Do you feel like the winds of change are blowing today too?
POSTED BY: 6ixStringJack
UPDATED: Saturday, September 12, 2026 16:11
VIEWED: 185382
PAGE 48 of 48
Quote:Trump robs these dummies of their money, and so Trump is not to blame because they are dumb.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
That's a heartwarming story.
Fucking idiot.
Sounds like he was doing alright up through his late 20's. We were rocking just about the same amount of cash at that time in our lives.
One guy decided to never gamble or play the stock market again, and the other guy blew all of his money on stupid shit because he's a simple-minded retard.
Enjoy your empty lot, dummy. Your poor wife and kids.
Alternatively, Trump should be removed from office and forced to repay what he stole.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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The Zombification of America
By Stephen Marche | July 9, 2026
Mr. Marche is the author, most recently, of “The Next Civil War.” He wrote from Toronto, where he lives.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/09/opinion/america-world-us-isolation.
html
The rupture of the world order is going much better than expected.
At first there was rage at America’s betrayal, when President Trump called for the annexation of Canada, threatened Greenland, imposed tariffs on its friends and began his campaign to undercut NATO, which continued at its latest meeting this week, in Ankara, Turkey. Now, a strange feeling is emerging in some of the countries that used to be known as America’s allies: Optimistic determination. There’s an established principle in chess that applies to geopolitics as well: “The threat is stronger than the execution.” The possibility of U.S. abandonment of the world order was terrifying. The reality turns out to be a new beginning.
Canada, America’s neighbor, was the first to see it, naturally. Since the beginning of Mr. Trump’s second term, American bullying on trade has been ferocious. As a result, Canada has had to consider what American favor or disfavor is worth. The Bank of Canada recently ran a scenario in which the United States imposed a 25 percent tariff on everything Canada exports to the United States. Canada’s growth of its gross domestic product would slow by about 2.4 percentage points, which over a period of adjustment is well within Canada’s capacity. A disaster, to be sure, but not the end of the world. That’s the worst-case scenario.
A recent study by economists at the Canadian Shield Institute, commissioned for the podcast “Gloves Off,” which I host, found that Canadian merchandise exports to the United States last year fell by over 30 billion Canadian dollars, (21 billion U.S. dollars), or over 5 percent of exports to the United States. But that loss was offset by nearly 29 billion Canadian dollars in new demand from the rest of the world. When services were included, total exports from Canada increased by almost 7 billion dollars. America can make whatever threats it likes, but if you have the aluminum or oil or potash, somebody will buy it.
It’s not just Canada. European equities outperformed American equities in 2025, and surged in the first two months of 2026. The European Defense Industrial Strategy, put in place in 2024, is keeping more of Europe’s rapidly expanding military spending within the continent. And after the threat of the European Union’s anti-coercion instrument, the so-called trade bazooka allowing rapid counter tariffs, forced Mr. Trump to back down from his early round of Greenland threats, the Europeans now know that they have their own Strait of Hormuz — their own pain point that can make America flinch.
American military threats have the same diminishing power. If recent history has taught us anything, it’s that when the United States decides to achieve a geopolitical aim by means of military force, you can make a pretty safe bet that aim will not be achieved. Against all odds in a war with the United States, Iran’s corrupt and cruel regime has maintained its power and is now receiving sanctions relief. While the U.S. military invents whole new genres of defeat, the Gulf states, and their airports, have now learned during the Iran war exactly what an American security guarantee is worth.
At the NATO meeting in Ankara, where Mr. Trump berated allied nations — especially Spain — and repeated his call for U.S. control of Greenland, the leaders of Spain and Denmark took Mr. Trump’s comments as the idle threats they self-evidently are. Prime Minister Mark Carney of Canada may well say that Mr. Trump “won the argument” on NATO members raising their spending levels for defense. The reason they are spending more now may be that they know that American military power is in retreat. American support, whatever that even means anymore, guarantees nothing.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire
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Shut up, faggot.
Keep your stupid ass opinions in Canada where they belong. Nobody here gives one single fuck what you have to say about anything, Stephan.
Spell your name like a man with a V too, while you're at it.
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Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.
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Judge voids Donald Trump's 'improper' $1.8b IRS settlement that gave him immunity from tax audits
https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cn8q0e8d4ego
A US judge has voided a legal agreement between President Donald Trump and federal agencies that granted him immunity from tax audits and allowed his administration to create a since-abandoned $1.8bn (£1.3bn) "anti-weaponisation" fund.
The fund, intended to compensate individuals claiming they were unfairly targeted by the government, was unveiled in May in exchange for Trump dropping his personal $10bn lawsuit against the Internal Revenue Service (IRS).
But on Monday, US District Judge Kathleen Williams said the suit was filed for an improper purpose.
She also referred a Trump lawyer to state authorities to determine whether ethics rules were violated and disciplinary action required.
In the ruling, Williams cast Trump's lawsuit - which he, two of his sons and the Trump Organization filed in 2026 - as far from a dispute between two opposing sides. Instead, she described it as more of an action carried out by lawyers with ties to Trump and those who claimed to have been government targets.
Williams wrote the lawsuit "was never about a party seeking judicial resolution of a legal issue or a factual dispute" between Trump and the IRS, which he controls as president.
She also described the settlement as a bid to "provide some legitimacy to an agreement to confer immunity to people and entities affiliated with the President and to earmark billions of dollars from American taxpayers to redress grievances not defined in the law."
The decision also prevents those involved with the case - including Trump and his sons - from referring to the settlement or citing its terms in future legal proceedings. This, in turn, could mean that the IRS can move forward with future audits into Trump's tax claims.
In the initial lawsuit, Trump claimed that nothing had been done to prevent the leak of his private tax information by a former IRS contractor, Charles Littlejohn.
Just before the 2020 presidential election, which Trump lost, the leaked information formed the basis of a New York Times investigation that revealed he paid only $750 in federal income taxes the year he won his presidency in 2016, and no taxes at all in 10 of the previous 15 years.
"President Trump did not pursue his claims until he once again occupied the White House and had appointed his former lawyer, and the former lawyer of persons who are putative beneficiaries of the 'Anti-Weaponization Fund' to prominent positions in the DOJ," Williams wrote, referring to the Department of Justice.
"These officials then negotiated on behalf of the United States, with his current lawyers, including his former White House Counsel to reach a 'settlement.' It is risible to suggest that there was ever adverseness between the Parties," she added.
One of Trump's attorneys, Alejandro Brito, was also referred to the Florida bar for potential disciplinary action, while a second lawyer, Daniel Epstein, will now be unable to join cases in the Southern District of Florida for at least a year.
In a statement to the BBC, a spokesman for Trump's legal team said the IRS "wrongly allowed a rogue, politically-motivated employee to leak private and confidential information" to the media.
"President Trump continues to hold those who wrong America and Americans accountable," the spokesman added.
Calling the agreement a "sweetheart deal" for Trump that had given him "unauthorized and unprecedented" exemptions from tax audit rules, Tax Law Center Policy Director Brandon DeBot said it had gone against "the tax system's protections against political interference".
"The court's decision is important, but does not remove the need for congressional action to nullify the entire deal and
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Trump and DOJ spend 130 pages supporting Judge Cannon's 'discretion' in burying Mar-a-Lago secrets, as rivals hold up Mueller report as 'precedent'
Matt Naham | Jul 14th, 2026, 11:58 am
https://lawandcrime.com/high-profile/trump-and-doj-spend-130-pages-sup
porting-judge-cannons-discretion-in-burying-mar-a-lago-secrets-as-rivals-hold-up-mueller-report-as-precedent/
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/trump-and-doj-spend-130-pages-
supporting-judge-cannon-s-discretion-in-burying-mar-a-lago-secrets-as-rivals-hold-up-mueller-report-as-precedent/ar-AA27TZkd
Attorneys for President Donald Trump, his former co-defendants, and the DOJ each filed lengthy briefs on Monday in support of U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon's "discretion" in permanently blocking the release of ex-special counsel Jack Smith's Mar-a-Lago report.
Oral argument had been tentatively scheduled for late September, but the 11th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals weeks ago removed the consolidated cases from the calendar, noting the appeals would be "reassigned at a later date."
In the meantime, lawyers for Trump, his valet Walt Nauta, and Mar-a-Lago property manager Carlos De Oliveira on Monday submitted a 75-page brief praising Cannon's decision to block the DOJ from "releasing, sharing, or transmitting Volume II of the Final Report or any drafts of Volume II outside the Department of Justice."
https://s3.documentcloud.org/documents/28473950/trump-mal.pdf
https://lawandcrime.com/high-profile/cannon-buries-jack-smith-mar-a-la
go-report-on-trump-angry-that-special-counsel-had-the-audacity-to-create-it/
"At its core, this matter arises out of Jack Smith's brazen and failed attempts to unconstitutionally prosecute and imprison President Trump and those around him, including Mr. Nauta and Mr. De Oliveira," Trump's brief began. "Even after the District Court dismissed Smith's baseless charges on the grounds that his appointment and the funding of his office violated the United States Constitution, Smith unlawfully prepared and sought to release a two-volume 'Final Report' in hopes of vindicating his efforts through other means."
Cannon, a Trump appointee, controversially dismissed the classified documents prosecution against the then-presidential candidate in July 2024, finding after "careful study" that Smith was unlawfully appointed as special counsel. In February, the judge said that her ruling meant "all" of Smith's acts were invalidated, and thus he had no business producing the report in the first place.
Construing that as a "breach" of her order, Cannon stopped short of ordering the destruction of Volume II, but she made her injunction permanent — leaving two groups who attempted to intervene under the Freedom of Information Act out in the cold.
On Monday, Trump's team fully backed Cannon against American Oversight and the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University at the 11th Circuit.
"The District Court did not abuse its discretion in denying Appellants' motions to intervene, and that this Court should dismiss their appeals for lack of jurisdiction," the brief said, not mentioning that the 11th Circuit previously chided Cannon for her "undue delay" in ruling on the motions.
On the same day, the DOJ weighed in with a 55-page brief of its own, from the office of U.S. Attorney Jason Reding Quiñones.
The DOJ argued that Cannon's review of Volume II in her chambers did nothing to help the attempted third-party intervenors.
"And, even if the report were a judicial record, the district court was well within its discretion to deny intervention to access it. The district court found that the disclosure would expose non-public discovery material implicating grand jury and privilege concerns and would contravene basic notions of fairness and justice. While the proposed intervenors may disagree, that does not amount to an abuse of discretion
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He's just going to win all this too, so why don't you spend some of your free time fixing your fucking party.
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Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.
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Quote:The Trumptards are rapists. To prove that point, you will explode when you learn that the writer E. Jean Carroll has collected over $5.6 million that a jury awarded in her sexual abuse and defamation lawsuit against President Donald Trump, court records and her lawyers said.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
He's just going to win all this too, so why don't you spend some of your free time fixing your fucking party.
The payment — representing the $5 million jury award, plus interest — was made Monday from an account where it had been held in escrow since the 2023 verdict, according to court records. Carroll’s lawyer, Roberta Kaplan, confirmed the payment Tuesday.
https://apnews.com/article/trump-e-jean-carroll-lawsuit-award-payment-
c02b153cdc88fe0dafbf5146a1be6be2
Democrats kick rapists out of the party. Trumptards do the opposite.
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:The Trumptards are rapists. To prove that point, you will explode when you learn that the writer E. Jean Carroll has collected over $5.6 million that a jury awarded in her sexual abuse and defamation lawsuit against President Donald Trump, court records and her lawyers said.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
He's just going to win all this too, so why don't you spend some of your free time fixing your fucking party.
The payment — representing the $5 million jury award, plus interest — was made Monday from an account where it had been held in escrow since the 2023 verdict, according to court records. Carroll’s lawyer, Roberta Kaplan, confirmed the payment Tuesday.
https://apnews.com/article/trump-e-jean-carroll-lawsuit-award-payment-
c02b153cdc88fe0dafbf5146a1be6be2
Democrats kick rapists out of the party. Trumptards do the opposite.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
Also E. Jean Carroll telling Anderson Cooper that everyone has Rape Fantasies. That Rape is Sexy and she was leaking all over her chair while Anderson Cooper was desperatly trying to cut to commercial:
These are your heroes of the Democratic Party. You're a bunch of losers.
You are a Shit Golem, Shit Golem.
FIX YOUR FUCKING PARTY WHILE YOU STILL HAVE A CHANCE, LOSER.
NOBODY GIVES A SINGLE FUCK WHAT TRUMP IS DOING.
NOBODY WANTS TO HEAR ONE MORE FUCKING WORD OUT OF YOU ABOUT TRUMP.
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Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.
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By the way... Trump is still polling nearly 41% on the RCP average. And that's with this Iran thing still dragging out.
All of this that you've done has meant NOTHING.
NOBODY is listening to you anymore.
I've said it before and I'll say it again now because it's even more real now than it's ever been before... YOU work for Trump for free. There are people who will vote for Trump simply to spite shit golems just like you and braindead Ted over there in the corner.
Trump's approval rating right now is 3 points higher than Joe Biden*'s was at the same time in his single term.
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Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.
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President Donald Trump’s businesses and top executives have faced major legal penalties for tax-related fraud, and his personal tax practices remain highly controversial. Donald Trump paid zero federal income taxes in 11 years between 2000 and 2020. Donald Trump paid $750 in federal income taxes for 2016 and 2017.
The characterization of Trump regarding his taxes generally falls into three distinct categories based on legal rulings, investigative reporting, and political debate.
1. Corporate Convictions and Executive Guilt
While Donald Trump has avoided personal criminal tax charges, entities under his direct control have been convicted in court:
• The Trump Organization Conviction: In December 2022, a New York jury found two corporate entities of the Trump Organization guilty on 17 counts of criminal tax fraud and falsifying business records. Prosecutors proved a 15-year scheme to compensate top executives with off-the-books perks (like luxury cars and rent-free apartments) to evade payroll and income taxes.
• Executive Pleadings: Longtime Trump Organization Chief Financial Officer Alan Weisselberg pleaded guilty to 15 felony counts of tax fraud and testified that the company benefited from the scheme.
• Trump's Awareness: During the trial, prosecutors argued that Trump signed documents explicitly approving elements of the off-the-books perks. However, Trump's defense attorneys argued he was unaware of the improper accounting, and Trump himself was not personally indicted in that case.
2. Aggressive Tax Avoidance vs. Fraud
When a House committee released six years of Trump's personal federal tax returns, it revealed that he paid $750 in federal income taxes in 2016 and 2017 and zero dollars in 2020.
• The Critical View: Investigative reporters and critics point to these documents as evidence of "brazen" tax manipulation. They highlight massive, questionable deductions—such as writing off millions in personal estate expenses as business costs, or utilizing complex shell companies to pass down family wealth via inflated transactions.
• The Defense: Trump and his supporters maintain that his tax practices represent standard, legal, and highly aggressive "tax avoidance" utilized by major real estate developers. They argue that real estate tax laws allow for large depreciations and write-offs to offset income legally. Trump has previously described avoiding high tax burdens as making him a "savvy businessman."
3. Civil Fraud History and Developments
Trump has faced extensive civil litigation over how he presents his finances to authorities:
• Asset Valuations: New York State previously brought a massive civil fraud lawsuit against Trump for artificially inflating his net worth on financial statements to secure favorable loans and insurance terms. While a lower court issued a $355 million penalty against him, an appeals court later threw out the massive fine. While the fine was eliminated, the court upheld the underlying finding that Trump and the Trump Organization committed fraud. As a result, non-monetary punishments were kept in place, including: 1) A three-year ban preventing him from taking out loans from New York banks. 2) A ban on serving as a director of any New York company.
• Recent IRS Settlement Dispute: In July 2026, a federal judge threw out a controversial $10 billion lawsuit Trump filed against the Internal Revenue Service. The administration had attempted to finalize an agreement granting Trump and his family broad immunity from tax audits. The judge voided the settlement, ruling that the lawsuit was filed in "bad faith" and lacked a real legal dispute.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Let's see your tax returns, Shit Golem.
Go fuck yourself. Nobody cares except for you and Rachel Maddow.
Clowns.
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Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.
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The Forever War Gets Scary
But I'm not talking about bombs and drones
By Paul Krugman | Jul 15, 2026
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/the-forever-war-gets-scary
Transcript
The war with Iran has just reached a very scary phase, and I’m not talking about the bombs and the drones. Hi, Paul Krugman here, doing a brief podcast instead of a full post, because I actually spent the day with friends and doing other things, and this is a quicker alternative.
If you’re following the news, you know that the sort-of ceasefire with Iran has been called off. Trump has reinstated the blockade. The Iranians are back to hitting things with their drones and missiles.
The U.S. position has been wildly erratic. First, Trump said he was going to impose a 20% toll on all shipping, basically turning the Strait of Hormuz into a U.S. toll booth, which would have been wildly illegal and irresponsible, aside from being impossible. Now he says, no, he’s going to demand that countries invest in the United States, which is also actually wildly illegal. But in any case, it’s never going to happen.
And yet, this is extremely scary. The reason to be afraid is not that I think the war is going to come to America. It’s not even that I think the United States is going to seriously try to occupy Iran. We don’t have the troops. We don’t have the missiles. Trump depleted a large share of our weaponry in the course of his failed war so far. So this is likely going to be punitive strikes, maybe some war crimes along the way, but that’s all.
But what is really frightening here is that it does appear as if Trump has given up on trying to extract something that looks like victory. If we go back just a few days ago, it appeared that what was going to happen was that Trump was going to de facto pull out, give up on the project, take advantage of falling oil prices because the strait was sort of kind of open — and try to spin the story about this was truly, this was actually an American victory and the economy is great and look at the stock market.
And, you know, it was just a little bit — more than a little bit — stupid and doomed. It was also kind of amazing because a serious attempt to end the conflict would have required facing up to reality, saying, OK, this war didn’t go well, but America remains great. Sorry about that.
But that was apparently not something Trump could emotionally bring himself to do. He just cannot admit that this venture failed. He can never admit that anything failed. We’re going to be searching for the saboteurs of the reflecting pool for the remainder of his presidency.
This is a change in strategy that is ominous because what is Trump’s plan for the midterm elections? Here the idea presumably was that there would be enough economic success and people would have sufficiently short memories that they would possibly give Trump credit for opening the Strait of Hormuz, but in any case have put the gas price shock and the whole disruption surrounding the war behind them. And be ready to start admitting that this is the golden age that Trump and company keep on claiming it is.
Now that’s all off. Now it’s just that we’re going to bomb Iran. No clear strategy there, but we’re not going to even pretend that things are okay. We’re going to blockade them, which actually has a little bit more leverage, but no hint that anything might be resolved in a way that would help Republican chances in the midterms. So what is going to happen?
I don’t think it’s a coincidence that just as Trump essentially gives up, not gives up in the sense of abandoning his war, but gives up on trying to achieve anything he can even spin as a positive outcome, that we now have an announcement that this Thursday he’s going to have a primetime speech, which reports say is going to be about election fraud in 2020. Some reports hint that he might try to declare the two Democratic senators from Georgia somehow illegitimate.
Okay, that’s not going to actually work. And nobody’s going to be convinced by the claim that he actually wo
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By the way... Trump is still polling nearly 41% on the RCP average. And that's with this Iran thing still dragging out.
All of this that you've done has meant NOTHING.
NOBODY is listening to you anymore.
I've said it before and I'll say it again now because it's even more real now than it's ever been before... YOU work for Trump for free. There are people who will vote for Trump simply to spite shit golems just like you and braindead Ted over there in the corner.
Trump's approval rating right now is 3 points higher than Joe Biden*'s was at the same time in his single term.
--------------------------------------------------
Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.
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Quote:Even 41% Nazi is not enough to win. Nazis need 50%.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
By the way... Trump is still polling nearly 41% on the RCP average. And that's with this Iran thing still dragging out.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Confession proves Trump insiders know the reckoning is coming | Opinion
By Thom Hartmann
Jul 15
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/confession-proves-trump-inside
rs-know-the-reckoning-is-coming-opinion/ar-AA27XTlb
Donald Trump is already telling us he’s going to try to steal the 2026 election, and the fact that he’s saying it now, months in advance, is the whole tell.
Back in February, he stood up and declared that “Republicans ought to nationalize the voting,” floated taking over the vote in 15 states his party doesn’t control, and returned to the lie he’s been pushing for a decade, that mail-in ballots are crawling with fraud.
They aren’t. Americans have voted by mail for more than a century and a half, and the Brennan Center has shown over and over that you’re more likely to be struck by lightning than to commit mail-ballot fraud.
The fraud claim was never an argument: it’s an excuse for voter suppression, its own form of election fraud. When you convince tens of millions of people that the only way your side can possibly lose is if the other side cheats, you’ve prepared them to swallow whatever you “have to do to protect the vote,” and to reject the result as illegitimate if you lose anyway. That’s the groundwork, and they’re laying it right now in the open.
The measures themselves are extraordinary. This spring, Trump signed an executive order trying to seize federal control over how states run their elections, and when the courts blocked most of it, his administration found a back door through, of all places, the Post Office.
The Postal Service has proposed a rule that would let it refuse to deliver mail-in ballots in any state that won’t first hand over its complete list of mail voters to the federal government, a rule the NAACP says is built to disenfranchise voters and that 23 Democratic-led states are now suing to stop.
Steve Bannon went on his podcast and promised that “we’re gonna have ICE surround the polls come November,” and when reporters asked the White House to rule it out, the press secretary wouldn’t.
More than forty-eight million Americans voted by mail in 2024.
These men want the power to decide whose ballot gets carried to the mailbox and who feels safe enough to show up in person.
If you’re wondering why they’re working this hard to keep you from voting, the answer slipped out of Todd Blanche’s mouth this spring.
Standing on a stage at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) outside Dallas, the man who’d been Trump’s personal criminal defense lawyer and who now runs the Justice Department as acting Attorney General told the crowd, “Everybody’s afraid that the next administration, if we don’t win, we’re going to all be investigated and indicted.”
He meant it as a rallying cry. What he actually delivered was a confession: you don’t spend your evenings bracing for an indictment unless some quiet part of you already knows what you’ve done.
A reckoning is coming for the people breaking the law for this president, and they can feel it.
And now the White House is even discussing completely blowing up the Constitution and the right of habeas corpus, which dates back to the year 1215 when the British elite forced King John to sign the Magna Carta on the plain at Runnymede. As the New York Times reported:
“Suspending habeas corpus was one of two radical ideas [Trump's Deputy Chief of Staff Stephen] Miller had been pushing that alarmed [White House Staff Secretary Will] Scharf. The other was invoking the Insurrection Act to deploy the military to enforce the law on American streets as protests grew against deportation sweeps.”
Todd Blanche, in particular, has every reason to be worried: he knows who Trump really is, and what he’s capable of.
He’s the lawyer who defended Trump in the New York hush-money trial that ended in 34 felony convictions, and in the federal cases over January 6th and the classified documents stashed at Mar-a-Lago.
He’s also the guy who’s now hiding three million Epstein documents and cut the cushy, puppy
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:Even 41% Nazi is not enough to win. Nazis need 50%.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
By the way... Trump is still polling nearly 41% on the RCP average. And that's with this Iran thing still dragging out.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
You guys voted for Platner.
Nobody wants to hear anything out of you about Nazis ever again, Shit Golem.
You fucking loser.
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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 Democrats found out Platner was a Nazi and rapist, they curb-stomped him. When Trumptards found out Trump was a Nazi, a rapist, a tax cheat, and being bribed, they voted for him. Simultaneously, they said everything is Fake News, including climate change.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:Even 41% Nazi is not enough to win. Nazis need 50%.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
By the way... Trump is still polling nearly 41% on the RCP average. And that's with this Iran thing still dragging out.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
You guys voted for Platner.
Nobody wants to hear anything out of you about Nazis ever again, Shit Golem.
You fucking loser.
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Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.
Trump is $4 billion Richer Than He Was Before The 2024 Election Because Of Bribes He Has Received As President.
https://www.newyorker.com/news/a-reporter-at-large/trumps-profiteering
-hits-four-billion-dollars
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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A tale of two Trump flip-flops
The president undid everything the Logoff wrote about this week.
By Andrew Prokop
Jul 15, 2026, 5:45 PM CDT
https://www.vox.com/politics/495780/trump-flip-flop-ice-stops-strait-h
ormuz
What happened? On Monday afternoon, President Donald Trump said he would charge a 20 percent fee to protect shipping in the Strait of Hormuz.
But he reversed course on that yesterday morning, posting on Truth Social that he’d “replace” the fee with trade and investment deals that Gulf nations would purportedly make in the US.
Yesterday afternoon, after two recent deadly shootings, ICE had been ordered to temporarily stop making traffic stops nationwide.
But this morning, Trump declared that traffic stops were back on, posting: “The Radical Left Dumocrats would like to see this done, but it won’t happen on my watch.”
Why did Trump flip-flop? The Hormuz fee was a Trump whim that many of his own aides had deep logistical and political qualms about. For one, they believed the move could push gas prices higher. Secretary of State Marco Rubio had said just last month that “no country is allowed to charge tolls or fees on an international waterway.”
As Monday stretched on, Trump was deluged with lobbying from Gulf nations who rely on the strait — such as Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates — and ultimately decided to back down.
The ICE traffic stop pause followed the opposite trajectory. This was a decision made by administration officials without Trump’s knowledge — and when he watched press coverage and heard right-wing criticism of it, he was irate, per CNN.
What’s the takeaway? The reversals show whose criticism and feedback Trump actually cares about.
Wealthy Gulf leaders and the spectre of higher gas prices helped talk him down from his Hormuz fee. And on traffic stops, he ultimately cared less about tamping down national outrage over deadly shootings than he did about preserving his “tough on immigration” reputation and agenda.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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[America’s first Nazi President speaks tomorrow night about “saving” Democracy]
Midterm Elections: The Con Always Works, Right Up Until the Moment It Doesn’t
Democracy has survived con men before, but only because ordinary Americans refused to become the mark.
By Thom Hartmann | July 15, 2026
https://hartmannreport.com/p/midterm-elections-the-con-always-4c5
Tomorrow night at nine o’clock Eastern, Donald Trump will look into a television camera and tell America he’s rescuing democracy. He teased the address to reporters this week, promising “really big news” about “free and fair elections” and adding that “it doesn’t get bigger.” For once, he and I agree. It doesn’t get bigger.
An administration official told Reuters that the speech will center on newly declassified intelligence about the 2020 election and what the White House calls voting machine vulnerabilities open to foreign hackers; multiple election experts quoted in that same reporting warn he’s laying the groundwork to contest Republican losses this November.
To understand what we’ll actually be watching Thursday night, we have to go back to 1973, to a Manhattan night spot called Le Club, where a 27-year-old Donald Trump, freshly sued by the Justice Department for refusing to rent apartments to Black families, met the most feared lawyer in New York. It’s a story I tell in detail in The Last American President.
Roy Cohn had made his reputation as Joe McCarthy’s chief counsel, wrecking careers with accusations he never had to prove. His advice to young Trump, as Cohn’s own cousin later recalled it, was blunt: “You might be guilty; it doesn’t matter.” Don’t settle. Don’t apologize. Attack the accuser.
So instead of quietly signing the consent decree his father’s regular lawyers recommended, Trump called a press conference and countersued the federal government for $100 million. A judge tossed the countersuit; the Trumps eventually signed roughly the deal they’d been offered at the start, and Cohn declared total victory anyway.
He understood something that’s become the operating system of Donald Trump’s entire life: the court of public opinion matters more than any court of law, and a lie defended with absolute commitment will usually beat a truth defended halfheartedly.
Over their thirteen years together, Cohn drilled three rules into his student: Attack, never defend. Deny everything, admit nothing. Claim victory no matter what actually happened.
When Jeff Sessions recused himself from the Russia investigation in 2017, Trump reportedly demanded of his aides, “Where’s my Roy Cohn?” He was mourning a fixer who’d been dead for three decades.
It took him eight more years, but he’s finally found his Roy Cohn. He’s found several of them, in fact, and he’s installed them at the Justice Department, the FBI, and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.
That’s the machinery humming behind Thursday’s speech. The acting Director of National Intelligence is now Bill Pulte, a nepo-baby real estate guy with no intelligence experience who referred Trump’s political enemies for criminal prosecution based on mortgage records he pulled from government databases, and who Democrats say was installed precisely to help Republicans rig the midterms.
A White House task force has been combing through thousands of pages of classified documents, timed to land in the middle of an election season. Federal agents have already raided the Fulton County elections office and carted off 700 boxes of 2020 ballots, something I covered here at the Hartmann Report earlier this year.
Steve Bannon has promised ICE agents at the polls come November, and Trump’s new Postmaster General has confirmed the Postal Service won’t deliver mail-in ballots from states that refuse to hand over sensitive voter data to the federal government. And Jay Clayton, Trump’s pick for permanent DNI, faces his Senate confirmation hearing today, one day before the speech, having already auditioned for the job by echoing Trump’s phony claims about “election integrity” on CNB
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:When the Democrats found out Platner was a Nazi and rapist, they curb-stomped him.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:Even 41% Nazi is not enough to win. Nazis need 50%.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
By the way... Trump is still polling nearly 41% on the RCP average. And that's with this Iran thing still dragging out.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
You guys voted for Platner.
Nobody wants to hear anything out of you about Nazis ever again, Shit Golem.
You fucking loser.
--------------------------------------------------
Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.
No. They didn't. They all circled the wagons and protected him and said that it was more important for Republicans to lose than to worry about who they were voting for.
(You really should look at more than just what I post in the Garden, and you would have known about the dozens upon dozens of Left-wing shit sites that were blowing Platner even after the tattoo thing, and maybe you wouldn't look like a fucking idiot again right now).
It was only after one of yours came out and claimed that he raped her that they curb stomped him.
Being a Nazi was never a disqualifying issue as far as Democrats were concerned about Platner. Even the Jews that vote straight-ticket Democrat rallied behind him. Being an alleged rapist was never an issue for Democrats either, until it was a woman who voted Democrat that came out and claimed he raped her.
And it is just another in a very, very long list of reasons that nobody takes a fucking thing you say on any topic seriously anymore.
Your party is shit. You are shit. Shit Golem.
You stand for nothing, and you NEVER have.
All you care about is the destruction of everything good.
--------------------------------------------------
Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.
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Quote:I'm gonna make this as blunt as possible: Trumptards are evil. Nazis were evil, too, but at least they tried to hide their evilness by keeping silent about their plans to exterminate all inferior people. Trumptards? They talk about it. Trumptards can't shut up about their plans. Last night, Trump told the world about his plans. Hitler would have been aghast to see how talkative America's Nazi leaders have become, but way back in the 1930's Germans were much smarter than Trumptards are. Americans can be told and shown what Trump's plans are, and yet they are too dull-witted to understand.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack
Your party is shit. You are shit. Shit Golem.
You stand for nothing, and you NEVER have.
All you care about is the destruction of everything good.
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/trump-cant-get-no-respect
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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[Trump is obviously a lying sack of shit: The Reflecting Pool Edition]
Reflecting Pool peeling probably caused by application flaws, experts say
President Donald Trump has blamed vandals, but a Washington Post analysis finds that the peeling tracks closely with stages of the renovation process.
By Jarrett Ley, Meg Kelly, Klara Auerbach and Maura Judkis
July 16, 2026 at 10:17 a.m.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/investigations/interactive/2026/07/16/r
eflecting-pool-peeling-likely-caused-by-application-flaws-experts-say/
The lining of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool peeled away in at least seven places along seams that were created when the material was applied in large rectangular sections, indicating likely problems in how it was installed, according to a Washington Post analysis of visuals and interviews with experts.
President Donald Trump has repeatedly said vandals are to blame for the damage that appeared just two weeks after the $14 million renovation was completed in early June. “The slashes were 300 yards long, and the floor of the pool was cut and then pulled upward, with great force, by these thugs,” he wrote in a post on his Truth Social platform on Monday. On Tuesday, photos emerged on social media that showed the pool had been drained in preparation for repairs.
Interior Secretary Doug Burgum made similar claims in television interviews in early July, saying on Fox News that vandals left gashes totaling 350 feet. “[The lining] didn’t peel off,” he said on CNN, adding that people were “literally trying to destroy part of a monument.”
Post reporters visited the Reflecting Pool on June 25 and identified seven locations where the lining — a waterproof membrane that was painted onto the concrete basin — had partially or entirely peeled away. The peeling occurred in irregularly shaped patches that stretched alongside the long edges of the pool. The pieces ranged in size from a few inches to as long as six feet. In one case, the concrete was visible underneath. (Reporters could not see the condition of the lining in the middle of the basin.)
By comparing the seven locations with satellite imagery, photos and videos taken during the renovation process, the analysis found that all of the failures occurred at the seams — lines between two areas that were painted at different times.
Four experts in waterproofing materials — who have decades of experience and have served as educators and expert witnesses in pool-related construction lawsuits — reviewed The Post’s findings and said the failure pattern strongly suggested errors in the application process. They said that while a precise cause cannot be determined without on-site examination and lab testing, such seams require careful attention and are especially prone to failure.
When The Post shared its findings with the White House and the Interior Department, spokespeople disputed that the surface had been improperly applied. “There were no missteps during the initial repairs to the pool,” said White House spokeswoman Taylor Rogers. “Unfortunately, deranged individuals made several gashes in the side of the pool and destroyed over 300 feet of the pool’s siding. Once the necessary repairs to fix the vandalism are complete, the Reflecting Pool will be restored to all its glory.”
An Interior spokesperson said that “the National Park Service team has walked every foot of the Reflecting Pool, and unlike the exorbitant Obama renovation, the Reflecting Pool is now leak-proof. This project was executed after consultation with the Army Corps of Engineers Engineering Research and Design Center and other leading experts who have experience working on the Reflecting Pool.” Interior said “gashes” are located along the edge of the pool on its perimeter expansion joint, which is where the coating is soft enough to be cut. Officials provided no evidence to support the administration’s assertion that the pool was vandalized.
After the concrete basin was emptied, cleaned and dried, the Reflecting Pool was p
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:I'm gonna make this as blunt as possible: Trumptards are evil.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack
Your party is shit. You are shit. Shit Golem.
You stand for nothing, and you NEVER have.
All you care about is the destruction of everything good.
Rejected, Shit Golem.
Nobody gives a shit about your opinion.
Go fuck yourself.
--------------------------------------------------
Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.
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THE THREAT
By Andrew Tobias | July 17, 2026
https://andrewtobias.com/the-kings-speech-ii/
Jamison Firestone’s Rule of Lies: My Wild Ride Through Chaos, Corruption, and Murder in Putin’s Russia is at once amazing, engaging, important, tragic, true — and highly relevant to USA situation today. [Free download from https://z-lib.sk/s/Jamison%20Firestone ]
It’s no coincidence Trump admires Putin and never says a bad word about him.
Russia’s path from democracy to kleptocracy — it briefly had one after Reagan got Gorbachev to “tear down that wall” — and from a free press and the rule of law (at least somewhat) to jailing dissidents and the rule of lies . . . to a president for life surrounded by loyalists living, like him, lives of luxury while the masses struggle to get by . . . has so many parallels to the direction Trump has been taking us that it’s frightening.
It shows us how a murderous thug leading his country to ruin could remain popular among millions of his countrymen . . . and what could eventually happen here. Trump could eventually walk down Fifth Avenue shooting people and not lose support if we don’t succeed in restoring checks and balances.
I can’t recommend Rule of Lies highly enough.
It even has a (relatively) happy ending. As will, I think, the drama we’re living through.
From the Introduction
Quote:
While I’m American by birth, a great part of me is Russian. I founded the first independent foreign-owned law firm in Russia to help small businesses and entrepreneurs enter the market. I lived and worked in Russia for eighteen years. Most of my extended family and closest friends are Russian. I arrived in Russia in 1991 at the age of twenty-four and was living in Moscow when modern Russia came into existence. I have seen the country go from a land of infinite freedom, opportunity, and hope to a Mafia state, and from there to a dictatorship that attacks its own people, destabilizes our democracies, and wages war on its neighbors. For better or worse, I’m both a victim of Russia and one of its success stories.
So on that note, let me explain how a kid from New York founded a law firm in Moscow, had to flee for his life, and ended up in a pissing contest with the Putin regime. There’s a bit of family history in this story, but it’s there for a reason. It’s not something most of my clients or work colleagues have ever heard.
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 War on the Future, Monetary Edition
Trying to punish Brazil for adopting a better payment system
Paul Krugman
Jul 20, 2026
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/trumps-war-on-the-future-monetary
Brazil introduced Pix, a digital payment system, almost 6 years ago. The system — which allows people to make payments on their phones, not very differently from Apple Pay or Google Pay, except that Pix payments are official currency rather than transfers from private companies — has been highly successful. The vast majority of Brazilians use it regularly, and by all accounts Pix — which is free for individuals and cheap for businesses — is hugely popular.
On Wednesday — as it happens, on the first anniversary of an article I posted praising Pix and suggesting that it may represent the future of money — the Trump administration will try to punish Brazil for this success. It will do so by imposing tariffs on Brazilian exports under Section 301 of the 1974 Trade Act, which permits such tariffs to counter “unfair trade practices.”
Why is it unfair for a nation to offer its own citizens a better way to make purchases and pay bills? To some extent the Trump administration is still trying to punish Brazil for being a real democracy. Unlike the United States, Brazil put its former president, Jair Bolsonaro, on trial for trying to foment an insurrection when he lost the last election
Trump’s hostility towards Brazil’s Pix system is also an illustration of the same phenomenon we see in his energy policy: this administration is hostile to progress whenever that progress works against the interests and ideology of the oligarchs who have poured money into Trump’s campaigns and his pockets.
Pix is essentially a digital version of the real, Brazil’s currency. As a Federal Reserve report from 2022 said, a central bank digital currency — which is what Pix is — “is analogous to a digital form of paper money.” Brazilian banks are required to offer Pix, which the Trumpists claim gives it an unfair advantage over debit cards and other payment methods. But this requirement is similar, at a fundamental level, to the requirement that all U.S. banks accept dollar notes as deposits and disburse dollar notes on demand, which few people would consider unfair.
Who is hurt by the advent of Pix? Brazilians’ ability to cheaply make instantaneous payments from their phones certainly hurts the business of Visa and Mastercard, which are both U.S. companies. But since when is it an unfair business practice when companies lose business to a competitor that offers a better, cheaper product? For example, should we shut down the U.S. Postal Service because it offers better and cheaper mail delivery than UPS or FedEx? Should we shut down PayPal and Venmo because they compete with Mastercard and Visa?
Beyond concerns about Visa and Mastercard profits, Trump officials are reportedly concerned that Pix and similar payment systems elsewhere might challenge the international dominance of the dollar. In reality, Brazil is too small a player to make much of a dent in the world payments system. The dollar may, however, face a real challenge if the European Central Bank is able, as it hopes, to introduce a digital euro in 2029. If that happens, it’s not hard to imagine that a significant number of transactions that would otherwise have been made in dollars will be made in digital euros instead.
But let’s be clear: the reason people might switch to digital euros will be because the US won’t be offering an equally good means of payment. Why won’t there be a digital dollar? Not because it’s a bad idea — as Brazil has shown, it would be a very good idea. But there are powerful special interests that oppose any such move.
Last year Republicans in the House passed a bill that didn’t just forbid the creation of a U.S. central bank digital currency; it prohibited any study of the issue by the Federal Reserve. “Don’t even think about creating a digital dollar.”
Proponents of this ban claimed to have concerns about how a central bank digital cur
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In his history of the rise and fall of the Roman Empire, Edward Gibbon believed that “the great constant of history was self-delusion: the willful inability of people to recognize how much the habits, rituals, and laws they took for granted had slowly changed — until it was too late to bend them back into shape.” The same could be said about the U.S. today, as the social, cultural, and legal norms that once guided collective behavior and undergirded liberal democracy have slowly eroded over time until they have become largely unrecognizable.
Posted on Monday, Jul 20, 2026 6:00 AM by John Ambrosio
https://3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2026/07/living-with-unbearable-k
nowledge-in-an-era-of-polycrisis.html
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:
In his history of the rise and fall of the Roman Empire, Edward Gibbon believed that “the great constant of history was self-delusion: the willful inability of people to recognize how much the habits, rituals, and laws they took for granted had slowly changed — until it was too late to bend them back into shape.” The same could be said about the U.S. today, as the social, cultural, and legal norms that once guided collective behavior and undergirded liberal democracy have slowly eroded over time until they have become largely unrecognizable.
Posted on Monday, Jul 20, 2026 6:00 AM by John Ambrosio
https://3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2026/07/living-with-unbearable-k
nowledge-in-an-era-of-polycrisis.html
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
Translation: "6ixStringJack was absolutely right to create this thread on Monday, January 20, 2025 at 8:20 AM.
I'm never going to stop crying now that my globalist woke dystopia dreams are never going to play out, and that the illusory world that we've all been living in for about 3 generations was funded by around $39 Trillion of debt and never actually existed in the first place.
Get fucked, losers.
And fuck your Liberal Democracy. It's dead.
Just like I told you it would be.
--------------------------------------------------
Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.
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You want to see how much your world has changed and doesn't exist anymore, Shit Golem?
Watch this video.
--------------------------------------------------
Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.
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This sheer terror is driving Trump's 2 a.m. rage tweeting
By Thom Hartmann | July 21, 2026 5:30AM ET
https://www.rawstory.com/raw-investigates/trump-prison/
Last week, Donald Trump essentially told us exactly what he will do this November. When reports start coming in that the Democrats are winning, he will send in the troops.
He’ll point back to last week's national address and tell the nation:
“I told you so. I warned you. They rigged the election for the Democrats and now I have to stop it.”
He’ll mobilize ICE and the National Guard’s “Rapid Reaction Force” that he’s assembled over the past six months to seize ballot boxes and crush the inevitable “insurrection” — protests in the streets against his seizing ballot boxes — by “left-wing communist radical domestic terrorists.”
He’ll declare a state of emergency, invoke his NSPM-7, and blame it on a foreign country and/or “Antifa.” He’ll declare protesting a crime, and tear gas will fill our streets.
This is easy for me to imagine: I was there in 1967 when Lyndon Johnson did nearly the same thing, although for an entirely different purpose, and I’ve worked in several countries where this very scenario had already played out.
And those same white supremacists Trump has already pardoned can also easily imagine how it should play out when he calls them out to attack protesters; they’ve been terrorizing minority communities for centuries and are very good at it.
This includes his tens of thousands of well-armed loyalist cult members who’re salivating at the idea of splitting that $1.776 billion they believe they’ll get when he seizes absolute control of the country.
As Senator Amy Klobuchar said on MSNOW:
“This is a man desperate to hold onto his power and he will do anything to keep that power.”
Would he actually be so audacious as to try that? Could he actually pull it off?
He could, he will, because he’s already tried it once.
The difference is that six years ago — the last time he tried to overturn an election he lost — his Attorney General, FBI Director, Director of National Intelligence, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, DHS Secretary, and Chief of the National Guard would all have refused such an order, so he called on thousands of violent thugs to attack the Capitol, stop the election certification, and murder the vice president.
This time, in a classically Putin-esque move, he’s replaced all of those people with lickspittles like Blanche and true believer fanatics like Miller and Homan who’ll do exactly what he tells them to.
Many of them sat in the room with him, in the front row in front of the teleprompter, watching and nodding along with his lies. They know that if Democrats win and the election is certified this fall many of them, too, will end up on the wrong end of civil and criminal investigations.
Trump has recently declared, officially, that Democrats are traitors, communists, potential terrorists, and should be deported. The only thing he hasn’t demanded is for Democrats to be arrested for our politics, and that may well come in just a few months.
After all, he can’t afford to allow the House or Senate to fall into Democratic hands, because then he’ll be investigated with the power of law and subpoena for the many crimes he is currently committing.
He wouldn’t survive that politically, and he believes the Senate this time will actually convict him: they know that once he’s convicted and has thus lost his power, there’s no way he can regain it and he’ll no longer represent a threat to their political careers.
This is all why he’ll say or do anything to hang onto his power, because he knows if he loses that power his entire house of cards collapses.
He and his children go to prison or are forced into exile. His wife gets to reinvent her life the way she wants. What’s left of his properties gets sold off at auction like his casinos were the last time he went bankrupt.
This is what he’s imagining at 2 o’clock in the morning when he’s rage-tweeting. He’s also remembering the terri
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:
In his history of the rise and fall of the Roman Empire, Edward Gibbon believed that “the great constant of history was self-delusion: the willful inability of people to recognize how much the habits, rituals, and laws they took for granted had slowly changed — until it was too late to bend them back into shape.” The same could be said about the U.S. today, as the social, cultural, and legal norms that once guided collective behavior and undergirded liberal democracy have slowly eroded over time until they have become largely unrecognizable.
Posted on Monday, Jul 20, 2026 6:00 AM by John Ambrosio
https://3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2026/07/living-with-unbearable-k
nowledge-in-an-era-of-polycrisis.html
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
Translation: "6ixStringJack was absolutely right to create this thread on Monday, January 20, 2025 at 8:20 AM.
I'm never going to stop crying now that my globalist woke dystopia dreams are never going to play out, and that the illusory world that we've all been living in for about 3 generations was funded by around $39 Trillion of debt and never actually existed in the first place.
Get fucked, losers.
And fuck your Liberal Democracy. It's dead.
Just like I told you it would be.
--------------------------------------------------
Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.
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Oy, Canada Tariffs
How to lose friends and influence nothing
By Paul Krugman | Jul 21, 2026
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/oy-canada-tariffs
Donald J. Trump @realDonaldTrump
We are holding Canada responsible for the fact that they are not properly maintaining their Forests, and Brush therein, and the United States is being unnecessarily invaded by filthy, polluted, and unhealthy air, the quality of which is dangerous, and totally unacceptable! I will call the Prime Minister during the day to find out what they are going to do about it. The cost is incalculable! Canada has refused to engage in basic Forest Management and Debris Removal, knowing that such refusal will lead to exactly this result. This is Willful Negligence, and becoming a yearly occurrence, costing the United States Billions of Dollars, which cost of this pollution must of necessity be added to the TARIFFS Canada is currently paying. Thank you for your attention to this matter! President DONALD J. TRUMP
Jul 17, 2026, 3:24 PM
The Trade Act of 1930, generally known as the Smoot-Hawley tariff, lost its standing as the worst trade policy action in US history when Donald Trump imposed his “Liberation Day” tariffs in April 2025. But Smoot-Hawley was widely recognized as a terrible mistake soon after its passage, as it provoked widespread retaliation and contributed to the downward spiral of world trade that accompanied and reinforced the Great Depression.
Recognition of Smoot-Hawley’s stupidity led to the 1934 Reciprocal Trade Agreements Act, under which the US began negotiating trade deals — we’ll reduce our tariffs if you reduce yours — that helped pave the way for the great recovery of world trade and the global economy as a whole in the decades that followed World War II.
Yesterday the Trump administration invoked an obscure and never-before-used provision of Smoot-Hawley — Section 338 — to impose 50 percent tariffs on a wide range of Canadian goods.
Why? Why now? The White House fact sheet claims that the new tariffs are a response to Canadian policies that discriminate against U.S. products, notably the moves by most Canadian provinces (not the federal Canadian government) to stop importation of US alcoholic beverages. But these policies were themselves a response to the tariffs on Canadian goods Trump had previously imposed, without justification. Canadians were also reacting to Trump’s repeated demands that Canada surrender its independence and become the 51st state.
Were these complaints about Canadian policies the real reason for the new tariffs? On Friday Trump lashed out with the Truth Social post at the top of this article, threatening to impose tariffs on Canadian goods because of … wildfire smoke.
For the record, wildfires have been raging in Canada’s boreal forest, which covers 2 million square miles — the majority of Canada’s land area — and is mostly unmanaged because it’s completely inaccessible. Blaming Canada for not controlling fires that are, in reality, largely a consequence of global warming is unutterably idiotic.
Now, Trump officials claim that these tariffs aren’t about wildfire smoke, although the timing of these latest tariffs is curious. Notably, they haven’t ruled out the possibility of wildfire tariffs in the future. “The president has asked for options on that, and options are being shared with him,” one official told the Financial Times.
Also, one has to wonder whether Trump is feeling upset at the way he was massively booed at the World Cup final — while Mark Carney, the Canadian Prime Minister and his co-host, was not.
Whatever the real motivation for these new tariffs, they are almost surely illegal. They are definitely a violation of the U.S.-Mexico-Canada trade agreement, a revision of NAFTA negotiated and signed by Trump himself during his first term. Indeed, the White House fact sheet explicitly states that the new tariffs will be imposed “regardless of whether a good originates under the U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement (USMCA).”
So these latest actions confirm what most people
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Keep crying Paul. You fucking loser.
Quote:
Originally posted by second:
In his history of the rise and fall of the Roman Empire, Edward Gibbon believed that “the great constant of history was self-delusion: the willful inability of people to recognize how much the habits, rituals, and laws they took for granted had slowly changed — until it was too late to bend them back into shape.” The same could be said about the U.S. today, as the social, cultural, and legal norms that once guided collective behavior and undergirded liberal democracy have slowly eroded over time until they have become largely unrecognizable.
Posted on Monday, Jul 20, 2026 6:00 AM by John Ambrosio
https://3quarksdaily.com/3quarksdaily/2026/07/living-with-unbearable-k
nowledge-in-an-era-of-polycrisis.html
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
Translation: "6ixStringJack was absolutely right to create this thread on Monday, January 20, 2025 at 8:20 AM.
I'm never going to stop crying now that my globalist woke dystopia dreams are never going to play out, and that the illusory world that we've all been living in for about 3 generations was funded by around $39 Trillion of debt and never actually existed in the first place.
Get fucked, losers.
And fuck your Liberal Democracy. It's dead.
Just like I told you it would be.
--------------------------------------------------
Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.
NOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Trump’s Kiss of Death
By Thomas B. Edsall | July 21, 2026
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/21/opinion/trump-inept-second-term.htm
l?unlocked_article_code=1.zVA.5cRx.5x6M1sGgcugz&smid=url-share
Donald Trump is the black-thumb president.
Let’s start small. He persuaded FIFA to quash the one-game suspension of the U.S. striker Folarin Balogun, after which the American men’s soccer team suffered a humiliating 4-1 loss to Belgium.
When Trump first announced plans to renovate the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool, he said it would cost $1.5 million. On July 15, The Associated Press reported that despite this initial promise, “the bill ballooned to more than $16 million by June. Trump had said the repairs would last a century, but within days of the project’s initial completion last month, the water was beset by an algae bloom and pieces of the new coating appeared to be peeling off the bottom.”
These setbacks are just two examples of Trump’s kiss of death, the defeats and economic setbacks that have come to characterize his second term in office, including the job losses following Trump’s imposition of tariffs, the surge in the national debt after passage of Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act and the economic havoc resulting from his war against Iran.
Trump is one of the most — if not the most — ham-handed presidents in the nation’s history.
I asked Matthew Dallek, a political historian at George Washington University, for his take on Trump in 2026. He replied by email:
Governing via conspiracy theories, personal whim and wish-casting, Trump has taken his place as the most consistently inept president of this century. At home and abroad, in many cabinet and sub-cabinet agencies, the administration’s culture is dominated by incompetence.
Trump’s infliction of harm is not a result of bad luck or malign interference by foreign and domestic adversaries — the common fate of American presidents. In the overwhelming majority of cases, Trump himself initiated the policies and actions that turned belly-up.
One of the most egregious examples, perhaps, is his decision to join Israel’s bombing of nuclear facilities in Iran on June 21, 2025.
“The strikes were a spectacular military success,” Trump declared in an address to the nation that day. “Iran’s key nuclear enrichment facilities have been completely and totally obliterated.”
Despite these claims of success 13 months ago, the United States and Israel struck again this year, beginning on Feb. 28, and the war on Iran is in its fifth month, with the conflict intensifying and Americans beginning, once again, to die.
On his Substack, Popular Information, Judd Legum documented 24 instances between April 17 and July 13 of Trump making some variation of the claim “that the Strait of Hormuz was ‘open’ or controlled by the United States.”
Trump also let the Iranians know that “You got beat to hell” and boasted that it was a “Total and complete victory. 100 percent.”
More important than Trump’s false claims of victory, the war on Iran — a war of choice — has inflicted severe damage on the United States, including the death of at least 17 American military personnel and the wounding of more than 400 others.
According to Brown University’s Iran War Energy Cost Tracker, Americans are paying $71.3 billion more for gasoline and diesel alone. The increases in fuel costs translate into average household costs of $543.94 as I write. It will be more when you read this.
Let’s take a closer look at some of Trump’s proudest achievements.
On April 2, 2025, he announced “Liberation Day,” his plan to impose tariffs on America’s trading partners.
“Jobs and factories will come roaring back into our country,” the president asserted, adding, “We will supercharge our domestic industrial base.”
So what actually happened?
When Trump took office for the second time in January 2025, the total number of men and women employed in manufacturing was 12,673,000, according to the Federal Reserve. By June 2026, the number fell to 12,598,000, a loss of 75,0
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Quote:Have you heard of Herbert Hoover? The predecessor to President FDR? Hoover spent the rest of his life accusing Democrats of destroying America. Hoover also crashed the US economy, had no idea how to end the Great Depression, and opposed the US entering WWII. He was an early version of Trump, every instinct was wrong.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Get fucked, losers.
And fuck your Liberal Democracy. It's dead.
Just like I told you it would be.
https://www.google.com/search?q=did+herbert+hoover+oppose+early+entry+
into+ww2
Herbert Hoover vehemently opposed early United States entry into World War II. As a vocal non-interventionist, he criticized President Franklin D. Roosevelt's diplomatic maneuvers. Hoover believed that the conflict was an unnecessary European power struggle and argued that keeping the U.S. out was the best way to preserve democracy and economic Stability.
Key aspects of Hoover's anti-interventionist stance include:
• Opposition to War Preparations and Aid: He actively opposed measures like the Lend-Lease policy and warned that President Roosevelt was provoking both Germany and Japan. He frequently stated that if the U.S. had not provoked Japan, the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor would not have occurred.
• Distrust of Alliances: Hoover was a staunch anti-communist. He publicly disparaged any tacit alliance with the Soviet Union, arguing that fighting alongside Joseph Stalin would ultimately result in a greater tragedy.
• Concerns Over Domestic Impact: He feared that fighting a second global war would lead to massive government centralization, destroy the British Empire, and inadvertently empower the Soviet Union.
Hoover summarized his stance in a 1941 radio broadcast, asking: "Are we now to march out into the desert of European war and see the wells of freedom dried up behind us?", as documented by Teaching American History. He maintained this opposition until the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor brought the United States into the Conflict.
Post-War Vindication Efforts -- Hoover's bitterness over the war lasted for decades. He spent much of his later life writing Freedom Betrayed, a massive, posthumously published critique of WWII diplomacy. In it, he argued that the war was entirely unnecessary and that a non-interventionist approach would have resulted in Germany and the Soviet Union destroying each other, sparing American lives and preventing the Cold War.
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:Have you heard of Herbert Hoover?
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Get fucked, losers.
And fuck your Liberal Democracy. It's dead.
Just like I told you it would be.
Your dead whore mother was a Hoover.
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Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.
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The dismantling of USAID and the firing of its staff was illegal
By J. Brian Atwood and Kevin E. Byrnes | 07/22/26 12:30 PM ET
https://thehill.com/opinion/judiciary/5981243-doge-usaid-lawsuit-civil
-servants/
When Elon Musk and his youthful Department of Government Efficiency warriors boasted of taking a “chainsaw” to the U.S. Agency for International Development, they did more than destroy a government agency. They violated the law by summarily firing USAID’s public servants while placing millions of people around the world in mortal danger.
The thousands of public servants, fired without due process, care deeply about the agency’s mission. They did not deserve to be fired, nor did they deserve the efforts by the president himself to pile on by besmirching their reputation.
These actions have ramifications far beyond the impact on the individuals involved. They place every government employee at risk. Career professionals in the State Department and the intelligence community have also been summarily relieved of duty.
If the courts fail to intervene, our nation will be sent hurtling back in history to the era of the corrupt spoils system. That era ended when the Civil Service Reform Act of 1883 created a system based on merit. The law was updated in 1978 and it explicitly states that a public servant can only be removed if there is evidence of misconduct or poor performance — and only then after providing an opportunity for due process.
The administration violated this act, and we are contesting these firings in federal court. One of us is an attorney who has represented federal employees for more than three decades. The other served as the head of USAID for over six years in the Clinton administration.
DOGE made no real effort to determine what would be lost, including millions of lives. And it showed no empathy for USAID’s career employees, a professional staff that had made the agency a global leader in development cooperation.
USAID was irresponsibly removed from the world stage, and its employees were locked out. The president and Elon Musk labeled USAID’s professional public servants as “radical, leftist lunatics” and, with no evidence, stated that the agency was rife with “waste, fraud and mismanagement.”
Those labels were not mere insults. In a court of law, they are evidence.
The administration knew it could not fire career employees for their politics or for invented misconduct, so it dressed the purge as a “reorganization.” That was a façade.
The administration’s cover story has continued in court. Ironically, government lawyers now concede that no one was fired for misconduct or poor performance. That concession should end the matter. It is an admission that the lawful basis for these firings never existed.
Instead of acknowledging an unlawful purge, the government recasts the firings as a reorganization, a label engineered to deny employees’ due process. The reorganization is a fiction. The record shows a coordinated mass firing driven by the very motive the law forbids.
The Merit Systems Protection Board, created to oversee and implement the law protecting the civil service, has been reshaped into a rubber stamp for executive excess. The New York Times reported that the White House pressed the board behind closed doors to adopt a sweeping theory of presidential power.
In March, the board complied, breaking with decades of precedent to hold that Article II permits the president to remove career officials without due process. The decision is being appealed through the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit.
Fired USAID employees want their procedural rights observed, the law followed and their losses reversed or compensated. They want a reaffirmation of the principle contained in the law that a federal employee be judged not on a perception of their beliefs, but on the actions they take.
That legal principle keeps public service from being reduced to peonage. In the end, this is a battle over whether the rule of law can be quietly replaced by
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Man... You got up nice and early and started bouncing on your TDS dildo before they even put out any of the morning stories today, huh Shit Golem.
Good for you, buddy.
--------------------------------------------------
Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.
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The American People Need the Truth About the Iran War
The president and the Pentagon are not being up front about what has happened in more than 20 weeks of hostilities.
By Tom Nichols | July 22, 2026, 4:03 PM ET
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/07/trump-iran-conflict-pentagon
/688026/
For nearly five months, Donald Trump and his Cabinet have been misleading the American people about the war in Iran. When the president makes statements about the war, they are full of wishful thinking, hyperbole, and outright lies. He has devoted a full address to the topic only once—a rambling prime-time speech nearly four months ago that contained little substance. At this point, after more than 20 weeks of hostilities and at least 18 Americans dead and hundreds wounded, the people of the United States do not—cannot—entirely know what is happening, what progress U.S. forces are making, or what the president’s goals are.
This opacity seems to be by design: The president and his lieutenants appear unwilling to admit that they started, and are now losing, a war with one of America’s most dedicated enemies, and obfuscating probably seems less damaging than admitting this painful truth. Of course, some of their statements are merely mistakes. Some are spin. Others are exaggerations. But many of them are flat lies that Trump and his appointees dump into the public square seemingly without hesitation.
Consider the number of times Trump has said that the war is over or almost over, such as his April 17 declaration to USA Today that the fight to reopen the Strait of Hormuz is “over, it’s a great victory.” (He has made other claims of imminent victory at least 30 times, by one count.) He has insisted for months that the Iranian military is finished and that it has nothing left, as he did in the first week of the war when he said: “We’ve decimated their whole evil empire.” (He made similar claims at least half a dozen times in the first month of the war alone.) He has said that Iranian nuclear materials must be handed over, then said that the same materials are worthless and can stay where they are, and now has gone back to arguing that ending the Iranian nuclear program is the most important goal of the war.
All of these claims are dominoes that were set up to fall, one after another, by the single most egregious mistake that Trump made when choosing to go to war: He bet on quick regime change in a terrorist dictatorship and had no other plan should his long shot fall short. Perhaps Trump, after talking with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, believed the optimistic scenarios of a rapid regime collapse that Netanyahu and others floated. Trump’s own secretary of state reportedly warned the president that he was being sold “bullshit.” Nonetheless, despite Trump’s statement on the first night of the war offering a jumble of rationalizations, he at least made clear that he intended to topple the regime.
But within days, it became apparent that regime change was not happening. Unable to face failure, Trump resorted to prevarication. The war was supposed to be over in a matter of weeks, perhaps a month or a little more. When that timeline fell apart, Trump and his advisers began to dial through various reasons for staying in the war, but regime change—so prominent a goal in the first hours of the conflict—was now no longer one of them. Trump eventually claimed, dishonestly, that he’d never had any such intentions. (He has also said that U.S. actions changed the regime anyway by killing top Iranian leaders—“We’ve had regime change,” he said in late March—implying that he either doesn’t know what regime change means, or he knows and was trying to save face.)
He then piled up more falsehoods. The war was going great, the president and the self-appointed “secretary of war” told the world. “Total and complete victory. 100 percent,” Trump told the French AFP news service on April 8. “No question about it.” Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, the same day, called Operation Epic Fury “a
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Trump’s Nuclear Doctrine: Anything Is Possible For A Price
By David Averre | Jul 23, 2026 at 02:31 PM EDT
https://www.newsweek.com/trump-saudi-nuclear-deal-anything-possible-ne
w-doctrine-12234080
The United States’ new nuclear deal with Saudi Arabia, struck yesterday as American missiles continue to batter Iran, was met with cries of hypocrisy! and warnings it would spur on the race for a nuclear bomb in the Middle East.
This is neither surprising nor unfair, but the criticism fails to address a deeper, and perhaps more consequential, problem.
The agreement—which could purportedly grant Riyadh a path to build its own uranium enrichment facilities as part of its civilian nuclear program without undergoing stringent inspections by the UN’s nuclear watchdog, the IAEA—signals we are entering a new era of nuclear doctrine.
Nuclear nonproliferation is no longer being treated as a universal standard. Donald Trump likes to make deals, and the White House is telling the world that anyone can pursue their nuclear ambitions—provided you have enough bargaining power.
What may follow is a future in which states with enough money and geopolitical leverage can shop around for special nuclear deals from Washington—or Beijing or Moscow—while international safeguards become something to negotiate around rather than rules to meet.
Out With the Old Logic
The full text of the U.S.-Saudi agreement is yet to be made public, and any safeguards contained within remain unclear. Trump claimed in a Truth Social post on Thursday: "There will be no enrichment of material!" But several reports suggest Riyadh could process spent atomic fuel and build its own uranium enrichment facilities, pending a joint study to assess feasibility.
Not only do these capabilities present a pathway to producing nuclear weapons, but the Saudis may also be granted leave to operate their nuclear program without signing the "additional protocol"—an extra layer of protection that gives IAEA inspectors special monitoring powers to ensure everything is done by the book.
The logic that giving a country the freedom to enrich uranium, reprocess its fuel and operate free of strict international inspections could increase the risk of weaponization is exactly the premise that governed Washington’s other major civilian nuclear agreement in the Middle East.
In 2009, the U.S. and the U.A.E. signed a deal enabling Washington to transfer nuclear technology to the Emiratis for civilian use. In exchange for America’s help in kick-starting a nuclear energy program, Abu Dhabi agreed it would not pursue enrichment or reprocessing capabilities and would comply with the IAEA’s additional protocol inspections, thereby guaranteeing it could not build a nuclear weapon.
The Saudi agreement seems to point in the opposite direction. Now, at a time when the U.S. military is waging war on Iran to demolish its nuclear program, the White House appears willing to throw out its own nonproliferation principles to give special treatment to an economically valuable ally.
Darya Dolzikova, a Senior Research Fellow for Proliferation and Nuclear Policy at the RUSI think tank, told Newsweek: "It’s not surprising that the U.S. treats its allies a little differently from adversaries, even when it comes to nuclear nonproliferation.
"But once a country gets the expertise and technology to process fuel and enrich uranium, that knowledge doesn’t go away. Relationships change—Iran first got its nuclear technology from the United States, but the political winds shifted and now those countries are at war.
A New Buyers’ Market?
Riyadh is not the first partner to negotiate a bespoke nuclear deal with Washington outside of international safeguards.
India signed a deal in 2008 to receive additional U.S. support for its civilian nuclear program while retaining its own enrichment capabilities. But New Delhi already had its own robust civilian and military nuclear program, and is not a signatory of the international Non-Proliferation Treaty that a
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:
The full text of the U.S.-Saudi agreement is yet to be made public
So shut the fuck up until it is, faggot.
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Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:
The American People Need the Truth About the Iran War
From Tom Nichols and the rest of the paid liars at The Atlantic.
Fuck you, Shit Golem.
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Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.
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Even Trump Can’t Spin This One
You can’t post your way out of a war.
By Charlie Warzel | July 25, 2026, 7 AM ET
https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/2026/07/trump-iran-war-social-m
edia/688065/
If President Trump has one true skill, it is conjuring up alternate realities and getting his supporters to accept them. The examples are everywhere: dismissing stories he doesn’t like as “fake news” from corrupt media, casting the January 6 rioters as victims, election denial. After he baselessly insisted that there had been rampant mail-in voter fraud in the 2020 presidential election, 11 states made mail-voting access more restrictive. His repeated false claims in 2024 that Haitians in Springfield, Ohio, were eating pets led to real threats against the community. Trump builds a world, and by virtue of his power and influence, all of us end up living in it in some way or another.
That era may be coming to a close, in large part because of the way he and his administration have bungled the war in Iran. Trump seems unable to spin this conflict, divert sufficient attention away from it with a new controversy, or end it outright. His social-media posts, which once acted as a de facto assignment editor for the mainstream media, no longer command the same attention or respect. Now, interspersed with AI slop and inexplicable middle-of-the-night reposting binges, Trump’s Truth Social screeds sound more like the fevered ramblings of a radicalized Facebook uncle. For the past five months, he’s been trying to convince the American public (or at least his Truth Social followers) that the war is over, or ending, or a rousing success. His administration is even retroactively changing on the Pentagon’s website the number of American service members who have died in the conflict. But no one seems to be falling for it. His posts don’t have the juice. His alternate universe is no match for the harsh reality of war.
In the Trumpian vision of the world, the U.S. invasion of Iran was not only necessary but also urgent: In February, Trump alleged that Iran was attempting to rebuild its nuclear-weapons program and had continued developing long-range missiles that were threatening U.S. allies and could reach the United States “soon.” But Trump’s claim is dubious, at least according to a March 2025 U.S. intelligence assessment, which noted that “Iran is not building a nuclear weapon.” Experts also cast doubt on the strength of Iran’s missiles: “There is little evidence that Iran could build missiles that reach the United States in the near future,” Emma Sandifer of the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation told FactCheck.org in March.
Justifications aside, the attacks, which were not authorized by Congress, were immediately unpopular with Trump’s base, which elected him in part for his isolationist tendencies. (On Election Night 2024, Trump even remarked, “I’m not going to start a war. I’m going to stop wars.”) Iran’s predictable retaliation, closing the Strait of Hormuz and drastically cutting off crucial supply routes for oil and other natural resources, subsequently drove up prices for goods around the world—immediately exacerbating the unpopularity of the conflict and shocking the markets. The fallout appeared to take Trump by surprise, and in the early weeks of the war, he used his bully pulpit for damage control: On March 9, with Brent-crude futures spiking to nearly $120 a barrel, he gave an interview to CBS News suggesting that the “war is very complete, pretty much.” Oil futures swiftly plunged to less than $90 a barrel.
Trump used this tactic repeatedly. On March 20, he posted on Truth Social that the U.S. was “close to meeting our objectives” in Iran. Oil futures dropped. On March 23, he signaled that discussions between the U.S. and Iran were productive, leading Brent crude futures to plummet by 13 percent. Each time, Trump offered no real proof of his claims, yet markets responded to his version of the story. An NBC News analysis found 32 examples of the president suggesting that the war was coming to a clo
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Psychologist explains why fact-checking Trump fails — and what to do instead
By Michael Bader
Jul 27, 2026
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/other/psychologist-explains-why-fact-ch
ecking-trump-fails-and-what-to-do-instead-opinion/ar-AA28M2Ft
“Two years ago our country was dead. Today we are the hottest country in the world. America is respected like it's never been respected before…. Our stock markets are at their highest point of all time….”
The American public has gotten so used to Donald Trump’s bizarre hyperbolic rhetoric that we usually don’t pause to try to understand what it means. By bizarre, I mean his apparently compulsive need to constantly speak in glittering generalities, meaningless hyperbole, and superlatives. It’s closer to what George Orwell called “Duckspeak” than normal speech. [In 1984, Big Brother mandated a language that was English, but was also mindless, repetitive, with hardly any conscious thought]. And as Trump tells it, in such instances he is always the hero of the story. There is hardly a speech in which Trump does not use phrases like “the likes of which nobody’s ever seen before,” “Numbers we’ve never seen,” or “Like nobody ever thought possible.”
One news agency reported that he had used such phrases over 200 times this year already. Of course, such extreme declarations usually cast Trump himself in near-messianic terms — not just as an observer of these unprecedented feats, but their sole and irreplaceable author. This type of vacuous repetition has the effect of hypnotizing his already admiring audience, holding them in place. For those of us who are not enthralled with the man and his actions, this hypnosis becomes paralysis. There is simply nothing there to latch onto and undo.
So, we fact-check.
Trump’s grandiosity isn’t limited to vainglorious claims about rescuing America from the dangerous vermin and garbage ridden hell that he apparently inherited from Obama and Biden, but it frequently appears in much more personal territory, for example, when he preened that no one had ever seen a body as beautiful as his, that he is a ‘stable genius,” that he had been “the most effective President for the black community since Abraham Lincoln,” or when he portrayed himself as Jesus.
Because such bragging is invariably shot through with lies and falsehoods, Progressives and the mainstream media usually respond to Trump’s chest-thumping by fact-checking him. So, for example, following Trump’s speech about election security, the entire media echo chamber was filled with corrections of his facts.
Trump constantly lies, and so we constantly fact-check him. It's as if we believe that the best we can do so often is to defend objective reality in the hopes that people see the light. What we don’t do is try to understand why his lying and boasting are so ubiquitous. Is it that we don’t understand it? Or might it even be that we are embarrassed by it and so keep trying to dig into it as if there was some hidden and perverse sense and logic?
If we did ask why Trump has to lie so much, we would find that the answer is hiding in plain sight. You don't need to be Sigmund Freud to intuitively understand that someone who publicly boasts all the time must privately struggle with feelings of inferiority and inadequacy. This is simply the normal functioning of the mind. Psychologists have long known that our minds are programmed to avoid or otherwise get rid of real, imagined, or predicted feelings or situations that we fear will be too psychologically painful. One person might get rid of a bad feeling through denial. Another might project this feeling onto someone else. Many people, however, do what Trump does—they exaggerate the opposite. So if someone (usually a man) is especially threatened by situations that might make him feel helpless, unimportant, or shamed in some way, that man – Donald Trump – will automatically try to mitigate such a threat by arguing to himself and others that he is actually powerful, special, and perfect.
But this psychological dynamic –
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The Gordie Howe Bridge Is What American Betrayal Looks Like
Canada spent billions on the crossing. Trump turned it into a shakedown
By David Moscrop | Updated 8:00, Jul. 27, 2026
https://thewalrus.ca/the-gordie-howe-bridge-is-what-american-betrayal-
looks-like/
As a symbol of Canada’s relationship with the United States, it’s a bit too on the nose. Linking Windsor with Detroit and named after a Canadian hockey legend who played for an American team, the Gordie Howe International Bridge sat empty for months, completed and useless, after Washington threatened to block the opening, then huffily cancelled the ceremony in June of this year.
Today, the bridge—all 2.5 kilometres of its soaring cable-stayed deck—is finally open for business. That the bridge is doing what it was built to do is a good thing. The structure will handle a substantial share of Canada’s busiest commercial gateway. Billions of dollars worth of cars, auto parts, machinery, food, pharmaceuticals, and other sundry goods will traverse each year, along with friends, families, tourists, and business travellers. But the whole sorry episode is a reminder of the extent to which Donald Trump has built a bullying, sinister plutocracy that has utterly captured American economic and political life—and some of Canada’s too.
The story of what should have been a triumph of continental integration goes something like this. To ease travel times and facilitate trade, Canada agreed in 2012 to pony up the cash—ultimately $6.4 billion—to construct a new bridge and then earn that money back through tolls. It would be owned jointly between the Government of Canada and the state of Michigan, with the former recouping costs for the capital outlay before splitting revenues with the state. This was, and it can’t be repeated enough, an unusually generous arrangement.
Then, in February, Trump made his opening demand: a 50 percent ownership stake as the price for allowing the first vehicle through. One ostensible justification for the last-minute renegotiation was his desire to, as per the CBC, rectify “longstanding unfair trade practices.” It was nothing more than a shakedown.
Well, there might have been something more. Allegations of political interference cite the influence of the billionaire Moroun family, one of whom—Matthew Moroun—owns the aging Ambassador Bridge also linking the two cities. The Morouns have long opposed the Gordie Howe Bridge, which would rival their own and, presumably, reduce traffic and tolls. Moroun donated $1 million (US) to the Trump-aligned MAGA Inc. political action committee last January and later met with Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick right before the US administration blocked the opening.
Despite the accusations, there has been no proven quid pro quo or untoward dealings involving the Morouns and the Trump administration. However, Mike Levin, the representative from California’s Forty-ninth Congressional District, summed up the situation bluntly: “My friends, it’s corruption in plain sight. A government should work for the people, not for whoever writes the biggest cheque. Open the bridge.”
The ribbon has now been cut. There isn’t a lot to celebrate about how it happened. Canada was able to keep its original pact with Michigan—but only after agreeing to a second deal that, for fifteen years, diverts half the bridge’s net revenues into a US regional development fund under Washington’s sole control. We effectively paid to remove an obstacle Trump himself imposed. Tony Soprano would be proud.
Plans for the bridge were in the works for decades before Trump crashed into the Oval Office. In 2000–2001, transportation planners on both sides of the border looked at the Detroit River, noted the surging trade and mounting traffic, and warned of looming gridlock. They recommended a new international crossing. By 2004, both governments endorsed the idea, sending engineers to their drawing boards eight years later. Throughout it all, Canada and America alternated between co-operation and competition. Canadian ministries join
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The Putinization of the American Military
When poseurs and yes-men run a war
By Paul Krugman
Jul 28, 2026
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/the-putinization-of-the-american
Donald Trump’s Iran debacle is by no means the first war the United States has lost in modern times. In Vietnam and in Afghanistan, America was similarly defeated by enemies that were nominally less advanced yet implacable. The humiliating images of the last helicopter taking off from Saigon, and the chaos of the mad scramble to board the last plane departing in Kabul, are reminders of the folly of forever wars that are bound to lose the support of the American people.
But the loss to Iran is different: it is the closest we have come to outright military defeat. U.S. forces pulled out of Saigon and Kabul, not because they had been beaten in battle, but because the domestic political cost of propping up client regimes became too great.
Granted, U.S. forces haven’t suffered any conventional defeats at Iranian hands either.
But all indications are that the main reason the Trump administration is again calling off major operations against Iran is that America is running critically short of ammunition.
So Trump isn’t backing down because his war of choice is extremely unpopular, although it is. Nor is he backing down because the economic costs of the closure of the Strait of Hormuz are too great, or because the fiscal cost of the war is skyrocketing, while the country faces enormous deficits and rising long-term interest rates. Trump says he doesn’t care about any of that. And in a way I believe him — because even a fully reopened Strait won’t recoup his standing with voters fast enough to salvage the midterm elections for Republicans.
No, most reports, like this one from the Wall Street Journal, say that Trump is backing down because military professionals have finally managed to convince him that U.S. stocks of advanced munitions are so severely depleted that the current rate of use will soon leave America critically weakened. Moreover, replenishing those stocks will take years once the shooting ceases.
For example, the Center for Strategic and International Studies estimates that the US has expended more than half of the Patriot missiles it had before the war, and that it will take until 2029 to replace them:
The administration’s response to such reports, exemplified by recent remarks by Mike Waltz, the US ambassador to the United Nations, is that
· Munitions aren’t depleted
· Anyone leaking the fact that they are depleted should go to jail
· It’s Joe Biden’s fault
Given the nature of Trump-speak, Waltz’s statement is in effect an admission that the U.S. military is now in deep trouble.
How could this happen? How could the best-equipped, most sophisticated military in the world have allowed itself to be humiliated by a third-rate power?
First of all, Pete Hegseth and Donald Trump began with an astonishingly stupid theory of war: the belief that performative masculinity is how you win. Hegseth literally believes that the secret of military might in an age of AI-enabled drones that can travel hundreds of miles is more testosterone.
Now, the idea that being manly and anti-woke makes an army strong was the reason that many on the American right admired Vladimir Putin before he invaded Ukraine. You might think that 1.4 million Russian casualties — 450,000 of them dead — and the spectacle of burning Russian oil refineries and factories would have disabused them of this notion. But no.
And the fixed belief that “lethality” is how you win surely led to basic inability to anticipate the blindingly obvious: that we have a limited supply of sophisticated weapons and that the Iranians w
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Worst Person You Know Just Made a Good Point on Impeaching Trump
The Iran war is apparently a bridge too far for some people.
Malcolm Ferguson | July 29, 2026 11:18 a.m. ET
https://newrepublic.com/post/213682/alex-jones-impeach-donald-trump-ir
an
Right-wing conspiracy theorist Alex Jones is calling for the impeachment of President Donald Trump, a dramatic about-face for someone who has been an unflinching supporter of the president for years.
Jones based his demands on Trump’s war on Iran, which many on the MAGA right were opposed to from the start, viewing it as yet another endless foreign war—a pattern Trump ran on ending.
“The big issue is how to stop Trump. And we have to have Congress go for the war powers. They’ve tried three times to vote on war powers—they’re supposed to authorize a war. This is a war; they’re getting the draft ready. If this isn’t a war, nothing’s a war. I mean, this is absolutely out of control,” Jones said in a video posted on Tuesday afternoon. “And so I’m calling for it right now: Twenty-Fifth Amendment, impeachment, whatever needs to happen to get this front and center, to get control of our country.”
Jones went on to allege that Trump is preparing for a boots-on-the-ground invasion of Iran, a line in the sand for many in the “America First” wing of MAGA.
“They want us in a total war so they can censor and take our freedoms, nationalize everything, and push us aside with AI—total liability, immunity, and protection. This is a disaster. We are facing tyranny, but the public’s awakening,” he continued. “We’ve got to come together and transcend left and right, and we have to say no to an expanded war that will definitely destroy the economy and kill a bunch of our troops. They’re preparing a massive ground invasion. It’s all confirmed. This is going down right now.”
While this announcement is historically uncharacteristic for Jones, the internal MAGA split on the Iran war has been brewing for some time.
“How do we 25th Amendment his ass?” Jones wrote back in April after Trump warned that “a whole civilization will die tonight,” referring to Iran. “WAR CRIME ALERT!!—Trump on Iran: ‘A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again. The definition of genocide is destroying an entire civilization/people! Trump literally sounds like an unhinged super villain from a Marvel comic movie. This IS NOT WHAT WE VOTED FOR!!!”
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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‘The Boss Wants This Money’: Trump’s Fundraising Operation
Meredith O’Rourke, nicknamed ‘princess of darkness,’ carries out the president’s desire to wring hundreds of millions from companies for his projects.
By Josh Dawsey, Dana Mattioli, Annie Linskey and Emily Glazer | July 30, 2026 7:30 pm ET
https://www.wsj.com/politics/policy/trump-donations-company-fundraisin
g-1e34a78f
WASHINGTON—Almost every night in the White House, President Trump calls his fundraiser, Meredith O’Rourke, for an update.
Trump asks O’Rourke which companies and donors have cut checks and which haven’t, and for how much. He often asks her to make much larger financial requests than she was planning—for some donors the ask is $5 million, for others it is $50 million. And the president gives her names to call, often including people who have recently met with him, according to people with knowledge of the calls.
“This is very important to the president. He’s asked me to call you and ask you for this donation,” O’Rourke has relayed on phone calls with companies, persistently following up with them. In some calls, she has referred to Trump as the boss, saying “the boss wants this money.” In turn, Trump has called her the “princess of darkness” because she is such a “killer” with donors, according to people who have heard his comments.
SoftBank donated $50 million toward Trump’s presidential library. Apple cut a check for around $25 million toward his White House ballroom project, while Microsoft gave around $10 million and Amazon chipped in around $5 million, according to people familiar with the contributions. Meta Platforms recently gave $10 million to a Trump-aligned political committee, people familiar said, on top of a multimillion donation to the ballroom and a prior $22 million payment to the planned presidential library.
Trump stands out for taking personal control of the fundraising, and no sitting American president has ever raised these amounts for his pet projects. At the same time, companies have paid new attention to the White House as Trump has gotten involved in regulatory decisions that once were made by independent agencies, dramatically shifting the balance of power across Washington.
Trump has been demanding checks from companies for a range of political and legacy projects—telling executives and lobbyists their companies should give $25 million or $50 million.
No laws prohibit presidents from raising unlimited sums for nonprofits, like the ones used for the ballroom and his presidential library, his super PAC or political issue committees. For most of these types of transactions, public disclosure of donors isn’t required and reporting on spending is infrequent.
All told, the second-term president has raised more than $800 million since returning to office, according to an updated Wall Street Journal analysis.
Some of the money is earmarked for specific projects, including the White House ballroom and the Freedom 250 funds for the nation’s birthday celebrations, but Trump has floated using funds in other ways. The president, at the dinner thanking contributors to the ballroom project, said, “We’ll have money left over, and we’ll use that for something...maybe for the arch or something else that will come.”
Tracking who gives
Interviews with dozens of donors, executives, lobbyists, Trump advisers and others indicate a staggering fundraising and influence operation, with Trump at the center. The president closely tracks who gives, aides said, repeatedly assigning O’Rourke with big asks that she has told others make her uncomfortable. Danielle Alvarez, an outside spokeswoman for Trump and O’Rourke, said it was “laughable” that O’Rourke had ever been uncomfortable with a request.
Chevron was asked to give $50 million. The oil company gave millions, but far less than the requested amount. Several top Washington lobbyists have been asked to raise $50 million or more for Trump projects.
Meta executives convened a series of calls among themselves to discuss strategy after being repeatedly aske
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Thanks for proving my point all along and turning this into a daily diary of a TDS suffering fool's thread.
Your world is dead. It never existed in the first place.
It was funded by $39 Trillion in debt.
We are going to fix everything and never let people like you run anything a step above a lemonade stand going forward and we're never going to look back, loser.
You are irrelevant.
You always were irrelevant.
But now everybody knows it.
--------------------------------------------------
Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.
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The people who built Trump now say he’s evil and demonic (150 seconds): Alex Jones, Tucker Carlson, et. al.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Where Are Trump's Lawyers Now?
• Roy Cohen Disbarred; dead
• Michael Cohen Disbarred; pleaded guilty to tax, campaign, and false-statement crimes
• Rudy Giuliani Disbarred in NY and DC; $148 million in defamation damages
• Alina Habba Sanctioned $1 million for frivolous litigation
• Boris Epshteyn Pending Arizona criminal charges in fake-elector case
• John Eastman Disbarred in California and suspended in DC; Arizona criminal case pending
• Kenneth Chesebro Disbarred in New York; pleaded guilty in Georgia; Wisconsin case pending
• Sidney Powell Pleaded guilty in Georgia
• Jenna Ellis Pleaded guilty in Georgia; suspended in Colorado; Arizona criminal case pending
• Jeffrey Clark Facing criminal charges in Arizona over fake-elector scheme
• Christina Bobb Facing Arizona criminal charges over fake-elector scheme
• Lin Wood Disbarred in Colorado; Retired and surrendered his law license rather than face disbarment in his home state of Georgia
• Total number of criminal convictions or disbarments among all of Ronald Reagan's, George H. W. Bush's, Bill Clinton's, George W. Bush's, Barack Obama's, and Joe Biden's lawyers: ZERO
• Total number of criminal convictions or disbarments among Donald Trump's lawyers: Ten and counting
https://imgur.com/gallery/where-are-they-now-0cJdfqJ
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Say whatever you want, Shit Golem.
Your party is dead.
--------------------------------------------------
Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.
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Where Are Trump's Lawyers Now?
• Roy Cohen Disbarred; dead
• Michael Cohen Disbarred; pleaded guilty to tax, campaign and false-statement crimes
• Rudy Giuliani Disbarred in NY and DC; $148 million in defamation damages
• Alina Habba Sanctioned $1 million for frivolous litigation
• Boris Epshteyn Pending Arizona criminal charges in fake-elector case
• John Eastman Disbarred in California and suspended in DC; Arizona criminal case pending
• Kenneth Chesebro Disbarred in New York; pleaded guilty in Georgia; Wisconsin case pending
• Sidney Powell Pleaded guilty in Georgia
• Jenna Ellis Pleaded guilty in Georgia; suspended in Colorado; Arizona criminal case pending
• Jeffrey Clark Facing criminal charges in Arizona over fake-elector scheme
• Christina Bobb Facing Arizona criminal charges over fake-elector scheme
• Lin Wood Disbarred in Colorado; Retired and surrendered his law license rather than face disbarment in his home state of Georgia
• Total number of criminal convictions or disbarments among all of Ronald Reagan's, George H. W. Bush's, Bill Clinton's, George W. Bush's, Barack Obama's, and Joe Biden's lawyers: ZERO
• Total number of criminal convictions or disbarments among Donald Trump's lawyers: Ten and counting
https://imgur.com/gallery/where-are-they-now-0cJdfqJ
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Say whatever you want, Shit Golem.
Your party is dead.
--------------------------------------------------
Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.
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Trump’s Irrationality Is Dangerous
The president’s recent rant is a sign of serious dysfunction in the Oval Office.
By Tom Nichols | August 4, 2026, 6:03 PM ET
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/08/trump-reflecting-pool-irrati
onality/688180/
Many Americans—and much of the rest of the world—have become inured to Donald Trump’s strange rants. When he shouts about sharks, when he drones on about his brilliant uncle, when he casually ponders violating the Constitution, his supporters try to dress his statements up as some kind of strategy: He’s not lost touch with reality, you see. He’s doing the weave, or he’s owning the libs. He’s fighting the fake news and flooding the zone. He knows what he’s doing.
These excuses have never really held much water. But his rant yesterday about the Reflecting Pool (speaking of things that don’t hold water) was a warning that the president has encased himself in the hard amber of irrationality that inevitably surrounds authoritarian leaders. He has become detached from reality—and that detachment is extremely dangerous.
The Reflecting Pool mess is different from other Trump obsessions because it reveals just how immune to evidence and logic his beliefs have become, even when a trusted lieutenant wheels an entire box of supporting evidence into the Oval Office. In Trump’s world, nothing is ever innocent. If something went wrong, the fault must lie with Americans conspiring against him, not with a contractor who did shabby work. And so the boss put out the order: Find the criminals who destroyed my lovely pool.
The task of prosecuting this inane case fell to Jeanine Pirro, who has known Trump for more than three decades. She has long been one of his most loyal defenders on Fox News, and she was his personal choice for the job of U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia after the failed nomination of Ed Martin. She dutifully charged multiple people with vandalizing the Reflecting Pool, including the Olympic athlete David Hearn. But last week, she moved to drop the case after admitting that the pool’s condition was “the result of a botched installation” and not of criminal activity. Trump immediately turned on her. In a Truth Social post after Pirro’s filing, Trump said he disagreed “100%” with his old friend. “I don’t know what she was thinking? To me, it was a pure case of VANDALISM.”
This outburst, however, was merely a warm-up for a nearly 10-minute performance yesterday afternoon in the Oval Office that went well beyond Trump’s usual whining. Pirro, he said, “choked” under pressure from the court. She “made a mistake. It was vandalism.” He continued:
Quote:But how did Trump know that Pirro was wrong and he was right? “We have photographs or tapes,” he said, “like moving cameras, right? We have them where people are on the side, cutting it with a box knife.” Trump then admitted that he wasn’t “thrilled” with the work the contractor did, but “in addition, there was vandalism.” He complained about some damage to the grass nearby, but then came back to the pool, where “they took knives or cutters, and they cut the material—it’s material. And they put their hands and they pulled it.”
One of the things was, the Reflecting Pool hasn’t worked since 1922, because it always leaked. It always leaked from 1922. You know, it’s the largest, longest pool ever, all that. The concept is beautiful, but it always leaked because of the size, because of maintenance, whatever. But it was built in 1922, and from the day it was built, it was—it leaked. Biden spent $58 million. Barack Hussein Obama spent much more than that. He said, “I have an idea. Let’s take the river from, let’s take the water from the Potomac.” So they took the water from the Potomac, and it was putrid. It was putrid. It was a disaster. Biden was a disaster.
Pirro undermined all of this in a lengthy filing to the court that accompanied her request to withdraw the case. Perhaps in an earlier time, when Trump appeared more amenable to listening to the advice of friends and trusted advisers,
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Say whatever you want, Shit Golem.
Your party is dead.
--------------------------------------------------
Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.
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World Leaders Are Getting Sick and Tired Of Donald Trump’s Antics
By Daniel R. DePetris | Aug 05, 2026 at 10:21 AM EDT
https://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-tariffs-deal-tactics-12286430
Before Donald Trump was President of the United States, he was a real-estate magnate in Manhattan who courted celebrity about as much as he courted the big deal. His negotiating style wasn’t prefaced on traditional give-and-take but rather on pummeling the other side into submission. "The best thing you can do is deal from strength, and leverage is the biggest strength you can have," Trump wrote in his 1987 bestseller, The Art of the Deal. "Leverage is having something the other guy wants. Or better yet, needs."
For a while, Trump’s strong-arm tactics worked after he ascended to the White House. After all, foreign leaders can’t just stick their heads in the sand when the most powerful person on the planet makes threats. More often than not, those on the receiving end of those threats offered Trump concessions in the hope he would take the worst-case scenario off the table.
Trump’s coercion paid him dividends in the first year of his second term. Mexico was hit with tariffs, forcing President Claudia Sheinbaum to deploy 10,000 troops along the U.S.-Mexico border to put a dent in the northerly flow of migrants and fentanyl.
Deathly afraid that Trump would withdraw the United States from NATO, the alliance’s members flattered the American president before signing up to a massive hike in defense spending.
And after Trump used his inauguration address to threaten a takeover of the Panama Canal due to what he argued was excessive Chinese influence there, the Panamanian government sought to mollify his anger by withdrawing from Beijing’s Belt and Road Initiative and declaring Hong Kong-based CK Hutchison’s operations in the strategic waterway unconstitutional.
Yet as Trump’s second term grinds on, small and middle powers who may have thought submission was their best course of action are now fighting back. Trump is as loud and brash as ever, but the results aren’t nearly as impressive for him today as they were in the past. States as varied as Brazil, Canada and Spain are dismissing Trump’s noise and using it as an opportunity for a strategic reassessment.
Brazil is the poster-child of this trend. In July 2025, the Trump administration declared Brazil a national security threat to the United States, accused the Brazilian government of undermining the rule of law and denounced its judicial system for "persecuting" former Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro.
Based on this justification, the White House slapped Brazil with an additional tariff of 40 percent in a bid to pressure President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva into dropping Bolsonaro’s case and changing Brazil's trade practices.
The outcome, however, was far from what Trump expected. Instead of capitulating, Lula da Silva argued that Washington was in essence trying to extort a proud, independent Brazil for political purposes. He played the nationalism card and projected himself as the defender of Brazilian sovereignty.
The strategy worked—Lula saw his approval ratings go up; searched for alternative trading partners to lessen dependency on the United States as an export market; and dropped opposition to negotiating a regional trade pact with Beijing. Trump’s decision to leverage America’s economic firepower merely induced Brazil to double down on its economic relationship with China, the very power the Trump administration views as its biggest non-hemispheric competitor in Latin America. Brazilian exports to China have risen by 22 percent year-on-year.
Canada is increasingly resistant to getting pushed around too. Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney isn’t jettisoning the strategic alliance with the United States—indeed it would be foolish to do so given Canada’s status as a neighbor and the deep military-to-military ties it shares with Washington as part of the North American Aerospace Command.
But what Ottawa reg
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Say whatever you say, Shit Golem.
Your party is dead.
--------------------------------------------------
Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.
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When a President Promises a Massacre
Harkening back to colonial massacres, Trump abandons the premise of proportionality for butchery in Iran and beyond.
By Nick Turse | August 5, 2026, 1:21 p.m.
https://theintercept.com/2026/08/05/trump-colonial-extermination-asymm
etric-warfare/
“I want to give them every last chance before decapitation,” President Donald Trump said on Tuesday when asked about his floundering war with Iran. “It’s a very, very tough thing to do.”
Trump was assumedly talking about wiping out Iran’s leadership — a strategy that failed him earlier in the conflict. But the horror from which that shorthand derives, the literal taking of heads, has long been employed as a method of psychological warfare from ancient times until today. (I’ve seen it firsthand.) Such atrocities were, in fact, central to 19th-century colonial warfare from Africa to Asia. In the former, to take one example, a white military officer “ornamented his flower beds with heads of twenty-one natives killed in a punitive expedition,” a horror later retold as fiction in Joseph Conrad’s classic “Heart of Darkness.”
Trump may not advocate for such conspicuous atrocities, but his brand of warfare shares some of the key hallmarks of such unrestrained colonial extermination campaigns. To understand the magnitude of this horror which has mostly gone unacknowledged, take a trip with me into Trump’s own heart of darkness; an exploration of his world of wars that might best be described as a war of the worlds.
— Nick Turse, editor of TomDispatch
Channeling His Inner-Martian
As his war in Iran has imploded, his poll numbers have plummeted, the U.S. economy has cratered, and he finds himself in the grip of a steep cognitive decline, President Donald Trump has increasingly lashed out, calling for cataclysm, slaughter, and even genocide. As he tries desperately, if ham-handedly, to extricate himself from a losing war, the commander-in-chief of the world’s most destructive military offers up deranged rants, baying for blood and issuing orders that throw the concept of proportionality in warfare out the window.
Trump’s bloodthirsty rhetoric has been borne out in asymmetrical slaughter, with Iranian fatalities exceeding American deaths by multiple orders of magnitude. And this follows similarly lopsided casualty tolls in Trump’s conflicts in Somalia, Venezuela, Yemen, and on the high seas. This low-risk butchery masquerading as warfare harkens back to 19th-century extermination campaigns in which so-called inferior races were massacred in spectacles of slaughter — colonial violence that wiped out ethnic groups and set the stage for 20th-century genocide.
“Every time Iran kills an American Soldier, they will pay for that killing many times over!” Trump recently announced on Truth Social. “This directive has been passed on to Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Daniel Caine, and every Leader in the Military.”
This unhinged command for disproportionate retaliation — which may amount to a violation of international humanitarian law — was featured, mostly without further remark, in news reports with bland headlines, like “Trump pays respects to 4 US service members killed in the Middle East.” It was also, for example, tucked deep inside and presented without further comment in a New York Times article about impending testimony before the Senate Appropriations Committee by Hegseth and Caine.
Trump’s order, and the matter-of-fact coverage from the Times, reminded me of a report by a different Times, almost exactly 199 years earlier: an article from Van Diemen’s Land, the Ireland-sized island to the southeast of Australia that we now know as Tasmania.
White settlers poured onto the island in the early 1800s, wiping out the kangaroos and replacing them with sheep. They treated the Indigenous people no differently. “Thousands were hunted down like wild beasts,” according to the local press. When one of the white people were killed by locals, the Colonial Times reported that other settlers
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:
When a President Promises a Massacre
Harkening back to colonial massacres, Trump abandons the premise of proportionality for butchery in Iran and beyond.
By Nick Turse | August 5, 2026, 1:21 p.m.
Iranians, Latin Americans, Somalis, and Yemenis have all been in the crosshairs of America’s lopsided killing campaigns during his second term, but in this new age of slaughter, all of us are potentially targets in Trump’s war on the world.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
If Nick actually believed any of this, he wouldn't have the fucking balls to write any of it.
Because he's a lying bigmouth pussy, just like you and everyone who voted for Kamala Harris.
You're fucking gutter trash, and I'd love for you to finally figure out where I live so you can come and visit and I'll put you into the fucking ground where you belong.
--------------------------------------------------
Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.
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Quote:Have you seen too many superhero movies, 6ix? If it makes you feel powerful to believe you will triumph in an impromptu duel to the death, keep fantasizing. That's why people like you go to movies. But you might need to practice to make it a reality. Otherwise, you're just a duck or deer during hunting season dreaming of killing the hunter.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
If Nick actually believed any of this, he wouldn't have the fucking balls to write any of it.
Because he's a lying bigmouth pussy, just like you and everyone who voted for Kamala Harris.
You're fucking gutter trash, and I'd love for you to finally figure out where I live so you can come and visit and I'll put you into the fucking ground where you belong.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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The Once-Shameless President Is Deeply Embarrassed
As Donald Trump faces one humiliation after another, he is attacking those he blames.
By Jonathan Lemire | August 5, 2026
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/2026/08/trump-humiliated-iran-ref
lecting-pool/688184/
One of President Trump’s superpowers is his shamelessness. Most of the time, he demonstrates a singular ability to shrug off—or flat-out lie about—scandals or missteps that would have caused another politician’s career to self-immolate. Get caught on an Access Hollywood video boasting about abusing women? That’s just locker-room talk! Grow insecure about crowd size? The photo must be doctored! Mistakenly suggest that Alabama was in the path of a hurricane? Someone get a Sharpie and a map! Trump has long been able to shrug off a bad headline and move on to the next news cycle, counting on his base to swallow his claims and never waver in their support.
But that power appears to be fading. Trump is undeniably in a bad spot. His poll numbers have tumbled, and Republicans are fearful that they will lose at least one chamber of Congress this November. Trump’s behavior has grown more erratic in recent months—just check out his Truth Social account most nights—and he recently marked his 80th birthday. And lately, he has shown something else: an ability to be embarrassed. When that has happened, he has lashed out angrily—and has been willing to deploy the levers of government, and his compliant staff, to menace those he blames for his humiliation.
His recent targets include an Olympic canoeist accused of vandalizing the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool after a rushed and botched renovation project, and journalists who reported about the security deficiencies of Trump’s new Air Force One. In the first matter, he pushed for a prosecution after an arrest was made; in the other, he ordered a criminal investigation. (The case against the canoeist and other alleged vandals fell apart, and the subpoenas of the journalists have been dropped, at least for the moment.)
For months now, Trump has been on the receiving end of another humiliation: He has been repeatedly mocked and ignored by the hard-line leaders in Iran. Once more this week, the president reacted with rage when Iran again contradicted his claims about negotiations to bring the war to a close. How will he lash out this time?
Trump really, really does not want to be forgotten, and he cares deeply about leaving his physical mark on Washington. He is a developer at heart who spent decades obsessing over the details of his homes in Manhattan and Palm Beach while also overseeing the design of luxury golf courses around the world. He mostly kept that impulse in check during his first term, but now, facing his political mortality, he has decisively shifted his focus to his legacy, whether that be trying to claim territory for the United States or reshaping the nation’s capital. You know the list: the East Wing, the Rose Garden, the Kennedy Center, the arch, the municipal golf courses, a helipad on the White House South Lawn, and so on. Trump has long prized symbols—particularly when the symbols can project his power—and seized upon America’s 250th birthday as an opportunity to further beautify Washington, his backdrop as he presided over the grandiose celebrations. His attention was particularly drawn to the Reflecting Pool.
Trump was not wrong in thinking it could use a little love. The Reflecting Pool, which stretches east from the Lincoln Memorial, on the National Mall, toward the Washington Monument, has long leaked and showed its age, bedeviling administrations for decades. In April, Trump announced a solution: a swimming-pool liner that would be, in his words, American-flag blue. To complete the project before the July 4 festivities, the Trump administration awarded no-bid contracts to redo the base of the pool and install a nanobubbling system that was meant to kill off algae growth. Instead, the algae flourished, the pool turned green, fences went up, and mitigation efforts failed. The R
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U.S. Attorney Jeanine Pirro’s clash with President Trump over the handling of the Reflecting Pool case is raising questions about Trump’s sanity.
There is video of Trump explaining that vandals, not incompetent workers, caused the Reflecting Pool liner to peel. Trump is crazy.
https://www.politico.com/news/2026/07/31/doj-reflecting-pool-damage-bo
tched-installation-not-vandalism-01021291
The video of Trump being senile and talking faster than his brain works.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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The Watchdogs Are Barking Themselves Hoarse
The scandals of the president’s first term now seem quaint.
By Marie-Rose Sheinerman | August 9, 2026, 8 AM ET
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/2026/08/trump-ethics-corruption-c
rypto-watchdogs/688187/
Last May, President Trump held an “intimate” dinner at his members-only golf club in Virginia for the top-220 investors in $TRUMP, a meme coin he launched days before the start of his second term that, by the end of 2025, would generate $636 million for him. About 100 protesters gathered outside in rain jackets, baseball caps, and muddy sneakers to confront the dinner guests arriving in shiny dress shoes, tuxedos, and black Cadillac SUVs. They pointed to the dinner as the encapsulation of the troublesome grift of Trump’s second term: trading personal access to the president in exchange for cash and funneling money to a Trump-owned property. “This is like the Mount Everest of corruption,” Senator Jeff Merkley of Oregon, a Democrat, said that night, standing before a crowd spotted with signs reading GRIFTER IN CHIEF and DON THE CON.
But a year later, when Trump hosted the winners of the second iteration of the so-called crypto contest at a luncheon gala in Mar-a-Lago in Florida, no large group of protesters greeted the attendees. The private Florida resort is a logistically more challenging location for a protest than a golf club 45 minutes from downtown Washington. But the ever intensifying rush of ethics concerns had also made the crypto contest fade into the background, even for activists who closely follow each allegation. The Mar-a-Lago edition of the feast didn’t make headlines the way the first had done. “I think maybe it is because people have become more inured to some of what was going on, and it wasn’t breaking through in the same way,” Lisa Gilbert, a co-president of Public Citizen, a consumer-rights group that helped organize the protest last year, told me. “As profiteering becomes the norm, it’s harder to explain why it’s outrageous.”
Washington’s ethics watchdog groups thought they were prepared for Trump’s second term. During his first four years in the White House, they had quickly learned which possible misuses of taxpayer funds to focus on, which apparent case of profiteering off the presidency to anchor a report around, and which allegations of nepotism or self-dealing to try to pitch to journalists as worthy of a story. Most such allegations frequently generated shock and anger, and some surveys of Trump voters found that they were outraged at several of his Cabinet secretaries for spending millions in taxpayer dollars on first-class air travel and personal security, or Trump’s family businesses making millions while he was in office. Sometimes, the backlash prompted accountability: Three of Trump’s Cabinet members were forced out, lawmakers from both parties launched inquiries into alleged ethics violations, and top officials reimbursed the government for travel originally paid for by taxpayers.
This term, the watchdogs are even more alarmed by what they’re witnessing, and they are racing to keep up. Public Citizen added litigators and researchers, and Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington (CREW) hired an expert in cryptocurrency. Last year, the Campaign Legal Center filed its highest number of ethics complaints in a single year and launched a tracker of “corrupt transactions” to ensure that “the exhaustion factor” doesn’t get in the way of keeping a careful count of such instances, even if the media no longer closely cover each one, Saurav Ghosh, the group’s director of federal-campaign-finance reform, told me.
That doesn’t mean the public has grown indifferent. Although polls show that voters have long considered most politicians to be corrupt, a recent survey by Echelon Insights found that the share of Americans who see corruption as the biggest issue facing the nation is now 17 percent, up from 8 percent in December 2024. But there has also been a dampening of objections to possible instances of self-dealing, espe
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The Man in Charge of Immigration Data Just Resigned
The Department of Homeland Security has stopped releasing timely, reliable statistics on immigration enforcement.
By Nick Miroff | August 10, 2026, 6 AM ET
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/2026/08/trump-dhs-deportation-dat
a-ice/688220/
Marc Rosenblum, the top statistician at the Department of Homeland Security for more than a decade, resigned in frustration in late July. Three years ago, he established the Office of Homeland Security Statistics, with support from lawmakers from both parties, to provide Congress and the broader public with reliable, timely statistics on immigration enforcement and other homeland-security trends free of political interference. When President Trump returned, that effort was doomed.
During the past year and a half, as the White House directed DHS to run the largest deportation campaign in history, Trump officials blocked Rosenblum’s team from publishing monthly reports. The office’s website went stale, and its immigration-enforcement tables became frozen in 2024, as if nothing has happened since then. In a post on LinkedIn, Rosenblum said he was glad to quit an administration whose values he didn’t share but sad to leave his team operating in a “hostile work environment.”
It’s difficult to think of an issue other than immigration that both plays such a central role in our national politics and has basic statistical metrics that are so poorly understood and easily twisted. Presidential administrations from both parties have tried to spin or delay the release of certain data categories, such as illegal border crossings, when the numbers aren’t favorable. The Trump administration has taken the distortions to extremes. Over the past several months, the White House “border czar” Tom Homan and DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin have pledged greater transparency and better data sharing, but the administration’s immigration crackdown continues in a fog of fake numbers and statistical subterfuge.
Arrests and deportations by Immigration and Customs Enforcement are the data categories most crucial to understanding what Trump is doing in his second term. With DHS’s data office muzzled, the only public source for immigration data has been the ICE website, where the agency periodically publishes enforcement statistics—but it has sometimes gone months without posting updates. ICE statistics show that the agency deported about 400,000 people during Trump’s first year in office, a figure well short of the White House’s goal of 1 million annual removals. Trump officials, starting with Kristi Noem during her time as DHS secretary, found a way to gloss over this fact by claiming that a far greater number of immigrants left the United States voluntarily than were removed by ICE. The department has counted these estimates as “self-deportations,” as if they were confirmed departures rather than rough guesses.
I asked DHS why Rosenblum’s team had been blocked from publishing monthly reports. The department’s press office didn’t answer that question, but it sent a statement: “This is the most transparent administration in American history.” The email was unsigned, and sentences appeared in different-size fonts, as if they had been copied and pasted. The statement said that during the president’s first year in office, “more than 3 million illegal aliens have left the U.S. because of the Trump administration’s crackdown on illegal immigration including an estimated 2.2 million self-deportations.”
Even the immigration hard-liners in Trump’s MAGA movement aren’t buying it. They say that the administration is backing off the president’s campaign pledge to undertake the largest mass-deportation campaign in history, swayed by pro-business Republicans who are worried about labor shortages and political strategists who warn that aggressive enforcement will hurt the party in the midterm elections. Critics on the right—including Trump’s former adviser Steve Bannon, the Fox News host Tomi Lahren, and the MAGA influencer Laura Loomer—have most recentl
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Replenishing Stocks Will Just Recreate A Failed Military
The US Military Must Be Remade--Not Reconstructed As It Was
Phillips P. OBrien | Aug 11, 2026
https://phillipspobrien.substack.com/p/replenishing-stocks-will-just-r
ecreate
Lately there has been a great deal of discussion of how the USA has run down its stocks of certain classes of advanced military equipment. I know, as I have been a part of that debate starting here, and also in the Atlantic. This expenditure of ammunition is indeed shocking, and even before the latest Trump escalation in July had led to dangerously low stockpiles in certain areas; stockpiles so low that, I for one, do not believe that the US military will be capable of fighting a major war for years.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Donors to Trump’s ballroom include 14 companies that have received new or increased government contracts over the last 6 months worth over $50 billion. 16 corporate donors are either facing federal enforcement actions or had actions suspended by the Trump administration, including antitrust actions, merger reviews, and SEC investigations. https://www.citizen.org/article/ballroom-billions/
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 a new book on Trump.
Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump
By Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan | Jun 23, 2026
Simon and Schuster, 464 pp., $34.00
Download for free from https://annas-archive.gl/search?q=Maggie+Haberman+Jonathan+Swan&ch
eck=1
or from https://z-lib.gl/s/Maggie%20Haberman%20Jonathan%20Swan
From the Introduction
History is full of ironies. For Democrats, there could be no irony more painful than the realization it was their own success in removing Donald Trump from the White House in the 2020 election—and their subsequent determination to ensure he would never return—that has made him the most consequential and feared President of our lifetimes.
Had Trump eked out a victory over Joe Biden in that election, he would have begun his second term in a sorry state. The pandemic was still raging in early 2021, still killing Americans by the thousands, warping the economy, and disrupting global trade. Inflation would soon arrive, as it did across major economies worldwide, dragging down the approval ratings of incumbent leaders in nearly every liberal democracy and fueling the rise of right-wing populists. There is no reason to think Trump would have been the exception. He has insisted that inflation would never have happened on his watch, but that claim, while impossible to disprove, was equally impossible to take seriously. That spring, Trump was set to withdraw American forces from Afghanistan. He had wanted to move much faster than that, and it had required a concerted effort by his military leaders and national security advisor to stop him from initiating a wildly precipitous withdrawal of all U.S. troops from the Middle East and Africa before he left office on January 20, 2021. Who knows whether Trump’s withdrawal from Afghanistan would have been smoother, more competent, than Biden’s disastrous exit, but the withdrawal was never going to be easy and would have added yet another burden to a consecutive term.
Where Trump envisaged success in a second term, it is not hard to instead imagine him hobbling through those four years, reacting to the pressures that would soon pile up, throwing him off balance and preventing him from ever taking full command of the presidency. Trump had felt stymied for much of his first term, starting with the investigation into Russian meddling in the 2016 election, then impeachment, and then Covid. By the end of Trump’s first term he was deeply unpopular, with his approval rating in the thirties. And given the trajectory he was on, it was certainly feasible that he might have finished a consecutive term with an even lower approval—which would have made him an historically unpopular President. Had that happened, Trump’s MAGA movement would have been greatly weakened. And the old-line Republican establishment would have had a fighting chance to yank the party away from the populism that Trump had channeled and fueled so masterfully.
All those what-ifs.
Instead, Joe Biden won the 2020 election—a fact Trump would never concede. When, in early 2021, Trump’s aides sent out a press release from the office of the “former” President, he made sure it never happened again. For months, he inhabited a fantasy world where, encouraged by oddballs and diehards, he would insist that what he portrayed as the greatest crime in American history—the supposed theft of the 2020 election—would soon decisively be proved and he would return to office as early as August of 2021. To admit he had lost—not to mention that he had lost to an aging politician who struggled on the stairs—would have been psychologically impossible for this New York developer and reality TV star who had spent his life trying to avoid humiliation, trying to brand himself as the world’s greatest “winner.”
Another irony: Some Trump aides eventually would concede, though only privately, that it was precisely because of Trump’s unique pathologies—especially a delusional capacity that they thought at the time was entirely self-destructive—that he pulled off the improbable fe
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Trump’s Constitutional Dictatorship
Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan’s inside account of the Trump administration portrays a president with a vast appetite for power but who repeatedly backs down when the costs of his actions become too high.
By Mark Danner | August 20, 2026 issue
https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2026/08/20/trumps-constitutional-dict
atorship-regime-change-haberman-swan/
Reviewed:
Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump
by Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan
Simon and Schuster, 464 pp., $34.00
Download from https://annas-archive.gl/search?q=Maggie+Haberman+Jonathan+Swan&ch
eck=1
or from https://z-lib.gl/s/Maggie%20Haberman%20Jonathan%20Swan
Amid the tumult and the bluster and the noise, what exactly makes our singular president tick? After revisiting in minute detail the innumerable outrages and atrocities of Donald Trump’s second term we come upon, in the epilogue to Regime Change, the purported answer. The New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan, having mostly completed their epic chronicle, arrive at the now-gilded Oval Office for their “fact-checking” interview. The president, in an expansive mood, greets them and guides them to their seats in front of the Resolute Desk. “No other president,” he had recently declared with his customary eloquence, “could do some of the shit I’m doing.”
Exactly what shit might he have had in mind? Sending masked ICE agents to seize and deport hundreds of thousands of largely law-abiding people and imprison 60,000 more? Overturning the eighty-year-old world trade system by imposing arbitrary tariffs? Launching a war of choice against Iran with nary a word to Congress or the American people? Firing hundreds of thousands of government workers and gutting USAID, PBS, and the Kennedy Center? Attacking law firms and universities and television networks?
One could go on, but the president wishes to make a broader point. A loyal-unto-death aide, Natalie Harp—known to her colleagues as “the human printer”—is dispatched to fetch a document, and the president begins to read from it,
reciting the names of some of history’s most powerful figures, explaining how each fell short of his own power as US President. Alexander the Great, the Caesars, William the Conqueror—“They didn’t have airplanes, right? You couldn’t travel around.” Genghis Khan. Attila the Hun. Tamerlane. “Napoleon,” he said with relish. “Hitler. Mao. Stalin.”
These leaders “maintained power through fear,” he said. “Who would ever do a thing like that? Right?”
Trump lingered on the document’s central argument: that each leader, however fearsome in his day, had no global reach. Their power was local. But his was not.
“I never thought of it in terms of that,” Trump said. “It’s very interesting, the power.” Then he added: “But when I read it, I said, ‘He’s right.’”
And the “he” in question? The “historian” whose name had slipped the president’s mind, Harp later texts them, was actually the golfer Gary Player’s longtime caddy. No matter. “What was revealing,” they write,
was not really that Trump agreed with the thesis but the way he inhabited it: the evident pleasure he took in the company of Mao, Hitler, and Stalin, masters of state control through murder, torture, and detention, and Napoleon—and the untroubled ease with which he accepted a place among men who had reshaped the world through conquest and fear. He drew no distinction between those who built and those who destroyed.
The scene is irresistible: the president of the United States sitting at the Resolute Desk and comparing himself blithely to Mao, Hitler, and Stalin. Still, what does it tell us? That a tireless and amoral will to power is deeply embedded in Donald Trump’s narcissism and vanity is not exactly a revelation: anyone who has watched him perform a ninety-minute stand-up routine before a crowd of supporters—drinking in, with almost erotic delight, the fervent worship of thousands—cannot have failed to notice. And after the undermining of
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Buttigieg slams Trump over ‘completely unacceptable’ USS Lincoln crisis
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Quote:Speaking of aircraft carriers, Trump thinks he knows a better way to design them, and he doesn't care about cost increase because he is not paying for it:
Originally posted by JAYNEZTOWN:
Buttigieg slams Trump over ‘completely unacceptable’ USS Lincoln crisis
Navy weighs major warship redesign to match Trump’s preferences
The president wants the new fleet of aircraft carriers to more closely resemble those from World War II. The change could cost billions.
By Noah Robertson and Tara Copp | August 15, 2026 at 8:00 a.m. EDT
https://www.washingtonpost.com/national-security/2026/08/15/navy-weigh
s-major-warship-redesign-match-trumps-preferences/
The U.S. Navy is considering a major redesign of its new aircraft carriers to better match President Donald Trump’s preferred aesthetic for the warships, according to seven current and former U.S. officials familiar with the matter.
The service is evaluating the feasibility of moving the multistory tower that acts as the carrier’s command center farther forward, toward the middle of the ship, to resemble older vessels, the officials said. The review, which has not been previously reported, is in response to Trump’s concerns about the “look” of the new Ford-class ships, where the tower is near the rear, these people said.
The timing and extent of the Navy’s evaluation is unclear, with current and former officials cautioning that the service was concerned that such a change would require significant time and money. Like others, they spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive situation.
Moving that command center, known as the “island,” would be the second major design change prompted by the president, who on Thursday issued a national security memorandum directing the Navy to develop a plan to revert to older steam-powered catapults on future carriers. The systems help launch jets off the ships’ flight decks.
Trump’s preference, current and former officials said, is for the new aircraft carriers to look more like those that were in service during World War II.
The Navy also examined the issue during his first term as president, said a former senior U.S. official. A study found that moving the island could cost billions of dollars in redesign costs and significantly delay the program, this person said.
“It came back that the cost and time to do so would just be extraordinary,” the former official said.
There are three Ford-class carriers in various stages of development. The USS John F. Kennedy is undergoing sea trials and getting closer to joining the fleet while the USS Enterprise and USS Doris Miller are under construction. The first carrier in the class, USS Gerald R. Ford, is already in service and recently finished a lengthy combat tour in the Middle East.
Plans call for building up to 10 Ford-class carriers over the next four decades, at a projected future cost of $22 billion each, according to the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office and the Navy’s most recent shipbuilding plan.
Relocating the island would be “a major redesign,” said Bryan Clark, a former Navy officer who studies the service at the Hudson Institute, a right-leaning think tank in Washington. Such an alteration to the carrier’s layout, he said, would affect the ship’s buoyancy and weight and come at a significant cost.
“You could change it,” he added, “but it’s very disruptive.”
The Pentagon and the Navy referred requests for comment to the White House, which pointed to the new national security memorandum when asked about Trump’s desire to relocate the island on future Ford-class aircraft carriers. The memorandum does not address the issue. https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/2026/08/rebuilding-the
-united-states-navy-and-americas-shipbuilding-industrial-base/
Another U.S. official familiar with both the potential changes to the catapult and the island said that the Navy is taking both matters seriously because of the delays and severe cost overruns it could create.
Tru
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Trump’s Last Loyal Constituency
The administration delivers a win for financial crooks at the expense of honest businesses.
By David Frum | August 16, 2026, 6 AM ET
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/08/trump-business-dark-money/68
8290/
“Many secrets; no mysteries.” That’s the master code of the Trump administration. When it does something strange, there’s never any mystery as to why: Somebody close to the president, or possibly the president and his family themselves, intends to score a dishonest dollar. Exactly who and how may be secret. Exactly why is no mystery.
So it is with the news that the Department of the Treasury has ended ownership-reporting requirements for U.S. businesses and purged the existing database of ownership information. This seemingly technical-sounding change is a huge gift to financial crooks, who can now store and launder dark money in U.S. financial institutions with less risk of detection. But the gift comes at the direct expense of banks, mutual funds, insurance companies, and other financial institutions, which now have to shoulder the burden of verifying customer data themselves.
The Treasury advertises the measure as deregulatory, lifting burdensome red tape from business owners. But the relief to honest business owners is tiny. The added burden on the financial sector is huge. The real winners here are shady business owners. In 2021, Capital One, the Trump Organization’s then-bank, closed more than 300 of the Trump Organization’s accounts on suspicion that they violated anti-money-laundering rules. The action just taken by the Treasury may best be understood as payback for those who tried to enforce the law against Donald Trump.
After the 9/11 terror attacks, Congress took action to prevent terrorists and other criminals from using the U.S. financial system to move money around undetected. Congress enacted laws requiring U.S. financial institutions to “know your customer.” If someone tried to open an account for a shell company, perhaps owned by another shell company, the financial institution had to pierce the layers of concealment to know the human beneficial owners of the account.
The information required was pretty basic: name, address, birth date, and a government ID—a Social Security card, say, or a passport. For the great majority of U.S. enterprises, these rules were easy to comply with. Almost 80 percent of American businesses have no employees other than the owner. You have probably divulged the requested information dozens of times without inconvenience.
For the institutions receiving the information, however, its collection was very burdensome. Most clients told the truth. Some did not. How to tell which was which—and how to authenticate the information provided by untruthful clients? The consequences of a mistake could be catastrophic for the financial institution. In 2024, TD Bank paid $3 billion in fines—and accepted limits on the future growth of its business—to settle U.S. claims that it had not properly monitored accounts opened by fentanyl traffickers.
To protect themselves, financial institutions pay third-party agencies to check information about their customers, especially those algorithmically identified as high-risk. One study puts the cost of financial-crimes compliance in the United States and Canada at $61 billion.
Financial institutions have clamored for years for some relief from the tangled mess of reporting imposed on them. In 2020, Congress attached a new Corporate Transparency Act to the 2021 Pentagon budget, which imposed an obligation on most businesses operating inside the United States to report their ownership directly to the government. The Corporate Transparency Act authorized the Treasury to establish a database of this information. At first, the database would be accessible only to law enforcement, but the plan was to open the database to financial institutions too. If a financial institution sensed something amiss, the federal database would assist its investigation. The go
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The Misery Will Continue Until Morale Improves
Why Trump is eviscerating the military
Paul Krugman
Aug 17, 2026
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/the-misery-will-continue-until-mora
le
According to an old military maxim, amateurs talk about strategy, professionals talk about logistics. But these days we need a third category: Immature, insecure guys think that war is about acting tough and looking cool.
Hi, Paul Krugman with a podcast update for today. I want to weigh in on the incredible rash of stories about how Trump and company are eviscerating the military. It is truly remarkable. If there’s one thing that we thought that the United States was still kind of number one at, it was that we had the world’s premier military. Now, of course, we managed to rather quickly effectively lose the war with Iran, although current management will never admit it.
But also just a series of stories, some of them related to that war, some of them going beyond and to other areas that just are truly shocking, even for somebody like me, who had no expectation that this administration would be doing any good for the nation.
Just to remember the story: So first we had the big warning that the U.S. military was basically running out of ammunition. That the precision missiles that are so essential to waging war were largely gone, expended unproductively against Iran. And clearly the cost benefit calculus was a disaster because the Iranians were sending cheap drones and we were using multi-million dollar weapons in an attempt to counter them.
After that, we got the story about the horrific conditions on board the USS Lincoln, the aircraft carrier that’s been stationed for a very long time without, it appears, adequate resupply and with toilets flooding. Apparently just horrific conditions, which turn out to be not unique to that ship: Other ships are having problems. There’s the USS Boxer, an amphibious assault ship, which apparently has run out of feminine hygiene products, among other things.
Okay, so we have those horrific stories. And then we have the stories about Trump intervening. Demanding, first, that the Navy construct a whole new class of ships, Trump-class battleships, which are useless and would be sitting ducks. Then demanding that the Navy replace modern catapults with steam catapults, which he thinks are cooler. And then demanding that they relocate the command tower on aircraft carriers because he wants them to look more like the way they looked during World War II.
Is this America? I mean, think about the American way of war. We are not a warrior nation, which is fine. We are a lot of other things.
We were a nation that was supreme in the arts of peace. We were a nation of know-how. America won its wars by doing the arts of peace right, by building better and more stuff than other countries. By getting our act together in ways that didn’t necessarily involve fighting.
Of course, you always need courageous warriors. You always need people able and willing to risk death in the service of their nation. But what America was supreme at was logistics. If you ask how did America and its allies pull off D-Day, well, a lot of it was being able to deliver supplies to the beaches of Normandy in a way that the Germans never thought was possible.
America was always the place, the country that was really good at logistics. For us to be not feeding our sailors, not able to keep ships that are not, after all, under fire all the time, to keep the plumbing working, that is incredible.
The idea that the president is imposing his personal aesthetic preferences to undo design decisions that were made by military professionals is also basically incredible.
Okay, what is this all about? And what happened? Some of it is specifically military, but mostly it’s not. I think these military failings should be put in the same context as the frantic and disastrous destruction and redesign of Washington, D.C. The demolition of the East Wing. The disastrous attempt to refurbish the reflecting pool to reflect T
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Trump’s Ballroom Was His Dream of Beauty and Space. Now It’s a ‘Military Complex.’
As courts have questioned the president’s authority for the project, he has leaned in to arguments of national security
By Will Hobson and Louise Radnofsky
Aug. 16, 2026 11:00 am ET
https://www.wsj.com/politics/policy/trumps-ballroom-was-his-dream-of-b
eauty-and-space-now-its-a-military-complex-89a7e230
WASHINGTON-President Trump’s vision for a White House ballroom stretches back more than a decade. His argument that it is “vital to our national security,” which culminated Friday in an appeal to the Supreme Court, is far more recent.
When Trump announced last year that he was demolishing part of the White House to make way for the project, he framed it as a matter of aesthetics and space.
“It will be a great legacy project, and I think it will be special,” the president said that July. “I think it will be really beautiful.”
Trump on that day and many others said it was unbefitting for a nation of the U.S.’s stature to have to erect temporary tents for large events. “When it rains, it’s a disaster,” he said. “And the tent is a hundred yards— that’s more than a football field—away from the main entrance, and people are schlepping down to the tent. It’s not a pretty sight.”
Trump raised the ballroom idea in 2010, in a private phone call with David Axelrod, then senior adviser to President Barack Obama. The conversation came in the midst of the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, and Trump called to suggest he could help. After Axelrod politely declined, Trump offered to build a White House ballroom.
“They turned it down,” Trump said on the campaign trail in 2016. “I was going to put up $100 million to build a ballroom at the White House, because having a tent is not that good.”
In a signing ceremony shortly after returning to office last year, Trump said he had been rebuffed on the ballroom “three or four times,” including during the Biden administration, but joked that he would be more receptive to his own proposal now that he occupied the White House. “I’m going to try and make the offer to myself, you know? Because we could use a bigger room,” he said.
The White House news release on the project touted the need for “a large event space on the White House complex that can hold substantially more guests.” It said the Secret Service “will provide the necessary security enhancements and modifications.”
Construction began in September, and the demolition of the East Wing soon followed. The first major legal challenge was filed in mid-December.
An early Justice Department legal submission cited the tent issue and emphasized the president’s role as “the sole organ of American foreign policy,” requiring him to be able to receive ambassadors and other public ministers in an appropriate setting. “It is entirely fitting, then, that the presidential residence and workplace be equipped for that purpose,” the government said. “Given modern needs, the White House is not.”
By January, the administration’s legal arguments on security were growing, with its lawyers telling a judge that halting the construction project midstream would endanger the safety of the president and others who work in the White House. Secret Service Deputy Director Matthew Quinn added in a court declaration that a permanent structure for screening guests and hosting events would “also increase the safety and security of all attendees at those events, including the President and foreign leaders and dignitaries.”
In late March, Trump aboard Air Force One shared renderings of the project and emphasized the security upgrades that he said came at the request of the military. “They wanted additional security, drone-proof roofing, and reinforced glass,” he said. “And unfortunately, we’re living in an age where that’s a good thing.”
Two days later, U.S. Judge Richard Leon ordered construction of the ballroom to halt above ground, unless and until it was blessed by Congress. The Justice Department quickly appealed, and construction has been allowed
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It may seem a small thing to Trump voters, but President Donald Trump told a story about South Korea on Monday. Every single part of it is false.
August 17, 2026
https://www.cnn.com/2026/08/17/politics/fact-check-trump-south-korea-c
ost-sharing-biden
Trump has delivered versions of his fictional story before; CNN debunked one telling last year. The president delivered Monday’s version the day after he announced the US would reduce military exercises with South Korea – citing his “very good relationship” with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un and also mentioning that South Korea declined to participate in the US war with Iran.
The latest version of Trump’s tale, which you can watch in full here, went like this:
Start at 19 minutes 13 seconds
South Korea “essentially” didn’t pay for the cost of the US military presence in the country before Trump first became president. Trump then got South Korea to unhappily agree to pay “$3 billion” in a year, with further increases the following year and the year after that. But then the 2020 election was “rigged” against him. When Joe Biden became president, South Korea convinced Biden that Trump was “probably a bad person” and they shouldn’t have to pay the money, so Biden “immediately rescinded” Trump’s “order.”
Let’s walk through why all of this is wrong. The facts show that Trump’s comments include at least five separate inaccurate claims – in addition to his usual exaggeration of the size of the US military presence in South Korea, which he put at “39,000” but the Pentagon said was actually 26,589 as of the end of March.
Here’s what Trump claimed Monday: “Just so you understand with South Korea, look: South Korea has been protected by us for many, many years, and during my first term, they agreed to pay close to $3 billion a year for protection, because we don’t – you know, they essentially weren’t paying.” Last year, he explicitly said South Korea’s cost-sharing payments didn’t exist before he became president.
The reality: For decades before Trump took office, South Korea spent substantial sums to share the cost of the US military presence in the country; its cost-sharing “Special Measures Agreements” with the US began in 1991. Under the final five-year agreement signed before Trump became president in 2017, negotiated by the Obama administration, South Korea agreed to spend more than $800 million per year from 2014 through 2018. Trump is entitled to argue that this was insufficient, but it was far from not paying at all.
Here’s what Trump claimed Monday: “But we agreed for a short term that it would be $3 billion…” Later in his remarks, he referred to the supposed arrangement as “$3 billion a year” from South Korea.
The reality: Under a one-year Special Measures Agreement negotiated by the Trump administration in 2019, South Korea agreed to an 8.2% increase in its spending – but the new total was still less than $1 billion, not $3 billion.
Here’s what Trump claimed Monday: “But we agreed for a short term that it would be $3 billion, and next year it would go up and the next year it would go up, so that they start paying for their protection.”
The reality: Trump did not secure three years of spending increases. He did achieve the one-year increase for 2019, but negotiations on a post-2019 deal stalled amid Trump’s demands for a massive increase in South Korea’s contribution, and the talks were still unresolved when Biden took office in January 2021.
South Korea did come to a narrower deal with the Trump administration in mid-2020 to spend $200 million that year to pay South Korean employees of US forces, who had been put on leave because Trump’s one-year deal expired at the end of 2019. Clearly, though, that wasn’t two years of spending hikes over the supposed “$3 billion.”
Here’s what Trump claimed Monday: “When the election was rigged and I ended up watching for four years and then coming back…”
The reality: Trump was lying. He lost the 2020 election fair and square to Biden.
It’s not tru
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Quote:It may seem a small thing to Trump voters, but Trump’s staff claims he could never do anything unethical.
Originally posted by second:
It may seem a small thing to Trump voters, but President Donald Trump told a story about South Korea on Monday. Every single part of it is false.
What Trump Officials Mean by “Never”
The claim that the president could not possibly do something unethical marks a new frontier of impunity by the administration.
By Jonathan Chait | August 17, 2026, 5:16 PM ET
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/08/todd-blanche-trump-power-abu
se/688310/
Attorney General Todd Blanche has made abundantly clear that he will not act independently of President Trump’s desires. So yesterday, NBC’s Kristen Welker posed an obvious question to Blanche on Meet the Press: “If the president asks you to do something that you feel crosses an ethical or legal line, would you do it?” Blanche replied confidently, “The president will never ask me to do something unethical or illegal. He never has. He never will.”
This particular formulation—never has, never will—has become a new mantra for the administration. Last month, in response to reports that Trump had personally gained $2 billion in the previous year, the White House spokesperson Anna Kelly said, “Neither the President nor his family has ever engaged—or will ever engage—in conflicts of interest.” When ProPublica reported in December that Trump had personally used the same mortgage-application fraud that he has called an imprisonable offense for various political targets, a White House spokesperson said, “President Trump has never, or will ever, break the law.”
This is an epistemic frontier of impunity that can be understood only in the context of Trump’s disregard for legal or normative guardrails against his abuses of power.
In some circumstances, to state that you never have and never will do something bad might be unremarkable, and perhaps reassuring. But when the category of behavior is something you engage in constantly and with little disguise, the effect is quite different, akin to a company accountant solemnly promising that he would never dip into the kitty as he boards a helicopter to his private island.
To begin with, we know that giving an improper order to the attorney general is something Trump would do, because he has more or less done it. Last year, for instance, in a social-media post that was intended as a private message for her but was mistakenly posted on Truth Social, he pressured then–Attorney General Pam Bondi to charge several people that Trump wished to punish for political reasons. Blanche has personal experience with Trump’s obsessive habit of demanding federal investigations of his enemies, having been asked to bring new charges against David Hearn for his alleged defacement of the Reflecting Pool, even after the Justice Department conceded in a court filing that it had no evidence that Hearn had done such a thing, and that the damage to the floor lining had been caused by faulty installation.
Likewise, Trump’s conflicts of interest are of the most flagrant variety. Since the 1970s, previous occupants of his office have placed their investments in blind trusts. Jimmy Carter gave up control of his peanut farm to avoid the appearance of even the subtlest pro-peanut bias creeping into his decision making. Yet Trump has controlled a business empire and made numerous decisions that benefited it directly.
The same holds true for the assertion that he has never violated the law. Trump’s first brush with fame occurred in a lawbreaking context—he and his father were charged with excluding Black tenants from their apartments. They settled with the Justice Department without admitting wrongdoing but also agreed to abide by the Fair Housing Act. Trump was also convicted of falsifying business records in New York in 2024 and escaped more criminal charges (for stealing classified material, storing boxes of it in his home, and refusing to return it while lying to federal officials about it) through d
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Quote:A New Level of Trumpian Evil
Originally posted by second:
It may seem a small thing to Trump voters, but President Donald Trump told a story about South Korea on Monday. Every single part of it is false.
North Korea is the worst government on Earth; Trump prefers it to the prosperous democracy next door
By Paul Krugman | Aug 18, 2026
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/a-new-level-of-trumpian-evil
Donald J. Trump @realDonaldTrump wrote:
Based on my very good relationship with Kim Jong Un, of North Korea, I am not happy with the fact that the United States has, long ago, agreed to participate in Joint Military Exercises with South Korea. These exercises are not only costly, with much of these costs paid for by the United States of America (as usual!), but send a signal that is totally inappropriate and hostile, to a Country that, as long as Donald J. Trump has been President, has been unthreatening and respectful. Therefore, and based on the fact that it is too late to cancel, I have instructed Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth, to substantially reduce the Joint Military Exercises! While somewhat unrelated (?), I recently asked the President of South Korea if they would like to join us in the Denuclearization of the Islamic Republic of Iran, and they said, "No thanks!" Thank you for your attention to this matter. President DONALD J. TRUMP
20 ReTruths 61 Likes
Aug 16, 2026 at 4:04 PM
I know that Donald Trump does something new and terrible every day, sometimes several times a day. Yet his betrayal of South Korea in favor of his “very good relationship with Kim Jong Un” stands out even among his many betrayals.
Why? Because North Korea isn’t simply a bad government, just another murderous authoritarian regime. It is something that has become rare, even among dictatorships: a full-blown totalitarian state, in which the government controls every aspect of life and even thinking dissident thoughts is a crime.
Let’s be clear: Vladimir Putin’s Russia is an ugly regime, a kleptocracy in which critics of the leader have a habit of falling out of high windows. Xi Jinping’s China isn’t a free society either. But they’re mild and open compared with North Korea, where indoctrination is constant, where everyone must, if they value their lives, constantly praise the leader, whose name and portrait are everywhere:
Deeply creepy': Enormous brooding banner of Trump now hangs next to Lincoln outside Department of Agriculture
Wait, did I get the right country?
North Korea is, in short, arguably the worst regime on the planet.
South Korea is, by contrast, one of the happiest stories in history. Obviously it’s not utopia, because no nation is. But it is a functioning democracy, which beat back a former president’s attempt to impose martial law — then put him on trial, convicted, and imprisoned him. (Is that the real reason for Trump’s hostility?)
It’s also an incredible economic success story, which transitioned over the course of just two generations from a desperately poor, war-ravaged nation to a standard of living comparable to that in Western Europe. It’s one of America’s biggest trading partners, a crucial supplier of semiconductor chips.
And South Korea is or was one of our most important military allies, with a military budget roughly the same size as Ukraine’s.
Much of the commentary I’ve seen about Trump lashing out at South Korea has focused on the damage to U.S. foreign policy and diplomacy. How can anyone consider us a reliable ally at this point? Fair enough.
But it’s even more important to realize that Trump clearly prefers a nightmarish, totalitarian dictatorship — the worst regime on the planet — to a vibrant, successful democracy. A democracy, by the way, that more than 36,000 Americans gave their lives to defend during the Korean War.
America has a president who hates everything our nation was supposed to stand for.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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The Top 10 Ways Trump Has Made America Weaker
He’s been one of the most consequential presidents in U.S. history—in all the wrong ways.
By Stephen M. Walt, a columnist at Foreign Policy and the Robert and Renée Belfer professor of international relations at Harvard University.
August 17, 2026, 4:36 AM
https://foreignpolicy.com/2026/08/17/top-10-trump-america-weaker/
MAGA: “Make America Great Again.” That was U.S. President Donald Trump’s promise to the American people. Elect him, and the country would recover its mojo and return to a golden age of internal harmony, economic vitality, domestic sovereignty, and global influence. It was a seductive vision, especially for those Americans who had been buffeted by globalization and believed that immigrants and “globalists” were undermining the country from within.
As Trump’s second term nears the midway point, there can be little doubt that he is one of the most consequential presidents in U.S. history. Unfortunately, almost all the consequences of his actions have been harmful, not just for most people in the United States but also for America’s relative power and standing in the world. His cronies and family members may be reaping the benefits, but the cumulative impact of his actions will be not a return to greatness, but a weaker and more divided America.
Let me count the ways.
1. Destroying confidence in U.S. promises. The importance of credibility is sometimes exaggerated, but other states will be less inclined to cooperate with Washington if they do not believe that it will keep its promises. As he did throughout his litigious and bankruptcy-prone business career, Trump has repeatedly demonstrated that his threats are mostly empty bluster and his pledges mean nothing. He tore up the successful nuclear deal with Iran (didn’t that work out well?), and he now condemns the same trade agreement that he negotiated with Canada and Mexico during his first term (and that he said was the best deal ever). His on-again, off-again approach to tariffs, repeated threats to withdraw support from key allies, and unexplained reversal of his offer to let Ukraine build Patriot interceptors make it abundantly clear that his word means nothing. Zip. Nada.
This has real consequences: For example, Trump’s well-deserved reputation for double-dealing and unpredictability is one reason why he is having such trouble ending the war with Iran. Its leaders don’t believe a word he says—and why should they?—and they understandably want concrete concessions up front before they let him off the hook. It is also why more countries around the world are hedging their bets and looking for more reliable partners.
2. Reducing U.S. military capability. Despite spending unprecedented sums, boasting of the United States’ “lethality,” and making sure male troops have enough testosterone, Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth have made the country’s military forces weaker and undermined the U.S. ability to deter attacks on its partners.
How? By starting a foolish war with Iran, depleting stockpiles of critical weaponry, and keeping ships, squadrons, and service personnel on station for months on end, reportedly leading to a wave of suicide attempts. These actions have burned through valuable military capacity to no good purpose, showed potential adversaries where the country’s vulnerabilities are, and eroded service members’ morale in potentially tragic ways. While Trump and Hegseth have been squandering U.S. military assets, potential future adversaries have been arming, studying, training, and preparing.
To make matters worse, Trump and Hegseth are trying to politicize the uniformed services and make them a loyal part of the MAGA movement. Hegseth has actively sought to purge officers he regards as “woke,” fired or denied promotion to a disproportionate number of women and people of color—despite their stellar records and recommendations from the senior officers who know them best—and tried to impose ideological conformity on the entire military establish
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There is a contest that Trump is winning: ‘Easily the Worst President in U.S. History.’
By Thomas B. Edsall | April 21, 2026
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/21/opinion/trump-legacy-history-presid
ents.html?unlocked_article_code=1.clA.StLj.wTYHj_IJskBa&smid=url-share
The damage President Trump has inflicted on the United States and the world is so enormous and wide-ranging that it is hard to grasp.
It runs the gamut from public and private institutions to core democratic customs and traditions, from the legal system to universities, from innocent targets of fraud to those duped into believing vaccines do more harm than good.
One way to bring home the depth of Trump’s callousness is to look at a specific case. In May 2025, Anjee Davis, the chief executive of Fight Colorectal Cancer, a patient advocacy group, told CBS News:
We have a member who is being treated for Stage IV colorectal cancer. She had just qualified to enter a clinical trial that was going to be her last-chance effort to slow the spread of her cancer.
Her trial was about to start when N.I.H. funding was pulled overnight, and the trial was canceled.
Davis replied to my inquiry about the case by email. “This patient has since passed away without receiving the clinical trial she was counting on,” she wrote.
“What we will never know,” Davis added, “is whether that trial could have given her more time with her children.”
I have described in earlier columns bits and pieces of Trump’s destructiveness, but the list grows daily.
Projections suggest there will be millions of dead men, women and children as a result of his budget cuts, which were made without direct congressional approval. A study published in The Lancet, the London-based medical journal, found that Trump administration cuts in U.S.A.I.D. funding “would result in approximately 1,776,539 all-age deaths and 689,900 deaths in children younger than 5 years” in 2025 alone.
“Over the remainder of the period,” the study continues, “the complete defunding of U.S.A.I.D. would cause an estimated 2,450,000 all-age deaths annually, leading to a total of 14,051,750 excess all-age deaths and 4,537,157 excess under-5 deaths by 2030.”
There are the fraud victims who will never get court-ordered restitution because Trump pardoned the guilty. In a June 2025 report, Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee found that “Trump’s pardons cheat victims out of an astounding $1.3 billion in restitution and fines, allowing fraudsters, tax evaders, drug traffickers to keep ill-gotten gains.”
It doesn’t stop there. America can thank the president for environmental deregulation that could sicken and kill people by the tens or even hundreds of thousands.
Everything happens in such a rapid and scattershot way with Trump that it is easy to forget what happened as recently as last year.
An Associated Press investigation published in 2025 found that Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency was seeking to eliminate or weaken “at least 30 major rules that seek to protect air and water and reduce emissions that cause climate change.”
If successful, the E.P.A. would gut pollution rules that were estimated, according to The Associated Press, to save “more than 30,000 lives annually.”
At the same time, the administration has been canceling funding for lifesaving scientific and medical research. In November, JAMA Internal Medicine published “Clinical Trials Affected by Research Grant Terminations at the National Institutes of Health.”
It said that “in the first half of 2025, the N.I.H. terminated grants supporting 383 unique clinical trials, affecting 74,311 individuals.”
In an accompanying commentary, two researchers, Dr. Teva D. Brender and Dr. Cary P. Gross, wrote about the JAMA study:
There is a more direct and sobering impact of premature and scientifically unjustifiable trial terminations: the violation of foundational ethical principles of human participant research.
First and foremost, it is betrayal of the fundamental principles of informed consent
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This cocktail party proves Trump has no idea what's coming | Opinion
By John Casey | Aug 22, 2026
https://www.rawstory.com/raw-investigates/trump-reality/
Christof, the megalomaniacal director of The Truman Show, played brilliantly by actor Ed Harris, had a line he loved to repeat: “We accept the reality of the world with which we're presented.”
I’ve been thinking about that line as of late because of the avalanche of stories about Trump’s “human printer” (or whatever she is), Natalie Harp, who prints out things for Trump to read since the climate skeptic in him can’t get enough of paper.
According to lots of media reports, she only prints out good news for him, with the intensity of a star-crossed paramour, or whatever she may be. If these reports are true, then Trump is only seeing the world that he is presented.
It’s either that, or Trump’s dementia has progressed to a point where he lives in a reality that bears no resemblance to reality. There have been some who have generally compared Trump to Jim Carrey’s Truman Burbank but, after what happened on Wednesday, Trump has truly drifted into a fictitious universe, a reality that he is now presenting himself.
Truman Burbank’s reality was a meticulous, white-picket-fence cage called Seahaven. For Trump, it’s a cacophony of appliqués, granite, gold, tarp-covered Corinthian concrete, marble and placards, a proverbial White House soundstage, and this week, in the midst of a war and cratering economy, he gave the press corps a tour of his far-from-reality set.
Wednesday’s tone-deaf press gaggle wasn’t about inflation, or the war he’s dragged the country into with Iran, or the dismal jobs reports that keep getting updated and downgraded.
No, it was his vaunted, stylized and once-uneven helipad, which is made with some super-duper granite he claims can withstand 35,000 pounds per square inch, or whatever that’s supposed to mean.
Trump explained, “That’s stone that, if you took a hammer and you started hammering right now, all day long, you wouldn’t see a mark on it.”
I think the same thing could be said about Trump’s obtuse head?
He put his autograph on a piece of the $5 million helipad going in on the South Lawn, then laid out this so-out-of-touch scenario that it makes Truman Burbank look like a realist. He said that guests could step out of the car onto “a beautiful new roadway,” walk the path, “have cocktails and everything outside of the White House,” on the helipad he meant, and then head into the ballroom.
It was a remarkable half hour of enthusiastic fantasy from an 80-year-old man who has genuinely lost his mind, lost his marbles, lost his way, or is lost in space.
Somewhere behind him, out of frame, is the criminality of a crater where the historic East Wing was reduced to rubble by a wrecking ball for a shiny eight-figure ballroom.
You might think of that demolition the same way Trump has torn down the American economy. The ballroom is supposed to be underwritten by corporations and private donors who are the only ones benefiting from Trump’s destructive economy.
But in the end, we, the taxpayers, will be footing some or most of that bill because Trump inevitably dumps the excesses of his soiling on us.
Outside the gates of the metaphorical Seahaven, a different reality is unfolding for everyone not invited to a cocktail reception on the helipad. Grocery bills keep climbing. Premiums keep climbing. Treasury yields are sitting at levels that make economists nervous, and the jobs numbers have been weak for three straight months.
But for Trump, that’s all negligible compared to slabs of stone with “a million-year life.” In the reality that is presented to Trump, only lives that last a million years count. Those of us who are mere mortals don’t have a place in his Seahaven.
Now, here’s the part of the Truman Show comparison that used to feel like a stretch and now doesn’t. Remember the studio light that falls out of a clear blue sky and shatters at Truman’s feet? That was such an obvious, glaring sig
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Why does Trump attack California? Is it because it matters so much to the world?
California's economy ranks as the fourth-largest in the world, with a nominal gross domestic product (GDP) passing $4.2 to $4.4 trillion. If treated as an independent country, the state trails only the rest of the United States, China, and Germany, narrowly fluctuating ahead of or alongside Japan.
How Trump is trying to crush California’s environmental policies
The New York Times reports:
The Trump administration has taken a series of extraordinary steps to attack California’s position as a national leader in environmental protection, enlisting at least a half-dozen federal agencies to undermine the state’s efforts to pivot away from fossil fuels.
The stakes are high. Because of its market muscle as the world’s fourth largest economy, California’s environmental regulations have influenced the manufacturers of automobiles and other consumer goods. And its green policies have spread to some other states in what’s known as the “California effect.”
But President Trump has marshaled the full power of the federal government to clamp down on the state’s climate initiatives. He has been vocal in his contempt for Gov. Gavin Newsom of California, a Democrat and possible 2028 presidential contender whom he refers to as “Gavin Newscum.”
Mr. Newsom, a loud and pointed critic of Mr. Trump, pledged soon after the 2024 election to insulate California’s environmental policies from a second Trump administration — perhaps making the state an inviting target for a president who has been using government levers to punish perceived enemies.
There are almost too many examples to list.
Mr. Trump and his Republican allies in Congress have blocked California from setting its own limits on automobile pollution, which federal law has permitted since the 1970s. The Energy Department has announced $75 million for a new coal export terminal in Oakland, Calif. The Interior Department has paid energy companies to cancel planned wind farms off the coast of California and other blue states. The president ordered a company to restart a pipeline that caused one of the state’s largest oil spills in 2015.
And just last week, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration signaled it could curb the power of the California Coastal Commission, a state agency that has protected the shoreline from threats like oil spills for more than half a century.
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/08/20/climate/trump-california-climate.ht
ml
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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We did Nazi this one coming. What This Congressman’s Nazi Staffer Scandal Says About the GOP’s Future. It could help Democrats win a key Senate seat, too.
By Ian Prasad Philbrick | Aug 27, 2026 6:15 PM
https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2026/08/mike-collins-nazi-republic
an-senate.html
Contrary to what you learned in civics class, the grease that keeps the wheels of American democracy turning isn’t voters, legislation, or donor cash; it’s staffers. Without the armies of aides, interns, and volunteers who answer phones in Capitol Hill offices, draft bills, and staff campaigns, lawmaking and reelection bids across the country would grind to a halt.
But who you surround yourself with is part of who you are, which means staffers can also create problems for the politicians they work for. That’s what’s currently happening in the race for U.S. Senate in Georgia, one of a handful of elections this fall that will determine which party controls the Senate. Rep. Mike Collins, a two-term Republican running for the seat, is on defense after multiple people in his orbit turned out to have dabbled in racism and white supremacy. It’s part of a trend among GOP staffers toward greater extremism that augurs a dark future for the party.
Who exactly are these staffers, and what did they do?
Rumblings of trouble surfaced in May—in Slate, no less. As my colleague Ben Jacobs reported, Collins’ then–chief of staff Kip Talley had been part of a group chat that included Nick Fuentes and Richard Spencer, two well-known white nationalists. In the chat, Talley bragged about using his position as a congressional aide to help Charles Johnson, a notorious Holocaust denier and racist, get out of jail. Johnson, who was imprisoned last year for contempt of court connected to a civil racketeering case, has claimed that Nazi gas chambers were “not real” and repeatedly posted the N-word online. Talley left Collins’ office in July. (In a statement, Talley stated that he’d tried to help Johnson “solely in my personal capacity after hearing concerns that an acquaintance I have known for years was being mistreated in custody and denied basic medical care.”)
OK, but surely that’s all for dodgy people who worked for Collins?
Au contraire! As the Washington Post revealed Thursday, a different former Collins staffer named Preston Parra recently posted an A.I.-generated photo of himself styled as a member of the Ku Klux Klan, wearing white robes and holding a telltale pointed hood. Parra, who is 24, interned in Collins’ congressional office in 2024 and worked as a contractor for a Collins-affiliated political action committee until last year. Parra shared the KKK image on an X account where he’d previously described himself as a “twink fascist” and posted “DEUTCHLAND UBER ALLES,” anti-Black slurs, and the phrase White power. Last month, Parra posted the word TWINK dozens of times in an arrangement shaped like a swastika. Parra told the Post that he isn’t a white supremacist but does believe “that the white race contributes more to the world.”
How do people with this sort of background even get hired??
Great question! Collins’ office declined to comment on the record to Slate when asked about Talley’s participation in the group chat and didn’t answer the Post’s questions about Parra, who claims that Collins’ office wasn’t aware of his posts. “What, is there supposed to be some kind of CIA background check?” Parra said.
But he and Talley aren’t the only former Collins employees with questionable histories. The chief of staff Talley replaced, Brandon Phillips, had worked for Donald Trump’s 2016 campaign until reporters revealed that he’d been charged after damaging a woman’s laptop, attacking a man, and slashing his tires years earlier. Phillips ultimately lost his job with Collins too, this time after crudely mocking a rival political operative whose wife had accused former NBC journalist Matt Lauer of rape. Phillips was additionally probed by the House Ethics Committee for allegedly hiring a girlfriend to intern in Collins’ office. (C
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:
We did Nazi this one coming.
Oh. That's so clever!
*yawn*
Shut the fuck up, faggot.
--------------------------------------------------
Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.
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Why are there braindead liberal dipshits under 30 all over TikTok and Reddit celebrating the death of Dolly Parton right now?
You people just fucking suck and you're awful all the time.
Why target Dolly? Was she some sort of MAGA Bogey Man or something?
I didn't even know she was still alive and haven't even heard her name spoken or written in what??? 20 years now maybe?
What the fuck did she say that was so horrible 40 years ago that has you worthless faggots cheering on her death from your poor parents' basements?
What the fuck is wrong with you?
Get some help.
--------------------------------------------------
Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.
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What Might Happen to Trump’s Ill-Gotten Gains
Lessons from fallen autocrats
By David Frum | August 29, 2026, 6 AM ET
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/08/reclaim-wealth-trump-corrupt
ion/688435/
Americans are not accustomed to learning lessons about democracy from Nigeria, Peru, or the Philippines. That disregard may soon change. Those countries offer examples of what it looks like to reclaim stolen or swindled wealth from fallen authoritarian rulers. Done right, this work can deliver justice and strengthen democratic institutions for the long run. But cleaning up after a corrupt regime also comes with serious challenges and hazards.
The Trump presidency has often looked more like a post-Soviet or postcolonial regime than like a first-world democracy. The Trump post-presidency may look the same. Trump has abused his office to enrich himself and his family in ways that are completely unprecedented—not only in the United States but also in the history of almost any peer democracy. Only Silvio Berlusconi, Italy’s notoriously lawless former prime minister, was in any way comparable, and Berlusconi was sentenced to prison.
Trump faces little danger of prison. The U.S. Supreme Court has bestowed substantial criminal impunity on him, even assuming that he leaves office in 2029 as required by the Constitution. But an ex-president remains subject to civil liability, and the proceeds of bribery, extortion, insider trading, and market manipulation may be exposed to civil penalties. Other countries have shown the way.
Alberto Fujimori, who was elected president of Peru in 1990, entered office at a time of extreme national crisis. The murderous Shining Path insurgency controlled much of Peru’s hinterland and terrorized the capital, Lima. Inflation ran at nearly 8,000 percent. Food and electricity were in constant shortage. Fujimori stopped the inflation and crushed the insurgency, but his harsh and sometimes criminal methods included warrantless detentions and extrajudicial killings. Fujimori dissolved Congress and the Supreme Court and rewrote Peru’s constitution to allow his own reelection in 1995. He won roughly two-thirds of the vote in a free, more or less, election.
But as Fujimori was doing things Peruvians wanted done, he was also presiding over a secret scheme of self-enrichment. His intelligence chief, Vladimiro Montesinos, operated a system of embezzlement and kickbacks that amassed hundreds of millions of dollars in foreign bank accounts. When this deception came to light, just after Fujimori’s 2000 reelection to a third term, he fled the country and resigned from office.
To claw back these funds, Peru created a special prosecutor’s office and worked closely with the countries that hosted these contested assets. Peru has since recovered about $200 million of misappropriated wealth from accounts in the Cayman Islands, Switzerland, the United States, and Luxembourg, according to the database of the World Bank’s Stolen Asset Recovery Initiative. Peru’s economy also grew strongly after Fujimori’s fall from power. Foreign investment returned when the country renewed the rule of law. But then, in the 2010s, world demand slowed for Peru’s mineral exports, ensuring that Peru’s economy slowed too. Political instability returned.
As Peru rotated through eight presidents over the past decade, a mood of “Fujimori nostalgia” gained strength. Fujimori’s daughter Keiko, who was elected to Congress in 2006, founded her own political party in 2010, built mostly on a message of family revenge and redemption. She ran for president in 2011, 2016, and 2021, losing narrowly each time. She ran again this year—and won.
Believers in free and fair government can hope that Peru’s democratic institutions have strengthened sufficiently over the past quarter century to deter Keiko Fujimori from indulging in the deviousness that led to her father’s disgrace. But her tenure is new, and her political message has long been one of excusing her father’s abuses.
Peru is not the only case of a former kleptocratic ruling
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If you called yours out and didn't pretend they weren't all doing the same thing, somebody might care about Trump now.
But you didn't so nobody does.
Keep crying about bullshit everyday, Shit Golem.
Fucking waste of carbon.
--------------------------------------------------
Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.
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Quote:Don't change, 6ixStringJoker. Your "logic" and "reasoning" are truly world-class, same as Trump.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
If you called yours out and didn't pretend they weren't all doing the same thing, somebody might care about Trump now.
But you didn't so nobody does.
Keep crying about bullshit everyday, Shit Golem.
Fucking waste of carbon.
--------------------------------------------------
Those who dance always seem crazy to those who can't hear the music.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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The Court’s Ballroom Decision Is a Sign of Deeper Problems
The conservative justices have separation of powers exactly backwards.
By Leah Litman | September 2, 2026, 10:38 AM ET
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/09/scotus-separation-powers-bal
lroom-trump/688499/
In deciding to allow President Trump to proceed with constructing a new ballroom, which Congress has not authorized, at the White House, which Trump does not own, the U.S. Supreme Court invoked the separation of powers. But the Court got the constitutional problem precisely backwards: The separation-of-powers problem isn’t that courts are impermissibly blocking the president’s use of taxpayer funds to create a ballroom. It’s that the president is impermissibly using unauthorized taxpayer funds to create a ballroom.
The Court’s missteps were many, starting in the very first sentence of its opinion: “In October 2025, the federal government started a project to replace the East Wing of the White House.” (The opinion, decided via the Court’s shadow docket, was per curiam, meaning that it did not indicate an author, but because the four dissenters noted their names, we know the five justices in the majority were Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett.)
But the federal government didn’t begin replacing part of the White House. Only the president and the executive branch did. Under the U.S. Constitution, the president is not the be-all and end-all of the federal government. Far from it: The legislature, Congress, is the body that has the power to establish and regulate federal property (including the White House) and to authorize the spending of federal funds. Indeed, the plaintiff in the case—the National Trust for Historic Preservation in the United States—argued that the president was proceeding without congressional authorization and in violation of federal laws. The Supreme Court majority did not say otherwise, making no claim as to whether the ballroom-construction project was legal or whether the president had the authority to undertake it.
The Supreme Court’s conflation of the president with the federal government is the latest iteration in the Court’s steady embrace of the unitary-executive theory and the accompanying expansion of executive power. This theory maintains that all executive power resides in the president, and that Congress cannot limit the president’s exercise of that power. Yet these days, the president, occasionally with the Court’s blessing, is claiming to possess legislative powers too. That is the case when the president declines to spend funds that Congress has obligated or when the president decides to spend funds that Congress has not authorized. Under the Constitution, Congress, not the president, has the power of the purse. Nevertheless, the unitary-executive theory unites all government power in the president, paving the way for an executive unbound by law.
The Court’s errors continued as justices attempted to explain why the lower courts were wrong to block the president’s demolition of a portion of the White House. The Court relied on the doctrine of standing, which maintains that a plaintiff challenging the government’s actions must show that they have been injured by the actions they are contesting. In this case, one of the members of the National Trust for Historic Preservation, who lives in Washington, D.C., and about once a month visits the neighborhood where the White House is located, alleged that she had “aesthetic, cultural, and historical interests” in what happened there.
Under the Court’s precedents, that injury should have sufficed. Indeed, in a prior opinion by Justice Antonin Scalia, the Court had said that desire to “observe an animal species, even for purely esthetic purposes,” can constitute “a cognizable interest for purpose of standing.” Crocodiles and all animals are great and important, to be sure. But so is the White House. As Chief Justice John Roberts wrote in his dissent, “The White House is not just any building.” It is “an iconic
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Trump Speaks His Truth About Russia And Ukraine
Phillips P. OBrien
Sep 06, 2026
https://phillipspobrien.substack.com/p/weekend-update-201-it-will-be-a
-brutal
At times Donald Trump speaks the truth. It can happen when he loses control and gets so angry that he blurts out what he really thinks. He did that this week on twitter, when he started a rant about the US reporting of his war with Iran, but then turned into a whine about how the US needs to be paid back for giving Ukraine aid under the Biden Administration.
Donald J. Trump @realDonaldTrump
For the treasonous SCUM that refuses to accurately report on our Military Operation in Iran, we have virtually unlimited amounts of Mid to High Grade Ammunition, far more than we could ever use for this, or for any other War (which is highly unlikely!), that could improbably take place. In addition, we are producing Munitions at levels never seen before. We are stockpiling and preparing for any contingency that could happen. We are taking them for ourselves, the U.S.A., rather than selling them to others, but the sales to Allies will soon again, begin. Also, please let it be known, that the Biden Administration gave far more Munitions away to Ukraine, at no cost to them, whatsoever, than we have used in Iran. Hundreds of Billions of Dollars was given to Ukraine and NATO, free of charge, that Europe would have paid for — If they were only asked, but we will be asking for that money, though somewhat belatedly! Thank you for your attention to this matter. President DONALD J. TRUMP
7.63k ReTruths 31.3k Likes
Sep 03, 2026, 4:56 PM
It seems he could not control himself and Natalie could not either, so he just had to let his resentment towards Ukraine come out.
Note—this aid was all congressionally sanctioned, so actually the US cannot demand any money back. Trump cares so little for Congress that he overlooks that. However, the truth is that if Trump could make Ukraine pay back the aid—he would.
At the same time that Trump could not control himself about Ukraine, he revealed his instinctive respect and affection for Putin by defending the Russian dictator from the charge that it was Russians who had orchestrated the attack on Germany’s Leipzig airport (which is now what the German government is stating clearly). When Trump was asked about the German government’s claim, he instinctively jumped to Putin’s defense, and, as he often does with the Russian dictator, talked up the fact that the two of them have a close personal relationship.
“I don’t think that Putin will be… I speak to him. I know him very well. Putin’s not looking to attack NATO territory,”
This instinctive Trumpian affection for Putin and Russia was shown in the other big story of the last few days, the visit of Steve Witkoff and Jared Kushner to Moscow and Kyiv. That trip (which started yesterday when the two reached Moscow and which should soon see them in Kyiv) reveals just how deep the affection runs between Trump and Putin. When Witkoff and Putin sat down with Putin yesterday, the Americans could not have been more positive. Witkoff gushed about his repeated pleasure at meeting Putin, saying that when he retires he will look back on all these “incredible stories and incredible memories and yours will be right at the top.”
Witkoff can barely contain his glee at meeting again with Putin
Beyond Trump’s and Witkoff’s obvious affection for Putin, the staging of the visits reveals a great deal. Even though the two have never before visited Ukraine, Trump felt the need for them to go to Moscow first, to show Putin he is, always, the number 1 priority. Only after seeing Putin, and presumably working out a plan with him, can they be allowed to finally visit Ukraine. Remember, the last time they presented a “compromise” plan to the Ukrainians, it was practically word for word a dictation of a Russian plan.
So once again, the US government seems to need to agree to a position with Putin before it can talk with Ukraine.
Such behavior, btw, makes me doubt that the real reason behind the R
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Trump Will Never Mail the $5,000 Checks
Deconstructing a policy proposal that makes no sense on any level
By Jonathan Chait | September 12, 2026, 7 AM ET
https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/09/trump-5000-rebate-checks/688
599/
Donald Trump’s new promise to give a $5,000 check to every adult American citizen if Republicans win the midterm elections may be an effort to answer a variant of an age-old riddle: Can Trump devise a policy so ill-conceived that even Trump’s intelligence is insulted?
Candidates often make inducements part of their campaign pitch. One obvious peculiarity of this plan is that Trump’s party already controls both chambers of Congress. Why, then, should the bonus checks be contingent on voters giving Republicans another two-year majority?
Trump has told reporters that he could distribute the loot without congressional approval. This is untrue. (It’s a facially unconstitutional infringement of Congress’s spending authority.) If it were true, however, it would make his decision to hinge the checks on the election’s outcome even more mysterious. If the choice were his alone, the outcome would seem totally irrelevant.
Under certain economic circumstances, distributing checks to everybody can make sense. In a deeply depressed economy, in which consumer spending is too low to maintain high employment levels, juicing it with a cash infusion can help keep it alive.
However, current circumstances are quite different. Unemployment is low and growth is healthy. The problem is that inflation is running well above target levels. Injecting roughly $1.2 trillion (the one-year cost of the checks) into the economy would likely make inflation worse—more cash would be chasing the same number of goods and services, driving up their price. This, in turn, would probably force the Federal Reserve to raise interest rates to tamp down inflation, which would throw recovery into jeopardy.
J. D. Vance has suggested that the checks could be paid for with tariff revenue. In theory, that would offset the inflationary effect of the new spending. But the tariffs are already in place, meaning that he’s citing a current revenue source to fund a new cost—at a moment when revenue is nowhere near sufficient: The U.S. government is running a deficit of nearly $1.8 trillion.
Trump, for his part, explained to reporters that he intends the checks not as an economic policy but as a treat: “I’m doing it as a reward for people having to put up for five years and four years of a horrible situation caused by Biden … It’s almost a reward for the people having to put up with Biden’s policy.”
When Trump ran in 2024 against Joe Biden’s policies, the “reward” was supposed to be having Trump and his policies in place. Now he seems to be suggesting that Trump’s incredible economy is not enough. This explanation is also impossible to square with his claim that the bonus would be contingent on Republicans winning the midterms. Why do Americans deserve a retroactive bonus for living in Biden’s America only if Republicans win the midterm elections? By Trump’s logic, if we were forced to endure two years of Democrats sharing power, that would make us more, not less, deserving of compensation.
The pretense that these checks have any economic logic has proved too great to bear for at least some Republicans. Senator Ted Cruz of Texas and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis dissented mildly, causing Trump’s advisers to heap them with ridicule. “Ron and Ted—the co-captains of your old high school Math-Lete Team—will nerd out on this while jockeying for 11th place in ’28,” a senior adviser to the White House told Politico Playbook.
In a normal administration, These guys understand high-school-level math is a credential, albeit a minimal one, to opine on economic policy. Only in the Trump era can it be presented as a disqualification.
The actual defense of the policy, obviously, is that it’s never going to happen. Last February, Elon Musk floated a DOGE dividend (which never arrived, in part because DOGE never produced meaningful savings). That year, Trump repeatedly promised tariff-rebate checks, which also never happened.
The Fox News host Laura Ingraham asked Trump why he doesn’t simply send the checks out now. He replied, “Because the Democrats can’t do it. Because for them, it’s negative growth. With us, it’s so positive.” What does this answer mean? Does it mean anything at all? Does Trump even believe it has any meaning, other than constituting a string of sentence fragments conveying the general sentiment Democrats bad; me good?
The actual divide within the party pits the Republicans who think that their voters are dumb enough to fall yet again for Trump’s free-money promise against those who suspect that the ruse has worn thin. Trump has spent his career betting against the intelligence of the American voter. The $5,000-check promise may be the moment he finally underestimated his audience.
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