Trump Derails His Christmas Speech to Ramble About Snakes |
Guests at the White House Christmas reception fell silent Sunday as President Donald Trump veered way off topic to deliver a cozy holiday tale about … poisonous snakes?
“Tale” is probably giving him too much credit. During his address, 79-year-old Trump turned his attention to Peru, which he said “is known to be a rather rough place in terms of physical creatures crawling around.”
“Twenty-eight thousand people die a year from a snake bite, a certain snake. It’s a viper. It’s said to be the most poisonous snake in the world,” Trump said. “But the venom rarely works, it’s so powerful, the snake. It’s said to be the most poisonous. That, the black mamba, the brown mamba, and the viper from Peru.”
Trump tried to explain that he was telling this “story” because his son Donald Jr. was sitting in the audience, but he didn’t end up telling any story at all.
“And so, he’s being read his rights and his—this is, they thought he was dead three times, three different times, they carried him out, feeding him the anti-venom, and over a period of months he was unconscious for a long time, many weeks, and he made it. I asked him, ‘How ya doing today?’ And he said, ‘Is it perfect?’” the president rambled incoherently.
Suddenly, Trump seemed to notice that he’d lost his audience.
“Look how quiet everybody is,” the president said. “You know, it’s funny when you talk about snakes and things like that, people find it interesting.”
Interesting? No. Deeply concerning? Yes.
The son of Representative Ilhan Omar was caught up in the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown in Minnesota.
In an interview with local TV station WCCO on Sunday, Omar said that federal agents pulled over her son on Saturday and demanded proof of citizenship.
“Yesterday, after he made a stop at Target, he did get pulled over by [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] agents, and once he was able to produce his passport ID, they did let him go,” Omar said, adding that her son always carries his passport. According to the Somali American congresswoman, it’s not her son’s first brush with ICE: In the past, agents entered a mosque where he and others were praying but left without incident.
After ICE had visited that mosque, she said she “had to remind him just how worried I am, because all of these areas that they are talking about are areas where he could possibly find himself in and they are racially profiling, they are looking for young men who look Somali that they think are undocumented.”
Earlier this month, President Trump launched an immigration crackdown targeting the local Somali American community in the Minneapolis-St. Paul metro area, the largest in the country. The president said he did not “want them in our country,” calling Omar and the rest of the community garbage.
On Friday, Omar sent a letter to Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem and acting ICE Director Todd Lyons accusing the government of “blatant racial profiling” and “an egregious level of unnecessary force” in Minnesota.
“It is clear to me that this surge came in direct response to Trump’s racist comments about Somali people, and about me in particular,” Omar wrote.
Kash Patel celebrated too early again.
On Sunday, the FBI director made a lengthy post boasting about the bureau’s efforts to detain a person of interest in the Brown University shooting on Saturday night that killed two and wounded nine.
“Early this morning, FBI Boston’s Safe Streets Task Force … detained a person of interest in a hotel room in Coventry, RI, based off a lead by the @ProvidenceRIPD. We have deployed local and national resources to process and reconstruct the shooting scene—providing HQ and Lab elements on scene,” Patel wrote, attaching pictures. “We set up a digital media intake portal to ingest images and video from the public related to this incident. And the FBI’s victim specialists are fully integrating with our partners to provide resources to victims and survivors of this horrific violence. This FBI will continue an all out 24/7 campaign until justice is fully served.”
Local authorities even confirmed that the person of interest was detained off of a tip obtained by Patel’s FBI.
Q: What exactly was the evidence that led you to this person of interest?
A: There was a tip that came in just like we were taking any other tips and that one came in specifically identifying a person of interest, which was this individual. And so we are detectives, just like…