All Things Trump: The Return Of The King

[Tero]

The Trump lies:
He builds plausible deniability into every utterance. It's one of the very few things he is actually good at.

https://www.threads.com/@personality_of ... ohBdtuOPEA

That’s called obsession and it’s entirely yours. —been there, done that, and getting out didn’t mean the other guy wasn’t a baddie, just that I was free to leave it at that and return to my own world…

No, this is not just me. We have green card immigrants on my FB group afraid to travel. This focus on people not born in the US is giving millions of people a lot of unnecessary grief and second thoughts about any travel. For 4 years I cannot ever be free of Trump.

[Tero]

Amd not much better for people around the world, even if they never paln to come here:
Norwegian

I'm not saying the US is lost, but it's got a hell of a hole to dig itself out of. In fact I too am starting to think it'll have to go through some terrible process that'll probably involve death and suffering before re-emerging as something new. I don't wish for it, of course, but it's like watching, as some other poster said, a dear friend decide to go back to taking heroin and living on the streets after being clean for four years. You just know it'll get really bad before it (hopefully) gets better.

[Sean Hayden]

The Trump lies:
He builds plausible deniability into every utterance. It's one of the very few things he is actually good at.

https://www.threads.com/@personality_of ... ohBdtuOPEA

That’s called obsession and it’s entirely yours. —been there, done that, and getting out didn’t mean the other guy wasn’t a baddie, just that I was free to leave it at that and return to my own world…

No, this is not just me. We have green card immigrants on my FB group afraid to travel. This focus on people not born in the US is giving millions of people a lot of unnecessary grief and second thoughts about any travel. For 4 years I cannot ever be free of Trump.

Trump is dangerous. He’s not a supervillain. He has no special abilities for good or bad. Obsessively analyzing how he “achieves” what he has only serves to elevate his image and help those who use it. He’s a bad guy, but nothing special.

But I guess everyone caught in that nightmare has to work their own way out.

[L'Emmerdeur]

Aye. Not forgetting the abundance of dark opera buffa themes and episodes. The ham-handed flailing with tariffs, turning the economy into a roller-coaster, et cetera nearly ad infinitum. The obvious mental deterioration, which was apparent before the election. 'Good days and bad days' but the ratio shifts with time.

[Tero]

Buried in the budget bill:
In light of all this, the House bill seems squarely and unacceptably focused on shielding the Trump administration from accountability when it breaks the law.

To make matters worse, the new rule would be so broad that it could allow any government actor to escape being held accountable for violating court rulings. It would also apply to court orders and injunctions issued before the law takes effect. This would render thousands of prior orders across the country immediately unenforceable through contempt proceedings, no matter how the public has already relied on them.

https://campaignlegal.org/update/these- ... -democracy

[Svartalf]

I guess that if accountability is sought , this bill could be attacked in justice for being illegal/unconstitutional

[Tero]

People voted for Trump! They must get all that Trump wants!

"Vance’s comments are not the product of ignorant bluster (for this, see the recent assertion by Kristi Noem, the Secretary of Homeland Security, that “habeas corpus is a constitutional right that the president has to be able to remove people from this country”). Vance is a graduate of Yale Law School, and his wife clerked for the Chief Justice. He surely understands that Roberts—the author of Trump v. United States, the 2024 ruling on Presidential immunity that is perhaps the broadest grant of executive authority in the history of the Court—is no foe of Presidential power but one of its fiercest advocates. Yet Vance has for years been picking an argument with the Chief Justice over the legitimacy of federal court orders. If Vance were giving Trump one piece of advice, he said in 2021, it would be to “fire every single mid-level bureaucrat, every civil servant in the administrative state. Replace them with our people. And when the courts—because you will get taken to court—and when the courts stop you, stand before the country like Andrew Jackson did and say: ‘The chief justice has made his ruling. Now let him enforce it.’ ” Roberts warned against remarks like these in his latest year-end report on the federal judiciary, saying that “elected officials from across the political spectrum have raised the specter of open disregard for federal court rulings. These dangerous suggestions, however sporadic, must be soundly rejected.”

"Of course, it is not healthy if courts consistently find themselves far out of step with the country, as Justice Elena Kagan noted at a judicial conference in 2022, following the tumultuous term in which the Court eliminated the right to abortion. If the Court “loses all connection with the public and with public sentiment, that’s a dangerous thing for a democracy,” she cautioned. Still, Kagan said, “By design, the court does things sometimes that a majority of the country doesn’t like.” Vance ignores this counter-majoritarian imperative."

"Vance views these episodes as the courts telling the American people that “they’re not allowed to have what they voted for.” He is wrong. There’s no doubt that many voters were unhappy about illegal immigration during the Biden Administration and that this contributed to Trump’s victory last November. But the polls suggest that at least some of his supporters did not vote for the kind of unfairness inflicted on Özturk, Abrego Garcia, and others."

https://www.newyorker.com/news/the-lede ... et-in-line

[Tero]

On those Harvard students:
"Couldn't he just put a 100% tariff on students?"

[Tero]

Trump writes out 21 million. Then he puts the word million after the number.
https://bsky.app/profile/tero88jarvi.bs ... 3lfmt3hs2a

[L'Emmerdeur]

Trump and his clown car of appointees may be wilfully ignorant arses, but there are some relatively competent people working in the White House. Problem is, they're doing what they can to empower the wilfully ignorant arses and helping to whitewash Trump's incoherent blithering by posting video of his public statements rather than publishing official transcripts. However they're being selective in which videos are released on the official White House website.

'White House purges transcripts of Trump's remarks from its website'

The White House has removed official transcripts of President Donald Trump’s public remarks from its government website, replacing them with selected videos of his public appearances.

As recently as Sunday, transcripts of Trump’s speeches and comments were still showing up in the “Remarks” section of WhiteHouse.gov. The next day, they were gone, snapshots of the site from an internet archive show. The only transcript appearing now is of Trump’s inaugural address on Jan. 20.

Government stenographers are still recording and transcribing Trump’s remarks, a White House official said. But in an internal policy change in recent days, the White House took down the transcripts in favor of audio and video of his appearances.

The idea behind the move is that people will get a fuller and more accurate sense of Trump by watching and listening to him as opposed to reading a transcript, which they may not be inclined to do anyway, the official said. Purging the transcripts and switching to audio and video of Trump's remarks was intended to create "consistency" across the website, the official said.

...

[Some] questioned the rationale the White House official put forward. The real motivation may be that Trump’s frequent digressions — which he calls “the weave” — can come off as gibberish in written form, critics said.

Perhaps the White House “didn’t want ‘the weave’ exposed,” said Mike McCurry, a press secretary in Bill Clinton’s White House.
The last presidential event that the White House transcribed and made public happened more than two months ago — an Oval Office meeting with NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte.

Though some videos of Trump's appearances are available on the White House's website, many are not.

The site shows 10 videos in April, including events with Ohio State University’s football team, the Los Angeles Dodgers baseball team, the Philadelphia Eagles football team and the Italian and Norwegian prime ministers.

Not shown are videos of more than two dozen events Trump participated in last month. Among them is an Oval Office meeting on April 14 with El Salvador President Nayib Bukele, who is accepting migrants deported from the United States and putting them in a maximum-security prison. In the meeting, Trump said he wanted Bukele to take in as many criminals “as possible.”

Also missing are videos of Trump's various interactions with the media. There is no record, for example, of a Q&A with reporters on April 17 covering issues involving a school shooting at Florida State University (“The gun doesn’t do the shooting; the people do,” he said) and Harvard University’s tax-exempt status (“I think Harvard is a disgrace. They’re obviously antisemitic.").

This month, the White House website has posted 11 videos of Trump’s appearances. That accounts for less than half of the Q&A sessions with the media and other events Trump has participated in so far.

The left-out events include a meeting with Canada’s new prime minister, Mark Carney, who batted down Trump’s interest in making Canada the 51st state.

“Canada won’t be for sale, ever,” Carney said.

Past White Houses routinely publicized the official transcripts of the president’s remarks. Indeed, in the first four months of Trump’s first term, the White House posted more than 100 transcripts of his remarks. By contrast, in Trump’s new term, his White House posted only 30 before they disappeared.

[JimC]

Is there some independent group that maintains transcripts of Trump's utterances?

[Brian Peacock]

I guess the media groups that stream the events or edit them for broadcast have a copy.

[pErvinalia]

I can see why they don't want transcripts. It really is gibberish.

[Tero]

When Trump speaks, the words soon after the word "I" are always gibberish.

[Tero]

Trump at 8 minutes. Reading teleprompter. Not quite Reagan level speaking.

https://youtu.be/FdjaYXxCKU4?si=OPjgSQO7oZbGXE6K
Hegseth is a tough cookie.
...rest in glory. Moment of crisis.
Lists of US battles. List of places around the world.
Altar of freedom.
22 minutes: rambling spot of the speech. Missed his second term. So he can do the parade at 250 years from soemthing to celebrate the birthday of Trump. God did that. God gave him the soccer world cup.
Heroic deeds come back: It defies comprehension what the dead dudes did.
Love, sacred soil, list of battles repeat. Torch of liberty. Gallantry! Revering leagacy! Making America greater. No mention of Greenland.