Border Patrol Chief Michael Banks has resigned, ostensibly “to retire and return home to Texas to focus on my family and ranch.” Banks served under President Biden but quit in frustration over the administration’s lax border policies. When Trump returned to office, Banks took up his old job again: like Cincinnatus, he came out of retirement to serve, and will now return to his plow.
Perhaps “plow” is the operative word here. It’s widely speculated that Banks is in fact resigning because of a Washington Examiner investigation, which claims that he was a sex tourist who made regular trips to Colombia and Thailand while in post. According to six current and former Border Patrol employees, Banks used to boast of his sexual exploits to colleagues, and would be remarkably upfront about the purpose of these trips to anyone who asked. It ought to be said that prostitution is legal in both those countries, but that using the services of ladies (or gentlemen!) of the night is against agency policy.
According to the Examiner, some sort of internal investigation into Banks was underway, but was quashed by Kristi Noem, Banks’s former boss at DHS. A Border Patrol spokesman has said that the matter is closed, and that no further action will be taken.
Would it be churlish for Cockburn to say that perhaps Banks has earned his R&R? Illegal border crossings have fallen to virtually zero. For decades it was taken for granted that patrolling the US-Mexico border was operationally impossible; that illegal aliens would use ladders to climb over any wall, or swim around it, or hide in the cargo holds of airplanes. Now it seems that, under Banks, the Gordian Knot really has been cut. Cockburn only hopes that, in line with the rest of MAGA, he will “reshore” his proclivities stateside.
On our radar
TAIPEI 101 President Trump says that he talked “a lot” about Taiwan with his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping. “He doesn’t want to see a war,” Trump said.
PRATT SHOW Los Angeles mayoral candidate Spencer Pratt has signed a deal to participate in a reality TV show documenting his mayorship if he’s victorious.
ON A PEDESTAL President Trump has selected DC’s West Potomac Park as the location for his planned “National Garden of American Heroes,” which will feature statues of John Adams, Kobe Bryant, Whitney Houston and Antonin Scalia, among others.
A sweetheart deal for Katie Miller?
You’re an executive at a mass media conglomerate. You’ve been asked by your owner to help make your company’s output more palatable to Trumpworld. You have made early steps in the right direction: you settle a spurious lawsuit filed by the President, acquire an anti-woke media startup, use its staff to reshape your national news brand, change the evening news anchor and fiddle with your nationally respected flagship newsmagazine.
It’s not enough. The higher-ups demand more – the wheels need greasing to ensure a multi-billion dollar acquisition of another media conglomerate gets regulatory approval.
You suffer sleepless nights. Minutes before you’re due to provide an update to the board, you’re scrolling through YouTube, desperate for the idea that will save your skin. Suddenly, you see it: “FCC Chair Brendan Carr DESTROYS Wokeness In Legacy Media & Disney.”
It’s an interview on the Katie Miller Pod, the YouTube show from the wife of Trump’s chief policy advisor, who has rebranded as MAGA’s Oprah. “NOTHING is off limits,” the description declares. You check the view count: 4.6k after two weeks. Good enough.
Presumably a scene like this unfolded at Paramount Skydance over the past few days, as the company explores a deal with Miller’s podcast. Guests have included Vice President J.D. Vance, Nicki Minaj, Lara Trump and various cabinet secretaries appearing with their wives (though RFK Jr. and Cheryl Hines are on separate episodes). “She’s a VERY rare breed. I get it,” wrote Minaj in response to news of the possible deal.
Other reactions are more cynical. “Katie Miller’s podcast has about half as many YouTube subscribers as this random channel that’s just AI jazz music with cartoons of cats,” wrote a Washington Post tech correspondent. “The MAGA movement is DEI for conservative losers,” said a Democratic strategist.
Given those numbers, it seems reasonable to ask what problem the Katie Miller Pod would solve for Paramount Skydance: audience or access?
In This Bar We Believe…
Who hasn’t experienced that moment where you wake up at the crack of noon, head spinning, and think, “what on earth did I do last night?” Most of us, however, won’t have committed a faux-pas quite on par with Will Paul, son of Senator Rand.
Stories from NOTUS and the New York Post recount how young Paul accosted Congressman Mike Lawler in a Capitol Hill bar. He supposedly said “your people” would be responsible if Lawler’s House colleague from Kentucky, Thomas Massie, is defeated in the forthcoming Republican primary. Paul mistakenly assumed Lawler was Jewish – he is Catholic. Paul then went on a tirade about how the Iran war was “about the gays and the Jews, and I hate them both, and I don’t care if they die.”
Paul tweeted out a statement from his X account Wednesday. “I’m sorry and today I am seeking help for my drinking problem,” he wrote. His X handle remains “@TastyBrew1776.”
The Capitol Hill bar in question, the Tune Inn, has taken a principled stand. “Our bar is a safe space for EVERYONE,” a post on the Tune Inn’s Instagram Story reads. “That person had his last drink at the Tune that night.”
Banning a senator’s son for a drunken anti-Semitic rant is one thing. But where were those egalitarian values just over a decade ago, when the Tune Inn employed a bartender with a Nazi tattoo? The bartender in question, Graham Platner, is currently favored in most polls to beat incumbent Susan Collins in Maine, and so will end up… in Congress with Rand Paul and Mike Lawler.
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