Archives for category: Trump

Trump had a phone call with Putin before Zelensky arrived to confer with Trump about a peace plan. Trump spoke to Putin for two hours before Zelensky arrived.

When Zelensky’s airplane landed, no American was there to greet him, only Ukraine’s Ambassador to the U.S. This contrasted with Trump’s warm welcome for Putin when they met in Alaska. Trump had Marines on their knees unfurling a red carpet for Putin, and Trump waited for Putin on the tarmac, greeting him with the joy of a boy for his beloved father.

The meeting takes place as Russia has stepped up the intensity of its nightly bombing of Ukrainian cities, with more drones and missiles than at any time since Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022.

Trump apparently believes that Russia wants peace, even as they daily target residential apartment buildings and power plants in Ukraine.

Trump and Putin are dear friends. Or, more likely, Putin plays Trump like a violin, praising him lavishly and inflating his giant ego.

I’m sorry to say it but Zelensky is wasting his time by counting on Trump. Trump has thus far asked Zelensky to accept “peace” on Putin’s terms. The U.S. is not Ukraine’s ally. He should rely on Europe because they don’t want the aggressor to prevail.

Simon Rosenberg of Hopium Chronicles wrote:

Trump and Zelensky had a press conference where both sides committed to keep working. Throughout the run up and the event today Trump and his team continued to repeat outlandish Russian talking points….

Listen to Trump here. The man negotiating the fate of the West is clearly unwell and delusional. Trump: “It’s funny, I settled 8 wars. Some were going on for 35 years. And we got them settled in a couple of days. Some of them — one was going on for 37 years. I settled it in one day. But this is a very complex one” (Via Aaron Rupar)

Listen to Trump here. The man negotiating the fate of the West is clearly unwell and delusional. Catch Zelenskyy’s facial expressions when Trump claims Putin wants Ukraine to succeed and is willing to help with reconstruction: 

Here’s that question again with a close up on Zelenskyy: 

The National Trust for Historic Preservation, a private nonprofit tasked by Congress with helping preserve historical buildings, sued the Trump administration for tearing down the East Wing of the White House and asked a federal judge for an emergency stop-work order. The judge did not stop work on the new ballroom, but he did order the White House to get approval from the necessary agencies.

In his eagerness to build his gigantic ballroom, Trump bypassed the normal review process for making changes to a historic building.

Trump knew that if he went through the legally-required process, it would take years to get the necessary approvals, and some busybody preservationists might tell him to scale back his grand plans. The new ballroom–at 95,000 square feet– will be almost double the size of the entire White House–which is 55,000 square feet.

So he followed his personal motto: “Stop me if you can.”

Without asking permission he demolished the East Wing. It is gone, finished.

Now he will take his plans to the National Capital Planning Commission, which will hold hearings starting January 8.

Ordinarily, the NCPC review is rigorous and involves multiple hearings before a shovel touches the ground, reviewing esthetic and environmental issues.Trump expects to get done in a few months what customarily takes years of review before any work begins.

The 12-member NCPC will not pose a problem. The Washington Post reported:

The NCPC is led by Will Scharf, the White House staff secretary and Trump’s former personal lawyer, whom the president appointed as commission chair in July, and its members tilt toward Trump. The president appointed two other White House officials to the body, and the commission also includes nine seats apportioned to sitting Cabinet secretaries and other local and federal officials.

Trump’s grandiose plan must also win the approval of the U.S. Commission on Fine Arts. That should not be a problem either, because in October, Trump fired all six members of the Commission. That Conmission (if Trump has appointed new members) will review the proposed ballroom that will replace the East Wing and also Trump’s plan to build an Arc d’Trump.

It’s clear sailing with no dissents anticipated.

This is an important development. Our nation needs at least two sensible political parties. A two-party system with vigorous third parties is healthy for our democracy.

When one of our two major parties is captured by an extremists cult, it’s a very bad sign. When that cult revels in cutting ties with our historic allies, in brutalizing immigrants and even citizens who look like immigrants (brown skin color), in sending troops to American cities, in killing people on boats that might or might not be transporting drugs instead interdicting them, in abandoning civil rights laws, and in treating the president as a king to be obeyed and worshipped, that cult is not a normal participant in American politics because it is not bound by the Constitution.

Thus, in my opinion, it is very good news that sane conservatives are abandoning the Heritage Foundation–whose leader was the architect of Project 2025–and joining forces with Mike Pence.

Pence is a conservative through and through, and I disagree with him on most issues. But in 2020, he refused Trump’s direct order to join the insurrection by refusing to certify Biden’s election. Pence certified Biden’s election and was reviled by MAGA for following the Constitution, not Trump. They chanted “Hang Mike Pence” on January 6, 2021, and even built a scaffold outside the U.S. Capitol. Trump shrugged with indifference, and the mob searched for Pence.

Politico wrote about the splintering at the Heritage Foundation.

More than a dozen staffers at The Heritage Foundation are leaving the conservative think tank to join a nonprofit led by former Vice President Mike Pence as the embattled organization continues to reel from ongoing turmoil.

Advancing American Freedom — founded by Pence in 2021 “to defend liberty and advance policies that build a stronger America” — announced Monday that three senior officials who led the legal, economic and data teams at Heritage would be joining the group next year, along with several members of their teams.

This is good news for the conservative Republican Party and good news for our democracy. Genuine conservatives can’t abide the extremism of MAGA.

I’ll be watching to see what Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger do in the future.

Our President extends Christmas wishes to all, even the “radical left scum.” This is his effort to bring the country together, to extol himself, and to mark a day of Peace and Joy! Who better to celebrate and congratulate than himself?

A Message from the President

Did you see this one?

Someone at the White House thinks cruelty is funny.

I’m confused. Yesterday afternoon, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that Trump could not send the National Guard to Chicago. Okay.

But a few minutes later, he mobilized the Louisiana National Guard and ordered it to New Orleans, where serious crime is declining. Jeff Landry, the Republican Governor of Louisiana, was delighted that Trump was sending in the Guard.

Questions:

If the president can’t send the Guard to Chicago, why can he send it to New Orleans?

If Governor Landry thought that New Orleans needed the National Guard, why didn’t he mobilize them himself? Maybe it’s because the federal government will pay part of the costs. But if the need was urgent, it seems the Governor would have acted without delay.

Answers?

www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2025-capital-flow-trump/

This is a gift article that appeared in Bloomberg News. It describes the dramatic changes that Trump has made by executive order to redirect the flow of money.

It’s unlikely that Trump wrote these orders or even understood their implications. He is surrounded by people who know precisely what they are doing: windfalls for the rich.

As has been widely reported, CBS’ “60 Minutes” announced that it would release a program about the notorious prison in El Salvador– CECOT–where the U.S. sent migrant prisoners, who were allegedly hardened criminals, “the worst of the worst.”

The program interviews released prisoners, who describe torture, beatings, and inhumane conditions that would never be permitted in U.S. prisons. It also reviewed records and concluded that few of those sent to CECOT were hardened criminals or terrorists.

Bari Weiss, the editor-in/chief of CBS News, stopped the release of the segment because no one in the Trump administration agreed to respond to it. Critics said that if that was legitimate grounds for blocking a story, the Trump administration could block all critical coverage by refusing to comment.

After CBS was sold to the Ellison billionaires, David Ellison hired Bari Weiss to be editor-in-chief and bought her website “The Free Press” for $150 million. Weiss has no experience in the broadcast industry.

Apparently the show aired in Canada, where a viewer copied it and posted it on Reddit.

Here is the link on Reddit. Decide for yourself whether Weiss was right to stop the show until someone from the Trump administration commented.

“Go to ProgressiveHQr/ProgressiveHQ13h agoCrystalVibes52

The 60 minutes interview that was not aired in the US was aired and recorded in Canada and posted on YouTube. It has since been taken down. No worries though, I screen recorded it.

See it before it is taken down.

It was originally posted on YouTube but was taken down.

Trump filed a lawsuit against the board of the Pulitzer Prizes in 2022, demanding that it retract any prizes awarded to reporters from The New York Times and The Washington Post who covered the investigation into Trump’s relationship with Russia in his first term.

Trump refers to the episode and the FBI’s investigation as the “Russia, Russia, Russia Hoax.”

The Pulitzer board issued the following response:

A Statement from the Pulitzer Prize Board

The Pulitzer Prize Board has an established, formal process by which complaints against winning entries are carefullyreviewed. In the last three years, the Pulitzer Board has received inquiries, including from former President Donald Trump, about submissions from The New York Times and The Washington Post on Russian interference in the U.S. election and its connections to the Trump campaign–submissions that jointly won the 2018 National Reporting prize.

These inquiries prompted the Pulitzer Board to commission two independent reviews of the work submitted by those organizations to our National Reporting competition. Bothreviews were conducted by individuals with no connection to the institutions whose work was under examination, nor any connection to each other. The separate reviews converged in their conclusions: that no passages or headlines, contentions or assertions in any of the winning submissions were discredited by facts that emerged subsequent to the conferral of the prizes.

The 2018 Pulitzer Prizes in National Reporting stand.

The case has dragged on. Recently the board of the Pulitzer Prizes announced a new twist. It has asked Trump to provide full records of his medical history, his psychological tests, and his income tax returns since 2015.

Trump might rethink this particular lawsuit. Other groups sued by the litigious Trump should scrutinize the Pulitzer board’s strategy.

The Trump administration is engaged in a war against science and medicine. It has eliminated funding in many crucial areas of research conducted by universities and by the National Institutes of Health. Incalculable damage has been done to set back the search for cures for cancer, Alzheimer’s, heart disease, infectious diseases, HIV, respiratory diseases, and pediatric cancer. People will die because of the ignorance of those who close down ongoing, vital research.

Trump has consistently claimed that “climate change” is a hoax. He has said that the term “climate change” refers to the weather. He hates wind farms and has cut federal funding for them. He has hated wind farms since wind turbines were built near his Trump International Golf Links in Scotland. He sued to block them but repeatedly lost.

Now he is closing down a major hub of climate research.

The New York Times reported:

The Trump administration said it will be dismantling the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Colorado, one of the world’s leading Earth science research institutions.

The center, founded in 1960, is responsible for many of the biggest scientific advances in humanity’s understanding of weather and climate. Its research aircraft and sophisticated computer models of the Earth’s atmosphere and oceans are widely used in forecasting weather events and disasters around the country, and its scientists study a broad range of topics, including air pollution, ocean currents and global warming.

But in a social media post announcing the move late on Tuesday, Russell Vought, the director of the Office of Management and Budget, called the center “one of the largest sources of climate alarmism in the country” and said that the federal government would be “breaking up” the institution.

Mr. Vought wrote that a “comprehensive review is underway” and that “any vital activities such as weather research will be moved to another entity or location.”

USA Today first reported on the White House plans.

Scientists, meteorologists and lawmakers said the move was an attack on critical scientific research and would harm the United States.

The National Center for Atmospheric Research was originally founded to provide scientists studying Earth’s atmosphere with cutting-edge resources, such as supercomputers, that individual universities could not afford on their own. It is now widely considered a global leader in both weather and climate change research, with programs aimed at tracking severe weather events, modeling floods and understanding how solar activity affects the Earth’s atmosphere.

The center’s research has often proved useful in unexpected places, such as when its studies of downdrafts in the lower atmosphere in the 1970s and 1980s led to development of wind shear detection systems around airports that helped address the cause of hundreds of aviation accidents during that era.