REAL WORLD EVENT DISCUSSIONS

Trump Is Destroying Everything He Touches

POSTED BY: JJ
UPDATED: Friday, December 19, 2025 10:46
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Tuesday, December 9, 2025 9:53 AM

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


Trump Warns of ‘Dark and Sinister Forces’ as Supreme Court Decision Looms

By Shane Croucher | Dec 09, 2025 at 07:08 AM EST

https://www.newsweek.com/donald-trump-tariffs-supreme-court-ruling-111
78256

President Donald Trump warned that the Supreme Court ruling against him in a key case on his power to apply tariffs would be the "biggest threat in history to United States National Security."

"We would be financially defenseless," Trump said in an early hours post on Truth Social, pointing to a report that the European Union is planning to apply new tariffs on China. "We would not be allowed to do what others already do!"

Trump said tariffs have "greatly enhanced" national security and that they had made the U.S. the "financially strongest" country in the world, adding: "Only dark and sinister forces would want to see that end!!!"

Supreme Court Weighs Future of Signature Trump Policy

In November, Supreme Court justices heard oral arguments in the case that challenged Trump's executive authority to impose tariffs—his signature economic policy—over the head of Congress.

The court expedited the case after a request from the Trump administration. Justices are yet to make a ruling, one that could upend a foundation stone of Trump's policy agenda.

Lower courts have repeatedly ruled against the administration's authority in imposing broad and sweeping tariffs on an emergency basis.

Trump has liberally used tariffs since retaking office in January. He sees them as a vital tool of American economic power, one that can protect and rebuild American manufacturing and production sectors by deterring unfair global competition.

The Republican president has also used tariffs to punish U.S. rivals and foes, such as China for its role in the fentanyl trade and Russian trading partners for their role in aiding the Kremlin's war on Ukraine.

But critics of the tariffs—a tax paid by the importer—say they are pushing up inflation and can deprive American firms of raw materials and other products they need.

Moreover, they say Trump has also used tariffs aggressively against allies, weakening vital strategic partners that the U.S. should be helping to strengthen.

And they have prompted trading partners to hit back with their own tariffs on American imports, hurting U.S. exporters.

What Supreme Court Justices Are Thinking on Tariffs

A potential majority in a ruling against the tariffs would almost certainly bring together the court’s three liberal justices and at least two conservatives.

Justices Amy Coney Barrett and Neil Gorsuch, both Trump appointees, and Chief Justice John Roberts appeared to be the most likely to rule against the president.

The Constitution gives Congress the power to impose tariffs, but Trump has claimed extraordinary power to act without congressional approval by declaring national emergencies under the 1977 International Emergency Economic Powers Act.

At the hearing for oral arguments, Gorsuch signaled he was troubled by the idea that Congress could give away its power over taxes to the president.

"The power to reach into the pockets of the American people is just different and it’s been different since the founding," Gorsuch said, when disputes over taxes helped spark the American Revolution.

Both Barrett and Roberts asked questions indicating at least some unease about how the case should come out, and Justices Brett Kavanaugh, Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas also could support the administration.

Kavanaugh asked about the 10 percent worldwide tariffs imposed by President Richard Nixon under a predecessor to IEEPA that used very similar language.

Understanding Nixon’s tariffs, which were upheld by an appellate court but never reached the Supreme Court, "is real important to deciding this case correctly," he said.

Barrett and Kavanaugh seized on arguments made by the challengers that the president could order a complete trade embargo but not impose tariffs of even 1 percent under the emergency law.

"Doesn’t it seem like it would make sense, then, that Congress would want the president to use something that was…weaker medicine than completely shutting down trade as leverage to try to get a foreign nation to do something?" Barrett asked.

Tariff Revenues Defy Trump Claims

The president has said that the U.S. is taking in "trillions" of dollars from import tariffs and other investments. But the actual numbers are far less than that. Treasury Department data shows that revenue from tariffs in the last fiscal year was nearly $195 billion. In the current fiscal year, tariffs have earned around $31 billion so far.

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

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Tuesday, December 9, 2025 2:09 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


It's moot.

SCOTUS will side with Trump on this.

Your article written by "experts" who are always wrong about everything isn't worth reading.

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Wednesday, December 10, 2025 7:35 AM

SECOND

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


Trump Says That You Are the Problem
Everything is perfect. Why aren’t you grateful?

By Paul Krugman | Dec 10, 2025

https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/trump-says-that-you-are-the-problem

Last night Donald Trump gave an important speech on the economy in Pennsylvania — supposedly in a working-class area, although the actual venue was a luxury casino resort. The event was initially touted as the start of an “affordability tour,” the first of a series of speeches intended to reverse Trump’s cratering approval on his handling of inflation and the economy. A number of news analyses suggested that he would use the occasion to blame Democrats for the economy’s troubles.

That was never going to happen. Trump did, of course, take many swipes at Joe Biden, as well as attacking immigrants, women and windmills. But to blame Democrats for the economy’s problems he would have to admit that the Trump economy has problems. And the speech was important because it revealed that he won’t make any such admission, and will continue to gaslight the public.

On Monday Politico interviewed Trump, asking him, among other things, what grade he would give the current economy. His answer: “A-plus-plus-plus-plus-plus.”

In fact, until very recently Trump wouldn’t even accept the reality that ordinary Americans don’t share his triumphalism. When Fox News’s Laura Ingraham asked him a month ago why people are anxious about the economy, Trump replied

I don’t know they are saying that. The polls are fake. We have the greatest economy we’ve ever had.

Since then Trump and his minions seem to have come around to admitting that Americans are, in fact, unhappy with the state of the economy. But if the economy is A+++++, why don’t people see it? The problem can’t possibly lie with him — so it must lie with you. “The American people don’t know how good they have it.”

I put that line in quotes because it isn’t a caricature or a paraphrase. It is, in fact, literally what Scott Bessent, the Treasury secretary, said the other day:

We’ve made a lot of gains, but remember, we’ve got this embedded inflation from the Biden years, where mainstream media, whether it’s Greg Ip at the Wall Street Journal, toxic Paul Krugman at New York Times or former Vice Chair, Alan Blinder, all said it was a vibecession. The American people don’t know how good they have it.

Incidentally, I appreciate the personal plug. Trump has already called me a “deranged bum.” Now Bessent says I’m “toxic.” Give me a fake peace prize, and I’ll have all the honors anyone could ask for.

Anyway, I may not be a political strategist, but I don’t think “You’re all a bunch of ingrates” is a winning message. It was, however, really the only message Trump could deliver, given his utter lack of empathy or humility.

At this point I could bombard you with a lot of data showing that the economy is not, in fact, A+++++. But it isn’t a disaster area, at least not yet. So why are Americans feeling so down? The main culprit is Trump himself.

First, during the 2024 campaign Trump repeatedly promised to bring consumer prices way down beginning on “day one.” We’re now 11 months in, prices are still rising, and voters who believed him feel, with reason, that they were lied to. Last night Trump insisted that prices are, in fact, coming way down. Again, “Who you gonna believe, me or your lying eyes?” is a self-destructive political strategy.

Second, Trump would be in much better political shape right now if he had basically continued Biden’s policies, with only a few cosmetic changes. When he took office inflation was on a declining trajectory. Consumer sentiment was relatively favorable at the start of 2025. Americans were still angry about high prices, but the inflation surge of 2021-3 had happened on Biden’s watch and was receding into the past. My guess is that many voters would have accepted Trump’s claims that high prices were Democrats’ fault and given him the benefit of the doubt about the economy’s future if he had simply done nothing drastic and left policies mostly as they were.

Instead, he brought chaos: Massive and massively unpopular tariffs, DOGE disruptions, masked ICE agents grabbing people off the street, saber-rattling and war crimes in the Caribbean. Many swing voters, I believe, supported Trump out of nostalgia for the relative calm that prevailed before Covid struck. They didn’t think they were voting for nonstop political PTSD.

And there’s more to come. Health insurance costs are about to spike, because Republicans refuse to extend Biden-era subsidies. Inflation may pick up in the next few months as retailers, who have so far absorbed much of the cost of Trump’s tariffs, begin passing them on to consumers.

So the “affordability tour” is off to a disastrous start. And it won’t get better, because while Trump insists that the problem is you, it’s actually him. And he isn’t going to change.

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

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Wednesday, December 10, 2025 7:38 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


There hasn't been any cratering on Trump's approval. He's still above where Biden, Obama and GWB were all at during this time in their 2nd term.

Keep dreaming, Paul.



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Thursday, December 11, 2025 6:57 AM

SECOND

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


The last time so much wealth was tied up in such obscure overlapping arrangements was just before the 2008 financial crisis.

By Rogé Karma | December 10, 2025, 1:13 PM ET

An AI-induced financial disaster is far from inevitable. Still, given the warning signs, one would hope for the federal government to be doing what it can to reduce the risk of a crisis. Instead, the Trump administration is doing the opposite. In August, the president signed an executive order that instructs federal agencies to loosen regulations so that ordinary 401(k) holders can invest directly in “alternative assets” such as, yes, private credit, a change that could expose a far broader swath of the public to the fallout if AI loans go bad. Perhaps that is the key difference between 2008 and 2025. Back then, the federal government was caught off guard by the crash; this time, it appears to be courting one.

Evidence is growing that the links between private credit and the rest of the financial system are stronger than once believed. Careful studies from the Federal Reserve estimate that up to a quarter of bank loans to nonbank financial institutions are now made to private-credit firms (up from just 1 percent in 2013) and that major life-insurance companies have nearly $1 trillion tied up in private credit. These connections raise the prospect that a big AI crash could lead to a wave of private-credit failures, which could in turn bring down major banks and insurers, Natasha Sarin, a Yale Law School professor who specializes in financial regulation, told me. “Unfortunately, it usually isn’t until after a crisis that we realize just how interconnected the different parts of the financial system were all along,” she said.

https://www.theatlantic.com/economy/2025/12/nvidia-ai-financing-deals/
685197/

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

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Thursday, December 11, 2025 9:35 AM

THG

Keep it real please


Quote:
Originally posted by JJ:
Merkel: G-7 summit with Trump was a 'sobering' experience

FRANKFURT, Germany — German Chancellor Angela Merkel found the contentious Group of Seven summit with U.S. President Donald Trump a "sobering" and "depressing" experience but said European leaders won't be "taken advantage of" on trade.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/merkel-g-7-summit-with-trump-was-
a-sobering-experience/ar-AAytwie?ocid=spartanntp

Some of us called this as soon as Trump started campaigning. The rest here were at that time, and remain to this day, to be fools and trolls.



T

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Thursday, December 11, 2025 10:07 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Why are you doubling down on stupid shit you've posted all over the board today?

You're just embarrassing yourself twice for the same thing when you do that.

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Thursday, December 11, 2025 12:09 PM

SECOND

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


Visitors to the U.S. — including those from visa-free countries such as France, Germany and Britain — would have to submit five years of social media activity before being allowed through the border, according to a proposal by the Trump administration published Wednesday:
https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2025/12/10/2025-22461/agency
-information-collection-activities-revision-arrival-and-departure-record-form-i-94-and

The new rules, which would also require travelers to provide emails, phone numbers and addresses used in the last five years, would come into effect early next year — shortly before hundreds of thousands of football fans are expected to travel to the U.S. to watch their teams compete in the World Cup, which begins in June. The U.S. is co-hosting the tournament with Mexico and Canada.

“President Trump’s plan to screen visitors to the U.S. based on their past five-year social media history is outrageous,” Irish Member of the European Parliament Barry Andrews of the centrist Renew group said in a statement.

“Even the worst authoritarian states in the world do not have such an official policy,” he added. “The plans would of course seriously damage the U.S. tourist industry as millions of Europeans would no longer feel safe … including football fans due to attend next year’s World Cup.”

https://www.politico.eu/article/donald-trump-fifa-world-cup-social-med
ia-technology-politics-europe/

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

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Thursday, December 11, 2025 12:35 PM

SECOND

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


Trump plans to break up the EU by ‘pulling four MAGA allies’ out of the bloc, report claims

By James C. Reynolds | Thursday 11 December 2025 11:41 EST

https://www.the-independent.com/news/world/europe/trump-eu-break-up-it
aly-hungary-bloc-b2882684.html

The Trump administration made plans to pull four friendly countries out of the European Union and into America’s orbit in an effort to “Make Europe Great Again”, according to a report.

The 29-page US National Security Strategy (NSS) sent shockwaves around Europe when it was unveiled last week, condemning Washington’s European allies as “weak” and offering support to far-right political parties.

According to Defense One, a longer and unpublished version of the document suggested taking Austria, Hungary, Italy and Poland out of the EU and into greater alignment with the US, while backing movements supportive of “traditional European ways of life”.

The four nations were cited as countries the US should “work with more ... with the goal of pulling them away” from the EU, according to US-based news channel Defense One, which claimed to have reviewed the document.

Defense One claims that it elaborated on how Trump would like to build Washington’s relationship with ideologically-aligned administrations, as the US focuses on domestic priorities.

“We should support parties, movements, and intellectual and cultural figures who seek sovereignty and preservation/restoration of traditional European ways of life…while remaining pro-American,” it said, according to Defense One.

The alleged document is likely to spark further alarm in Europe, just days after the NSS claimed countries such as France and Germany were “decaying” due to migration and stifled economic growth.

[The White House denies it, but the cat is out of the bag.]

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

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Thursday, December 11, 2025 12:44 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Visitors to the U.S. — including those from visa-free countries such as France, Germany and Britain — would have to submit five years of social media activity before being allowed through the border, according to a proposal by the Trump administration published Wednesday:


Good.

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Thursday, December 11, 2025 12:45 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Trump plans to break up the EU by ‘pulling four MAGA allies’ out of the bloc, report claims


Even better, if true.

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Friday, December 12, 2025 7:47 AM

SECOND

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


Donald Trump, Security Threat

The call is coming from inside the White House

By Paul Krugman | Dec 12, 2025

https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/donald-trump-security-threat

Donald J. Trump @realDonaldTrump
Because of Tariffs, easily and quickly applied, our National Security has been greatly enhanced, and we have become the financially strongest Country, by far, anywhere in the World. Only dark and sinister forces would want to see that end!!!
Dec 09, 2025, 3:45 AM

To update Samuel Johnson, these days national security is the last refuge of a scoundrel. According to Donald Trump, anything he doesn’t like is a threat to national security. Question his clearly illegal tariffs? You’re a dark and sinister force trying to undermine America. When the New York Times reported on signs that age may be taking a toll on Trump’s stamina, he denounced the reporting as “seditious, maybe even treasonous.”

But some of America’s allies — and many of us here at home — are becoming increasingly open about saying that the real danger is coming from inside the White House: Trump himself has become the biggest security threat facing the U.S. and, indeed, all the world’s democracies.

On Wednesday a new report from Denmark’s military intelligence service contained the most explicit statement of the growing alarm. It pointed out that, under Donald Trump, America is no longer acting like a friendly partner:

The United States uses economic power, including threats of high tariffs, to enforce its will, and no longer rules out the use of military force, even against allies.

Without a doubt, Denmark’s concerns have been heightened by Trump’s repeated assertions that he wants to “get” Greenland, which is a Danish territory. In August the Danish government summoned the head of the U.S. embassy to protest about “covert influence operations” in Greenland undertaken by Americans with ties to Trump.

However, Denmark is certainly not alone in raising concerns and acting on them. Several of America’s closest traditional allies, including Canada and the UK, have reportedly acted to limit intelligence-sharing with the U.S. One cited concern is the risk of being complicit in unlawful acts or war crimes arising from the deadly strikes on boats in the Caribbean.

Sotto voce, it’s also clear that the Canadians and the Europeans are alarmed by the presence of Putin sympathizers and conspiracy theorists like Tulsi Gabbard, the Director of National Intelligence, in sensitive positions within the Trump administration. After hearing the leaked tape of Steve Witkoff’s fawning and borderline treasonous conversation with Yuri Ushakov, Putin’s foreign policy adviser – in which Witkoff coached him on how to manipulate Trump -- who would want to share sensitive information with this American president?

More broadly, in a world of growing geopolitical conflict, it has become increasingly clear whose side the Trump administration is on — the side of Trump’s personal interests, grudges and biases. Trump’s new National Security Strategy, released last week, made this dynamic clear. There was no condemnation of Russian aggression against Ukraine and hardly any mention of the US rivalry with China. Yet it lambasted Europe and openly supported right-wing extremist parties that are trying to undermine European democracy.

Trump’s proposed “peace plan” for Ukraine not only reads like a Russian wish list, but it also uses some odd phrasing and syntax suggesting that it was translated from a Russian original. Moreover, the Wall Street Journal reports that the plan includes a number of undisclosed appendices that would unlock frozen Russian assets and bring Russia’s economy “in from the cold,” effectively ending the sanctions Putin has faced since he invaded Ukraine.

As odious as Witkoff’s actions were, they revealed the truth of the matter: Trump’s foreign policy is not about securing the safety and well-being of the United States. It’s about playing to Trump’s ego, about appealing to his incessant psychodrama of domination and sycophancy. Anyone who believes otherwise is living in La-La-Land.

This betrayal of America’s security interests extends to Trump’s international economic policy and his clear misuse of tariff laws. Under Section 232 of the Trade Expansion Act of 1962, a president is given considerable discretion to impose tariffs to protect industries deemed crucial to national security. And national security tariffs are legal under international law.

The Trump administration has, however, made a mockery of Section 232, using it to justify tariffs on many goods that have no conceivable relationship to national security. In October, for example, Trump imposed Section 232 tariffs on upholstered furniture and kitchen cabinets. In Trump’s mind America would be put at great risk if it were dependent on foreign suppliers of new sofas in the midst of an international conflict.

Even as he imposes 50 percent tariffs to limit the menace of Chinese kitchen cabinets, Trump has decided to allow China to buy the advanced Nvidia semiconductor chips that power many AI models. Bear in mind that the U.S. lead in cutting-edge technology is one of our few advantages in geopolitical competition with China, and this gift to the Chinese has been strongly criticized by every genuine national security expert that I know. (Our other big advantage used to be that we had so many strong allies, but Trump has ended that.)

Yet Trump is now, for a modest fee, letting the Chinese have access to our most advanced semiconductors. As the Wall Street Journal — not exactly a left-wing rag — put it,

The Indians struck a better deal when they sold Manhattan to the Dutch. Why would the President give away one of America’s chief technological advantages to an adversary and its chief economic competitor?

But the answer is simple: Trump doesn’t care at all about national security, or for that matter America’s national interests. Instead, it’s all about him: reportedly Trump took the decision to allow the Chinese to have the advanced Nvidia chips after personal lobbying by Jensen Huang, the CEO of Nvidia. Clearly Chinese exporters of furniture and kitchen cabinetry need to get coached by Steve Witkoff.

Just to be clear, I am not a free trade purist. I am not saying national security should be ignored or underplayed when setting economic policy. On the contrary, in a world in which China is arguably the world’s leading superpower, in which Putin feels free to launch a war of conquest on Europe’s doorstep, national security considerations are critically important. In fact, it’s arguable that the twin threats from China and Russia have rendered the US far more vulnerable than at any other period in our lifetimes.

Yet the biggest threats to U.S. national security aren’t coming from Beijing or Moscow. They’re coming straight out of the Oval Office.

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

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Saturday, December 13, 2025 7:52 AM

SECOND

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


The Curse of Trump 2.0

What does it say that the President doesn’t even feel he needs to hide his most profane and radical views anymore?

By Susan B. Glasser | December 11, 2025

https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-trumps-washington/the-curse
-of-trump-20

In January of 2018, Donald Trump hosted a group of lawmakers in the Oval Office to discuss the possibility of a bipartisan immigration deal. But, when talking about plans to give protected status to immigrants from African countries and other nations, such as El Salvador and Haiti, he grew frustrated. “Why are we having all these people from shithole countries come here?” he demanded, adding that he’d prefer to have more people enter the U.S. from largely white, European nations such as Norway. The remarks, published soon after the meeting in the Washington Post, caused a sensation. Trump denied the reporting, and a couple of the Republican senators who were present said they did not recall him making the comments. “This was not the language used,” Trump tweeted. He called the account “made up by Dems.” When questions about the statements persisted, he told reporters, “I am not a racist. I’m the least racist person you have ever interviewed.”

Nearly eight years later, and more than an hour and twenty-five minutes into a speech at a rally in Pennsylvania this week, Trump finally admitted that he had, in fact, used the “shithole” language. He then set off on an extended riff about how the United States takes in too many immigrants from Somalia and other places that are “filthy, dirty, disgusting, ridden with crime.” Trump didn’t just acknowledge what he once denied; as the audience applauded, he lingered on his past remark as a fond memory.

For many, it was a gotcha moment—the President taking ownership, belatedly, for one of his most iconic lines. “The truth comes out,” Dick Durbin, the Democratic senator from Illinois, whose account of the meeting had been questioned by his G.O.P. colleagues, posted on social media. Others focussed less on the revelation that our chronically untruthful leader had failed to tell the truth about something, and more on the escalating hate speech about Somali immigrants in Minnesota that the President is now spewing forth on a regular basis. It was both of those things, of course, and also a perfect example of the contrast between Trump’s two terms. Trump is still Trump, but what a difference it is, nonetheless, to go from a President who felt it necessary to deny that he had said “shithole countries” to one who, eight years later, is celebrating the fact that he said it.

Trump 2.0 is all about this break with the stylistic norms, rules, and traditions that governed the Presidency in the past, and that, we must now understand, includes Trump 1.0. For years, he has complained that pretty much all of his predecessors in the White House were wrong about everything. The surprise of his second term, to the extent that there is one, is that Trump’s critique of America’s other Presidents is no longer just a repudiation of George W. Bush, Barack Obama, and Joe Biden; it now extends to Trump himself. Not to him personally, of course. Anyone who has watched even a minute of a Trump Cabinet meeting knows that our President is never wrong about anything. But, if Trump is unwilling to admit any errors of his own, he is more than happy to reject the policies of those who worked for him, even when it’s his big, bold signature scribbled with his trademark black Sharpie on the cover.

Eight years ago this month, Trump’s White House published its first national-security strategy, a document that extolled NATO’s enduring value as “one of our great advantages over our competitors,” and praised America’s allies as, in the words of one of the strategy’s principal authors, the then national-security adviser H. R. McMaster, “the best defense against today’s threats.” Its most famous passage declared a new era of “great power competition” and warned that China and Russia posed grave long-term dangers to the United States. I cannot count the number of times I had this document quoted to me by Republican-establishment types eager to prove that Trump really was a Reaganesque tough-on-Russia guy, after all.

His new national-security doctrine, released late last week, has abandoned the language about great-power threats from China and Russia in favor of a reduced role for America as the unchallenged hegemon of the Western hemisphere. To the extent that a global theory of the case is expressed, it is a Darwinian vision of geopolitical might makes right: “The outsized influence of larger, richer, and stronger nations,” the document stresses, “is a timeless truth of international relations.” The thirty-three-page paean to the leadership of the “President of Peace” also calls for an end to NATO expansion, treats Russia as an equal to Europe (without mentioning its responsibility for launching a war of aggression against Ukraine), and essentially promotes regime change—for America’s European allies. (In the language of the strategy: “cultivating resistance to Europe’s current trajectory within European nations.”) The plan, not surprisingly, was well received by the Kremlin, where Vladimir Putin’s spokesman, Dmitry Peskov, praised the adjustments to U.S. strategy as “largely consistent with our vision.”

However much Trump was personally involved in shaping these national-security documents, there’s little doubt that the 2025 version sounds a lot more like the man himself than the 2017 iteration. Back then, Trump’s real views about the world—a profoundly disruptive departure from decades of Republican foreign policy—were, like his “shithole countries” comment, still meant only for private consumption. Now he’s loud and proud about them.

The most important point here is that Trump’s second term—the “Do-Over Presidency,” I called it a few months ago—is an exercise in Presidential wish fulfillment. This time, he is not about to let persnickety lawyers, or his own past record, stand in the way. Think of the long list of extreme policies that Trump talked about in his first term but has only followed through on in this one: ending the constitutional guarantee of birthright citizenship, imposing sweeping tariffs on U.S. trade partners by declaring a national “emergency,” sending troops into Democratic-run cities to quell domestic political protests.

All three of these policies, it should be noted, are currently subject to lawsuits in the federal courts—a major reason that Trump’s first-term advisers warned him against pursuing them. But he did not get rid of the policies; he ditched the advisers. Unconstrained and emboldened, today’s Trump has learned from years of experience how to make the machinery of Washington give him what he wants, whether it is legal or not. He is, at last, the “Jurassic Park” velociraptor that figures out how to open the door, in the memorable image once evoked for me by a national-security official from Trump’s first term.

Some of the difference between Trump 1.0 and 2.0, as in the rally the other night, is in the presentation. Although he’s always been lewd and rude, a liar and an extemporizer whose public shows are designed to shock and entertain, his tongue has clearly been loosened by advancing age and the adoring bubble of sycophants in which he now exists. Having dispensed entirely with the dreary rituals of acting Presidential, Trump now talks in public the way he does in private—swearing, rambling, sexist, racist. It wasn’t just the rant about Somali immigrants, or the extreme length of his speech. (Ninety-seven minutes, compared with an average of forty-five minutes at his rallies in 2016.) Or the cringey digression about “that beautiful face and those lips that don’t stop, pop, pop, pop, like a little machine gun,” of his young female press secretary. And the cursing—where to begin? There’s just so much of it. Is that because he’s eight years older and no longer bound by his old inhibitions? Or maybe he’s just really angry that his poll numbers have sunk so low?

If that’s the case, we can expect a whole lot more expletives, because Trump, untethered, is now by many measures more unpopular than ever before. In his first term, the President was already a polarizing and historically unpopular figure, but he had a strong economy going for him—even if it was never “the greatest economy in the history of the world” that he so often proclaimed it to be. This time, with persistent inflation, fears of impending recession, and global jitters about his preference for market-crushing tariffs, support for Trump’s economic policies has fallen even lower than backing for the man himself. On Thursday, the Associated Press and NORC released a new survey showing him with his worst numbers of the year—with just thirty-six per cent approving of his job performance and thirty-one per cent supporting what he’s done for the economy, his lowest showing in either of his two terms. Gallup, in a similar recent survey, found that sixty per cent of Americans now disapprove of his second-term job performance. The electorate, it turns out, has a few choice words for Trump, too.

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

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Saturday, December 13, 2025 9:32 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Democrats are cancer and Paul Krugman is an idiot.

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Saturday, December 13, 2025 9:51 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:
Democrats are cancer and Paul Krugman is an idiot.
Lacking 1) self-discipline and 2) mental stability, Trumptards and Trump are trapped by their personal dramas. They blame their troubles on Democrats rather than on their malfunctioning minds because the effort required to achieve 2) mental stability is too much, especially because they lack 1) self-discipline.

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

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Saturday, December 13, 2025 1:13 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Democrats are cancer and Paul Krugman is an idiot.


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Sunday, December 14, 2025 6:54 AM

SECOND

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


RIP American Tech Dominance

Lifting export controls on Nvidia’s second-best chip jeopardizes America’s AI advantage over China.

By Rogé Karma | December 12, 2025

https://www.theatlantic.com/economy/2025/12/trumps-china-ai-chips/6852
35/

Donald Trump launched his political career by insisting that free-trade deals had sacrificed the national interest in the pursuit of corporate profits. One wonders what that version of Trump would make of his most recently announced trade policy. On Monday, he declared on Truth Social that the United States would lift restrictions on selling highly advanced semiconductors to China. In doing so, the president has effectively chosen to cede the upper hand in developing a technology that could determine the outcome of the military and economic contest between the U.S. and its biggest geopolitical rival.

The U.S. is currently ahead in the AI race, and it owes that fact to one thing: its monopoly on advanced computer chips. Several experts told me that Chinese companies are even with or slightly ahead of their American counterparts when it comes to crucial AI inputs, including engineering talent, training data, and energy supply. But training a cutting-edge AI model requires an unfathomable number of calculations at incredible speed, a feat that only a few highly specialized chips can handle. Only one company, the U.S.-based Nvidia, is capable of producing them at scale.

This gives the U.S. not only an economic advantage over China, but a military one. Already, AI systems have revolutionized how armies gather intelligence on enemies, detect troop movements, coordinate drone strikes, conduct cyberattacks, and choose targets; they are currently being used to develop the next generation of autonomous weapons. “Over the next decade, basically everything the military and intelligence communities do is going to some extent be enabled by AI,” Gregory Allen, who worked on the Department of Defense’s AI strategy from 2019 to 2022, told me. This is why, in October 2022, the Biden administration decided to cut off the sale of the most advanced semiconductors to China. The aim of the policy, according to the head of the agency in charge of implementing it, was “to protect our national security and prevent sensitive technologies with military applications from being acquired by the People’s Republic of China’s military, intelligence, and security services.”

Rogé Karma: Something ominous is happening in the AI economy

The policy seems to have done its job. Chinese AI firms tend to explicitly cite export controls as one of the biggest obstacles to their growth. DeepSeek, the Chinese company that earlier this year introduced an AI model nearly as good as those made by the leading American firms, is the exception that proves the rule. At first, DeepSeek’s progress was taken as evidence that restricting China’s access to advanced chips was a failed project. However, the company turned out to have trained its model on thousands of second-tier Nvidia chips that it had acquired via a loophole that wasn’t closed until late 2023. DeepSeek’s AI model would have been even better if the company had had access to more and better Nvidia chips. “Money has never been the problem for us,” Liang Wenfeng, one of DeepSeek’s founders, told a Chinese media outlet last year. “Bans on shipments of advanced chips are the problem.”

At first, Trump seemed eager to tighten the Biden-era restrictions even further. In April, his administration banned the sale of Nvidia’s H20 chip, which the company had designed specifically to sell to China without violating the export ban. But in subsequent months the balance of power in the White House began to tilt toward advisers who were skeptical of export controls, notably Trump’s AI czar, the Silicon Valley investor David Sacks. Meanwhile, Trump began meeting regularly with Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang—who, somewhat understandably, didn’t love that his company was being deprived of the Chinese market. In July, Trump reversed course and lifted restrictions on the H20 chip. And this week, he went even further by removing the ban on the far more powerful H200, Nvidia’s second-best chip.

“This policy will support American Jobs, strengthen U.S. Manufacturing, and benefit American Taxpayers,” Trump declared in his Truth Social post. The strongest case for the shift goes something like this: Restricting the sale of American chips would simply encourage Chinese companies like Huawei to develop their own. Selling chips to China, by contrast, would undercut Chinese chipmakers and keep its AI firms dependent on American technology. Meanwhile, as long as the U.S. maintained controls on the most advanced chips, Chinese AI firms would remain behind. “We are not selling the latest and greatest chips to China, but we can deprive Huawei of having this giant market share in China that they can then use to scale up and compete globally,” Sacks said at an event in July, defending Trump’s decision to lift the H20 ban. “The policy is nuanced and it makes a lot of sense.”

It does not, in fact, make a lot of sense. China is nowhere close to producing chips as advanced as America’s. “This is the most complex device made by most complex machines depending on most complex supply chains in all of human history,” Chris McGuire, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and one of the architects of the Biden administration’s export controls, told me. “China is great at making things, but this may just be the one thing they can’t.” According to McGuire’s analysis of Huawei’s own projections, by the end of this decade the Chinese giant still won’t be capable of producing a chip on par with what Nvidia is producing today.

Even if China could one day produce highly sophisticated chips, there’s no evidence that lifting export controls will slow down the country’s effort to do so. In response to Trump’s latest decision, Beijing reportedly plans to limit access to H200s to only the companies that can convincingly justify why they need these foreign chips rather than domestic ones. According to Saif Khan, who served in Joe Biden’s National Security Council, American exports will allow Beijing to bring in just enough foreign chips to enable it to stay competitive in the AI race while continuing to provide state assistance to its own local chip producers. “We’re basically handing them a lifeline,” Khan told me.

Moreover, although the H200 is technically the second-best Nvidia chip, it is still nearly six times more powerful than the H20, the best chip China currently has access to, and is more than capable of training top-performing AI systems. Prior to Trump’s decision, the Institute for Progress, a think tank focused on science and technology policy, estimated that the U.S. would produce 20 to 50 times more “compute power” than China by 2026 if it had kept full chip restrictions in place; unrestricted H200 exports could shrink that gap to almost nothing. “Compute power is the only reason we’ve retained our advantage so far,” Khan, who co-authored that report, told me. “And we’re about to just give it away.”

Thomas Wright: Trump wasted no time derailing his own AI plan

Perhaps this would have been justified if Trump had extracted a major concession from China. In fact, the president received nothing from Beijing in return for lifting the export controls. The one concession he did extract was from Nvidia itself: According to Trump, the company will give the U.S. government 25 percent of its revenue from sales to China. (It isn’t yet clear how exactly this will work or whether it is even legal.) Nvidia has said that Chinese companies will need approval from the Commerce Department in order to access H200s, but experts told me that that this measure won’t stop the chips from falling into the hands of the Chinese military or defense contractors; after all, the U.S. has no control over what happens to the chips once they’re in China.

You don’t have to believe that AI companies are creating godlike superintelligence to believe that this technology will be transformative. Already, AI systems are being used to produce self-driving cars, automate coding, develop autonomous weapons systems, allow for instant translation, speed up drug discovery, and enhance manufacturing productivity. The country that emerges as a leader in AI will gain a huge upper hand in many of the most important industries of the future, giving it much greater geopolitical and economic clout. “I think a world where China catches up to us on AI looks fundamentally different in five or 10 years,” Tim Fist, the director of emerging technology policy at the Institute for Progress, told me. “This is about who has the best military, who has soft power, who leads the world in economic growth and scientific progress. Those are the stakes.”

Even some of Trump’s Republican allies are alarmed by what he has done. Just days before the Trump administration’s announcement, a bipartisan group of senators, including Tom Cotton, introduced the SAFE Chips Act, a bill that would have prevented the Commerce Department from loosening chip-export restrictions for two and a half years. The move to lift restrictions on the H200 chips has been assailed by both progressive Democrats such as Senator Elizabeth Warren and MAGA Republicans such as Senators Josh Hawley and Lindsey Graham. But unless Congress actually passes a law, those criticisms will just be empty talk. Perhaps this is a test of whom congressional Republicans fear more: Beijing or Trump.

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

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Sunday, December 14, 2025 1:46 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:
Originally posted by second:
(It isn’t yet clear how exactly this will work or whether it is even legal.)


Then shut the fuck up, Rogé Karma.

And then get a new name, faggot.

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Monday, December 15, 2025 8:58 AM

THG

Keep it real please



T






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Monday, December 15, 2025 1:11 PM

THG

Keep it real please



Comrade signym, it's them damn tariffs again.

T

Trump PANICS as Companies SUE to STOP Taxes on Americans



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Monday, December 15, 2025 1:57 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK




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Monday, December 15, 2025 5:20 PM

SECOND

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


Trump Is Using a Sacred Power for Depraved Purposes

The president’s pardons encourage public officials to place personal interests ahead of the interests of the people.

By Liz Oyer | December 15, 2025

Liz Oyer served as Pardon Attorney for the Department of Justice from 2022 to 2025.

When Donald Trump pardoned U.S. Representative Henry Cuellar earlier this month, he added to a spate of clemencies that has directly attacked a founding principle of America’s democratic republic: the expectation that elected representatives will serve as fiduciaries of the public trust. Cuellar became the 11th elected American official to receive clemency from President Trump this year. Other presidents have shied away from using the pardon power to protect public officials. Joe Biden issued individual pardons to just two state-level elected officials, but not for crimes that occurred while they held public office. Neither Barack Obama nor George W. Bush pardoned any elected officials during their respective eight years in office.

Trump, by contrast, has pardoned both well-known figures such as Cuellar, accused of taking $600,000 in bribes from foreign companies; Representative George Santos of New York, who defrauded his constituents in virtually every conceivable way; and Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich, who tried to sell a U.S. Senate seat; and lesser characters, such as a state official in Nevada who stole money from a police memorial fund, an elected sheriff in Virginia who sold badges for cash, and a former Tennessee state legislator who defrauded taxpayers to win contracts for his business. Cuellar’s pardon came just days after Trump’s unprecedented pardon of a foreign head of state—former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernandez—who was convicted of corrupting his own government from the top down by operating it as a narco-state. Trump pardoned at least 10 public officials in his first term in office.

Read: Trump grants clemency to one of the world’s richest men

Since Gerald Ford’s pardon of Richard Nixon, which prompted swift public backlash, pardons for official corruption have been rare, until now. The Justice Department—whose Office of the Pardon Attorney advises the president on pardons—has long considered crimes involving a breach of the public trust to be among the most serious offenses on the books. That office, which I led from 2022 until March of this year, has rarely if ever recommended pardons for such betrayals. In effect, Trump’s pardons are licensing elected officials, at all levels of government, to profit off the powers entrusted to them by the American people.

Trump’s agenda transcends partisan politics. In addition to Cuellar and Blagojevich (who recently visited the Justice Department), Trump has pardoned a third Democratic politician this year: Alexander Sittenfeld, a Cincinnati city councilman convicted of bribery and attempted extortion. Elected officials on both sides have also benefited from dismissals of prosecutions, sweetheart plea deals, and the dismantling of the Justice Department’s Public Integrity Section, a specialized unit created to target public corruption. Trump’s goal is much more ambitious than boosting his political allies—he is aiming to fundamentally reshape the American system of governance to make room for graft. Such self-enrichment is antithetical to a government that is supposed to serve the people.

Trump, though, has moved swiftly to implement a different vision for American government. He is engineering a return to a patronage system, in which pardons feature prominently. The Justice Department used to rely on merit-based guidelines, rooted in considerations of remorse, rehabilitation, and redemption. Trump has abandoned those, favoring instead a transactional approach. Pardon seekers once applied for relief through the Office of the Pardon Attorney, a process that can be lengthy and cumbersome due to rigorous vetting requirements. Today, wealthy and powerful pardon hopefuls are funneling their requests straight to the president’s desk by way of well-connected intermediaries. Untold sums are changing hands along the way, in the form of lobbying fees, legal services, donations, and investments.

Trump has discovered that pardons can serve as an inexhaustible supply of currency that he can print with his own hand and dispense as easily as signing a check. He is using the currency of pardons to amass power, wielding their possibility as a tool to command political loyalty. This was obvious in the case of Cuellar, who lavished Trump with praise and gratitude after the announcement.

Pardons have also been a lucrative source of personal wealth for this president. The desire to obtain a pardon looks to have induced a foreign billionaire to broker a multibillion-dollar investment using the Trump-family cryptocurrency company. The same ambition appears to have driven a well-heeled Palm Beach mother to shell out $1 million for the opportunity to make her case for her son’s clemency over dinner with the president at Mar-a-Lago. Others have donated handsomely to Trump’s campaign.

Casey Michel: America has never seen corruption like this

Pardons are just one piece of a larger strategy to take America back to a “spoils system” of government. This phrase emerged during the presidency of Andrew Jackson—Trump’s favored predecessor—when Senator William Marcy of New York, who defended Jackson’s stacking of government with political loyalists, said, “To the victor belong the spoils of the enemy.” In the decades that followed, Congress ended the spoils system with a series of legislative enactments that created a nonpartisan, merit-based civil-service government. Trump is now seeking to restore the old way of doing business, including bypassing the civil-service laws—which he views as an unconstitutional constraint on his Article II powers—to replace career officials with political loyalists. (Case in point: My former post of pardon attorney historically has been reserved for a nonpolitical official; the person who now holds the post is a staunch partisan operative.) Normalizing public corruption through clemency is another flex of the president’s Article II powers.

Trump’s destruction of long-standing clemency norms is already having numerous corrosive effects on democracy. It undermines public trust in government. It undercuts the fair and impartial administration of justice. And it licenses public officials to place their own personal and financial interests ahead of the interests of the people they were elected to serve, just as Donald Trump is doing at the very top. To him, of course, that’s not a problem; it’s the goal.

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

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Monday, December 15, 2025 6:33 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Maybe somebody would take your claims seriously if you hadn't posted 20,000 negative articles about Trump over the last decade.

Nobody cares. Shut the fuck up, stupid.

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Tuesday, December 16, 2025 8:06 AM

THG

Keep it real please


T

Pollster: Americans OVERWHELMINGLY believe country is on the WRONG TRACK



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Tuesday, December 16, 2025 8:11 AM

SECOND

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


Thanks to Trump’s Extortionist Immigration Policies, Rural America Won’t Have Enough Doctors

Affordable Care Act subsidies are expiring anyway, so what’s the difference, right?

By Charles P. Pierce | Dec 15, 2025 4:05 PM EST

https://www.esquire.com/news-politics/politics/a69731828/doctors-rural
-america-trump/

Among its more obvious faults—and there is no bigger one than the vicious clowns the president has appointed to run it—the administration’s toxic spitball approach to immigration is almost completely incoherent. This administration is deliberately oblivious to consequences anyway, be they intended or unintended. However, its policies on H-1B visas are doing real-world damage in many different places. From The Washington Post:

The overworked kidney doctors in this small town were supposed to get reinforcement this fall with the arrival of a new colleague from India. Patients already had appointments scheduled with the incoming nephrologist. Then the Trump administration demanded that companies pay a $100,000 visa fee to bring highly skilled workers from abroad, including doctors and medical professionals urgently needed in health care deserts. Nephrology Associates of the Carolinas could no longer afford to sponsor the Indian kidney specialist, and it has not found an American well suited for the job. After President Donald Trump signed the executive order restricting H-1B visas in September, soaring costs are roiling rural health care facilities that have long struggled to find staff. The fee increase for visa applicants, coupled with broader crackdowns on legal pathways for foreign-born workers, threatens a growing industry and jeopardizes patients who need timely care, according to labor experts and immigration lawyers.

It is easy to say, Okay, rural voters, stop voting for morons and mountebanks who couldn’t care less if you sicken and die. I’ve done it myself, many times. But kidney patients in Shelby are just as much in need of medical treatment as kidney patients in Wellesley or the Hamptons. And to have their health ruined by the administration’s frankly extortionist H-1B policy is a disgrace about which none of us should be blithe.

These legal workers fill crucial gaps in rural and underserved regions, according to medical associations and health care researchers. Iowa, North Dakota and West Virginia—states that overwhelmingly voted for Trump in the last three elections—lead the nation with the highest percentage of physicians who hold H-1B visas, according to a study published this year. Last year, the percentage of H-1B-sponsored doctors in rural counties was nearly twice the share in urban ones, according to research published in JAMA in October. Impoverished counties also had a significantly higher percentage of H-1B physicians, said lead author Michael Liu, a resident physician at Brigham and Women’s Hospital. Liu himself works on a trainee visa from Canada and hopes to eventually remain in the United States on an H-1B visa.

With the subsidies under the Affordable Care Act expiring, most of these folks aren’t going to be able to afford to see a doctor anyway, so what’s the difference, right? That this county can’t—and won’t—be able to figure out what every other industrialized nation figured out years ago continues to amaze and astonish.

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

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Tuesday, December 16, 2025 8:27 AM

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


What The US Is Doing To Ukraine Is Far Worse Than Yalta

Phillips P. OBrien

Dec 16, 2025

https://phillipspobrien.substack.com/p/what-the-us-is-doing-to-ukraine
-is

If history does not exactly repeat itself (and it does not) then it does often rhyme. What we are seeing from the Trump administration is unprecedented in its betrayal of Ukraine. The US is now acting like an agent of Vladimir Putin’s dictatorship in bullying democratic Ukraine to surrender parts of it territory, a wealth of natural resources and millions of its people to Putin’s brutal rule. The USA is not negotiating between Ukraine and Russia, it is putting enormous pressure on Ukraine to agree to a deal that might appeal to Putin. This is what I mean when I say that the US is now the enemy of freedom. It wants to strengthen dictatorships at the expense of democracies.

However there are some interesting historical comparisons that people are making—the rhymes as it were. The one most commonly thrown around in US history is Franklin Roosevelt at Yalta. In this case the US supposedly accepted the expansion of brutal totalitarian rule over countries that wished to be their allies. Aha, we are told, Trump is nothing new. The USA has in the past sold out possible allies into dictatorial rule.

Btw, before Donald Trump took over the Republican Party, you could reliably expect to hear any Democratic attempt to reach a compromise deal described by Republicans as a potential sell-out of the type Franklin Roosevelt supposedly did at the Yalta Conference (February 4-11, 1945). Ronald Reagan, for example, was a constant critic of Roosevelt’s actions at Yalta, with examples ranging from the 1950s through his two terms in office.

The widely shared Republican critique was that the Roosevelt too easily trusted Stalin, deferred to the USSR and as a result consigned half of Europe to totalitarian rule for generations.

So it is rather bitterly ironic today that it is the GOP, after decades of attacking FDR for “betraying” Poland, that is using all of America’s might to betray and weaken a democratic Ukraine. That being said, what Trump is doing is far far worse than anything FDR was accused of. To understand just how large the differences are, I will start with a short primer on Yalta and FDR.

Roosevelt and Yalta

What happened factually at Yalta is actually not an area of disagreement. Roosevelt went to the conference, in the Crimea, with Stalin and Churchill to try and work out some growing problems between the Big Three over the shape of post-war Europe. When it came to Eastern Europe, and in particular Poland, FDR wanted to convince Stalin to allow some democratic influence into a new Polish government. He was faced with a great dilemma on Poland. He very much would have wanted a free Poland with a pro-western alignment, but Poland was entirely occupied by Stalin’s Red Army, and it was Stalin who was establishing the facts on the ground.

In particular Stalin refused to have anything to do with the pre-war Polish government (which had been recognized by the USA) and had installed a new pro-Communist “Lublin” government which was preparing to do his bidding.

Much more at https://phillipspobrien.substack.com/p/what-the-us-is-doing-to-ukraine
-is

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

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Tuesday, December 16, 2025 1:02 PM

SECOND

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


The Longest Suicide Note in American History

The Trump administration’s new National Security Strategy targets liberal democracy itself.

By Anne Applebaum | December 16, 2025, 6 AM ET

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2025/12/national-security-strategy-d
emocracy/685270/

Last year, a team of American diplomats from the State Department’s Global Engagement Center traveled to two dozen countries and signed a series of memoranda. Along with their counterparts in places as varied as Italy, Australia, and Ivory Coast, they agreed to jointly expose malicious and deceptive online campaigns originating in Russia, China, or Iran.

This past September, the Trump administration terminated these agreements. The center’s former head, James Rubin, called this decision “a unilateral act of disarmament,” and no wonder: In effect, the United States was declaring that it would no longer oppose Russian influence campaigns, Chinese manipulation of local politics, or Iranian extremist recruitment drives. Nor would the American government use any resources to help anyone else do so either.

The recent publication of the Trump administration’s new National Security Strategy showed that this decision was no accident. Unilateral disarmament is now official policy. Because—despite its name—this National Security Strategy is not really a strategy document. It is a suicide note. If the ideas within it are really used to shape policy, then U.S. influence in the world will rapidly disappear, and America’s ability to defend itself and its allies will diminish. The consequences will be economic as well as political, and they will be felt by all Americans.

Before explaining, I should acknowledge the curious features of this document, which seems, like the Bible, to have several different authors. Some of them use boastful, aggressive language—America must remain “the world’s strongest, richest, most powerful country for decades to come”—and some of them prefer euphemism and allusion. Sometimes these different authors contradict one another, proposing to work with allies on one page and to undermine allies on the next. The views expressed in the document do not represent those of the entire U.S. government, the entire Republican Party, or even the entire Trump administration. The most noteworthy elements seem to come from a particular ideological faction, one that now dominates foreign-policy thinking in this administration and may well dominate others in the future.

The one genuinely new, truly radical element in this faction’s thinking is its absolute refusal to acknowledge the existence of enemies or to name any countries that might wish America ill. This is a major departure from the first Trump administration. The 2017 National Security Strategy spoke of creating an alliance against North Korea; noted that Russia is “using subversive measures to weaken the credibility of America’s commitment to Europe, undermine transatlantic unity, and weaken European institutions and governments”; and observed that China is “using economic inducements and penalties, influence operations, and implied military threats” to bully others. The 2017 Trump policy team also observed a “geopolitical competition between free and repressive visions of world order.”

The second Trump administration can no longer identify any specific countries that might wish harm to the United States, or any specific actions they might be taking to do harm. A decade’s worth of Russian cyberwarfare, political intervention, and information war inside the United States goes unmentioned. Russian acts of sabotage across Europe, Russian support for brutal regimes across the Sahel region of Africa, and, of course, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine aren’t important either. None of these Russian acts of aggression gets a mention except for the war in Ukraine, which is described solely as a concern for Europeans.

Phillips Payson O’Brien: A wider war has already started in Europe

Even more strangely, China appears not as a geopolitical competitor but largely as a trading rival. It’s as if Chinese hacking and cyberwar did not exist, as if China were not seeking to collect data or infiltrate the software that controls U.S. infrastructure. China’s propaganda campaigns and business deals in Africa and Latin America, which could squeeze out American rivals, don’t seem to matter much either. The new document makes only a vague allusion to a Chinese economic presence in Latin America and to a Chinese threat to Taiwan. When discussing this latter possibility, the authors drop their swaggering language about American power and slip into bureaucratese: “The United States does not support any unilateral change to the status quo in the Taiwan Strait.”

Other rivals and other potential sources of conflict get no mention at all. North Korea has disappeared. Iran is described as “greatly weakened.” Islamist terrorism is no longer worth mentioning. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is still “thorny,” but thanks to President Donald Trump, “progress toward a more permanent peace has been made.” Hamas will soon fade away. The American troops who are still fighting in Somalia and Syria—and in some cases dying—are ignored, as if they didn’t exist at all.

But if America has no rivals and expects no conflicts, then neither the military nor the State Department nor the CIA nor the counterintelligence division of the FBI needs to make any special preparations to defend Americans from them. The document reflects that assumption and instead directs the U.S. national-security apparatus to think about “control over our borders,” “natural disasters,” “unfair trading practices,” “job destruction and deindustrialization,” and other threats to trade. Fentanyl gets a mention. So, rather strangely, do “propaganda, influence operations, and other forms of cultural subversion”—although there is no indication of who might be using propaganda and cultural subversion against us or how it might be countered, especially because the Trump administration has completely dismantled all of the institutions designed to do so.

But what if this document was not written for the people and institutions that think about national security at all? Maybe it was instead written for a highly ideological domestic audience, including the audience in the Oval Office. The authors have included ludicrous but now-familiar language about Trump having ended many wars, a set of claims as absurd and fanciful as his FIFA Peace Prize. The authors also go out of their way to dismiss all past American foreign-policy strategies, presumably including those pursued by the first Trump administration, as if only this administration, under this near-octogenarian president, can see the world clearly.

Finally, although they do not name any states that might threaten America, the authors do focus on one enemy ideology. It is not Chinese communism, Russian autocracy, or Islamic extremism but rather European liberal democracy. This is what this radical faction really fears: people who talk about transparency, accountability, civil rights, and the rule of law. Not coincidentally, these are the same people whom the MAGA ideologues hate and dislike at home, the same people who are fighting to prevent MAGA from redefining the United States as a white ethno-state, who oppose the corruption of America’s democratic institutions, and who object when Trump’s friends, family, and tech allies redirect U.S. foreign policy to benefit their private interests.

European and American liberal democracy is so dangerous to their project, in fact, that the MAGA ideologues seem to be planning to undermine it. They don’t want to meddle in anyone’s internal politics anywhere else on the planet: “We seek good relations and peaceful commercial relations with the nations of the world without imposing on them democratic or other social change.” The glaring exception to this rule is in Europe. Here, it is now American policy to “help Europe correct its current trajectory,” language that implies that the U.S. will intervene to do so.

Eliot A. Cohen: Trump’s security strategy is incoherent babble

According to reporting by Defense One, an earlier version of the National Security Strategy said that U.S. foreign policy should even seek to support illiberal forces in at least four countries—Hungary, Poland, Italy, and Austria—to persuade them to leave the European Union. For all four, this would be an economic catastrophe; for the rest of the continent, this would be a security catastrophe, because a damaged EU would struggle to counter Russian hybrid warfare and Chinese economic pressure. If the union breaks up, there would also no longer be a European Commission capable of regulating American tech companies, and perhaps that is the point.

At the same time, the document’s authors seem to derive their hatred of Europe from a series of false perceptions—or, perhaps, from a form of projection. The authors fear, for example, that “certain NATO members will become majority non-European” very soon. Because they are presumably not talking about non-European Turkey and Canada, the clear implication is that countries such as France and Germany have so much immigration from outside Europe that they will be majority nonwhite. And yet, it is the United States, not Europe, that is far more likely to become “majority minority” in the coming years.

The security strategy also talks, bizarrely, about Europe being on the verge of “civilizational erasure,” which is not language used by many European politicians, even those in far-right parties. Carl Bildt, the former Swedish prime minister and foreign minister, has called this sentiment “to the right of the extreme right.” In multiple indices, after all—health, happiness, standard of living—European countries regularly rank higher than the United States. Compared with Americans, Europeans live longer, are less likely to be living on the streets, and are less likely to die in mass shootings.

The only possible conclusion: The authors of this document don’t know much about Europe, or don’t care to find out. Living in a fantasy world, they are blind to real dangers. They invent fictional threats. Their information comes from conspiracist websites and random accounts on X, and if they use these fictions to run policy, then all kinds of disasters could await us. Will our military really stop working with allies with whom we have cooperated for decades? Will the FBI stop looking for Russian and Chinese spies? Earlier this month, the Justice Department announced that it was taking action against two Russian state-sponsored cybercriminal groups that, among other things, targeted American industrial infrastructure. But if our real enemy is “civilizational erasure” in Europe, then surely we should redirect resources away from this kind of secondary problem and focus them on the threat posed by the British Labour Party or the German Christian Democrats.

One is tempted to laugh at these kinds of ideas, to express incredulity or turn away. But similar conspiracist thinking has already done real damage to real institutions. Elon Musk believed distorted or completely false stories about USAID that he read on his own X platform. As a result, he destroyed the entire organization so rapidly and so thoughtlessly that tens or even hundreds of thousands of people may die as a result. At the State Department, Darren Beattie, the undersecretary for public diplomacy, has repeatedly and falsely stated that the Global Engagement Center was censoring Americans, a fantasy that he encountered on the internet and that he continues to repeat without proof. As a result, he destroyed that organization and ended its international negotiations. He is now conducting an internal departmental witch hunt, trying to find or perhaps invent post hoc evidence for his conspiracist ideas.

Some elements of this story are familiar. Americans have overestimated, underestimated, or misunderstood their rivals before. And when they do, they make terrible mistakes. In 2003, many American analysts sincerely thought that Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction. During the Cold War, many analysts believed that the Soviet Union was stronger and less fragile than it proved to be. But I am not sure whether there has ever been a moment like this one, when the American government’s most prominent foreign-policy theorists have transferred their domestic obsessions to the outside world, projecting their own fears onto others. As a result, they are likely to misunderstand who could challenge, threaten, or even damage the United States in the near future. Their fantasy world endangers us all.

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

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Tuesday, December 16, 2025 5:53 PM

SECOND

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


Trump is failing and it’s his own fault.

by Zack Beauchamp | Dec 16, 2025, 5:00 AM CST

https://www.vox.com/politics/472346/trump-democracy-2025-haphazard-aut
horitarian

If you want to understand how the US government works today, you should study President Donald Trump’s attempt to pardon a woman named Tina Peters last week.

Peters is a former Colorado election clerk and a die-hard believer in the false claim that the 2020 election was stolen. In 2021, Peters committed a series of crimes in an attempt to “prove” election fraud occurred — including, most seriously, allowing a fellow 2020 truther to make copies of the actual hard drives of Mesa County voting machines. A Colorado jury convicted her of seven crimes last year, and a judge sentenced her to nine years in prison.

Last Thursday, Trump intervened on Peters’s behalf, declaring he was “granting Tina a full Pardon for her attempts to expose Voter Fraud in the Rigged 2020 Presidential Election.” On its face, this is menacingly authoritarian: the president abusing his powers to protect a woman who literally compromised the integrity of America’s vote-counting on his behalf.

Yet, Trump’s order is also something else: impotent.

The Constitution explicitly states that the presidential pardon power only applies to crimes committed “against the United States,” meaning federal rather than state crimes. Peters was convicted in a Colorado court under state law, and, thus, cannot be pardoned by the president. The state’s governor, attorney general, and secretary of state have all rejected the legality of Trump’s order; Peters remains incarcerated.

Trump’s actions were reported, in the New York Times and elsewhere, as a “symbolic” pardon. But that framing gives Trump too much credit. If you read his full post on Truth Social, there’s no indication that this is anything but a genuine attempt to do something clearly illegal. He genuinely seems to think that he can pardon her for state crimes, even though he very obviously cannot.
https://truthsocial.com/@realDonaldTrump/posts/115703610330402175

The Peters case represents an especially clear example of what I’ve come to see as the defining style of the second Trump administration: an incompetent form of authoritarianism that can best be described as “haphazardism.”

Key takeaways:

• Trump’s first year has revealed that he’s pursuing an authoritarian agenda in an incoherent and incompetent manner.

• This style of politics, which I’ve termed “haphazardism,” emerges from Trump’s own character — both his insistence on wielding untrammeled power and his inability to approach acquiring it in a strategic or detailed fashion.

• The emergence of haphazardism should make us optimistic about American democracy’s survival, even if the short-term outlook is still quite troubling.

Haphazardism is authoritarianism without vision, a governing style defined by a series of individual attacks on democracy without any kind of overarching logic, strategic structure, or clear end state in mind. These attacks can do (and indeed have done) real damage to the American political system, but they are often poorly executed and even self-undermining — preventing Trump from ruling in the truly unconstrained manner he seems to desire.

“Is he succeeding at breaking democracy? Yes,” said Steve Levitsky, a Harvard political scientist and author of How Democracies Die. “Is he succeeding at consolidating autocratic power? No.”

Haphazardism, as a concept, helps us understand Trump’s dangers to democracy in a more nuanced and precise way. And it can also help us see, after almost a year of Trump’s second presidency, where things might stand when he leaves power for good.

What haphazardism is

Donald Trump, like many of history’s villains, has extraordinary political talents. His authoritarian menace stems from these talents being married to a deep, primal lust for power — a desire to wield full authority over others without constraint or restriction. In his first term, these impulses were checked by a coterie of advisers who saw restraining him as part of their job description. This time, there are no guardrails.

Yet, at the same time, Trump is an impulsive man with little understanding of the actual levers of policy and administration. His statements on the topics are marked with intentional lies, to be sure, but also feature seemingly genuine (and profound) misunderstandings about basic issues, such as how trade deficits work. He is also showing signs of age, with fewer public appearances and a noticeably compressed daily schedule. The advisers who step up to shape policy are not always the most competent, and sometimes have agendas of their own that clash with both Trump’s public statement and their fellow aides’ agendas.

Haphazardism emerges from the interaction of these dynamics.

On the one hand, unbound Trump is pushing the limits of his authority in ways that often directly threaten pillars of the democratic system. Trump has unilaterally asserted extraordinary powers, like the ability to direct revenue and levy tariffs, that are explicitly reserved for Congress. He has attempted to prosecute his political enemies, undermine the fairness of the midterm elections, bully corporations and universities, and hand control over increasingly large swaths of the media to friends.

In many of these areas, he really has been able to change policy in unprecedented ways. The closure of USAID, the unbalanced “deal” with Columbia University, convincing Texas to enact an extreme gerrymander, and pressuring Paramount into selling to a Trump-aligned billionaire family — these are all examples of real victories for Trump’s effort to assert more personal control over American governance and society.

On the other hand, this list of authoritarian successes is counterbalanced by meaningful failures. Consider three developments from the past week alone:

• An aggressive pressure campaign on Indiana Republicans to enact an extreme gerrymandering that backfired, solidifying resistance in the state Senate and dooming the White House’s preferred house map in a Thursday campaign.

• An effort to prosecute one of Trump’s enemies, New York state Attorney General Letitia James, on such transparently fake charges that two grand juries refused to indict her.

• The resignation of Alina Habba, Trump’s former personal attorney, after a court ruled that she had been unlawfully appointed federal prosecutor for New Jersey.

These three failures all share something in common: the administration attempting to grab power without a real theory for overcoming the constraints in their way.

They did not understand the historic independence and small-c conservatism of Indiana’s Republican Party. They attempted to push through obviously political charges against James, heedless of how a jury might react. They didn’t care how illegal Habba’s appointment was.

These failures reflect more than mere misjudgments or technical incompetence. Rather, they reveal a White House trying to act on the president’s incoherent, often impossible desires. Trump personally wanted Republicans around the country to do extreme gerrymandering. He publicly demanded that the Justice Department prosecute James (and other enemies like James Comey). He wanted Habba installed in a key prosecutorial role.

Trump’s desires here do not reflect a coherent view of how to take over the American state. Rather, they reflect particular cases where the president wants maximal power or personal control without any deeper understanding of whether his desires are feasible or strategically wise. Trump’s aides and lawyers have little choice but to act on the boss’s desires and are often set up to fail.

This is the central way that haphazardism manifests: the sheer inconsistency or short-sightedness of Trump’s personal judgment leading to authoritarian setbacks. It’s a pattern that has repeated throughout the Trump presidency and produced some of its most notable and enduring failures.

The most important example is the “Liberation Day” tariffs. In that case, Trump’s personal obsession led him to assert extraordinary powers — to raise a tax seemingly at will — that would amount to a shocking revision of the constitutional order. On paper, that looks like a win for a president who wants to grab greater and greater personal power over the economy.

But, in the long run, the tariffs have done far more harm to Trump than good. They have been immensely unpopular and done damage to the real economy, both of which have fueled Democratic election gains and made it harder to convince others in society that resistance is futile. Moreover, they seem very likely to be overturned by the Supreme Court, meaning that Trump’s temporary gains for executive power will likely prove ephemeral.

Or, consider another example: the attempted takedown of Jimmy Kimmel in September.

In that case, FCC chair Brendan Carr was clearly attempting to act on Trump’s broadly stated desire to stop Kimmel. His chosen mechanism for doing that, making mafioso-like threats to network licenses during an appearance on a right-wing podcast, was extremely threatening to democracy. The government was overtly weaponizing its regulatory powers to punish a critic of the president!

But Carr’s actions were also self-defeatingly blunt. The obvious threat to free speech created a massive backlash, including a mass citizen-led drive to cancel Disney+ subscriptions. ABC-Disney ultimately had no choice but to reinstate Kimmel, and he remains on the air today. The short-term attempted power grab ended in long-term failure.

Finally, consider a third example: the purging of the civil service.

While the Trump team’s actions here have no doubt removed bureaucrats who might oppose his agenda from within, they’ve also pushed out untold numbers of talented individuals with irreplaceable knowledge of how government actually works. This doesn’t only damage the functioning of the US state; it also makes it harder for the Trump administration, specifically, to turn their desires into effective policies.

“A breakdown in state capacity — what the US is capable of doing — is very bad. And paradoxically…that may be the thing that is saving democracy,” says Oren Samet, a political scientist at Stanford University.

Is a haphazard America still a democracy?

Haphazardism is, by its nature, a very confusing style of governance. It is one in which traditional rules of democratic politics, like the rule of law, no longer fully bind the chief executive. Yet, at the same time, that chief executive is not using the powers he is accumulating in any kind of effective or coherent way — leading not only to poor policy but also a failure to systematically prevent meaningful political competition from the opposition.

So, is the United States under Trump’s haphazardism a democracy or an authoritarian state?

Harvard’s Levitsky is one of the leading voices arguing that America is already living under a form of authoritarianism. Indeed, he published a new piece with frequent coauthors Dan Ziblatt and Lucan Way making this case just last week.
https://www.foreignaffairs.com/united-states/american-authoritarianism
-levitsky-way-ziblatt

Yet, when I spoke to Levitsky on the phone, he distinguished between an authoritarian government and an authoritarian regime. The former refers to the way in which the people in power are ruling at the present moment; the latter refers to whether they are taking steps to permanently change the political system into something in which they and their allies can hold power indefinitely.

For Levitsky, Trump’s “systematic and regular abuse of power” is enough to establish that America currently has an authoritarian government. But, he does not believe that we are living under an authoritarian regime — believing that Trump’s authoritarian actions were likely to be “reversed” in the near future. He, thus, characterizes the current American situation as most likely to be a “mild and short-lived burst of authoritarianism” (with the major caveat that even “mild” authoritarianism is still quite dangerous).

Unlike Levitsky, I think that it’s still more accurate to call the United States a democracy. I have a hard time describing a country that still has reasonably free and fair elections, in which the incumbent party loses and departs office, as anything but.

But, that’s not really a substantive disagreement so much as it is a difference in emphasis. We agree on the basic haphazardist account of the Trump presidency — that it is taking authoritarian actions without effectively changing the operating logic of the system to sustain an unfair lock on political power. Whether you call such a situation “authoritarian” or “democratic” depends on whether you put more weight on current governance or regime fundamentals.

Laura Gamboa, a professor at Notre Dame who studies democratic backsliding in Latin America, says this unclarity is relatively typical of periods of political transformation. When a democracy is under serious attack, she says, there is often “muddiness and contention.” We just might not be able to know what the most precise characterization of the country’s politics is for years.

Ultimately, however, these tricky categorization questions are less important than the question of America’s political trajectory, which is whether democracy is likely to survive (or rebound from) his second term. And on that score, Trump’s haphazardism gives us some reasons for hope.

While 2025 has been an undeniably bad year for American democracy, the haphazardist pattern that has emerged shows that Trump’s authoritarian project may be self-limiting.

Amid the fevered climate following Charlie Kirk’s shooting, there was a clear and plausible pathway the Trump administration could have taken to create authoritarian change — one that centered on using federal regulatory and prosecutorial powers to repress their enemies. But, in the following months, the administration’s haphazardism has made it very difficult for them to go down this road in any kind of straightforward manner. There hasn’t been a single-minded focus on repression, and the efforts they have made — like the prosecutions of Comey and James — have run up against major barriers.

This, as both Levitsky and Gamboa pointed out, reflects how hard it is to change a country like the United States. In a country like the United States, with such a long democratic history and established institutions, it takes a lot of planning and ingenuity to overcome the forces standing in their way. Some modern authoritarians, like Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, possessed this kind of authoritarian vision and talent from the moment they took office. Trump seemingly didn’t.

It’s not impossible to overturn a democracy haphazardly. Other successful autocrats, such as Turkey’s Recep Tayyip Erdogan, built an authoritarian state through a more winding and improvisational pathway than Orbán. But doing it in the United States is an altogether different, and tougher, task.

Again, this does not mean the survival of American democracy is assured. Trump is persistent in pushing democratic limits, and the American presidency is an extraordinarily powerful office.

But, it does mean that the limits of the administration’s current strategy are very real — and coming into sharper focus.

Zack Beauchamp’s book on democracy, The Reactionary Spirit: how America’s most insidious political tradition swept the world, was published on July 16, 2024.
Free download at https://annas-archive.org/search?q=The+Reactionary+Spirit

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

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Tuesday, December 16, 2025 6:09 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Trump is failing and it’s his own fault.



December 16, 2025:
Trump: 43.8% Favorable / 52.8% Unfavorable (Split: -9.0)
https://www.realclearpolling.com/polls/favorability/donald-trump

December 17, 2021:
Biden: 42.9% Favorable / 52.2% Unfavorable (Split: -9.3)
https://www.realclearpolling.com/polls/favorability/joe-biden

December 15, 2013:
Obama: 42.5% Favorable / 53.4% Unfavorable (Split: -10.9)
https://www.realclearpolling.com/polls/approval/barack-obama/approval-
rating

December 16, 2005:
GWB: 43.2% Favorable / 53.6% Unfavorable (Split: -10.4)
https://www.realclearpolling.com/polls/approval/george-w-bush/approval
-rating


Shut up, Idiot.

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

Be Nice. Don't be a dick.

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Tuesday, December 16, 2025 8:26 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Thanks to Trump’s Extortionist Immigration Policies, Rural America Won’t Have Enough Doctors


I guess maybe we should start giving scholarships to young white men who would become doctors again, instead of giving them to white women who get nothing but gender studies degrees, the Chinese and Indian immigrants, and minorities here who can't even read or write, huh?

Sounds like a problem that you created.


America. The Land of the Over-Educated Idiots.

We've got enough women with HR qualifications that we could have an HR director hovering over every single person who is actually working for a living.

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

Be Nice. Don't be a dick.

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Wednesday, December 17, 2025 6:20 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:
Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Thanks to Trump’s Extortionist Immigration Policies, Rural America Won’t Have Enough Doctors


I guess maybe we should start giving scholarships to young white men who would become doctors again, instead of giving them to white women who get nothing but gender studies degrees, the Chinese and Indian immigrants, and minorities here who can't even read or write, huh?

Sounds like a problem that you created.


America. The Land of the Over-Educated Idiots.

We've got enough women with HR qualifications that we could have an HR director hovering over every single person who is actually working for a living.
I know those young, white men. It is NOT money that is stopping them from becoming doctors. They don't become doctors because they don't have what it takes to graduate. See 6ixStringJoker's multiple attempts at college. And the ones who do have the stamina to finish college and medical school and an internship don't want to live where the population is angry, poor white trash. Trumptard country. Where the pay is low, and the patients are sicker because they are stupider. Sick from smoking. Sick from drinking. Sick from gluttony. Teeth falling out because they are too stupid to brush or even go to a dentist.

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

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Wednesday, December 17, 2025 6:21 AM

SECOND

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


. . . the treasury secretary appeared onstage with Aaron Ross Sorkin and acted as though he was auditioning for the Scott Jennings chair at CNN.

Secretary Scott Bessent blustered. He attacked the media and claimed that he no longer reads the New York Times because it dared to say that Donald Trump — the most powerful, virile, dynamic man since Liberace — is old and slowing down. Then, when asked about affordability, Bessent made things up. Here’s the exchange:

Bessent: In a blue state, affordability is worse than a red state.

Ross Sorkin: We can debate that, but keep going—

Bessent: No, no, there’s no debate. The number is 50 basis points higher inflation. The ten highest inflation rates are in blue cities.

Ross Sorkin: But just so you know, because I went to look at this — this is the Joint Economic Committee—since 2021 the highest inflation of the past four years has been in red states, especially Florida.

Bessent: I’m talking about current. Current. Current, not over the past four years. . . . Today.

At this point, the audience laughed at the U.S. treasury secretary. I’m not sure people realize how dangerous it is for the SecTreas to be a laughingstock.

We’ll talk about why in a minute, but first I want you to consider the future. In May, President Trump will nominate the next chairman of the Federal Reserve. Bessent might get that job. If he does not, the gig could go to Kevin Hassett, who is a political hack like Bessent, only dumber.

What happens if Trump breaches the wall between the presidency and the central bank? What happens if the world understands that American fiscal policy is no longer being decided by an apolitical group of serious economists, but dictated by a geriatric conman through his puppet?

No one knows.

https://www.thebulwark.com/p/what-if-its-already-too-late-maga-institu
tions-leadership-bessent

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

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Wednesday, December 17, 2025 6:59 AM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Thanks to Trump’s Extortionist Immigration Policies, Rural America Won’t Have Enough Doctors


I guess maybe we should start giving scholarships to young white men who would become doctors again, instead of giving them to white women who get nothing but gender studies degrees, the Chinese and Indian immigrants, and minorities here who can't even read or write, huh?

Sounds like a problem that you created.


America. The Land of the Over-Educated Idiots.

We've got enough women with HR qualifications that we could have an HR director hovering over every single person who is actually working for a living.
I know those young, white men.


No. You don't.

You don't have any friends. You don't have any family.

Everybody you have ever known hates you.



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

Be Nice. Don't be a dick.

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Thursday, December 18, 2025 8:37 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:

No. You don't.

You don't have any friends. You don't have any family.

Everybody you have ever known hates you.
I don't think any limits on either Trump or his Trumptards are stopping them. They vomit all day. It's a contest. Who among the Trump lovers can empty their guts in public, making the biggest, nastiest mess where everybody can see what goes on inside Trumptards?

Why Trump’s Viciousness Matters

He wants to destroy our values, not just our democracy

By Paul Krugman | Dec 18, 2025

https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/why-trumps-viciousness-matters

For a recent example of Trump being himself:

Donald J. Trump @realDonaldTrump
A very sad thing happened last night in Hollywood. Rob Reiner, a tortured and struggling, but once very talented movie director and comedy star, has passed away, together with his wife, Michele, reportedly due to the anger he caused others through his massive, unyielding, and incurable affliction with a mind crippling disease known as TRUMP DERANGEMENT SYNDROME, sometimes referred to as TDS. He was known to have driven people CRAZY by his raging obsession of President Donald J. Trump, with his obvious paranoia reaching new heights as the Trump Administration surpassed all goals and expectations of greatness, and with the Golden Age of America upon us, perhaps like never before. May Rob and Michele rest in peace!
9.83k ReTruths 41.5k Likes Dec 15, 2025,10:51 AM

My first reaction upon reading Donald Trump’s despicable statement on the murders of Rob Reiner and his wife Michele was a sense of both shock and lack of surprise. It wasn’t news to me that the president of the United States is a vicious shmuck. My second reaction was the thought that I have nothing new to contribute here, as plenty of other people were already denouncing yet another example of Trump’s vindictive narcissism.

Yet, on reflection, I realized that there’s a story here that’s bigger than Trump, a story in which Trump is one especially egregious example of a larger pattern. What is that pattern? That being vicious and bigoted is cool, is based in current slang. Trump is one data point in the midst of an epidemic of performative hate-mongering in America. And while most of this is emanating from right-wing extremists, not all of it is.

I am not going to present some rose-tinted, Pollyannaish view of America’s past here. There were people who crowed over the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. For most of our history there were Americans who reveled in harming, subjugating and dispossessing those who were considered of the wrong race, ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation or gender identity. But we, as a country, changed. Over time, Americans on the whole became more humane and tolerant.

It’s true that significant numbers of Americans were never fully on board with liberal humanism. For example, a majority of white American’s didn’t approve of interracial marriage until 1997. However, we were slowly becoming a country in which open bigotry was frowned upon. Although we were never perfect, there was a growing sense of norms that contained any underlying hatred.

Now the impulse to hate is back. For example, according to a long-running survey conducted by NORC and the ADL, antisemitism has been making a big comeback:
Antisemitic Attitudes in America 2024

https://www.adl.org/resources/report/antisemitic-attitudes-america-202
4

And Trump has made innumerable crudely racist comments about Black Americans, particularly about Black American women. He’s demonized immigrants and Muslims, and suggested Democratic politicians should be executed. But the resurgence of hate speech isn’t just about Trump, nor is it solely about politics. Grown men — it’s mostly, although not only, men — now feel free to be publicly cruel and vindictive, spouting childish insults against whomever they dislike.

Why is this happening? The rise of social media is one significant factor in making it far easier for the like-minded to find one another and magnify their hate.

The app formerly known as Twitter is thoroughly infested with bigots and bots, and all too many people who immerse themselves in that toxic environment end up internalizing the viciousness. Even right-wing activists like Chris Rufo are complaining that X has been “increasingly hijacked by bad actors who peddle baseless conspiracies and indulge their personal psychopathologies.” And G. Elliott Morris’s Substack “Strength in Numbers” has an excellent post on how Fox News polarized American voters and helped break American politics.

However, media alone are not to blame. I’ve been reading the British economist Simon Wren-Lewis, who has been writing about “the growing acceptability of xenophobic discourse” in the UK. His thesis is that there have always been a substantial number of people in Britain — and, surely, in every Western nation — who are socially reactionary and racist. In the past, however, mainstream political parties refused to associate themselves with anyone espousing such views. Eventually the cynical search for votes led to a breakdown of this cordon sanitaire — the Germans call their equivalent the Brandmauer, or firewall — and the latent viciousness broke into the open.

In a follow-up post Wren-Lewis, citing the work of the political scientist Vicente Valentim, acknowledges that broader social norms, largely established after World War II, also made overt racism and other forms of bigotry unacceptable in the public sphere. Even people who were privately cruel and bigoted – some of them in influential positions – felt obliged to be hypocrites and hide their true nature.

In time, however, events, ranging from the Syrian refugee crisis in Germany to the election of America’s first Black president, loosened the grip of these social norms. The already-existing pool of cruelty and bigotry, which had previously been veiled by hypocrisy, came back into full view.

A similar phenomenon is occurring in the US, where some Trump supporters are gleeful that Trump’s presidency will allow them to drop the veil of hypocrisy. For example, the Financial Times reported on the reasons some on Wall Street were welcoming Trump’s return:

“I feel liberated,” said a top banker. “We can say ‘retard’ and ‘pussy’ without the fear of getting cancelled . . . it’s a new dawn.”

But where I would differ from Wren-Lewis’s analysis — although I’m not sure Simon would disagree — is that he implicitly treats the number of reactionaries and bigots as immutable. In fact, as G. Elliott Morris likes to point out, ordinary voters’ positions on issues — and, I’d argue, elites’ positions too — are far less fixed than political strategists tend to assume. They can and do shift greatly based on what people hear.

If this is true, then the world in which we lived until recently was a world in which the general public was steered away from the worst bigotry because, over time, it had been made socially unacceptable. Yes, there was substantial hypocrisy lurking below the surface, but the hypocrisy was a useful tool that reduced the amount of violent and hate-filled rhetoric.

Now, Trump is purposely breaking norms and engaging in open expressions of hate and bigotry. And among a set of people, this serves as a signal that it’s now socially acceptable to do the same – look, for example, atthe extremely racist and Nazi-praising chats among young Republican activists leaked to Politico. While these young MAGA-landers were outed and chastised, it’s clear that within MAGA-world emulating Trump’s hate-filled rhetoric is considered a way of signaling that you are loyal to the movement.

And it’s also clear that if Trumpism persists, we are facing a future in which such behavior is no longer publicly unacceptable. Because Trump’s remarks about the murder of the Reiners weren’t just his personal venting. They were a symptom and a symbol of his systematic destruction of our norms, our humanism, just as he tried to destroy the norms of American democracy on January 6, 2021. It’s a profoundly nihilistic vision for America.

And one of these days, I predict, history will judge harshly those who stayed silent.

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

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Thursday, December 18, 2025 12:12 PM

SECOND

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


This Is What Presidential Panic Looks Like

Donald Trump delivered a fear-drenched rant live from the White House.

By Tom Nichols | December 17, 2025, 10:36 PM ET

https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2025/12/what-presidential-panic-look
s-like/685307/

The president of the United States just barged into America’s living rooms like an angry, confused grandfather to tell us all that we are ungrateful whelps.

When a president asks for network time, it’s usually to announce something important. But tonight, Donald Trump did not give anything like a normal speech or address. He was clearly working from a prepared text, but it sounded like one he’d written—or dictated angrily—himself, because it was full of bizarre howlers that even Trump’s second-rate speech-writing shop would probably have avoided, such as his assertion that inflation when he took office was the worst it had been in 48 years. (Why did he pick 1977 as a benchmark? Who knows. But he’s wrong.) He read the speech quickly, his voice rising in frustration as he hurled one lie after another into the camera.

We could take apart Trump’s fake facts, as checkers and pundits will do in the next few days. But perhaps more important than false statements—which for Trump are par for the course—was his demeanor. Americans saw a president drenched in panic as he tried to bully an entire nation into admitting he’s doing a great job. For 20 minutes, he vented his hurt feelings without a molecule of empathy or awareness. Economic concerns? Shut up, you fools, the economy is doing fine. (And if it isn’t, it’s not his fault—it’s Joe Biden’s.) Foreign-policy jitters? Zip it, you wimps, America is strong and respected.

In effect, Trump took to the airwaves, pointed his finger, and said: Quiet, piggy.

I consider myself a connoisseur of Trump’s speeches. I’ve watched them and live-tweeted them for years because I think Americans need to see what kind of man sits in the Oval Office. But even by Trump’s standards, this was an unnerving display of fear. I can only imagine America’s enemies in Moscow and Beijing and Tehran smiling with pleasure as they watched a president losing his bearings, berating his own people, and demanding that they absolve him of any blame when things get worse.

His rant contained no news, other than an example of his contempt for the U.S. military, whose loyalty he thinks he can purchase with a onetime $1,776 bonus check. This is projection: Trump has shown his willingness to be bought off with gold bars and trinkets, and he may think that the men and women of the armed forces are people of equally low character.

This was not a holiday address from the president of a great democracy to its citizens. This was a desperate tin-pot leader yelling into a microphone while cornered in his palace redoubt. Trump has been unraveling for weeks, and his speech tonight, like Trump himself, was unworthy of America and its people.



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

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Thursday, December 18, 2025 1:17 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:
Originally posted by second:
This Is What Presidential Panic Looks Like

Donald Trump delivered a fear-drenched rant live from the White House.


No he didn't.

I could see why YOU might be scared after watching it though.



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

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Thursday, December 18, 2025 1:37 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:
Quote:
Originally posted by second:
This Is What Presidential Panic Looks Like

Donald Trump delivered a fear-drenched rant live from the White House.


No he didn't.

I could see why YOU might be scared after watching it though.
Trump is attaching a ballroom to the White House, but can't even do that properly. The price has gone from $200 to $400 million in a couple of months because he is fucked up in the head. I wouldn't be surprised if the eventual price goes to $800 million or $1.6 billion because Trump is seriously screwed up. He keeps saying that taxpayers don't have to pay because billionaires are paying, but the billionaires are going to receive something under the table for their generosity toward Trump.

https://thehill.com/blogs/in-the-know/5652531-trump-cost-new-ballroom-
400m/

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

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Thursday, December 18, 2025 5:39 PM

SECOND

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


The U.S. Has a Great Warning System for Deadly Weather. Trump Wants to Destroy It.

The National Center for Atmospheric Research helps power weather and wildfire forecasts across the country. Now it’s being targeted in a presidential feud.

By Marianne Lavelle | Dec 18, 2025 3:15 PM

https://slate.com/technology/2025/12/donald-trump-jared-polis-colorado
-climate-change-extreme-weather.html

One of the world’s leading climate, weather, and wildfire science research institutions is being targeted for elimination in what many of those affected see as President Donald Trump’s political vendetta against Colorado Gov. Jared Polis.

Word that the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder would be broken up, with some of its functions moved elsewhere, came hours after the cancellation of $109 million in federal environmental and safety grants for Colorado, and one day after Trump took time during an Oval Office ceremony to excoriate Polis as a “weak and pathetic man.” Russell Vought, the director of the White House budget office, announced that the center would be eliminated in a post on the social media site X on Tuesday evening. His office did not respond to a request for further comment Wednesday.

Trump’s beef with Polis stems from the jailing of a former county election official in Colorado, Tina Peters, who was convicted of giving Trump allies unauthorized access to a voting machine in the aftermath of the 2020 election. An anonymous White House official told the Washington Post: “The Colorado governor obviously isn’t willing to work with the president.”

Scientists affiliated with NCAR expressed shock that the center—a linchpin in climate and weather research globally—is at risk of becoming collateral damage in one of Trump’s feuds.

“One theory is that this is designed to put pressure on the Governor of Colorado to allow the pardon Trump attempted to go through???!!!” wrote NCAR distinguished scholar Kevin Trenberth in an email. “Shutting NCAR would be a major setback for the entire community and would have impact for decades to come.”

NCAR, founded in 1960 and administered by the National Science Foundation, provides state-of-the-art data and technology resources for 129 North American university partners. Partners rely on NCAR supercomputers, heavily instrumented aircraft, and Earth-systems modeling. NCAR developed the Dropsonde, the equipment that hurricane-hunter aircraft use to measure temperature, pressure, and humidity of tropical storms. The center does real-time operational forecasting for the military, for example, at the antiballistic missile systems site at Fort Greely, Alaska, and has done the computer modeling that has helped improve forecasting of wildfire behavior.

NCAR is “is quite literally our global mothership,” said climate scientist Katharine Hayhoe in a post on X. “Nearly everyone who researches climate and weather—not only in the US, but around the world—has passed through its doors and benefited from its incredible resources.”

NCAR is “truly an international treasure, not just a national treasure,” said Antonio Busalacchi, president of the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research, which manages NCAR for the National Science Foundation. UCAR has 1,450 employees, 830 of them at NCAR.

As of Wednesday midday, Busalacchi said he had received no word from Washington about the dismantling plan aside from Vought’s announcement Tuesday night, linking to an exclusive USA Today story that quoted him.

Aside from meeting any political aims, the elimination of NCAR would fulfill Vought’s goals of shrinking the size of government and rooting out climate science. “This facility is one of the largest sources of climate alarmism in the country,” Vought said in his post on X, quoting verbatim the controversial conservative blueprint for the Trump administration, Project 2025, which he helped author.

He said that critical weather work would be moved to another location, but gave no details. Daniel Swain, an expert on extreme weather at University of California Agriculture and Natural Resources and an NCAR research partner, disputed the idea that the study of climate and weather can be separated.

“Increasingly, the science has demonstrated that there is no clean separation between weather and climate,” Swain said in a YouTube livestream Wednesday. “It’s the same atmosphere. It’s just different timescales.”

Swain said he is only able to do his work at the University of California because all of his computing needs are met by NCAR. “There are hundreds, if not thousands, of scientists all around the country that use those NCAR resources day-to-day to do their science, to conduct their visualizations,” he said. “It’s actually a very efficient process, in the sense that it centralizes what otherwise would be distributed, more expensive, complicated, and in many cases, therefore just wouldn’t happen at all.”

He noted the irony that the NCAR community was grappling with the news at the same time that Boulder has been under an extreme wildfire risk warning—the kind of warning that NCAR’s research has enabled. The local utility, Xcel Energy, preemptively cut power in the region as a result.

“If there are no major fires in the Boulder area, it is possibly at least going to be in part because these excellent weather forecasts regarding the upcoming event allowed the utilities to take preemptive action and prevent those branches and trees that might fall on power lines from igniting the fires,” Swain said.

NCAR received $123 million in funding from the National Science Foundation in the last fiscal year, accounting for one half of its budget, according to Science magazine. NCAR receives other funding from the Pentagon and other federal agencies as well as from states and private sources. NCAR and UCAR are part of a complex of more than 30 federally funded laboratories and institutions in Colorado that have a $2.6 billion annual impact on the state’s economy, according to research by the University of Colorado’s Leeds School of Business.

Polis said in a statement that Colorado has not received information directly from the Trump administration about the NCAR plan or the cancellation of a wide array of transportation grants that was reported by the Colorado Sun. The cuts include a $66 million grant set to pay for a critical rail-safety mechanism in the northern part of the state, $11.7 million to electrify the Fort Collins vehicle fleet, and $11.7 million to Colorado State University Pueblo to study how to power rail vehicles with hydrogen and natural gas.

If the reports are true, Polis said, “public safety is at risk and science is being attacked.

“Climate change is real,” he said. “But the work of NCAR goes far beyond climate science. NCAR delivers data around severe weather events like fires and floods that help our country save lives and property, and prevent devastation for families. If these cuts move forward we will lose our competitive advantage against foreign powers and adversaries in the pursuit of scientific discovery.”

In a post on X, Colorado Democratic Rep. Joe Neguse, who represents the district that includes Boulder, called the plan to dismantle NCAR “a deeply dangerous & blatantly retaliatory action by the Trump administration.

“NCAR is one of the most renowned scientific facilities in the WORLD—where scientists perform cutting-edge research everyday,” Neguse wrote. “We will fight this reckless directive with every legal tool we have.”

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

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Thursday, December 18, 2025 5:59 PM

SECOND

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


The check is NOT on the way because Trump came up with this idea during the speech and has pre-planned nothing.

Trump Promises $1,776 ‘Warrior Dividend’ for Troops — Here’s What Service Members Need to Know

Douglas Lindsay, Nick Mordowanec | December 18, 2025

https://www.military.com/daily-news/investigations-and-features/2025/1
2/18/trump-promises-1776-warrior-dividend-troops-heres-what-service-members-need-know.html

President Donald Trump's promised one-time $1,776 payment for U.S. service members dubbed a “Warrior Dividend” is being framed as both a financial boost and a symbolic gesture tied to the nation’s founding.

“We are sending every soldier $1,776 — and the checks are already on the way,” Trump said. “Nobody deserves it more than our military.”

The announcement made Wednesday evening during a nationally televised address immediately sparked questions across the force—not just about the money itself but about who actually qualifies, when it would show up on paychecks, whether it would be taxed, and whether it would affect existing pay and benefits.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, in a video posted Thursday morning on X, said the payments will be tax-free and issued to more than 1.45 million service members "in the coming days." He made a mention of payments being issued before Christmas.

He said the payments provide "a whole new modern meaning" to 1776 and the American Revolution, as well as to the current joint force, praising Trump's "unwavering commitment" for the military.

"This has never happened before, every member of our military from E-1 to O-6," Hegseth said.

Questions Service Members are Asking Right Now

Here’s what service members and military families need to know right now, including what’s confirmed, what’s still unclear, and what to watch for next:

Do I actually qualify?
When will this hit my LES?
Is it taxable?
Does this affect my BAH or pay raise?
Does this impact Guard and Reserve members?
Is this real or political talk?

In the hours after the speech, similar questions repeatedly surfaced across installations, unit group chats, and military family networks. While Hegseth provided some context regarding the tax aspect, most other questions currently remain unanswered.
What is the 'Warrior Dividend'?

Trump said the administration plans to issue a one-time $1,776 payment to roughly 1.4 million active-duty and eligible reserve service members, tying the amount to 1776—the year of American independence.

“In honor of our nation’s founding in 1776, we are sending every soldier $1,776,” Trump said during the address.

White House officials have said the payment would apply to service members through the rank of colonel (or Navy captain equivalent), but final eligibility rules have not yet been released by the Department of Defense.
What This Is and Isn’t

A one-time bonus payment.
Not a permanent pay raise.
Not a change to BAH, BAS, retirement, or health care.
Not guaranteed until DoD and DFAS issue implementing guidance.

How to Know if You Qualify

Active-duty service members are expected to be the primary eligible group based on Trump’s remarks and historical precedent.

However, no formal eligibility memo has been released; rank limits, duty status and service dates may apply; and prior one-time payments often included cutoff dates or minimum service thresholds.

Until the Pentagon publishes guidance, eligibility should be viewed as likely but not confirmed.

What About Guard and Reserve Members?

This remains one of the biggest unanswered questions.

Although Trump used broad language mentioning “every soldier,” Guard and Reserve members have historically been included only if they meet qualifying active-duty criteria.

Those particular troops should watch for:

Activation or Title 10 requirements.
Minimum days served.
Specific qualifying windows.

For now, eligibility for drilling Guard and Reserve members remains unclear.
When Will This Hit My LES?

Based on prior military bonus payments, service members should expect:

A separate line item on their Leave and Earnings Statement.
Processing through DFAS, not unit finance offices.
No action required by the service member.

Despite Trump’s claim that checks are “already on the way,” no DFAS implementation timeline has been officially announced.

Until DFAS guidance is released, there is no confirmed deposit date.
Is the Payment Taxable?

At this point payment is taxable unless explicitly exempted.

Under federal law, most bonuses and special pay are treated as taxable income unless Congress specifies otherwise. No tax exemption has been announced for the $1,776 payments.

Service members should plan conservatively and assume federal taxes will apply, that state tax treatment may vary, and that net pay may be less than $1,776.

Does This Affect My BAH or Pay Raise?

This does not affect BAH or BAS, as the 'dividend' does not change base pay.

It also does not alter the annual military pay raise, nor does it count toward retirement calculations. It is a standalone, one-time payment.

Is This Real or Politics?

The announcement is real in the sense that it was delivered by the president during a national address.

However, the following must still occur to make it a reality:

The payment still requires Department of Defense execution.
Funding authority must be clearly identified.
DFAS must issue formal guidance.

Until those steps occur, the payment should be viewed as a presidential commitment awaiting implementation, not an automatic entitlement.

How Trump Said the Payment Would Be Funded

Trump said higher-than-expected federal revenue, particularly from tariffs, made the payment possible.

“We made a lot more money than anybody thought,” he said during the speech.

Budget experts note that one-time military payments typically require explicit congressional authorization, meaning funding and legal mechanisms may face scrutiny in the coming days from both chambers on Capitol Hill.
What Else Trump Covered in Speech

Beyond the warrior dividend, Trump’s address covered several broader themes with indirect implications for service members and military families, including the following key policies and objectives:

The Economy and Inflation

Trump claimed progress on inflation and wages, framing economic strength as a national security issue.

“Our nation is strong, our economy is strong,” he said.

Economic conditions affect purchasing power of military pay, cost of living near installations, and housing affordability for military families.

Trump blamed his predecessor, saying that under former President Joe Biden "inflation was the worst in 48 years, and some would say in the history of our country.” Inflation was worst under Biden in June 2022 when it hit 9.1%, though the largest inflation rate in U.S. history was 23.7% in 1920.

When Biden left office and Trump was inaugurated for his second term, inflation was at 3%. The most recent numbers issued in September 2025 showed inflation still sitting at 3%.

New numbers were scheduled to be released Thursday morning.

The president emphasized tariffs as both leverage and a revenue source, including funding priorities such as the troop payment.

Trade policy can influence consumer prices, defense supply chains, and employment in military-heavy regions.

Trump called "tariffs" his favorite word during the speech.

"Companies know that if they build in America there are no tariffs, and that's why they are coming home to the USA in record numbers," the president said.
Immigration and Border Security

Trump reiterated claims of progress on border enforcement, an issue that often drives National Guard deployments, federal resource allocation, and broader security priorities.

The president said in his speech that he inherited "the worst border anywhere in the world."

"In a few short months, we went from worst to best," he added.

It was part of a broader theme of his speech, tossing blame on the previous administration that he said gave him a "mess" to fix.
National Security Posture

Trump framed the speech as a statement of strength and deterrence but did not announce new military operations, force posture changes, or defense budget adjustments.
What Service Members Should Do Next

Until formal guidance is released, service members should:

Monitor DFAS announcements
Watch service-specific pay messages
Avoid assuming eligibility or timing
Plan conservatively

Military families should remember that one-time payments provide short-term relief, not long-term compensation reform.

Bottom Line

President Trump’s speech paired broad economic messaging with a symbolic, and potentially meaningful, financial gesture toward service members.

The promised $1,776 payment could provide short-term relief for many troops but critical questions about eligibility, timing, taxation and execution remain unanswered.

For now, it is best understood as a real announcement that still requires real implementation—one the military community will be watching closely.

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

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Thursday, December 18, 2025 6:04 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:
Quote:
Originally posted by second:
This Is What Presidential Panic Looks Like

Donald Trump delivered a fear-drenched rant live from the White House.


No he didn't.

I could see why YOU might be scared after watching it though.
Trump is attaching a ballroom to the White House, but can't even do that properly. The price has gone from $200 to $400 million in a couple of months because he is fucked up in the head. I wouldn't be surprised if the eventual price goes to $800 million or $1.6 billion because Trump is seriously screwed up. He keeps saying that taxpayers don't have to pay because billionaires are paying, but the billionaires are going to receive something under the table for their generosity toward Trump.


He's paying for it. Shut the fuck up.

Besides... Bill Maher is happy that he doesn't have to sit under a fucking tent outdoors the next time there's a White House get together.

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

Be Nice. Don't be a dick.

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Thursday, December 18, 2025 6:05 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:
Originally posted by second:
The check is NOT on the way because Trump came up with this idea during the speech and has pre-planned nothing.


You've got nothing to complain about today so this worthless article full of nobody gives a shit needed to be posted here?

Shut the fuck up.

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

Be Nice. Don't be a dick.

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Thursday, December 18, 2025 6:15 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:
Trump blamed his predecessor, saying that under former President Joe Biden "inflation was the worst in 48 years, and some would say in the history of our country.” Inflation was worst under Biden in June 2022 when it hit 9.1%, though the largest inflation rate in U.S. history was 23.7% in 1920.


Oh. Okay. Let's quibble over the fact that the last time inflation was as bad as Joe Biden*'s destruction of the US economy came when less than 1% of 1% of 1% of currently living Americans were even born.

Shut the fuck up.

Quote:
When Biden left office and Trump was inaugurated for his second term, inflation was at 3%. The most recent numbers issued in September 2025 showed inflation still sitting at 3%.


Yeah. All the damage had already been done, long before Trump came back.

Thank you for confirming what we all already knew.


I love how all of you braindead retards have been forced to admit how bad Joe Biden* was for the economy in 2025 after 4 straight years of pretending that there wasn't any inflation.

Shut the fuck up.

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

Be Nice. Don't be a dick.

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Thursday, December 18, 2025 8:37 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:

I love how all of you braindead retards have been forced to admit how bad Joe Biden* was for the economy in 2025 after 4 straight years of pretending that there wasn't any inflation.

Shut the fuck up.
6ixStringJoker, how can you NOT understand something so simple as how prices are set? The wages paid to workers are NOT set by workers in the US. The price workers pay for what they buy is also NOT set by workers. Who do you think sets wages/prices if NOT the poorest? It is the richest, not some imaginary invisible hand of the marketplace.

Trump refused to veto any congressional spending and added $7.8 trillion to the nation debt. Then the people who set prices raised prices to take all that unpaid tax money away from poorer people:
https://www.google.com/search?q=How+much+did+the+National+debt+increas
e+during+Trump%27s+term

How much did Biden increase the National debt? Half as much as Trump. If only Biden could have undone Trump’s tax cuts, the debt would be even smaller. Again, the people who set prices raised prices to take all that money back:
https://www.axios.com/2024/06/24/trump-biden-debt-deficits-election

All of Trump’s tax cuts were set to expire after 10 years, but instead of letting the tax cuts expire, Trump passed a new law to keep them in place. In time, the people who set prices will once again raise prices to take all that money back from poor people. There will be a new burst of price inflation to match older bursts:


https://fred.stlouisfed.org/graph/?g=1wmdD

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

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Thursday, December 18, 2025 10:10 PM

6IXSTRINGJACK


Quote:
Originally posted by second:
Quote:
Originally posted by 6ixStringJack:

I love how all of you braindead retards have been forced to admit how bad Joe Biden* was for the economy in 2025 after 4 straight years of pretending that there wasn't any inflation.

Shut the fuck up.
6ixStringJoker, how can you NOT understand something so simple as how prices are set?


Shut. The. Fuck. Up.

You have shown everyone here over the years that you don't know one fucking thing about anything.

Loser.


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

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Friday, December 19, 2025 10:46 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.

You have shown everyone here over the years that you don't know one fucking thing about anything.

Loser.
6ixStringJoker, you flunked out of college. That is possibly because you cannot understand ideas that take more than 100 words to explain. Trump knows your limitations and never goes beyond them, but Paul Krugman always pushes beyond your 100-word limit, which makes you angry at him. Also, any bar graph will go beyond 6ixStringJoker's limitations. This story has two bar graphs, causing 6ix to be discombobulated:

What MAGA genius thought that Trump’s “affordability” speech was a good idea?

By Paul Krugman | Dec 19, 2025

https://paulkrugman.substack.com/p/lies-damned-lies-and-trump-speeches

Healthcare is an area where policy has a huge effect on affordability. It’s also an area in which Trump talked utter nonsense.

Here’s what you should know: The Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare, offers Americans who aren’t covered by Medicare, Medicaid or through their employers the ability to purchase insurance coverage from private insurers, with the federal government subsidizing most enrollees’ premiums. However, enhanced subsidies put in place under the Biden administration will expire on January 1st, 2026, leading to large cost increases for many families.

Costs will soar for two reasons. There’s the direct effect of losing subsidies. But there’s also an indirect effect, because the loss of subsidies will lead millions of people to drop their coverage — and those who drop coverage will, on average, be healthier than those who don’t, worsening the risk pool. Insurers, anticipating this effect, have already sharply raised premiums.

Charts from KFF show the effects on some representative couples. More than 20 million would be affected, but the worst hit will be older, moderately well-off Americans who are earning just a bit too much to remain eligible for subsidies. For example, a 60-year-old couple with an income of $85,000 will face a premium hike equal to more than a quarter of their pre-tax income:


Source: https://www.kff.org/affordable-care-act/aca-marketplace-premium-paymen
ts-would-more-than-double-on-average-next-year-if-enhanced-premium-tax-credits-expire/

What should the Trump Administration do? Here’s Trump:

“I’m also taking on the gigantic health insurance companies that have gotten rich on billions of dollars of money that should go directly to the people. The money should go to the people. That’s you, so they can buy their own health insurance, which will give far better benefits at much lower costs.”

So Trump says that he’ll replace the current system, in which people buy their own health insurance with the aid of government subsidies, with a system in which the government gives people money they can use to buy their own health insurance. How is that different? In fact, it isn’t different except for one devastating detail: Republicans in Congress will never approve subsidies adequate to make health insurance affordable. Because the Republican plan would be far stingier than the one currently in place, millions of people will be forced to drop their insurance. And as I said, because it’s the younger and relatively more healthy that will drop their coverage, the pool of those who keep their coverage will be older and sicker. And you know what happens next – premiums go up even further. No wonder that four Republican congressmen in purple districts defied Mike Johnson and voted to extend the Obamacare subsidies.

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

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