The Daily Wrap-Up

28 October, 2025

How very Orwellian of them.

[Watch on YouTube here.]

Today, Donald spoke to over 6,000 American troops based in Japan. Early on, his remarks took a dark turn when he threatened more serious crackdowns on American cities.

Now we’re starting in Memphis and Memphis was a disaster. It’s been there. They’ve been there for two weeks and it’s a whole different series. Crime is less than half and within a month it’ll be gone getting rid of all the bad ones that we’re going to go into Chicago, we’re going to go into our cities, we’re going to clean ‘em out, we’re going to straighten ‘em out, and we are going to have safe cities because you want to protect safe cities. . . . We are sending in our National Guard and if we need more than the National Guard, we’ll send more than the National Guard because we’re going to have safe cities. We’re not going to have people killed in our cities and whether people like that or not, that’s what we’re doing.

This is an example of Donald doing one of the few things he’s good at—softening the ground by slowly, over time, getting people used to ideas they’d normally find unacceptable. The rest of his speech, if you can call it that, was a rambling, disjointed and often incoherent mess. Over the course of an hour, he told the troops they were good looking and then declared that he can’t stand good looking people; he claimed there would be salary increases despite the government shutdown; he rambled bizarrely about magnets versus hydraulic; and he bragged about his recent murderous attacks on boats in the Caribbean.

Finally, he went off on a bizarre tangent about how President Biden used to say he was a pilot and a truck driver. I don’t think either of those things is true. Then he told the troops that Biden “wasn’t much of a president. That I can tell you. That we all know.” That’s standard operating procedure for Donald, but it’s also grotesque for him to engage in such a partisan attack in front of American service members and it’s not something that should ever be normalized.

---

The New York Times reported today that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth ordered another series of deadly military strikes on boats suspected of smuggling narcotics. These actions took place off the coast of Central and South America and killed 14 people. This brings the death toll of 57 since this campaign began in September. Hegseth said that the latest strikes, of which there were three, occurred in international waters and are said to be part of the Trump regime’s expanding war on “narco-terrorists.”

The mainstream media shouldn’t be using the language of legitimate warfare to describe what’s happening here: Donald and Hegseth are issuing illegal orders to the United States military to murder people.

So far, we know that at least two of the 57 people killed were innocent fishermen who had no links to the drug trade. We have no idea if the other 55 dead people who’ve been killed had anything to do with drug running or terrorism. We are being asked to take on faith the Trump regime’s assertion that it has evidence they’ve been targeting the “right” people.

I don’t know what the penalty is if you’re found guilty of drug trafficking. Maybe it’s the death penalty. Maybe you think it should be. But the death penalty is not being carried out here. People are being denied their due process rights. Donald is acting like judge, jury, and executioner. This is, to put it simply, murder.

---

As the shutdown continues, 25 states are suing Donald and the Trump regime for suspending SNAP benefits beginning November 1^st. Lawyers are asking a federal judge in Massachusetts to order the continuation of benefits throughout the government shutdown. The lawsuit says in part:

the loss of SNAP benefits leads to food insecurity, hunger and malnutrition, which are associated with numerous negative health outcomes in children such as poor concentration, decreased cognitive functioning, fatigue, depression, and behavioral problems.

This shutdown is to be laid entirely at the feet of the fascist Republican Party, and they are keeping it shutdown at Donald’s behest. The executive branch could easily dip into contingency funds to continue SNAP benefits, but they are refusing to do so.

Why? One reason is that they don’t care about children, especially poor children. Another is that it’s very important to them that they convince enough people that the government shutdown is the fault of the Democratic Party even though the Republicans are in control of everything. One way to accomplish this is to do something so cruel that the Democrats make a bad long-term bargain to reopen the government and prevent short-term suffering.

If you’re a cynical Republican like Mike Johnson, you can tell people that the Democrats could have opened the government all along because they’re the ones who shut it down in the first place.

Let’s put this SNAP issue in perspective: Roughly 42 million Americans receive snap benefits; 39% of those are children. Those numbers should be enough to make us hang our heads in shame, but if Republicans can score some cheap political points by letting children starve, that’s what they’re going to do.

Some Republicans in Congress are concerned their constituents will punish them if they don’t fund SNAP. One of them, Missouri Senator Josh Hawley, introduced a bill last week to guarantee continued food assistance funding during the shutdown.

[Watch on YouTube here.]

Oklahoma Jobs consultant Sammy Jones lays out why cutting SNAP will ending up hurting all of us:

If you are naive enough to think that the pause to snap benefits on November 1st isn’t going to affect you because you don’t receive food stamps, I want you to hear this about one in eight Americans receive snap benefits. In fact, in Oklahoma where I live, that’s one in six people. So about 600,000 people in my state alone, Oklahoma receive snap benefits about one in four children in the US receive SNAP benefits, but you’re not one of those people so you don’t care. But hang with me when those benefits go away, just about $9 billion in grocery spending vanishes. So you’ve got to be thinking about not just the grocery stores being able to stay open and pay their employees, but you have to think about the entire supply chain trucks on the road. People who provide food to these grocery stores, $9 billion every dollar spent in SNAP benefits adds about a dollar 50 to a dollar 80 to the economy.

So, cutting those benefits isn’t saving that dollar, it’s taking away that dollar 50 to your local economy, but you don’t receive SNAP benefits. You don’t work for a grocery store, you don’t drive a truck, you don’t give a shit. But when all of those things happen, the only way to combat that is to drastically increase the price of groceries. Grocery prices are already up over 3% in 2025 alone, which is almost an entire percentage higher than the average increase in grocery prices over the last 20 years. I thought they were supposed to go down day one though. So even if SNAP benefits only pause for one month, which by the way would be detrimental to all the people I mentioned before that you don’t give a shit about, it will cost the economy roughly 13 to $14 billion in profit and you can expect your grocery prices in just that one month to go up at least 1% and states will stand to lose about 300 to $500 million in sales tax revenue. So even if you do not receive SNAP benefits, you never have. You never will. You do not want these to be paused on November 1st.

In America, we need to explain these things in the context of other people’s self-interest, which I have a hard time accepting. You’d think we would all just want children to be fed properly but, no, Americans need to understand that they will be adversely affected if we let children go hungry. If we hadn’t been brainwashed into thinking that ours is a country of rugged individualists who don’t need community and don’t care about the commons, then we probably wouldn’t be having this conversation. It would have been enough to say, “We cannot allow children to go hungry.”

---

As Politico recently reported, because of Donald’s trade war with China that country has stopped buying soybeans from U.S. farmers. Instead, China is buying them from Brazil and Argentina. Meanwhile, United States beef prices are high compared to last year and to combat that problem, Donald announced plans to quadruple the amount of beef we buy from Argentina which seems counter-intuitive.

To help his ally, the chainsaw-wielding Argentine president Javier Milei, Donald is deliberately sabotaging American farmers and cattle ranchers, many of whom voted for him. In addition to opening the market to Argentine beef, Donald has also announced plans to give Argentina another bailout to the tune of $40 billion. That is more than the entire annual budget of USAID, a now-defunct agency that was created designed to prevent children in other countries from dying from starvation and easily preventable diseases. Thanks to Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency, USAID no longer exists because it was deemed too expensive.

While Donald is spending tens of billions of dollars of American taxpayers’ dollars on Argentina, hundreds of thousands of federal workers are currently furloughed and a few hundreds of thousands more are working without pay.

We need to think about the interconnectedness of all of this—the tariffs which made the bailout of American farmers necessary in the first place; China’s retaliation against the American soybean market; the failure of Donald and Republicans to govern; the bailout of Donald’s allies at the expense of America’s children; the greed. And, of course, the unspeakable cruelty.

[Watch on YouTube here.]