Trump Is Destroying Everything He Touches
POSTED BY: JJ
UPDATED: Friday, September 11, 2026 21:58
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Lobbyists close to Trump say their going rate to advocate for a pardon is $1 million
December 27, 2025
The Wall Street Journal reports:
President Trump had just awarded a posthumous Presidential Medal of Freedom for Charlie Kirk in October when his son ushered friends toward the Oval Office.
As a string ensemble played in the background, Donald Trump Jr. walked up with lobbyist Ches McDowell to chat with the president. Trump Jr. at one point pulled McDowell forward to shake the president’s hand, according to a livestream broadcast. After they went inside, McDowell took the president aside to discuss a pressing issue, according to people familiar with the matter: One of his clients was seeking a pardon.
The client was Changpeng Zhao, founder of the world’s largest crypto exchange, Binance. That afternoon, the president agreed to sign Zhao’s pardon, the people said.
Zhao was one of the beneficiaries of a new, informal path to presidential pardons that has become a feature of Trump’s second term, which allows some clemency applicants with deep pockets or politically connected lobbyists to circumvent the traditional pardon process.
McDowell told The Wall Street Journal that Trump Jr. didn’t help him pursue the pardon and had left the room when he brought up Zhao. Trump Jr. had brought him because they were leaving later that afternoon for a hunting trip in Utah, McDowell said. A spokesman for Trump Jr. declined to comment.
The president formally signed the pardon for Zhao a week later, setting off an uproar in Washington. Democrats — pointing to steps Binance has taken that boosted the cryptocurrency company that Trump Jr. co-founded along with his father and brothers, World Liberty Financial — said the move amounted to brazen corruption. Several Republicans, including Sen. Thom Tillis of North Carolina and Trump donor Joe Lonsdale, said they were alarmed by it. Trump ally Laura Loomer called it a “terrible Pardon idea.”
For Binance, it was the culmination of a nearly yearlong effort to pursue clemency for its founder. It had paid lobbyists around $800,000 to lobby for a pardon, U.S. policy changes and other matters, according to federal records. It also approached other lobbyists about a pardon, offering success fees of as much as $5 million if they could help secure one, according to people familiar with the outreach. The company pleaded guilty in 2023 to violating anti-money-laundering rules and paid a $4.3 billion fine, and Zhao served a four-month prison sentence on a related charge. A pardon could make it easier for the company to return to the U.S. market.
https://attentiontotheunseen.com/2025/12/27/lobbyists-close-to-trump-s
ay-their-going-rate-to-advocate-for-a-pardon-is-1-million/
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Quote:Money has always bought access in Washington but it’s never been this naked.
Originally posted by second:
Lobbyists close to Trump say their going rate to advocate for a pardon is $1 million
A cannabis CEO spent 18 months cutting seven-figure checks to Trump’s political groups, attended fundraisers billed at $1 million per guest, and landed a two-hour Oval Office meeting where a Florida sheriff watched the president chat about Palm Beach real estate and golf courses. The CEO walked out with marijuana rescheduling, overriding Speaker Johnson, 22 Republican senators, and the religious right. “It was a little surreal,” the CEO told the Wall Street Journal.
Bradford County (FL) Sheriff Gordon Smith described the Oval Office meeting where Trump decided to loosen marijuana restrictions to the Wall Street Journal.
After about two hours, Trump said he was going to reschedule the drug and said he wanted to post on Truth Social, the sheriff recalled. Trump said he wanted everyone on board.
“The lawyers and his staff, they started yelling, ‘No sir, you can’t yet; there’s a 30-day period, it’s gotta go through this and that,’ ” Smith said. “They had to stop him from posting.”
If you can write a seven-figure check, you get the meeting. If you can’t, you get lied to.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/how-trump-became-the-unlikely-
champion-of-easing-marijuana-restrictions/ar-AA1T8kRE
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:6ixStringJoker supports Trump because both have done the same things to women:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Also, young, low-IQ college "educated" American women:
You [women] fucked up our country single-handedly, so get the fuck out.
Buh-Bye!
You won't be missed.
--------------------------------------------------
Be Nice. Don't be a dick.
I said, don't misquote me, cunt.
--------------------------------------------------
Be Nice. Don't be a dick.
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Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:Quote:
Originally posted by second:
American women want to opt out
More want to leave the country than ever before. That’s not the only way they’re escaping.
By Constance Grady | Dec 26, 2025, 6:00 AM CST
https://www.vox.com/culture/473273/american-women-expat-trad-wife-opt-
out
Young American women, it seems, want out of America. A Gallup poll in November found that 40 percent of US women ages 15 to 44 say they would move abroad permanently if they had the opportunity. That percentage is up 10 times since 2014, and it is shared by neither other American demographic groups nor young women in other developed economies.
Also, young, low-IQ college "educated" American women:Quote:
While there's no precise statistic,
a large majority of women in viral social media polls choose a grizzly bear over an unknown man in the woods, reflecting deep-seated fears of male violence, harassment, and assault, where a bear's threat (kill or leave alone) feels more predictable and less personally violating than the potential for prolonged harm from a man, which often carries societal disbelief.
This video shows some of the women's responses to the question:
You fucked up our country single-handedly, so get the fuck out.
Buh-Bye!
You won't be missed.
--------------------------------------------------
Be Nice. Don't be a dick.
Also, also young, low-IQ, college "educated" American women:
Fortune: ‘He satisfies a lot of my needs’: Meet the women in love with ChatGPT
https://fortune.com/2025/12/26/women-in-love-with-chatgpt-he-satisfies
-a-lot-of-my-needs/
And their lost daughters...
WaPo: Her daughter was unraveling, and she didn’t know why. Then she found the AI chat logs
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/she-thought-a-predator-was-grooming-
her-daughter-it-was-an-ai-chatbot/ar-AA1STa9t
--------------------------------------------------
Be Nice. Don't be a dick.
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Quote:JAYNEZTOWN resurrected a dead thread where 6ixStringJoker showed off his mental illnesses:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
I said, don't misquote me, cunt.
--------------------------------------------------
Be Nice. Don't be a dick.
http://fireflyfans.net/mthread.aspx?bid=18&tid=60485
I’ll be short. Trump and his Trumptards have troubled lives because they are sick in the head. Trump has profited from others being mentally ill because he understands their pathological psychology and knows how to swindle them. What Trump does not know is how to run an organization that is not designed to swindle people. That's why he opened casinos, overpriced hotels, and upscale golf courses (the world's most worthless sport). Every day Trump plays golf will cost taxpayers $millions.
6IXSTRINGJACK Wednesday, April 13, 2016 5:14 PM wrote
I'm not autistic, but without having ever been diagnosed, I believe myself very much to be OCD and possibly suffering from Asperger Syndrome...
High functioning, yes, but still... Nobody here would deny I'm without problems, and at 36 years old and perpetually single and all but a hermit in real life it's getting very hard to even pretend to people I care about that I'm even close to "normal".
6IXSTRINGJACK Wednesday, April 13, 2016 5:45 PM
I don't believe I'm Autistic. I'm confident I'm OCD, and I'm pretty sure there's some Ass Burgers in there. :)
6IXSTRINGJACK Friday, December 26, 2025 9:02 PM
ZERO trust. They have NOBODY but themselves to thank for that outcome.
Trumptards and Trump understand each other pretty well because they are all fucked up in the head in the same way, but that is a disadvantage when they deal with other people who aren't diseased like they are.
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:JAYNEZTOWN
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
I said, don't misquote me, cunt.
--------------------------------------------------
Be Nice. Don't be a dick.
Shut the fuck up, retard.
--------------------------------------------------
Be Nice. Don't be a dick.
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We're on the eve of Trump's final reckoning | Opinion
By Robert Reich | December 28, 2025 4:58PM ET
https://www.alternet.org/trump-final-reckoning/
About a year ago, at the start of the Trump regime, a woman was about to pass me on the sidewalk and then stopped, turned toward me, and almost shouted, “It’s a f------ nightmare!”
It has been a “f------ nightmare.”
But sometimes a nation needs a nightmare before it can fully awaken to long-simmering crises.
Martin Luther King Jr. mobilized the nation against racial injustice by making sure almost everyone in the United States saw its horrors — on the nightly news, watching peaceful Black people getting clubbed and arrested for exercising their rights.
Were it not for that painful national exposure to racist brutality, we wouldn’t have gotten the Civil Rights Act or the Voting Rights Act.
Something similar happened in the first years of the 20th century, when muckraking journalists revealed the monopolies, corruption, and public-be-damned arrogance of the robber barons.
Were it not for that painful national exposure, we wouldn’t have gotten the reforms of the Progressive Era.
A similar dynamic is playing out as Americans witness the nightmare of Trump’s neofascism: its mindless cruelty, blatant attempts to silence critics, wanton destruction of much of our government, open racism and misogyny.
Trump has revealed himself in ways his first-term handlers wouldn’t allow — as a sociopath who posts AI cartoons showing himself s------- on millions of Americans who marched against him. A malignant narcissist unable to respond to the tragic killings of Rob and Michele Reiner without making it all about himself. A chronic liar who says prices are dropping when everyone knows they’re rising.
As Americans see all this, outrage has been growing. We are beginning to mobilize — not all of us, of course, but the great majority.
Record numbers of us marched on October 18, No Kings Day. Democratic candidates have won just about every recent special election and mayoral and gubernatorial contest and a remarkable number of down-ballot races in bright red states and cities. MAGA is coming apart. Trump’s polls are tanking.
We are organizing and mobilizing with a resolve I have not seen in my lifetime.
America had to come to this point. We couldn’t go on as we were, even under Democratic presidents. For 40 years, a narrow economic elite has been siphoning off ever more wealth and power.
I’m old enough to remember when America had the largest and fastest-growing middle class in the world. We adhered to the basic bargain that if someone worked hard and played by the rules, they’d do better than their parents, and their children would do even better.
I remember when CEOs took home 20 times the pay of their workers, not 300 times. When members of Congress acted in the interests of their constituents rather than being bribed by campaign donations to do the bidding of big corporations and the super-wealthy.
I remember when our biggest domestic challenges were civil rights, women’s rights, and gay rights — not the very survival of democracy and the rule of law.
But over the last 40 years, starting with Reagan, America went off the rails. Deregulation, privatization, free trade, wild gambling by Wall Street, union-busting, monopolization, record levels of inequality, stagnant wages for most, staggering wealth for a few, big money taking over our politics.
Corporate profits became more important than good jobs and good wages for all. Stock buybacks and the well-being of investors more important than the common good.
Democratic presidents were better than Republican, to be sure, but the underlying rot worsened. It was undermining the foundations of America.
Trump has precipitated a long-overdue reckoning.
That reckoning has revealed the rot.
It has also revealed the suck-up cowardice of so many CEOs, billionaires, Wall Street bankers, media moguls, tech titans, Republican politicians, and other so-called “leaders” who have stayed
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Why the Pantomime by Trump? It Has Always Been About Defending Putin
And Perhaps Getting A Nobel Prize
By Phillips P. OBrien | Dec 29, 2025
https://phillipspobrien.substack.com/p/why-the-pantomime-its-always-be
en
Let’s start with two recent quotes about Vladimir Putin.
The first was a claim by President Trump yesterday during the press conference he held with President Zelensky after the latest episode of the long-running pantomime negotiations between the USA, Ukraine and Russia.
“Russia wants to see Ukraine succeed…President Putin was very generous in his feeling toward Ukraine succeeding, including supplying energy, electricity and other things at very low prices.”
And then this quote from Trump’s chief of staff and intimate, Suzie Wiles, in her extraordinary Vanity Fair interview. It has the ring of truth
“The experts think that if he (Putin) could get the rest of Donetsk, then he would be happy,” Wiles told me in August. But privately, Trump wasn’t buying it—he didn’t believe Putin wanted peace. “Donald Trump thinks he wants the whole country,” Wiles told me.
Both of these statements cannot be true. Indeed they cancel each other out. There is one that is far more likely to be true (Wiles estimation) and one that was almost certainly a lie (what Trump said yesterday).
The statement by Trump that Putin wants to see Ukraine succeed seems to have been deliberate choice by Donald Trump to deceive. The reason for that lie is to protect Vladimir Putin and mislead the American people (and the world) about Russia’s intentions. It explains why this pantomime is no joke or “nothingburger”. Instead, it has been deadly effective and it serves Russian interests and has protected Russia for almost a year and threatens to do so well into a second year.
Btw, you can watch the whole press conference here. The lie about Putin wanting Ukraine to succeed comes at 20:05.
The fact was that Trump spent most of the press conference yesterday either defending or praising Putin and undermining the Ukrainian position. It is indicative of why he is doing what he is doing and why it has been so effective. This whole pantomime is not a “nothingburger” or anything like that. It is a very effective con that has gone on for almost a year, which has provided protection to Putin/Russia and strung along Europeans and Ukrainians. Moreover, it is a pantomime that Trump will keep going as long as possible.
Lets look at other examples of how Trump defended or praised Putin during the press conference yesterday. Will include the time stamps so you can check
The Praise For Putin.
Trump gushed about the closeness of his relationship with Putin and it came up regularly during the press conference. He boasted about how long the Trump-Putin phone call was before the meeting with Zelensky—”two and a half hours” (17:11).
btw, that really is extraordinary. Before meeting with Zelensky for far less than 2.5 hours, Trump initiated a call with Putin to coordinate plans. And afterwards Trump was slated to call Putin as well for a debrief. He clearly gets nervous about operating without Putin’s advice.
Moreover, Trump a number of times waxed rhapsodical about the closeness of his connection to Putin and in particular how the two bonded about what he calls the Russia “hoax”, but of course which was very real. Here was the first mention (10:27).
“Uh, and I spoke with President Putin. I got along with him very well despite the Russia Russia Russia hoax, which was a total hoax. Used to say, "What is going on over there?" But it was a total hoax as he knew and as I knew.”
Here was the second mention, which shows Trump believes they have bonded (16:03).
“Don’t forget we went through the Russia Russia Russia hoax together. And he'd call me, I'd call him, I'd say, "Can you believe the stuff that they're making up?" And it turned out we were right.”
Finally, Trump feels so close to Putin that he explains the Russian dictator’s opinions and
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Quote:
Originally posted by second:
We're on the eve of Trump's final reckoning | Opinion
By Robert Reich | December 28, 2025 4:58PM ET
https://www.alternet.org/trump-final-reckoning/
About a year ago, at the start of the Trump regime, a woman was about to pass me on the sidewalk and then stopped, turned toward me, and almost shouted, “It’s a f------ nightmare!”
It has been a “f------ nightmare.”
But sometimes a nation needs a nightmare before it can fully awaken to long-simmering crises.
Martin Luther King Jr. mobilized the nation against racial injustice by making sure almost everyone in the United States saw its horrors — on the nightly news, watching peaceful Black people getting clubbed and arrested for exercising their rights.
Were it not for that painful national exposure to racist brutality, we wouldn’t have gotten the Civil Rights Act or the Voting Rights Act.
Something similar happened in the first years of the 20th century, when muckraking journalists revealed the monopolies, corruption, and public-be-damned arrogance of the robber barons.
Were it not for that painful national exposure, we wouldn’t have gotten the reforms of the Progressive Era.
A similar dynamic is playing out as Americans witness the nightmare of Trump’s neofascism: its mindless cruelty, blatant attempts to silence critics, wanton destruction of much of our government, open racism and misogyny.
Trump has revealed himself in ways his first-term handlers wouldn’t allow — as a sociopath who posts AI cartoons showing himself s------- on millions of Americans who marched against him. A malignant narcissist unable to respond to the tragic killings of Rob and Michele Reiner without making it all about himself. A chronic liar who says prices are dropping when everyone knows they’re rising.
As Americans see all this, outrage has been growing. We are beginning to mobilize — not all of us, of course, but the great majority.
Record numbers of us marched on October 18, No Kings Day. Democratic candidates have won just about every recent special election and mayoral and gubernatorial contest and a remarkable number of down-ballot races in bright red states and cities. MAGA is coming apart. Trump’s polls are tanking.
We are organizing and mobilizing with a resolve I have not seen in my lifetime.
America had to come to this point. We couldn’t go on as we were, even under Democratic presidents. For 40 years, a narrow economic elite has been siphoning off ever more wealth and power.
I’m old enough to remember when America had the largest and fastest-growing middle class in the world. We adhered to the basic bargain that if someone worked hard and played by the rules, they’d do better than their parents, and their children would do even better.
I remember when CEOs took home 20 times the pay of their workers, not 300 times. When members of Congress acted in the interests of their constituents rather than being bribed by campaign donations to do the bidding of big corporations and the super-wealthy.
I remember when our biggest domestic challenges were civil rights, women’s rights, and gay rights — not the very survival of democracy and the rule of law.
But over the last 40 years, starting with Reagan, America went off the rails. Deregulation, privatization, free trade, wild gambling by Wall Street, union-busting, monopolization, record levels of inequality, stagnant wages for most, staggering wealth for a few, big money taking over our politics.
Corporate profits became more important than good jobs and good wages for all. Stock buybacks and the well-being of investors more important than the common good.
Democratic presidents were better than Republican, to be sure, but the underlying rot worsened. It was undermining the foundations of America.
Trump has precipitated a long-overdue reckoning.
That reckoning has revealed the rot.
It has also revealed the suck-up cowardice of so many CEOs, billionaires, Wall Street bankers, media moguls, tech titans, Republican politicians, and oNOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
MAGA’s Betrayal of Small Business
A key right-wing constituency is feeling the pain
By Paul Krugman | Dec 29, 2025
https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/magas-betrayal-of-small-business
Source https://tinyurl.com/bddfbtps
Owners of small businesses are, on average, a strongly right-leaning group. Indeed, along with white Christian nationalists, they are one of the core components of the MAGA base. And small business owners celebrated Donald Trump’s victory last fall. Small business optimism, as measured by the National Federation of Independent Businesses’ monthly survey, soared after the election:
Source https://www.nfib.com/news/monthly_report/sbet/
Yet 2025 was a miserable year for small business — and 2026 will be worse.
Before I get into the reasons MAGA is so bad for some of its most fervent supporters, let’s talk about why small-business owners lean right.
Partly it’s a matter of who they are. Other things equal, higher income — which means paying more in taxes and being less likely to depend on the safety net — tends to make a voter more Republican. However, higher levels of education, which are correlated with income, tend to make voters more Democratic.
This is a fairly new development — as recently as two decades ago the correlation between education and partisanship went the other way. I would attribute this reversal to the changing nature of the G.O.P., which has become ever more anti-intellectual and anti-science. For the purposes of today’s post, however, this doesn’t matter. The point, instead, is that if we ask who in America is likely to have relatively high income either without having a college degree or without having had any postgraduate education — and therefore be predisposed to favor Republicans — the answer is clearly owners of successful small businesses.
Beyond that selection effect, a recent study of small-business partisanship by Malhotra, Margalit and Shi finds that “the experience of being a small business owner leads people to adopt conservative views on government regulation.” So small business owners supported Trump in the belief that he would get the government off their backs.
That’s not what happened. Instead, the second Trump administration has been marked by increased government-imposed burdens on small business. High tariffs have been a body blow to the many small businesses that rely, one way or another, on imported goods. Mass arrests of immigrants have also been highly disruptive for businesses, such as construction contractors, that depend on foreign-born workers.
You might be tempted to say that these are burdens on all businesses, not just small business, which is true. But large businesses have been better able to weather the Trump shock than small businesses, for at least three reasons.
First, big businesses are more likely than small businesses to have the resources needed to adapt to a suddenly changed business environment. Suppose, for example, that a business has been heavily reliant on inputs imported from China, which now face an average tariff rate of 37 percent. A large corporation can try to find alternative suppliers in nations that face much lower average tariffs, such as Vietnam and Mexico. A small business won’t have the staff or money to search for and develop these alternative sources of supply.
Second, big businesses are better able to game the system. For example, one unanticipated result of the Trump tariffs has been much more thorough exploitation of the rules of the U.S.-Mexico-Canada trade agreement, the agreement formerly known as NAFTA. It turns out that until this past s
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