May 5, 2025
Today's Rich
Both sides don't yell the n-word at an autistic black kid in a public park.
Both sides don't then donate $700K to the dipshit woman who yelled that word at that kid.
Both sides don't cozy up with racist Nazi assholes.
Watchful
We have to be more than allies. We have to be willing to put ourselves between marginalized people and the dangers they're being subjected to because of this fucked up regime.
Another Win
...for the good guys. This time, it's Janet Mills, Maine's Governor.
I need a scorecard - some way to keep track of Trump's lengthening string of losses.
Not To Get All Techie And Shit
...but the use of chat apps and the infuriating nonchalance of these idiot motherfuckers in the Trump administration - it's got me boilin'. Again. Still.
May 4, 2025
Standing Up
"All" hasn't always meant 'all'. But if we're going to to that "more perfect union" thing, we need to be committed to working at it. Working harder that we have been anyway.
"...all...are created equal."
"...with liberty and justice for all."
I drove by UVa for that torchlight shit Aug 11, 2017 - and then I was downtown in Charlottesville the next day. It kinda knocked me back, and I felt the need to do my protesting in cyberspace.
But seeing what was happening with the BLM demonstrations, and then with more recent events - where only black folks are being detained and arrested, it's time for me to step up and get back in the game in meatspace.
I'm getting a little old for this, but I'm there. I'm up on my hind legs.
At this point, I've got way more to gain - way more important things - than I have to lose.
If we're not 'all', then we're nothing.
Like Mr Jefferson said:
"...with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes, and our Sacred Honor."
That About Covers It
Americans didn’t vote for less stuff that costs more
Trump is wrong to say he has buy-in for transforming the world’s biggest economy.
President Donald Trump seems to be in denial about the unpopularity of his trade wars. On what he intended as a victory lap to coincide with the 100th day of his second term, he repeatedly attacked pollsters as “crooked people” who put out “fake polls.”
At a rally in Michigan on Tuesday, Trump claimed his approval rating was “in the 60s or 70s.” A Washington Post-ABC News-Ipsos poll puts it at 39 percent. This is the same share of American adults as approve of his handling of the economy. And nearly two-thirds, 64 percent, oppose Trump’s tariffs on imported goods.
These numbers are consistent across several recent public surveys. This led to one of the more awkward moments of the past week. During a live interview Tuesday, Fox News correspondent John Roberts asked Stephen Miller, a White House deputy chief of staff, about his network’s polling. “Particularly on the economy, tariffs and inflation, he’s well underwater,” Roberts said of Trump. To which Miller responded: “It is our opinion that Fox News needs to fire its pollster. … We don’t acknowledge any of that polling.”
In another interview Tuesday, Terry Moran of ABC News asked Trump about economists warning that his trade war with China will cost the typical American family thousands of dollars a year. The correspondent said many who voted for Trump fear the fallout. Trump replied: “Well, they did sign up for it, actually. And this is what I campaigned on.” Then he insisted that China will “eat those tariffs” rather than raise prices. This is unimaginable.
During a Cabinet meeting Wednesday, Trump seemed a little more willing to acknowledge that a protracted trade fight with China will force consumers to adjust their behavior. “Maybe the children will have two dolls instead of 30 dolls,” he said. “And maybe the two dolls will cost a couple bucks more than they would normally.”
This sounded like Trump’s “malaise” moment. In 1979, President Jimmy Carter delivered a notorious address from the Oval Office that was similarly motivated by a lamentation of U.S. dependence on foreign imports. In Carter’s case, though, the import was oil. “We can’t go on consuming 40 percent more energy than we produce,” he said. Americans didn’t want to wear cardigans or lower their thermostats. Outside wartime, calling for austerity has rarely been a winning political message.
Trump’s assumption, for decades, has been that Americans can have it all. During the rally Tuesday, he promised to make the country wealthy again. Yet here he was acknowledging to his Cabinet that Americans might need to pay more money for less stuff.
The president is right to say that he campaigned on imposing tariffs. At his rallies, he extolled the beauty of the T-word. Yet many of his voters did not think they were voting to end the era of consumerism. This has become a refrain from his administration. As Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said in March, “Access to cheap goods is not the essence of the American Dream.”
Yes, Americans still want to put inexpensive Barbies, G.I. Joes and Disney dolls under their Christmas trees. But the United States depends on Chinese imports for far more than cheap toys.
Even a slight majority of Republicans, 51 percent, say they think Trump’s economic policies will cause an economic recession in the short term, even as they overwhelmingly continue to support him, according to the Post-ABC-Ipsos poll. Asked whether Trump’s policies will put the U.S. economy on a stronger foundation in the long run, only 31 percent of Americans said yes; 42 percent said they will leave us weaker, and 22 percent said it’s too soon to say.
Trump said Friday on social media that the economy is going through a “transition stage.” He’s blaming his predecessor and urging patience. So far, the U.S. economy has proved quite resilient, even as businesses pause investment decisions while they wait for some certainty about what’s ahead. Though the labor market cooled last month, the government said Friday that employers still added 177,000 jobs. And though the U.S. economy shrank for the first time in three years during the first quarter, annualized gross domestic product contracted by just 0.3 percent.
A central challenge for Trump’s project is that he still has not secured buy-in to fundamentally transform the world’s biggest economy, let alone to decouple from China, the world’s second-largest economy. A resolution disapproving Trump’s “Liberation Day” tariffs failed in the Senate on Wednesday with only 49 votes but would have passed had two senators not been absent. Sen. Rand Paul (R-Kentucky), who deserves credit for defending Congress’s constitutional prerogative, said afterward that many GOP senators privately dislike the tariffs and will start speaking out if the economy continues to weaken. They hope Trump cleans up the mess first.
With luck, this might still be possible. China signaled a new willingness Friday to start talks with the United States. Container ships that carry goods from China take about a month to cross the Pacific. Trump can get them moving again if both sides come to the table.
Oy
The spin doctors could make this out to be "Man of the People" kinda shit.
Donald Trump Says He Runs the Country and the World, But He Still Answers Calls From Unknown Numbers
Two reporters from The Atlantic cold-called the president. He picked up and had a little chat.
WASHINGTON, DC - APRIL 23: U.S. President Donald Trump talks to reporters after inspecting the North Lawn with members of the White House grounds crew to look for a place to put a 100-foot-tall flag pole on April 23, 2025 in Washington, DC. He said that he wants to put two 100-foot flag poles, one on the North Lawn and another on the South Lawn. (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
Donald Trump talks a lot of smack about the media in public. But, in private, it turns out he’s happy to shoot the breeze with reporters—even the ones he claims are liars and lunatics.
Even when they cold-call him from an unknown number.
Even on a Saturday morning.
At least, that is how journalists Ashley Parker and Michael Sherer scored an interview with the president last month, according to their sweeping new cover story in The Atlantic about Trump's return to the White House.
In late March, just days after Trump excoriated both reporters on Truth Social following their request for an interview with him, Parker and Sherer wrote that they called the president directly on his cell phone from a number he didn’t recognize at 10:45 am on a Saturday. And he actually picked up.
“Who’s calling?” he reportedly asked, like any other 78-year-old grandpa, the sound of what Parker and Sherer said seemed to be the television blaring in the background at his Bedminster, New Jersey golf club.
“We had a perfectly fine, gracious interview,” Sherer told CNN Monday.
Despite his very public insistence on Truth Social that Parker is “as terrible as is possible” and Sherer “virtually always LIES,” the president apparently was happy to talk. On the subject of his new billionaire bestie, Jeff Bezos, Trump reportedly said, “He’s 100 percent. He’s been great.” And Mark Zuckerberg? He too has "been great,” Trump said. “Maybe they didn’t know me at the beginning, and they know me now,” Trump told Parker and Sherer of the tech executives.
Trump also used the call to take a victory lap around the recent capitulation of law firms and universities in the face of his threats. “What do you think of the law firm? Were you shocked at that?” he asked the reporters regarding Paul Weiss’s negotiations with the White House over an executive order that would have restricted its attorneys’ access to federal buildings.
And he celebrated the leverage he has over the rest of the Republican party. “When I endorse somebody, they win,” Trump told Parker and Sherer.
Trump warned the reporters that if The Atlantic wrote “good stories and truthful stories, the magazine would be hot,” and said that most media owners were growing tired of standing up to Trump, a possible reference to Bezos’s Trump-friendly turn at The Washington Post. “At some point, they say, No más, no más,” Trump reportedly said.
The interview came shortly before The Atlantic broke the news about National Security Advisor Michael Waltz accidentally inviting Atlantic editor Jeffrey Goldberg to a private Signal chat, which prompted the president to sour on the magazine all over again. (Trump called Goldberg “a total sleazebag.”) But once again, his public barbs didn’t stand in the way of a separate invitation to the White House, which he extended to Sherer, Parker, and Goldberg last week. During that meeting, Sherer said on CNN, Trump “was in a far more conciliatory mood” and acknowledged the turmoil that has since overtaken the Pentagon. “I think he’s gonna get it together,” Trump said of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. “I had a talk with him, a positive talk, but I had a talk with him.”
As for the news that his Cabinet officials had accidentally texted secretive strike plans to Goldberg, Trump said he’d instructed his team, “Maybe don’t use Signal, okay?”
The Atlantic’s story is a telling account of how the president staged an unlikely comeback after becoming a political pariah in the wake of the January 6, back when his team was reportedly having trouble getting him even booked on Fox & Friends. It also shows how he’s come back more powerful than the first time around now that the guardrails of his first term are off. As Trump reportedly put it during the Saturday morning phone call, “The first time, I had two things to do—run the country and survive; I had all these crooked guys. And the second time, I run the country and the world.”
But even more than that, the story is a stunning illustration of how, perhaps the most media-savvy president of all time works the press in public and private—but still somehow does not know how to screen a phone call.
To me, it means he's a small man with only a sporadic understanding of the enormity of his position. And that's a deadly combination, the obvious portents of which we are seeing play out in real time.
There are historical examples of this
- Henry VI - The Naïve Fool - England
- George III - The Mad King - England
- Afonso VI "The Glutton" - Portugal - a grinning moron
- Charles IX "The Snotty King" - France - the murderous mama's boy
- John - England - the famously corrupt Prince John, from the Robin Hood stories
Two reporters from The Atlantic cold-called the president. He picked up and had a little chat.
WASHINGTON, DC - APRIL 23: U.S. President Donald Trump talks to reporters after inspecting the North Lawn with members of the White House grounds crew to look for a place to put a 100-foot-tall flag pole on April 23, 2025 in Washington, DC. He said that he wants to put two 100-foot flag poles, one on the North Lawn and another on the South Lawn. (Photo by Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images)Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
Donald Trump talks a lot of smack about the media in public. But, in private, it turns out he’s happy to shoot the breeze with reporters—even the ones he claims are liars and lunatics.
Even when they cold-call him from an unknown number.
Even on a Saturday morning.
At least, that is how journalists Ashley Parker and Michael Sherer scored an interview with the president last month, according to their sweeping new cover story in The Atlantic about Trump's return to the White House.
In late March, just days after Trump excoriated both reporters on Truth Social following their request for an interview with him, Parker and Sherer wrote that they called the president directly on his cell phone from a number he didn’t recognize at 10:45 am on a Saturday. And he actually picked up.
“Who’s calling?” he reportedly asked, like any other 78-year-old grandpa, the sound of what Parker and Sherer said seemed to be the television blaring in the background at his Bedminster, New Jersey golf club.
“We had a perfectly fine, gracious interview,” Sherer told CNN Monday.
Despite his very public insistence on Truth Social that Parker is “as terrible as is possible” and Sherer “virtually always LIES,” the president apparently was happy to talk. On the subject of his new billionaire bestie, Jeff Bezos, Trump reportedly said, “He’s 100 percent. He’s been great.” And Mark Zuckerberg? He too has "been great,” Trump said. “Maybe they didn’t know me at the beginning, and they know me now,” Trump told Parker and Sherer of the tech executives.
Trump also used the call to take a victory lap around the recent capitulation of law firms and universities in the face of his threats. “What do you think of the law firm? Were you shocked at that?” he asked the reporters regarding Paul Weiss’s negotiations with the White House over an executive order that would have restricted its attorneys’ access to federal buildings.
And he celebrated the leverage he has over the rest of the Republican party. “When I endorse somebody, they win,” Trump told Parker and Sherer.
Trump warned the reporters that if The Atlantic wrote “good stories and truthful stories, the magazine would be hot,” and said that most media owners were growing tired of standing up to Trump, a possible reference to Bezos’s Trump-friendly turn at The Washington Post. “At some point, they say, No más, no más,” Trump reportedly said.
The interview came shortly before The Atlantic broke the news about National Security Advisor Michael Waltz accidentally inviting Atlantic editor Jeffrey Goldberg to a private Signal chat, which prompted the president to sour on the magazine all over again. (Trump called Goldberg “a total sleazebag.”) But once again, his public barbs didn’t stand in the way of a separate invitation to the White House, which he extended to Sherer, Parker, and Goldberg last week. During that meeting, Sherer said on CNN, Trump “was in a far more conciliatory mood” and acknowledged the turmoil that has since overtaken the Pentagon. “I think he’s gonna get it together,” Trump said of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. “I had a talk with him, a positive talk, but I had a talk with him.”
As for the news that his Cabinet officials had accidentally texted secretive strike plans to Goldberg, Trump said he’d instructed his team, “Maybe don’t use Signal, okay?”
The Atlantic’s story is a telling account of how the president staged an unlikely comeback after becoming a political pariah in the wake of the January 6, back when his team was reportedly having trouble getting him even booked on Fox & Friends. It also shows how he’s come back more powerful than the first time around now that the guardrails of his first term are off. As Trump reportedly put it during the Saturday morning phone call, “The first time, I had two things to do—run the country and survive; I had all these crooked guys. And the second time, I run the country and the world.”
But even more than that, the story is a stunning illustration of how, perhaps the most media-savvy president of all time works the press in public and private—but still somehow does not know how to screen a phone call.
Subscribe to:
Comments (Atom)