Trump Is Destroying Everything He Touches
POSTED BY: JJ
UPDATED: Friday, September 11, 2026 21:58
VIEWED: 85257
PAGE 108 of 137
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Trump Is Using a Sacred Power for Depraved Purposes
The president’s pardons encourage public officials to place personal interests ahead of the interests of the people.
By Liz Oyer | December 15, 2025
Liz Oyer served as Pardon Attorney for the Department of Justice from 2022 to 2025.
When Donald Trump pardoned U.S. Representative Henry Cuellar earlier this month, he added to a spate of clemencies that has directly attacked a founding principle of America’s democratic republic: the expectation that elected representatives will serve as fiduciaries of the public trust. Cuellar became the 11th elected American official to receive clemency from President Trump this year. Other presidents have shied away from using the pardon power to protect public officials. Joe Biden issued individual pardons to just two state-level elected officials, but not for crimes that occurred while they held public office. Neither Barack Obama nor George W. Bush pardoned any elected officials during their respective eight years in office.
Trump, by contrast, has pardoned both well-known figures such as Cuellar, accused of taking $600,000 in bribes from foreign companies; Representative George Santos of New York, who defrauded his constituents in virtually every conceivable way; and Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich, who tried to sell a U.S. Senate seat; and lesser characters, such as a state official in Nevada who stole money from a police memorial fund, an elected sheriff in Virginia who sold badges for cash, and a former Tennessee state legislator who defrauded taxpayers to win contracts for his business. Cuellar’s pardon came just days after Trump’s unprecedented pardon of a foreign head of state—former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernandez—who was convicted of corrupting his own government from the top down by operating it as a narco-state. Trump pardoned at least 10 public officials in his first term in office.
Read: Trump grants clemency to one of the world’s richest men
Since Gerald Ford’s pardon of Richard Nixon, which prompted swift public backlash, pardons for official corruption have been rare, until now. The Justice Department—whose Office of the Pardon Attorney advises the president on pardons—has long considered crimes involving a breach of the public trust to be among the most serious offenses on the books. That office, which I led from 2022 until March of this year, has rarely if ever recommended pardons for such betrayals. In effect, Trump’s pardons are licensing elected officials, at all levels of government, to profit off the powers entrusted to them by the American people.
Trump’s agenda transcends partisan politics. In addition to Cuellar and Blagojevich (who recently visited the Justice Department), Trump has pardoned a third Democratic politician this year: Alexander Sittenfeld, a Cincinnati city councilman convicted of bribery and attempted extortion. Elected officials on both sides have also benefited from dismissals of prosecutions, sweetheart plea deals, and the dismantling of the Justice Department’s Public Integrity Section, a specialized unit created to target public corruption. Trump’s goal is much more ambitious than boosting his political allies—he is aiming to fundamentally reshape the American system of governance to make room for graft. Such self-enrichment is antithetical to a government that is supposed to serve the people.
Trump, though, has moved swiftly to implement a different vision for American government. He is engineering a return to a patronage system, in which pardons feature prominently. The Justice Department used to rely on merit-based guidelines, rooted in considerations of remorse, rehabilitation, and redemption. Trump has abandoned those, favoring instead a transactional approach. Pardon seekers once applied for relief through the Office of the Pardon Attorney, a process that can be lengthy and cumbersome due to rigorous vetting requirements. Today, wealthy and powerful pardon hopefuls are funneling their requests straight to the president’s desk by way of well-c
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Maybe somebody would take your claims seriously if you hadn't posted 20,000 negative articles about Trump over the last decade.
Nobody cares. Shut the fuck up, stupid.
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T 
Pollster: Americans OVERWHELMINGLY believe country is on the WRONG TRACK
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Thanks to Trump’s Extortionist Immigration Policies, Rural America Won’t Have Enough Doctors
Affordable Care Act subsidies are expiring anyway, so what’s the difference, right?
By Charles P. Pierce | Dec 15, 2025 4:05 PM EST
https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a69731828/doctors-rural
-america-trump/
Among its more obvious faults—and there is no bigger one than the vicious clowns the president has appointed to run it—the administration’s toxic spitball approach to immigration is almost completely incoherent. This administration is deliberately oblivious to consequences anyway, be they intended or unintended. However, its policies on H-1B visas are doing real-world damage in many different places. From The Washington Post:
The overworked kidney doctors in this small town were supposed to get reinforcement this fall with the arrival of a new colleague from India. Patients already had appointments scheduled with the incoming nephrologist. Then the Trump administration demanded that companies pay a $100,000 visa fee to bring highly skilled workers from abroad, including doctors and medical professionals urgently needed in health care deserts. Nephrology Associates of the Carolinas could no longer afford to sponsor the Indian kidney specialist, and it has not found an American well suited for the job. After President Donald Trump signed the executive order restricting H-1B visas in September, soaring costs are roiling rural health care facilities that have long struggled to find staff. The fee increase for visa applicants, coupled with broader crackdowns on legal pathways for foreign-born workers, threatens a growing industry and jeopardizes patients who need timely care, according to labor experts and immigration lawyers.
It is easy to say, Okay, rural voters, stop voting for morons and mountebanks who couldn’t care less if you sicken and die. I’ve done it myself, many times. But kidney patients in Shelby are just as much in need of medical treatment as kidney patients in Wellesley or the Hamptons. And to have their health ruined by the administration’s frankly extortionist H-1B policy is a disgrace about which none of us should be blithe.
These legal workers fill crucial gaps in rural and underserved regions, according to medical associations and health care researchers. Iowa, North Dakota and West Virginia—states that overwhelmingly voted for Trump in the last three elections—lead the nation with the highest percentage of physicians who hold H-1B visas, according to a study published this year. Last year, the percentage of H-1B-sponsored doctors in rural counties was nearly twice the share in urban ones, according to research published in JAMA in October. Impoverished counties also had a significantly higher percentage of H-1B physicians, said lead author Michael Liu, a resident physician at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. Liu himself works on a trainee visa from Canada and hopes to eventually remain in the United States on an H-1B visa.
With the subsidies under the Affordable Care Act expiring, most of these folks aren’t going to be able to afford to see a doctor anyway, so what’s the difference, right? That this county can’t—and won’t—be able to figure out what every other industrialized nation figured out years ago continues to amaze and astonish.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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What The US Is Doing To Ukraine Is Far Worse Than Yalta
Phillips P. OBrien
Dec 16, 2025
https://phillipspobrien.substack.com/p/what-the-us-is-doing-to-ukraine
-is
If history does not exactly repeat itself (and it does not) then it does often rhyme. What we are seeing from the Trump administration is unprecedented in its betrayal of Ukraine. The US is now acting like an agent of Vladimir Putin’s dictatorship in bullying democratic Ukraine to surrender parts of it territory, a wealth of natural resources and millions of its people to Putin’s brutal rule. The USA is not negotiating between Ukraine and Russia, it is putting enormous pressure on Ukraine to agree to a deal that might appeal to Putin. This is what I mean when I say that the US is now the enemy of freedom. It wants to strengthen dictatorships at the expense of democracies.
However there are some interesting historical comparisons that people are making—the rhymes as it were. The one most commonly thrown around in US history is Franklin Roosevelt at Yalta. In this case the US supposedly accepted the expansion of brutal totalitarian rule over countries that wished to be their allies. Aha, we are told, Trump is nothing new. The USA has in the past sold out possible allies into dictatorial rule.
Btw, before Donald Trump took over the Republican Party, you could reliably expect to hear any Democratic attempt to reach a compromise deal described by Republicans as a potential sell-out of the type Franklin Roosevelt supposedly did at the Yalta Conference (February 4-11, 1945). Ronald Reagan, for example, was a constant critic of Roosevelt’s actions at Yalta, with examples ranging from the 1950s through his two terms in office.
The widely shared Republican critique was that the Roosevelt too easily trusted Stalin, deferred to the USSR and as a result consigned half of Europe to totalitarian rule for generations.
So it is rather bitterly ironic today that it is the GOP, after decades of attacking FDR for “betraying” Poland, that is using all of America’s might to betray and weaken a democratic Ukraine. That being said, what Trump is doing is far far worse than anything FDR was accused of. To understand just how large the differences are, I will start with a short primer on Yalta and FDR.
Roosevelt and Yalta
What happened factually at Yalta is actually not an area of disagreement. Roosevelt went to the conference, in the Crimea, with Stalin and Churchill to try and work out some growing problems between the Big Three over the shape of post-war Europe. When it came to Eastern Europe, and in particular Poland, FDR wanted to convince Stalin to allow some democratic influence into a new Polish government. He was faced with a great dilemma on Poland. He very much would have wanted a free Poland with a pro-western alignment, but Poland was entirely occupied by Stalin’s Red Army, and it was Stalin who was establishing the facts on the ground.
In particular Stalin refused to have anything to do with the pre-war Polish government (which had been recognized by the USA) and had installed a new pro-Communist “Lublin” government which was preparing to do his bidding.
Much more at https://phillipspobrien.substack.com/p/what-the-us-is-doing-to-ukraine
-is
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
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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.
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Thanks to Trump’s Extortionist Immigration Policies, Rural America Won’t Have Enough Doctors
I guess maybe we should start giving scholarships to young white men who would become doctors again, instead of giving them to white women who get nothing but gender studies degrees, the Chinese and Indian immigrants, and minorities here who can't even read or write, huh?
Sounds like a problem that you created.
America. The Land of the Over-Educated Idiots.
We've got enough women with HR qualifications that we could have an HR director hovering over every single person who is actually working for a living.
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