Do you feel like the winds of change are blowing today too?
POSTED BY: 6ixStringJack
UPDATED: Sunday, September 6, 2026 16:05
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PAGE 376 of 479
Quote:President for Life
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Shut the fuck up
Donald Trump is trying to amass the powers of a king.
By J. Michael Luttig | October 28, 2025
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2025/12/trump-third-term-
authoritarianism/684616/
In the normal course of history, the president of the United States is a figure who inspires optimism in the American people. The 47th president prefers to stir feelings of fear, vulnerability, hopelessness, and political inevitability—the sense that he, and only he, can rescue the nation from looming peril. Since his second inauguration, Donald Trump has seized authoritarian control over the federal government and demanded the obedience of the other powerful institutions of American society—universities, law firms, media companies. The question weighing heavily on the minds of many Americans is whether Trump will subvert next year’s midterm elections or the 2028 presidential election to extend his reign.
With his every word and deed, Trump has given Americans reason to believe that he will seek a third term, in defiance of the Constitution. It seems abundantly clear that he will hold on to the office at any cost, including America’s ruin.
The Founders of our nation foresaw a figure like Trump, a demagogue who would ascend to the presidency and refuse to relinquish power to a successor chosen by the American people in a free and fair election. Writing to James Madison from Paris in 1787, Thomas Jefferson warned that such an incumbent, if narrowly defeated, would “pretend false votes, foul play, hold possession of the reins of government.” Were that moment ever to come, the Founders believed, it would mark the demise of the nation that they had conceived, bringing to a calamitous end the greatest experiment in self-government ever attempted by man.
Trump proved in 2021 that he would do anything to remain in the White House. Even after the violence of January 6, his second impeachment, and the conviction and incarceration of scores of his followers, he reiterated his willingness to subvert the 2024 election. That proved unnecessary. Yet since his victory, Trump has again told the American people that he is prepared to do what it takes to remain in power, the Constitution be damned.
In March, Trump refused to rule out a third term, saying that he was “not joking” about the prospect and claiming that “there are methods which you could do it.” He was asked about the idea of Vice President J. D. Vance running for the presidency, getting elected, and then passing the baton back to him. “That’s one,” he said. “But there are others, too.” As he so often does, Trump later claimed that he wasn’t being serious. But also in March, Trump’s ally Steve Bannon said that he is “a firm believer that President Trump will run and win again in 2028,” adding that he and others are working on ways to do it, which would require circumventing the Twenty-Second Amendment. (Bannon later told The Economist: “Trump is gonna be president in ’28, and people just ought to get accommodated with that.” He added, “At the appropriate time, we’ll lay out what the plan is. But there’s a plan.”) In September, after meeting with congressional leaders about the looming government shutdown, Trump posted photographs on Truth Social in which Trump 2028 hats rested prominently on his Oval Office desk. In October, when discussing the possibility of a third term, Trump said, “I would love to do it. I have my best numbers ever.”
We Americans are by nature good people who believe in the inherent goodness of others, especially those we elect to represent us in the highest office in the land. But we ignore such statements and other expressions of Trump’s intent at our peril. The 47th president is a vain man, and nothing would flatter his vanity more than seizing another term. Doing so would signify the ultimate triumph over his political enemies.
I am not a Pollyanna, nor am I a Cassandra. I was at the forefront of the conservative legal movement that began in 19
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The Trump Outrages That Matter Most
Razing the East Wing? Breaking Congress? An unscientific survey of the President's most disruptive, significant, and truly surprising moves.
By Susan B. Glasser | October 30, 2025
https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-trumps-washington/the-trump
-outrages-that-matter-most
In the past few days, as President Trump neared the three-hundred-day mark of his second term, he made what amounted to a royal progress through Asia, negotiating trade deals and basking in gilded palaces. In South Korea, he was presented with a replica of an ancient golden crown. “I’d like to wear it right now,” he said, only eleven days after millions of Americans had gathered to protest his assumption of near-monarchical powers, in hundreds of No Kings rallies around the country. The South Koreans sure knew their mark. During the trip, Trump also announced, via a social-media post, the resumption of nuclear tests for the first time in decades; unleashed another deadly strike on an alleged drug-running boat in what appears to be an undeclared war for regime change in Venezuela; threatened, during a political pep rally in front of the supposedly apolitical U.S. military, to send active-duty troops to American cities; and admitted that he “would love” to remain in office for a third term before reluctantly acknowledging the Constitution’s strict ban on it.
Back in Washington, meanwhile, the U.S. government remained shut down for a fourth straight week, the result of an impasse with congressional Democrats that Trump has seemingly done nothing to resolve—even as thousands of workers go without pay. It was, in other words, just another week in the Trump era. The new normal is forgetting yesterday’s scandals in order to make room in our overcrowded brains for tomorrow’s. Remember when Trump imposed punitive new tariffs on Canada because he got mad about a television ad? When he demanded that the Justice Department pay him more than two hundred million dollars in compensation for the costs he incurred from the Biden Administration’s decision to investigate him? When he circulated an A.I.-generated video of himself dumping poop on Americans protesting him? That was so last week. And last week, in the Trump era, might as well have been an eternity ago. The black hole in which our previous outrage resides is vast.
Which is why I was struck by the visceral and lasting anger that has resulted from Trump’s decision to raze the East Wing of the White House without so much as a single public hearing or permit. A very senior Republican, a repeat Trump voter, told me that it was “disgusting” and “sick.” Polls show that large bipartisan majorities oppose the demolition. It’s been more than a week and people are still stewing about it. Has something finally broken through? Is that even possible anymore?
At a dinner I attended earlier this week, a query about what the worst thing was that had happened since Trump’s return to the White House prompted a chilling array of answers—only one of which was the tearing down of the East Wing. (Can you imagine if a Prime Minister of the United Kingdom just woke up one morning and ordered the smashing of a wing of Buckingham Palace, someone said.) It was the range of responses that seemed most telling to me—from Trump’s politicization of the military and the Justice Department to the unleashing of a new MAGA culture celebrating cruelty.
I decided to continue the conversation, asking a few dozen smart folks to send me their thoughts about the most disruptive, significant, or truly surprising events of these past few months. Answers poured in—thoughtful, anguished, perceptive answers that reminded me that there is value in naming the problem, even if nothing, for the moment, can be done to stop it. It is a response, if an imperfect one, to the sense of being overwhelmed by events to take a minute to pause and assess them, to think about what really matters and what might last from the jarring, undeniably historic moment through which we are living.
Some of my co
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The president spoke to reporters on Air Force One while en route to Florida for the weekend. His administration has recently conducted a series of strikes on boats. The strikes have killed 61 people, instead of arresting them.
https://www.newsweek.com/venezuela-strikes-donald-trump-us-military-at
tack-maduro-10973127
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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The GOP’s top think tank just defended an open Nazi
Reasonable people can disagree about whether Hitler was good, says the Heritage Foundation. Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts said this about podcaster and antisemitic Nick Fuentes: “Canceling him is not the answer.”
By Zack Beauchamp | Oct 31, 2025, 12:50 PM CDT
https://www.vox.com/politics/466905/the-gops-top-think-tank-just-defen
ded-an-open-nazi
On Thursday night, the president of the Heritage Foundation — the MAGA right’s leading think tank — welcomed an open Nazi into his political coalition.
You might think I am exaggerating. I assure you I am not. The Nazi in question here, podcaster Nick Fuentes, has described Adolf Hitler as “really fucking cool” and said “perfidious Jews” must “be given the death penalty” after “we take power.”
https://www.texastribune.org/2023/10/10/nick-fuentes-texas-meeting/
https://x.com/karol/status/1984244275899728379
And on Thursday, Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts released a video defending this person’s inclusion in polite-right politics: describing Fuentes not as a hate-monger to be banished from the decent right, but as a coalition member whose view of Jews-as-evil-traitors should be politely debated.
“The American people expect us to be focusing on our political adversaries on the left, not attacking our friends on the right,” Roberts said. “I disagree with, and even abhor, things that Nick Fuentes says. But canceling him is not the answer.”
This is an epochal moment for American conservatism. In the past, the movement felt the need to hide bigotries — including antisemitism — behind a thin veil of plausible deniability. But with Fuentes, there’s no hidden message: He just says, over and over again, that Jews are evil and the source of America’s biggest problems. If someone like him can be considered one of Roberts’s “friends on the right,” then the movement’s leadership is now conceding that overt antisemitism is a legitimate political position in the MAGA movement.
Now, prominent conservative figures — like the writers Erick Erickson and Rod Dreher — are aghast, raging against Fuentes’ newfound acceptability. The criticism is getting quite heated.
“The question is not whether one may criticize Israel. It is whether open antisemitism and racism are acceptable in conservative politics,” writes Mike Doran, a leading conservative voice on Middle East policy. “A movement that can’t recognize and reject blatant antisemitism has no moral core and no future.”
Earlier this week, I suggested the GOP might be in the opening stages of a civil war over the status of Jews in American life. I’m now convinced that it is. And the stakes couldn’t be higher.
How we got here: Tucker Carlson
To understand what’s happening right now, you need to understand the man who served as the bridge between Fuentes and Roberts: Tucker Carlson.
Carlson and Fuentes had, as recently as August, openly hated each other (Carlson memorably called Fuentes a “weird little gay kid”). But, increasingly, they’ve come to be two sides of the same coin. While Fuentes is openly and violently antisemitic, Carlson has mainstreamed similar ideas more subtly — by, for example, implying the Jews killed Jesus during Charlie Kirk’s memorial and elevating revisionist “histories” of World War II in which the real bad guy was not Adolf Hitler but rather Winston Churchill.
Earlier this week, they buried the hatchet: Carlson released a fawning interview with Fuentes that serves, in large part, to make the extremist look far more reasonable than he sounds on his own show. There was no open support for Hitler, though Fuentes did (to Carlson’s chagrin) manage to say something nice about another mass-murdering antisemite: Joseph Stalin.
The sit-down was, in many respects, a kind of concession on Carlson’s part: Though he once attempted to push Fuentes aside, it seems he has since he realized he didn’t have the muscle to do so. Fuentes’ supporters, called “groypers,” had come to make up a huge perce
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Shut the fuck up.
--------------------------------------------------
For all that I've blessed, and all that I've wronged. In dreams until my death, I will wander on.
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Quote:America, the Juvenile
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Shut the fuck up.
By Tom Nichols | November 3, 2025, 10:37 AM ET
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/11/trump-maga-insults-t
rolling/684786/
In 1949, the German historian and political philosopher Hannah Arendt visited Europe for the first time since fleeing to America during the war. A year later, she wrote an analysis of what she called “the aftermath of Nazi rule.” She found the Old World lacking in civic maturity and commitment compared with her new home, the then-booming United States, noting that “the peoples of Western Europe have developed the habit of blaming their misfortunes on some force out of their reach.” She believed that her adopted country, by comparison, enjoyed a kind of clarity of public vision: “With the possible exception of the Scandinavians,” she wrote, “no European citizenry has the political maturity of Americans, for whom a certain amount of responsibility, i.e., of moderation in the pursuit of self-interest, is almost a matter of course.” Arendt wasn’t celebrating a perfect America; rather, she was lauding a people who approached political life with an adult sensibility and a reserve of self-control.
Arendt, and any judicious observer, could not make the same assessment of America today.
The United States is now a nation run by public servants who behave no better than internet trolls, deflecting criticism with crassness and obscenity. The White House press secretary answers a question from a member of the free press—a serious question about who planned a meeting between the American and Russian presidents—by saying, “Your mom did.” The secretary of defense cancels DEI and other policies by saying, “We are done with that shit.” The vice president calls an interlocutor on social media a “dipshit.” The president of the United States himself, during mass protests against his policies, responds by posting an AI-generated video of himself flying a jet fighter over his fellow citizens and dumping feces on their heads.
These are not the actions of mature adults. They are examples of crude people displaying their incompetence as they flail about in jobs—including the presidency—for which they are not qualified.
The republic will not fall because Vice President J. D. Vance has decided that swearing is edgy, and the juvenility of American public life did not begin with the Trump administration. But the larger danger under all of this nastiness is that President Donald Trump and his courtiers are using crass deflection and gleeful immaturity as means of numbing society and wearing down its resistance to all kinds of depredations, including corruption and violence. When the U.S. military kills people at sea and Vance, responding to a charge that such actions might be war crimes, responds, “I don’t give a shit what you call it,” the goal is not just to boost Vance’s hairy-chest cred; it’s also to grind others down into accepting the idea of extrajudicial executions.
The collapse of a superpower into a regime of bullies and mean girls and comic-book guys explains much about why American democracy is on the ropes, reeling from the attacks of people who in a better time would never have been allowed near the government of the United States.
For years, Trump has attracted acolytes by being the patron saint of the third string, gathering people who seem to feel, for various reasons, that they were iced out of national politics. Some hold opinions too extreme for any but a Trump administration. Stephen Miller’s odious views, including his echoing of Adolf Hitler’s rhetoric and his accusation that the president’s critics are terrorists, would make him a liability not just in any other administration but even at a family dinner, as remarks from some of his own relatives have suggested.
Other Trump appointees, however, have used personal loyalty as the bridge across the chasm that separates their lack of ability from the jobs they occupy. The experiences of prior Trump appointees suggest that ma
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We’re Number Two!
How Trump ceded the future to China
By Paul Krugman | Nov 03, 2025
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/were-number-two
Does Donald Trump realize that he has ceded world leadership to China? Probably not: During his recent Asian trip, foreign leaders flattered him and showered him with personal gifts, so he came home with his ego even more inflated than usual. Nobody close to him would dare tell him that if you look at the substance of what he agreed to, it amounted to an ignominious retreat. When Chuck Schumer pointed out the reality of what Trump didn’t accomplish, his reaction was hysterical:
Donald J. Trump @realDonaldTrump
Worked really hard, 24/7, took in Trillions of Dollars, and Chuck Schumer said trip was "a total dud," even though he knows it was a spectacular success. Words like that are almost treasonous!!!
Oct 30, 2025, 3:46 AM
https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/posts/115462006949579771
The whole world knows what Trump’s sycophants won’t tell him: His confrontation with China has ended up demonstrating Chinese strength and American weakness.
Much more at https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/were-number-two
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 did not just change his mind about crypto, but became a leading crypto entrepreneur right in the heart of the campaign season. That was something totally different. He not only took all this money and policy advice from that industry, but also decided to go into business with them.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Shut the fuck up.
Krugman: Campaign finance is one thing and that’s huge. The role of crypto as the dominant corporate donor was new, but the direct enrichment of the president and his family: that’s a new chapter in American politics. These guys seem to be better positioned to do that or have better tools for doing that than other industries ever had.
Silverman: I think partially because they don’t have to create a real product that people want. I mean, yes, World Liberty Financial might want to sell to the broader public, but what they essentially serve as is the drop box for people who want to give money to Trump. That means, UAE princes, sovereign wealth funds and financial criminals from overseas, or Justin Sun, or Changpeng Zhao, as we saw recently both of whom have benefited politically.
Because there’s relatively low overhead, you can just keep doing this and every regulation or law or investigatory body that might put a check on this has essentially been dismantled and Trump has pretty broad legal immunity. So it just seems like something that can keep going without much stopping it.
Krugman: Yeah. The pardoning of Binance, Changpeng Zhao, that just happened a few days before we had this conversation. It’s truly extraordinary.
Silverman: This is something we knew might happen because it had been reported that they were talking and then CZ (Changpeng Zhao) claimed, “well, we hadn’t talked about this but now I want a pardon.” He said that publicly. You could see this coming. But each time one of these happens it’s very striking. This is arguably, not by prison time, but probably the biggest criminal in the world of crypto or certainly one of the most important figures and someone who pled guilty to a favorable deal because he saw the writing on the wall and his company was supposed to pay the biggest fine in U.S. corporate history, or at least close to it. It’s not just that he pardons him, it’s that they’re already in business together. So, the fact that it could continue to be so blatant, so brazen without any checks on it, is pretty troubling.
Krugman: The Gilded Age was pretty long, so there was a lot of corruption but it wasn’t ever quite as brazen as what we’re seeing now.
Silverman: I think also because we all know about it. Maybe some of these things were reported on well at the time, 120 years ago, but you can see this stuff happening today. You can even go on the blockchain and look at some of the data and see some of these bad actors paying World Liberty Financial and knowing that 70% of that money is going to go into Trump’s pocket. So, it’s very proudly trumpeted.
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/gilded-rage-talking-with-jacob-silv
erman
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Trump told his usual lie that the free and fair 2020 election was stolen from him. He lied again that grocery prices “are down” even after CBS’ Norah O’Donnell informed him they are up. He declared once more that there is now “no inflation,” though there certainly is, and then that inflation is 2% or “even less than 2%,” though the most recent available Consumer Price Index figure is now up to 3%.
The president also deployed multiple other fictional numbers during his exchanges with O’Donnell, which were recorded Friday and released by CBS on Sunday.
He falsely claimed “$17 trillion” is being invested in the US “right now,” though the $17 trillion figure is nearly double the White House’s own wildly inflated figure.
He falsely claimed each alleged drug boat the US has attacked in recent weeks “kills 25,000 Americans,” though experts note this figure plainly does not make sense.
He falsely claimed some recent former presidents invoked the Insurrection Act “28 times,” though no individual president has invoked it on more than six occasions with this record set by President Ulysses S. Grant in the 1800s.
He falsely claimed he has ended “eight wars,” though his list includes two situations that were not wars at all and at least one war that continues.
He falsely claimed CBS aired an edited interview with Trump’s 2024 opponent Kamala Harris “two days” before the election, though it was actually more than four full weeks before Election Day.
He falsely claimed former President Joe Biden gave $350 billion in aid to Ukraine (the real number is well under half that) and allowed in “25 million” migrants (the real number here is well under half that, too).
And Trump made a variety of additional false claims on several subjects, including the government shutdown, the artificial intelligence boom, tariffs, his first impeachment and his former legal battle with “60 Minutes” itself.
CBS posted a full transcript of the interview, which O’Donnell said ran for nearly 90 minutes, and a nearly 73-minute video; it aired about 28 minutes on television.
Here is a more detailed breakdown of Trump’s claims.
https://www.cnn.com/2025/11/03/politics/fact-check-trump-cbs-interview
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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President Donald Trump's administration is creating detailed plans to send U.S. troops and intelligence officers into Mexico to combat drug cartels, NBC News reported Monday, citing two U.S. officials and two former senior U.S. officials.
https://www.newsweek.com/trump-admin-us-troops-mexico-combat-cartels-1
0982742
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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