All Things Trump: The Return Of The King

[JimC]

I'm surprised some MAGA lunatic hasn't already tried to ban maths as a school subject! "We don't need no stinking' algebra!"

[pErvinalia]

Al-Gebra.... Muzzy propaganda!

[Tero]

I'm surprised some MAGA lunatic hasn't already tried to ban maths as a school subject! "We don't need no stinking' algebra!"

Can't have no Arabic math. Back to Roman numerals. Romans were Christians.

[Sean Hayden]

—of a sort

[Tero]

""Like a machine gun," is how Donald Trump, a 79-yo world leader, said of his 27-yo press secretary's lips. "The way they move," he added, before asking somewhat sheepishly if she were in the room.

Huh."
https://www.threads.com/@personality_of ... aTqjdmeVRw

[JimC]

Dirty Old Man syndrome...

[Svartalf]

What freaks me out is the fact that he blames Canada for trafficking fentanyl to the States, and justifies his tariffs on that. The US border agents have seized less than 59 pounds of fentanyl originating in Canada. That is less than 1% of the seizures.

honestly, either he's a bad liar, or totally crazy.
either way, he needs to be impeached.

[Sean Hayden]

When they’re not just lying they are trolling more than half the country.

[Tero]

"Confabulation isn’t misremembering a date or forgetting something. The mistakes of memory we are all subject to become confabulation when people remember false information in vivid detail — detail so vivid and complete that people who don’t know otherwise often believe what they are hearing is true.

In older people, confabulation is one of the clearest early signs of dementia. "
https://thehill.com/opinion/campaign/54 ... tia-signs/

[L'Emmerdeur]

I don't quote Thom Hartmann too often. Though I agree with his take on most things I'm not one to idolize pundits. This piece covers the twisted cruelty that is at the heart of the Trumpist project. Too much Jesus for my taste, but you can't have everything.

'The Cruelty Machine: Inside Trump’s America, Where Pain is Policy & Fear is the Fuel'

Early this month, ICE agents detained a 6‑year‑old Honduran boy battling leukemia as he left an immigration court in Los Angeles with his mother and sister.

A child fighting for his life was ripped from his fragile medical routine and locked away for over a month, interrupting his treatment, crying himself to sleep night after night in a concrete cell instead of a hospital bed.

This wasn’t a mistake. It was cruelty by design: an intentional act of terror by a government that now treats compassion as weakness and suffering as a political weapon.

...

When Donald Trump descended that golden escalator ten years ago and called Mexicans rapists and murderers, we should have known what was coming. What many mistook for bombast or political performance art in 2015 has since revealed itself to be something much darker: cruelty as a political strategy, an ideology, and a governing philosophy.

Here on the last day of July 2025, after six months of Trump’s second term and with a fully compliant GOP marching behind him, it’s undeniable: this is not incompetence or accidental malice. It is deliberate. Strategic. Authoritarianism.

Cruelty is not a bug in Trumpism; it is the central operating system. And it has become the organizing principle of today’s Republican Party as you can see from the glee with which Republican members of Congress strip rights and supports from vulnerable people, and rightwing media stars brag about ICE’s brutal tactics.

This administration’s cruelty isn’t just directed at migrants or protestors or the poor: it’s aimed at democracy itself.

When they normalize suffering, when they use state power to punish the vulnerable and reward the cruel, they erode everything that holds a pluralistic democracy together: the rule of law, institutional checks and balances, civic trust, and the belief at the foundation of every functional and successful society that, “We’re all in this together.”

For example, look at the “Big Beautiful Bill” that Trump, Majority Leader John Thune, and House Speaker Mike Johnson rammed through Congress last month with much fanfare and zero Democratic support.

They called it “patriotic” and “pro-growth.” In reality, it’s one of the most draconian pieces of legislation ever passed in modern American history. It strips healthcare from over 23 million Americans by gutting the ACA’s Medicaid expansion, throws up roadblocks to staying on Medicaid, and cuts subsidies to working families.

It raises taxes on middle- and lower-income households by removing credits and deductions that working people rely on, even as it slashes corporate, income, and estate taxes for the morbidly rich. It slashes funding for Medicaid, food stamps, school lunches, Pell Grants, Head Start, and housing assistance. It cuts Medicare and accelerates the GOP’s long-sought privatization of Medicare and Social Security.

And then it turns around and hands over $4 trillion in tax cuts to the very billionaires who fund Trump’s brutal machine.

Trump and the billionaire boys’ club who got him elected and are in his cabinet — including the same crew that reprogrammed their social media algorithms to favor the far right and suppress independent and progressive media — are now openly celebrating policies that will kill poor people. That isn’t hyperbole; it’s the core of their political project made possible by the corrupt Citizens United Supreme Court decision.

It’s a project built on fear, exclusion, and the weaponization of difference. What began with chants of “Build the Wall” has metastasized into a state-run deportation machine that operates like a fascist police force. ICE, now expanded and unaccountable, no longer just terrorizes undocumented immigrants; it raids sanctuary cities, surveils citizens who participate in protests, and detains people without charges in the name of “national security.”

...

Trump’s cruelty is designed not only to consolidate power but to distort our collective sense of right and wrong. For today’s Republicans, empathy is now considered weakness. Kindness is called “wokeness.” Helping your neighbor is labeled “socialism.”

...

Trump’s America today is in decline, but it’s not because we’ve become too compassionate. It’s because we’ve allowed the morbidly rich to hoard wealth, the powerful to dodge responsibility, and the cruel to dominate the public square.

[pErvinalia]

I feel like the American public isn't educated enough to get itself out of this.

[Brian Peacock]

The public everywhere get the bulk of their political education from political operators - the US simply moreso.

[Tero]

More pain: round up 1 million.
Trump wants to hire 10,000 new ICE agents, the equivalent of roughly 50 percent of the current total manpower of the agency, along with 3,000 new border patrol agents. And he wants to do it fast, the better to help reach Stephen Miller’s arbitrary and increasingly unrealistic goal of one million deportations in 2025.
https://www.thebulwark.com/p/the-worst- ... g-training

[Tero]

There are 2 million people in American prisons. Miller will round up 1 million, so by the end there will be 3. With 1 million waiting to go to El Salvador.