[Transcript edited for flow and clarity.]
One of the many reasons we're where we are right now at this point in American history is that for reasons that remain beyond my comprehension, everything always breaks Donald Trump's way. This has been true since the 1960s and it continues to be true. We've seen it in the context of his family. We've seen it in the context of banks continuing to bail him out through the eighties and the nineties. We saw it when Mark Barnett gave him a lifeline in the aughts when he was a washed up failure of a businessman. We saw it when the Republican Party decided against everybody's better instincts to let him be their nominee in 2016. He got away with the Access Hollywood debacle; he got away with over two dozen credible accusations of sexual harassment and assault; he got away with six bankruptcies.
He got away with five deferments during Vietnam. He kept getting away with it and nobody seemed to care. Nothing stuck. Nothing was cumulative. It was if the new bad news about him completely erased the old bad news about him. And today, one more thing broke his way.
The corrupt, illegitimate super-majority of the Supreme Court essentially made Donald an imperial president. Aileen Cannon, his personal pocket judge, was randomly assigned to the stolen classified documents case in Miami and, instead of acting like a jurist acted like Donald Trump's personal defense attorney. Now, three judges on the DC Circuit Court of Appeals were randomly chosen to consider a recent ruling by Judge Boasberg. There are 16 judges in the DC Circuit Court of Appeals—the three assigned were all appointed by Donald and they have blocked Boasberg’s order that the Trump regime provide due process to the people he and his ICE agents have illegally detained and deported.
I'm grappling with that one today: Everything breaks Donald Trump's way. And what is that in service to? That is in service to empowering a man who is so delusional, who is so poisoned with his lust for power, who is so depraved and degraded by his quest for more—whatever that means—that right now the future of the entire country hangs in the balance.
There's a lot to get to today, but I needed to start there because it has been on my mind and I'm sorry to say it may be on my mind for a very, very long time.
Let's dive in.
Good evening, everybody. Welcome to this episode of Mary Trump Live. It is wonderful to have you here. As I said, there's a lot going on. So let's start with this news. The Los Angeles Police Department is investigating a potential hit and run. After suspected ICE agents struck a man’s car with their vehicles, they blocked him in, detained him, and then left the scene without reporting the crash. The incident occurred around 10 47 local time in East Los Angeles, KTLA reported live from the scene and provided surveillance footage of the hit and run.
In video provided by local channel KTLA, a white Mercedes tried to make a right hand turn when a gray pickup truck blocked it and a light color blue SUV hit the vehicle from behind pinning the vehicle in.
Then what appear to be federal agents in plain clothes, exit their vehicles and start firing possible pepper ball rounds at the vehicle. The LAPD is investigating this crash because the ostensible federal agents left the scene.
A couple of observations: First of all, to state the obvious, hit and run accidents are accidents and this was clearly intentional. It’s a tactic to box one car in by flanking it with two cars. Secondly, the man was in his car when officers exited their vehicles with guns drawn. When he got out of his car, he put his hands in the air and then he put his hands behind his head. They shot at him anyway. Luckily they weren't using bullets, but it is not okay to fire any kind of weapon at somebody who is trapped in their car or standing with their hands in the air clearly unarmed and not a threat to anybody. A final thought: It's illegal to flee the scene of a crime. Also, if you flee the scene of a car accident you caused, that is a crime makes it a crime.
These ice agents who have been empowered by the Trump regime and by thugs like Stephen Miller and Tom Holman are cowards. They're the last people in the world who should be entrusted with any kind of power at all.
This incident comes as the Trump regime continues to paint protestors and immigrants as criminals when it's federal agents under its auspices who are breaking the law in plain sight.
It isn't just Democrats who are realizing the horror of what's happening, even Trump voters are as well. According to a report from NBC six in South Florida.
Six Nicaraguan men were detained along U.S. 1 in Sugarloaf Key on May 27th on their way to a job. Vincent Scardina, a supporter of Donald, is the owner of the roofing company where they worked. Given his support for the Donald, he was asked what he would say to Donald.
"What happened here. This situation is just totally just blatantly not at all what they said It was.”
He thought the Trump administration was going to focus solely on deporting criminals. It seems immigration officials, he says, are just trying to meet quotas now.
“Financially as well as emotionally, it takes a toll. You get to know these guys. You become their friends, just not an employer, but a friend, and you see what happens to their family. It's quite a shock.”
I am not going to throw stones at somebody who is finally coming to the realization that all is not as it was presented to them to be but to be honest, my initial thought in hearing this is that maybe if he’s been paying more attention, maybe if he’s realized Donald lies about everything, you would have reconsidered voting for him.
But that's not entirely fair. It's hard to take a step back, but the truth of the matter is that people like that Scardina have been lied to for years. People like him get their news from outlets that lie to them constantly, that misrepresent what's really going on. And they get lied to by the people in whom they put their trust including elected officials like Donald Trump.
When faced with the truth of what's actually going on, I think we need to be supportive of people who start to realize what really is going on; we need to have some sympathy for what they're losing.
Most of us are human beings who make meaningful connections with other people. We care about those who work for us, with whom we work o work for. As he said, these are relationships that go beyond employer and employee. Let's hope that more people start to see just how devastating the Trump regime's policies are, and let's hope it happens quickly enough so that we can put a stop to these kinds of wrongful detentions.
Donald's problems and his grandstanding are not just confined to Los Angeles—we're continuing to see them play out in the military as well. Yesterday Donald visited Fort Bragg in order to brag about his agenda, insult Democrats, and do what he always does—lie and talk about things that are essentially unseemly in such circumstances.
But there was more to his appearance at the military base than first reported. We're now hearing that not only were Fort Bragg soldiers told to stay behind if they didn't support Donald's political views, they were told that only attractive and fit soldiers were allowed to be in the crowd. One unit level message said “no fat soldiers” were allowed. To make matters even more egregious, a pop-up shop operated by 365 campaign, a realtor that sells pro-Donald apparel, was exclusively selling gear at Fort Bragg that had MAGA logos and cards that read, “White Privilege Card: Trumps Everything.“ This violates Department of Defense regulations that are in place in order to preserve political neutrality in the armed forces. Donald is not the first president to use the military as a background for speeches—most presidents do that at one point or another—but he's almost certainly the first president to demand that troops look like they come out of central casting, and he's definitely the first president to sell his branded merchandise at a military base. It's all disgraceful, but the last one is almost certainly illegal.
Between Fort Bragg, the Marines being deployed to Los Angeles, the preparations for this weekend’s obscene military parade this has been a bad week for the armed forces. And there is a storm continuing to brew between what Donald and members of the armed because what he wants and what they are willing to provide are completely at odds.
It is a bad look in any event for the president of the United States to demand a military parade in the streets of Washington DC. But we know that Donald has been wanting to do this since his first administration. Now, the difference is that back then there were people in positions of power willing to say no to him. Some of the reasons were logistical: thousands of tanks have been rolled into DC from across the country at enormous taxpayer expense, and the streets of DC and Virginia are incapable of supporting their weight.
But that's what we've come to expect because even though Republicans scream about “waste, fraud, abuse” all the time, they don't care about waste, fraud abuse. It’s just their catchphrase to trick people into thinking they're actually trying to reign in spending. But they’re perfectly comfortable wasting our money.
The bigger issue here is that it is deeply un-American to use massive shows of military force, especially since, in this instance, this military parade is in service to Donald Trump's ego. It's not to celebrate anything or anybody else.
The Trump regime continues to cause chaos but not only with our military. In the wake of Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert Kennedy's removing all 17 sitting members of the Centers for Disease Controls Advisory Committee on immunization Practices (ACIP), CDC staff is speaking out in a large protest outside of CDC headquarters in Atlanta.
ACIP is vital for vetting vaccine safety and efficacy and CDC employees know just how detrimental Kennedy’s move is for our public health. Doctors across the country and American Medical Association President Dr. Bruce Scott warned that this is extremely dangerous because it undermines trust in vaccines and could further fuel measles spread amid an ongoing outbreak.
It's not just CDC employees and doctors who are alarmed. Donald's own allies are speaking out including Republican Senator Bill Cassidy, who is also a medical doctor. Despite knowing better, Cassidy backed Kennedy's confirmation anyway in part because Kennedy promised not to change ACIP. In light of Kennedy’s recent actions, Cassidy expressed alarm and concern that ACIP’s replacements may lack vaccine expertise.
Well, Senator Cassidy, that's the point. You knew you were being lied to but you made the calculation that standing up against Kennedy's confirmation, explaining to the American people how dangerous he would be to the health of the American people, would jeopardize your bid for reelection.
The fact that Cassidy is expressing alarm now, well, I think we call that closing the barn doors after the horses already escaped.
__
Donald and the Trump regime have been making big claims about the success of their policies, but when it comes to China, there is literally no evidence to back up their false claims. Despite this, Donald went on his failing social media site to say that the United States and China have come to a trade deal during talks in London, but experts aren't so sure about that.
According to a report from ABC news, Donald announced a finalized trade deal with China. “He says the United States will get magnets and rare earth metals from China, and that tariffs on Chinese goods will go to 55%. The president also says the US relationship with China is excellent.”
China hasn’t responded to Donald’s comments yet and it's unclear what they’ve agreed to at this point.
We’re supposed to believe that this is such an amazing deal that President Xi Jinping of China has said nothing about it publicly. It’s such an amazing deal that nobody in the Trump regime, including Donald, has released the details of said deal. This does not instill confidence, especially in the case of rare earth minerals, China holds basically all of the cards here. Wendy Cutler, a former U.S. trade negotiator warned that the United States seems to have given up a lot just to regain access to China's critical minerals and magnets, specifically by allowing sensitive tax export controls to become part of the deal. She told the New York Times, “These matters have been deliberately kept off the negotiating table for years given U.S. insistence that national security related measures are not appropriate for a give and take. By apparently now reversing this long held position, the US has opened the door for China. That will be difficult to close.”
This is what happens when you put a master negotiator like Donald in a position to screw everything up. Regardless, he's going to put himself out there as a great deal maker because as I said at the beginning of the show, he's a deeply delusional and depraved individual. But it's the same old story. Donald created this crisis, this unilateral, unprovoked trade war in which he imposed insanely high tariffs on our biggest trading partner. Then when it became clear that his tactics were backfiring, he crawls back to the negotiating table, fails again, and then sells the partial resolution as a historic deal. I guess it depends on what you mean by historic because this is historically bad, but that's always the case when we're talking about the things Donald Trump is doing during the first six months of his regime.
What's happening in Los Angeles is extraordinarily important news. It's critical, it's pivotal. A president of the United States has usurped control of California's National Guard over the objection of the state’s governor. The president of the United States deployed active military to be used against Americans on American soil. That's extraordinarily dangerous. That is a slippery slope. I do not think we get to climb back up that slope if things continue to unfold the way they seem to be unfolding. But here’s the thing—it’s also a distraction because what haven't we been hearing about?
We have not been hearing about the immigration cases. We have not been hearing much about the economy and the continuing tariff debacle. We continue to focus on Donald's illegal and unconstitutional use of the military, his aggressive and unconstitutional attitude towards protestors, his burning desire to create a circumstance in which he can declare martial law because that is the most important crisis of our time.
This is a reminder that sometimes the news, the most important news we need to focus on, is also serves as a distraction. But we can't focus on everything at once, right? It's not that we're not paying attention to the other things—we are—but once in a while, because one story in particular has such far-reaching implications, we have to make a choice. So just wanted to let you know that the team is on top of all of it, and I promise you, we're not letting any balls drop.
Share this post