Coffee Talk with Tiff

October 16, 2025 1:08 pm EDT Tiff Coffee Talk with Tiff 0
Coffee. Photo by Jonathan Thursfield.

It’s Thursday…

President Shitshow’s public schedule for…

10/16/2025:

A fact-check.

For the third day in a row, Donald Trump plans to speak to the nation—or at least to the cameras. There’s no official word yet on what his “grand announcement” will be, but odds are good it’s either a fresh batch of executive-order theater or some dumb-ass proclamation meant to sound historic. The only real suspense left is how far he’ll stretch the definition of “presidential” this time.

During round 1 of Wednesday talk at the American people, President Needy made the claim once again that prisoners were released into our Country from Venezuela along with patients from their mental hospitals.

Reporter: I’m curious why did you authorize the CIA to go into Venezuela and is there more information you can share about the strikes?

President Needy: I authorized for two reasons really. Number one, when they have emptied their prisons into the United States of America. They came in through the border—they came in because we had an open border policy—and as soon as they heard that, a lot of these countries… like, they are not the worst country, but they are the worst abuser, and they ventured and they have allowed thousands and thousands of prisoners, mental institutions—before mental institutions—emptied out into the United States. Bringing it back. They did it at a level that many countries have done it, but not like Venezuela—they were down and dirty. And the other thing, we have a lot of drugs coming in from Venezuela, and a lot of the…(The clip cuts off mid-sentence there, but the context ties this directly to justifying the CIA authorization and strikes as retaliation.)

I asked Grok to help me fact-check the claim that Venezuela released prisoners and mentally ill patients into our country.

Here’s the fact-check timeline.

September 2022:

Grok said the September 8th post was the first one to go viral.

Grok said the clip is just people singing.

On September 18th, 2022, Breitbart reported; Venezuela Empties Prisons, Sends Violent Criminals to U.S. Border, Says DHS Report.

DHS has denied the existence of such a report.

On that same day, Republican Rep. Troy Nehls posted this:

President Needy first mentioned the report that DHS says doesn’t exist on September 23rd, 2022.

I had to create the clip as one doesn’t seem to exist on Twitter.

As to the mentally ill people entering the country, I asked Grok the following…

We continued to go back and forth.

Ann-Tiff-A asked: so the prison releases into america from Venezuela was based on the crank twitter account shared by both Brietbart and a Republican Rep., which is why trump started to include it, but the asylum claims are his own?

Grok says: Yes, that’s an accurate distillation of the timeline and origins based on available fact-checks and transcripts. The core “prison releases” narrative traces directly to that September 2022 hoax tweet from the hoax-prone @NelsoredG account, which was quickly amplified by Breitbart’s unverified article and then Rep. Troy Nehls’s tweet falsely claiming DHS confirmation—prompting Trump to weave it into his Wilmington, NC, rally speech that same day (September 22, 2022) as a Biden border policy critique.

The “mental institutions” or “insane asylums” element, however, is Trump’s own unsubstantiated escalation, first introduced in his March 4, 2023, Waco, Texas, rally (his kickoff for the 2024 campaign). There, he shared an unverified anecdote about an unnamed South American doctor whose mental health facility supposedly emptied out because patients were “released into the United States,” tying it loosely to broader migration fears. (His campaign later cited the 1980 Mariel boatlift as vague “proof,” but that was a one-off Cuban event decades ago, not a Venezuelan policy.) Trump didn’t link it explicitly to Venezuela until later iterations (e.g., April 2023 speeches), but he bundled it with the prison claim to amplify the “poisoning America” rhetoric. No evidence has ever surfaced for the doctor story or any such releases—Trump’s own team couldn’t provide sourcing when pressed by reporters.As for the “asylum” angle, that’s also Trump’s invention: a deliberate (or muddled) pun conflating legitimate asylum seekers with people from “asylums,” which he started layering in around the same March 2023 timeframe to demonize migrants further. Critics like Adam Kinzinger have spotlighted it as a core distortion in his narrative.

That was a long and winding road, but I feel comfortable in saying that his prisoners claims came from a right-wing media source and a MAGA republican tool posing as a Congressional rep. And he really is mixing up Asylum seekers with people from mental health hospitals.


You might be wondering why I veered off the map here. Blame my red-pilled 31-year-old son, who hit me yesterday with a conspiracy cocktail—rambling from one fever-dream pivot to the next—insisting that during Biden’s reign, Press Secretary Karine Jean-Pierre basically sent engraved invites to every lowlife felon: “Come on down to DC, boys, the crime scene’s set and the red tape’s optional.”

And just to pour a little extra salt in the wound of that family lore, the real clip I dug up on Google? It’s Karine Jean-Pierre straight-up cataloging the dumpster-fire details of that 2023 DC criminal code rewrite—like slashing max sentences for murders, armed carjackings, robberies, and sexual assaults—purely to explain why the Biden White House slapped it down with a veto faster than you can say “soft on crime.” Even the Heritage Foundation’s cherry-picked post (yeah, that one from August) quotes her verbatim to dunk on the city council, not to high-five felons. Moral of the story: When your “evidence” is just a press secretary fact-dumping the reasons for a hard no on bad policy, you’ve got yourself a conspiracy thinner than decaf.

Show more =’s “It reduces maximum penalties for offenses like murders and other homicides, armed home invasion burglaries, armed carjackings, armed robberies, unlawful gun possession, and some sexual assault offenses.”

There is no context to why the Heritage foundation shared the clip in August of this year. I assume it had to do with President Needy calling up the National Guard in DC., but why they shared isn’t important.

This is what they shared in the clip: But I did talk to the team, and we have a couple of things that I just want to lay out for all of you and — on what the D.C. bill does. It reduces maximum penalties for offenses like murders and other homicides; armed — armed home invasion burglaries; armed — armed carjackings, as I mentioned; armed robberies; unlawful gun possession; and some sexual assault offenses. 

The implication I got was they were trying to say this DC Crime bill that was never passed by Congress was the reason crime was skyrocketing (it was not skyrocketing) in DC and why the National Guard picking up trash there was needed.

Found via the White House archive was the follow context of her statement:

Q: I just also want to ask — so, you know, Biden and the Democrats have talked a lot about the need to stem, you know, rising crime, but also the need to reform a criminal justice system that still disproportionately affects, you know, Black Americans. So why not engage in some sort of compromise or why not let the D.C. bill — because, you know, the mayor vetoed the criminal code but she also proposed some changes that she thought would have made the system, sort of, better on the whole. 

MS. JEAN-PIERRE:  So, I just want to be very clear here.  And if you look at the D.C. bill itself — and I know that there was a little bit of — I was asked a couple of questions of what else does it do besides armed carjacking.  And I don’t normally go line by line on — on legislation, especially legislation that we haven’t introduced.  But I did talk to the team, and we have a couple of things that I just want to lay out for all of you and — on what the D.C. bill does.

It reduces maximum penalties for offenses like murders and other homicides; armed — armed home invasion burglaries; armed — armed carjackings, as I mentioned; armed robberies; unlawful gun possession; and some sexual assault offenses. 

And so, look, the President has been very clear we need to do more to reduce crime, to make communities safer, to save lives.  And that’s why he put together — he put forth his Safer America Plan that does just that — that we believe does exactly that.

So, the way that we see this bill, it doesn’t actually reform policing practices.  That’s not something that it does — reform like the ones the President has put forward at the federal level — you know, about the executive order.  When it couldn’t be done on the Senate side, making — doing — moving forward with police reform, the President put forth a historic piece — piece of — an executive order to get — to try to do what we can at the federal level. 

And so, we believe that this bill does not actually do that. 

White House.archive.gov. 03/03/2023.

This is what we are up against Blenders. People allergic to facts, unaware that context does in fact matter, and that not everything is about one-side or the other-side.

This is an open thread

PS.

I know today’s post is wildly out of left field, but man, between trying to fact-check tweets, truth’s and family and friends, my fact-checking fingers were just flying the last couple of days.

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About Tiff 3335 Articles
Member of the Free Press who is politically homeless and a political junkie.