Sideshow Donald's Theater Of Cruelty

     Donald Trump, geriatric showbiz thimblerigger with ideations of self-grandeur, now President of incompetence and chaos,

...is putting on the spectacle of his life, a sensationalistic global extravaganza of economic ​calamity with his colossally foolish tariffs and the trade war he's declared on the world, a trade war which, according to political observers and historians, could well lead to a killing war.
      And there is Donald Trump’s supporting cast of characters who've hitched their hopes for power and attainment to his star, making statements to the media in support of his economic insanity as if everything were going smooth as Jell-o and Dream Whip, as if his actions were ushering the world into a new era of prosperity and peace instead of setting the world on the brink of catastrophe.
    Among these members of Trump's troupe are Secretary of the U.S. Treasury Scott Bessent,

​...economist and former Trump advisor Peter Navarro, who went to prison rather than testify against Trump,

​...Secretary of Agriculture Brooke Rollins,

​...Harvard PhD and Trump economic advisor Stephen, greatest of Trump's tariff cheerleaders.

...and others.
​       I’ve heard these people speak. Listening to them one would say they're serious people, Ivy League educated, highly intelligent and knowledgeable, top experts in their field, people to be believed and trusted. 
       And yet it's clear they're no more to be trusted or believed than the marionettes they are. I say this not because their opinions fly in the face of the opinions of every other reputable economist on the planet; after all, who knows, maybe they do in fact honestly believe in their own prognostications, and who's to say that it's one hundred percent outside the realm of possibility that Trump's tariffs and trade war just might turn out splendidly as they're telling us they will?
      No, the problem is that while these Donald Trump's leading men and women are giving ovations and rave reviews to his  performance on the economy, Trump is simultaneously producing and directing a horrific sideshow in which innocent people are suffering cruelly.
         Under Donald Trump, Immigration and Customs Enforcement has turned into an American Gestapo whose officers have been using flagrant terror tactics against lawfully documented immigrants, trampling on their legal and human rights.
         There was the incident on March 25 in which  Rumeysa Ozturk, a 30-year-old Tufts PhD student in the U.S. on a Fulbright Scholarship,

...was jumped on the street by a group of ICE agents in black masks, seized, 

...and whisked away to a detention center in Louisiana where she is still being held. Though she has not been charged with any crime or illegal activity, her visa has been terminated because last year she wrote a letter to the Tufts student newspaper sympathetic to the plight of the Gazans.
​          There is the shockingly shameful treatment of Columbia University graduate student Mahmoud Khalil, a lawful permanent green card resident married to an American citizen, who was arrested on March 8 and  also taken away to a Louisiana detention center for having led peaceful pro-Palestinian demonstrations last year. Khalil has not been charged with any crime or illegal activity, but his green card and legal status have been revoked and  few days ago a Louisiana judge ruled that he could be deported, even though as a Palestinian refugee whose family fled to Syria then later from Syria to Lebanon he has no real homeland to go back to.

    Then there is the cruelest, most heart-wrenching plight of them all, that of Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the 29-year old Salvadoran refugee with protected legal status, husband of a U.S. citizen and father of three, who was mistakenly targeted by Immigration as a Venezuelan gang member and seized on March 12 by ICE agents.

      Abrego Garcia, who is guilty of no crime nor has broken any law, was sent to a notorious  Salvadoran mega-prison crowded with violent gang members. And even though the Trump administration has admitted that Abrego Garcia was arrested and deported because of a clerical error, not the least effort has been made by Immigration or the State Department to have him released from that brutal prison and returned home to the United States. A judgement handed down by U.S. Federal Court has been flouted by Donald Trump. 
     In fact, yesterday Donald Trump hosted President of El Salvador Nayib Bukele, who calls himself the world’s coolest dictator, at the White House. The two dictators, who got along swimmingly, 

​...jovially agreed that Kilmer Abrego Garcia would not be returned to his home and family in the U.S., but would be kept incarcertated in the Salvadoran prison. Trump meanwhile floated the idea of paying El Salvador to build more prisons to which American criminals could be sent, "criminals" meaning anyone Donald Trump doesn't like, such as, for example, the former Department of Homeland Security official Miles Taylor, 

...whom Trump has accused of treason for writing a letter during Trump's first term to the New York Times that was critical of Trump.
​     Nor has Trump's Republican Congress emitted a breath of protest against these outrages or similar outrages perpetrated against other innocent legal immigrants by Donald Trump's Departments of Immigration and Homeland Security.
       And here are these Trumpian players  on the world stage,

...singing Donald Trump's praises, delivering their lines as if Trump's economic show existed independent of his horror show of human rights abuse, as if the horror show didn't exist at all, as if his theater of cruelty were not intertwined with his theater of the economy, as if the two were not part of the same spectacle.
       And as if these people didn't understand that a bad tree cannot bear good fruit any more than a good tree can produce bad. Or as if they never pondered what it profits them if they gain the whole world and forfeit their soul.

​References
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https://www.cnn.com/2025/04/12/politics/trump-krebs-khalil-taylor-crackdown-dissent-what-matters/index.html

https://www.cnn.com/2025/03/27/us/rumeysa-ozturk-detained-what-we-know

https://www.cnn.com/2025/04/04/us/maryland-father-el-salvador-immigrants/index.html?iid=cnn_buildContentRecirc_end_recirc

https://www.cnn.com/2025/04/13/us/mahmoud-khalil-deportation-ruling-appeals/index.html

https://www.cnn.com/2025/04/10/us/immigration-detainees-trump-ice-students-visa/index.html?iid=cnn_buildContentRecirc_end_recirc​

https://www.msn.com/en-in/autos/photos/stephen-miran-the-harvard-trained-economist-behind-trumps-tariff-strategy/ar-AA1CEYQF​

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/trump-miles-taylor-treason-chris-krebs-doj-investigate_n_67f7024ce4b0148714528bcf

https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/national-security/trump-orders-probes-two-former-officials-defied-rcna200523​