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Tag: Donald Trump

  • Who you gonna believe, Hegseth or yYour lyin’ eyes? – The Bulwark

    Of course, it’s an open question how much “thinking” went into it at all. The Trump administration runs on pure id; its default media strategy is an exercise in raw narrative domination. It’s all there in the three rules Trump learned from his mentor, Roy Cohn: always attack, always deny everything, always declare victory. This isn’t just a strategy; it’s a habit of mind. After a decade of the party teaching itself to react to all stimuli like this, it’s unclear they know how to proceed in any other way.

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  • ‘Nowhere on earth is safe’: Trump imposes tariffs on uninhabited islands near Antarctica – The Guardian

    The export figures from Heard Island and McDonald Islands are even more perplexing. The territory does have a fishery but no buildings or human habitation whatsoever. Despite this, according to export data from the World Bank, the US imported US$1.4m (A$2.23m) of products from Heard Island and McDonald Islands in 2022, nearly all of which was “machinery and electrical” imports. It was not immediately clear what those goods were.

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  • The stupidest chart you’ll see today – The Economist

    Calculating reciprocal tariffs is hard. It takes years of determined study to get a PhD in trade economics. And you need teams of these types of wonks to come up with policies that will work. Scratch that. All that’s needed is an idiot, an AI chatbot, or some combination of the two. It took no more than a couple of hours after President Donald Trump announced the United States’ new reciprocal tariff rates for the commentariat to work out how exactly they had been arrived at.

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  • The leaked Signal chat, annotated – The New York Times

    Excerpts of a Signal chat published Monday by The Atlantic provide a rare and revealing look at the private conversations of top Trump administration officials as they weighed plans for U.S. strikes on Houthi targets in Yemen. … President Trump on Tuesday downplayed the apparently accidental inclusion of Jeffrey Goldberg, the editor in chief of The Atlantic, in the chat, claiming that officials did not share classified information. However, Mr. Goldberg reported that highly sensitive military operational information was posted in the channel. The Atlantic did not publish those details.

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  • A president touting Musk’s cars from the White House shows this: the Tesla boycott really irks him – The Guardian

    Personally I’ve always had my doubts about consumer boycotts, which at best tend to make the non-buyer feel good without achieving very much and at worst hurt ordinary employees with no power to grant whatever the boycotter wants. But Magaworld evidently believes in them, judging by the way Bud Light’s sales plummeted after it featured a trans influencer in a marketing campaign. And while there’s no justification for violence against car dealers, peacefully not buying stuff is the safest form of protest imaginable for anyone fearful of retaliation by this regime. You don’t have to risk getting arrested, fired or deported; you don’t even have to wave a placard. And for all Trump’s talk of campaigners “illegally and collusively” boycotting Tesla, you can’t be sued for not wanting to buy a car. That boycotts get under the president’s skin where nothing else – not court orders, not the barely disguised horror of old allies abroad – seems therefore to make a strange kind of sense. To a president who sees everything in terms of making money, it’s consumers who matter. And now their wrath is spreading well beyond Musk’s companies.

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  • Brooks and Capehart on the implications of Trump’s altercation with Zelenskyy – PBS News

    What we saw in the Oval Office was a travesty, horrendous, despicable. I — there aren’t any words to describe what we watched, where we saw a vice president who’s never been to Ukraine lecture a wartime president who was clearly summoned to the White House to humiliate him on the world stage either on behalf of or for the benefit of Vladimir Putin in Russia. […]

    What I have seen over the last six weeks is the United States behaving vilely, vilely to our friends in Canada and Mexico, vilely to our friends in Europe. And today was the bottom of the barrel, vilely to a man who is defending Western values, at great personal risk to him and his countrymen. … And I have — I first started thinking, is it — am I feeling grief? Am I feeling shock, like I’m in a hallucination? But I just think shame, moral shame. It’s a moral injury to see the country you love behave in this way.

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  • Antiscientific vandalism – Quillette

    To understand how biomedical scientists feel as they watch Donald Trump and Elon Musk aim their bazookas at the National Institutes of Health (NIH), recall how you felt when the Taliban aimed their bazookas at the 1,500-year-old Bamiyan Buddhas of Afghanistan. “Senseless” may be one word that springs to mind. “Permanent” might be another.

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  • You can never truly go back – Garbage Day

    Thanks to large, under-moderated social platforms, anyone can write their own Mein Kampf now. Or, more likely, film it with their phone. Which is exactly what journalist Max Read noted last year, following Trump’s second win. He argues that the effect that Warzel observed back in 2021 has now turned normal internet users into a new “petite bourgeoisie.” “Influencers are, at bottom, small-business owners, and small-business owners love Trump,” Read writes. “He’s going to lower your taxes and limit the worker and consumer protections that hold you back (a genuine concern for medium-sized streamers and influencers!).”

    Which is how Democrats ended up sleep-walking into the election last year, assuming they were still selling a product — former Vice President Kamala Harris — to consumers, i.e., us. While Trump and the Republicans correctly understood that they were platforming an influencer — Trump — to either other, smaller influencers or parasocial audience members (who, of course, would probably love to be influencers, themselves).

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  • ‘No to ethnic cleansing’: over 350 rabbis sign US ad assailing Trump’s Gaza plan – The Guardian

    In a news release accompanying the ad, Spitzer, senior rabbi of congregation Dorshei Tzedek in Newton, Massachusetts, said: “It is vitally important that we in the American Jewish community add our voices to all those refusing to entertain this insidious plan. Hitler’s dream of making Germany ‘Judenrein,’ ‘cleansed of Jews,’ led to the slaughter of our people.” “We know as well as anyone the violence that these kinds of fantasies can lead to. It is time to make the ceasefire permanent, bring all of the hostages home, and join in efforts to rebuild Gaza for the sake of and with the people who live there,” Spitzer added. […]

    Rabbi Yosef Berman of the New Synagogue Project in Washington DC said Trump “seems to believe he is God with authority to rule, own, and dominate our country and the world”. “Jewish teaching is clear: Trump is not God and cannot take away Palestinians’ inherent dignity or steal their land for a real estate deal. Trump’s desire to ethnically cleanse Palestinians from Gaza is morally abhorrent. Jewish leaders reject Trump’s attempts to wring profit from displacement and suffering and must act to stop this heinous crime,” Berman added.

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  • Getting rid of the penny introduces a new problem: nickels – CNN Business

    “Without the penny, the volume of nickels in circulation would have to rise to fill the gap in small-value transactions. Far from saving money, eliminating the penny shifts and amplifies the financial burden,” said American for Common Cents, a pro-penny group funded primarily by Artazn, the company that has the contract to provide the blanks used to make pennies.

    According to the latest annual report from the US Mint, each penny cost 3.7 cents to make, including the 3 cents for production costs, and 0.7 cents per coin for administrative and distribution costs. But each nickel costs 13.8 cents, with 11 cents of production costs and 2.8 cents of administrative and distribution costs.

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  • Google Maps now shows the ‘Gulf of America’ – The Verge

    It made the change after the Trump administration formally changed the name today of the body of water spanning between the eastern coast of Mexico and the Florida panhandle. … Users in Mexico will continue to see “Gulf of Mexico,” while the rest of the world will see the original name with “Gulf of America” in parentheses.

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  • You can’t post your way out of fascism – 404 Media

    If there’s one thing I’d hoped people had learned going into the next four years of Donald Trump as president, it’s that spending lots of time online posting about what people in power are saying and doing is not going to accomplish anything. If anything, it’s exactly what they want. […]

    But perhaps the greatest of these sins is convincing ourselves that posting is a form of political activism, when it is at best a coping mechanism—an individualist solution to problems that can only be solved by collective action. This, says Cross, is the primary way tech platforms atomize and alienate us, creating “a solipsism that says you are the main protagonist in a sea of NPCs. Everything on social media is designed to make you think like that,” said Cross. “It’s all about you—your feed, your network, your friends.”

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  • Trump is unleashing sadism upon the world. But we cannot get overwhelmed – The Guardian

    An exhilarated hatred now parades as freedom, while the freedoms for which many of us have struggled for decades are distorted and trammeled as morally repressive “wokeism”.

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  • There is no going back – The New York Times

    The first casualty that we know of is the United States Agency for International Development, or U.S.A.I.D. Musk seems to hold a vendetta against the agency. He has called it a “radical-left political psy op,” a “criminal organization” and a “a viper’s nest of radical-left Marxists who hate America.” On Monday, shortly before 2 a.m., he bragged that he and his allies had spent the weekend “feeding USAID into the wood chipper.” In addition to wreaking vengeance on an agency he hates for still undisclosed reasons (although it may be worth noting that U.S.A.I.D. supported the efforts of Black South Africans during and after apartheid), Musk believes that cutting government spending is the only way to reduce inflation and put the U.S. economy on firm footing. […]

    To describe the current situation in the executive branch as merely a constitutional crisis is to understate the significance of what we’re experiencing. “Constitutional crisis” does not even begin to capture the radicalism of what is unfolding in the federal bureaucracy and of what Congress’s decision not to act may liquidate in terms of constitutional meaning.

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  • Treasury official quits after resisting Musk’s requests on payments – The New York Times

    Mr. Musk has been fixated on the Treasury system as a key to cutting federal spending. Representatives from his government efficiency initiative began asking Mr. Lebryk about source code information related to the nation’s payment system during the presidential transition in December, according to three people familiar with the conversations. Mr. Lebryk raised the request to Treasury officials at the time, noting that it was the type of proprietary information that should not be shared with people who did not work for the federal government. Members of the departing Biden administration were alarmed by the request, according to people familiar with their thinking. The people making the requests were on the Trump landing team at the Treasury Department, according to a current White House official.

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  • I’m a federal worker. Elon Musk’s government data heist is the entire ballgame. – Slate

    Those of us within the ranks of the federal workforce looked on in horror at all of this. Those outside the federal government might not understand the gravity of this situation. Think of OPM and the Treasury’s Bureau of the Fiscal Service as the valet sheds of the federal government. They’re not flashy or big, but they hold all the keys. OPM maintains the private information of federal civil servants—bank codes, addresses, insurance information, retirement accounts, employment records. The Treasury’s system processes every payment to everyone from grandmothers waiting for their Social Security check to cancer researchers working to crack the cure. Now there’s a ham-fisted goon in an ill-fitting valet attendant’s coat rummaging in broad daylight through all of the keys—all of that private information, previously given in trust, handled with care, and regulated by law.

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  • A 25-year-old with Elon Musk ties has direct access to the federal payment system – WIRED

    A source says they are concerned that data could be passed from secure systems to DOGE operatives within the General Services Administration. WIRED reporting has shown that Elon Musk’s associates—including Nicole Hollander, who slept in Twitter’s offices as Musk acquired the company, and Thomas Shedd, a former Tesla engineer who now runs a GSA agency, along with a host of extremely young and inexperienced engineers—have infiltrated the GSA and have attempted to use White House security credentials to gain access to GSA tech, something experts have said is highly unusual and poses a huge security risk.

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  • ‘Scared and betrayed’ – workers are reeling from chaos at federal agencies – The Verge

    It’s long been a strategy in Trump world to “flood the zone” with information, making it hard for the media and the public to know where to look, or where to concentrate their opposition. That feeling of disorientation is magnified for federal workers in the past couple weeks, as they wade through the eye of the storm. “These executive orders are flying fast and furious. I think that’s on purpose,” says one federal worker. “They’re giving agencies very little time to comply and even decide if they want to or not because there’s so much.” […]

    “Nobody knows if they’ll have a job tomorrow, especially if your agency works on something that the Trump administration seems to be targeting,” says one federal worker. That might include anything from education to gender to climate-related issues. But even if they are fired, some workers are questioning if it would even be worth fighting for their jobs back. “This isn’t the job I loved and wanted,” says the DOL employee. “This is like some evil demon took it over.” […]

    The crackdown on things like work from home or acknowledging gender has created an atmosphere of paranoia and hyper vigilance. Many federal employees have moved work-related conversations to encrypted messaging app Signal. And the tech industry’s embrace of right wing politics and politicians has created a sense of distrust, a federal contractor says, with people fearing that communication on other platforms could be leaked by pro-Trump companies.

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  • Trump’s proposal to ‘take over’ Gaza sparks immediate rebukes – The New York Times

    In the United States, Senator Chris Murphy, Democrat of Connecticut, said that Mr. Trump’s proposal — which flies in the face of decades of debate over how to resolve the Israeli-Palestinian conflict — was meant to distract people from Elon Musk’s sweeping attempts to downsize the U.S. government on Mr. Trump’s behalf. “I have news for you — we aren’t taking over Gaza,” Mr. Murphy said on social media. “But the media and the chattering class will focus on it for a few days and Trump will have succeeded in distracting everyone from the real story — the billionaires seizing government to steal from regular people.”

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  • Archivists work to identify and save the thousands of datasets disappearing from Data.gov – 404 Media

    Disproportionately, the datasets that are no longer accessible through the portal come from the Department of Energy, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the Department of the Interior, NASA, and the Environmental Protection Agency. But determining what is actually gone and what has simply moved or is backed up elsewhere by the government is a manual task, and it’s too early to say for sure what is gone and what may have been renamed or updated with a newer version.

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  • Think Trumpism couldn’t take root and flourish in Britain? Think again – The Guardian

    I wondered: when the government changed last year, did it make them feel any different about the future? “No,” said Emma, wearily. “We don’t expect anything out of what we’re told.” What if a Trump-type figure promised to make Britain great again? She laughed, and glanced at her partner. “We’ve got different opinions on that,” she said. “I kind of like what he’s doing. I wish more would be put into the UK. I think we need someone with a bit more of … an oomph about them.”

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  • ‘The world order could start to evolve from the Arctic’: Trump, thin ice and the fight for Greenland’s Northwest Passage – The Guardian

    Denmark, which is responsible for Greenland’s defence, does not have a single icebreaker – having retired its remaining three in 2010. Yet the ownership of these specialist vessels has suddenly become what could be a new front in the fight for dominance between the world’s biggest powers – commanding access to everything from shipping routes to search and rescue and minerals. Such is the attraction of Greenland that Trump has not ruled out using military force to get it. […]

    Russia is by far and away the icebreaker superpower. It is understood to have at least 50 icebreakers – at least 13 of which can operate in the Arctic and seven of which are nuclear – as well as a substantial network of ports in the region. China is understood to have four that are suitable for the Arctic, while new Nato members Sweden and Finland, as well as the US and Canada, all own their own versions of these specialist vessels.

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  • A century ago, Warren Harding prefigured Trump’s brand of strongman nationalism – Conflict and Civicness Research Blog

    Historical analogies are often misleading devices. But it is difficult not to be struck by the parallels between Harding’s early 20th century American nationalism and Donald Trump’s bid for the White House. For the latter’s success perhaps lies in it bringing back to the surface of the country’s political life a violent ethnic nationalism that was for years suppressed, but never wholly absent from the fabric of American culture.

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  • A brief guide to Trump and the Spectacle – London Review of Books

    Trump is an early warning signal. He’s a phenomenon of transition, only half adjusted to emerging reality. Of course, he’s not such a fool as to believe that he will, or anyone could, Make America Great Again; but his politics has to steer a course between those in his audience who do believe it, or make-believe it, and those, perhaps the majority, who are there for fun. They’re as cynical as he is. Or rather, they are serious about spectacle. About the chanting, the hats, the latest insult. They know that’s what politics now is. They know what politics is not allowed to interfere with: that is, everything just described about empire.

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  • Fee, fi, fo…Trump: how an ogre won back the White House – The Guardian

    Indeed, the description of an ogre above might – without too much modulation – be deftly repurposed as a set of character notes for the future actors who will no doubt play him. The extra-large suits, the extra-large tie. The endless huge of it all. The hyperbole of speech and form. The anti-intellectual, anti-law, anti-civility. The lethal cunning, the canny instinct. The way he looms and thuds through the world – fist-inverted, heavy-footed, fee-fi-fo-fum. Trump doesn’t engage in a debate about “values” – no, sir; Trump smells your blood. All that grabbed pussy. All that hoarded gold way up the beanstalk on the 56th floor of Trump Towers.

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  • Your memecoin is your slush fund – Noahpinion

    Suppose you wanted to buy a favor from Donald Trump, and he wanted to let you buy a favor from him. How could you do it? You can’t just pay him a giant bribe — that’s illegal. Maybe you could pledge him a bunch of cash for his presidential campaign. But there are campaign finance laws that will get in your way, and even if you succeed, he can only use the money for his campaign, not to buy yachts or whatever else he might like to use the money for. Instead, what you can do is to buy a bunch of TRUMP or MELANIA. When you buy one of those memecoins, you increase the demand for the memecoin. Its price then goes up. This makes Donald Trump richer, without any money actually having to change hands.

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  • Washington DC residents flee ahead of Trump inauguration: ‘I can’t be here’ – The Guardian

    “I have a fundamental set of beliefs and values that differ greatly from the supporters of the president-elect, so it is best that I just remove myself,” said Butler, a human resources executive who had worked for the federal government for nearly two decades before leaving to work at a non-profit. “It says to me that we’d rather have a criminal leading our country than a person of color, or a criminal rather than a woman.”

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  • TikTok is partially back online in the US, but it’s not back in the App Store yet – The Verge

    US users were shut out of TikTok last night ahead of the federal ban coming into effect, with the app displaying a message that its services were “temporarily unavailable.” Service started to be restored on Sunday around 12PM ET in TikTok’s mobile app and on the web. The app now displays a message saying “Welcome back!” and crediting Trump with restoring service. “As a result of President Trump’s efforts, TikTok is back in the U.S.!” the message reads.

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  • It’s the racism, stupid – BuzzMachine

    This is why it is so horribly wrong to hear the likes of Chris Matthews smugly declare on Morning Joe that identity politics is dead because identity politics are to blame for Harris’ loss. Can he not hear himself? The election of Trump is the product of identity politics: white identity politics, dismissing, disdaining, and threatening people of every other identity.

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  • “Subway Therapy” displays New Yorkers’ post-election thoughts – Hyperallergic

    At the height of the project’s post-election popularity in 2016, disgraced former Governor Andrew Cuomo left a note of his own: “New York State holds the torch high! – Andrew C.” Strangers left messages including “Trump is inhumane,” “Love to my Muslim brothers and sisters,” angry sentiments toward the electoral college, and the popular slogan “Love Trumps Hate.” Eight years later, the rhetoric hanging from the neon Post-it squares is different. While there was barely any room for even one more sticky note at the Union Square station in 2016, this year’s confessionals are more sparsely populated, and their messages seem less reactive to a Trump win.

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  • Trump team reportedly getting fed up with Elon Musk’s weird behavior – Futurism

    Musk is “behaving as if he’s a co-president and making sure everyone knows it,” one person familiar with the matter told NBC News. … “He’s sure taking lots of credit for the president’s victory,” NBC’s source continued, speaking of Musk. “Bragging about America PAC and X to anyone who will listen. He’s trying to make President Trump feel indebted to him. And the president is indebted to no one.”

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  • Elon Musk may already be overstaying his welcome in Trump’s orbit – NBC News

    Musk traveled to Mar-a-Lago to watch the election returns come in last week, and he has been there much of the past week, the two sources said. They said he is there at all hours, sitting with Trump and joining calls and meetings. … The second person said that Musk has an “opinion on and about everything” and that he shares them so forcefully that he has begun to pester Trump insiders. “He wants to be seen as having say in everything (even if he doesn’t),” this source said.

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  • Trump win ‘awkward’ for critics in U.K., France, Australia governments – The Washington Post

    After Trump declared victory in the election on Wednesday, Khan tweeted, without directly referring to Trump: “An important reminder today for Londoners: our city is — and will always be — for everyone. We will always be pro-women, pro-diversity, pro-climate and pro-human rights.”

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  • How counties are shifting in the 2024 presidential election – Washington Post

    Most of the nation’s 3,000-plus counties swung rightward compared with 2020. The Republican shift appeared across rural border communities in Texas, the wealthy suburbs of Washington, D.C., and even reliably Democratic counties in New York City. Trump widened his margins in rural areas, while Harris underperformed compared with Biden in safely blue cities. This combination, and a rightward lurch in major suburbs and midsize metros, amounted to a Trump victory in every battleground state.

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  • 10 takeaways from the night Trump marched back to the White House – The New York Times

    Mr. Trump has praised the authoritarian leaders of China, North Korea and Russia while demeaning democratic American allies in Europe and Asia. Whether the United States remains part of NATO is a live question. Aid to Ukraine as it struggles to fight off Russia’s invasion is in peril. And the Mideast conflict will have a powerful, unpredictable new actor who has not demonstrated an interest in calming tensions. […]

    Mr. Trump’s Justice Department is likely to drop the federal charges against him in his classified documents and election interference cases. He has already said he would fire Jack Smith, the special counsel who has led the federal investigations and prosecutions into the former president over the last two years. There is not much doubt that a Trump-appointed attorney general would drop the charges shortly after being confirmed.

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  • Is the race for the White House ‘a real Armageddon election’? – The Guardian

    Tara Setmayer, a former Republican communications director on Capitol Hill, said: “The approach of leaning into a toxic masculinity-themed campaign at a time when women’s rights are literally under assault in America is indicative of the absolute regressive and draconian worldview that Donald Trump brings to politics. They have doubled and tripled down on it, appealing to the worst instincts and lowest common denominator in the country.”

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  • Rural Arizona shows how Trump allies could try to thwart election certification – The Washington Post

    After the 2022 midterm election, two county leaders on a three-member board refused to accept the outcome in a timely matter, citing concerns about voting equipment that were rooted in false theories and real problems in the Phoenix area, 200 miles north. One of the leaders eventually relented, after a judge intervened, and joined the Democratic member to sign off on the results. But the standoff pushed the state past its certification deadline, triggered a legal battle and criminal prosecutions, and set off fears that local leaders around the nation would try the same strategy after November’s presidential election, should former president Donald Trump again lose.

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  • How the US elections will unfold overnight for British viewers – The Guardian

    UK residents determined to stick around to the bitter end, whenever that might be, should consider getting some sleep at 8pm or 9pm, and setting alarms (at least six, at three-minute intervals) for midnight or 1am, since not much will happen before then anyway. But pace yourself. For all that we talk about election night, any of the key races – or several of them – could take well into the next day, or longer, to produce a clear result.
    donald-trump elections kamala-harris politics usa

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  • Crudely gesturing Trump effigy appears in Philadelphia – Hyperallergic

    “When I first saw the images of it, I thought, oh, it’s really disrespectful to women, facing this really gentle, beautiful form,” said Cohen, whose organization restored the sculpture and placed it in the park. But when she read the text, she understood that the installation was actually a work of satire, which she called “brilliant.” “This is what public art is all about,” Cohen said. “These kinds of dialogues and debates and standing by your words when you’re quoted in such a manner in public.”

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  • It sure looks like Trump watches are breaking copyright law – WIRED

    The pair of watches, initially named “Fight Fight Fight” and “Victory Tourbillon,” retail from between (the recently inflated) $799 and $100,000, and the timepieces were said to feature “premium, Swiss-Made materials” and include “intricate details.” However, as watch connoisseurs began to review the Trump Watches marketing materials, they were less than kind about the craftsmanship. WIRED’s watch expert called them the most tragic celebrity watches yet. … According to the Associated Press, though, TheBestWatchesonEarth LLC advertised a product it can’t deliver, as that image is owned by the 178-year-old news agency. This week, the AP told WIRED it is pursuing a cease and desist against the LLC, which is registered in Sheridan, Wyoming.

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