Do you feel like the winds of change are blowing today too?
POSTED BY: 6ixStringJack
UPDATED: Sunday, September 6, 2026 16:05
VIEWED: 185382
PAGE 467 of 479
Quote:I understand that Trump is a thief, a liar, and the leader of America's Nazi Party. If Hitler had stolen this much money, his own people would have assassinated him:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Oh... I think you misunderstand me.
Records reveal a $600,000,000 estimate for Trump’s ballroom project, with half from taxpayers
An internal cost estimate in March by the project’s contractor ran $200 million more than Trump has said publicly and counters his claims that no taxpayer money will be spent.
June 16, 2026 at 6:00 a.m. EDT
By Sarah Blaskey and Jonathan O'Connell
https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/2026/06/16/records-revea
l-600m-estimate-trumps-ballroom-project-with-half-taxpayers/
Five months after the demolition of the White House’s East Wing, President Donald Trump claimed that the project to construct a massive ballroom and a bunker in its place would cost up to $400 million and that private donors would pay for all of it.
“This is taxpayer-free. We have no taxpayer putting up 10 cents,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office on March 31, describing the project as including bomb shelters and major medical facilities.
But a detailed project summary prepared for the White House by the contractor more than three weeks before Trump’s comments estimated the total construction cost at $600 million — with more than half coming from taxpayers, according to a copy of the contractor estimate obtained by The Washington Post.
By the time Trump made his comments in March, the federal government had already approved more than a dozen payments to the contractor overseeing the work, Clark Construction, totaling tens of millions of dollars in public funds, according to a log of the contractor’s invoices obtained by The Post.
Since first announcing the East Wing project last July, Trump has repeatedly said that the price tag would not exceed $400 million and that private donations routed through a nonprofit would cover its entire cost. At other times, he has said that the Secret Service and the military would contribute security enhancements, without elaborating on the price of those upgrades.
Multiple project summaries provided to the White House by Clark Construction show that internal cost estimates have been significantly higher than administration officials have acknowledged in public comments or court filings. They also show that the work was projected to rely heavily on taxpayer dollars from the moment it was announced.
The White House did not answer questions about the internal cost estimates or taxpayer funding.
“President Trump and generous American patriots are funding the ballroom to the tune of approximately $400 million, which will be a secure and appropriate venue for Presidents for generations to come,” White House spokesman Davis Ingle wrote in a statement.
A spokesperson for McLean, Virginia-based Clark Construction said all project details are confidential and referred questions to the White House.
The Post obtained six cost estimates for the entire East Wing project, dated from July 2025 to March of this year, that show an increasing price tag as well as the expected sources of funding. Those records, as well as invoice logs and correspondence, provide the clearest accounting yet of Trump’s most ambitious construction project in the nation’s capital. The project is deeply unpopular with most Americans, and even some Republican lawmakers have balked at funding it.
When the White House first announced the plan to build a ballroom on July 31, 2025, it said in a news release that contributions from Trump and “other patriot donors” would cover the cost of the project, which it said would be $200 million. The White House added that the “United States Secret Service will provide the necessary security enhancements and modifications.” There was no mention of an underground military bunker.
The records obtained by The Post show that the administration and Clark worked hand in hand starting last June to determine the scope
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Donald Trump Is Finally Cracking Up for Real
His recent tirades confirmed what more than half of America now believes: The president is mentally unfit. How will we survive two and a half more years of this? And what’s he got in store for us?
By Molly Jong-Fast, Michael Tomasky | May 21, 2026
https://newrepublic.com/article/210114/donald-trump-cracking-up-mental
ly-unfit
Angelo Carusone and Aaron Rupar share a distinction that we imagine many Americans would happily cede to them: They have likely watched more Donald Trump rallies, speeches, and press briefings than any other living Americans. Carusone is the chairman and president of Media Matters for America, the liberal media watchdog group; Rupar is an independent journalist who fires off dozens of posts a day about Trump to his two million followers across Bluesky and X. Carusone reckons he’s watched around 650 Trump events over the course of a decade. Rupar estimates that, while he may have missed a few events in that time, he has endured “probably like 98 percent of his speeches and rallies.” And both closely monitor the president’s social media posts.
So they’re pretty well-qualified to assess the question: Has Trump deteriorated over the years?
“The past year, I will say it’s accelerated more than anything,” Carusone said. “It’s really noticeable.” For starters, he said, Trump simply sounds different: “There’s a lack of crispness in his articulation.” And at rallies, which Trump is doing very infrequently these days, “He just reads the room less effectively. He’s less nimble … less responsive to where the crowd is.”
Rupar sees things a bit differently. “He’s always been extremely incoherent, very untruthful, impulsive,” Rupar said. “So I don’t really think any of those core things are new. I just think that it breaks through now more than it did in the past.” Even so, Rupar counted himself surprised, he said, on the morning of Easter Sunday, when someone DM’d him Trump’s latest Truth Social post. “And my very first thought when I saw it was, ‘That’s the craziest thing he’s ever posted,’” Rupar said.
The post he’s referring to is the first of two that, even by Trump’s standards, will live in presidential infamy. For the record: “Tuesday will be Power Plant Day, and Bridge Day, all wrapped up in one, in Iran. There will be nothing like it!!! Open the Fuckin’ Strait, you crazy bastards, or you’ll be living in Hell - JUST WATCH! Praise be to Allah. President DONALD J. TRUMP.” It was followed two days later by the post Trump opened with the sentence: “A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again.”
These posts were a turning point: They lit a match that started a bonfire of new speculation about Trump’s mental state. It consumed social media and cable news; by the next week, it made A1 of The New York Times. What was happening here? The man was once desperate and insecure enough to label himself a “very stable genius”; that was pathetic enough, but that was eight long years ago. Where is he now? The day between those two posts brought the traditional White House Easter Egg Roll, which saw Trump surrounded by children and regaling them with the story of … the Easter Bunny? The Last Supper? Christ’s Resurrection? Try again. Joe Biden’s autopen. To a bunch of six-year-olds.
Oh, and speaking of Christ … that moment on April 12, when Trump reposted an AI-generated image of himself as Jesus, on the same day he was picking a fight with the pope, was a little much even for his admirers. He took it down and, laughably, tried to say it was an image of him as a doctor. That very night and into the next morning, Democratic commentator Harry Sisson monitored Trump’s social media activity:
9:49pm AI Jesus photo
9:50pm Trump tower on moon
10:10pm dumb meme
10:32pm news clip
10:53pm news clip
12:43am announcing Hormuz blockade
2:35am article about Biden
2:36am article on naval blockade
2:37am article on [now former] Representative Eric Swalwell
2:37am posted the same article
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Wall Street Journal BOOKSHELF | By Barton Swaim | June 15, 2026 4:05 pm ET
‘Communion’ Review: The Veep’s Progress
JD Vance recounts his conversion to Catholicism and explains what he calls a ‘Christian approach to economics.’
Harper, 304 pages, $35
https://www.wsj.com/arts-culture/books/communion-review-the-veeps-prog
ress-358f0ac2
JD Vance’s intellectual evolution continues apace. In “Hillbilly Elegy” (2016) he lamented the social pathologies he witnessed as a child in small-town Kentucky and Ohio—drug addiction, domestic violence, idleness and dependency—but concluded that “these problems were not created by governments or corporations or anyone else. We created them, and only we can fix them.” As a political figure, first as U.S. senator and currently as vice president, Mr. Vance now holds that governments and corporations did create them, namely by free trade and offshoring. As for the state’s role in welfare dependency, Mr. Vance no longer has much to say about it.
These changes of mind more or less tracked his altered views on Donald Trump, which went from scathing in 2016, when Mr. Vance had a book to sell, to laudatory in 2022, when he needed the former president’s endorsement in the Ohio Senate race.
Mr. Vance’s second memoir, “Communion,” chronicles the evolution of his religious views: from the Evangelical-Pentecostal faith of his early years, through the halfhearted atheism of his 20s, to his conversion to Roman Catholicism in 2019 at age 35. The book is part religious memoir, part campaign book. Roughly the latter half articulates Mr. Vance’s updated thoughts on foreign policy and economics, with Christianity making appearances at opportune moments; readers familiar with books by ambitious politicians will assume the author of this one has an eye on 2028.
Mr. Vance has no ill words for the unlearned fundamentalism in which his grandmother raised him. He credits the small-town nondenominational congregants of his early years with living out the kind of communitarian values the rest of the world professes to value but mostly doesn’t. You soon get the feeling, however, that the Bible-carrying countryfolk of Mr. Vance’s early years serve mainly as a foil for the educated elites he so detests. “From the professional pipeline I encountered in law school to the social media mob of the 2016 election,” he writes, “the intensity of social control was far greater among our elites than anything I’d seen in a Pentecostal or Southern Baptist church back home.”
More than once Mr. Vance scorns elite “strivers” and purports to feel shame that he once tried hard to gain admittance to their circles. “I wanted to win the race because other people wanted to win the race,” he recalls of his feverish attempt to attend an elite law school. “In a sense, I won that race and was admitted to Yale Law School.” But it all came at a price. “Without realizing it, I had become addicted to winning the competitions other people set for me.” On the next page, Mr. Vance uses the term “humblebrag,” but about other people, not himself.
You might have thought the esteem in which he holds working folk, together with his disdain for elites who presume to know what other people need, would have led Mr. Vance to appreciate laissez-faire economics, presuming as it does that ordinary people generally know how to use their own resources more wisely than faraway eggheads. And maybe he almost did plump for free markets at one time. Early in the book, in a passage I’m tempted to think he forgot to cut, he makes the point that religious questions often involve hidden complexities. Mr. Vance draws a comparison with minimum-wage laws, which, he notes, seem like a great idea but “could do more harm than good” by dissuading employers from hiring more workers. His lesson: “The complexity counsels some humility in the face of difficult questions.”
That bit appears in Chapter 2. By Chapter 11, “A Dismal Science,” Mr. Vance has cast humility aside. Straw men populate the book’s later chapters, particularly on economic questions. He e
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If Trump signs, he will have formalized his surrender to Iran. But he is known for breaking treaties, so his signature isn't final.
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Read the 14-Point Draft Memorandum Between the US and Iran
(Bloomberg) -- The US and Iran are expected to formally sign a memorandum of understanding on June 19 in Switzerland, paving the way for 60 days of talks aimed at ending their war for good and putting strict new limits on Iran's nuclear program.
Below is the text of the 14-point draft memorandum, as seen by Bloomberg News.
By Jonathan Tirone, Daniel Flatley and Josh Wingrove
Tue, June 16, 2026 at 5:09 PM CDT
1. The Islamic Republic of Iran and the United States, together with their allies in the current war, declare upon the signing of this Memorandum of Understanding an immediate and permanent end to the war on all fronts, including Lebanon, and undertake that from now on they will not launch any hostile action against each other, and will refrain from the threat or use of force against each other. The final agreement will confirm the provisions of this Article and the remaining Articles.
2. The Islamic Republic of Iran and the United States undertake to respect each other's sovereignty and territorial integrity, and to refrain from interfering in each other's internal affairs.
3. The Islamic Republic of Iran and the United States undertake to negotiate and reach a final agreement within a maximum period of 60 days, extendable by mutual consent.
4. Immediately upon the signing of this Memorandum of Understanding, the United States Lift the naval blockade and prevent any interference or obstruction against the Islamic Republic of Iran, and restore traffic within a maximum of 30 days to its full capacity; the traffic of ships shall be proportional to the pre-war volume of traffic on the part of the Islamic Republic of Iran. The United States also undertakes to withdraw its forces from the surrounding areas within 30 days after the final agreement.
5. Upon signing this Memorandum of Understanding, the Islamic Republic of Iran will immediately take steps to ensure that the movement of merchant ships from the Persian Gulf to the Sea of ??Oman and vice versa is resumed within 30 days to the pre-war volume, taking into account the need for the removal of technical obstacles and the neutralization of mines by Iran.
6. The United States undertakes, together with its regional partners, to create a comprehensive plan agreed upon by both parties for the rehabilitation and economic development of the Islamic Republic of Iran, While ensuring financing of at least $300 billion. The implementation mechanism of this plan, as part of the final agreement, will be formulated within 60 days.
7. The United States commits to ending, on a schedule to be agreed upon as part of the final agreement, all types of sanctions currently facing the Islamic Republic of Iran, including resolutions of the United Nations Security Council and the Board of Governors of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), and all unilateral U.S. sanctions, both primary and secondary.
8. The Islamic Republic of Iran reiterates that it will never produce nuclear weapons. The Islamic Republic of Iran and the United States have agreed that the fate of enriched material and the fate of all other mutually agreed nuclear-related issues, including Iran's nuclear needs, will be adequately addressed in a final agreement; the final agreement will confirm the provisions of this Article.
9. The Islamic Republic of Iran and the United States agree that, pending a final agreement, they will maintain the status quo: Iran will maintain the status quo on its nuclear program, and the United States will not impose new sanctions on Iran or strengthen its forces in the region.
10. The United States undertakes that immediately after the signing of this Memorandum of Understanding, and until the date of the lifting of sanctions, the
Trump Does Not Understand the War He Lost
The president’s comments at the G7 summit revealed that he doesn’t understand the war he started—or the words that come out of his own mouth.
By Tom Nichols | June 16, 2026, 6:42 PM ET
https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/2026/06/trump-g7-comments-misu
nderstsand-middle-east/687569/
Donald Trump arrived in France yesterday for this morning’s G7 summit and promptly confirmed America’s capitulation to Iran. Instead of merely repeating the outlines of what looks to be a terrible peace deal, however, Trump made a series of statements so bizarre, even by his usual standards, that they raise the question of whether the president still understands the words that come out of his own mouth.
The president began with a classic Trumpian move, daring his listeners to forget today what they knew yesterday. Just this winter, Trump had promised the Iranian people that the tyrants who ruled them would be gone. But now? “I never cared about regime change,” he told reporters, waving away his failure to achieve a primary strategic goal by denying that it had ever been a goal at all.
Things got a little weirder, however, when he described the Iranians who have stepped in to replace the regime leaders killed in U.S. strikes: “We’re dealing with people that I think are very rational people. And they were nice to deal with.”
“They were strong people, smart people,” he added. And then he dropped this remarkable claim: “They’re not radicalized, and they’re, you know, looking to help their country.”
This definitely not-radicalized group that Trump seems to like includes the new supreme leader, Mojtaba Khamenei (whose father, wife, and son were killed by U.S. strikes), and the still-standing Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, all of whom have shown no compunction about lashing out in any direction during Trump’s “cease-fire,” the make-believe pause in the war during which no one actually ceased firing.
Trump’s description of the current regime in Tehran as a bunch of swell guys was brewed in a heavy-duty vat of wishful thinking. It’s an extreme version of Trump’s tendency, when he’s been outplayed by powerful enemies, to describe his opponents as basically reasonable people. (He has done the same over the years with dictators and autocrats in North Korea, Russia, and China, among other countries.) This is his way of assuring the public that he did not get taken to the cleaners—because, of course, his affable partners would never do that.
Trump fared no better talking about the Iranian nuclear program. Iran’s stockpile of highly enriched uranium exists largely because Trump unilaterally called off U.S. participation in the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, the 2015 agreement that was meant to prevent Iran from enriching uranium beyond minimal levels for civilian uses. After the U.S. and Israeli attacks last year, and yet more pounding during Operation Epic Fury, that uranium remains underground, either hidden in storage or buried beneath tons of rubble; some of it can likely be recovered and enriched for military uses. Trump has said, repeatedly, that Iran must hand it over.
Until today.
“I call it the nuclear dust, their enriched material, right?” Trump said. (Why he calls it this remains a mystery.) Does America still insist on its removal from Iran? Well, maybe.
“The whole mountain has collapsed on top. We have cameras on it,” Trump said. “You could make the case ‘Why are you even bothering?’ ’cause it’s not really valuable. It’s, you know, it’s probably half a million dollars’ worth. It’s not very valuable stuff, but I think psychologically we wanna get it.”
The United States and Israel ostensibly went to war with Iran last summer over the prospect of the Tehran regime developing a bomb, and that same threat has supposedly been at the center of America’s largest military operation in decades—but now the highly enriched uranium isn’t very valuable? The president wants it for “psychological”
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Sounds like you want Iran destroyed now too.
Look at Trump. The great unifier.
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Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.
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Quote:When the bills are finally paid, Trump will have made the United States hundreds of billions of dollars poorer, but accomplished none of his goals for the Iran war. Did it ever occur to you that either Trump should not have gone to war, or he should have won it? But he did neither. Instead, he squandered vast amounts of time and money. As a bonus, he made the US military look both incompetent and wasteful with ammunition while killing school children in Iran.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Sounds like you want Iran destroyed now too.
Look at Trump. The great unifier.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Trump in Defeat [Do you feel like the winds of change are blowing today, too?]
The president went to war triumphant and will likely leave greatly weakened.
By Jonathan Lemire | 11:05 a.m. ET on June 17, 2026
https://www.theatlantic.com/national-security/2026/06/trump-defeat-ira
n-war/687566/
President Trump lost. The war he waged against Iran promises to conclude in a humbling whimper with the signing of a cease-fire agreement later this week. The United States is left weaker—diminished militarily, strategically, economically, and perhaps morally.
The war, which the United States fought alongside Israel, accomplished none of the goals that Trump named at the outset. Instead, it only empowered the hard-liners in Tehran and arguably emboldened them to someday seek a nuclear weapon. Despite that, the president was so desperate for the war to end that he repeatedly backed off his threats—allowing Iran to call his bluff—and upbraided his close ally Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for responding to attacks in the region in a manner that jeopardized the negotiations.
Trump won’t admit to any of this. He has spent recent days furiously spinning the tentative deal as a clear win, and has seethed at unflattering comparisons with the deal that President Obama struck with Iran more than a decade ago, aides and outside advisers told me. Trump, they said, has privately denounced Iran hawks, some of whom are among his closest allies in the Republican Party, for questioning the strength of the agreement. Within the administration, there is a divide on the deal, but Trump sided with those advocating for the war to wind down, no matter the terms, as fears mount about the economic toll on Americans and the political costs for Republicans in the midterms.
Trump’s own anger masks a desperate desire to find an off-ramp from a conflict that did not go the way he had planned, an outcome that has threatened to leave the United States—and Trump—reduced in the eyes of the world. For a decade, Trump has dominated the global stage and wielded extraordinary executive power. But now he is saddled with low poll numbers and unhappy Republicans, and he may soon have to contend with a Democratic Congress. His evolution into a lame duck is accelerating, and the political world is poised to soon look beyond him and focus on the 2028 contenders hoping to succeed him. World leaders, who were once cowed, have begun to defy him. Trump’s defeat in Iran, and the way he lost, may hasten his irrelevance.
It’s not usually a vote of confidence for your deal when you won’t let anyone else read it. But Trump and his team have threatened to not release the Iran agreement until after it is signed in Geneva on Friday. Officials have said that the deal will extend the cease-fire over the next 60 days and that Iran will reopen the Strait of Hormuz, allowing the U.S. to drop its naval blockade and oil to flow from the region again. Although Iran has agreed to not collect fees on the strait for the next 60 days, it has (according to Iranian state media) left open the door to doing so afterward—and the deal delays addressing Iran’s uranium-enrichment program, despite Trump having cast it as his urgent motivation for war. The president’s lead negotiators, Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff, have supported the agreement, as has Vice President Vance, who has been promoting it during preplanned TV appearances to sell his new book. Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, CIA Director John Ratcliffe, and others have expressed quiet reservations with how the deal will be implemented, according to four outside advisers and senior White House officials who, like others, spoke with me on the condition of anonymity to discuss private conversations.
The deal has also alarmed the GOP’s Iran hawks. Mark Levin, the right-wing radio host who championed the case for war, posted on social media his disbelief that Trump had rebuked Netanyahu and that the agreement remained shrouded in secrecy: “I have asked for days, why can’t we, the p
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:When the bills are finally paid, Trump will have made the United States hundreds of billions of dollars poorer, but accomplished none of his goals for the Iran war. Did it ever occur to you that either Trump should not have gone to war, or he should have won it? But he did neither. Instead, he squandered vast amounts of time and money. As a bonus, he made the US military look both incompetent and wasteful with ammunition while killing school children in Iran.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Sounds like you want Iran destroyed now too.
Look at Trump. The great unifier.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
Joe Biden* made our country trillions of dollars poorer and you didn't say shit about it.
No. That's not true. Any time that blame was placed where it belonged, you defended Joe Biden* by saying that nothing that was happening was his fault and he had no power over any of it. (Which actually WAS true, but only because he was a fucking vegetable and not for any of the reasons you were claiming).
So nobody is interested in hearing any of your bitching about billions in 2026.
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Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.
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And really...
At the end of the day, why are you so confident the "war" with Iran is over?
You've never believed a single word that's come out of Trump's mouth so far.
Why start now?
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Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.
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