Trump and Vance’s Oval Office announcement turned into a spectacle of barely contained rage

Trump and Vance’s Oval Office announcement turned into a spectacle of barely contained rage This was already a strange policy. But then the anger in the room turned personal and at times genuinely frightening, writes Holly Baxter - Bookmark - CommentsGo to comments Become an Independent member to bookmark this article Already a member? Log in Donald Trump has found a new way to make America great again: paying people to become professional snitches. On Tuesday, the president and JD Vance unveiled a $25 million fraud whistleblower fund, under which Americans who provide tips leading to successful prosecutions would receive large financial rewards. Basically, you can rat on your enemies to the government for cash now — and, Trump added, he will be the personal arbiter on whether the fraud is real and how much money you get. Just think of it as a big reality TV show, like when Oprah gives out the cars except it’s that guy at work you once fell out with and you get to send him to jail. The launch of this McCarthyist-style nightmare took place in the Oval Office, where Trump assembled a supporting cast of loyalists to help explain why America is being plundered by thieves and scammers - but taking enough time away from the announcement to attack The Independent’s journalist. Joining the president was Dr. Mehmet Oz, who gave an incensed little speech about how people in California are being paid to unpack groceries and play mahjong in senior centers (the horror!) There was Nick Shirley, a 24-year-old influencer who was there to be presented with a check. There was Vance, who got to put on his best poker face when the president went on an overly long rant about Zelensky. And there was Stephen Miller, recently crowned the world’s least appealing man by Sycophants Weekly, who lingered in the corner with his hands in his pockets until he was finally given the stage. Entertainingly, Trump himself referred to this little group during his opening speech as “JD and the untouchables”. It’s a moniker I’m happy to steal, plundering foreigner that I am. Trump’s opening speech revealed quite quickly what this was all about: the latest Democratic bogeyman, Minnesota Rep. Ilhan Omar (who, he later added, he thinks should be in prison); Obamacare (“a totally corrupt form of healthcare for foreign migrants”); blue-leaning states (“California, Minnesota, Maine”); and the “sick” people who are everywhere, stealing American money clandestinely and mysteriously. Interestingly, Trump added that JD Vance had recently told him going after the fraudsters would be “like shooting fish in a barrel,” even though he’d just detailed how conniving and evil these scheming foreigners can be. “To Americans everywhere: your tax dollars are being stolen,” Vance added, before announcing the $10,000 that they would be giving to Nick Shirley, presumably taken from taxpayer funds. This was a particularly fascinating press conference, because it went on much longer than anybody had expected and it spiraled quickly into uncontrollable rage. The launching of a task force really shouldn’t end up with the president yelling at The Independent’s chief DC correspondent Andrew Feinberg that he’s a “sick person,” and it shouldn’t really include Stephen Miller screaming that “refugees, illegal aliens and foreigners” who “came to this country to loot and plunder us” are now buying Mercedes, buying BMWs and flying first class while “YOU PAID EVERY PARKING TICKET YOU EVER HAD!” And yet somehow, both of these things happened within minutes of each other, as the atmosphere in the room shifted suddenly from jovial and celebratory to breathlessly irate. Wild-eyed, Miller delivered a bizarre speech that painted a vision of millions of murderers pouring into the country to “pillage” from right-thinking, middle-class, completely helpless Americans and included the phrase “that’s what the Democrat Party did to you!” He is grateful, so grateful to the president, he added, not just as a professional but as a citizen, for finally defending the homeland. It would have been a truly impressive display of emotion, had we all been at a high school drama society production and not standing in the Oval Office, waiting for somebody to lead the country. And yet, the cavalcade of strange men continued on. They took turns to “congratulate” Trump and then president took questions, where he suggested that the entirety of Europe needed new leadership because France, Spain, Italy and everywhere else has an “immigration problem”, complained that nobody would come to war with him even though he gives money to NATO, and then erroneously claimed that he “got Greenland anyway.” He went on an extremely long aside about Zelensky, which included a tale about a “not very beautiful woman” from Ukraine being sad about the deaths of Ukrainian men and ended up at some misdirected anger about how Zelensky won’t “make a deal”. Then came the 4chan-style conspiracy-mongering. “You cannot in California stop fraud,” Trump said, at one point. “You know why? Because they want fraud.” Miller jumped in to say that fraud from foreigners funds the Democrats directly, that it’s an entire scheme they set up themselves, presumably with the help of lizard people and the Illuminati, and Trump added that if you ask for voter ID in California, “they put you in jail.” He segued from this quite easily into how Omar should be imprisoned because “she’s a sick, very dishonest person who hates our country” and who “comes from Somalia, and it’s a real shithouse, OK?” where “all they do is have people running around shooting each other.” The president then did a high-pitched imitation of Omar saying, “Oh, I have constitutional rights,” because apparently constitutional rights are some idiotic commie fantasy, and added that it’s only Somalians who vote for her anyway, and “they have a 98 percent unemployment rate” (Somalis in America actually have an 81.6 percent employment rate, but we’re way past using real facts here.) The Omar aside is instructive, because it goes back to something that was suggested earlier in the press conference: that officials who “don’t stop fraud” in their states - i.e. anybody who works for a state where fraud is happening somewhere and who didn’t act on it themselves, potentially because they have no idea it is happening - can and will be arrested. So if you find someone in a Democrat state doing something like running illegal daycares, you can put the Democrat governor and all sorts of other legitimate opponents in jail. Like shooting fish in a barrel, eh, JD? There is no reason to assume that every fraud investigation undertaken by this administration will be illegitimate, or that financial rewards for whistleblowers are inherently a bad idea. Properly designed reporting programs can help expose genuine wrongdoing. But they require clear rules, credible evidence and decisions made independently of political favor. Trump's announcement offers a rather different vision: a country where citizens are encouraged to inform on one another, political enemies are publicly branded criminals, and the president himself decides who deserves a payout and who deserves a pardon. If this was supposed to restore Americans' faith that their money is being protected from dishonest people, it was pretty poorly designed. But judging by the badly contained rage in the room today, I don’t think that’s what it was supposed to do at all. We ended up at a very predictable place: the midterms. “The president always loses, whatever the reason, the midterms,” said Trump. “Great presidents, lousy presidents. Oz,is there a reason you can think of, medically?” Oz laughed weakly at that, and the president continued: “I do say this: When I was on the ticket — when I ran, we won everything. When I don’t run, people don't show up to vote. If I could get my voters to get out to vote… we’d win in a landslide.” With that, the event finally ended, the president having once again said the quiet part out loud, and the people around him having displayed that they are all acutely on-edge. Indeed, when you see JD and the untouchables in that room together, you realize how much panic there must be inside the administration right now. And if you don’t realize it, then Trump is right there to underline exactly why they’re all so tense. Join our commenting forum Join thought-provoking conversations, follow other Independent readers and see their replies Comments