This Week in Patriotic Grift (and Terror)
Sadists in Minnesota, Herr TrumpEpstein gets his Nobel Peace Prize and then cashes a bigly Venezuela oil check in Qatar for him and his crime family
I had a nasty dream last night. It was triggered because I watched part of the movie “The Apprentice,” about the grifter’s relationship with his mentor, Roy Cohn.
In my dream, Trump hired me to design a brochure for him. I woke up angry at myself for agreeing to it, knowing I wouldn’t get paid.
Now, on to this week’s horrors.
These items are not necessarily in chronological order.
Friday, December 19, was the deadline for the Justice Department to release the Epstein Files. Attorney General Pam Bondi broke the law by not meeting the deadline.
Since that first drop? Nothing. It’s been 28 days.
Pam Bondi released a little less than one percent of them, according to most reports, and the sleaze machine has been creating all kinds of mayhem to distract people long enough for Bondi’s new team of markup specialists to paint millions of documents black. Apparently, they really believe there aren’t multiple backups to these things.
With all the terrorism in Minneapolis and elsewhere, along with at least one well-documented extrajudicial killing, you can understand why Americans have let this slip.
But there’s a direct connection to stopping the terror and digging through the trillions of gigabytes that will implicate Herr TrumpEpstein. Even a few cult members have a line in the sand. Not many, but probably enough to topple him.
Put pressure on your congress critters, especially Democrats, to stop lounging around. They should be doing their job without us hassling them about it, so this is a good time to remind them that primaries are just around the corner. They can find ways to force Bondi to follow the law. They just need to do it. Or lose their jobs.
If the reason they’ve stopped putting pressure on Bondi is that some of them are in the files, tough. They go down, too. That’s how it works.
Renee Nicole Good
I don’t have much more to say in addition to what’s been said. Many great tributes to her abound. Well-deserved anger towards the authoritarian regime has flooded the internet.
I’ll add that she deserves justice. I don’t know how it would play out from a legal standpoint, but one idea I’ve seen floated is to urge Hennepin County’s District Attorney to address the situation.
Here’s how:
Contact form | Phone number: 612-348-5550 | Email: Email | Instagram | Facebook | Twitter
h/t Christopher Armitage and his post here.
The terror continued late this week in Minnesota, as most of you know, when an innocent man was shot. The regime claimed he was… whatever they were claiming, but we have no idea what happened because last I looked, no witnesses have come forward.
After the man was shot, somebody chased ICE agents with a snow shovel, afterwhich Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey felt obliged to say in a press conference, “Don’t take the bait,” because the Minnesota Police Chief was standing next to him with a stern look on his face.
I probably would have said something like, “Next time, try a sickle.”
But this is why Frey is a big city mayor, and I’m not, I guess. Also, protesters were throwing weapons of mass destruction, such as firecrackers, in response to the attempted murder.
Frey seems like a good dude, though, and he’s genuinely and righteously pissed. So he’s got this, I think. But don’t get bullied by your police chief, Jacob.
While you sleep fitfully, Fox and their friends seethe
While you’re trying to sneak in a wee bit of shut-eye during this never-ending hate fest, the Fox and Right Wing grievance machine endlessly creates one new delta point for their toxic anger after another.
Laura Chen, who self-exiled to Canada in 2024 for being a Russian propagandist, said that Renee Nicole was the kind of woman who was “almost wholly responsible for the decline of Western civilization.” The regime, of course, has welcomed Chen back with open arms. Canadians are surely breathing a sigh of relief.
Fox News said that “organized gangs of wine moms” were making ICE stormtrooper cosplayers pee in their pants, forcing them to leave the scenes of their attacks before they really had a fair chance to knock the crap out of a few more unarmed female drivers, which is now sort of becoming a thing.1
This is the kind of stuff people in that other echo chamber listen to. It’s why that wall of 35-40% approval for Trump remains, no matter how outrageous his next move. They see about ten percent of what you do, if that. Instead, they hear nutters wailing on about soccer moms.
Geraldo Lunas Campos
Mr. Campos was killed by five ICE goons who mugged him in an El Paso, Texas, concentration camp. According to the Washington Post, he was choked to death in early January.2 News is only now trickling out about this latest tragedy. Keep in mind that many abductees disappear without a trace. We simply don’t know how many people ICE kills in any given week. There is no formal tracking mechanism.
Trump floats the Insurrection Act again
Like he always does in the wee hours, he asked himself early Thursday morning how he can most quickly upset the largest number of people, and the answer his guardian demon came up with was, “Threaten the good people of Minneapolis with a military invasion via the Insurrection Act.”
For a closer look at his personal demon, I posted a personal letter he wrote to Screwtape in April 2025:
We here at the crack news team at Ruminato don’t miss a beat. So this is a good time to subscribe if you haven’t. Substack always yells at me when I post if I don’t include a subscribe button, so I may as well ask you to put it to good use now:
Today, Trump backed off, saying there is no need yet for invoking the Insurrection Act. Tomorrow is another day.
Off to Maine
ICE has targeted the state of Maine next, probably to hunt down Stephen King, who hates Herr TrumpenGeezer as much as you do, if that’s possible. Little do these idiots know that King lives in Florida now. They’ll figure that out, presumably, and leave Maine or even forget to show up. They won’t terrorize Florida in a hunt for King because it’s a red state that could conceivably flip if conditions are right.
The target date for arrival in Maine is two weeks. Hopefully, Pennywise is still around.
Herr TrumpenGrifter snags a Nobel Peace Prize
What do you do if you're a serial killer slash serial pedophile in desperate need of a Nobel Peace Prize? You abduct the dictator of an oil-rich country, pretend it’s all about democracy and fentanyl, then coordinate a massive oil sale with the deposed dictator’s number two in command, who suddenly discovers the joy of working closely with crime families even more profligate than the one she was working for before the helicopters said hi.
Here’s how it went down if you missed it:
Helicopters and other flying gadgets descended upon Caracas under a fusillade of new Pentagon toys. Some stories even suggested that the military tried a new sonic weapon so that Drunky Kegsbreath could watch people bleed from their nose and eyeballs in real time, but those stories are unconfirmed and always will be.
American special forces nabbed the dictator (name doesn’t matter) and flew him to the United States while he was in workout sweats, even though the regime has clearly stated people need to dress better when they fly.3 Hypocrites.
The obvious choice to replace him was the pro-democracy advocate, a lady, last name of Machado, who won a peace prize from those Nobel folks. Many of you know that MegaGrift has coveted the Nobel Peace Prize ever since Obama nabbed one (and then celebrated by drone-bombing the crap out of Afghanistan). She was the Venezuelan dictator’s main opposition, and is a right-winger, too. In fact, it’s fair to say she’s MAGA. Crazy, huh?
Alas, to no avail.
She visited Herr TrumpenFarter and nearly soaked his diapers with her saliva, she paid so much homage to His Excellency. Then, she gave him her Nobel Peace Prize medal. Just handed it to him: “Here! Take it!”
Everybody is on drugs.
He said, “Well, thank you very much. You’re a very impressive person,” or whatever he says when he fake-compliments, and then kicked her out of his lair and hooked up with the dictator’s second in command, another lady, to make a bigly huge oil deal with the banks, whereby he cut himself and his family a check for $500 million from Venezuelan oil sales and deposited it in a Qatari bank for safekeeping.4
Qatar, for those of you confused by the massive web of swindles during the past year, is the Arabian petrostate that gifted him his own private Air Force One in a presidential grift bonus that even dedicated Magat Ben Shapiro called “skeezy.”5
Whew. Did you get all that? I’m not even sure I did, so let’s move on. It was a busy week.
DiaperDon poos his pants in front of oil executives
I saw unverified reports that he reeked of an aggrievously horrific stench even by his standards while holding court with oil executives he tried to bully into investing in Venezuela. ExxonMobile’s chief executive said of his proposals, “Uninvestible,” so Donald stood up, walked up to the window, and gazed upon the ruins of the East Wing while declaring what a beautiful view it was.
The oil executives all looked like they were watching a kid wet his pants during show and tell.
The monsters inside his head must have laid some eggs, cuz that brain is scrambled beyond repair.
Anyhoo, according to my sources (a guy in his mom’s basement in Penobscot, Maine hunkering down while waiting for the ICE invasion), Mr. Fulbright (TrumpenFührer’s guardian demon, see embedded link above) has decided that the Grifter in Chief needs multiple demons on the case because the grifter’s brain is so twisty with pretzel logic that Mr. Fulbright is having trouble getting him to properly follow instructions.
I’m exhausted by all this. But I’ll soldier on.
More grifty pardons
I want to meet the individual whose official title is “Pardon Meister.” It’s doubtful that the Orange Puffaloe has the memory capacity to remember any of these people he keeps pardoning. This week’s lucky winner was Adriana Camberos, whose name is probably on a Noem list somewhere (because look at that name! It’s got “squirrel” written all over it for these maniacal ICE goons).
Adriana was busted in 2017 for trying to pawn off millions of dollars’ worth of phony 5-Hour Energy drinks, and no, this is not satire.6
I mean, hell, I’d probably pardon her, too. That’s creative. Who’d a thunk it? Although the fact that she managed to get caught might suggest she’s not the sharpest shank in the women’s prison.
She was pardoned for that in 2021, but as if to demonstrate my point, she and her brother, Andres, got nailed in another fraud case in 2024. This time, according to the Department of Justice, they were convicted “for lying to manufacturers to sell wholesale groceries and other goods at steep discounts by promising the goods would be sold in Mexico, or to prisons or rehabilitation facilities. Instead, the defendants sold the products at higher prices to U.S. distributors, for the U.S. market.”7
So Trump pardoned her again. You can’t make this stuff up. And I repeat, this is not satire.
No word on whether the government has plans to chase the two around the country in SUVs with tinted windows driven by newly recruited Proud Boys or Jan Sixers.
The pair are Trump supporters, according to reports, so it’s fair to guess, “No, they have ICE terror immunity,” but who knows? Mistakes happen, especially with these clowns.
Adriana isn’t the first pardon grifter to get into trouble again. There have been many.8
The highlight of this particular class of TrumpenCriminal is a goon named Jaime A. Davidson, who received a life sentence for armed robbery and killing a police officer. The Mad Clown freed him from a life sentence, even though his applications for clemency had been rejected twice by the Obama administration (or maybe because they were). Davidson got out of prison and promptly beat up his wife last year, for which he served a whopping three-month sentence.
It’s a good bet Davidson will land a job with ICE any day now. He’s sort of the template.
A study by the Federal Sentencing Reporter from the University of California Press found that only 25 of the approximately 240 clemency actions and pardons handed out by the predator in chief were approved by the official pardon meister.9
Believe it or not, there is such a thing as a “Pardon Attorney,” and double believe it or not, this is not a Trumpian invention. They are tasked with finding people to pardon. I want this job.
So it’s not a “pardon meister,” even though I happen to think that sounds better. I didn’t research to find out who this person is, mostly because, as I suggested, I want to replace this person, and I happen to think I’d be very good at this job.
Are you as tired as I am? Should I go on?
What the hell. I might as well. Drink!
Onward to Greenland!
Or not. Multiple reports have appeared in various newsy places that indicate that military brass would walk out of the room if the malodorous murderer of Mar-a-Lago ordered an invasion against NATO, which is what an attack on Greenland would be.
Republicans, too, are balking. I know, right? You don’t believe me, do you? Okay, I’ll add a link for this one. Footnote: 10
Representative Don Bacon of Nebraska called Trump’s bizarre fantasy “buffoonery.” Join the world of the sane, Don. Now that you’re about to become a new target of Maga, you might as well go all in.
"There's so many Republicans mad about this," Bacon told an Omaha Paper. "If he went through with the threats, I think it would be the end of his presidency." Let me digress for just a moment to say how cool it is that a congressional representative in farm country is named Bacon. Especially given the obvious probability that he spends a lot of time acquiring pork through the legislative process.
Bacon went on to say he’d lean toward impeachment if Herr Trumpfenstench was stupid enough to attack NATO in Greenland.
Nevertheless, the puffins await and are at the ready.
Canada turns to China in the face of American insanity.
Canada, faced with a southern neighbor stoned on so many drugs that it elected a lunatic, turned to China this week to bulk up its economy.11
The highlight of the deal is a reversal of tariffs that had mirrored those President Biden had placed on American imports of Chinese electric vehicles (EVs).
Prime Minister Mark Carney’s reason for forging a massive trade deal with China was simple: China, he said, is a more predictable superpower than one that is dumb enough to elect Trump (my words, not his).
The deal will result in a massive influx of EVs into Canada from China, which in turn will bolster China’s chief competitor to Elon Musk’s fading Tesla brand, BYD, which is already the world’s sales leader in worldwide EV sales.
The Trump regime is overseeing the transformation of the United States to a failing, former industrial power, as he pushes coal, dirty fuel, and gasoline-powered automobiles like it’s 1960.
Trump regime orders USDA Employees to investigate foreign researcher and colleagues
ProPublica, one of the few true journalism services still alive, reports that the USDA (US Department of Agriculture) is telling workers to:
check the backgrounds of foreign nationals collaborating with the department’s scientists for evidence of “subversive or criminal activity.” Their names are being sent to national security experts at the agency.12
The USDA frequently collaborates with scientists based at universities in the U.S. and abroad. Some agency workers told ProPublica they were uncomfortable with the new requirement because they felt it could put those scientists in the crosshairs of the administration. Students and postdocs are particularly vulnerable as many are in the U.S. on temporary visas and green cards, the employees said.
Jennifer Jones, director for the Center for Science and Democracy at the Union of Concerned Scientists, called the directive a “throwback to McCarthyism” that could encourage scientists to avoid working with the “best and brightest” researchers from around the world.
This is right out of every authoritarian playbook ever written. More accurately, it is from the first authoritarian playbook ever written. The report suggests that this is part of a broader effort across the entire federal bureaucracy.
I wonder if all the federal agencies are going to start calling pest control to look for vampire bats with bald heads.
Trump makes a pretend proposal to lower credit card interest rates
Realizing he won’t be able to stop an election where he’ll get hammered even in red states, Herr Trumpengrifter discovered affordability early this week and told banks to lower their ceilings on credit card interest rates to ten percent. The banks promptly said, “No.”
Most economists say a law dictating a sudden change like this would cut off credit to people who need it most. Rates are too high, and on the face of it, it’s actually a good idea, in my opinion, if it’s phased in over time. This, of course, would require action on the part of Congress, so it’s a moot point, since the Mike Johnson Congress thinks a busy legislative session is a vacation of endless recess and avoiding anything related to the Trump-Epstein mess that is going to bring down Maga and this illicit presidency.
You can expect more stuff like this coming out of the orange blob’s spluttering lips. Some of it might even sound kind of cool. Just remember that it’s part of the grift.
It’s always part of the grift.
The New York Times interviews sanewashes Trump for two hours
Regular readers may have already read my take on this disaster here:
In that post, I promised a full transcript if I ever saw one. I did. It’s here as a gift link to any of my awesome readers who are into a form of mental self-flagellation:
🎁 Ruminato gift link: https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/11/us/politics/trump-interview-transcript.html 🎁
This is obviously not a comprehensive review of all the week’s news regarding the fading orange puddle of toxicity. I’ve mostly just included the things I noticed and stuff that couldn’t escape the current news cycle.
Notes
My eyes are a blurry mess tonight. If you see an important typo or gaffe, feel free to let me know in the comments.
Image of sickle from the Hida Tool Company, Berkeley, CA. I’d include a link, but I don’t want you to take the bait. Let’s try to do this peacefully if we can.
Image of Stephen Miller is public domain.
My footnotes are a little different today because my bibliography tool isn’t working well, as the internet has been having intermittent problems throughout the day.
Thanks for reading!
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Footnotes
MacMillan, Douglas. “Medical Examiner Likely to Classify Death of ICE Detainee as Homicide, Recorded Call Says.” The Washington Post, January 15, 2026. https://www.washingtonpost.com/immigration/2026/01/15/ice-detention-death-homicide/
Renshaw, Jarrett. “US Completes First Venezuelan Oil Sales Valued at $500 Million, US Official Says.” Reuters, January 14, 2026. https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/us-completes-first-venezuelan-oil-sales-valued-500-million-us-official-says-2026-01-14/.
CBC. “Canada Strikes Tariff Deal with China as Global Trade Moves Further from U.S. | CBC,” 2026. https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/livestory/canada-china-electric-vehicles-canola-trade-deal-carney-xi-9.7048058.
I would like to add that no one that ordered the "Trump Phone" seems to have received theirs. I did NOT order that phone AND ALSO HAVE NOT RECEIVED ONE!! So, same, same...
Ok, even more confused. Why does it look like I hit reply to Cliff's comment? I didn't hit reply. Yep, I had enough internet for today. LOL