Trump 2024: What he said, what he did, what happened

You miss a lot of actual suppressed news by avoiding X.

...FEMA Actively shuts down help for people in desperate need and refuse to help Trump voters...

Rumor: FEMA is moving resources away from North Carolina and other areas affected by Helene to respond to the California wildfires.

This is false. FEMA has enough funding to support recovery efforts in multiple areas, including communities affected by Hurricanes Helene and Milton as well as response efforts in California.

The supplemental funding bill approved by Congress on December 20, 2024 included $29 billion for the Disaster Relief Fund. FEMA is supporting over 100 major disasters and will continue to support the recovery in these communities for as long as it takes.
January 11, 2025


Rumor: FEMA pulled out of hurricane-affected areas of North Carolina due to threats.

This is false.

While taking steps to ensure the safety of our staff and the people we are trying to help, we continued to support the communities affected by Helene.

On October 12, 2024, FEMA was made aware of a potential threat to our staff in North Carolina. We made the decision to shift from sending FEMA disaster survivors assistance teams into neighborhoods to knock on doors to stationing teams at neighborhood locations where they could still meet and work with disaster survivors to help them get assistance. This decision was made through our usual field operations processes to ensure FEMA staff are safe and able to focus on helping disaster survivors.

We worked closely with local law enforcement and state officials throughout this process and announced on October 14 that FEMA teams will soon resume door-to-door survivor assistance.

FEMA will continue monitoring threat information and adjust this posture on a regular basis in coordination with local officials.
October 15, 2024

President Donald Trump suggested at a Friday briefing on North Carolina’s hurricane recovery that he would sign an “executive order to begin the process of fundamentally reforming and overhauling FEMA, or maybe getting rid of them.” He later added of the Federal Emergency Management Agency’s future, “We’re going to recommend that FEMA go away.”

It’s astonishing that anyone could accuse anyone else of not caring about a budget after the Biden presidency.

On Tuesday, a day after Donald Trump’s inauguration as the new U.S. president, the Department of Homeland Security told members of several advisory committees that they were effectively fired.

Among the committees impacted is the Cyber Safety Review Board, or CSRB, according to sources familiar with the board who spoke to TechCrunch, as well as reporting by other news outlets. The CSRB was made up of both private sector and government cybersecurity experts.

Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents attempted to conduct an enforcement action at Hamline Elementary School in Back of the Yards, Ald. Jeanette Taylor (20th Ward) and Chicago Public Schools officials said Friday.

The agents were turned away and no one appears to have been detained, said Taylor, who told WTTW News she was headed to the school at 4747 S. Bishop St., southwest of the Loop, to assess the situation.

“Hamline staff followed CPS' established protocols; they kept the ICE agents outside of the school and contacted CPS' Law Department and CPS' Office of Safety and Security for further guidance,” according to a statement from a department spokesperson. “The ICE agents were not allowed into the school and were not permitted to speak to any students or staff. Teaching and learning continued throughout the day at Hamline.”

The arrival of federal immigration agents at a Chicago Public Schools campus is the first sign that President Donald Trump’s promise to launch the “largest domestic deportation operation in American history” has reached Chicago. A spokesperson for ICE did not respond to repeated requests for comment from WTTW News.

With billions of dollars going missing, this was a great move.

With billions of dollars going missing, this was a great move.

When I drove around Silicon Valley in 2017, talking to tech gods for a magazine piece, trying to figure out if A.I. would be friend or foe, Washington barely seemed to be on their radar.

As far as they were concerned, they were the nation’s capital. In D.C., pols merely passed laws. In Silicon Valley, techies were creating a new species, trying to conjure a nonhuman sentient mind. Forget Henry Adams; this was Mary Shelley stuff. Some tech titans were buoyant about the future. Some were wary. Elon Musk warned we might be “summoning the demon.”

Silicon Valley was run by a bunch of boys with toys. Brilliant, quirky young engineers trying to get more toys than the others, better rockets or self-driving cars or robots. They were developing a monopoly on Americans’ attention, learning how to ratchet up the algorithms to create division, distrust and envy, siloing people and spreading angst — all under the innocent guise of connecting us and making our lives better.

Within their own elite circle, the tech billionaires were volatile — sometimes friendly, sometimes feuding, sometimes, in the case of Musk and Mark Zuckerberg, threatening cage matches, sometimes, in the case of Musk, selling off his houses and sleeping on friends’ couches. They were the richest, most potent men in the world, with a visceral high school vibe. They were the bitchiest, weirdest mathletes in history.

Eventually, the digerati gazed east and discovered a fascinating new toy they could fight over: the American president. Suddenly, Democratic Silicon Valley is Trump country. The moment crystallized when Zuckerberg — fed up with Democrats’ sermonizing about his company’s failure to shut down misinformation in 2016 — bought a yacht, put on a gold necklace and got a streetwear makeover, declared that Donald Trump’s response to the assassination attempt was “one of the most bad-ass things I’ve ever seen in my life,” and ended fact-checking at Meta.

Wow, the tech moguls thought: This could be cool, to not only control all communications and manipulate all emotions in the country, but to reprogram the government’s regulatory engine so it runs like we want it to! Just give some puny millions to Trump’s campaign and inauguration, throw some flattery at the unquenchable maw of Trump’s ego, and you were suddenly at his elbow onstage in the Capitol when he swept back into power.

Trump is a 78-year-old Luddite who has a beautiful young woman nicknamed the “human printer” following him around with a petite printer in her backpack. She cranks out positive stories to show him and takes dictation for his social media posts. He still prefers a Sharpie to a keyboard.

Yet suddenly he’s the savior of TikTok teens and crypto bros. King Donald’s court is filled with the lords of the cloud, courtiers who are bringing their chaos and drama to a Trump orbit brimming with chaos and drama. At the inauguration, the tech tycoons outranked most of the political class in the seating placement — sitting on par with former presidents.

It’s a remarkable spectacle watching an entirely new power center flock to Washington, fight for Trump’s attention, jockey to prove their loyalty, post groveling encomiums to Trump, throw money at him, clamor for eight-figure mansions around town.

As the OpenAI chief Sam Altman gushed on X this past week: “watching @potus more carefully recently has really changed my perspective on him,” adding, “i’m not going to agree with him on everything, but i think he will be incredible for the country in many ways.”

Trump, who always wanted elites to love him, relishes the crème de la tech lining up to kiss his ring. If they see him as a new toy to compete over, he sees them the same way.

The returning president wasted no time putting the cat among the pigeons when he held a news conference Tuesday announcing a joint venture among OpenAI, SoftBank and Oracle called “Stargate” to generate about $100 billion in computing infrastructure for A.I., with a goal to invest $500 billion by the end of Trump’s term.

Trump, savoring his new image as a champion of Silicon Valley in its bid to beat out China on A.I., showcased Altman at the White House, even though he knows Altman and Musk — who co-founded OpenAI — are in a legal feud. Elon has accused his former pal, Sam, of deserting their original mission when he changed its nonprofit status to for-profit; Altman allies think Musk is just jealous that the young, ragtag crew working in a makeshift office blasted off a few years after he left, ultimately creating ChatGPT.

Musk went bananas (or more bananas) on X, declaring that the troika did not have the money for such an initiative. Altman fired back, saying Musk was wrong, and Musk escalated the brawl by posting old Altman tweets criticizing Trump.

It was an eye-popping crack in the Donald/Elon bromance, which is being watched closely now that Trump has given Musk the power to roam the West Wing, where he is working out of an office on the second floor, and take a hatchet to government.

Furious Trump aides told Politico that the mercurial Musk got over his skis, discrediting a project Trump had just called “tremendous” and “monumental.”

Did Trump think flirting with Musk’s nemesis was a good way to put Elon in his place and remind people that there’s only one star of the Trump show?

Asked by reporters about Musk undermining him, Trump was nonchalant. He knows from digital insults.

The president dismissed it as a personality clash, noting that Musk “hates one of the people,” allowing, “I have certain hatreds of people, too.”

The colliding egos of Silicon Valley have joined the colliding egos on the Potomac, but the president is not perturbed. Mixing it up, stirring conflict for its own sake, this is just how Donald Trump has fun.

With billions of dollars going missing, this was a great move.

(...) As MSNBC host Rachel Maddow noted, as soon as Senator Joni Ernst (R-IA), whose “yes” was secured only through an intense pressure campaign, had voted in favor, President Trump informed at least 15 independent inspectors general of U.S. government departments that they were fired, including, as David Nakamura, Lisa Rein, and Matt Viser of the Washington Post noted, those from “the departments of Defense, State, Transportation, Labor, Health and Human Services, Veterans Affairs, Housing and Urban Development, Interior, Energy, Commerce, and Agriculture, as well as the Environmental Protection Agency, Small Business Administration and the Social Security Administration.” Most were Trump’s own appointees from his first term, put in when he purged the inspectors general more gradually after his first impeachment.

Project 2025 called for the removal of the inspectors general. Just a week ago Ernst and her fellow Iowa Republican senator Chuck Grassley co-founded a bipartisan caucus—the Inspector General Caucus—to support those inspectors general. Grassley told Politico in November that he intends to defend the inspectors general.

Congress passed a law in 1978 to create inspectors general in 12 government departments. According to Jen Kirby, who explained inspectors general for Vox in 2020, a movement to combat waste in government had been building for a while, and the fraud and misuse of offices in the administration of President Richard M. Nixon made it clear that such protections were necessary. Essentially, inspectors general are watchdogs, keeping Congress informed of what’s going on within departments.

Kirby notes that when he took office in 1981, President Ronald Reagan promptly fired all the inspectors general, claiming he wanted to appoint his own people. Congress members of both parties pushed back, and Reagan rehired at least five of those he had fired. George H.W. Bush also tried to fire the inspectors general but backed down when Congress backed up their protests that they must be independent.

In 2008, Congress expanded the law by creating the Council of Inspectors General on Integrity and Efficiency. By 2010 that council covered 68 offices.

During his first term, in the wake of his first impeachment, Trump fired at least five inspectors general he considered disloyal to him, and in 2022, Congress amended the law to require any president who sought to get rid of an inspector general to “communicate in writing the reasons for any such removal or transfer to both Houses of Congress, not later than 30 days before the removal or transfer.” Congress called the law the “Securing Inspector General Independence Act of 2022.”

The chair of the Council of Inspectors General on Integrity and Efficiency, Hannibal “Mike” Ware, responded immediately to the information that Trump wanted to fire inspectors general. Ware recommended that Director of Presidential Personnel Sergio Gor, who had sent the email firing the inspectors general, “reach out to White House Counsel to discuss your intended course of action. At this point, we do not believe the actions taken are legally sufficient to dismiss” the inspectors general, because of the requirements of the 2022 law.

This evening, Nakamura, Rein, and Viser reported in the Washington Post that Democrats are outraged at the illegal firings and even some Republicans are expressing concern and have asked the White House for an explanation. For his part, Trump said, incorrectly, that firing inspectors general is “a very standard thing to do.” Several of the inspectors general Trump tried to fire are standing firm on the illegality of the order and plan to show up to work on Monday. source