Greetings and welcome to this still somewhat logy post-Thanksgiving performance of the Carnival of Fools! You’ll notice that most of our usual players are missing today, no doubt nursing mild holiday hangovers from turkey-induced tryptophan bloat. I myself enjoyed sacking out on the couch and watching the suddenly indestructible Chicago Bears make a feathery snack out of the Eagles, and I even got a weekend bonus when the Washington Commanders – who, recall, I actively loathe as an ex-fan – came this close to upsetting the fraudulent Denver Broncos, but fell short. (The Broncos themselves have an appointment with a horse doctor in the playoffs.)
Apparently, President Trump has a different way of relaxing. The most powerful man in the world chose not to laze by the fire, monitoring the situation with the NFL, but instead put his idle hands to use over the holiday weekend — tapping, tapping, tapping away, cranking out one seemingly major announcement after another on his Truth Social account from the warm glow of his iPhone.
Sweeping bans were enacted. Laws were proclaimed to be undone. At least one Democratic governor was labeled a “retard.” What to make of this spewing storm on an otherwise quiet stretch of days? Should we chalk it up to a bad case of indigestion, a series of acidic belches, or is there something more here? Let’s sift through some of Donny’s holiday leftovers.
Trump Calls a Lid on the Third World
On November 26, a 29-year-old Afghan refugee, Rahmanullah Lakanwal, shot two West Virginia National Guardsmen on deployment in Washington, D.C. in the head while shouting “Allahu akbar!” One of the guardsmen, 20-year-old Specialist Sarah Beckstrom, died from her injuries, and another, 24-year-old Staff Sgt. Andrew Wolfe, is fighting for his life. Lakanwal was wounded on the scene but taken alive.
The fact that the shooting took place the day before the four-day Thanksgiving weekend means that commentary on it has been muted, at least so far. And I feel like I have little to contribute: Would you like me to try my hand at setting a Munchian scream in prose form? I’m not sure what value that offers.
It is a hideous atrocity, yet one more in a 2025 miserably stocked with them, all of them bearing dreadful political and cultural import. Lakanwal’s attack on the guardsmen took place in the context of his reportedly spiraling mental breakdown, but this is not just a mental health story, no matter how desperate the hope on the part of defensive Democrats and immigration advocates that the media will spin it that way. Lakanwal drove across the country to commit his attack in D.C., specifically targeting the guardsmen he knew would be present there. That must mean something political, and this supposition raises its share of recriminating questions. (To name but one: Is it not alarming that the “failure mode” for young male Afghan refugees around the world seems to be “violent criminal,” if not “suicidal jihadi”? That seems like a debate we ought to be having with clear eyes.)
But what matters for our purposes is that on Thanksgiving, Donald Trump announced on Truth Social that he was going to call an immediate halt to all third world immigration for the foreseeable future:
I will permanently pause migration from all Third World Countries to allow the U.S. system to fully recover, terminate all of the millions of Biden illegal admissions, including those signed by Sleepy Joe Biden’s Autopen, and remove anyone who is not a net asset to the United States, or is incapable of loving our Country, end all Federal benefits and subsidies to noncitizens of our Country, denaturalize migrants who undermine domestic tranquility, and deport any Foreign National who is a public charge, security risk, or non-compatible with Western Civilization. These goals will be pursued with the aim of achieving a major reduction in illegal and disruptive populations, including those admitted through an unauthorized and illegal Autopen approval process. Only REVERSE MIGRATION can fully cure this situation.
The president then concluded by wishing America a Happy Thanksgiving.
Because Trump has a tendency to announce all sorts of impossible fantasies on Truth Social, you could be forgiven for wondering whether he was once again bloviating here. As it turns out, he was not! On that very day, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services announced that it would halt all asylum decisions “until we can ensure that every alien is vetted and screened to the maximum degree possible.” Then, as reported by the BBC, USCIS proclaimed that it would “re-examine green cards issued to individuals who had migrated to the US from 19 countries, without mentioning Wednesday’s attack.” (I chuckled at that last note because it felt like a subtle whine: Confound it, they’ve finally learned to keep their fool mouths shut.)
Can he actually do this? I am not an immigration expert, but what I do know of the president’s executive powers suggests that he quite likely can. (My bet: Should Trump choose to stay with it, this will be the most fiercely litigated issue in America next year.)
Should he do this? Set aside the inflammatory specifics of this provocation and the inevitable “not all Afghans” rhetoric that is already spreading online, because there is a larger principle at stake here: What specifically does America owe to people from third world countries, ones with cultures often aggressively inimical to Western values, who seek to immigrate here?
What case is there to be made for admitting them in numbers large enough to re-create the sclerotic worlds they escaped, only in miniature? What case, when ever larger numbers are failing to assimilate, encouraged as they are in their alienation from mainstream America by an education system that teaches their children nothing except the language of helpless, cynically racialized grievance? What to do when, for example, a sizable percentage of Somalians who move to America, instead of becoming American, simply import the criminal pathologies of the culture they left behind?
‘Trump Tags Tim as Tard,’ and Other Obnoxious Distractions
This naturally brings us to the matter of Somali welfare fraud in Minnesota. It’s a topic that people like PowerLine’s Scott Johnson have been reporting about for years but that crept into broader American political consciousness only recently, when several Minneapolis men and women were charged in late September with being part of an outrageously large welfare and special-needs-funding fraud ring centered in the Twin Cities’ large Somali refugee community.
Or that would have brought us to the matter, had Trump not decided to address the topic on Thanksgiving in the most Trumpian way imaginable. And since this is the Carnival of Fools, that means I now have to talk about the epithet Trump hurled at Tim Walz. Take it from there, Mr. President:
As an example, hundreds of thousands of refugees from Somalia are completely taking over the once great State of Minnesota. Somalian gangs are roving the streets looking for “prey” as our wonderful people stay locked in their apartments and houses hoping against hope that they will be left alone. The seriously retarded Governor of Minnesota, Tim Walz, does nothing, either through fear, incompetence, or both, while the worst “Congressman/woman” in our Country, Ilhan Omar, always wrapped in her swaddling hijab, and who probably came into the U.S.A. illegally in that you are not allowed to marry your brother, does nothing but hatefully complain about our Country, its Constitution, and how “badly” she is treated, when her place of origin is a decadent, backward, and crime ridden nation, which is essentially not even a country for lack of Government, Military, Police, schools, etc.
Before I continue, a round of applause: That excerpt was only three sentences long. The third sentence in particular is a tangled marvel, a quasi-Proustian run-on bleat that somehow manages to remain grammatically coherent from beginning to end, like a drunkard wobbling blindly but safely across a five-lane highway.
The multiple spicy slanders are more noteworthy. Social media was so busy plotzing over Trump’s description of Governor Walz as “seriously retarded” that they seemingly failed to notice that he also casually accused Ilhan Omar of marrying her brother to get him a green card. (It is a story that has been so close to definitively proven that it cannot be dismissed.) On Sunday, the president affirmed his stance on Walz: “There’s something wrong with him. Anybody that would do what he did, anybody that would allow those people into his state and pay billions of dollars out to Somalia.”
That part is certainly true enough: The New York Times confirmed it this weekend with a brutal piece of reporting on how Somali welfare fraud skyrocketed specifically under Walz’s watch. But Trump has once again chosen to attack a very fertile issue in a pointlessly unproductive way. Walz is father to a special-needs son. Trump surely knows this biographical factoid. As the father of a special-needs son myself, I don’t consider the use of “retarded” to be a violation of polite discourse deserving of the death penalty — no better word exists to describe the politics of Will Stancil, for example — but, in this context, I recognize it as the needless provocation that it is. Next time, Mr. President, stick to the meat of a winning issue. (And if you’re going to push questionable topics under the guise of presidential privilege, let’s hear some more about Ilhan Omar’s brother instead.)
Trump Revokes Joe Biden’s Presidency
I end with what is, in theory at least, Trump’s most sweeping announcement from the holiday weekend: With the stroke of a fingertip, Donald Trump proposed on Friday to revoke the entire Biden presidency via tweet.
Any document signed by Sleepy Joe Biden with the Autopen, which was approximately 92% of them, is hereby terminated, and of no further force or effect. The Autopen is not allowed to be used if approval is not specifically given by the President of the United States. The Radical Left Lunatics circling Biden around the beautiful Resolute Desk in the Oval Office took the Presidency away from him. I am hereby cancelling all Executive Orders, and anything else that was not directly signed by Crooked Joe Biden, because the people who operated the Autopen did so illegally. Joe Biden was not involved in the Autopen process and, if he says he was, he will be brought up on charges of perjury. Thank you for your attention to this matter!
It’s a bold legal strategy, and we’ll see if it pays off for him. I left this until last because it is barely worthy of commentary, especially since I’ve litigated the autopen scandal here once before already. Joe Biden is alive and happy to tell the world that he willingly signed every executive order, appointment, and law via autopen, in a horribly careless display of delegation to his staff. But neither of these are sufficient grounds for undoing a single act of his administration. There is no “one weird trick” that exists to magically nullify four years of executive decision-making, and Donald Trump knows it. (He hopes you do not.)
Trump is as free to repeal Biden’s executive orders as Biden was to issue them in the first place. He can do this because that is the nature of executive orders: They are executive. Trump cannot revoke a pardon, a fact he is well aware of and one for which the many dubious recipients of his largesse are doubtless grateful. The rest is a cheap fantasy sold to the MAGA faithful — mere words, of which Donald Trump gave us far too many over a long weekend.
Until next week.