The Trump-Mamdani meeting is over, and apparently nothing bad happened. I’m saying somebody slipped Trump some Valium before the meeting.
You may have missed it, but recently the Department of Defense invaded Mexico. This was allegedly an accident. On Monday or thereabouts Mexican naval personnel found a bunch of DoJ contractors posting signs on a Mexican beach declaring the area — roughly twelve miles south of the U.S.-Mexico border — to be U.S. Department of Defense property and restricted. It turns out the contractors were lost, or at least that’s what they said. They took their signs down and marched back across the border.
However, the story as reported in Mexico News Daily makes it sound more like a deliberate provocation.
Playa Bagdad is located where the Rio Grande meets the Gulf of Mexico. The river, which originates in south-central Colorado in the United States and is called the Río Bravo on the Mexican side, forms the border between the two countries for a long stretch.
Reports of unidentified men arriving at the beach by boat to install signs prompted the response from Mexico’s Naval Ministry (Semar).
The signs reportedly stated in Spanish and English that the area was Department of Defense property and a “Restricted Area” by order of “the commander.” They also said that “unauthorized entry is prohibited,” as are photography or drawings, and stated, “If you are found here, you may be detained and searched.”
Sheinbaum said her government was communicating with U.S. authorities in order to get an explanation.
“First, the consulate was consulted, then the embassy,” she said. “They hadn’t issued an official report, so the signs were removed. Later, a U.S. government agency stated that a company had indeed been hired to put them up.”
Trump has been pushing Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum to allow U.S. troops on Mexican soil to go after drug cartels. President Sheinbaum says no way. But the official excuse from the DoJ is that the contractors were lost and didn’t realize they were in Mexico.
Anything is possible, frankly. This story has been reported, but I’m just now noticing it. There’s no much other news it kind of got lost. In normal times it would have been a big deal.
But during the Trump Administration, it’s normal. We keep hearing that, about all kinds of news stories — if this had happened with any other President … Lawrence O’Donnell opened his show last night pointing out that if any other president had called for members of Congress to be executed there would have been massive banner headlines across the country. But in the Trump Administration, it’s just Thursday. What will it take for the media to begin to treat Trump just as they’ve treated any other president?
And then there’s this. This is a screen grab from the Memeorandum news aggregate site.
Yesterday swastikas and nooses were no longer hate symbols. Oops! today they’re hate symbols. Why was this even an issue? Incompetence abounds.
It feels as if the entire Right is beginning to flail around. See Philip Bump at MSNow.
Unlike most past chief executives, Trump’s power depends on strict loyalty from congressional Republicans. He’s pushed — and flown past — traditional boundaries of presidential power largely because Congress won’t do anything about it. No more than a handful of Republicans tried to hold him to account when he stoked a violent attack on the results of the 2020 presidential contest. You think they’re going to vote to impeach because he’s stealing their authority to raise and spend revenue?
That loyalty has depended on the perception that Trump holds enormous power; specifically, power over the Republican electorate. But Epstein is not the only issue on which Trump has faced headwinds of late: As inflation and prices remain high, he has struggled to convince Americans there are no affordability issues. His suggestion last week that skilled immigrants are necessary workers roiled his MAGA base.
Trump’s polling numbers are dropping like a rock. He’s deeply underwater on every issue. His brilliant initiatives keep failing. Even a lot of the MAGA influencers who helped Trump win in 2024 are questioning his competence. And we are just under a year to the midterms. I believe we’ve reached the point at which Republican legislators facing re-election next year are thinking hard about how much space they may need between themselves and their dear leader.