All Things Trump: The Return Of The King

[Sean Hayden]

I’m guilty. Thankfully it’s easy enough to remove all your uploads, or it was last time I tried.

[Tero]

The secret meeting that was not about Epstein.
https://bsky.app/profile/tero88jarvi.bs ... rgxv27qs24

[L'Emmerdeur]

It's good to be the king.

U.S. President Donald Trump is constitutionally prohibited from being elected to a third term in office, but that's not stopping his super political action committee from raising eye-popping sums of money.

A report from the Brennan Center for Justice released on Tuesday found that MAGA Inc., the main super PAC supporting Trump's political campaigns, raised an "unprecedented" sum of $200 million between last November's presidential election and the end of June 2025. This massive war chest is more than six times the amount that former President Joe Biden's super PAC raised between the November 2020 election and the end of June 2021.

The Brennan Center also said that MAGA Inc. has become "almost exclusively a game for the richest of the rich," with 96% of the money it's received over the last seven-plus months coming "from donors who gave more than $1 million each." This massive fundraising haul raises serious questions about where this money is going, presuming that Trump isn't going to try to run for an unconstitutional third term.

The biggest donors to the super PAC have been entities that might benefit from regulatory or policy changes that the government could enact: Energy Transfer, the company behind the Dakota Access Pipeline, donated $25 million; investor Jeffrey Yass, whose company Susquehanna International Group owns a large stake in the parent company of Chinese social media app TikTok, donated $16 million; and Foris Dax Inc., the firm behind Crypto.com, donated $10 million.

Advocacy group Public Citizen on Monday took a look at the donations pouring into MAGA Inc. and found that cryptocurrency companies, executives, and investors had forked over a total of $41.7 million to the PAC, while fossil fuel companies and executives had shelled out $26.8 million.

...

"The degree to which wealthy donors appear to be using super PAC contributions to curry favor with the Trump administration once again illustrates how wrong the Supreme Court was... when it predicted [in its 2010 decision in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission] that the 'independence' of groups like super PACs would prevent them from becoming vehicles for real or perceived corruption," the Brennan Center wrote.

[source]

[pErvinalia]

I suppose Trump will try to funnel it to himself if he doesn't manage a third (perpetual?) term.

[Tero]

More South Park on Trump, Ice
https://www.threads.com/@jakebroe/post/ ... Osa7ld4YNA

[Tero]

EU "gave" Trump billions:
Paul Krugman writes;

On Tuesday Donald Trump went on CNBC to explain why the European Union is facing a tariff of “only” 15 percent. But what he said was simply delusional — and the delusion should be even more concerning than the tariffs.

The Europeans, Trump asserted, had agreed to cough up $600 billion, which he described as a “gift,” not a loan. And he emphasized that this is “$600 billion to invest in anything I want. Anything. I can do anything I want with it.”

So Trump apparently believes that the European Union has agreed to provide him with a personal $600 billion slush fund.

In fact, as I pointed out after the “deal” was announced, the EU agreed to no such thing. In fact, it literally couldn’t have made such an agreement. European nations aren’t command economies in which government can tell the private sector where to invest, and in any case the [EC], which negotiated with Trump, can’t tell the governments of member states what to do.

https://www.threads.com/@arpeejaay/post ... 9YhKFrE4iw

[Tero]

Also in the episode: Kristi shoots....animal.
https://www.threads.com/@surfpeeps/post ... o_CjDDw9sw

[Tero]

NYT map of trade wars in link
https://www.threads.com/@tero55jarvi/po ... _3Ga5Ih7vw

[Sean Hayden]

Isn’t Krugman always wrong?

https://letmegooglethat.com/?q=why+is+p ... ways+wrong

[Tero]

Trump volunteers to check the sex of every olympian himself.
https://bsky.app/profile/lippoenen.bsky ... rn4fnwps2k

[L'Emmerdeur]

Isn’t Krugman always wrong?

https://letmegooglethat.com/?q=why+is+p ... ways+wrong

Funny, the links on the first page of that are in Chinese and they're basically ads for Baidu, nothing to do with the supposed search terms. Go, Google!

[L'Emmerdeur]

Meanwhile back at the ranch, 'Fuck you for your service.'

Following the Trump administration’s ban on transgender service members, the U.S. Air Force is now denying early retirement benefits to transgender troops with 15 to 18 years of service.

“This is just betrayal of a direct commitment made to these service members,” Shannon Minter of the National Center for LGBTQ Rights told Reuters, calling it “devastating.”

According to Minter, the denial of early retirement benefits could cost transgender service members hundreds of thousands of dollars over their lifetimes.

Reuters calls the benefits denial “the latest escalation by President Donald Trump’s administration as it seeks to bar transgender individuals from joining the U.S. military and remove all who are currently serving. The Pentagon says transgender individuals are medically unfit, something civil rights activists say is untrue and constitutes illegal discrimination.”

...

“Absolutely appalling bigotry,” wrote Jessica Riedl, a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute. “This is how the administration treats people who have defended our country in the military for nearly two decades? I hope the courts block this, as it cannot possibly be legal.”

[source]

Career military being forced out because of who they are. If they didn't make it to 20 years' service before the righteous Christians took over, tough luck.

[pErvinalia]

Isn’t Krugman always wrong?

https://letmegooglethat.com/?q=why+is+p ... ways+wrong

Funny, the links on the first page of that are in Chinese and they're basically ads for Baidu, nothing to do with the supposed search terms. Go, Google!

It doesn't even show any results for me.

[Sean Hayden]

—meh, you’ve just trained your algorithms to reject good sense by surfing all that commie trash…

[Tero]

Susan Glasset, NYT:
.....construction project was its relatively short time frame. “It is expected to be completed long before the end of President Trump’s term,” the statement said. Maybe it was wrong, but I took this as good news—a sign, perhaps, that he’s really planning on leaving?"

"Now that he’s made his plans for the White House public, they make perfect sense to me. Marbled halls and golden pillars bearing his personal stamp were always going to be the kind of Presidential accomplishment that mattered most to the master of Mar-a-Lago—so much else that he’s promised to do, after all, rests on the fantastical castles of air that he’s so adept at conjuring with his bluster. I have no doubt that he can cajole a couple hundred million dollars for his White House addition out of various billionaires and corporate rent-seekers who will see their presumably undisclosed donations as a small price to pay for whatever access and regulatory rollbacks they are seeking from his Administration. I also have no doubt that Trump will, sooner or later, endorse some or all of the various bills introduced in Congress by Republican members looking to rename everything from the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts to the Washington Dulles International Airport in his honor. This is a man who has put his name on the cover of the Bible in order to sell copies of it; of course he is going to want it chiselled on as many Washington landmarks as possible."