policies that are couched in cover stories that beguile even the smartest people. Wishes fuddle the minds of the most astute. They serve to obscure the interests of U.S. dominance of the world, a dominance that is now threatened, and one that Trump is not abandoning, even as he adjusts American tactics on the fly.

The Council of Foreign Relations (CFR) and its magazine, Foreign Affairs are where the ruling elites of the United States debate and determine American foreign policies from administration to administration, regardless of political party.

The CFR is the preeminent U.S. think tank; it is over one hundred years old, financed by the Ford, Rockefeller, and Carnegie Foundations and its members have included former CIA Director Allen Dulles, McGeorge Bundy, Henry Kissinger, Zbigniew Brzezinski, and many other high government and financial figures, including David Rockefeller, who served as  chairman between 1970-1985.

“Largely unbeknownst to the general public, executives and top journalists of almost all major US media outlets have long been members of the influential Council on Foreign Relations (CFR).” It is evidence of why the corporate mainstream media is an adjunct of the U.S. propaganda system. To become a member is to be baptized into the U.S. ruling establishment and its vast propaganda network that includes, as former CIA analyst Ray McGovern describes it: the Military-Industrial-Congressional-Intelligence-Media-Academia-Think-Tank complex, MICIMATT.

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Trump Reportedly Considering Striking Cartels Inside Venezuela

President Donald Trump is reportedly considering unleashing military strikes directly against drug cartels operating deep inside Venezuela, as part of a no-holds-barred strategy to dismantle Nicolas Maduro’s regime.

The consideration comes amid Trump’s ongoing war on narco-trafficking, which he sees as a direct threat to American security, especially with the flood of drugs pouring across our southern border under failed Biden-Harris policies.

Citing multiple unnamed sources briefed on the plans, CNN reported on Friday evening that Trump has greenlit options for targeted strikes on Venezuelan soil, building on a recent lethal operation that sank an alleged drug-smuggling boat leaving the country.

CNN reports:

The US has moved substantial military firepower into the Caribbean in recent weeks, a move meant in part to be a signal to Maduro, according to multiple White House officials.

Ships armed with Tomahawk missiles, an attack submarine, a range of aircraft and more than 4,000 US sailors and Marines are now all positioned near Venezuela. Two White House officials told CNN 10 advanced F-35 fighter jets are also being sent to Puerto Rico, where a Marine unit is currently conducting amphibious landing training exercises.

The administration has taken steps to connect Maduro to its broader anti-drug mission – labeling him as a narco-terrorist with ties to some of those recently-designated cartels – and doubling the bounty for his arrest to $50 million.

This shift will treat cartel operatives as enemy combatants, not just criminals, allowing for decisive military action.

White House officials emphasized that no final decision has been made regarding strikes inside Venezuela, but the door remains open if it serves U.S. interests.

Secretary of State Marco Rubio was asked on Tuesday if the White House was considering strikes on Venezuelan soil against the Maduro regime, and he did not rule out the possibility.

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Trump Bluntly Explains The US Bombed Iran For Israel

President Trump said in an interview published on Tuesday that no one has done more for the state of Israel than himself and cited his recent airstrikes on Iranian nuclear facilities as an example.

“So, Israel is amazing, because, you know, I have good support from Israel,” the president told the Daily Caller. “Look, nobody has done more for Israel than I have, including the recent attacks with Iran, wiping that thing out. We, that plane, wiped them out like nobody ever saw before.”

Trump made the comments when asked if he was worried about the growing skepticism among young Republicans when it comes to the US relationship with Israel, and he noted the Israel lobby’s control over Congress, saying it has waned in recent years.

“But when, if you go back 20 years. I mean, I will tell you, Israel had the strongest lobby in Congress of anything or body, or of any company or corporation or state that I’ve ever seen. Israel was the strongest. Today, it doesn’t have that strong a lobby. It’s amazing,” Trump said.

“There was a time where you couldn’t speak bad, if you wanted to be a politician, you couldn’t speak badly. But today, you have, you know, AOC plus three, and you have all these lunatics, and they’ve really, they’ve changed it,” he added.

The criticism of Israel among a small number of members of Congress is no longer limited to Democrats, as Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), who is considered a strong supporter of President Trump, has recently come out strongly against Israel’s campaign in Gaza and became the first Republican in Congress to label it a genocide. Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) is also known for his opposition to US aid to Israel and the pro-Israel lobby group AIPAC.

“Israel, you would understand this very much, Israel was the strongest lobby I’ve ever seen. They had total control over Congress, and now they don’t, you know, I’m a little surprised to see that,” Trump said.

The president, who is strongly backing Israel’s assault in Gaza, said the military campaign is not good for Israel’s public image. “They may be winning the war, but they’re not winning the world of public relations, you know, and it is hurting them. But Israel was the strongest lobby 15 years ago that there has ever been, and now it’s, it’s been hurt, especially in Congress,” he said.

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The Power Of Siberia 2 Pipeline Deal Signifies The Failure Of Trump’s Eurasian Grand Strategy

Trump’s escalatory signals in Ukraine, the Indo-US split that he induced, and the attendant alleviation of the Sino-Indo security dilemma freed Russia up to clinch the long-negotiated Power of Siberia 2 deal…

Trump’s Eurasian grand strategy has sought to preemptively avert Russia’s potentially disproportionate dependence on China in order to avoid having its natural resources turbocharge the superpower trajectory of the US’ only systemic rival. In pursuit of this, the US envisaged entering into a resource-centric strategic partnership with Russia upon the end of the Ukrainian Conflict, expecting that this shared goal would incentivize Putin into agreeing to significant territorial and/or security concessions.

Trump’s unwillingness or inability to coerce Zelensky into any of Putin’s demanded concessions paired with increasingly concerning reports about plans to deploy NATO to Ukraine to spook Putin into ditching his balancing act and pivoting to China. The successful clinching of their long-negotiated deal over the Power of Siberia 2 gas pipeline, which will nearly double Russia’s gas exports to China to ~100 bcm a year and at a cheaper price than the EU receives, signifies the failure of Trump’s Eurasian grand strategy.

Putin might have held out for longer had Trump not inadvertently catalyzed the incipient Sino-Indo rapprochement via his hypocritically punitive tariffs that aim to derail India’s rise as a Great Power. That spooked India into patching up its ties with China, which alleviated their security dilemma that the US was exploiting to divide-and-rule them. This in turn reduced India’s worries about closer Russian-Chinese energy cooperation that it previously feared could lead to Russia becoming China’s junior partner.

It was never officially voiced, but astute observers and those who’ve talked to Indian thinkers know that India was worried that China might leverage its influence over Russia to get it to curtail or cut off military exports to India, therefore giving China a pivotal edge in their border dispute. The Trump-induced Indo-US split and attendant alleviation of the Sino-Indo security dilemma freed Russia up to clinch the Power of Siberia 2 deal without fear of spooking India into the US’ arms and thus dividing-and-ruling Eurasia.

The growing convergence between BRICS and the SCO, which aim to gradually reform global governance via their complementary efforts to accelerate multipolar processes, is due in no small part to India’s embrace of both in response to new strategic threats from the US. Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s first visit to China in seven years to attend the SCO Leaders’ Summit, during which time he held an important bilateral meeting with President Xi Jinping, is expected to lead to a new normal in Sino-Indo ties.

The roots of their tensions haven’t been resolved, but Russia expects that they’ll now be better managed, ergo why it clinched its deal with China over the Power of Siberia 2 gas pipeline right after also concluding that the US won’t try to help it obtain any of what it wants from Ukraine. To review, Trump signaled escalatory intent in Ukraine reportedly as the quid pro quo for the US-EU trade deal and then Sino-Indo ties improved as Indo-US ones worsened, thus making Power of Siberia 2 politically possible.

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