Apparently, he’d tell suffering people in the middle of a horrific disaster to do what an imbecilic cretin tells them to do or go fuck themselves.
BREAKING: In a stunning moment, Mike Johnson refuses to rule out conditioning aid to California. Johnson continues to prioritize his politics over people’s lives. pic.twitter.com/EDHnaFDqUP
Now it’s back. In both instances its owners seized the opportunity to praise Dear Leader. Smart move. He loves to have his boots licked more than anything. They can totally manipulate him with flattery.
Trump has his own reasons for all this:
2021: Trump demonized tiktok because it was useful for Chinese xenophobia and he thought he could force them to sell it to his friends at Walmart and Oracle
2023:
2024: Trump wants to “save” Tiktok to help billionaire Trump donor and Tiktok investor Jeffrey Yass and force a sale to somebody like Musk
Now he’s indicating that he might nationalize it but I feel very confident he won’t do that. He’ll make sure one of his billionaire buds is in charge.
Trump’s shitcoin scam has now reached almost $60 Billion in 48 hours. No doubt he and his family are very excited. Some of his followers who understand what he’s doing are a little squeamish, however:
Yeah, “reputation” is no longer operative in GOP politics.
The $TRUMP memecoin — a financial asset that didn’t exist on Friday afternoon — now accounts for about 89% of Donald Trump’s net worth.
The coin (technically a token that’s issued on the Solana blockchain) has massively enriched Trump personally, enabled a mechanism for the crypto industry to funnel cash to him, and created a volatile financial asset that allows anyone in the world to financially speculate on Trump’s political fortunes.
After another massive overnight rally, as of Sunday morning Trump’s crypto holdings were worth as much as $58 billion on paper, enough — with his other assets — to make him one of the world’s 25 richest people.
While the Biden administration broadly took the view that memecoins like $TRUMP are securities subject to SEC regulation, the incoming Trump administration has pledged to be much more crypto-friendly and to regulate such coins with a light or nonexistent touch.
The coin’s official website, GetTrumpMemes.com, urges visitors to buy coins with either dollars or crypto in order to “Celebrate Our Win & Have Fun!”
The coin is “not intended to be… an investment opportunity,” per the site, which says that it “has nothing to do with any political campaign or any political office.”
That hasn’t stopped investors from making millions by speculating on the price of the coin, which was launched while Trump was reportedly hosting a “Crypto Ball” in Washington.
Some 200 million of the 1 billion total coins have already been released and are being actively traded. The rest, which are owned by Trump-controlled entities, will be able to be sold at various points over the next three years, starting in April.
On average, Trump’s companies will be able to sell some 24 million coins per month into the market, which at current prices (which keep moving), would amount to an income of $1.73 billion per month, or $20.7 billion per year. (Although no one has a clue what the value of the coin will even be this afternoon, let alone three years from now.)
[…]
Since then, Trump has listed a meme stock where he controls more than 50% of the shares — and, now, has a meme coin that’s even less tethered to reality.
Both of them represent a much more direct way of funneling money to Trump than staying at his hotel did.
The emoluments clause of the Constitution, written in 1787, hardly envisaged a world where a president could conjure billions of dollars of wealth out of nowhere just by endorsing a meme.
In the present day, it’s impossible to track who’s going to be buying this coin over the next three years and thereby directing their money directly at Trump.
Given the Supreme Court’s expansive view of presidential immunity, there’s a good chance that any such action will be deemed lawful.
They conclude: “The bottom line: Trump has just delivered a masterclass in the ability of a president to turn power into wealth.”
Nothing to see here folks.
Trump will be overseeing this arcane, new market that very few average people understand much less participate in. He is making himself into one of the richest men in the world right before our eyes.
This must be that populism everyone’s talking about.
In a Seinfeld episode entitled “The Opposite” from 1994 (before my Gen Z friends were born, sorry), Jerry convinces George Costanza, perennial sad sack, that “if every instinct you have is wrong, then the opposite would have to be right.” George tries doing the opposite of what his instincts tell him and his fortunes rapidly turn around.
The United States after instituting The New Deal built the greatest middle class the world has ever seen. Then after social and political reforms of the 1960s opened more opportunity to Americans still lagging behind, business interests organized a quiet counterrevolution to do the opposite.
The rich got their taxes cut under Ronald Reagan and fat cats got even fatter. Upward mobility stopped. Wages stagnated. President Bill Clinton loosened banking regulations opening the door for mortgage-backed securities and the subprime mortgage crisis. President George W. Bush, the supposed apotheosis of the grandees’ grand designs, cut their taxes even more and the economy crashed, impoverishing average Americans even more. The Obama administration let the fattest-cats-yet get away with their gains, and — voilà — Donald Trump, himself a privileged fat-cat-celebrity, promised the suckers he’d turn things around. He’d make America “great again,” invoking the historical period and economy his rich buddies had worked decades to unmake.
Trump’s opposite turns out to be more of the same, Eugene Robinson explains:
Trump connected with many voters who feel their current trajectory is downward, who no longer have the confidence that their children’s lives will be more affluent than their own. These voters put their faith in Trump to put them and their communities once again on a rising path.
But Trump promises to do the opposite: to double down on policies that have made the rich richer and the poor poorer.
This is already a second Gilded Age. Trump imagines adding even more gaudy gold leaf to it. He wants to return to the days of Wlliam McKinley: high tariffs, monopolies, and American expansionism. Good times for fat cats. Lean times for everyone else. After McKinley, Theodore Roosevelt came along and did the opposite.
Roosevelt promised a “square deal” for everyday Americans. Trump portrays himself as a champion of the working class, but his policies and practices say otherwise. I’ll believe him when he stops trying to fleece his supporters by selling them $40 American flag flip-flops, $55 MAGA hats and ugly red $200 sneakers.
He’s back for what will be four long years. If you love everything about him, enjoy the ride. If you don’t, spend this time planning and working to bring the Second Gilded Age to its end.
“Look at the size of this. It’s massive,” said Trump.
How the hell did we survive four years of this deeply insecure man-child once? How did Americans get crazy enough to give this unstable knot of personality defects four more years in the White House instead of in jail?
Anne Applebaum’s account of her visit to Denmark has me waggling my head like a Lonney Tunes character. She writes that “a Danish prime minister cannot sell Greenland any more than an American president can sell Florida.” And yet Donald Trump apparently called Copenhagen on Wednesday and demanded Mette Frederiksen do a real estate deal with him. It’s Kafkaesque.
Trump the Transactional seems to have generated a political crisis in Scandinavia even before his inauguration.
“In private discussions, the adjective that was most frequently used to describe the Trump phone call was rough. The verb most frequently used was threaten. The reaction most frequently expressed was confusion,” Applebaum writes. It’s not as if anything Trump might want the U.S. to do in Greenland is not already doable.
A former Danish diplomat related a story from 1957. The American ambassador sent the Danish prime minister a note that the U.S. was considering storing nukes at their Greenland base. Would the Danes like to be notified? Since it was not a specific ask, H.C. Hansen’s reply was:
“I do not think your remarks give rise to any comment from my side.” In other words, If you don’t tell us that you are keeping nuclear weapons in Greenland, then we won’t have to object.
The Danes are faithful trade partners and allies who lost a larger proportion of their population fighting alongside the U.S. in Afghanistan than we did. One diplomat asked Applebaum what the Danes did wrong:
Obviously, they did nothing wrong—but that’s part of the crisis too. Trump himself cannot articulate, either at press conferences or, apparently, over the telephone, why exactly he needs to own Greenland, or how Denmark can give American companies and soldiers more access to Greenland than they already have. Plenty of others will try to rationalize his statements anyway. The Economist has declared the existence of a “Trump doctrine,” and a million articles have solemnly debated Greenland’s strategic importance. But in Copenhagen (and not only in Copenhagen) people suspect a far more irrational explanation: Trump just wants the U.S. to look larger on a map.
Windmills, sharks, Hannibal Lecter, and now Greenland, Applebaum laments. The Russians are crowing over the similarity between Trump’s territorial ambitions in Greenland and Vladimir Putin’s imperial designs on Eastern Europe. Republicans on Capitol Hill and elsewhere just smile, nod, and say, “Yes, sir. How high?”
One year shy of 250 years old, the United States is the world’s most enduring democracy, yet still in its adolescence. Many of the world’s greatest creatives do their best work as adolescents, or as recent ones. The Beatles began in their teens. Steve Jobs launched Apple at 21. The U.S. has led the world in technological advancement and politically for a century. But plenty of adolescents never survive their teens.
In honor of Martin Luther King Day, I’ve combed my review archives and curated 10 films that reflect on race relations in America; some that look back at where we’ve been, some that give us a reality check on where we’re at now and maybe even one or two that offer hope for the future. We still may not have quite reached that “promised land” of colorblind equality, but each of us doing whatever we can in our own small way to help keep Dr. King’s legacy alive will surely help light the way-especially in these dark times.
BlackKkKlansman (2018)– So what do you get if you cross Cyrano de Bergerac with Blazing Saddles? You might get Spike Lee’s BlackKkKlansman. That is not to say that Lee’s film is a knee-slapping comedy; far from it. Lee takes the true story of Ron Stallworth (John David Washington), an African-American undercover cop who managed to infiltrate the KKK in Colorado in the early 70s and runs with it, in his inimitable fashion.
I think this is Lee’s most affecting and hard-hitting film since Do the Right Thing (1989). The screenplay (adapted by Charlie Wachtel, David Rabinowitz, Kevin Willmott and Lee from Stallworth’s eponymous memoir) is equal parts biopic, docudrama, police procedural and social commentary, finding a nice balance of drama, humor and suspense. (Full review)
The Black Power Mixtape (2011)–Historically, the Black Power movement of the mid-60s to mid-70s has been somewhat misrepresented, with a tendency to spotlight its more sensationalist elements. The time is ripe to re-examine the movement, which despite its flaws, represents one of the last truly progressive grass roots political awakenings we’ve had in this country (if you’re expecting bandolier-wearing, pistol-waving interviewees spouting fiery Marxist-tinged rhetoric-dispense with that hoary stereotype now).
Director Goran Olsson was given access to a trove of vintage yet pristine 16mm footage that had been tucked away for years in the basement of Swedish Television; representing a decade of candid interviews with movement leaders, as well as meticulous documentation of Black Panther Party activities. Olsson presents the clips in a historically chronological timeline, with minimal commentary. While not perfect, it is an essential document, and one of the more eye-opening films I have seen on this subject. (Full review)
The Boys of Baraka (2005) – Co-directors Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady deliver a fresh take on a well-worn cause celebre: the sad, shameful state of America’s inner-city school system. Eschewing the usual hand-wringing about the underfunded, over-crowded, glorified daycare centers that many of these institutions have become for poor, disenfranchised urban youth, the filmmakers chose to showcase one program that strove to make a real difference.
The story follows a group of 12-year-old boys from Baltimore who attended a boarding school in Kenya, staffed by American teachers and social workers. In addition to more personalized tutoring, there was emphasis on conflict resolution through communication, tempered by a “tough love” approach. The events that unfold from this bold social experiment (filmed over a three year period) are alternately inspiring and heartbreaking. (Full review)
The Force (2017) – Peter Nicks’ documentary examines the rocky relationship between Oakland’s police department and its communities of color. The force has been under federal oversight since 2002, due to myriad misconduct cases. Nicks utilizes the same cinema verite techniques that made his film The Waiting Room so compelling. It’s like a real-life Joseph Wambaugh novel (The Choirboys comes to mind). The film offers no easy answers-but delivers an intimate, insightful glimpse at both sides. (Full review)
The Girls in the Band (2011)– Contextual to a curiously overlooked component within the annals of American jazz music, it’s tempting to extrapolate on Dr. King’s dream. Wouldn’t it be great to live in a nation where one is not only primarily judged by content of character, but can also be judged on the merits of creativity, or the pure aesthetics of artistic expression, as opposed to being judged solely by the color of one’s skin…or perhaps gender? At the end of the day, what is a “black”, or a “female” jazz musician? Why is it that a Dave Brubeck is never referred to as a “white” or “male” jazz musician?
In her film, director Judy Chaikin chronicles the largely unsung contributions that female jazz musicians (a large portion of them African-American) have made (and continue to make) to this highly influential American art form. Utilizing rare archival footage and interviews with veteran and contemporary players, Chaikin has assembled an absorbing, poignant, and celebratory piece. (Full review)
I Am Not Your Negro (2016)– The late writer and social observer James Baldwin once said that “Whatever white people do not know about Negroes reveals, precisely and inexorably, what they do not know about themselves.” Sadly, thanks to the emboldening of certain elements within American society that have been drawn from the shadows by the openly racist rhetoric that spouted from the Former Occupant of the White House, truer words have never been spoken.
Indeed, anyone who watches Raoul Peck’s documentary will recognize not only the beauty of Baldwin’s prose, but the prescience of such observations. Both are on display in Peck’s timely treatise on race relations in America, in which he mixes archival news footage, movie clips, and excerpts from Baldwin’s TV appearances with narration by an uncharacteristically subdued Samuel L. Jackson, reading excerpts from Baldwin’s unfinished book, Remember This House. An excellent and enlightening film. (Full review)
In the Heat of the Night(1967)– “They call me Mister Tibbs!” In this classic (which won 1967’s Best Picture Oscar) the late Sidney Poitier plays a cosmopolitan police detective from Philly who gets waylaid in a torpid Mississippi backwater, where he is reluctantly recruited into helping the bigoted sheriff (Rod Steiger) solve a local murder. Poitier nails his performance; you can feel Virgil Tibb’s pain as he tries to maintain his professional cool amidst a brace of surly rednecks, who throw up roadblocks at every turn.
While Steiger is outstanding as well, I find it ironic that he won “Best Actor in a leading role”, when Poitier was ostensibly the star of the film (it seems Hollywood didn’t get the film’s message). Sterling Silliphant’s brilliant screenplay (another Oscar) works as a crime thriller and a “fish out of water” story. Director Norman Jewison was nominated but didn’t score a win. Future director Hal Ashby won for Best Editing. Quincy Jones composed the soundtrack, and Ray Charles sings the sultry theme. (Full review)
The Landlord (1970)– Hal Ashby only directed a relative handful of films, but most, especially his 70’s output, were built to last (Harold and Maude, The Last Detail, Bound for Glory, Shampoo, Being There).
In The Landlord, Beau Bridges plays a trustafarian with “liberal views” that his conservative parents find troubling…especially after he buys a run-down inner-city tenement, with intentions to renovate. His subsequent involvement with the various black tenants is played sometimes for laughs, other times for intense drama, but always for real. The social satire and observations about race relations are dead-on, but never preachy or condescending.
Top-notch ensemble work, featuring a young Lou Gossett (with hair!) giving a memorable turn. The lovely Susan Anspach is hilarious as Bridge’s perpetually stoned and bemused sister. A scene featuring Pearl Bailey and Lee Grant getting drunk and bonding over a bottle of “sparkling” wine is a minor classic all on its own. Moses Gunn’s sharp screenplay was adapted from Kristin Hunter’s novel. They don’t make ‘em like this anymore-honest, bold, uncompromising, socially and politically meaningful, yet also entertaining. (Full review)
Let the Fire Burn(2013)– While obscured in public memory by the (relatively) more “recent” 1993 Branch Davidian siege in Waco, the eerily similar demise of the Philadelphia-based MOVE organization 8 years earlier was no less tragic on a human level, nor any less disconcerting in its ominous sociopolitical implications.
In this compelling documentary, director Jason Osder has parsed a trove of archival “live-at-the-scene” TV reports, deposition videos, law enforcement surveillance footage, and other sundry “found” footage (much of it previously unseen by the general public) and created a tight narrative that plays like an edge-of-your-seat political thriller.
Let the Fire Burn is not only an essential document of an American tragedy, but a cautionary tale and vital reminder of how far we have yet to go to completely purge the vestiges of institutional racism in this country. (Full review)
The Trials of Muhammad Ali (2013)– There have been a number of films documenting and dramatizing the extraordinary life of Muhammad Ali, but they all share a curious anomaly. Most have tended to gloss over Ali’s politically volatile “exile years” (1967-1970), during which the American sports icon was officially stripped of his heavyweight crown and essentially “banned” from professional boxing after his very public refusal to be inducted into the Army on the grounds of conscientious objection to the Vietnam War.
Director Bill Siegel (The Weather Underground) fills in those blanks in his documentary. As you watch the film, you begin to understand how Ali the sports icon transmogrified into an influential sociopolitical figure, even if he didn’t set out to become the latter. It was more an accident of history; Ali’s affiliation with the Nation of Islam and stance against the Vietnam War put him at the confluence of both the burgeoning Black Power and anti-war movements. How it all transpired makes an absorbing watch. (Full review)
I’m sure this is all Biden’s fault as everything bad will be for the next four years. Still, from what I’ve been told, the price of eggs is the most important issue faced by all mankind. Of course, now that Dear Leader has returned I’m sure most people will be happy to roll with the punches.
Marc Andreessen, the billionaire tech investor who co-founded Netscape, has recently been making the rounds on various podcasts to talk about how the Democrats were so very mean to him and forced him to become a supporter of Donald Trump. Andreessen’s obnoxious whining wouldn’t otherwise be notable, given how many guys in the tech industry have blamed backlash against “wokeness” on their support for the MAGA movement. But a new interview released by the New York Times on Friday is interesting, if only because the Times cleaned up its own transcript to make Andreessen sound like less of an idiot.
Andreessen said that Hillary Clinton was really running the government between 2017 and 2021. The Times claimed he misspoke but as you read further it’s clear that he’s talking about some conspiratorial deep state BS about which either the Times is unaware or they decided to ignore.
But even if Andreessen did misspeak he still sounds like a sophomoric fool, much like the rest of these tech bros who all seem to be in the grip of serious cases of arrested development.
Who knows that Showtime’s “Silicon Valley” was a documentary?
Klein: I think attention is now to politics what people think money is to politics. Certainly at the high levels.
There are places where money is very powerful, but it’s usually where people are not looking. Money is very powerful when there’s not much attention. But Donald Trump doesn’t control Republican primaries with money — he controls them with attention.
I keep having to write about Musk, and I keep saying he’s the richest man in the world. But it’s actually not what matters about him right now. It’s just how he managed to get the attention and become the character and the wielder of all this attention. And that’s a changeover I think Trumpist Republicans have made, and Democrats haven’t.
Democrats are still thinking about money as a fundamental substance of politics, and the Trump Republican Party thinks about attention as a fundamental substance of politics.
Hayes: I really like this theory. I think there are a few things: One, I think you’re totally right to identify that it’s sort of a sliding scale between the two. Which is to say: For politics that get the least attention, money matters the most.
So in a state representative race, money really matters — partly because no one is paying attention to who the state rep is. Local media has been gutted. Money can buy their attention. You could put out glossy mailers. There’s a lot you could do. The further up you go from that, to Senate to president, the more attention there is already, the less the money counts.
And you saw this with the Harris campaign. They raised a ton of money, and they spent it the way that most campaigns spend it, which is on trying to get people’s attention, whether that’s through advertising or door knocking — but largely attention and then persuasion: I’m running for president. Here’s what I want to do. Here’s why you should vote for me.
Now you can do that at billions of dollars’ worth of advertising, and everything is just like drops of rain in a river because there is so much competition for attention.
What Trump and Musk figured out is that what matters is the total attentional atmosphere. That in some ways, it’s kind of a sucker’s game to try to pop in and be like: I got an ad. Hey, hey, do you like tax cuts? What do you like?
All that is just going to whiz past people. The sort of attentional atmosphere — that’s where the fight is.
And that’s what Musk’s Twitter purchase ended up being — an enormous, almost Archimedean, lever on the electorate.
On Monday, the three wealthiest men in the world—Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Mark Zuckerberg—are scheduled to be at the Capitol as honored guests for Donald Trump’s presidential inauguration, seated where four years ago Christian nationalists, neo-Nazis, white supremacists, militia members, and other extremists, incited by his brazen lies about the 2020 election, violently attacked Congress to overturn American democracy and keep Trump in power. This transition—from brownshirts to billionaires—encapsulates what has gone wrong. It is a clear signal that the United States is broken.
With the news that Trump launched that new shitcoin and has made at least $25 billion overnight, I feel very hopeless today. This is what it’s come to.
