Trans-identifying city council official arrested at Trump Tower protest



A trans-identifying city council official who prefers they/them pronouns was arrested during a protest at Trump Tower last week, and some of his leftist colleagues on the council are coming to his defense.

On Thursday, June Rose, chief of staff of the Providence City Council, joined a raucous group that stormed into Trump Tower in New York City to protest the arrest and detention of Mahmoud Khalil, an apparent terrorist sympathizer accused of orchestrating violent, destructive demonstrations at Columbia University last year.

Wearing shirts emblazoned with anti-Israel slogans, a mob of about 150 members of Jewish Voice for Peace burst into a dining area of the Trump building and refused to leave. Nearly 100 of them, apparently including Rose, were arrested as a result.

"Those arrests are for trespassing, obstructing government administration, and resisting arrest by virtue of us having to carry some of the people out of the escalator," said NYPD Chief of Department John Chell.

"We gave warnings on our pager system, and once we did that warning three times, the NYPD with its professionalism, as you saw, went in and made the arrests. There were no injuries. There were no incidents. There was no damaged property."

'We’re making decisions on revenue, where are they? They’re in jail.'

Rose, who grew up in an Orthodox Jewish family and community and who still considers himself culturally Jewish, was arrested during the incident. He was released the same day and was back in Providence by Friday, Council President Rachel Miller claimed.

According to her bio, Miller has a long history of "economic, racial, and social justice" activism. In her statement about the arrest, Miller implied that Rose had done nothing wrong.

"This is a perilous moment for our democracy, and taking action is not something to be scorned. June was using vacation time today and chose to use their time to defend constitutional freedoms," she stated, according to GoLocalProv.

City Councilor Miguel Sanchez, whose X posts reveal a deep animus toward President Donald Trump's agenda and who was even fired from far-left Democrat Gov. Dan McKee’s Office of Constituent Services for his anti-Israel activism, likewise stands by Rose.

"I’m so proud that we have staff members who not only do so much for our city but also use their voice to fight for a better world," Sanchez wrote. "As the majority whip of the @pvdcitycouncil, June has my full support."

Other council members took a different view. Councilman James Taylor even called on Rose, the highest-paid council staffer, to resign for leaving the city "on the busiest council day of the year."

According to Taylor, last Thursday was "was a big day for the City Council" since the Finance Committee was set to consider a tax-hike proposal from Mayor Brett Smiley.

"All eyes were on the council with the administration, the budget — the most important day, when they’re chief of staff, supposed to be running the council, making sure they get everything they need — the biggest day, we’re making decisions on revenue, where are they? They’re in jail," Taylor said.

City Council spokesperson Roxie Richner confirmed that Rose makes more than $136,000 per year.

Rose came out as bisexual more than a decade ago and as transgender last year. "I always say that my bullies knew I was queer long before I did," he previously stated.

This arrest is the second for Rose in less than a year. He was arrested in Washington, D.C., last June in connection with a protest of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s appearance before Congress.

Rose also served as Rhode Island delegate to the Democratic National Convention last summer, and he tried to use his vote as leverage for the Palestinian cause.

"My job has always been about outcomes, about winning," he said in the weeks leading up to the convention in Chicago. "Here, winning means fewer Palestinian children are killed. There would be no greater victory than helping save the lives of Palestinian children living under occupation."

H/T: Libs of TikTok

Like Blaze News? Bypass the censors, sign up for our newsletters, and get stories like this direct to your inbox. Sign up here!

NYPD Arrests Dozens After Jewish Voice for Peace Storms Trump Tower To Demand Release of Pro-Hamas Columbia Activist

Police arrested dozens of Jewish Voice for Peace agitators after they stormed Trump Tower in New York to demand the release of Mahmoud Khalil, the pro-Hamas Columbia University activist in ICE custody.

The post NYPD Arrests Dozens After Jewish Voice for Peace Storms Trump Tower To Demand Release of Pro-Hamas Columbia Activist appeared first on .

'The Apprentice': Not your average Trump derangement cinema



"You create your own reality. The truth is malleable," Roy Cohn tells a young Donald Trump in the new movie "The Apprentice."

It's a lesson that the starry-eyed scion from Queens will take all the way to the White House.

The crude patriotism expressed by both Trump and Cohn may be self-serving, but it's hard not to see it as preferable to the pessimistic inertia dragging this once great city down.

But it could also serve as a warning to anyone trying to make a film about Trump: The reality-distortion field surrounding our 45th president affects his critics no less than his fans.

Man, myth, monster

Trump is one of the most controversial human beings in contemporary history; a populist messiah or rage-fueled fascist, depending on who you ask.

It is almost impossible to portray him in a neutral or sympathetic light, to grapple with the humanity under the accumulated detritus of five decades of public life.

Past attempts, like Showtime’s “The Comey Rule" — a blatant piece of "resistance" propaganda uninterested in any coherent depiction of the Trump administration's inner workings — don't bother trying.

As a result, most film and TV versions of Trump barely rise above Alec Baldwin's crude "Saturday Night Live" caricature, driven by partisan resentment and mesmerized by Trump's often disagreeable public persona.

Trump in training

“The Apprentice” largely avoids this trap by approaching its subject indirectly. Instead of the fully-formed scourge of democracy, it gives us a portrait of the deal artist as a young man.

Set in the 1970s and 1980s, the film opens on boyish Donald Trump still struggling to break free from his boorish, domineering father and his modest, outer-borough real estate empire.

A company vice president whose duties include going door-to-door collecting overdue rent from disgruntled tenants, the young Trump dreams of turning the family business into something bigger but is hampered by a federal lawsuit alleging racist housing discrimination (a charge the movie suggests is true).

It isn't until a chance meeting with infamous Joseph McCarthy prosecutor and political fixer Roy Cohn that Trump sees a way out from under his father's shadow. Taking the aspiring mogul under his wing, Cohn guides him through the early stages of his career by teaching him the three cardinal rules of winning: attack, deny everything, and never admit defeat.

Sympathy for the Donald

Echoing themes from “Citizen Kane” and classic Greek tragedies, "The Apprentice" presents the rise of Trump as a cautionary tale; director Ali Abbasi and writer Gabriel Sherman are smart enough to understand that their protagonist needs a sympathetic core if his hollowing out is to be effective.

Superficially, the movie isn’t shy about its contempt toward the man and his influences. Family patriarch Fred Sr. is unabashedly racist, Cohn drops homophobic slurs and rambles about liberals and socialists stealing from great men, and one of Trump’s opening scenes is him as a landlord threatening to evict Section 8 renters overburdened by medical bills.

Trump himself is depicted as a venal adulterer who goes as far as to rape his wife (as Ivana Trump alleged and later backtracked on in her 1990 divorce deposition). The movie works overtime to earn its bleak conclusion, in which the student callously discards the master.

Surgical strike

"The Apprentice" emphasizes Trump's ultimate dehumanization and moral degradation in the graphic, close-up shots of scalp-reduction surgery and liposuction (on a patient coyly suggested to be Trump) with which it ends. Evoking both Darth Vader and Dr. Frankenstein's abomination, this clinical, creepy scene makes the movie's subtext clear: We've just witnessed the creation of a monster.

Trump may be a monster, but he's also very much a product of his environment. As "The Apprentice" takes care to establish, the New York City of this era is rotting, with even the iconic Chrysler building in foreclosure. The crude patriotism expressed by both Trump and Cohn may be self-serving, but it's hard not to see it as preferable to the pessimistic inertia dragging this once great city down.

According to Abbasi, his goal was not to portray Trump as “a caricature or a crooked politician or a hero or whatever you might think, but as a human being.” As Politico puts it, he’s an anti-hero. “He’s tragic, not evil.”

High-rise Hamlet

Sebastian Stan brings this tragic note to his portrayal of Trump, especially in scenes with his alcoholic older brother, Freddy (a suitably dissolute Charlie Carrick), summoning a tenderness not often associated with the former president. Stan ably captures his subject's more peculiar eccentricities, speech patterns, and mannerisms — even if the face of the Winter Soldier occasionally proves distracting.

This is a quality film, to use one of Trump's favorite descriptors. But its nuance may well have hurt its commercial prospects. Despite being marketed as "the movie Donald Trump doesn't want you to see" (bolstered by Trump's threats to sue the filmmakers for "pure malicious defamation"), "The Apprentice" hasn't done much business after a week in theaters.

Not much of an October surprise after all. But then, maybe it was too much to ask a well-crafted period piece like "The Apprentice" to compete with the riveting drama playing out before us in real time.

Trump isn't one for dwelling on the past, and neither are those drawn to him, whether out of love or hate. Where's he's been has always been far less compelling than what he'll do next.

Democrats’ Campaign Strategy Of Anti-Trump Lawfare Makes A Mockery Of The Justice System

Democrats are undermining the legitimacy of the judicial branch with an unprecedented lawfare campaign against former President Trump.

N.Y. Judge Cherry-Picks Lowball Mar-a-Lago Appraisal To Find Trump Guilty Of Inflating Property Values

A Democrat judge relied on an appraisal of Mar-a-Lago that valued the compound at a small fraction of what it's worth compared to neighboring Palm Beach properties.