Trump: We may be a very substantially enlarged country in the not too distant— Isn't it nice to see — for years, decades, we’re the same size to the square-foot, probably got smaller actually but we might be an enlarged country pretty soon. pic.twitter.com/K255p9Se0i
He’s talking about taking over Greenland, a Danish autonomous territory and Denmark is our long time ally. He doesn’t give a damn. He will do it whether they like it or not just to prove his shriveled manhood is still working.
Donald Trump had a fiery phone call with Danish prime minister Mette Frederiksen over his demands to buy Greenland, according to senior European officials.
Speaking to the Financial Times, officials said that Trump, then still president-elect, spoke with Frederiksen for 45 minutes last week, during which he was described to be aggressive and confrontational about Frederiksen’s refusal to sell Greenland to the US.
The Financial Times reports that according to five current and former senior European officials who were briefed on the call, the conversation “was horrendous”. One person said: “He was very firm. It was a cold shower. Before, it was hard to take it seriously. But I do think it is serious and potentially very dangerous.”
Another person who was briefed on the call told the outlet: “The intent was very clear. They want it. The Danes are now in crisis mode.” Someone else said: “The Danes are utterly freaked out by this.”
According to one former Danish official, the call was a “very tough conversation” in which Trump “threatened specific measures against Denmark such as targeted tariffs”.
I know that Europe is freaked out about possible Russian expansion into their territory. Maybe they ought to be looking west instead of east. The US has a madman in charge who thinks he’s invented manifest destiny.
Update —
Oh my:
On Air Force One from Las Vegas to Miami, President Trump says Palestinians in Gaza should be relocated. “I’d like Egypt to take people. I’d like Jordan to take people,” he tells reporters.”We just clean out that whole thing.”
On Greenland: “I think we’re going to have it. I think the people want to be with us,” President Trump tells reporters on AF1. “I don’t really know what claim Denmark has to it, but it’d be a very unfriendly act if they didn’t allow that to happen because it’s for the protection of the free world.”
Canada is a “country that should be a (US) state,” reiterates President Trump. “They’ll get much better treatment, much better care and much lower taxes, and they’ll be much more secure.”
I wish I knew why the Democrats are acting like they just lost in a huge landslide so they must find ways to appeal to the huge majority of MAGA acolytes or stay out in the cold for a generation. It just ain’t true.
However, one of the real lessons of the election, indeed the last several elections probably going back to Occupy Wall Street, is that the country is in a populist phase and it’s up for grabs which party will be able to meet the moment. The Democrats passed big pieces of legislation aimed at working people while Trump and the Republicans have used typical right wing xenophobic and “anti-elite” populist sentiments neither of which has brought either party a real majority.
However, if you want real populism, the GOP has given the Democrats an opening they couldn’t have dreamed of. Josh Marshall wrote about it today:
I’ve mentioned a few times that Donald Trump is giving Democrats a big, big opening by so conspicuously surrounding himself and seeking the counsel of almost all of the country’s super-billionaires. If you’re a bruised party looking to get a footing in a populist moment, having the billionaire (at least branded as such) head of the opposite party surround himself with the country’s top billionaires and basically say, “We’re Team Billinoaire” is a pretty good opening. And the American people seem to agree.
AP has a new poll out which asked whether people think it’s a good or bad thing that the President “relies on billionaires for advice about government policy.” When I first saw the results of this poll as “good” coming in at “+12” I thought they meant “net” 12% and I thought, “eeeesh, the honeymoon phase is more intense than I thought!” But no, 12%: as in, 12% of the public think it’s a good thing. 60% think it’s not. That’s U.S. adults. The only outliers are Republicans, 20% of whom think this is a good thing. But even that is pretty feeble. To put it simply, these are terrible numbers.
The most important thing to remember about polls is that the opinions captured in them are often less important than the salience of those numbers. Maybe Donald Trump likes linguini and 90% of Americans are against it. But who cares? No one’s going to make their vote on that basis. Salience is critical. On its own I’m not sure surrounding yourself with billionaire friends is a major voting issue. But it’s unlikely to stay on its own since we’re about to see huge shifts in fiscal policy which favor billionaires at the expense of everyone else. The biggest point is that Democrats need to make it salient. But these numbers show there’s very fertile ground for doing so.
He goes on to point out that this means the Democrats don’t have to get into the argument about whether or not a New York City family making $500,000 a year is “really rich.” Yes, they are by the standards of the rest of the country. But in relation to these insanely wealthy billionaires, they’re as poor as the rest of us, which is important politically since that is a group that the Democrats need to win elections.
And the vast majority of these billionaires are now slavering over the opportunity to serve Donald Trump and the Republicans.
By the way, DOGE is extremely unpopular while the core Democratic policy agenda is not:
A few other data points. 29% support “DOGE”; 39% oppose it. A fairly large 20% don’t know and 12% don’t have a clear opinion. Rather strikingly, when asked which things the government isn’t spending enough money on social security (67%) and education (65%) ranked highest, with assistance to the poor (62%) and Medicare (61%) just slightly behind. Notably, just slightly further behind are Medicaid (55%) and Border Security at (51%)
They have handed the Democrats a perfect opening but they need to go through it and they need to do it quickly. They can tie everything Trump is doing to it — every single decision he’s making is really in service of his rich pals. He’s actually saying it. Here he is in the last couple of weeks lamenting the hell people in Beverly Hills are supposedly enduring at multiple appearances:
Trump on Beverly Hills: "They wanted to restrict you to 38 gallons of water a day. That sounds like a lot, but it's not when you're a rich person and you want to take a shower." pic.twitter.com/yUkeyGBTEM
Trump: I know those areas very well. I have many friends living in those houses. That is a true tragedy. Nobody ever thought — I mean virtually Beverly Hills and areas around Beverly an are being decimated. pic.twitter.com/OPSlREdpQe
Trump: I have a house in Beverly Hills and we get notices wanting you to go down to 38 gallons per person per house… You should not be in a position where you have tumbleweed that is dry as a bone, even tumbleweed can be nice and green and rich and loaded with water that won't… pic.twitter.com/IWhUKY6ZzU
He sounds a lot more out of touch than he used to with this embrace of the Billionaire Boys Club. The Dems have to stop being afraid of them and take it to the people. Remember, most of these guys are just delayed adolescent nerds. It shouldn’t be that hard to get them to go back to what they’re good at and stay out of partisan politics. It really isn’t their thing.
Elon Musk tells an AfD rally in Germany: "I think there is too much focus on past guilt (in Germany), and we need to move beyond that. Children should not feel guilty for the sins of their parents – their great grandparents even" pic.twitter.com/xtFMfAYrIp
Don’t tell anyone but Elon’s grandparents were actual Nazis.
Germany should be proud of its past history, I guess. Well, there was that little blip in the last century but who’s counting?
There is no doubt in my mind that Elon was doing a Nazi salute. I will accept that he was probably high and lost control what with the excitement and all. But that’s what he was doing.
Sort of like this:
Update: By the way, Elon’s speaking at the Afd rally today. In Germany. After the Nazi salute thing.
President Donald Trump made clear during his campaign that he wanted little to do with Project 2025, the sweeping and controversial conservative policy blueprint created by the Heritage Foundation. But just days into his second term, many of Trump’s early actions align with the Project 2025 agenda.
An analysis by TIME found that nearly two-thirds of the executive actions Trump has issued so far mirror or partially mirror proposals from the 900-page document, ranging from sweeping deregulation measures to aggressive immigration reform.
Democrats had seized on Trump’s connection to Project 2025 during the campaign, pointing out that many of the playbook’s contributors previously worked for Trump or had connections to his orbit. Trump repeatedly said he had “no idea who is behind” the conservative blueprint and that some of its ideas were “absolutely ridiculous and abysmal.” He appeared to soften his stance after winning the election, telling TIME in November, “I don’t disagree with everything in Project 2025, but I disagree with some things.”
Despite Trump’s past disavowals, many of the individuals involved in drafting Project 2025, such as Russell Vought and Brendan Carr, have been tapped to serve in prominent positions in his Administration. Vought was nominated to run the Office of Management and Budget, while Carr was tapped to lead the Federal Communications Commission. The Heritage Foundation declined to comment for this story.
For a man with a decades-long obsession with the world laughing at us (him) and a visceral fear of looking weak, Donald Trump sure is determined to give the world plenty to laugh about. Especially for our sworn enemies.
Vice President J.D. Vance cast a tie-breaking vote Friday night in the U.S. Senate to confirm Pete Hegseth, the scandal-spangled, alleged hard-drinking, former Fox News weekend talk show co-host, as Trump’s next secretary of defense. What won’t Hegseth do at Trump’s whim? Shooting Americans in the legs could be the least of it.
Stuart Stevens, former chief Republican strategist and Lincoln Project adviser, posted to social media Friday night that “Trump could have appointed serious Conservatives to his Cabinet. Instead, he picked nuts and freaks. Why? To prove he could make Republican Senators do whatever he told them to.”
Trump could have appointed serious Conservatives to his Cabinet. Instead, he picked nuts and freaks. Why? To prove he could make Republican Senators do whatever he told them to.
“Humiliation through submission,” Stevens concluded.
Republican senators are not the only ones Donald Trump means to humiliate through submission. He just wants to “do them” first to show the world who’s boss and who’s the gimp.
Shamelessness was once the conservative superpower. Now it’s spinelessness. Trump is the Shameless One.
Every Democrat voted against Hegseth. In the end, only three Republicans voted against Trump’s nominee for defense secretary. No one else had the guts to be the final vote to defeat Trump’s pick (CNN):
Vice President JD Vance cast the 51-50 tie-breaking vote after former GOP Leader Mitch McConnell and GOP Sens. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska and Susan Collins of Maine joined Democrats to oppose Hegseth’s nomination. It was just the second time in history that a vice president has broken a tie for a Cabinet nominee – the other being then-Vice President Mike Pence for Betsy DeVos’ 2017 confirmation to lead the Education Department.
Politico describes McConnell as some kind of principled maverick for taking a stand against Hegseth.
McConnell’s chance to take a stand was during the Senate impeachment vote after Trump was charged with incitement of insurrection. McConnell’s shrinking from his responsibility in February 2021 led directly to Trump’s reelection and the complete debasement of Lincoln’s former Republican Party:
McConnell, in a lengthy statement, warned that whoever leads the Pentagon faces a “daily test with staggering consequences for the security of the American people and our global interests.”
“Mr. Hegseth has failed, as yet, to demonstrate that he will pass this test. But as he assumes office, the consequences of failure are as high as they have ever been,” he said.
McConnell has failed repeatedly. The world is living with the consequences of his spinelessness before Trump, even if the childhood polio survivor votes against Trump HHS secretary nominee Robert F. Kennedy Jr., or Russophile Tulsi Gabbard for director of national intelligence nomination, or Kash Patel for FBI director.
Overheard at the Capitol for the Hegseth vote: “So many of these guys want to be John McCain but ultimately they’re just Thom Tillis.”
I make a lot of movie references in these pages. The images, characters and narratives are cultural shorthand. Too often, moderate Democrats and progressives would rather satisfy their egos and show off how smart they are by laying out detailed philosophical arguments against political adversaries. This is a mistake. Invoking sounds, images and stories already in people’s heads is more straightforward, as well as quicker than trying to plant and water them until they sprout. That’s not to say that there are not ideas that need cultivating, like renewing a sense of common purpose and civic duty. Those will take time and movies that might never be made.
For now, it is plain that Trump is trying to turn his own supporters into his gimps. I don’t need to paint that picture. Quentin Tarantino has already done that.
Casanova Frankenstein (Geoffrey Rush): It’s so easy to get the best of people when they care about each other. Which is why evil will always have the edge. You good guys are always so bound by the rules (throws switch & electrocutes the Frat Boys). You see, I kill my own men. And lucky me…I get the girl. (Mystery Men, 1999.)
Donald Trump, twice-impeached convicted felon and career huckster, spent the first week of his second term exacting revenge against current and former officials who as much as contradicted his frequent misstatements. He cancelled the federal security details for Dr. Anthony Fauci, John Bolton, Mike Pompeo and Brian Hook (The Hill):
Fauci led the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) for almost 40 years, including at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. Bolton was Trump’s national security adviser, and Pompeo was Trump’s secretary of State. Hook was a key Pompeo aide.
All four men have fallen out of favor with Trump, with Bolton in particular now a strident critic of the president.
Fauci has long been the target of threats from anti-vaccine extremists. Iran has targeted Bolton for his role 2020 drone killing of Quds Force commander Qassem Soleimani.
Friday night, Trump fired 17 federal inspectors general, internal watchdogs for multiple government agencies, including the Departments of Defense, State, Transportation, Veterans Affairs, Housing and Urban Development, Interior, and Energy, reports The Washington Post. Trump’s action is an apparent violation of a federal law requiring that the president give Congress 30 days’ notice of firing a Senate-confirmed inspector general:
Most of those dismissed were Trump appointees from his first term, which stunned the watchdog community. One prominent inspector general survived the purge — Michael Horowitz at the Justice Department, an appointee of President Barack Obama who has issued reports critical of both the Biden administration and Trump’s first administration.
“It’s a widespread massacre,” said one of the fired inspectors general. “Whoever Trump puts in now will be viewed as loyalists, and that undermines the entire system.”
You see, Trump fires his own men. In his first term, Trump hired “the best people” and subsequently fired dozens of them, and did again Friday night (New York Times):
The firings threatened to upend the traditional independence of the internal watchdogs, and critics of Mr. Trump reacted with alarm.
“Inspectors general are charged with rooting out government waste, fraud, abuse and preventing misconduct,” Senator Elizabeth Warren, Democrat of Massachusetts, said in a statement. “President Trump is dismantling checks on his power and paving the way for widespread corruption.”
Trump is in the process of sweeping away the last remnants of the Old Republic, to borrow from a cultural touchstone.
In firing his own men, Trump sends a clear signal that he will tolerate no insubordination. There will be no oversight, no rules unbroken, no limits in his second term. Trump always wanted to be emperor and, as far as he’s concerned, he is one now. He has all but subjugated his entire political party and reduced its “leaders” to fawning courtiers. (But that’s another post.)
Meantime, Democrats in the minority struggle to find any way to restrain Trump’s worst instincts, unwilling or unable as many senior Democrats in Congress are, to face the fact that they are bringing 20th-century knives to a 21st-century gun fight. The Washington they knew was a long time ago in a galaxy far, far away.
I find that I need animal soothers much more often than I used to. These are tough times. One of the sites that I look at every morning before I look at anything else is We Rate Dogs. I read it on Bluesky but you can find it on the other sites as well. The videos are fun and inspiring and heart warming. I think we all need a little bit more of that. Every day. Maybe twice a day…
Yesterday, Trump pardoned a whole bunch of people who had been prosecuted for violating the FACE act by obstructing people’s access to abortion clinics. Some of them assaulted workers and patients in the process. So it’s not surprising that the anti-abortion zealots are feeling their oats.
We are writing to urge the Department of Justice (DOJ) to enforce the anti-abortion trafficking rules in the so-called “Comstock Act” by (1) rescinding the Office of Legal Counsel’s (OLC) Memorandum Opinion, Application of the Comstock Act to the Mailing of Prescription Drugs That Can Be Used for Abortions (2022) and (2) taking immediate action to enforce the mail-order abortion prohibition within the Act, 18 U.S.C. §§ 1461‒62. These laws prohibit the distribution of abortifacient matter—including the abortion pill regimen of mifepristone and misoprostol—through the United States Postal Service, express companies, common carriers, and interactive computer services. The United States Supreme Court has recognized provisions of the Act as proper exercises of Congress’ Postal and Commerce Clause powers. Yet in recent years, there has been an alarming increase in the distribution of abortion pills by mail and online, which raises the risk of intimate partner violence and precludes essential health and safety screening for women seeking these drugs. It is imperative that the DOJ ensure compliance with the Act as a matter of public policy and patient safety
There’s more. It’s all horrible.
Liz Winstead’s Abortion Access Front has been sounding the alarm on this for a long time. It’s real. Project 2025 was all over it.
I got into a conversation with some friend’s about the Dem’s failure to prepare for the nomination hearings. I KNEW that there were multiple weaknesses in them, but I also knew that the Trump team had a strategy to push them through.
I saw lots of complaints about Dem Senators questions at the hearings. It is hard, especially when Team Trump uses these tactics:
1) Withholding evidence
2) No background checks by FBI AND the FBI doesn’t share the info with all committee members
3) Coach candidates to give non-answers and to give technically correct, but misleading answers
“It wasn’t an NDA, It was a “non- disparagement clause in the divorce proceedings” Come on man! GIVE ME A BREAK!
4) Threaten people who have legit questions about their qualifications, or have issues about their character. See what they did to Sen. Joni Ernst.
I learned a lot. There are multiple weakness that could be exploited if someone was in charge of a PR campaign to derail her nomination. I don’t know if anyone is, but I do know the people in charge of pushing nominees are ON THE JOB! They are busy, pre-emptively shutting down lines of attack on Tulsi.
In Howie’s piece he points to an Atlantic article, “Elaine Godfrey managed to do what few reporters have managed to do— a journey to the heart of Gabbardism. She started at just the right place too: the Chris Butler Hare Krishna cult Tulsi built her life around.”
That leader is Chris Butler, the founder of an offshoot of the Hare Krishna movement in Hinduism, called the Science of Identity Foundation. Butler’s followers know him as Jagad Guru Siddhaswarupananda Paramahamsa, and Gabbard, who identifies as Hindu, has called him her “guru-dev,” or spiritual master.
What Everyone Gets Wrong About Tulsi Gabbard Other than raw ambition, only one through line is perceptible in a switchbacking political career The Atlantic, January 21, 2025
Howie talks about meeting her:
When I first came across Tulsi Gabbard, she was two things to me: a right-wing Hare Krishna and a fanatic intent on persecuting the LGBTQ community in Hawaii. From the very beginning I saw her as, first and foremost, an enemy— and then as a brainwashed cultist moron.
Long before her sudden transformation into a Berniecrat— so still a right-wing, faux-Dem— she called me to ask for a Blue America endorsement. She didn’t really try to paint herself as a progressive and she came across as a garden variety careerist Democrat, not especially bad and not especially good. At the end of the interview, I asked her about the process by which she had come to change her position on LGBT equality. She immediately said she’d call back and then hung up abruptly and… never called back.
Howie Klein
Now, it might be interesting if some Dem senators asked her ask questions about her involvement with her Guru Butler. But if they did, she is prepared to take umbrage at it. Hegseth pre-emptively dismissed any concerns about his Christian Nationalism and nobody dug into it because it would require educating the public about its dangers.
The group in question, The Science of Identity Foundation, got ahead of any questions and put out a press release attacking the Media for how they are covered. They also got multiple groups to sign a letter to basically say, “Any attack on Butler & his group is an attack on all Hindus.”
So, if any media WANTS to talk about the group & her connection to them will need experts or groups not on that list who can say, “Look, don’t lump all Hindus together. This is what Butler has said on homosexuality, gay marriage, transgender, and abortions. This is what these 3 main Hindu groups have said on these topics, But Tulsi is her own person, ask her what her views are right now about these topics. What will come out is that she has “evolved” then “devolved” and “revolved.” They could even go back to 1998, when here father Mike Gabbard put out a TV ad featuring a teenage Tulsi and her siblings that likened marrying someone of the same sex to marrying your dog.
(YouTube link, I’ll but a copy of the video below in case it gets removed.)
Now, in my attempt to find those experts, I got this excellent comment, her Hinduism isn’t the issue here; it’s her hate campaign against gay and trans people.
That should be the focus, but it won’t come up during her hearings because it won’t be deemed relevant. But it is, because her position of power would give her the ability to persecute and gather information on groups here in the U.S. who she hates, for whatever reason.
Jim Stewardson and my friends at Mind War suggested that I look up what Tulsi Gabbard had to say on Rumble (funded by Peter Thiel & now a publicly traded company) where she got big bucks for a few videos. I’m sure the Dems can ask her about how much she got when they get her TAX returns (if the FBI will provide it to them.) And seeing that Thiel companies (Palantir Technologies) is one of the big vendors to the intelligence community & Rumble is big in the misinformation & disinformation community, it wouldn’t be like a conflict of interest or anything… especially in the Trump admin.
Marcy Wheeler @emptywheel.bsky.social made a great point about the strategy behind Sen Kaine’s questions to Hegseth on the Nicole Sandler show last week.
Rather than saying, “Did you rape that woman?” he said “Did you cheat on your wife?” The more important question is, “Why didn’t you tell Donald Trump?”
This is, in my opinion, how Democrats should be approaching these hearings, How can I describe the danger you pose to Donald Trump? How can I describe the danger you pose to the Republican project of, for example, really taking on China?
My point is It SHOULD be the job of the Dems who are going to talk to the media before, during and after these confirmation hearings to find weaknesses in these nominees that can be used to protect the American people.
I’m doing the best I can to help in advance. I’ve found a lot of damming videos of her on Rumble but the ones that won’t show up in the Senate hearings will be her anti-trans views because that’s been normalized on the right.
What MIGHT show up are ways that her flip flopping views might come back to hurt Trump, Trump cabinet members, rich gay donors, or Republican money making projects.
It looks like at least one of them (a person you would not expect) is considering it. Josh Marshall reports:
It probably won’t surprise you that RFK Jr., along with Tulsi Gabbard, are among the few Trump nominees who might actually not get confirmed. But I’m told that one senator who Democratic senators and health care advocates have real concerns about is none other than Senator Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI). To be clear, Whitehouse isn’t confirmed as voting for Kennedy. But he appears to be actively considering it. (Ed Note: WTF?)
Why? I’m told that there appear to be two reasons: One is that Whitehouse and Kennedy are personal friends. They were law school roommates at UVA and that seems to have been the beginning of a lifelong friendship. There are also specific issues with Rhode Island’s health care system that apparently need regulatory flexibility from HHS. That seems to be a real issue. But it hasn’t been enough of an issue to shift the state’s senior senator, Sen. Jack Reed (D-RI), who remains firmly opposed to Kennedy’s nomination.
Whitehouse isn’t the only Democratic senator not firmly locked down. There are also concerns about John Fetterman (D-PA) and Bernie Sanders (I-VT). But observers seem fairly confident that both will oppose Kennedy.
Whitehouse is the question mark.
Jesus H. Christ. I understand personal loyalty (although if one of my close friends decided to sell their soul to the antichrist as RFK has done, our friendship would not survive) but this is too much. Actually, I’m pretty sure that if my college roommate went batshit crazy years ago and was responsible for the deaths of dozens of Samoan children that friendship would have ended long ago.
The problem here is much bigger than one vote though. RFK’s nomination is in trouble. But if any Democrats come over, the GOP will hang together to let him through:
Here’s why Whitehouse’s possible vote to confirm Kennedy would be of more than just symbolic importance. There’s potential Republican opposition to Kennedy both for his advocacy in favor of polio, measles and other childhood diseases but also because, at least until a few weeks ago, he was pro-choice. But the first is the real problem. Dyed-in-the-wool anti-abortion advocates like Josh Hawley (R-MO) have giving Kennedy their blessing. It’s polio and measles, stupid, to paraphrase a younger James Carville.
Vote counters opposing Kennedy’s nomination believe there is a handful of Republicans seriously considering opposing Kennedy. But they’re unlikely to do so if one or more Democrats themselves vote to confirm him.
This is a question of life and death. If Whitehouse is your Senator (or Fetterman and Sanders, for that matter) I would suggest you give their offices a call. This is nothing to play with.
