Trump Is Destroying Everything He Touches by JJ

REAL WORLD EVENT DISCUSSIONS

Trump Is Destroying Everything He Touches

POSTED BY: JJ
UPDATED: Saturday, December 13, 2025 13:13
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Tuesday, December 9, 2025 9:53 AM

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

Trump Warns of ‘Dark and Sinister Forces’ as Supreme Court Decision Looms

By Shane Croucher | Dec 09, 2025 at 07:08 AM EST

https://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-tariffs-supreme-court-ruling-111
78256

President Donald Trump warned that the Supreme Court ruling against him in a key case on his power to apply tariffs would be the "biggest threat in history to United States National Security."

"We would be financially defenseless," Trump said in an early hours post on Truth Social, pointing to a report that the European Union is planning to apply new tariffs on China. "We would not be allowed to do what others already do!"

Trump said tariffs have "greatly enhanced" national security and that they had made the U.S. the "financially strongest" country in the world, adding: "Only dark and sinister forces would want to see that end!!!"

Supreme Court Weighs Future of Signature Trump Policy

In November, Supreme Court justices heard oral arguments in the case that challenged Trump's executive authority to impose tariffs—his signature economic policy—over the head of Congress.

The court expedited the case after a request from the Trump administration. Justices are yet to make a ruling, one that could upend a foundation stone of Trump's policy agenda.

Lower courts have repeatedly ruled against the administration's authority in imposing broad and sweeping tariffs on an emergency basis.

Trump has liberally used tariffs since retaking office in January. He sees them as a vital tool of American economic power, one that can protect and rebuild American manufacturing and production sectors by deterring unfair global competition.

The Republican president has also used tariffs to punish U.S. rivals and foes, such as China for its role in the fentanyl trade and Russian trading partners for their role in aiding the Kremlin's war on Ukraine.

But critics of the tariffs—a tax paid by the importer—say they are pushing up inflation and can deprive American firms of raw materials and other products they need.

Moreover, they say Trump has also used tariffs aggressively against allies, weakening vital strategic partners that the U.S. should be helping to strengthen.

And they have prompted trading partners to hit back with their own tariffs on American imports, hurting U.S. exporters.

What Supreme Court Justices Are Thinking on Tariffs

A potential majority in a ruling against the tariffs would almost certainly bring together the court’s three liberal justices and at least two conservatives.

Justices Amy Coney Barrett and Neil Gorsuch, both Trump appointees, and Chief Justice John Roberts appeared to be the most likely to rule against the president.

The Constitution gives Congress the power to impose tariffs, but Trump has claimed extraordinary power to act without congressional approval by declaring national emergencies under the 1977 International Emergency Economic Powers Act.

At the hearing for oral arguments, Gorsuch signaled he was troubled by the idea that Congress could give away its power over taxes to the president.

"The power to reach into the pockets of the American people is just different and it’s been different since the founding," Gorsuch said, when disputes over taxes helped spark the American Revolution.

Both Barrett and Roberts asked questions indicating at least some unease about how the case should come out, and Justices Brett Kavanaugh, Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas also could support the administration.

Kavanaugh asked about the 10 percent worldwide tariffs imposed by President Richard Nixon under a predecessor to IEEPA that used very similar language.

Understanding Nixon’s tariffs, which were upheld by an appellate court but never reached the Supreme Court, "is real important to deciding this case correctly," he said.

Barrett and Kavanaugh seized on arguments made by the challengers that the president could order a complete trade embargo but not impose tariffs of even 1 percent under the emergency law.

"Doesn’t it seem like it would make sense, then, that Congress would want the president to use something that was…weaker medicine than completely shutting down trade as leverage to try to get a foreign nation to do something?" Barrett asked.

Tariff Revenues Defy Trump Claims

The president has said that the U.S. is taking in "trillions" of dollars from import tariffs and other investments. But the actual numbers are far less than that. Treasury Department data shows that revenue from tariffs in the last fiscal year was nearly $195 billion. In the current fiscal year, tariffs have earned around $31 billion so far.

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

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Tuesday, December 9, 2025 2:09 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK

It's moot.

SCOTUS will side with Trump on this.

Your article written by "experts" who are always wrong about everything isn't worth reading.

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Wednesday, December 10, 2025 7:35 AM

SECOND

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

Trump Says That You Are the Problem
Everything is perfect. Why aren’t you grateful?

By Paul Krugman | Dec 10, 2025

https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/trump-says-that-you-are-the-problem

Last night Donald Trump gave an important speech on the economy in Pennsylvania — supposedly in a working-class area, although the actual venue was a luxury casino resort. The event was initially touted as the start of an “affordability tour,” the first of a series of speeches intended to reverse Trump’s cratering approval on his handling of inflation and the economy. A number of news analyses suggested that he would use the occasion to blame Democrats for the economy’s troubles.

That was never going to happen. Trump did, of course, take many swipes at Joe Biden, as well as attacking immigrants, women and windmills. But to blame Democrats for the economy’s problems he would have to admit that the Trump economy has problems. And the speech was important because it revealed that he won’t make any such admission, and will continue to gaslight the public.

On Monday Politico interviewed Trump, asking him, among other things, what grade he would give the current economy. His answer: “A-plus-plus-plus-plus-plus.”

In fact, until very recently Trump wouldn’t even accept the reality that ordinary Americans don’t share his triumphalism. When Fox News’s Laura Ingraham asked him a month ago why people are anxious about the economy, Trump replied

I don’t know they are saying that. The polls are fake. We have the greatest economy we’ve ever had.

Since then Trump and his minions seem to have come around to admitting that Americans are, in fact, unhappy with the state of the economy. But if the economy is A+++++, why don’t people see it? The problem can’t possibly lie with him — so it must lie with you. “The American people don’t know how good they have it.”

I put that line in quotes because it isn’t a caricature or a paraphrase. It is, in fact, literally what Scott Bessent, the Treasury secretary, said the other day:

We’ve made a lot of gains, but remember, we’ve got this embedded inflation from the Biden years, where mainstream media, whether it’s Greg Ip at the Wall Street Journal, toxic Paul Krugman at New York Times or former Vice Chair, Alan Blinder, all said it was a vibecession. The American people don’t know how good they have it.

Incidentally, I appreciate the personal plug. Trump has already called me a “deranged bum.” Now Bessent says I’m “toxic.” Give me a fake peace prize, and I’ll have all the honors anyone could ask for.

Anyway, I may not be a political strategist, but I don’t think “You’re all a bunch of ingrates” is a winning message. It was, however, really the only message Trump could deliver, given his utter lack of empathy or humility.

At this point I could bombard you with a lot of data showing that the economy is not, in fact, A+++++. But it isn’t a disaster area, at least not yet. So why are Americans feeling so down? The main culprit is Trump himself.

First, during the 2024 campaign Trump repeatedly promised to bring consumer prices way down beginning on “day one.” We’re now 11 months in, prices are still rising, and voters who believed him feel, with reason, that they were lied to. Last night Trump insisted that prices are, in fact, coming way down. Again, “Who you gonna believe, me or your lying eyes?” is a self-destructive political strategy.

Second, Trump would be in much better political shape right now if he had basically continued Biden’s policies, with only a few cosmetic changes. When he took office inflation was on a declining trajectory. Consumer sentiment was relatively favorable at the start of 2025. Americans were still angry about high prices, but the inflation surge of 2021-3 had happened on Biden’s watch and was receding into the past. My guess is that many voters would have accepted Trump’s claims that high prices were Democrats’ fault and given him the benefit of the doubt about the economy’s future if he had simply done nothing drastic and left policies mostly as they were.

Instead, he brought chaos: Massive and massively unpopular tariffs, DOGE disruptions, masked ICE agents grabbing people off the street, saber-rattling and war crimes in the Caribbean. Many swing voters, I believe, supported Trump out of nostalgia for the relative calm that prevailed before Covid struck. They didn’t think they were voting for nonstop political PTSD.

And there’s more to come. Health insurance costs are about to spike, because Republicans refuse to extend Biden-era subsidies. Inflation may pick up in the next few months as retailers, who have so far absorbed much of the cost of Trump’s tariffs, begin passing them on to consumers.

So the “affordability tour” is off to a disastrous start. And it won’t get better, because while Trump insists that the problem is you, it’s actually him. And he isn’t going to change.

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

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Wednesday, December 10, 2025 7:38 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK

There hasn't been any cratering on Trump's approval. He's still above where Biden, Obama and GWB were all at during this time in their 2nd term.

Keep dreaming, Paul.

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

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Thursday, December 11, 2025 6:57 AM

SECOND

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

The last time so much wealth was tied up in such obscure overlapping arrangements was just before the 2008 financial crisis.

By Rogé Karma | December 10, 2025, 1:13 PM ET

An AI-induced financial disaster is far from inevitable. Still, given the warning signs, one would hope for the federal government to be doing what it can to reduce the risk of a crisis. Instead, the Trump administration is doing the opposite. In August, the president signed an executive order that instructs federal agencies to loosen regulations so that ordinary 401(k) holders can invest directly in “alternative assets” such as, yes, private credit, a change that could expose a far broader swath of the public to the fallout if AI loans go bad. Perhaps that is the key difference between 2008 and 2025. Back then, the federal government was caught off guard by the crash; this time, it appears to be courting one.

Evidence is growing that the links between private credit and the rest of the financial system are stronger than once believed. Careful studies from the Federal Reserve estimate that up to a quarter of bank loans to nonbank financial institutions are now made to private-credit firms (up from just 1 percent in 2013) and that major life-insurance companies have nearly $1 trillion tied up in private credit. These connections raise the prospect that a big AI crash could lead to a wave of private-credit failures, which could in turn bring down major banks and insurers, Natasha Sarin, a Yale Law School professor who specializes in financial regulation, told me. “Unfortunately, it usually isn’t until after a crisis that we realize just how interconnected the different parts of the financial system were all along,” she said.

https://www.theatlantic.com/economy/2025/12/nvidia-ai-financing-deals/
685197/

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

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Thursday, December 11, 2025 9:35 AM

THG

Keep it real please

Quote:
Originally posted by JJ:
Merkel: G-7 summit with Trump was a 'sobering' experience

FRANKFURT, Germany — German Chancellor Angela Merkel found the contentious Group of Seven summit with U.S. President Donald Trump a "sobering" and "depressing" experience but said European leaders won't be "taken advantage of" on trade.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/merkel-g-7-summit-with-trump-was-
a-sobering-experience/ar-AAytwie?ocid=spartanntp

Some of us called this as soon as Trump started campaigning. The rest here were at that time, and remain to this day, to be fools and trolls.

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Thursday, December 11, 2025 10:07 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK

Why are you doubling down on stupid shit you've posted all over the board today?

You're just embarrassing yourself twice for the same thing when you do that.

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Thursday, December 11, 2025 12:09 PM

SECOND

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

Visitors to the U.S. — including those from visa-free countries such as France, Germany and Britain — would have to submit five years of social media activity before being allowed through the border, according to a proposal by the Trump administration published Wednesday:
https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2025/12/10/2025-22461/agency
-information-collection-activities-revision-arrival-and-departure-record-form-i-94-and

The new rules, which would also require travelers to provide emails, phone numbers and addresses used in the last five years, would come into effect early next year — shortly before hundreds of thousands of football fans are expected to travel to the U.S. to watch their teams compete in the World Cup, which begins in June. The U.S. is co-hosting the tournament with Mexico and Canada.

“President Trump’s plan to screen visitors to the U.S. based on their past five-year social media history is outrageous,” Irish Member of the European Parliament Barry Andrews of the centrist Renew group said in a statement.

“Even the worst authoritarian states in the world do not have such an official policy,” he added. “The plans would of course seriously damage the U.S. tourist industry as millions of Europeans would no longer feel safe … including football fans due to attend next year’s World Cup.”

https://www.politico.eu/article/donald-trump-fifa-world-cup-social-med
ia-technology-politics-europe/

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

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Thursday, December 11, 2025 12:35 PM

SECOND

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

Trump plans to break up the EU by ‘pulling four MAGA allies’ out of the bloc, report claims

By James C. Reynolds | Thursday 11 December 2025 11:41 EST

https://www.the-independent.com/news/world/europe/trump-eu-break-up-it
aly-hungary-bloc-b2882684.html

The Trump administration made plans to pull four friendly countries out of the European Union and into America’s orbit in an effort to “Make Europe Great Again”, according to a report.

The 29-page US National Security Strategy (NSS) sent shockwaves around Europe when it was unveiled last week, condemning Washington’s European allies as “weak” and offering support to far-right political parties.

According to Defense One, a longer and unpublished version of the document suggested taking Austria, Hungary, Italy and Poland out of the EU and into greater alignment with the US, while backing movements supportive of “traditional European ways of life”.

The four nations were cited as countries the US should “work with more ... with the goal of pulling them away” from the EU, according to US-based news channel Defense One, which claimed to have reviewed the document.

Defense One claims that it elaborated on how Trump would like to build Washington’s relationship with ideologically-aligned administrations, as the US focuses on domestic priorities.

“We should support parties, movements, and intellectual and cultural figures who seek sovereignty and preservation/restoration of traditional European ways of life…while remaining pro-American,” it said, according to Defense One.

The alleged document is likely to spark further alarm in Europe, just days after the NSS claimed countries such as France and Germany were “decaying” due to migration and stifled economic growth.

[The White House denies it, but the cat is out of the bag.]

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

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Thursday, December 11, 2025 12:44 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Visitors to the U.S. — including those from visa-free countries such as France, Germany and Britain — would have to submit five years of social media activity before being allowed through the border, according to a proposal by the Trump administration published Wednesday:

Good.

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Thursday, December 11, 2025 12:45 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Trump plans to break up the EU by ‘pulling four MAGA allies’ out of the bloc, report claims

Even better, if true.

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Friday, December 12, 2025 7:47 AM

SECOND

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

Donald Trump, Security Threat

The call is coming from inside the White House

By Paul Krugman | Dec 12, 2025

https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/donald-trump-security-threat

Donald J. Trump @realDonaldTrump
Because of Tariffs, easily and quickly applied, our National Security has been greatly enhanced, and we have become the financially strongest Country, by far, anywhere in the World. Only dark and sinister forces would want to see that end!!!
Dec 09, 2025, 3:45 AM

To update Samuel Johnson, these days national security is the last refuge of a scoundrel. According to Donald Trump, anything he doesn’t like is a threat to national security. Question his clearly illegal tariffs? You’re a dark and sinister force trying to undermine America. When the New York Times reported on signs that age may be taking a toll on Trump’s stamina, he denounced the reporting as “seditious, maybe even treasonous.”

But some of America’s allies — and many of us here at home — are becoming increasingly open about saying that the real danger is coming from inside the White House: Trump himself has become the biggest security threat facing the U.S. and, indeed, all the world’s democracies.

On Wednesday a new report from Denmark’s military intelligence service contained the most explicit statement of the growing alarm. It pointed out that, under Donald Trump, America is no longer acting like a friendly partner:

The United States uses economic power, including threats of high tariffs, to enforce its will, and no longer rules out the use of military force, even against allies.

Without a doubt, Denmark’s concerns have been heightened by Trump’s repeated assertions that he wants to “get” Greenland, which is a Danish territory. In August the Danish government summoned the head of the U.S. embassy to protest about “covert influence operations” in Greenland undertaken by Americans with ties to Trump.

However, Denmark is certainly not alone in raising concerns and acting on them. Several of America’s closest traditional allies, including Canada and the UK, have reportedly acted to limit intelligence-sharing with the U.S. One cited concern is the risk of being complicit in unlawful acts or war crimes arising from the deadly strikes on boats in the Caribbean.

Sotto voce, it’s also clear that the Canadians and the Europeans are alarmed by the presence of Putin sympathizers and conspiracy theorists like Tulsi Gabbard, the Director of National Intelligence, in sensitive positions within the Trump administration. After hearing the leaked tape of Steve Witkoff’s fawning and borderline treasonous conversation with Yuri Ushakov, Putin’s foreign policy adviser – in which Witkoff coached him on how to manipulate Trump -- who would want to share sensitive information with this American president?

More broadly, in a world of growing geopolitical conflict, it has become increasingly clear whose side the Trump administration is on — the side of Trump’s personal interests, grudges and biases. Trump’s new National Security Strategy, released last week, made this dynamic clear. There was no condemnation of Russian aggression against Ukraine and hardly any mention of the US rivalry with China. Yet it lambasted Europe and openly supported right-wing extremist parties that are trying to undermine European democracy.

Trump’s proposed “peace plan” for Ukraine not only reads like a Russian wish list, but it also uses some odd phrasing and syntax suggesting that it was translated from a Russian original. Moreover, the Wall Street Journal reports that the plan includes a number of undisclosed appendices that would unlock frozen Russian assets and bring Russia’s economy “in from the cold,” effectively ending the sanctions Putin has faced since he invaded Ukraine.

As odious as Witkoff’s actions were, they revealed the truth of the matter: Trump’s foreign policy is not about securing the safety and well-being of the United States. It’s about playing to Trump’s ego, about appealing to his incessant psychodrama of domination and sycophancy. Anyone who believes otherwise is living in La-La-Land.

This betrayal of America’s security interests extends to Trump’s international economic policy and his clear misuse of tariff laws. Under Section 232 of the Trade Expansion Act of 1962, a president is given considerable discretion to impose tariffs to protect industries deemed crucial to national security. And national security tariffs are legal under international law.

The Trump administration has, however, made a mockery of Section 232, using it to justify tariffs on many goods that have no conceivable relationship to national security. In October, for example, Trump imposed Section 232 tariffs on upholstered furniture and kitchen cabinets. In Trump’s mind America would be put at great risk if it were dependent on foreign suppliers of new sofas in the midst of an international conflict.

Even as he imposes 50 percent tariffs to limit the menace of Chinese kitchen cabinets, Trump has decided to allow China to buy the advanced Nvidia semiconductor chips that power many AI models. Bear in mind that the U.S. lead in cutting-edge technology is one of our few advantages in geopolitical competition with China, and this gift to the Chinese has been strongly criticized by every genuine national security expert that I know. (Our other big advantage used to be that we had so many strong allies, but Trump has ended that.)

Yet Trump is now, for a modest fee, letting the Chinese have access to our most advanced semiconductors. As the Wall Street Journal — not exactly a left-wing rag — put it,

The Indians struck a better deal when they sold Manhattan to the Dutch. Why would the President give away one of America’s chief technological advantages to an adversary and its chief economic competitor?

But the answer is simple: Trump doesn’t care at all about national security, or for that matter America’s national interests. Instead, it’s all about him: reportedly Trump took the decision to allow the Chinese to have the advanced Nvidia chips after personal lobbying by Jensen Huang, the CEO of Nvidia. Clearly Chinese exporters of furniture and kitchen cabinetry need to get coached by Steve Witkoff.

Just to be clear, I am not a free trade purist. I am not saying national security should be ignored or underplayed when setting economic policy. On the contrary, in a world in which China is arguably the world’s leading superpower, in which Putin feels free to launch a war of conquest on Europe’s doorstep, national security considerations are critically important. In fact, it’s arguable that the twin threats from China and Russia have rendered the US far more vulnerable than at any other period in our lifetimes.

Yet the biggest threats to U.S. national security aren’t coming from Beijing or Moscow. They’re coming straight out of the Oval Office.

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

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Saturday, December 13, 2025 7:52 AM

SECOND

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

The Curse of Trump 2.0

What does it say that the President doesn’t even feel he needs to hide his most profane and radical views anymore?

By Susan B. Glasser | December 11, 2025

https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-trumps-washington/the-curse
-of-trump-20

In January of 2018, Donald Trump hosted a group of lawmakers in the Oval Office to discuss the possibility of a bipartisan immigration deal. But, when talking about plans to give protected status to immigrants from African countries and other nations, such as El Salvador and Haiti, he grew frustrated. “Why are we having all these people from shithole countries come here?” he demanded, adding that he’d prefer to have more people enter the U.S. from largely white, European nations such as Norway. The remarks, published soon after the meeting in the Washington Post, caused a sensation. Trump denied the reporting, and a couple of the Republican senators who were present said they did not recall him making the comments. “This was not the language used,” Trump tweeted. He called the account “made up by Dems.” When questions about the statements persisted, he told reporters, “I am not a racist. I’m the least racist person you have ever interviewed.”

Nearly eight years later, and more than an hour and twenty-five minutes into a speech at a rally in Pennsylvania this week, Trump finally admitted that he had, in fact, used the “shithole” language. He then set off on an extended riff about how the United States takes in too many immigrants from Somalia and other places that are “filthy, dirty, disgusting, ridden with crime.” Trump didn’t just acknowledge what he once denied; as the audience applauded, he lingered on his past remark as a fond memory.

For many, it was a gotcha moment—the President taking ownership, belatedly, for one of his most iconic lines. “The truth comes out,” Dick Durbin, the Democratic senator from Illinois, whose account of the meeting had been questioned by his G.O.P. colleagues, posted on social media. Others focussed less on the revelation that our chronically untruthful leader had failed to tell the truth about something, and more on the escalating hate speech about Somali immigrants in Minnesota that the President is now spewing forth on a regular basis. It was both of those things, of course, and also a perfect example of the contrast between Trump’s two terms. Trump is still Trump, but what a difference it is, nonetheless, to go from a President who felt it necessary to deny that he had said “shithole countries” to one who, eight years later, is celebrating the fact that he said it.

Trump 2.0 is all about this break with the stylistic norms, rules, and traditions that governed the Presidency in the past, and that, we must now understand, includes Trump 1.0. For years, he has complained that pretty much all of his predecessors in the White House were wrong about everything. The surprise of his second term, to the extent that there is one, is that Trump’s critique of America’s other Presidents is no longer just a repudiation of George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden; it now extends to Trump himself. Not to him personally, of course. Anyone who has watched even a minute of a Trump Cabinet meeting knows that our President is never wrong about anything. But, if Trump is unwilling to admit any errors of his own, he is more than happy to reject the policies of those who worked for him, even when it’s his big, bold signature scribbled with his trademark black Sharpie on the cover.

Eight years ago this month, Trump’s White House published its first national-security strategy, a document that extolled NATO’s enduring value as “one of our great advantages over our competitors,” and praised America’s allies as, in the words of one of the strategy’s principal authors, the then national-security adviser H. R. McMaster, “the best defense against today’s threats.” Its most famous passage declared a new era of “great power competition” and warned that China and Russia posed grave long-term dangers to the United States. I cannot count the number of times I had this document quoted to me by Republican-establishment types eager to prove that Trump really was a Reaganesque tough-on-Russia guy, after all.

His new national-security doctrine, released late last week, has abandoned the language about great-power threats from China and Russia in favor of a reduced role for America as the unchallenged hegemon of the Western hemisphere. To the extent that a global theory of the case is expressed, it is a Darwinian vision of geopolitical might makes right: “The outsized influence of larger, richer, and stronger nations,” the document stresses, “is a timeless truth of international relations.” The thirty-three-page paean to the leadership of the “President of Peace” also calls for an end to NATO expansion, treats Russia as an equal to Europe (without mentioning its responsibility for launching a war of aggression against Ukraine), and essentially promotes regime change—for America’s European allies. (In the language of the strategy: “cultivating resistance to Europe’s current trajectory within European nations.”) The plan, not surprisingly, was well received by the Kremlin, where Vladimir Putin’s spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, praised the adjustments to U.S. strategy as “largely consistent with our vision.”

However much Trump was personally involved in shaping these national-security documents, there’s little doubt that the 2025 version sounds a lot more like the man himself than the 2017 iteration. Back then, Trump’s real views about the world—a profoundly disruptive departure from decades of Republican foreign policy—were, like his “shithole countries” comment, still meant only for private consumption. Now he’s loud and proud about them.

The most important point here is that Trump’s second term—the “Do-Over Presidency,” I called it a few months ago—is an exercise in Presidential wish fulfillment. This time, he is not about to let persnickety lawyers, or his own past record, stand in the way. Think of the long list of extreme policies that Trump talked about in his first term but has only followed through on in this one: ending the constitutional guarantee of birthright citizenship, imposing sweeping tariffs on U.S. trade partners by declaring a national “emergency,” sending troops into Democratic-run cities to quell domestic political protests.

All three of these policies, it should be noted, are currently subject to lawsuits in the federal courts—a major reason that Trump’s first-term advisers warned him against pursuing them. But he did not get rid of the policies; he ditched the advisers. Unconstrained and emboldened, today’s Trump has learned from years of experience how to make the machinery of Washington give him what he wants, whether it is legal or not. He is, at last, the “Jurassic Park” velociraptor that figures out how to open the door, in the memorable image once evoked for me by a national-security official from Trump’s first term.

Some of the difference between Trump 1.0 and 2.0, as in the rally the other night, is in the presentation. Although he’s always been lewd and rude, a liar and an extemporizer whose public shows are designed to shock and entertain, his tongue has clearly been loosened by advancing age and the adoring bubble of sycophants in which he now exists. Having dispensed entirely with the dreary rituals of acting Presidential, Trump now talks in public the way he does in private—swearing, rambling, sexist, racist. It wasn’t just the rant about Somali immigrants, or the extreme length of his speech. (Ninety-seven minutes, compared with an average of forty-five minutes at his rallies in 2016.) Or the cringey digression about “that beautiful face and those lips that don’t stop, pop, pop, pop, like a little machine gun,” of his young female press secretary. And the cursing—where to begin? There’s just so much of it. Is that because he’s eight years older and no longer bound by his old inhibitions? Or maybe he’s just really angry that his poll numbers have sunk so low?

If that’s the case, we can expect a whole lot more expletives, because Trump, untethered, is now by many measures more unpopular than ever before. In his first term, the President was already a polarizing and historically unpopular figure, but he had a strong economy going for him—even if it was never “the greatest economy in the history of the world” that he so often proclaimed it to be. This time, with persistent inflation, fears of impending recession, and global jitters about his preference for market-crushing tariffs, support for Trump’s economic policies has fallen even lower than backing for the man himself. On Thursday, the Associated Press and NORC released a new survey showing him with his worst numbers of the year—with just thirty-six per cent approving of his job performance and thirty-one per cent supporting what he’s done for the economy, his lowest showing in either of his two terms. Gallup, in a similar recent survey, found that sixty per cent of Americans now disapprove of his second-term job performance. The electorate, it turns out, has a few choice words for Trump, too.

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

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Saturday, December 13, 2025 9:32 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK

Democrats are cancer and Paul Krugman is an idiot.

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Be Nice. Don't be a dick.

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Saturday, December 13, 2025 9:51 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:
Democrats are cancer and Paul Krugman is an idiot.

Lacking 1) self-discipline and 2) mental stability, Trumptards and Trump are trapped by their personal dramas. They blame their troubles on Democrats rather than on their malfunctioning minds because the effort required to achieve 2) mental stability is too much, especially because they lack 1) self-discipline.

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

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Saturday, December 13, 2025 1:13 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK

Democrats are cancer and Paul Krugman is an idiot.

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Be Nice. Don't be a dick.

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6ixStringJack	12.13 13:13