Saturday Report 2/7/26 — Surprise Surprise?! TrumpRX is a fake. Read the fine print...

The Best of the Rest of the News and Opinion

See you this morning at 9 am PT, noon ET, on our “Ask Thom Anything” Zoom meeting!

— These people are monsters. The Trump regime is now trying to deport little five-year-old Liam Ramos, the child they had used as bait in Minneapolis and then deported to Texas before a judge ordered them to take him back to his home in Minnesota. They’re apparently doing because this because his cuteness and innocence embarrassed them. I can think of no other word to describe these people than “monsters.”

— Trump’s racist attack on the Obamas highlights his alleged lifelong racism. Trump retweeted a post from a racist regular over on Elon’s sewer that featured the faces of Barack and Michelle Obama pasted onto the bodies of gorillas, as I wrote about yesterday. After a firestorm that included Tim Scott — the only Black Republican US Senator — demanding it be taken down, the repost has been deleted. But no apology; in fact, now they’re claiming it was a “staffer” who put it up. At midnight. From the bedroom of the White House. Are any of the prediction markets taking bets on the identity of the staffer who was tweeting from Trump’s bedroom in the middle of the night? Some cute, new white female worker bee? Or is it just another lie, and Trump pushed this racist post out with his very own tiny little fingers? Has everybody forgotten that when Trump announced his campaign for the White House in 2015 — because, it’s reported, he wanted GE/NBC to give him a raise — the company fired him from his Apprentice show because his anti-Mexican rhetoric was too racist for the network? Or that Trump and his father were indicted by the Nixon administration for refusing to rent apartments to Black people? This racist repost wasn’t a joke or a mistake, and we should all take it as a warning about how racism, silence, and abuse of power are eating away at our democracy…

— Senator Gallego calls for a national strike when Trump tries to steal this November’s election. Almost daily, Trump is telegraphing to the nation that he’s going to try to steal the 2026 election in many of the same ways he tried to steal the 2020 election. And some new ones, too. Arizona’s US Senator Ruben Gallego is taking it very seriously, saying: “We have to prepare for the outmost scenario, the worst scenario which is they try to either capture the ballot box as ballots are being counted, they try to stop the count, they try to surround polling places, whatever it is. … We need to make sure that we have an ultimate response to that which, I believe, has to be a true national strike, in the sense that, if they do this, if they try to overthrow our democracy, if you are allied with democracy, do not go to work. If you’re a pilot, do not show up. If you drive a train, do not show up. If you’re a teacher, do not show up. We grind the country to a halt … if we have to destroy the stock market to save democracy, we need to accept that.” Gallego is absolutely right when he points out that America’s biggest economic advantage is our democratic system and our embrace of the rule of law, both treasures paid for with the blood of patriots for over 250 years. “The richest and the most powerful people in the world and in this country need to understand that that is a real possibility,” he added. “There is no economic stability without democratic stability. If you take away our democratic stability, we will take away the economic stability.” Stay tuned…

— Non-citizen voting is a GOP scam the NY Times just busted wide open. An Arizona Republican election official just penned an article for the Times pointing out that, in response to Trump’s constant claims of non-citizen voters (he claimed a quarter-million Mexicans voted in that state in 2020), a half-dozen or so GOP-controlled states have done exhaustive searches of their voter rolls looking for non-citizens. What they found is that the entire thing is — and has been since the GOP started this in the 1960s with Rehnquist’s Operation Eagle Eye — a scam. In Utah, they found one non-citizen on the rolls, out of 2.1 million citizen voters. It was 36 people out of over a million in Idaho. For Louisiana, it was 79 out of 2.9 million, and 23 out of just short of a million in Montana. Georgia had 24 out of 8.2 million. In other words, almost nobody who is in this country without legal status has any interest in casting one vote out of millions that may endanger their going to prison. This scam has been used for decades to justify draconian voter ID laws ever since Governor Mike Pence made Indiana the first state to require ID to vote in 2006, producing about a 6% drop-off in minority voters (who didn’t possess the necessary ID), helping the GOP keep that state Red. Noting that it is typically poor people or those living in cities with good public transportation who don’t need to own a car who lack ID, and those people are typically democratic voters, Trump now is demanding Congress pass a law requiring the same ID requirements for every state in the country. Buckle up: this is going to be a wild ride.

— Let’s not forget the Epstein files! Trump is wildly flailing, trying to get Americans and the press to stop talking about the possibility that he was raping children or providing kids to his “best friend” Jeffrey Epstein both from Mar-a-Lago’s spa and his Miss Teen USA pageant and his Trump teen modeling agency. And why did the DOJ redact the names of the predator men but reveal the names and even nude pictures of some of the victims? Sure looks like they’re trying to threaten the victims to keep their mouths shut, while aggressively covering up for wealthy, powerful men.

— Trump killed the Voice of America, our messenger to the world, and is replacing it with US taxpayer money for racist rightwing think tanks in Europe. The Financial Times reports that the Trump regime is going to hand off huge piles of cash to racist, xenophobic, and neofascist groups across Europe: “The US state department is set to fund Maga-aligned think-tanks and charities across Europe…” The US National Security Strategy last year came right out and said what was up, in a widely ignored story, arguing that “mass migration” of brown-skinned people into Europe is leading to “civilizational erasure.” In a “Freedom Speech Tour” that explicitly complains about the censorship of pro-Nazi content on social media, Trump’s emissary Sarah Rogers has already visited “London, Paris, Rome and Milan.” We’re now taking Putin’s and Orbán’s side against pluralistic, democratic republics that have traditionally been our allies. This is simply evil.

— Incompetence Alert! Bob Kennedy claims KETO diets can cure schizophrenia. Wow. While there is some preliminary evidence that people experiencing severe mental illness are more vulnerable to be behavioral changes as a consequence of eating diets super high in sugar and ultraprocessed foods, there is no evidence that a keto diet will “cure“ schizophrenia, a claim that Bob Kennedy made in a speech this week. What kind of idiot would fire the doctors and scientists and put a lawyer in charge of his nation’s public health? Now we know…

— Surprise, Surprise?! TrumpRX is a fake: read the fine print. Most drug companies offer introductory specials on their new drugs, where if you contact them they’ll give you a substantial discount for the first one or two months. Trump’s new TrumpRX website claims to reduce the cost of drugs for Americans, but all it does is link you to the drug companies’s websites where these very limited coupons are available. It’s just another grift, as one should always expect from this professional grifter…

— Crazy Alert! ‘Mortifying’: Fury as Trump demands Dulles and Penn Station renamed after himself. The largest infrastructure project in the country right now is a connecting tunnel between New York and New Jersey that is about 1/3 built. Trump just suspended the cash for this project and is offering to if they will name New York’s Penn Station and Washington DC’s Dulles airport after him. It really doesn’t get more pathetic than this…