Welcome to another edition of What Fresh Hell?, Raw Story’s roundup of news items that might have become controversies under another regime, but got buried – or were at least under-appreciated – due to the daily firehose of political pratfalls, unhinged tweet storms and other sundry embarrassments coming out of the current White House.
Throughout the 2016 campaign, Donald Trump focused relentlessly on how we needed to reduce our trade deficit, especially with China. It was an odd, even obscure issue to emphasize – some thought that he may have been confusing the trade deficit with the federal budget deficit – but emphasize it he did. For Trump, the trade deficit wasn’t just an economic indicator, its size was also proof of the incompetence – the utter stupidity -- of our leadership. It was the feckless politicians who were letting everyone, especially Mexico and “Gina,” rip us off, and only Donald Trump, the master of the Art of the Deal, could fix it.
This, along with the horrors of immigrants coming to the US to pick your produce murder your puppies, were the only truly consistent themes of his 2016 campaign.
As you may have guessed, the Commerce Department announced this week that the US posted an $891.2 billion trade deficit in goods last year, which was, according to WaPo, “the largest in the nation’s 243-year history despite more than two years of President Trump’s ‘America First’ policies.” (The overall deficit, at $621 billion, was somewhat smaller because we had a surplus in services, but it was still the biggest the US has run since 2008.) And as Philip Bump pointed out, while our trade gaps with some countries have narrowed, our deficits with China and Mexico, Trump’s bogeymen on the campaign trail, have actually expanded “dramatically” on his watch.
Oh well -- he probably did as well as an intellectually challenged reality TV star could reasonably have been expected to.
This was a busy week for under-the-radar outrages so let’s dig into this week’s roundup.
*****
The Associated Press reported this week that the Pentagon is planning to use $1 billion in funds slated for the troops’ pay and pensions on the stupid border wall that Trump insisted Mexico would pay for. This is unconstitutional on its face but nothing matters anymore.
*****
Representing the “forgotten” working men and women…
*****
So this has been happening…
Lawfare's Susan Hennessy tweeted, "Guess who else has 100% known about this from the beginning? Chinese intelligence services."
*****
“Puerto Rico has started cutting benefits paid out by a food stamps program used by more than 1 million of its residents, as federal lawmakers have not provided the island with additional emergency disaster funding amid opposition from the Trump administration,” reported WaPo’s Jeff Stein.
The benefit cut, caused by an impasse among federal lawmakers over aid funding for the U.S. territory, has sparked new fears among Puerto Ricans about a critical lifeline for poorer residents amid an explosion of hunger since the hurricane hit...The Trump administration had previously dismissed House Democrats’ proposed $600 million plan to extend additional aid as “excessive and unnecessary,” amid a report … that President Trump told top White House officials he did not want a single dollar going to Puerto Rico because he thought the island was not using the money properly and was exploiting the federal government.
*****
The Trump regime’s hostility toward détente in our long Cold War with Cuba has always been kind of inexplicable.
NBC reported that the Trump regime “said Monday it will allow unprecedented lawsuits in American courts against Cuban companies using property seized during the 1959 revolution, as it works to discourage more of the foreign investment in Cuba that provides the island's economy with a lifeline.”
*****
We can't even come up with a snarky comment for this one...
*****
Vice News dug into Justice Department data and discovered that the Trump regime “is pursuing far fewer civil rights cases — including hate crimes, police bias, and disability rights cases — than the Obama or Bush administration did.” Not exactly shocking news, but good to have on the record.
*****
ICE isn’t the only rogue immigration enforcement agency.
Julia Ainsley reported for NBC that “Customs and Border Protection has compiled a list of 59 mostly American reporters, attorneys and activists who are to be stopped for questioning by border agents when crossing the U.S.-Mexican border at San Diego-area checkpoints, and agents have questioned or arrested at least 21 of them.”
Also, according to NBC, “a federal judge on Friday ruled that the Trump administration is responsible for migrant children separated even before it instituted a ‘zero tolerance’ policy.”
The ruling followed a report from the Department of Health and Human Services Inspector General that found that "potentially thousands" of children were separated from their parents between June 2017 and May 2018, when the Trump administration began prosecuting under the zero tolerance policy all those crossing the border illegally and separating parents from their children in the process.
“For the first time in its history, the U.S. government is detaining more than 50,000 people it says are undocumented immigrants in jails and prisons around the country,” according to The Daily Beast. Most of these people are accused of committing a misdemeanor and could be released pending their hearings. But someone has to keep the private prison business afloat.
And we feel a lot of sympathy for the undocumented workers who have been working for the Trump family for years and are now being unceremoniously fired to obscure the Trump Crime Family’s ubiquitous hypocrisy.
WaPo spoke this week with Juan Quintero, who “lost his golf course job after 18 years of employment — part of a purge of undocumented workers from Trump’s businesses amid revelations that the company relied on illegal labor for years, well into Trump’s presidency. Gone, too, was his side job at the hunting retreat.”
“All of the years you give them, and they just let you go,” Quintero said in a recent interview at his home in Poughkeepsie, N.Y. “They do not say, ‘Let’s do something, let’s try to help you.’ They simply said, ‘Your documents are not valid,’ and that is it.”
*****
Quick follow-up to a story we mentioned last year when The Guardian reported that the Trump regime was moving “to allow marine creatures such as whales and dolphins to be harmed by companies as they search for potential oil and gas reserves off the Atlantic coast.”
Darryl Fears reported for WaPo this week that at a Natural Resources subcommittee hearing, a regime official “testif[ied], over and over, that firing commercial air guns under water every 10 seconds in search of oil and gas deposits over a period of months would have next to no effect on the endangered animals, which use echolocation to communicate, feed, mate and keep track of their babies.” At some point, it seems that Rep. Joe Cunningham (D-SC) had had enough and he pulled out an airhorn and blasted it at the goofball official, who insisted he didn’t find it terribly disruptive.
*****
And finally, in this week’s positive news, a federal judge came down hard on Grifty Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross for violating the Constitution by inserting a question about citizenship designed to skew the Census results in the GOP’s favor.
Via Law and Crime, Judge Richard Seeborg “awarded a nationwide injunction to the plaintiffs–the State of California and the City of San Jose–in a massive 126-page order, which concluded that the inclusion of the question violated the Administrative Procedure Act (APA) and the Enumeration Clause of the Constitution.”
“In short, the inclusion of the citizenship question on the 2020 Census threatens the very foundation of our democratic system—and does so based on a self-defeating rationale,” he said. “In light of these findings, Defendants do not get another bite at the apple. Defendants are hereby enjoined from including the citizenship question on the 2020 Census, regardless of any technical compliance with the APA.”
