REAL WORLD EVENT DISCUSSIONS

Do you feel like the winds of change are blowing today too?

POSTED BY: 6IXSTRINGJACK
UPDATED: Thursday, December 4, 2025 11:20
SHORT URL:
VIEWED: 101296
PAGE 81 of 81

Monday, December 1, 2025 10:20 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


Quote:

Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

That's a message from human beings to other human beings.

We don't exactly know what you are, but you aren't a part of the group.

Go fuck yourself, you miserable little piece of dog shit.

Any group that votes for Trump more than once is a group of evil people. 6ixStringJoker, did you smoke a cigarette and watch porn this morning to launch your day?

Journalists say they know why Trump pardoned Honduran drug trafficker

“Let’s be very clear: the narco dictator Trump is pardoning was beloved by the crypto world for creating lawless, sovereign zones for tech utopias organized around crypto,” wrote journalist Ryan Grim in a social media post on X. “The current [government] moved to shut them down. The crypto class fought back and Trump is now doing their bidding.”

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/journalists-say-they-know-why-tru
mp-pardoned-honduran-drug-trafficker/ar-AA1RrlMv


---------

Trump Gives Bonkers Excuse for Pardoning Drug-Runner President

President Donald Trump thinks a former Central American leader was simply set up by the Biden administration.

By Julia Ornedo | Dec. 1 2025 6:30AM EST

https://www.thedailybeast.com/trumps-bonkers-excuse-for-pardoning-scan
dalous-honduran-ex-president
/

President Donald Trump defended his pardon of a former Honduran president who once bragged that he would “stuff the drugs up the gringos’ noses.”

Trump, 79, stood by his announcement on Friday that he would grant “a full and complete pardon” of Juan Orlando Hernandez, the 57-year-old former Honduran leader who was sentenced to 45 years in prison last year after he was convicted of drug trafficking and firearms offenses.

“Well, I was told—I was asked by Honduras, many of the people of Honduras, they said it was a Biden setup,” Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One on Sunday. “He was the president of the country. And they basically said he was a drug dealer because he was the president of the country.”

The Justice Department, under former President Joe Biden, had said Hernandez “abused his power to support one of the largest and most violent drug trafficking conspiracies in the world,” helping heavily armed traffickers smuggle as much as 400 tons of cocaine into the U.S.—all while publicly promoting anti-narcotics policies in the Central American nation.

The prosecution of Hernandez began in Trump’s first term and concluded under Biden. Hernandez was extradited to the U.S. in 2022 and sentenced in a New York federal courtroom two years later for taking bribes from drug traffickers to move “well over approximately 4.5 billion individual doses of cocaine.”

In 2021, a witness recalled Hernandez as saying, “We are going to stuff the drugs up the gringos’ noses, and they’re never even going to know it.”

But Trump insisted Sunday that “the people of Honduras really thought he was set up, and it was a terrible thing.”

“He was the president of the country, and they basically said he was a drug dealer because he was the president of the country, and they said it was a Biden administration setup. And I looked at the facts, and I agreed with that,” he claimed.

When a reporter asked him to share any evidence showing that Hernandez was set up, Trump replied: “They could say that you take any country you want, if somebody sells drugs in that country, that doesn’t mean you arrest the president and put him in jail for the rest of his life. That includes this country.”

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

NOTIFY: Y   |  REPLY  |  REPLY WITH QUOTE  |  TOP  |  HOME  

Monday, December 1, 2025 10:28 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:

Originally posted by second:
Quote:

Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

That's a message from human beings to other human beings.

We don't exactly know what you are, but you aren't a part of the group.

Go fuck yourself, you miserable little piece of dog shit.

Any group that votes for Trump more than once is a group of evil people.



Says the most evil person I've ever known personally.

Shut the fuck up. We're finished with you.

AMERICA is finished with you.

--------------------------------------------------

Be Nice. Don't be a dick.

NOTIFY: Y   |  REPLY  |  REPLY WITH QUOTE  |  TOP  |  HOME  

Monday, December 1, 2025 5:03 PM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


Quote:

Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

Says the most evil person I've ever known personally.

Shut the fuck up. We're finished with you.

AMERICA is finished with you.

Why can't Trump remember why he had an MRI?

By Lisa Needham | Monday, December 01, 2025 at 3:30:06p CST

https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2025/12/1/2356309/-Why-can-t-Trump-re
member-why-he-had-an-MRI


President Donald Trump is pretty sure he just had the most perfect MRI of all time, but he can’t quite seem to remember what part of his most perfect body was scanned.

This, of course, raises not one, but two, health concerns: Which health condition is the president hiding that required a magnetic resonance imaging test, and which health condition is the president unwittingly revealing when he can’t seem to recall why he even had an MRI?

He did remember, however, to be a jerk to the female reporters who asked about it, personally attacking one by explaining that he does absolutely know what part of his body was not scanned. Per Trump, no one has shoved his large orange-slathered noggin into an MRI machine because his brain is perfect since he “aced” a cognitive test. He got a “perfect” score, which he told one reporter she would “be incapable of doing.”

Yes, Trump is still running around bragging about his cognitive abilities, seemingly unaware that he’s bragging about having been given the basic cognitive test to check for cognitive impairments such as dementia.

Back in his first term, Trump’s unreleased tax returns arguably represented everything we knew was bad about him, but didn’t have specifics for. Much like this mysterious MRI, Trump was forever promising those tax returns would be released at some point in the future, all the while fighting to stop them from ever seeing the light of day.

Fast-forward eight years, and it seems quaint to care about that. Trump’s second-term corruption is so open and obvious that seeing his tax returns wouldn’t really tell us anything we don’t already know. When the House finally released six years of Trump’s returns, including those from his first term, in 2022, it wasn’t as much a revelation as a confirmation: Trump’s a tax cheat who is bought and paid for.

During Trump’s second term, the mysterious yet perfect yet still unknown MRI results serve the same function as the quest for his tax returns did: We all know there is something very bad regarding Trump’s health, but we don’t have specifics about it.

What we do have, though, is evidence of someone falling apart while insisting everything is totally fine and normal.

Is it normal for the president to take a little unscheduled wander along the White House rooftop?

Is it normal that the president keeps insisting that his creepy, heavily bruised, disintegrating hand is totally just from lots of handshaking, as if Donald J. Trump were the first president to shake a lot of hands? Or that after confirming Trump was diagnosed with chronic venous insufficiency, which was glaringly obvious from his visibly swollen ankles, the White House tried to claim that it is also the reason for the creepy hand?

Is it normal that the president is using the r-word to slur a Democratic elected official—who just happened to be the vice presidential candidate in the 2024 election?

Hilariously, that attack on Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz seems to have backfired, with Walz, unruffled, responding “Release the MRI results.”

While Trump has a history of vulgar name-calling, his other recent behavior is raising eyebrows.

He’s out here pardoning people but he can’t say who they are or why he’s doing it. He falls asleep during meetings and then gets furious if people point that out. Yes, Donald, the radical left conspired to make you fall asleep on camera.

Additionally, last time we checked, neither chronic venous insufficiency nor oodles of handshaking explain Trump’s ongoing decompensation when talking to female reporters, calling one “piggy” and another “insubordinate” for daring to do their jobs and ask him questions.

Sure, it would be great to pry loose those MRI results. These days, you can assume a New York Times reporter probably already has them, but needs to keep it quiet until they secure a blockbuster second-term tell-all book deal.

And, in the end, what would those results reveal that we don’t already know?

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

NOTIFY: Y   |  REPLY  |  REPLY WITH QUOTE  |  TOP  |  HOME  

Monday, December 1, 2025 5:41 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:

Originally posted by second:
Quote:

Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

Says the most evil person I've ever known personally.

Shut the fuck up. We're finished with you.

AMERICA is finished with you.

Why can't Trump remember why he had an MRI?



I dunno...

Why can't you remember what you post 5 minutes ago and regularly put your hypocrisy regarding every issue under the sun on full display here every single day?

Maybe you and Trump have a lot more in common with each other than you think and you're both retarded in your own special ways?

--------------------------------------------------

Be Nice. Don't be a dick.

NOTIFY: Y   |  REPLY  |  REPLY WITH QUOTE  |  TOP  |  HOME  

Monday, December 1, 2025 6:13 PM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


Quote:

Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

I dunno...

Why can't you remember what you post 5 minutes ago and regularly put your hypocrisy regarding every issue under the sun on full display here every single day?

Maybe you and Trump have a lot more in common with each other than you think and you're both retarded in your own special ways?

Lest we forget… Trumptards claim that Democrats shut the entire world down for 2 years over a cold.

One of our biggest divides is over remembering who was president in 2020.

Hint: Trump.

On Friday, March 13, 2020, President Trump declared a national emergency under provisions of the Stafford Disaster Relief and Emergency Assistance Act of 1988 (Stafford Act) . . .

https://balderson.house.gov/coronavirus-updates/president-trump-declar
es-national-emergency.htm


https://www.politico.com/news/2020/03/13/coronavirus-emergency-declara
tion-trump-128530


"In addition to his executive actions, Trump has pressed Congress for an economic stimulus package that could amount to hundreds of billions of dollars." Actually, $7,800 billion. Seeing all that new money, the people who set prices proceeded to raise prices in order to capture that $7.8 trillion for themselves, thanking Trump for making the wealth transfer possible.

https://www.propublica.org/article/national-debt-trump

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

NOTIFY: Y   |  REPLY  |  REPLY WITH QUOTE  |  TOP  |  HOME  

Tuesday, December 2, 2025 7:24 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


Lock Them Up for War Crimes

Secretary of War Pete Hegseth must be prosecuted for murdering Venezuelan civilians on a speedboat

Dec 01, 2025

https://democracydefender2025.substack.com/p/pete-hegseth-war-crime-ve
nezuela


In September 2025, a U.S. military operation in the Caribbean resulted in the deaths of several Venezuelan civilians aboard speedboats. While the Secretary of War Pete Hegseth framed the incident as a counter-narcotics operation, evidence suggests that he ordered the survivors to be executed. The killings violated international humanitarian law (IHL), specifically the Geneva Conventions and the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC). Hegseth’s actions constitute war crimes including extrajudicial killings, disproportionate use of force, and violations of the principle of distinction between combatants and civilians. He must be held accountable under international law and prosecuted for these alleged crimes.

The Legal Framework: War Crimes and International Law

War crimes are defined under Article 8 of the Rome Statute as serious violations of the laws and customs of war, including:

1. Willful killing (Article 8(2)(a)(i))

2. Intentionally directing attacks against civilians (Article 8(2)(b)(i))

3. Excessive incidental death, injury, or damage (Article 8(2)(b)(iv))

4. Violations of the principles of distinction and proportionality (Additional Protocol I to the Geneva Conventions)

Precedents for Prosecuting High-Ranking Officials

Several high-profile cases demonstrate that military and political leaders can be held accountable for war crimes:

1. Slobodan Miloševic (Yugoslavia) – Prosecuted by the ICTY for war crimes in Bosnia.

2. Charles Taylor (Liberia) – Convicted by the Special Court for Sierra Leone for aiding and abetting war crimes.

3. Omar al-Bashir (Sudan) – Indicted by the ICC for genocide and war crimes in Darfur.

4. U.S. Cases – While no U.S. official has been convicted by the ICC, former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld faced civil lawsuits in Europe for torture at Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo.

If the U.S. fails to prosecute Hegseth domestically, the ICC could assert jurisdiction under Article 12 of the Rome Statute, especially if Venezuela (a party to the ICC) refers the case.

Much more at
https://democracydefender2025.substack.com/p/pete-hegseth-war-crime-ve
nezuela


The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

NOTIFY: Y   |  REPLY  |  REPLY WITH QUOTE  |  TOP  |  HOME  

Tuesday, December 2, 2025 7:57 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:

Originally posted by second:
Quote:

Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

I dunno...

Why can't you remember what you post 5 minutes ago and regularly put your hypocrisy regarding every issue under the sun on full display here every single day?

Maybe you and Trump have a lot more in common with each other than you think and you're both retarded in your own special ways?

Lest we forget…



You forget everything.

Save your bullshit in here. Nobody is going down for any war crimes.

This is just another bullshit issue of yours to throw on the heap of bullshit issues you've posted here over the years and forgotten completely about 5 minutes later.

You suck dude. You're invisible now.

People don't even hate your kind anymore. We don't even see you anymore.

You no longer even exist in our world.

--------------------------------------------------

Be Nice. Don't be a dick.

NOTIFY: Y   |  REPLY  |  REPLY WITH QUOTE  |  TOP  |  HOME  

Tuesday, December 2, 2025 9:33 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


Quote:

Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Quote:

Originally posted by second:
Quote:

Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

I dunno...

Why can't you remember what you post 5 minutes ago and regularly put your hypocrisy regarding every issue under the sun on full display here every single day?

Maybe you and Trump have a lot more in common with each other than you think and you're both retarded in your own special ways?

Lest we forget…



You forget everything.

Save your bullshit in here. Nobody is going down for any war crimes.

This is just another bullshit issue of yours to throw on the heap of bullshit issues you've posted here over the years and forgotten completely about 5 minutes later.

You suck dude. You're invisible now.

People don't even hate your kind anymore. We don't even see you anymore.

You no longer even exist in our world.

--------------------------------------------------

Be Nice. Don't be a dick.

The legal system to bring Secretary of War Pete Hegseth to justice is the same one used on Slobodan Miloševic (Yugoslavia). Slobby died of old age before justice could be done because the legal system doesn't function. There are alternative methods completely outside of the legal system. Two bullets in the back of Pete's head would be quick justice, but that requires somebody who understands how fucked up the legal system is and who cares enough to fix what is wrong with Pete.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

NOTIFY: Y   |  REPLY  |  REPLY WITH QUOTE  |  TOP  |  HOME  

Tuesday, December 2, 2025 9:34 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


Trump Fury Erupts at NYT as Mental Decline Visibly Worsens

As Trump’s rage at the paper of record reveals too much, the author of a piece on Trump as a “lame duck dictator” explains how devastating it is for him that his carefully cultivated illusion of strength is collapsing.

President Trump is very, very angry about a New York Times piece that carefully documents his obvious physical decline. Trump raged over the piece, letting out a stream of lies about his performance in office and even attacking the reporter who wrote the piece as ugly. This may seem typical of Trump, but we think it gets at something deeper. Trump’s entire political mystique is premised on the fiction that he’s a strong, virile, formidable figure who wields absolute mastery over his enemies at all times. His defensive eruption shows that he knows that the second his aura of strength is deflated and he comes to be seen as a shriveled, floundering figure, his whole political house of cards is in danger of collapsing. David Lurie, a lawyer who writes for the Public Notice Substack, has a good new piece developing a framework that describes Trump as a “lame duck dictator.”

https://newrepublic.com/article/203765/transcript-trump-fury-erupts-ny
t-mental-decline-visibly-worsens


Sargent: So the New York Times piece is pretty devastating. It talks about how Trump has been dozing off at events, how he’s traveling a good deal less than he used to, how he’s seen in public less often. There’s this brutal video of him embedded in the piece looking exhausted and befuddled. He comes to the Oval Office for work at 11 a.m. The piece even implied that Trump is now eyeing the great beyond. David, what did you make of this piece?

Lurie: Well, Greg, on the one hand, the piece was quite gentle to Trump because it avoided the elephant in the room, which is his very evident and advancing state of dementia. But it also was devastating for the reasons that you observed, because his sheer and pervasive state of exhaustion and his ever more inescapable showing of his age is exactly what Trump cannot abide. It’s devastating precisely because it was so factual. The video was perhaps the most devastating part of it, as was the very accurate description of the truly bizarre—I think historically bizarre—moment when a pharmaceutical executive collapsed next to Trump and he—in a state of bewilderment mixed with the apparent desire to remain the center of attention—stood up from his chair and then stared into the void. So it’s a devastating piece, and it’s devastating because of its factuality, in my view.

Sargent: Well, I think you raise a really important point in saying that it, if anything, danced around the elephant in the room, which is that he is in a state of serious mental decline, as well. We can all see it. It’s apparent to everybody at all times. He posted a long Truth Social rant, in which he said, “The creeps at the failing New York Times are at it again.” He claimed that he won in 2024 by a landslide, that he settled eight wars, that our economy is great, that he has his highest poll numbers ever. He even called the Times’ Katie Rogers ugly on the inside and out. Now, David, on the substance, all of that is bullshit. He won the narrowest victory in recent memory. He hasn’t settled anything close to eight wars. Our economy is in rough shape, and his polling has hit a new low. But there’s a real hit-dog quality to the lying here. Don’t you think, David?

Lurie: Well, on the one hand, it’s his greatest hits. But on the other hand, people are not imagining that Trump is becoming more out of control, that he’s becoming more misogynistic, that he lacks impulse control, which causes his natural meanness and bullying tendencies to come out.

Sargent: I want to bring in something Fox News did here because it’s extraordinary. There was a recent Fox poll, which had Trump’s approval on the economy at 38 percent to 61 percent disapproval, Trump’s approval on tariffs at 35 to 63, and his approval on health care at 34 to 64. Absolutely terrible numbers in the 30s stuck down there. He’s floundering. But then Media Matters documented that Fox personalities, after this poll came out, buried the poll and instead showered him with all this obsequious praise. Portraying him as this world-historical figure—one of them even described him as a king whose ring people were going to kiss, literally described Trump that way. They were almost apologetic about their own network’s poll showing him as really, really weak, so they had to make up for it. I think what that gets at, David, is that Trump’s own propagandists understand how important this aura of strength is to his political mystique.

Lurie: When the character image is punctured in any way, there’s a risk the whole balloon is going to lose its air. It’s the reason that the Fox News personalities recognize they have to engage in these obsequious and absurd, embarrassing demonstrations of praise, because otherwise the image is vulnerable. It’s ever more vulnerable. And when it goes, there’s really nothing left—nothing left at all.

Sargent: Exactly. You had this piece—you came up with the frame of the lame duck dictator, which is a good way to describe this. Now it’s common for presidents to present themselves as healthy and strong to the public. We’ve seen that over the decades. We’ve seen it for a long time. But Trump is doing something a little different here, I think. It’s more akin to those pictures of Vladimir Putin shirtless on horseback. This sort of cultishness is a hallmark of authoritarian politics, right? Do you see some of those strains in what Trump’s doing? What’s your sense of that?

Lurie: Well, first of all, I think we’re past the point of having a strain of authoritarianism. It doesn’t mean that we are Putin’s Russia. In fact, it’s because we’re not that we’re seeing the kind of displays that you pointed to. It’s because Trump—and his acolytes and, in the case of Fox News, the businesses that depend on the media-slash-political industry that he is the center of—all depend on Trump appearing to be like Vladimir Putin. Vladimir Putin—his regime depends on him appearing to be something he’s not. Well, Trump, it’s even more the case, right? Here we are in—Trump is, and his people are trying to append a dictatorship to the United States. And yes, it appeared for some time that they were going to succeed. I mean, Trump has been functioning as a dictator in many respects, but the problem is, of course, that it’s a vulnerable dictatorship. Virtually none of these abuses are popular with the American people. And unlike in Russia, where you can—the dictator can—actually kill a million Russians or send a million Russians to their death in a pointless war, in the United States, when presidents, even those who aspire like Trump to be a dictator, do things that are wildly unpopular—there is a political impact. And it’s coming home to roost for Trump, in my opinion.

Sargent: Well, I want to home in on your point about how this illusion of strength is necessary for masking the weaknesses of this presidency; the structural, deep weaknesses. You see White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt constantly talking about how energetic Trump is. You see his doctor’s reports on his glowing health becoming something almost comical. We’ve all seen these Cabinet meetings where one after another of these figures functions as a North Korea–style propagandist for him, obsequiously bowing down to him, talking about how strong he is, how powerful he is, how—and this is important—what a world-historical figure he is. This is an essential piece of a lot of it. And I think we see with Trump’s reaction to this Times piece that he and they all know how important that illusion of strength is, right? But what his crazy response reveals is that the only way to prop up that illusion is with a lot of lies, and also what’s revealed is that they know how dangerous it is for him to be perceived as weak and diminished. Hence the absurd overreaction.

Lurie: When the image of strength is the linchpin of a leader’s political success, then all it takes is a puncturing of the image for the success to start to dissipate. And then all of the tools that have been used in the past to promote Trump’s image—some of which you were just referring to, right: the praising of him in the weird Cabinet meetings—they actually end up weakening him. And that, I believe, is the dynamic.

Sargent: I want to close on what I think is a real tension in this situation. It’s between Trump’s political weakness on the one hand, his unpopularity on the one hand, and, on the other hand, his consolidation of authoritarian power. He is a lame duck, as you put it, right? He’s politically weak. He’s unpopular. He’s physically and mentally declining in pretty much every way. And it’s right out there for the country to see the emperor’s clothes have fallen off. And so, given that tension, they have another reason to try to prop up this illusion of strength, mastery, virility, et cetera. It’s so that people don’t resist—they see his triumph over them as inevitable. I thought your piece got at this. In essence, what we’ve got is people not accepting the emperor as he’s being presented to us. And that’s essential, right? It’s essential that they’re not accepting the strong-emperor fiction.

Lurie: It’s now becoming clear that actually having communities organized, particularly through churches and other community organizations, is really, really impairing the invasions on a local level. When they went into North Carolina, particularly through the Catholic Church, communities were immediately organized as soon as they got there. And what had taken a number of weeks to start to organize in Los Angeles, and a shorter period of time to organize in Chicago, took a much—even that much—shorter time to organize in North Carolina, which I believe must have surprised Bovino and Trump. I think they thought they were going into an easy target. At the same time, it’s a much longer conversation, but I think that we’re seeing that his weakness in Washington is developing in a multiplicity of ways. It’s not just the quote-unquote “crack-up of MAGA.” And it’s not just the effectiveness of the ACA strategy that the Democrats implemented well before the shutdown, through the shutdown and continued to now. It’s that when the resistance is effectuated and when it’s shown to have a base of popularity, it starts to bring to the fore that Trump’s not a populist leader—politicians start—including Republicans start—to get worried that if they go along with it, they’re going to pay a price, which is not something they for whatever reason recognized months ago. It was the perceived power of Trump that has been the key to the quote-unquote “success” that he’s realized to this point. And it is the diminishment of that appearance of power that is actually the key to the diminishment of his actual power. I think that’s really what we’re getting at.

Sargent: To sum up, David Lurie, he’s a lame duck dictator and he’s getting a lot lamer, which is going to make him get more dictatorial, but it’s going to fail for him. David Lurie, thank you so much for coming on, man. Great stuff.

Lurie: My pleasure.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

NOTIFY: Y   |  REPLY  |  REPLY WITH QUOTE  |  TOP  |  HOME  

Tuesday, December 2, 2025 10:19 AM

THG

Keep it real please


Quote:

Originally posted by second:

Trump Fury Erupts at NYT as Mental Decline Visibly Worsens

As Trump’s rage at the paper of record reveals too much, the author of a piece on Trump as a “lame duck dictator” explains how devastating it is for him that his carefully cultivated illusion of strength is collapsing.

President Trump is very, very angry about a New York Times piece that carefully documents his obvious physical decline. Trump raged over the piece, letting out a stream of lies about his performance in office and even attacking the reporter who wrote the piece as ugly. This may seem typical of Trump, but we think it gets at something deeper. Trump’s entire political mystique is premised on the fiction that he’s a strong, virile, formidable figure who wields absolute mastery over his enemies at all times. His defensive eruption shows that he knows that the second his aura of strength is deflated and he comes to be seen as a shriveled, floundering figure, his whole political house of cards is in danger of collapsing. David Lurie, a lawyer who writes for the Public Notice Substack, has a good new piece developing a framework that describes Trump as a “lame duck dictator.”

https://newrepublic.com/article/203765/transcript-trump-fury-erupts-ny
t-mental-decline-visibly-worsens


Sargent: So the New York Times piece is pretty devastating. It talks about how Trump has been dozing off at events, how he’s traveling a good deal less than he used to, how he’s seen in public less often. There’s this brutal video of him embedded in the piece looking exhausted and befuddled. He comes to the Oval Office for work at 11 a.m. The piece even implied that Trump is now eyeing the great beyond. David, what did you make of this piece?

Lurie: Well, Greg, on the one hand, the piece was quite gentle to Trump because it avoided the elephant in the room, which is his very evident and advancing state of dementia. But it also was devastating for the reasons that you observed, because his sheer and pervasive state of exhaustion and his ever more inescapable showing of his age is exactly what Trump cannot abide. It’s devastating precisely because it was so factual. The video was perhaps the most devastating part of it, as was the very accurate description of the truly bizarre—I think historically bizarre—moment when a pharmaceutical executive collapsed next to Trump and he—in a state of bewilderment mixed with the apparent desire to remain the center of attention—stood up from his chair and then stared into the void. So it’s a devastating piece, and it’s devastating because of its factuality, in my view.

Sargent: Well, I think you raise a really important point in saying that it, if anything, danced around the elephant in the room, which is that he is in a state of serious mental decline, as well. We can all see it. It’s apparent to everybody at all times. He posted a long Truth Social rant, in which he said, “The creeps at the failing New York Times are at it again.” He claimed that he won in 2024 by a landslide, that he settled eight wars, that our economy is great, that he has his highest poll numbers ever. He even called the Times’ Katie Rogers ugly on the inside and out. Now, David, on the substance, all of that is bullshit. He won the narrowest victory in recent memory. He hasn’t settled anything close to eight wars. Our economy is in rough shape, and his polling has hit a new low. But there’s a real hit-dog quality to the lying here. Don’t you think, David?

Lurie: Well, on the one hand, it’s his greatest hits. But on the other hand, people are not imagining that Trump is becoming more out of control, that he’s becoming more misogynistic, that he lacks impulse control, which causes his natural meanness and bullying tendencies to come out.

Sargent: I want to bring in something Fox News did here because it’s extraordinary. There was a recent Fox poll, which had Trump’s approval on the economy at 38 percent to 61 percent disapproval, Trump’s approval on tariffs at 35 to 63, and his approval on health care at 34 to 64. Absolutely terrible numbers in the 30s stuck down there. He’s floundering. But then Media Matters documented that Fox personalities, after this poll came out, buried the poll and instead showered him with all this obsequious praise. Portraying him as this world-historical figure—one of them even described him as a king whose ring people were going to kiss, literally described Trump that way. They were almost apologetic about their own network’s poll showing him as really, really weak, so they had to make up for it. I think what that gets at, David, is that Trump’s own propagandists understand how important this aura of strength is to his political mystique.

Lurie: When the character image is punctured in any way, there’s a risk the whole balloon is going to lose its air. It’s the reason that the Fox News personalities recognize they have to engage in these obsequious and absurd, embarrassing demonstrations of praise, because otherwise the image is vulnerable. It’s ever more vulnerable. And when it goes, there’s really nothing left—nothing left at all.

Sargent: Exactly. You had this piece—you came up with the frame of the lame duck dictator, which is a good way to describe this. Now it’s common for presidents to present themselves as healthy and strong to the public. We’ve seen that over the decades. We’ve seen it for a long time. But Trump is doing something a little different here, I think. It’s more akin to those pictures of Vladimir Putin shirtless on horseback. This sort of cultishness is a hallmark of authoritarian politics, right? Do you see some of those strains in what Trump’s doing? What’s your sense of that?

Lurie: Well, first of all, I think we’re past the point of having a strain of authoritarianism. It doesn’t mean that we are Putin’s Russia. In fact, it’s because we’re not that we’re seeing the kind of displays that you pointed to. It’s because Trump—and his acolytes and, in the case of Fox News, the businesses that depend on the media-slash-political industry that he is the center of—all depend on Trump appearing to be like Vladimir Putin. Vladimir Putin—his regime depends on him appearing to be something he’s not. Well, Trump, it’s even more the case, right? Here we are in—Trump is, and his people are trying to append a dictatorship to the United States. And yes, it appeared for some time that they were going to succeed. I mean, Trump has been functioning as a dictator in many respects, but the problem is, of course, that it’s a vulnerable dictatorship. Virtually none of these abuses are popular with the American people. And unlike in Russia, where you can—the dictator can—actually kill a million Russians or send a million Russians to their death in a pointless war, in the United States, when presidents, even those who aspire like Trump to be a dictator, do things that are wildly unpopular—there is a political impact. And it’s coming home to roost for Trump, in my opinion.

Sargent: Well, I want to home in on your point about how this illusion of strength is necessary for masking the weaknesses of this presidency; the structural, deep weaknesses. You see White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt constantly talking about how energetic Trump is. You see his doctor’s reports on his glowing health becoming something almost comical. We’ve all seen these Cabinet meetings where one after another of these figures functions as a North Korea–style propagandist for him, obsequiously bowing down to him, talking about how strong he is, how powerful he is, how—and this is important—what a world-historical figure he is. This is an essential piece of a lot of it. And I think we see with Trump’s reaction to this Times piece that he and they all know how important that illusion of strength is, right? But what his crazy response reveals is that the only way to prop up that illusion is with a lot of lies, and also what’s revealed is that they know how dangerous it is for him to be perceived as weak and diminished. Hence the absurd overreaction.

Lurie: When the image of strength is the linchpin of a leader’s political success, then all it takes is a puncturing of the image for the success to start to dissipate. And then all of the tools that have been used in the past to promote Trump’s image—some of which you were just referring to, right: the praising of him in the weird Cabinet meetings—they actually end up weakening him. And that, I believe, is the dynamic.

Sargent: I want to close on what I think is a real tension in this situation. It’s between Trump’s political weakness on the one hand, his unpopularity on the one hand, and, on the other hand, his consolidation of authoritarian power. He is a lame duck, as you put it, right? He’s politically weak. He’s unpopular. He’s physically and mentally declining in pretty much every way. And it’s right out there for the country to see the emperor’s clothes have fallen off. And so, given that tension, they have another reason to try to prop up this illusion of strength, mastery, virility, et cetera. It’s so that people don’t resist—they see his triumph over them as inevitable. I thought your piece got at this. In essence, what we’ve got is people not accepting the emperor as he’s being presented to us. And that’s essential, right? It’s essential that they’re not accepting the strong-emperor fiction.

Lurie: It’s now becoming clear that actually having communities organized, particularly through churches and other community organizations, is really, really impairing the invasions on a local level. When they went into North Carolina, particularly through the Catholic Church, communities were immediately organized as soon as they got there. And what had taken a number of weeks to start to organize in Los Angeles, and a shorter period of time to organize in Chicago, took a much—even that much—shorter time to organize in North Carolina, which I believe must have surprised Bovino and Trump. I think they thought they were going into an easy target. At the same time, it’s a much longer conversation, but I think that we’re seeing that his weakness in Washington is developing in a multiplicity of ways. It’s not just the quote-unquote “crack-up of MAGA.” And it’s not just the effectiveness of the ACA strategy that the Democrats implemented well before the shutdown, through the shutdown and continued to now. It’s that when the resistance is effectuated and when it’s shown to have a base of popularity, it starts to bring to the fore that Trump’s not a populist leader—politicians start—including Republicans start—to get worried that if they go along with it, they’re going to pay a price, which is not something they for whatever reason recognized months ago. It was the perceived power of Trump that has been the key to the quote-unquote “success” that he’s realized to this point. And it is the diminishment of that appearance of power that is actually the key to the diminishment of his actual power. I think that’s really what we’re getting at.

Sargent: To sum up, David Lurie, he’s a lame duck dictator and he’s getting a lot lamer, which is going to make him get more dictatorial, but it’s going to fail for him. David Lurie, thank you so much for coming on, man. Great stuff.

Lurie: My pleasure.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two





The thing about Trump as I see it, is that it shows those here who support Trump to be hypocrites of the umpteenth degree. All their negative posts over the years about politicians and political parties acting badly according to their moral standards, is/was bullshit. Their moral standards align with Trump’s, and he has no morals.

All the shit they claimed to be true about Biden that was false, Trump is doing, again, to the umpteenth degree with impunity.

We can post many different sources for what we post, only to have them call it fake, lies, or they agree with Trump’s path of immorally deconstructing America.

Two words that comes to mind describing their behavior is; ignorant troll.

T


NOTIFY: Y   |  REPLY  |  REPLY WITH QUOTE  |  TOP  |  HOME  

Tuesday, December 2, 2025 1:14 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:

Originally posted by THG:
The thing about Trump as I see it, is that it shows those here who support Trump to be hypocrites of the umpteenth degree.



You look like the dumbest person in the world saying shit like this.

This is why you need to look at threads of shit you've said in the past when I repost them.

You are a hypocrite to the core, buddy.

Nobody gives a single fuck what you think about them. Take your opinions and shove them up your ass before I do it for you again.

--------------------------------------------------

Be Nice. Don't be a dick.

NOTIFY: Y   |  REPLY  |  REPLY WITH QUOTE  |  TOP  |  HOME  

Wednesday, December 3, 2025 6:30 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


Trump Claims MRI on His Brain Found Nothing

Andy Borowitz | Dec 01, 2025

WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report) — Boasting about his cognitive health, on Monday Donald J. Trump asserted that an MRI performed on his brain found nothing.

"I had a perfect MRI," he told reporters. "The greatest doctors in the country looked at my brain and came up empty."

Trump said there was no point in releasing his MRI because "there's nothing to see," adding, "It's like the East Wing."

___________________

Governor Newsom Press Office @GovPressOffice

Summary of Governor Gavin C. Newsom’s Advanced Imaging Results

Physician to the Governor
State of California

Memorandum
December 1, 2025
To The Media
From Dr. Dolittle, MD., PhD., Governor’s Physician, Chief of Peak Human Performance

For Immediate Release

As part of Governor Gavin Newsom’s annual physical, we conducted advanced imaging of his cardiovascular, musculoskeletal, and neurological health. I’m pleased to report that nothing about the Governor’s health is merely normal. Governor Newsom remains the healthiest human currently alive or recorded in medical history.

His cardiovascular scans are the best we’ve ever recorded. His arteries were described as shimmering, and his resting heart rate was so steady the EKG machine asked if he was meditating or just naturally enlightened.

His bone density is exceptional. A radiologist briefly wondered if we’d scanned a redwood, and his brain imaging showed no issues other than an unusually active region associated with intelligence, multitasking, and being wildly productive before sunrise.

While we do not typically comment on the health of other elected officials, we are aware of a letter released today from the White House claiming that President Trump is in excellent health. We simply note that Governor Newsom completes full workdays without falling asleep in meetings, does not require executive time to lie down and watch TV during work hours, and is able to stand upright without looking like the leaning Tower of Pisa.

If a side by side health chart were released, we recommend redacting it for the President’s emotional well being.

Governor Newsom remains the healthiest person alive and ever to live. Please direct follow up questions to my office.

Respectfully,
Dr. Dolittle

Physician to the Governor
California Department of Peak Excellence

Help this information get to more voters. A well-informed electorate is a prerequisite to Democracy.—Thomas Jefferson

https://www.facebook.com/voteinorout/posts/governor-newsom-press-offic
egovpressofficesummary-of-governor-gavin-c-newsoms-ad/1485572413570927
/

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

NOTIFY: Y   |  REPLY  |  REPLY WITH QUOTE  |  TOP  |  HOME  

Wednesday, December 3, 2025 7:06 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


Trump to Disaster Victims: Drop Dead

Sorry, but we don’t help the little people

By Paul Krugman | Dec 03, 2025

https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/trump-to-disaster-victims-drop-dead

The Mississippi flood of 1927 was one of America’s greatest natural disasters. Some 27,000 square miles were inundated, in some cases by 30 feet of water. Hundreds, maybe thousands, died — many of the victims were poor and Black, and their deaths went unrecorded. Around 700,000 people were displaced — equivalent to about 2 million people today, adjusting for population growth.

How did America respond? Initially, President Calvin Coolidge was adamantly opposed to any federal role in disaster relief, declaring that “The Government is not an insurer of its citizens against the hazard of the elements.” His refusal to provide aid was, however, deeply unpopular, and he eventually gave in to demands from Congress to deliver government aid.

Ever since that catastrophic flood, providing government aid to the victims of natural disasters has been an integral part of the American Way: federal aid to disaster victims became the norm after the Mississippi flood. Yet it was often a haphazard, uncoordinated process until 1979, when the federal response to natural disasters was consolidated under the Federal Emergency Management Agency.

Since then FEMA has become a well-established part of the American social safety net, especially in the face of worsening climate catastrophes. Americans have come to rely on FEMA as a first line of support after disasters. And when FEMA was seen to be falling down on the job, as it did after Hurricane Katrina virtually destroyed New Orleans in 2005, Americans were angry. The fact is, they want FEMA to be better, not smaller. In a July poll, only 9 percent of Americans wanted to see FEMA eliminated, and only another 10 percent wanted to see its budget cut.

Donald Trump, however, believes that he knows better than the majority of Americans. In June he announced his intention to dismantle FEMA and force the states to assume responsibility for disaster relief. While Trump publicly backed down after an intense public backlash, in practice he is gutting FEMA nonetheless. He is drastically scaling back federal emergency aid, even for communities in which the need for federal assistance is overwhelming.

The latest example of Trump’s stiffing those in need is in rural northern Michigan, where the power grid suffered severe damage from an ice storm last March. Rebuilding the power lines will cost thousands of dollars for each household served by the region’s power cooperatives. Without outside help, that cost will have to be paid by the cooperatives’ customers, a huge burden on a relatively poor part of the state. Yet FEMA has turned down the state’s request for aid, in an unprecedented break with past policies.

Adding further injury to Michiganders, who – by the way – voted to deliver the presidency to Donald Trump in 2024, the Trump administration has ordered another Michigan utility to keep an aging, unneeded, highly polluting coal-fired power plant operating, at a cost to ratepayers of $113 million so far, and ongoing at $615,000 per day.

Trump tried, unsuccessfully, to withhold wildfire aid from California unless it adopted voter ID. He has also tried to divert aid away from states that, in his view, aren’t cooperating with his immigration policies, although the courts stopped him. But the storm-hit areas that he is currently refusing to help are, or plausibly “were”, Trump country. The map on the left shows the areas covered by different Michigan electricity utilities; #3 and #7 are the utilities seeking FEMA aid. The map on the right shows the 2024 presidential vote by county, with deeper red corresponding to a higher Trump share:


Since this is not another case of Trump’s political retribution, what lies behind the denial of aid? I believe that it is a knee-jerk dominance display on Trump’s part. Whenever someone comes to him in need, whether its Volodomyr Zelensky, helpless African children dependent on USAID, or rural Michiganers, his cruelty is activated. And he likes surrounding himself with those of the same ilk: Stephen Miller, Pete Hegseth, and Kristi Noem, the secretary of homeland security, who impeded and slow-walked the emergency response to deadly Texas flooding back in July.

But that’s not all: there’s also an ideological component.
The pre-Trump typical conservative argument against government aid restricted itself to programs like food stamps. The usual suspects fulminate against those who need help putting food on the table, asserting that it’s because they have chosen to be poor. In the conservative ideology of Ronald Reagan, helping the poor relieves them of individual responsibility and only makes them lazy.

But those old-time conservatives also recognized a difference between being the victim of a natural disaster and being impoverished. In their view, nobody chooses to have an ice storm or a hurricane. And helping to re-build entire communities didn’t, in their view, encourage sloth.

But that was conservatism then and this is Trumpism now. The fact is that disaster relief runs counter to the libertarian ideology embraced by tech bros like Peter Thiel. In the world of the libertarian tech broligarchy, who believe that they should be running things rather than be constrained by democracy, selfishness is a virtue. Hence they don’t believe that their tax dollars should be used to help others, even when those others are victims of circumstances beyond their control. Oh, that is, unless you are a wealthy Silicon Valley type with deposits at the failed Silicon Valley Bank. They apparently had no problem with a federal bailout of SVB.

In fact, the libertarian tech broligarchy is opposed to the very impulse to care about other people. “The fundamental weakness of Western civilization,” declared Elon Musk last March, “is empathy.”

And let’s not forget — because conservatives never do — that there’s a deeper strategy at play: if you want people to despise and hate government, you don’t want them to see the government doing anything that clearly helps people.

So American victims of natural disasters are being abandoned by Trump. That abandonment reflects his personal cruelty and that of those around him, as well as the ideological allegiance to cruelty among the libertarian tech broligarchy. And the resulting message is clear. Trump to disaster victims, wherever they live and whoever they voted for: Drop dead.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

NOTIFY: Y   |  REPLY  |  REPLY WITH QUOTE  |  TOP  |  HOME  

Wednesday, December 3, 2025 9:09 AM

THG

Keep it real please


Quote:

Originally posted by second:

Trump Claims MRI on His Brain Found Nothing

Andy Borowitz | Dec 01, 2025

WASHINGTON (The Borowitz Report) — Boasting about his cognitive health, on Monday Donald J. Trump asserted that an MRI performed on his brain found nothing.

"I had a perfect MRI," he told reporters. "The greatest doctors in the country looked at my brain and came up empty."

Trump said there was no point in releasing his MRI because "there's nothing to see," adding, "It's like the East Wing."

___________________






Wow, where did it go? Did they eventually find his brain?

too funny...

T


NOTIFY: Y   |  REPLY  |  REPLY WITH QUOTE  |  TOP  |  HOME  

Wednesday, December 3, 2025 10:32 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


A sickening moral slum of an administration

Regarding Venezuela, Ukraine and much more, Trump and his acolytes are worse than simply incompetent.

By George F. Will | December 2, 2025 at 1:47 p.m.

www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2025/12/02/trump-hegseth-rubio-ukraine
-venezuela-boats
/

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth seems to be a war criminal. Without a war. An interesting achievement.

In 1967, novelist Gwyn Griffin published a World War II novel, “An Operational Necessity,” that 58 years later is again pertinent. According to the laws of war, survivors of a sunken ship cannot be attacked. But a German submarine captain, after sinking a French ship, orders the machine-gunning of the ship’s crew, lest their survival endanger his men by revealing where his boat is operating. In the book’s dramatic climax, a postwar tribunal examines the German commander’s moral calculus.

No operational necessity justified Hegseth’s de facto order to kill two survivors clinging to the wreckage of one of the supposed drug boats obliterated by U.S. forces near Venezuela. His order was reported by The Post from two sources (“The order was to kill everybody,” one said) and has not been explicitly denied by Hegseth. President Donald Trump says Hegseth told him that he (Hegseth) “said he did not say that.” If Trump is telling the truth about Hegseth, and Hegseth is telling the truth to Trump, it is strange that (per the Post report) the commander of the boat-destroying operation said he ordered the attack on the survivors to comply with Hegseth’s order.

Forty-four days after the survivors were killed, the four-star admiral who headed the U.S. Southern Command announced he would be leaving that position just a year into what is usually a three-year stint. He did not say why. Inferences are, however, permitted.

The killing of the survivors by this moral slum of an administration should nauseate Americans. A nation incapable of shame is dangerous, not least to itself. As the recent “peace plan” for Ukraine demonstrated.

Marco Rubio, who is secretary of state and Trump’s national security adviser, seemed to be neither when the president released his 28-point plan for Ukraine’s dismemberment. The plan was cobbled together by Trump administration and Russian officials, with no Ukrainians participating. It reads like a wish-list letter from Vladimir Putin to Santa Claus: Ukraine to cede land that Russia has failed to capture in almost four years of aggression; Russia to have a veto over NATO’s composition, peacekeeping forces in Ukraine and the size of Ukraine’s armed forces. And more.

Rubio, whose well-known versatility of convictions is perhaps not infinite, told some of his alarmed former Senate colleagues that the plan was just an opening gambit from Russia — although Trump demanded that Ukraine accept it within days. South Dakota Republican Sen. Mike Rounds, a precise and measured speaker, reported that, in a conference call with a bipartisan group of senators, Rubio said the plan was a Russian proposal: “He made it very clear to us that we are the recipients of a proposal that was delivered to one of our representatives. It is not our recommendation. It is not our peace plan.” Hours later, however, Rubio reversed himself, saying on social media that the United States “authored” the plan.

The administration’s floundering might reflect more than its characteristic incompetence. In a darkening world, systemic weaknesses of prosperous democracies are becoming clearer.

Harvard sociologist Daniel Bell’s 1976 book, “The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism,” argued that capitalism’s success undermines capitalism’s moral and behavioral prerequisites. Affluence produces a culture of present-mindedness and laxity; this undermines thrift, industriousness, discipline and the deferral of gratification.

Today’s cultural contradictions of democracy are: Majorities vote themselves government benefits funded by deficits, which conscript the wealth of future generations who will inherit the national debt. Entitlements crowd out provisions for national security. And an anesthetizing dependency on government produces an inward-turning obliviousness to external dangers, and a flinching from hard truths.

Two weeks ago, the chief of staff of the French army said: “We have the know-how, and we have the economic and demographic strength to dissuade the regime in Moscow. What we are lacking … is the spirit which accepts that we will have to suffer if we are to protect what we are. If our country wavers because it is not ready to lose its children … or to suffer economically because the priority has to be military production, then we are indeed at risk.”

Putin has surely savored the French recoil from these words. And he has noticed that, concerning Ukraine and the attacks on boats near Venezuela, the Trump administration cannot keep its stories straight. This probably is for reasons Sir Walter Scott understood: “Oh, what a tangled web we weave,/ when first we practise to deceive!” Americans are the deceived.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

NOTIFY: Y   |  REPLY  |  REPLY WITH QUOTE  |  TOP  |  HOME  

Wednesday, December 3, 2025 11:52 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


The Last Big Case Against Trump Has Been Dropped

The U.S. justice and political systems have shown that they can’t hold the president and his allies to account for trying to steal the 2020 election.

By David A. Graham | December 2, 2025, 6:33 PM ET

https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/2025/12/trump-georgia-case-dro
pped-election-subversion/685119
/

Even today, nearly five years later, listening to Donald Trump’s call is shocking.

“So look. All I want to do is this. I just want to find 11,780 votes,” he told Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger and a few aides on January 2, 2021. Trump warned Raffensperger, a fellow Republican, that if he didn’t act, he would face prosecution: “That’s a criminal, that’s a criminal offense. And you can’t let that happen. That’s a big risk to you and to Ryan, your lawyer.” And to underscore that he was asking Raffensperger to subvert the election results, he added, “So what are we going to do here, folks? I only need 11,000 votes. Fellas, I need 11,000 votes. Give me a break.”

The Washington Post obtained the call and published it on January 3. Three days later, a crowd of Trump supporters, whipped into a frenzy by the president, marched on the Capitol, attacked police, and sacked the building in an attempt to prevent the certification of Joe Biden’s victory. In the days, weeks, and years to follow, much more would be revealed: a long-running campaign, as dedicated as it was sloppy, to steal the 2020 election.

Trump and several associates were charged for their roles in the scheme in a splashy Georgia indictment, but the case’s dismissal last week, on the eve of the Thanksgiving holiday, received less attention. A judge acted at the request of Peter Skandalakis, the prosecutor appointed to handle the case after Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis, who obtained the indictment, was disqualified from overseeing it. Skandalakis made both legal and practical arguments against the racketeering case, deeming the charges against some of the defendants weak. (The racketeering law allowed Willis to charge many people at once but created a sprawling case.) As for Trump, Skandalakis wrote, “There is no realistic prospect that a sitting President will be compelled to appear in Georgia to stand trial on the allegations in this indictment.” By the time he leaves office, “eight years will have elapsed since the phone call at issue.”

The Georgia case was the last remaining criminal case against Trump, and the last legal or political avenue to hold him accountable for the 2020-election plot. (It was also important because Trump cannot pardon himself or others if convicted in state court.) A federal election-subversion case against him was dismissed after he won reelection last November. State prosecutions against fake electors have not made much headway. And last month, Trump issued pardons to dozens of people implicated in the attempted subversion. In short, Trump has gotten away with his attempt to subvert the election: If the criminal-justice system is incapable of prosecuting attempts to steal an election, then stealing an election is de facto legal.

Each of these cases had its own wrinkles and reasons for failing. In the Georgia case, for example, Willis made grievous errors in judgment, intertwining her personal life and work by hiring a dubiously qualified special prosecutor with whom she was in a romantic relationship. Her racketeering charge was also ambitious but risky, as Skandalakis argued; the collapse of her case against the rapper Young Thug’s YSL group shows how such cases can go wrong.

The federal prosecution was set up for failure by Attorney General Merrick Garland’s decision to slow-walk prosecuting Trump to appear nonpartisan; the result was that by the time Special Counsel Jack Smith took over, he had little time to work. The Supreme Court used much of that time deliberating a challenge from Trump before issuing a startling opinion that gives presidents immunity for a huge range of “official” acts.

Political remedies haven’t worked either. The House voted to impeach Trump for his actions, but the Senate, under the influence of the GOP leader Mitch McConnell, failed to convict him. Republicans fell back on both legalistic claims—they argued that they couldn’t convict Trump once he was no longer president—and a misplaced belief that Trump would never be able to mount a political comeback. And when states tried to disqualify Trump from appearing on the 2024 ballot under the Fourteenth Amendment (a legally questionable approach), the Supreme Court blocked them.

All that remains are a few cases against the fake electors who allegedly formed alternative pro-Trump slates. A case in Michigan was dismissed. Wisconsin’s case is creeping forward. A case in Nevada was quashed by a trial judge on procedural grounds but resuscitated by the state supreme court; something similar happened in Arizona, where the attorney general has asked the state supreme court to revive a case. (That one also involves a few Trump allies.) Even if some of these cases succeed, though, they will punish the lowest-level participants while allowing the big fish—Trump chief among them—to swim free.

Trump’s pardon order guarantees that some of the high-profile figures will never face federal charges related to the 2020 election, including the lawyers Rudy Giuliani, Sidney Powell, Kenneth Chesebro, Boris Epshteyn, John Eastman, Jeffrey Clark, and Jenna Ellis, as well as former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows. (Trump’s order explicitly ruled himself out; he has previously said that he has the power to self-pardon, but many legal scholars disagree.) Giuliani and Eastman have lost their law license, and Clark may as well, but that’s hardly proportional punishment.

Notwithstanding the various prosecutors’ miscalculations that led to this point, it is possible that no effective legal path existed to hold Trump and his minions accountable. Despite their bumbling, their scheme was vague and diffuse enough that prosecuting them was tricky. This does not make election-subversion attempts acceptable, though; it means that lawmakers should write laws that would allow authorities to punish the kind of behavior that occurred after the 2020 election. Unfortunately, there is little prospect of that at the federal level or in potential key states. And as I wrote in The Atlantic’s December cover story, the president and his allies are already working to interfere in the 2026 election.

When moving to dismiss the Georgia charges, Skandalakis lamented the sordid aftermath of the election: “Never before, and hopefully never again, will our country face circumstances such as these.” The failure to punish the major figures, however, all but guarantees a repeat.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

NOTIFY: Y   |  REPLY  |  REPLY WITH QUOTE  |  TOP  |  HOME  

Wednesday, December 3, 2025 11:54 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


Donald Trump’s Plan to Subvert the Midterms Is Already Under Way

Our election system is reaching a breaking point.

By David A. Graham | October 28, 2025

This article appears in the December 2025 print edition with the headline “The Coming Election Mayhem.”

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2025/12/2026-midterms-tru
mp-threat/684615
/

Imagine for a moment that it’s late on Election Day, November 3, 2026. Republicans have kept their majority in the Senate, but too many House races are still uncalled to tell who has won that chamber. Control seems like it will come down to two districts in Maricopa County, Arizona. ICE agents and National Guardsmen have been deployed there since that summer, ostensibly in response to criminal immigrants, though crime has been dropping for several years. The county is almost one-third Hispanic or Latino. Voting-rights advocates say the armed presence has depressed turnout, but nonetheless, the races are close. By that evening, the Republican candidates have small leads, but thousands of mail and provisional ballots remain uncounted.

Donald Trump calls the press into the Oval Office and announces that the GOP has held the House—but he warns that Democrats will try to steal the election, and announces plans to send a legal team to Arizona to root out fraud. He spends the rest of the night posting threats and allegations on Truth Social. In the morning, Republican lawyers file to stop vote counting, arguing that any votes counted after Election Day are illegal under federal law. Attorney General Pam Bondi sends a letter to Adrian Fontes, Arizona’s Democratic secretary of state, and the county board of supervisors, instructing them to retain all documents and warning that the Department of Justice may intervene if it suspects anything untoward. On X, FBI Director Kash Patel reposts false rumors about fraud and announces plans to lead a group of agents to Phoenix. Meanwhile, Democratic candidates have pulled ahead in both races by Wednesday afternoon, but the margin is just 143 votes in the Eighth District, with many votes still not tallied.

By now, conservative outlets are running wall-to-wall coverage alleging fraud, offering tales of immigrants being bused to voting locations and accusing Democrats of treason. MAGA has learned its lesson since 2020, and Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell are nowhere near the cameras. Instead, administration officials like Bondi are the face of the allegations on TV. Behind the scenes, Trump is making phone calls. He’s unable to reach any county supervisors, whose lawyers have warned them not to speak with him, but he gets through to the county recorder, a MAGA loyalist elected as part of the backlash to the 2020 election. No one knows quite what is said—the call isn’t taped—but when Trump hangs up, he posts that the county has agreed to hand over control of voting machines to the Department of Homeland Security.

Fontes and the board of supervisors rush to court to block the move, and a judge quickly grants an injunction. But Trump declares a national emergency that he says supersedes the order; helicopters are en route from a Marine air base in Yuma to take control of the voting machines. By the time Supreme Court Justice Elena Kagan, who is assigned to hear emergency matters from Arizona, issues an order blocking this, Marines have already commandeered ballots and machines. Patel, having just arrived in Phoenix, holds a press conference and announces, without providing evidence, that votes have been tampered with. He proclaims the Republican candidates the winners.

Despite Marines on the street, small but fierce protests erupt in Phoenix and elsewhere; Trump uses them as a pretext to invoke the Insurrection Act and announces “martial law in Democrat-run cities.” Who actually won the election can never be determined—the Marines and Patel have broken the chain of custody, as well as some of the machines themselves—but the state names the two Democrats as winners. House Republicans reject Arizona’s certification and instead seat the GOP candidates. Trump’s allies keep the House in a profoundly illegitimate election rejected by many Americans.

This is just one possible scenario. Is it too pessimistic? Perhaps. But at this stage of the election cycle in 2019, no one expected a crowd of Trump supporters to storm the U.S. Capitol on January 6, 2021. No one expected the president himself to explicitly lend his support to their efforts to “Stop the Steal.” Certainly no one expected that there would be calls to hang the vice president for his refusal to subvert the democratic process. If anything, when it comes to 2026, I worry more about the limits of my imagination than about the hazards of speculation.

Trump has made his intentions clear. At a rally last summer in West Palm Beach, Florida, he offered his supporters a promise. “Christians, get out and vote, just this time. You won’t have to do it anymore. Four more years, you know what, it’ll be fixed, it’ll be fine. You won’t have to vote anymore, my beautiful Christians,” he said. “We’ll have it fixed so good, you’re not gonna have to vote.”

We’ll have it fixed so good. It’s not hard to guess what Trump might do to fulfill this promise. He has, after all, already attempted to disrupt and overturn an election. In 2020, those efforts involved questioning results, asserting widespread fraud without evidence, pressuring local officials to overturn outcomes, filing spurious lawsuits, and ultimately inciting supporters to sack the Capitol. Now that he’s back in the White House, he will draw from this playbook again—perhaps adding new maneuvers, such as deploying armed troops.

As president, Trump has very little statutory power over elections, yet the office provides him with plenty of opportunities for chicanery. He also has powerful reasons to interfere next year. If Democrats recapture the House (by gaining three seats) or the Senate (four seats), they could stall his agenda, launch oversight proceedings, and potentially bring new impeachment charges against him.

Trump and his allies will have before them less an orderly set of instructions than a buffet of options. Some of these options will go untested, or amount to nothing. But elections are a game of margins. Only a handful of Senate seats and a few dozen House races may be seriously contested, thanks to maps drawn to guarantee safe seats for one party or the other. Of those, some may be very close. In 2024, 18 House races were decided by fewer than 10,000 votes. Democrats won 11 of those.

To understand the threat to democracy, and how it might be stopped, I spoke with experts on election administration, constitutional law, and law enforcement. Many of them are people I have known to be cautious, sober, and not prone to hyperbole. Yet they used words like nightmare and warned that Americans need to be ready for “really wild stuff.” They described a system under attack and reaching a breaking point. They enumerated a long list of concerns about next year’s midterms, but they largely declined to make predictions about the 2028 presidential election. The speed of Trump’s assault on the Constitution has made forecasting difficult, but the 2026 contests—both the way they work, and the results—will help determine whether democracy as we know it will survive until then. “If you are not frightened,” Hannah Fried, the executive director of the voter-access group All Voting Is Local, told me, “you are not paying attention.”

Even so, the breakdown of the system is not a foregone conclusion. We can take some comfort next year in the fact that messing with 468 separate elections for House and Senate seats is more complicated than interfering with a presidential race. There will be more opportunities for shenanigans—but it will also be harder to change the overall outcome if one party leads by more than 10 or so seats.

It’s also worth remembering that courts have not looked favorably on recent challenges to elections. Scores of pro-Trump suits failed in 2020, and although the Supreme Court has sanctioned many of Trump’s executive-power grabs, most election cases are decided in lower courts, where Trump has fared poorly thus far in his second term. Finally, the decentralization of the voting system is both a weakness and a source of resilience. The patchwork of laws and offices that govern elections at the state and local levels ensures that some jurisdictions are fairer and more secure than others. It also means that nefarious actors might be able to access only small parts of the system.

Yet Trump has demonstrated that he is more effective at executing his will than he was during his first term. He has surrounded himself with aides whose loyalty is to him, not the rule of law, and who have learned from the flaws of MAGA’s 2020 plan. They are better versed in the inner workings of elections and eager to use the Justice Department as a tool for political gain.

Stopping any attempt to subvert the midterms will require courage and integrity from the courts, political leaders of both parties, and the local officials running elections. Most of all, it will depend on individual Americans to stand up for their rights and demand that their votes are counted.

I. Laying the Groundwork

Let’s get something out of the way: Donald Trump will not try to cancel the midterm elections. He lacks both the power to do so—a fact that offers only partial reassurance, with this president—and the incentive.

Modern authoritarians love elections. In Hungary, Turkey, Russia, and other countries, repressive leaders have kept the framework of democracy in place while guaranteeing that they always or usually win. Doing so helps them escape international condemnation and lends an imprimatur of legitimacy. Trump himself has warmly congratulated these leaders on electoral victories that much of the world has deemed unfair.

The political scientists Steven Levitsky and Lucan Way coined the term competitive authoritarianism to describe a system that gives an all-but-preordained outcome the patina of democratic choice. “Competition is real, but unfair,” Levitsky told me.

Competitive-authoritarian regimes elsewhere in the world offer models for how a leader might make it harder for his adversaries to regain power long before ballots are cast. For example, he might launch an effort to undermine the rule of law, which could be used to hold him accountable. He might seek to change or eliminate term limits. He might seek to co-opt and intimidate the press, rewarding friendly outlets to create a palace media and intimidating others into tempering their criticism. He might seek to pack the government with loyalists, replacing civil servants with political operatives and appointing allies to the judiciary. Finally, a competitive authoritarian might use the government’s powers to harass political rivals, weakening the opposing party well ahead of elections. When necessary, he might imprison rivals or even kill them; see, for example, the fate of Alexei Navalny in Russia. This is a last resort, though: Such heavy-handedness tends to attract condemnation, and usually isn’t necessary anyway.

Trump has already done a lot of this. He has coerced law firms into questionable agreements that aligned them with the administration. He has launched criminal investigations into officials who have tried to hold him to account. He has questioned whether the constitutional right of free speech extends to criticism of him. He has pressured social-media companies into ending their moderation of disinformation, of which he is a prodigious source. He has used lawsuits and the Federal Communications Commission to bully entertainment conglomerates and news outlets. His administration engineered a deal for the sale of TikTok, a major information source for younger Americans, to a group of investors that includes political allies.

Trump has directed the Justice Department to investigate ActBlue, the fundraising platform that raised more than $3.6 billion for Democratic candidates in the 2024 cycle. After the assassination of Charlie Kirk, he issued an executive order that could target a range of left-wing political organizations. Trump has not yet arrested any high-profile candidates for office, but, as of this writing, his administration has launched an investigation into Senator Adam Schiff, a California Democrat who led Trump’s first impeachment, and charged Representative LaMonica McIver, a New Jersey Democrat, with assault after an incident at a migrant-detention facility in Newark. The Justice Department also charged former FBI Director James Comey with felonies for allegedly lying to Congress and indicted New York Attorney General Letitia James for alleged mortgage fraud. (Schiff and James have denied any wrongdoing; McIver and Comey have pleaded not guilty.)

The cumulative effect in the United States is likely to be the same as it has been overseas: Prospective donors, candidates, and campaign workers or volunteers will wonder whether the benefits of participation outweigh the risks of harassment and persecution. By the time voting starts, the opposition party will already be at a steep disadvantage.

II. Changing the Rules

Over the summer, Texas Governor Greg Abbott called the state legislature to Austin for a special session in which, among other things, it redrew congressional districts. The aim was to give the GOP five additional seats in the U.S. House. This was a brazen move. States normally redistrict only once a decade, after the census. Texas’s 2021 map was already engineered for Republican advantage, but the White House pushed the state to go further, hinting at retribution for anyone who resisted, according to The New York Times. This set off a chain of attempted copycats in red states and attempted payback in blue ones. Trump reportedly threatened primary challenges for Republicans who opposed him and sent the vice president to pressure Indiana lawmakers—all of which suggests that the president believes the midterms will be close.

Redistricting was an especially blunt and public effort to change the rules ahead of Election Day. Most of the other methods that Trump and his allies have tried or are likely to try will not be so overt, and may also be less successful. The problem for Trump is that power over elections rests with the states and, to a lesser extent, Congress, not the executive branch.

Nevertheless, Trump has simply asserted control and dared anyone to say no. In March, he issued an executive order that purported to make several changes to voting. It instructed the Election Assistance Commission, a bipartisan federal agency that helps states administer elections, to require proof of citizenship to vote. (Congress is also considering a bill that would do the same.) It also demanded that only ballots received by Election Day be counted, regardless of state rules. The executive order was largely blocked by two federal judges, one of whom noted that citizenship was already required to vote and added, “The Constitution does not grant the President any specific powers over elections.”

Trump has been trying to teach the American people to distrust elections since 2016, and many of his actions now are designed to create a pretense for claiming fraud later. For example, he has repeatedly suggested that millions of unauthorized immigrants are voting, although this is not true. Now the Justice Department has ordered many states to turn over voter-registration records with detailed private information, which it says it’s sharing with the Department of Homeland Security. Some states prohibit releasing this information, which is unlikely to either produce evidence of fraud or improve voter rolls. Previous attempts at matching voter lists against other databases have produced many false positives but few actual examples of illegal voting. An election-integrity commission established during Trump’s first term also tried to acquire voter rolls for the same purpose, but was rebuffed by states and tied up in litigation. This time around, the Justice Department is suing states that don’t comply, and could use their resistance as a pretext for future allegations of fraud.

Trump has consistently tried to spread distrust of voting by mail. Most recently, he reported that, during an August summit in Alaska, Putin told him, “Your election was rigged because you have mail-in voting.” Trump then announced on Truth Social that, in an effort to ban voting by mail and require paper ballots, he would issue a new executive order, adding, “Remember, the States are merely an ‘agent’ for the Federal Government in counting and tabulating the votes.”

This is false, and no executive order has emerged yet, perhaps because plenty of Republicans vote by mail, and eliminating it wouldn’t have a clear partisan advantage. Even so, assailing mail-in voting is useful to Trump because it creates a justification to claim fraud after the elections. In 2020, Trump seized on claims about mailed ballots being stolen, altered, or dumped in a river, even long after those stories were debunked. And in 2024, he was preparing to do so again, until it became clear that he had won.

Similarly, Trump and his allies have insisted for nearly a decade—without ever providing proof—that many voting machines are not secure. In his executive order on voting, Trump instructed the Election Assistance Commission to decertify all voting machines in the U.S. within 180 days and recertify only those that met certain requirements. This would be impractical, in part because it’s unclear whether any voting machines that meet those standards could be available in time for the election. But again, the order may be designed to serve a different purpose: If races don’t go the way the president wants, he can point to the executive order and say that the voting machines didn’t meet the standards. The results, therefore, are not valid, or at least cannot be trusted.

The administration’s own actions are actually undermining election security. In past elections, the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, a part of DHS, assisted local officials. That might have meant providing protection from hacking or doing site visits to make sure door locks and electricity were secure. But Trump has held a grudge against CISA since Chris Krebs, then the agency’s leader, vouched for the security of the 2020 election. (Trump fired Krebs at the time and earlier this year directed the Justice Department to open an investigation into him.) The administration has cut about a third of CISA’s workforce and slashed millions of dollars of assistance to local officials, potentially exposing election systems to interference by foreign or domestic hackers. The big risk is not changing actual vote tallies, but disrupting the system to create chaos and doubt and to prevent people from casting ballots.

This summer, DHS appointed Heather Honey, an election denier involved in efforts to challenge the 2020 election, to the newly created role of deputy assistant secretary for election integrity. Meanwhile, troubling examples of attempted interference with the system are popping up in swing states.

In a peculiar turn this July, 10 Colorado counties reported being contacted by Jeff Small, a Republican consultant, who told some of them he was working on behalf of White House Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller and requested access to voting machines. According to The Denver Post, Small connected at least one Colorado election official with a person at the Department of Homeland Security, suggesting that he was acting with the administration’s cooperation. (Small did not reply to interview requests. An administration spokesperson told CNN earlier this year that Small “does not speak for the White House” and was never “authorized to do official business on behalf of the White House.”)

In September, Reuters reported that Sigal Chattah, the acting U.S. attorney for Nevada, had directed the FBI to investigate claims of voter fraud in that state, hoping that a probe would help Republicans keep the House. (Shortly thereafter, a court found Chattah’s appointment invalid.)

III. Election Day

Voter suppression has a long history in the U.S., but the methods have become more sophisticated and less obvious than in the days of literacy tests, poll taxes, and the KKK. Republican jurisdictions in particular have enacted rules that have made it harder for people to vote. They have placed restrictions on voter-registration drives by outside groups; required photo identification to vote (which is popular, although its effects are often discriminatory because Black, older, and poorer people are less likely than other voters to have qualifying ID); tried to limit the hours that polls are open; and, in Georgia, put restrictions on giving food or water to people waiting in line to vote.

The Justice Department recently announced that it would take the unusual step of sending poll monitors to observe elections in six counties in New Jersey and California this November. Both states have important elections—Californians are voting on a new congressional map that could eliminate GOP seats, and a Trump ally is trying to capture New Jersey’s governorship from Democrats. This could be a test run for broader use of monitors in 2026 to intimidate poll workers and voters around the country.

None of these things, in isolation, will prevent large numbers of people from voting, but they create barriers that might make a difference at the margins. They are likely to especially affect people who vote infrequently. Whether this is beneficial for Trump and his allies is a matter of debate among experts. (Traditionally, high turnout was thought to help Democrats, but Trump’s coalitions have included many irregular voters.)

In 2026, however, Trump could far surpass these small-bore measures. The fear I heard, again and again, is that the president will attempt to use armed federal agents to interfere with elections. In its simplest form, this could look like federal law-enforcement officers patrolling the streets in blue cities, a possibility that some influential people in Trump’s orbit have already embraced. “They’re petrified over at MSNBC and CNN that, hey, since we’re taking control of the cities, there’s gonna be ICE officers near polling places,” Steve Bannon said in August. “You’re damn right.”

But many people now worry that Trump would go further and use the military. Not long ago, this would have seemed nearly unthinkable. In January, the Brennan Center for Justice, the University of Virginia’s Center for Public Safety and Justice, and the States United Democracy Center held a tabletop exercise to consider best practices for policing in a tense society. The participants imagined that the National Guard might be deployed to cities—by sometime in 2028. “Even our most unlikely circumstances were far passed in the first few months of this year,” Ben Haiman, the executive director of CPSJ, told me. “We got there real fast.”

Federal law specifically bans the presence of “any troops or armed men at any place where a general or special election is held, unless such force be necessary to repel armed enemies of the United States.” But some of the experts I spoke with believe that military intervention is now not only possible, but likely. “They’re telling me that it’s really unconstitutional and illegal for them to be there, but that doesn’t seem to make a lot of difference to this administration,” Aaron Ammons, the clerk of Champaign County, Illinois, told me.

The administration could try to get around the ban on troops at polling places in a few ways. Cleta Mitchell, a conservative lawyer who was involved in “Stop the Steal” efforts in 2020 and remains influential in the White House, suggested in September that Trump could use emergency powers. “The chief executive is limited in his role with regard to elections, except where there is a threat to the national sovereignty of the United States,” she said on a conservative talk show. “I think maybe the president is thinking that he will exercise some emergency powers to protect the federal elections going forward.” Trump might allege foreign interference in the elections—asserting, for example, that Iranian hackers had changed voter results—in order to claim that national security required him to intervene.

Elizabeth Goitein, an expert on presidential emergency powers at the Brennan Center, told me that nothing like what Mitchell described exists: “There are no powers that give him the authority to do anything around elections, full stop.” But Goitein warned that Trump could try anyway. One possibility is that he could invoke the Insurrection Act, as he has repeatedly threatened to do, by claiming it is necessary to enforce federal law or protect voters’ constitutional rights.

Mobilizing troops takes time and is hard to do without anyone noticing. Trump might find it easier to deploy troops between now and November and have them on the streets already when voting starts. During a meeting with top military leaders in September, he said, “We should use some of these dangerous cities as training grounds for our military.”

He’s already started. In June, Trump federalized 4,000 members of the California National Guard and sent Marines into Los Angeles, putatively to maintain order and protect ICE agents. He has since deployed the National Guard to Washington, D.C., and moved to send Guardsmen to several other cities. These deployments could accustom Americans to seeing troops in the streets well ahead of the elections.

A military or federal-law-enforcement presence creates the danger of intimidation. Right-wing figures tend to write this off as blather: If you’re not an illegal immigrant, you have nothing to fear. But ICE’s recent dragnets have arrested and jailed American citizens. Beyond that, the presence of police, or especially troops, could make it harder to reach polling places and could sap voters’ energy. Even a small presence of troops in a few cities might create enough media attention to affect turnout elsewhere.

In the worst-case scenarios, armed troops could be ordered to close polling areas, commandeer voting machines, or crack down on protesters. These orders would be illegal, and units might refuse to follow them, potentially producing a standoff between the president and his military brass. But it wouldn’t take more than a few officers complying to corrupt the election.

IV. After Election Day

As soon as the polls close, Trump and other Republicans will try to stop the counting of votes. Scholars have documented a phenomenon called the “red mirage” or “blue shift,” in which early results seem more favorable to Republicans, but as mail-in ballots, provisional ballots, and tallies in slow-counting Democratic-leaning cities and states trickle in, Democrats’ outcomes look better.

In 2020, with many states still counting, Trump spoke at the White House early on the morning of November 4 and demanded that no new votes be included in tallies. “Frankly, we did win this election. We did win this election,” he said. “So our goal now is to ensure the integrity for the good of this nation. This is a very big moment. This is a major fraud in our nation. We want the law to be used in a proper manner. So we’ll be going to the U.S. Supreme Court. We want all voting to stop.”

In his blocked executive order on elections this spring, Trump instructed the attorney general to target states that allow the counting of votes that arrive after Election Day (but are postmarked by then), arguing that “federal law establishes a uniform Election Day across the Nation” and that any ongoing counting is thus illegal. Even if that goes nowhere, Republicans will use the same argument in lawsuits seeking to throw out any such votes. This will be only the start of the lawfare. A flurry of lawsuits in close House districts or states with close Senate races will aim to give Republican candidates an edge.

To see how this might look, consider a 2024 race for the North Carolina Supreme Court. Early returns suggested that the Republican Jefferson Griffin had defeated the incumbent Democrat, Allison Riggs, but once every ballot was counted, Riggs took a narrow lead, which was confirmed by multiple recounts. Griffin then filed suit seeking to throw out thousands of votes. Some were overseas ballots, including from military voters, that did not include photo ID; others were in heavily Democratic counties, from voters whose registration did not include a Social Security number. Everyone agreed that these ballots had been cast in accordance with the rules of the election at the time, but Griffin wanted to change the rules after the fact. He almost succeeded, with the help of favorable rulings from GOP-dominated state courts, before a federal judge shut him down.

In the days after the 2026 elections, Republicans will announce that Democratic victories are fraudulent. They may point to alleged deficiencies in voting machines, using Trump’s decertification mandate as a starting point, but many candidates have previously just relied on rumor and innuendo. Republicans will demand that elections be invalidated or rerun because they are tainted.

At the same time, Republican leaders—including Trump—will be working the phones, trying to recruit local and state election officials to help. In 2020, Trump called many local GOP officials seeking assistance, most infamously asking Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find” him almost 12,000 votes. Given that he was caught on tape doing so and has thus far faced no repercussions, Trump has no reason not to do it again. The pressure he exerted in 2020 didn’t work, in part because many Republican officials refused to abet his schemes, but in some places, these officials have been replaced by election deniers and MAGA loyalists. Trump might, for instance, call someone like Linda Rebuck—the chair of North Carolina’s Henderson County board of elections, who was reprimanded last year for sending false election information to state legislators—or leaders in Cochise County, Arizona, who recently asked Attorney General Bondi to investigate the results of the 2022 election, which they themselves failed to certify on time.

Even the best-intentioned official might bend under pressure from the White House, because it’s very hard to say no to the president of the United States when he asks for a favor—especially if the alternative is doxxing, harassment, political ostracism, or worse. And if that prospect doesn’t sway them, a threat from the Justice Department might. How many county clerks are willing to trust their own legal advice over an order from the attorney general?

Stephen Richer, a Republican who was elected the Maricopa County recorder in 2020, described to me what it was like when he and other GOP officials defended the integrity of local elections. Like other Republicans who contradicted Trump, he was chased from office, losing a primary to a MAGA-aligned candidate. “It is incredibly lonely,” he said. “Very few people will have your back, especially if you’re a Republican. There is no constituency.” Standing up to Trump can stymie a political career, as it did for Richer, or lead to criminal jeopardy, as it has for Krebs.

In 2020, Trump also contemplated seizing voting machines. The ostensible reason was to search for evidence of fraud, but taking possession of the machines creates its own huge risk of fraud, and would destroy any trust in results. Aides drafted executive orders instructing the Defense Department or DHS to seize machines, but, amid resistance from advisers, Trump never went forward with the plan. Now he’s surrounded by aides more likely to encourage his most outrageous ideas.

If all of that fails, Republicans could attempt to refuse to seat Democrats who are elected. The House is the arbiter of its own members, and on several occasions—in 1985, for example, during an election that came down to a handful of votes—the body has refused to seat the winner as certified by a state. With Trump blowing wind into flimsy fraud allegations, the House GOP caucus could try to use them to preserve a narrow majority.

The backdrop to all of this will be the possibility of violence by Trump supporters if they believe the election is being stolen. Just as the Krebs investigation is a warning to anyone who might publicly contradict Trump, the president’s mass clemency for people involved in the January 6 riot—including those convicted of violent attacks on police officers—is a signal to anyone who might act to assist the president’s cause that he will help them out afterward. The insurrection failed the first time, but the second try might be more effective.

V. The Way Out

The most important defense against losing our democracy is the same thing that makes it a democracy in the first place: the people. An engaged electorate, demanding clean elections and turning out in force, has been the strongest and most consistent bulwark against Trump. “It is going to require that every single American do everything in their power to ensure that elections happen, to ensure that they are free and fair, and to push back on this extremism,” Skye Perryman, the president and CEO of Democracy Forward, told me.

The burden will fall especially on local election workers, who will be more prepared than they were six years ago but also more battered. In a survey this spring conducted by the Brennan Center, four in 10 local election officials said they’d received threats; six in 10 said they worried about political interference. They also worry about funding shortfalls. State and local governments are facing smaller budgets, and since 2020, many states have banned private donations for election administration.

Election officials are deluged by requests for information or demands that certain voters be removed from rolls—even when the law doesn’t provide for purges. Remaining apolitical has become next to impossible. “We have been asked to definitively say whether the 2020 election was fair and legitimate,” Natalie Adona, the registrar of voters in Marin County, California, told me. “I can say without a doubt that that election was fairly decided. Does that now mean that I have made a partisan statement?”

At a previous job elsewhere in California, Adona had to obtain a restraining order because of persistent harassment. In Detroit in 2020, a mob tried to break into a vote-counting center. Since then, poll workers have been doxxed, received death threats, and faced persistent verbal abuse. One result is that many experienced officials have left their jobs. Those who remain are forced to make plans for their physical safety—at polling places, but also at facilities where votes are counted, and even at home.

Despite all of this, there are reasons for hope. Even in a competitive-authoritarian system, recent examples show, elections can defeat incumbents. Scholars consider Poland one of the most encouraging stories in the cohort of the world’s backsliding democracies. Starting in 2015, the country saw a steady drop in freedom. The ruling Law and Justice party pursued many of the same strategies that Trump has now adopted, or might yet. But in the 2023 parliamentary elections, a coalition of pro-democracy opposition parties was able to defeat Law and Justice, carried to victory on the strength of an astonishing 74 percent turnout among voters.

The midterm elections could be a similarly pivotal moment for American democracy. Defending the system in 2026 won’t guarantee clean elections in 2028, but failing to do so would be catastrophic. Trump will exploit any weaknesses he can find; any damage to the system will encourage worse rigging in two years, and maybe even a quest for a third term. And if the president has two more years to act without any checks, there may not be much democracy left to save in 2028.

This article appears in the December 2025 print edition with the headline “The Coming Election Mayhem.”

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

NOTIFY: Y   |  REPLY  |  REPLY WITH QUOTE  |  TOP  |  HOME  

Thursday, December 4, 2025 7:55 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


Eggs, Lies and Gasoline

The unbearable lightweightness of being Kevin Hassett

By Paul Krugman | Dec 04, 2025

https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/eggs-gas-and-lies

Last Sunday Kevin Hassett — chair of the National Economic Council, effectively the Trump administration’s chief economist — was interviewed by Nancy Cordes for CBS’s Face the Nation. Most observers expect Hassett to be appointed as the next chair of the Federal Reserve. Prediction markets give him a virtual lock.

So CBS was probably hoping that he would say something newsworthy. He didn’t.

But he did, in just a few sentences, make it clear that he is absolutely unqualified — intellectually and morally — to be Fed chair. And the fact that nobody took notice, that his ignorance and mendacity were accepted as par for the course, demonstrated just how far our standards for public service have been degraded.

Here’s the exchange that caught my eye:

NANCY CORDES: What’s your advice to holiday shoppers who don’t want to spend more this year than they did last year, or can’t afford to spend more?

HASSETT: Right. Well, as you know, it depends on what you’re looking at. Like egg prices are down. Gasoline prices drop below $2 a gallon in a lot of places, mortgage rates are down—

NANCY CORDES: --you mean below- gas prices on average are still at $3 a gallon.

HASSETT: Yeah that’s right for a few states they got below two.

Given the timidity of legacy media these days, Trump officials need to be really out there to get fact-checked in real time. But Cordes was right: average national gas prices are around $3 a gallon. And contra Hassett, there are no states in which gas prices are below $2, or even close:


Was Hassett lying, or just unaware of basic facts? Neither is what you want to see in a man who may soon be overseeing monetary policy.

Furthermore, if you’re trying to assess economic policy, it’s hard to come up with worse indicators than the prices of eggs and gasoline. Egg prices fluctuate wildly, not in response to policy changes, but because of the coming and going of bird flu. Gasoline prices mainly reflect the global price of crude oil, a price on which U.S. policy has at most a marginal influence.

So what are we to make of Hassett boasting about prices he should be ignoring if he becomes Fed chair?

Look, I’m not naïve. I understand that when you work for the president — any president — you’re expected to make the best case you honestly can for his policies. But “honestly” is the key word. Sycophancy toward a president who refuses to acknowledge reality, who insists that affordability is a “con job,” crosses that line.

It’s especially important that public officials not tarnish their reputations if they’re going to be moving on to jobs that are supposed to be apolitical — jobs like chairing the Federal Reserve.

The truth is that if Hassett becomes Fed chair, he’s likely to face some very hard choices. How will the Fed deal with the conundrum of weak labor markets combined with stubbornly elevated inflation? How will it respond to soaring electricity prices? If AI is a bubble, what will the Fed do when it bursts? If geopolitical conflict erupts, disrupting supply chains, how will the Fed react?

And the next Fed chair won’t just have to deal with these hard choices. He’ll have to build consensus among his colleagues. For crucial decisions about interest rates aren’t made by the chair, they’re made by committee.

To lead the Fed, then, requires both good judgment and gravitas. For the past two decades we’ve been blessed with chairs who possessed both. Ben Bernanke and Janet Yellen were both highly regarded researchers who were able to combine intellectual excellence with strong management skills and a firm grasp on real-world concerns. Jerome Powell came from the world of investment banking — and is a lifelong Republican — but has earned widespread respect for his open-mindedness and willingness to learn from experts.

Hassett has none of these strengths. I won’t bore you with a review of his research career, from Dow 36,000 to his “cubic model” that predicted very few deaths from Covid, except to say that few would describe it with the words “highly regarded.”

My guess is that few economists will be willing to say this openly, but basically everyone understands that Hassett is an ideological DEI hire. That is, his career has depended not on getting things right but on displaying unswerving loyalty to conservative causes — and, latterly, on saying whatever Donald Trump wants to hear.

Some observers are consoling themselves with the thought that since interest rate decisions are made by committee, Hassett can’t do too much harm. But we expect more from Fed chairs than for them to be mostly harmless. We expect and need them to be effective leaders.

That’s not what we’re going to get.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

NOTIFY: Y   |  REPLY  |  REPLY WITH QUOTE  |  TOP  |  HOME  

Thursday, December 4, 2025 9:58 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


Condemning Millions for One Man’s Crime

By George Packer | December 3, 2025, 10:13 AM ET

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2025/12/trump-refugee-collective-pun
ishment/685115
/

Most of us are lucky enough to avoid any direct encounter with the true nature of Donald Trump’s presidency. But over time, abstract nouns such as authoritarianism and xenophobia lose their hard edges with too much use. It can take some personal experience to bring home what the Trump administration is doing to human lives and values.

The solitary Afghan man who allegedly shot two members of the West Virginia National Guard near the White House last week, killing a 20-year-old woman and critically wounding a 24-year-old man, gave the president exactly the pretext he needed to crush the hopes of desperate people here and around the world. Trump started with Afghans, canceling all U.S. visas issued to Afghans abroad and barring visa holders from entering the country, including men and women who aided the 20-year American war effort in Afghanistan. He halted asylum hearings in the U.S. for all migrants; announced that green cards issued to migrants from 19 countries, including Afghanistan, would be reviewed; and promised to examine every asylum case approved under the previous administration. He wrote that any foreign-born resident of the U.S. found to be “incapable of loving our Country” or “non-compatible with Western Civilization” would be deported.

This broad assault against the right of refuge is being staged on a heap of lies. Trump suggested that he would never have allowed the alleged gunman—who had served in a CIA-trained unit during the war—and others like him into the country; in fact Trump criticized President Joe Biden for leaving Afghan allies behind after the fall of Kabul in 2021, and the alleged gunman was granted U.S. asylum in April, under Trump. He said that Afghans were allowed into the U.S. “unvetted,” when they’ve been put through security screenings at every stage, from the original entry to the request for asylum and green cards. The claim by Kristi Noem, Trump’s secretary of homeland security, that Afghanistan is now safe enough for her department to send Afghan refugees back there is a lie.

The argument that federal troops are needed in U.S. cities to end a nonexistent crime wave created by refugees and other migrants is a lie, as is the administration’s insistence that national security requires mass deportation. Trump himself has undermined that security far more by purging the FBI of agents deemed disloyal, cutting millions of dollars from counter-terrororism, and diverting thousands of federal law-enforcement officers to the dirty business of rounding up men in Home Depot parking lots and arresting married couples who have shown up to a green-card hearing. “If they are correct in characterizing the shooting as a terrorist attack,” Becca Heller, the founder of the International Refugee Assistance Project, told me, “how come no one is talking about the intelligence failure that allowed a terrorist attack against U.S. troops on U.S. soil?”

All of these lies are built on a deeper one. Stephen Miller, the ideologue behind the foreigners-out policy, told it over the weekend in a social-media post: “You are not just importing individuals. You are importing societies. No magic transformation occurs when failed states cross borders. At scale, migrants and their descendants recreate the conditions, and terrors, of their broken homelands.”

If it were true that those fleeing horrifying violence are bound to inflict the same oppression on others, Miller might well have added: Just as Jews imported here from postwar Europe brought the industrial slaughter of Dachau and Bergen-Belsen with them and inflicted it on their innocent American neighbors in Scarsdale. Just as South Vietnamese who managed to flee the victorious North terrorized the peaceful streets of Galveston with civil war and torture. Just as multiple generations of Iranians and Sudanese have imposed the brutal tyrannies of their homelands on the good people of Los Angeles and Fargo.

Miller is justifying collective punishment and guilt by blood. I’ve witnessed those barbarisms elsewhere, in war-ravaged countries and in dictatorships, but never before during my lifetime as a matter of national policy here at home. Trump and his top aides are re-creating in America the conditions and terrors of failed states. They’re erasing the distinction between the perpetrators and victims of violence. They’re abolishing the essential value of the Western civilization they claim to be defending: the sanctity of each individual; the right of all men and women to be judged on their own merits, not as faceless carriers of the pathologies of entire societies and heritages.

Within hours of the shooting, I received a text from an Afghan woman I know, whom I’m calling Saman. (She asked that I not use her real name.) She’s a refugee in Pakistan, where she, her husband, and their two small children are barely surviving month to month as they try to escape deportation by the Pakistani authorities back to Afghanistan. There an ominous fate would await them. Both Saman and her husband served in the Afghan special forces during the American war. She is Hazara, a religious minority that has suffered severe repression under the Taliban; her sister in Afghanistan is hiding from Taliban attempts to force her into marriage; her husband’s brother is languishing in a Taliban prison. After years of repeated vetting by the U.S. refugee agency, the couple was about to be resettled here in January, when Trump returned to office and halted the program.

No other country is willing to accept them, and now they’ve been utterly abandoned by the country at whose side they fought. An administration that claims to be standing up for the U.S. military is inflicting moral injury on troops that have vouched for their wartime Afghan comrades, including Saman and her husband. I was still trying to find a way to tell her that their last hope of being allowed to come here had just died—that the president and his advisers have deemed her and her family incapable of loving America, incompatible with Western civilization, and certain to bring Afghanistan’s chaos and terror to the United States—when I heard from her. I can’t come up with any answer to the Trump administration better than what Saman said herself:

This tragedy was shocking, painful, and beyond anything words can truly express. I want to offer my sincere condolences to you and to everyone affected by this terrible event. I want to state clearly and with all my heart that I strongly condemn this attack. Such violence is inhuman, unjustifiable, and against every moral value I believe in. As an Afghan, I feel a heavy weight of sorrow and shame that someone from my country committed such a horrific act, even though I know very well that the actions of one individual do not represent an entire nation.

To be completely honest … sometimes I wish I were not Afghan. I wish I had not been born in Afghanistan so I would not have to carry the burden and the pain caused by the actions of people who do not represent the real, peaceful Afghan people.

I kindly ask you not to let this tragedy change the way you see me, or the many Afghans who believe deeply in peace, humanity, and mutual respect.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

NOTIFY: Y   |  REPLY  |  REPLY WITH QUOTE  |  TOP  |  HOME  

Thursday, December 4, 2025 10:08 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


This Is How Venezuela Becomes A Quagmire Like Iraq

U.S. 'decapitation' campaigns are rarely swift or clean

By Paul Iddon | Dec 02, 2025

https://www.trenchart.us/p/venezuela-could-become-an-iraq-style

As the months-long standoff between the United States and Venezuela intensifies, many speculate that U.S. Pres. Donald Trump may opt for a decapitation strike against Venezuelan Pres. Nicolas Maduro’s government. If Saddam Hussein’s Iraq serves as any precedent, a “clean” strike against the leadership in Caracas may not succeed—or avert wider war.

Trump and Maduro spoke by phone a week ago. According to sources cited by The Miami Herald, Trump offered Maduro and his family guaranteed safe passage if he agreed to resign immediately. The Venezuelan president’s public appearance a few days later, Nov. 30, following speculation that he had fled, confirms he hasn’t taken Trump up on this alleged offer. Venezuela, Maduro chanted, is “indestructible, untouchable, unbeatable.”

Over the last few months, the U.S. military has built up substantial naval and air power and deployed 15,000 troops in the Caribbean. They have destroyed several small boats allegedly smuggling drugs on dubious legal grounds. On Nov. 27, Trump said the U.S. military would counter this alleged Venezuelan drug trafficking “by land” and “very soon.” On Nov. 29, he declared Venezuelan airspace “closed in its entirety.” When asked on Nov. 30 if that meant imminent U.S. strikes on Venezuela, he vaguely answered, “Don’t read anything into it.”

Several prominent media outlets and think tanks have already highlighted Trump’s potential options for an escalated military campaign against Venezuela. These include decapitation strikes targeting Maduro’s government and military. Despite America’s overwhelming military superiority against the South American nation, such a move could prove complicated, as would mounting an effective coup. The 2003 invasion of Saddam Hussein’s Iraq may offer some important lessons.

As War on the Rocks has already noted, Maduro has already been “coup-proofing” his regime over the past decade, “by building overlapping structures that can survive leadership decapitation.” Saddam Hussein’s Ba’ath Party did the same shortly after taking power in 1968. Therefore, American hopes for an internal coup by the Iraqi military following the 1991 Persian Gulf War were fantastical. CIA efforts to depose Hussein later in the 1990s also ended in abysmal failures.

When the United States made the fateful decision to invade Iraq, it found that decapitating the Iraqi regime by military force wasn’t straightforward either.

As the U.S. amassed ground forces to invade in March 2003, then-president George W. Bush gave Saddam Hussein and his sons a 48-hour ultimatum to leave Iraq. They refused. As that ultimatum expired, Washington received intelligence regarding the whereabouts of the Iraqi dictator and his two notorious sons. All three Husseins were apparently meeting in a bunker at the Dora Farms complex outside Baghdad. It was too good a potential opportunity to miss: eliminating the Iraqi dictator in a relatively “clean” strike in the war’s crucial opening salvo.

Shortly after the 48-hour deadline expired, on Mar. 19, 2003, two Lockheed F-117 stealth fighters flew toward Dora Farms. Each carried two 2,000-pound EGBU-27 bombs. It marked the combat debut of the EGBU-27, guided by GPS in addition to a laser seeker system and an inertial navigation unit. The F-117s dropped their bombs where the U.S. guessed the bunker was most likely located. A salvo of 40 Tomahawk cruise missiles launched from naval destroyers and submarines in the Persian Gulf quickly followed the F-117s’ air strike.

The attack intentionally spared the primary residence at Dora Farms, where U.S. intelligence deemed there was a greater risk of killing women and children. Additionally, military lawyers rejected a follow-up Tomahawk bombardment on the site after deeming the risk of civilian casualties and killing of medical staff unacceptably high. Neither Hussein nor any of his sons were present at Dora Farms during the strike. Furthermore, there wasn’t any bunker or remains of a bunker found at the site afterward, raising fundamental questions about the validity of the intelligence U.S. forces acted on.

Ultimately, the U.S. military wouldn’t find the Husseins until months after conquering and occupying Iraq. The sons, Uday and Qusay, were found hiding together in a villa in the northern city of Mosul on July 22, 2003. Both brothers perished after a four-hour gun battle with U.S. soldiers, who fired 10 BGM-71 TOW missiles at the residence. Saddam Hussein was finally found hiding in a tiny spider hole near his hometown of Tikrit on Dec. 13, 2003, where he surrendered to U.S. troops without a fight.

Quagmire

American troops would remain in Iraq, where tens of thousands fought in an increasingly unpopular war, until the first complete troop withdrawal in 2011. More than 4,000 lost their lives. Trump previously campaigned against becoming embroiled in costly and protracted wars of precisely this kind.

The U.S. State Department is presently offering up to $50 million “for information leading to the arrest and/or conviction of” Maduro “for violating U.S. narcotics laws.” The bounty offered for Hussein in 2003 was $25 million, adjusted for inflation. Of course, that doesn’t mean the U.S. is presently poised to launch an all-out Iraq-style invasion, which would likely require significantly greater numbers than the 15,000 troops currently deployed in Venezuela’s vicinity.

Nevertheless, Trump’s record suggests he could favor a Dora Farms-type decapitation strike. He may believe, or become convinced, that it’s a viable alternative to a full-fledged war that would achieve his regime change objective with little cost or commitment in blood and treasure. During his first term, Trump became infuriated following a chemical weapons attack on civilians in Syria and wanted to assassinate Syrian Pres. Bashar Al Assad. He ultimately settled for launching an enormous salvo of 59 Tomahawk cruise missiles against the air base used by the Syrian aircraft involved in that attack.

Late in his first term, Trump ordered the assassination of Iranian Gen. Qassem Soleimani, commander of the powerful paramilitary Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps’ extraterritorial Quds Force and the second most powerful man in Iran. A few days later, Iranian ballistic missiles rained down on an Iraqi air base hosting U.S. troops, leaving several with life-altering traumatic brain injuries, which Trump blithely called “headaches.”

Some have already compared today’s situation in the Caribbean to America’s 1989 invasion of Panama, Operation Just Cause, which deposed Pres. Manuel Noriega. The present U.S. military deployment in the area is the biggest since 1989. Still, 27,684 U.S troops participated in Operation Just Cause, roughly twice the number now deployed near Venezuela.

It should go without saying that Venezuela is approximately 12 times the size of Panama—and twice the size of Iraq.

Thanks for reading Trench Art! This post is public so feel free to share it.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

NOTIFY: Y   |  REPLY  |  REPLY WITH QUOTE  |  TOP  |  HOME  

Thursday, December 4, 2025 11:20 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two


Murderers claim it is perfectly legal to murder criminals instead of arresting them.

Pentagon Claims It “Absolutely” Knows Who It Killed in Boat Strikes. Prove It, Lawmaker Says.

Rep. Chrissy Houlahan said, “If there is intelligence to 'absolutely confirm' this, the Congress is ready to receive it.”

By Nick Turse | December 4, 2025, 10:41 a.m.

https://theintercept.com/2025/12/04/boat-strike-venezuela-war-departme
nt-pete-hegseth-kingsley-wilson-chrissy-houlahan
/

After Pentagon Press Secretary Kingsley Wilson declared the War Department was certain about the identities of supposed drug smugglers killed in boat strikes, Rep. Chrissy Houlahan, D-Pa., had some questions about the intelligence. When Houlahan called on Wilson to appear before Congress, however, the outspoken and controversial spokesperson suddenly went silent.

“I can tell you that every single person who we have hit thus far who is in a drug boat carrying narcotics to the United States is a narcoterrorist. Our intelligence has confirmed that, and we stand by it,” Wilson said on Tuesday during a pseudo Pentagon press briefing where attendance was limited to media that have agreed to limits on the scope of their reporting.

Houlahan expressed her doubts and demanded proof.

“If there is intelligence that ‘absolutely confirms’ this — present it. Come before the House or Senate Intelligence committees and let Congress provide the proper oversight and checks and balances the American people deserve,” said Houlahan, who serves on the House Armed Services Committee and the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence. “Put the whispers and doubts to rest once and for all. If there is intelligence to ‘absolutely confirm’ this, the Congress is ready to receive it. Until we all see it, you can surely understand why we are skeptical.”

Both the House Armed Services Committee and the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, both of which Houlahan serves on, routinely receive classified briefings from the military.

Wilson – who touted a “new era” of working to “keep the American people informed and to ensure transparency” on Tuesday – did not respond to questions or requests for comment from The Intercept about Houlahan’s remarks or appearing before Congress.

In past classified briefings to lawmakers and Congressional staff, the military has admitted that it does not know exactly who it’s killing in the boat strikes, according to seven government officials who have spoken with The Intercept.

Rep. Sara Jacobs, D-Calif., also a member of the House Armed Services Committee, said that Pentagon officials who briefed her admitted that the administration does not know the identities of all the individuals who were killed in the strikes.

“They said that they do not need to positively identify individuals on the vessels to do the strikes,” Jacobs told The Intercept in October. “They just need to show a connection to a DTO or affiliate,” she added, using shorthand for “designated terrorist organizations,” the Trump administration’s term for the secret list of groups with whom it claims to be at war.

Twenty-One Attacks

The military has carried out 21 known attacks, destroying 22 boats in the Caribbean Sea and eastern Pacific Ocean since September and killing at least 83 civilians. It has not conducted a strike on a vessel since November 15.

Since the strikes began, experts in the laws of war and members of Congress from both parties say the strikes are illegal extrajudicial killings because the military is not permitted to deliberately target civilians — even suspected criminals — who do not pose an imminent threat of violence.

The summary executions mark a major departure from typical practice in the long-running U.S. war on drugs, where law enforcement agencies arrest suspected drug smugglers.

A double-tap strike during the initial September 2 attack — where the U.S. hit an incapacitated boat for a second time, killing two survivors clinging to the wreckage — added a second layer of illegality to strikes that experts and lawmakers say are already tantamount to murder. The double-tap strike was first reported by The Intercept.

War Secretary Pete Hegseth has been under increasing fire for that strike. The Washington Post recently reported that Hegseth personally ordered the follow-up attack, giving a spoken order “to kill everybody.”

Hegseth acknowledged U.S. forces conducted a follow-up strike on the alleged drug boat during a Cabinet meeting at the White House on Tuesday but distanced himself from the killing of people struggling to stay afloat.

“I didn’t personally see survivors,” Hegseth told reporters, noting that he watched live footage of the attack. “The thing was on fire. It was exploded in fire and smoke. You can’t see it.”

He added, “This is called the fog of war.”

Hegseth said Adm. Frank M. Bradley, then the commander of Joint Special Operations Command, or JSOC, and now head of Special Operations Command, “made the right call” in ordering the second strike, which the war secretary claimed came after he himself left the room. In a statement to The Intercept earlier this week, Special Operations Command pushed back on the contention that Bradley ordered a double-tap attack.

“He does not see his actions on 2 SEP as a ‘double tap,’” Col. Allie Weiskopf, the director of public affairs at Special Operations Command, told The Intercept on Tuesday.

Bradley and Gen. Dan Caine, the chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, are slated to go to Capitol Hill on Thursday to answer questions about the attack amid an ongoing uproar. Congressional staffers say that Bradley is currently slated to only meet with House Armed Services Committee Chair Mike Rogers, R-Ala., and ranking member Rep. Adam Smith, D-Wash., along with the Senate Armed Services Committee Chair Roger Wicker, R-Miss., and ranking member Sen. Jack Reed, D-R.I.

“The Seditious Six”

Houlahan was one of six Democratic members of Congress who appeared in a video late last month reminding members of the military of their duty not to obey illegal orders. President Donald Trump called for the group to face arrest and trial or even execution, saying the video amounted to “SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR FROM TRAITORS.”

Wilson, during her faux press briefing — delivered to mostly administration cheerleaders after outlets from the New York Times to Fox News relinquished their press passes rather than agree to restrictions that constrain reporters’ First Amendment rights —called out Houlahan and her fellow lawmakers in the video.

“The Seditious Six urged members of our military to defy their chain of command in an unprecedented, treasonous and shameful conspiracy to sow distrust and chaos in our armed forces,” said Wilson. She went on to call the video “a politically motivated influence operation” that “puts our warfighters at risk.”

Hegseth described the members of Congress’s video as “despicable, reckless, and false.” Hegseth himself, however, had delivered a similar message recorded in 2016 footage revealed by CNN on Tuesday.

“If you’re doing something that is just completely unlawful and ruthless, then there is a consequence for that. That’s why the military said it won’t follow unlawful orders from their commander-in-chief,” Hegseth told an audience in the footage. “There’s a standard, there’s an ethos, there’s a belief that we are above what so many things that our enemies or others would do.”

Wilson did not reply to a request for comment about Hegseth’s remarks.

Hegseth is also on the hotseat after the Pentagon’s Inspector General’s Office determined that he risked the safety of U.S. service members by sharing sensitive military information on the Signal messaging app, according to a source familiar with the forthcoming report by the Pentagon watchdog.

The report, which is expected to be released on Thursday, was launched after a journalist at The Atlantic revealed he had been added to a chat on the encrypted messaging app in which Hegseth and other top officials were discussing plans for U.S. airstrikes in Yemen that also killed civilians.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

NOTIFY: Y   |  REPLY  |  REPLY WITH QUOTE  |  TOP  |  HOME  

YOUR OPTIONS

NEW POSTS TODAY

USERPOST DATE
second 12.04 07:55
second 12.04 09:58
second 12.04 10:08
second 12.04 11:20

OTHER TOPICS

DISCUSSIONS
Merry Christmas
Thu, December 4, 2025 12:03 - 21 posts
Merry Christmas Firefly Fans!
Thu, December 4, 2025 11:58 - 6 posts
Happy Hanukkah, Merry Christmas, Joyous Kwanzaa, jolly Sun Return, and Happy Festivus!
Thu, December 4, 2025 11:55 - 36 posts
Russia Invades Ukraine. Again
Thu, December 4, 2025 11:36 - 9482 posts
Trump Is Destroying Everything He Touches
Thu, December 4, 2025 11:31 - 1029 posts
Do you feel like the winds of change are blowing today too?
Thu, December 4, 2025 11:20 - 4021 posts
In the garden, and RAIN!!! (2)
Thu, December 4, 2025 02:51 - 6413 posts
End of the world Peter Zeihan
Wed, December 3, 2025 18:38 - 282 posts
Midterms 2026
Wed, December 3, 2025 15:07 - 283 posts
You can't take the sky from me, a tribute to Firefly
Wed, December 3, 2025 13:45 - 339 posts
Intercepted communications between Russia, Trump
Wed, December 3, 2025 13:43 - 132 posts
THG and 6ixStringJack: And I'll make you a deal about Charlie Kirk / THG, I accept
Wed, December 3, 2025 13:40 - 28 posts

FFF.NET SOCIAL