Trump Ruins America pt 1
I'm starting a new blog for stories that may or may not rate a seed of their own but are still worth mentioning.
We start with affirmative action for rich white MAGA's
@ChrisDJackson
A man who attacked police on Jan 6 is now wanted in Houston for charges of online solicitation of a minor which he was facing Before his riot arrest.
Trump Leads America Boldy Into Decline
Trump Leads America Boldy Into Decline | Froma Harrop | Columns | ArcaMax Publishing
Not a month old, the second Trump presidency is barreling toward the decline that big-mouth leaders have been sending their countries for centuries. Theodore Roosevelt warned of such dangers.
Speaking at the 1901 Minnesota State Fair, he famously shared the African proverb, "Speak softly and carry a big stick."
Roosevelt elaborated: "If a man continually blusters, if he lacks civility, a big stick will not save him from trouble." For a nation, he added, "It is both foolish and undignified to indulge in undue self-glorification, and, above all, in loose-tongued denunciation of other peoples."
Trump's threat of a 25% tariff against Colombia if it didn't start accepting planeloads of deported Colombians did work. But rather than take quiet satisfaction, he had to make a high school-level jab against Colombia's leader, calling him "very unpopular amongst his people." (An earlier White House statement on the planned sanctions ignorantly misspelled Colombia as "Columbia.'" That's the university, not the country. Also the Hollywood filmmaker.)
China is another matter. Trump has backed off on the big-stick approach toward China. He's now threatening tariffs of 10%, marked down from his earlier 60%. But can China be intimidated by a smaller stick from a blowhard? A stick of any size constitutes a challenge to China's self-esteem, something China has in quantity, and its own quest for global dominance.
About which, China has developed an AI model called DeepSeek that's almost as good as its American competitors' while using inferior AI chips. It costs a lot less and consumes less energy. That triggered a rout on Wall Street, hitting investors, not to mention Trump's beloved technology oligarchs, in the gut.
Americans now have a recovering (we hope) alcoholic in charge of the nation's defense. Even if Pete Hegseth were a beacon of sobriety, he utterly lacked the qualifications for that job. He was, however, a photogenic talking head on Fox.
On his first day at Defense, Hegseth announced big plans to ban transgender people from the military. Why Americans should feel safer knowing that people who identify with a gender other than the one they were born with can't serve in the military is unclear.
Israel, Australia, Canada and Germany let transgender soldiers operate openly without concerns for military readiness. In this country, female-born Shane Ortega served in the Marines before transitioning to male identity. He then transferred to the Army and flew countless helicopter missions in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Elsewhere in his second presidential term, Trump has failed his promised follow-through on lowering the price of groceries. On the contrary, egg prices are setting new records. They are up nearly 37% from this time last year, and are expected to go higher still. Kind of makes you miss the more affordable grocery carts of the Biden era.
Lumber prices have risen 35% from five years ago. Trump's threat to slap a 25% tariff on Canada, a major supplier, isn't going to make wood products more affordable. One feels for the disaster-struck people of North Carolina and California who need lumber to rebuild.
But since the construction industry depends so heavily on workers whom Trump vows to rapidly deport, there may not be enough people left to do the rebuilding. At the very least, the cost of employing them would go way up.
As for shaking his shrunken stick at China, Trump has become one of the "obnoxious" individuals Theodore Roosevelt warned against. One "who is always loudly boasting" and "absolutely contemptible" for not being prepared to back up his words.
In other business, Trump's attacks on electric vehicles are helping Chinese competitors eat our domestic carmakers' lunch on EV production and future sales. That depressing topic is for another day.
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Trumps newest bimbo mouthpiece, whose name isnt worth remembering, will hold the first White House press briefing this afternoon.
is it the blonde bimbo under investigation by the FEC for campaign finance violations?
probably
Jan. 6 rioter pardoned by Trump is sentenced to 10 years in deadly DWI crash
Jan. 6 rioter pardoned by Trump is sentenced to 10 years in deadly DWI crash
Another one, eh? Sounds like these people are natural born criminals
This was on an charge from 2022.
.
I'm glad she got sent back to prison
Interestingly - A friend of mine ( while I was in the Coast Guard back in '96 ) got 4 years in prison for doing the same thing while a local woman was given probation, community service & counseling 2 weeks later by the same judge.
that's odd
It was explained in the news coverage at the time, sentencing is often dictated by how the survivors' family feels. Also my friend only did 14 months of his 4 year sentence.
it's the party of criminals now ...
... traitorous criminals.
Let’s not be hasty. We haven’t seen the OF yet.
A J6 pardon recipient was shot dead by police in Indiana yesterday.
[deleted][✘]
zero loss to america ...
How many times?
Trump is now threating a 25% tariff on Taiwan chip maker TSMC who is building a plant in the Phoenix area.
LOL! OMG! Wouldn't that plant provide American jobs? He really is as dumb as he looks
That's Newsmax, tho. Nasty bunch.
One of my favorite Mexican restaurants plays that channel. They must play it for their customers
that channel or FOX on the TV is always a sign of fine dining ...
Bullshit is always at the top of the menu in MAGA world.
The ramblings of a madman inventing his own self-aggrandizing reality. The guy is sick in the head.
From what I've read: The water isn't coming from the Pacific Northwest. The pumps in question were down for maintenance and were simply brought back online afterwards. The water mostly goes to agriculture in the Central Valley, not to the fire zones in and around L.A. The federal government already controls the pumps in question, so the military didn't have anything to do with it.
Incidentally, if Trump actually had sent the military to take over something state-controlled, all hell would probably be breaking loose right now. How stupid is it that he's willing to play around with language like that?
Horrendous leadership. Great job, Trump voters.
who knows better than trump, what his adoring audience of supporters will believe ...
Apparently, if Trump says anything at all, it's fact for 23% of the voting public.
the maga gospel ...
There is no grand spigot. Water hasn’t been turned off. The state is not diverting badly needed water to the ocean. No sane, educated person past the age of about 8 thinks this is happening. Trump didn’t turn on shit.
I need some MAGA in here right now to explain how you can support such clear bullshit.
I'm sure there's a hilarious trump-splanation forthcoming...
Donald Trump Wants You to Die
The attack on public health begins
Paul Krugman
Jan 24, 2025
One enduring theme of the MAGA movement has been hostility toward the “deep state” — what people outside the movement might call professional civil servants. Trump and company believe that the deep state is out to get them, which is paranoid. But they’re not wrong to believe that public employees who see themselves as working for the nation rather than for whoever currently occupies the White House pose a problem for their agenda.
So what will MAGA do, now that it’s in power? Many observers, myself included, have focused on plans to convert a number of civil service jobs into political appointments. But just a few days into the new regime it’s clear that the assault on professional government will be much broader than that — that it will involve an effort to intimidate and politicize civil servants, too.
And early indications are that one prime target will be agencies devoted to protecting public health.
About the broad attack on the civil service: The Trump administration has ordered an immediate end to all diversity, equity and inclusion efforts across the federal government. That’s pretty shocking, especially because it’s open-ended. What counts as D.E.I.? Is it forbidden even to mention anything involving race, gender or socioeconomic status? Probably.
But the really shocking thing is that all federal employees have been ordered to become informers — threatened with “adverse consequences” if they fail to report on colleagues who surreptitiously engage in what the administration considers D.E.I..
And just like that, the federal government has become our own private East Germany.
Public health agencies, even more than the rest of the government, are in the firing line. You can’t talk seriously about health policy without taking race and gender into account; yet according to the New York Times, one contractor collecting demographic data for the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services has already been told to stop work, and the results of an already completed survey won’t be released.
But wait, there’s more: federal health agencies, including the Food and Drug Administration, the Centers for Disease Control and the National Institutes for Health, have been ordered to pause all external communications, including health advisories and scientific reports.
NIH, in particular, appears to have been effectively put in lockdown, with even routine meetings canceled and employees forbidden to travel.
Is this just a temporary phase, with normal health policy returning soon? Don’t count on it.
After all, Trump is trying to install Robert F. Kennedy, an anti-vaccine crank, as head of Health and Human Services. In general, public health policy, which used to be nonpartisan — in the past Anthony Fauci, whom President Biden preemptively pardoned to protect him from possible persecution, served both Democratic and Republican administrations — has become a political flash point. Right-wing hostility to medical science caused a strong partisan divide in willingness to get vaccinated against Covid. Here’s Charles Gaba’s plot showing a strong negative relationship between how many people in a county voted for Trump in 2020 and how many got the Covid vaccine when it became available:
This same hostility to medical science probably lies behind a truly alarming decline in the percentage of children vaccinated against measles, mumps and rubella (95 percent is generally considered necessary to prevent outbreaks):
And let’s not forget that when the Covid pandemic was raging, Trump seemed far more interested in preventing people from hearing bad news than he was in holding down the death toll.
So my prediction — which I hope proves false — is that when NIH and other health agencies emerge from the current freeze they will have been emasculated and politicized, prohibited from releasing information and research whose implications the Trump administration doesn’t like, banned from making policy recommendations that are inconvenient for Trump or at odds with the prejudices of the MAGA base.
And many Americans will die as a result.
Some historical perspective may be useful here. As everyone knows, Trump has a thing about the McKinley era, when, he believes, America was truly great. What I’m sure he doesn’t know is that America circa 1900 had incredibly high rates of death from infectious disease:
We were able to mostly conquer infectious disease in part thanks to advances in the scientific understanding of disease, in part because of the development of vaccines. But these scientific advances by themselves wouldn’t have been enough. Progress depended crucially on public policy, ranging from the provision of clean water to vaccine mandates.
If MAGA had been around at the time, do you have any doubts that it would have opposed all of these public health measures and accused their proponents of being part of some dark conspiracy?
And when — not if — the next pandemic strikes, do you expect our battered, politicized public health agencies to keep Americans properly informed? If Trump is still in charge, do you expect him to respond effectively, as opposed to minimizing the threat and muzzling anyone who might contradict him? It’s hard to feel optimistic about any of these concerns.
So, is America great again?
He's bringing back the original DEI - Discrimination-Exclusiveness-Inequality.
He's making it great for himself, Musk, the Klan, prominent Neo-Nazi's and the like. Ans you're correct, he likes the McKinley-era and IS McKinley as just like him, Trump's presidency has been bought. Musk, Zuckerberg, big-business like Target...
If people get sick, he'll just tell them to drink bleach.
Does he know what happened to McKinley?
Question, does everyone who opens a Chevrolet Denali
need to replace the nameplate with McKinley?
First off...why would anyone buy a POS like that. Second, go for it I don't care
What I want to know is if we all die who will be around to make money for them?
Ummm.... TG??
What you are doing there is called "thinking ahead". They don't even know what that means.
Trump is going back to the original DEIA days:
Discrimination-Exclusiveness-Inequality-Abhorrent
Good luck keeping up with the fire hose of ruinous activity, meant exclusively to flood the zone so that nobody has time to count the ways he is destroying everything this country has worked to become. Making America Go Away.
Yeah, we’ve all been shriveling up and choking on dust because we needed the Wizard of Oz to turn on the Golden Spigot. /s
FUCK there are some stupid people in this country! They believe this shit!
He depends on it.
Oh, dear....I must be a leftist because I studied all of those subjects!
She's in good company..........
Maybe we can see her crying video and compare it to Selena Gomez's to see who did it better.
She’s going to climb up there with a pumpkin carving kit and do it herself.
@Monica60517016
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House Republicans have introduced a BRAND NEW bill to rename DC's Dulles Airport "Donald J. Trump International Airport.
The God-like worship of this stain on humanity is beyond the pale
@tusk81.bsky.social
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“I came out of my meeting with RFK Jr. stunned,” Sen. @murray.senate.gov said this week. “I have never left a meeting with a Cabinet nominee as disconcerted and troubled by their words in my entire career.” www.wonkette.com/p/live-some-...
Gee.....a Democrat Senator saying negative things about a Trump nominee.
I think she is the first s/
They'll be having her parade on Friday.
You're looking for American hypocrisy?
The American government consistently assures the Chinese government it adheres to the "One China Policy" and the three joint communiques while simultaneously arming Taiwan and sending its government officials to visit Taipei.
@RonFilipkowski
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With waterboarding or without?
Quote
Acyn
@Acyn
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Trump: Today I'm also signing an executive order to instruct the departments of defense and homeland security to begin preparing the 30,000 person migrant facility at Guantanamo Bay
Another Trump bimbo misspelled her job title
They’re not being hired for their communication skills.
It must be for their hair.
[✘]
Bad but does not even remotely compare to calling Harris a stupid whore. Glass houses and all that.
The War Room is Bannons You Tube show, or it was also the name of a Trump campaign twitter page.
In either case they now have a white house correspondent. The Onion must be jealous of reality.
As for her, I think a white house correspondent should be able to spell the word. You might say it could be a job requirement.
But the difference is there is documented evidence to support my claim, any indication that Natalie Brown slept with Wille Brown or anybody else to achieve this position?
I know, right? And suggesting she blew her way to the top. All John said was must be the hair in response to Hal's not hired for communications skills
A woman who (presumably) had sex with her boyfriend is not evidence that she is a whore. Unless you believe every woman whose boyfriend helped her out early in her career is necessarily a whore.
A woman who has earned a JD, passed the CA bar, operated as a prosecuting attorney, become the SF District Attorney, was twice elected as the CA AG, was elected as a Senator for CA, was elected as VP, was nominated for PotUS is demonstrably NOT stupid.
The evidence is overwhelming against your chauvinistic / partisan claim that Harris is a 'stupid whore'.
She looks like a cheerleader
I dont know whether this young lady is literally a bimbo, I was being snarky.
If she works for Steve Bannon she's probably a bimbo. One could say maybe its a typo and she simply misspelled correspondent unintentionally, but I wouldnt bet a nickel on it.
For the Kit Kat ranch, a brothel in NV.
... oh yeah ...
Photograph: Allison Bailey/NurPhoto/REX/Shutterstock
Support letter for RFK Jr’s confirmation includes signatures of doctors with suspended or revoked licenses
Meant to lend credibility to his nomination to head HHS, the letter is signed by some doctors disciplined for not following Covid guidelines
A letter submitted to the US Senate that states it was sent by physicians in support of Robert F Kennedy Jr’s nomination as secretary of health and human services includes the names of doctors who have had their licenses revoked or suspended, or who have faced other disciplinary actions, the Associated Press has found.
The letter was meant to lend credibility to Kennedy’s nomination, which has faced strenuous opposition from medical experts due to his two decades of anti-vaccine activism. Republican senator Bill Cassidy of Louisiana, a medical doctor who boasts on his official website of an effort he created to vaccinate 36,000 children against hepatitis B, expressed hesitancy about Kennedy’s nomination and is seen as a key vote.
The AP found that in addition to the physicians who had faced disciplinary action, many of the nearly 800 signers are not doctors. The letter with the names of those who signed was provided to the AP by Senator Ron Johnson’s office after he entered it into the Congressional Record on Wednesday during the first of Kennedy’s two confirmation hearings.
Among those who signed it were a self-described journalist, a certified public accountant, a firefighter/paramedic, a certified health coach and someone who said they had a bachelor’s degree “with an emphasis on Jungian psychology”. The signers include at least 75 nurses, as well as physician’s assistants. More than 90 did not include any credentials at all.
More than 20 were chiropractors, representing an industry that has funded Kennedy’s work. An AP investigation found that donations from a chiropractic group represented one-sixth of the revenues collected by Kennedy’s anti-vaccine non-profit in 2019.
The letter was organized and submitted by Maha Action, which is run by Del Bigtree, who worked for Kennedy’s presidential campaign and is a longtime anti-vaccine activist. The Washington Post reported on Wednesday that Kennedy transferred the trademark for the “Maha” slogan to an limited liability company run by Bigtree. Kennedy reported that he received $100,000 in income from licensing the slogan and said in his financial disclosures that he had transferred the trademark for “no compensation”.
Maha stands for “Make America healthy again”, a play on Donald Trump’s “Make America great again”.
Emma Post, a Maha Action spokesperson, said in an email that the letter was “shared and circulated organically in a grassroots manner with explicit instructions that it was for physicians only to sign on to”. She did not address the AP’s questions about what further steps the group took to verify credentials, if any.
Bigtree and Kennedy did not return messages seeking comment. A White House spokesperson, Kush Desai, said the administration looks forward to the Senate’s swift confirmation of Kennedy.
The letter includes the header “Doctors for Robert F Kennedy Jr” and begins with the words “We, the undersigned physicians”. It says lower down that it “reflects the collective voice of physicians and medical professionals” committed to addressing chronic disease.
The AP’s review found that at least 10 doctors who signed the letter had run into trouble with state medical boards or their board certification body for a variety of alleged misconduct. Sanctions they faced included having their license revoked or suspended, being put on probation, receiving a reprimand or other action. One received a warning letter from the Federal Trade Commission, which said he was unlawfully advertising products as treatments or prevention for Covid-19, including intravenous nutrient therapy and vitamins.
Among the signers was Paul Thomas, an anti-vaccine doctor who voluntarily surrendered his medical license in 2022 after Oregon’s medical board found he had engaged in repeated and gross negligence in the practice of medicine.
Thomas did not admit or deny the finding. NBC News reported that Thomas was part of a team assembled by Kennedy who remotely advised an anti-vaccine activist in Samoa during a measles outbreak there on how to treat children with vitamins. A person who responded on behalf of Thomas, DeeDee Hoover, said the information the AP had was inaccurate but did not reply when asked what specifically was wrong.
Other signers included Dr Simone Gold, who was reprimanded by California’s medical board after she pleaded guilty to a misdemeanor for her conduct at the US Capitol on 6 January 2021. Gold was recently pardoned by Trump and told the AP in an email that her reprimand and other disciplinary action were overturned by a judge prior to her pardon.
“Robert F Kennedy Jr is an honorable and honest person with vast subject matter knowledge and experience who values the health of the American people, and furthermore because he is willing to challenge corporate interests where they conflict with the best interests of those citizens,” Gold wrote in an email.
Meryl Nass, whose medical license was suspended in Maine over her treatment of Covid-19 patients, also signed. She told the AP she is appealing the decision and expects to be fully vindicated.
At least two of the doctors were disciplined, prior to the pandemic, for improperly giving out vaccine waivers, including one who had his license revoked and another who was put on probation. Another doctor’s license was revoked for refusing to follow Covid-19 guidelines.
Post said Maha Action’s letter was just one of several provided to the Senate supporting Kennedy, including one that she provided a link to that she said was signed by “17,000 medical professionals”. That letter stated it was from international medical providers and did not include the names of those who signed.
Opponents of Kennedy’s nomination sent their own letter with signatures from what they said were more than 18,000 “vetted and verified” doctors. The group, the Committee to Protect Health Care, said that the letter was initially circulated among verified physicians and that as additional signatures were added, their credentials were checked. The group provided the list of signatories to the AP but with anonymized names that included the first initial of their first name along with the first three letters of their last name, as well as their medical credentials. They said doctors’ names were anonymized for their privacy and to protect them from harassment.
Trump Is Doing Exactly What He Said He Would. Who Could Have Predicted That?
Maybe the oligarchs deserve what’s coming. But the rest of us don’t.
When democracies die , big business and wealthy individuals often play a crucial role in their demise. They provide a would-be strongman with financial support; their control of or influence over news media ensures that he receives favorable coverage, while his opponents are trashed. They do this because they expect to be rewarded with policies that favor their interests and imagine that they will in effect be shareholders in the new autocracy.
What comes next is familiar to anyone who studies history (which the oligarchs don’t.) Eventually it becomes clear that they don’t own the dictator they’ve helped install; he owns them. Maybe they’ll like some of his policies, maybe they won’t, but in any case they’re not in control — and they soon learn that criticizing the big man isn’t just fruitless, it’s dangerous.
In the past this script has typically taken a few years to play out, but this is the internet age, so right now in America the process seems to be taking only a few weeks.
Donald Trump’s decision to launch an all-out trade war, not with China, but with our neighbors and allies — who are gearing up for large-scale retaliation — probably isn’t the most important thing happening right now. I’ll talk in a minute about what is. But it has certainly come as a wake-up call for business.
It would be funny if it weren’t so serious. Actually it is funny if you’re into gallows humor. Trump spent the entire campaign proclaiming that he was a Tariff Man, promising high tariffs and asserting that we were somehow subsidizing Canada and Mexico. Yet businesses and bank analysts blithely assumed that he didn’t really mean it. On Inauguration Day he made a very specific promise: 25 percent tariffs on Canada and Mexico by Feb. 1. Yet the newsletter I receive from Goldman Sachs summarized the day with the headline “A More Benign Tone on Tariffs,” and declared
And Jamie Dimon , CEO of JPMorgan, told everyone to calm down about Trump’s tariffs:
Is Dimon getting over it right now?
I have great respect for the economics team at Goldman, which has called many things right over the years. But like many in the business community, they are clearly clueless when it comes to facing the new political reality.
One team I don’t respect is the editorial board at the Wall Street Journal. But they got it right with Friday’s editorial:
The question, however, is, what did they expect? The Journal has spent decades promoting the economic ideas of charlatans and cranks ; now it’s upset to find out that cranks are in full control, but they aren’t their cranks. And Trump spent the entire campaign signaling his intention to start a destructive trade war. It’s a bit late to be shocked, shocked that he meant what he said.
What should really have the Journal upset, however, is Trump’s response:
What you need to understand is that in MAGA world, calling someone a “Globalist” isn’t just an insult; it’s a threat of retribution. And I’d put fairly high odds on the proposition that sometime in the fairly near future the Journal will issue an abject, groveling apology for daring to question Trump Thought.
For as I said, the trade war, drastic as it is, isn’t the most important story right now. It takes second place to what looks like a quiet takeover of the machinery of government.
Here’s how it works: Scott Bessent, the Treasury secretary — whose selection was, financial types assured me, an indication that Trump wouldn’t go wild — has given associates of Elon Musk, who as far as we know aren’t even government employees let alone officials with the right security clearance, access to the computers at the Treasury department that control the federal government’s financial plumbing — that make payments to contractors, workers, everything.
This situation gives Musk’s minions the ability to download millions of Americans’ private information. But people who understand the system better than I do say that it also effectively gives them control of public spending. Congress may have passed a law mandating that money be spent for some public purpose; but Musk and company may simply, in effect, tell the system not to cut the checks.
If this is really the case, and serious people say that it is , we may already have experienced what amounts to a 21 st -century coup. There may not be tanks in the streets, but effective control of the government may already have slipped out of the hands of elected officials.
I’ll have more to say about this once I understand it better, and also as events play out. But meanwhile business goes on — or, in many cases now that the trade war has begun, maybe it doesn’t go on. So let me get back to the tariffs.
As I get ready to hit the publish button, stock futures are down — but not nearly as much as the situation seems to warrant. Investors still seem to believe that there’s a good chance that Trump will use some minor concessions (about what?) to declare victory and dial the tariffs back. As I wrote about the same time Goldman and Dimon were telling us to chill out, this market complacency is a self-defeating prophecy: muted market reaction makes it likely that Trump will continue and expand his trade war.
And even if some of the tariffs prove temporary, the Rubicon has been crossed. We now know that when the United States signs an agreement, on trade or anything else, the president will treat that agreement as a mere suggestion to be ignored whenever he feels like it. That revelation in itself will do huge long-term damage .
All of this was entirely predictable. But there are none so blind as those who will not see.