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

From Robert Reich

Friends,

We are living in an age of bullies. Those with power are less constrained today than they have been in my lifetime, since the end of World War II.

The question is: How do we lead moral lives in this era?

Putin launches a horrendous war on Ukraine.

After Hamas’s atrocity, Netanyahu bombs Gaza to smithereens and is now starving to death its remaining occupants.

Trump abducts thousands of hardworking people within America and puts them into detention camps — splitting their families, spreading fear. His immigration agents target people with brown skin and Mexican-sounding names.

He usurps the powers of Congress, defies the courts, and prosecutes his enemies.

He and his Republican lackeys cut Medicaid and food stamps — lifelines for .....

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Congressional stock trading ban gets Senate panel’s OK​

Democrats agreed to exempt President Donald Trump to advance GOP Sen. Josh Hawley’s bill.

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Hawley's GOP colleagues on the committee split off, allowing the bill to advance with mostly Democratic support. |

A Senate committee voted to advance a bill that would ban stock trading by lawmakers, presidents and vice presidents — over objections from most Republicans and with a limited carve-out for President Donald Trump.

Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.) introduced the original bill barring members of Congress and their spouses from trading stocks. It was named, to Democrats’ dismay, for Rep. Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.), who has come under scrutiny for her husband’s extensive trading without evidence that any of it was done using insider information from Capitol Hill.

In conjunction with Sen. Gary Peters of Michigan, the top Democrat on the Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee, Hawley offered an alternative to the panel that would ditch the contentious name and expand the prohibitions to the president and vice president — but only for future administrations.

“We have an opportunity here today to do something that the public has wanted us to do for decades, and that is to ...

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Re the "the “exemption for Donald Trump substitute.”

Democrats ultimately voted to alter the bill in a way that would allow Trump to maintain his holdings during his term, an apparent concession to appease Hawley and secure the measure’s approval in committee. If signed into law, it still would prohibit Trump and Vice President JD Vance from buying stock.

snip ...

“We all saw Vance and Trump come out against this publicly ....
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Be thankful you didn't read this last night before going to bed - too grim and depressing to read at bedtime.

July 30, 2025 (Wednesday)

On July 2, 2024, just about a year ago, president of the right-wing Heritage Foundation Kevin Roberts told the listeners of Steve Bannon’s War Room webcast: “[W]e are going to win.

We’re in the process of taking this country back.” Roberts pointed to the Supreme Court’s decision in Donald J. Trump v. United States the day before giving the president absolute immunity for committing crimes while engaging in official acts.

“That Supreme Court ruling yesterday on immunity is vital, and it's vital for a lot of reasons,” Roberts said, adding that the nation needs a strong leader because “the left has taken over our institutions.” “[W]e are in the process of the second American Revolution,” he said, “which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be.”

Roberts was the man who organized Project 2025, the blueprint for a new kind of government dictated by a right-wing strongman. Creating that new government would require a president willing to act illegally, stripping the secular language of civil rights from public life, packing the government with loyalists, ending the social safety net, killing business regulations, and purging American institutions of all but right-wing ideologues.

When Americans learned about Project 2025 ....

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Just what Donnie has always wanted - a monument to himself ...

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July 31, 2025 (Thursday)

On Monday, at a meeting with U.K. prime minister Keir Starmer in Scotland, President Donald Trump boasted that he was solving all the world’s problems: “I’ve stopped six wars in the last—I'm averaging about a war a month. But the last three were very close together. India and Pakistan, and a lot of them. Congo was just and Rwanda was just done, but you probably know I won't go into it very much, because I don't know the final numbers yet. I don't know. Numerous people were killed, and I was dealing with two countries that we get along with very well, very different countries from certain standpoints. They've been fighting for 500 years, intermittently, and we solved that war. You probably saw it just came out over the wire, so we solved it….”

Yesterday, as Jeff Tiedrich noted, he promised he would fix the United States as well. “I think we're gonna have the richest economy you’ve ever seen. We have money coming in that we’ve never even thought about, at numbers that nobody’s ever seen before. We have a deal with Japan where they're going to pay us $550 billion. We have a deal with Europe where they're doing 750 billion plus 400 billion, plus 300 billion, and many other countries.”

Today the administration announced that Trump is adding a 90,000-square-foot event space to the White House. The White House itself, excluding the East Wing and the West Wing, is about 55,000 square feet. Groundbreaking for the new ballroom, which will replace the East Wing, is supposed to start in September, although it is not clear who picked the architects or the design. The administration says Trump and private donors will fund the building, which is estimated to cost around $200 million.

The announcement says that ....

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Not sure if my tinfoil hat is strong enough for this one ....​

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Ex-CIA Whistleblower: "The NSA Audited The 2024 Election, Kamala Harris Won"​

Math doesn’t lie—people do. A buried NSA‑authorized audit paved the way for this unelected illegitimate regime.​

This Will Hold

“In December 2024, I was personally involved in an NSA‑authorized forensic audit of the 2024 election. Kamala Harris and Tim Walz won—by a wide margin. Trump lost dramatically. There are multiple layers of complexity to this cover‑up, including transnational organized crime syndicates that extend far beyond the United States and our elections. To that point, I work in the human trafficking sector, which intersects with the stolen election(s) and has ties to Trump and Epstein—not to President Biden, Vice President Harris, or Governor Walz, but to the Democrats and other allied interests responsible for burying the audit.” — Adam Zarnowski, ex-CIA agent and author of Jörmungandr
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In an exclusive interview, former CIA operative Adam Zarnowski laid out pieces of an intricate network of bad actors and covert operations behind transnational organized crime and the stolen 2024 election. Some of his disclosures confirmed long‑held suspicions; others were shocking, exposing connections between organized crime, political operatives, and global power brokers.

Adam’s testimony paints one of the clearest—and most disturbing—pictures yet of how the cover‑up was orchestrated and why it has remained ....

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BREAKING: Journalist Michael Wolff exposes the shocking full story behind what ended Donald Trump's friendship with Jeffrey Epstein — and it involves alleged Russian money laundering, a $40 million house, and allegations that Trump "was fully acquainted" with Epstein's sex crimes.

Wolff also revealed what Epstein believed about Trump "to his dying day..."

"Now, Epstein’s explanation for why this friendship ended is as follows. In 2004, Epstein believed himself to be the high bidder on a piece of real estate in Palm Beach. A house. $36 million was his bid," Wolff said to MeidasTouch in a new interview.

"He took his friend Trump around to see the house, to advise him on how to move the swimming pool," Wolff continued. "Trump thereupon went around Epstein’s back and bid $40 million for the house and got the property.

"Epstein, who was well acquainted, in fact deeply involved with Trump’s scattered finances, understood that he didn’t have $40 million to pay for this house," said Wolff. "Now, if that was the case, it was someone else’s $40 million. At the time, Epstein believed this to be the $40 million of a Russian oligarch by the name of Rybolovlev.

"Less than two years later, this same house that Trump had bought for $40 million was sold for $95 million and it was in fact sold to Mr. Rybolovlev," he went on. "This is all a red flag of money laundering. And what Epstein did, and he was furious about losing this house... I mean, there’s something about these guys, these men, that nothing rouses them so much as a real estate betrayal."

"Epstein, after the sale of this house, after Trump went around his back, got this house, Epstein began to threaten him," explained Wolff. "He began to threaten him with lawsuits.

He began to threaten him with going to the press and saying that Trump was a ....

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Predictably Trump claimed that the commissioner of labor statistics, Dr. Erika McEntarfer, had manipulated the jobs report. “In my opinion, today’s Jobs Numbers were RIGGED in order to make the Republicans, and ME, look bad,” he wrote. He fired her.

August 1, 2025 (Friday)

Economists have been expressing concern about the accuracy of economic statistics coming out of the Trump administration for months. Cuts to the staff at agencies that collect data have meant that the consumer price index from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, for example, contains far more estimates of values than it did before the cuts.

With that warning, today’s jobs report packed a one-two punch.

The numbers showed that employers added only 73,000 jobs in July, way below ....

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August 2, 2025 (Saturday)

Republicans in the Texas legislature are working to redistrict the state before the 2026 midterm elections. Although state legislatures normally redraw district lines every ten years after the census required by the Constitution, President Donald J. Trump has asked Texas Republicans to redistrict now, mid-decade, in order to cut up five districts that tend to vote

Democratic and create districts Republicans will almost certainly win. Five additional seats will help the Republicans hold control of the House of Representatives despite their growing unpopularity.

Trump is urging other Republican-dominated state legislatures—those in Florida, Indiana, Missouri, New Hampshire, and Ohio, for example—to do the same thing. “We’re going to get another three or four or five, in addition,” Trump said to reporters about House seats. “Texas would be the biggest one, and that’ll be five.”

Shane Goldmacher and Nick Corasaniti of the New York Times note that “[v]oters are…reduced almost to bystanders as Republicans essentially admit to trying to .....

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