Trail Notes
SOTU tall tales / Rich got richer / Missing Epstein files / Petty Kash / Thinner ICE / Judges push back / Pentagon money pit / Cannon fodder / Amazon cashes in
SOTU tall tales
If you’re ancient like me, you surely remember the iconic scene from television’s black-and-white days when Lucy Ricardo, played by Lucille Ball, is working in a candy factory and the chocolates start coming down a conveyor belt at a faster and faster clip. Soon she’s stuffing candy in pockets and her mouth as she tries to keep up. That’s what it’s like being a fact checker during a Donald Trump speech.
Sure, every State of the Union address is a presidential performance, and every president brags about a strong America that’s only getting stronger. But Trump is in a league of his own when it comes to spewing “alternative facts.” This is the guy, after all, who once told then White House Press Secretary Stephanie Grisham, “It doesn’t matter what you say. Say it enough and people will believe you.” Likewise, when John Kelly, Trump’s chief of staff during his first term, questioned why he kept repeating something that wasn’t true, the president responded: “But it sounds good.”
So, on Tuesday night Trump claimed he inherited a “stagnant economy” that’s now “roaring like never before.” (Last year the U.S. economy grew at a rate of 2.2 percent, which was lower than every year of the Biden administration.) He proclaimed that inflation was “at record levels” when he returned to the White House. (Actually, it was at 3 percent then, only slightly higher than now.) And he boasted that prices are “plummeting downward.” (The price of most groceries continues to rise, while the cost of electricity rose nearly 7 percent last year, and is projected to go up another 4 percent this year.)
Rich got richer
When the president talks about providing Americans more tax breaks, here’s some perspective: Billionaires have collectively increased their wealth by $1.5 trillion since Trump returned to office. The top 1 percent now holds more wealth than the entire middle class combined. So far, in Trump’s second term, the 15 richest U.S. billionaires saw their wealth increase by $800 billion, or 33 percent. Together they now are worth $3.2 trillion.
Missing Epstein files
The Jeffrey Epstein plot thickens. Less than a week ago, Donald Trump declared himself “totally exonerated” by the documents the Department of Justice (DOJ) released. But now questions are being raised about material that the department catalogued but did not make public, according to an NPR investigation. It includes more than 50 pages of FBI interviews, as well as notes from conversations with a woman who accused Trump of sexually abusing her decades ago when she was a minor.
A Justice Department spokeswoman contended that any unreleased documents are privileged or relate to an ongoing investigation. And a White House spokeswoman said that the president “has done more for Epstein’s victims than anyone before him.” But California Democrat Robert Garcia, ranking member of the House Oversight Committee, contended that he “can confirm that the DOJ appears to have illegally withheld FBI interviews with this survivor who accused President Trump of heinous crimes.” This saga is not going away.
Petty Kash
It somehow seems fitting to revive some Kash Patel memories. Remember his children’s book, “The Plot Against the King,” in which a wizard named Kash investigates an election conspiracy against King Donald.? The point of the book, aside from scoring brownie points with the real Donald, is to teach kids the importance of truth and integrity. And how about those times when Kash the podcaster ranted about his predecessor, Christopher Wray, wasting so much taxpayer money flying on an FBI plane to his family’s vacation home in upstate New York? Those were the days.
Flash forward to Kash the FBI director, but clearly no longer a wizard. He’s come under fire recently for flying on an agency jet to see his girlfriend sing at a wrestling event in Pennsylvania, and then for a trip to a luxury hunting resort in Texas. So, when the story broke last week that Patel was planning to fly to Italy on an FBI plane to watch the U.S. men’s hockey team compete for a gold medal, his staff went into attack mode against the MS Now journalists who reported it. FBI spokesman Ben Williamson, with the administration’s signature blend of snark and outrage, wrote on social media: “Your rag outlet wrote that he went to hang out at the Olympics on the taxpayer dime—even when provided information that your theory was false.”
Williamson claimed that Patel was flying to Milan to meet with ambassadors and Italian law enforcement officials. Ah, but on Sunday, a video of Patel guzzling beer and celebrating in the victors’ locker room showed up on social media. The clip was later deleted.
Thinner ICE
The Trump administration seemingly has no qualms about lowering the bar when it comes to training and hiring federal law enforcement agents, and now we’re finding out how much. Until two weeks ago, Ryan Schwank was an instructor at the ICE training academy in Georgia, but he resigned because he said he was expected to lie about the diminished training standards. It’s not just that the program has been cut from 72 days to 42 days, he told a Senate forum this week, but instruction about the legal boundaries for the use of force, how to safely handle firearms, and the proper way to detain and arrest immigrants has been eliminated. He described the training now as “deficient, defective and broken.”
Judges push back
It also has become an increasingly common practice in deportation cases for Justice Department prosecutors to blow off orders from judges. A New York Times analysis found that at least 35 times since last August, judges have had to issue orders requiring the government to explain why it shouldn’t be punished for ignoring or violating court orders. All of the cases have involved arresting immigrants who have been living in the United States for years after entering the country illegally.
Judges have largely refrained from penalizing government lawyers, but last week Laura Provinzino, a federal judge in Minnesota, found a Justice Department attorney in contempt of court. She had ordered that a detained immigrant be returned to Minnesota. He was released, but in El Paso, where he had to stay in a shelter. She had also ordered the government to return the man’s property, but instead it held on to his identity papers. When Provinzino asked for an explanation, she was told that “things had slipped through the cracks.” She fined the attorney $500 a day until the papers were returned. They arrived in a FedEx package the next day.
Pentagon money pit
It’s reached the point that Congress has allocated so much money to the Defense Department that the Trump administration is struggling to find ways to spend it all. So, when Pete “Swagger Boy” Hegseth convinced Donald Trump to boost the Pentagon’s budget by $500 billion in his proposed budget, other White House officials, including Office of Management and Budget Director Russell Vought, warned that spending that kind of money will spike the federal deficit, according to Washington Post reporting. But at this point, Hegseth is getting what he wants, and he said his record budget will “send a message to the world” even though the United States already spends more on its military than the next nine countries combined.
Cannon fodder
There are judges who don’t do everything Donald Trump wants, and then there’s Aileen Cannon. Appointed by Trump in 2020 to the U.S. District Court for Southern Florida, she has lived up to the president’s expectations that federal judges are supposed to serve him.
On Monday, Cannon delivered for Trump big time by deep-sixing the report by former Special Counsel Jack Smith based on his probe of those boxes of classified documents found at Mar-a-Lago.
Cannon first stopped the case from moving forward in July 2024 when she ruled that Smith’s appointment as special counsel was unconstitutional. Then, last January she barred the Justice Department from sharing the results of Smith’s investigation with members of Congress. And this week she delivered the final blow to the report, which contained, she confirmed, “detailed and voluminous” information outlining the case against Trump.
The president has often claimed that he did nothing wrong and that his privacy was violated when the FBI searched his Florida home. Nonetheless, the self-proclaimed “most transparent administration in U.S. history” is more than happy to have this story fade away.
MAHA betrayal?
Donald Trump didn’t do his health secretary any favors when he signed an executive order recently protecting the production of glyphosate, the active ingredient in such weedkillers as Roundup and a chemical some studies have linked to cancer. The president’s move was seen by Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s “Make America Healthy Again” (MAHA) boosters as a betrayal. They have been pushing for a glyphosate ban and are involved in lawsuits against Bayer, which now produces Roundup. Instead, Trump provided “immunity” for the company, contending that the herbicide is needed for “economic and national security” reasons. Bayer donated $1 million last year to Trump’s inaugural committee.
Amazon cashes in
The Big Beautiful Bill Act was especially beautiful for Amazon. Thanks to the generous tax cuts in the legislation, the company only paid $1.2 billion in taxes last year compared to $9 billion the previous year. In 2025, Amazon’s profits jumped 45 percent to nearly $90 billion.
Don’t bank on it
The Trump administration is considering an executive order that would require banks to verify their customers’ citizenship. That means that they could be compelled to ask customers for an unprecedented collection of documents, including passports. The proposed order is raising concern in the financial community that it will force banks to play a role in the government’s deportation sweeps.
Randy Rieland is a former columnist at Smithsonian magazine, website director at the Discovery Channel, and senior writer at Washingtonian magazine.
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