The Trump Presidency, Season 2

[Innula Zenovka]

I missed this a week or so ago.

The Garden of Forking Paths | Brian Klaas | Substack

Wandering around an infinitely complex, ever-changing world. Click to read The Garden of Forking Paths, by Brian Klaas, a Substack publication.

www.forkingpaths.co

Evernote Link

 

[Innula Zenovka]

Jonathan Freedland (@jonathanfreedland.bsky.social)

Donald Trump is crashing the US economy - just one more consequence of him being trapped in a disinformation bubble. Latest column https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/mar/14/donald-trump-crashing-us-economy-fake-news

bsky.app

Why, then, is Trump pursuing a course of action that can only damage the country and dent his own standing? The explanation lies in the way Trump sees the world. Which is through a lens clouded by the very phenomenon he once did so much to identify: fake news.

For most of the past decade, the focus has been on the likes of Trump and Musk as peddlers of falsehoods. There has been less attention paid to their role as consumers of lies. And yet it’s long been clear that Musk is spending too much time on X and is getting extremely high on his own supply. Witness his credulous swallowing of all kinds of far-right rubbish about Britain.

 

[Cristiano]

 

[Dancien]

JD Vance is the motherfucker who tries to zipper merge from the shoulder with no signal.

 

[Bartholomew Gallacher]

What if Donald Trump would be flying an airplane...

TikTok - Make Your Day

 

[Myradyl Muse]

View attachment 769

Did he also borrow Guiliani's hair dye to use as eyeliner?

 

[Katheryne Helendale]

Trump is expected to invoke the Alien Enemies Act as part of the efforts to carry out mass deportations, according to two U.S. officials familiar with the matter.

Trump to invoke wartime Alien Enemies Act to carry out mass deportations: Sources

Trump is expected to invoke the Alien Enemies Act as part of the efforts to carry out mass deportations, according to two U.S. officials familiar with the matter.

abc30.com

via ABC30 App

Yup. He went and did it.

Trump invokes 18th century law to speed deportations, judge stalls it hours later

A federal judge barred the Trump administration Saturday from carrying out deportations under a sweeping 18th century law that the president invoked just hours earlier to speed removal of Venezuelan gang members from the United States.

apnews.com

 

[Innula Zenovka]

ICE seem to have it in for Germans

Tim Onion (@bencollins.bsky.social)

ICE stripped a German green card holder naked, drove him from Boston to Vermont to Rhode Island, put him in a cold shower, deprived him of medication, sleep and food until he collapsed. No one knows why he was detained...

bsky.app

Schmidt had been visiting Luxembourg and flew back to the U.S. on Friday. His partner had gone to pick him up at Logan Airport, and waited four hours before calling authorities.

“It was just said that his green card was flagged,” said Astrid Senior, his mother. She said she didn’t hear from her son directly until Tuesday, when she learned he’d been hospitalized.

Senior described Schmidt being “violently interrogated” at Logan Airport for hours, and being stripped naked, put in a cold shower by two officials, and being put back onto a chair.

She said Schmidt told her immigration agents pressured him to give up his green card. She said he was placed on a mat in a bright room with other people at the airport, with little food or water, suffered sleep deprivation, and was denied access to his medication for anxiety and depression.

“He hardly got anything to drink. And then he wasn’t feeling very well and he collapsed,” said Senior.

He was transported by ambulance to Mass General Hospital. He didn’t know it at the time, but he also had influenza.

On Tuesday, Schmidt was transported to the regional headquarters for ICE in Burlington, Massachusetts, and then transferred to the Wyatt facility. The family, including his partner, who is a cardiologist in Nashua, have acquired attorneys and been working with the German consulate in hopes to have him released on bail

 

[Cindy Claveau]

They can't. The Secret Service won't let them due to security reasons. This also applies to former Presidents and Vice Presidents.

All true, but Trump can't drive in the first place. The whole Tesla show was propaganda.

 

[Bartholomew Gallacher]

Trump is axing the Voice of America and other similar agencies to bare minimum. All employees have been put on leave.

Trump signs order to gut staff at Voice of America and other US-funded media organizations

President Donald Trump is ordering his administration to gut Voice of America and other pro-democracy media organizations run by the U.S. government.

apnews.com

 

[GoblinCampFollower]

ICE seem to have it in for Germans

Tim Onion (@bencollins.bsky.social)

ICE stripped a German green card holder naked, drove him from Boston to Vermont to Rhode Island, put him in a cold shower, deprived him of medication, sleep and food until he collapsed. No one knows why he was detained...

bsky.app

This isn't the first such story I heard about ICE harassing Germans. ...and I admit it's pretty surprising to me. I expected stuff like this to mostly be aimed at people of color but it looks like someone has an ax to grind against Germans in particular.

 

[Casey Pelous]

This isn't the first such story I heard about ICE harassing Germans. ...and I admit it's pretty surprising to me. I expected stuff like this to mostly be aimed at people of color but it looks like someone has an ax to grind against Germans in particular.

I think it's more like ICE auditioning for the role of New SS by thumping on some innocent white folks. Just in case we thought we'd be immune by being Not Brown.

 

[Innula Zenovka]

The lethal triumph of the anti-vaxxers

Trump and the assault on reason

nickcohen.substack.com

What makes the triumph of unreason so bizarre is that it will not be college-educated American liberals who suffer and die, but the very people who voted for Trump.

Let’s take a breath and savour the moment. Much of politics consists of the political class forcing its views on the masses. In this instance, however, the paranoid fear that vaccines induce has risen up from below. His supporters have insisted that Trump do his best to kill them.

Evernote Link

 

[Innula Zenovka]

The Guardian (@theguardian.com)

Russell T Davies: gay society in ‘greatest danger I’ve ever seen’ after Trump win https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/mar/16/russell-t-davies-gay-society-greatest-danger-ever-seen-trump?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=bluesky&CMP=bsky_gu

bsky.app

 

[Dancien]

Brandon Friedman (@brandonfriedman.bsky.social)

This is blood-boiling. Charles Rogers was awarded the Medal of Honor in Vietnam after being wounded three times leading the defense of a position. Google his name and the entry below comes up. When you click, you'll see the page has been deleted and the URL changed to include "DEI medal."

bsky.app

I honestly don't even have the words at this point

 

[Free]

Brandon Friedman (@brandonfriedman.bsky.social)

This is blood-boiling. Charles Rogers was awarded the Medal of Honor in Vietnam after being wounded three times leading the defense of a position. Google his name and the entry below comes up. When you click, you'll see the page has been deleted and the URL changed to include "DEI medal."

bsky.app

I honestly don't even have the words at this point

I have words, but there's a risk Cris could ban me for them.

 

[Dancien]

Same

 

[Ellie]

“You wake up one day and discover you’re dead,” Johnson told me. “It’s been truly surreal.
“There’s nothing you need to do — we’ve deducted the funds from LEONARD A. JOHNSON’s account.”

Uh oh. It itemized how $5,201 had been stricken from their bank account, on the grounds that Ned wasn’t justified to get those benefits — because he was dead. That was for payments he’d received in December and January.

https://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/politics/heres-a-dead-person-on-social-security-in-seattle-with-plenty-to-say/

 

[GoblinCampFollower]

 

[Free]

Oh, this is rich.

Tesla Warns That Trump's Tariffs Are Hurting It Terribly

Elon Musk may be the second most powerful man in the world, but that might not be enough to stop Tesla's plummeting sales.

futurism.com

Faced with a combination of slumping sales and tariff see-sawing, Tesla execs just sent a panicked letter to the Office of the United States Trade Representative (USTR) expressing concern over "disproportionate impacts" to their bottom line.

The letter said that Tesla was trying to make as many components as possible in the United States, but that "even with aggressive localization of the supply chain, certain parts and components are difficult or impossible to source within the US."

It also warned that "past trade actions by the United States have resulted in immediate reactions by the targeted countries, including increased tariffs on EVs imported into those countries."