People forget or wilfully forget that Trump is not a "politician", not a polished duplicitous back stabbing sweet talking politician. He is a successful businessman. He is plain talking and honest, uncouth, talks rough, he tries to make the best deals possible using everything at his disposal. He is not a genius, he can make mistakes, other people can fool him some of the time. In his first term in office he was a little bit out of his depth.
In reality both parties get pissed on. That's what Trump is betting on. The other side is less accepting than him of getting pissed on.
Maddog said
Feb 5 4:14 AM, 2025
Anonymous wrote:
People forget or wilfully forget that Trump is not a "politician", not a polished duplicitous back stabbing sweet talking politician. He is a successful businessman. He is plain talking and honest, uncouth, talks rough, he tries to make the best deals possible using everything at his disposal. He is not a genius, he can make mistakes, other people can fool him some of the time. In his first term in office he was a little bit out of his depth.
People know what he is by now..He's definitely different than a run of the mill politician..
I wake up every.day wondering what his next idea is.
Maybe I'm a little crazy, but I find it interesting even when I don't agree with him.
And, I do think there are a great number of his ideas that he never plans on doing. He loves rattling cages. By now, the smart money says wait until Donald actually does something because half of what he proposes is just bluster..
Trump says he is building on the Gaza strip. I don't know what for tbh. Maybe another Vegas lol.
Just read, he said it will be an American Rivera 🤔. Good luck with that then, it would have to be patrolled by an army!
-- Edited by Magica on Wednesday 5th of February 2025 10:45:11 AM
Maddog said
Feb 5 2:56 PM, 2025
Magica wrote:
Trump says he is building on the Gaza strip. I don't know what for tbh. Maybe another Vegas lol.
Just read, he said it will be an American Rivera 🤔. Good luck with that then, it would have to be patrolled by an army!
-- Edited by Magica on Wednesday 5th of February 2025 10:45:11 AM
This is another dumb idea. Of course it may be him just stirring the pot..
Anonymous said
Feb 5 3:46 PM, 2025
Anonymous wrote:
People forget or wilfully forget that Trump is not a "politician", not a polished duplicitous back stabbing sweet talking politician. He is a successful businessman. He is plain talking and honest, uncouth, talks rough, he tries to make the best deals possible using everything at his disposal. He is not a genius, he can make mistakes, other people can fool him some of the time. In his first term in office he was a little bit out of his depth.
He's a grifter, and not suitable for public office.
PS BIB - no way.
Anonymous said
Feb 5 5:22 PM, 2025
Several people are claiming Donald Trump has crossed the line to dictatorship citing a New York Times article - see my next post. They are claiming that if Donald Trump doesn't die in the next four years he will orchestrate a dictatorship so that he holds onto power after his second term. These people are generally sane but it seems not when it refers to Donald Trump in that one can't have a reasoned interaction with them without them becoming incivil, abusive and emotive.
However there does appear to be serious debate whether some of Donald Trumps executive orders and actions are constititutionally legal in that he has to get congressional approval first. There is such a thing called Trump Derangement Syndrome with much of the reporting since 2015 which means getting to the truth is difficult. There are also many Trump Defenders on Social Mredia - many of them were kicked off Youtube and other platforms during the run up to the 2020 US general election - that usually give a different impression but one cannot be certain of them either and they are generally marginalised. Look what happened to Tucker Carlson - he got kicked off Fox News.
A proper civil discussion would be:
A) What are the issues Donald Trump is trying to address.
B) Is Trump correct about those issues needing to be addressed.
C) Is Trump going about addressing those issues in a legally correct manner.
D) ..
However just saying the above will get me kicked off some websites, while other websites I will get abuse, derision and threats.
The NYT article to follow
Anonymous said
Feb 5 5:23 PM, 2025
Here is the article
"Mr. Trump has effectively nullified laws, such as by ordering the Justice Department to refrain from enforcing a ban on the wildly popular app TikTok and by blocking migrants from invoking a statute allowing them to request asylum. He moved to effectively shutter a federal agency Congress created and tried to freeze congressionally approved spending, including most foreign aid. He summarily fired prosecutors, inspectors general and board members of independent agencies in defiance of legal rules against arbitrary removal
This week, Mr. Trump moved to effectively dismantle the U.S. Agency for International Development and fold its functions into the State Department, making Secretary of State Marco Rubio its acting director. He had already crippled U.S.A.I.D. by imposing a “temporary” freeze on disbursing foreign aid that Congress appropriated, which as time passes is increasingly at odds with the Impoundment Control Act of 1974.
Since the first Congress, it has been the legislative branch — not the president — that decides how to structure the executive branch, creating departments and agencies, giving them functions and providing them with funds to carry out those missions. And Congress has enacted laws that say U.S.A.I.D. is to exist as an “independent establishment,” not as part of any executive department.
No matter. On Monday, Mr. Trump was asked whether he needed an act of Congress to do away with the agency. He dismissed that suggestion and insulted the officials who work there.
“I don’t think so, not when it comes to fraud,” Mr. Trump said. “If there’s fraud — these people are lunatics — and if — if it comes to fraud, you wouldn’t have an act of Congress. And I’m not sure that you would anyway.”
Rumors abound that Mr. Trump is weighing executive actions to at least partly dismantle the Education Department, another component of the government that Congress has mandated exist by law.
Mr. Trump and his appointees have also been firing people in naked defiance of statutes Congress enacted to protect against the arbitrary removal of certain officials, like civil servants or board members at independent agencies.
For example, Mr. Trump shut down three agencies by ousting Democratic members before their terms had ended. That effectively hobbled the agencies, the National Labor Relations Board, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, because they were left with too few officials to have a quorum to act.
Congress created those agencies to be independent of the White House, and all three have been understood to have forms of protections limiting the president’s ability to remove their leaders without a good cause, like misconduct, although only the labor board statute says that. Regardless, Mr. Trump flouted the limit.
The Justice Department has fired most of the prosecutors who worked on the cases that led to two indictments of Mr. Trump, along with those who worked on cases against ordinary rioters from the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol assault. Top career leaders across the F.B.I. have been fired as well, and on Tuesday the bureau turned over a list of the thousands of agents who participated in those investigations, raising fears that they, too, will be purged.
None of those firings have complied with laws aimed at protecting the civil service and its senior career officials from losing their posts without a good cause, a process that includes hearings before the Merit Systems Protection Board.
Peter L. Strauss, a professor emeritus of law at Columbia University who is a critic of the strong version of the unitary executive theory, said the Trump administration had embraced lawlessness.
“President Trump and his friends are ignoring both federal law and the, to me, clear limitation of presidential power in Article II of the Constitution,” he said. “The Constitution did not imagine what we are seeing. All one has to do is to read the whole of Article II to understand that.”
And the Trump team has at least partly sidelined the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, which is supposed to review proposed executive orders and substantive proclamations for form and legality.
During transitions, the normal process is for a career lawyer in that office, walled off from the exiting administration’s political appointees, to vet drafts of directives the president-elect is considering issuing upon taking office. But Mr. Trump’s transition team did not use that mechanism for his slew of early directives, instead vetting drafts with handpicked lawyers from outside.
Mr. Musk and employees from his various companies have also been rampaging through the federal bureaucracy, including by seizing access to a Treasury Department system that handles federal payments and has sensitive information, like Social Security numbers, whose disclosure is limited by the Privacy Act. Mr. Musk’s team also got into a standoff with employees at U.S.A.I.D. over its demand for access to classified information.
Federal employees at both the Treasury and U.S.A.I.D. who resisted him were placed on administrative leave. Mr. Musk’s team also shut down U.S.A.I.D.’s headquarters overnight, emailing employees not to come in, and its website went dark.
The Trump team has been opaque about exactly what legal status allows Mr. Musk to be exercising executive power, even at Mr. Trump’s behest, but The New York Times reported this week that Mr. Musk has been deemed a “special government employee.”
The administration has not said when he acquired that status, nor whether or to what extent Mr. Trump has waived a criminal conflict-of-interest law that binds even special employees from touching government matters that could affect their personal interests. For Mr. Musk, that category is vast given how heavily his companies rely on federal contracts.
Nor have congressional Republicans sharply pushed back against Mr. Trump’s summary firing of 17 inspectors general, the independent watchdogs Congress created to hunt for waste, fraud, abuse and illegality in the government. The firings defied a law that required him to give detailed, written justifications to lawmakers 30 days in advance."
Anonymous said
Feb 5 6:35 PM, 2025
Magica wrote:
Trump says he is building on the Gaza strip. I don't know what for tbh. Maybe another Vegas lol.
Just read, he said it will be an American Rivera 🤔. Good luck with that then, it would have to be patrolled by an army!
-- Edited by Magica on Wednesday 5th of February 2025 10:45:11 AM
Lol?
Maddog said
Feb 5 7:08 PM, 2025
Aknownymouse wrote:
Several people are claiming Donald Trump has crossed the line to dictatorship citing a New York Times article - see my next post. They are claiming that if Donald Trump doesn't die in the next four years he will orchestrate a dictatorship so that he holds onto power after his second term. These people are generally sane but it seems not when it refers to Donald Trump in that one can't have a reasoned interaction with them without them becoming incivil, abusive and emotive.
However there does appear to be serious debate whether some of Donald Trumps executive orders and actions are constititutionally legal in that he has to get congressional approval first. There is such a thing called Trump Derangement Syndrome with much of the reporting since 2015 which means getting to the truth is difficult. There are also many Trump Defenders on Social Mredia - many of them were kicked off Youtube and other platforms during the run up to the 2020 US general election - that usually give a different impression but one cannot be certain of them either and they are generally marginalised. Look what happened to Tucker Carlson - he got kicked off Fox News.
A proper civil discussion would be:
A) What are the issues Donald Trump is trying to address.
B) Is Trump correct about those issues needing to be addressed.
C) Is Trump going about addressing those issues in a legally correct manner.
D) ..
However just saying the above will get me kicked off some websites, while other websites I will get abuse, derision and threats.
The NYT article to follow
It's a good question in terms of the legality of his EO's.
He does have a great deal of latitude in how the executive branch is run, and how large a workforce is needed. As for spending measures passed by congress, that's a different question? Is he required to spend it?
Maddog said
Feb 5 7:12 PM, 2025
Here is a problem that is rearing it's head. Congress has continually given the president in their party more power forgetting that their party will lose some elections.
A good example is the use of force. Historically (if you remember our headlines Dec 8, 1941) congress decides when we commit forces. At least they used to. Now, there is very little stopping Trump from trying to fix Gaza.
Maddog said
Feb 5 7:13 PM, 2025
Let's look at tariffs. Until the Carter adminstration, tariffs were passed by congress. Then they gave Jimmy "emergency powers" and they have never been revoked.
Anonymous said
Feb 6 11:25 AM, 2025
Trump said on Tuesday the displacement of Palestinians from Gaza would be permanent, now his spokeswoman has tried to rescue him, saying he'd be "temporarily" relocating its residents.
I wonder if he wants a temporary permanent relocation or a permanent temporary relocation?
Doesn't matter what the politicians say or do right now the Canadian people
are taking it upon themselves to not buy American products.
Jack Daniels being removed from shelves
Mexican and European goods along with Canadian goods taking the place of American goods.
The Canadian people are seriously angry about being talked down being threatened even
by the orange man next door.
AQ lot of them own summer homes in the USA but they're now going up for sale.
This attitude is spreading to other countries forcing America into
a corner... of isolationist reality.
Beware south America because the USA might well have to consider it
for resources and markets.... having two continents might make isolation very liveable.
jackb said
Feb 7 12:44 AM, 2025
jackb said
Feb 7 1:02 AM, 2025
jackb wrote:
Maddog is the following true?
Canada agreed to spend up to $1.3 billion on border control a deal they already signed with Biden in December. Further the so called illegals from Canada are less than 1% of the total in the past year. The fentanyl crisis at the border with Canada? 42 pounds or 19kg out of 22,000 pounds in the past year.
A win?
Now they have pissed off the greatest friend and ally of the USA in history for nothing, absolutely nothing. Ontario and other provinces are instituting don’t buy USA products no US companies are welcome and are putting in long term policies designed to specifically hurt the USA.
And Mexico?
The President of Mexico said she will send 10,000 troops to the border to help with border controls. Biden already had that done in 2022 with 10,000 Mexican troops and the current border situation is under control and the lowest in decades.
WTF?
These are wins?
And go against the entire trade agreement Trump negotiated and signed with Mexico and Canada to replace NAFTA just a few short years ago.
You have to be brain dead to call these victories. Piss off your allies, get nothing in return, absolutely nothing and call it a victory trying to kill your own agreement that he signed?
People forget or wilfully forget that Trump is not a "politician", not a polished duplicitous back stabbing sweet talking politician. He is a successful businessman. He is plain talking and honest, uncouth, talks rough, he tries to make the best deals possible using everything at his disposal. He is not a genius, he can make mistakes, other people can fool him some of the time. In his first term in office he was a little bit out of his depth.
More will be hitting the fan soon...
That'd sorta how they work..
In reality both parties get pissed on. That's what Trump is betting on. The other side is less accepting than him of getting pissed on.
People know what he is by now..He's definitely different than a run of the mill politician..
I wake up every.day wondering what his next idea is.
Maybe I'm a little crazy, but I find it interesting even when I don't agree with him.
And, I do think there are a great number of his ideas that he never plans on doing. He loves rattling cages. By now, the smart money says wait until Donald actually does something because half of what he proposes is just bluster..
Trump says he is building on the Gaza strip. I don't know what for tbh. Maybe another Vegas lol.
Just read, he said it will be an American Rivera 🤔. Good luck with that then, it would have to be patrolled by an army!
-- Edited by Magica on Wednesday 5th of February 2025 10:45:11 AM
This is another dumb idea. Of course it may be him just stirring the pot..
He's a grifter, and not suitable for public office.
PS BIB - no way.
Several people are claiming Donald Trump has crossed the line to dictatorship citing a New York Times article - see my next post. They are claiming that if Donald Trump doesn't die in the next four years he will orchestrate a dictatorship so that he holds onto power after his second term. These people are generally sane but it seems not when it refers to Donald Trump in that one can't have a reasoned interaction with them without them becoming incivil, abusive and emotive.
However there does appear to be serious debate whether some of Donald Trumps executive orders and actions are constititutionally legal in that he has to get congressional approval first. There is such a thing called Trump Derangement Syndrome with much of the reporting since 2015 which means getting to the truth is difficult. There are also many Trump Defenders on Social Mredia - many of them were kicked off Youtube and other platforms during the run up to the 2020 US general election - that usually give a different impression but one cannot be certain of them either and they are generally marginalised. Look what happened to Tucker Carlson - he got kicked off Fox News.
A proper civil discussion would be:
A) What are the issues Donald Trump is trying to address.
B) Is Trump correct about those issues needing to be addressed.
C) Is Trump going about addressing those issues in a legally correct manner.
D) ..
However just saying the above will get me kicked off some websites, while other websites I will get abuse, derision and threats.
The NYT article to follow
Here is the article
"Mr. Trump has effectively nullified laws, such as by ordering the Justice Department to refrain from enforcing a ban on the wildly popular app TikTok and by blocking migrants from invoking a statute allowing them to request asylum. He moved to effectively shutter a federal agency Congress created and tried to freeze congressionally approved spending, including most foreign aid. He summarily fired prosecutors, inspectors general and board members of independent agencies in defiance of legal rules against arbitrary removal
This week, Mr. Trump moved to effectively dismantle the U.S. Agency for International Development and fold its functions into the State Department, making Secretary of State Marco Rubio its acting director. He had already crippled U.S.A.I.D. by imposing a “temporary” freeze on disbursing foreign aid that Congress appropriated, which as time passes is increasingly at odds with the Impoundment Control Act of 1974.
Since the first Congress, it has been the legislative branch — not the president — that decides how to structure the executive branch, creating departments and agencies, giving them functions and providing them with funds to carry out those missions. And Congress has enacted laws that say U.S.A.I.D. is to exist as an “independent establishment,” not as part of any executive department.
No matter. On Monday, Mr. Trump was asked whether he needed an act of Congress to do away with the agency. He dismissed that suggestion and insulted the officials who work there.
“I don’t think so, not when it comes to fraud,” Mr. Trump said. “If there’s fraud — these people are lunatics — and if — if it comes to fraud, you wouldn’t have an act of Congress. And I’m not sure that you would anyway.”
Rumors abound that Mr. Trump is weighing executive actions to at least partly dismantle the Education Department, another component of the government that Congress has mandated exist by law.
Mr. Trump and his appointees have also been firing people in naked defiance of statutes Congress enacted to protect against the arbitrary removal of certain officials, like civil servants or board members at independent agencies.
For example, Mr. Trump shut down three agencies by ousting Democratic members before their terms had ended. That effectively hobbled the agencies, the National Labor Relations Board, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and the Privacy and Civil Liberties Oversight Board, because they were left with too few officials to have a quorum to act.
Congress created those agencies to be independent of the White House, and all three have been understood to have forms of protections limiting the president’s ability to remove their leaders without a good cause, like misconduct, although only the labor board statute says that. Regardless, Mr. Trump flouted the limit.
The Justice Department has fired most of the prosecutors who worked on the cases that led to two indictments of Mr. Trump, along with those who worked on cases against ordinary rioters from the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol assault. Top career leaders across the F.B.I. have been fired as well, and on Tuesday the bureau turned over a list of the thousands of agents who participated in those investigations, raising fears that they, too, will be purged.
None of those firings have complied with laws aimed at protecting the civil service and its senior career officials from losing their posts without a good cause, a process that includes hearings before the Merit Systems Protection Board.
Peter L. Strauss, a professor emeritus of law at Columbia University who is a critic of the strong version of the unitary executive theory, said the Trump administration had embraced lawlessness.
“President Trump and his friends are ignoring both federal law and the, to me, clear limitation of presidential power in Article II of the Constitution,” he said. “The Constitution did not imagine what we are seeing. All one has to do is to read the whole of Article II to understand that.”
And the Trump team has at least partly sidelined the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, which is supposed to review proposed executive orders and substantive proclamations for form and legality.
During transitions, the normal process is for a career lawyer in that office, walled off from the exiting administration’s political appointees, to vet drafts of directives the president-elect is considering issuing upon taking office. But Mr. Trump’s transition team did not use that mechanism for his slew of early directives, instead vetting drafts with handpicked lawyers from outside.
Mr. Musk and employees from his various companies have also been rampaging through the federal bureaucracy, including by seizing access to a Treasury Department system that handles federal payments and has sensitive information, like Social Security numbers, whose disclosure is limited by the Privacy Act. Mr. Musk’s team also got into a standoff with employees at U.S.A.I.D. over its demand for access to classified information.
Federal employees at both the Treasury and U.S.A.I.D. who resisted him were placed on administrative leave. Mr. Musk’s team also shut down U.S.A.I.D.’s headquarters overnight, emailing employees not to come in, and its website went dark.
The Trump team has been opaque about exactly what legal status allows Mr. Musk to be exercising executive power, even at Mr. Trump’s behest, but The New York Times reported this week that Mr. Musk has been deemed a “special government employee.”
The administration has not said when he acquired that status, nor whether or to what extent Mr. Trump has waived a criminal conflict-of-interest law that binds even special employees from touching government matters that could affect their personal interests. For Mr. Musk, that category is vast given how heavily his companies rely on federal contracts.
Nor have congressional Republicans sharply pushed back against Mr. Trump’s summary firing of 17 inspectors general, the independent watchdogs Congress created to hunt for waste, fraud, abuse and illegality in the government. The firings defied a law that required him to give detailed, written justifications to lawmakers 30 days in advance."
Lol?
It's a good question in terms of the legality of his EO's.
He does have a great deal of latitude in how the executive branch is run, and how large a workforce is needed. As for spending measures passed by congress, that's a different question? Is he required to spend it?
A good example is the use of force. Historically (if you remember our headlines Dec 8, 1941) congress decides when we commit forces. At least they used to. Now, there is very little stopping Trump from trying to fix Gaza.
Trump said on Tuesday the displacement of Palestinians from Gaza would be permanent, now his spokeswoman has tried to rescue him, saying he'd be "temporarily" relocating its residents.
I wonder if he wants a temporary permanent relocation or a permanent temporary relocation?
Great news! Men shouldn't be in women's sports.
Huge backlash coming from the
Canadian people.
Doesn't matter what the politicians say or do right now the Canadian people
are taking it upon themselves to not buy American products.
Jack Daniels being removed from shelves
Mexican and European goods along with Canadian goods taking the place of American goods.
The Canadian people are seriously angry about being talked down being threatened even
by the orange man next door.
AQ lot of them own summer homes in the USA but they're now going up for sale.
This attitude is spreading to other countries forcing America into
a corner... of isolationist reality.
Beware south America because the USA might well have to consider it
for resources and markets.... having two continents might make isolation very liveable.
Maddog is the following true?
Canada agreed to spend up to $1.3 billion on border control a deal they already signed with Biden in December. Further the so called illegals from Canada are less than 1% of the total in the past year. The fentanyl crisis at the border with Canada? 42 pounds or 19kg out of 22,000 pounds in the past year.
A win?
Now they have pissed off the greatest friend and ally of the USA in history for nothing, absolutely nothing. Ontario and other provinces are instituting don’t buy USA products no US companies are welcome and are putting in long term policies designed to specifically hurt the USA.
And Mexico?
The President of Mexico said she will send 10,000 troops to the border to help with border controls. Biden already had that done in 2022 with 10,000 Mexican troops and the current border situation is under control and the lowest in decades.
WTF?
These are wins?
And go against the entire trade agreement Trump negotiated and signed with Mexico and Canada to replace NAFTA just a few short years ago.
You have to be brain dead to call these victories. Piss off your allies, get nothing in return, absolutely nothing and call it a victory trying to kill your own agreement that he signed?