‘Neokayfabe’

[mister_coffee]

"Unworkable" is such a polite word for something that is simply delusional. The Mass Deportations are "unworkable" in the same sense that trying to fly to Japan by standing on the beach and flapping your arms really hard is "unworkable".

I honestly want to see them actually try to do it because the failure will be so spectacular.

[just-jim]

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And now - Newt Gingrich (who knew he was a leftie on the issue, let alone actually has a spine!) has called Felon Diaper donnie’s plan for deportation - “unworkable”.

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/202 ... t-gingrich

It’s going to be fun watching the various MAGA, MAGA-Lite, Mainstream Rs and so called RINOs slug it out!

My prediction…nothing very substantial is going to happen.
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[PAL]

The last article I saw said he would not pardon violent protesters.

[Rideback]

Sunday Vance broke the news that Trump won't be pardoning J6 criminals.

[just-jim]

.
The Junior High Skool food fight continues!!!

Steve Bannon has decided that Elon cant sit at the same table with the Kool Kids any longer!

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/202 ... usk-racist

“He is a truly evil guy, a very bad guy. I made it my personal thing to take this guy down,” Bannon said. “Before, because he put money in, I was prepared to tolerate it – I’m not prepared to tolerate it any more.”

He added: “I will have Elon Musk run out of here by inauguration day”, which falls on 20 January. “He will not have full access to the White House. He will be like any other person.”

It just gets more interesting watching the clown show/train wreck continue….
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[Rideback]

Rep Granger has been in dementia care since July. Her seat was filled by Craig Goldman who won the election in Texas.
With all the noise among the R's it seems to get more problematic by the day for Johnson to retain his leadership. Trump is trying like crazy to focus the noise on immigration after the New Orleans attack but that is boomeranging on him.

[mister_coffee]

It will be fun to watch the next couple of days in the House.

There will obviously be a battle for the Speaker of the House that might not be immediately resolvable and might resolve itself in surprising ways. They can't swear in and seat House members until a Speaker is selected, and obviously can't make any votes until a Speaker is selected. Of course they are required to certify the election on January 6th, which they will be unable to do if they haven't selected a Speaker by then. If the wrangling goes on long enough (to January 20th) Biden and Harris are out of office and the presidency goes to the president pro tem of the Senate, whomever that might be in the new Republican Senate. This would be fun just because it would ruin all of the 'Trump 47" memorabilia that they are grifting to their cult members.

A long-shot possibility is that Hakeem Jeffries might be Speaker, and at least in the short term until some special elections seat more Republicans the Democrats could have a majority. It isn't really clear to me what the score is right now, but given that several R House members resigned to take jobs in the new administration, one R House member just resigned (largely because of his proclivity for young girls), and one R House member hasn't been seen in public for over a year and apparently is in hospice care (someone please explain to me how she got re-elected) the numbers are very close. Having a D House majority even for a few months would make things even more entertaining.

[just-jim]

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Timothy Snyder on Elon owning diaper-donnie…..

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2025/ ... nald-trump

A partial quote:

“I think we overestimate Trump and we underestimate Musk,” Snyder said. “People can’t help but think that Trump has money, but he doesn’t. He’s never really had money. He’s never even really claimed to have money. His whole notion is that you have to believe that he has money. But he’s never been able to pay his own debts. He’s never been able to finance his own campaigns.

“Musk, with an amount of money that was meaningless to him, was able to finance Trump’s campaign, essentially.”

As owner of businesses including Tesla, SpaceX and X (the social media platform formerly known as Twitter), Musk poured millions of dollars into supporting Trump in his presidential election campaign against the Democratic nominee, the current vice-president, Kamala Harris. Musk was widely reported to have been a key influence in Trump naming the Ohio senator JD Vance as his vice-presidential pick.

Since Trump’s victory in November, from Mar-a-Lago in Florida to Notre Dame in Paris, Musk has been constantly at Trump’s side, earning the satirical nickname “first buddy” but also an appointment with the biotech investor Vivek Ramaswamy to jointly head the “department of government efficiency”, or “Doge”, a group tasked with meeting Trump’s wildly ambitious campaign promise of slashing trillions from federal spending.

Considering instances of Musk’s apparent influence over Trump as the president-elect has struggled to control congressional Republicans – an unruly party already split on how to continue funding the government they also want to defund – Snyder said: “All the threats that Trump is now going to issue – ‘I’m going to primary people, I’m going to sue people’ – Musk is going to pay for that, not Trump. And when Trump needs money for anything, he’s going to be asking Musk.

“Unless Trump breaks it off right now, he’s going to be in this kind of dependent relationship for the rest of the way, because you get used to people giving you money … and I think if you were a friend of Trump, you would be worried.”
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[just-jim]

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Yale Historian Timothy Snyder - who coined the term ‘Mump’ - now has a glossary:


1. Mump regime. Musk plus Trump. Mu...mp. The real centibillionaire and the fake rich person in the proper order.

2. Mump oligarchy. The regime is an oligarchy, rule by the wealthy few. Trump is the oligarchs' spokesman. He might stay or go. The oligarchs will remain.

3. Mump as illness. Physical illness: we are made sick and scammed blind (think of RFK Jr and Ramaswamy). Mumps is one of the diseases that will return without vaccines. Mental illness: Musk's idea of prosperity is that he hurts you and you thank him. See my work on sadopopulism.

4. In Mumptopia, Americans spend our time in front of screens, instructed whom to hate and worship by algorithms curated by immigrant software engineers. We die pointlessly young on an overheated Earth with the word “Mars” on our lips. The Mump mage performs a ritual rocket dance, leaping a few inches over our graves.

5. Mump not MAGA. The MAGA folks somehow did not realize that they were giving power to a an illegal immigrant South African centibillionaire. This is not their regime.

6. Mumpers. South Africans, Russians, and others close to power. Musk, Putin, Thiel, Sacks, Trump (today), Vance (tomorrow) and their closest circles.

7. Mumpery. Behavior typical of the Mump regime. Gaslighting, theft, scams, tax avoidance, disinformation, Putinism, dictator worship, threatening U.S. allies, submitting to U.S. enemies, persecuting Americans, suppressing speech with threats of violence and lawsuits, promoting pollution and global warming, ending public services.

8. Mumpets. Those who choose to submit to Musk. For example, senators who ignore their constitutional responsibilities and vote for Trump's Cabinet nominees, whose buffoonery and fascism are meant to weaken the state so Musk can profit. Compare: puppet, pet.

9. To mumpify. To become a mumpet. Nouns can be formed from this verb. For example: "Senator Fetterman is pretty far along in his mumpification." Or adjectives: "Yep, I'd say he's mumpified by now." Compare: zombify, zombification.

10. Mumpy, or mumpish. People influenced by the Mump regime, or actions that tend towards a mumpified world. "That's mumpier than I would have expected." "She's gone all mumpy on me." Supercedes: trumpy.

This warning might seem just to skim the surface, or to be too much about personalities, or to lean too much on language, or to be too playful. These substack essays enable me to be brief and suggestive. For those who wish to go deeper on the issues of oligarchy, technofascism, sadopopulism, and the politics of catastrophe, there are the six books I wrote in the last decade, each of which in some sense anticipates where we are now.

https://open.substack.com/pub/snyder/p/ ... a-glossary
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[just-jim]

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Just the FIRST of many flip-flops, walk-backs, about turns, ‘re-positioning’, ‘new information has come to light’ that we will enjoy in the coming months.

This is gonna be VERY interesting…..Pee-Pants doing the shuffle according to whichever Capitalist/Billionaire/Toady has his attention. Or - whatever he can do with the Adderall riddled mind that he has left.

Along with abandoning the Constitution - and Democracy in General - maybe he’ll go REAL crazy….try and sell the Washington Monument? Or the Smithsonian?

It’s a whole NEW world out there!
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[Rideback]

And here ya have it. Trump flip flops
https://www.cnn.com/2024/12/28/politics ... index.html

Trump bends a knee to Musk

[mister_coffee]

I normally don't have much use for Twitter/X but the last 48 hours has been the best soap opera ever.

It is even more hilarious that both sides are badly mistaken.

[Rideback]

Steve Bannon and Musk are now rumbling. Bannon is calling for child protective services to do a wellness check on Musk the toddler...
and Musk replies to Bannon with a serious threat of war the likes of which Bannon can't even imagine.

This isn't going to end well.

ps Musk calling MAGAs 'contemptible fools' YOUCH!

https://heathercoxrichardson.substack.c ... irect=true

'Civil war has broken out within the MAGA Republicans. On the one side are the traditional MAGAs, who tend to be white, anti-immigrant, and less educated than the rest of the U.S. They believe that the modern government’s protection of equal rights for women and minorities has ruined America, and they tend to want to isolate the U.S. from the rest of the world. They make up Trump’s voting base.

On the other side are the new MAGAs who appear to have taken control of the incoming Trump administration. Led by Elon Musk, who bankrolled Trump’s campaign, the new MAGA wing is made up of billionaires, especially tech entrepreneurs, many of whom are themselves immigrants.

During the campaign, these two wings made common cause because they both want to destroy the current U.S. government, especially as President Joe Biden had been using it to strengthen American democracy. Traditional MAGA wants to get rid of the government that protects equality and replace it with one that enforces white male supremacy and Christianity. New MAGA—which some have started to call DOGE, after the Department of Government Efficiency run by Musk and pharmaceutical entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy—wants to get rid of the government that regulates business, especially technology, and protects American interests against competition from countries like China.

Their shared commitment to the destruction of the current government is about the only overlap between these two factions.

With the campaign over, traditional MAGA and DOGE are ripping apart. Trump sparked the fight when he announced on Sunday, December 22, that he would appoint Musk associate Sriram Krishnan, who was born in India, as a senior policy advisor on artificial intelligence.

On Monday, MAGA activist Laura Loomer criticized Trump’s choice of Krishnan. Loomer was in Trump’s inner circle until three months ago, when her anti-immigrant tirades made Trump campaign staff worry she would cost Trump votes and forced her out of his public schedule. Loomer noted that Krishnan wants to remove the cap on green cards for workers from certain countries.

Krishnan has also called for making it easier for skilled foreign workers to come to the U.S. on H-1B temporary visas. These programs are important to the technology sector, but critics say they enable companies to hire foreign workers at lower pay than U.S. workers, that H-1B workers are trapped in their jobs, and that wage theft is rampant in the H-1B program.

Loomer said those jobs “should be given to American STEM students.” Then she got to the heart of the matter, complaining that MAGA is getting left out of the new administration. She noted that “none of the tech executives who are meeting with Trump and getting appointed in his cabinet supported him in 2020 or during the 2024 primary.” She continued: “I feel like many of them are trying to get into Trump’s admin[istration] to enrich themselves and get contracts at [the] D[epartment] O[f] D[efense]. This is not America First Policy.”

When another tech entrepreneur and Trump appointee David Sacks defended Krishnan, Loomer made a series of racist posts, claiming among other things that: "Our country was built by white Europeans, actually. Not third-world invaders from India." She said, "It's not racist against Indians to want the original MAGA policies I voted for. I voted for a reduction in H-1B visas. Not an extension."

On Wednesday, December 25—Christmas, a major holiday for MAGA supporters—Musk took a stand against Loomer and the MAGAs. He posted on X that the U.S. needs twice the number of engineers it has, and welcomed foreign engineers. “The number of people who are super talented engineers AND super motivated in the USA is far too low,” he tweeted. “Think of this like a pro sports team: if you want your TEAM to win the championship, you need to recruit top talent wherever they may be. That enables the whole TEAM to win.”

Loomer responded: “Is DOGE real? Or is it a vanity project?” Others complained about the “Tech Bros” “hubris [and] arrogance with their flippant, condescending, and elitist responses to legitimate criticisms of the H1B1 program.” Still others pointed out that there were big layoffs in tech this year and asked why they weren’t getting rehired if there was such a desperate need for workers.

Musk posted: “Investing in Americans is actually hard. Really hard. It costs money and time and effort to make a person productive. It’s a short term net loss. It’s much easier to bring in skilled workers who might not do quite a good a job [sic], but will work for a fraction of the cost and be happy just to be here.”

Loomer responded: “The elephant in the room is that [Musk], who is not MAGA and never has been, is a total f*cking drag on the Trump transition. He’s a stage 5 clinger who over stayed his welcome at Mar a Lago in an effort to become Trump’s side piece and be the point man for all of his accomplices in big Tech to slither in to Mar a Lago.” [sic]

Musk called Loomer a troll, and she responded that “Telling the truth isn’t trolling… You bought your way into MAGA 5 minutes ago…. We all know you only donated your money so you could influence immigration policy and protect your buddy Xi JinPing.”

Thursday everything broke open. Ramaswamy, who was born in Ohio to parents who immigrated to America from India, posted on X an indictment of American culture that seemed a direct assault on MAGA Republicans, who have been vocal about their disdain for education.

Ramaswamy posted that tech companies hire foreign-born and first-generation engineers rather than native-born Americans because “American culture has venerated mediocrity over excellence for way too long…. A culture that celebrates the prom queen over the math olympiad champ, or the jock over the valedictorian, will not produce the best engineers.” He called for “[m]ore math tutoring, fewer sleepovers. More weekend science competitions, fewer Saturday morning cartoons. More books, less TV. More creating, less ‘chillin.’ More extracurriculars, less ‘hanging out at the mall.’”

“If you grow up aspiring to normalcy, normalcy is what you will achieve,” he warned. “‘Normalcy’ doesn’t cut it in a hyper-competitive global market for technical talent. And if we pretend like it does, we’ll have our a**es handed to us by China.” He called for America to embrace “a new golden era,” but warned it was possible “only if our culture fully wakes up. A culture that once again prioritizes achievement over normalcy; excellence over mediocrity; nerdiness over conformity; hard work over laziness. That’s the work we have cut out for us, rather than wallowing in victimhood & just wishing (or legislating) alternative hiring practices into existence.”

With that, the fat was in the fire. MAGA dragged Ramaswamy, with even former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley retorting: “There is nothing wrong with American workers or American culture. All you have to do is look at the border and see how many want what we have. We should be investing and prioritizing in Americans, not foreign workers.” Haley ran for president against Trump but ultimately endorsed him. She is herself the child of Indian immigrants.

Loomer also hit back against Musk, posting: “Is DOGE a way to ‘cut spending’ or REDIRECT the spending toward the pet projects of tech bro billionaires? It’s looking like the latter, T[o] B[e] H[onest].” She continued: “‘Hey, let’s convince the peasants that we are saving them money as we enrich ourselves!’” Another right-wing poster wondered: “How did DOGE go from ‘let’s cut wasteful government spending’ to ‘here’s why we need to import more immigrants’ almost overnight?”

When Musk appeared to limit Loomer’s ability to use X, she posted: “I have always been America First and a die hard supporter of President Trump and I believe that promises made should be promises kept. Donald Trump promised to remove the H1B visa program and I support his policy. Now, as one of Trump’s biggest supporters, I’m having my free speech silenced by a tech billionaire for simply questioning the tech oligarchy.” Other right-wing accounts accused Musk of censoring them, too, and racist anti-immigrant sentiments flowed freely.

On Friday, when cartoonist and right-wing commenter Scott Adams posted that MAGA was “taking a page from Democrats on how to lose elections while feeling good about themselves,” Musk agreed and added: “And those contemptible fools must be removed from the Republican Party, root and stem.”

Loomer commented that Musk “is now referring to MAGA as ‘contemptible fools.’... The Trump base is being replaced by Big Tech executives. So sad to see this.” She tagged Trump and added “I feel so sad for MAGA.” Meanwhile, other MAGA supporters on X piled on Musk, complaining that he had not paid them, as promised, for their participation in his “free speech” petition during the campaign.

By today, key Trump ally Steve Bannon, a central figure in MAGA, had taken to another right-wing social media platform to warn his supporters that Musk is showing his “true colors” and to demand that the H-1B visa program be “zeroed-out.” Another right-wing influencer, Jack Posobiec, tweeted: “Today was the day we found out who is getting rich by screwing over the American worker.”

Trump did not weigh in on the fight but, in what appeared to be intended to be a private communication to Musk, wrote on his social media site: “Where are you? When are you coming to the ‘Center of the Universe,’ Mar-a-Lago. Bill Gates asked to come, tonight. We miss you and x! New Year’s Eve is going to be AMAZING!!! DJT.” (According to Aaron Pellish and Alayna Treene of CNN, “x” here likely refers to Musk’s son X Æ A-Xii.)

Why does this all matter? Because while Trump’s people keep insisting he won in a landslide and has a mandate that he will put in place on day one, his fragile coalition is splintering even before he takes office.

Trump won less than 50% of the vote. Despite their slim victory, the Republican Party was already in a civil war between MAGA and establishment Republicans who are fed up with the MAGAs who threaten to burn down the government and almost a century of international diplomacy: just a week ago, Senate Republicans were publicly complaining about the dysfunctional “sh*t show” and “fiasco” in the House.

Now, with Trump not even in office yet, the two factions of Trump’s MAGA base—which, indeed, have opposing interests—are at war.'

[just-jim]

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More……

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/202 ... m-krishnan


It’s a FOOD FIGHT in the Jr High Skool lunchroom, all over!!!!


Interesting to see the overt racism come out - up front. Looney-tunes Loomer doesn’t seem to know that ‘tech’ jobs have been filled by immigrants for 40+ years, if not longer.


“Musk’s stance was supported by Ramaswamy, his partner in the fledgling “department of government efficiency” (Doge), an informal agency Trump claims he will create, under which the two men will be charged with the task of cutting government spending.

In a lengthy social media post, Ramaswamy – the son of immigrants from India – argued that the US was doomed to decline without high-skilled foreign workers and suggested American culture had become geared towards “mediocrity”.

“The reason top tech companies often hire foreign-born & first-generation engineers over ‘native’ Americans isn’t because of an innate American IQ deficit,” he wrote.

“A key part of it comes down to the c-word: culture.

“Our American culture has venerated mediocrity over excellence for way too long. That doesn’t start in college, it starts YOUNG.

“A culture that celebrates the prom queen over the math olympiad champ, or the jock over the valedictorian, will not produce the best engineers. ‘Normalcy’ doesn’t cut it in a hyper-competitive global market for technical talent. And if we pretend like it does, we’ll have our asses handed to us by China.”

The arguments were met by a fierce backlash from Maga exponents, led by Loomer, who delved into racist arguments.

“@VivekGRamaswamy knows that the Great Replacement is real,” she wrote. “It’s not racist against Indians to want the original MAGA policies I voted for. I voted for a reduction in H1B visas. Not an extension.

“The tech billionaires don’t get to just walk inside Mar-a-Lago and stroke their massive checkbooks and rewrite our immigration policy so they can have unlimited slave laborers from India and China who never assimilate.

“You don’t even know what MAGA immigration policy is.”
.

[Rideback]

It's getting more interesting by the hour. Musk can't shutdown the noise.

[mister_coffee]

Popcorn, anyone?

Just let 'em go at each other and when its all over clean up the mess and move on, I say.

[just-jim]

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I think you are probably right David - it WILL be entertaining!

The underlying thing among those with an authoritarian mindset is that loyalty is at best conditional.
And trusting one another? - absolutely laughable; unless you're blackmailing them they'll actively hunt for ways to betray each other. If you do blackmail them they'll just do it secretly, instead.

It's Game of Thrones style feudalism, restarted.
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[mister_coffee]

I still think that an alliance with Musk is like keeping a ludicrously poisonous spider in your hat. One way or the other that alliance is going to end up being catastrophic for both Trump and the MAGA/Republican Party at large. I'm stocking up on popcorn because it is sure to be entertaining to watch.

[Rideback]

It's fascinating to watch the Tech Right vs the Right Right blowing up across social media
https://deadline.com/2024/12/elon-musk- ... heE4evH06w

'The past couple of days have exposed a fissure in Donald Trump‘s coalition over H-1B visas, used by major tech firms and some major media congloms to lure highly skilled workers to employment in the United States.

“That pretty much sums it up,” Musk wrote on X on Thursday evening. “This was eye-opening.”

Musk was responding to a post in which an X user wrote, “So basically the right split into two factions, tech right and right right, and the tech right is like ‘hey we need h-1b visa people to do the jobs,’ and the right right was like ‘no you need to hire americans,’ and the tech right is like ‘but you guys are retarded,’ and the right right is like ‘well you don’t train us,’ and the tech right is like ‘you can’t outtrain being retarded,’ and while all this was going on we learned some people *really* don’t like Indians.”

[mister_coffee]

The problem with the rare earth angle is that rare earth minerals aren't that rare. We import them largely because it is cheaper than complying with our own environmental regulations. Of course, if you make Greenland part of the USA it would be subject to the same laws so I do not see what you would accomplish there.

Personally I think this is what happens when an inherently abusive and mentally unstable person goes into decline. So we'll get a front-row seat to that. A whole lot of the language Trump uses shows an obsession with having power over others and a fear of being seen as weak. Which basically describes abusive people to a T. Or, I don't know, people who commit sexual assault.

Just saying, but you have to wonder about anyone who would spend Christmas Day hate-posting on social media. That alone is a serious cry for help.

[Rideback]

Greenland is a rich source of rare earth minerals. Something that would be of interest to Musk.
Panama has prohibited Russian ship traffic from using the canal since Russia invaded Ukraine. Something that would be of interest to Putin.

Trump seems to be looking at ways to pay his enablers back.

[just-jim]

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Great H. C. Richardson column today…

https://open.substack.com/pub/heatherco ... er-26-2024

A partial…..and a reference to the seminal work of Hannah Arendt, 75 years ago…in bold.



“It is starting to seem like the best way to interpret social media posts from President-elect Donald Trump is through the lens of professional wrestling. Never a true athletic competition—although it certainly required athletic training—until the 1980s, professional wrestling depended on “kayfabe,” the shared agreement among audience and actors that they would pretend the carefully constructed script and act were real.

But as Abraham Josephine Reisman explained in the New York Times last year, Vince and Linda McMahon pushed to move professional wrestling into entertainment to avoid health regulations and the taxes imposed on actual sporting events. That shift damaged the profession until in the mid-1990s, wrestlers and promoters began to mix the fake world of wrestling with reality, bringing real-life tensions to the ring in what might or might not have been real. “Suddenly,” Reisman wrote, “the fun of the match had everything to do with decoding it.”

Nothing was off-limits, and the more outrageous the storylines, the better. “[F]ans would give it their full attention because they couldn’t always figure out if what they were seeing was real or not.” This “neokayfabe” “rests on a slippery, ever-wobbling jumble of truths, half-truths, and outright falsehoods, all delivered with the utmost passion and commitment.”

Reisman concluded that producers and consumers of neokayfabe “tend to lose the ability to distinguish between what’s real and what isn’t.” In that, they echo the world identified by German-American historian and philosopher Hannah Arendt in her 1951 The Origins of Totalitarianism. “The ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist,” she wrote, “but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction…and the distinction between true and false no longer exist.”

Yesterday, on Christmas and the first night of Hanukkah, Trump posted a “Merry Christmas to all” message that went on to claim falsely that Chinese soldiers are operating the Panama Canal, that President Joe Biden “has absolutely no idea what he’s doing.” The heart of his message, though, was that the U.S. should take over both the Panama Canal and Canada, and that Greenland, which is a self-governing territory of Denmark, “is needed by the United States for National Security purposes,” and that “the people of Greenland…want the U.S. to be there, and we will!”

Trump’s sudden pronouncements threatening three other countries—he has been quiet about Mexico since its president pushed back on his early threats—have media outlets scrambling to explain what he’s up to. They have explained that this might be a way for him to demonstrate that his “America First” ideology, which has always embraced isolation, will actually wield power against other countries; or suggested that his claim against Panama is part of a strategy to counter China; or pointed out that global warming has sparked competition to gain an advantage in the Arctic.

The new focus on threatening other countries, virtually never mentioned during the 2024 campaign, has driven out of the news Trump’s actual campaign promise. Trump ran on the promise that he would lower prices, especially of groceries. Yet in mid-December he suggested in an interview with Time magazine that he doesn’t really expect to lower prices. That promise seems to have been part of a performance to attract voters, abandoned now with a new performance that may or may not be real…….”

There is more on the link…..

Pee-pants is running AMUCK!!!!
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