classymelania (@classymelania) | TikTok
melania fan cam edits
Energy Dept. adds ‘climate change’ and ‘emissions’ to banned words list
Who Goes MAGA? | Techdirt
Rural Americans may be more susceptible to MAGA than most people, but I doubt it. College graduates are supposedly inoculated, but it is an arbitrary assumption. I know lots of PhD holders who are born MAGAs and many others who would don the red hat tomorrow morning in response to some perceived slight. There are people who have repudiated their own principles in order to become “Honorary Patriots”; there are lifelong Democrats who have enthusiastically entered Trump’s orbit. MAGA has nothing inherently to do with geography, education, or even stated political beliefs. It appeals to a certain type of mind.
It is also, to an immense extent, the disease of a generation—the generation that grew up online, that learned to mistake engagement for truth, that confused being heard with being right. This is as true of suburban millennials as it is of rural boomers. It is the disease of the algorithmically poisoned.
The Contrarian Intellectual
His Substack has 10,000 subscribers and a name like “Uncomfortable Truths” or “Against the Grain.” He has an advanced degree and a career in academia or journalism. He positions himself as a truth-teller willing to say what others won’t.
He’s built his brand on being the reasonable liberal who’s willing to criticize his own side.
But his criticism only flows in one direction. He’s endlessly concerned about cancel culture but never mentions voter suppression. He worries about campus speech codes but not about book bans. He’s created a career out of giving conservatives permission to feel intellectual about their prejudices.
The Wellness Influencer
Her Instagram is a masterpiece of soft-focus selfies and inspirational quotes. She sells courses on “authentic living” and posts about the importance of “doing your own research.” She’s got 50K followers who hang on her every word about manifestation, healing crystals, and toxic relationships.
She already went MAGA during the pandemic, though she’d never admit it. It started with “questioning the narrative” about vaccines and evolved into sharing Robert F. Kennedy Jr. content and ranting about “globalist elites.” She doesn’t post Trump content directly—that would hurt her brand—but she’s constantly sharing adjacent conspiracy theories about child trafficking, fluoride in water, and the “plandemic.”
The Venture Capitalist
His Twitter is a constant stream of complaints about “woke employees” destroying productivity and liberal professors poisoning young minds. He’s worth $500 million because of a few home run investments that he lucked into thanks to his Stanford network, but talks like he’s the victim of a vast conspiracy. His feed alternates between humble-brags about his latest investment and rants about how universities are churning out unemployable graduates who expect “participation trophies.”
He’s already MAGA, though he’d never admit it publicly—bad for fundraising. He privately complains that diversity hiring is destroying meritocracy while his portfolio companies are run entirely by Stanford MBAs who look exactly like him. He thinks workers asking for fair wages are “entitled” and students protesting genocide are “indoctrinated.”
The Legacy Media Reporter
His bio says “Covering politics for [Major News Outlet]” and he takes pride in his “objectivity.” He writes careful both-sides pieces about every issue and treats Trump’s fascist rhetoric as just another political strategy worth analyzing.
He’s not quite MAGA yet, but he’s already doing their work for them. He frames voter suppression as “election integrity measures” and describes anti-trans legislation as “parental rights bills.” He gives equal weight to climate scientists and oil industry propagandists because “balance” is more important than truth
The Business Owner
She runs a small business—maybe a restaurant, maybe a retail store. She posts about “entrepreneurship” and “the American dream.” She works seventy hours a week and takes pride in “building something from nothing.”
She’s prime MAGA material because she’s been trained to see her success as purely individual and her struggles as evidence of government overreach. When COVID restrictions hurt her business, she blamed “bureaucrats” rather than the virus. When she can’t find workers, she blames unemployment benefits rather than wages.
Her MAGA turn will be complete when she decides that her business problems are caused by taxes, regulations, and lazy workers rather than market forces and systemic issues. She’ll vote for anyone who promises to “get government out of the way” and let “job creators” like her prosper.
The Normie
He doesn’t post about politics much. His feed is mostly sports, vacation photos, and memes. He seems reasonable, moderate, unengaged with the culture wars. He’s the kind of person who says “I don’t really follow politics” and means it.
But he’s susceptible to MAGA because he’s politically lazy. He gets his information from headlines and assumes that “both sides” are equally bad. He’s annoyed by political discussions and just wants everyone to “get along.”
His MAGA evolution will happen gradually, through exposure to right-wing content disguised as non-political entertainment. He’ll start sharing “funny” memes that happen to have political undertones. He’ll begin to believe that liberals are “too sensitive” and conservatives are “more reasonable.”
The Ones Who Won’t
Take the small-town Republican from Ohio who should be MAGA by every demographic marker—pickup truck, church every Sunday, straight GOP for twenty years. But her childhood best friend came out as trans, and suddenly the culture war had a face she loved. Now she’s at city council meetings defending the very people she once thoughtlessly condemned.
They don’t need enemies to blame for their problems. They don’t need simple answers to complicated questions.
They’re the teacher who posts about her students’ achievements without making it about herself. They’re the small business owner who pays his workers well because he knows it’s right and actually better for business, not because he has to. They’re the veteran who talks about service without wrapping it in nationalism. They’re the parent who worries about their kids without blaming teachers for everything.
MAGA appeals to people who need to feel special, who need enemies to blame, who need simple answers to complex problems. It attracts those who mistake confidence for competence, who confuse being loud with being right, who think that admitting uncertainty is weakness.
It’s not about education or geography or even politics. It’s about character. It’s about whether you can tolerate complexity, whether you can admit mistakes, whether you can see other people as fully human.
The scary thing about MAGA isn’t that it’s obviously evil—it’s that it’s appealing to people who think they’re good. It offers them a way to feel righteous about their resentments, patriotic about their prejudices, and principled about their selfishness.
Fact vs. freakout on the SCOTUS universal injunctions ruling.
Trump is trying something blatantly unconstitutional that I’m confident the Supreme Court will not allow, though it is allowing this administration to use a little court gamesmanship to fight the fights they can win. Basically, the administration is not asking whether they overstepped the line but whether the courts are using the right tools to pull them back. I understand why this is happening, but it doesn’t make it any less frustrating (or alarming) that it's working.
The majority found a reasonable answer, which seems to limit universal injunctions without stopping them altogether. In the immediate term, the majority opinion left open the possibility that federal judges can issue universal injunctions when their absence would create what Justice Brett Kavanaugh called “an unworkable or intolerable patchwork” across states (such as, conveniently, with birthright citizenship)
The court further clarified that it still sees other kinds of challenges, like class-action lawsuits, as appropriate ways to trigger universal injunctions in the future. These lawsuits have more procedural hurdles to clear, but they’re still quite common, and until the 21st century were the most common way to trigger the kind of universal injunction we are discussing now.
Kavanaugh said that the Supreme Court could pick up some of the authority it limited to district courts by hearing more direct appeals for universal injunctions itself. Specifically, Kavanaugh said that when the Supreme Court is asked to intervene, it “should not and cannot hide in the tall grass,” but must “grant or deny” relief as a form of nationwide guidance until the issue is resolved
The Supreme Court did not say federal courts can’t issue these injunctions, it said “universal injunctions likely exceed the equitable authority that Congress has given to federal courts.” In other words, courts likely don't have this power, which is granted by Congress.
The court has narrowed, but not stripped, the power of U.S. district courts to issue universal injunctions. It has not unleashed presidential lawlessness, and in the future, its decision will benefit a lot of the people who are screaming from the rooftops now about unchecked executive power.
Trump administration working on plan to move 1 million Palestinians to Libya
Sounds like the definition of ethnic cleansing
Trump's "final offer" for peace requires Ukraine to accept Russian occupation
100 days of DOGE: lots of chaos, not so much efficiency
"DOGE is not a serious exercise," said Jessica Riedl, a fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a fiscally conservative think tank that supports streamlining government. She estimates DOGE has only saved $5 billion to date, and believes it will end up costing more than it saves.
The examples - previously unreported - span 14 government agencies and were described in Reuters interviews with three dozen federal workers, union representatives and governance experts.
At the Social Security Administration, in a four-day period in the first week of March, computer systems crashed 10 times. Because a quarter of the agency's IT staff have quit or been fired, it's taking longer to get the systems online again, disrupting the processing of claims, one IT worker told Reuters.
Few dispute the SSA's computer systems are old, often crash and need updating. Musk told Baier the agency's computer systems are "failing", and "we're fixing it."
Since its founding on Trump's first day in the White House, DOGE has largely shut down the U.S. Agency for International Development, which provides aid to the world's needy, canceling more than 80 percent of its humanitarian programs. Almost all of the agency's employees will be fired by September, all of its overseas offices shut, with some functions absorbed into the State Department.
At home, the government overhaul has resulted in the firing, resignations and early retirements of 260,000 civil servants, according to a Reuters tally.
Over 20,000 probationary workers - recently hired or recently reassigned employees - were fired in February. After court rulings they were reinstated but most were sent home on full pay. Most are now being fired again after further court decisions.
Trump and Musk have said the U.S. government is beset by fraud and waste. Few civil servants and governance experts dispute efficiencies can be made, but say there are already people inside the federal bureaucracy trying to save taxpayer dollars. Yet some of these offices have been targeted for cuts by DOGE.
American Disruption
manufacturing in Asia is fundamentally different than the manufacturing we remember in the United States decades ago: instead of firms with product-specific factories, China has flexible factories that accommodate all kinds of orders, delivering on that vector of speed, convenience, and customization that Christensen talked about.
Every decrease in node size comes at increasingly astronomical costs; the best way to afford those costs is to have one entity making chips for everyone, and that has turned out to be TSMC. Indeed, one way to understand Intel’s struggles is that it was actually one of the last massive integrated manufacturers: Intel made chips almost entirely for itself. However, once the company missed mobile, it had no choice but to switch to a foundry model; the company is trying now, but really should have started fifteen years ago. Now the company is stuck, and I think they will need government help.
companies that go up-market find it impossible to go back down, and I think this too applies to countries. Start with the theory: Christensen had a chapter in The Innovator’s Dilemma entitled “What Goes Up, Can’t Go Down”:
Three factors — the promise of upmarket margins, the simultaneous upmarket movement of many of a company’s customers, and the difficulty of cutting costs to move downmarket profitably — together create powerful barriers to downward mobility. In the internal debates about resource allocation for new product development, therefore, proposals to pursue disruptive technologies generally lose out to proposals to move upmarket. In fact, cultivating a systematic approach to weeding out new product development initiatives that would likely lower profits is one of the most important achievements of any well-managed company.
So could Apple pay more to get U.S. workers? I suppose — leaving aside the questions of skills and whatnot — but there is also the question of desirability; the iPhone assembly work that is not automated is highly drudgerous, sitting in a factory for hours a day delicately assembling the same components over and over again. It’s a good job if the alternative is working in the fields or in a much more dangerous and uncomfortable factory, but it’s much worse than basically any sort of job that is available in the U.S. market.
First, blanket tariffs are a mistake. I understand the motivation: a big reason why Chinese imports to the U.S. have actually shrunk over the last few years is because a lot of final assembly moved to countries like Vietnam, Thailand, Mexico, etc. Blanket tariffs stop this from happening, at least in theory.
The problem, however, is that those final assembly jobs are the least desirable jobs in the value chain, at least for the American worker; assuming the Trump administration doesn’t want to import millions of workers — that seems rather counter to the foundation of his candidacy! — the United States needs to find alternative trustworthy countries for final assembly. This can be accomplished through selective tariffs (which is exactly what happened in the first Trump administration).
Secondly, using trade flows to measure the health of the economic relationship with these countries — any country, really, but particularly final assembly countries — is legitimately stupid. Go back to the iPhone: the value-add of final assembly is in the single digit dollar range; the value-add of Apple’s software, marketing, distribution, etc. is in the hundreds of dollars. Simply looking at trade flows — where an imported iPhone is calculated as a trade deficit of several hundred dollars — completely obscures this reality. Moreover, the criteria for a final assembly country is that they have low wages, which by definition can’t pay for an equivalent amount of U.S. goods to said iPhone.
At the same time, the overall value of final assembly does exceed its economic value, for the reasons noted above: final assembly is gravity for higher value components, and it’s those components that are the biggest national security problem. This is where component tariffs might be a useful tool: the U.S. could use a scalpel instead of a sledgehammer to incentivize buying components from trusted allies, or from the U.S. itself, or to build new capacity in trusted locations. This does, admittedly, start to sound a lot like central planning, but that is why the gravity argument is an important one: simply moving final assembly somewhere other than China is a win — but not if there are blanket tariffs, at which point you might as well leave the supply chain where it is.
You can certainly make the case that things like castings and other machine components are of sufficient importance to the U.S. that they ought to be manufactured here, but you have to ramp up to that. What is much more problematic is that raw materials and components are now much cheaper for Haas’ foreign competitors; even if those competitors face tariffs in the United States, their cost of goods sold will be meaningfully lower than Haas, completely defeating the goal of encouraging the purchase of U.S. machine tools.
Fourth, there remains the problem of chips. Trump just declared economic war on China, which definitionally increases the possibility of kinetic war. A kinetic war, however, will mean the destruction of TSMC, leaving the U.S. bereft of chips at the very moment that A.I. is poised to create tremendous opportunities for growth and automation. And, even if A.I. didn’t exist, it’s enough to note that modern life would grind to a halt without chips. That’s why this is the area that most needs direct intervention from the federal government, particularly in terms of incentivizing demand for both leading and trailing edge U.S. chips.
my prevailing emotion over the past week — one I didn’t fully come to grips with until interrogating why Monday’s Article failed to live up to my standards — is sadness over the end of an era in technology, and frustration-bordering-on-disillusionment over the demise of what I thought was a uniquely American spirit.
Internet 1.0 was about technology. This was the early web, when technology was made for technology’s sake. This was when we got standards like TCP/IP, DNS, HTTP, etc. This was obviously the best era, but one that was impossible to maintain once there was big money to be made on the Internet.
Internet 2.0 was about economics. This was the era of Aggregators — the era of Stratechery, in other words — when the Internet developed, for better or worse, in ways that made maximum economic sense. This was a massive boon for the U.S., which sits astride the world of technology; unfortunately none of the value that comes from that position is counted in the trade statistics, so the administration doesn’t seem to care.
Internet 3.0 is about politics. This is the era when countries make economically sub-optimal choices for reasons that can’t be measured in dollars and cents. In that Article I thought that Big Tech exercising its power against the President might be a spur for other countries to seek to wean themselves away from American companies; instead it is the U.S. that may be leaving other countries little choice but to retaliate against U.S. tech.
There is, admittedly, a hint of that old school American can-do attitude embedded in these tariffs: the Trump administration seems to believe the U.S. can overcome all of the naysayers and skeptics through sheer force of will. That force of will, however, would be much better spent pursuing a vision of a new world order in 2050, not trying to return to 1950. That is possible to do, by the way, but only if you accept 1950’s living standards, which weren’t nearly as attractive as nostalgia-colored glasses paint them, and if we’re not careful, 1950’s technology as well. I think we can do better that that; I know we can do better than this.
Trump brags that billionaire pals made a killing after he pulled the plug on tariffs
Trump’s EPA Plans to Stop Collecting Greenhouse Gas Emissions Data From Most Polluters
The One Word that Explains Globalization's Failure, and Trump's Response
The proper objective for a nation, as Adam Smith put it, is to arrange things so we get as large a volume of imports as possible for as small a volume of exports as possible.”
By this logic, anything that slows the flow of imports, or raises their cost, would indeed be a self-inflicted wound. If the Chinese Communist Party wants to block the sale of U.S. electric vehicles in China, let it. We should still want as many cheap Chinese EVs as possible flooding into our market.
Even Friedman’s claim that “the proper objective for a nation, as Adam Smith put it, is to arrange things so we get as large a volume of imports as possible for as small a volume of exports as possible,” runs directly counter to what Smith actually wrote, which was: “If a foreign country can supply us with a commodity cheaper than we ourselves can make it, better buy it of them with some part of the produce of our own industry.”
With some part of the produce of our own country. A vital assumption of the classical model was that trade would be balanced—something made here for something made there
Trump’s Executive Order Targeting Perkins Coie Must Be Condemned | National Review
The Trump Administration Accidentally Texted Me Its War Plans
The term principals committee generally refers to a group of the senior-most national-security officials, including the secretaries of defense, state, and the treasury, as well as the director of the CIA. It should go without saying—but I’ll say it anyway—that I have never been invited to a White House principals-committee meeting, and that, in my many years of reporting on national-security matters, I had never heard of one being convened over a commercial messaging app.
On Tuesday, March 11, I received a connection request on Signal from a user identified as Michael Waltz. Signal is an open-source encrypted messaging service popular with journalists and others who seek more privacy than other text-messaging services are capable of delivering. I assumed that the Michael Waltz in question was President Donald Trump’s national security adviser. I did not assume, however, that the request was from the actual Michael Waltz.
I accepted the connection request, hoping that this was the actual national security adviser, and that he wanted to chat about Ukraine, or Iran, or some other important matter.
Two days later—Thursday—at 4:28 p.m., I received a notice that I was to be included in a Signal chat group. It was called the “Houthi PC small group.”
We discussed the possibility that these texts were part of a disinformation campaign, initiated by either a foreign intelligence service or, more likely, a media-gadfly organization, the sort of group that attempts to place journalists in embarrassing positions, and sometimes succeeds. I had very strong doubts that this text group was real, because I could not believe that the national-security leadership of the United States would communicate on Signal about imminent war plans. I also could not believe that the national security adviser to the president would be so reckless as to include the editor in chief of The Atlantic in such discussions with senior U.S. officials, up to and including the vice president.
I was still concerned that this could be a disinformation operation, or a simulation of some sort. And I remained mystified that no one in the group seemed to have noticed my presence. But if it was a hoax, the quality of mimicry and the level of foreign-policy insight were impressive.
According to the lengthy Hegseth text, the first detonations in Yemen would be felt two hours hence, at 1:45 p.m. eastern time. So I waited in my car in a supermarket parking lot. If this Signal chat was real, I reasoned, Houthi targets would soon be bombed. At about 1:55, I checked X and searched Yemen. Explosions were then being heard across Sanaa, the capital city.
I went back to the Signal channel. At 1:48, “Michael Waltz” had provided the group an update. Again, I won’t quote from this text, except to note that he described the operation as an “amazing job.” A few minutes later, “John Ratcliffe” wrote, “A good start.” Not long after, Waltz responded with three emoji: a fist, an American flag, and fire. Others soon joined in, including “MAR,” who wrote, “Good Job Pete and your team!!,” and “Susie Wiles,” who texted, “Kudos to all – most particularly those in theater and CENTCOM! Really great. God bless.” “Steve Witkoff” responded with five emoji: two hands-praying, a flexed bicep, and two American flags. “TG” responded, “Great work and effects!” The after-action discussion included assessments of damage done, including the likely death of a specific individual. The Houthi-run Yemeni health ministry reported that at least 53 people were killed in the strikes, a number that has not been independently verified.
In an email, I outlined some of my questions: Is the “Houthi PC small group” a genuine Signal thread? Did they know that I was included in this group? Was I (on the off chance) included on purpose? If not, who did they think I was? Did anyone realize who I was when I was added, or when I removed myself from the group? Do senior Trump-administration officials use Signal regularly for sensitive discussions? Do the officials believe that the use of such a channel could endanger American personnel?
William Martin, a spokesperson for Vance, said that despite the impression created by the texts, the vice president is fully aligned with the president. “The Vice President’s first priority is always making sure that the President’s advisers are adequately briefing him on the substance of their internal deliberations,” he said. “Vice President Vance unequivocally supports this administration’s foreign policy. The President and the Vice President have had subsequent conversations about this matter and are in complete agreement.”
It is not uncommon for national-security officials to communicate on Signal. But the app is used primarily for meeting planning and other logistical matters—not for detailed and highly confidential discussions of a pending military action. And, of course, I’ve never heard of an instance in which a journalist has been invited to such a discussion.
Conceivably, Waltz, by coordinating a national-security-related action over Signal, may have violated several provisions of the Espionage Act, which governs the handling of “national defense” information, according to several national-security lawyers interviewed by my colleague Shane Harris for this story. Harris asked them to consider a hypothetical scenario in which a senior U.S. official creates a Signal thread for the express purpose of sharing information with Cabinet officials about an active military operation. He did not show them the actual Signal messages or tell them specifically what had occurred.
All of these lawyers said that a U.S. official should not establish a Signal thread in the first place. Information about an active operation would presumably fit the law’s definition of “national defense” information. The Signal app is not approved by the government for sharing classified information. The government has its own systems for that purpose. If officials want to discuss military activity, they should go into a specially designed space known as a sensitive compartmented information facility, or SCIF—most Cabinet-level national-security officials have one installed in their home—or communicate only on approved government equipment, the lawyers said.
Normally, cellphones are not permitted inside a SCIF, which suggests that as these officials were sharing information about an active military operation, they could have been moving around in public. Had they lost their phones, or had they been stolen, the potential risk to national security would have been severe.
There was another potential problem: Waltz set some of the messages in the Signal group to disappear after one week, and some after four. That raises questions about whether the officials may have violated federal records law: Text messages about official acts are considered records that should be preserved.
“Intentional violations of these requirements are a basis for disciplinary action. Additionally, agencies such as the Department of Defense restrict electronic messaging containing classified information to classified government networks and/or networks with government-approved encrypted features,” Baron said.
It is worth noting that Donald Trump, as a candidate for president (and as president), repeatedly and vociferously demanded that Hillary Clinton be imprisoned for using a private email server for official business when she was secretary of state. (It is also worth noting that Trump was indicted in 2023 for mishandling classified documents, but the charges were dropped after his election.)
Waltz and the other Cabinet-level officials were already potentially violating government policy and the law simply by texting one another about the operation. But when Waltz added a journalist—presumably by mistake—to his principals committee, he created new security and legal issues. Now the group was transmitting information to someone not authorized to receive it. That is the classic definition of a leak, even if it was unintentional, and even if the recipient of the leak did not actually believe it was a leak until Yemen came under American attack.
Trump's plan for Gaza.
A UN commission investigating crimes against humanity in Yugoslavia defined ethnic cleansing as “rendering an area ethnically homogeneous by using force or intimidation to remove persons of given groups from the area.” That’s an accurate description of what Trump wants to do in Gaza. What else would we call it? And where are they going to go? Egypt, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Qatar, the United Arab Emirates, and even the West Bank all reject this plan. One of Gaza’s defining characteristics is that over 80% of its inhabitants are descendants of people displaced following the 1948 war; that history is part of what makes Gazans so committed to staying in place — but Trump wants to run it back.
the route of peacemaking he’s pursuing is making one of two sides just go away. That’s not peacemaking; it’s domination. And it’s a means of diplomacy that tends to create the preconditions for future conflicts.
The same president who criticized nation-building in Afghanistan and wanted to avoid conflict in Ukraine now wants to “take over” Gazan reconstruction.
Trump tends to push interpretations of his statements towards the poles of either optimistically brushing him off or paranoia, depending on the person or the topic. For me, on this topic, it creates paranoia. What exactly does Trump mean by “we’re going to take it over?”
Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt says Trump wants to remove Gazans from the strip temporarily, but Trump also literally said he wants to permanently relocate them and then rebuild Gaza “for the world’s people”
Trump consistently phrased his descriptions of Gaza to avoid apportioning any amount of responsibility to Israel. Gaza is a “demolition site,” but demolished by whom? “Gaza is a guarantee that they’re going to end up dying,” meaning the location itself is hostile to Palestinians? Gazans have suffered “bad luck,” meaning that bad things have just happened to occur to them?
Trump rescinds executive order after law firm agrees to provide $40m in free services
What has Trump done today?
Kennedy Center Bottoms Out: Ticket Sales Plummet, No Donations, Cancellations
Free school lunches are not Republican or Democratic lunches – they’re American because that’s who we are. Somewhere just a tad under those ideals comes the Kennedy Center, the new upstart competing with opera houses and symphonies around the world, and doing it very well. From its inception in the 1970s to now, it has been a source of national pride without regard to the party in power – no one thought to bring that agenda. The ideal is that arts, like science, education, and faith – inform politics, not the other way around. But all of the ideals above can be put at risk if the consequences of political overkill are ignored.
Yes, he promised to “destroy the government” – in a sense. There is the government we all see on television, Congress, the EPA, the FDA, etc. And then there is the government we don’t see until we need them, the person who picks up the phone at Social Security, the local school administrator that bills a federal fund for the cafeteria’s food, the VA hospital. No one asked anyone to touch that part of the government that everyone expected to simply “work.” Going even further, there’s still another level – government that few even consider government, the air traffic controllers, the park rangers – the Kennedy Center.
There is no utopia waiting on the other side of Trump's economy
Canadian Sovereignty, Digital and Geographic
Putting the Reconciliation Resolution in Context-2025-03-11
“For context, a $2.8 trillion reconciliation bill – with nearly all the borrowing between 2026 and 2034 – would:
- Equal more than all spending programs except for the Social Security retirement program, Medicare, Medicaid, net interest, veterans’ and defense spending.
- Equal two times as much as Medicare Part D, almost three times as much as the Child Tax Credit and Earned Income Tax Credit, and five times as much as foreign aid from USAID and the State Department.
- Add more to the deficit than any legislation enacted in the past decade, including 50 percent more than the American Rescue Plan Act, twice as much as the original Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, and seven times as much as the bipartisan infrastructure law”
Trump’s FBI Moves to Criminally Charge Major Climate Groups
Conservatives now just 1 point ahead of Liberals: Nanos
Conservatives' 25-point lead over Canada's liberal party evaporated, seemingly in response to Trump's antagonism toward Canada
Trump’s Latest Weapon Against Critics: Destroying Their Lawyers
Trump executive order kneecapping a prominent law firm
The Trump Administration Said These Aid Programs Saved Lives. It Canceled Them Anyway.
Dismantling the Department of Education.
So, we’ll “defund” the department, but the money will “keep flowing.” We’ll “dismantle” it, but really redistribute its programs across the government. We’ll “eliminate” it, but actually reassign its various responsibilities to other agencies. When you add that actually eliminating ED will require an act of Congress and 60 Senate votes (as Ramesh Ponnuru wrote under “What the right is saying”), what actually ends up happening is not at all clear to me.
Defund ED? Who would teach? Who would create curriculums? How would our public schools stay funded?
I was subsequently surprised to learn then that ED has very little to do with curriculum or employing teachers, and that its role in funding public schools is fractional.
The Department of Education is responsible for about 14% of all funding that goes to our K–12 schools, and at the same time the department’s reach into state and local education has gone incredibly far. Through the power of the purse, the Education Department now wields a great deal of influence over how parents, teachers, and schools behave. At the same time, a lot of what ED does could be easily moved to other departments (for instance, I think it’s pretty easy to argue that ED’s Office for Civil Rights could move to the Department of Justice).
Some writers, like Cato’s Neal McCluskey, have made straightforward arguments that we don’t need a federal education agency when the federal government isn’t allowed to regulate education, and that the department itself is neither competent nor effective. At the very least, I think one of ED’s biggest responsibilities — its federal student loan programs — has gotten completely out of control. When higher-education costs have exploded and the president responds to those costs by forgiving hundreds of billions in student debt, moving that responsibility somewhere else makes sense. Writers on the left and right have made the case that the Treasury would be better suited to manage and oversee student loans, and I’m inclined to agree with them.
my general view is that ED is not really emblematic of a thriving, successful expansion of federal government — and while trying to “delete” it with Musk-level tact or care would be a disaster, I also think Congress (if it wanted) could significantly reduce ED’s role in American life, turn over its responsibilities to other federal agencies, and streamline a lot of the work it does as a department.
The problem with the current debate is that doing so wouldn’t really reduce the size of the federal government — and it wouldn’t save us all that much money, either. Instead, the administration would just create a whole lot of disruption, risk interrupting popular services, and probably lose the political debate in the public square — all to simply pass on one department’s responsibilities to others.
America, the final season
Trump, early on, dropped any last vestiges of what a modern political campaign should look like, continuing to stump in rallies across swing states, even after multiple assassination attempts forced the former president to encase himself in a cube of agony. He whittled down his campaign into a simple message: “I will make you wealthy and hurt everyone you hate.”
unlike the Harris campaign, he only relied on the internet for propaganda, following his son Barron’s advice, who reportedly was the one pushing him to spend his time doing manosphere podcast interviews. Meanwhile, his vice presidential pick, JD Vance, gave him an important line to Silicon Valley’s most radicalized CEOs and the country’s two most-brainrotted men, Elon Musk (metaphorical brainrot) and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. (literal brainrot).
In terms of what we can expect from Trump’s second term, conservatives have already laid out their blueprint online. They’ve spent the last four years reshaping the architecture of the social web to match their designs for American society at large. It has been easy to laugh off Musk’s purchase of Twitter and its subsequent drop into irrelevance. But irrelevance was never a bug, but a feature. Big Tech monopolists, many of whom are now congratulating Trump on his win today, have successfully created an internet of paranoid cul-de-sacs, where no one trusts each other and nothing can break through the noise.
Kash Patel and Dan Bongino to lead FBI.
I’m going to share seven quotes. Some of them are real things Kash Patel and Dan Bongino have said. Some of them are made up. Let’s see if you can spot the fake ones.
“We’re blessed by God to have Donald Trump be our juggernaut of justice, to be our leader, to be our continued warrior in the arena.”
“My recommendation is Donald Trump should ignore this [court order]... who is going to arrest him? The marshals? You guys know who the U.S. Marshals work for? The Department of Justice, that is under the — oh yeah, the executive branch. Donald Trump is going to order his own arrest? This is ridiculous.”
“The only thing that matters is power. That is all that matters. ‘No it doesn’t, we have a system of checks and balances.’ Ha! That’s a good one. That’s really funny. We do?”
“The irony about this for the scumbag commie libs is that the cold civil war they’re pushing for will end really badly for them. Libs are the biggest pussies I’ve ever seen and they use others to do their dirty work. Their mommas are still doing their laundry for them as they celebrate tonight that their long sought goal of the destruction of the Republic has been reached. But they’re not ready for what comes next.”
“My entire life now is about owning the libs.”
“And you've got to harness that following that Q [of QAnon] has garnered and just sort of tweak it a little bit. That's all I'm saying. He should get credit for all of the things he has accomplished, because it's hard to establish a movement."
“We’re going to come after the people in the media who lied about American citizens who helped Joe Biden rig presidential elections. We’re going to come after you, whether it’s criminally or civilly. We’ll figure that out. But yeah, we’re putting you all on notice.”
Just kidding. They’re all real.
1, 6, and 7 were things Kash Patel said. 2, 3, 4, and 5 are things Dan Bongino said.
Stop Analyzing Trump's Unhinged Ideas Like They're Normal Policy Proposals
Let's be clear about what's happening: The President of the United States is openly fantasizing about forcibly annexing a sovereign nation of 40 million people. He's been repeatedly referring to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau as "Governor Trudeau" and threatening our closest ally with absorption into the United States. This isn't a policy proposal to be analyzed; it's the ravings of a dangerous authoritarian.
But instead of treating this story as what it is — evidence of Trump's increasingly unhinged worldview and contempt for democratic norms — Baker decides to play electoral college calculator. He walks us through detailed scenarios about House seats and Senate majorities, complete with expert quotes about the Democratic Party's theoretical gains. It's like writing about the thermal properties of the emperor's new clothes while ignoring his nakedness.
The real story here isn't about electoral math. It's about a sitting president who talks about invading allied nations while referring to their democratically elected leaders as though they were already his subordinates. It's about the continued deterioration of democratic norms. It's about how the institutions meant to protect democracy — including the press — seem increasingly unable or unwilling to call out authoritarian behavior for what it is.
The press needs to stop treating politics like a game of electoral mathematics and start treating it like what it is: a serious business with real consequences for democracy and human lives. When the president starts talking like a mad emperor, that's the story, not how many House seats his delusions might hypothetically affect.
Trumpian policy as cultural policy - Marginal REVOLUTION
Trumpian Policy as Cultural Policy Analysis: Trump's administrative actions and policy decisions are primarily driven by a strategy to reshape American culture rather than achieve specific policy outcomes, using controversial decisions to dominate public discourse and shift cultural narratives.
- The article analyzes Trump's policy approach as primarily a cultural strategy rather than traditional policy-making
Key aspects of this cultural policy approach:
- Focuses on highly visible, controversial decisions that generate widespread discussion
- Prioritizes cultural messaging over policy effectiveness or implementation
- Aims to control ideological agenda through rapid, multiple policy announcements
- Doesn't require policies to be legal, practical, or even implemented to achieve cultural impact
Specific examples:
- Executive orders against DEI and affirmative action as first actions
- Proposed renaming of Dulles Airport
- Bill to add Trump to Mount Rushmore
- Tariff threats against Canada and Mexico
- Changes to federal employment structure
- Elimination of Black History Month at Department of Defense
- Targeting of US AID
- Nomination of RFK Jr.
Strategic elements:
- Uses polarization to guarantee at least one-third public support
- Deliberately chooses well-known targets (like Canada/Mexico) for maximum cultural impact
- Creates debates that delegitimize existing institutions
- "Floods the zone" with multiple controversies to maintain constant cultural dialogue
Author's analysis:
- Strategy doesn't require coordinated planning
- Works through spontaneous order of competing interests
- Relies on three factors:
- Conflicting interest groups
- Competition for Trump's attention
- Trump's belief in cultural issues' importance
Effectiveness factors:
- Leverages internet-intensive, attention-based media environment
- Creates disorganization among opponents
- Uses negative contagion to reinforce cultural shifts
- Prioritizes cultural impact over policy success
HIV, transgender care, climate change and other federal websites go dark