President Donald Trump inexplicably claimed that Missouri’s 2024 general election had been rigged, using that falsehood as an excuse to try to convince state Republicans to redistrict.

Writing on X Thursday, Missouri Times editor Jake Kroesen said that during a meeting of Missouri state Senate Republicans the day before, Governor Mike Kehoe had called in with a surprising guest: the president of the United States.

And Trump had a mission: convince the lawmakers to pass the state’s newly gerrymandered congressional map that would erase the Democratic seat in Kansas City.

Trump ranted to lawmakers about how popular he was for about 20 minutes, reciting inflated poll numbers and claiming he could even win a third term in office.

“Trump reportedly told Senators that polling data he has seen shows he is more popular than Reagan,” Kroesen wrote. “He added that his Missouri numbers in 2024 were lower than he had anticipated and claimed the numbers were possibly rigged.”

Trump then told lawmakers he “needed their help securing another seat to maintain control of the House.”

When Trump left the call, Kehoe reportedly said, “See how hard it is to say no to him?”

In 2024, Trump won nearly 59 percent of the vote in Missouri with 1,751,027 votes, beating out Democratic challenger Kamala Harris by more than 550,000 votes. Still, he suggested that the election had been rigged in a state he’d handily won.

Trump’s efforts to personally bully state lawmakers into gerrymandering district maps betray his desperation for Republicans to keep control of the House and Senate in the upcoming midterm elections.

President Donald Trump told the country that his federal crackdown on Washington, D.C. would focus on ridding the streets of violent crime, theft, and gang violence.

In reality, that effort has been an extension of his deportation campaign, as a whopping 40 percent of arrests made since the occupation have to do with immigration, according to recent data collected by The Associated Press.

The Trump administration says that it’s arrested more than 2,300 people: around 12 for homicide suspicion, 20 for alleged gang membership, and a few hundred for drug-related crimes. But more than 940 people have been arrested by Immigrations and Customs Enforcement, more than any of the aforementioned categories.

While the Trump administration claims that deportation and violent crime go hand in hand, it’s hard to see how snatching UberEats drivers off their scooters midroute, harassing anyone who looks Latino at checkpoints, and forcing street vendors to stay inside out of fear helps curtail violent crime.

The president said he was going to “rescue our nation’s capital from crime, bloodshed, bedlam, and squalor, and worse,” after the Big Balls mugging. The results of his efforts have not reflected that.

In light of the immigration enforcement raid on a Hyundai plant in Georgia last week, South Korean President Lee Jae Myung on Thursday issued a warning to the United States.

The raid saw hundreds of South Korean workers shackled and detained, straining diplomatic relations between Washington and Seoul, a key U.S. ally. Currently, 316 South Korean nationals and 14 others are in the process of being transported back to their country.

At a press conference, Lee said South Korean companies may think twice before establishing factories in the United States going forward, unless Washington improves the visa process for South Koreans.

“Under the current circumstances, Korean companies will be very hesitant to make direct investments in the United States,” Lee said, according to United Press International. “Companies will have to worry about whether establishing a local factory in the United States will be subject to all sorts of disadvantages or difficulties,” which “could have a significant impact on future direct investment.”

“It’s not like these are long-term workers,” the South Korean president observed, per the Associated Press. “When you build a factory or install equipment at a factory, you need technicians, but the United States doesn’t have that workforce and yet they won’t issue visas to let our people stay and do the work.”

Earlier this week, South Korean businesses reportedly suspended at least 22 projects in the United States in reaction to the raid.

“Korean workers are being treated like criminals for building factories that Washington itself lobbied for,” one executive in Seoul told The Korea Economic Daily. “If this continues, investment in the U.S. could be reconsidered.”

Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick is jazzing up his song and dance to further distract from the cooling economy.

Speaking with CNBC Thursday, the trade official hypothesized that the real benefits of Donald Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariffs would be realized very soon—that is to say, next year.

“So now, everybody knows their tariff, right? So now you’re going to see factories getting built in America at a scale that you’ve never seen before,” Lutnick said. “More than $10 trillion of factory build coming. Alright? And so theres huge amount of construction jobs.”

“I would say the first quarter of next year will be the best quarter of construction jobs this country’s ever seen, and that’s going to roll all the way through ’26,” he continued. “So I think you’re gonna see GDP growth next year over four percent.”

“You do? Four percent? $10 trillion over what period of time, Secretary?” pressed one of the anchors.

But Lutnick’s perpetual........

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