El Salvador Staged Detail in Photo of Dem Senator and Abrego Garcia (2025)

Senator Chris Van Hollen’s meeting with wrongly deported immigrant Kilmar Abrego Garcia in El Salvador was stage-managed by Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele, right down to the table settings.

Bukele used the meeting to mount a propaganda campaign on X, posting photos from their meeting and claiming that “Kilmar Abrego Garcia, miraculously risen from the ‘death camps’ & ‘torture,’” was “now sipping margaritas with Sen. Van Hollen in the tropical paradise of El Salvador!”

In reality, those “margaritas” were glasses with cherries and salted rims, placed on the table in front of Van Hollen and Abrego Garcia by a Bukele aide in the middle of their meeting to stage a photo. The photo was quite different from the one Van Hollen shared.

Abrego Garcia’s attire of a button-down shirt with jeans and a baseball cap was also different from what he was photographed wearing when he arrived at El Salvador’s Centro de Confinamiento del Terrorismo, a prison known for human rights abuses. Gone were the white shirt and pants uniform of the prison’s inmates, and the cap covered Abrego Garcia’s newly shaved head, a practice that every inmate at the facility experiences.

It all seems to have been choreographed by Bukele to refute the reports of what life is really like in the prison, as well as the rumors that Abrego Garcia may have been in poor physical condition or deceased.

Americans are starting to see through Donald Trump’s economic promises as he continues to tank the economy with his volatile approach to global trade.

A new poll from The Economist/YouGov, conducted April 13–15, shows that Trump’s economic approval is at an all-time low. Fifty-two percent of respondents said the economy is getting worse, up 5 percent from “Liberation Day,” when Trump implemented reciprocal tariffs of 10 percent or more on about 90 countries, sending stock markets plummeting to a generational low. He then rescinded the majority of those tariffs days later (but increased the ones on China), causing confusion and chaos for consumers and small-business owners.

Three-quarters of voters said they thought tariffs “will increase the price of goods they buy,” and about two-thirds of Americans think the state of the stock market is Trump’s fault, according to the YouGov poll.

As data journalist G. Elliott Morris pointed out Friday in a Substack post, Trump’s average net economic approval in YouGov polls over the last month is -6 percent, the worst he’s ever polled as president. While handling the outbreak of Covid-19 during his first term, Trump’s net economic approval rating was 3 percent, Morris noted.

Trump ran his 2024 presidential campaign on the promise of economic prosperity and change for millions of Americans fed up with inflation and the high cost of living. He pledged an “end to the devastating inflation crisis,” lower prices, tax cuts, and a tariff scheme that would bolster American manufacturing. But as the likelihood of a recession inches closer, just three months into Trump’s term, people are clearly starting to lose faith in the president’s disastrous economic plan. Forty-two percent of respondents said they “strongly or somewhat oppose” Trump’s budget, and the percentage of Americans who say the economy is their top concern has increased since Trump took office, the poll found.

The president’s performance isn’t flailing in just the Economist/YouGov poll, either. Investor sentiment has only been lower a handful of times since this data started being recorded, including post-9/11 and during the 2008 global financial crisis, according to a review of economic polls from The Independent.

In a University of Massachusetts Amherst poll of 1,000 respondents conducted April 4–9, nearly two-thirds of people said they don’t think Trump is handling inflation well and 58 percent think he is mishandling trade policy.

“Three months into his second administration, the honeymoon might be over for President Donald Trump,” Tatishe Nteta, the poll’s director, said in a statement. Hopefully he’s right.

Donald Trump may be trying to shield his old buddy Mike Lindell, the CEO of MyPillow, from being audited by the Internal Revenue Service, The Washington Post reported Thursday.

David Eisner, a senior presidential appointee at the U.S. Department of Treasury, wrote to senior staff at the IRS that Lindell, a “friend of the president,” was “concerned he may have been inappropriately targeted” after receiving his second audit in as many years, according to two people familiar with the request and records reviewed by the Post.

Eisner’s inquiry was then referred to the Treasury inspector general for tax administration.

Nina Olson, who served as the national taxpayer advocate from 2001 to 2019, told the Post the request from the Trump official was “so inappropriate.”

“In my 18 years as the national taxpayer advocate with over 4 million cases that came into the Taxpayer Advocate Service, in that time with taxpayers experiencing significant problems with the IRS, I have never had a Treasury official write me about a case,” she said.

Lindell claimed that the Treasury had “misconstrued” his request and claimed he had been trying to ask about an employee retention credit he’d received from the IRS. He said he’d already emailed the agency weeks ago and been referred to the Treasury.

Lindell, a former millionaire, spent months after the 2020 presidential election pushing theories about a grand conspiracy between electronic voting companies to keep Trump out of the White House. Lindell is facing a series of expensive lawsuits for not only allegedly defaming these companies but attempting to profit from his conspiracies.

During a hearing in U.S. District Court Wednesday, Lindell refused to pay the more than $50,000 he owes to Smartmatic, after filing a frivolous counterclaim against the electronic voting company he smeared. The MyPillow CEO insisted that he couldn’t pay because his company was already $70 million in debt and was already paying garnishments to the IRS.