The Trump Presidency, Season 2

[Beebo Brink]

I don't mourn the decline of the U.S. so much as I worry about the loss of the post-WWII stability that muted the inclination toward global conflagrations.

 

[Free]

Trump in China: A Case Study Of US Decline

Signs of decline can be dramatic or they can be small.

phillipspobrien.substack.com

But mostly, they're embarrassing.

 

[Innula Zenovka]

But mostly, they're embarrassing.

That's Trump's decline rather than that of the US, of course.

 

[Free]

That's Trump's decline rather than that of the US, of course.

He's doing a good job of combining the two.

 

[Innula Zenovka]

He's doing a good job of combining the two.

Though I wouldn't say that having more Chinese restaurants than US fast food chain outlets is necessarily a sign of national decline. A sign of discernment and good taste, I'd have thought.

 

[Free]

Though I wouldn't say that having more Chinese restaurants than US fast food chain outlets is necessarily a sign of national decline. A sign of discernment and good taste, I'd have thought.

Not really the point. But sure...

 

[Innula Zenovka]

German leader Merz says he ‘would not advise my children to go’ to US

"I am a great admirer of America. At the moment my admiration is not growing,” he said during a podium discussion, citing the quickly changing “social climate” in the deeply polarised country.

“I would not advise my children today to go to the US, get educated there or work there, simply because a certain social climate has suddenly developed there.”

The 70-year-old father of three continued: “Today, even the best-educated people in America are finding it very hard to get a job.”

 

[Kamilah Hauptmann]

derek guy (@dieworkwear.bsky.social)

unfortunately, kim il sung's clothes hang a lot better

bsky.app

 

[Mona Eberhardt]

Still I don't see a man in a mansion
That an accurate pen won't puncture...

 

[Mona Eberhardt]

Absolutely fucked up.

 

[Beebo Brink]

The Rude Pundit: In Foreign Policy, Trump Learns That White Doesn't Make Right

Donald Trump is sold to racists as some kind of pinnacle of the innate superiority of whiteness, and it's kind of hilarious that he's so fucking dumb and so fucking blind to his own flaws that he just keeps punching himself under his gut in his tiny ballsack every single time he attempts to assert his illusionary white superiority over non-white leadership in other countries.

The thing about Trump and all the idiots, greedy pricks, and hangers-on who enable him is that they think that their whiteness is a superpower when, really, it's their tragic flaw.

 

[Innula Zenovka]

TRUMP JUST GOT EXPOSED FOR RUNNING THE BIGGEST INSIDER TRADING OPERATION IN AMERICAN HISTORY.

Pelosi traded $5 million and Congress lost its mind. Trump just disclosed $750 MILLION in a single quarter — while running the country that regulates every stock he bought.

deanblundell.substack.com

Between January and March of 2026 — three months — Donald Trump personally executed 3,700 individual stock transactions worth between $220 million and $750 million.

Three thousand seven hundred trades.

In ninety days.

That’s roughly 60 trades per day, every day, including weekends and holidays — while signing executive orders, meeting foreign leaders, threatening wars, lifting and imposing tariffs, and making policy decisions that directly move the stocks he was buying and selling.

Every Wall Street veteran with a pulse is staring at this filing like a fire hydrant in their living room.

“This is an insane amount of trades.”

— Matthew Tuttle, CEO, Tuttle Capital Management
"In 40-plus years on Wall Street, this is an unusual amount of trading by any standards.” — Eric Diton, The Wealth Alliance

Forty years on Wall Street. The guy works in the building where they invented financial crime. He’s never seen anything like it.

And the kicker — the part that should melt the brain of any honest person reading this, left, right, or whatever you call yourself — is what Trump did with the stocks after he bought them.

 

[GoblinCampFollower]

TRUMP JUST GOT EXPOSED FOR RUNNING THE BIGGEST INSIDER TRADING OPERATION IN AMERICAN HISTORY.

Pelosi traded $5 million and Congress lost its mind. Trump just disclosed $750 MILLION in a single quarter — while running the country that regulates every stock he bought.

deanblundell.substack.com

We desperately need an anti corruption amendment (that we realistically won't get) since courts have often protected the rights to do this shit in plain sight. Presidents were historically expected to have neutral assets before Trump, but congress and justices have been insider trading out in the open for a while.

 

[Innula Zenovka]

We desperately need an anti corruption amendment (that we realistically won't get) since courts have often protected the rights to do this shit in plain sight. Presidents were historically expected to have neutral assets before Trump, but congress and justices have been insider trading out in the open for a while.

Something like this would be a suitable statue to memorialise Trump, I think

 

[Noodles]

We desperately need an anti corruption amendment (that we realistically won't get) since courts have often protected the rights to do this shit in plain sight. Presidents were historically expected to have neutral assets before Trump, but congress and justices have been insider trading out in the open for a while.

I wish we had some mechanism like other countries where we can say "fuck it, lets do an election right now" instead of waiting every X years.

 

[Jopsy Pendragon]

Something like this would be a suitable statue to memorialise Trump, I think

I'd prefer the "damnatio memoriae" approach, basically redacting his name and image everywhere, the way they did in 1355 with the erasure of Marino Faliero, the 55th Doge of Venice. There's still a blacked out portrait of him hanging in the palace.

 

[GoblinCampFollower]

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/05/19/us/politics/trump-irs-doj-lawsuit-audit.html?unlocked_article_code=1.jlA.lMUH.ZiPkZBmz13Gv

 

[Innula Zenovka]

Interesting (and somewhat alarming) special report by Reuters:

Inside the unraveling of U.S. diplomacy under Trump

Evernote Link

LONDON - When Donald Trump warned Iran on April 7 that “a whole civilization will die tonight,” a European diplomat in Washington said his government wanted an urgent answer to a chilling question: Was the U.S. president contemplating the use of a nuclear weapon?

Across Europe and Asia, the concern went beyond whether Trump’s apocalyptic threat was real or bluster. One fear, the diplomat said, was that Russia could seize the moment to justify similar threats in Ukraine, triggering a nuclear crisis on two continents.

European governments immediately sought reassurance through a traditional channel: the U.S. State Department. But according to the diplomat, officials there gave an unsettling response: They didn’t know what Trump meant or what actions his words might portend.

 

[Jopsy Pendragon]

Because isolationism worked out so damned well for us 90 years ago?

This isn't new. The FlatulenT Rump administration absolutely gutted the state department their first time in office, leaving posts unfilled, losing institutional memory and connections that I'm certain have damaged our standing in the world ever since.

"I have nukes" is his idea of diplomacy. And while the threat of force/lawsuits works at one level... like a high school bully who painted themselves into a corner without any skills who ends up as a drunk gas station attendant with a miserable fading trophy wife who thought he was going places... he's now parked in a job he clearly doesn't like, knocking down institutions left and right so that he can get money for his self-aggrandizing monuments to meaningless self-given trophies.

Maybe we couldn't keep funding the state department at the level we had been, who knows, but he's not smart enough to know that, or to adequately weigh the cost benefit to the nation without a strong investment in international relations.

But whatever history books are supposedly printed on, will remember his name and face as "The Death of U.S. Supremacy".

Fuck him and his torched and salted legacy.

 

[Free]

So there may be a Trump Phone, after all. Get ready for the worst security ever.