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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Behind the Curtain: The most unprecedented presidency in 250 years
By Jim VandeHei, Mike Allen | Sept 23, 2025
https://www.axios.com/2025/09/23/trump-unprecedented-presidency-behind
-the-curtain
Not since America's founding 250 years ago has a U.S. president expanded power — and punished critics — in more unprecedented ways than Donald J. Trump.
1. Executive power: Trump has declared nine national emergencies in his first eight months in office, stretching the definition of "emergency" in creative and aggressive ways.
• Historical analogy: Since 1980, presidents have declared an average of seven in a four-year term. Trump's 200+ executive orders fall far short of the thousands issued by FDR (a wartime president elected to four terms), but Trump's pace—142 in his first 100 days—is the highest on record.
• New precedent: Future presidents can use loosely defined "emergencies" as a routine tool to bypass Congress and unlock extraordinary powers governing trade, immigration, mineral extraction and foreign disputes.
2. Free-press crackdown: Trump has waged the most aggressive government campaign against mainstream media in modern U.S. history —stripping funding from public outlets, pushing the FCC to revoke broadcast licenses over negative coverage, and personally suing CBS/ Paramount, the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times while in office.
• Historical analogy: No modern president has deployed such a mix of lawsuits and regulatory muscle. Even Richard Nixon, who targeted the Washington Post and CBS through the IRS and FCC, never sued multiple networks directly.
• New precedent: Future presidents can use lawsuits, regulatory threats, and funding pressure to bring independent media to heel.
3. Seizing congressional purse strings: Trump has tried to freeze or redirect billions in congressionally appropriated funds, from public health to foreign aid to university research.
• Historical analogy: The closest precedent is Nixon, who tried to "impound" funds in the early 1970s. Congress responded by passing the Impoundment Control Act of 1974—which the Trump White House claims is unconstitutional—to stop presidents from unilaterally withholding money. No president since has attempted impoundments at this scale, or with such open defiance of Congress and the courts.
• New precedent: Future presidents can treat Congress's "power of the purse" as optional, withholding or redirecting funds to pressure states, institutions or foreign governments.
4. Tariffs: Trump has effectively seized the authority over tariffs that the Constitution gives to Congress, wielding tariffs to reshape global trade and punish countries for political or economic disputes.
• Historical analogy: The last sweeping tariff shock was Smoot–Hawley, which President Hoover signed in 1930 and wound up worsening the Great Depression. Since then, presidents have used delegated powers narrowly — including President Reagan's selective tariffs on Japanese motorcycles and semiconductors in the 1980s to try to protect American manufacturing. Trump is the first to use emergency authorities to impose broad tariffs without new congressional legislation.
• New precedent: Future presidents can bypass Congress to unilaterally set tariff policy, erasing one of the legislature's core constitutional powers.
5. Overriding the Constitution: Trump issued an executive order seeking to eliminate birthright citizenship — a right guaranteed in the 14th Amendment — for the children of unauthorized immigrants.
• Historical analogy: Past constitutional showdowns have come during war or insurrection: Abraham Lincoln suspended habeas corpus in the Civil War. FDR interned Japanese Americans during World War II. In each case, presidents acted under extraordinary wartime claims of ne
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Aaron Rupar @atrupar.com
Q: Officials say the suspect in the DC shooting was vetted & it came up clean
TRUMP: He went cuckoo. He went nuts. There was no vetting
Q: Actually, your DoJ Inspector General says there was a thorough vetting of Afghans. So why blame Biden?
TRUMP: You're just asking questions because you're a stupid person
Video of a confused and dishonest Trump saying this is here: https://bsky.app/profile/atrupar.com/post/3m6nnmy5kzv2q
Even in the face of a tragedy that he caused, Trump can't take a moment to act like an adult.
REPORTER: Do you plan to attend [Guardsmen] Sarah's funeral?
TRUMP: I haven't thought about it yet, but it's certainly something I can conceive of. I love West Virginia. You know, I won West Virginia by one of the biggest margins of any president anywhere.
Trump couldn't, even for one moment, just be a decent person and not make it about himself.
Lord have mercy and may her memory be eternal. He is truly the most demented malignant narcissist alive. What a sick man.
https://imgur.com/gallery/petulant-man-child-y9Bt3iR
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 campaign of retribution: At least 470 targets and counting
Reuters documented at least 470 targets of retribution under Trump’s leadership – from federal employees and prosecutors to universities and media outlets. The list illuminates the sweeping effort by the president and his administration to punish dissent and reshape the government.
By Peter Eisler, Ned Parker, Linda So and Joseph Tanfani
Filed Nov. 26, 2025, 11 a.m. GMT
https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-trump-retribut
ion-tracker/
In his second term, Donald Trump has turned a campaign pledge to punish political opponents into a guiding principle of governance.
What began as a provocative rallying cry in March 2023 – “I am your retribution” – has hardened into a sweeping campaign of retaliation against perceived enemies, reshaping federal policy, staffing and law enforcement.
A tally by Reuters reveals the scale: At least 470 people, organizations and institutions have been targeted for retribution since Trump took office – an average of more than one a day. Some were singled out for punishment; others swept up in broader purges of perceived enemies. The count excludes foreign individuals, institutions and governments, as well as federal employees dismissed as part of force reductions.
The Trump vengeance campaign fuses personal vendettas with a drive for cultural and political dominance, Reuters found. His administration has wielded executive power to punish perceived foes – firing prosecutors who investigated his bid to overturn the 2020 election, ordering punishments of media organizations seen as hostile, penalizing law firms tied to opponents, and sidelining civil servants who question his policies. Many of those actions face legal challenges.
At the same time, Trump and his appointees have used the government to enforce ideology: ousting military leaders deemed “woke,” slashing funds for cultural institutions held to be divisive, and freezing research grants to universities that embraced diversity initiatives.
Reuters reached out to every person and institution that Trump or his subordinates singled out publicly for retribution, and reviewed hundreds of official orders, directives and public records. The result: the most comprehensive accounting yet of his campaign of payback.
The analysis revealed two broad groups of people and organizations targeted for retaliation.
Much more at https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-trump-retribut
ion-tracker/
. . . Nixon’s plotting remained a secret until the Watergate hearings exposed it, turning his enemies list into a symbol of presidential abuse. The secrecy reflected a political culture in which retaliation was whispered, not broadcast, and where institutional checks blunted many of Nixon’s ambitions.
Trump’s approach reverses that pattern, historians say. He has openly named his perceived enemies, urged prosecutions in public and framed vengeance as a campaign vow. Some say today’s “enemies list” politics are in that sense farther-reaching than Nixon’s, possibly signaling a shift toward a normalization of retribution in American political life.
Corey Brettschneider, a political science professor at Brown University who has written a book on power grabs by American presidents, said Nixon was ultimately checked and forced to resign by Congress, including members of his own Republican Party. “That's just not happening now,” he said.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Grow up and get a hobby bitch.
If you don't stop talking about Trump, you will never win an election again.
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Be Nice. Don't be a dick. 
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Quote:What is clearly the agenda? I mean, this is not a normal presidency. This is not normal politics in the United States. What we have is a group of would-be authoritarians trying to speedrun a transition into one-party, non-democratic rule. It’s clear that the goal was to be reached before anybody had a chance really to stand up to them. It was to end US democracy more or less permanently. I mean, that’s not hyperbole. That’s just where we are. And the good news is, it does not seem to be going well, or at least it’s not going according to schedule. People like Orban in Hungary or Putin in his early years had broad public support during their extended takeovers. Trump’s support has cratered. If you had doubts about the polling, these elections in New Jersey and Virginia that we had early in November said, oh, no, the polling is right, if anything, it’s understating how much the public now loathes Donald Trump. Now, that’s not necessarily enough. There are still a lot of craven politicians and craven institutions. At least the momentum has slowed. Now, whether we can actually turn this around, ask me in a couple of years.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Grow up and get a hobby bitch.
If you don't stop talking about Trump, you will never win an election again.
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Be Nice. Don't be a dick.
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/another-talk-with-martin-wolf
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Isn't Trump indiscriminately executing people for drug trafficking? But Trump to pardon ex-Honduras leader serving drug trafficking sentence in US
Hernández was convicted in 2024 of accepting millions in bribes to protect cocaine shipments
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/nov/28/trump-pardon-honduras-
hernandez-drugs
Donald Trump has said he will grant a pardon to Juan Orlando Hernández, the former president of Honduras who is serving a 45-year prison sentence in the US on drug trafficking and weapons charges.
“I will be granting a Full and Complete Pardon to Former President Juan Orlando Hernandez who has been, according to many people that I greatly respect, treated very harshly and unfairly,” Trump said on Friday in a post on Truth Social.
In March of last year, Hernández was convicted in US courts of accepting millions of dollars in bribes to protect US-bound cocaine shipments belonging to traffickers he once publicly proclaimed to combat. Speaking during closing arguments at the trial, assistant US attorney Jacob Gutwillig said Hernández had “paved a cocaine superhighway to the United States”.
Hernández was sentenced last June and called his conviction wrongful. He had served two terms as the leader of the country of roughly 10 million people, and was considered a top US ally in Central America, particularly by the Trump administration.
Trump’s announcement to pardon Hernández comes even as the Republican leader casts himself as being tough on combating drug problems.
Trump’s administration designated multiple drug cartels as “foreign terrorist organizations” and used claims of a “war on drugs” to justify deadly airstrikes on vessels across the Caribbean and Pacific. These strikes have prompted the United Nations and other humanitarian organizations to condemn the operations as extrajudicial executions.
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 is clearly the agenda?
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Grow up and get a hobby bitch.
If you don't stop talking about Trump, you will never win an election again.
--------------------------------------------------
Be Nice. Don't be a dick.
You know everything, Paul. You tell us.
Why do you still listen to this retard, retard?
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Be Nice. Don't be a dick.
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Quote:Is executing a drug dealer without a trial illegal? Not according to Trump or Trumptards I have asked, but asking a lawyer gets the opposite answer. Trumptards mainly listen to the distorted voices howling madly in their heads, not to experts:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
You know everything, Paul. You tell us.
Why do you still listen to this retard, retard?
Statement of the “Former JAGs Working Group” on Media Reports of Pentagon “No Quarter” Orders in Caribbean Boat Strikes
29 November 2025
https://www.justsecurity.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/11/former-jag-wor
king-group-no-quarter-statement.pdf
Yesterday, the Washington Post and CNN reported that the Secretary of Defense personally issued orders to “kill everybody” aboard a civilian vessel suspected of narcotrafficking. The attack on 2 September 2025 targeted a vessel carrying 11 civilians and, allegedly, an unknown quantity of drugs. The first strike resulted in near-total destruction of the vessel. However, two survivors were apparently observed via surveillance video clinging to wreckage, whereupon the commander directing the operation ordered a second strike. The second strike killed both survivors.
The Former JAGs Working Group unanimously considers both the giving and the execution of these orders, if true, to constitute war crimes, murder, or both. Our group was established in February 2025 in response to the SECDEF’s firing of the Army and Air Force Judge Advocates General and his systematic dismantling of the military’s legal guardrails. Had those guardrails been in place, we are confident they would have prevented these crimes.
. . .
Again, the bottom line is that, since orders to kill survivors of an attack at sea are “patently illegal,” anyone who issues or follows such orders can and should be prosecuted for war crimes, murder, or both.
_______________
Drug Boat Strikes Spark Debate Over Legal Justification
Nov. 26, 2025 | By Greg Hadley
https://www.airandspaceforces.com/drug-boat-strikes-spark-debate-over-
legal-justification/
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:Is executing a drug dealer without a trial illegal?
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
You know everything, Paul. You tell us.
Why do you still listen to this retard, retard?
They don't have any Constitutional protections. They aren't my people. They are bringing harm to my people. Despite the dangers you're so concerned about, they still choose to risk those dangers to bring harm to my people while making profit off of them.
Fuck them.
You find yourself not only on the opposite side of logic, reason and self-preservation once again, but your toxic empathy is going to get your stupid, Liberal ass killed one day. Nobody gives a shit if you're willing to risk your own ass for them.
By all means. If you really give a fuck about them, then you pack up your Billions, Mr. Oil Tycoon, and you go take your morally-superior ass over there and you fight for them.
If not? Shut the fuck up.
We're all fucking tired of hearing any of your bullshit, and you are the reason why your Political Party is dead and will never recover.
As for Paul, I'm simply pointing out that Mr. Krugman has not had a correct prediction or anything worth putting to paper in at least 5 years. And yet after hundreds of posts of stupid shit he's said and failed predictions he's made being reposted by you on the regular, cataloging all of his failures over the years all without ever saying anything that remotely resembles the truth, here we are.
Fuck Paul Krugman. And Fuck You, Second.
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Be Nice. Don't be a dick.
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