This isn’t “unacceptable.” This is unAmerican.
The Trump administration is an exercise in an addled, 78-year-old man-child flexing autocratic power and encouraging cruelty for cruelty’s sake. Trump the Insecure needs to satiate his bottomless appetite for revenge and to impress the world’s real autocrats who will never accept him into their club.
Others in Trump’s circle, like “Discount Goebbels” and Russ Vought, flex their autocratic impulses from behind the curtain as operators of Audio-Animatronic Trump. The Trump White House is cosplaying a dysfunctional reboot of “The West Wing” as a reality show with poseurs pretending to be leaders. Just not leaders of a democracy.
“We are getting close now,” warns author Seth Abramson. Close to?
And Trump himself? He’s in charge. He’s not in charge. He’s in charge. He’s….
Since President Donald Trump was sworn into office in January, he has sat for just 12 presentations from intelligence officials of the President’s Daily Brief.
That’s a significant drop compared with Trump’s first term in office, according to a POLITICO analysis of his public schedule.
Trump doesn’t know what he doesn’t know. Same as it ever was.
As the headline on David Graham’s Atlantic column declared earlier this week, “The president wants to seize new powers, yet he’s also eager to hand off responsibility for hard decisions.”
Kristen Welker (NBC News): Do people in the U.S. have a right to due process of law?
Trump: “I don’t know. I’m not a lawyer.”
Welker: “Don’t you need to uphold the Constitution of the United States as president?”
Trump: “I don’t know. I have to respond by saying, again, I have brilliant lawyers that work for me, and they are going to obviously follow what the Supreme Court said.”
And tax cuts?
Trump wants the power and the perks, just not the responsibility. Same as it ever was.
Can we stop pretending now?
ICE agents arrested Newark, New Jersey Mayor Ras Baraka on Friday outside a privately owned ICE facility for “tresspassing” after inviting him inside the gate and asking him to leave. They manhandled three members of Congress who called the episode “unacceptable.”
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It went as well as everything else under Trump 2.0. Fox News accused the visitors of storming an ICE facility.”
Menendez: I would not have waited an hour and a half if my intent was to storm the facility. If they’re so concerned about these things, they’d be more vocal critics of what happened on January 6th pic.twitter.com/m0JHi7AvAt
— Acyn (@Acyn) May 10, 2025
Can we stop pretending? It’s not unacceptable. It’s unAmerican. It’s Trumpism, something else entirely.
Behold. Trump is tripling down on ignoring the Constitution and the courts.
We’re not “close.” We’re there.
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