Do you feel like the winds of change are blowing today too? by 6ixStringJack

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Do you feel like the winds of change are blowing today too?

POSTED BY: 6IXSTRINGJACK
UPDATED: Tuesday, November 4, 2025 15:13
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Friday, October 31, 2025 10:32 AM

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Shut the fuck up

President for Life

Donald Trump is trying to amass the powers of a king.

By J. Michael Luttig | October 28, 2025

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2025/12/trump-third-term-
authoritarianism/684616/

In the normal course of history, the president of the United States is a figure who inspires optimism in the American people. The 47th president prefers to stir feelings of fear, vulnerability, hopelessness, and political inevitability—the sense that he, and only he, can rescue the nation from looming peril. Since his second inauguration, Donald Trump has seized authoritarian control over the federal government and demanded the obedience of the other powerful institutions of American society—universities, law firms, media companies. The question weighing heavily on the minds of many Americans is whether Trump will subvert next year’s midterm elections or the 2028 presidential election to extend his reign.

With his every word and deed, Trump has given Americans reason to believe that he will seek a third term, in defiance of the Constitution. It seems abundantly clear that he will hold on to the office at any cost, including America’s ruin.

The Founders of our nation foresaw a figure like Trump, a demagogue who would ascend to the presidency and refuse to relinquish power to a successor chosen by the American people in a free and fair election. Writing to James Madison from Paris in 1787, Thomas Jefferson warned that such an incumbent, if narrowly defeated, would “pretend false votes, foul play, hold possession of the reins of government.” Were that moment ever to come, the Founders believed, it would mark the demise of the nation that they had conceived, bringing to a calamitous end the greatest experiment in self-government ever attempted by man.

Trump proved in 2021 that he would do anything to remain in the White House. Even after the violence of January 6, his second impeachment, and the conviction and incarceration of scores of his followers, he reiterated his willingness to subvert the 2024 election. That proved unnecessary. Yet since his victory, Trump has again told the American people that he is prepared to do what it takes to remain in power, the Constitution be damned.

In March, Trump refused to rule out a third term, saying that he was “not joking” about the prospect and claiming that “there are methods which you could do it.” He was asked about the idea of Vice President J. D. Vance running for the presidency, getting elected, and then passing the baton back to him. “That’s one,” he said. “But there are others, too.” As he so often does, Trump later claimed that he wasn’t being serious. But also in March, Trump’s ally Steve Bannon said that he is “a firm believer that President Trump will run and win again in 2028,” adding that he and others are working on ways to do it, which would require circumventing the Twenty-Second Amendment. (Bannon later told The Economist: “Trump is gonna be president in ’28, and people just ought to get accommodated with that.” He added, “At the appropriate time, we’ll lay out what the plan is. But there’s a plan.”) In September, after meeting with congressional leaders about the looming government shutdown, Trump posted photographs on Truth Social in which Trump 2028 hats rested prominently on his Oval Office desk. In October, when discussing the possibility of a third term, Trump said, “I would love to do it. I have my best numbers ever.”

We Americans are by nature good people who believe in the inherent goodness of others, especially those we elect to represent us in the highest office in the land. But we ignore such statements and other expressions of Trump’s intent at our peril. The 47th president is a vain man, and nothing would flatter his vanity more than seizing another term. Doing so would signify the ultimate triumph over his political enemies.

I am not a Pollyanna, nor am I a Cassandra. I was at the forefront of the conservative legal movement that began in 1981 with the inauguration of Ronald Reagan. I have had the privilege of spending much of my career in public service, first in the Ford and Reagan White Houses; then in the Department of Justice; and, finally, appointed by George H. W. Bush, in the federal judiciary. I have never once in more than four decades believed that any president—Democrat or Republican—would intentionally violate the Constitution or a law of the United States. But Trump is different from all prior presidents in his utter contempt for the Constitution and America’s democracy.

The clearest evidence that Trump may subvert upcoming elections is that he tried to overturn the 2020 election. He shocked the nation and the world when he ordered then–Vice President Mike Pence not to certify the votes electing Joe Biden president, while claiming that the election had been stolen from him by his “radical left” enemies, whoever they are. When Pence refused to yield to Trump’s demand, Trump instigated the attack on the U.S. Capitol to prevent Congress from counting the votes and certifying Biden as his successor.

On January 6, Trump tweeted, “Mike Pence didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our Country and our Constitution,” further inflaming the crowd that had already breached the Capitol. Witnesses before the January 6 committee testified that Trump expressed support for hanging Pence while the attack was under way. Trump was prosecuted by the United States for having committed the gravest crime that a president can commit: attempting to remain in the presidency after losing an election and thereby obstructing the peaceful transfer of power. Yet he continues to deny that he lost the election. He describes January 6 as a glorious day in American history, not one of its darkest.

Among his first acts after being sworn in again was pardoning or commuting the sentences of every person convicted in connection with January 6. He then set about exacting revenge on the American justice system. He summarily fired dozens of government officials who had tried to hold him accountable for the attack on the Capitol, as well as for his other alleged criminal offenses of removing classified documents from the White House upon his departure, secreting them to Mar-a-Lago, and obstructing the government’s efforts to find and retrieve the documents. He has since replaced those fired officials with loyalists—sycophants committed to him, not to our democracy or the rule of law.

Today, Trump has vastly greater powers than he did in 2020. He has a willing vice president to preside over the joint session of Congress that will certify (or not) the next election, a second in command who refuses to admit that his boss lost the 2020 election. (Vance has said that he would not have certified the results without asking states such as Pennsylvania and Georgia to submit new slates of electors, a solution he invented to a problem that does not exist—there is no evidence of widespread fraud in those states or any state in 2020.) Trump’s party controls both houses of Congress, and he will surely do everything he can to maintain those majorities. The Supreme Court, meanwhile, has paved the way for a third Trump term, as it did for his current term, by essentially granting him absolute immunity from criminal prosecution for any crimes he might commit in violation of the Constitution or the laws of the United States.

For anyone who doubts that Trump is contemplating a monarchical reign, consider how very far down that road he already is. Since returning to office, he has sought absolute power, unchecked by the other branches of government, the 50 states, or the free press.

On the first day of his current term, he launched a direct attack on the Constitution’s Fourteenth Amendment guarantee of birthright citizenship when he issued an executive order contradicting the clear language of the amendment, federal statute, and Supreme Court precedent.

He has arrogated to himself Congress’s power to levy tariffs, declaring that previous foreign-trade and economic practices had created a national emergency justifying his unilateral imposition of sweeping global tariffs. When Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell predicted that Trump’s unlawful tariffs would cause “higher inflation and slower growth,” Trump wrote on Truth Social that “Powell’s termination cannot come fast enough!” Later, he fired Fed Governor Lisa Cook, purportedly “for cause.” The Supreme Court has temporarily blocked Cook’s firing, but it won’t decide until next year whether Trump has the power to fire a member of the independent Federal Reserve. A ruling in Trump’s favor would give him absolute control over the central bank and thus over the monetary policy of the United States.

He has usurped Congress’s spending and appropriation powers by attempting to impound billions of dollars that Congress designated for specific purposes, including for public broadcasting, for Voice of America, and for desperately needed U.S. aid to starving and disease-stricken populations around the world.

He has likewise usurped Congress’s power to establish executive-branch departments and agencies, fund their operations, and provide civil-service protections to federal-government employees, unilaterally overhauling the U.S. government. He has hollowed out the Department of Education, effectively abolishing it. He has dismantled the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau and asserted executive control over the independent Federal Election Commission and Federal Trade Commission, and fired thousands of federal employees without reasonable cause or explanation—all while Congress has stood by silently.

The Supreme Court, too, has largely given the president its imprimatur to continue his power grab. It has either effectively reversed lower-court rulings against the president using the so-called shadow docket, or allowed the administration to proceed until the Court determines the constitutionality of various actions, by which time the damage to the Constitution, the U.S. government, and American society will have been done, as the justices well know. When the Court has ruled against Trump—for example, forbidding him from deporting undocumented immigrants without due process—he has provoked a constitutional crisis by ignoring the order.

The Founders built layers of safeguards into the American system of government to constrain a president, not just the checks and balances by the branches of the federal government. But Trump has run roughshod over these fail-safes, too. In violation of the sovereign rights reserved for them by the Constitution, Trump has commanded state officials to aid him in his purge of undocumented immigrants.

The president has also taken military command of cities across the country—over the vehement objection of the states. When a federal judge held that Trump’s military occupation of Portland, Oregon, was unlawful, he circumvented her orders and trashed the judge—whom he appointed—for her ruling, saying that she should be “ashamed” of herself.

Given that Trump has for years pronounced the free press in America “the enemy of the people,” it came as no surprise when media companies were among the first Trump targeted with unconstitutional edicts. In return for his favor, many of the country’s major media institutions have surrendered to him.

Though he claims to be a great friend of free enterprise, Trump has asserted dominion over the economy and insinuated his administration into American capitalism so that our great businesses are dependent on and subject to the government, as they are in communist and socialist nations.

He has extorted the nation’s legal profession, forcing law firms to betray their clients and the law in order to secure his favor. He has bludgeoned the nation’s colleges and universities with lawless order after lawless order. The federal government cannot tell universities how to conduct their affairs or dictate the viewpoints that professors teach. The First Amendment zealously guards such decisions, and the Constitution categorically forbids the president from wielding Congress’s power of the purse to punish these institutions.

Trump has turned the federal government against the American people, transforming the nation’s institutions into instruments for his vengeful execution of the law against honorable citizens for perceived personal and political offenses. He has silenced dissent by persecuting and threatening to prosecute American citizens for speaking critically of him, and he has divided us, turning us against one another so that we cannot oppose him.

Trump has always told us exactly who he is. We have just not wanted to believe him. But we must believe him now.

This is the man who said in January 2016, “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters, okay? It’s, like, incredible.”

The man who proposed in 2022 that the “Massive Fraud” he alleged in the 2020 election “allows for the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution,” and who proclaimed, soon after reassuming office, “He who saves his Country does not violate any Law.”

The man who, when asked the question “Don’t you need to uphold the Constitution of the United States as president?,” answered, “I don’t know.” And the man who, when asked whether every person in the United States is entitled to due process, replied, “I don’t know.”

The man who said in August that he can “do anything I want to do,” because he’s president.

The man who has demanded that his attorney general and Department of Justice immediately prosecute his enemies: “We can’t delay any longer, it’s killing our reputation and credibility. They impeached me twice, and indicted me (5 times!), OVER NOTHING. JUSTICE MUST BE SERVED, NOW!!!”

And the man who summoned American military generals from around the world to Quantico, Virginia, to tell them that “America is under invasion from within,” repeatedly describing that enemy invasion as being by the “radical left,” a term he now seemingly uses to characterize all of his political opponents. He also said at this meeting, “We should use some of these dangerous cities as training grounds for our military” for fighting the “war from within.”

Donald Trump is clearly willing to subvert an election in order to hold on to the power he so craves, and he is now fully enabled to undermine national elections. No one can prevent him from remaining president of the United States for a constitutionally prohibited third term—except the American people, in whom ultimate power resides under the Constitution of the United States.

On July 4, 1776, nearly 250 years ago, America freed itself forever from the oppression of tyrannical rule by monarchs. There was never to be a king in the United States of America. Never again were the liberties and freedoms of Americans to be subject to the whims of a monarch. From that day, Thomas Paine wrote, “so far as we approve of monarchy, that in America the law is king. For as in absolute governments the King is law, so in free countries the law ought to be King; and there ought to be no other.”

The nation has survived great challenges and calamities, including the Civil War. Now it is being tested again. Once more, we must ask, as Lincoln did, whether a nation so “conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal,” can long endure.

If America is to long endure, we must summon our courage, our fearlessness, our hope, our spirited sense of invulnerability to political enthrall, and, most important, our abiding faith in the divine providence of this nation. We have been given the high charge of our forebears to “keep” the republic they founded a quarter of a millennium ago. If we do not keep it now, we will surely lose it.

This article appears in the December 2025 print edition with the headline “President for Life.”

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Friday, October 31, 2025 1:05 PM

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The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

The Trump Outrages That Matter Most

Razing the East Wing? Breaking Congress? An unscientific survey of the President's most disruptive, significant, and truly surprising moves.

By Susan B. Glasser | October 30, 2025

https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-trumps-washington/the-trump
-outrages-that-matter-most

In the past few days, as President Trump neared the three-hundred-day mark of his second term, he made what amounted to a royal progress through Asia, negotiating trade deals and basking in gilded palaces. In South Korea, he was presented with a replica of an ancient golden crown. “I’d like to wear it right now,” he said, only eleven days after millions of Americans had gathered to protest his assumption of near-monarchical powers, in hundreds of No Kings rallies around the country. The South Koreans sure knew their mark. During the trip, Trump also announced, via a social-media post, the resumption of nuclear tests for the first time in decades; unleashed another deadly strike on an alleged drug-running boat in what appears to be an undeclared war for regime change in Venezuela; threatened, during a political pep rally in front of the supposedly apolitical U.S. military, to send active-duty troops to American cities; and admitted that he “would love” to remain in office for a third term before reluctantly acknowledging the Constitution’s strict ban on it.

Back in Washington, meanwhile, the U.S. government remained shut down for a fourth straight week, the result of an impasse with congressional Democrats that Trump has seemingly done nothing to resolve—even as thousands of workers go without pay. It was, in other words, just another week in the Trump era. The new normal is forgetting yesterday’s scandals in order to make room in our overcrowded brains for tomorrow’s. Remember when Trump imposed punitive new tariffs on Canada because he got mad about a television ad? When he demanded that the Justice Department pay him more than two hundred million dollars in compensation for the costs he incurred from the Biden Administration’s decision to investigate him? When he circulated an A.I.-generated video of himself dumping poop on Americans protesting him? That was so last week. And last week, in the Trump era, might as well have been an eternity ago. The black hole in which our previous outrage resides is vast.

Which is why I was struck by the visceral and lasting anger that has resulted from Trump’s decision to raze the East Wing of the White House without so much as a single public hearing or permit. A very senior Republican, a repeat Trump voter, told me that it was “disgusting” and “sick.” Polls show that large bipartisan majorities oppose the demolition. It’s been more than a week and people are still stewing about it. Has something finally broken through? Is that even possible anymore?

At a dinner I attended earlier this week, a query about what the worst thing was that had happened since Trump’s return to the White House prompted a chilling array of answers—only one of which was the tearing down of the East Wing. (Can you imagine if a Prime Minister of the United Kingdom just woke up one morning and ordered the smashing of a wing of Buckingham Palace, someone said.) It was the range of responses that seemed most telling to me—from Trump’s politicization of the military and the Justice Department to the unleashing of a new MAGA culture celebrating cruelty.

I decided to continue the conversation, asking a few dozen smart folks to send me their thoughts about the most disruptive, significant, or truly surprising events of these past few months. Answers poured in—thoughtful, anguished, perceptive answers that reminded me that there is value in naming the problem, even if nothing, for the moment, can be done to stop it. It is a response, if an imperfect one, to the sense of being overwhelmed by events to take a minute to pause and assess them, to think about what really matters and what might last from the jarring, undeniably historic moment through which we are living.

Some of my correspondents offered long lists of shocking events. Gary Bass, a professor of world politics at Princeton, listed seventeen examples “off the top of my head,” ranging from “pardoning the Jan. 6 insurrectionists” to “working to rig elections so that this nightmare never ends.” Others focussed on a telling individual moment. Jake Sullivan, who served as national-security adviser in the Biden Administration, said that it was the early capitulation of the law firm Paul, Weiss to Trump’s demands that set off “alarm bells.” It was, he added, the “canary in the coal mine.” Jill Lepore, a New Yorker colleague who is the Kemper Professor of American History at Harvard, and a law professor at Harvard Law, wrote that she was “genuinely surprised when, asked if it was his duty to uphold the Constitution, he said, ‘I don’t know.’ Just a surprising thing to say, given that the oath he’d taken, twice, is to ‘preserve, protect and defend the Constitution.’ ” She noted, “It seems a small thing, in a way, but I was struck by the glimmer of honesty here, a sort of shrug that seemed to say, ‘Eh, nah, who knows.’ ”

Several people mentioned the extraordinary command performance of senior military officers at Quantico, where Trump and his self-styled Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth, lectured them on the need to battle “the enemy from within”—and, Hegseth added, to do more pushups. “When addressing the generals from around the world he summoned to Quantico, he politicized the U.S. military in a single hour of American history,” J. Michael Luttig, a conservative former appeals-court judge who has emerged as one of Trump’s most visible critics, wrote, “trashing our former Presidents and the ‘radical-left lunatics’ of the Democratic Party and announcing that, on his orders as Commander-in-Chief, the United States military will henceforth use America’s liberal cities as ‘training grounds’ for fighting the war against his political opposition, whom he called the ‘enemy from within.’ ”

Michael Kazin, a historian at Georgetown, was struck by the singular ambition of what Trump is attempting in his second term. “The most disruptive thing he’s done is also the most significant: Trump has set out to reverse some of the most prominent cultural and political gains that liberals and progressive movements achieved from the nineteen-sixties on: affirmative action, the legitimacy of public workers’ unions, an openness to immigrants from all over the world,” Kazin wrote. “The effort shows that Trump is the most radical and, if he mostly succeeds, will be seen as the most consequential president of the twenty-first century and perhaps the most consequential political figure in the world.” The only problem with Kazin’s extensive catalogue, which included several more examples, might simply be that it was too limited; others, such as the former Council on Foreign Relations president Richard Haass, added a long list of global disruptions, as well.

Taken together, the answers provided a sort of battle-damage assessment of the current moment, the kind undertaken while everyone is still patting themselves to figure out which parts survived the explosion intact. Nearly every respondent nodded to the larger themes that shadow us in the Trump Presidency: the politicization of previously nonpolitical institutions; the sweeping assertions of executive power to justify acts of overreach or outright lawlessness; the reorientation of America’s national-security doctrine away from confrontation with great-power adversaries such as Russia and China in favor of confrontation against “the enemy from within”; the “gobsmacking” self-enrichment of Trump and his family, as they leverage the power of the Presidency in service of their private interests; and the caving of those who could have stood up to Trump but chose not to—from Congress to the Supreme Court to various leaders of civil society.

This last item, I think, has been most stunning for many. Trump, after all, is a known quantity by now. It is as a mirror for the rest of America that he continues to amaze and stun us. “The most surprising—and it shouldn’t have been—was how well intimidation works,” said Miles Taylor, the former Department of Homeland Security official who wrote an anonymous op-ed from inside Trump’s first term, and who has been targeted for investigation by the President in his second term. “Entire sectors of society that stood up to Trump in his first term have been crumpled up and tossed like tissue paper, offering feeble resistance to his power grab and revenge campaign. We were unprepared for it. And it shows.”

That is what gets me, too. So many individual decisions have gone into the making of our American monarch. I suppose there’s a perfectly rational reason for South Korea’s President to give Trump a golden crown, and for the leaders of Apple and Amazon and other companies whose services we use every day to contribute millions of dollars to knock down the East Wing of the White House. Republicans in Congress, who have failed to perform their constitutional duty and stand up for their branch of government, may justify their inaction as the price they have to pay to hang on to their positions in a Party whose electorate will not tolerate anyone who defies its leader. Hence, the debacle of 2025: what looks rational for an individual has produced decisions of collective madness. I’ll leave the final word to a college friend, Robbie Baxter, a strategic business consultant and author in Silicon Valley. “I am most astounded,” she wrote, “by the fact that no one is really stopping him.”

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Friday, October 31, 2025 1:12 PM

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The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

The president spoke to reporters on Air Force One while en route to Florida for the weekend. His administration has recently conducted a series of strikes on boats. The strikes have killed 61 people, instead of arresting them.

https://www.newsweek.com/venezuela-strikes-donald-trump-us-military-at
tack-maduro-10973127

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Friday, October 31, 2025 3:09 PM

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The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

The GOP’s top think tank just defended an open Nazi

Reasonable people can disagree about whether Hitler was good, says the Heritage Foundation. Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts said this about podcaster and antisemitic Nick Fuentes: “Canceling him is not the answer.”

By Zack Beauchamp | Oct 31, 2025, 12:50 PM CDT

https://www.vox.com/politics/466905/the-gops-top-think-tank-just-defen
ded-an-open-nazi

On Thursday night, the president of the Heritage Foundation — the MAGA right’s leading think tank — welcomed an open Nazi into his political coalition.

You might think I am exaggerating. I assure you I am not. The Nazi in question here, podcaster Nick Fuentes, has described Adolf Hitler as “really fucking cool” and said “perfidious Jews” must “be given the death penalty” after “we take power.”
https://www.texastribune.org/2023/10/10/nick-fuentes-texas-meeting/
https://x.com/karol/status/1984244275899728379

And on Thursday, Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts released a video defending this person’s inclusion in polite-right politics: describing Fuentes not as a hate-monger to be banished from the decent right, but as a coalition member whose view of Jews-as-evil-traitors should be politely debated.

“The American people expect us to be focusing on our political adversaries on the left, not attacking our friends on the right,” Roberts said. “I disagree with, and even abhor, things that Nick Fuentes says. But canceling him is not the answer.”

This is an epochal moment for American conservatism. In the past, the movement felt the need to hide bigotries — including antisemitism — behind a thin veil of plausible deniability. But with Fuentes, there’s no hidden message: He just says, over and over again, that Jews are evil and the source of America’s biggest problems. If someone like him can be considered one of Roberts’s “friends on the right,” then the movement’s leadership is now conceding that overt antisemitism is a legitimate political position in the MAGA movement.

Now, prominent conservative figures — like the writers Erick Erickson and Rod Dreher — are aghast, raging against Fuentes’ newfound acceptability. The criticism is getting quite heated.

“The question is not whether one may criticize Israel. It is whether open antisemitism and racism are acceptable in conservative politics,” writes Mike Doran, a leading conservative voice on Middle East policy. “A movement that can’t recognize and reject blatant antisemitism has no moral core and no future.”

Earlier this week, I suggested the GOP might be in the opening stages of a civil war over the status of Jews in American life. I’m now convinced that it is. And the stakes couldn’t be higher.

How we got here: Tucker Carlson

To understand what’s happening right now, you need to understand the man who served as the bridge between Fuentes and Roberts: Tucker Carlson.

Carlson and Fuentes had, as recently as August, openly hated each other (Carlson memorably called Fuentes a “weird little gay kid”). But, increasingly, they’ve come to be two sides of the same coin. While Fuentes is openly and violently antisemitic, Carlson has mainstreamed similar ideas more subtly — by, for example, implying the Jews killed Jesus during Charlie Kirk’s memorial and elevating revisionist “histories” of World War II in which the real bad guy was not Adolf Hitler but rather Winston Churchill.

Earlier this week, they buried the hatchet: Carlson released a fawning interview with Fuentes that serves, in large part, to make the extremist look far more reasonable than he sounds on his own show. There was no open support for Hitler, though Fuentes did (to Carlson’s chagrin) manage to say something nice about another mass-murdering antisemite: Joseph Stalin.

The sit-down was, in many respects, a kind of concession on Carlson’s part: Though he once attempted to push Fuentes aside, it seems he has since he realized he didn’t have the muscle to do so. Fuentes’ supporters, called “groypers,” had come to make up a huge percentage of the GOP youth cadres. In his post on the Carlson-Fuentes meetup, for example, Dreher cited a rough estimate from “a big player in conservative politics” that “30 to 40 percent of the Republican staff in Washington under the age of 30 are Groypers.”

These people make up a core audience that Carlson couldn’t afford to alienate; their existence explains why he and fellow podcaster Candace Owens have been leaning so hard into antisemitism in recent broadcasts. The young conservatives who watch online shows and streamers like this stuff, and they’re more than willing to pay for it.

But Carlson is more than just part of the online right’s ecosystem: He is one of the MAGA right’s most influential voices, bar none. He spoke in prime time at the 2024 Republican National Convention and, by all accounts, played a major role in the elevation of JD Vance to the vice presidency. Once he platformed Fuentes, it blessed the “weird little gay kid” outside of the internet fever swamps: making it okay for leading Trump-aligned figures to openly court Fuentes and his groyper hordes.

Carlson’s decision to do this met with real resistance: Both National Review magazine and Sen. Ted Cruz lit into him over it.

“If you sit there with someone who says Adolf Hitler was very very cool, and that their mission is to combat and defeat global Jewry, and you say nothing — then you are a coward and complicit in that evil,” Cruz said.

Enter: The Heritage Foundation

This is the absolutely critical context for Roberts’ ultimate intervention. His primary goal in the video was not defending Fuentes per se; it was defending Carlson against these post-Fuentes attacks.

“We will always defend our friends against the slander of bad actors who serve someone else’s agenda,” Roberts said. “That includes Tucker Carlson — who remains, and as I’ve said before, always will be a close friend of the Heritage Foundation. The venomous coalition attacking him are sowing division. Their attempt to cancel him will fail.”

Roberts’s video shows why Carlson’s friendly sit-down with Fuentes was so important — ”one of the most dangerous videos ever in MAGA media,” as The Bulwark’s veteran right-watcher Will Sommer puts it.
https://www.thebulwark.com/p/one-of-the-most-dangerous-interviews-ever
-maga-media-tucker-carlson-nick-fuentes

When Carlson decided to back Fuentes, he put his own reputation on the line as well. The inevitable attacks on Carlson personally from people like Cruz activated Carlson’s allies in mainstream MAGA world, like Roberts, to defend him.

And there was no way to do that without, implicitly or explicitly, saying that it’s okay to let people like Fuentes into the right’s broader tent.

Thus, Carlson’s choice to sit down with Fuentes had a very real and direct effect: leading the right’s top think tank to admit a Hitler worshipper as a legitimate discussion partner. Fuentes is now, in a very real sense, mainstream himself.

Conservatives need some cancel culture

Now, the Fuentes-Carlson-Roberts axis is waking up Trump-aligned conservatives to the rot in their movement. People like Dreher, a postliberal writer who moved to Hungary in large because he admires Viktor Orbán’s authoritarian-right regime, are calling for a purge. As Dreher writes:

“I simply cannot understand the logic behind treating Fuentes as a normal political actor — even if he has a relatively big following. He is a deeply bad man, with no redeeming qualities. If his mode of discourse, and beliefs, become part of the mainstream of conservatism, we’re done, and we will deserve it. A line must be drawn between us and the likes of Fuentes…because they cannot be reasoned with, don’t want to reason with anybody, and are driven by nothing but the pleasure of hating and transgressing. They will poison anything they touch.”

I wish them well in this quest: Truly, I do. Fuentes is every bit as awful as Dreher says; it is paramount for the safety of my community (American Jews) that people like him succeed in booting Fuentes from the coalition.

But I also wish they would engage in a little self-reflection. Because without it, their quest might be doomed to fail.

The dominant strain of right-wing punditry has been preoccupied with the overwhelming dangers of “cancel culture” and “wokeness” — Dreher published an entire book labeling it “soft totalitarianism.” In doing so, they defended and apologized for bigotry coming from people like Trump and Carlson when they railed against the evils of mass migration, Islam, and urban crime.

In doing so, they elevated anti-anti-bigotry into a kind of defining ideological principle: that accusations of bigotry, and not bigotry itself, is the real problem. The popularity of this attitude makes it exceptionally difficult for the right to police its own; any attempt at saying “this far, and no farther” is met with accusations of wokeness and cancellation.

“It’s not even ‘no guardrails’ — it’s policing to make sure there aren’t guardrails,” as Richard Hanania, an influential writer on the right (and himself a former white nationalist forum poster), put it to me in a recent interview

This is the “no enemies on the right” logic that allowed Vance to dismiss the pro-Hitler texts among New York Young Republicans — and was explicitly deployed by Kevin Roberts in his dual defense of Carlson and Fuentes.

As long as it holds sway in the minds of most Republicans — as long as they believe that the very idea of enforcing standards is the greatest form of political perfidy — it will pose a massive barrier to any kind of effort to excise Fuentes, let alone Carlson, from the coalition.

People like Roberts will be there to defend them, using the language that Republicans have used to excuse every single awful thing Trump and others in his tent have been saying about minorities for years. And it’ll work.

“I’m afraid the campus speech debates of the 2010s dulled the discernment of many conservatives,” Giancarlo Sopo, a former Trump campaign adviser on Hispanic outreach, posted on X. “However depraved the sentiment, criticism becomes taboo, and ostracism unthinkable, so long as one gestures vaguely toward ‘the right.’”

So the current struggle within the right does not just require open confrontation with Fuentes. It requires some soul-searching about what the more mainstream right did to open the door for him.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Friday, October 31, 2025 4:17 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK

Shut the fuck up.

--------------------------------------------------

For all that I've blessed, and all that I've wronged. In dreams until my death, I will wander on.

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Monday, November 3, 2025 4:06 PM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Shut the fuck up.

America, the Juvenile

By Tom Nichols | November 3, 2025, 10:37 AM ET

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2025/11/trump-maga-insults-t
rolling/684786/

In 1949, the German historian and political philosopher Hannah Arendt visited Europe for the first time since fleeing to America during the war. A year later, she wrote an analysis of what she called “the aftermath of Nazi rule.” She found the Old World lacking in civic maturity and commitment compared with her new home, the then-booming United States, noting that “the peoples of Western Europe have developed the habit of blaming their misfortunes on some force out of their reach.” She believed that her adopted country, by comparison, enjoyed a kind of clarity of public vision: “With the possible exception of the Scandinavians,” she wrote, “no European citizenry has the political maturity of Americans, for whom a certain amount of responsibility, i.e., of moderation in the pursuit of self-interest, is almost a matter of course.” Arendt wasn’t celebrating a perfect America; rather, she was lauding a people who approached political life with an adult sensibility and a reserve of self-control.

Arendt, and any judicious observer, could not make the same assessment of America today.

The United States is now a nation run by public servants who behave no better than internet trolls, deflecting criticism with crassness and obscenity. The White House press secretary answers a question from a member of the free press—a serious question about who planned a meeting between the American and Russian presidents—by saying, “Your mom did.” The secretary of defense cancels DEI and other policies by saying, “We are done with that shit.” The vice president calls an interlocutor on social media a “dipshit.” The president of the United States himself, during mass protests against his policies, responds by posting an AI-generated video of himself flying a jet fighter over his fellow citizens and dumping feces on their heads.

These are not the actions of mature adults. They are examples of crude people displaying their incompetence as they flail about in jobs—including the presidency—for which they are not qualified.

The republic will not fall because Vice President J. D. Vance has decided that swearing is edgy, and the juvenility of American public life did not begin with the Trump administration. But the larger danger under all of this nastiness is that President Donald Trump and his courtiers are using crass deflection and gleeful immaturity as means of numbing society and wearing down its resistance to all kinds of depredations, including corruption and violence. When the U.S. military kills people at sea and Vance, responding to a charge that such actions might be war crimes, responds, “I don’t give a shit what you call it,” the goal is not just to boost Vance’s hairy-chest cred; it’s also to grind others down into accepting the idea of extrajudicial executions.

The collapse of a superpower into a regime of bullies and mean girls and comic-book guys explains much about why American democracy is on the ropes, reeling from the attacks of people who in a better time would never have been allowed near the government of the United States.

For years, Trump has attracted acolytes by being the patron saint of the third string, gathering people who seem to feel, for various reasons, that they were iced out of national politics. Some hold opinions too extreme for any but a Trump administration. Stephen Miller’s odious views, including his echoing of Adolf Hitler’s rhetoric and his accusation that the president’s critics are terrorists, would make him a liability not just in any other administration but even at a family dinner, as remarks from some of his own relatives have suggested.

Other Trump appointees, however, have used personal loyalty as the bridge across the chasm that separates their lack of ability from the jobs they occupy. The experiences of prior Trump appointees suggest that many of the current crew know they are in over their head, which could explain much about their churlish and unprofessional behavior.

Consider the candid admissions of Stephanie Grisham, a press secretary in Trump’s first term who later walked away from Trump. In 2021, she explained to New York magazine why she took the job in the first place.

For people like me—and I’m not proud of this—you have a sick sense of pride. All the people who told you how terrible he was? You’re like, Oh? He’s the nominee, buddy! I’m not proud of that. And then he wins, and you get into the White House, and you’re in the White House.

To be fair, many reasonable people have the same kind of awestruck moment when they arrive in Washington. (I certainly felt overwhelmed many years ago when I showed up for my first day of work in the Senate.) But Grisham admits to a deeper insecurity: “I thought that they”—the Trump team—“were the only ones who would ever get me there. My lack of confidence in myself as a single mother and someone who has made mistakes in my past, I thought, Well, this is my only shot. Nobody’s gonna ever want me, really, but these people did. So I’ll stick around.”

This kind of private insecurity can manifest in public life as childishness and trollishness. Or maybe such behavior is simply a reflection of the man at the top. Like all schoolyard bullies, Trump is crude and surrounds himself with people who will not challenge him. Thus his appointees, instead of rising to their responsibilities as public servants, emulate their boss’s shallow swagger. Instead of advising the president, they seek to placate him. Instead of showing leadership, they replace their own dignity with loyalty to Trump and do whatever it takes to stay out of the Eye of Sauron.

Whatever the reason for their immaturity, the effect is miserable policy and a corroded democracy. The public is poorly served and does not get answers to important questions. Tariffs? Inflation? Immigration? Peace or war? Who’s responsible for these choices?

Your mother, apparently.

The corruption, mendacity, and incompetence of those in charge are perhaps less astonishing than the willingness of Trump’s most loyal supporters to tolerate them all. By now, any other president would have been restrained by Congress or, as happened in 2020, by voters. In Trump’s second term, however, his base seems almost eager to forgive him for anything, with the possible exception of his involvement with the deceased sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

But Trump’s popular support (which is probably firmest in the range of some 35 to 40 percent of the U.S. population but much higher within the GOP) is not as much a mystery as it might appear. Americans of all political leanings have been poisoned for years by memes and disinformation. They have marinated in the nihilism of a culture that regards everything with a kind of post-ironic glib dismissal. (As usual, The Simpsons was ahead of its time: A 1996 episode shows two teens at a music festival, where one asks the other, “Are you being sarcastic, dude?” The other, crestfallen, says: “I don’t even know anymore.”)

Perhaps Trump’s voters have become like the members of the administration, delighting in the crassness and obscenity that pours out of the president and his circle whenever they are challenged. The White House’s approach to social media in particular, as my colleague Ali Breland wrote recently, “now resembles the polemical, trolling, vicious manner of posting” pioneered by white supremacists such as Nick Fuentes and his fans, who have become more visible participants in the MAGA movement during Trump’s second term.

Friedrich Nietzsche created a concept that can help us understand this political moment. He imported a word from French to describe a kind of deep-seated anger that goes beyond transitory gripes: ressentiment, a feeling that comes from a combination of insecurity, an amorphous envy, and a generalized sense of resentment. Citizens engulfed by this emotion want to bring others down to what they think is their own underappreciated station and identify scapegoats to bear the blame for their misfortunes, real or imagined. They are driven by grievance and a continual, unfocused sense of injury. Accordingly, they see politics as a way to get even with almost everyone outside of their immediate circle. A Trump voter put out of work during the 2019 government shutdown captured this mentality when she exclaimed: “He’s not hurting the people he needs to be hurting.”

Sociologists and political scientists have long been aware of the effects of ressentiment on entire nations, not least because it is often a red flag: a marker of a society ripe for decay into authoritarianism. And that is where the danger lies in the juvenility and coarseness among both the Trump elite and its most loyal supporters, some of whom treat grave issues of national and even global importance as little more than raw material for mean-spirited jokes and obscene memes. This shallow behavior leads to a deadening of the moral and civic spirit that undergirds democracy.

People who are willing to accept “your mom” as an answer to important questions are people who have already decided that democracy is a rigged game. The political process, for many of them, doesn’t seem to be a means for solving common problems and developing solid policies. Instead, they treat it as just another opportunity to excoriate their fellow citizens. They may support candidates such as Trump (and the late Silvio Berlusconi in Italy, and the now-imprisoned former leaders Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines and Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil) not because they expect responsible government, but because such candidates promise to hurt the right people—to humiliate them, impoverish them, and perhaps even shoot them.

What can other American citizens do when faced with a government that offers trolling and obscenity as replacements for governing? How do people who care about democracy and the rule of law deal with fellow voters who keep electing a class of public officials who seem to be all id and no superego?

Perhaps most important, other Americans should model the behavior they hope to foster in their friends and neighbors. Populist ressentiment is not necessarily produced by inequality. It’s driven by a perception of inequality, a sense of being looked down on by others. It is a demand for attention and emotional engagement. But trying to answer that demand is a fool’s errand: On social media, for example, some of Trump’s voters seem especially enraged not by arguments but by indifference. The whole point of their trolling is to gain attention and then intimidate others.

Both online and in daily life, Americans who are part of the pro-democracy coalition should resist such invitations. Responsible citizens must hold themselves to a higher standard than officials who are acting like grade-schoolers. The national figures, from Trump on down, who put out rancid bait may do so because they want others to argue and lower themselves, and thus prove that no one holds the moral high ground. (Perhaps this is why Trump and so many of his supporters resort to whataboutism when confronted with their behavior.) When these leaders and their followers swear or behave rudely, they may hope and expect that others will do likewise.

As tempting as it is to trade punches to the groin, the better approach is to model mature behavior and demand it in return from people being paid to serve the public. When the White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt answered the journalist S. V. Dáte’s text-message question about who chose the location of a possible U.S.-Russia summit with “Your mom did,” Dáte texted back: “Is this funny to you?” Leavitt then went full Regina George, calling him a “far left hack” and refusing to answer his “bullshit questions.” Leavitt later posted the exchange on X, where Dáte responded: “Feel better now? Now can you answer the question? Please and thank you.” That’s the only way to go: Ask the question, and then ask it again, and keep asking.

This is not Michelle Obama’s “When they go low, we go high” argument. (Even she seems to have abandoned that strategy.) Rather, it is a recognition—and a plea—that the voters and candidates who wish to replace this current government must present themselves as stable, responsible, and adult alternatives to a claque of trolls and incompetents. (Even California Governor Gavin Newsom’s troll-back of the president, as clever as it was, has run its course.) The right answer now to the faux-macho silliness of someone such as Pete Hegseth is not to produce clever memes and nicknames for the secretary of defense; it is to remind people that Hegseth is acting like a teenager and trying to distract Americans with idiotic slurs about fat soldiers because Pete Hegseth is terrible at his job.

Like most things that require some adulting, this approach is emotionally unsatisfying. And it may not gain much ground if enough Americans have decided that they are satisfied with poop jokes as public policy. The “No Kings” protests, however, are an example of how people can mobilize to mock ridiculous behavior (and do so festively, even) without the mayhem that Trump and his lieutenants seemed to hope would arise.

In addition to marching, Americans who care about democracy must organize and vote in every election, no matter how small or local. And in their personal lives, people who want to restore maturity to national government must be clear with those around them, even if it means risking their personal relationships, that some things, such as glib schoolyard taunts and scatological nonsense from the commander in chief, are not acceptable.

Americans have learned that guardrails are easily destroyed. Restoring them will take time—because they have to be repaired by each of us, one person at a time, making small but important decisions about how we want to live.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Monday, November 3, 2025 4:31 PM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

We’re Number Two!
How Trump ceded the future to China

By Paul Krugman | Nov 03, 2025

https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/were-number-two

Does Donald Trump realize that he has ceded world leadership to China? Probably not: During his recent Asian trip, foreign leaders flattered him and showered him with personal gifts, so he came home with his ego even more inflated than usual. Nobody close to him would dare tell him that if you look at the substance of what he agreed to, it amounted to an ignominious retreat. When Chuck Schumer pointed out the reality of what Trump didn’t accomplish, his reaction was hysterical:

Donald J. Trump @realDonaldTrump
Worked really hard, 24/7, took in Trillions of Dollars, and Chuck Schumer said trip was "a total dud," even though he knows it was a spectacular success. Words like that are almost treasonous!!!
Oct 30, 2025, 3:46 AM
https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/posts/115462006949579771

The whole world knows what Trump’s sycophants won’t tell him: His confrontation with China has ended up demonstrating Chinese strength and American weakness.

Much more at https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/were-number-two

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Monday, November 3, 2025 4:40 PM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Shut the fuck up.

Trump did not just change his mind about crypto, but became a leading crypto entrepreneur right in the heart of the campaign season. That was something totally different. He not only took all this money and policy advice from that industry, but also decided to go into business with them.

Krugman: Campaign finance is one thing and that’s huge. The role of crypto as the dominant corporate donor was new, but the direct enrichment of the president and his family: that’s a new chapter in American politics. These guys seem to be better positioned to do that or have better tools for doing that than other industries ever had.

Silverman: I think partially because they don’t have to create a real product that people want. I mean, yes, World Liberty Financial might want to sell to the broader public, but what they essentially serve as is the drop box for people who want to give money to Trump. That means, UAE princes, sovereign wealth funds and financial criminals from overseas, or Justin Sun, or Changpeng Zhao, as we saw recently both of whom have benefited politically.

Because there’s relatively low overhead, you can just keep doing this and every regulation or law or investigatory body that might put a check on this has essentially been dismantled and Trump has pretty broad legal immunity. So it just seems like something that can keep going without much stopping it.

Krugman: Yeah. The pardoning of Binance, Changpeng Zhao, that just happened a few days before we had this conversation. It’s truly extraordinary.

Silverman: This is something we knew might happen because it had been reported that they were talking and then CZ (Changpeng Zhao) claimed, “well, we hadn’t talked about this but now I want a pardon.” He said that publicly. You could see this coming. But each time one of these happens it’s very striking. This is arguably, not by prison time, but probably the biggest criminal in the world of crypto or certainly one of the most important figures and someone who pled guilty to a favorable deal because he saw the writing on the wall and his company was supposed to pay the biggest fine in U.S. corporate history, or at least close to it. It’s not just that he pardons him, it’s that they’re already in business together. So, the fact that it could continue to be so blatant, so brazen without any checks on it, is pretty troubling.

Krugman: The Gilded Age was pretty long, so there was a lot of corruption but it wasn’t ever quite as brazen as what we’re seeing now.

Silverman: I think also because we all know about it. Maybe some of these things were reported on well at the time, 120 years ago, but you can see this stuff happening today. You can even go on the blockchain and look at some of the data and see some of these bad actors paying World Liberty Financial and knowing that 70% of that money is going to go into Trump’s pocket. So, it’s very proudly trumpeted.

https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/gilded-rage-talking-with-jacob-silv
erman

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Monday, November 3, 2025 4:47 PM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Trump told his usual lie that the free and fair 2020 election was stolen from him. He lied again that grocery prices “are down” even after CBS’ Norah O’Donnell informed him they are up. He declared once more that there is now “no inflation,” though there certainly is, and then that inflation is 2% or “even less than 2%,” though the most recent available Consumer Price Index figure is now up to 3%.

The president also deployed multiple other fictional numbers during his exchanges with O’Donnell, which were recorded Friday and released by CBS on Sunday.

He falsely claimed “$17 trillion” is being invested in the US “right now,” though the $17 trillion figure is nearly double the White House’s own wildly inflated figure.

He falsely claimed each alleged drug boat the US has attacked in recent weeks “kills 25,000 Americans,” though experts note this figure plainly does not make sense.

He falsely claimed some recent former presidents invoked the Insurrection Act “28 times,” though no individual president has invoked it on more than six occasions with this record set by President Ulysses S. Grant in the 1800s.

He falsely claimed he has ended “eight wars,” though his list includes two situations that were not wars at all and at least one war that continues.

He falsely claimed CBS aired an edited interview with Trump’s 2024 opponent Kamala Harris “two days” before the election, though it was actually more than four full weeks before Election Day.

He falsely claimed former President Joe Biden gave $350 billion in aid to Ukraine (the real number is well under half that) and allowed in “25 million” migrants (the real number here is well under half that, too).

And Trump made a variety of additional false claims on several subjects, including the government shutdown, the artificial intelligence boom, tariffs, his first impeachment and his former legal battle with “60 Minutes” itself.

CBS posted a full transcript of the interview, which O’Donnell said ran for nearly 90 minutes, and a nearly 73-minute video; it aired about 28 minutes on television.

Here is a more detailed breakdown of Trump’s claims.

https://www.cnn.com/2025/11/03/politics/fact-check-trump-cbs-interview

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Tuesday, November 4, 2025 5:29 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

President Donald Trump's administration is creating detailed plans to send U.S. troops and intelligence officers into Mexico to combat drug cartels, NBC News reported Monday, citing two U.S. officials and two former senior U.S. officials.

https://www.newsweek.com/trump-admin-us-troops-mexico-combat-cartels-1
0982742

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Tuesday, November 4, 2025 5:30 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

The big Donald Trump foreign policy question heading into this week looked like it was going to be when and if the US was going to launch military strikes against Venezuela. That’s still a live question, but in the meantime, the president has threatened to attack an entirely different country on the other side of the Atlantic, vowing to send troops “guns-a-blazing” into Nigeria if that country’s government fails to prevent the persecution of Christians.

https://www.vox.com/politics/467256/trump-nigeria-christians-intervent
ion-military

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Tuesday, November 4, 2025 5:30 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Asked about Andrew being stripped of his title of "prince," Trump said, "I feel very badly. It's a terrible thing that's happened to the family."

Nothing tugs at his heartstrings as much as rich white men being punished for raping children.

https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/trump-weighs-in-on-andrew-mount
batten-windsors-fall-from-grace_uk_69086556e4b0ad5446e0a71d

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Tuesday, November 4, 2025 5:33 AM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Shut the fuck up.

What’s a Scandal When Everything Is Outrageous

Trump’s ballroom blitz is blatantly corrupt. The fact that no one seems to care shows just how low the standards of behavior have fallen in Washington.

By Jonathan Chait | November 3, 2025, 9:50 AM ET

https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2025/11/trump-ballroom-co
nstruction-corruption/684784/

The revelation that Donald Trump has demolished the East Wing, with plans to rebuild it at jumbo size with private funds, provoked an initial wave of outrage—followed by a predictable counter-wave of pseudo-sophisticated qualified defenses.

“In classic Trump fashion, the president is pursuing a reasonable idea in the most jarring manner possible,” editorializes The Washington Post. The New York Times’ Ross Douthat and The Wall Street Journal’s editorial board have similar assessments: We should all calm down, put aside our feelings about the president and the admittedly flawed process by which he arrived at this project, and appreciate the practical value of the new facility.

Let’s forget questions of proportion and aesthetics and consider the matter solely on the issue of corruption. Trump has funded the project by soliciting donors who have potential or actual business before the government. By traditional standards, this would constitute a massive scandal.

We know this because a very similar scandal occurred about a decade ago. Remember the Clinton Foundation? After the 43rd president left office, he established a charitable foundation to undertake good works: disaster relief, public health, and other largely uncontroversial endeavors.

But the Clinton Foundation became a political liability after reports suggested that it created a potential conflict of interest. Bill Clinton may have retired from elected office, but Hillary Clinton harbored widely known ambitions to run in the future. So the wealthy people and companies that donated to the foundation might have been hoping for access to and gratitude from a potential future president.

Conservatives were not alone in denouncing this arrangement. In August 2016, the Post editorialized that “some donors to the Clinton Foundation may have seen their gifts as means to buy access—and it points to much bigger potential problems. Should Ms. Clinton win in November, she will bring to the Oval Office a web of connections and potential conflicts of interest, developed over decades in private, public and, in the case of her family’s philanthropic work, quasi-public activities.” Similar criticism appeared from the likes of NPR (“I think it contributes to all of the concern about her honesty and trustworthiness,” observed the now-late Cokie Roberts), the Times’ editorial board, me, and others.

Like pretty much any other pre-Trump complaint, all of this sounds quaint today. But the actual facts of the case are at least as damning. The solicitations for the $300 million ballroom (as of press time, the cost continues to rise) are being made not by a candidate but by a sitting president. The money is not going to charity but to a public project that will, in part, underwrite Trump’s luxurious lifestyle. (Imagine if the Clinton Foundation had been building gold-embossed ballrooms for Bill and Hillary to entertain guests in!) While the Clinton Foundation disclosed all its donors, Trump has kept many of his ballroom donors secret.

The greatest difference is that Trump’s moves to benefit his friends and hurt his enemies are out in the open, which makes the quid pro quo element far cruder. If donating to a Clinton charity was like buying your date a nice dinner in the hopes of getting lucky, donating to a Trump charity is more like bringing a fistful of cash to a brothel.

The Clintons’ conflict of interest drove waves of skeptical coverage and hostile commentary. This concern has yielded barely a footnote in the Trump-ballroom story. The Post brushes off the problem in a clause (“Though the fundraising for the ballroom creates problematic conflicts of interest, two examples validate Trump’s aggressive approach”), later noting, almost in passing, that the donors include the Post’s owner, Jeff Bezos. Douthat and the Journal’s editorial page likewise dispense with the conflict issue in a sentence.

It may well be true that concerns about the corrupting effect of these donations are just too slight against the backdrop of a presidency that has obliterated the wall between public policy and personal gain. I will concede that the East Wing demolition is not the worst thing Trump has done. It may not even rank among the top 1,000 worst things he’s done.

But the fact that one of the biggest scandals of the Clintons’ careers hardly warrants a harrumph now shows how low the standards of behavior have fallen in Trump’s Washington.

I sympathize with the mainstream media’s inability to properly capture the breadth of Trump’s misconduct. The dilemma is that holding Trump to the standards of a normal politician is impossible. The Times would have to run half a dozen banner-style Watergate-style headlines every day, and the news networks would have to break into regular programming with breathless updates every minute or so. Maxing out the scale of outrage has the paradoxical benefit of allowing Trump to enjoy more generous standards than any other politician has.

Still, although holding Trump accountable to normal expectations of political decorum may be impossible, surely we don’t need to praise him for merely committing normal-sized scandals. The people losing perspective here are not the ballroom’s critics, but its defenders.

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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Tuesday, November 4, 2025 3:13 PM

SECOND

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

On the heels of Trump accepting a $400 million jet from Qatar, Kristi Noem, the Secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, decided she needs a new government jet too. Two actually. And not just any jet, but a brand new Gulfstream G700, the latest in billionaire luxury. Reportedly, Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos each have one. The price tag for the two private jets is at least $172 million, more taxpayer dollars.

A DHS spokesperson says the current plane Noem uses is old and in need of maintenance, even though a new, but not as fancy, jet was purchased in 2022, with an expected service life of 20 years.

https://angrybearblog.com/2025/10/you-have-done-enough-have-you-no-sen
se-of-decency

The Joss Whedon script for Serenity, where Wash lives, is Serenity-190pages.pdf at https://www.mediafire.com/two

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