'Gestapo Administration'

Trump’s creative comparisons: At a donor retreat in Florida on Saturday, former President Donald Trump—who is facing 88 criminal charges from four separate indictments—delivered a 75-minute broadside that compared the Biden administration to Nazis.

“These people are running a Gestapo administration,” said Trump. “And it’s the only thing they have. And it’s the only way they’re going to win, in their opinion, and it’s actually killing them. But it doesn’t bother me.”

The Gestapo comments were in reference to Trump’s “complaint that [President Joe] Biden’s White House is behind the multiple criminal prosecutions of the presumptive GOP nominee, including his ongoing hush money and fraud trial in New York and additional cases stemming from his efforts to overturn the 2020 election,” reports the Associated Press.

“This was a short comment deep into the thing that wasn’t really central to what he was talking about,” said North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum (who, if you recall, was running for the GOP nomination early in the cycle) on a Sunday panel for CNN. “A majority of Americans feel like the trial that he’s in right now is politically motivated.”

Trump peppered in some more points as well. “When you are Democrat, you start off essentially at 40 percent because you have civil service, you have the unions and you have welfare,” said Trump at another point in the speech. “And don’t underestimate welfare. They get welfare to vote, and then they cheat on top of that—they cheat.”

As usual with Trump, there’s a tiny bit of truth nestled between the lies and exaggerations: Union members and poor people who rely on government handouts are disproportionately Democrat voters. The point is made even more salient by Biden’s repeated yet ill-fated attempts at student loan forgiveness, which looks like an obvious ploy to win over younger voters, prudence (and legality of the policy) be damned.

Trump’s frequent allegations that Democrats cheated to win the 2020 election, on the other hand, are not well-substantiated. The courts have repeatedly considered the question of whether Democrats committed voter fraud in the aftermath of the 2020 election, with outcomes that have been decidedly unfavorable to the “stolen election” types, across all jurisdictions and considered by judges of all political persuasions. (Dear readers, before sending me hate mail for this point, please do take the time to read some substantial number of the 12 links I inserted above.)

Scenes from New York: Went to Streecha in the East Village this weekend.

“More akin to eating at someone’s home than a formal restaurant, Streecha—run by volunteers and considered a hub for Ukrainian immigrants—serves a small menu of Ukrainian favorites,” reports Eater.

“An extension of the nearby St. George’s Ukrainian Catholic Church, the money Streecha makes from food orders serves as a fundraiser for it.”

Really solid, easy on the budget, and full of information about the war effort in Ukraine. My toddler loved the holubtsi (and being cooed over by old ladies).

• The Israeli military has started telling civilians to move out of Rafah, in the southern part of the Gaza Strip—a sign that it is soon to start carrying out a long-predicted attack in that region.
• New birth/fertility-rate data just dropped. Some highlights: Chile is down 20 percent, Macao down 16 percent (for a shockingly low total fertility rate of 0.59), Hungary down 9 percent (but the total fertility rate there remains high, possibly in part because it has tried to engineer a baby boom via tax breaks). All in all, very little good news for those concerned—as I am—about dropping fertility rates.
• Tonight is the Met Gala. Employees of Condé Nast, which puts on the event, are threatening to picket.
• “A hyped venture space only exists after the winning company in that space has already been created, discovered, funded, and become popular,” writes Trae Stephens for Pirate Wires. “The very existence of the space proves the search for a winning investment is already over. This is the reality of venture investing, and the herd behavior operating in open defiance of this reality is necessarily limiting fund returns while denying capital to promising companies simply because they aren’t on trend.”
• “There are people out there in the world who may decide, based on their democratic rights, to elect Donald Trump as president,” New York Times executive editor Joe Kahn told Semafor‘s Ben Smith. “It is not the job of the news media to prevent that from happening. It’s the job of Biden and the people around Biden to prevent that from happening.” Naturally, the peanut gallery of angry liberals has positively exploded at Kahn for…speaking truth.
• “Israel ordered the local offices of Qatar’s Al Jazeera satellite news network to close Sunday, escalating a long-running feud between the broadcaster and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s hard-line government as Doha-mediated cease-fire negotiations with Hamas hang in the balance,” reports Politico. 
• Not good:

Russian forces are now deployed next to withdrawing US troops in Niamey. This supports CTP’s assessment that Russian troops will also backfill the US base in northern Niger, which will create several long-term opportunities for the Kremlin to strategically threaten Europe. 1/9???? https://t.co/mWtWuvBHl8 pic.twitter.com/80ToSFGD2I

— Critical Threats (@criticalthreats) May 3, 2024

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