Former President Joe Biden doesn’t think the election would have been any different if he’d dropped out sooner.

“I don’t think it would have mattered. We left at a time when we had a good candidate,” Biden told the BBC, in his first interview since leaving the White House. “Things moved so quickly that it made it difficult to walk away. And it was a hard decision.… I think it was the right decision. I think that … it was just a difficult decision.”

Biden dropped out a mere four months before Election Day, in the midst of mounting fears regarding his mental acuity. The White House insisted over and over again that he was as sharp as ever. Senator Chuck Schumer called the fears “right-wing propaganda,” former Federal Reserve Chair Janet Yellen said he was “at the top of his game,” and Senator Bernie Sanders said that Biden “seemed fine” to him. But the truth came out at the first televised debate between Trump and Biden, in which Biden delivered perhaps the worst performance of all time—a bumbling, sad, and incoherent showing that made it clear that he was not mentally prepared to run again.

It’s easy to play the “what if” game in hindsight. But it’s painfully obvious that Biden dropping out sooner would have allowed the Democratic Party to have an actual primary, in which a diverse field of candidates would have been able to sharpen their positions and differentiate themselves from one another. Instead there was no primary, no differentiation between Harris and Biden, and a brutal loss to show for it.

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has a message for a hypothetical little girl worried that she won’t have more than two dolls because of Donald Trump’s disastrous tariff policy.

“I would tell that young girl that you will have a better life than your parents,” Bessent said, during an appearance on Fox News Tuesday night. “That you and your family, thanks to President Trump, can now be confident again that you will have a better life than your parents, which, working-class Americans had abandoned that idea.”

“Your family will own a home, you will be able to advance. You will have a good education, you will have economic freedom,” Bessent continued.

“Confident” is an interesting choice of words for Bessent, after consumer confidence sank a whopping 7.9 points in April, to its lowest level since May 2020.

The beleaguered Bessent has been desperate to rebrand Trump’s isolationist America First economic policy as a Buddhist-like maxim on desire as the root of all suffering. In March, Bessent claimed that “access to cheap goods is not the essence of the American dream.” In fact, being able to afford to live is a huge part of the American dream, and abundant consumer conveniences have become baked into our national identity.

But Bessent and Trump are insistent that they’re playing the long game—a little pinch in the present to make way for an expansive future they haven’t deigned to actually progress toward yet.

Small consumer grievances may illustrate the present-day realities of Trump’s tariffs, but they should not be used by the administration to obscure the larger picture. If we’re really going to play with hypotheticals, then we should imagine how a little girl’s “economic freedom” might be hurt by the collapse of her family’s soybean farm. Maybe then she can get a job in one of Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick’s factories, and then her children can work there, and her children’s children. By then, maybe they’ll have dolls to play with.

The Trump administration is planning to use a military plane to deport immigrants to Libya in a cruel, arbitrary escalation of its mass deportation campaign. The deportations could happen as soon as Wednesday, and the nationality of the immigrants remains unclear. 

The situation in Libya is so unstable that the State Department dissuades its citizens from traveling there “due to crime, terrorism, unexploded land mines, civil unrest, kidnapping and armed conflict.” 

The detention centers where these migrants would be held are even worse. A 2021 Amnesty International investigation found “horrific violations” in the prisons there, calling them a total “hellscape.” The organization’s Middle East deputy director, Diana Eltahaway, noted that prisoners are “immediately funnelled into arbitrary detention and systematically subjected to torture, sexual violence, forced labour and other exploitation with total impunity.… The entire network of Libyan migration detention centres is rotten to its core and must be dismantled.”

This comes months after the administration pulled a similar move by sending Venezuelan immigrants to the infamous CECOT prison in El Salvador—an extrajudicial  move that is still being debated by the court.

The president’s Make Alcatraz Great Again pitch just got more fuel from one of his subordinates.

Attorney General Pam Bondi suggested Tuesday that alleged international drug traffickers, “if convicted,” should stay in American prisons—“maybe Alcatraz,” she added with a smile.

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