Amid a dust-up with ex-bestie and top donor Elon Musk, Donald Trump on Wednesday has lashed out at Joe Biden and foreign nationals, again.
Bellowing “Kill Bill” online with some Quentin Tarantino in hand, the recently dethroned Musk has turned on Trump’s spiteful and spendthrift “Big Beautiful Bill,” so it’s no surprise the White House occupant is looking to shift focus to old foils Biden and travel bans to take control of the narrative.
Just days after Trump reposted on social media that the man who beat him in 2020 was “executed” five years ago and replaced with “clones doubles & robotic engineered soulless mindless entities,” Trump tonight inked an memo on “Reviewing Certain Presidential Actions” as well as shutting down travel to the U.S. starting June 9 from a dozen nations including Iran, Afghanistan, Yemen and Burma.
In public appearances and online Wednesday, Trump has nothing about Musk, a fellow frequent poster.
Going after Biden and emphasizing tales of the 46th president’s “serious cognitive decline,” Trump’s memorandum seeks “an investigation into who ran the United States while President Biden was in office,” as an accompanying fact sheet says. All of which can be read as an attempt by Trump to potentially overturn vast swaths of actions during his predecessor’s term, from pardons to executive orders and more — essentially erasing Biden from the legislative and policy books.
“In recent months, it has become increasingly apparent that former President Biden’s aides abused the power of Presidential signatures through the use of an autopen to conceal Biden’s cognitive decline and assert Article II authority,” the memo to Attorney General Pam Bondi and other aides reads. “This conspiracy marks one of the most dangerous and concerning scandals in American history. The American public was purposefully shielded from discovering who wielded the executive power, all while Biden’s signature was deployed across thousands of documents to effect radical policy shifts.”
Flooding the media zone as he often does when under attack or politically damaged, Trump tossed rancid red meat at the MAGA base and nervous members of Congress with a travel ban on 12 countries and and order to “partially restrict and limit the entry of nationals” from seven other nations in the service of stopping terrorism and “other national security and public safety threats.”
Spotlighting the lack of stable governments in the nations in question, the measures are set to take effect in five days at midnight.
Reminiscent of the “Muslim Ban” during Trump’s first term, the nations fully banned for the “entry of immigrants and nonimmigrants” are Afghanistan, Burma, Chad, Republic of the Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Haiti, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan and Yemen. There are a couple of extenuating circumstances on the bans, like letting in people “whose entry serves U.S. national interests.” Whether this would include stopping the likes of Iranian It Was Just an Accident filmmaker and recent Palme d’Or winner Jafar Panahi from coming to America for awards like the Golden Globes and the Oscars is unclear. The seven countries now under a partial ban are Burundi, Cuba, Laos, Sierra Leone, Togo, Turkmenistan and Venezuela.
Not unexpected based on statements and executive orders Trump made in the early days of his second term, the bans come as a response by Trump to the horrific antisemitic Molotov cocktail attack this past weekend in Boulder, CO, by overstaying visa immigrant Mohamed Soliman, White House sources spun to the media. That line is easily undermined by the fact that Soliman, whose family has been rounded up by ICE and were set for deportation until a federal judge stepped in Wednesday, is Egyptian. The recipient of American military sales and more, Egypt is not among the banned countries.
Still, the Boulder attack was a rationale for the latest travel ban as Trump himself stated in a video posted by the White House tonight.
In the chaos of the dust-up between DOGE pals Musk and Trump, a new book and new political affiliation by former White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre and the validity of government economic data, the breaking news of the new travel ban was ignored by the partisan Fox News and MSNBC, while CNN was along among domestic cable newsers to provide scant coverage. The BBC went more in depth on the ban, but no one turned to the Biden probe.
