President Donald Trump intensified his attacks on the Federal Emergency Management Agency during a visit to Hurricane Helene-damaged parts of North Carolina on Friday, announcing he is planning on reforming or “getting rid of FEMA,” and proposed an unprecedented move to condition disaster relief on the passage of a voter ID law by California’s lawmakers, “as a start.” Trump’s trip, which will include travel to California later Friday, appears designed to target the emergency management agency, which he has been criticizing for months.

In what appeared to be scripted remarks, Trump later elaborated that he would “sign an executive order to begin the process of fundamentally reforming and overhauling FEMA, or maybe getting rid of FEMA. I think frankly, FEMA’s not good. I think when you have a problem like this, I think you want to go and, uh, whether it’s a Democrat or Republican governor, you want to use your state to fix it and not waste time.”

“Calling FEMA and then FEMA gets here and they don’t know the area,” Trump claimed. “They’ve never been to the area and they want to give you rules that you’ve never heard about, they wanna bring people that aren’t as good as the people you already have,” he alleged.

“FEMA turned out to be a a disaster. And you could go back a long way, you could go back to Louisiana, you could go back to some of the things that took place in Texas. And it turns out to be the state that ends up doing the work. It just complicates it. I think we’re gonna recommend that FEMA go away. And we pay directly and we pay a percentage to the state, but the state should fix it.”

RELATED: Is Trump Using Project 2025 to Eliminate FEMA?

In his wide-ranging remarks, President Trump also claimed that “rather than going through FEMA,” disaster relief aid to California and North Carolina “will go through us,” meaning, through his administration. FEMA is a federal government agency under the wide umbrella of the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. The president nominates the HHS Secretary, a cabinet level official, and the FEMA administrator.

Trump claims that disaster aid for North Carolina and California will go through his administration instead of FEMA pic.twitter.com/oEyg1injoA

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) January 24, 2025

And Trump appeared to say that he will assign Republican National Committee chairman Michael Whatley to manage financial aid to North Carolina, removing FEMA from the state.

“Trump also said FEMA would not be involved in further relief efforts and instead suggested that Whatley, North Carolina Governor Josh Stein (D), and a trio of Republican House members would be working with the White House directly because the agency ‘hasn’t done the job,'” The Independent reported.

“I wanna see two things in Los Angeles,” Trump also told reporters late Friday morning, “voter ID so that the people have a chance to vote, and I want to see the water be released and come down into Los Angeles and throughout the state. Those are the two things. After that, I will be the greatest president that California ever has ever seen.”

“I want the water to come down and come down to Los Angeles and also go out to all the farm land that’s barren and dry,” Trump claimed. This week the President appeared to suggest that water runs only north to south.

READ MORE: Danish MP Follows Profane Message to Trump With Warning to Greenlanders on US Civil Rights

“So, I want two things,” Trump repeated, “I want voter ID for the people of California. They all want it. Right now you have no, you don’t have voter ID. People want to have to voter identification. You wanna have proof of citizenship. Ideally, you have one-day voting, but I just want voter ID to start, and I want the water to be released, and they’re gonna get a lot of help from the U.S.”

Trump on disaster aid to California: “I want to see two things in Los Angeles. Voter ID, so that the people have a chance to vote, and I want to see the water be released and come down into Los Angeles and throughout the state. After that, I will be the greatest president that… pic.twitter.com/JLsFicyyes

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) January 24, 2025

Trump later responded to a reporter’s question about his remarks on ending FEMA, calling the agency “a very big disappointment” that costs “a tremendous amount of money.” He alleged, “they end up in arguments if they’re fighting, all the time over who does what, it’s just it’s just not a good system.”

“I think it’s, I think when there’s a, uh, when there’s a problem with the state, I think that that problem should be taken care of by the state. That’s what we have states for. They take care of problems, and a government can handle something very quickly,” Trump said, appearing to not mention the scope of FEMA’s actions, responsibilities, and resources.

Jordan Weissmann, reporter for Yahoo Finance covering federal agencies, offers this explanation on California water: “The water issue Trump is fixated on doesn’t really have anything to do with the wildfires. It’s a fight between Central Valley farmers and Northern California farmers and environmentalists about who gets more fresh water.”

Watch the videos above or at this link.

READ MORE: Trump’s J6 Pardons Are ‘High Crime’ and ‘Abuse of Power’ Legal Expert Says

Image: Trump, First Lady Melania Trump and Franklin Graham in North Carolina Friday, via Reuters

President Donald Trump’s desire to acquire Greenland from Denmark isn’t going over well with some Danes, including one of Denmark’s politicians who used vulgarity to express his opposition earlier this week, and is now citing a century-long historical record to issue a warning to Greenlanders on America’s refusal to grant full voting rights to its citizens in U.S. territories.

Anders Vistisen, a Danish Member of the European Parliament, reminded Trump earlier this week that “Greenland has been part of the Danish Kingdom for 800 years,” and “is not for sale.”

“Let me put it in words you might understand: Mr. Trump. f*** off,” Vistisen said.

“Mr. Trump, F*ck Off”

Anders Vistisen, a Danish member of the European Parliament offered a blunt message to Trump about his obsession with taking over Greenland pic.twitter.com/uMSbZh6GGD

— Republicans against Trump (@RpsAgainstTrump) January 22, 2025

Thursday night on CNN, Vistisen, a member of a right wing populist party, expanded his battle against Trump’s aspiration to annex Greenland.

READ MORE: Trump’s J6 Pardons Are ‘High Crime’ and ‘Abuse of Power’ Legal Expert Says

Addressing what he called the “argument that America can make a great deal,” an apparent reference to Donald Trump, Vistisen said, “we actually have some historical precedence for this. A hundred years ago we sold you what you call the U.S. Virgin Islands. Today, that territory still doesn’t have voting rights for your presidential elections.”

“That place doesn’t have a voting member of your parliament, the Congress — or the House of Representatives, and the Senate, and when I visited, when we had the hundred years commemoration, there was not a great lot of enthusiasm about the way the U.S. is handling that.”

“So I think if the Greenlandic people are looking carefully at this and they are looking on the U.S. overseas territories,” Vistisen continued, “looking at how Indigenous people are treated in the U.S., it’s very hard to make a compelling argument that they will have a better deal from the United States than what they have within the Danish realm, the kingdom of Denmark, where they have full voting rights in the Danish parliament are actually are overrepresented, and as you clearly stated, they have a very beneficial agreement, economically with Denmark.”

Vistisen: 100 years ago, we sold you what you call the U.S. Virgin Islands today. And that territory still doesn’t have voting rights for your presidential elections. That place doesn’t have a voting member of the congress.. And when I visited, when we had the 100 year… pic.twitter.com/a2EIEtTZ1h

— Acyn (@Acyn) January 24, 2025

The Atlantic’s David Frum, a former Bush 43 White House speechwriter, responded to Vistisen’s remarks.

“In 1917, Denmark (legally neutral but sympathetic to the Allies) sold the [Virgin] islands to the USA to prevent Germany from seizing them for a submarine base. Also, the islands were economically desperate, and war-isolated Denmark could not aid them. As part of the deal, the US guaranteed Danish sovereignty over Greenland. Another reason that seizing Greenland would be an act of US bad faith,” Frum wrote.

Watch the videos above or at this link.

READ MORE: Is Trump Using Project 2025 to Eliminate FEMA?

Image by Elekes Andor via Wikimedia Commons and a CC license

At least four well-respected current and retired federal judges have spoken out to denounce President Donald Trump’s sweeping, unilateral pardons of over 1500 people convicted of numerous crimes related to the January 6 insurrection and attack on the Capitol, and his commutations for “14 members of far-right extremist groups.” A constitutional scholar and retired Harvard law professor has suggested Trump’s acts of clemency could be considered a “high crime and misdemeanor,” worthy of impeachment.

“No stroke of a pen and no proclamation can alter the facts of what took place on January 6, 2021,” wrote U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson, the latest judge to denounce the pardons, as Politico’s senior legal affairs reporter Kyle Cheney reported. “When others in the public eye are not willing to risk their own power or popularity by calling out lies when they hear them, the record of the proceedings in this courthouse will be available to those who seek the truth.”

Judge Jackson pointed to “the hundreds of law enforcement officers who put their lives on the line against impossible odds to protect not only the U.S. Capitol building and the people who worked there,” and noted that those workers “were huddled inside in terror as windows and doors were shattered.”

She wrote of “those valiant officers who fulfilled their oaths to ‘support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic.'”

READ MORE: Is Trump Using Project 2025 to Eliminate FEMA?

“They are the patriots. Patriotism is loyalty to country and loyalty to the Constitution –  not loyalty to a single head of state.”

A second jurist also denounced Trump’s pardons.

Trump “said the clemency would begin a process of ‘reconciliation’ and correct a ‘grave national injustice’, but in a scathing order on Wednesday the US district judge Beryl Howell disagreed,” The Guardian reported.

“No ‘national injustice’ occurred here, just as no outcome-determinative election fraud occurred in the 2020 presidential election,” Howell wrote.

“No ‘process of national reconciliation’ can begin when poor losers, whose preferred candidate loses an election, are glorified for disrupting a constitutionally mandated proceeding in Congress and doing so with impunity,” she added. “This court cannot let stand the revisionist myth relayed in this presidential pronouncement.”

U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan, who presided over Trump’s January 6 attack and election subversion case prosecuted by Special Counsel Jack Smith, delivered one of the more scathing denunciations.

She wrote that the pardons “cannot whitewash the blood, feces, and terror that the mob left in its wake,” as The Guardian also reported.

“It cannot repair the jagged breach in America’s sacred tradition of peacefully transitioning power,” Chutkan continued.“In hundreds of cases like this one over the past four years, judges in this district have administered justice without fear or favor. The historical record established by those proceedings must stand, unmoved by political winds, as a testament and as a warning.”

On Wednesday, a well-known retired U.S. District Judge, who served on the federal bench for over three decades, also condemned Trump’s pardons.

“Former U.S District Judge Shira Scheindlin agrees with the judges who sentenced the Jan. 6 rioters and are criticizing Trump’s pardons,”  CNN’s Kaitlan Collins noted.

“They had a trial before a jury and the jury convicted them,” Judge Scheindlin said (video below). “This is all nonsense. These people are not hostages. They’re not heroes. They’re not political prisoners. They’re criminals. They attacked people. They assaulted people.”

Repeatedly calling Trump’s acts of clemency “overly broad,” Judge Scheindlin told Collins, “I know the views of probably every judge, no matter who appointed that judge, or Republican president, Democratic president, it doesn’t matter. The process worked, the trials were fair. As you said, many of these people pled guilty. There there’s really no excuse for this.”

“They sat through trials, they worked hard on those trials,” she said of the judges. The people who were convicted “had a chance to tell their stories.”

“They had a trial before a jury and the jury convicted them. So, this is all nonsense. These people are not hostages, they’re not heroes, they’re not political prisoners. They’re criminals, they attacked people, they assaulted people, they committed property damage. They committed so many crimes, of course, the seditious conspiracy that you mentioned, and they were convicted and sentenced. So I understand there’s a pardon power, but this was overly broad.”

READ MORE: ‘Civil Rights Canon in American Law’: Trump Rescinds Historic LBJ Nondiscrimination Order

“All these people, I thought [Trump] was going to separate them, violent and the nonviolent. That’s what JD Vance told us…It didn’t happen. He just pardoned all of them because he can.”

Retired Harvard Law Professor Laurence Tribe, a well-regarded constitutional scholar, responded:

“Absolutely right, Judge Scheindlin. These pardons are legally authorized but constitutionally unpardonable. Their issuance is a ‘high crime and misdemeanor’ within the meaning of the Impeachment Clause because it is a clear abuse of presidential power.”

Watch the video below or at this link.

Former U.S District Judge Shira Scheindlin agrees with the judges who sentenced the Jan. 6 rioters and are criticizing Trump’s pardons: “They had a trial before a jury and the jury convicted them. This is all nonsense. These people are not hostages. They’re not heroes. They’re… pic.twitter.com/hLb5pnny7f

— Kaitlan Collins (@kaitlancollins) January 23, 2025

READ MORE: Trump May Invite J6 Pardoned Convicts to the White House: CNN

Image via Reuters