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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