Chaos erupted in the Oval Office last night. I mean, more than usual.
A ceremony to swear in Donald Trump’s new administrator of the Centres for Medicare and Medicaid Services was brought to an abrupt end, when a visitor to the Oval apparently collapsed.
“Everybody out, please move,” a White House aide shouted – as the press and photographers were ushered out of the room. “No photos,” they shouted, ordering the live feed be turned off too.
It was a dramatic moment, to be sure.
But it wasn’t one of the unhinged things Trump did yesterday.
Swearing in his choice for the Centres for Medicare and Medicaid Services certainly was, though.
Here’s that, and more.
The man Donald Trump has chosen to put in charge of Medicare and Medicaid Services – the free healthcare available to the elderly and people on low incomes – is Dr Mehmet Oz.
Dr Oz is best known as a TV doctor and host of his own show, the Dr Oz Show, which ran for 13 seasons from 2009 to 2022.
While he is a medical doctor, he has no previous experience of running a large organisation. Around 6,400 people work for the Centres for Medicare and Medicaid – with more services contracted to third parties. It has a budget of around $1.5 trillion.
This all means the people holding the two most powerful roles in American healthcare are now a guy who thinks vaccines cause autism and dumped a dead bear in Central Park, and a TV doctor who used to hawk “miracle” weight loss cures on his show.
(The person who collapsed is reportedly one of his relatives. We hope they’re doing well.)
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The US will “take a pass” on trying to broker peace between Russia and Ukraine if either side make it “very difficult” to reach a deal, Donald Trump said last night.
“We’re talking about here people dying. We’re going to get it stopped, ideally,” he said.
“Now if, for some reason, one of the two parties makes it very difficult, we’re just going to say, ‘you’re fools, you’re horrible people,’ and we’re going to just take a pass.”
He boasted on the campaign trail that he would end the war in Ukraine within 24 hours of taking office.
What he meant by that, obviously was that he’d end the war in Ukraine, as long as it’s not too much bother.
So Trump’s big brainwave about how it could deport hundreds of thousands of people without having to bother with courts or due process or basic humanity was to declare gang members to be enemies of America, under the Alien Enemies Act.
The act is a wartime authority dating back to 1798, allowing the President to detain or deport citizens or natives of another nation with which the US is at war.
It is perhaps best known for its use in the World War II “internment” of 120,000 Japanese Americans, one of the bleaker moments from the country’s modern history.
Well, last night, the Supreme Court decided they’re not having any of that, for now at least.
The Court blocked, for now, the deportations of any Venezuelans held in northern Texas under the law, after an emergency appeal from the American Civil Liberties Union.
In the Oval Office, Trump claimed: “You can have all the eggs you want. We have too many eggs. In fact, if anything the prices are getting too low.”
While it’s true that the average price of a dozen eggs has come down from its peak of more than $8 in February, its current level of $3.10 is almost double where it was in October last year, the month before Trump was elected.
Trump posed behind the Resolute Desk, holding up a picture of Kilmar Abrego Garcia’s knuckles,
Mr Abrego Garcia, like many Americans, has tattooed knuckles – a marijuana leaf on his index finger, then a smiley face with crossed out eyes, a cross and a skull on his pinkie.
Trump’s picture is handily marked up to point out that marijuana starts with an M and smiley starts with an S…then it gets a bit confusing.
The cross, which one could imagine standing for a T at a push, is marked up as standing for a digit 1, with the skull for no adequately explained reason standing for a 3.
This is, of course, nonsense.
MS-13 gang members do often have tattoos – though most often they simply say “MS 13”.
Occasionally, according to Canada’s border services agency, they use a picture of a devil horns hand gesture with three dots nearby as a code. Sometimes they use the code 3C to mean 13.
But no, normally they don’t hide it. An M on the right shoulder with a stylised S is the most common. Or anywhere really. Sometimes on the face.
Mr Abrego Garcia, as far as anyone can tell, just has pretty basic taste in tatts, which is not a crime.
Elon Musk’s squad of pint-sized tech bros is building a massive database of information from across government agencies, which would create “a surveillance tool of unprecedented scope”, according to Wired magazine.
According to their sources, Doge is knitting together biometrics, immigration data, voting records and social security information in a way which could “later be searched to identify and surveil immigrants”.
Or anyone, for that matter.
A senior official told them: “It has nothing to do with finding fraud or wasteful spending … They are already cross-referencing immigration with [Social Security Agency] and [Internal Revenue Service] as well as voter data.”
“There’s a reason these systems are siloed,” Victoria Noble, a staff attorney at the Electronic Frontier Foundation told Wired. “When you put all of an agency’s data into a central repository that everyone within an agency or even other agencies can access, you end up dramatically increasing the risk that this information will be accessed by people who don’t need it and are using it for improper reasons or repressive goals, to weaponise the information, use it against people they dislike, dissidents, surveil immigrants or other groups.”
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