Category: News

On Friday of last week Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s (ICE) posted on X a clip from Fox News of the acting director of ICE, Todd Lyons, being interviewed. The interviewer, Griff Jenkins, brought the tragic situation where a Ukrainian refugee was stabbed to death in Charlotte earlier this year. But they didn’t mention that they were a Ukrainian refugee, saying “you can, of course, recall Iryna Zarutska, the young woman killed by an illegal alien.” Beyond ignoring that she was an immigrant, the assailant isn’t an immigrant, much less an “illegal alien.” So the host turned an immigrant being killed into a immigrant not legally in the country killing someone. Jenkins then said “Do you feel like your critics aren’t fully taking in perspective on exactly who you’re trying to protect?” That is of course a very problematic question, considering he had just put forward a false picture of who the victim and assailant were. Todd Lyons didn’t correct the falsehood about that situation.

On Thursday, the Department of Labor belatedly released the jobs report for September. While there were 119,000 new jobs added during that month according to the preliminary data, another 6,000 manufacturing jobs were lost during the month. Revisions for the previous two months also reduced manufacturing jobs by another 10,000. That brought the total decline to 49,000 since Donald Trump took office.

As Donald Trump has done repeatedly in the past, on Tuesday he claimed that manufacturing is coming back to America:

they were saying two, three years ago when the country was really losing business, not gaining business, that will never be manufacturers again, we’ll never be doing any of these businesses again that are coming back to us in record numbers, AI plants, but maybe even most importantly, in a sense, the auto plants. They’re all pouring back into the United States.

He went on to credit tariffs and last year’s election for that, “And I have to say, because of tariffs, I’ll also say because of November 5th, the election. But because of the tariffs there coming back.”

Someone with a mild grasp of modern manufacturing would know that manufacturing often requires inputs and or equipment that are acquired from foreign countries, making tariffs a negative as much or more than a positive. Donald Trump appears to have no grasp of the impacts of tariffs or much else about economics.

This morning the White House put out a press release about the belated release of the September jobs report. In that they promoted 11 comments made by a number individuals and entities. The first was former Trump advisor Steve Moore. The second was ABC News’s Alexis Christoforous. That person was then cited again next. The 9th comment was attributed to simply ABC News. Also, today on Bluesky, the Health and Human Services Department cited a news story from ABC News. That shouldn’t be unusual, since ABC News is large, widely consider reliable news outlet. But it should be coming from the Trump administration since just yesterday they put out another press release titled “ABC ‘News’ Is Fake News.”

The press release is like previous White House press releases rather silly. One example they provide of ABC News’ supposed “long, rich tradition of peddling lies, conspiracies, and outright opinion thinly veiled as fact” is “In February, ABC News mischaracterized the Trump Administration’s effort to eliminate waste, fraud, and abuse in the bloated federal bureaucracy as an ‘attack on veterans.’” That was a comment from a veteran. An ABC News reporter was claimed to have said that the veteran “hopes Americans realize that an attack on civil servants is an attack on veterans.’”

In another instance, the White House example reads “In January, ABC News editorialized in a partisan way that President Trump’s personnel directives were ‘retribution.’” ABC News was referring to Donald Trump’s own usage of that word, “President Donald Trump promised ‘I am your retribution’ to his supporters in his 2024 campaign.”

On Friday night aboard Air Force One Donald Trump was asked by a reporter “do you believe that a president should be able to order investigations?” That came after the reporter asked him about a just announced investigation of the likes of Bill Clinton, Larry Summers, Reid Hoffman, and JPMorganChase. The three individuals all are prominently connected to the Democratic party. His response was to say “Sure, I’m the chief law enforcement officer of the country. Not that I want to use that, but I am considered the chief law enforcement agent in the country. And I’m a, I’m allowed to do it. I don’t want to do it. I’m not doing it.” That is exactly what happened with that mentioned investigation.

That morning he wrote this on Truth Social:

Now that the Democrats are using the Epstein Hoax, involving Democrats, not Republicans, to try and deflect from their disastrous SHUTDOWN, and all of their other failures, I will be asking A.G. Pam Bondi, and the Department of Justice, together with our great patriots at the FBI, to investigate Jeffrey Epstein’s involvement and relationship with Bill Clinton, Larry Summers, Reid Hoffman, J.P. Morgan, Chase, and many other people and institutions, to determine what was going on with them, and him. This is another Russia, Russia, Russia Scam, with all arrows pointing to the Democrats. Records show that these men, and many others, spent large portions of their life with Epstein, and on his “Island.” Stay tuned!!!

Attorney General Pam Bondi responded four hours later on X, writing:

Thank you, Mr. President. SDNY U.S. Attorney Jay Clayton is one of the most capable and trusted prosecutors in the country, and I’ve asked him to take the lead. As with all matters, the Department will pursue this with urgency and integrity to deliver answers to the American people.

That post also included a screenshot of Donald Trump’s Truth Social post.

Perhaps Donald Trump would try to litigate that asking is not ordering, but that seems like difference without distinction here.

Just about any time that Donald Trump talks to the press he claims that he has brought trillion of dollars in investment in to the US. He seems incapable of providing a consistent figure for that investment. Since we started recording his various comments on this last month, he vacillates between claiming that it is $17 or $18 trillion. The number changes back forth even within an hour of a previous claim. It turns out the White House has a page detailing these supposed investments and the number is much smaller. It is currently $8.9 trillion, which is half the higher figure.

Looking back in time, the numbers don’t match up with his other claims. For example, on November 6, he claimed his recent trip to Asia had brought in $2 trillion in investment, but the White House figure ahead of the trip was $8.8 trillion, a difference of only 0.1 trillion from the current figure.

Earlier today, Donald Trump posted a clip on Truth Social from the Fox Business channel of Maria Bartiromo claiming that Donald Trump has been focused on affordability since day one of this term. She then said “Look at the price of oil. Look at the price of certain foods.” And she later said “he’s done actually effective job in bringing down the price of oil and I know it’s working on on other elements of affordability as well.” In the clip, she didn’t come back to what the “certain foods” you are supposed to be looking at the price of.

Oil is a bit of an odd thing to highlight, as almost no Americans are buying barrels of oil. They do buy products that come from oil. The most obvious one is gasoline. She didn’t mention the price of that decreasing. The price of Brent Crude oil, which is commonly referenced in media accounts as measure of the price of oil, is down 20.8% from when Donald Trump took office. By comparison, AAA’s national gas price average is down 1.6%. From $3.120 to $3.071 a gallon.

Notably, the price of gas isn’t close to $2 despite Donald Trump again today claiming, as he has done repeatedly, that it would soon reach that level.

Normally lower priced oil should lead to lower priced gasoline, the difference in the price change of oil and gas has been covered by the media this year.

During Donald Trump’s first term, there was Sharpiegate, which involved in part him altering a poster showing the expected track of a hurricane to include Alabama in the path of the storm. After he had falsely claimed it was at risk from the hurricane several days before. Here was the original poster being shown to him in the Oval Office:

And here is it after he drew on it:

Photos released by the White House show him doing this again this week, though with a less serious topic to mislead on, the price of weight loss drugs.

In this photo you can see Dr. Mehmet Oz explaining one of the posters that would be presented at an Oval Office press briefing:

They also released this black and white photo showing Trump in the process of changing the poster as Dr. Oz chuckles:

There were two additional photos released showing him inspecting the poster with Sharpie in hand:

Another photo they release shows the changes made unclearly:

A press photographer got a clearer shot of the changes.

The first change made was to add “Biden” to the bar for the list price of a weight loss drug. The label for the next bar has been blacked out and “retail now” has been added to the bar. The final bar, which has been labeled as “Trump (MFN)”, has had “or lower” added to the bar.

What might explain some of the change is that in an Oval Press briefing last month, Donald Trump claimed the price was going to be lowered to $150. To which, Dr. Oz interjected, “we have not negotiated those yet.”

The federal government stopped reporting jobs data since the shutdown started, but a private firm says that there were 153,000 job cuts in October. So far this year they say there have 1.1 million cut jobs, up from 761,000 in all of 2024 and the most since 2020. Against that backdrop, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is trying to hire 10,000 new agents. They are clearly having a problem finding qualified applicants, as Homeland Security Secretary told Fox News they have now received more than 200,000 applications. And they are still promoting joining.

Fox News ignored that they are still are looking for more applicants despite having 20 times more applications than needed agents. Julia Ainsley and Didi Martinez from NBC News covered this and reported that people who entering its training program were not being properly vetted and had disqualifying issues:

ICE officials only later discovered that some of the recruits failed drug testing, have disqualifying criminal backgrounds or don’t meet the physical or academic requirements to serve, the sources said.

During Donald Trump’s first term various people declared that his superpower was shameless. Whether it is a superpower or not, the obvious shameless has continued in to his second term. One area that has unsurprisingly been on display is inflation. Donald Trump promised to lower the cost of goods, which would require deflation, but prices have been going up instead. How does he address that? Blatantly lie about it.

On Tuesday, he claimed his administration had “inherited the worst inflation ever, that we’ve ever had.” He then went on to claim “now we’re down to a very low rate of inflation, 2.7 percent, and it’s going to be a little bit lower than that. It’s almost a perfect number. Believe it or not, you don’t want to have zero. You want to have 1 percent to 2 percent, and we’re very close to that number.” The numbers tell a different story.

Trump didn’t specify what figure he was referring to, but the what matches that 2.7% in the latest month available is the personal consumption expenditures (PCE) number, which is seen as the Federal Reserves preferred measure of inflation. Here is the government’s chart of that going back in to the Biden administration:

You can see that since Donald Trump took over the figure went down from where it was at the end of the Biden administration and then went up to the level it was when he took over. Considering the rate is the same as it was under Biden,how can the “worst inflation ever” also be “very low inflation”? It could be that the worst inflation was actually very low inflation. Or in reality, Trump just claims that things are good under him and bad under other people.

Also, worth noting in the comments quoted above, he said that you want to have inflation, which runs counter to his promise to lower prices, which, would require deflation.

After a meeting between Donald Trump and Chinese dictator Xi Jinping it was announced that China would again by US soybeans. The amount is notably less than it was under President Biden last year, as reported by Politico’s Megan Messerly and Phelim Kine:

[Treasury Secretary Scott] Bessent, speaking on Fox business Thursday morning, said that China has agreed to buy 12 million metric tons of soybeans between now and January and 25 million metric tons each year for the next three years after that. The U.S. exported nearly 27 million metric tons of soybeans to China in 2024.

Reality didn’t get in Trump’s way as usual, as today talking to reporters on Air Force One, he claimed that the 25 million metric tons in future years is “a numbers that they’ve never seen before in terms of the soybeans.” He then stated to farmers, “I suggest that they go out and buy larger tractors and more land. Okay? We want larger tractors and more land because nobody’s ever seen anything like it.”

Bessent didn’t disclose if some of the soybeans being sold to china would come from his farm.