Donald Trump’s 24 hours and all of the issues he tried to make use of the UFO information to distract from
Keir Starmer may have had a bad day in the local elections, but at least nobody’s re-drawing constituency boundaries to rig our elections. But don’t look at that, says Trump, look at this picture of a flying saucer. Here’s what you need to know
Never mind the Iran War, the rising fuel prices and the election I’m trying to rig, here’s some little green men(Image: Getty Images)
Donald Trump is trying to distract Americans from …something.
I’ve never been one to engage in the conspiracy-tinged assumption that almost everything the government does is deliberately intended to distract from something else. In my experience, it’s almost never a dead cat. Except when it’s aliens. The Trump administration today released a trove of documents and images documenting claims of UFO sightings. A lot of it is fascinating. None of it is particularly convincing. If it was, they probably wouldn’t have released it. On the other hand, it does look like a remarkably ham-fisted attempt to get his MAGA die-hards to talk about it, rather than…something else.
The thing about the Trump administration is that there’s so much going on, and so much of it is unprecedented, openly corrupt and alarming, that it’s hard to know what the UFO drop is trying to distract from. Anyway, because it’s Friday, why don’t we have a look through some of the things that happened today that Trump might rather you weren’t talking about, and you were reading about flying saucers instead.
1. Trump’s Republicans aren’t wasting any time in setting up the means to rig the midterms
Republicans in Southern states have been moving quickly to try to capitalise on a recent US Supreme Court ruling in a Louisiana case that significantly weakened Voting Rights Act protections for minorities. Tennessee enacted new congressional districts yesterday that carve up a Democratic-held, Black-majority district in Memphis – making it almost impossible for a black candidate to be elected. The city of Memphis is 64% black. Currently it’s covered by Tennessee’s ninth congressional district. Under the new map, the city is split into three – with each seat containing a third of the city’s black population. The state Democratic Party sued today, seeking to prevent the districts from being used until after this year’s elections because of the tight time frame. If it’s still not clear what’s happening, give this a watch.
There were also unedifying visuals from the Tennessee Senate, where one Republican wore a Trump flag as a cape to gloat about using the Supreme Court-provided loophole to render the votes of black voters in Memphis meaningless. A Louisiana Senate committee considered several redistricting options from Republican state Sen. John “Jay” Morris that would eliminate either both or one of the current Black-majority US House districts. “Every one of these maps reduces Black voting power in every one of the districts. And I think that’s a problem,” Democratic state Sen. Sam Jenkins told Morris. Morris denied the proposed redistricting maps were racially discriminatory. He said his goal was to be “respectful of the traditional boundaries” of the state’s six congressional districts. “I don’t think we should care that much about race,” Morris said.
Meanwhile in Alabama, Republicans were so eager to approve a plan to re-draw electoral boundaries to benefit them that they rammed it through even as a tornado warning was blaring through the Senate chamber. And they passed a plan to allow a re-run of statewide primaries if the courts approve the new map. The move came the same day that the Virginia Supreme Court dealt a major setback to Democrats by overturning a redistricting plan that could have helped Democrats win as many as four additional House seats. Meanwhile, Republicans in South Carolina also presented congressional redistricting plans that faced staunch opposition from civil rights activists and Democrats.
2. Trump might have called a reporter a b***h
Donald Trump drove his motorcade down the Lincoln memorial reflecting pool last night. The pool, is in the process of being resurfaced with swimming pool sealant at the President’s orders after he cancelled a planned multi-year refurbishment of the beloved landmark. But if that weren’t sacrilege enough, he rolled several vehicles down it late on Thursday to inspect the progress. And progress is something there does not seem to have been a lot of. When he announced the deeply weird plan, Trump claimed it would take “a week”. That was two weeks ago, and the “American Flag Blue” coating has only been applied to about a quarter of the surface of the pool. Trump then greeted the workers who are performing the job, asking them if they wanted Iran to have a nuclear weapon. “No sir,” they said in unison. He didn’t ask them if they were happy to be paying a third more for their petrol as a result of his (maybe) preventing them having a nuclear weapon, so we’ll never know what their answer will be. He then took some questions from the press – including ABC’s Rachel Scott, whom Trump does not care for. She asked why he was spending so much time looking at and talking about his bedazzling of Washington DC, while most of the country is worried about the war he chose to wage in Iran and the impact it’s having on their day to day expenses.
“Such a STUPID question you ask,” he fumed. “You can understand dirt, maybe, better than I can! This is one of the worst reporters, she’s a horror show! “She’s saying, why would you bother fixing this up? Why would I bother taking 11 or 12 truckloads of filth out of the water in front of the Lincoln Monument? That’s what made our country great. Beauty made our country! People made our country great. A question like that is a disgrace to our country.” At the end of the session, Trump made a remark that was not picked up on mic, but which appeared to many to be him referring to Ms Scott as a “b***h”. There are many documented cases of President Trump using that word to describe women.
3. Trump’s dictator statue gets a ceremonial dedication
There’s some kind of weird cult event happening at Trump’s Doral golf course in Miami, Florida. We saw yesterday the gaudy, gold (leaf) statue erected of the man himself at the resort. Well today the statue was “dedicated” at a ceremony overseen by a pastor, and attended by a crowd of supporters. Trump spoke at the event by phone, telling people how much he likes the gold statue, which was draped with scarves of blue and white for the event, which made it look kind of like it had been “toilet papered” by pranksters.
4. ‘Tis but a trifle
Donald Trump last night insisted the ceasefire in Iran was still intact, despite the US and Iran exchanging fire around the strait of hormuz yesterday. The US said it was responding to incoming threats, while Iran accused the US of launching unprovoked attacks. None of it bodes well for the one-page document Trump wants Iran to sign off on to declare peace in the region and re-open the strait. Trump, who is definitely across all of this, dismissed the exchange of fire as a “trifle”. And he said the world would know when the ceasefire was broken, because: “You’re just going to have to look at one big glow coming out of Iran.”
5. Let them eat chicken paillard
Trump administration officials have been all over the airwaves in the last couple of days, bragging about changes to food assistance for the poor, which will amount to about 4.5 million Americans getting kicked off food stamps.
Meanwhile, at the White House, Trump hosted a dinner at the “Rose Garden Club”, which started with a Caprese salad, followed by chicken paillard with spring risotto and sugar snap peas, all rounded off with a vanilla panna cotta.
6. Trump announces three-day ceasefire in Ukraine
Trump announced Vladimir Putin and Volodymyr Zelensky had agreed to his request for a three-day ceasefire and an exchange of prisoners, saying he hoped such a pause in hostilities could be the “beginning of the end” of the long war between them. President Zelensky confirmed the agreement. There was no immediate comment from Russian President Vladimir Putin or the Kremlin. Trump announced on social media that the ceasefire would run Saturday through Monday. Saturday is Victory Day in Russia, a holiday that commemorates victory over Nazi Germany in World War II. “I am pleased to announce that there will be a THREE DAY CEASEFIRE (May 9th, 10th, and 11th) in the War between Russia and Ukraine,” Trump wrote. “The Celebration in Russia is for Victory Day but, likewise, in Ukraine, because they were also a big part and factor of World War II.”
Trump said the ceasefire includes a suspension of all kinetic activity and the exchange of 1,000 prisoners by each country. Russia had announced a ceasefire for Friday and Saturday, but it quickly unraveled, with both sides blaming the other for the continued fighting, just as they had when Ukraine’s own unilateral ceasefire had swiftly collapsed earlier in the week. Trump said he made his request for the ceasefire “directly” to the two presidents. “Hopefully, it is the beginning of the end of a very long, deadly, and hard fought War,” he said.
