Do you feel like the winds of change are blowing today too?
POSTED BY: 6ixStringJack
UPDATED: Saturday, September 12, 2026 16:11
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PAGE 182 of 479
One Moment That Foretold It All
Ezra Klein | May 4, 2025
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/04/opinion/trump-vance-100-days.html
I’m going to break the boundaries of the prompt and say that the most important — or at least most predictive — day of Donald Trump’s second term came before it even began: It was July 15, 2024, the day he announced that JD Vance was his choice for vice president.
The runner-ups were Marco Rubio and Doug Burgum — representatives of the Republican Party that existed before Trump’s 2016 campaign, choices Trump might have made to reassure voters who doubted or feared him. Vance was of the MAGA movement in a way Rubio and Burgum were not. Vance hated all the right people. Rubio and Burgum were seen as moderating forces; Vance pitched himself as an accelerationist who believed the biggest problem with Trump’s first term was that Trump was surrounded by people who, occasionally, said no to him. Vance was the only one of the three vice presidential contenders to say he would have done what Mike Pence would not: refuse to certify the 2020 election result.
There was little sense, in the days before Trump’s pick, that Vance held the pole position. Later reporting revealed a lobbying campaign: Rupert Murdoch and his allies tried to talk Trump out of Vance, as did Ken Griffin, the chief executive of Citadel, and even Kellyanne Conway. But Trump was swayed by other voices: Don Jr., Elon Musk and Tucker Carlson, who reportedly told Trump that if he picked Rubio or Burgum he was likelier to be assassinated by MAGA’s enemies.
This was the moment we could see the structure of Trump’s first term giving way to the structure of his second. Trump’s first administration was almost like a European coalition government: Trump governed in an uneasy alliance with a Republican Party he did not fully control or even like, with a business community in which many viewed him as a buffoon, with a staff that saw part of its role as curbing and containing the boss’s most destructive impulses, atop an administrative state that often resisted his demands. That friction frustrated Trump and many of his first-term allies. It was also why the most dire predictions for his first term largely did not come true and why so many wrongly predicted that his second term would follow the same script.
But Trump’s second term was never going to follow the same script because it has a completely different structure. This isn’t a coalition government; it’s a royal court. Trump is surrounded by courtiers who wield influence so long as they maintain his favor and not a moment longer. When is the last time he heard the word “no,” or was told, “I’m sorry, sir, you can’t”? In his first term, Trump either sought or was steered toward advisers and appointments that would reassure many of his doubters; in his second, he has prized loyalists who will do what they’re told and enforcers who will ensure that others fall in line as well.
I made this argument before the election, and it has proven true: One of Trump’s fundamental characteristics, for good and ill, is his disinhibition. He will do and say what others will barely think. In his first term, that disinhibition sat in tension with people around him who acted as inhibitors — a staff that was willing to think him wrong or even ridiculous, a congressional Republican Party that was not fully rebuilt around loyalty and sycophancy. For those who believed his first term a success, that tension was essential: Trump pushed the Republican Party and the bureaucracy to consider new policies and possibilities, but he was protected from carrying out his dumbest and most destructive ideas.
In his second term, Trump is surrounded by yes men and accelerationists. His staff has no interest in second-guessing the Grand Ayatollah of MAGA. Congressional Republicans are introducing bills to offer Trump a third term or carve his face onto Mount Rushmore. The guardrails are gone. The choice of JD Vance was when that structure came clear. It revealed that Trump’s second term would offer no concessio
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Originally posted by second:
Trump’s gaudy-awful Oval Office is all too American
George Will WaPo
https://eedition.houstonchronicle.com/infinity/article_popover_share.a
spx?guid=88d24d05-64cc-4c6a-b69a-c81cccb904e3&share=true
When the 47th president does something right, he repents by doing something that contradicts it. Consider his excellent executive order about the importance of aesthetic good taste in governance, and his subsequent redecoration of the Oval Office.
Issued during the blizzard of orders in his first full day in office, “Promoting Beautiful Federal Civic Architecture,” was thoughtful and sensible. Making amends for this, the president has redecorated the Oval Office. The style, which is not for the squeamish, is best described (actually, it is best not described, but here goes) as: “The Atlantic-City-Aspiring-to-be-Las-Vegas School of Interior Design.” Or (intellectual whiplash warning) Founding Fathers Bling. In short: Maximalism.
The president evidently likes working inside a Faberge egg. For readers of the Washington Post, Carolina A. Miranda, a talented cultural journalist, has described the new Oval Office, stuffed with stuff:
The mantel is adorned by seven gold examples of authentic bric-a-brac. Gold floral moldings are stuck here and there. Gold angels. Gold eagles on side tables. Gold coasters. Gold medallions on the fireplace. Gilded mirrors on the doors and gilded frames for about 20 paintings, more than triple the number Biden had, so there. Gold cherubs imported from Mar-a-Lago, which is probably still is not destitute of them. Gold coasters. A large gold block paperweight inscribed with TRUMP, in case he momentarily forgets to think about himself.
Miranda finds this sinister. And she bills the decor as “un-American.” If only.
We have a national knack for wretched excess, of which Super Bowl halftime shows are, amazingly, not the most vivid eruptions. Remember Detroit’s 1950s land yachts: The 1956 Chrysler Imperial and the 1958 Lincoln Premiere were 19 feet long. What is more vulgar than 21st-century State of the Union addresses?
Benjamin Franklin pointedly wore clothes of homespun cloth to the Court of St. James’, and Thomas Jefferson sometimes wore slippers when receiving presidential visitors. Nowadays, however, Americans enjoy leavening republican simplicity with touchingly absurd attempts at grandeur: There are, surely, communities where Kiwanis Club lunches are held in Holiday Inns’ Versailles Rooms, cheek-by-jowl with hardware stores and grain silos.
What has become of the aesthete who issued the Day 1 presidential order on “beautiful federal civic architecture”? The president said: “Federal public buildings should be visually identifiable as civic buildings and respect regional, traditional, and classical architectural heritage in order to uplift and beautify public spaces and ennoble the United States and our system of self-government.” Quite right.
Recently Paul Zepeda, an architecture student at Catholic University, writing for Civitas Outlook of the University of Texas at Austin’s Civitas Institute, noted that the current president was reversing his predecessor’s reversal of a 2020 executive order. Cue the “here-comes-Hitler” warnings. (He did have an unhealthy interest in overbearing architecture that diminished the individual relative to the state.)
And critics of the president’s January order issued somber warnings about attacks on “design freedom.”
“Design freedom,” which has often meant indifference to design, has blighted Washington with durable examples of brutalist architecture, such as the FBI Building on Pennsylvania Avenue. Might such architecture foment in citizens a sense of alienation from their government?
In October 1943, after German bombs destroyed the House of Commons, Prime Minister Winston Churchill insisted on rebuilding it with its traditional rectangular, and adversarial, arrangement rather than the semicircular design favored by many legislatures (including the U.S. Congress). Churchill thought it sNOTIFY: Y | REPLY | REPLY WITH QUOTE | PERMALINK | TOP | HOME
Quote:Trump has plans to take over Canada, but without explicitly stating it, he will do it using only his amazing skills as a salesman without nuking Ottawa. Trump certainly doesn't feel the need to get a Declaration of War from Congress. Congress has not issued such a declaration since 1942, despite the Constitution requiring a declaration before Trump can invade another country:
Originally posted by Brenda:
Tacky for the Oval Office but it figures.
And this guy shouldn't be giving him any ideas for the National Mall. I happen to like that open space and I'm Canadian. Also like the Lincoln memorial which is well deserved for Mr. Lincoln. Now the Washington Monument looks like an obelisk from Ancient Egypt and it was transplanted to DC.
Trump says ‘I don’t know’ when asked if he’s required to uphold Constitution
By Matt Viser | May 4, 2025
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2025/05/04/trump-nbc-interview
-constitution-economy/
WEST PALM BEACH, Fla. — President Donald Trump, asked during an interview on NBC News’s “Meet the Press” whether he believes that he needs to uphold the Constitution during his presidency, responded, “I don’t know.”
Video at https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/trump-administration/trump-rejects-co
ncerns-prices-economic-uncertainty-defends-agenda-rcna203512
The comment came as Trump remained adamant that he wanted to ship undocumented immigrants out of the country and said it was inconceivable to hear millions of cases in court, insisting he needed the power to quickly remove people he said were murderers and drug dealers.
“I was elected to get them the hell out of here, and the courts are holding me from doing it,” he said.
Pressed by host Kristen Welker on whether he still needs to abide by the Constitution, he said, “I don’t know.”
“I have brilliant lawyers that work for me, and they are going to obviously follow what the Supreme Court said,” he said, appearing to downplay the oath of office that includes a commitment to “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution.”
In the wide-ranging interview that aired Sunday, Trump was dismissive of his higher tariffs’ economic consequences for consumers, saying Americans would simply have to make do with fewer dolls and pencils, and higher costs for strollers. And he brushed aside the spiraling effects that a recession could bring.
He also did not rule out the use of military force to take Greenland, while saying it’s “highly unlikely” he would use force against Canada. He complimented Vice President JD Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio as potential successors, and he said he planned to foot the bill for adding a ballroom to the White House that would be more in line with his Mar-a-Lago estate.
The interview was remarkable at times, such as when a president elected on a pledge to lower costs and fight inflation minimized concerns about the potential for a recession and suggested that having an economic hit in the short term would be worth it if he can achieve his long-term goals.
“Everything’s okay,” he said. “I said this is a transition period. I think we’re going to do fantastically.”
He said he was not worried about the economy contracting under his watch but did not rule it out.
“Anything can happen,” he said. “But I think we’re going to have the greatest economy in the history of our country. I think we’re going have the greatest economic boom in history.”
Last week, new data showed that the U.S. economy shrank in the first three months of the year, a stark reversal after nearly three years of solid growth amid tariff-related uncertainty.
Trump swiftly blamed his predecessor, and he continued to say in the interview that former president Joe Biden was responsible for aspects of the economy, while conceding that it is “partially” the Trump economy going forward.
“I think the good parts are the Trump economy and the bad parts are the Biden economy because he’s done a terrible job,” he said. “He did a terrible jo
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The U.S. Threat Looming Over Canada
The consequences if Trump followed through on his belligerent rhetoric about a “51st state” would be catastrophic.
By Stephen Marche | May 4, 2025
Stephen Marche is the author of The Next Civil War. https://bookshop.org/a/12476/9781982123215
Download the book for free from the mirrors at https://libgen.rs/search.php?req=Stephen+Marche+The+Next+Civil+War
https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2025/05/canadians-fe
ar-war-trump/682674/
The idea of a war between Canada and the United States was inconceivable even a few months ago. Most Americans still don’t believe it’s a possibility, or simply haven’t noticed their president’s occupationist rhetoric, or can’t imagine a world in which a neighbor they have been at peace with for 150 years is suddenly an enemy. The very idea seems completely absurd.
But Canada does not have the luxury of dismissing White House rhetoric as trolling. Canadians are imagining the unimaginable because they have to.
Donald Trump’s pointless and malicious trade war has been, by his own account, a prelude to softening up Canada economically so that it can be appropriated as the 51st state. He has brought up his plans for incorporating Canada into the union with Prime Ministers Justin Trudeau and Mark Carney in private calls. The definitive end of the status quo came with the president’s casual comment that he would sell only deliberately downgraded F-47s to allies who purchased American military hardware, “because someday, maybe they’re not our allies.” From that point on, spending on equipment from the American military-industrial complex is a form of national suicide for any country in the free world. Canada could no longer comfortably sit within the American military sphere.
In this stark moment, our nation has abruptly become an adversary of the most powerful country in the world.
An American military threat is Canada’s worst nightmare. And Canada is unprepared precisely because it never considered the U.S. to be a potential threat. Trust made Canada vulnerable. For 60 years at least, both Conservative and Liberal governments have worked toward greater integration with the United States. Our country’s trade and security policies have been built on the premise of American sanity. That assumption, it turned out, was a mistake, hopefully not a fatal one.
What would a continental conflict look like? Conventional war between the United States and Canada would be highly asymmetric, to say the least. The U.S. possesses an enormous military, comprising more than a million men and women under arms. Canada’s armed forces have 72,000 active members. Even worse, because of its deep-seated trust in the United States, Canada has built its forces around interoperability with U.S. forces, both for mutual continental protection, in binational projects such as the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD), and for expeditionary forces such as the NATO mission to Afghanistan.
This vulnerability does not mean that Canada would be there for the taking. “The U.S. military does not have the capacity to seize the country,” Scott Clancy, who served as a Colorado-based director of operations for NORAD, told me recently. Clancy served 37 years in the Royal Canadian Air Force and rose to the rank of major-general, and is intimately familiar with U.S. and Canadian military capabilities. “They would have to seize specific points. And the more they went into cities, the more it would become unmanageable from an American military point of view.” A continental war would, then, likely play out as an insurgent conflict in Canadian North America—and across the U.S. homeland, as well. “Let’s say they just hold the oil fields,” Clancy said, referring to a U.S. military occupation of Canadian oil reserves. “We’re not gonna roll over. And just because you attacked Alberta doesn’t mean that we’re not gonna strike at you in New York.”
When I interviewed half a dozen experts on insurgent conflict for my book The Next Civil War, they all agreed that i
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There will be no war with Canada.
That would be over in 2 hours.
Shut the fuck up, stupid. Your party is dead and your media is next.
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"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
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Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:Quote:
Originally posted by second:Quote:“That was some weird shit,” George Bush said about Trump. That doesn't mean I approve of Bush, but Trumptard 6ix weirdly thinks different. Weird shit is an excellent description of all Trumptard behavior.
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
At this point I've just got to ask myself how far to the ultra-fringe-right I can push Second if given enough time.
Let's see...
We've got him posting about religion in a positive light every other day now. He was in full support of the Cheney family in the months leading up to the election. He posts online at least once per week about who should be murdered this week.
Is it any wonder why GenZ hates the Democratic Party and cringes hard any time one of them talk?
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"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
What George W. Bush Really Thought of Donald Trump
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2017/03/what-george-w-bush-really-thou
ght-of-trumps-inauguration.html
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
Some would argue that thinking it was a good idea to run on a dual-platform of Privatizing Social Security and Banning Gay Marriage would make a mindless Lefty headline-reader-bot question how prudent it would be to use that person's words and judgement as a good choice to bolster their own argument 21 years later in 2025. Especially after doing the same thing with the Cheney family before the election turned out the way that it did. And certainly, especially when the headline-reader-bot already possesses the data that the human being they are interacting with cares not whatsoever for George W. Bush or anything he's ever had to say about any topic.
But we're still dealing with pretty unsophisticated AI when it comes to the Second-Bot and the mindless articles it scrapes off the internet.
Keep watching your party circle the drain and wondering why you're completely powerless to do anything about it, drone.
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"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
No reply to this one, huh bigmouth?
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"I don't find this stuff amusing anymore." ~Paul Simon
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Trump’s assault on the media is being welcomed by authoritarians around the world
By Michael Savage | Sat 3 May 2025 02.00 EDT
https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/ng-interactive/2025/may
/03/a-cocktail-for-a-misinformed-world-why-china-and-russia-are-cheering-trumps-attacks-on-us-media
As Donald Trump’s executive order in March led to the shuttering of Voice of America (VOA) – the global broadcaster whose roots date back to the fight against Nazi propaganda – he quickly attracted support from figures not used to aligning themselves with any US administration.
Trump had ordered the US Agency for Global Media, the federal agency that funds VOA and other groups promoting independent journalism overseas, to be “eliminated to the maximum extent consistent with applicable law”. The decision suddenly halted programming in 49 languages to more than 425 million people.
In Moscow, Margarita Simonyan, the hardline editor-in-chief of the state broadcaster RT described it as an “awesome decision”. The Global Times, an English-language Chinese state media publication, crowed that the broadcasters had been discarded by the White House “like a dirty rag”, ending their “propaganda poison”. Azerbaijan’s president, Ilham Aliyev, whose regime has been accused of repressing political opposition, described Trump’s move as “very promising”.
Domestically, Trump has continued to target the media, whether by taking outlets including CBS News and ABC to court, attempting to block political access to the White House by the Associated Press, or defund National Public Radio and the Public Broadcasting Service – institutions he has described as “radical left monsters”.
For many senior media figures around the world, there has been a tipping of the scales as authoritarian regimes are emboldened by a US administration not only attacking the media at home, but also withdrawing from the fight for free information overseas.
As the world marks Press Freedoms Day on May 3, observers are now warning that in countries where free media is weak, America’s withdrawal from this geopolitical balancing act will have far-reaching effects.
As well as VOA, which was founded in 1942 at the height of the second world war and broadcasts in nearly 50 languages, Trump has withdrawn funding from Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL), which was founded during the cold war and broadcasts to countries including Belarus, Russia and Ukraine.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Lawyers warn that the president's assault on the legal profession threatens the rule of law itself.
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Donald Trump Is Using the Presidency to Get Rich
“The amount of money flowing into the Trump family coffers is of a scale and scope that just sort of blows the mind in any context,” the staff writer Susan B. Glasser says.
With Susan B. Glasser, Jane Mayer, and Evan Osnos | May 3, 2025
https://www.newyorker.com/podcast/political-scene/donald-trump-is-usin
g-the-presidency-to-get-rich
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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Trump Says He’s Instituting a “100% Tariff” on Films Produced Outside of the U.S. Because the “Movie Industry in America Is Dying”
The president posted that Hollywood and other areas are "being devastated" due to "a concerted effort by other Nations," which constitutes a "National Security threat."
By Kimberly Nordyke, Aaron Couch | May 4, 2025 8:39pm
https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/movies/movie-news/trump-tariff-movie
s-produced-outside-america-1236206949/
“The Movie Industry in America is DYING a very fast death,” he wrote. “Other Countries are offering all sorts of incentives to draw our filmmakers and studios away from the United States. Hollywood, and many other areas within the U.S.A., are being devastated. This is a concerted effort by other Nations and, therefore, a National Security threat. It is, in addition to everything else, messaging and propaganda!”
“Therefore, I am authorizing the Department of Commerce, and the United States Trade Representative, to immediately begin the process of instituting a 100% Tariff on any and all Movies coming into our Country that are produced in Foreign Lands. WE WANT MOVIES MADE IN AMERICA, AGAIN!”
“What they’ve done is other nations have been stealing the movies, the moviemaking capabilities from the united States,” he said, adding: “I’ve done some very strong research over the past week, and we’re making very few movies now. Hollywood is being destroyed. Now, you have a … grossly incompetent governor that allowed that to happen, so I’m not just blaming other nations, but other nations have stolen our movie industry. If they’re not willing to make a movie inside the United States, then we should have a tariff on movies that come in. And not only that, governments are actually giving big money. They’re supporting them financially. That’s sort of a threat to our country in a sense.”
The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two
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