By design.

This is a deliberate offensive in the class war the wealthy snd empowered few are already fighting, and that we’re losing by forfeit.

Ah… I’ve been waiting for them to complete the Lebanon/Syria/Iran/Yemen rotation for a few weeks now.

I am so fucking tired of this government of not simply the most corrupt, but the most stupidly corrupt.

The kakistocrat.

Sure a good thing that the responsible and conscientious conservatives elected a right-thinking president who’s going to cut wasteful spending and balance the budget, hmm?

Imagine what it would be like if instead a rabble of petulant, frightened assholes elected a deranged overgrown toddler who pissed away billions on whatever idiocy happened to trigger his stunted emotions on any given day.

There’s no need for anyone to tell anyone anything.

The rich shitweasels who own one media conglomerate have enough common interests with the rich shitweasels who own another media conglomerate that they tend to arrive at more or less the same decisions and same policies even if they do so wholly and completely separately.

That’s generally the case broadly too - not just in this instance, or even just regarding media conglomerates.

It’s cynically amusing that at this point Trump isn’t even doing any of the things his apologists pointed to.

Supposedly it was okay if he had some personal ethics issues, because he was going to drive down prices and inflation, cut wasteful spending, balance the budget and keep the US out of foreign wars.

And instead, he’s driving up prices and inflation, increasing wasteful spending, increasing the deficit by the greatest amount ever in history, and warmongering around the world. And his personal ethics issues have exploded into a veritable orgy of ridiculously brazen corruption.

And the apologists just keep shambling along, leading a parade of morons who still can’t see it.

Just as with the Trump regime, all you have to do to recognize their lies is listen to what they say all the rest of the time.

Teachers from California and New York who want to work in Oklahoma public schools

So nobody ever.

Best guess - is he so stupid he believes this or so dishonest he pretends?

Yes, he lies literally non-stop, so that’s always the safe bet, but with this tariff thing in particular, he seems to sincerely believe that they’re some kind of magic, and he fairly obviously has no idea how they actually work. So it seems at least possible that he genuinely believes this.

Which would take a special kind of stupid, but if there’s anyone capable of it, it’s Trump.

One can only conclude that the official Mt. Sinai position is that Gaza must die.

Pence has to be trolling him, right?

Trump’s a lovestruck teenager and Putin’s his bad boy crush. He couldn’t stand up to him if his life depended on it. And Pence has to know that (hell - anybody who isn’t a delusional MAGA has to know it - it’s not like he’s subtle about it).

Where did I say that others do deserve to?

Yeah… somehow I can’t be arsed to care about the supposed threats to someone who oversees an army of masked thugs who black bag people and send them to concentration camps and foreign torture prisons.

Seems to me that if that’s the kind of world she wants, that’s the kind of world she, more than anyone else, should have to live in.

Politics, in any form.

Corporate, in any form.

Police, in any form.

Military, in any form.

They all - I believe that institutionalized, hierarchical authority is rather obviously inherently destructive, and I couldn’t willingly take part. In fact, one of the things that perplexes me the most about politics in particular is that there are people who do willingly take part. I can only conclude that their brains are broken in some fundamental way such that they don’t see or don’t care about the harm they inevitably do.

One of the oddest aspects of this patently insane era, to me, is that all it takes to see its insanity is to simply listen to what politicians (and their cronies and minions) are actually saying and watch what they’re actually doing.

For example, even as official mouthpieces continue to insist that Israel is not engaged in a genocide of Palestinisns, right-wing politicians and their supporters are actively and even enthusiastically calling for it and soldiers and police and government agents are gleefully bragging about and even filming themselves carrying it out.

It’s not even insanity - that’s an insufficient term. It’s like exponential insanity - insanity².

I’m sure they’re looking at the long term.

While Trump might prove a short term difficulty for them, they’re very much in favor of his project of concentrating power in the executive branch and are looking forward to getting someone more amenable (read “for sale”) in the office.

I just think it’s funny that “AI” (which is “artificial intelligence” not in the sense of “human-made” but in the sense of “fake”) is contemperaneous with Trump.

This is going to go down in history (if humanity survives long enough) as the Idiot and Lunatic Age.

From what I’ve gleaned of the ravings of the angry stupid right blogosphere, a lot of people actually do think that only tree huggers want green energy.

And I have little doubt that that’s an opinion that Trump shares, but that’s not his main motivation in all of this. His main motivation is big fat bribes from the fossil fuel industry.

And thanks to Trump, the US is perfectly placed to be entirely left behind.