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
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.
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
No, any other stupid questions?
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.
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.
@Monica60517016
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6m
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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21m
“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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2m
With waterboarding or without?
Quote
Acyn
@Acyn
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13m
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