Friday News Roundup
I am currently working on a writing project that has reduced some of my output on this newsletter, but for the duration, I will keep sending you a news roundup every Friday. If anything, I hope it can give you Donald Trump in a concentrated yet therapeutic dose that frees you from any impulse to start doomscrolling during the rest of the week.
The Trump tariff “war” is even more haphazard and ill-conceived than I thought.
On February 1, Trump imposed a tariff on Canada via executive order. The executive order was originally titled Imposing Duties to Address the Flow of Illicit Drugs Across Our Northern Border. The text of the order appears to mainly inspired by moral panic about fentanyl. Two days later, Trump delayed imposing the tariff until March 4.
Also on February 1, Trump imposed a tariff on Mexico via the executive order, Imposing Duties to Address the Situation at Our Southern Border. Two days later, Trump also delayed imposing that tariff until March 4 as well.
Yet again on February 1, Trump imposed another tariff on China via the executive order, Imposing Duties to Address the Synthetic Opioid Supply Chain in the People’s Republic of China. According to a Congressional research report from 2024, Mexico had already overtaken China by 2019 as a source of synthetic opioids used in making fentanyl. I had not had Donald Trump reviving the 19th century Opium Wars on my bingo card, although the Yellow Peril rhetoric was totally predictable. Unlike the tariffs on Canada and Mexico, the tariffs on China remain in effect.
Deportation Watch
In Los Angeles on February 3, thousands of anti-deportation protesters blocked the 101 Freeway in protest against Donald Trump’s ICE raids.
On February 6, the British newspaper The Independent reported that Trump sent 10 non-citizen prisoners in shackles via military helicopter to Guantanamo Bay. The Trump Administration claims that the prisoners are from the violent Tren de Aragua gang from Venezuela, but there is no confirmation of that independent of statements made by Trump Administration officials themselves.
Donald Trump plans to invoke the Alien Enemies Act, still on the books from the year 1798, in order to facilitate his mass deportation plans. If you forget your high school history classes, the Alien Enemies Act is part of the Alien and Sedition Acts that induced enough of a backlash among liberty-loving post-Revolutionary Americans to lead to the peaceful Revolution of 1800 that swept Thomas Jefferson into the presidency during the elections that year.
Forbes magazine has a surprisingly good timeline summary of Trump’s mass deportation actions. Here are two highlights.
El Salvador’s authoritarian populist leader Nayib Bukele has agreed to accept immigrants deported by Trump and send them to his anti-gang gulag, CECOT (Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo). Bukele has indicated that he will imprison immigrants deported by the United States, regardless of their nationality or even their ability to speak Spanish.
Security of Homeland Security Kristi Noem (yes, the lady who bragged about murdering her dog) has revoked temporary protected status for about 350,000 Venezuelan immigrants in the United States. None of these immigrants are illegal in any sense. The Biden Administration had legally expanded these Venezuelans’ protected status in 2023 in response to the instability of the left-wing authoritarian Maduro regime. Many refugees of left-wing governments in Venezuelan had voted for Trump, but now Trump’s deportation policy has left them feeling betrayed.
Pandemic Watch
The H5N1 bird flu has been detected in poultry farms in nine states as of yesterday, February 6.
The H5N1 flu has already infected over 500 species, including 480 bird species and 70 mammal species. Chris Walzer, a veterinarian and the director of health for the Wildlife Conservation Society, has called the trend “an existential threat to the world’s biodiversity.”
The CDC reported two cases of pet cats transmitting H5N1 to humans, but the Trump Administration deleted the data. The pro-pandemic policies of RFK Jr. at the Department of Health and Humans Services continue unabated.
Climate Change Watch
Now that the California wildfires are almost 100% contained, I’m shifting this section to be about climate change with a focus on extreme weather events.
A Sudden Stratospheric Warming (SSW) event with the potential to create a rare split in the polar vortex is projected to bring prolonged cold weather to North America in mid-February.
California may be free of major wildfires for now, but the third Pacific storm in a row has left the state vulnerable to mudslides.
Heavy rains in Sonoma County, California have also led to two confirmed deaths, although names have been withheld until notification of next of kin.
Trump Craziness Watch
One way of maintaining your sanity is to realize that you are not going crazy. Your government is. Here are some highlights.
The Trump administration went after the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) after making the ridiculous claim that the Biden Administration earmarked $100 million in condoms for Hamas. Because of nonsense claims like this, Trump has recalled almost all USAID employees from overseas and plans to shrink the agency to a skeleton crew of 300 employees. According to a statement from Elon Musk last Sunday, Musk’s completely unofficial Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has confirmed that his goal is to shut down USAID with Trump’s support.
About 500 Marines have deployed to Guantanamo Bay to provide security at a facility designed to imprison up to 30,000 undocumented immigrants swept up Trump’s mass deportations.
The FBI handed over details on over 5,000 employees to the Trump Administration in response to the administration’s demand for personal data on agency employees who investigated the January 6th insurrection against the U.S. Capitol. The FBI previous only provided Trump with employee ID numbers, but they have now since handed over the names of those FBI employees. Screenshots of a questionnaire that the Trump Administration has been using to gather info on and intimidate FBI employees about the January 6th investigations can be found at the court filing here.
WIRED magazine has identified six minions of Elon Musk, ranging in age from 19 to 24, who have seized control of internal computer systems in the federal government. One teenager on this project who works for Elon Musk has the online handle “Big Balls” and owns a company called Tesla DOT Sexy LLC (I wrote it out this way to avoid the computer from forcing me to create a link of that monstrosity), which appears to be mainly a shell corporation that controls at least two Russian-affiliated web domains. The Elon “employees” involved cybervandalism of the government are not just plain vanilla software engineers, but rather include two ex-criminal computer hackers, including one affiliated with a hacker group called UGNazis.