The Second Term of Donald J. Trump as President of the United States of America

“I’m beginning to think Trump isn’t a benign, suffering child at all." "I’m beginning to think everybody treats Trump like this, not because he’s the Make-A-Wish kid, but because he’s that ‘Twilight Zone’ kid that anytime somebody made him mad, he sent them out to the cornfield."

Click to expand...

BREAKING: Legendary comedian Jon Stewart incinerates Donald Trump by comparing the fawning praise he receives at Cabinet meetings to the treatment of a "Make-A-Wish kid."

This one has MAGA world screeching...

"Whenever any of his biggest supporters are with him, it sounds like they’re saying goodbye,” Stewart said on his show. He then played clips of MAGA officials praising Trump, including a particularly pathetic moment of U.S. special envoy Steve Witkoff telling Trump that working for him has been "the greatest honor" of his life.

Imagine the kind of life you'd have to lead for the crowning moment to be working for an adjudicated rapist, felon, fascist clown.

“Once you begin to notice this pattern, you begin to see ...

MORE>

September 9, 2025 (Tuesday)

As Joe Perticone outlines in The Bulwark today, Republican lawmakers are greeting the release of the lewd letter in Jeffrey Epstein’s birthday book depicting the outline of a child and apparently signed by Donald Trump either by saying they don’t care or by denying the signature is Trump’s. For this to be true, someone would have had to have slipped the letter into the book when it was bound in leather in 2003, a story that makes no sense at all. But, as J.V. Last of The Bulwark notes, Trump and his loyalists, including White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt, are insisting the letter is a hoax.

Last speculates this is the route they’re taking because claiming proof that Russian operatives worked to elect Trump in 2016 was a “hoax” mostly worked, because claiming the letter is a hoax is a loyalty test, or because Trump knows what else is out there and is setting a marker to declare any more revelations a lie.

Or, perhaps, all three.

As Last writes, the material in the 238-page book reveals that the friends of the convicted sex offender described him as a “super-rich” man who liked “having sex with very young girls.” But rather than recoiling from his predatory habits, they ....

MORE>

Why target Chicago? Or this is what real journalism looks like - and Donnie doesn't like facts.

More on the story that will not die

BREAKING: MAGA Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt gets cornered about Donald Trump's nude drawing and letter to Jeffrey Epstein in the infamous "birthday book" and scrambles for an insane excuse.

The walls are closing in fast on this issue...

"The Epstein files are back in the news because a lot of Americans feel that Jeffrey Epstein's victims never got justice," said a reporter. "Does the president care about these victims?

Does he want to deliver more justice for them? And is he willing to meet with them?"

"The president cares about victims of all crimes," Leavitt managed to say with a straight face. "And that's why Republicans in the Trump Department of Justice have done more in terms of transparency when it comes to the Epstein case than any prior administration."

In truth, the Justice Department under Trump's corrupt Attorney General Pam Bondi is still stonewalling the American people on Epstein. They are refusing to release the full files and we know that ....

CONTINUED

Sounds like Trump did blow up a boat full of innocent people ....



BREAKING: Senator Jack Reed drops bombshell news and reveals that the evidence presented by the MAGA Pentagon to justify their military strike on a boat in the Caribbean does not prove that they were drug smugglers for Tren de Aragua.

Trump may have blown up a boat full of innocent people...

“They have offered no positive identification that the boat was Venezuelan, nor that its crew were members of Tren de Aragua or any other cartel,” said Senator Jack Reed, the ranking member of the Senate Armed Services Committee.

Reed and his staff were formally briefed by the Department of Defense. According to two sources who spoke to CNN, the Pentagon officials who briefed them admitted that they were unable to discern exactly where it was that the boat was headed.

The attack was already deeply controversial due to its blatantly illegal nature. Trump released footage of the killing, claiming it .....

MORE>

Shiftless2 said:

Trump may have blown up a boat full of innocent people...
“They have offered no positive identification that the boat was Venezuelan, nor that its crew were members of Tren de Aragua or any other cartel,” said Senator Jack Reed, the ranking member of the Senate Armed Services Committee. #1,405

Click to expand...

Didn't President Trump offer as a reason he sought to end Russia's War in Ukraine the carnage Trump wanted to stop?
So it's bad when Putin does it, but it's not so bad when Trump does?

If you kill one or two, they prosecute & imprison you. If you kill10 or 20, they put you in an insane asylum. If you kill 10 or 20 thousand, they invite you to a peace conference. - Internet cliché

Click to expand...

When was the last time you saw this much projection?

Good morning! Today’s dispatch is a little leaner than usual because I’ve been buried in a larger weekend piece, more on that soon. For now, think of this as the amuse-bouche before the main course: a brisk, sharp slice of the chaos we’re all marinating in.

We start in Utah, where the FBI has once again demonstrated its flair for slapstick policing. The shooting of Charlie Kirk, MAGA’s loudest youth pastor of hate, was always going to be spun into a morality play. What no one expected was that the Bureau would audition for the role of Keystone Cops. First, they misidentified the suspect not once, but twice. Then, thanks to Kash Patel and Dan Bongino, two podcasters cosplaying as law enforcement brass, they put out false statements about having “their guy” in custody, only to quietly release the poor soul hours later. For the grand finale, the ATF managed to confuse a common ammunition headstamp with a secret transgender-antifascist manifesto allegedly etched into bullets. The Wall Street Journal dutifully printed it, MAGA media had a field day, and then, oops, it turned out to be a manufacturer’s mark.

Why the farce? Because the adults have been fired. Patel personally axed Mehtab Syed, a Pakistani-American and the highly respected head of the Utah field office, a veteran counterterrorism agent who also happened to be both Muslim and female. Syed had led sensitive investigations since 9/11 and was known inside the Bureau as steady, professional, and competent, three qualities that apparently disqualified her under Trump’s “retribution” agenda. Along with other career officials forced out, she has now joined a lawsuit alleging unlawful firings and political retaliation. In their place, Trump installed MAGA influencers who treat law enforcement like a podcast set. The result: a Bureau that can’t ....

MORE>
\

Charlie Kirk’s rival showed the internet what real empathy looks like.

Dean Withers—longtime rival of Charlie Kirk—reacted to Kirk’s fatal shooting in a way that shocked the internet. His words weren’t political. They weren’t calculated. They were human.

Consider this: someone who spent years debating and opposing Kirk was suddenly confronted with what no one should ever face—the death of a parent, the terror of witnessing it, the unimaginable pain inflicted on a family. His response wasn’t to politicize or condemn. It was to grieve.

Empathy is rare. It’s seeing the person behind the ideas, even when you fiercely disagree. It’s understanding that disagreement is never a justification for cruelty. The moment we stop recognizing our rivals as human, we all lose—not just them, but our own moral compass, our sense of decency, and the health of our democracy.

Trump's lawyer met with Maxwell .....

September 12, 2025 (Friday)

Since a gunman murdered right-wing activist Charlie Kirk at an outdoor event at Utah Valley University in Orem, Utah, both social media circles and the political sphere have been alight with accusations that “the Left” was responsible for the shooting. Prominent right-wing social media accounts called the Democratic Party “a domestic terror organization” and declared “WAR.” Billionaire Elon Musk posted: “The Left is the party of murder.”

From the Oval Office, President Donald J. Trump blamed the shooting on “the radical left” and vowed to “find each and every one of those who contributed to this atrocity, and to other political violence, including the organizations that fund it and support it, as well as those who go after our judges, law enforcement officials, and everyone else who brings order to our country.”

Without any information about the shooter, the media got in on the game, with the Wall Street Journal reporting yesterday that “[a]mmunition engraved with transgender and antifascist ideology was found inside the rifle authorities believe was used in Kirk’s shooting.” Bomb threats targeted Democratic politicians—primarily Black politicians—and historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs).

Condemnation of the shooting was widespread. Perhaps eager to distance themselves from accusations that anyone who does not support MAGA endorses political violence, commenters portrayed Kirk as ....

MORE>

No really, I am s h o c k e d ....


For those who have never heard the term "groypers" before - they're a group that doesn't think MAGA is right wing enough

Good morning! Donald Trump’s America is on the verge of shutting down again. The government lurches toward September 30 with no budget in sight, and Trump’s grand advice to his own party is: “don’t even bother dealing with” Democrats. The political equivalent of a toddler covering his ears and screaming until the Play-Doh is pried from his hands. Democrats are drawing a line where anyone with a functioning moral compass would: healthcare. Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer have made it clear they won’t greenlight another budget that rips Medicaid to shreds or lets ACA premiums skyrocket. Families are already getting notices that their bills are set to rise by hundreds of dollars a month thanks to Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act, beautiful in the same sense that a foreclosure notice is beautiful. Meanwhile, Republicans mutter that Democrats actually want a shutdown for political reasons, as if preserving healthcare is a sinister plot.I have to ask not whether our democracy can survive three more years of Trump, but whether our planet can.

And at this point, I have to ask not whether our democracy can survive three more years of Trump, but whether our planet can. While the lights threaten to go out in Washington, the Environmental Protection Agency has decided that the best way to fight climate change is to stop measuring it. The Greenhouse Gas Reporting Program, the backbone dataset for tracking emissions and enforcing laws since 2010, is slated for the chopping block. Without it, states, scientists, and even businesses will be flying blind. You can’t regulate what you don’t measure, and smashing the thermometer doesn’t ....

MORE>

Have to ask if those farmers are tired of winning yet?

S2 has shined a candle-flicker on a gargantuan problem needlessly self-inflicted by the Trump administration. "America First"

Shiftless2 said:

"Have to ask if those farmers are tired of winning yet?" S2 #1,418

Click to expand...

Tragically, it's not just farmers.
a) There are many others directly affected.
b) And there are also those affected indirectly, quite likely billions of them.

Directly affected?

The F-35 Should Have Been NATO’s Fighter — What’s Gone Wrong?​

The multi-billion dollar project was turning into a great example of transatlantic cooperation. Then things changed.
By Michael Peck / April 7, 2025
For an alliance built on cooperation, NATO airpower often seems like a competition. With a dozen types of combat jets, from cutting-edge stealth fighters to old Soviet designs, the alliance has lacked a standard combat aircraft.

If any weapon had a chance to be called “NATO’s jet,” it was the F-35. Following Russia’s all-out invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the stream of orders became a torrent.

Is there a problem?
There certainly is.

A welter of US statements (and tariffs) suggesting that the continent is no longer seen as a friend ...

A key Danish legislator says he regrets supporting his country’s purchase of the F-35, and warns that his country “must avoid American weapons if at all possible.”
British trade unions are demanding that the Royal Air Force buy fourth-generation Eurofighter Typhoons instead of F-35s.

Take the US administration’s pledge to annex Greenland from Denmark, even refusing to rule out using military force to seize territory from a fellow NATO ally. There is profound anger over the value destruction caused by newly imposed tariffs. And there are rumors — denied by American and European officials, as well as the aircraft manufacturer, Lockheed Martin — that the F-35 has a “kill switch” that enables the US to deactivate the jet remotely. Persistent development and manufacturing problems have hampered the aircraft’s capabilities and driven up the cost.

Meanwhile, European nations, including Britain, France and Germany, are pushing for the continent to rearm against the Russian threat. Buying European-made jets such as France’s Rafale, Sweden’s Gripen, and the Typhoon would be a big boost to Europe’s struggling defense-industrial base.

The F-35 Should Have Been NATO’s Fighter — What’s Gone Wrong?

The F-35 multi-billion dollar project was turning into a great example of NATO's transatlantic cooperation. Then things changed.

cepa.org

Thus Trump / MAGA voters are now learning what the rest of us understood from the start.
In our quarter millennium of human history there has never been a U.S. president that put America second. BUT !
None of them alarmed our allies & trade partners, and shocked the world by provocatively, insultingly asserting it publicly.

This is what happens when that happens.

note:

And there are rumors — denied by American and European officials, as well as the aircraft manufacturer, Lockheed Martin — that the F-35 has a “kill switch” that enables the US to deactivate the jet remotely.

Click to expand...

Haven't seen the "kill switch" claim. Just rumors that the versions sold to non-Americans will have substandard software and it won't be upgraded