That hideous “portrait” is available online for $35.00. Seriously:
That comes from this article in Rolling Stone about the extent to which the administration and the GOP in general is devoted to extolling Dear Leader.
Trump’s gaudy sensibilities have seemingly been indulged without limit. The Oval Office has been gilded to the hilt, with much of the molding painted gold and an assortment of gold statuettes occupying the bulk of the once-venerated room’s ledge and table space. The president bragged about his “24-karat gold” office during a meeting in May with Canada’s new prime minister, Mark Carney. (The Oval Office statuette of Trump raising his fist after the assassination attempt, however, is bronze.) A different White House official favorably compares the new decor and faux glitz to that of Iraq’s late genocidal dictator Saddam Hussein, whom Trump has praised for his prolific ability to slaughter “terrorists.”
The White House is merely a physical realm, though. The ability to deify Trump as the god-king of the United States is unlimited on the internet, and the administration’s social media has been rife with AI-generated images depicting Trump as everything from the new pope to a muscle-bound, light-saber-wielding figure posing in front of bald eagles and American flags. It’s supposedly being done in the name of trolling, a word the White House has used to describe the administration entertaining the idea that Trump could stay in office beyond 2028. Trump has seemed serious about the notion, claiming he’s “not joking” about it before noting that there are some “loopholes” that could allow him to serve beyond a second term.
[…]
The GOP has introduced a bill to make Trump’s birthday a holiday.
Last year, Republicans introduced a very real resolution to rename the Washington area’s Dulles airport after Trump, and another to rename America’s coastal waters after the president, with Rep. Greg Steube (R-Fla.) citing how Trump “took several commendable actions for our oceans.” Shortly after Trump took office this year, Republicans tried to formally censure a bishop at the Washington National Cathedral whom Trump attacked after she delivered a sermon asking him to have mercy on the less fortunate. They’ve also introduced bills to rename D.C.’s Metrorail the “Trump Train,” to amend the Constitution so he can run for a third term, to put his face on the $100 bill, and if that wasn’t enough, to put his face on a newly created $250 bill.
“The most valuable bill for the most valuable president!” said Rep. Joe Wilson (R-S.C.).
Trump wants to see his face on something much larger than a piece of currency, though. He talks to this day about how much he deserves to see himself on Mount Rushmore. Yes, Republicans have introduced a bill to make it happen.
That’s just for starters. There’ are the worshipful cabinet meetings, the Qatari plane,the military parade on his birthday. He wants a statue of himself put up in the Kennedy Center because there’s already a bust of JFK. The list goes on.
This is not the way we have traditionally looked at the presidency which was not supposed to be treated like a imperial position. When I think of how appalled the public was at the excesses of Nixon and Reagan in this regard, I just have to laugh. The taste level alone is incomparable. The White House is now a cheap version of the Trump Taj Majal.
We’ll see. But Trump is telling everyone who’ll listen that he isn’t interested.
Fox is reporting that Bret Baier just spoke with Trump and Trump said he is not interested in speaking with Elon Musk. Trump also said: Elon Musk has totally lost it pic.twitter.com/xLpIXNAD8v
In a phone conversation this morning, @realDonaldTrump told me @elonmusk is “the man who has lost his mind.” Trump did not, however, seem angry or even concerned about the feud. As for reports that there is going to be a Trump/Musk call scheduled for today, Trump told me he is…
I just got off the phone with President Trump. He told me he's "not even thinking about Elon. He's got a problem. The poor guy’s got a problem." pic.twitter.com/zNQvtqDX5H
In a phone conversation, Pres. Trump told me he is moving forward with his presidency today and "totally" focused on policy matters, not Musk. Shrugged off feud, brought up the economy, which he cast in positive light.
"That's all I focus on," Trump said of his presidency. "I…
"The scientific research base of the United States of America *is* the research university. We made that decision 80 years ago. We don't have a Plan B." — Condoleezza Rice
It seems like only a couple of days ago that I was writing about President Trump and his former BFF Elon Musk’s apparently falling out. Actually it was a couple of days ago but even as I was pretty sure that the famous bromance was on the rocks, due to all the vicious, anonymous back-stabbing by administration figures, I had no idea it was going to blow up as spectacularly as it did on Thursday.
I won’t go into the details because I’m sure you’ve heard all about it. The upshot is that Musk was obviously upset by Trump’s unwillingness to do everything he wanted which convinced Trump to finally listen to the people around him and ease him out. Unfortunately for Trump, Musk didn’t want to go quietly and he worked himself up into a frenzy about the “One Big Beautiful Bill” undoing his measly work at DOGE and began a crusade on X to kill it. It wound up with a torrent of whining by Trump at a White House event with the German Chancellor with Musk tweeting furiously in response. It continued throughout the day until Trump finally threatened to cancel Musk’s government contracts Musk threatened to leave the astronauts stranded on the Space station and then blew up the MAGA universe by saying that Trump won’t release the Epstein files because he’s in them.
I have no idea if they will patch things up but Donald Trump lives for revenge and if I were Elon Musk, I’d watch my back in any case. But setting aside the soap opera aspects of the break up, the catalyst for the cat fight was the budget bill that’s currently sitting in the Senate and Musk isn’t the only one who’s got a very big problem with it. In fact, virtually nobody likes it but they were forced into doing something they know is a loser because Trump insisted that they put the whole kitchen sink into one bill instead of passing a popular immigration and defense bill early and then spending the rest of the year negotiating what was always going to be a heavy lift to pass their precious massive tax cuts and slash popular programs.
Musk’s involvement in all this may seem odd but he demonstrated his willingness to jump into the fray back in December when, you’ll recall he managed to kill a delicately negotiated bipartisan continuing resolution demanding that the government shut down until Donald Trump was inaugurated. Trump had signed off on the bill ( Speaker Mike Johnson would never have dared agree without his blessing) and was out of loop when Musk fired his first salvos on X, but quickly jumped in behind him, pretending it was his idea.
This was Musk’s first foray into real political leadership and he won. He saw the power of his Twitter feed and the clout he could muster to influence the deficit hawks with whom he shares a deep commitment to razing the federal government (except the parts from which he benefits, of course.) They got an agreement to keep the government open for a couple of months but it had required Johnson to make a side agreement that would couple a future $1.5 trillion increase in the nation’s borrowing authority with a $2.5 trillion cut in net mandatory spending. The stage was set for this monstrosity that Trump fatuously insisted be officially named the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act.”
Johnson also promised to get a bill passed by Memorial Day and he managed to do it by having the committees hastily put together a sloppy wish list in the middle of the night and getting it to the floor before anyone could see what was in it. With Donald Trump leaning heavily on anyone who looked wobbly, the Republicans passed the bill with just two House members voting against it and two more just voting present. One suspects that more than a few of those who took that vote, particularly in the frontline purple districts, did so holding their breath in hopes that the Senate would water down some of the worst aspects.
It hit the Senate with a thud. The deficit hawks are apoplectic at the cost of the bill which every non-partisan analyst, including their own Congressional Budget Office, estimates will add $2.4 trillion to the deficit while the “populist” Republicans, such as they are, are nervous about the 16 million people losing their health insurance. In fact, they’re all so discombobulated by this thing that some of them are making monumental political gaffes trying to deal with it. A case in point is Iowa Senator Joni Ernst with her notoriously clumsy “we’re all going to die” comment and even worse follow up.
Even some of the staunch Trump allies in the House are expressing regret at having voted for it.
Full transparency, I did not know about this section on pages 278-279 of the OBBB that strips states of the right to make laws or regulate AI for 10 years.
I am adamantly OPPOSED to this and it is a violation of state rights and I would have voted NO if I had known this was in… pic.twitter.com/bip3hztSGq
— Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene🇺🇸 (@RepMTG) June 3, 2025
Apparently, the Republicans have convinced themselves that if they can just appease the hard core budget cutters, they can snow the American people about these massive cuts by lying to their faces and saying that no one will be affected.
On Thursday, NBC reported that they are now talking about cutting Medicare and saying that Trump has signed on:
Senate Republicans said that they discussed the issue during a closed-door meeting and that it also came up with Trump when Republicans on the Senate Finance Committee met with him Wednesday.
“What the president made clear is [he] does not want to see any cuts to beneficiaries. But to go after, he repeated over again — the waste, fraud and abuse, the waste, fraud and abuse,” Sen. Steve Daines, R-Mont., said.
Keep in mind they are calling the cuts to Medicaid cutting “waste, fraud and abuse” as well, but it’s going to result in tens of millions of people losing their health care. Now they’re going to try that dirty trick on Medicare recipients, while refusing to even consider not slashing taxes on billionaires like Elon Musk.
Republicans are known to favor the rich and everyone knows they are champing at the bit to cut the safety net programs. It seems Trump’s found a way to abandon his pledge not to do that by realizing that his docile GOP potted plants will eagerly back his lie that they aren’t doing it when they obviously are.
But Social Security and Medicare are different. They are not called the third rail for nothing. Missouri Senator Josh Hawley isn’t right about much but he’s right about this:
“In 2004 President Bush got re-elected and promptly tried to privatize Social Security, and Republicans didn’t win the popular vote for 20 years,” Hawley said. “So if you don’t ever want to win an election again, just go fiddle around with people’s Medicare that they’ve worked hard for, paid into.”
All for the love of billionaire tax cuts. If they do this they are going to wish Musk had succeeded in killing the bill.
Consider that installing Vance is part of “the Silicon Valley model” [timestamp 9:45] that broligarchs like Peter Thiel and Curtis Yarvin want to see. And you don’t.
All this time, we dirty hippies wondered when Real Americans™, so ab-so-friggin-lutely convinced of the superiority of their God-bless-America common sense, would eventually come to theirs.
I feel like a kid in the back seat. Are we there yet?
BREAKING: I don’t care what political side you’re on. Donald Trump is officially off the rails, threatening Elon Musk.
We are ruled by toddlers. One, we didn’t elect. The other we never should have. Oh, and Nazi-wannabes like Stephen Miller and Christian theocrats like Russ Vought.
I wrote the following over two years ago. It was among many pieces that I wrote, read and watched during the presidential campaign. It was out there for all to see. I grant you that I didn’t see Musk coming or the fact that he would do so much during the first few months. But it was there. I knew it and so did you.
Picture if you will, it’s January 21, 2025 and Donald Trump has just been inaugurated for his second term after the Biden interregnum. Yes, it would be a horrific time, not unlike those first horrible weeks in 2017 when over half the country struggled to grasp how it was possible that an ignorant, bombastic, game show host had eked out a win through an electoral college fluke. But those feelings of despair are where the similarities will end. The next Trump administration will be ready to hit the ground running with their leader’s Retribution Agenda and it won’t be because Trump is any more effective at presidential leadership. It will be because right-wing institutions will have spent their four years in the wilderness preparing for their chance to enact a radical overhaul of the federal government unlike anything we’ve ever seen in this country.
Even some members of the GOP establishment are getting nervous:
Former Defense Sec. Robert Gates tells @margbrennan he's "concerned" that former Pres. Trump is the current front-runner for the 2024 GOP nomination because he's been "very clear that he wants to dramatically change, if not dismantle, some major institutions" in U.S. government. pic.twitter.com/uBUlpHcGPE
There was always talk of this among the original Trumpers, even though the president himself didn’t have a clue what they were talking about. Recall former adviser Steve Bannon bellowing about the “deconstruction of the administrative state” and former Attorney General Bill Barr’s assertions of unchecked executive power for example. As it happened, Trump was so far in over his head and ran such a chaotic, scandal-filled administration that they were unable to institute many systematic changes to test their theories but they came away with the knowledge that given another chance with a corrupt demagogue they could make changes to the system that could help them stay in power indefinitely.
Republicans have come to believe that the entire federal government is filled with woke liberals.
There has been a cascade of stories discussing the poor roll out of Trump’s campaign and how he’s still stuck in the repetitive groove of his grievances over the 2016 campaign and his loss in 2020. His appearance on CNN’s generous kick-off campaign rally for him a couple of weeks ago reinforced that idea, as he repeated all his punch lines and the audience cheered and clapped ecstatically. It certainly left the impression that if Trump were to win the election next year we would be in for a repeat of his first term: turmoil, scandal and ineptitude in which the most terrifying consequence is that a crisis hits or someone makes a catastrophic error. Last time, you’ll recall, we got hit with the first deadly global pandemic in a hundred years and Trump publicly told America to take unproven snake oil cures and instructed scientists to look into having people ingest disinfectants since they kill the virus on surfaces.
It was a disaster.
Many people died and many more families were decimated but I fear that too many Americans may think that a rerun of the The Trump Show won’t be a catastrophe since most of us survived his tenure. But it won’t be a rerun. Since the day Trump left the White House for his exile at Mar-a-Lago, well-funded right-wing organizations have been planning the return to power with a fully developed agenda and plan to enact it. All they have to do is put the Sharpie in Trump’s hand to sign what they put in front of him after which he can run out to the cameras and whine and complain about whomever is his target that day as his minions turn the executive branch into a full functioning partisan operation.
Last summer, Axios’ Jonathan Swan wrote a long report on what they’ve been planning:
The impact could go well beyond typical conservative targets such as the Environmental Protection Agency and the Internal Revenue Service. Trump allies are working on plans that would potentially strip layers at the Justice Department — including the FBI, and reaching into national security, intelligence, the State Department and the Pentagon, sources close to the former president say…The heart of the plan is derived from an executive order known as “Schedule F,” developed and refined in secret over most of the second half of Trump’s term and launched 13 days before the 2020 election.
Schedule F is an executive order which would reassign potentially tens of thousands of federal employees they determine to have policy influence so they would lose their civil service protections. Republicans have come to believe that the entire federal government is filled with woke liberals intent on depriving them of their natural right to rule without restraint.
The plan is being produced by a number of Republican groups and coordinated by some names with which you are no doubt familiar, like former Justice Department (DOJ) lawyer Jeffrey Clark, former Devin Nunes and Pentagon staffer Kash Patel, and former White House Chief of Staff Mark Meadows all of whom are caught up in Trump’s legal messes as well. They plan to salt every department with GOP toadies from the military to the DOJ to the Department of Education to the Centers for Disease Control and the National Institutes of Health. And conservative organizations like the Heritage Foundation are drawing up lists of candidates. (That same right-wing institution similarly staffed the provisional government in Iraq with young neocons to disastrous results.)
The beauty of this plan is that it doesn’t actually matter if Trump wins again. They can use it just as easily for another Republican. But it would be especially well-suited for Trump’s principal rival Florida Governor Ron DeSantis. Time Magazine’s Molly Ball reported on DeSantis’ desire to use every bit of executive power to achieve his goals:
“One of my first orders of business after getting elected was to have my transition team amass an exhaustive list of all the constitutional, statutory, and customary powers of the governor,” he writes in The Courage to Be Free. “I wanted to be sure that I was using every lever available to advance our priorities.” Aides from the time have corroborated this account, describing a thick binder of information that DeSantis proceeded to devour.
There’s no need to reiterate all the ways in which he uses every lever and coerces the legislature to enact the most extreme agenda of any state in America and now promises to take it national. Should he win he will run with the Schedule F plan and probably come up with a few of his own. This is what defines him as a political leader.
In fact, from the sound of all the Republicans on the trail extolling the alleged “bombshell” that’s actually a dud of the Durham Report as if it’s some huge indictment of the “deep state” that has to be completely dismantled, it’s obvious that this is going to be a Republican Party project, not a Trump project at all. They are all organizing themselves around blatant lies about elections, democracy, law and justice, health, foreign policy and national security and their partisan institutions are plotting to use those lies to remake the federal government.
It’s an ambitious plan but with the courts on their side and a congressional majority, it’s eminently doable. It’s imperative that the American people do not let them attain power again as long as this is their agenda or there may be no going back.
When Thomas Fugate graduated from college last year with a degree in politics, he celebrated in a social media post about the exciting opportunities that lay beyond campus life in Texas. “Onward and upward!” he wrote, with an emoji of a rocket shooting into space.
His career blastoff came quickly. A year after graduation, the 22-year-old with no apparent national security expertise is now a Department of Homeland Security official overseeing the government’s main hub for terrorism prevention, including an $18 million grant program intended to help communities combat violent extremism.
The White House appointed Fugate, a former Trump campaign worker who interned at the hard-right Heritage Foundation, to a Homeland Security role that was expanded to include the Center for Prevention Programs and Partnerships. Known as CP3, the office has led nationwide efforts to prevent hate-fueled attacks, school shootings and other forms of targeted violence.
Fugate’s appointment is the latest shock for an office that has been decimated since President Donald Trump returned to the White House and began remaking national security to give it a laser focus on immigration.
News of the appointment has trickled out in recent weeks, raising alarm among counterterrorism researchers and nonprofit groups funded by CP3. Several said they turned to LinkedIn for intel on Fugate — an unknown in their field — and were stunned to see a photo of “a college kid” with a flag pin on his lapel posing with a sharply arched eyebrow. No threat prevention experience is listed in his employment history.
I read the Big Balls has been hired as a permanent government employee? Soon the entire federal bureaucracy will be led by little tech boys. I’m sure it will be a huge improvement.
The whole thing is worth watching if you have time (and can stand the sound of his voice that long.) He said he is “very disappointed in Elon.” Sad.
Some highlights below. This break-up isn’t pretty:
“I would have won Pennsylvania regardless of Elon…I’m very disappointed with Elon.
He knew this bill better than anyone and he only developed a problem when he found out I would cut the EV mandate…
When he left he said the most beautiful things about me, he hasn’t said anything bad yet but I’m sure that will be next…
I’ve helped Elon a lot…
Elon worked hard at DOGE and I think he misses the place…
I think he got out there and he’s no longer in this beautiful Oval Office…it’s not just Elon, I think when some people leave they miss it so badly they develop a type of TDS…some embrace it and some become hostile.”
False, this bill was never shown to me even once and was passed in the dead of night so fast that almost no one in Congress could even read it! https://t.co/V4ztekqd4g
When a reporter asked Elon about his black eye in the Oval last week, Trump said he hadn't noticed it. Now he's claiming to have even offered him concealer. Not an important detail, obviously, but the way in which the American President so casually & endlessly lies obviously is. https://t.co/BGmTMxsLoo
I can't stress enough how wrong and disingenuous the most recent wave of COVID revisionism is. The *only period* when Democratic counties had higher death rates was April-May 2020. From June 2020 onwards, Republican laxity and denialism were the most powerful force driving deaths.
They sacrificed themselves for QAnon and Donald Trump. And it’s their right to do it if they choose. Unfortunately, when it comes to deadly contagious diseases they inevitably end up taking down many people who didn’t choose it with them.
Of course, we’ve seen this with their gun fetish for years. It’s not new. America is a dangerous place to live — and it’s not because of immigrants or Big Government.
