Do you feel like the winds of change are blowing today too? by 6ixStringJack

REAL WORLD EVENT DISCUSSIONS

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

POSTED BY: 6IXSTRINGJACK
UPDATED: Wednesday, December 17, 2025 23:37
SHORT URL:
VIEWED: 103378
PAGE 83 of 83

Monday, December 15, 2025 5:22 AM

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

Smoking does cause cancer. Trump hasn't murdered anybody.

Your pathetic attempts at emotional blackmail through hyperbole are as paper thin as your personality.

I know you think you're special, but you don't sound any different than anybody else saying all the things you say every day. Outside of anger and insults, you don't even have the capability to think for yourself anymore. None of your thoughts remain your own.
If smoking causes cancer, why did you ever smoke, 6ix? Because you never believed that it could happen to you.

Yeah. I was once young and dumb. Thought that I was the bright shiny center of the universe. Thought that I was invincible. Just like everybody else.

Quote:
If Trump killed hundreds of thousands of children, why did you ever vote for him, 6ix?

He didn't.

So shut the fuck up.

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

Be Nice. Don't be a dick.

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

Monday, December 15, 2025 12:59 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:
Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

Smoking does cause cancer. Trump hasn't murdered anybody.

Your pathetic attempts at emotional blackmail through hyperbole are as paper thin as your personality.

I know you think you're special, but you don't sound any different than anybody else saying all the things you say every day. Outside of anger and insults, you don't even have the capability to think for yourself anymore. None of your thoughts remain your own.
If smoking causes cancer, why did you ever smoke, 6ix? Because you never believed that it could happen to you.

Yeah. I was once young and dumb. Thought that I was the bright shiny center of the universe. Thought that I was invincible. Just like everybody else.

Quote:
If Trump killed hundreds of thousands of children, why did you ever vote for him, 6ix?

He didn't.

So shut the fuck up.

I know you will keep lying forever, 6ixStringJoker. It shows you are a goddamn Nazi. The Holocaust deniers protect the reputation of Hitler and his Nazis, and those who deny that Trump killed hundreds of thousands of children are protecting Trump's and his Trumptards' reputation.

How many children died because Trump shut down USAID?

The Trump administration's decision to freeze and cut most U.S. foreign aid programs has been estimated by public health experts and modeling studies to be in the hundreds of thousands so far, with projections reaching into the millions over the coming years if cuts continue.

https://www.google.com/search?q=How+many+children+died+because+Trump+s
hut+down+USAID

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 15, 2025 1:00 PM

SECOND

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

MAGA leaders warn Trump the base is checking out. Will he listen?

Story by Natalie Allison, Kadia Goba, Hannah Knowles

Dec 15, 2025

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/maga-leaders-warn-trump-the-ba
se-is-checking-out-will-he-listen/ar-AA1SmUR4

As Donald Trump ate his crab cake lunch inside the White House last month, conservative pollster Mark Mitchell tried to explain that there was a disconnect between what the administration seemed to be focused on, and what Trump’s passionate base of supporters want to see.

“Sir, you got shot at the Butler rally,” Mitchell said, invoking the “really strong optics” of Trump raising his fist in defiance after the attempted assassination in July 2024.

“You said, ‘Fight, fight, fight.’ But nobody ever clarified what that means,” Mitchell continued. “And right now, you’re fight-fight-fighting Marjorie Taylor Greene, and not actually fight-fight-fighting for Americans.”

The head pollster at Rasmussen Reports warned Trump that many of his supporters believe he hasn’t “drained the swamp” in Washington, and suggested the president refocus with a plan to embrace “pragmatic economic populism.”

“To the extent to which we were talking about the economic populism message, he wasn’t as interested as I would have hoped,” Mitchell said, adding that it was a “long-ranging conversation.”

Mitchell’s critique echoes a growing chorus of faithful MAGA supporters who have begun raising concerns over what they see as Trump’s second-term shortcomings. In recent weeks, pockets of the president’s base — well-known for its unwavering dedication to Trump and his MAGA agenda — have accused the president of focusing too much on foreign affairs, failing to address the cost of living issues he pledged to fix, aligning himself too closely with billionaires and tech moguls, and resisting the release of more investigative files on the deceased sexual predator Jeffrey Epstein.

Across the conservative spectrum, a steady drumbeat of commentators have warned that Trump’s coalition is weakened, and the party is headed for defeat in November’s midterms elections. There are concerns that the base won’t show up over frustrations that Trump hasn’t pursued the MAGA agenda aggressively enough. And others worry economic concerns could threaten his standing with the independent voters key in next year’s midterms.

Trump’s top advisers have taken note of the criticism from within MAGA, and see it as part of the “cyclical” feedback the administration will receive throughout his term, as one senior White House official put it. Trump’s staff have planned for him to begin holding near-weekly rallies to tout his accomplishments after spending little time on the stump this year, two officials told The Washington Post, speaking on the condition of anonymity to detail internal conversations. But on his first stop of that effort, at a casino in Pennsylvania last week, Trump again mocked the word “affordability” and downplayed concerns about rising costs and inflation before acknowledging, “I can’t say affordability is a hoax because I agree the prices were too high.”

His advisers anticipate complaints from Trump’s base could even become “louder” as the midterms approach, but will subside as more of his policies take effect. Eventually, an adviser quipped, the cycle will restart with a new set of criticisms.

Chief among the recent critics has been Greene (R-Georgia), whose complaints led to Trump disavowing her last month and her subsequent decision to resign from Congress.

“I’m an early indicator — I’m like a bellwether,” said Greene, who stood by Trump during his political exile after the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol, and has prided herself on being closely attuned to Trump’s base. “I say it, and then within four to six months, everybody’s saying the same thing.”

In an interview with The Washington Post, Greene said most of Trump’s longtime supporters still want to see him succeed, but “the base is jaded.” They know what they elected him to do, Greene said, and “they’re aware he’s not doing it.”

‘Driving 80 miles an hour at a brick wall’

Public polling has shown mixed signals about how much Trump’s support has slipped among Republicans. He maintains support from the vast majority of the party, though recent polling shows he has dipped below the GOP’s usual 90-percent approval mark. But Trump’s approval overall has lagged in recent weeks. It reached its worst with voters in late November and has ticked up slightly since, though it remains lower than at this point in his first term. An Economist/YouGov poll conducted this month found that 41 percent of Americans approve of the job Trump is doing, and 55 percent disapprove, a net improvement of five percentage points from the same poll a week earlier.

That apparent softness has coincided with some Republicans emboldened to push back against aspects of the Trump agenda, including last week, when GOP state senators in Indiana blocked a White House-led effort to redraw the state’s congressional maps. And on Thursday, 20 Republicans in Congress joined Democrats in another rebuke, supporting a bill that would overturn Trump’s executive order that limited union rights for federal workers.

What remains to be seen is whether that brewing dissatisfaction will grow, or if Trump can more aggressively focus on issues that quiet the discontent. Trump said Tuesday that his remaining three years in office amount to an “eternity” in “Trump time” to carry out his agenda.

Still, the chorus of supporters willing to speak out has become louder.

Mitchell was invited to the White House by Vice President JD Vance, who follows him on X and has communicated with Mitchell about polling in recent months. Before lunch with Trump, Mitchell met with Vance, White House chief of staff Susie Wiles and Secretary of State Marco Rubio. Mitchell is not part of the president’s political operation, but Trump’s advisers were interested in hearing his outside perspective, a White House official told The Post.

Mitchell said Trump listened to his concerns and asked questions, but eventually pivoted to one of his favorite conversation topics: golf. He gushed about two of his golf partners, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-South Carolina) and Fox News host Bret Baier, both of whom are the subject of MAGA-faction ire. Trump also bragged about how much money he had raised during a golf fundraiser for Graham the weekend before, a day after he declared he was rescinding his support for Greene.

In an interview, Mitchell suggested that it would have been better for the administration to acknowledge early on that repairing the economy would take significant changes and would not occur overnight.

“The very first thing they shouldn’t have done is lower gas prices one dollar and then say, ‘The Golden Age is here,’ ” he said.

Greene also believes Trump is missing an opportunity to connect with his base on affordability. People “understand that it takes time to stabilize the economy,” Greene said, but they take issue with Trump’s claims that concerns about affordability are part of a “Democrat hoax.”

“No, it’s not, and the health care situation is serious. It’s dire, and Republicans are only just now taking it serious,” Greene said, referring to expiring health care subsidies that will cause insurance prices to surge for Americans enrolled in Affordable Care Act plans. “This is a country driving 80 miles an hour at a brick wall on Jan. 1,” when they expire, Greene said.

‘Punchy tweets, cool video edits … no follow through’

Savanah Hernandez, a conservative commentator who serves as a Turning Point USA contributor, described the second Trump term so far as “underwhelming,” while crediting Trump with making positive, lasting changes to the conservative movement.

She was among the influencers the White House assembled for an “Antifa Roundtable” with Trump in October to discuss how to stop a movement of far-left activists who have at times incited violence during protests. But on that and a host of other issues Trump’s base cares about — including the administration’s goal to deport more than 1 million illegal immigrants this year, which it is not expected to reach; accountability for what they believe were government agencies being “weaponized against” conservatives; and vows to make life more affordable — Hernandez said he has fallen short.

“All we’ve really seen is punchy tweets, cool video edits, but really no follow through on any of the promises,” she said of the messaging coming from the White House.

“And if he listened to his base and he was connected to us, even just through social media, you would see that the average person is still struggling to buy groceries, that the housing crisis is still on the mind of everybody, that inflation is still a really big issue, and when Americans see billions of dollars going overseas to any country, it really feels like a betrayal when we’re struggling here at home,” Hernandez said.

Two senior White House officials said Trump on nearly a daily basis is shown a range of feedback from MAGA commentators, including criticism about his performance. In a statement, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt called Trump the “proud founder and undisputed leader” of MAGA, “the greatest political movement in American history.”

“President Trump is delivering on his core campaign promises across the board, keeping his word to the nearly 80 million patriots who elected him in a landslide, and fighting every day to make America greater than ever before,” she said.

Other MAGA-aligned voices downplayed the extent that critical voices within the movement are a warning sign. Jack Posobiec, a longtime activist and conservative media figure, described Trump’s performance as “light-years beyond” his first term.

“You will always have this sliver of people — it’s a very online group of people, a very active group of people, who would say they want more, they want more, they want more,” Posobiec said in an interview. “And I get that.”

Isabel Brown, another conservative podcaster, said the complaints from within MAGA are “a signal of a healthy conservative debate.”

Populist voices urge Trump to course correct

In Georgia, 36-year-old Jessie Meadows, a Trump voter who describes herself as “MAGA,” grew frustrated this year as prices remained high and the president responded dismissively to the push to release more files on Epstein. Her disappointment hardened as Trump attacked Greene and Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Kentucky), who also pushed for the files’ release. Trump’s online posts touting favorable polls and success bringing down inflation seemed like his own version of “fake news,” Meadows said.

She voted for Democratic candidates in November’s Public Service Commission elections in Georgia that flipped the seats from the GOP, and said that going forward, she will back candidates she considers “America First,” regardless of party.

“If I had known what Trump was going to turn into now, I would have stayed home,” Meadows said.

Many supporters like her have been turned off seeing what was once a full calendar of rallies in Middle America replaced with opulent events with business leaders, deal-signings with billionaires and travel to other continents. While meeting with Trump, Mitchell told the president his base of supporters wanted to see him “smash the oligarchy, not be the oligarchy.”

“Building billionaire-funded ballrooms and jet-setting around the world and trillion-dollar investment deals looks a lot like oligarchy stuff,” Mitchell told The Post.

Despite acknowledging Trump’s departures from his base on issues like foreign and tech policy, some top populist voices in his movement insist the president is course-correcting to win back support ahead of the midterms.

Trump “is pivoting into a much harder populist nationalist stance — on deportations, drug cartels, Third World fraud, tariffs,” said Stephen K. Bannon, his former adviser turned influential talk show host and operative.

“It’s only harder from here to November 2026,” Bannon, who has been outspoken against efforts by wealthy tech executives to influence Trump’s policies, told The Post. “Broligarchs didn’t sign up for the ‘wetwork’ of modern politics. They will be the first off the bus.”

MAGA influencers have cringed at some of Trump’s comments they view as out of touch with his base, especially his assertion on Fox News that the U.S. needs foreign workers because it does not have enough “talented people.” Not long after, Trump acknowledged that his base wasn’t happy with his decision to welcome foreign tech workers to the country, but said his poll numbers would instead go up with “smart people.”

Raheem Kassam, a British right-wing influencer living in Washington, who is editor of the conservative National Pulse, said his phone lit up with complaints when Trump made the poll comment.

“I’m just saying, listen to the people that elected you, because right now, apart from the deportation stuff, you’re not really connecting with them,” Kassam said.

In response to a request for comment from the White House, in addition to Leavitt, Vance provided The Post with a statement touting a reduction in the number of illegal immigrants in the country, Trump’s work with pharmaceutical companies to lower drug prices for some Americans, among other accomplishments.

“Is there more work to do? Of course there is,” Vance said. “And no one is more committed to doing it than the President of the United States and his team.”

Other Trump supporters said that while not everything has panned out as they hoped, they remained confident in the president.

“He is not a king,” said Jerry Ramsey, 81, from Marietta, Georgia. He can’t just say, ‘You gotta cut the price of a hamburger.’ Within another year, I think things will be rocking on pretty good.”

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 15, 2025 2:05 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
MAGA leaders warn Trump the base is checking out. Will he listen?

December 15, 2025:
Trump: 43.8% Favorable / 52.8% Unfavorable (Split: -9.0)
https://www.realclearpolling.com/polls/favorability/donald-trump

December 15, 2021:
Biden: 42.9% Favorable / 52.2% Unfavorable (Split: -9.3)
https://www.realclearpolling.com/polls/favorability/joe-biden

December 16, 2013:
Obama: 42.9% Favorable / 53.0% Unfavorable (Split: -10.1)
https://www.realclearpolling.com/polls/approval/barack-obama/approval-
rating

December 17, 2005:
GWB: 43.5% Favorable / 52.7% Unfavorable (Split: -9.2)
https://www.realclearpolling.com/polls/approval/george-w-bush/approval
-rating

Shut up, Second.

Ain't nobody ever voting a Democrat for President again, so it's moot anyhow.

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

Be Nice. Don't be a dick.

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

Monday, December 15, 2025 2:28 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:
Quote:
Originally posted by second:
MAGA leaders warn Trump the base is checking out. Will he listen?

December 15, 2025:
Trump: 43.8% Favorable / 52.8% Unfavorable (Split: -9.0)
https://www.realclearpolling.com/polls/favorability/donald-trump

December 15, 2021:
Biden: 42.9% Favorable / 52.2% Unfavorable (Split: -9.3)
https://www.realclearpolling.com/polls/favorability/joe-biden

December 16, 2013:
Obama: 42.9% Favorable / 53.0% Unfavorable (Split: -10.1)
https://www.realclearpolling.com/polls/approval/barack-obama/approval-
rating

December 17, 2005:
GWB: 43.5% Favorable / 52.7% Unfavorable (Split: -9.2)
https://www.realclearpolling.com/polls/approval/george-w-bush/approval
-rating

Shut up, Second.

Ain't nobody ever voting a Democrat for President again, so it's moot anyhow.

6ixStringJoker, if Trumptards weren't nearly crazier than Trump, they would notice that Trump is batshit crazy. His wacko daily behavior seems sane to the insane:

Trump Seizes on Rob Reiner’s Death to Attack the Hollywood Director

The president attributed the killing of Rob Reiner and his wife to “Trump derangement syndrome.” There was no indication that the couple’s political beliefs were linked to their deaths.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/15/us/politics/trump-rob-reiner.html

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

Police arrest Rob Reiner’s son after director and wife found dead

President Trump criticised for remarks blaming Hollywood figure’s death on his ‘Trump derangement syndrome’.

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/12/15/police-take-hollywood-direct
or-actor-rob-reiners-son-into-custody

Trump’s post on his Truth Social platform states that Reiner’s death was “reportedly due to the anger he caused others through his massive, unyielding, and incurable affliction with a mind crippling disease known as TRUMP DERANGEMENT SYNDROME”.

The Republican president added that Reiner was “known to have driven people CRAZY by his raging obsession of President Donald J Trump, with his obvious paranoia reaching new heights as the Trump Administration surpassed all goals and expectations of greatness”.

Those comments prompted angry condemnations and were deemed insensitive even by Trump’s standards of harsh attacks on his political rivals.

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

Nick Reiner once ‘destroyed’ parents Rob and Michele’s home during drug-fueled rage

Nick recalled a time when he became violent while he was high “on meth.”

https://pagesix.com/2025/12/15/celebrity-news/nick-reiner-once-destroy
ed-parents-rob-and-micheles-home-during-drug-fueled-rage/

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

Trump Hits New Low With Twisted Reaction to Stabbing of Rob Reiner

Donald Trump claims Reiner was responsible for his own death.

Trump has a history of undignified responses to the deaths of people who have criticized him, most notably Senator John McCain.

https://newrepublic.com/post/204420/trump-reaction-rob-reiner-stabbing
-death

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 16, 2025 8:13 AM

SECOND

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

The Year in Trump Cashing In

In 2025, the President’s family has been making bank in myriad ways, many of them involving crypto and foreign money.

By John Cassidy | December 15, 2025

https://www.newyorker.com/news/the-financial-page/the-year-in-trump-ca
shing-in

Since many of the Trump or Trump-affiliated ventures are privately owned, we don’t have a complete account of their finances. But in tracking company announcements, official filings, and the assiduous reporting of a number of media outlets, a clear picture emerges: enrichment of the First Family on a scale that is unprecedented in American history. Other Presidential relations, including Donald Nixon, Billy Carter, and Hunter Biden, have engaged in questionable business deals. But in terms of the money involved, the geographic reach, and the explicit ties to Presidential actions—particularly Trump’s efforts to turn the United States into the “crypto capital of the world”—there has never been anything like the second term of Trump, Inc.

The Setup

The time line begins in September, 2024, a couple of months before the Presidential election. It was then that Trump announced that his family was partnering with the family of a longtime friend of his, the real-estate developer Steve Witkoff, and two little-known online entrepreneurs, Zachary Folkman and Chase Herro, to create a new crypto company, World Liberty Financial, which his three sons, Eric, Donald, Jr., and Barron, would all be involved with. In a message on social media, Trump said, “Crypto is one of those things we have to do. Whether we like it or not, I have to do it.” By the following month, he had apparently quashed any doubts he may have harbored about marketing digital assets of dubious value to his supporters. In a post advertising a sale of crypto tokens that World Liberty was organizing, he declared, “This is YOUR chance to help shape the future of finance.”

According to Reuters, the Trumps are entitled to receiving seventy cents for every dollar raised from World Liberty’s token sales. Reports in the crypto media said that the initial demand for them was weak. But they did attract one significant buyer: Justin Sun, a Chinese-born billionaire who founded the Tron crypto platform, invested thirty million dollars. At the time, the Securities and Exchange Commission (S.E.C.) was suing Sun and his companies for fraud and other violations, which he denied. In a tweet announcing his purchase, Sun wrote, “TRON is committed to making America great again and leading innovation. Let’s go!”

After Trump won the election, he repeated the pattern of his first term, refusing to divest his businesses and instead placing them in a revocable trust. Although this trust is managed by his eldest sons—Eric and Donald, Jr.—Trump remains the owner of the Trump Organization. The potential conflict of interest was obvious: if the reelected President adopted policies or took any other actions that his businesses benefited from, he and his family stood to gain financially.

In another post-election development, Donald, Jr., expanded his business ambitions by joining 1789, a venture-capital fund founded by Omeed Malik and Charles Buskirk, two conservative financiers, and Rebekah Mercer, a conservative hedge-fund heiress. According to the New York Post, 1789 has raised large sums of money from Middle Eastern sovereign wealth funds. Some of the firm’s early investments were in conservative-media ventures, including Tucker Carlson’s company, but by the time Donald, Jr., joined it was also branching out into other industries, including consumer goods, defense, and technology.

On January 17, 2025, three days before Trump’s second Inauguration, he took another leap into the crypto world, releasing a new meme coin: $TRUMP. The day before the ceremony, his wife, Melania, launched her own coin, $MELANIA. Unlike the World Liberty tokens, which gave their holders certain governance rights associated with the company, these assets were simply memes. The $TRUMP one featured a picture of the President with his fist raised and the words “FIGHT FIGHT FIGHT” emblazoned over him. The Melania meme showed a closeup of her face with her hands clasped in front, as if in ebullient prayer. After the Trumps advertised the coins on their social-media accounts, their value jumped up. “$TRUMP is currently the hottest digital meme on earth,” Eric Trump said in a statement to the Times. “This is just the beginning.”

The Rake-In

With Trump back in the Oval Office, and players all over the world keen to get in his good books, developments came thick and fast, many of them involving crypto, foreign money, or both. One of his first acts as President was ordering agencies to identify regulations affecting the digital-asset sector and recommend which should be “rescinded or modified.” In February, the S.E.C.—now under new leadership—asked a court to pause its lawsuit against Sun, who by then had raised his World Liberty stake to seventy-five million dollars.

In March, Trump hosted a crypto summit at the White House, which was organized by his “crypto czar,” David Sacks, a Silicon Valley venture capitalist, and announced plans for a U.S. “Strategic Bitcoin Reserve.” Later that month, Eric and Donald, Jr., merged a company that they had formed only the previous month with a Canadian-based bitcoin-mining outfit, Hut 8, to take an ownership stake in a new company, American Bitcoin, which, according to the Wall Street Journal, had ambitions to become the world’s biggest bitcoin miner, and to establish its own bitcoin reserve.

The spring also saw the Trump brothers expanding in other areas, particularly the Persian Gulf. In April, Dar Global, a Saudi-owned real-estate developer that was already partnering with the Trumps on other Trump-branded projects in the Middle East, declared plans to launch a Trump hotel in Dubai and a Trump golf resort in neighboring Qatar. Eric Trump was in the Gulf for these announcements.

On the home front, his brother Donald, Jr., attended the launch party for another of his business ventures: the Executive Branch, an exclusive Washington club supposedly charging members an entry fee of half a million dollars. News reports identified Donald, Jr., as one of the club’s owners, and two others as Malik and Buskirk, his partners at 1789, and Zach and Alex Witkoff, two of Steve Witkoff’s sons, who are both co-founders of World Liberty Financial. CNBC said that the attendees at the Executive Branch party included Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Attorney General Pam Bondi, Paul Atkins, the head of the S.E.C., and Brendan Carr, the head of the Federal Communications Commission.

Crypto—and the cultivation of foreign investors—remained central to the Trumps’ enrichment strategy. According to a lengthy report on their “global crypto cash machine” that Reuters published in October, Eric Trump, while attending a cryptocurrency conference in Dubai in May, pitched World Liberty to potential investors, including a Chinese businessman named Guren (Bobby) Zhou, who had been arrested for suspected money laundering in Britain. (Zhou denied any wrongdoing, and he has not been convicted of any crimes.) Subsequently, the Reuters report said, a U.A.E.-based company associated with Zhou purchased a hundred million dollars’ worth of the World Liberty Financial crypto tokens, WLFI. Evidently, there have been many other foreign purchases. An analysis published by Reuters indicated that more than two-thirds of the purchases of World Liberty’s tokens were carried out via digital wallets that were likely linked to overseas buyers.

Trump also gained from official largesse. The Constitution explicitly prohibits federal officials, including the President, from accepting gifts from foreign governments without congressional consent. But, in February, Trump, who had been complaining about how long it was taking to build a new Air Force One, went to Palm Beach International Airport and toured a luxurious Boeing 747 owned by the government of Qatar. In May, days before leaving on a trip that took him to Qatar, the U.A.E., and Saudi Arabia, Trump announced on social media that the Pentagon would accept the 747 from the Qatari royal family to replace Air Force One as a “GIFT, FREE OF CHARGE.” The White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, said in a statement, “Any gift given by a foreign government is always accepted in full compliance with all applicable laws. President Trump’s administration is committed to full transparency.”

Another transaction that involved a Gulf state and benefitted the Trumps received less publicity. MGX, an investment fund controlled by the U.A.E. government, put two billion dollars into Binance, the world’s largest cryptocurrency exchange, using a stablecoin issued by World Liberty to make the payment. Stablecoins are supposedly a safer form of cryptocurrency backed by reserves of other assets, such as dollars; essentially, they provide a way to make deals in the crypto universe without having to worry about wild price fluctuations.

To put it mildly, the circumstances of the MGX-Binance transaction were curious. Last year, the founder of Binance, Changpeng Zhao, a Chinese-born Canadian crypto billionaire who is commonly known as C.Z., served four months in a U.S. federal prison after pleading guilty to failing to maintain an effective anti-money-laundering program at his crypto exchange. In March of this year, the Wall Street Journal reported that Zhao was pushing for a Presidential pardon. That same month, World Liberty announced that it was creating its own stablecoin, USD1, and the use of the new coin in the MGX-Binance transaction was transformative. “The deal caused the amount of the cryptocurrency in circulation to erupt 15-fold and overnight become one of the world’s largest,” the Journal noted. It also put two billion dollars on World Liberty’s books, which it could invest in Treasuries, or similar assets, to generate returns that Bloomberg estimated at eighty million dollars annually—money flowing directly to the Trump family business.

Why would Binance and MGX decide to use the largely untested USD1? MGX told Forbes the parties settled on the new stablecoin because it was backed by safe assets “all held and managed by an independent, U.S.-based custodian in externally audited custodial accounts.” The cynical explanation is that C.Z. was angling for a pardon and the U.A.E. wanted to curry favor with an Administration that could deliver valuable concessions. In a detailed reconstruction of the deal, the Times pointed out that two weeks after the transaction was completed the White House let the U.A.E. import hundreds of thousands of advanced computer chips that previously had been subject to U.S. export restrictions.

Summer is sometimes a slow season for business, but not for the Trumps this year. In July, with urging from the Administration, Congress passed the GENIUS Act, which created a regulatory framework for stablecoins but failed to assuage fears, in some quarters, that integrating crypto into the mainstream financial system could be dangerous. That same month, Trump Media & Technology said that it had bought about two billion dollars in bitcoins and other related securities, pivoting from social media to become a “bitcoin Treasury” company, following the example of Michael Saylor’s MicroStrategy. The announcement produced a spike in Trump Media’s stock price, which had fallen sharply since the start of the year. In August, the Trumps applied some financial engineering to World Liberty. They invested in a small publicly traded company, which then issued seven hundred and fifty million dollars in stock to buy WLFI tokens. “This sort of circular transaction—with the same party as buyer and seller, dealing in products they themselves created—is more common in the crypto world than in traditional finance,” an article in the Journal noted. At the start of September, some of the WLFI tokens started trading on crypto exchanges. Two days later, American Bitcoin—the bitcoin-mining company in which Eric and Donald, Jr., have ownership stakes—started trading on the Nasdaq and immediately jumped in value. These moves enabled the Trump family “to rack up about $1.3 billion,” Bloomberg reported.

Through the fall, the deals and controversies continued. In October, Trump pardoned C.Z., which caused an uproar, but he claimed that he didn’t know the crypto entrepreneur and added that he had handed down the pardon “at the request of a lot of very good people.” The following month, Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee published a staff report that said Trump had “leveraged his office to make himself a crypto billionaire,” extending “broad protection to fraudsters, scam artists, and other online criminals—who, in turn, repay the President and his family with millions of dollars in tribute.” Responding to the report, Leavitt, the White House press secretary, said in a statement, “Neither the president nor his family have ever engaged, or will ever engage, in conflicts of interest. Through executive actions, supporting legislation like the GENIUS Act, and other common-sense policies, the administration is fulfilling the President’s promise to make the United States the crypto capital of the world by driving innovation and economic opportunity for all Americans.”

The Over-All Tally

There are various tallies of how much money the Trumps are making over all. During the first six months of this year, Reuters estimated, the family garnered about eight hundred million dollars through crypto sales. Looking at the twelve months leading up to October, 2025, the Financial Times put the haul at more than a billion. Adding in the proceeds of non-crypto ventures—licensing arrangements, gifts, sweetheart media deals, and legal settlements—the Center for American Progress, a think tank with close ties to the Democratic Party, puts the total “Trump Take” at $1.8 billion since he was reëlected. Taking a longer-term view, my colleague David Kirkpatrick estimated that, going back to 2016, Trump has generated $3.4 billion from the Presidency.

It should be noted that these figures refer to cash income. They don’t include the gains in paper wealth that Trump and his family have enjoyed, especially through their ownership stakes in World Liberty Financial and other crypto businesses. In September, after WLFI tokens started trading on crypto exchanges, some accounts put the value of the family’s crypto wealth at five billion dollars or more.

During the past few months, however, the market value of virtually all crypto assets, including the Trump ones, has fallen sharply. The $TRUMP meme coin has dropped in value by about eighty per cent, and the Melania meme coin has plummeted by 98.5 per cent. Stock in Trump Media & Technology, which, in financial terms, is now largely an acquisition vehicle for Bitcoin, is down by close to seventy per cent, year to date, and by close to forty per cent since it started accumulating the cryptocurrency in bulk. World Liberty is a private company, so it doesn’t have a publicly traded stock. But the value of its WLFI tokens has decreased by more than a third since the start of September. Stock in American Bitcoin, the company associated with Eric Trump, has fallen by more than seventy-five per cent over the same period.

For the Trumps and their business partners, this market plunge was the sting in the tail from their strategy of going all in on crypto. Going forward, their prospects are heavily dependent on the future path of Bitcoin and other crypto assets. Yet, even after their recent slump, the Trumps’ digital holdings still have a paper value of billions of dollars. And, even if the crypto markets went to zero tomorrow, the family would still have the hard cash it has already pocketed since its patriarch returned to Washington—and the possibility of making further scores going forward.

Earlier this month, the Financial Times reported that the Pentagon’s Office of Strategic Capital, which the Biden Administration created in 2022 to help finance the development of new technologies with national-security applications, has awarded a loan of six hundred and twenty million dollars to a rare-earths startup with links to Donald, Jr. The firm, Vulcan Earth, recently received backing from 1789, the venture-capital fund where he is a partner. A spokesman for Donald, Jr., told the Financial Times that he wasn’t involved in the company’s dealings with the government; officials at the Pentagon and Commerce Department said the same thing, as did Vulcan’s chief executive.

Still, the loan raises questions. “At least four of 1789’s portfolio companies have won contracts from the Trump administration this year, amounting to $735 million,” the Financial Times report noted. From one perspective, this might suggest that 1789 is following a clever business strategy: aligning its investments with the emerging priorities of Trump’s Pentagon. From another perspective, it looks like more Trump enrichment. When the public and the private are as intertwined as they are in this Administration, it’s hard to tell the difference.

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 16, 2025 10:34 AM

SECOND

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

Trump cannot arrest these "criminals" because they are in international waters.
Instead, Trump kills them:

Tuesday December 16, 2025

The US has carried out strikes on three alleged drug-trafficking vessels in the eastern Pacific Ocean, killing eight people, after President Trump signed an executive order declaring fentanyl a weapon of mass destruction.

https://www.thetimes.com/us/news-today/article/eight-killed-in-us-stri
kes-on-drug-trafficking-boats-in-pacific-nm3bbrvlz

Trump has justified the attacks as a necessary escalation to halt drug trafficking and asserted the US is engaged in an “armed conflict” with drug cartels.

Trump backed this up with an executive order signed Monday declaring fentanyl a weapon of mass destruction.

Unprecedented for a narcotic, the designation puts the synthetic opioid on a par with chemical weapons, allowing intelligence agencies to deploy against drug traffickers the tools normally reserved for countering weapons proliferation.

The legality of the Trump administration’s strikes against boats in the Pacific Ocean has been called into question, with little or no proof made public that the boats are carrying drugs.

The latest boat strikes come on the eve of briefings on Capitol Hill for all members of Congress as questions mount over the military campaign.

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 16, 2025 1:01 PM

SECOND

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

The Longest Suicide Note in American History

The Trump administration’s new National Security Strategy targets liberal democracy itself.

By Anne Applebaum | December 16, 2025, 6 AM ET

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2025/12/national-security-strategy-d
emocracy/685270/

Last year, a team of American diplomats from the State Department’s Global Engagement Center traveled to two dozen countries and signed a series of memoranda. Along with their counterparts in places as varied as Italy, Australia, and Ivory Coast, they agreed to jointly expose malicious and deceptive online campaigns originating in Russia, China, or Iran.

This past September, the Trump administration terminated these agreements. The center’s former head, James Rubin, called this decision “a unilateral act of disarmament,” and no wonder: In effect, the United States was declaring that it would no longer oppose Russian influence campaigns, Chinese manipulation of local politics, or Iranian extremist recruitment drives. Nor would the American government use any resources to help anyone else do so either.

The recent publication of the Trump administration’s new National Security Strategy showed that this decision was no accident. Unilateral disarmament is now official policy. Because—despite its name—this National Security Strategy is not really a strategy document. It is a suicide note. If the ideas within it are really used to shape policy, then U.S. influence in the world will rapidly disappear, and America’s ability to defend itself and its allies will diminish. The consequences will be economic as well as political, and they will be felt by all Americans.

Before explaining, I should acknowledge the curious features of this document, which seems, like the Bible, to have several different authors. Some of them use boastful, aggressive language—America must remain “the world’s strongest, richest, most powerful country for decades to come”—and some of them prefer euphemism and allusion. Sometimes these different authors contradict one another, proposing to work with allies on one page and to undermine allies on the next. The views expressed in the document do not represent those of the entire U.S. government, the entire Republican Party, or even the entire Trump administration. The most noteworthy elements seem to come from a particular ideological faction, one that now dominates foreign-policy thinking in this administration and may well dominate others in the future.

The one genuinely new, truly radical element in this faction’s thinking is its absolute refusal to acknowledge the existence of enemies or to name any countries that might wish America ill. This is a major departure from the first Trump administration. The 2017 National Security Strategy spoke of creating an alliance against North Korea; noted that Russia is “using subversive measures to weaken the credibility of America’s commitment to Europe, undermine transatlantic unity, and weaken European institutions and governments”; and observed that China is “using economic inducements and penalties, influence operations, and implied military threats” to bully others. The 2017 Trump policy team also observed a “geopolitical competition between free and repressive visions of world order.”

The second Trump administration can no longer identify any specific countries that might wish harm to the United States, or any specific actions they might be taking to do harm. A decade’s worth of Russian cyberwarfare, political intervention, and information war inside the United States goes unmentioned. Russian acts of sabotage across Europe, Russian support for brutal regimes across the Sahel region of Africa, and, of course, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine aren’t important either. None of these Russian acts of aggression gets a mention except for the war in Ukraine, which is described solely as a concern for Europeans.

Phillips Payson O’Brien: A wider war has already started in Europe

Even more strangely, China appears not as a geopolitical competitor but largely as a trading rival. It’s as if Chinese hacking and cyberwar did not exist, as if China were not seeking to collect data or infiltrate the software that controls U.S. infrastructure. China’s propaganda campaigns and business deals in Africa and Latin America, which could squeeze out American rivals, don’t seem to matter much either. The new document makes only a vague allusion to a Chinese economic presence in Latin America and to a Chinese threat to Taiwan. When discussing this latter possibility, the authors drop their swaggering language about American power and slip into bureaucratese: “The United States does not support any unilateral change to the status quo in the Taiwan Strait.”

Other rivals and other potential sources of conflict get no mention at all. North Korea has disappeared. Iran is described as “greatly weakened.” Islamist terrorism is no longer worth mentioning. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is still “thorny,” but thanks to President Donald Trump, “progress toward a more permanent peace has been made.” Hamas will soon fade away. The American troops who are still fighting in Somalia and Syria—and in some cases dying—are ignored, as if they didn’t exist at all.

But if America has no rivals and expects no conflicts, then neither the military nor the State Department nor the CIA nor the counterintelligence division of the FBI needs to make any special preparations to defend Americans from them. The document reflects that assumption and instead directs the U.S. national-security apparatus to think about “control over our borders,” “natural disasters,” “unfair trading practices,” “job destruction and deindustrialization,” and other threats to trade. Fentanyl gets a mention. So, rather strangely, do “propaganda, influence operations, and other forms of cultural subversion”—although there is no indication of who might be using propaganda and cultural subversion against us or how it might be countered, especially because the Trump administration has completely dismantled all of the institutions designed to do so.

But what if this document was not written for the people and institutions that think about national security at all? Maybe it was instead written for a highly ideological domestic audience, including the audience in the Oval Office. The authors have included ludicrous but now-familiar language about Trump having ended many wars, a set of claims as absurd and fanciful as his FIFA Peace Prize. The authors also go out of their way to dismiss all past American foreign-policy strategies, presumably including those pursued by the first Trump administration, as if only this administration, under this near-octogenarian president, can see the world clearly.

Finally, although they do not name any states that might threaten America, the authors do focus on one enemy ideology. It is not Chinese communism, Russian autocracy, or Islamic extremism but rather European liberal democracy. This is what this radical faction really fears: people who talk about transparency, accountability, civil rights, and the rule of law. Not coincidentally, these are the same people whom the MAGA ideologues hate and dislike at home, the same people who are fighting to prevent MAGA from redefining the United States as a white ethno-state, who oppose the corruption of America’s democratic institutions, and who object when Trump’s friends, family, and tech allies redirect U.S. foreign policy to benefit their private interests.

European and American liberal democracy is so dangerous to their project, in fact, that the MAGA ideologues seem to be planning to undermine it. They don’t want to meddle in anyone’s internal politics anywhere else on the planet: “We seek good relations and peaceful commercial relations with the nations of the world without imposing on them democratic or other social change.” The glaring exception to this rule is in Europe. Here, it is now American policy to “help Europe correct its current trajectory,” language that implies that the U.S. will intervene to do so.

Eliot A. Cohen: Trump’s security strategy is incoherent babble

According to reporting by Defense One, an earlier version of the National Security Strategy said that U.S. foreign policy should even seek to support illiberal forces in at least four countries—Hungary, Poland, Italy, and Austria—to persuade them to leave the European Union. For all four, this would be an economic catastrophe; for the rest of the continent, this would be a security catastrophe, because a damaged EU would struggle to counter Russian hybrid warfare and Chinese economic pressure. If the union breaks up, there would also no longer be a European Commission capable of regulating American tech companies, and perhaps that is the point.

At the same time, the document’s authors seem to derive their hatred of Europe from a series of false perceptions—or, perhaps, from a form of projection. The authors fear, for example, that “certain NATO members will become majority non-European” very soon. Because they are presumably not talking about non-European Turkey and Canada, the clear implication is that countries such as France and Germany have so much immigration from outside Europe that they will be majority nonwhite. And yet, it is the United States, not Europe, that is far more likely to become “majority minority” in the coming years.

The security strategy also talks, bizarrely, about Europe being on the verge of “civilizational erasure,” which is not language used by many European politicians, even those in far-right parties. Carl Bildt, the former Swedish prime minister and foreign minister, has called this sentiment “to the right of the extreme right.” In multiple indices, after all—health, happiness, standard of living—European countries regularly rank higher than the United States. Compared with Americans, Europeans live longer, are less likely to be living on the streets, and are less likely to die in mass shootings.

The only possible conclusion: The authors of this document don’t know much about Europe, or don’t care to find out. Living in a fantasy world, they are blind to real dangers. They invent fictional threats. Their information comes from conspiracist websites and random accounts on X, and if they use these fictions to run policy, then all kinds of disasters could await us. Will our military really stop working with allies with whom we have cooperated for decades? Will the FBI stop looking for Russian and Chinese spies? Earlier this month, the Justice Department announced that it was taking action against two Russian state-sponsored cybercriminal groups that, among other things, targeted American industrial infrastructure. But if our real enemy is “civilizational erasure” in Europe, then surely we should redirect resources away from this kind of secondary problem and focus them on the threat posed by the British Labour Party or the German Christian Democrats.

One is tempted to laugh at these kinds of ideas, to express incredulity or turn away. But similar conspiracist thinking has already done real damage to real institutions. Elon Musk believed distorted or completely false stories about USAID that he read on his own X platform. As a result, he destroyed the entire organization so rapidly and so thoughtlessly that tens or even hundreds of thousands of people may die as a result. At the State Department, Darren Beattie, the undersecretary for public diplomacy, has repeatedly and falsely stated that the Global Engagement Center was censoring Americans, a fantasy that he encountered on the internet and that he continues to repeat without proof. As a result, he destroyed that organization and ended its international negotiations. He is now conducting an internal departmental witch hunt, trying to find or perhaps invent post hoc evidence for his conspiracist ideas.

Some elements of this story are familiar. Americans have overestimated, underestimated, or misunderstood their rivals before. And when they do, they make terrible mistakes. In 2003, many American analysts sincerely thought that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. During the Cold War, many analysts believed that the Soviet Union was stronger and less fragile than it proved to be. But I am not sure whether there has ever been a moment like this one, when the American government’s most prominent foreign-policy theorists have transferred their domestic obsessions to the outside world, projecting their own fears onto others. As a result, they are likely to misunderstand who could challenge, threaten, or even damage the United States in the near future. Their fantasy world endangers us all.

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 16, 2025 5:48 PM

SECOND

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

Trump is failing and it’s his own fault.

by Zack Beauchamp | Dec 16, 2025, 5:00 AM CST

https://www.vox.com/politics/472346/trump-democracy-2025-haphazard-aut
horitarian

If you want to understand how the US government works today, you should study President Donald Trump’s attempt to pardon a woman named Tina Peters last week.

Peters is a former Colorado election clerk and a die-hard believer in the false claim that the 2020 election was stolen. In 2021, Peters committed a series of crimes in an attempt to “prove” election fraud occurred — including, most seriously, allowing a fellow 2020 truther to make copies of the actual hard drives of Mesa County voting machines. A Colorado jury convicted her of seven crimes last year, and a judge sentenced her to nine years in prison.

Last Thursday, Trump intervened on Peters’s behalf, declaring he was “granting Tina a full Pardon for her attempts to expose Voter Fraud in the Rigged 2020 Presidential Election.” On its face, this is menacingly authoritarian: the president abusing his powers to protect a woman who literally compromised the integrity of America’s vote-counting on his behalf.

Yet, Trump’s order is also something else: impotent.

The Constitution explicitly states that the presidential pardon power only applies to crimes committed “against the United States,” meaning federal rather than state crimes. Peters was convicted in a Colorado court under state law and, thus, cannot be pardoned by the president. The state’s governor, attorney general, and secretary of state have all rejected the legality of Trump’s order; Peters remains incarcerated.

Trump’s actions were reported, in the New York Times and elsewhere, as a “symbolic” pardon. But that framing gives Trump too much credit. If you read his full post on Truth Social, there’s no indication that this is anything but a genuine attempt to do something clearly illegal. He genuinely seems to think that he can pardon her for state crimes, even though he very obviously cannot.
https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/posts/115703610330402175

The Peters case represents an especially clear example of what I’ve come to see as the defining style of the second Trump administration: an incompetent form of authoritarianism that can best be described as “haphazardism.”

Key takeaways:

• Trump’s first year has revealed that he’s pursuing an authoritarian agenda in an incoherent and incompetent manner.

• This style of politics, which I’ve termed “haphazardism,” emerges from Trump’s own character — both his insistence on wielding untrammeled power and his inability to approach acquiring it in a strategic or detailed fashion.

• The emergence of haphazardism should make us optimistic about American democracy’s survival, even if the short-term outlook is still quite troubling.

Haphazardism is authoritarianism without vision, a governing style defined by a series of individual attacks on democracy without any kind of overarching logic, strategic structure, or clear end state in mind. These attacks can do (and indeed have done) real damage to the American political system, but they are often poorly executed and even self-undermining — preventing Trump from ruling in the truly unconstrained manner he seems to desire.

“Is he succeeding at breaking democracy? Yes,” said Steve Levitsky, a Harvard political scientist and author of How Democracies Die. “Is he succeeding at consolidating autocratic power? No.”

Haphazardism, as a concept, helps us understand Trump’s dangers to democracy in a more nuanced and precise way. And it can also help us see, after almost a year of Trump’s second presidency, where things might stand when he leaves power for good.

What haphazardism is

Donald Trump, like many of history’s villains, has extraordinary political talents. His authoritarian menace stems from these talents being married to a deep, primal lust for power — a desire to wield full authority over others without constraint or restriction. In his first term, these impulses were checked by a coterie of advisers who saw restraining him as part of their job description. This time, there are no guardrails.

Yet, at the same time, Trump is an impulsive man with little understanding of the actual levers of policy and administration. His statements on the topics are marked with intentional lies, to be sure, but also feature seemingly genuine (and profound) misunderstandings about basic issues, such as how trade deficits work. He is also showing signs of age, with fewer public appearances and a noticeably compressed daily schedule. The advisers who step up to shape policy are not always the most competent, and sometimes have agendas of their own that clash with both Trump’s public statement and their fellow aides’ agendas.

Haphazardism emerges from the interaction of these dynamics.

On the one hand, unbound Trump is pushing the limits of his authority in ways that often directly threaten pillars of the democratic system. Trump has unilaterally asserted extraordinary powers, like the ability to direct revenue and levy tariffs, that are explicitly reserved for Congress. He has attempted to prosecute his political enemies, undermine the fairness of the midterm elections, bully corporations and universities, and hand control over increasingly large swaths of the media to friends.

In many of these areas, he really has been able to change policy in unprecedented ways. The closure of USAID, the unbalanced “deal” with Columbia University, convincing Texas to enact an extreme gerrymander, and pressuring Paramount into selling to a Trump-aligned billionaire family — these are all examples of real victories for Trump’s effort to assert more personal control over American governance and society.

On the other hand, this list of authoritarian successes is counterbalanced by meaningful failures. Consider three developments from the past week alone:

• An aggressive pressure campaign on Indiana Republicans to enact an extreme gerrymandering that backfired, solidifying resistance in the state Senate and dooming the White House’s preferred house map in a Thursday campaign.

• An effort to prosecute one of Trump’s enemies, New York state Attorney General Letitia James, on such transparently fake charges that two grand juries refused to indict her.

• The resignation of Alina Habba, Trump’s former personal attorney, after a court ruled that she had been unlawfully appointed federal prosecutor for New Jersey.

These three failures all share something in common: the administration attempting to grab power without a real theory for overcoming the constraints in their way.

They did not understand the historic independence and small-c conservatism of Indiana’s Republican Party. They attempted to push through obviously political charges against James, heedless of how a jury might react. They didn’t care how illegal Habba’s appointment was.

These failures reflect more than mere misjudgments or technical incompetence. Rather, they reveal a White House trying to act on the president’s incoherent, often impossible desires. Trump personally wanted Republicans around the country to do extreme gerrymandering. He publicly demanded that the Justice Department prosecute James (and other enemies like James Comey). He wanted Habba installed in a key prosecutorial role.

Trump’s desires here do not reflect a coherent view of how to take over the American state. Rather, they reflect particular cases where the president wants maximal power or personal control without any deeper understanding of whether his desires are feasible or strategically wise. Trump’s aides and lawyers have little choice but to act on the boss’s desires and are often set up to fail.

This is the central way that haphazardism manifests: the sheer inconsistency or short-sightedness of Trump’s personal judgment leading to authoritarian setbacks. It’s a pattern that has repeated throughout the Trump presidency and produced some of its most notable and enduring failures.

The most important example is the “Liberation Day” tariffs. In that case, Trump’s personal obsession led him to assert extraordinary powers — to raise a tax seemingly at will — that would amount to a shocking revision of the constitutional order. On paper, that looks like a win for a president who wants to grab greater and greater personal power over the economy.

But, in the long run, the tariffs have done far more harm to Trump than good. They have been immensely unpopular and done damage to the real economy, both of which have fueled Democratic election gains and made it harder to convince others in society that resistance is futile. Moreover, they seem very likely to be overturned by the Supreme Court, meaning that Trump’s temporary gains for executive power will likely prove ephemeral.

Or, consider another example: the attempted takedown of Jimmy Kimmel in September.

In that case, FCC chair Brendan Carr was clearly attempting to act on Trump’s broadly stated desire to stop Kimmel. His chosen mechanism for doing that, making mafioso-like threats to network licenses during an appearance on a right-wing podcast, was extremely threatening to democracy. The government was overtly weaponizing its regulatory powers to punish a critic of the president!

But Carr’s actions were also self-defeatingly blunt. The obvious threat to free speech created a massive backlash, including a mass citizen-led drive to cancel Disney+ subscriptions. ABC-Disney ultimately had no choice but to reinstate Kimmel, and he remains on the air today. The short-term attempted power grab ended in long-term failure.

Finally, consider a third example: the purging of the civil service.

While the Trump team’s actions here have no doubt removed bureaucrats who might oppose his agenda from within, they’ve also pushed out untold numbers of talented individuals with irreplaceable knowledge of how government actually works. This doesn’t only damage the functioning of the US state; it also makes it harder for the Trump administration, specifically, to turn their desires into effective policies.

“A breakdown in state capacity — what the US is capable of doing — is very bad. And paradoxically…that may be the thing that is saving democracy,” says Oren Samet, a political scientist at Stanford University.

Is a haphazard America still a democracy?

Haphazardism is, by its nature, a very confusing style of governance. It is one in which traditional rules of democratic politics, like the rule of law, no longer fully bind the chief executive. Yet, at the same time, that chief executive is not using the powers he is accumulating in any kind of effective or coherent way — leading not only to poor policy but also a failure to systematically prevent meaningful political competition from the opposition.

So, is the United States under Trump’s haphazardism a democracy or an authoritarian state?

Harvard’s Levitsky is one of the leading voices arguing that America is already living under a form of authoritarianism. Indeed, he published a new piece with frequent coauthors Dan Ziblatt and Lucan Way making this case just last week.
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/united-states/american-authoritarianism
-levitsky-way-ziblatt

Yet, when I spoke to Levitsky on the phone, he distinguished between an authoritarian government and an authoritarian regime. The former refers to the way in which the people in power are ruling at the present moment; the latter refers to whether they are taking steps to permanently change the political system into something in which they and their allies can hold power indefinitely.

For Levitsky, Trump’s “systematic and regular abuse of power” is enough to establish that America currently has an authoritarian government. But, he does not believe that we are living under an authoritarian regime — believing that Trump’s authoritarian actions were likely to be “reversed” in the near future. He, thus, characterizes the current American situation as most likely to be a “mild and short-lived burst of authoritarianism” (with the major caveat that even “mild” authoritarianism is still quite dangerous).

Unlike Levitsky, I think that it’s still more accurate to call the United States a democracy. I have a hard time describing a country that still has reasonably free and fair elections, in which the incumbent party loses and departs office, as anything but.

But, that’s not really a substantive disagreement so much as it is a difference in emphasis. We agree on the basic haphazardist account of the Trump presidency — that it is taking authoritarian actions without effectively changing the operating logic of the system to sustain an unfair lock on political power. Whether you call such a situation “authoritarian” or “democratic” depends on whether you put more weight on current governance or regime fundamentals.

Laura Gamboa, a professor at Notre Dame who studies democratic backsliding in Latin America, says this unclarity is relatively typical of periods of political transformation. When a democracy is under serious attack, she says, there is often “muddiness and contention.” We just might not be able to know what the most precise characterization of the country’s politics is for years.

Ultimately, however, these tricky categorization questions are less important than the question of America’s political trajectory, which is whether democracy is likely to survive (or rebound from) his second term. And on that score, Trump’s haphazardism gives us some reasons for hope.

While 2025 has been an undeniably bad year for American democracy, the haphazardist pattern that has emerged shows that Trump’s authoritarian project may be self-limiting.

Amid the fevered climate following Charlie Kirk’s shooting, there was a clear and plausible pathway the Trump administration could have taken to create authoritarian change — one that centered on using federal regulatory and prosecutorial powers to repress their enemies. But, in the following months, the administration’s haphazardism has made it very difficult for them to go down this road in any kind of straightforward manner. There hasn’t been a single-minded focus on repression, and the efforts they have made — like the prosecutions of Comey and James — have run up against major barriers.

This, as both Levitsky and Gamboa pointed out, reflects how hard it is to change a country like the United States. In a country like the United States, with such a long democratic history and established institutions, it takes a lot of planning and ingenuity to overcome the forces standing in their way. Some modern authoritarians, like Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, possessed this kind of authoritarian vision and talent from the moment they took office. Trump seemingly didn’t.

It’s not impossible to overturn a democracy haphazardly. Other successful autocrats, such as Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan, built an authoritarian state through a more winding and improvisational pathway than Orbán. But doing it in the United States is an altogether different, and tougher, task.

Again, this does not mean the survival of American democracy is assured. Trump is persistent in pushing democratic limits, and the American presidency is an extraordinarily powerful office.

But, it does mean that the limits of the administration’s current strategy are very real — and coming into sharper focus.

Zack Beauchamp’s book on democracy, The Reactionary Spirit: how America’s most insidious political tradition swept the world, was published on July 16, 2024.
Free download at https://annas-archive.org/search?q=The+Reactionary+Spirit

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 16, 2025 6:11 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Trump is failing and it’s his own fault.

December 16, 2025:
Trump: 43.8% Favorable / 52.8% Unfavorable (Split: -9.0)
https://www.realclearpolling.com/polls/favorability/donald-trump

December 17, 2021:
Biden: 42.9% Favorable / 52.2% Unfavorable (Split: -9.3)
https://www.realclearpolling.com/polls/favorability/joe-biden

December 15, 2013:
Obama: 42.5% Favorable / 53.4% Unfavorable (Split: -10.9)
https://www.realclearpolling.com/polls/approval/barack-obama/approval-
rating

December 16, 2005:
GWB: 43.2% Favorable / 53.6% Unfavorable (Split: -10.4)
https://www.realclearpolling.com/polls/approval/george-w-bush/approval
-rating

Shut up, Idiot.

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

Be Nice. Don't be a dick.

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

Wednesday, December 17, 2025 6:35 AM

SECOND

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

"You never blame yourself. You have to blame something else. If you do something bad, never, ever blame yourself."
- Donald Trump

https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/trump-say-never-blame-yourself/ cannot verify that Trump said these exact words, but he has said similar things about avoiding responsibility many times and about blaming the President (when he wasn’t in office).

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 17, 2025 6:58 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK

Quote:
Originally posted by second:
cannot verify that Trump said these exact words

Of course you can't.

But you have a brain defect that made you post it anyhow.

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

Be Nice. Don't be a dick.

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

Wednesday, December 17, 2025 11:11 AM

SECOND

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 17, 2025 1:47 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK

Boy. You really are stupid, aren't you?

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

Be Nice. Don't be a dick.

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

Wednesday, December 17, 2025 2:44 PM

SECOND

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

Easily the most important story so far about the inner workings of the second Trump Administration appeared yesterday. It appeared in Vanity Fair, and was based on numerous interviews with Trump’s political inner circle, in particular with his Chief of Staff Susie Wiles. The story is very detailed and in two parts, and here are links to take you to archived versions of both sections.

Section 1: https://archive.is/79tgs

Section 2: https://archive.is/wDiHj

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

Susie Wiles Gets in Trouble for Saying What Everyone Knows

The Trump administration delivers yet more shocks but no surprises.

By Jonathan Chait | December 16, 2025, 3 PM ET

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/2025/12/real-revelation-susie-wil
es-interviews/685281/

In a normal presidency, the interviews that White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles gave to Vanity Fair would trigger her resignation, maybe even the president’s impeachment. She admitted that President Donald Trump employs prosecutorial power for “score settling,” called Budget Director Russell Vought “a right-wing absolute zealot,” described Vice President J. D. Vance as “a conspiracy theorist for a decade,” and attributed Elon Musk’s erratic style in gutting federal agencies to his “avowed ketamine” use.

Yet no one on the right is calling for anyone to resign, or even for a congressional investigation into these allegations. That is not because Wiles—who is credited with largely masterminding Trump’s victorious presidential campaign—lacks credibility, nor is it because she has denied these comments (she has accused the magazine of taking her words out of context, which is what people say when they know they were recorded). It is simply because these quotes, while dire, are also unsurprising. Wiles did not say anything that Republicans didn’t already know. Her error lay in the breach between what Trump’s supporters understand and what they are permitted to say.

To grasp the moral abnormality of this state of affairs, let’s try a thought experiment. Suppose Joe Biden’s chief of staff had told a reporter that the president at least sometimes charged his political enemies with federal crimes because he didn’t like them, and that his most influential officials were ideological zealots, conspiracy theorists, and drug users.

I can imagine two possible responses to such an interview. One is to conclude that the chief of staff had gone crazy and should be fired immediately. The other is to consider the allegations worthy of investigation in order to assess whether the president is fit to hold the powers of the presidency. What I can’t imagine concluding is that the allegations were true and that Biden could continue going on his merry way as president.

Yet this is the Republican Party’s response. The Trump administration swiftly rolled out a series of tributes attesting to Wiles’s loyalty and blaming the “fake news” media for her comments. “The radical left is at it again, trying to create discord on President Trump’s team. It won’t work because we know & love @SusieWiles,” tweeted Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy, who added: “As someone who actually works closely with Susie, I can attest that she is brilliant, tough as nails, and is 100% dedicated to President Trump & America.”

Kelly Loeffler, the head of the Small Business Administration, called Wiles “a brilliant strategist who leads the Cabinet with grace and grit, even in the face of relentless fake news.” Donald Trump Jr. wrote a long testimonial calling Wiles “by far the most effective and trustworthy Chief of Staff that my father has ever had,” neglecting to even mention the inconvenient revelations.

Outside of the administration, Trump’s media defenders have responded by angrily castigating Wiles for opening her mouth to the media. “Genuinely sick to death of people on the right who seek the approval of left-wing media. Or even play with them for a minute. I can’t take it. It’s the saddest fetish,” complained the Federalist editor Mollie Hemingway. “You talked to them. What did you expect?” scolded National Review’s Dan McLaughlin.

These esteemed members of the conservative press appear untroubled over whether the Trump administration is in fact filled with crackpots who commit grave abuses of power. Their anger is reserved for Wiles for admitting as much to the “lamestream” media.

In this way, the most remarkable revelation from these newly published interviews comes not from what Wiles did or didn’t say, but in how Trump and his enablers are spinning it. Comments that would have precipitated a crisis in any other presidency are now simply being dismissed—knowingly, cynically—as “fake news.”

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 17, 2025 3:42 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK

Boy. You really are stupid, aren't you?

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

Be Nice. Don't be a dick.

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

Wednesday, December 17, 2025 11:37 PM

SECOND

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

Starting at 9 minutes, Trump is giving away money to everybody! Vote for me!

The revealing pointlessness of Trump’s primetime speech

The president is a desperate man.

By Zack Beauchamp | Dec 17, 2025, 9:25 PM CST

https://www.vox.com/politics/472786/trump-primetime-speech-wednesday-i
nflation-pointless

When a president gives a primetime televised speech, it is typically about something of serious import: to make the case for a major new policy or to announce the beginning of a war.

President Donald Trump’s speech on Wednesday night had no grave significance. In fact, there didn’t seem to be much of a point at all.

The speech was a jumble of his usual false or even impossible claims — like a promise to reduce prescription drug costs by an impossible 400 percent — smashed together in no particular order. The speech began with a discussion of the cost of living, a subject he would drop and then return to as if just remembering that it was the number one reason his polls were low. Even the delivery was weird: Seemingly under network time constraints, the president read off the teleprompter angrily and quickly, speaking with the motormouth intensity of a 20-something banker who just discovered cocaine and now has a really great idea for a new restaurant.

So why am I writing about it at all?

Because the fact that it happened at all tells us something much more important: that the Trump administration is sinking, and his White House has no idea what to do about it.

The haphazard presidency, in one crystal clear moment

Earlier this week, I described the president’s second term governing style as “haphazardism.” Trump has basically authoritarian aims — he wants to wield untrammeled power — but has no clear plan or strategy for securing it. So what has happened so far is a series of individual abuses of power, each dangerous and damaging to democracy, but ultimately adding up to less than their parts in that they have not helped build a durable authoritarian model of governance.
https://www.vox.com/politics/472346/trump-democracy-2025-haphazard-aut
horitarian

Ultimately, haphazardism has put his presidency on the pathway to failure. Because the main guide to policy is Trump’s own instincts, which are changeable and inconsistent and often just weird, he does things that do serious damage to his own political position. The most notable example is tariffs: a policy that has clearly contributed to his biggest problem, a high cost of living, and thus a significant driver of his collapsing poll numbers.

For the White House, this is a very hard problem to solve. While actual policy on many issues is delegated to advisers like Stephen Miller and Russell Vought, the ultimate foundation of their power is the charismatic authority of Donald J. Trump. They cannot contravene him on his personal obsessions, like tariffs or prosecuting his enemies, without risking defenestration. So getting Trump to back off entirely from some of his most self-defeating moves is off the table.

Yet the White House is staring down abysmal poll numbers, a series of schisms inside the GOP and among the conservative elite, and looming midterm elections where Democrats appear poised to make massive gains. So what can they do?

Try other stuff and see if something, anything, might work to turn the ship around. Like, say, a televised address where the president just talks — yells, really — at the country for 20 minutes

Under normal circumstances, no White House would ever greenlight such a move (and, frankly, the networks probably wouldn’t go along with it). But things are looking desperate, and the Trump administration still retains a capacity to threaten private sector actors with the kind of persecution they’ve directed at places like Harvard. So why not demand some time on TV and see if a weird pseudo-stump speech will move the dial?

I’m not saying it’s a good approach. It’s not: It reeks of desperation.

But the fact that they needed to try such a desperate move at all is notable. It is the latest sign, among many, that the wheels are coming off the Trump train.

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

SHARE THREAD

NEW POSTS TODAY

USER	POST DATE

USER

POST DATE