Good morning. I’m Corinne Straight, and this is AlterNet America. Please take a moment to click the ❤️ and restack this post. The oligarchs’ platforms are trying to keep stories like the ones below from hitting your feeds, and this helps us break through.
Trump told a Georgia rally crowd that he doesn’t care about high gas prices because the country is “making a fortune.” He also claimed the United States has acquired Greenland and Venezuela, which it has not. The Trump administration threatened to strip California of its coastal protections unless the state agrees to its list of demands. And a South Texas Trump supporter is regretting her vote after ICE detained and deported her brother.
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Trump Says He Doesn’t ‘Give a Damn’ About Gas Prices
His advisors also told him not to stare at the eclipse.
Trump told a rally crowd in Perry, Georgia on Saturday that he doesn’t care about rising gas prices because the United States is “making a frickin fortune” from the war in Iran. He said his advisors warned him not to talk about it, but he talked about it anyway.
“I can just see the fake headlines,” Trump said. “President Trump is talking about all the money they’re making while people are suffering at the pump. But I said, ‘I don’t give a damn.’”
The national average price for a gallon of regular gasoline was $4.29 on October 25, according to AAA. That’s a gain of about $1.23 per gallon over the past 12 months, or about 40 percent.
Gas prices were the worst-performing issue for the president in the survey, with 73 percent of likely voters saying they disapprove of how Trump has handled the issue, according to a New York Times/Siena poll. That includes 77 percent of independents and 42 percent of Republicans.
Trump Says the U.S. Has Acquired Greenland and Venezuela
He’s two rallies away from claiming the moon.
Trump told the same Georgia rally crowd that Denmark gave the United States Greenland, and that America now controls Venezuela and its oil reserves. Neither claim is true.
“What do you take: Venezuela or Greenland? Both? We got them both!” Trump told the crowd. “It’s going to go down as the greatest real estate deal in history.”
The United States and Denmark on October 22 signed a memorandum of understanding to boost maritime industrial cooperation. The accord explicitly says it does not apply to Greenland or the Faroe Islands, and creates no legal rights.
Trump’s comment on Venezuela followed the arrest of former leader Nicolás Maduro earlier this year. No one seems to have told Venezuela’s acting president, Delcy Rodríguez, who said at the UN General Assembly in September that her government would take “historic responsibility” for leading the country to full democracy.
Trump Threatens to Strip California of Coastal Protections
Why go through the appeals process when you can go through the president?
Draft findings of a federal review obtained by the Los Angeles Times show the Trump administration threatened to strip California of its authority to protect its coastline if state regulators didn’t agree to more than a dozen “corrective actions.” The 92-page review accused California coastal authorities of “unjustified hostility and political bias against offshore drilling opportunities, oil and gas projects broadly, and SpaceX’s launch activities.”
At the top of the list is a demand that the California Coastal Commission meet with SpaceX to talk about “political bias.” The review also ordered authorities to sit down with Sable Offshore, a Texas oil company that has been lobbying Trump to help it bypass what the document called “regulatory burden and overreach” and restart a drilling operation near Santa Barbara.
For 50 years, the Coastal Zone Management Act has given coastal states the authority to review federal projects that affect their shorelines. California had already undergone a routine review under the Biden administration, and a draft of that review gave the state top marks.
More than 23,000 people submitted written responses during the review’s comment period this summer, and about 95 percent supported the state. Federal officials rejected all but 22 of them as not “complex” enough to consider, and about 12 of those 22 became the basis for the corrective actions.
Trump Voter Who ‘Expected Deportations’ Regretful After Brother Is Deported
The good news is she’ll never have to wonder whether her vote mattered.
Jessica Vuittonet, who owns a coffee shop in San Benito, Texas, voted for Trump in 2024 knowing he planned to deport people. She told CBS News she never anticipated the targets would be those she describes as hardworking and innocent, like her brother, who was detained at a routine check-in and later deported.
It was the first time Vuittonet had ever voted. She told The New York Times that her brother’s detention felt like a punch in the gut, and she started to resent the Trump supporters she had once rallied alongside.
Benny Melendez, who runs a small construction company near the border in McAllen, voted for Biden in 2020 but turned to Trump in 2024. He told CBS News he has started putting up fencing around his job sites to keep ICE from taking his workers, and building a house now takes his crew about a year, instead of four months.
Republican McAllen Mayor Javier Villalobos said the ICE crackdown was his constituents’ top issue and warned the party risked losing some of the gains it had made with Latino voters. “It is not a good picture,” he said.
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Amazon Abandons Data Center Plans for Former GW Campus in Loudoun County. Amazon has withdrawn its application to build an 800,000 square foot data center on the 122-acre property it bought from George Washington University for $427 million. The company agreed to rezone the property for mixed-use development with a permanent ban on data centers after weeks of opposition from residents and county officials who said the area was never meant to be industrial. Loudoun County has approximately 260 data centers either constructed or planned, and opposition from the public has grown over the industry’s electricity needs and water use. Amazon also will contribute $5 million to a county housing fund.
Lula Wins a Record Fourth Term in Brazil After Losing the First Round. Lula da Silva won Brazil’s presidential runoff on Sunday with 51.8 percent of the vote, a result that would have seemed unlikely three weeks ago when he lost the first round to Flávio Bolsonaro by nearly two points. No candidate had ever come back from a first-round deficit since Brazil became a democracy in 1989. In the final weeks of the campaign, Lula appealed to the 33 million eligible voters who didn’t cast ballots, boosting family benefits and introducing a plan to refinance consumer debt. Bolsonaro’s father, former president Jair Bolsonaro, is serving a 27-year sentence for trying to overthrow the government after he lost to Lula in 2022.
