Trump Offers Mind-Boggling Definition of the Word Skedaddle

Step aside Merriam-Webster, Donald Trump is once again slinging definitions. If only they made any sense.  

During a Cabinet meeting Tuesday, Trump lauded his own strike on three Iranian nuclear facilities last month as “a perfect military performance.” But as he spoke, his description devolved into inscrutable drivel. 

“Those machines flew for 37 straight hours, they didn’t stop. They went skedaddle. You know the word skedaddle? It means skedaddle,” Trump explained. 

“They dropped the bombs, and somebody said, ‘Skedaddle! Let’s get the hell out of here!’” Trump continued. “And every bomb hit its mark, and hit it beautif—hit it incredibly.”

While an early intelligence assessment suggested that the U.S. strike may only have delayed Iran’s nuclear capabilities by a few months, the White House and Department of Defense have insisted that the sites were “obliterated.” 

For what it’s worth, skedaddle is a real word. It’s an intransitive verb that means to leave immediately. Trump has a tendency to get caught up in his own syntax and has repeatedly waxed poetic about the word groceries, which he treats like an archaic term he’s unearthed for the masses. 

Speaking of groceries, on Tuesday, Trump claimed that he’d successfully brought prices down, but the consumer price index says otherwise. According to the USDA Economic Research Service, the CPI has increased 0.2 percent from April to May 2025, and is up 2.4 percent from May 2024. The CPI for June will be released later this month. 

The Wisconsin Supreme Court has cleared the way for a ban on LGBTQ+ conversion therapy, deciding that a Republican-controlled legislative committee rule blocking bans on the practice was unconstitutional.

The court ruled 4–3 Tuesday that the powers granted to the Joint Committee for Review of Administrative Rules had violated the state constitution.

At the heart of the case, brought by Governor Tony Evers, was the committee’s decision to block a 2020 rule by the state administration that listed conversion therapy—the practice of forcibly convincing LGBTQ+ people that they are straight—as “unprofessional conduct.” The committee decided that the rule was “arbitrary and capricious,” and failed to comply with “legislative intent.” Republicans in support of the committee’s decision insisted that the issue wasn’t the conversion therapy policy, but whether the state licensing board had the authority to ban the practice.

The state Supreme Court’s decision effectively blasted a hole in the issue, stripping the committee of its ability to independently impede the executive branch. And the decision will have long-lasting implications for Wisconsin, far beyond the scope of conversion therapy.

The court’s ruling has effectively upended several other attempts by the committee to block Evers’s agenda, including blocks on new environmental regulations, updates to commercial building codes, vaccine requirements, and public health policy.

Although conservative Justice Brian Hagedorn sided with the majority, he warned in a partially dissenting opinion that the decision went too far and would spur a “hornet’s nest of constitutional issues,” arguing that stripping the committee’s ability to block executive branch directives would reverse years of court-set precedent.

“The majority adopts one of those arguments in an opinion that is devoid of legal analysis and raises more questions than it answers,” Hagedorn wrote.

In a dissenting opinion, Justice Annette Ziegler flamed the court for pursuing a “misguided quest” to restructure the state government.

Evers, however, celebrated the judicial smackdown.

“It’s pretty simple—a handful of Republican lawmakers should not be able to single-handedly and indefinitely obstruct state agencies from doing the people’s work,” Evers said in a news release. “Wisconsinites want to protect our constitutional checks and balances. Today’s Wisconsin Supreme Court decision ensures that no small group of lawmakers has the sole power to stymie the work of state government and go unchecked.”

The Badger State Supreme Court has twice now been the center of attention for out-of-state conservatives worried that a liberal majority of justices would overturn right-wing measures such as an abortion ban and allegedly gerrymandered congressional districts. The two most recent Supreme Court elections have resulted in some of the most expensive judicial campaigns in history, including a massive funding push from Elon Musk during the election in April.

Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins on Tuesday seemingly contradicted President Trump’s recent pledge to let immigrant farmworkers remain in the United States if their employers vouch for them. Instead, she put forth an insane scheme in which Medicaid recipients will replace deported farm laborers.

“There will be no amnesty,” Rollins said. “The mass deportations continue, but in a strategic way. And we move the workforce towards automation and 100 percent American participation, which, again, with 34 million … able-bodied adults on Medicaid, we should be able to do that fairly quickly.”

Notably, there are only roughly four million able-bodied adults without dependents on Medicaid who work fewer than 80 hours a month, per Matt Bruenig at the People’s Policy Project.

Nonetheless, Rollins is here barbarically proposing that the government have Medicaid recipients toil in fields in order to keep their health care coverage under recently passed Medicaid work requirements. All this to implausibly avoid crippling the U.S. food supply after immigrant farmworkers have been mass-deported.

Behold: MAGA populism.

The MAGA base is still irate at the Trump administration’s decision to essentially drop the Jeffrey Epstein case. 

Trump made a dubiously timed Truth Social post on Monday praising FBI Director Kash Patel and Deputy Director Dan Bongino for “locking up criminals, and cleaning up America’s streets.” The praise came after a day of excoriation from the deep MAGA base, as they called for the heads of Patel, Bongino, and Attorney General Pam Bondi. And they have a point—all three of the senior Trump officials (and even Vice President JD Vance) either outright pushed or fanned the flames of the idea that Epstein didn’t kill himself. 

When Bongino replied to Trump’s praise with a nonchalant “We are doubling down. No letting up,” the supporters who once felt represented by Bongino came for him. Nearly every reply to the post was a reference to Epstein and Bongino’s broken promise. 

“Sorry sir, today is not a good day to try and inspire confidence. How did we go from ‘the client list is on my desk’ to there is no list and he killed himself?” said one dismayed loyalist. “How is [Ghislaine] Maxwell in prison for trafficking to no one?”

“Dan we need answers on the Epstein stuff bro, can’t let Bondi off the hook for lying to everybody,” the Hodge Twins posted. 

“The only thing we see you doubling down on is covering up the Epstein stuff. He trafficked kids to someone, and I don’t buy for a second that the FBI doesn’t know a single one of his clients,” an account with “America First Christian” in its bio wrote. “You should resign in disgrace.”

Frankly, it is weird. Unearthing the Epstein case and exposing Democrats like the Clintons and Obamas has been a longtime talking point of MAGA’s QAnon wing that reached the campaign’s mainstream. This current moment highlights the “real MAGA” versus “traditional neocon” split that has been a constant point of friction within Trump’s administrations. And it is surfacing once again as people like Patel and Bongino, who are of that “real MAGA” ilk, make decisions that so many of their supporters feel are aligned with the “deep state,” which must certainly feel like a dagger to the heart to them.   

“Sorry Dan. Practically been a zealot behind you forever. After yesterday, I no longer trust you or anyone else there. You people are no better than the last admin. You just talk a better game,” said another. “We’re not stupid.” 

As Donald Trump has rapidly expanded immigration enforcement, he and his administration have also begun stripping government oversight—and people are already dying, according to a report published by CNN Tuesday.

Court documents filed in April as part of a lawsuit against the Trump administration revealed that the Trump administration effectively shuttered three watchdog organizations at the Department of Homeland Security. Employees at the Office for Civil Rights and Civil Liberties, or CRCL; the Citizenship and Immigration Services Ombudsman, or CISOMB; and the Office of the Immigration Detention Ombudsman, or OIDO, were abruptly suspended in March and given a separation date of May 23.

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem’s budget requests for the fiscal year 2026, zeroed out the OIDO budget. The Trump administration has claimed that the budget request was merely a recommendation from the president, according to CNN.

While the DHS has claimed to have plans to reconstruct department oversight, rebuilding the watchdogs would likely take time—time that immigrant detainees don’t have. The new Citizenship and Immigration Services Ombudsman Ronald Sartini, the person charged with reassessing the DHS’s oversight efforts, was stranded as the only employee assigned to CISOMB, CRCL, and OIDO, according to CNN.

As DHS carries out a massive reduction in force, the size of its detainment and deportation operation has only grown. Since Trump’s inauguration in January, 60 local, state, and federal prisons—public and private—have been detaining immigrants for DHS and Immigration and Customs Enforcement.

At least 12 people have already died in ICE custody so far this year, the same number that died in all of 2024. Administration officials have brushed off these deaths as business as usual, but Michelle Brané, a former Immigration Detention Ombudsman, told CNN that the death toll “could be much higher.”

“People’s lives are at risk,” Brané said.

Katie Shepherd, who previously served as a senior policy advisor at CRCL before she was removed as part of the DHS oversight cuts, said the agency was moving in the wrong direction.

“As the Trump administration is doubling down on immigration enforcement, and the number of people in custody is rapidly increasing, we should be increasing oversight, not eliminating it,” Shepherd said.

When asked about the ongoing cases at CRCL, Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin told CNN that the department was still “committed to civil rights,” claiming that CRCL had “actually undermined civil rights protections as well as basic federal law enforcement.”

“All legally required functions are still being carried out—but in a more efficient and cost-effective way, and without compromising the department’s core mission of securing the homeland,” McLaughlin said. “Oversight offices continue to receive and open new complaints and investigations.”