The Trump Presidency, Season 2

[Free]

coughHitleryClintoncough

coughEpsteinDidn'tKillHimselfcough

 

[Bartholomew Gallacher]

LOLWUT?

 

[Innula Zenovka]

This is rather worrying

Slate: It Was Meant to Solve the Housing Crisis. Trump Is Using It to Create an Enemies List.

ust this Monday, Trump fired Federal Reserve Board Governor Lisa Cook after accusing her of falsifying records on past mortgage applications. In recent weeks, Sen. Adam Schiff and New York Attorney General Letitia James have faced the same allegation. Mortgage fraud, for the uninitiated, typically means intentionally misstating something on a loan application, such as income, assets, or even whether you intend to live in the house. This type of fraudulent conduct is not trivial—penalties can include millions of dollars in fines and prison sentences measured in decades—but they are hardly the kind of scandal you expect to end a career in Washington. Which raises the obvious question: Why mortgage fraud?

The answer has less to do with the crime itself than with the ease of finding it. Mortgage fraud may sound obscure, but it is the kind of violation that leaves a long paper trail, and the federal government now happens to sit on an enormous archive of those papers. Every borrower who wants a typical government-backed mortgage (a conforming loan) must fill out the Uniform Residential Loan Application, and since 2023, the Supplemental Consumer Information Form, which together capture the important personal and financial details about a household, such as income and employment history, bank accounts and debts, family structure and marital status, property ownership, past bankruptcies or foreclosures, race and ethnicity, military service, whether the borrower has received housing counseling, and even their preferred language of communication. At closing, those files are supplemented with appraisal reports and a standardized closing disclosure, all of which flow electronically into Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac’s databases. Fannie and Freddie are still in federal conservatorship, meaning that the Federal Housing Finance Agency has supervisory access to the loan-level data of tens of millions of mortgages. As a result, the government has, at its fingertips, a dossier of detailed and often sensitive information on virtually every ordinary borrower. Which is why, if you want to target a political adversary, their mortgage paperwork is almost certainly already there, waiting to be mined.

Evernote Link

 

[Free]

I know you've all been waiting for an update...

President Trump is alive and well after bizarre, false online speculation suggested he died

Trump was photographed in a white polo, black pants and his signature red MAGA hat about 8:45 a.m. , appearing alongside his granddaughter, Kai Trump, as they loaded up in a vehicle headed for his …

nypost.com

They have photos of him taken today. Looking alive, but not necessarily all that well.

 

[Beebo Brink]

They have photos of him taken today. Looking alive, but not necessarily all that well.

Mrs. Beebo thinks Trump went out in public because he was so irritated by JD Vance's remarks.

JD Vance says he’s ready to take over as president ‘if, God forbid, there’s a terrible tragedy’ with Trump

 

[Isabeau]

Just Jack (@just-jack-1.bsky.social)

He can pretend to be dead all he wants. I still want the Epstein files released.

bsky.app

 

[Isabeau]

An opinion piece, and we all know it, but still, from The Guardian.

Step back and take it in: the US is entering full authoritarian mode

If this were happening somewhere else – in Latin America, say – how might it be reported? Having secured his grip on the capital, the president is now set to send troops to several rebel-held cities, claiming he is wanted there to restore order. The move follows raids on the homes of leading dissidents and comes as armed men seen as loyal to the president, many of them masked, continue to pluck people off the streets …

Except this is happening in the United States of America and so we don’t quite talk about it that way.
[…]

 

[Cindy Claveau]

 

[Innula Zenovka]

An opinion piece, and we all know it, but still, from The Guardian.

Step back and take it in: the US is entering full authoritarian mode

Also this, from today's Guardian

Has Trump succeeded in normalising American autocracy?

Abdelrahman ElGendy has watched this process with a feeling of grim recognition. ElGendy spent six years in prison in his native Egypt on political charges, but fled to the US in order to work on a memoir he is set to release next year.

In April, however, he packed his things and left the US following the detention of the Columbia graduate Mahmoud Khalil. ElGendy’s lawyers warned him that he could face a similar fate after his personal details were posted on a website used to target opponents of Israel’s war in Gaza.

Since then, he has watched from abroad as the situation has worsened.

“I haven’t second-guessed leaving the US. In fact I feel very grateful that I made the choice that I did before things got even worse,” he said. “I left Egypt to escape political persecution … The reason I left the US is because I started to recognize those same patterns forming around me. And since leaving it’s only gone downhill.”

 

[detrius]

Fake. Good old Bill Door would never use a scythe like that,

 

[Innula Zenovka]

 

[Free]

Is that what his granddaughter Kai Trump looks like? And what happened to Trump's right arm below the elbow? Did he have surgery this week?

 

[Innula Zenovka]

Is that what his granddaughter Kai Trump looks like? And what happened to Trump's right arm below the elbow? Did he have surgery this week?

It's an extreme (though effective) way of concealing the bruises on his right hand.

 

[Free]

Uh oh, we have a conspiracy brewing.

 

[Free]

 

[Innula Zenovka]

"That is not dead which doth incessantly lie," as Abdul Alhazred almost remarked.

 

[Noodles]

An opinion piece, and we all know it, but still, from The Guardian.

Step back and take it in: the US is entering full authoritarian mode

Dear world, you know how the US is constantly "Bringing freedom" to other countries?

Can you all maybe return the favor?

 

[Beebo Brink]

 

[GoblinCampFollower]

Mark my words, when Trump does finally kick the bucket, right wing media will pretend it's very sudden and somehow suspicious.

 

[Dakota Tebaldi]

The bruising on the back of the hand has happened before, hasn't it?

I haven't been reading any of the speculation but I'm guessing it's from an IV stick and happened because Trump is on a blood thinner, or his veins have naturally gotten frail owing to his age.