I urge people to read the transcript or watch the video of Pritzker’s speech, because frankly, that is the way it’s done.
Pritzker didn’t dismiss concerns about crime in the city. “Not one person here today will claim we have solved all crime in Chicago, nor can that be said of any major American metro area,” he said. Instead, the governor turned those concerns on Trump, listing the ways the president and his fellow Republicans have made Chicago less safe for its residents:
If Donald Trump was actually serious about fighting crime in cities like Chicago, he, along with his congressional Republicans, would not be cutting over $800 million in public safety and crime prevention grants nationally, including cutting $158 million in funding to Illinois for violence prevention programs that deploy trained outreach workers to de-escalate conflict on our streets; cutting $71 million in law enforcement grants to Illinois, direct money for police departments through programs like Project Safe Neighborhoods, the State and Local Antiterrorism Training Program, and the Rural Violent Crime Reduction Initiative; cutting $137 million in child protection measures in Illinois that protect our kids against abuse and neglect.
Pritzker put it succinctly: “Trump is defunding the police.”
Not only is that true, it’s great messaging — and Democrats should follow the governor’s lead. Democrats must make it clear to the American people that they take crime very seriously. But they also have to show voters what’s happening in Chicago and that what will likely happen in other Democratic-run cities across the country isn’t really about crime. It’s about the performative retribution of Trump — it’s about politics.
This is a president who is acting as if he has no limits. He is destroying constitutional guardrails and violating the norms of democracy almost daily. The question now is: How much damage can he do before he’s stopped?
One of the major problems that we’ve faced in dealing with Trump has been a failure of imagination. How far would he go? How bad could it get? What would he do with the unchecked powers of the presidency?
In real time, we are seeing what he is capable of doing. We’re seeing it play out in Washington, D.C., and we may soon see it in Chicago. Trump is giving us a brutal reality check about how fragile our constitutional republic really is.
Which brings me to another important line from Pritzker’s speech: “If it sounds to you like I am alarmist, that is because I am ringing an alarm, one that I hope every person listening will heed, both here in Illinois and across the country.”
We must understand the magnitude of the moment. All of this may feel like some sort of dystopian nightmare, but it is literally the times that we are living in, and every American must open their eyes and see what’s happening.
This article was originally published on MSNBC.com
Earlier today, I asked rhetorically: When it comes to the necessity of speaking out against this dangerous and detestable regime, where are Bill Clinton and George W. Bush, and where are their vice presidents, Al Gore and Dick Cheney? When I wrote this I had not come across a particularly powerful speech Al Gore delivered last week in San Francisco at Climate Week. My error. Here it is, in full:
***
It is abundantly clear, after only three months and one day, that the new Trump administration is attempting to do everything it possibly can to try to halt the transition to a clean energy future and a deep reduction in the burning of fossil fuels. The climate crisis is a fossil fuel crisis, basically 80% of it.
Many of you here today have likely felt the chilling effect of the policies and the rhetoric coming from Washington, D.C. and what the effect has been on businesses and investors and far beyond.
The Dow Jones, of course, today fell another thousand points and since Donald Trump’s inauguration it’s gone down six thousand points. But while the most visible impacts of what the new administration is doing may be in the market for stocks and bonds, that’s not the only thing that he has caused to crash.
The trust market has crashed.
The market for democracy has taken a major hit.
Hope is being arbitraged in the growing market for fear.
Truth has been devalued and confidence in U.S. leadership around the world has plummeted.
We are facing a national emergency for our democracy and a global emergency for our climate system.
We have to deal with the democracy crisis in order to solve the climate crisis.
The scale and scope of the ongoing attacks on liberty are literally unprecedented. With that in mind, I want to note before I use what is not a precedent, I understand very well why it is wrong to compare Adolf Hitler’s Third Reich to any other movement. It was uniquely evil, full stop. I get it.
But there are important lessons from the history of that emergent evil, and here is one that I regard as essential.
In the immediate aftermath of World War II, a small group of philosophers who had escaped Hitler’s murderous regime returned to Germany and performed a kind of moral autopsy on the Third Reich. The most famous of the so-called Frankfurt School of Philosophers was a man named Jurgen Habermas – best known, I would say. But it was Habermas’ mentor, Theodor Adorno, who wrote that the first step of that nation’s descent into Hell was, and I quote, “the conversion of all questions of truth into questions of power.” He described how the Nazis, and I quote again, “attacked the very heart of the distinction between true and false.”
The Trump administration is insisting on trying to create their own preferred version of reality. They say Ukraine attacked Russia instead of the other way around, and expect us to believe it! At home, they attack heroes who have defended our nation in war and against cyberattacks as traitors.
They say the climate crisis is a “hoax” invented by the Chinese to destroy American manufacturing.
They say coal is clean.
They say wind turbines cause cancer.
They say sea level rise just creates more beachfront property.
Their allies in the oligarchic backlash to climate action argue that those who want to stop using the sky as an open sewer, for God’s sake, need to be more “realistic” and acquiesce to the huge increases in the burning of more and more fossil fuels (which is what they’re pushing), even though that is the principal cause of the climate crisis.
You may not be surprised to learn that this propagandistic notion of “climate realism” is one that the fossil fuel industry has peddled for years.
The CEO of the largest oil company in the world, Saudi Aramco has said “We should abandon the fantasy of phasing out oil and gas.”
His colleague, Exxon CEO Darren Woods, has claimed that “the world needs to get real. … The problem is not oil and gas. It’s emissions.”
The American Petroleum Institute says that we need “a more realistic energy approach” – one that, you guessed it, includes buying and burning even more oil and gas.
So, allow me to put this question to all of you: What exactly is it that they want us to be realistic about?
Their twisted version of “realism” is colliding with the reality that humanity is now confronting.
The accumulated global warming pollution (because these molecules linger there on average about 100 years and it builds up over time), it’s trapping as much extra heat now every single day as would be released by the explosion of 750,000 first generation atomic bombs blowing up on the Earth every single day!
Is it realistic to let that continue?
Is it realistic to think that if we opt out of taking action to reduce greenhouse gas pollution, we’ll be able to just wish it away and continue with business as usual? Well, Mother Nature makes a pretty good case against that argument. Every night on the TV news is like a nature walk through the Book of Revelation.
Is it realistic, for example, to continue stoking the risk of wildfire in California, after what has already happened to so many communities in Northern California? And just look at the devastation caused by the Los Angeles wildfires in January.
Is it realistic to tell homeowners around the world that the global housing market is expected to suffer a $25 trillion loss in the next 25 years? Fifteen percent of all the residential housing stock in the world if we do not change what we’re doing? Is that realistic in their view?
Is it realistic to continue quietly accepting 8.7 million deaths every single year from breathing in the particulate co-pollution that also comes from the burning of fossil fuels? That is the number of people who are already being killed. According to health experts, it is, and I quote, “the leading contributor to the global disease burden.” When you’re burning coal, oil and gas, it puts the heat trapping pollution up there and it puts the particulate and PM 2.5 pollution into the lungs of people downwind from where the facilities are burning the fossil fuels.
Is it realistic, in their view, for governments to manage 1 billion climate migrants crossing international borders in the balance of this century? That’s how many the Lancet Commission estimates will be crossing borders in the decades to come, if we continue driving temperatures and humidity higher and making the physiologically unlivable regions of the world vastly larger by continuing to put 175 million tons of man-made heat-trapping pollution into that thin shell of the troposphere surrounding the planet. You know what that blue line looks like, that thin blue shell is blue because that’s where the oxygen is. And it’s so thin, if you could drive a car straight up in the air at highway speeds, you’d get to the top of that blue line in five to seven minutes.
That’s what we’re using as an open sewer. Is that realistic? I don’t think it is.
We’ve already seen, by the way, how populist authoritarian leaders have used migrants as scapegoats and have fanned the fires of xenophobia to fuel their own rise to power. And power-seeking is what this is all about. Our Constitution, written by our founders, is intended to protect us against a threat identical to Donald Trump: someone who seeks power at all costs to get more power. Imagine what the demagogues would do as we continued toward a billion migrants crossing international borders. We could face a grave threat to our capacity for self-governance.
Is it “realistic” to continue inflicting the financial toll that the climate crisis is taking on the global economy? According to Deloitte, climate inaction will cost the economy $178 trillion over the next half century. And is it realistic to miss out on the economic opportunity that we could seize by going toward net-zero? Over that same period, climate action would increase the size of the global economy by $43 trillion.
A question with particular relevance in nearby Silicon Valley: is it realistic for the semiconductor industry to experience losses of up to 35% of annual revenues due to supply chain disruptions caused by the stronger and more severe cyclonic storms and supercell storms?
Is it realistic to continue with a system of financing that leaves the entire continent of Africa completely out? Right now, the entire continent of Africa, fastest-growing population in the world, has fewer solar panels installed than the single state of Florida in the United States of America. That’s a disgrace to the makeup of our financial system. But Africa has three times as many oil and gas pipelines under construction and preparing for construction to begin than all of North America. It is ridiculous to allow this system to continue as it is. How is that realistic? Or fair? Or just?
Is it realistic for us, all of us here, to consign our children and grandchildren to what scientists warn us would be Hell on Earth in order to conserve the profits of the fossil fuel industry? The predictions of the scientists 50 years ago have turned out to be spot on correct. Their predictions just a few decades ago have turned out to be exactly right. Should not that cause us to listen more carefully to what they’re warning us will happen if we do not sharply and quickly reduce the emissions from burning fossil fuels?
Is that unrealistic to listen to a proven source of advice?
This newfound so-called climate realism is nothing more than climate denial in disguise. It is an attempt to pretend there is no problem and to ignore the reality that is right in front of our faces.
What’s never present in any of this so-called “realism” is any credible challenge whatsoever to the conclusions of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the IPCC. They never address that. They just wish it away and say, “Oh it’s unrealistic to actually do anything about it.”
I wish we could wish it away, but we cannot.
The hard reality is that the fossil fuel industry has grown desperate for more capital. They’re seeing their two largest markets wither away: electricity generation, number one and transportation, number two. They’ve been losing their share of investment in the energy market to renewables and so they’re panicked.
That explains why they are so aggressively using their captive policymakers to block meaningful solutions. Of course, as you know, they’re way better at capturing politicians than they are at capturing emissions. They’ve grown very skillful at that.
They are the wealthiest and most powerful industry lobby in the history of the world. They make the East India Company look like a popcorn vendor. They are the effective global hegemon.
They have used their war chests and their legacy network of political and economic power to block any reductions of fossil fuel burning emissions – whether at the international conferences that we call the COPs, the Conference of Parties in the UN process, or at the global negotiations for a plastic treaty. They blocked anything there, too.
Why? They’re losing the first market of electricity generation because 93% of all the new electricity generation installed worldwide last year was solar and wind. They’re losing that market steadily. EVs are rising dramatically. They say they’ve slowed down. Well, we just got the new figures – an 18% increase year-on-year here in the United States. In many countries much faster than that.
And so, their third market – they’re telling Wall Street that they’re going to make up all of the expected lost revenue in their first two markets by tripling the production of plastics over the next 35 years.
Well, we might have a word to say about that. Is that realistic? Because we’ve already found – the scientists say – that some seabirds are manifesting symptoms like Alzheimer’s disease from the plastic particles in their brains and they found that it crosses the blood-brain barrier in humans, and the size of the amount has doubled just in the last decade.
Do we really want to continue that?
It’s crazy, but they are blocking action at both of these international forums and they’re blocking action in the deliberations of nation-states, even in states and provinces, and even at the local level. Anywhere in the world where there is an effort to pass legislation or regulations that reduces the burning of fossil fuels, they are there with their money, with their lobbyists, with their captive politicians, blocking it as best they can.
And the solution is what you’re doing here at Climate Week here in San Francisco. We have got to rise up and change this situation.
That’s also why they are ballyhooing ridiculously expensive and hilariously impractical technologies like building giant mechanical vacuuming machines to suck it back out of the atmosphere after they put it up there. Could that someday be a realistic part of the solution? Perhaps, perhaps. But not now! Not even close.
They use it as a bright, shiny object to distract attention and say, ‘see this, see this, this could be so miraculous, we don’t have to stop burning fossil fuels at all! We can actually continue to increase the burning of fossil fuels because look at this bright, shiny object. We’ve got this vacuuming machine.’
Well, CO2 is 0.035% of the molecules in the air. You’re gonna use an energy-intensive, ridiculous, expensive process to filter through the other 99.965% of the molecules? It’s absolutely preposterous.
In reality, the Sustainability Revolution is powering more and more of our global economy. It has the scale and impact of the Industrial Revolution and is moving at the pace of the Digital Revolution.
By the way, in Texas, which used to have a free market for energy, over 90% of all their new electricity generation last year was solar and wind. And, you know, they’ve got captured politicians there. They’re pushing legislation in Texas to legally require any developers of solar and wind to spend time and money developing more oil and gas before they’re given permission to develop renewables.
That’s not realism, that’s pathetic.
That is a sign of desperation.
They don’t trust the free market. They’re just relying more and more on the politicians who will jump when they tell them jump and ask how high when they tell them to jump again.
So, around the world, the market is transforming. Since the Paris Agreement, the cost of solar has dropped 76%. The cost of wind is down 66%. Utility-scale batteries are down 87%.
In 2004, when Generation was founded, it took a full year for the world to install one gigawatt of solar power. Now it takes one day to install one gigawatt of solar power.
And it’s not just renewables. We’re seeing the Sustainability Revolution rapidly take hold across the rest of the global economy from transportation, to regenerative agriculture, to circular manufacturing, and so much more.
So, as we gather here to kick off Climate Week and as we gather on the eve of Earth Day, we have to treat this moment as a call to action.
So, I’m here not only to respond to the invitation for which I’m grateful…. I’m here to recruit you.
Many of you are already working on this, but those of you who are not, I’m here to recruit you. We need you. This is the time and this is a break glass moment. This is an all hands on deck moment.
Now is the time to look at every aspect of your businesses, your investments, and your civic engagement to determine whether or not you can contribute even more to solving the climate crisis.
It’s easy to adopt our own versions of climate realism to say that the challenge is too great. Some people worry about that. To say that our individual role is too small to have an impact. Some use that as an excuse: that if the government won’t act, what can any of us do about it?
Well, just as the climate crisis does not recognize borders between countries, it does not either recognize delineations between the duty of government and businesses and all significant participants in the global economy.
Climate change is already impacting your life and work and will more so through disrupted supply chains, increased liability, changes in consumer demand, and more.
This is a moment when we all have to mobilize to defend our country. And remember the antidote to climate despair is climate action. It was in this city in the 1960s that Joan Baez first said that the antidote to despair is action. And we need to remember that now.
And during a time of when people were tempted to despair in the struggle for civil rights in this country, Martin Luther King said something about overcoming the forces that try to discourage you and halt progress. He said this: “If you can’t fly, run. If you can’t run, walk. If you can’t walk, crawl. But by all means, keep moving.”
And that’s where we are.
Every one of the morally based movements in the past had periods when advocates felt despair. But when the central choice was revealed as a choice between right and wrong, then the outcome at a very deep level became foreordained.
Because of the way Pope Francis reminded us we have been created as God’s children.
We love our families.
We are devoted to our communities.
We have to protect our future.
And if you doubt for one moment ever that we as human beings have the capacity to muster sufficient political will to solve this crisis, just remember that political will is itself a renewable resource.
Comments Off on Elon Musk Backs Warren Buffett’s Brutal ‘5-Minute Deficit Fix’ To Ban Congress From Reelection If They Blow the Budget: ‘100% This Is the Way!
There is no reason to complain if you are paying attention to what is happening in our legislative house. The vote has always been the answer! MA.
Ivy Grace-Benzinga
Fri, July 4, 2025 at 6:00 PM CDT
Elon Musk Backs Warren Buffett’s Brutal ‘5-Minute Deficit Fix’ To Ban Congress From Reelection If They Blow the Budget: ‘100% This Is the Way’
More than a decade ago, Warren Buffett said the national deficit could be solved in just five minutes. His plan? “You just pass a law that says that any time there is a deficit of more than 3% of GDP, all sitting members of Congress are ineligible for reelection.”
That 2011 quote, from an interview with CNBC’s Becky Quick, resurfaced in early June — and this time, it gained traction with one of the world’s most influential voices.
On June 4, Utah Sen. Mike Lee (R-UT) posted the clip on X and asked, “Would you support this amendment?” Elon Musk didn’t hesitate. He reposted it with the words “100%” and “This is the way,” signaling full endorsement of Buffett’s blunt solution.
Thank you, Senator Cory Booker. In your record-breaking Senate talk-a-thon, you sounded the alarm about President Donald Trump’s increasingly blatant threats to Social Security, and the devastating impacts for ordinary people who count on it.
Ninety years ago, our three grandfathers created Social Security. It’s the most popular, efficient and effective government program ever, ensuring financial security for 73 million Americans today. Now, appallingly, America’s workers and seniors must get ready to fight like hell.
The first draft of Social Security was written by a small committee including Agriculture Secretary Henry A. Wallace and top FDR advisor and Federal Relief Administrator Harry Hopkins, chaired by legendary Labor Secretary Frances Perkins. FDR had insisted that Social Security be funded by a system of payroll taxes, with both worker and employer contributing. He expressed great confidence that this would give workers an unquestionable “legal, moral and political right” to collect benefits.
Save Social Security. Don’t “outsource” it. Don’t tolerate this “reverse Robin Hood”—taking from the poor and giving to the rich.
President Dwight Eisenhower got it. There may be “a tiny splinter group” of politicians who want to mess with Social Security, he wrote, but “their number is negligible and they are stupid.”
Now comes Trump and Musk. They’ve fired 7,000 Social Security Administration staffer, citing a “bloated” workforce (actually severely overstretched at 50-year lows), made it harder to access their benefits, and closed most of the regional and field offices, guaranteeing chaos. Musk has called Social Security a “Ponzi scheme” (it’s NOT), and shared a post calling Social Security recipients “the parasite class.” Trump has lied that Social Security benefits are being collected by illegal immigrants (they actually strengthen Social Security by paying payroll taxes while being barred from collecting benefits) and by tens of millions of people over 120 years old (nobody in the worldis over 120 years old, and in fact, only 89,000 people over age 99 receive Social Security benefits). Musk says fraud in “entitlement spending … is the big one to eliminate“.
Now, after whipping up anger at imaginary Social Security abuses, Trump is proposing to end all federal taxes on people earning less than $150,000—the largest category of taxes for people in that bracket being the payroll taxes that sustain Social Security— which, when combined with the current payroll tax cap of $176,000, would leave Social Security with virtually no revenues. Trump previously promised to completely end payroll taxes.
Could their intentions be any clearer? Trump campaigned on a promise that Social Security “will not be touched, it will only be strengthened” (and Musk has recently promised that benefits will be increased, unbelievably, without congressional action and without worsening the government spending he enjoys slashing with his chainsaw).
Today, the CEO earning $10 million a year hits that limit and stops paying payroll taxes after the first week of the year, while his janitor keeps paying the 6.2% payroll tax for the next 51 weeks. It’s an outrage against all working people.
But remember how a previous President, George W. Bush, wanted to “strengthen” Social Security? By privatizing it. Trump’s acting Social Security Commissioner now prefers to frame it as “outsourcing.”
The Washington Post reports that with seniors “beside themselves” with uncertainty stoked by all the cutbacks, “many current and former [Social Security] officials” fear that the ultimate goal is privatization. And they’ve got plenty of company among Democrats in Congress. (Trump’s Treasury Secretary recently suggested that the goal was to privatize everything government does.) And Trump’s likeliest argument is that the only way to prevent benefit cuts driven by the system’s looming solvency crisis, and strengthen retirement security, is to put Social Security’s money in Wall Street (rich financiers would surely love the extra $3 trillion in investments).
The fact is that there is absolutely no way for Musk and Trump to reach their goal of eliminating $2 trillion in federal spending without either 1) raising revenues or 2) decimating the largest federal spending program in America: Social Security (Medicare and Medicaid are not far behind).
What could avert such stupidity? Revenues. Make the wealthy pay their fair share. One no-brainer example: eliminate the current $176,000 cap on payroll taxes. Today, the CEO earning $10 million a year hits that limit and stops paying payroll taxes after the first week of the year, while his janitor keeps paying the 6.2% payroll tax for the next 51 weeks. It’s an outrage against all working people.
What related outrages should we expect? Start with Trump’s promised $5 trillion of tax cuts for billionaires (like Trump and Musk). That’s the justification for all of Trump’s cuts to programs that help ordinary people, from veterans to children to health care to preventing terrorism. And don’t imagine for a second that the privatization of Social Security can be blocked in Congress, as it was under President George W. Bush. Trump’s reign of boundary-pushing executive orders has made a supine Congress irrelevant and the Constitution a technicality.
Save Social Security. Don’t “outsource” it. Don’t tolerate this “reverse Robin Hood”—taking from the poor and giving to the rich. Don’t count on “guardrails” like Congress or the courts. It will take a movement of ordinary Americans shouting to protect FDR’s greatest legacy of financial security for working people.
My opinion: There was a chance to avoid this corrupt administration but too many people went for the: egress” and now find them selves outside! MA.
Friends,
Trump is overplaying his hand.
Not just by usurping the powers of Congress and ignoring Supreme Court rulings. Not just abducting people who are legally in the United States but have put their name to opinion pieces Trump doesn’t like and trucking them off to “detention” facilities. Not just using the Justice Department for personal vengeance. Not just unilaterally deciding how much tariff tax American consumers will have to pay on almost everything they buy.
Polls show all these are tanking Trump’s popularity.
But one thing almost all Americans are firmly against — even many loyal Trumpers — us bribery. And Trump is taking bigger and bigger bribes.
Yesterday it was reported that he’s accepting a luxury Boeing 747-8 plane worth at least $400 million from the Qatari royal family, for use during his presidency and for his personal use afterward.
Trump just can’t resist. He’s been salivating over the plane for months. It’s bigger and newer than Air Force One — and so opulently configured that it’s known as “a flying palace.” (No report on whether it contains a golden toilet.)
Apparently he’s been talking about the plane for months. In February, he toured it while it was parked at Palm Beach International Airport.
He’s tried to redecorate the White House into a palace but that’s not nearly as satisfying as flying around the world in one, especially once he’s left the White House (assuming he will).
Attorney General Pam Bondi said it’s perfectly legal for him to accept such a bribe, er, gift.
Hello?
The U.S. Constitution clearly forbids officers of the United States from taking gifts from foreign governments. It’s called the “emoluments clause.” (See Article I, Section 9.)
Anyone viewing Bondi as a neutral judge of what’s legal and what’s not when it comes to Trump can’t be trusted to be a neutral judge of Bondi. Recall that she represented Trump in a criminal proceeding. Presumably he appointed her attorney general because he knew she’d do and say anything he wanted.
Oh, and she used to lobby for Qatar.
So, what does Qatar get in return for the $400 million plane? What’s the quid for the quo?
This week Trump takes the first overseas trip of his second presidency. He’ll land in Saudi Arabia on Tuesday, followed by a visit to Qatar, and then to the United Arab Emirates (U.A.E).
That’s a big boost for Qatar right there.
Trump also just did what Qatar has been wanting done for years — announcing that the Persian Gulf (as it’s been known since at least 550 B.C.) will henceforth be known as the Arabian Gulf.
Trump’s company has just announced a new golf resort in Qatar, reportedly partnering with a company owned by the royal family.
Qatar is also pushing the Trump regime to lift sanctions on Syria.
The payback could be any number of things. The only certainty is that you and I and other Americans won’t necessarily benefit.
This week’s trip to Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the U.A.E. is as much a personal business trip for Trump and his family businesses as a diplomatic trip.
Eric Trump, who officially runs the family business, has just announced plans for a Trump-branded hotel and tower in Dubai, part of the U.A.E.
The Trump family’s developments in the Middle East depend on a Saudi-based real estate company with close ties to the Saudi government. Saudi Arabia has a long list of pressing matters before the United States, including requests to buy F-35 fighter jets and gain access to nuclear power technology.
Trump’s family crypto firm, World Liberty Financial, announced that its so-called “stablecoin” — with Trump’s likeness all over it — will be used by the U.A.E. to make a $2 billion business deal with Binance, the largest crypto exchange in the world. The deal will generate hundreds of millions of dollars more for the Trump family.
I had assumed that Trump’s undoing would be his unquenchable thirst for power. It may yet be, but I’m beginning to think his insatiable greed will do him in. America’s Grifter-in-Chief knows no bounds.
In the last week, Trump has gone wild on the global economy, saying tariffs are the key to American prosperity.
As a result, global stock and bond markets tanked.
Today — telling reporters that “you have to be flexible” and conceding that “over the last few days it looked pretty glum” — Trump paused his tariffs for most countries for the next 90 days, backing down on his policy that had sent markets into a tailspin and threatened to upend global trade.
The reversal prompted the S&P 500 stock index to climb over 7 percent in just minutes.
Traders with inside information about what Trump was about to do — some of them, presumably, Trump family members and cronies — just made a fortune.
It looks like chaos but Trump’s chaos always creates winners and losers, and Trump makes sure he’s on the winning side.
The mayhem that Trump’s cuts in the federal workforce is creating have nothing to do with efficiency or with reducing the federal budget deficit.
Trump and Musk just gutted the IRS at the height of tax season by firing thousands of employees – and is planning to downsize the agency even more.
Recent estimates show that the richest 1 percent of Americans already underpay their taxes by as much as $205 billion each year. And for each $1 the IRS invests in auditing the tax returns of the richest 1 percent, it collects $13 in additional tax revenue.
So the tax revenue our government loses every year is way higher than the amount of taxpayer dollars DOGE claims to have “saved” by cancelling contracts and grants for vital government programs – of which only a small portion can actually be verified.
The truth is: Gutting the IRS has everything to do with making it easier for billionaires like Elon and Trump to evade taxes.
It all feels like chaos until you look more closely
Trump’s unpredictability also makes him seem particularly powerful and dangerous.
In 1517, Niccolò Machiavelli argued that sometimes it is “a very wise thing to simulate madness.” Wise, that is, for the manipulative ruler. Trump is simulating madness, but it’s all about increasing his wealth and power.
An increasing number of so-called “leaders” – in the private, public and non-profit sectors, and around the world – are telling their boards, overseers, trustees or legislatures: “We have to give Trump whatever he wants and even try to anticipate his wants, because who knows how he’ll react if we don’t?”
My strong recommendation to anyone in a position of leadership here or abroad: Do not give in to Trump’s feigned madness. Do not surrender. Do not capitulate. Join forces and fight back.
Comments Off on ‘Full-blown meltdown’: President doesn’t care about criticism as ‘Trump continues to Trump’
Story by Ailia Zehra • 17h • 2 min read
President Donald Trump’s recent actions including his tariff policy and his defiance of courts over the deportations being carried out by his administration have raised concerns, but the president has been doubling down on most of his controversial positions.
In an article for the Washington Post published Friday, columnist Dana Milbank noted Trump is least concerned with the blowback.
“And Trump continues to Trump. Twice in the last week, he has posted a photo from the Oval Office of himself holding an image purporting to show the knuckles of deportee Abrego García, with a message saying ‘He’s got MS-13 tattooed onto his knuckles,’ Milbank said.
“But the ‘MS-13’ characters are obviously photoshopped, as clumsily done as Trump’s one-time manipulation of a government weather map with a Sharpie,” he added.
“’The president deserves better than the current mishegoss at the Pentagon,’ John Ullyot, who just quit as a top aide to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, wrote in a takedown of his former boss in Politico this week. Ullyot, who had been the department’s chief spokesman, described ‘a month of total chaos at the Pentagon,’ a ‘near collapse inside the Pentagon’s top ranks’ and a ‘full-blown meltdown at the Pentagon,’ and he alleged that ‘the Pentagon focus is no longer on warfighting, but on endless drama.’
The author noted that “in the celebrated case of Kilmar Abrego García, deported from Maryland to El Salvador in violation of a court order, the Trump administration blamed ‘an administrative error’ and ‘an oversight’ for the original deportation. Now, the administration is trying to justify Abrego García’s deportation retroactively with a statement from a disgraced police officer who claims the Maryland resident was an ‘active member’ of the MS-13 gang in Upstate New York — where he has never lived.
Comments Off on The Truth Curdles Like Milk In His Mouth
Over the past 8 years we have been subject to lies, ravings and ill-conceived ideas of DJT. His much-touted business acumen has been proven to be fallacious and a fantasy. The millions who believed his stewardship of the United States would be better than his predecessors because he is a businessman. Let’s look at what we know and many of his supporters failed to acknowledge or understand:
DJT:
Bankrupted 3 casinos for sure
Dodged paying construction crews who worked on his properties, While Trump has used little of his own money but used the bankruptcy laws as a hedge:
Trump said in August 2015:
“I have used the laws of this country just like the greatest people that you read about every day in business have used the laws of this country, the chapter laws, to do a great job for my company, my employees, myself and my family.”
The above statement is more of a boastful statement rather than a explanation of circumstances. This is what has fueled his Presidency and his mistakes in the office. He has bullied and lied his way in life until he has reached the highest office. This pretty much the way another demagogue in the 1930’s, the pattern is the same and running true to form aka “divide and conquer”. We the people have allowed and promoted his actions thereby condoning his methods to our own detriment. Impeaching him at this time will bring more problems since this time his VP and the House speaker are weak people who shout and talk a lot but have no ability to govern. We must look at what he did before and what he is doing now then decide what to do during next election cycle where we can dilute the power of current political groups. This is not a Democrat or Republican issue, it is a people issue and trusting or not trusting office holders and aspirants to office. Please remember public opinion, TV personalities are not definitive reasons to vote for anyone. Just one last point:
This is a quote from: Austan Goolsbee President of Chicago Federal Bank, He made this statement in reply to use of Tariffs: Using tariffs to fix the economy is like using explosives to clear the kitchen sink!
Michael1942's Blog 
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