FUCK TRUMP
Who Engaged The Child Locks?
You Fucking Believed Him
FUCK TRUMP
If Only…We're Not That Lucky
Right?!
This Guy?
From Greg Fallis:
Okay, first off, I admit I'm confused. I mean, I understand that Donald Trump, with the assistance of a cadre of feral Christo-fascist authoritarians and the support of a cartoonist collection of buffoons, is conducting an aggressive frontal assault on the US Constitution. And so far it's been mostly effective.
Unlike a LOT of folks, I'm inclined to think Trump has a plan. It's a very simple, very very stupid, and very selfish plan, to be sure. It's the sort of plan you'd expect from a cartoon villain. But it's still a plan. As I see it, Donald Trump's plan is as follows:
Make everybody dependent on the whims and wishes of Donald Trump.
It's ridiculous, isn't it. What Trump really wants, of course, is loyalty and respect. Two things he'll never get. He'll never get the respect he wants (and thinks he deserves), and I suspect he knows that. Nor will he ever get real loyalty, because loyalty is reciprocal; you earn loyalty by being loyal to others. Trump is loyal to nothing and nobody. Who's going to respect of be loyal to this guy?
Since he can't/won't get the respect and loyalty he truly wants, Trump has to settle for a shabby substitute–unquestioned obedience. The problem for Trump, even as POTUS, is that there are HUGE intentional limits to presidential obedience in a representative democracy.
The president's actual job is to preside over the government, not to rule it. 'Preside' literally means "to sit in front of." The president is basically like an orchestra leader. In order for Trump to command unquestioned obedience, he has to first weaken or destroy the Constitutional constraints on presidential power.
That's exactly what he's doing. In his first term, Trump converted the entire Republican Party to so-called MAGA loyalists (I say 'so-called' because many/most of the GOP are just sycophantic cowards or craven opportunists, not actual loyalists). He also stacked the Supreme court with 'loyalists'. The only check on his authority came from the professionals who occupied the Cabinet posts and the various governmental agencies. Now, in his second term, he's replaced the Cabinet secretaries and the heads of every government agency with more so-called loyalists. He's basically removed or degraded almost every federal administrative constraint on his authority (there are still some federal judges who remain independent, though they're under attack now).

But hey, it's working. Some large law firms and some universities have already compromised themselves; many news agencies have modified their coverage of Trump and are parroting his bullshit; a lot of businesses threatened by Trump's trade practices are considering personal appeals to Trump and praising his harmful policies. Intimidation works. But c'mon, how could anybody be intimidated by this guy?
I find truly astonishing that so many people and institutions are afraid of this guy. He's a cartoonish nitwit; he's more a malignant Elmer Fudd than an evil genius. The sheer mass of his ignorance could bend light. He's ten pounds of racist bullshit in a five pound bag. He's a coward and a liar. People are afraid of taking on this guy?
This guy?
We Should Be So Lucky…
Wanna Hear A Joke?
We Are Fucking Doomed
The Economist On Felon47's Mindless Tariffs
The Economist:
On economics Mr Trump's assertions are flat-out nonsense. The president says tariffs are needed to close America's trade deficit, which he sees as a transfer of wealth to foreigners. Yet as any of the president's economists could have told him, this overall deficit arises because Americans choose to save less than their country invests — and, crucially, this long-running reality has not stopped its economy from outpacing the rest of the g7 for over three decades. There is no reason why his extra tariffs should eliminate the deficit. Insisting on balanced trade with every trading partner individually is bonkers — like suggesting that Texas would be richer if it insisted on balanced trade with each of the other 49 states, or asking a company to ensure that each of its suppliers is also a customer.
And Mr Trump's grasp of the technicalities was pathetic. He suggested that the new tariffs were based on an assessment of a country's tariffs against America, plus currency manipulation and other supposed distortions, such as value-added tax. But it looks as if officials set the tariffs using a formula that takes America's bilateral trade deficit as a share of goods imported from each country and halves it — which is almost as random as taxing you on the number of vowels in your name.
There is no way to report on these tariffs in a way that is honest and accurate without describing them as bonkers and nonsensical. News publications that are trying to present them as rational, or describing them as "reciprocal" just because that's the word the White House is using, are beclowning themselves.
Felon47 Declares A Trade War On Uninhabited Islands, US Military, And Economic Logic
From Daring Fireball:
Mike Masnick has a great piece at TechDirt running down just how stupid everything about Trump's tariff trade war is:
Whoever on the Council of Economic Advisers used this formula should turn in their econ degree, because this is not how anything works. Even if they then go on to publish another version of the formula that looks all sophisticated and shit.
Brendan Duke, on X, shows that the fancier version of their formula — which is fancy in the way that Vertu phones are "fancy" — is even stupider, because the two Greek letters they chose to glam it up just cancel each other out.
Back to Masnick:
This is what happens when you ask ChatGPT to "make my wrong econ math look more scientific." The document even admits that they couldn't figure out the actual tariff rates, so they "proxied" them with this formula instead. That's a bit like saying you couldn't find your house keys, so you proxied them with a banana.
The fundamental problem here isn't just that the tariff numbers are wrong — though they absolutely are. It's that the entire premise rests on treating trade deficits as if they were tariffs. They're not the same thing. At all.
Let's back up for a moment and talk about trade deficits, because Trump has been getting this wrong for longer than some of his supporters have been alive. His logic appears to be:
-
-
-
- "Deficit" sounds bad.
- Therefore, trade deficits must be bad.
- Therefore, countries with whom we have trade deficits must be cheating us.
- Therefore, we should punish them with tariffs to "level the playing field."
-
-
This sounds like it must be an exaggeration for comic effect, but it's not. That's how Trump's mind works. This is what Trump has been saying about trade deficits for decades. It's like how he understands "asylum" to mean "insane asylum" and so when he talks about political asylum he starts talking about "the late great Hannibal Lecter".
We're not living in the Bad Place. We're living in the Stupid Place.
What A Fucking Asshole Enemy Of The People
He's going to destroy the U.S. economy. I'm not even sure this is the full list yet.
So basically almost every single country is going to have at least a 10% tariff tax on their imports. I haven't even heard of some of these countries.
He's calling it "reciprocal" because these countries will be imposing tariffs on us in return. Which is the opposite of what "reciprocal" means, but his fanbase won't understand that. And it's obvious HE still doesn't understand how tariffs work. ASSHOLE.
What's weird is that Canada and Mexico seems to be absent so far.
#TRUTH
Does This Surprise ANYONE?
They're All Idiots
Dear Media…
What A Way To Start A Week…
It's Not Working…
Accurate
REMINDER: Executive Orders Aren't Worth The Paper They're Written On
FUCK THE ORANGE FELON
Vomiting It All Up
Maybe They're Right After All
From Jeff Tiedrich:
it's probably not a good sign when your homeys have to swear that you weren't blitzed out of your mind when you did that thing you definitely did.
who among us hasn't woken up to discover that we did something ill-advised after a night of over-enthusiastically bending the elbow?
oh fuck, I did what?
for most of us, it's generally something low-stakes — like going online and buying some fugly sweater that we don't even remember ordering until it shows up a few days later.
for others, it's bombing the shit out of another county.
Alexa, show me the least-reassuring headline, ever.
Pete Hegseth was not drunk when he discussed plans to bomb Yemen in a group chat which included a journalist, the director of the CIA has said.
you can trust the CIA, because they would never lie to us, right?
but how does the CIA director know that Plastered Pete wasn't plastered? was he there? does the Signal app have a built-in breathalyser?
by the way, Donny's DOJ won't be prosecuting anyone over this Signal clusterfuck, because of course they won't — because reasons, and also because something something look over there, it's Hillary Clinton!
reporter: "the Signal chat controversy that's going on. is DOJ involved at this point? if so, why? if not, why not?"
Pam Bondi: "well first, it was sensitive information, not classified, inadvertently released, and what we should be talking about is it was a very successful mission … if you want to talk about classified information, talk about what was at Hillary Clinton's home."
so, we're playing semantics games now. the intel was sensitive, not classified. (spoiler alert: it was classified.) and Pete didn't mean to do it, so no harmsies, ok? and besides, Yemen got the shit bombed out of it, very successfully. so what's the big deal?
by the way, handwaving away a major security breach by saying 'it was a successful mission' is like justifying drunk driving by pointing out that you managed not to run over anyone on the way home.
speaking of which — Plastered Pete is playing semantics games, too. check this out.
oops, sorry — wrong clip! here's the one we meant to show you.
"nobody is texting war plans. well I noticed this morning, out came something that doesn't look like war plans. and as a matter of fact, they even changed the title to 'attack plans,' because they know it's not war plans. there's no units, no locations, no routes, no flight paths, no sources, no methods…"
Piss-Drunk Pete is so good at being indignant, isn't he? it's a he skill honed through years of being a weekend chat-show bobblehead on Fox News. just the talent you want in someone who may not remember who he bombed last night.
whether we call it war plans or attack plans — that's not the fucking issue here. let's recall exactly what Pete did: he took classified intel — specific times of air strikes — and cut-and-pasted it into his phone.
then he sent it to all his homies (and a reporter!), hours before the attacks took place, over a janky app that he was warned by his own NSA not to use— because it's so fucking easily hacked by foreign actors — giving advance notice of bombing runs to anyone who might have gained access to his personal, unsecured phone.
but look, let's not bicker and argue over war plans and attack plans.
the administration has bigger fish to fry. apparently, the National Zoo has been suffering because of all the woke.
President Donald Trump signed an executive order on Thursday directing Vice President JD Vance to remove "improper ideology" from institutions such as the National Zoo.
what in the world? how can a zoo be woke? I've been racking my brain trying to figure this out. are they just inventing things for JD to do, because he's a clueless dope and they want to get him out of the White House?
'hey there, JD, when you've finished fucking the furniture, could you run over to the National Zoo and make sure there's no DEI going on in the elephant house?'
It's Happening
From Palmer Report:
Last month I wrote that by the time we got to the hundred day mark in Donald Trump's presidency, if he was unpopular enough, House and Senate Republicans would begin selfishly prioritizing their own reelection prospects over their support of Trump. You can almost never count on Republicans to do the honest thing, but you can nearly always count on them to do the self interested thing.
We're still only sixty-seven days into this debacle, which means that in theory Trump should still have some more time to get his act together. But the funny thing about political scandals – real scandals, the ones that move the ground under everyone's feet – is that they can throw all the timetables out the window.
This brings us to Donald Trump's Signal-gate scandal (it's going to need a better name than that). Half of Trump's top handpicked people, including Pete Hegseth, JD Vance, Mike Waltz, John Ratcliffe, and Tulsi Gabbard, are now embroiled in a scandal that keeps getting worse by the hour. It was bad enough that they all committed a felony just by discussing military attack plans in Signal. They've since all blown the coverup entirely. They can't get their stories straight, it's top headline news every day, and it's just not going away. Trump's refusal to fire anyone over it is making it an even bigger scandal.
Suddenly it no longer appears to matter that Trump is still in his first hundred days. He had his chance to make this scandal go away by firing people, and he missed his window. Now he's at a point where he'll probably end up having to fire people over this in the end, and it still won't make the scandal go away.
How do we know this? Because House and Senate Republicans are now making it very clear (not with their words but with their actions) that they know this scandal is toxic and isn't going away. On Thursday the Republican House forced Trump to pull the plug on his cabinet nomination of Elise Stefanik, for fear the Democrats could win the resulting special election and take control of the House. That's a Republican plus-nine district. But things are just that ugly for Trump and his Republican Party right now.
The Republican Senate is also taking its own first steps toward insulating itself from Trump's Signal-gate implosion. The Republican Chair and the Democratic Ranking Member of the Senate Armed Services Committee have jointly asked the Department of Defense Inspector General to investigate this scandal. We know that Trump and Hegseth aren't going to allow the DOD to investigate this. But this letter is the Senate's precursor to launching its own investigation into the matter, likely complete with public hearings where all of these Trump buffoons will have to testify (or make the headlines even worse for themselves by fighting the subpoenas in court).
We all know that the Republican House and Senate won't go one inch further in this direction than they think is necessary to protect their own reelection prospects. But they are indeed going in this direction. As has been said many times, ignore their words and instead focus on their actions. House and Senate Republicans are afraid that this Trump scandal will cost them their seats and majorities unless they selfishly do something to distance themselves from it. Whether you trust them or not – and you shouldn't – this does tell you just how damaging and long lasting this scandal is going to be.
Vomiting It All Up – And It's Only Wednesday!
Fixed It For Ya
Area Fascist Demands Voters Show Their Papers
From Mock Paper Scissors:
Yesterday, Lord Damp Nut signed another Executive Order, this time demanding that the states surrender election control to the federal government or else he will pull funding to the offending state, which is impoundment and is patently illegal:
NEW YORK (AP) — President Donald Trump on Tuesday signed a sweeping executive action to overhaul elections in the U.S., including requiring documentary proof of citizenship to register to vote in federal elections and demanding that all ballots be received by Election Day.
The order says the U.S. has failed "to enforce basic and necessary election protections" and calls on states to work with federal agencies to share voter lists and prosecute election crimes. It threatens to pull federal funding from states where election officials don't comply.
The move, which is likely to face swift challenges because states have broad authority to set their own election rules, is consistent with Trump's long history of railing against election processes. He often claims elections are being rigged, even before the results are known, and has waged battles against certain voting methods since he lost the 2020 election to Democrat Joe Biden and falsely blamed it on widespread fraud.
[Before we fall too far into the rabbit hole, remember the executive orders are essentially memos, and not laws. And duh, a memo that instructs someone to break a law is definitionally not allowed. ]
We've covered the civics of elections before, our pals at Electoral-Vote explain to us why this memo is stupid:
Broadly speaking, this XO is mostly bark, and not a lot of bite. The federal government has very little role in administering elections, and so has little right to dictate terms under which elections are conducted. Indeed, even the provision of federal law that prohibits non-citizens from voting in federal elections, which was only adopted in 1996, might not be legal—it just hasn't been tested in court. Whoever it is that is writing Trump's XOs for him clearly knows all of this, which is why "enforcement" of the order rests not in any existing legal authority, but instead in the threat that if states don't do what they are told, they will lose federal funding.
The emptiness of the order is best illustrated by looking closely at the portion that made all the headlines yesterday, namely the part about proving one's citizenship in order to be able to vote. Since there is absolutely no way that blue states are going to go for that (as doing so would effectively justify Republicans' phony arguments about mass voter fraud), what the order actually does is order the Election Assistance Commission (EAC) to change the federal voter registration form to include a proof-of-citizenship requirement.
There are many problems here from the vantage point of the Trumpers. First, the EAC is an independent agency, and not subject to presidential orders. Further, like the FEC, it is deliberately set up to have an equal number of Democratic and Republican commissioners (2 of each in the case of the EAC; 3 of each in the case of the FEC). So, there is no reason to think the EAC is going to play ball here. And even if they do, then people who don't have proof of citizenship, or don't feel like proving their identity just 'cause The Man says so, will just use their state's registration form. And all of this is before we talk about the lawsuits that are coming, and that the administration will lose. Oh, and if Trump does try to yank funding in order to punish a state for not following his decrees, that's a different set of lawsuits, since that would be impoundment, which is illegal.
So we've seen this movie before, we know the ending. I'll add to the mix that the Constitution very clearly gives election management to the individual states, and to change that it would require an amendment to the Constitution, requiring ⅔ of both houses of Congress to approve and ¾ of the States to ratify.