Happy Saturday! I’m John Byrne.
Do us a quick favor before we start. Hit that ❤️ and restack this edition. Corporate media will never tell you this honestly, and restacking is what forces the platform to carry it to people who would otherwise never know it happened.
The White House has turned mass deportation into a video-game arcade. The president woke up Saturday to a nation calling him the “dumbest racist alive.” Trump’s former labor secretary allegedly ran her department like a bachelorette weekend, booze on federal property and all. And a woman who spent seven years trapped in Jeffrey Epstein’s orbit is speaking publicly for the first time. Four stories, one thread: power that treats people as props.
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If the cruelty were confined to policy, that would be one horror. Instead, the administration has decided to make it fun.
The official White House website has launched an “arcade” of five games built around Trump’s priorities.
In “Build the Wall,” a Tetris knockoff, you stack blocks to keep out green and orange alien-like figures swarming what the game calls the “Southern Border” in a “zombie border siege.” In “Rio Run,” a Snake clone, you “arrest” asylum seekers at the Rio Grande, and each one you catch trails behind you in a growing line of orange jumpsuits.
Then there’s more: a game about sorting school lunches to “make America healthy again,” another about a Trump savings account, and “Flappy Bill,” where you pilot a bald eagle down the National Mall.
The launch video ripped off Sega’s logo and its signature jingle. Metro has asked Sega for comment.
A White House official told CNN the arcade was about contrasting a “culture of fun and winning” against the “dark socialist vision Democrats have for America.”
Earlier this year, the same website rolled out an “aliens” portal urging citizens to report neighbors they suspect of being undocumented.
Turning human beings into falling blocks and jumpsuited dots isn’t a glitch; it’s the entire point.
Bewilderment rolled across the country Saturday morning as word spread that the president had threatened to cut off trade with Canada because America doesn’t need a cinnamon candy he thinks comes from south of the border.
It started in the Oval Office Friday, when Trump decided to teach a reporter how trade deficits work. He promptly revealed he has no idea.
“We lose, with the European Union, $200 billion a year,” he said. “If I didn’t trade with them, we’d lose nothing.”
This isn’t true. A trade deficit isn’t money handed over; it means you bought more from someone than they bought from you. As one reader’s fact-check on X put it, it’s like having a “deficit” with your grocery store — you give Safeway money, Safeway gives you food, and nobody’s been robbed.
Then Trump reached for a punchline he didn’t know he was writing.
“If I don’t trade with Mexico, they have nothing that we have to have,” he said. “I mean, Hot Tamales, tomatoes, a couple of things. But basically they have nothing that we need.”
Hot Tamales are made by Just Born, a company founded in Trump’s home state of New York that’s now headquartered in Pennsylvania. It proudly bills itself as maker of “America’s #1 Cinnamon flavored candy.”
Trump then threatened to blow up trade with Canada, musing that without us, “I don’t think they’d exist.”
The reaction was swift. “Hot tamales?” replied Ron Filipowski. “WTF?”
Metro Weekly editor Randy Shulman offered the morning’s tidiest summary: “He is the dumbest racist alive.”
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And then, because the week refused to quit, there’s Lori Chavez-DeRemer.
Trump’s former labor secretary was appointed in January 2025 and resigned this past April under a cloud. She’s the subject of a 38-page Inspector General report drawn from 38 witnesses. It reads like a screenplay somebody rejected for being too over-the-top.
According to the report, Chavez-DeRemer drank during working hours, kept alcohol on federal property, and mocked employees who abstained. She used agency funds for personal travel, including five trips to Las Vegas and three nights at a luxury Palm Beach hotel. She purportedly made staff come to her home to organize her bedroom closet on the clock.
Then there’s the showstopper. During a personal trip to Oregon, she allegedly had a security agent stop at a strip club, pulled bills from her purse, and instructed him to drop them “one by one” onto a dancer.
He complied, the report says, “against his wishes.”
Her aides reportedly held “beatdowns” where they berated employees. One deputy allegedly moved a worker’s desk so a “fat person” wouldn’t be visible from the front office, and told another employee not to cut her hair short lest she risk “turning into a lesbian.”
Her attorney’s defense: she “did not break any laws.”
That sentence tells you everything about the bar this administration sets for itself.
The Epstein story isn’t going away, no matter how badly the Trump White House wants it to. And this weekend, we learned about a new survivor.
Julia Molchanova was 22, living in Russia, and barely spoke English when Jeffrey Epstein spotted her on a Manhattan sidewalk in December 2011 and steered her to his townhouse. He asked, through a translator, what she dreamed of. She said fashion design. He promised her a spot at the Fashion Institute of Technology.
“That was the hook,” she told the * Wall Street Journal*, speaking publicly for the first time.
The school never materialized. What did was seven years of sexual abuse under the cover of a fake job as one of his “assistants.” Molchanova revealed she was the lead Jane Doe in the class-action suit against Bank of America, which a judge recently settled for $72.5 million to be shared among dozens of Epstein victims.
Her account shows how much more careful Epstein got after his 2008 conviction. He targeted women over 18 who looked younger. His lawyer set up an LLC in her name, sold to her as her own design company, which Epstein then used to move money and make purchases she knew nothing about. This included a furniture order of nearly $40,000 she only found this year, buried in the Justice Department files.
Epstein dictated what she wore, how long her hair was, which doctors she saw, and whom she dated. He arranged for her to marry another young woman. When she failed to bring him new girls, he sent her to a room in his home to sit in isolation for days.
“It was like a cult,” she said.
Molchanova got out in 2019 after finding strange credit cards on her credit report and confronting him. Epstein invited her to Palm Beach. She refused.
“I thought for sure, at that moment, someone would find me on the bottom of his pool if I go,” she said.
Epstein was arrested three months later.
His lawyer and accountant say she never told them she was a victim. His longtime assistant says she knew nothing. The modeling agency says it never dealt with him. The bank says it facilitated nothing.
Everyone, as always, saw nothing. Which is precisely why the remaining files matter, and why this administration fights so hard to keep them shut.
Ask yourself which of this morning’s four stories your morning show led with. The men who own those newsrooms have business in front of this administration, and some of them run in the same circles as the men in the Epstein files. We’re going to keep asking about those files no matter how many lawyers show up. We chase these stories without a billionaire deciding what reaches your eyes, and Facebook keeps throttling how far they travel, so we are betting everything on this page. If just five percent of readers signed up as paying subscribers, we’d hit our subscription goals for the year. Share this with someone who needs to see it. Every subscriber makes it harder for them to shout this down and keeps us going.
One more quick favor before you go. Hit the ❤️ and restack this. It’s what gets these stories past the algorithm. Thank you for everything you do.
Thanks for refusing to look away. I’m John Byrne. I’ll see you tomorrow.
