Originally published at: Trump’s DOJ Now Also Justifying Admin’s Efforts To Defy The Judiciary
Some of President Trump’s more influential cronies (namely, Elon Musk, Stephen Miller) have been pushing the envelope since the beginning of his second administration, goading the President as he openly brainstorms ways to punish judges who rule against his executive actions and encouraging him to ignore court orders he doesn’t agree with. He’s had backup…
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How is it we elected a toxic piece of human waste to be President? Oh, of course, too many idiots couldn’t bring themselves to vote for a half-black female…makes perfect sense to me. Instead we have a would-be king…
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Same way we elected Reagan. Polished Bullshit with a dash of foreign intervention, capped off with a democratic party afraid to be bold and proudly go back to its New Deal roots.
Reagan is/was worse largely because at least Trump will be remembered as the POS he is… Whereas Reagan is exalted.
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Wiping your ass with the Constitution (sending people to torture camps in a different country)? No problem.
Raise taxes and hit a millionaire’s bottom line? Oh fuck no!!!
And I know our retirement is on the line, believe me I know, but hearing this shit from the party who questioned our patriotism over socialist concepts like healthcare, unions, DEI and LGBTQ rights etc. can fuck right off.
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Gonna call bullshit on this. There is no way Trump was in any way ‘polished’. He was unhinged and ridiculous, screaming about ‘they’re eating the pets!’
This was 100% about the racism and misogyny.
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The media polished the turd for us… just like with Reagan… Reagan was just less overt and made their jobs easier…
So was Reagan, it was just coded…
Welfare Queens… states rights… Philadelphia Mississippi speech…
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Yes, a would-be king who already was an adjudicated rapist, an adjudicated fraudster determined by a court to have defrauded the state of New York out of close to a half billion dollars, and a person who, because he lost an electoin that at least 60 courts decreed that he had lost fair and square, sicced a bunch of armed fans on the U.S. Capitol, while signaling that their desire to hang his vice president – and perhspas others, such as the Speaker of the House – was a-ok with him. In fact, he considered it participation in a Day of Love.
THAT kind of aspiring king is what Americans preferred to a half-Black female who only wnted to be a president.
It’s still hard to get my mind around that.
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In regard to tariffs, below is another informative article from Paul Krugman. A couple of key points in the article need to be highlighted.
First, according to Paul Krugman, a Nobel laurate winning Economist whose expertise is International Trade, before Trump started these trade wars,
The average European Union tariff on U.S. goods was 1.7%, the average U.S. tariff on EU goods was 1.4%
Now there can be some debate over this as these figures are really hard to pin down, for example is this on goods currently be sold which will not include goods but for tariffs that would be sold. But it goes without saying that unlike Trump’s formula that for computing tariffs that has no factual basis and in fact has nothing to do with actual tariffs, (imports to US - Exports from U.S)/Exports from US, Krugman’s numbers no doubt have real facts behind them and are far closer to the truth than Trump’s pull it out your arse figures.
Yesterday I commented on Trump’s numbers being presented as facts by JP Morgan which was otherwise highly critical of Trump’s tariffs but want other than its paying corporate clients to think Trump is standing up for America because they really fear Elizabeth Warren, I got the same sort of briefing today from BMO Harris.
That is while large financial institutions whom along with their clients are loosing billions thanks to Trump’s reckless tariffs, they continue to prop up Trump with voters including promulgating his lies because they would rather they and their clients loose trillions than have to face accountability and regulation.
Or this is how Krugman puts it:
Many wealthy people imagined that Trump II would be like Trump I, mostly a standard right-winger with a bit of a protectionist hobby. They thought he would cut their taxes, eliminate financial and environmental regulations and promote crypto, making them even wealthier. They expected him to back off his tariff obsession if the stock market started to fall. If he ripped up the social safety net, well, they don’t depend on food stamps or Medicaid.
And if Trump II really had been like Trump I, America’s oligarchs would be very happy right now.
It’s also true that successful businessmen often believe that their financial success makes them experts on economic policy even though they haven’t made any effort to understand the issues.
Finally, great wealth often enables great pettiness. Some readers may remember Wall Street’s “Obama rage”: Financial titans were furious at the president who bailed them out after the global financial crisis because he dared to hint that they had played some role in causing that crisis. Why, he even called them “fat cats!”
The pettiness has been even worse this time around. A few days before the inauguration the Financial Times ran an article titled “Is corporate America going MAGA?” that quoted one “top banker”:
I feel liberated. We can say ‘retard’ and ‘pussy’ without the fear of getting cancelled . . . it’s a new dawn.
I wonder how liberated he’s feeling now.
Which brings up the one bright spot in all of this according to Krugman which he hopes will save Democracy:
To be honest, I’m actually glad that Trump II is proving to be such a disaster for the economy. If he had exercised some restraint, if he had simply claimed credit for the very good economy Joe Biden left him, many wealthy people would have cheered him on while he destroyed democracy. Now they may turn on him.
But I hope the rest of us have learned a lesson from the oligarchy’s support for Trump, even if it’s now cracking: Extreme wealth inequality has given great power to people who exert a malign influence on our politics.
The entire article is below.
Political Styles of the Rich and Clueless
There are none so blind as those that will not see
Paul Krugman
Apr 07, 2025
As we wait to see what fresh hell awaits us this week, one obvious question is, who put these malevolent clowns in power?
The short answer is ignorant people. But political ignorance takes two different forms.
On one side there are “less-engaged” voters who don’t follow politics closely. And to be fair, ordinary Americans have good excuses for not paying close attention to the news: They have jobs to do, children to raise, lives to live. Unfortunately, many of these voters believed Trump’s fabulist promises. They are only now beginning to understand what they voted for.
There’s now a huge debate among Democrats about how to reach less-engaged voters. But that’s a topic for future posts.
But less-engaged voters weren’t the only people who missed the warning signs and supported Donald Trump. Trump also had a number of ultra-wealthy backers, both on Wall Street and in Silicon Valley, who are now shocked, shocked to discover that he is who he always was.
Over the weekend Bill Ackman, a hedge-fund billionaire who has been one of Trump’s most vocal supporters, suddenly turned on his champion, declaring on X that
by placing massive and disproportionate tariffs on our friends and our enemies alike and thereby launching a global economic war against the whole world at once, we are in the process of destroying confidence in our country as a trading partner, as a place to do business, and as a market to invest capital.
But Ackman refused to take any responsibility for enabling the destruction:
I don’t think this was foreseeable. I assumed economic rationality would be paramount. My bad.
Indeed. Who could have foreseen that the self-proclaimed Tariff Man, who posts crazy stuff on Truth Social every day, would impose destructive tariffs? Who could have imagined that the many economists, myself included, who warned that a Trump victory would be very bad for the economy would turn out to have been right? Or if we were wrong, it was only because we underestimated the damage.
OK, Ackman is a fool, but he wasn’t alone in getting Trump all wrong. Many wealthy people imagined that Trump II would be like Trump I, mostly a standard right-winger with a bit of a protectionist hobby. They thought he would cut their taxes, eliminate financial and environmental regulations and promote crypto, making them even wealthier. They expected him to back off his tariff obsession if the stock market started to fall. If he ripped up the social safety net, well, they don’t depend on food stamps or Medicaid.
And if Trump II really had been like Trump I, America’s oligarchs would be very happy right now.
It’s also true that successful businessmen often believe that their financial success makes them experts on economic policy even though they haven’t made any effort to understand the issues.
Even relatively sensible business leaders like Jamie Dimon of JPMorgan Chase tend to stumble when they try to play economist. Does anyone remember Dimon proclaiming in 2014 that we couldn’t restore full employment because American workers didn’t have the right skills? Five years later the unemployment rate was below 4 percent.
I was struck over the weekend when Elon Musk (I know, I know), seemingly breaking with Trump, called for zero tariffs between the United States and Europe. I think it’s safe to assume that Musk has no idea that trans-Atlantic tariffs were, in fact, close to zero in 2024: The average European Union tariff on U.S. goods was 1.7%, the average U.S. tariff on EU goods was 1.4%.
Finally, great wealth often enables great pettiness. Some readers may remember Wall Street’s “Obama rage”: Financial titans were furious at the president who bailed them out after the global financial crisis because he dared to hint that they had played some role in causing that crisis. Why, he even called them “fat cats!”
The pettiness has been even worse this time around. A few days before the inauguration the Financial Times ran an article titled “Is corporate America going MAGA?” that quoted one “top banker”:
I feel liberated. We can say ‘retard’ and ‘pussy’ without the fear of getting cancelled . . . it’s a new dawn.
I wonder how liberated he’s feeling now.
To be honest, I’m actually glad that Trump II is proving to be such a disaster for the economy. If he had exercised some restraint, if he had simply claimed credit for the very good economy Joe Biden left him, many wealthy people would have cheered him on while he destroyed democracy. Now they may turn on him.
But I hope the rest of us have learned a lesson from the oligarchy’s support for Trump, even if it’s now cracking: Extreme wealth inequality has given great power to people who exert a malign influence on our politics.
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The time for yapping and making witty comments is about to end, if it hasn’t already.
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Said another way, the Federal government continues to fight itself and justifying their civil war.
This despite Judge Roberts declaring a full surrender.
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The Exalted and Much Worshipped Market (in which we prey) may actually settle down at some point. But by then, the Beautiful Tariffs should be beginning to bite. You don’t like eggs at $7 a dozen? Howza bout bananas at $4 a pound? Coffee at twice its price, to where brewing it at home costs as much as a cup at the 'bucks?
And meanwhile, you’re out of work because you worked for the federal government, or for a contractor of the federal government, or in the medical industry which is no longer getting those government insurance payments, or maybe in nuclear safety, which obviously isn’t “necessary.”
It isn’t over. Goose your local Democrats, if you have any, and help them out if you can. Yell at your Republican representatives. Even if it doesn’t motivate them, you’ll feel better.
History doesn’t end. Regardless of what that moron Francis Fukuyama says.
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Never!! Witty comments keep us going in the worst of times. Which we still have not reached.
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We didn’t elect him. He cheated his way in.
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True dat. Saint Ronnie the Actor was just as big a racist POS as Trump. Remember this.
On this day in 1988, the House, following the Senate’s lead, overrode President Ronald Reagan’s veto of the Civil Rights Restoration Act of 1987.
https://www.politico.com/story/2010/03/reagan-veto-overridden-march-22-1988-034778
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Not only a half black female but an extremely qualified and experienced one.
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It’s an insult to women everywhere that 2 superbly qualified, well trained politicians, with government savvy had to run against this orange, stupid blob and lose. When are misogynists going to learn that smart women can run a country better than most men?
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They already know… thats what they fear.
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Good news? Going up against each other?
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No, with Reagan there were a lot of legitimate and seemingly-legitimate issues in play, too. Volcker’s efforts to deal with stagflation caused a recession. They were necessary, but they caused a lot of economic hardship for regular people.
Then came the Iran hostage crisis, and the Pentagon’s failure to remember the lessons of North Africa (‘How do you operate aircraft in a desert?’) gave Reagan all of the ‘weak on defense’ ammunition he needed, especially with him illegally conducting foreign policy behind the scenes by cutting a deal with the Iranians to keep our people from coming home before the election.
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The market for Treasury Bonds is collapsing. No one wants our debt. The bond market is the law and the truth. No amount of Trump bullshit will change the market’s judgement of his impact on the economy.
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