Do you feel like the winds of change are blowing today too?
POSTED BY: 6ixStringJack
UPDATED: Thursday, September 10, 2026 23:15
VIEWED: 187742
PAGE 42 of 48
Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:If smoking causes cancer, why did you ever smoke, 6ix? Because you never believed that it could happen to you.
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.
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.
--------------------------------------------------
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Quote: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.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:If smoking causes cancer, why did you ever smoke, 6ix? Because you never believed that it could happen to you.
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.
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.
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
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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 n
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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.
--------------------------------------------------
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Quote: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:
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.
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/
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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
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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 fis
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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
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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 competi
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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 i
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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.
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"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
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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.
--------------------------------------------------
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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
For those who do not know Wiles, she is arguably the most important person in the administration not named Trump (with Trump, family always comes first). A long-time Republican political operative, Wiles was taken onboard during Trump’s first election campaign when she was his Florida chair (a rather important position considering the crucial weight of Florida’s electoral votes). Wiles stayed very close since and helped Trump win election again in 2024. She was them immediately named Chief of Staff. She runs the White House.
In other words, Trump trusts her politically as much as he trusts any non family member and she knows where the bodies are buried.
This makes the whole story invaluable and worth a close read. There are many extraordinary tidbits. RFK Jr and his anti-vax lunacy are not some fringe movement, for instance, but respected in the White House. This is how Wiles described him.
She referred to Health and Human Services secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., another world-class disrupter, as “my Bobby” and “quirky Bobby.” In Wiles’s view, RFK Jr.’s shock treatment of HHS is warranted. “He pushes the envelope—some would say too far. But I say in order to get back to the middle, you have to push it too far.”
. . .
The whole story is fascinating. But it is Wiles’ comments that stand out as they are so frank and have the ring of honest answers.
Much more at https://phillipspobrien.substack.com/p/trump-knows
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Boy. You really are stupid, aren't you?
--------------------------------------------------
Be Nice. Don't be a dick.
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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 expe
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Boy. You really are stupid, aren't you?
--------------------------------------------------
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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,
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This Is What Presidential Panic Looks Like
Donald Trump delivered a fear-drenched rant live from the White House.
By Tom Nichols | December 17, 2025, 10:36 PM ET
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2025/12/what-presidential-panic-look
s-like/685307/
The president of the United States just barged into America’s living rooms like an angry, confused grandfather to tell us all that we are ungrateful whelps.
When a president asks for network time, it’s usually to announce something important. But tonight, Donald Trump did not give anything like a normal speech or address. He was clearly working from a prepared text, but it sounded like one he’d written—or dictated angrily—himself, because it was full of bizarre howlers that even Trump’s second-rate speech-writing shop would probably have avoided, such as his assertion that inflation when he took office was the worst it had been in 48 years. (Why did he pick 1977 as a benchmark? Who knows. But he’s wrong.) He read the speech quickly, his voice rising in frustration as he hurled one lie after another into the camera.
We could take apart Trump’s fake facts, as checkers and pundits will do in the next few days. But perhaps more important than false statements—which for Trump are par for the course—was his demeanor. Americans saw a president drenched in panic as he tried to bully an entire nation into admitting he’s doing a great job. For 20 minutes, he vented his hurt feelings without a molecule of empathy or awareness. Economic concerns? Shut up, you fools, the economy is doing fine. (And if it isn’t, it’s not his fault—it’s Joe Biden’s.) Foreign-policy jitters? Zip it, you wimps, America is strong and respected.
In effect, Trump took to the airwaves, pointed his finger, and said: Quiet, piggy.
I consider myself a connoisseur of Trump’s speeches. I’ve watched them and live-tweeted them for years because I think Americans need to see what kind of man sits in the Oval Office. But even by Trump’s standards, this was an unnerving display of fear. I can only imagine America’s enemies in Moscow and Beijing and Tehran smiling with pleasure as they watched a president losing his bearings, berating his own people, and demanding that they absolve him of any blame when things get worse.
His rant contained no news, other than an example of his contempt for the U.S. military, whose loyalty he thinks he can purchase with a onetime $1,776 bonus check. This is projection: Trump has shown his willingness to be bought off with gold bars and trinkets, and he may think that the men and women of the armed forces are people of equally low character.
This was not a holiday address from the president of a great democracy to its citizens. This was a desperate tin-pot leader yelling into a microphone while cornered in his palace redoubt. Trump has been unraveling for weeks, and his speech tonight, like Trump himself, was unworthy of America and its people.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:
This Is What Presidential Panic Looks Like
Donald Trump delivered a fear-drenched rant live from the White House.
No he didn't.
I could see why YOU might be scared after watching it though.
--------------------------------------------------
Be Nice. Don't be a dick.
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Quote:Did you miss the part where Trump gives 1776 dollars to everybody in the military, before Christmas? How about Trump giving $11,000 to $20,000 to "most" taxpayers? Trump is scared, and he is paying bribes to protect himself. He is saying, "Here is money. You've got to love me. I gave you money!"
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:Quote:
Originally posted by second:
This Is What Presidential Panic Looks Like
Donald Trump delivered a fear-drenched rant live from the White House.
No he didn't.
I could see why YOU might be scared after watching it though.
But if you think about it, all Trump is really doing is doubling the National Debt in the next ten years because of the weird rules and laws he passes now will prevent the IRS from collecting taxes long after Trump is dead meat.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Trump’s handpicked board votes to rename Washington performing arts center the Trump Kennedy Center
https://apnews.com/article/trump-kennedy-center-performing-arts-8b7159
067174f3a0070b877c149ff0a7
I look forward to the Trump statues and monuments as proof that the winds of change are blowing hard. Maybe a TRUMP sign covered in gold leaf on the White House would give the place some classiness?
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:
This Is What Presidential Panic Looks Like
Donald Trump delivered a fear-drenched rant live from the White House.
No he didn't.
I could see why YOU might be scared after watching it though.
--------------------------------------------------
Be Nice. Don't be a dick.
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Inside Stephen Miller’s Dark Plot to Build a MAGA Terror State
He is descended from Russian Jews—you know, the kind of people who were once denounced as alien and unassimilable. Today, his project is to unleash government persecution of those he deems alien and unassimilable. How far will Miller’s sadistic designs go?
By Greg Sargent | December 15, 2025
https://newrepublic.com/article/204191/stephen-miller-maga-terror-stat
e-dark-plot
Stephen Miller’s ancestors first arrived in the United States in 1903. That’s when a man named Wolf Laib Glosser disembarked at Ellis Island after leaving behind his hometown in Antopol, a small town in the part of the czarist Russian empire that is now Belarus. Wolf Laib, who was fleeing a life marked by anti-Jewish pogroms and forced conscription, quickly set about trying to raise more money to bring over relatives.
“Wolf Laib found work in New York City peddling bananas and other fruit on street corners, and began sending small sums of money back to the family,” reads an unpublished book about the family that one of Stephen Miller’s relatives shared with The New Republic. The book—which tells the story of some of Miller’s ancestors’ immigration to the United States and their subsequent thriving here—was written by Miller’s grandmother, Ruth Glosser. Now that Miller has accumulated such extraordinary power over the future of our immigration system, it’s worth turning to this remarkable document, which we’re making available online for the first time.
https://assets.newrepublic.com/pdf/1998-Precious-Legacy-by-Ruth-Glosse
r.pdf
As the book recounts, Wolf Laib managed to bring over more family members in 1906, including a son, Sam Glosser. Over time, Wolf Laib—Miller’s great-great-grandfather—and his descendants built a successful haberdashery business in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, which evolved into a chain of supermarkets and department stores. Sam Glosser’s American-born son, Izzy, had two American children, David and Miriam Glosser—who were to become the uncle and mother of Stephen Miller.
This story, of course, tracks with that of countless others who arrived in the United States as part of the great migration, mostly from Southern and Eastern Europe, between the 1880s and the 1910s, which numbered as high as 20 million. As the book notes, they were out to “escape economic hardships and religious persecution” to build a “better life for themselves and their children.”
Yet at the time, many Americans didn’t think people like Miller’s ancestors were fit to become a part of the United States. They were targeted by a virulent strain of nativism toward those from Southern and Eastern Europe that was largely about race—it was rooted in the “scientific racism” of the day. But it also involved a somewhat different claim: that the new arrivals suffered from a “social degeneracy” or “social inadequacy”—two typical phrases at the time—which rendered them a threat to the “civilization” the United States was in the process of becoming. In this telling, as prominent sociologist Edward Alsworth Ross declared in a 1914 broadside, these new immigrants were inferior to Americans who descended from the “pioneer breed” who’d given birth to the American nation. The new arrivals, Ross said, had “submerged” that ancestral connection to the “pioneer breed,” setting the nation on a path to the “extinction that surely awaits it.”
Much more at https://newrepublic.com/article/204191/stephen-miller-maga-terror-stat
e-dark-plot
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Shut the fuck up, stupid.
--------------------------------------------------
Be Nice. Don't be a dick.
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:
This Is What Presidential Panic Looks Like
Donald Trump delivered a fear-drenched rant live from the White House.
No he didn't.
I could see why YOU might be scared after watching it though.
--------------------------------------------------
Be Nice. Don't be a dick.
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I'm no supporter of Donald Trump, but I'll give him this: he's held up a mirror to society and shown us exactly who among us harbors hatred, bigotry, and self-interest above all else. I never knew there were so many evil people living among us.
https://www.threads.com/@pilarmiami/post/DSGs1ExjA4P/i-dont-know-who-to-give-credit-for-this-quote-but-it-rings-so-true-im-no-support
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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How Epstein and Trump bonded over the pursuit of women
The two men’s relationship was both far closer and far more complex than the president now admits.
https://www.sltrib.com/news/nation-world/2025/12/19/how-epstein-trump-
bonded-over/
Tina Davis, who modeled for Ford in the mid-1990s, said in an interview that her Ford booker instructed her to get dressed up and attend a Mar-a-Lago party in late 1994. Just 14 and new to Miami, she was told to “dress sexy,” according to her mother, Sandra Coleman, who had accompanied her to Florida. Eight or nine other models came along on the bus. “All the girls were really young,” Ms. Coleman recalled in an interview. “Some of them could have been in training bras."
When they arrived at Mar-a-Lago, Ms. Coleman said, her daughter was promptly handed a glass of champagne. She took it away, but waiters kept offering more. Each time one of the middle-aged men at the party approached her daughter, Ms. Coleman would walk over and introduce herself as Ms. Davis’s mother.
During a trip to the bathroom, they ran into Mr. Trump’s new wife, whom they had met earlier. Ms. Maples clasped her hands, Ms. Coleman recalled, and looked her in the eye. “Whatever you do, do not let her around any of these men, and especially my husband,” she told Ms. Coleman. “Protect her.”
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:
I'm no supporter of Donald Trump, but I'll give him this: he's held up a mirror to society and shown us exactly who among us harbors hatred, bigotry, and self-interest above all else. I never knew there were so many evil people living among us.
We've been telling you about your problem for years.
Glad you're finally coming to terms with it.
Your party is dead. Your ideology is dead. We're shipping everyone back home.
You lose forever, loser.
Congratulations.
And save your Epstein bullshit.
You haven't even looked through those photos yet, have you?
Don't be surprised if Hillary has Bill murdered, is all I'm sayin'.
--------------------------------------------------
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Donald Trump promised a new ‘golden age’ for the US economy. Where is it?
Most Americans have yet to see this boom – but they’ve certainly heard a lot about it from the president
By Callum Jones, Andrew Witherspoon and Aliya Uteuova
Sat 20 Dec 2025 05.00 EST
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2025/dec/20/trump-us-economy
Moments into his second term, opening his inaugural address, Donald Trump was unequivocal. “The golden age of America begins right now,” he declared.
At a White House reception last weekend, a little over 10 months later, the US president appeared to acknowledge just how far his timeline had shifted.
“We’re going to have … I say it’s the golden age of America,” Trump told his audience. “We have an age that’s coming up, the likes of which … this country has never seen. And I just look so forward to the results. You’re going to see results in six months to a year.”
The US economy has come under pressure in 2025. A golden age did not promptly take hold, as Trump initially claimed, upon his return to office in January.
On two areas the president pledged to rapidly improve – jobs and prices – the results have so far been lackluster.
The labor market started the year steady. It had slowed, but still managed to expand by an average of 168,000 jobs each month, in 2024.
During his joint address to Congress in March, however, Trump claimed to have inherited an “economic catastrophe” from Joe Biden’s administration, and vowed to create jobs “like we have never seen before”.
A new ‘golden age’
Jobs growth has, in fact, stalled in 2025 – with an average of 55,000 jobs added each month, according to official data for the first 11 months of the year, down 67% on 2024.
The headline unemployment rate, which fluctuated between 3.9% and 4.2% in the last year of Biden’s presidency, has climbed under Trump to 4.6% – its highest level in more than four years – in November.
On the campaign trail last year, Trump promised a “new American industrialism” on his watch, through which the US would become a “manufacturing powerhouse” once again, with a resurgence in factory jobs.
In reality, manufacturing employment has not increased this year. The US economy has so far added factory jobs in just two of 10 months after Trump’s return to office.
Realizing this distant dream of an industrial renaissance, according to the White House, will require ramping up the president’s flagship economic policy: tariffs.
And Trump has moved to do just that, hiking the overall average effective US tariff rate from 2.4% to 16.8%, the highest level since 1935, according to analysis by the Budget Lab at Yale.
The rollout of higher tariffs has been erratic and marred by uncertain deadlines, delays and reversals. The process has been “more painful than I expected”, Trump’s chief of staff Susie Wiles conceded to Vanity Fair.
‘Nobody can believe what’s going on’
For all the pain this agenda has caused inside the White House, economists have repeatedly warned of a potentially stark impact on millions of Americans. Tariffs on goods from overseas, often passed along by the businesses that pay them, can lead to higher prices on store shelves.
Officials and policymakers inside the Federal Reserve have spent months considering whether the ultimate effect of Trump’s tariffs will be a one-time jolt to prices, or something more lasting.
Inflation surged to its highest level in a generation in 2022 as the Covid-19 pandemic unleashed a series of supply and demand shocks on the world economy. By last year, however, the US consumer price index (CPI) was falling back down towards typical levels – and continued to do so during the early months of 2025.
By Trump’s telling, though, his administration inherited an “inflation nightmare” from Biden, which he vowed to turn around. In a primetime TV address on Wednesday, he declared: “I am bringing those high prices down and bringing them down very fast.”
But CPI has held firm since the spring. In November, it rose by an annual rate of 2.7%, according t
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The United States of Donald Trump
Donald Trump is slapping his name and face on everything he can, but America’s institutions don’t belong to him.
By David A. Graham |December 19, 2025, 7:11 PM ET
https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/2025/12/donald-trump-naming-am
erican-institutions/685362/
When President Donald Trump visited George Washington’s Mount Vernon in 2018, he reportedly showed little interest in the estate or in the first president. But Trump did have a critique of his predecessor. “If he was smart, he would’ve put his name on it,” he reportedly said. “You’ve got to put your name on stuff, or no one remembers you.”
The advice might seem “truly bizarre,” as Mount Vernon’s CEO described the visit to others, but Trump practices what he preaches. Yesterday, the Trump White House announced that the board of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts—which is chaired by Donald J. Trump, who was appointed to that role by Donald J. Trump, who also filled the board with fellow Trump appointees—would rename the venue the Donald J. Trump and the John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts. This was, the Trump spokesperson Karoline Leavitt opined, a tribute to “the unbelievable work President Trump has done over the last year” at the center, “not only from the standpoint of its reconstruction but also financially, and its reputation.”
This is a challenging claim from a factual standpoint. As The Washington Post found, ticket sales at the Kennedy Center have tanked since Trump’s hostile takeover of the institution in February. Patrons booed Trump and Vice President J. D. Vance at concerts this year. Events there have taken on an uncanny sheen of decay and mediocrity, my colleague Alexandra Petri reported after attending the Kennedy Center Honors last week.
The announcement is also challenging from a statutory perspective. The Kennedy Center’s name was bestowed by a law passed by Congress and can’t be changed by the board on its own. Tim Shriver, John F. Kennedy’s nephew, wrote on X, “Would they rename the Lincoln memorial? The Jefferson?”
Who’s to stop Trump, though? Workers began changing the signage this morning, and Congress seems unlikely to act; anyway, even if the name isn’t formally changed, nothing will prevent the president from calling it what he wants. Consider the Department of Defense, which the administration insists on calling the Department of War, despite the former name being established by law. Or more apropos, take the U.S. Institute of Peace, which was also established and named by Congress but which recently got a (rather premature) rebrand, with the facade now reading Donald J. Trump United States Institute of Peace. The gesture here is blunt. The president placing his own name before the nation’s is redolent of dictators in isolated countries—North Korea’s Kim family and Turkmenistan’s Saparmurat Niyazov, who even renamed January after himself—and long-ago absolute monarchs such as Louis XIV, who is said to have declared, “L’état, c’est moi.”
In line with his view of himself not merely as an elected representative but as father of the nation (or perhaps “daddy” of the nation?), Trump has put his name and image in places large and small. His scowling visage is next to George Washington’s portrait on National Parks passes; for good measure, citizens can now enter parks for free on Trump’s birthday, which happens to be Flag Day, but no longer on Martin Luther King Jr. Day. A new pay-for-play visa for the very rich is called the Trump Gold Card. The Treasury has proposed 250th-anniversary $1 coins with Trump’s face on them, a serious deviation from precedent. (The law bars printing money with images of living people on it but does not apply to minting coins.) Does anyone have any doubt what name he’ll put on his boondoggle ballroom at the White House?
This tendency is not new. Throughout his career, Trump has plastered his name on whatever he can, including many buildings, a hideous pair of sneakers, a bottle-water brand, a short-lived airline,
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Settling with the President will cost the residents of South Park more than they bargained for.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Donald Trump promised a new ‘golden age’ for the US economy. Where is it?
It's up your ass, faggot.
Nobody wants to hear now from little bitches like you that denied inflation was a problem under Joe Biden* for 4 years.
It takes a while to fix what you stupid fuckers broke.
--------------------------------------------------
Be Nice. Don't be a dick.
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:
The United States of Donald Trump
Donald Trump is slapping his name and face on everything he can, but America’s institutions don’t belong to him.
Don't worry, pussy.
I'm sure you'll change it all right back via Executive Order along with the Gulf of America and Mt. Everest when your next idiot is in office.
But if we do get a new Golden Age economy coming our way, you're not going to live long enough to see any of that.
Tick Tock
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:If smoking causes cancer, why did you ever smoke, 6ix? Because you never believed that it could happen to you.
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.
I don't know, dude.
Why do you fuck monkeys and children, cunt?
--------------------------------------------------
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Trump is so sharp he can spot the difference between a hippopotamus and a giraffe, he claims
President Donald Trump once again boasted about having “aced” three cognitive tests in wide-ranging remarks.
Trump reminded a North Carolina crowd on Friday that he’s “aced” several cognitive exams and is in “perfect health.”
“I did something no other president’s ever done. I took cognitive tests because I know that and by the way, not easy,” Trump said in his Friday speech that was reportedly meant to focus on the economy.
He then took the opportunity to opine about how his predecessor, former President Joe Biden, would’ve performed on the mental fitness test: “You get to those last questions, those last 10, 15 questions…and I aced them. And no other president’s taken a cog–… Could you imagine sleepy Joe taking a cognitive test?”
“The first question is like, ‘What is this?’ And they show a lion, a giraffe, a fish, and a hippopotamus. And they say, ‘Which is the giraffe?’” he recalled.
“I’ve taken now three cognitive tests. I’ve aced every single one of them,” Trump claimed, pausing as the crowd erupted in applause and cheers.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/trump-pe
rfect-health-cognitive-tests-b2888369.html
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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There Is Something Deeply Wrong With Donald Trump—We Must Act Like It
Democracies survive only when citizens decide that character still matters, that truth still matters, that children deserve better examples than tantrums and threats and gold-plated vulgarity.
By Thom Hartmann | Dec 18, 2025
https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/something-wrong-donald-trump
Let me take off my psychotherapist hat and simply speak as a parent, an adult, a businessman, a citizen, and a human being.
There is something deeply and fundamentally wrong with Donald Trump.
Wednesday night’s speech demonstrated it. He didn’t need to trash-talk Joe Biden, or try to claim that the country was “dead” when he came into office, or exaggerate his accomplishments, or lie about the state of things. None of that was necessary.
He didn’t need to put depreciating comments under the pictures of prior presidents in the White House, or replace Joe Biden’s picture with a autopen.
This ends when we decide it ends. When we stop treating pathology as entertainment and cruelty as strength.
These are the kind of things junior high school boys do. And not even most junior high school boys; just the really dysfunctional ones. The bullies. The ones who are desperate to be part of the in crowd, but always on the outside looking in. The ones no one wants as friends.
This man is sick. And he’s inflicting his sickness on our country. And he’s surrounded himself with sick people, or at least with people willing to tolerate his mental, emotional, and spiritual sickness.
As well as people who share his sickness: There’s also clearly something wrong with man-children like Stephen Miller, Pete Hegseth, and Kash Patel.
With these men, it goes beyond the normal sellout type of person willing to do anything for wealth and power, the kind of behavior we see in people like Pam Bondi or the administration members who’ll swear that the 2020 election was stolen.
There’s a deep cruelty combined with a pathological insecurity and a level of hate and intolerance for others that’s shocking. Anybody who’s ever played any sort of role in leadership is looking at this administration aghast. The leaders of the rest of the rest of the world must be in shock.
There’s a deep sickness at the head of this government. The childishness. The violence. The bloodlust that we see off the coast of Venezuela. The willingness to sanction rape and murder and land grabs in Ukraine. The enthusiasm to bring our country to the brink of war. Plastering gold-painted geegaws all over the White House.
And then Wednesday night Trump goes off for 20 minutes quite literally shouting at the country like an old man yelling at kids on his lawn. Ranting about Black Somalis. Bragging about nonexistent victories and peace deals. Just making shit up.
No president of the United States has ever behaved this way. Probably no governor or mayor has ever gotten away with this kind of psychopathology and obscene behavior.
It’s embarrassing. It’s humiliating America.
It’s setting a terrible example for our young people. Children who were just entering the early years of public school when Trump first ran based on a racist rant in 2015 are now graduating from high school thinking that this is normal.
That, in and of itself, is a disaster for their and America’s future.
And now he has an “armada” poised off the coast of Venezuela trying to provoke a war with that nation.
It’s also becoming increasingly clear that he was right in the middle of it all with Jeffrey Epstein, and is now frantically trying to avoid questions about the teen modeling agency and talent show he owned back in those days.
He’s gutted America’s principal agencies of soft power, the Voice of America and USAID, strung Ukraine along for almost an entire year as their people get slaughtered, and accepted hundreds of millions of dollars worth of naked bribes from foreign autocrats and American business leaders.
He’s deployed masked, secret police into our cities who are gleefully brutalizing brown-skinn
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Trump Takes America’s ‘Imperial Presidency’ to a New Level
In his first year back in the White House, President Trump has greatly expanded executive power while embracing the trappings of royalty in ways not seen in the modern era.
By Peter Baker | Dec. 21, 2025
Peter Baker, the chief White House correspondent, has covered the past six presidencies and wrote a book about President Trump’s first term.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/21/us/politics/trump-imperial-presiden
cy.html
When President Trump hosted the crown prince of Saudi Arabia last month, he pulled out all the stops. To the traditional pomp of a formal White House visit, he added a few even fancier touches: a stirring military flyover, a procession of black horses and long, regal tables for the lavish dinner in the East Room instead of the typical round tables.
For surprised White House veterans who were paying attention, the unusual flourishes looked a little familiar. Just two months earlier, King Charles III of Britain welcomed Mr. Trump for a state visit that included, yes, a stirring military flyover, a procession of black horses and a long, regal table for the lavish dinner in St. George’s Hall at Windsor Palace.
In his first year back in office, Mr. Trump has unabashedly adopted the trappings of royalty just as he has asserted virtually unbridled power to transform American government and society to his liking. In both pageantry and policy, Mr. Trump has established a new, more audacious version of the imperial presidency that goes far beyond even the one associated with Richard M. Nixon, for whom the term was popularized half a century ago.
He no longer holds back, or is held back, as in the first term. Trump 2.0 is Trump 1.0 unleashed. The gold trim in the Oval Office, the demolition of the East Wing to be replaced by a massive ballroom, the plastering of his name and face on government buildings and now even the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, the designation of his own birthday as a free-admission holiday at national parks — it all speaks to a personal aggrandizement and accumulation of power with meager resistance from Congress or the Supreme Court.
Mr. Trump’s reinvention of the presidency has altered the balance of power in Washington in profound ways that may endure long after he departs the scene. Authority once seized by one branch of government is rarely given back willingly. Actions that once shocked the system can eventually become seen as normal. While other presidents pushed the limits, Mr. Trump has blown right through them and dared anyone to stop him.
“His second term in many respects represents not simply a break from presidential norms and expectations,” said Matthew Dallek, a political historian at George Washington University. “It’s also a culmination of 75 years in which presidents have reached for more and more power.”
It is also a culmination of four years of planning between Mr. Trump’s first term and his second. The last time around, he was a political novice who did not understand how government worked and surrounded himself with advisers who tried to restrain his most extreme instincts. This time, he arrived in office with a plan to accomplish what he did not in his first term, and a team of like-minded loyalists intent on remaking the country.
“The president knew exactly what he wanted to do coming into office this time,” said Jason Miller, a longtime Trump adviser. “Now the president had four years under his belt. He knows exactly how everything works. He knows all the international players. He knows all the national players. He knew what strategies and tactics worked the first go around and what strategies didn’t work.”
Strong and Weak
The presidency is a living organism, shaped by the person inhabiting it, whether it be self-styled men of action like Andrew Jackson and Theodore Roosevelt, father figures like Dwight D. Eisenhower, legislative wizards like Lyndon B. Johnson or captivating communicators like Ronald Reagan and Barack
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You are a constant source of embarrassment to yourself.
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Trump says he may cut US income tax 'completely' because tariff revenue will be 'so large.' But does the math actually add up?
They say death and taxes are life’s only certainties — but according to U.S. President Donald Trump, a significant portion of the latter could be on the chopping block.
Speaking to U.S. military service members last week, Trump floated the idea of eliminating income taxes entirely, funded by what he described as massive new tariff revenues.
"Over the next couple of years, I think we'll substantially be cutting and maybe cutting out completely, but we'll be cutting income tax. Could be almost completely cutting it because the money we're taking in is going to be so large," he said.
https://www.usnews.com/news/us/articles/2025-11-27/trump-says-he-may-c
ut-income-tax-completely-because-of-tariff-income
It’s a bold proposal, especially given that income tax is the federal government’s single largest source of revenue.
In fiscal year 2025, the federal government collected $2.656 trillion in individual income taxes — about 50.7% of Uncle Sam’s total $5.235 trillion in receipts (2). By comparison, corporate income taxes brought in $452 billion and tariff revenue totaled just $195 billion.
Critics quickly pointed out the gap.
Economist Erica York of the Tax Foundation said the math simply doesn’t work — nor would Trump’s vision be easy to implement.
“Mathematically impossible, plus any income tax cuts would require Congress,” York wrote on X (3).
“To replace the roughly $2 trillion of revenue raised by the individual income tax with tariffs would require astronomically high tariff rates. And those rates would shrink imports, making it impossible to generate enough revenue to replace the income tax (4).”
It’s also worth noting that even with income tax revenue, the federal government still spent far more than it brought in: $5.235 trillion in total receipts versus $7.010 trillion in outlays, leaving a $1.775 trillion deficit in fiscal 2025.
While Trump’s proposal faces serious doubts, policy changes aren’t the only route to lowering tax bills. . . .
https://finance.yahoo.com/news/trump-says-may-cut-income-141100484.htm
l
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Quote:Trump said he could set your income tax to zero!
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Trump is a constant source of embarrassment to himself.
See https://finance.yahoo.com/news/trump-says-may-cut-income-141100484.htm
l
Zero tax isn't extreme enough for Trump. He is going to the next step by saying he could pay you $2,000!
Top White House economic adviser Kevin Hassett says $2,000 tariff checks for Americans will depend on Congress
By Kaia Hubbard | December 21, 2025 12:13 PM EST
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/kevin-hassett-white-house-trump-tariff-ch
ecks-congress/
Washington — Director of the National Economic Council Kevin Hassett said Sunday that President Trump's idea to give Americans $2,000 checks funded by tariff revenue will "depend on what happens with Congress."
"I would expect that in the new year, the president will bring forth a proposal to Congress to make that happen," Hassett said on "Face the Nation with Margaret Brennan."
Since July, Mr. Trump has floated a possible rebate for some Americans based on tariff revenue. And last month, the president posted on social media that a "dividend of at least $2,000 a person (not including high income people!) will be paid to everyone." Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent told Fox News last month that the checks would likely go to households making less than $100,000. He said at the time it remained "in discussion."
Hassett noted that Congress would have to approve the funds, which would likely be issued through the tax code and require lawmakers to pass new legislation authorizing the Treasury Department to send checks. But Hassett touted "a lot of positive news about the economy" since July that he suggested makes the checks more possible.
"We've had a couple of quarters of almost 4% growth, we've got a big government surplus actually running for a few months in a row, the deficit relative to last year is down by $600 billion," Hassett said. "And so, in the summer, I wasn't so sure that there was space for a check like that. But now I'm pretty sure that there is."
Hassett said the funds could come from tariff revenue, while noting that "in the end, you know, we get taxes, we get tariffs, we get revenue from lots of places, and then Congress decides how to spend those money. That's an appropriation."
The comments come as the president has defended the tariffs as one of his administration's signature policies, touting the approach for helping the U.S. raise new revenue and driving investment in U.S. manufacturing.
Hassett said most of the tariffs put in place this year "have proven their mettle," pointing to high growth, reduction in the trade deficit and lower imports from China.
"So there's a lot of success to crow about in the tariff space," Hassett said. "But there are also things that we're hearing, when we talk to people like trading partners and companies that trade a lot in the U.S., there are also things that maybe could be adjusted."
Hassett said "there's an appetite to exempt things if they're really not meant to be made in the U.S.," because of factors like climate. He said U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer is leading that effort.
The top White House economic adviser also expressed confidence that the Supreme Court will side with the administration as the justices consider whether the president has the authority to unilaterally impose tariffs under a federal emergency powers law. The administration has relied on the law to impose duties on nearly every U.S. trading partner.
"We really expect the Supreme Court is going to find with us," Hassett said.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Trump is a constant source of embarrassment to himself.
Don't misquote me, cocksucker.
--------------------------------------------------
Be Nice. Don't be a dick.
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I can't stand Candice Owens or Ben Shapiro, but watching Candice rip him a new asshole was funny as hell.
“Fuck you Ben Shapiro and the midget horse you rode in on.”
--------------------------------------------------
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Quote:The Pitiful Childishness of Donald Trump
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Don't misquote me, cocksucker.
The president’s appetite for plastering his name on every available surface appears insatiable.
By Eliot A. Cohen | December 21, 2025, 3:18 PM ET
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2025/12/donald-trump-renaming/685376/
The Board of Trustees—or, if one prefers, the Board of Toadies—at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts has renamed it the Trump-Kennedy Center. The 47th president of the United States approves. Donald Trump’s appetite for flattery appears as insatiable as the supply of bootlickers among his followers appears inexhaustible. He also blessed engraving his name on the U.S. Institute of Peace building and delivered a cartographic decree that the Gulf of Mexico would henceforth be called the Gulf of America.
Meanwhile, his secretary of defense, in between haranguing generals about physical fitness and ordering the U.S. Navy to engage in the killing of criminals without trial, has renamed the Department of Defense “the Department of War” (illegally, as it happens). Pete Hegseth has also gone about renaming bases that were once named after Confederate generals (traitors, the lot of them, and for the most part incompetent military leaders) but, last year, renamed after real heroes. The Hegsethian names are the same as the originals (Bragg, Hood, Lee) but supposedly refer to different people.
It is all offensive and in some cases skirts the will, such as it is, of a feeble and craven Congress. It is also puerile. The names will come back. In 10 years’ time, the maps will say “the Gulf of Mexico,” and the odds are good that a Democratic administration will yet again rename the Department of Defense and the forts. Trump’s name will be chiseled out of the walls, as will his embarrassing japes at his predecessors in his “President’s Walk of Fame” at the White House. So why do Trump and his minions do things that are childish in and of themselves, and that anyone with political judgment knows will be undone when their opponents eventually return to power?
“Names are powerful,” the exceptional magician Eugene Burger used to say, which is why some mentalists begin their acts by memorizing the names of everyone in the audience. The Confederate names on forts built during the early 20th century were designed to consolidate the myth of the Lost Cause, conferring nobility on what was, in fact, a sordid struggle for chattel slavery—the worst cause for which men ever fought, as Ulysses S. Grant later noted. And in some measure they succeeded.
Names can be tributes too, sometimes of a paradoxical kind. Native Americans were cheated, occasionally massacred, displaced, and defeated by Americans moving West. But in 1973 Jeep named its premier vehicle the Cherokee, hoping to capture ruggedness and pride in the name, even giving the first truck to the then-head of the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians. The U.S. Army’s most lethal helicopter is the Apache, the Navy’s primary long-range missile is the Tomahawk, and a century ago William Tecumseh Sherman, one of the most formidable of Civil War generals, bore as his middle name that of one of the greatest Indian warriors Americans ever encountered.
One may debate whether such namings are appropriate—in 2021 the leaders of the Oklahoma-based Cherokee Nation, a different federally recognized tribe, formally objected to having the name on a hulking car—but it is clear that they are intended to serve as a tribute. The renamings carried out by Trump and Hegseth are different. They are akin to the newly positive use of the word swagger and to the photo-shoot cosplay of Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem or FBI Director Kash Patel in full tactical combat gear. They are childish.
Much of the leadership of the Trump administration, emphatically beginning at the top, exhibits the behavioral patterns of children—broken children, in many cases, who will never really become fully adult and do not understand what adul
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Grow up, idiot.
Seriously. Can't you even put a thought together anymore that doesn't involve Trump?
You are a disgusting human being.
--------------------------------------------------
Be Nice. Don't be a dick.
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Quote:What is your manly plan between now and New Year's Day? Smoke many cigarettes and watch porn? Trumptards don't prosper in America because that is how they waste their lives.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Grow up, idiot.
Seriously. Can't you even put a thought together anymore that doesn't involve Trump?
You are a disgusting human being.
MAGA’s Manly Manufacturing Misfire
Understanding Trump’s other big failure
By Paul Krugman | Dec 22, 2025
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/magas-manly-manufacturing-misfire
According to Navigator Research, a significant number of Americans who voted for Donald Trump in 2024 now regret their choice. As the word cloud above suggests, this regret is largely driven by Trump’s utter failure to deliver on his economic promises.
What did he promise? Most media attention has focused on his claim that he would bring the cost of living way down, starting on “day one.” This claim never made any sense, especially because Trump’s policy agenda — centered on tariffs and mass deportation — was clearly inflationary, not deflationary. And Trump isn’t improving his standing with his reality denial “affordability” tour, which will clearly take the form of multiple speeches in which he demands that Americans reject the evidence of their own eyes and admit that prices are falling, not rising.
But while Trump’s gaslighting on prices is a natural and appropriate target for critics, we shouldn’t forget that the main goal of his policy agenda wasn’t lower prices, it was job creation. Specifically, Trump and his economic advisers claimed — and may even have believed — that they would create lots of manly jobs for manly men. They would revive American manufacturing, they claimed, by unilaterally imposing huge tariffs and thereby breaking all our international agreements (and, whatever the Supreme Court may say, U.S. law). They would create mining and construction jobs, they claimed, by killing renewable energy and gutting environmental protection in order to promote fossil fuels. They would deport millions of undocumented workers which would result, they claimed, in a job boom for native-born workers.
My snark about “manly” jobs isn’t gratuitous. Mike Konczal has an excellent review of the way the MAGA labor market story has failed, in which he emphasizes how regressively gendered Trump’s vision was and is:
I wish I could tell you that the reason people in their twenties can’t find jobs and the reason many of us are likely to be poorer over the next few years was more sophisticated than “we’re going to turn all the girlbosses into tradwives once they see all the manly men at the USA iPhone-screwing factory.” But I don’t think it is.
Let me acknowledge, by the way, that U.S. men are having real problems. But nothing Trump is doing will help.
And even on its own absurd terms, the MAGA jobs strategy has been an abject failure — as abject as Trump’s failure to bring down prices. Here are the current official employment numbers for manufacturing, construction and employment:
Contrary to Trumpist claims that the Biden expansion didn’t create “real” jobs, the economy added a substantial number of jobs in “manly” sectors from 2021 to 2024. Part of this expansion was driven by Biden’s green energy policies, which boosted both construction and manufacturing employment.
Trump has scrapped Biden’s green energy policies in favor of tariffs and fossil fuels. But it isn’t working. Instead, employment in “manly” sectors has fallen since Trump took office. And as Dean Baker points out, there are strong reasons to believe that even these job numbers are overstated, and will eventually be revised down further.
I’ll talk about the failure of Trump’s dirty energy strategy to create jobs on another occasion. For now, let’s
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:What is your manly plan between now and New Year's Day? Smoke many cigarettes and watch porn? Trumptards don't prosper in America because that is how they waste their lives.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Grow up, idiot.
Seriously. Can't you even put a thought together anymore that doesn't involve Trump?
You are a disgusting human being.
If you're waiting for a cum back, you'll have to scrape mine off your mom's teeth.
--------------------------------------------------
Be Nice. Don't be a dick.
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Quote:6ixStringJoker, your insults are proof of depravity, which is why proof that Trump is evil can't faze you or your ilk:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
If you're waiting for a cum back, you'll have to scrape mine off your mom's teeth.
A $6 billion nuclear deal has Trump’s name all over it. It’s raising serious ethics concerns
By Matt Egan | Dec 22, 2025
https://www.cnn.com/2025/12/22/business/trump-stock-fusion
The Trump business empire’s expansion into nuclear fusion is alarming ethics experts, who warn it poses glaring conflicts of interest and risks the federal government playing favorites in what could be the holy grail of clean energy.
Trump Media & Technology Group (DJT) shocked Wall Street last week by arranging a $6 billion marriage with TAE Technologies, a Google-backed company at the leading edge of fusion energy.
The merger means that soon, President Donald Trump will simultaneously have a major financial interest in a company whose fortunes will be influenced by the actions of a government that Trump himself presides over.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:6ixStringJoker, your insults are proof of depravity
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
If you're waiting for a cum back, you'll have to scrape mine off your mom's teeth.
Why don't you tell us who you want to kill and who needs to die today, loser.
Go fuck yourself, you self-righteous prick.
--------------------------------------------------
Be Nice. Don't be a dick.
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Quote:Anxious? Having a problem concentrating, 6ixStringJoker? Read the soothing words from Paul Krugman:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Why don't you tell us who you want to kill and who needs to die today, loser.
Go fuck yourself, you self-righteous prick.
--------------------------------------------------
Be Nice. Don't be a dick.
A New K in America
The gap between haves and have-nots fell under Biden, but is rising under Trump
By Paul Krugman | Dec 23, 2025
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/a-new-k-in-america
According to current economic commentary, it’s all about “K”. Talk of a “K-shaped economy,” in which incomes and wealth are rising only for those at the top, has become ubiquitous. And rightly so. For high-income Americans who own a lot of stock, the past year has treated them pretty well. But for those who don’t, not so much.
However, too much of the commentary is marred by a sort of lazy cynicism. Too many of these commentaries rely on the casual assumption that it has always been thus. Or at least, that it was as true during the Biden years as it is now. But that’s not true. David Autor, Arindrajit Dube and Annie McGrew have documented that the Biden era post-pandemic economic recovery was the opposite of what we are experiencing now.
https://blueprintlabs.mit.edu/research/the-unexpected-compression-comp
etition-at-work-in-the-low-wage-labor-market/
In fact, during the Biden recovery wage gains for low-paid workers were much larger than for those further up the income scale. In fact, the pro-low-income worker tilt of wage gains during the Biden recovery was something we haven’t seen since the “Great Compression” of the 1940s. And that narrowing of wage gaps was due to special factors, including wartime wage policy and a rapid expansion of unions.
The chart below provides data to back up the observation that in going from the Biden Administration to the Trump Administration, we have traded an economy that disproportionately benefited low-income workers to won that disproportionately benefits the well-off (particularly those who own a lot of stocks). The graph plots the Atlanta Fed’s estimates for the rate of wage growth for two groups: workers in the bottom 25 percent of the wage distribution (blue line) and workers in the top 25 percent (red line).
Source https://www.atlantafed.org/chcs/wage-growth-tracker
During the Biden years of 2021 to 2023, low-paid workers saw consistently faster wage growth than high-paid workers. For example, in September of 2022, the wages of high-paid workers grew at an annual rate of 4%, but around 7.75% for low-paid workers as low-paid workers benefited from a tight labor market. The spread narrowed during the mid-2023 to mid-2024, as the economy slowly cooled in response to Fed interest rate hikes. By 2023 and into 2024, it was clear that the economy had achieved the desired “soft landing”: inflation was falling while employment stayed relatively strong.
In late 2024, however, the wage gains of high-paid workers began to outpace those of low-paid workers, which are barely outpacing inflation.
So the K-shaped economy is a real but relatively recent development. Why is it happening?
The proximate cause of the K-shaped economy is a weak job market. As I’ve written repeatedly, the U.S. economy has not (yet) experienced mass layoffs. Employers have, however, become very reluctant to hire new workers. Gallup asks whether now is “a good time or a bad time to find a quality job”:
Gallup’s result, consistent with other surveys like the Conference Board, sho
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Quote:President Trump says US needs Greenland for 'national security'
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Why don't you tell us who you want to kill and who needs to die today, loser.
Go fuck yourself, you self-righteous prick.
--------------------------------------------------
Be Nice. Don't be a dick.
President Donald Trump told reporters on Dec. 22 that the special envoy he appointed would "lead the charge."
By Michael Loria | Dec. 22, 2025, 7:57 p.m. ET
https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2025/12/22/donald-trump-g
reenland-united-states-national-security/87889073007/
"We need Greenland for national security," Trump told reporters on Dec. 22, during an announcement that the U.S. would build a "new "Golden Fleet" of "Trump-class" battleships. "You look up and down the coast, you have Russian and Chinese ships all over the place. We need it for national security. We have to have it."
Danish Foreign Minister Lars Lokke Rasmussen told TV2, "Out of nowhere, there is now a special U.S. presidential representative, who, according to himself, is tasked with taking over Greenland. This is, of course, completely unacceptable."
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Quote:Believe me, says 6ixStringJoker, the Nazi who claims he is not a Nazi.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
So shut the fuck up.
--------------------------------------------------
Be Nice. Don't be a dick.
JD Vance pretends almost no Americans are antisemitic
The Times of Israel reports:
US Vice President JD Vance claimed in an interview on Sunday that almost no Americans are antisemitic and that concerns about antisemitic voices are raised as a way to avoid discussing “a real backlash to a consensus view in American foreign policy” on Israel.
In the interview with the publication Unherd, Vance also downplayed concerns about Nick Fuentes, the popular far-right antisemitic podcaster, and said that Christianity is “very much at the heart” of America’s common culture.
The interview was the latest in a series of comments Vance has made dismissing or declining to condemn an increasing embrace of antisemitism among parts of the US right.
In a speech on Sunday to the conservative Turning Point USA’s annual convention, whose opening days were roiled by a debate over excluding antisemites, Vance said the movement should be open to everyone as long as they “love America,” coming down firmly against “purity tests” and adding that he “didn’t bring a list of conservatives to denounce or to de-platform.”
More, including videos, at
https://attentiontotheunseen.com/2025/12/22/jd-vance-pretends-almost-n
o-americans-are-antisemitic/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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MAGA Is Breaking Up Over an “Are Nazis Cool?” Debate. It’s a Sign of Things to Come.
Trump’s GOP is held together by a cult of personality. But what happens when that personality flickers?
By Jill Filipovic | Dec 23, 2025 1:09 PM
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2025/12/maga-heritage-foundation-m
ike-pence-donald-trump.html
In something of a Christmas miracle, the MAGA coalition may finally be starting to break down.
The Heritage Foundation, which published the Project 2025 blueprint for this Trump term, just saw more than a dozen staff members defect for former Vice President Mike Pence’s Advancing American Freedom think tank; turncoats include the former leaders of Heritage’s data, economics, and legal teams. Among prominent MAGA leaders—mostly elected officials, people who want to be elected officials, and podcasters—there is a growing divide over what one might assume should be an easily answered question: Should they welcome Nazis, avowed white supremacists, and unrepentant racists hurling slurs into the movement?
This is apparently quite the conundrum. It’s also telling that the cleavage is coming now. After all, the movement Donald Trump built has long welcomed bigots and racists; Trump himself dined with white supremacist Nick Fuentes and enthusiastic antisemite Kanye West at Mar-a-Lago, although he later claimed to not know who Fuentes was. The people who have gotten into bed with the president, whether they’re D.C. think tank staffers or Jan. 6 hooligans, realized who they were cozying up with.
That some are starting to object and defect suggests that two things are happening at once. The first is that MAGA bigotry has gotten significantly broader, expanding beyond the groups the broader right believes are acceptable to malign (women, Black people, immigrants, Muslims) and coming for groups of which prominent MAGA leaders are a part (Jews, Indians, anyone whose ancestors didn’t come over on the Mayflower). The second is that Trump himself is fading: He’s elderly and showing the typical signs of fatigue and cognitive decline. This is creating something of a vacuum in leadership. Vice President J.D. Vance is the clear MAGA heir apparent (or at least believes himself to be). But he won’t take the throne unchallenged. Some of these contenders want to sit in the Oval Office, and there can be only one butt in the chair behind the Resolute Desk. Others want a different kind of Republican Party: Some strive to turn away from Trumpian populism and toward a tax-cutting pro-business agenda; others aim for a return to the politics of conservative Christianity, with a refocus on restricting abortion and LGBTQ+ rights; a few really may object to MAGA’s blood-and-soil nationalist turn. But the coalition is currently fracturing for one reason: The leader is weak, and a successor is being chosen.
The growing objections to MAGA racism can feel pretty rich coming from people who seemed just fine with many kinds of racism up until now. But it’s also true that MAGA racism has, like the famous “First they came for” poem, proved itself insatiable. Vance has been among the leading voices for the idea that there is a category of “heritage Americans,” a very-online term for people whose family ancestry supposedly gives them more of a claim to legitimate Americanness than anyone else: naturalized citizens, children of immigrants, someone whose grandparents immigrated after World War II. If your ancestors came over anytime after 1789, you are not a “Grade A” American, as one chart puts it. “I think the people whose ancestors fought in the Civil War have a hell of a lot more claim over America than the people who say they don’t belong,” Vance has said—marking those who chose to become American as having a less legitimate right to Americanness than those who fought to break up the country.
This turn has alarmed many conservatives who, like most Americans, are not purely descended from Pilgrims. The elevation of unapologetically antisemitic rhetoric and the growing hatred of Jews among Gen Z conservatives seem to
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The Winds of Change have changed direction. Hey, remember April?
When President Donald Trump marked his 100th day in office at the end of that month, he was on a seemingly unstoppable roll. After taking four years out of office to prepare, he and his team returned to power with a blitz of more than 140 executive orders. He bent the Republican-controlled Congress to his will and dismantled much of the federal bureaucracy. He brought powerful institutions, including prestigious universities and law firms, to heel, demanding that his ring be kissed and his wallet fattened. He upended the nation’s economic and diplomatic relations with the world. He hijacked Americans’ attention—he was everywhere!—while openly musing about tearing up the Constitution and serving a third term. Moreover, Democrats were in disarray—truly—and their party’s future seemed in doubt. Trump stared out from the cover of this very magazine with the accompanying quote “I run the country and the world.” Honestly, it was hard to argue with him.
But as 2025 draws to a close, Trump seems a whole lot smaller. His party has been battered in recent elections. His poll numbers on even his signature issues—the economy, immigration—have tumbled. He’s seemingly lost touch with what got him elected, instead focusing on projects both petty and self-aggrandizing. As Americans worry about affordability, Trump and his family have profited wildly from his time in office. Republicans have begun to openly and repeatedly defy him. Democrats have started to outmaneuver him. Today, the Jeffrey Epstein scandal once more erupted with embarrassing revelations and unanswered questions. And every now and then, Trump seems to have a hard time even staying awake.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/opinion/trump-is-suddenly-looking-a-lot
-smaller/ar-AA1SViia
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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There’s a 92 Percent Chance Trump Is Making It Up
By Marie-Rose Sheinerman | December 20, 2025
https://www.theatlantic.com/national-security/2025/12/trump-strikes-ca
ribbean-military-number-venezuela/685348/
President Donald Trump likes to use a big number to anchor his point, especially when he wanders off on a tangent. Often it seems that a specific figure is on the tip of his tongue.
At this year’s ceremonial turkey pardon, Trump praised a farmer from Wayne County, North Carolina, for raising two “record-setting” birds, but then pivoted to his own electoral margin of victory: “I won that county by 92 percent.” (In fact, he won it by 16 percentage points.) At a McDonald’s corporate event last month, Trump claimed that the United States controls 92 percent of the shoreline of the Gulf of Mexico (the Gulf of America, as he calls it). It’s really about 46 percent. Trump won the veterans’ vote, he said on Veterans Day, with “about 92 percent or something,” and in July, he said he won farmers—well, “by 92 percent.” (More accurate estimates of the portion of the electorate he won would be 65 percent of veterans and 78 percent of voters in farming counties, according to exit polls and election data.)
His fixation on the number between 91 and 93 has been a feature for a while. In April, Trump claimed that egg prices had fallen by 92 percent. (The Bureau of Labor Statistics said 12.7 percent.) And at a rally shortly before last November’s election, while railing against journalists and the media, he allowed that “not all of them” are “sick people.” Just “about 92 percent.” That one, admittedly, is difficult to fact-check.
I came upon this curious pattern in the course of tracking down the basis for a far more serious claim the president has made repeatedly as part of his justification for the U.S. military buildup near Venezuela. More than two dozen strikes on small boats allegedly carrying drugs in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific have killed more than 100 people since September. The strikes have formed the core of the administration’s ongoing campaign to treat President Nicolás Maduro as a “narco-terrorist,” which many view as a veneer for wanting to see the Venezuelan strongman ousted from power and work with a new government to secure access to the country’s oil and rare earth minerals.
“The drugs coming in through the sea are down to—they’re down by 92 percent,” Trump told Politico on December 8. At a roundtable later the same day, he went with “92 or 94 percent.” Three days later: “Drug traffic by sea is down 92 percent,” Trump said in the Oval Office. A day after that brought a new estimate: “We knocked out 96 percent of the drugs coming in by water,” he told reporters.
More often than not, the president links the 92 (or more) percent claim to another: “Every one of those boats you see get shot down, you just saved 25,000 American lives.” In December alone, he has cited that figure—25,000 American lives saved per boat strike—on at least six different occasions.
I asked the Coast Guard—the lead federal agency for maritime drug interdiction—for any underlying data or information to support both of those figures. The Coast Guard referred me to the Pentagon. The Pentagon referred me to the White House. The Department of Homeland Security referred me to the Pentagon and the White House, which repeated Trump’s remarks without elaboration.
“President Trump is right. It is widely known that one small dose of these drugs is deadly, fentanyl is the number one killer of adults between the ages of 18 and 45, and any boat bringing this poison to our shores has the potential to kill 25,000 Americans or more,” Anna Kelly, a White House spokesperson, told me in a statement. “Rather than try to poke holes in these facts, The Atlantic should join President Trump in elevating the voices of families who have lost loved ones to the scourge of narcoterrorism.”
The president’s claims, however, are so porous that I hardly found anywhere to poke. Although Trump and other officials have repeatedly said that
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Trump is doing all he can to prove he is crazy:
Donald J. Trump @realDonaldTrump
The Failing New York Times, and their lies and purposeful misrepresentations, is a serious threat to the National Security of our Nation. Their Radical Left, Unhinged Behavior, writing FAKE Articles and Opinions in a never ending way, must be dealt with and stopped. THEY ARE A TRUE ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE! Thank you for you attention to this matter. PRESIDENT DJT
12/23/25, 12:32 AM
Trump, 79, Declares Absurd National Security Threat in Late-Night Meltdown
It is unclear what prompted the president’s latest deranged rant.
By Ewan Palmer | Updated Dec. 23 2025 3:02PM EST
https://www.thedailybeast.com/trump-79-declares-absurd-national-securi
ty-threat-in-late-night-meltdown/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Judges who ruled against Trump say that subsequent threats have changed their lives
NBC reports:
In his almost 45 years as a federal judge, John Coughenour has seen it all, including high-profile criminal trials that put his own safety at risk.
But this year, the 84-year-old senior district judge did something he hadn’t considered for a long time: He retrieved a gun he had stored at the federal courthouse in Seattle years ago and brought it back to his home in case he needed it to defend himself.
Coughenour is one of dozens of federal judges who have found themselves at the center of a political maelstrom as they have ruled against President Donald Trump or spoken up in defense of the judiciary. With Trump administration officials vilifying judges who rule against the government, a wave of violent threats and harassment has often followed.
More at https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/judges-ruled-trump-say-
harassment-threats-changed-lives-rcna248445
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:Believe me, says 6ixStringJoker, the Nazi who claims he is not a Nazi.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
So shut the fuck up.
--------------------------------------------------
Be Nice. Don't be a dick.
Shut the fuck up, idiot.
Last time everybody checked, it's YOUR fucking party that is out there shitting all over Jews literally every day.
You're the bad guys. You're fucking toast.
It's hilarious to watch, actually.
--------------------------------------------------
Be Nice. Don't be a dick.
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Quote:So This Is Why Trump Didn’t Want to Release the Epstein Files
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Shut the fuck up, idiot.
Last time everybody checked, it's YOUR fucking party that is out there shitting all over Jews literally every day.
You're the bad guys. You're fucking toast.
It's hilarious to watch, actually.
--------------------------------------------------
Be Nice. Don't be a dick.
The latest batch includes many new references to Trump—and enough ammunition for Congress to keep pressing.
By Sarah Fitzpatrick | December 24, 2025, 2:49 PM ET
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/2025/12/trump-epstein-files-justi
ce-department-redactions/685455/
Nearly two years ago, Donald Trump kicked off the presidential-campaign season with a declaration: “I was never on Epstein’s Plane, or at his ‘stupid’ Island,” he posted on Truth Social in January 2024. Reports to the contrary, he insisted, were the fault of AI—and of his political rivals: “This is what the Democrats do to their Republican Opponent, who is leading them, by a lot, in the Polls.”
But this week, the documents released by Trump’s own Justice Department—including flight logs and emails—told a different story. Federal prosecutors determined in January 2020 that Trump had been a passenger on the notorious private jet owned by Jeffrey Epstein—who would later be charged with sex trafficking—far more often than they had realized.
Many of the flights on what came to be known as the Lolita Express took place “during the period we would expect to charge in a Maxwell case,” a federal prosecutor in New York told colleagues. Epstein’s co-conspirator Ghislaine Maxwell was subsequently convicted and is now serving a 20-year prison sentence for her role in the sex-trafficking operation, including using the plane for “transporting a minor to participate in illegal sex acts.”
There are many other mentions of Trump. The president’s name appears more than 100 times in files released yesterday as part of the DOJ’s compliance with legislation requiring it to disclose everything it has on the Epstein case. Trump fought Congress’s demand for transparency for months before abruptly pivoting and endorsing the bill once he realized he had lost. Although many references to Trump are clearly from news reports or from seemingly unverified tips to the FBI, one conclusion from the files is that Trump’s relationship with Epstein, a former friend, was of interest to federal law enforcement for years.
A White House official told me that Trump was never contacted by law enforcement regarding his interactions with Epstein during the time period for which Epstein and Maxwell were charged. The president has denied wrongdoing, though his characterizations of his relationship with Epstein—including about his presence on the plane—have shifted over time. Abigail Jackson, a White House spokesperson, declined to answer questions about the discrepancy between the president’s prior statements and the material released by the DOJ but said in a statement, “The truth remains: Donald Trump did nothing wrong.”
Read: The Epstein files only get worse
Trump has also insisted that he knew nothing of Epstein’s criminal activity—though his critics have questioned how that could be true given their close relationship and history of chasing women together. Members of Congress from both parties have said they will continue to probe the issue in the upcoming year. Representatives I spoke with told me their takeaway from reading the files is that top officials in the Trump administration have not been honest about what was in them, and that they intend to press Attorney General Pam Bondi and FBI Director Kash Patel for more information.
“Although the files are overly redacted, they’ve already demonstrated that the narrative painted by Patel in hearings, Bondi in press statements, and Trump himself on social media wasn’t accurate,” Thomas Massie, the Kentucky Republican who co-authored the Epstein legislation, to
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The Real Reason Trump Runs America Like a TV Show
By Catherine Bouris | Dec. 26 2025
“It’s really more helpful to think of him in terms of being an actor than in terms of being a politician,” author Michael Wolff explained to the Daily Beast’s Joanna Coles. “In his courtship of the audience, in his own egomania, in his desire for attention.”
Referring to the first interview he conducted with Trump in 2016 for what would eventually become the book Fire & Fury, Wolff recalled asking the then-presidential candidate why he was running for office.
“He said, without missing a beat, and as though this was a perfectly normal goal, ‘To become the most famous man in the world,’” Wolff said.
Roger Ailes, the Fox News founder who was a close friend of Trump, once described Trump as “that kid whose parents never pulled him away from the television.”
“So he grew up just glued to the television at all times, not doing anything else, not paying attention to his schoolwork, not doing his homework, not really having friends, just glued to the television.”
Citing the New York trial where Trump was convicted on 34 felony counts, Wolff explained that the president’s entire frame of reference for how he wanted his legal team to defend him was television.
“He wants Perry Mason. He wants the guy who goes in and wins every case. He wants Roy Cohn, who he elevated to the guy who has won every case. He sees this just in terms of performance,” Wolff said.
“He wanted television lawyers. It was his entire reference. Everything is about television.”
Wolff also said that Trump almost always has the television on, adding, “There are very few moments in the car or when he’s doing a rally and a public appearance, but those are pretty much the only times that the television is not on.”
Above everything else, Trump responds to ratings. Wolff notes in one of his four books about the president that he is obsessed with the Nielsen ratings.
“His measure is always a popular audience measure. He’s kind of like a comedian working. He just throws out stuff, throws it out, throws it out,“ Wolff said, “and you can see him measuring the response. And when he really gets the response he likes, he just repeats it and repeats it and repeats it.”
“To judge him as a politician… you’re not going to get it. You’re not going to understand what’s going on here.”
https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-real-reason-trump-runs-america-like-
a-tv-show-wolff/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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I love at the end of 2025 all Democrats have left in their empty quiver is the Epstein files that they hid from the public for 4 years and wanted hidden so badly they murdered Epstein to cover it up.
Good luck. You'll need it.
--------------------------------------------------
Be Nice. Don't be a dick.
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Quote:So, Democrats write a story about Trump's mental illness expressed by his excessive TV viewing and 6ixStringJoker, the biggest fucking idiot Trumptard on his block, doesn't understand that Trump is crazy. It figures that the overarticulate Trumptards, such as Trump and 6ix, have no clue what they did wrong in life since adolescence or why they are in trouble now. Is Trump still your only hope, 6ix, you shithead?
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
I love at the end of 2025 all Democrats have left in their empty quiver is the Epstein files that they hid from the public for 4 years and wanted hidden so badly they murdered Epstein to cover it up.
Good luck. You'll need it.
--------------------------------------------------
Be Nice. Don't be a dick.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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US Trade Dominance Will Soon Begin to Crack
Savvy countries will discover there’s a way to mitigate the harm incurred by Trump’s tariffs—and it’ll boost their own economies while making goods cheaper too.
By Cory Doctorow | Dec 26, 2025 6:30 AM
https://www.wired.com/story/us-trade-dominance-will-begin-to-crack/
In 2026, the leaders of America’s (former) trading partners are going to have to grapple with the political consequences of tit-for-tat tariffs. A tariff is a tax paid by consumers, and if there’s one thing the past four years have taught us, it’s that the public will not forgive a politician who presides over a period of rising prices, no matter what the cause.
Luckily for the political fortunes of the world’s leaders, there is a better way to respond to tariffs. Tit-for-tat tariffs are a 19th-century tactic, and we live in a 21st-century world—a world where the most profitable lines of business of the most profitable US companies are all vulnerable to a simple legal change that will make things cheaper for billions of people, all over the world, including in the US, at the expense of the companies whose CEOs posed with Trump on the inaugural dais.
In 2026, countries that want to win the trade war have a unique historical possibility: They could repeal their “anticircumvention” laws, which make it illegal—a felony, in many cases—to modify devices and services without permission from their manufacturers. Over the past two decades, the office of the US Trade Representative–which is responsible for developing and coordinating US international trade, commodity, and direct investment policy—has pressured most of the world into adopting these laws, hamstringing foreign startups that might compete with Apple (by providing a jailbreaking kit that installs a third-party app store), or Google (by blocking tracking on Android devices), or Amazon (by converting Kindle and Audible files to formats that work on rival apps), or John Deere (by disabling the systems that block third-party repairs), or the Big Three automakers (by decoding the encrypted error messages mechanics need to service our cars). The rents that these digital locks help American companies extract run to hundreds of billions of dollars every single year. The world’s governments agreed to protect this racket in exchange for tariff-free access to American markets. Now that the US has reneged on its side of the bargain, these laws serve no useful purpose.
US tech giants (and giant US companies that use tech) have used digital locks to amass a vast hoard of ill-gotten wealth. In 2026, the first country bold enough to raid that hoard gets to transform hundreds of billions in US rents into hundreds of millions in domestic profits that launch its domestic tech sector into a stable orbit—and the remaining hundreds of billions will be reaped by all of us, everyone in the world (including Americans who buy gray-market jailbreaking tools from abroad), as a consumer surplus.
In 2026, many countries will respond to tariffs like they were still in the 19th century. But a few countries will have the vision, the boldness, and the political smarts to kick Donald Trump right in the dongle. The country that gets there first will enjoy the same relationship to, say, third-party app stores for games consoles, that Finland enjoyed in relation to mobile phones during the Nokia decade.
There are many countries with the technical nous to pull this off. Obviously, Canada and Mexico have pride of place, since Trump has torn up the USMCA agreement he arm-twisted them into in 2020, and heaped racist rhetoric on Mexico even as he threatened to annex Canada. Speaking of annexation targets with sizable communities of technical experts, the Danes could lead the EU out of the wilderness the bloc bargained its way into when they enacted Article 6 of the Copyright Directive in 2001. Then there's the global south: African tech powerhouses like Nigeria, South American giants like Bra
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The Santa Presidency
Trump is trying to fix the economy by handing out cash.
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/2025/12/trump-cash-tariffs-divide
nds-economy/685336/
President Donald Trump can hardly conceal his disgust for the word affordability, referring to its ascendance in America’s political lexicon as a “hoax,” a “con job,” and a “fake narrative” perpetuated by Democrats. But there’s one sign that he’s treating it like a very real political vulnerability: The former reality-television host is trying to give people cash.
In recent weeks, Trump has been pitching half a dozen schemes to, in the words of White House officials, put money “straight into the pockets of the American people.” After a year in which Americans’ pocketbooks have been walloped by Trump’s tariffs, cuts to the social safety net, and apparent nonchalance in the face of spiking health-care costs, the president is turning to the allure of sweepstakes-style checks from the government to help coax voters out of their financial malaise ahead of next year’s midterm elections. It likely won’t work, economists from across the political spectrum told me; one likened the payments to a bandage over a bullet wound.
Trump has floated a payment of $2,000 to most Americans in the form of a so-called tariff dividend, to be paid out from fees levied on foreign goods. He has offered $12 billion in relief to farmers reeling from the trade war he started. He has suggested paying subsidies “directly to the people” to pay for health insurance. And as my colleagues Ashley Parker and Nancy Youssef reported, Trump used a prime-time national address on December 17 to announce onetime bonus checks for troops in the amount of $1,776. “The checks are already on the way,” Trump said of the payments to 1.4 million service members. (The Pentagon says the money, which is being taken from a fund to improve housing for troops, landed in bank accounts before Christmas.)
Although the proposals each have different designs and purposes, taken together, they represent a concerted effort to neutralize the cost-of-living concerns dominating voters’ minds. Those worries are likely to only increase as Americans contend with rising health-care costs and growing signs of unease in the labor market, Mark Zandi, the chief economist at Moody’s Analytics, told me. Trump’s proposed payments are ill-suited to deal with those macroeconomic trend lines, he said. “It’s not a solution to anybody’s problem,” he said. “It doesn’t address inflation; it doesn’t address the weak labor market. It doesn’t address the fact that many Americans don’t have any assets and owe a lot on their credit cards.”
As the president’s first year in office comes to a close, the economy is showing signs of significant strain. A delayed jobs report earlier this month showed that the country’s unemployment rate ticked up to 4.6 percent in November, the highest since 2021. Young people and Black Americans are facing especially high rates of unemployment, which some economists see as a warning sign for the broader economy. Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell warned recently of “a labor market that seems to have significant downside risks.” Consumer sentiment has neared record lows in recent months, a somberness that Trump appeared determined to counteract during his rambling speech on December 17, in which he blamed high prices and low wages on former President Joe Biden and shouted a series of misleading statistics about how the economy is great.
Michael Strain, the director of economic-policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, told me that the president’s attempts to convince Americans that their financial circumstances are better than they think sound “eerily similar” to the strategy that Biden embraced amid widespread concerns over the cost of living. Trump’s desire to entice voters with onetime payments is unlikely to improve his standing, Strain said. “People don’t like higher prices, and they don’t like higher prices even if their incomes are going up faster than prices,” he said. “And my
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Why does Trump want war with Venezuela?
Americans deserve to know if move is gambit for something else
Opinion by The Houston Chronicle Editorial Board
Dec 29, 2025
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/opinion/you-deserve-to-know-why-trump-w
ants-war-with-venezuela-editorial/ar-AA1Tdh5b
https://eedition.houstonchronicle.com/infinity/article_popover_share.a
spx?guid=542d4792-ce7e-42e2-88e7-11aa17b2a829&share=true
What does “America First” mean? It’s a question that President Donald Trump may have to finally answer in his escalating campaign against Venezuela. The stakes for Americans couldn’t be higher.
Across Trump’s runs for the presidency, he appealed directly to Americans who were tired of high-minded talk of defending the “international order,” nation building, regime change and spreading American values abroad. He tapped into popular discontent about the long, difficult wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
He vowed to put America first. But that simple phrase could mean very different things to his supporters.
One group imagined that Trump, who called his 2024 campaign the “peace ticket,” would pull back from conflicts elsewhere — in Eastern Europe, the Middle East and the South China Sea — and focus on problems at home. This group included Trump’s Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, who has long warned against what George Washington, in his farewell address, described as the dangers of “foreign entanglements.”
Another group wanted roughly the opposite. They wanted America to use its power more aggressively — without all the talk of our values and principles. This group includes Stephen Miller, the president’s most important advisor, who recently wrote on X that “for years the United States operated as a ‘reverse empire,’” whose military too often “enrich[ed] foreign nations” instead of our own. “All we got in return were migrants,” he claimed.
Never mind the global order we shaped in our own image, placing the United States firmly at the center. The values of liberty and freedom that we helped spread and support. The vast wealth created and accumulated through America’s global dominance.
“No more,” Miller vowed.
Here in Houston, we know that neither camp has it right. From its founding, our city has been bound up in international conflicts. Our political leaders, like President George H.W. Bush and Secretary James Baker, never shied away from our nation’s global aspirations and commitments. Our varied immigrant communities reflect the United States’ long history of foreign intervention. During the Cold War and in the decades since, hundreds of thousands of people fled the resulting violence and repression, often settling in Houston. They ultimately made us stronger and more vibrant.
Yet Miller takes the wrong lesson from this chapter in our history. The Washington Post reports that the deputy White House chief of staff even hopes to use conflict with Caracas as an excuse to invoke the Alien Enemies Act and deport hundreds of thousands of Venezuelan immigrants.
Whatever the motivation, one of the biggest military buildups in the western hemisphere since the Cuban Missile Crisis is taking place in the waters around Venezuela. Last week, the U.S. military instituted what Trump is calling a “blockade” of the country’s sanctioned oil tankers. The Port of Galveston may become home to oil tankers seized off the coast of Venezuela. In international law, this is widely understood as an act of war. The administration has repeatedly hinted that something more serious is coming.
The Venezuelan government under Nicolás Maduro is deplorable in many ways. But the American people deserve to hear directly from the president why it is in our interest to meddle so aggressively — and what the goal is. Is there some actual just cause driving the sabre rattling, or is Miller simply so eager for mass deportation that he convinced the rest of the White House to put service members’ lives on the line as part of some grand leg
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:So, Democrats write a story about Trump's mental illness expressed by his excessive TV viewing and 6ixStringJoker, the biggest fucking idiot Trumptard on his block, doesn't understand that Trump is crazy. It figures that the overarticulate Trumptards, such as Trump and 6ix, have no clue what they did wrong in life since adolescence or why they are in trouble now. Is Trump still your only hope, 6ix, you shithead?
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
I love at the end of 2025 all Democrats have left in their empty quiver is the Epstein files that they hid from the public for 4 years and wanted hidden so badly they murdered Epstein to cover it up.
Good luck. You'll need it.
--------------------------------------------------
Be Nice. Don't be a dick.
Trump isn't crazy.
You're crazy for continuing to underestimate him after he destroyed your entire party, globalism, the entire Liberal Agenda in the media, illegal immigration and everything else your stupid ass cheerleads everyday.
You're fuckin' done dude.
Nobody will ever listen to you or anybody you read, ever again.
The world you thought you were living in 14 months ago is dead and will never come back.
Pat your stupid ass on the back, retard.
You did that.
--------------------------------------------------
Be Nice. Don't be a dick.
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Quote:Incandescent Anger
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Trump isn't crazy.
You're crazy for continuing to underestimate him after he destroyed your entire party, globalism, the entire Liberal Agenda in the media, illegal immigration and everything else your stupid ass cheerleads everyday.
You're fuckin' done dude.
Nobody will ever listen to you or anybody you read, ever again.
The world you thought you were living in 14 months ago is dead and will never come back.
Pat your stupid ass on the back, retard.
You did that.
Politics today is driven by grievances that can never be assuaged. What explains the perpetual need for political enemies?
23 December 2025 | By Paul Katsafanas, professor of philosophy at Boston University
https://aeon.co/essays/what-explains-the-perpetual-need-for-political-
enemies
Imagine someone who grows up in a declining rural town. She dreams of escape, fantasising about the vibrant lives she sees portrayed in cities, lives full of culture, opportunity, wealth and success. As the years go on, the dream seems unattainable. Jobs are scarce, advancement elusive, and nothing in her life resembles what she once imagined. Frustrated and unhappy, she feels like a failure in life. But then she encounters grievance-filled populist rhetoric. The people she once admired and envied – the people she now identifies as the urban elite – are cast as the cause of her suffering. They are selfish, out of touch, morally corrupt, and hostile to her way of life. What once seemed like an image of the good life now appears as injustice. And, rather than focusing on specific policy proposals for correcting structural economic injustices, she becomes energised by condemnation and hostility.
Or picture another person, a lonely man who watches others form friendships, build relationships, and move easily through social spaces, while he remains on the margins. He feels isolated, sad, alone. One day he stumbles into a corner of the internet that offers an explanation: the problem isn’t him, it’s the world. Reading incel websites, he comes to believe that feminism, social norms and cultural hypocrisy have made genuine connection impossible for someone like him. In time, he internalises this story. His disappointment becomes a source of pride, a mark of insight. His sadness transforms into anger. He has enemies to rail against and grievances to voice.
These cases differ in an interesting way: the economic case involves a real form of structural injustice, whereas the incel case involves an ideology that invents a grievance. But notice that beyond this difference, there’s a similar emotional arc. A person starts out with a positive vision of the good. But their life is full of hardship, disappointment and despair. Initially, they might blame themselves. And that’s painful. It’s hard to sit in one’s own pain, feeling responsible for it, feeling like a failure. It’s especially hard when you see other people enjoying the life that you wish you had.
In time, these people encounter a narrative that redirects the blame. Their unhappiness isn’t their own fault, it’s the fault of someone else. They are being treated unfairly, unjustly; they are being attacked, oppressed or undermined. This kind of story is seductive. It offers release from feelings of diminished self-worth. It offers a way to deflect pain, assign blame and recast oneself as a victim. It also offers a community of like-minded peers who reinforce this story. What emerges is a kind of negative solidarity: bound together through animosity, they attack or disparage an outgroup. The individual now belongs to a group of people who share outrage and recognise the same enemies. The chaos and turmoil of life is organised into a clear narrative of righteousness: in opposing the enemy, we become good.
The Vietnam War protests and the anti-apartheid movements both involved forms of opposition and grievance, but their antagonism was in the service of positive goals. The movements led by Tucker Carlson, Tr
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:Incandescent Anger
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Trump isn't crazy.
You're crazy for continuing to underestimate him after he destroyed your entire party, globalism, the entire Liberal Agenda in the media, illegal immigration and everything else your stupid ass cheerleads everyday.
You're fuckin' done dude.
Nobody will ever listen to you or anybody you read, ever again.
The world you thought you were living in 14 months ago is dead and will never come back.
Pat your stupid ass on the back, retard.
You did that.
Politics today is driven by grievances that can never be assuaged. What explains the perpetual need for political enemies?
You tell me, faggot.
You're the one always looking for a fight.
--------------------------------------------------
Be Nice. Don't be a dick.
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Quote:If you read the article, you would know why Trumptards are always angry at Democrats, falsely accusing them of causing the Trumptards' personal problems. Since the article was written by a philosopher, he quotes various other philosophers for the motivation behind the Trumptards' highly irrational behavior and even gives a solution in philosophical terms that the Trumptards would neither read nor understand. Since I am not a professional philosopher, my solution is from my recent experience as an engineer on construction jobs in Texas, where Trumptards are the majority. My solution is based on what Americans did to the Nazis during WWII. My harsh solution has worked even when the Trumptards, like the Nazis, don't want it to work. In contrast, the philosopher's gentle solution will only work if Trumptards stopped being Nazis and, instead, studied philosophy.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:Incandescent Anger
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Trump isn't crazy.
You're crazy for continuing to underestimate him after he destroyed your entire party, globalism, the entire Liberal Agenda in the media, illegal immigration and everything else your stupid ass cheerleads everyday.
You're fuckin' done dude.
Nobody will ever listen to you or anybody you read, ever again.
The world you thought you were living in 14 months ago is dead and will never come back.
Pat your stupid ass on the back, retard.
You did that.
Politics today is driven by grievances that can never be assuaged. What explains the perpetual need for political enemies?
You tell me, faggot.
You're the one always looking for a fight.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Quote:Jim Rossignol @jimrossignol
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
You tell me, faggot.
You're the one always looking for a fight.
I'm always fascinated by the line "we don't want to become minorities in our own country". Why not? Are they treated badly or something?
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Wow. So witty.
--------------------------------------------------
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Quote:I have been around Trumptards all my life and know for a fact they are fucked up bastards, very much like the antibellium slave-owners and those who wanted to own slaves but lacked the money. Those Americans were infamous for not working hard but forcing others to do the hard work for little or no money. That accurately describes both Trump and 6ix, with Trump being psychologically equivalent to a rich slave-owner and 6ix equivalent to a poor, wannabe slave-owner who is bitter about his circumstances and drinks to forget.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Wow. So witty.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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The Heritage Foundation Shows How MAGA Will Die
Even corrupt institutions can reach a tipping point
By Paul Krugman | Dec 30, 2025
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/the-heritage-foundation-shows-how
Will they change it to “The Trump Heritage Foundation”?
I have never, to put it mildly, been a fan of the Heritage Foundation. Ever since I started paying attention to Heritage’s work — which I started doing when I began writing for The New York Times, 26 years ago — the foundation has been a propaganda shop pretending to be a think tank, a producer of dishonest “research” purporting to justify a right-wing agenda of deregulation, dismantling the social safety net, and tax cuts for the rich. I wrote at length about Heritage’s deplorable record back in November.
Still, Heritage could have been worse. And sure enough, it has gotten worse in recent months, with Kevin Roberts, the foundation’s president — and the architect of Project 2025 — making it clear that he’s fine with white nationalist antisemites like Nick Fuentes.
And a funny thing has happened. It turns out that even at a fundamentally corrupt institution like Heritage there are lines you can’t cross. Suddenly, Heritage is experiencing a mass exodus of staff. In the latest wave of departures, more than a dozen staffers left to join an organization led by former Vice President Mike Pence. Heritage is, essentially, losing everyone who is even marginally competent or has any kind of reputation to protect.
My guess is that there have long been many people at Heritage who were privately disgusted at what the organization had become. I never said they were stupid. But they lacked the courage to leave until they saw their colleagues jumping ship. Then there was a mass rush for the exit.
Roberts may imagine that he and Heritage can ride out this storm, but I don’t believe they can.
Heritage has never been a source of credible research, but its role in the conservative movement has been to provide an intellectual gloss by producing what looked to the gullible — i.e., many people in the news media — like credible research. For example, back in 2002 David Broder, widely described as “the dean of the Washington press corps,” praised Heritage for its “intellectual honesty.” That was foolish even then, but I don’t think anyone would say that now.
But now that its illusion of credibility is gone, what is Heritage good for? It’s not as if MAGA wants to see any genuine policy research, or as if a hollowed-out Heritage would be capable of doing such research even if it tried.
Pence may imagine that his nonprofit, Advancing American Freedom, can take over the role that Heritage used to fill. If so, I believe that he’s wrong, at least as long as MAGA rules the American right. Donald Trump has no use for expertise, or even the illusion of expertise, and whoever comes next is unlikely to feel differently.
But MAGA’s rule may not last forever. Indeed, while I may be making too much of the demise of one organization, I see Heritage’s fall as a preview of how MAGA as a political movement will eventually implode.
For white Christian nationalism — which is now clearly MAGA’s essence — remains very much a minority position. Here are PRRI’s estimates for 2023:
Extremists have been able to gain so much power only thanks to support from ordinary conservatives. In the past it was largely about greed: people who wanted right-wing economic policies promoted Christian nationalists because they thought they could use them. Indeed, the creation of the Heritage Foundation and the creation of the Federalist Society — which stuffed the courts with ultra-religious judges, because secular conservatives had in the past turned moderate once on the bench — were part of the same power grab.
Today greed, while still part of the story, has increasingl
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:I have been around Trumptards all my life and know for a fact they are fucked up bastards
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Wow. So witty.
Yeah. We know you have dude.
How many of them fucked your wife?
--------------------------------------------------
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Quote:“I don't care what the Epstein Files say... I'd rather have a pedophile rapist grifting the country than admit I was ever wrong.”
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Yeah. We know you have dude.
How many of them fucked your wife?
--------------------------------------------------
Be Evil. Be a dick.
https://imgur.com/gallery/its-age-of-cognitive-dissonance-rJWMUQD
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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How Trump shrank the federal government and made it more inefficient
December 30, 2025
https://attentiontotheunseen.com/2025/12/30/how-trump-shrank-the-feder
al-government-and-made-it-more-inefficient/
The New York Times reports:
Even after Elon Musk’s bureaucracy-shrinking initiative upended agencies across the government, an analysis by The New York Times found it misstated its claims of large savings and failed to reduce federal spending.
And many current and former officials and people who routinely interact with the federal government say that it is far less efficient and less dependable in the services it provides to the American public.
Take the Agriculture Department, which lost 20,000 workers, nearly one-fifth of its staff.
Many farmers have found they cannot get critical information about the grants and conservation projects they had incorporated into their business plans, said Wes Gillingham, a farmer in upstate New York and the president of the Northeast Organic Farming Association. Just getting routine support from the agency is difficult because often there is no one in the regional office to answer the phone, he added.
“We’re just going to see a huge amount of farms going out of business this year because of the mayhem,” he said.
Among the other changes: The government’s most comprehensive system for tracking food-borne illnesses has been scaled back. It has canceled programs to deter young people from using tobacco, the leading cause of cancer. It curtailed research into cancer, as well as Alzheimer’s disease and workplace safety.
As of September, the government no longer issues reports about nationwide food insecurity, even as the problem is currently on the rise. The federal housing agency is doing less work enforcing fair housing laws. And in one of the biggest moves, the Trump administration dismantled the U.S. Agency for International Development, cutting off foreign aid around the globe.
“It’s a disaster,” said Max Stier, the chief executive of the Partnership for Public Service, a nonprofit group that promotes an effective federal work force. “It’s the single largest loss of capacity to keep us safe and to promote the public good that we’ve had in our history, by far and away, and it is for no purpose.”
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:“I don't care what the Epstein Files say... I'd rather have a pedophile rapist grifting the country than admit I was ever wrong.”
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Yeah. We know you have dude.
How many of them fucked your wife?
--------------------------------------------------
Be Evil. Be a dick.
No.
I want to know how many Trump voters fucked your wife.
--------------------------------------------------
Be Nice. Don't be a dick.
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Quote:The National Links Trust, the nonprofit that has operated Washington’s three public courses on federal land for the last five years, said Wednesday that the Department of the Interior had terminated its 50-year lease agreement.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
No.
I want to know how many Trump voters fucked your wife.
--------------------------------------------------
Be Evil. Be a dick.
The move gives Trump, whose private company has developed numerous golf courses in the U.S. and abroad, the right to remake links overlooking the Potomac River and in Rock Creek Park.
Officials for the National Links Trust said $8.5 million had gone toward capital improvements at the courses and that rounds played and revenue had more than doubled in their tenure managing the courses.
The Department of the Interior’s decision comes as Trump rebrands civic spaces in Washington with his name.
https://apnews.com/article/trump-golf-courses-washington-dc-53ba4e673b
b78bdea1fa101e4030b0bd
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Quote:Project 2025’s biggest victory has been an extraordinary presidential power grab, which has allowed Trump to act in ways that previous presidents have only fantasized about, and to act with fewer restraints. He has laid off tens of thousands of federal employees, sometimes in defiance of laws. More than 315,000 federal employees had left the government by mid-November, according to the Office of Personnel Management. Entire agencies, such as USAID, have been effectively shut down, and the Education Department may be next.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Yeah. We know you have dude.
How many of them fucked your wife?
--------------------------------------------------
Be Evil. Be a dick.
Elsewhere, the administration has slashed environmental regulations, withdrawn from a major international climate agreement, undermined renewable energy, and worked to encourage oil and gas drilling on public land. It has discarded key civil-rights-enforcement methods, dismantled anything that might be construed as DEI, and set the agenda for aggressive immigration policies, not just closing the border to many foreign nationals and deporting unauthorized immigrants but also cracking down on valid-visa holders and seeking to denaturalize citizens.
This is not small-government conservatism—it’s an effort to concentrate federal power and turn it into a political weapon. . . .
For decades, American conservatives have argued for restraints on government, in part out of fear of how progressives have used power to enact their policies. Project 2025 threw that out, embracing right-wing big government. Its unpopular ideas are one reason that Republicans are facing a daunting election environment in 2026 and perhaps 2028. If Project 2025’s authors felt, as Russell Vought once said, that America was “in the late stages of a complete Marxist takeover” before Trump returned to office, they may find the situation even more apocalyptic if a Democrat wins the presidency in 2028—and inherits the sweeping powers they have handed to the White House.
https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/2025/12/project-2025-year-revi
ew-trump/685395/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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An immediate death sentence without trial for speedboaters
The U.S. military said Wednesday it struck five alleged drug-smuggling boats over two days, killing a total of eight people while others jumped overboard and may have survived. Southern Command said it immediately notified the U.S. Coast Guard to activate search and rescue efforts. Southern Command's statement did not say whether those who jumped off the boats were rescued.
Calling in the Coast Guard is notable because the U.S. military drew heavy scrutiny after U.S. forces killed the survivors of an attack in early September with a follow-up strike to their disabled boat. Some Republican lawmakers say the follow-up strike was legal.
The latest attacks bring the total number of known boat strikes to 35 and the number of people killed to at least 115.
https://www.npr.org/2025/12/31/g-s1-104194/us-military-strikes-drug-bo
ats-survivors
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Criminals use Trump's tariffs to hide their $1.6 trillion in money laundering. Clever criminal accountants are outwitting not-so-clever tariff collectors working for Trump.
Total fines levied against companies for what the FT calls “dirty money” offenses came to a little less than $1.7 billion as of Dec. 19, the report said, citing data from compliance software provider Fenergo. Last year, that figure was $4.3 billion.
In his second term, the report added, President Donald Trump has directed financial regulators to adopt a more business-friendly stance. Since then, these watchdogs have pulled back from several investigations, including those involving cryptocurrency companies.
This decline in fines for violations of sanctions, terror finance and anti-money laundering (AML) rules came in tandem with an increase in such penalties elsewhere in the world, the FT said.
Jerry Haar writes:
U.S. trade policy is now synonymous with tariff policy. President Trump’s latest round of higher taxes on imports went into effect on Aug. 7, and the 40 countries with which the U.S. runs a trade deficit now face a 15 percent rate. Some will be hit with even steeper rates — Brazil, for one, faces a 50 percent total tariff.
While trade and tariffs have been a dominant economic policy issue since Trump took office in January, one related domain has been completely overlooked: the connection between high tariffs and trade-based money laundering, which disguises the proceeds of crime through the use of trade transactions in an attempt to legitimize their illicit origins.
Some sources estimate that trade-based money laundering could account for as much as $1.6 trillion of the total amount laundered globally each year. In a study cited by the Financial Action Task Force, trade mis-invoicing accounted for roughly 80 percent of illicit financial flows in developing countries.
The relationship between tariffs and money laundering represents one of the most complex challenges facing global trade and financial systems today. As tariff rates increase, so too does the incentive for both legitimate businesses and criminal organizations to engage in customs fraud and trade-based money laundering. This symbiotic relationship creates a dual threat: higher tariffs directly incentivize evasion schemes, while these same schemes provide convenient vehicles for laundering illicit proceeds from other criminal activities.
Simply stated, the fundamental relationship between tariffs and financial crime is straightforward: High tariffs create greater incentives to cheat.
https://attentiontotheunseen.com/2025/12/31/as-trump-raised-tariffs-fi
nes-for-money-laundering-fell-by-61/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Trump Isn’t Building a Ballroom
The Drey Dossier
Dec 15, 2025
https://thedreydossier.substack.com/p/trump-isnt-building-a-ballroom
The Contractor
The lead contractor is Clark Construction. I went to their website to see what they normally build, and their “Critical Facilities” portfolio immediately caught my attention: the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency Campus, CISA Cybersecurity Headquarters, USCENTCOM Headquarters at MacDill Air Force Base. These aren’t ordinary buildings. These are top-secret intelligence campuses and military command centers.
But what’s listed publicly is only part of the story. I started digging through government contract databases, and that’s when I found them. Six separate contracts for data centers where even the client names are redacted. Just listed as “Confidential Client Data Center 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6.” The facilities themselves are so classified that acknowledging who they’re built for would compromise national security.
So building classified data centers for clients they legally cannot name is actually Clark Construction’s specialty. And they have the contractual mechanisms to hide what they’re building - they hold a NAVFAC contract with a $950 million ceiling where the total value is public but individual task orders can be classified. Which means you can effectively hide the true cost and scope of specific projects by funneling them through pre-existing military construction contracts.
The Firing
Then on December 4th, something happened that made the picture even clearer. Trump fired his original architect. James McCrery, who designs beautiful churches and the Supreme Court gift shop (say what you want about the guy, but he’s got range), was replaced with someone named Shalom Baranes. When I looked into who Baranes is, I understood immediately what had changed.
After September 11th, when the Pentagon needed to be rebuilt and hardened against future attacks, they hired Shalom Baranes. This man designed the Pentagon’s post-9/11 hardening project - the secure wedges, the SCIFs, the bomb-resistant architecture. His entire portfolio is federal facilities requiring classified spaces and hardened infrastructure. And Trump hired him after demolition had already started, after the East Wing was already gone. The aesthetics had stopped mattering. You don’t replace your church architect with the Pentagon’s bunker guy because you want prettier chandeliers.
At this point I wanted to see what was actually happening on the ground. If this were really a data center, there would be physical evidence. And data centers need one thing above all else: massive amounts of power.
DC’s Power-grid
So I started looking at what’s been happening with DC’s power infrastructure, and that’s where the timeline becomes impossible to ignore. In August and September 2025, just weeks after Trump announced the ballroom in July, Pepco filed emergency requests for major infrastructure work near the East Wing. They’re not making incremental improvements. They’re replacing 45-year-old power feeders and increasing power capacity in this area by five times. Five hundred percent.
Here’s what makes that absurd: downtown DC office occupancy has been declining since COVID. Buildings sit half-empty. Commercial real estate demand has shrunk. Power demand in this area should be flat or declining. But Trump announces a ballroom in July, and by August, emergency filings go in to increase power capacity by 500 percent. Downtown DC is half-empty, but apparently we need five times the power for a dance floor.
During this same period, DC Water increased capital spending by $300 million with specific focus on the Federal Triangle area. The Washington Aqueduct - run by the Army Corps of Engineers - issued warnings that “data centers are planning to use Potomac River water for cooling.” They’re explicitly acknowledging that data center development is driving new infrastructure demands. The GSA Central Heating and Cooling Plant completed upgrades including industrial-scale cooling towers and magnetic
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Orsted files legal challenge to Trump’s wind-farm suspension
Jan 2, 2026
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/orsted-files-legal-challenge-to-t
rump-s-wind-farm-suspension/ar-AA1Tr9zK
(Bloomberg) -- Orsted A/S filed a legal complaint after the Trump administration suspended the lease of a wind project that’s near completion off Rhode Island.
The US government’s order “violates applicable law,” the Danish developer and joint-venture partner Skyborn Renewables said in a statement. The firms will call for the suspension to be lifted until the court hands down a final verdict.
It’s the second time the Revolution Wind project has been targeted by the administration. After the government issued a stop-work order in the summer, a judge ruled construction could resume while a legal challenge was underway. President Donald Trump has fought aggressively to thwart the growth of the industry as he rolls back Biden-era climate policies and champions fossil fuels.
Orsted rose as much as 3.7% at the open on Friday. The shares slumped more than 30% last year, dragged lower by Trump’s repeated attacks on the sector and by management’s decision to hold a massive share sale, which was effectively a handout by the Danish government.
Revolution Wind “faces substantial harm from a continuation of the lease suspension order,” the company said in the statement. The project is 87% complete and expected to be ready to deliver power to American homes this year.
The US in December suspended leases for five wind farms under construction off the East Coast, citing concerns over national security as the huge turbines may interfere with radar systems. Aside from Revolution Wind, Orsted’s Sunrise Wind project off the coast of New York was also affected.
The company “continues to evaluate all options” in relation to that project, including possible legal proceedings, it said in the statement. Other major developers, including Equinor ASA, are engaging with US authorities over security concerns tied to offshore wind.
________________
Recent Legal Developments (Late 2025 – 2026)
• Court Battles: Multiple federal judges have struck down Trump’s executive orders to freeze wind permitting, calling the actions "arbitrary and capricious".
• Project Pauses: Despite legal setbacks, the administration has used "stop work" orders for projects like Revolution Wind and Empire Wind, citing the need for further environmental and security reviews.
As of January 2, 2026, President Trump’s efforts to thwart wind power—particularly offshore wind—are driven by a combination of aesthetic personal grievances, ideological commitment to fossil fuels, and recently, specific claims regarding national security
His opposition stems from several key motivations:
1. Aesthetic and Personal Grievances
Trump's hostility toward wind power began over a decade ago when he unsuccessfully fought to block an offshore wind farm visible from his golf course in Scotland. He frequently describes turbines as:
• Ugly and "Disgusting": He often claims they ruin scenic views and property values.
• "Cemeteries" for Birds: He argues they "kill all your birds," specifically citing bald eagles, though many research studies show these claims are often exaggerated or unsupported by site-specific data.
2. National Security Claims
In late 2025, the administration cited national security risks as a primary legal justification for halting major wind projects.
• Radar Interference: The Department of the Interior paused five major offshore projects, claiming turbine blades create "clutter" that obscures and confuses military radar signals.
• Classified Reports: The administration has pointed to classified Pentagon reports as the basis for these halts, although critics and some judges have questioned the validity of these claims as a pretext for a broader ideological ban.
3. Energy Policy and Economic Ideology
Trump views wind energy as an inefficient competitor to traditional energy
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Comedy Writer Bought ‘Trump Kennedy Center’ Domain Names, Anticipating President Would Rename Institution After Himself: ‘Satire Became Unavoidable’
https://variety.com/2025/tv/news/south-park-writer-buys-trump-kennedy-
center-domain-names-1236617630/
“As soon as Trump began gutting the Kennedy Center board earlier this year, I thought, ‘Yep, that name’s going on the building,’” Morton recently told the Washington Post. “The Kennedy Center has always been a cultural institution meant to outlast any one administration or personality. It’s meant to honor culture, not ego. Once it was treated like personal branding, satire became unavoidable.”
Morton hasn’t launched websites on trumpkennedycenter.org or trumpkennedycenter.com at this point. But he pledged that when he does, they will “absolutely reflect the absurdity of the moment. Lots of surprises. Some things are truly hard to parody, though.”
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Comedy Writer Bought ‘Trump Kennedy Center’ Domain Names, Anticipating President Would Rename Institution After Himself: ‘Satire Became Unavoidable’
https://variety.com/2025/tv/news/south-park-writer-buys-trump-kennedy-
center-domain-names-1236617630/
“As soon as Trump began gutting the Kennedy Center board earlier this year, I thought, ‘Yep, that name’s going on the building,’” Morton recently told the Washington Post. “The Kennedy Center has always been a cultural institution meant to outlast any one administration or personality. It’s meant to honor culture, not ego. Once it was treated like personal branding, satire became unavoidable.”
Morton hasn’t launched websites on trumpkennedycenter.org or trumpkennedycenter.com at this point. But he pledged that when he does, they will “absolutely reflect the absurdity of the moment. Lots of surprises. Some things are truly hard to parody, though.”
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
Well now it's not funny.
And it probably won't even happen.
You're an idiot, dude.
--------------------------------------------------
Be Nice. Don't be a dick.
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Quote:What's funny is that Trump's Gestapo can arrest Trumptards, based on skin color, once Trump is gone:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Well now it's not funny.
And it probably won't even happen.
You're an idiot, dude.
--------------------------------------------------
Be Evil. Be a dick.
ICE is now the largest federal law enforcement agency in the country. And it has the fewest checks on its power.
Armed with sweeping powers, a ballooning budget, and minimal oversight, ICE is rapidly transforming into a force similar to those authoritarian regimes globally have used to spread fear and silence opposition.
https://represent.us/explains/ice-accountability/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:What's funny is that Trump's Gestapo can arrest Trumptards, based on skin color, once Trump is gone:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Well now it's not funny.
And it probably won't even happen.
You're an idiot, dude.
--------------------------------------------------
Be Evil. Be a dick.
Cool. They've been scouring the internet for death threats and maybe they'll find yours and finally toss you out on your ass even though you're white before Trump is gone.
--------------------------------------------------
Be Nice. Don't be a dick.
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Quote:This is exactly what the Founders warned us about
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Cool. They've been scouring the internet for death threats and maybe they'll find yours and finally toss you out on your ass even though you're white before Trump is gone.
--------------------------------------------------
Be Evil. Be a dick.
By Thom Hartmann | January 04, 2026 | 06:44AM ET
https://www.alternet.org/msn-uk/trump-founder/
The American Revolution was not just a revolt against British rule. It was a revolt against three ancient tyrannies that had dominated human society for thousands of years. Warlord kings. The morbidly rich. And theocrats.
The Founders knew exactly what they were fighting. They wrote about it constantly, in the Declaration of Independence and in decades of letters to one another. They believed those three forces were the natural enemies of freedom, and unless they were restrained, they would always claw their way back into power.
Today, every one of those tyrannies is back. And they’re not even pretending otherwise.
The first tyranny was the warlord king. For most of human history, power came from violence. Kings ruled because their ancestors slaughtered their neighbors, seized land, and enforced obedience at sword point. They claimed God had chosen them, demanded loyalty, and crushed dissent.
By 1776, monarchy was so normalized that the idea of overthrowing a king was considered radical, dangerous, and insane. But that was exactly what the American Revolution set out to do.
King George III ruled as all kings did. He taxed, punished, and occupied at will. He treated the colonies as property. Jefferson spelled it out in the Declaration, describing a ruler who had become a tyrant, “unfit to govern a free people.”
The Founders rejected that model completely. No kings. No thrones. No divine rights.
Fast forward to now.
We now have a president who openly admires strongmen and autocrats. He talks about ruling, not governing. He issues decrees like a monarch and demands personal loyalty and a constant stream of gifts and flattery.
He surrounds himself with suck-ups, fellow billionaires, and yes men. He’s reimagined the White House not as the people’s house but as a palace, complete with plans for a massive ballroom modeled after the gilded throne room of the Winter Palace in Saint Petersburg, Russia.
This is not just cosmetic: it’s symbolic, reflecting how kings think.
At the same time, this regime talks casually about seizing territory, controlling other nations’ resources, and using military and economic force to bend countries to our will. Greenland, Panama, and now Venezuela. That isn’t diplomacy: it’s warlord logic dressed up in patriotic slogans.
The second tyranny the Founders feared was the morbidly rich.
In the 18th century, they were called lords, dukes, earls, and princes. They inherited wealth they didn’t earn and used it to control governments. They owned monopolies like the East India Company, whose corruption and brutality helped ignite the American Revolution itself.
Thomas Jefferson and John Adams wrote again and again about how wealth corrupts democracy, never mincing words. Jean-Jacques Rousseau warned that the central duty of a republic was to protect the poor from the tyranny of the rich. Jefferson agreed, writing that the rich prey on the poor like animals “devouring their own kind.” Adams warned that once wealth and power become hereditary, elections would collapse into corruption.
Look around today.
Trump is an oligarch who’s stocked his administration with oligarchs. Billionaires write this administration’s policy. Billionaires get tax cuts. Billionaires dismantle regulations that protect workers, consumers, and the planet. The morbidly rich now sit openly in the halls of power, not behind the curtain but right at the table, shaping an economy designed to funnel wealth upwards and lock it there.
This system Trump is reinventing is not capitalism. It’s aristocracy with better br
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The Real Donroe Doctrine
Seeking cash and an ego boost, not regime change
By Paul Krugman | Jan 05, 2026
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/the-real-donroe-doctrine
For Americans of a certain age, the snatch and grab abduction of Nicolás Maduro, Venezuela’s president, brings back memories of the 2003 invasion of Iraq, in some ways with good reason.
Almost everyone now sees Iraq as a cautionary tale about the lies of the powerful: We were taken to war on false pretenses. Almost everyone also thinks of Iraq as a prime example of the power of delusional thinking on the part of the powerful themselves. Slogans of the time — “We will be welcomed as liberators”; “Mission Accomplished” — are now routinely used ironically, to denote foolish projects doomed to catastrophic failure. And Donald Trump’s Venezuela adventure is another tale of lies and delusion.
But in other ways the Trump/Venezuela story is very different from the Bush/Iraq story.
Two days after the abduction, it’s clear that Trump wasn’t seeking regime change, at least not in any fundamental way. He’s more like a mob boss trying to expand his territory, believing that if he knocks off a rival boss he can bully the guy’s former capos into giving him a cut of their take.
If that sounds harsh, bear in mind that before Trump stepped in, Maduro and his fellow Chavistas — the movement founded by Hugo Chavez — faced strong opposition from domestic pro-democracy forces led by María Corina Machado. Edmundo González, a Machado ally, clearly won Venezuela’s 2024 election, only to have Maduro steal it. So, if Trump wanted regime change he would be supporting Machado and her movement.
But in his triumphal Saturday press conference, Trump sneeringly dismissed Machado, declaring that “it’d be very tough for her to be the leader, she doesn’t have the support. She doesn’t have the respect.”
Instead, he appeared eager to support Maduro’s second-in-command, Delcy Rodriguez, implying that she was ready to cooperate with his designs. Indeed, during the press conference and afterward Trump repeatedly declared that he was already “running” Venezuela.
But it took only a few hours for Rodriguez to make him look like a fool: Later that day she and other leading members of the Maduro government denounced U.S. actions and declared on TV that Maduro is still president of Venezuela.
Oops. By Sunday Trump was threatening to punish Rodriguez for her defiance.
How did Trump make such a big miscalculation? Trump has surrounded himself with sycophants like Pete Hegseth, who has repeatedly described him as “the greatest president of my lifetime.” He lives in a self-aggrandizing fantasy world — a world in which he has a 64 percent approval rating and is a contender for the Nobel Peace Prize.
The Washington Post reports that Trump turned on Machado because she committed the “ultimate sin” of accepting her genuine Nobel prize.
Anyway, the core of Trump’s fantasy involves imagining that he really is the character he played on The Apprentice, a master of the Art of the Deal.
Given Trump’s belief that he can always out-deal, out-bully and out-cheat everyone else, it’s easy to see how he interpreted some conciliatory conversations with Rodriguez as a signal that she would be his obedient puppet.
Trump’s self-image as the ultimate dealmaker explains why he was so ready to believe, falsely, that he controlled Venezuela. It also explains his insistence that by, as he imagined, seizing Venezuela, he had gained a valuable prize in the form of its oil. “We’re going to be taking out a tremendous amount of wealth out of the ground.” Many Trump critics share his view that there’s a lot of money to be made from Venezuelan oil and condemn his intervention as an attempt to steal that money.
But you know who doesn’t think there’s a lot of money to be made in Venezuela? Oil companies. They see a dilapidated infrastructure that would cost billions to repair. They don’t see a stable political environment above ground. And while Venezuela has large oil rese
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Trump’s “Don Roe Doctrine” Turns Canada Into His Worst Nightmare | Jimmy Kimmel
Jan 4, 2026
Hello to all the loyal viewers and die-hard fans of Jimmy Kimmel — the people who can watch five minutes of Trump talking about foreign policy and instantly tell the difference between a real doctrine and a drunk guy doodling on a placemat at Mar-a-Lago. I hope you’re somewhere comfortable right now, maybe half-sliding off the couch with your phone in one hand and a snack you definitely didn’t intend to eat this late in the other, because tonight we’re going to talk about something that sounds like a bad joke, feels like a comic-book supervillain plan, and is actually being treated like a real threat by an entire country: Donald Trump’s so-called “Don Roe Doctrine” and how it just turned the Canadian people into some of the most determined Trump-resisters on the planet.
If you somehow missed it, here’s the quick horror recap. After Trump’s unlawful invasion of Venezuela — you know, that little “kinetic action” he announced like he was plugging a hotel opening — he walked into a press conference and bragged that he’d basically upgraded the Monroe Doctrine. Remember that old 19th-century policy that said the Western Hemisphere was kind of our neighborhood and European empires should back off? Trump stands there, sweaty and proud, and declares that under his “new national security strategy,” American dominance in the Western Hemisphere “will never be questioned again,” and that they now call it the “Don Roe Doctrine.” He even stumbles over the name like he’s not sure if he’s saying “Monroe,” “Don Roe,” or “Don’t Know,” which is honestly the most accurate version.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Trump Has Once Again Made Fools Out of His “Populist” Supporters
Trump’s new GOP looks a lot like the old GOP, especially after his invasion of Venezuela.
By Zachary D. Carter | Jan 05, 2026 5:40 AM
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2026/01/venezuela-trump-maduro-bus
h-biden-maga-republicans-democrats.html
There was a time not long ago when people would claim with a straight face that Donald Trump was a populist who prioritized the interests of working-class Americans and avoided stupid foreign wars. “Trump’s Best Foreign Policy? Not Starting Any Wars,” then-Senator J.D. Vance crowed in 2023. As Trump assembled his second-term national security team in 2024, Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) claimed to be “amazed by the Trump cabinet” and the president’s rejection of “warmongers.” A mere two months ago, one of those cabinet officials, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, told a conference in Bahrain that Trump had ended the “counterproductive and endless cycle of regime change or nation-building” that has defined American foreign policy for decades.
Trump’s brazenly illegal military assault on Caracas last week would embarrass these people, were they capable of embarrassment. Trump did not govern as a populist during his first term; his second term has been an unabashed celebration of crass imperialism and the super-rich.
And the super-rich are thrilled. Hedge fund billionaire Bill Ackman croons that Trump’s war in Venezuela “will lower oil prices, which is good for America.” The Jeff Bezos editorial board hailed the Trump invasion as a happy confluence of “justice” and technical prowess. Elon Musk is patching things up with Trump, proclaiming the war “a win for the world and a clear message to evil dictators everywhere.” Nor are Republicans the only enthusiasts. Democratic Party fundraiser Charles Myers is organizing a post-Maduro field trip to Venezuela with about 20 hedge funders and asset managers to scout investment opportunities in “oil and gas,” “construction,” and “tourism.”
The story of American capital profiteering on American war is as old as America itself, and Trump openly claims to have invaded Venezuela for its oil. But in this particular case the Wall Street opportunists have their work cut out for them. On Saturday, Politico reported that Trump offered U.S. oil executives “reimbursement” for oil assets that were nationalized by the Venezuelan government decades ago—but only on the condition that they actually take control of Venezuela’s oil fields. Ten days after making the offer, Trump doesn’t have any takers. Venezuela’s oil infrastructure is outdated, and it will take tremendous investments to meaningfully expand production, something oil companies are reluctant to do when large profits are readily available from high prices and low corporate investment. We are thus presented with the bizarre spectacle of an American president waging an imperialist war on behalf of American executives who are reluctant to claim the spoils. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, meanwhile, is telling reporters that Cuba may be next in line for American-imposed regime change, as the wife of Trump’s racism czar Stephen Miller points to Greenland.
Embarrassing as these developments are for the right-wing populists who supported Trump in 2024, I have always harbored some sympathy for their political plight. Conservative populists are generally right about war (bad) and poverty (wrong), and they claim to recognize warmongering and elite favor-trading as unpleasant features of Republican politics. At the same time, I have maintained contempt for the belief that Donald Trump might deliver America from those evils. Trump’s first term was defined by a massive tax cut for the rich, a bank deregulation bill that delivered a rash of bank failures, the destruction of a standing diplomatic treaty with Iran, and sustained, vocal support for the violent and corrupt governments of Israel and Saudi Arabia. All of these agenda items could have been implemented by a President Mitt Romney, had an election or two gone a l
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Trump shares debunked conspiracy theory that Minnesota Gov. Walz ordered the killing of state lawmaker Melissa Hortman and her husband in their home as her children beg Trump to remove the post. (KMSP Minneapolis) Published January 4, 2026 4:47pm CST
https://www.fox9.com/news/president-trump-pushes-false-hortman-killing
-conspiracy-jan-4
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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The Fuck-Around-and-Find-Out Presidency
Truman, Reagan, and Monroe wouldn’t approve of the language, but a doctrine is a doctrine, even if it’s only five words long.
By Missy Ryan and Ashley Parker | January 5, 2026, 7 AM ET
https://www.theatlantic.com/national-security/2026/01/trump-monroe-doc
trine-venezuela/685502/
In Marco Rubio’s telling, the stunning events in Venezuela on Saturday illustrate an essential truth—possibly the essential truth—about Donald Trump’s presidency: Global leaders cross him at their peril. “I don’t understand yet how they haven’t figured this out,” Trump’s secretary of state told reporters at Mar-a-Lago just hours after the capture of Nicolás Maduro.
World leaders could be forgiven for not understanding the simplicity of the Trump Doctrine, especially those who assume that the world’s dominant superpower still possesses complicated mechanisms for the manufacture of foreign-policy strategies. The country that gave the world the Truman Doctrine and the Reagan Doctrine as well as Trump’s apparent favorite, the Monroe Doctrine, now embraces the plainest and most ostentatiously bellicose of national-security policies: Fuck around and find out. Trump’s own Pentagon chief, the self-styled (until Congress approves the title change) secretary of war, Pete Hegseth, said as much when he told the nation that Maduro “effed around, and he found out.”
If the Fuck Around and Find Out Doctrine doesn’t sound like a concept for a stable and predictable foreign policy—one purpose of Washington’s doctrine-articulation complex—then maybe you can sympathize with those who Rubio says are still struggling to get it. Some experts reject the idea that something this crude even earns the right to be called a doctrine. As John Bolton, currently a Trump nemesis but once one of his first-term national security advisers, told us, “There is no Trump Doctrine: No matter what he does, there is no grand conceptual framework; it’s whatever suits him at the moment.” Kori Schake, the director of foreign- and defense-policy studies at the American Enterprise Institute, cautioned us that “we shouldn’t ennoble Trump policy by saying there’s a doctrine.”
In the early decades of the 20th century, “America First” was in part a euphemism for U.S. isolation from the ravages of war in Europe. Trump then revived the term, starting in 2016, when he promised to end America’s long post-9/11 conflicts, which cost taxpayers trillions and failed to deliver clear victories. Instead, he would prioritize domestic issues and the well-being of Americans. Yet there he was on Saturday at Mar-a-Lago, vowing to “run Venezuela for the foreseeable future.” And if that involves a bit of nation building and American boots on the ground, well, so be it. Trump, it turns out, seems to believe that a little foreign adventurism is just fine, as long as he’s the one doing the adventuring. It was a departure from his previous instinct to limit his foreign interventions to short, kinetic bursts of force—an unofficial one-and-done doctrine—visible in his first-term strike on the Iranian military leader Qassem Soleimani and his more recent decision to dispatch U.S. bombers deep into Iran.
“Rebuilding is not a bad thing, in Venezuela’s case; the country has gone to hell,” Trump told our colleague Michael Scherer in an interview yesterday. But when asked why similar actions in Iraq were an abomination, the president punted. “That was Bush,” Trump said. “You’ll have to ask Bush that question, because we should have never gone into Iraq. That started the Middle East disaster.” (In a separate Atlantic interview last year, Trump said that “America First” is whatever he says it is: “Considering that the term wasn’t used until I came along, I think I’m the one that decides that.”)
The White House quickly embraced the newly articulated doctrine, circulating after Saturday’s Mar-a-Lago press conference an image of a determined-looking Trump striding up steps, with the caption—you guessed it—“FAFO.” Another administration publicity push featured Ru
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Pentagon Official on Venezuela War: “Following the Old, Failed Scripts”
By Nick Turse | January 5 2026, 3:30 p.m.
https://theintercept.com/2026/01/05/trump-venezuela-war/
Early Saturday morning, after cloud cover lifted, elite Army Delta Force commandos moved in. With support from CIA covert operators and other military, intelligence, and law enforcement personnel, they carried out the Trump administration’s audacious regime-change project in Venezuela, upending global order and shattering what remains of geopolitical norms.
As the day wore on, the full scope of the operation became clear: The U.S. had attacked a sovereign nation with which it was not at war and did so without congressional authorization; kidnapped its leader Nicolás Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, and rendered them to the United States; announced plans to “run” that country as a de facto colony; and threatened further attacks and military occupation unless the acting president does America’s bidding.
“We’re in charge,” Trump said of Venezuela on Sunday night, speaking to reporters on Air Force One. “We’re going to run everything.”
Reflecting on the operation, dubbed Absolute Resolve, a senior defense official called America a “rogue state” and pronounced dead the liberal rules-based geopolitical order which U.S. administrations, of both parties, have championed since World War II.
“His powers are rooted in the fearmongering post-9/11 decisions creating emergency powers that were never reined back in.”
“It’s crazy how we are following the old, failed scripts: Topple government. Make no plans for the aftermath,” the senior defense official said. “We must face the reality Trump has no limits. His powers are rooted in the fearmongering post-9/11 decisions creating emergency powers that were never reined back in.”
The administration has justified Absolute Resolve by citing the president’s authority under Article II of the Constitution to protect U.S. personnel from an actual or imminent attack.
Sarah Harrison, who previously advised Pentagon policymakers on issues related to human rights and the law of war, said that the attack was a clear violation of international law and the administration’s justifications are baseless.
“Countries cannot go around the world using force against other states merely due to criminal activity. On this point the administration has put forward one of the most groundless legal arguments,” Harrison told The Intercept. “What happened on January 3 was clearly an offensive, not a defensive, mission, and an act of aggression in violation of the U.N. charter and customary international law.”
“There’s a pervasive corrosive fear in the Pentagon among those of us opposed to Trump and his policies,” the senior defense official told The Intercept. “We have supported the country and the institutions for decades and now watch as they are being dismantled.”
Pentagon press secretary Kingsley Wilson did not reply to repeated requests for comment concerning the statements by the senior defense official.
Forever Wars
Over the weekend, Trump repeatedly threatened continued war in Venezuela, as the U.S. maintains a massive military presence in the Caribbean, including the largest naval flotilla in the region since the Cold War. “We’re prepared,” Trump said of possible follow-up strikes on Venezuela. “You know, we have a second wave that’s much bigger than the first wave.”
He also threatened that the “American armada remains poised in position, and the United States retains all military options until United States demands have been fully met and fully satisfied.”
Trump also left the door open to a full-scale military occupation. “We’re not afraid of boots on the ground,” he said.
Trump said that the U.S. intends to employ Delcy Rodríguez, Maduro’s vice president, as a puppet under threat of further U.S. attacks.
“If Maduro’s vice president — if the vice president does what we want, we won’t have to do that,” he said of a military occupation. Trump told The Atlantic on Sunday th
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The Emperor’s New Oil Wealth
The truth behind Trump’s black, sticky fantasy
By Paul Krugman | Jan 07, 2026
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/the-emperors-new-oil-wealth
When George W. Bush invaded Iraq in 2003, he claimed that the goal was to establish a democratic regime. Some members of his administration may even have believed that. But many leftist critics insisted that it was all about seizing Iraq’s oil.
Although I was an outspoken opponent of that war, and deeply cynical about the Bush administration’s motives, I never believed the “war for oil” story. The principal motivation for the war, I still believe, was to wag the dog — to use a showy military victory to secure Bush’s reelection. According to some political scientists, that was a mission the war did, in fact, accomplish.
Donald Trump’s Venezuela venture is a very different story. During his triumphalist press conference after the abduction of Nicolás Maduro, Trump never used the word “democracy.” He did, however, say “oil” 27 times, declaring, “We’re going to take back the oil that, frankly, we should have taken back a long time ago.”
Even so, whatever it is we’re doing in Venezuela isn’t really a war for oil. It is, instead, a war for oil fantasies. The vast wealth Trump imagines is waiting there to be taken doesn’t exist.
You may have heard that Venezuela has the world’s largest oil reserves — 300 billion barrels. You probably don’t know that Venezuela’s reported oil reserves tripled while Hugo Chavez was president. This increase, from roughly 100 billion to 300 billion barrels, didn’t reflect major new discoveries or exploration. Instead, it reflected the Chavez government’s decision to reclassify the country’s Orinoco Belt heavy oil as “proved” — oil that can be recovered with reasonable certainty under existing economic and operating conditions:
Source: Torsten Slok
As Torsten Slok of Apollo, who recently made this point, notes, “Much of the oil is extra-heavy, which has low recovery and a high cost to produce.” This suggests that Venezuela’s claims to have immense usable oil reserves were politically motivated hype.
This view is supported by the fact that the huge increase in Venezuela’s reported oil reserves wasn’t followed by a surge in production. On the contrary, Venezuelan oil production soon plunged:
Source: Torsten Slok
Plunging production was associated with a steady degradation of Venezuela’s oil infrastructure, which would take years and many billions of dollars in investment to restore. Given these costs as well as political instability, major oil companies clearly aren’t enthusiastic about the idea of sinking money into Venezuela.
On Monday Trump suggested that he might reimburse oil companies for investment in the nation he claims — with no basis in reality — to control, reimbursing them for their outlays there. That is, we’ve gone in a matter of days from big talk about huge money-making opportunities to a proposal to, in effect, subsidize oil-industry investments in Venezuela at U.S. taxpayers’ expense.
Which is not to say that nobody has profited from the abduction of Maduro. A few months ago Trumpist billionaire Paul Singer bought Citgo, the former U.S.-based arm of Venezuela’s state-run oil company. Citgo owns three Gulf Coast refineries custom-built to process Venezuelan crude, refineries that have suffered from the U.S. embargo on imports of that crude. If Trump lifts that embargo, Singer will receive a huge windfall. But this windfall will have nothing to do with reviving Venezuelan production.
Singer has made huge politi
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Trump wants to build a 250-foot-tall arch, dwarfing the Lincoln Memorial
The White House stands about 70 feet tall. The Lincoln Memorial is roughly 100 feet. The triumphal arch President Donald Trump wants to build would eclipse both.
The planned Independence Arch is intended to commemorate America’s 250th anniversary. Trump has considered smaller versions of the arch, including 165-foot-high and 123-foot-high designs he shared at a dinner last year. But he has favored the largest option, arguing that its sheer size would impress visitors to Washington, and that ‘250 for 250’ makes the most sense.
Trump told Politico in December that he hoped to begin construction of the arch within two months. Memorial Circle, the plot of land that the president has eyed, is controlled by the National Park Service.
“The one that people know mostly is the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, France. And we’re gonna top it by, I think, a lot,” Trump said at a White House Christmas reception in December.
The Arc de Triomphe — already one of the world’s largest triumphal arches — measures 164 feet.
Trump on Jan. 23 also posted images on his Truth Social platform that depict a large triumphal arch with gold gilding — a hallmark of Trump’s construction projects.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/trump-wants-to-build-a-250-foot-tall
-arch-dwarfing-the-lincoln-memorial/ar-AA1Vnzel
The Arc de Trump may become Trump's final resting place . . . a suitably large monument to a large personality.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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President Trump said Sunday he will move to close Washington's Kennedy Center performing arts center. Trump's announcement on social media follows a wave of cancellations by leading performers and groups since the president ousted the previous leadership and added his name to the building. Trump made no mention in his post of the recent cancellations.
https://www.npr.org/2026/02/01/nx-s1-5695832/kennedy-center-renovation
s-trump
Trump’s “justification” for closing the performing arts center? Not because artists refuse to perform there since naming it after himself, but because the building will be rebuilt to Trump’s specifications. Expect Trump’s name on every wall in gold.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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I'm glad the site is back up so we can keep up with your daily record of lies and failed predictions.
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Be Nice. Don't be a dick.
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The Washington Post adopted the slogan “Democracy dies in darkness” in February 2017. Some found it pompous, but it reflected a widespread theory about how authoritarianism could come to America. This theory, based on the experience of democratic erosion in nations like Hungary and the work of scholars like Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, argued that autocracy wouldn’t be imposed by armed men beating and killing the regime’s opponents.
Authoritarian rule would, instead, be installed through a gradual process of subversion. Key institutions, especially the news media, would be co-opted or deprived of financing. Businesses would knuckle under so as not to be shut out of crony capitalism. Dissenters would be marginalized rather than sent to gulags.
The trajectory of the Post itself shows how that could work. The newspaper that broke the story of Watergate and brought down Richard Nixon has been Bezosified, its editorial independence destroyed and its newsroom increasingly eviscerated. Many other institutions, from other media organizations to some universities to law firms, have also become enablers of the regime. Big business has caved almost completely.
But it turns out that predictions of creeping authoritarianism both underestimated and overestimated MAGA. Almost everyone, myself included, underestimated how far MAGA would go in engaging in open violence and abuse of power against those it considers enemies. On the other hand, we overestimated the movement’s impulse control, its ability to mask its tyrannical goals until its power was fully consolidated.
As Steven Levitsky said in a recent interview, comparing Donald Trump with Hungarian strongman Viktor Orban,
Orbán doesn’t arrest journalists. And in Hungary, if you walk the streets of Budapest or other Hungarian cities, you will not find heavily armed masked men abducting people. That doesn’t happen in Hungary.
The startling extremism of the Trump regime, even compared with other modern wannabe dictatorships, is obvious to the naked eye. But I always find quantification useful. So I was very pleased to see that the estimable John Burn-Murdoch of the Financial Times has risen to the occasion, producing an index of democratic backsliding that lets us compare the trajectory of the United States under Trump with those of other nations we used to view as cautionary tales. (I’ve looked at how the index is constructed, and it’s reasonable.) We’re on a uniquely steep descent, at least for modern times:
It’s a horrifying picture. Yet the flip side of the naked extremism of the MAGA power grab is that it has produced a remarkably strong backlash. The size and determination of civil resistance to ICE has been incredible and inspiring, like nothing we’ve seen since the Civil Rights movement in the 1960s. Republicans are being punished at the polls: On Saturday a deep-red Texas Senate district that went Trump +17 in 2024 voted in a Democrat with a 15-point margin.
I keep asking two questions as ICE runs wild. First, what is the strategy here? How do Trump, Stephen Miller, etc., think this is going to work for them? Maybe their initial belief was that a display of force would shock and awe their opponents into submission. It’s not happening, yet they just keep ramping up the threats and violence, apparently not knowing how to do anything else.
The obvious answer is that there isn’t any strategy. These people aren’t evil masterminds — evil, yes, but masterminds, no. They’re just thugs too crude and undisciplined to control their own thuggishness. They were caught off guard by the strength of the resistance because the very concept of citizens standing up for their principles is alien to them, and they still can’t believe it’s real.
The second question is, how does this end? Most immediately, what will happen during and af
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Let's start with the US Constitution. The founders understood that if the American Republic was going to survive, it needed to prevent the possibility of foreign states corrupting its leadership. They were so worried about this happening that they added in the very first article of the Constitution what has come to be known as the emoluments clause.
It was not subtle.
No Title of Nobility shall be granted by the United States: And no Person holding any Office of Profit or Trust under them, shall, without the Consent of the Congress, accept of any present, Emolument, Office, or Title, of any kind whatever, from any King, Prince, or foreign State.
No US office holder should be allowed to accept presents or awards etc from any foreign state. To reinforce their worries about corruption, the founders made it, or “Bribery”, an explicit part of the impeachment process which was in Article 2.
The President, Vice President and all civil Officers of the United States, shall be removed from Office on Impeachment for, and Conviction of, Treason, Bribery, or other high Crimes and Misdemeanors.
And these restrictions while not perfect, were accepted by all parties. Now we have an administration that is openly selling itself, and America’s most important secrets, to foreign states and the guardrails are not only failing, they hardly seem to exist. In fact, the guardrails are collapsing in a haze of gold-plated, crypto shininess.
Step inside Donald Trump's new presidential jet. Picture: Altitude Jet
The lavish interior of the Boeing jumbo jet gifted to Trump—that is quite an emolument.
Let's start with some stories about present payoffs going to the administration. What we see are what seems to be straightforward payments, bribes, emoluments, call them what you will, that result in policy changes.
https://phillipspobrien.substack.com/p/no-the-guardrails-are-not-holdi
ng
Examples of Trump changing policy based on bribes
https://www.google.com/search?q=examples+of+Trump+changing+policy+base
d+upon+bribes
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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This Uniquely American Legal Kink Threatening to Destroy Democracy
By Dahlia Lithwick | Feb 03, 2026 2:16 PM
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2026/02/trump-law-bush-yoo-memo-mo
rality-torture-minneapolis.html
There is a uniquely American kink that holds that what really matters in terms of presidential policies and conduct is the question of whether something is “legal” as opposed to moral. In an essay for the Boston Review headlined “The Moral Stupefaction of the American Public,” professor Joseph Margulies argues that if conduct is deemed permissible simply because a mediocre law student can pen a mediocre legal memo justifying it, the country is in far deeper trouble than it presently comprehends. On this week’s Amicus podcast, he explained to Dahlia Lithwick that the inclination to fetishize that which can be justified legally has a way of opening the door to atrocities that cannot be tolerated.
Dahlia Lithwick: In your article, you draw out the fact that lawyers are extremely uneasy about invoking the language of morality, because morality is either too malleable or just sanctimonious and annoying. I think your point is that the law — dis-aggregated from morality — becomes an endless series of hollow CYA (cover-your-ass) memos to be deployed by any given administration to justify absolutely anything from torture at Gitmo to blowing up fishing vessels in the Caribbean?
Joseph Margulies: Yes. And that which is taking place in Minneapolis—and not simply in Minneapolis, but most pointedly in Minneapolis—ought not be framed as: “Is that lawful?” It ought to be framed as: “Is that right?” Are we going to allow a masked, heavily armed secret police force to march through the city all but unchecked, and checked only by the voluntary surveillance—to the extent they are checked—by plain citizens at their peril? A secret police force that, at least it appears at this point, enjoys absolute impunity?
Those are profoundly moral questions. Those are moral judgments. Have we lost the capacity to say this is simply wrong? That this is a grotesque obscenity and cannot be allowed to continue?
This is no longer simply a question of, “Is it a violation of the 10th Amendment?” That’s what they’re litigating in front of Judge Menendez. Or, “Is ICE violating judicial orders?” Answer: “Yes, there’s 96 of them.” The lawyers are fighting that out. Stop it. This is a horrible, grotesque, and ongoing wrong, and that’s the level at which we need to engage.
Why is it that we substitute what I call our legal voice for our moral voice? This is a country that purports to worship, and I use that term advisedly, the rule of law. We tend to believe that legality establishes rightness, establishes legitimacy. So when a question is posed: “Can they do that?” The answer is usually given in terms of: “Yes, of course, it’s all perfectly legal.” Over time, we lose the capacity to render moral objections, even when what is being done is unspeakably grotesque, because we simply don’t engage these muscles.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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