A Weekend Reid: The Autocrat in Sundown

Donald Trump is scraping up every penny he can in his declining years as America's most embarrassing, corrupt and mentally decrepit president, and the man who would be king

It’s not always clear that Donald Trump knows what’s happening around him. It’s just a fact of life that as we age, we lose a certain amount of mental acuity. And there is no out-clause on that biological fact for would-be dictators. And so, it you ask Donald Trump a question, prepare to get a geriatric brain dump of dementia-like proportions…

Somebody please ping Jake Tapper … he might have another best-seller on his hands…

But despite the fact that he is sundowning, you can’t say Trump isn’t accomplishing anything.

Through his sheer brazenness and corruption, he’s finally the billionaire he pretended to be all those years when he was driving his father’s real estate development business into the ground.

While he’s supposed to be pretending to be president, while Stephen Miller runs the country like his own private torture chamber, Donald is busy hawking merch to his sucker fans, from golden, not-quite “Made in America” Trump phones to $200 cologne (does it smell like a soiled adult diaper, I wonder?) to his seemingly solo-use “Truth Social” (whose posts are most frequently repurposed onto Twitter or onto cable news elements lists) to crypto, which has not just made him a billionaire, it’s allowed him to buy off $Melania with more than just that smarmy Amazon bribe deal to purchase her completely unwanted biography, while also giving his useless and untalented sons a gold-plated purpose.

But it’s the media bribes that really stand out. The pantsing of 60 Minutes, whose parent Paramount has agreed to pay Trump $16 million to settle his bogus campaign-era lawsuit, has to be the greatest feat of media dignity defenestration in history.

Read: The Daily Reid: A 60 Minutes warning

I’m not sure the 60 Minutes or CBS brands survive the payment of what amounts to the payment of extortion money to the president of the United States for the apparent crime of … editing an interview with his presidential opponent exactly the way the show normally does. Here is what Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren had to say about the settlement:

Senator Elizabeth Warren is calling, yet again, for a “full investigation” into Paramount and Donald Trump’s settlement discussions after the two parties agreed to resolve the president’s lawsuit against CBS and “60 Minutes” for $16 million.

“With Paramount folding to Donald Trump at the same time the company needs his administration’s approval for its billion-dollar merger, this could be bribery in plain sight,” the Democrat said in a Wednesday statement to TheWrap. “Paramount has refused to provide answers to a congressional inquiry, so I’m calling for a full investigation into whether or not any anti-bribery laws were broken.”

The settlement covers legal fees and other costs, as well as a donation that will be allocated to a “future presidential library.” Paramount also said that “in the future, ’60 Minutes’ will release transcripts of interviews with eligible U.S. presidential candidates after such interviews have aired, subject to redactions as required for legal or national security concerns.”

Notably, the settlement does not include any statement of apology or regret from CBS or “60 Minutes.”

Warren said the settlement “exposes a glaring need for rules to restrict donations to sitting presidents’ libraries,” adding that she plans to introduce new legislation to “rein in corruption through presidential library donations.”

“The Trump administration’s level of sheer corruption is appalling and Paramount should be ashamed of putting its profits over independent journalism,” Warren’s statement concluded.

Indeed. But if we’re being honest, the corruption exists on both sides of that transaction.

But this is where we are. CBS/Paramount has simply ventured into the same humiliating swamp where ABC/Disney trod before them. And one could easily assume that Comcast/NBC is readying their checkbook as well, so that Trump will stop screaming at Brian Roberts and let them merge or sell Versant (which honestly sounds like an erectile disfunction med) or merge it with who knows what, maybe CNN, which has its own Trump problem in that he is now openly attacking their most prominent Black woman host and demanding they fire reporter Natasha Bertrand for doing her job.

This as Trump’s defense secretary takes on the role of presidential spokesman, melting down at the lack of North Korea-style robotic Trump praise from the press over the wholly ineffectual side show bombing of Iran’s nuclear sites.

At this point, I can’t think of many legacy media companies with any real dignity left, other than the Associated Press. And who knows how long they will hold out before they too take the knee and write the greedy, geriatric man-child of Mar a Lago a fat check, as a substitute for a binky.

In an autocracy, courage is rare. But it is necessary.

But back to Trump. Is he sundowning? Giving in to the dementia that took his corrupt, tax-dodging father out at the ripe old age of 93; the same dementia the maga faithful routinely accuse Joe Biden of lying to the nation about? Who knows. What is clear is that according to his own family, he is growing even more ignorant and malevolent as he ages into his decrepit elder phase. Here is his Fourth of July message to America, celebrating the passage of his Big Billionaire Bailout bill, which will bankrupt this country and sicken and impoverish millions, so that he and his fellow billionaires can gwock down more caviar:

And in case it’s not clear, what he’s doing, on the day designated for the celebration of America’s independence from the King of England, is clearing the mental pathway for anyone who identifies with his monarchal maga movement — any member of his cult — to join him in hating Democrats. By casting Democrats as a hate object, the same way he has immigrants, he is signaling to his followers that anything that could be done to either of these groups, or to anyone else he hates, is personally sanctioned by their god-ordained leader: him. Maga can and should hate them. Disrespect them. Snatch them off the street and cast them into concentration camps. Maybe even hurt them, or worse. He will consider you a patriot. Donald Trump is doing what he has always done: set people up to be hurt or killed, simply because he enjoys the spectacle.

For Trump, it’s all just fun, like real-life WWE. He is a connoisseur of violence, though he skipped out on his opportunity to do violence in the service of his country during the Vietnam war, citing “bone spurs…”

Besides the violent machinations of our physical coward, mobster president, what is also clear is that he is rapidly devolving this country into something as monstrous as he is — a place where apparently the major industries will be few, and they will be miserable:

Oil and gas and coal drilling … forever. We are getting out of the new and clean energy business and ceding those lucrative, futuristic industries to China, while Trump signs executive orders boosting oil drilling on protected lands and “beautiful” coal — “beautiful” being his favorite label for dirty, rotten things.

Mass deportation and detention, for which a handful of private companies will grow exponentially richer, and even more people will die. The U.S. is already the world’s most aggressive carceral state. Now, we will be the most deadly. An El Salvador on steroids. Read this from the Washington Post and try not to weep:

The tax and spending bill passed by Congress on Thursday will triple federal funding for immigrant detention centers, setting the stage for a rapid expansion of these facilities and adding to concerns about the treatment of the growing numbers of immigrant detainees.

Congress allocated $45 billion to spend locking up immigrants over the next four years — more than the government spent on detention during the Obama, Biden and first Trump administrations combined, federal data show. The bill also includes $46.5 billion for building the wall along the U.S.-Mexico border and $6 billion for border technology and surveillance, along with other border security and immigration measures.

This is the most “funding we have seen for a border immigration agenda in the history of the country,” said Lauren-Brooke Eisen, who researches criminal justice and incarceration in her role as a senior director at the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University’s School of Law. “We are seeing a wholesale expansion of ICE detention centers.”

U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials say they plan to use the money to roughly double the nation’s detention capacity to 100,000 beds, giving them more capacity to arrest undocumented immigrants targeted for deportation. The average daily population of ICE detainees rose to 56,000 last month — the highest number since ICE began releasing those figures during the first Trump administration — and administration officials have acknowledged the surge in immigrant detainees has sometimes outpaced their ability to accommodate all of them.

And who benefits from this mass incarceration bonanza? A small group of corporations that donated tens of millions of dollars … to Donald Trump…

The U.S. immigrant detention system — the largest in the world — grew over the past four decades as a way to hold undocumented immigrants while they wait for their asylum claims or deportation cases to be processed. The network, which is largely composed of dozens of detention centers run by private contractors as well as dozens of county jails that contract part of their facilities to ICE, has in the past mostly been populated by border crossers deemed a flight risk or migrants charged with a crime.

During this Trump administration, however, as border crossings have dropped and ICE has increased arrests of people throughout the interior of the country, the detainee population is changing. As of June, about one-third of ICE detainees have never been charged with a criminal offense, and ICE is now arresting people with no criminal charges at a higher rate than people charged with crimes, according to Austin Kocher, a research assistant professor at Syracuse University who studies immigration data.

This year, ICE has already awarded new or expanded contracts to at least nine facilities owned by the Geo Group or CoreCivic, the two largest detention contractors, as well as contracts to companies that house immigrants in makeshift tent structures. The House of Representatives Appropriations Committee recently called that prior spending “budgetary mismanagement” because it surpassed the agency’s budget and forced the government to transfer funds that had been allotted to other agencies.

Together, Geo and CoreCivic have at least 14 additional unused prisons, which could be repurposed to hold thousands of ICE detainees in states including California, Colorado, North Carolina and Oklahoma, the companies have said. In some places, the firms are already taking applications for hundreds of jobs they expect to fill when contracts are awarded, such as at an unused former prison owned by CoreCivic in Leavenworth, Kansas.

Immigrant rights advocates are imploring the government not to award more contracts to Geo and CoreCivic, companies they say have failed to provide safe accommodations and adequate medical care to detainees. In recent weeks, immigrants protested what they said was a lack of adequate food and water at a Geo-owned facility in Newark, while detainees at a CoreCivic facility in Torrance County, New Mexico, complained they were not permitted to flush toilets for days at a time.

And how much did CoreCivic and Geo Group donate? A lot, with expectations of getting a lot in return.

In the months leading up to Election Day, the nation's largest private prison company poured a million dollars into a super PAC supporting former President Donald Trump.

The donations from Geo Group were far from the largest corporate contribution to Trump's war chest -- but few industries are set to benefit from the incoming Trump administration as significantly as private prisons, which are expecting a surge in business driven by Trump's plan to deport millions of undocumented immigrants.

During a recent corporate earnings call, Geo Group CEO Brian Evans estimated that his company could make as much as $400 million annually by filling empty or underutilized beds at existing detention facilities to support what he called the "future needs for ICE and the federal government," referring to the U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency.

"What is new is a potential sea change by the incoming Trump administration that is expected to implement a much more aggressive policy towards interior and border immigration enforcement," Geo Group founder George Zoley said on the call. "We believe that the private sector will play a critical role in assisting the government in carrying out its objectives."

Geo Group could expand the numbers of beds in its detention facilities, offer GPS monitoring for potentially millions of migrants, and ramp up its secure transportation of migrants, according to executives on the Nov. 7 earnings call.

"We have assured ICE of our capability to rapidly scale up our capabilities to monitor and oversee several hundreds of thousands, or even several millions of individuals in order to achieve the federal government's immigration law compliance objectives," Geo Group President Wayne Calabrese said on the call.

Investors appear to have noticed, with the company's stock price jumping more than 80% since the beginning of the month.

And here’s CoreCivic’s “contribution…”

Private prison company CoreCivic reported in a lobbying disclosure that it donated $500,000 to the Trump-Vance inaugural committee in December, underscoring the close relationship between President Donald Trump and the private prison industry.

As ABC News has previously reported, CoreCivic and private prison company GEO Group, both which have both long supported Trump, saw their stock prices immediately spike after Trump's victory in the November election.

The industry is expected to grow under Trump’s sweeping immigration crackdown.

This is not about national or domestic security. It’s about profits, pure and simple. And ICE agents, or masked men posing as ICE agents, are rushing to meet Herr Miller’s Brown People Roundup Quota to the point where the frantic pace is even wearing thin with some of them.

All of this as we lose everything that made America attractive to international students, as U.S.-born researchers and scientists join international tourists in shunning the U.S.A.

US, a global spotlight for tourists around the globe, is witnessing decline in both inbound and outbound visitors following tariff tension and political rhetoric around various issues.

The present crisis in tourism sector is a stark reminder that global perceptions matter and with international travellers shunning the US and domestic tourists tightening their belts, the industry faces a tough road ahead.

As reported in Wall Street Journal on 1 June 2025, the overseas travellers are opting out of US vacations, citing concerns over the Trump administration's immigration crackdowns and tariff threats.

With summer travel season underway, this downturn is projected to cost US a £9.6 billion ($12 billion) in 2025, threatening small businesses and local economies.

The perception of the US as an unwelcoming destination is gaining traction. The same Wall Street Journal report noted that a 6% drop in foreign arrivals at major US airports over the past four weeks compared to last year, with airline bookings from Europe down 12% through August.

And Trump has made it clear, he doesn’t want international tourists here anyway; signing yet another executive order just this week hiking ticket fees to U.S. national parks for foreign visitors.

"To fund improvements and enhanced experiences across the park system, I've just signed an executive order to raise entrance fees for foreign tourists while keeping prices low for Americans," Mr. Trump said in a Thursday evening rally in Iowa. "The national parks will be about America first."

Perhaps he wants to hide the changes that have turned the parks into white nationalist propaganda mills, where park rangers currently live under the shadow of a visitor snitch line, where maga tourists are encouraged report them to the Maga PolitBuro if they say anything “negative” about American history… Although so far, the snitch line doesn’t appear to be going as planned…

In the end though it’s clear. Everyone must be driven out of the United States: nonwhite immigrants, brown Trump voters, lawyers who represent nonwhite immigrants, protesters, veterans, anyone who dares to document or save brown people from masked agents in the streets, brown people who save children from sharks, even born and raised U.S. citizens who somehow got on the wrong mailing list — in short, anyone other than the Maga Herrenvolk; so Stephen Miller, Donald Trump and their un-merry band of fascists can live their fantasy of re-building a white supermajority America, as their compatriot Lara Loomer fantasizes out loud about alligators eating all 65 million American Latinos.

No subtlety there. And let’s not pretend she’s a one-off. Maga clearly believes, broadly, that every Latino person in this country is here illegally, and should be expelled, or worse, in order to preserve the white majority. That may be a surprise to Latinos for Trump, but it isn’t to anyone who has payed the slightest attention to the maga faith.

But not to worry, the ancestors are watching … Alligator Auschwitz flooded this weekend …

And with that, happy Fourth of July weekend to all, to the extent you feel good about celebrating America as Trump and maga have rebranded it.