Is Trump Now Using ICE to Take Revenge on CBS?
Immigration and Customs Enforcement on Tuesday raided a restaurant in Washington, D.C., owned by the husband of CBS News anchor Norah O’Donnell.
Early Tuesday morning, immigration officers dressed in Homeland Security uniforms busted into the American fare restaurant Chef Geoff’s and demanded to see employees’ work authorization, Fox5 reported. No one was taken into custody, marking yet another pointless, fearmongering raid from ICE.
O’Donnell is a senior correspondent for CBS News and a contributing correspondent for the network’s 60 Minutes, which Trump has targeted ever since the network did an interview with Kamala Harris before the 2024 election. It’s unclear whether ICE knew that O’Donnell’s husband, Geoff Tracy, is the owner of Chef Geoff’s.
ICE also raided at least seven other restaurants in Washington, D.C., on Tuesday, including Millie’s, Pupatella, and Chang Chang, to demand I-9 forms, The Washingtonian reported.
“We were under the impression that they were focusing on trying to find criminals,” Bo Blair, the owner of Millie’s, told The Washingtonian. “And this is just a whole new level of harassment to our hardworking, law-abiding employees.” The ICE agents informed staff at Millie’s that they will return on Monday to collect the remainder of the I-9 forms verifying employees’ identity and work authorization.
According to data from the Independent Restaurant Coalition, immigrants make up 22 percent of all U.S. workers in food services. Restaurant workers have long been bracing for ICE raids, and it looks like the GOP’s crackdown on yet another industry that relies heavily on immigrant labor is in full force.
Donald Trump made the “Gulf of America” so great again that he’s considering implementing a similar rebrand for another body of water—this time, one thousands of miles away from U.S. territory.
The president is considering renaming the Persian Gulf the “Arabian Gulf,” mere days after his family announced billions of dollars in forthcoming real estate deals in the region.
Those plans include a Trump-branded golf course in Qatar (as part of a $5.5 billion development project), a $1 billion Trump hotel and residence in Dubai, and a $2 billion investment by an Abu Dhabi firm into one of Trump’s cryptocurrency projects, the World Liberty Financial Coin.
The family also revealed in December that they would be expanding their presence in Saudi Arabia, announcing Trump Tower Jeddah. The price tag for the building has not been made public, but one of the developers on the project, Dar Global, compared it to another $530 million Trump Tower in the city, reported Reuters.
The Trumps have held deep financial ties to the region for years. After Trump’s first term, Saudi Arabia invested $2 billion in a firm belonging to Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law.
Trump is expected to travel to Saudi Arabia next week, where it’s anticipated that he’ll make the announcement publicly, according to two officials who spoke with the Associated Press.
As a reminder, it’s actually unconstitutional for presidents to profit from or receive compensation from foreign governments. The White House has contested that the deals are not a conflict of interest since the president’s assets are managed by his eldest sons, Eric and Donald Trump Jr. But Trump’s pockets will undoubtedly be lined by the deal—even if he has to wait a handful of years before he’s out of office to see the cashflow. In the meantime, he’ll receive myriad personal benefits from his relationships in the Middle East for arranging the deal.
Seven other nations surround the body of water, including Iran, Iraq, Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait, Oman, and the United Arab Emirates.
The Persian Gulf has been the body’s predominant name since the sixteenth century, but its moniker has also been regionally contested by other countries in the Middle East, where it is mainly referred to as the “Gulf of Arabia” or “Arabian Gulf,” according to The Daily Beast.
Referring to the inlet as the Arabian Gulf hasn’t served Trump’s diplomatic relations well in the past. During one such instance in 2017, former Iranian President Hassan Rouhani told the U.S. leader that he needed to “study geography.”
“Everyone knew Trump’s friendship was for sale to the highest bidder. We now know that his geography is, too,” Iranian Foreign Minister Mohammad Javad Zarif wrote online at the time.
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........© New Republic
