Trump to Charge Taxpayers $86 Billion for Deportations
New border czar says Trump's campaign promise comes with previously undisclosed price tag
Dec. 26: New border czar hits America with surprise junk fee … Family detentions to resume … Let’s see how Trump likes getting handed an epidemic … War-crimes trials for oil execs? Hmmm! …
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When Donald Trump promised on the campaign trail that he’d deliver mass deportations of undocumented immigrants, he never mentioned charging taxpayers for it. He didn’t even lie promise that Mexico would pay for it!
Turns out, we will.
Trump’s border czar, Tom Homan, confirmed on Christmas Eve how much the war on migrants will cost. “Eighty-six billion [dollars] is a start,” Homan said without mentioning an end. “We need at least that.”
Which is weird because Trump has deployed two billionaires to figure out how his government can spend less. Like, two trillion less.
In his appearance on Fox, Homan said the investment will save Americans money in the long run because they’ll no longer be paying for flights and medical care. The roundups and deportations, however, will require paying for flights and medical care.
Also, Homan’s concept of paying for things now to invest and save later runs counter to Republican philosophy. They want, for instance, to cut spending on IRS agents, even though IRS salaries pay for themselves every April 15.
And none of Trump’s people have even started to talk about the costs from the supply-chain and production disruptions being caused by just the threat of mass deportations.
“We are talking about the biggest national security vulnerability this country has,” Homan said, raising the prospect of another possible funding source. Because if it’s a national-security vulnerability, then obviously the money should come from the Defense Department!1
Anyhoo, point is, all the Trump parties involved in this clown party are already setting it up for failure. Which means we’re all gonna need mass importations of popcorn.
Homan Previews Homan Rights Abuses
Incoming border czar Tom Homan says that RePresident Donald Trump will once again be locking up entire families, even if their kids are U.S. citizens.
Homan told the Washington Post in an interview that, “We’re going to need to construct family facilities.”
As acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement during Trump1.0, Homan’s “achievements” section of his résumé includes separating more than 4,000 children from their families. (Ironically, it’s also estimated that more than 4,000 other children have been separated from their father after Trump denied paternity.)
Homan said that because deporting baby U.S. citizens forcibly would be more illegal than the new administration is prepared to be yet, Trump will give migrant families the choice of taking baby citizens with them when they’re deported, or splitting up the family by leaving them in the U.S. to become indoctrinated as Democratic voters.
And Homan said it’s the fault of the parents if their American-citizen kids get locked up by him and Trump during the detention process.
“You knew you were in the country illegally and chose to have a child. So you put your family in that position,” Homan said. It’s not clear whether Homan understands that people don’t get to choose in some states anymore, but it was in all the papers. Meaning, it was Trump who put their families in that position.
Of course, Homan blaming immigrants for having kids suggests the Trump administration-to-be is now flat-out telling undocumented immigrants to abort/murder their precious unborn children before they can become American. Homan’s policy could lead to expanded GOP abortion exceptions including rape, incest, health of the mother, and whether the fetus has its papers in order.
Biden Punishes Trump for Handing Him Covid By Returning the Favor
Four years after Pres. Donald Trump lost the presidential election largely on his (mis)handling of the Covid pandemic — handing the politicized, scientifically compromised mess to incoming Pres. Joe Biden — Biden is getting his revenge.
A major new KFF Health News report concludes that the Biden administration botched its response to the bovine outbreak of avian flu.
At first, bird flu was containable, the report concludes. The government could have isolated the initial outbreaks. But didn’t act fast enough:
“The U.S. government failed to eliminate the virus on dairy farms when it was confined to a handful of states, by quickly identifying infected cows and taking measures to keep their infections from spreading. Now at least 875 herds across 16 states have tested positive.”
The causes include not being Big Government and also letting big business run things instead. Turns out, the Invisible Hand doesn’t see quarterly profit margins in thwarting epidemics!
KFF identified four “key problems” in our fucked-up health system that helped explode bird flu:
“Deference to the farm industry”
“Eroded public health budgets”
“Neglect for the safety of agriculture workers”
“Sluggish pace of federal interventions.”
It’s worth noting that if those were the causes under Trump, the left would be howling like a pig getting vaccinated.
Already, the virus has mutated to spread in cows. And cows are genetically closer to people than to birds, meaning the virus has traveled more than halfway down the mutation path that leads to us.
The U.S. Department of Agriculture is singled out by the report as slow to get moving and respond to researchers’ and medical-type people’s pleas for help.
The report doesn’t mention Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack, so TFN is just gonna have to. As I’ve reported previously, Vilsack — first for Pres. Barack Obama and then for Biden — oversaw a USDA accused of regulatory capture, effectively serving as a tool for Big Agriculture to grind up small, family farms like so much pesticide-infused grist in an industrial-sized mill. This helped Big Agriculture. And it also helped Republicans, by forfeiting whatever political benefits Democrats might have gained with rural voters if they had defended small family farms against big crime-family farms.
WHOOPS Biden is also handing Trump the highest number of whooping-cough cases the country has seen since before Trump1.0.
Like, a lot more. NBC made a picture showing what highest-ness looks like in case the word “highest” has lost meaning in our post-math-literacy world:
And, sure, all the masking and isolating probably led to those dips in 2020 and after, but the resurgence is considerably worse than even pre-pandemic numbers.
Because it’s always a good time for finger-pointing, let’s point some newsfucking fingers, shall we? NBC reports that improved testing is a factor in the higher rates — meaning, in Biden’s defense, prior levels may have been underreported and we’re merely seeing more accurate numbers now.
But, in Biden’s not-defense, lower vaccination rates are also to blame. Which, in Biden’s defense, isn’t totally Biden’s fault. Yes, Biden and Democrats generally have ceded way too much ground in the arena of vaccines and vaccine mandates.
But Trump, too, has been hilariously ambivalent about vaccines: He knows MAGA hates them and complains that therefore he can’t brag about them.
With no elections to win anymore, and facing a possible whooping cough epidemic, Trump could, in theory, flip once more and champion vaccines. And because the far right will eat most of what Trump feeds them even if they’d reject it from Democrats, it might even just work. I mean, who’s easier to vaccinate than sheep?
Greenland Prepares for War
Danish officials say it’s “ironic” that they’ve just announced a major new military ramp-up for Greenland — which Denmark controls — right after RePresident-elect Donald Trump revived his ambitions to own Greenland, but it’s not like Denmark’s cancelling the ramp-up, either.
One of Trump’s signature issues long before Trump1.0 was blasting the U.S. invasion of Iraq (which obviously he originally supported because obviously). So it’s only a matter of time until Trump’s National Security Advisor — whoever that is at the time, Carrot Top or Rob Schneider — “reveals” that Greenland has WMDs.
But Greenland, seen below responding to Trump’s threat, will now be ready.
Danish Defense Minister Troels Lund Poulsen reportedly says, “[N]ow we are planning a stronger presence.”
That stronger Viking strength will consist of a military spending package totaling $1.5 billion, which is even more than the U.S. military spends on gas every month. Poulsen said Greenland’s defensive forces will get more military personnel, along with two patrol boats, two drones, and two sled-dog teams.
For the record, TFN did not make up the two sled-dog teams. Meaning this may be one Trump threat that bites us in the ass literally as well as the other way.
Dems to Fight Trump But Not on Picking Dem Leaders
With the next Congress coming next week, I want to revisit the committee leadership contest between Reps. Gerry Connolly (D-VA) and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY). Connolly won the ranking-member slot on the Oversight and Accountability panel, despite/because of being 74 years old (and also having cancer).
And it sounded as though there were decent reasons Connolly should be an exception to the generational churn we saw on other committees, in which generians both septua- and octo- were unseated by youngisher Democrats. But one Democratic reason to reject Ocasio-Cortez stuck out to TFN like a log in the egg nog.
An unnamed House Democrat told Politico that congressional Democrats debated whether to give a leadership post to someone Republicans have made a high-profile target. “[T]here’s been much conversation about whether it’s wise to promote the GOP’s favorite foil to lead a high-profile committee sure to provide the very content Republicans will use during the midterms to effectively define Dems as woke, Trump-hating leftists.”
In other words, one of the issues Democrats are willing to work with Trump on is who should be their leaders. As if sidelining Ocasio-Cortez means Republicans won’t target whoever the fuck Democrats make their leaders. There are so many reasons this is wrong but it’s also wrong-headed. It’s the classic pre-surrender, for one thing.
But also, Ocasio-Cortez didn’t make her name or her success championing woke causes. Ocasio-Cortez is an economic populist. In other words, she’s a rousing Democratic voice on exactly the issues where Trump is strongest.
So Democrats could have given the spotlight to someone who could actually protect the party’s left flank and manifest the fact that “woke”-ness isn’t just compatible with economic populism, it’s a necessary component. And Democrats are about to wish they had a leader protecting their left flank.
Because MAGA-land isn’t done claiming unprotected territory on the left.
Bannon Claims Unprotected Territory on the Left
Steve Bannon, longtime advisor to Donald Trump, last week resurrected key components of his economic populism in an interview with Semafor’s David Weigel. Here’s some Marxist-adjacent highlights that would’ve produced howls from Democrats if Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY) had said them:
“Taking on tech.”
“No tax on tips.”
“No tax on Social Security.”
“No tax on overtime.”
“Over the last 30 or 40 years, if you look at total returns from productive activity, more returns have gone to capital than have gone to work.”
“The response to [killing United Healthcare CEO Brian Thompson] is not more security for CEOs. It’s looking at how much, since 2008, has gone to stock buybacks for shareholders, not to reinvest in plants and equipment and capital to build jobs and robust communities.”
“You have to break that mindset that stock buybacks are fine, that crony capitalism is fine, and the tax breaks for the corporations are fine.”
“I’m for a dramatic increase in corporate taxes.”
“We have to increase taxes on the wealthy.”
“Everybody’s going to take a little pain, but the working people are going to take less pain than you [rich] guys.”
Now, Bannon agenda ≠ Trump agenda. And Bannon can’t resist a Biblical allusion, saying “In President Trump’s house, there are many mansions” because that’s a lot more Jesus-y sounding than just admitting the vast majority of Trump’s cabinet is billionaires hellbent on taking less pain than the working people.
But this is a real movement on the right. It won’t be quiet just because Trump is president. And Democrats should foster it and appeal to it and endorse it because when Trump betrays it — because Trump is the scorpion who can not help but sting the frog — Democrats can only win back those workers if their vision is even remotely like Bannon’s.
Three Quickies
Deregulation isn’t just for Wall Street, anymore! A big new report2 from the New York Times finds that after Oct. 7, the Israeli government and military went on the attack against the rules regulating how they attack people. The deregulating included lifting caps on how many civilians could be endangered and raising thresholds for civilian harm/death per strike. Israel acknowledged the rules changes, saying, yeah but Oct. 7.
The Bible is actually pro-LGBTQ+, according to an Anglican group that is also coincidentally pro-LGBTQ+. The advocacy organization, Changing Attitude England, joins a long line of organizations arguing that The Bible doesn’t hate them. The group says The Bible is chock full of LGBTQ+ folks, including eunuchs — aka transgender people kinda — non-cisgender people, and “some clear queer characters.” Weirdly, a book written by a perfect, all-knowing author has still, 2,000 years after He hit the best-seller lists, not made itself uniformly clear to everyone.
If you never thought a war-crimes trial could qualify as “Neat!” then TFN has a story for you. Sweden is prosecuting two men for war crimes in Sudan, where they allegedly were complicit with troops and militias who killed 12,000 people. Now, admittedly, that doesn’t sound too neat in retrospect, but we’re not at that part yet. The defendants are oil company executives. Allegedly, they were involved with clearing Sudanese oil sites, which regrettably sometimes involves a few murders, because if you’re gonna make a multi-billion-dollar omelet, ya gotta break 12,000 eggs. Anyway, the “Neat!” part is that this is the first time a country has used war-crimes statutes to prosecute crimes committed in other countries, a precedent that should scare the shit, complete with carbon emissions, out of oil executives around the world.
TCB
THANK YOU! I just want to acknowledge the outpouring of kind words and financial support in response to me outing myself professionally yesterday and sharing a bit about my background in journalism. I’m still running around doing holiday things for the next few days, so it may take me a while to respond.
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CONNECTING In addition to holiday stuff, there are a batch of stories I’m racing to break because they’re timely. So I’m not being great about responding to everyone right now but will get better as I get these stories out. (It’s also a goal for the new year to get TFN out a lot earlier in the mornings!)
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When I started reading Homan's cost of mass deportation at $86 billion, I immediately thought that it should come out of the defense budget! Then I kept reading and you say:
"Because if it’s a national-security vulnerability, then obviously the money should come from the Defense Department!¹"
LOL. I love when we think alike. It makes me feel less crazy.
Hmmm… it’s probably cheaper for me to hide and support a family of these folks than to pay for their deportation. However, I will gladly chip in to send MuskRAT back to South Africa.