On the menu today: This is one of those days where I’m likely to get accused of “Trump Derangement Syndrome” by those in the MAGA camp, even though I’m writing about President Trump breaking his campaign promises to the MAGA camp. Just like Republicans are considered at fault for noticing Democratic misdeeds — “pounce!” — you and I will be at fault for noticing that President Trump is not releasing the remaining Epstein files, wants to maintain or slightly increase the current number of Chinese students at U.S. universities, and is now arguing that America needs H1-B visas because he believes Americans cannot perform the jobs that need to be done.
You can blame the Democrats, or the media, or me, but a lot of days, the person who creates the most problems for Donald Trump is . . . Donald Trump.
Trump’s Continuing Epstein Evasion
There is a petition in the U.S. House of Representatives to consider and pass a resolution declaring that the Department of Justice “must publicly disclose all unclassified records, documents, communications, and investigative materials in its possession that relate to Jeffrey Epstein or Ghislaine Maxwell.” That petition now has 218 signatures, and the House will vote on it next week. One of the lawmakers that signed the petition is Lauren Boebert, a Colorado Republican who is usually a staunch supporter of the president and is known for her, er, theatrics.
On Wednesday, the White House invited Boebert to a meeting in the White House Situation Room with Attorney General Pam Bondi and FBI Director Kash Patel to discuss her demand to release the files. This was confirmed by White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt in the press briefing yesterday:
Q: In transparency, Karoline, why are White House officials then meeting with Representative Boebert in an effort to try and get her to not sign this petition calling for the release of the files?
Leavitt: Doesn’t it show transparency that members of the Trump administration are willing to brief members of Congress whenever they please? Doesn’t that show our level of transparency? Doesn’t that show the level of transparency when we are willing to sit down with members of Congress and address their concerns? That is the — that’s a defining factor of transparency, having discussions — having discussions with members of Congress about various issues. And I’m not going to detail conversations that took place in the Situation Room in the press briefing room.
I do not know what is in the Justice Department’s remaining unreleased files. But I do know that the White House briefing a GOP member of Congress about those files in the Situation Room makes it look like there’s something enormously consequential in those files.
And on Truth Social, the president keeps furiously insisting that the request for public disclosure of those files is part of “the Jeffrey Epstein Hoax.” At least twice on the campaign trail in 2024, Trump was asked about releasing any information the government had about Epstein and indicated that he would. And Vice President JD Vance, in an interview with podcast host Theo Von on October 22, 2024, said: “Seriously, we need to release the Epstein list. That is an important thing. We can go down that rabbit hole.”
The position of the White House is that President Trump never did anything wrong, and there is nothing in the remaining Epstein documents that would incriminate him or make him look bad, and that the remaining documents should not in any way, shape, or form be released.
I’m sorry — not only does that not add up, but that position makes the president look guilty as sin of doing something he doesn’t want the public to know about.
Suddenly, Trump Just Loves Chinese Students and H1-B Visas
President Trump has given his share of bad interviews, but his sit-down with Laura Ingraham of Fox News Channel this week ranks among his all-time worst. Credit Ingraham, who was such an impassioned supporter of Trump that she spoke at the 2016 Republican convention, for giving the president one of the toughest and most news-generating interviews he’s had in a while.
In May, Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced that his department and the Department of Homeland Security would “aggressively revoke visas for Chinese students, including those with connections to the Chinese Communist Party or studying in critical fields.” But by August, Trump had reversed course. “I hear so many stories about we’re not going to allow their students or no, we’re going to allow their students to come in. We’re going to allow it. It’s very important, 600,000 students.” (That sum represented the number over a two-year period, so it represented keeping the number of student visas issued to Chinese students relatively flat.)
Laura Ingraham: A lot of MAGA folks are not thrilled about this idea of hundreds of thousands of foreign students in the United States. We have about 350,000 Chinese. At one point during Covid you were going to push to get them out but that was pulled back. You’ve said as many as 600,000 Chinese students could come to the United States. Why, sir, is that a pro-MAGA position when so many American kids want to go to school and there are places not for them and these universities are getting rich off Chinese money?
Trump: Sure. Never said about China, but I — we do have a lot of people coming in from China. We always have, China and other countries. We also have a massive system of colleges and universities. And if we were to cut that in half, which perhaps makes some people happy, you would have half the colleges in the United States go out of business.
There were 277,000 Chinese attending U.S. universities and colleges in the 2023-24 school year. There are roughly 20 million college students across the U.S., and nearly 4,000 degree-granting colleges and universities, as of 2021. Trump is contending that if we admit just 138,000 Chinese students, nearly 2,000 colleges and universities will collapse:
Ingraham: So what?
Trump: Well, I think that’s a big deal.
Ingraham: Are they fancy?
Trump: But you would have, as you know, historically black colleges and universities would all be out of business. That you would have a system of colleges and universities—
Ingraham: So we’re dependent upon China to keep our university system going?
Trump: I think it’s good to have — I actually think it’s good to have outside countries. Look, I want to be able to get along with the world.
Ingraham: They’re not the French. They’re the Chinese. They spy on us. They steal our intellectual property.
Trump: What, you think the French are better?
Ingraham: Yeah.
Trump: Really? I don’t know. I’ll tell you. I’m not so sure. We’ve had a lot of problems with the French where we get taxed very unfairly on our technology with, you know, they put 25 percent taxes on American products. Look, assuming everyone treats us badly, because that’s the way I am, but we take in trillions of dollars from students. You know, the students pay more than double when they come in from most foreign countries.
The amount that international students spend on and off campus is high, but it is not “trillions of dollars.” In November 2024, the Association of International Educators released data showing that international students at colleges and universities in the United States contributed $43.8 billion to the U.S. economy during the 2023-2024 academic year.
Note that sum includes all foreign students, not just Chinese foreign students. I see very few people calling for banning all foreign students:
Trump: I want to see our school system thrive, but at the same time, I want to — I know you and I disagree, we never going to agree on it, but that’s okay — And it’s not that I want them, but I view it as a business. We have millions and millions of people. Also, I want to get along with countries if possible.
You know, people are shocked. Remember, Hillary Clinton said, “We’ll be in a war.” I stopped eight wars in the last nine months. I don’t want to be in wars. If I am in a war, we’re going to win the thing fast and it’ll be violent. But you know what? I don’t want to be in wars.
So, having made the unexpected decision to maintain or even slightly increase the number of Chinese students on American campuses, Trump defends the move by asserting that without Chinese students at that level, half of U.S. colleges will close their doors, all of America’s historically black colleges and universities would be out of business, and that NATO ally France is morally indistinguishable from China.
The interview was conducted in the White House. I will note that the square across the street from the White House is not named for Chairman Mao.
Trump also insinuates that if the U.S. does not continue accepting Chinese students at the current rate, there will be a war. (Just what did Xi Jinping say to him in that meeting in South Korea?)
You can love the president, or you can hate the president, but you cannot deny that he makes some astonishingly, jaw-droppingly ignorant and ill-informed statements sometimes. And when the president doesn’t know what he’s talking about, and refuses to learn anything new about what he’s talking about, you might as well make the decisions in the Oval Office with a Magic 8 Ball.
Trump continues:
Trump: But one thing, you don’t want to cut half of the people, half of the students from all over the world that are coming into our country. Destroy our entire university and college system. I don’t want to do that.
Ingraham: I wouldn’t lose any sleep over it.
Trump: And don’t forget, MAGA was my idea. MAGA was nobody else’s idea. I know what MAGA wants better than anybody else. And MAGA wants to see our country thrive.
And then there was Trump’s insistence that the U.S. needs to maintain the current level of H1-B visas because the current American workforce just doesn’t have the skills or learning capacity to do the jobs that need to be done:
Ingraham: Does that mean the H-1B visa thing will not be a big priority for your administration? Because if you want to raise wages for American workers, you can’t flood the country with tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of foreign workers.
Trump: Well, I agree, but you also do have to bring in talent when–
Ingraham: We have plenty of talented people.
Trump: No, you don’t. No, you don’t.
Ingraham: We don’t have talented people?
Trump: You don’t have certain talents, and people have to learn. You can’t take people off an unemployment line and say, ‘I’m going to put you in a factory where we are going to make missiles.’
Ingraham: How did we ever do it before, when you and I were growing up?
Trump: Let me give you an example. In Georgia, they raided . . . because they wanted illegal immigrants out. They had people from South Korea — made batteries all their life. Making batteries is very complicated. It’s not an easy thing. Very dangerous, a lot of explosions, a lot of problems. They had like, 500 or 600 people. Early stages to make batteries, and to teach people how to do it. Well, they wanted them to get out of the country. You are going to need that, Laura. I know you and I disagree on this. You can’t just say a country is coming in, going to invest $10 billion to build a plant and get — take people off an unemployment line who haven’t worked in five years, and they’re going to start making their missiles. It doesn’t work that way.
Color me skeptical of Trump’s assessment that the U.S. workforce will take too long to train to make the effort worthwhile. (Yesterday we just talked about those angry young men who are convinced they have no path to career advancement!) But if, as the president asserts, America does not have anywhere near a sufficient number of trained workers to do the sort of manufacturing jobs that the administration has prioritized, that seems like the sort of thing you should have thought about before you reorganized the country’s economic policies to prioritize the creation of those jobs.
ADDENDUM: As noted on yesterday’s Three Martini Lunch podcast, Los Angeles County has 7,417 damaged or destroyed structures from the wildfires that were finally contained at the end of January.
That month, California Governor Gavin Newsom promised victims of the fires they would “not get caught up in bureaucratic red tape” and would be able to “quickly rebuild their homes.” In March, Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass promised the neighborhoods would be rebuilt at “lightning speed.”
More than nine months later, the county has issued 776 building permits, covering roughly 10.4 percent of the damaged or destroyed structures. At this rate, the county will issue the final permits in July 2032.
If I were Illinois Governor JB Pritzker, with a net worth of roughly $3.9 billion and wanting to get an advantage in the 2028 Democratic primary, I would take $100 million or more and donate it to rebuilding Los Angeles, and announce, “I’m here to get things done for this community because Gavin Newsom has already proven he can’t.”