Trump 2: Electric Fuckyougaloo

When questioned about some (most?) of his actions over the past week I wish he would just respond with "Because I'm a white supremacist racist."

The technical definition of terrorism in US Code is violent acts in futherance of a political agenda. By that standard, Luigi Mangione faces an indictment on a terrorism charge. But, what was Jan 6 if it was not terrorism? And if it can be substantively established that ShitGibbon is responsible for inciting the attack, that would make him equivalent to Osama bin Laden (except, less likeable).
 
A bit of levity, the token lefty on the center right anti Trump The Bulwark podcast said fuck it, he's just going to spend the next year saying Harris won and Trump is an illegitimate president. :ROFLMAO: He knows that's not true but he should do it anyway. I hope he does and publicly a lot. Any kickback can just be responded to with "I'm concerned about irregularities." :ROFLMAO: If not him, some public pundit needs to be that guy (or woman). They should have intelligent discourse on everything else but stick to that. "I'm not here to talk about that." :ROFLMAO: SNL and The Onion shouldn't be the only source of the absurd times we live in.
 
Donald Trump signed pardons for 23 anti-abortion activists who were convicted for violating a federal law that makes it a crime to block entrances to reproductive health clinics.

The pardon list includes Lauren Handy, who is serving a nearly five-year prison sentence after forcing her way inside a Washington, D.C., clinic in 2020 and using ropes, bike blocks and chains to stop patients from entering — actions that anti-abortion groups and Republican officials have characterized as peaceful protests unjustly prosecuted by a politically motivated administration.

Their convictions under the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Actduring Joe Biden’s presidency were fiercely condemned by anti-abortion organizations and right-wing legal groups, which pressed Trump for Thursday’s pardon.
 
this guy who just screwed all Asians in America thinks this is good. Does he really think trump will support asians?????

"President Trump's executive orders rescinding affirmative action and banning DEI programs are a major milestone in American civil rights progress and a critical step towards building a colour-blind society," Yukong Mike Zhao, president of the Asian American Coalition for Education, said in a statement.

The Trump administration emailed thousands of federal employees on Wednesday, ordering them to report any efforts to "disguise" diversity initiatives in their agencies or face "adverse consequences".

The request came after President Donald Trump banned diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) offices and programmes throughout the government.

Emails seen by the BBC directed workers to "report all facts and circumstances" to a new government email address within 10 days.

Some employees interpreted it as a demand to sell out their colleagues to the White House.

"We're really freaked out and overwhelmed," said one employee at the Department Health and Human Services (HHS).

The Office of Personnel Management, which manages the federal workforce, issued guidance requiring agency heads to send a notice to their staff by 17:00 eastern time on Wednesday. It included an email template that many federal staffers ultimately received that night.

Some employees, like those at the Treasury Department, got slightly different versions of the email.

The Treasury Department email excluded the warning about "adverse consequences" for not reporting DEI initiatives, according to a copy shared with the BBC.

In one of his first actions as president, Trump signed two executive orders ending "diversity, equity, and inclusion" or "DEI" programmes within the federal government and announced any employees working in those roles would immediately be placed on paid administrative leave.

Such programmes are designed to increase minority participation in the workforce and educate employees about discrimination.

But critics of DEI, like Trump, argue that the practice itself is discriminatory because it takes race, gender, sexual identity or other characteristics into consideration.

Trump and his allies attacked the practice frequently during the campaign.

In a speech Thursday at the World Economic Conference in Davos, Switzerland, Trump declared he was making America a "merit-based country".

Critics of DEI have praised Trump's decision.

"President Trump's executive orders rescinding affirmative action and banning DEI programs are a major milestone in American civil rights progress and a critical step towards building a colour-blind society," Yukong Mike Zhao, president of the Asian American Coalition for Education, said in a statement.

The group had supported a successful effort at the US Supreme Court to overturn affirmative action programmes at US universities.
 
Don Jr is currently leading the Republican polls for the 2028 nomination.

And it just starts there. There's no doubt in my mind that trump has a plan that extends far beyond his four (eight total) years in office.

At that point in time (2028) it will be about trump's legacy and trump branding going forward. trump has three sons along with grandchildren, all with the trump name. Looking ahead I wouldn't be shocked if there are plans for them to run for President, sequentially. That may sound crazy, but I'm sure it's on his mind.

As an aside... the Romanovs had a pretty good run leading Russia for 300 years. Though in the end it sucked for Tsar Nicholas II and his family.
 
And it just starts there. There's no doubt in my mind that trump has a plan that extends far beyond his four (eight total) years in office.

If that is truly his plan, then Vance was a horrible choice for VP. Vance will be too strong of an “incumbent” candidate for Jr or Eric to overcome.
 
If that is truly his plan, then Vance was a horrible choice for VP. Vance will be too strong of an “incumbent” candidate for Jr or Eric to overcome.

Could be. Or... trump may toss Vance, who essentially will be doing nothing other than breaking ties in the Senate over the next four years, under the bus early 2028.

I've learned to never underestimate what trump is capable of doing, as long as it serves himself in some manner.
 
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Maybe this article will make all Americans rethink what's happening and reunite everyone for the common good. Remember the divide and conquer that's been used and still is.


"Some thoughts about the first week of Trump II.
The New York Times describes Trump as leading “a global wave of hard-line conservative populism.”
Rubbish.
What Trump is undertaking has nothing whatever to do with conservatism, which is about conserving institutions and shrinking the size of government. And it has nothing to do with populism, which is about confronting elites.
Trump is leading a move to replace democracy with oligarchy.
He’s implementing a plan to make the wealthiest people in America far wealthier and more powerful, including Trump himself, and to turn American democracy into a giant corporation run by a handful of absurdly rich men.
He thinks he can accomplish this by getting the rest of us so angry at one another — over immigration, LGBTQ+ rights, abortion, diversity, and the like — that we don’t look upward and see where most of the wealth and power have gone.
Trump’s divisive policies will cause great harm, to be sure, and we must do everything we can to protect those who are vulnerable to them. But his cruel divisiveness is deflecting attention from the main event.
The media reported on all the hot-buttons Trump pushed: The government now recognizes only two “immutable” genders, male and female. Migrants (now referred to as “aliens”) are being turned away at the border. Immigration agents are freed to target hospitals, schools, and churches in search of people to deport. Diversity efforts in the federal government have been dismantled and employees turned into snitches. Federal money will be barred from paying for many abortions.
All awful to be sure, but the bigger story is Trump’s consolidation of power — substituting loyalists for experts across the government, using retribution to intimidate others, purging the government’s independent inspectors general, giving the Defense Department more authority over civilian life (and putting a raving loyalist in charge), giving Elon Musk authority to cut spending and roll back regulations, and readying a massive tax cut for the wealthy and big corporations.
Americans aren’t seeing this big story yet because Trump’s divisiveness is masking it.
One example: Trump fired Lina Khan, the aggressive monopoly-buster chair of the Federal Trade Commission, and replaced her with corporate stooge Andrew Ferguson. As a result, giant corporations and their CEOs are now free to get even bigger — merging with one another, acquiring smaller companies, and using predatory bullying to wipe out competitors. These are key steps on the road toward even more concentrated oligarchic control.
Yet what’s been reported this week is that Ferguson is purging diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) policies from the Federal Trade Commission.
I’m not playing down the importance of DEI. I’m just saying that the really big shift is happening behind the rightward flip. In fact, the terms “left” and “right” mean less and less now. The big story is about power and wealth moving into fewer and fewer hands.
Trump is the frontman. The three richest men in the world (Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg) stood prominently before him when he was sworn in last week. Trump has appointed other billionaires to key positions.
Behind them is a coterie of billionaires pushing for more oligarchic control of America (among them, Peter Thiel, Blake Masters, tech entrepreneur David Sacks, Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale, Palantir adviser Jacob Helberg, and Sequoia Capital’s Doug Leone).
Their two key inside players are Musk and JD Vance.
The oligarchs are counting on Vance to become president when Trump is incapacitated or dies in office, or clings to power beyond 2028 and turns power over to Vance. Vance will manage the final transition to an oligarchic form of government.
Recall that Vance would never have been elected senator from Ohio in 2022 were it not for Thiel’s $15 million investment in him (by far the largest portion of Vance’s campaign fund).
Thiel knew what he was buying. Vance had worked for Thiel’s California venture capital firm before running for the Senate and was part of Thiel’s group of rich crypto bros, tech executives, back-to-the-landers, and disaffected far-right intellectuals.
Because Thiel had been a major funder of Trump’s 2016 presidential run, he had significant influence with Trump when urging him to pick Vance for vice president.
Thiel once wrote: “I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible.” Hello? Freedom is incompatible with democracy only if you view democracy as a potential constraint on your wealth and power.
That’s the whole point. Thiel and his fellow billionaire oligarchs want it all.

Their intellectual godfather is Curtis Yarvin, a 51-year-old computer engineer who believes that political power in the United States has been held by a liberal amalgam of universities and the mainstream media, whose commitment to equality and justice is eroding social order.
Yarvin thinks democratic governments are inefficient and wasteful. They should be replaced with sovereign joint-stock corporations whose major “shareholders” select an executive with total power, who serves at their pleasure. Yarvin refers to the city-state of Singapore as an example of a successful authoritarian regime.
The first step toward achieving Yarvin’s vision was offered by Vance in a 2021 podcast — replace “every single midlevel bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state … with our people. And when the courts stop you, stand before the country, and say” – as did Andrew Jackson – that “the chief justice has made his ruling. Now let him enforce it.”
Yarvin’s emphasis on the inefficiency of democratic government is the seed for Musk’s department of government efficiency, itself another step toward Yarvin’s joint-stock corporation of oligarchs.
A third step: cryptocurrency substitutes for the U.S. dollar. This would shift financial controls out of a democratically elected system of government and into the hands of oligarchs who control crypto.
Make no mistake: Trump’s first week was a catastrophe for many vulnerable people. But the biggest story was his startling initial moves from democracy to oligarchy.
My hope lies in Americans noticing this.
As I’ve said, not since the Gilded Age of the late 19th century has such vast wealth turned itself into power so unapologetically, unashamedly, and defiantly.
Americans don’t abide aristocracy. We were founded in revolt against unaccountable power and wealth. We will not tolerate this barefaced takeover.
The backlash, when it comes, will be stunning."
Robert Reich
 
… it has nothing to do with populism, which is about confronting elite …

"Populism" has always been oxymoronic. It has only ever been led by an "elite", which means it has always been self-defeating. It is ipso facto a scam. FDR did not, AFAICT, run as a "populist", he ran in opposition to Hoover's failed policies, and actually fixed things (s evidenced by his re-elections).

Populists are assholes who seek to gain power on the backs of public discontent in order to advance their own agenda (rarely improving most people's lives), and perhaps for the attention. Popular revolutions yield less than good results because the revolutionary leaders end up in the same seats as the people they displaced ("revolution", after all, means moving in a circle) with hardly a clue as to how to run things better.

Populism should always be treated with disdain, because it is nothing more than a tool for manipulating anger, and, as I have said (not sure where I heard it), the best way to lose a fight is to go in angry.
 
When questioned about some (most?) of his actions over the past week I wish he would just respond with "Because I'm a white supremacist racist." It's not like he'd pay a price for that and it would pretty much put an end to most future questioning.

Say what you will about the neo-nazis and the klan, you at least know where they stand.
 
There is probably some substance to that story, but, Greg fucking Palast. He ruins any story he puts out there with his shouty-shouty, sounding way too much like at CTist. In some ways, he seems like a RW plant, making important stories ignorable just by being Greg fucking Palast
 
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