President Donald Trump said Sunday that he would release the results of his MRI test that he received in October.
“If you want to have it released, I’ll release it,” the president said during an exchange with reporters as he traveled back to Washington from Florida.
He said the results of the MRI were “perfect.”
The White House has so far declined to detail why Trump had an MRI during his physical last month, or on what part of his body.
The press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, has said that the president received “advanced imaging” at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center “as part of his routine physical examination” and that the results showed Trump remains in “exceptional physical health.”
Trump added Sunday that he has “no idea” on what part of his body he got the MRI.
“It was just an MRI,” he said. “What part of the body? It wasn’t the brain because I took a cognitive test and I aced it.”
This is good ... for a laugh. Anyone who believes they'll release his MRI(s) needs one themselves. Isn't it amazing how the dimbulb doesn't know what part of his body got the MRI? Talk about a self- own! And boasting once again that he "aced" a cognitive test isn't much of a brag, since it's used to determine if there's any cognitive impairment (as might occur with a 79-year-old prone to rage-gasms, difficulty dealing with reality, delusions of grandeur, etc.). We only play doctors on this blog, but rest assured, MRI or not, the MF is mentally impaired, bigly.
One can imagine stretching Article II of the Constitution to authorize the U.S. drug boat campaign. The wildly overbroad Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) precedents, as I have written before, provide “no meaningful legal check on the president.” And there are dim historical precedents one could cite. Arthur Schlesinger Jr. noted in The Imperial Presidency that in the 19th century presidents unilaterally engaged in “[m]ilitary action against Indians—stateless and lawless by American definition—pirates, slave traders, smugglers, cattle rustlers, frontier ruffians [and] foreign brigands.”
One might also, possibly, stretch the laws of war to say that attacks on the drug boats are part of a “non-international armed conflict,” as OLC has reportedly concluded. This line of argument likely draws on a super-broad conception of the threat posed by the alleged drug runners as well as the expansive U.S. post-9/11 justification for treating as targetable (i) dangerous non-state actor terrorists off the battlefield; (ii) those who “directly support[] hostilities” in aid of the defined enemy;* and (iii) activities that provide economic support to the war effort, such as Taliban drug labs or ISIS oil trucks. I don’t think this argument comes close to working without deferential reliance on a bad faith finding by the president about the non-international armed conflict and much greater stretches of precedent than the United States previously indulged after 9/11. Still, the unconvincing argument is conceivable.
But there can be no conceivable legal justification for what the Washington Post reported earlier today: That U.S. Special Operations Forces killed the survivors of a first strike on a drug boat off the coast of Trinidad who, in the Post’s words, “were clinging to the smoldering wreck.”
Section 5.4.7 of the DOD Law of War Manual says:
Prohibition Against Declaring That No Quarter Be Given. It is forbidden to declare that no quarter will be given. This means that it is prohibited to order that legitimate offers of surrender will be refused or that detainees, such as unprivileged belligerents, will be summarily executed. Moreover, it is also prohibited to conduct hostilities on the basis that there shall be no survivors, or to threaten the adversary with the denial of quarter. This rule is based on both humanitarian and military considerations. This rule also applies during non-international armed conflict.
This is an old principle of the laws of war... (our emphasis)
A lawless American regime is committing war crimes in an extra-judicial military action. The lawless regime is doing it in the name of the American people. The American people need to stand up and let the perpetrators know they'll be held accountable, regardless of the corrupt Republican Supreme Court's un- Constitutional diktats.
... On Thursday evening, Trump condemned immigrants in a broad and vicious invective, painting them as “illegal and disruptive populations” and attacking “those that hate, steal, murder and destroy everything that America stands for”. He vowed to block all migration from “third world countries” to allow the “US system to fully recover”.
The president’s post follows a deadly shooting in Washington DC on Wednesday in which one National Guard member was injured and another killed by a 29-year old Afghan national who assisted the US military effort in Afghanistan and was evacuated to the US after the American military withdrew. [snip]
The unprecedented post from a US president – spiteful even by Trump’s standards contradicted extensive research showing irrefutably that immigrants to the US commit fewer crimes than people born there, and have done so for more than a century.
Despite Trump’s post, in which he claims incorrectly that 53 million people in the US – “most of which are on welfare, from failed nations, or from prisons, mental institutions, gangs, or drug cartels” – are contributing to “high crime”, economists have found that the immigrants are 60% less likely to be incarcerated compared to individuals born in the US. This trend has remained consistent for the past 150 years.
Moreover, as immigration rates have risen in the past few decades, crime rates across the country have fallen dramatically. According to an analysis by the American Immigration Council (AIC), the immigrant share of the US population has more than doubled since 1980, rising from 6.2% in that year to 13.9% in 2022. During the same period, the overall crime rate dropped by 60.4%, from 5,900 crimes per 100,000 people to 2,335. This includes a 34.5% decrease in violent crime and a 63.3% reduction in property crime.
In his post, Trump also claimed that immigrants and their children “are supported through massive payments from patriotic American citizens who … put up with what has happened to our country, but it’s eating them alive to do so”.
“A migrant earning $30,000 with a green card will get roughly $50,000 in yearly benefits for their family,” Trump added.
His claim is flatly contradicted by data showing that immigrants are significant contributors to the US economy. In 2023, undocumented immigrant households contributed $89.8bn in federal, state and local taxes, while holding $299bn in spending power, according to the AIC.
The organization also found that the vast majority of immigrants are not dependent on state governments to guarantee housing. Instead, in 2023, immigrant households paid more than $167bn in rent in the housing market and held over $6.6tn in housing wealth... (our emphasis)
There's more fact-checking at the link, but as we all should know by now, if his lips are moving, he's lying. His on-going, deranged efforts to pit one race/ religion/ nationality/ class/ etc., against another are vile and despicable attacks on our Nation as any ever made. Fanning irrational hatred against immigrants in this way is bound to result in more violence in our communities, whether by his ICE goons or by moron vigilantes.
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