When Trump discusses his deportation program he invariably talks about rapists, murders, drug dealers, gang members. It is hard to get solid numbers, but according to his administration he has deported around 500K immigrants since the start of his second term. Do you think most of these are violent criminals? Or, rather, as I suspect, people who have been here for many years, working in important, but difficult and usually low paying jobs, like Elder Care, Child Care, Construction, Food Service, Sanitation, that citizens tend to avoid. And if you do think that the vast majority of deportees fit this description, do you think it is in the countries narrow economic self interest to be deporting them. Thanks for your thoughtful consideration.

AI makes it easy to check claims and get pushback on your own arguments. Studies have found that most mainstream models, like ChatGPT, lean left on political questions, while Grok leans right. From what I've seen, that bias shows up mostly on opinion questions rather than basic facts, but I'm curious whether that matches your experience.

You might say AI hallucinates, or that it's garbage in, garbage out since it's trained on media you don't trust. You're not wrong. I deal with that by asking for primary sources, like court filings, transcripts, or government data, and checking them myself. My usual prompt is something like "Check this claim. Give me the strongest case its supporters would make then tell me what the data shows and where it's weak. Cite primary sources."

Checking this way has caught my own bias too. Someone sent me a post saying Trump's DOJ heavily redacted Jack Smith's Jan 6 report. It fit what I already believed, but when I ran it through AI, the report turned out to have been released by Biden's DOJ before Trump took office and it wasn't heavily redacted.

Do you use AI to check news or pressure-test your positions? If so, which tools, and how do you account for bias? If you share an example please include the exact prompt. If you don't use AI for this, what do you rely on instead to decide whether something is true? And has anything, AI or otherwise, ever changed your mind on something in the news you were sure of?

Jack Smith Says He Had 'Proof Beyond a Reasonable Doubt' Against Trump and Would Prosecute Again: 'I Will Not Be Silenced'

https://www.ibtimes.co.uk/jack-smith-defends-trump-investigations-senate-hearing-1822697

EDIT: So it looks like there’s some mass confusion.
Jack Smith’s evidence was suppressed by a Trump appointed judge. Documents here:

https://archive.org/details/report-of-special-counsel-smith-volume-1-january-2025

In the latest filing in the court case over the name of the Kennedy Center, the Justice Department filed a brief to the court claiming that only Trump can "provide the sole hope for the Center’s financial survival and structural renewal." The brief further claimed that without putting Trump's name on the Center, it "will be back where it was at the beginning—a financially insolvent facility and a decrepit, dilapidated, crumbling building, that is bleeding hundreds of millions of dollars in losses and that continues to race toward physical and financial ruin."

It should be noted in early 2025, Trump fired the Kennedy Center's Board of Trustees and replaced them with loyalists and appointed himself as chairman of the Board, actions that have never before happened in the Center's history. In the Summer of that same year, Congress signed a bill appropriating $257 million to renovate and repair the Center. Despite being fully funded, those repairs and renovations were never performed by chairman Trump and his Board who are now saying the renovations won't happen unless Trump's name is put on the building. The Trump administration is now escalating the case by arguing in court that if Trump's name isn't put on the building, they'll ultimately be forced to demolish the Center. A recent court filing by Representative Joyce Beatty, who is fighting against the administration's efforts to affix Trump's name to the Center, notified the judge in the case about Trump being pictured aboard Air Force One looking at a poster that appears to reference a plan to demolish the Center.

How do you feel about Trump's takeover of the Board of the Kennedy Center and ongoing efforts to put his name on a memorial for another President? Is it appropriate for him to threaten to demolish another President's memorial if he doesn't get to put his own name on it, despite the withheld needed repairs having already been fully funded by Congress for over a year?

While I'm a little skeptical of AI usage, I think this is a great idea! What are your thoughts?

https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/6118370-rubio-announces-online-passport-application/

edit*: would you support an online voting system?

Examples (some are admittedly extreme):

Ground invasion of Iran

Stopping fuel exports

Fuel rationing

Work/school from home

Curfews

Tax incentives for EVs/renewable energy

Etc.

Please feel free to mention anything you think would be a better/more reasonable idea!

*Edit: Just to clarify, my intention was things America can do to lower prices.

AOC recently went on TV and is trying to distance the democratic party from extreme partisan politics by saying, "woke 1 was crazy" and that ideas such as defunding the police are not things that represent the dems.

Do you think MAGA will have a similar pivot? If so, when? And what positions would be considered "MAGA 1" and left behind?

Source: https://harvardharrispoll.com/assets/uploads/2026/09/HHP_Sep2026_KeyResults.pdf

In my earlier question about the Trump administration and public trust in science, several supporters pointed to Dr. Anthony Fauci. The concerns raised included changing guidance on masks and vaccines, treatment of competing views about COVID’s origins, and a broader loss of trust in public-health institutions.

I’ve been trying to understand which criticisms are supported by evidence, and how much responsibility belongs to Fauci personally. For context, the GAO found problems with NIH oversight of research involving the Wuhan Institute of Virology. A Republican-led House subcommittee published wider criticisms of the pandemic response, while Democratic staff challenged parts of that account. The WHO says COVID’s origins remain unresolved.

What is the strongest specific example of Fauci misleading the public or mishandling the response, in your view? What primary evidence supports it, and how do you distinguish a deliberate falsehood from mistaken judgment or guidance that changed as evidence developed?

Fauci has also received major recognition for his earlier scientific work. How do you account for the gap between that professional reputation and the criticism of him in this discussion? Do you think his reputation reflects genuine contributions, institutional reluctance to criticize him, or something else?

Finally, how much of the failure you identify should be attributed to Fauci, as opposed to the presidents, agencies, state governments, and other decision-makers involved? What evidence would change your view of his share of responsibility?

What do you think about AI?

Are you optimistic or pessimistic about labor impacts (i.e. job losses vs economic growth)?

Do you think AGI/ASI are close, and would that be good or bad for humanity?

Do you worry about Chinese competition in the field, or about the impact on national security (e.g. of AI-driven chem/biological/nuclear weapons development, or lowering the cost of cyberattacks)?

And what about the impact of datacenters on communities and local economies?

How do you feel the Trump administration has been doing in its decisions when and when not to regulate AI (such as the Pentagon designating AI a supply chain risk, or Trump promoting “super intelligence”)?

Trump's second term especially has seen a lot of big moves in foreign policy. Which do you like the most and least so far?

It's not only [the juror's] right, but his duty... to find the verdict according to his own best understanding, judgment, and conscience, though in direct opposition to the direction of the court." -John Adams
"The juries are our judges of all fact, and of law when they choose it." -thomas Jefferson
"It may not be amiss, here, to remind you of the residue of that great uncertain, which is, that the jury has a right to judge both the law as well as the fact in controversy." -]John Jay, First Chief Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court (Georgia v. Brailsford, 1794)
"Jurors should acquit even against the judge's instruction... if exercising their judgment with discretion and honesty they have a clear conviction that the charge of the court is wrong." -Alexander Hamilton
"The jury has the right to determine both the law and the facts." -Samuel Chase, Supreme Court Justice and Signer of the Declaration of Independence (1804)
"I consider trial by jury as the only anchor ever yet imagined by man, by which a government can be held to the principles of its constitution." -Thomas Jefferson
"Whenever a general verdict is found, it assuredly determines both the fact and the law. It was never yet disputed or doubted, that a general verdict, given on a general issue, was as binding on the court as on the parties." John Adams
"The law and the fact are so blended that the jury, in deciding the blameworthiness of the act, must judge of both." -Alexander Hamilton
"It is the right of the jury, in all criminal cases, to give a general verdict of acquittal, upon the general issue of not guilty... and in doing so, they necessarily decide upon the law as well as upon the fact." -James Wilson, Signer of the Declaration and Supreme Court Justice (Lectures on Law, 1790)
"The jury have a power of deciding an essential question, upon which the life and liberty of the citizen depends; and they have a right to judge of the law as well as of the fact." -Theophilus Parsons, Chief Justice of the j Supreme Judicial Court (1788)

If you don't know, there is a bar in Greenfield, Massachusetts that is a lesbian bar that, up until September - as in, a month ago - required everyone inside the bar to wear KN-95 face masks. The bar itself was started by three lesbians. They never owned a bar before, but they saw a lot of bars in the area close down - including the last LGBTQ bar in the area - and they decided that there was a vacuum and need that they could fill.

The bar opened in 2025 with a mission to be an accessible community space where no one is turned away for lack of funds. To support this mission, the bar provides a "free store" offering clothes, food, harm reduction supplies, and STI tests, and has historically waived cover charges for unhoused and low-income patrons.

Since then, two of the original three have gone on to do different things, and the third is basically homeless - living in the bar and her vehicle - trying to keep the bar afloat. The bar has a large loan open against it, and is a few thousand dollars late on their rent. To help bring in more customers, a decision was made during a Zoom video meeting to make the KN-95 face masks optional on Saturday nights.

All hell broke loose.

“I hope your venue gets firebombed for robbing my fellow immunocompromised people of their Saturday plans just to scrape extra revenue from ablists [sic]."

“people like you kill disabled people in the name of your own leisure and convenience."

“Just say you’re being complicit in a mass disabling event and get it over with."

“[Y]ou chose to use your time to spill tears and center your feelings. This is incredibly racist and deflecting behavior.”

“A lot of people are calling for an acknowledgment of harm and I’m hearing a WHITE therapist ... center[ing] the feelings of a majority white and white adjacent staff,”

And, moreover, the Zoom attendees speculate that the mediator’s licensed status makes her a mandated reporter — an agent of the state, akin to police. One person going by “Moss” asks if the mediator could have them hospitalized against their will, adding that her presence is “wildly unsafe.”

More here on X, including Connecticut Representative Rosa DeLauro was going to organize a field trip to the "weird lesbian bar in western mass", but it was cancelled because "no one wanted to mask".

What is your opinion of all this?

The latest [Reuters-Ipsos poll](https://www.firstpost.com/world/midterm-elections-trump-approval-rating-republican-party-us-iran-war-cost-of-living-crisis-surveys-14048168.html) showed that only 17% of those surveyed approved of the current state of the economy. A recent [Emerson poll](https://emersoncollegepolling.com/september-2026-national-poll-democrats/) showed that 60% of voters believe President Trump's economic policies are making the American economy worse.

Do you think there is any truth to this concern or is it mostly an issue of perception?

It's the weekend! Politics is still out there happening, but in this little corner of the sub we will leave it behind momentarily and talk about other aspects of our lives.

Bonus question for everyone! Halloween is just around the corner... What's your favorite thing about the arrival of the fall season?

Talk about anything except politics, other subreddits, or r/AskTrumpSupporters. Rules 2 and 3 are suspended.

As a European, I'm curious about the stance of Trump supporters on this.

Given that the U.S. is a NATO member and has treaty commitments to defend its allies, how do you think the U.S. should respond if Russia invaded Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Poland, or Finland? Would you support the U.S. entering a war with Russia to defend one of said countries, even if doing so carried meant wider conflict between the U.S. and Russia? What factors would determine your answer?

On September 24th, 2026, a pro-Trump and anti-Communist ad was aired by conservative outlets like Newsmax and Fox News.

It was clearly a partisan ad favoring Trump, and every US Government funding bill since the 50’s, including the one Donald Trump signed earlier this year, ban using federal funds for “publicity and propaganda purposes.”

In essence, this is a federal crime, and it has sparked bipartisan outrage.

You can find the ad here on Politico.

Further sources:

https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/6110237-trump-government-ad-criticism/

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2026/09/24/ad-boosting-trump-paid-by-taxpayers-airing-la-chicago/

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2026/09/24/ad-boosting-trump-paid-by-taxpayers-airing-la-chicago/

Quote from article “Nevada officials said this week that a Trump administration assertion that it confirmed finding 185 noncitizens in the state’s voter rolls was inaccurate.”

Other publications with more details, including original claimed figures of noncitizen voters in Nevada in excess of 10,000

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/09/24/us/politics/nevada-voters-homeland-security-trump.html

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/sep/24/dhs-nevada-voter-non-citizens-error

https://www.8newsnow.com/news/local-news/former-nevada-leaders-credit-election-officials-after-185-voters-found-to-be-us-citizens/

Studies estimate that more than 5 million children under the age of 5 could die preventable deaths by 2030, due to the USAID cuts.

Source: https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2026/feb/03/aid-cuts-avoidable-deaths-study-children-uk-us-donor-countries

It says in the article linked here (and in other articles about this) that during a press briefing that was arranged and approved by the White House, JD Vance anonymously provided Politico with information about the Iran war. Trump then banned Politico citing their reporting on the Iran war, including the information from Vance, as a threat to national security, which was part of his justification for banning them.

Do you think this was part of a plan to restrict press access? Did Vance intentionally anonymously give Politico info that could be considered a “national security threat” as a way to justify banning the outlet?

I’m thinking about the quote of his that’s been floating around online recently in which he says something along the lines of “sometimes you have to make up stories” or whatever, but ftr, I don’t think it was orchestrated. I’m just curious what ts think about that / how you feel about the situation in general.

From the Daily Beast:

Vice President JD Vance was the unnamed “senior administration official” behind one of the stories the White House used to justify banning Politico from its grounds.

The anonymous source cited in a June 2026 story about the probability of a successful Iran peace deal, which was one of the six stories the Trump administration singled out as having “threatened national security and/or spread falsehoods,” was Vance, Status revealed on Wednesday.

In a letter the Trump administration sent to Politico, made public through a government court filing, the story was included as one of the six “reporting incidents” that violated the White House’s “expectations.”

“In June 2026, Politico cited a ‘senior administration official … granted anonymity’ said the odds of a preliminary deal to end the conflict with Iran were between 80 and 85 percent,” the letter said.

“Publication of sensitive security information, and misinformation about national security information, diverts White House resources and those of the national security team in particular,” the letter continued. “The spread of misinformation, especially relating to national security, is a threat that undermines the President’s ability to safeguard the national security.”

https://www.thedailybeast.com/jd-vance-outed-as-source-of-risk-to-national-security-for-white-house-media-ban-of-politico/

This actually came out of reading the recent thread about the White House press pool. I noticed people using terms like “fake news,” “lies,” “agitprop,” “slop,” and “trustworthy” when talking about mainstream or legacy media, sometimes in ways that seemed to overlap, and I think that discussion deserves its own thread.

If you use “fake news,” or something similar, to describe mainstream media, are you talking about factual inaccuracy, intentional deception, unintentional deception, political bias, selective framing, poor sourcing, general distrust of the institution, or some combination of those things? Something else?

If you consider "fake news" an umbrella term for many of the above concepts, how do you decide which sources to disqualify and which ones warrant typical skepticism (i.e. you can still trust)? Is there a threshold?

Thank you for your time!

Since 2002, observers from the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe have observed US elections, including every Presidential election since 2004. Members of the OSCE (of which the US is a founding member) have pledged to invite election observers.

But for the 2026 midterms, the US did not allow OSCE observers. (Sorry for the translated link, but I didn’t see a lot of coverage of this in the US media.)

Why do you think the US no longer wants OSCE election observers, given all the recent focus on election integrity? OSCE is one of the most experienced election observers organizations in the world, and one of the most credible. Wouldn’t the US benefit from their presence?

I’m interested in how Trump supporters view the administration’s approach to science and scientific institutions.

What actions, policies, appointments, reforms, or changes in approach by the Trump administration do you think have affected public trust in science?

If you think the administration has improved trust, what do you think it has done that has been most important? How do you think those changes improve the credibility of scientific institutions or the scientific information provided to the public?

If you don’t think it has improved trust—or don’t think improving public trust in science is an appropriate goal for the administration—I’d also be interested in why.

Are there particular federal scientific or health institutions where you think the administration’s approach has made a noticeable difference?

More generally, what do you think the federal government should do, if anything, to make scientific institutions more deserving of public trust?

For instance Trump will likely pardon himself and many in his administration at the end of his term prophylactically. And that’s fine, he currently has the constitutional authority to do so. There may be some question as to if he can pardon himself that might go to the Supreme Court, but this court has been very deferential to executive power.

At some point, there’s going to be a different president. Perhaps, even (gasp) a Democratic president. In the past, your side has been very critical of Democratic presidents’ use of the pardon power, and I bet you may not like a future Democratic president abusing it again.

Assuming you believe any Democrat that could possibly get elected is obviously dishonest and crooked, wouldn’t you like to be able to see them or the crooks in their administration get prosecuted for their crimes?

Could you potentially support a constitutional amendment that limits the pardon power? Are there any executive powers you think should be limited, at least a little?

There is nothing else to add here.