We have more to lose than any other country in terms of his dumbass proposal. The middle and lower class are going to feel it the most. This administration intends to put us through unnecessary hardship.
Mexican American War 2: Electric Boogaloo
Other reporting indicates that they will still not be using the FBI to conduct background checks on potential nominees.
Who are they using? The KGB?
Oh, it's the edgelord who is fighting an imaginary battle on the internet. How's that been going for ya, champ?
You just gave me something learn this holiday weekend. Thanks!
If I knew how to do that, I would. I support your endeavor 1000%, though. Flood that bitch.
Donald Trump is fuming after a New York Times story on his relationship with Natalie Harp, his 33-year-old personal aide.
>Donald Trump took to Truth Social in the early hours of Tuesday to go on a lengthy rant about Maggie Haberman, likely set off by a recent article in The New York Times on his weird relationship with aide Natalie Harp.
>"Will the failing New York Times apologize to its readers for getting years of “Trump” coverage so wrong. They write such phony “junk,” knowing full well how incorrect it is, only meaning to demean.” Magot Hagerman, a third rate writer and fourth rate intellect, writes story after story, always terrible, and yet I almost never speak to her. They do no fact checking, because facts don’t matter to them. I don’t believe I’ve had a legitimately good story in the NYT for years, AND YET I WON, IN RECORD FASHION, THE MOST CONSEQUENTIAL PRESIDENTIAL ELECTION IN DECADES. WHERE IS THE APOLOGY?"
>The article, published Monday, detailed Harp’s questionable proximity to Trump since his 2020 presidential campaign. Known as the “human printer” by the rest of the Trump team, Harp has “established herself at the center of a fast-moving carousel of text messages, articles and tidbits directed at Mr. Trump,” the Times reported, which is apparently worrisome to other aides “at a moment when Mr. Trump appears more contemptuous than ever of attempts to manage or control him.” Haberman goes on to describe her as an “instant enabler of [Trump’s] impulses.” For every Truth Social rant or mean tweet, Harp is there.
>Harp also freaked out the rest of Trump’s inner circle with steamy handwritten messages, writing, “you’re all that matters to me.… I’ll never let you down.” She also wrote to him that she wanted to reclaim the “synergy” they had. “We’d talk about everything and nothing.… I want to bring you joy,” Harp wrote. “To feel like we can get through a day without ever having to talk ‘work.’” And it isn’t particularly one-sided either. The Times, which viewed the letters, reported that Trump apparently commented that Harp was the only member of his team that truly cared about him.
>Harp first hit the scene in 2019, when she appeared on Fox News and started talking about how Trump saved her life by signing a law that gave her access to unspecified experimental drugs that helped treat her bone cancer. That launched her into a Republican National Convention speaking slot in 2020, and by 2022, she was a full-time aide to Trump.
And enabling authoritarian regimes to do what they want is the right thing to do? Fuck you.
Nothing like "America First" by destabilizing the dollar.
Oh, that's just dandy to hear. I'm guessing they are so demoralized that they aren't going to do anything about it.
Did you have a stroke?
Edit: You literally worship a grown man who shits his diapers.
Which has nothing to do with your mental illness at the moment, champ.
You really had to make an alt account for your pathetic trolling?
That's the shit that gets me, too. They're literally just letting everything happen. It feels fucking hopeless.
“Americans dodged a bullet with Gaetz’s withdrawal but Trump’s second choice for Attorney General is no better,” said state party Chair Nikki Fried. “Don’t forget — Pam Bondi tried to take healthcare away from millions of Floridians. She was the ring leader in the attempt to sue the Affordable Care Act out of existence and overturn the pre-existing conditions rule. She filed the original suit and was the lead plaintiff on the case seeking to dismantle affordable care. When Donald Trump says he’s going to end the ACA, believe him now that he’s nominated Pam Bondi to finish the job."
Only the "best." She's more competent than Gaetz, which is worse.
We've already jumped off the cliff. It's not a matter of if we hit the ground. It's a matter of when we hit it.
The leaders of the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security have declined to testify publicly at a scheduled Senate hearing on global national security threats.
>WASHINGTON (AP) — The leaders of the FBI and the Department of Homeland Security declined to testify publicly at a scheduled Senate hearing Thursday on global national security threats, a break from precedent following years of open testimony before the panel.
>“Their choice to not provide public testimony about their departments’ efforts to address wide-ranging national security threats robs the American people of critical information and the opportunity for public accountability of what the federal government is doing to keep Americans safe,” Sen. Gary Peters, chairman of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs committee, said in a statement.
>The Michigan Democrat said it was the first time in more than 15 years that an FBI director and Homeland Security secretary had refused to offer public testimony at the annual committee hearing focused on threats to the homeland, calling it a “shocking departure” from tradition.
>A separate hearing scheduled for Wednesday before the House Homeland Security committee also was postponed.
>...
>The Department of Homeland Security said in a statement that they and the FBI offered to speak to the committee in a classified setting and emphasized the amount of unclassified information they’ve already shared publicly
"Pure Democratic propaganda," one Trump-supporting critic wrote about the news show.
>Scott Pelley recapped the Cabinet picks of President-elect Donald Trump in the “60 Minutes” opening Sunday, enraging MAGA supporters despite the segment’s recitation of facts. (Watch the video below.)
>The summary “is exactly why no one respects the legacy media anymore,” one person complained on X, formerly Twitter.
>“Pure Democratic propaganda,” griped another.
>Pelley, a correspondent, began by noting “some nominees appear to have no compelling qualifications other than loyalty to Trump.”
>He pointed out defense secretary nominee Pete Hegseth’s lack of government experience and recent gig as a Fox News morning host; the investigation into attorney general nominee Matt Gaetz’s alleged sex with a minor; and the vaccine skepticism of health and human services nominee Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
>“It’s up to the new Republican majority in the Senate to decide whether these nominees are equipped to represent the American people,” Pelley concluded.
Nutshell - Alice in Chains
We chase misprinted lies
We face the path of time
And yet I fight, and yet I fight
This battle all alone
No one to cry to
No place to call home
The senator disagrees with Kamala Harris on Gaza, as do millions of voters. But he’s been arguing that “Trump and his right-wing friends are worse.”
>Senator Bernie Sanders has been an active surrogate for Vice President Kamala Harris and Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, telling crowds at dozens of stops in battleground states that “we must do everything we can to see that [former president] Donald Trump is defeated.” But that does not mean that the Vermont independent approves of the way in which the Democratic candidates have addressed particular issues—especially when it comes to the Israeli assault on Gaza, which has killed more than 44,000 Palestinian men, women, and children.
>Sanders has been an outspoken critic of US support for Netanyahu and the war on Gaza, which began after the October 7 attack by Hamas but has since stirred an international outcry because of the overwhelming number of Palestinians that Israeli forces have killed. And no matter who wins the election, the senator is determined to continue leading the charge “to block US military aid and offensive weapons sales to the right-wing extremist Netanyahu government in Israel.”
>Sanders is far from alone in that view. Polls show that, among American voters, there is strong support for cutting arms shipments. Polls also show that there are many Americans who are angry about the failure of the Biden administration to stand up clearly and effectively to Netanyahu.
>As the 2024 campaign concludes, Sanders has encountered voters across the country who share his frustration with the administration’s stance, and with the Harris campaign’s approach to the issue. He knows, from polling data and personal experience on the campaign trail, that Gaza is a top issue for millions of voters nationwide—and especially in the battleground states that will decide the election.
A damning, newly released recording exposes just how close Donald Trump was to Jeffrey Epstein.
>Explosive new audio reveals that Donald Trump detailed how he really felt about his White House staff to Jeffrey Epstein, and Epstein touted old photos of Trump with half-naked women taken at the site of the pedophile’s rampant sexual abuse of young girls.
>On author Michael Wolff’s Thursday episode of his podcast Fire and Fury, Wolff shared a recording of a conversation with Epstein from 2017, in which the convicted sex offender and alleged human trafficker recounted Trump’s true feelings about members of his administration, The Daily Beast reported.
>“His people fight each other and then have outsiders—he sort of poisons the well outside,” Epstein told Wolff. Epstein went on to paraphrase Trump’s candid statements about his former strategist Steve Bannon, former chief of staff Reince Priebus, and counselor Kellyanne Conway.
>“He will tell 10 people, ‘Bannon’s a scumbag’ and ‘Priebus is not doing a good job’ and ‘Kelly has a big mouth’—what do you think? ‘Jamie Dimon says that you’re a problem and I shouldn’t keep you. And I spoke to Carl Icahn. And Carl thinks I need a new spokesperson,’” Epstein said.
>“‘So Kelly[anne]—even though I hired Kellyanne’s husband—Kellyanne is just too much of a wildcard.’ And then he tells Bannon, ‘You know I really want to keep you, but Kellyanne hates you,’” Epstein continued.
>Wolff said that he had recordings of roughly “100 hours of Epstein talking about the inner workings of the Trump White House and about his long standing, deep relationship with Donald Trump
Congratulations to FlyingSquid for their Pic of the Week!
>HHS is the Department of Health and Human Services, which is in charge of protecting the health of all Americans. Among other things, it includes the agency that administers Medicare and Medicaid; oversees the National Institutes of Health, the Food and Drug Administration, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention; and works to prevent disease outbreaks and ensure food and drug safety. So the idea of letting Kennedy “control” such a department is actually insane, and if you’re wondering why, a quick reminder that Kennedy:
>Is a huge anti-vaxxer
>Penned an article titled “Deadly Immunity,” published in Rolling Stone and Salon in 2005, in which he alleged that the government had covered up a link between vaccines and autism. (Both outlets later retracted the piece, and the Salon editor who worked on it said that after it went up, “we were besieged by scientists and advocates showing how Kennedy had misunderstood, incorrectly cited, and perhaps even falsified data…. It was the worst mistake of my career. I probably should have been fired.”)
>Wrote a foreword for a book that claimed COVID-19 vaccines caused sudden deaths among healthy young people; the book featured on its cover a 12-year-old who’d never received the COVID-19 vaccine and had died as a result of a malformed blood vessel in his brain
>Has been accused of stoking fears about vaccines in the run-up to a measles outbreak in Samoa that killed 83 people
>Once implied that Anne Frank, she of Holocaust fame, had it easy compared to what anti-vaxxers go through
>Has more than once suggested that chemicals in the environment can make children gay and trans
>Declared, “I am not a church boy,” following a sexual assault allegation
>Admitted to staging an elaborate bear-murder scene in Central Park because he didn’t have time to eat said bear’s flesh
>Sawed a dead whale’s head off, according to one of his daughters, and strapped it to the roof of the family’s car, causing his children to have to wear plastic bags on their heads to avoid the “whale juice” that was “pour[ing] into the windows”
>Said in a 2012 divorce deposition that a worm “got into my brain and ate a portion of it and then died”
Watch how Donald Trump tried to explain Hurricane Helene to a crowd in North Carolina.
>“I must’ve been the first one, I followed that storm right in,” the former president said. “I saw the devastation, it was a travesty, it was viscous, it was water. The water was the worst we’d ever seen. It was a water hurricane, that’s what it was.”
“Our nation’s constitutional order, together with the quest for a more inclusive and just society, will live on — if persons of goodwill promote and support them,” writes Andrew Bjelland.
>The consequences: Never before has a former president who is as flawed a candidate as Trump — an individual some have called cognitively challenged and psychologically unstable and who believes in nothing other than himself, his appetites, his instincts and his autocratic ambitions — evidenced, according to major polls, a 50% chance of reelection.
>Never before has such an individual commandeered a major American political party, garnered the loyalty of its most radical and/or opportunistic power-players, and forced its moderates to choose between cowardly silence or the termination of their political careers.
>Never before could such an individual, if reelected, stand so thoroughly empowered to reject experienced advisors who are faithful to the Constitution — reject “the adults in the room” who might rein in his most authoritarian impulses — and instead appoint loyalists who will do his bidding. In addition those loyalists will enact the fusion of executive-branch dominance, faux-libertarianism and Christian nationalism mapped out in Project 2025.
>Never before would such an individual, if reelected, be so thoroughly insulated against criminal indictment and prosecution — all due to the wide-ranging and much criticized presidential-immunity decision rendered by six conservative justices of the U.S. Supreme Court.
For those of you who like to use the bad faith argument that Democrats fear monger every 4 years. THIS IS NOT NORMAL AND HAS NEVER HAPPENED IN OUR COUNTRY.
VOTE! Our lives literally depend on it!
Congratulations to CrimeDad for their Pic of the Week!
You can find @CrimeDad@lemmy.crimedad.work's Post Here
Playbook: Trump’s media backout
NO SHADE — Recently, it’s become something of a pattern: Trump is scheduled for an interview with a neutral media outlet, the date nears and then … things fall apart.
It happened just this week to planned Trump sit-downs with NBC in Philadelphia and CNBC’s “Squawk Box” — and that’s on the heels of him backing out of a “60 Minutes” episode earlier this month.
Why does this keep happening? Playbook has learned that yet another outlet was given an explanation by Trump’s team for why their own interview wasn’t coming to fruition: exhaustion.
The Trump campaign had been in conversations for weeks with The Shade Room about a sit-down interview. The site, which draws an audience that is largely young and Black, hosted an interview with Harris just last week.
But as no interview materialized, Shade Room staff began feeling that feet were being dragged inside Trump’s campaign. No date was ever set, we’re told, but the intention was to try and work toward a sit-down.
Trump has repeatedly threatened to deploy the military inside major cities run by Democrats. Senior officials nationwide are preparing to defend their communities from his threats
>Senior Democrats in US cities are preparing to defend their communities in the event of Donald Trump’s return to the White House after the former president has repeated threats that he would use presidential powers to seize control of major urban centers.
>Trump has proposed deploying the military inside major cities largely run by Democrats to deal with protesters or to crush criminal gangs. He has threatened to dispatch large numbers of federal immigration agents to carry out mass deportations of undocumented people in so-called “sanctuary” cities.
>He also aims to obliterate the progressive criminal justice policies of left-leaning prosecutors.
>“In cities where there has been a complete breakdown of law and order … I will not hesitate to send in federal assets including the national guard until safety is restored,” Trump says in the campaign platform for his bid to become the 47th US president, Agenda47.
>Trump provoked uproar earlier this week when he called for US armed forces to be deployed against his political rivals – “the enemy within” – on election day next month. But his plans to use national guard troops and military personnel as a means to attack those he sees as his opponents go much wider than that, spanning entire cities with Democratic leadership.
Congratulations to VeryNiiiice for their Pic of the Week!
You can find @VeryNiiiice@sh.itjust.works's Post Here
The U.S. has announced an agreement with the Iraqi government to wrap up the military mission in Iraq of an American-led coalition fighting the Islamic State group by next year.
>WASHINGTON (AP) — The U.S. announced an agreement with the Iraqi government Friday to wrap up the military mission in Iraq of an American-led coalition fighting the Islamic State group by next year, with U.S. troops departing some bases that they have long occupied during a two-decade-long military presence in the country.
>But the Biden administration refused to provide details on how many of the approximately 2,500 U.S. troops still serving in Iraq will remain there or acknowledge it will mark a full withdrawal from the country.
>“I think it’s fair to say that, you know, our footprint is going to be changing within the country,” Pentagon deputy press secretary Sabrina Singh told reporters Friday without providing specifics.
>The announcement comes at a particularly contentious time for the Middle East, with escalating conflict between Israel and two Iranian-backed militant groups — Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza — threatening a broader regional war. Bases housing U.S. forces and contractors have been regularly targeted by Iran-backed militias over the last several years, and those attacks intensified late last year and early this spring after the Israel-Hamas war broke out nearly a year ago