Lone Candle
Champion of Truth
Trump has used the pardon power to unjustly save his political allies. The founders said the control on the pardon power was impeachment, but that clearly isn’t going to happen.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q1kRAdQbQGA
South Park: Why Tech Bros WORSHIP Trump
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nIdmTmuNI58
“They were the 187th and 188th executive orders of Trump’s second term, on just its 203rd day.
That’s more executive orders than predecessor Joe Biden issued in his entire presidency, 162. It’s also more than George H.W. Bush (166), Gerald Ford (169), and 24 of the first 25 presidents. (Ulysses S. Grant, with his 217 over eight years, will likely be eclipsed by Trump’s 2025 totals this fall.) Neither the famously power-expanding George W. Bush, nor Barack Obama of the notorious “pen and phone,” signed as many as 188 executive orders in any of their combined four terms.
…
The move toward federal government by presidential fiat comes as a transformation not just of Republican orthodoxy, but of Trump’s own prior statements and actions.
At a campaign event in February 2016, the GOP front-runner complained that “the country wasn’t based on executive orders….Right now, Obama goes around signing executive orders. He can’t even get along with the Democrats, and he goes around signing all these executive orders. It’s a basic disaster. You can’t do it.” The next month, he vowed: “I want to not use too many executive orders, folks. Executive orders sort of came about more recently. Nobody ever heard of an executive order. Then all of a sudden Obama, because he couldn’t get anybody to agree with him, he starts signing them like they’re butter. So I want to do away with executive orders for the most part.”
The 2016 Republican Party Platform decried executive-branch overreach, starting a multiparagraph section on the subject with the declaration that “Our Constitution is in crisis.””
https://reason.com/2025/08/12/forget-obama-trumps-pen-and-phone-are-bigger-even-than-fdrs/
“Advocacy groups say more than 100 cruise ship crew members have been deported in recent months, and they’re not being shown the evidence against them or given any due process.”
https://reason.com/2025/08/13/cbp-is-deporting-cruise-ship-crew-over-child-pornography-allegations-without-evidence/
“”A lot of the problems with criminal justice in Washington lie in the federal courts where the city’s major prosecutions happen,” writes Josh Barro on Substack, imploring his fellow Democrats to be less dismissive about crime and to offer workable alternatives to Trump’s show-of-force plan. “There are too many judicial vacancies, and the U.S. Attorney’s office has been declining too many prosecutions, meaning too many criminals go free and too many miscreants believe they will get away with crime. Fixing those prosecutorial problems is a federal responsibility—Democrats should say that if Trump wants to be tough on crime, he can start by making sure prosecutors are bringing enough cases and there are enough judges to hear them.””
https://reason.com/2025/08/14/is-trumps-d-c-policing-doing-anything/
Because of the trade war, China is getting more agriculture goods from Brazil than the U.S.. China is building a port in Brazil to get even more from Brazil and even less from the U.S.. Too bad for U.S. farmers.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A4l_wHA8kvk
Trump is mostly deporting people without criminal histories.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AxXz7PbvT4I
If Trump successfully destroys the Fed’s independence, he will have eliminated the country’s ability to manage the economy with limited influence by short-term election cycles.
Israel hits hospital and kills five journalists, then says they will investigate what happened.
Trump is preparing to send the national guard to more cities. The national guard is not designed to enforce crime. Trump focuses on cities run by Democrats even though several high crime cities are run by Republicans. If Trump mostly or only sends troops to “crack down on crime” in Democrat run cities, that indicates that this is political intimidation and U.S. democracy is dead.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KLmiwzOxaaA
“Senate Republicans have already said they plan to move quickly to confirm Trump’s Council of Economic Advisers Chair Stephen Miran to fill one current vacancy. If Cook loses a pending legal challenge and is dismissed — and her replacement is confirmed by the GOP-controlled Senate —Trump-appointed Fed governors would hold four of the seven seats on the central bank’s board.
That majority, in turn, would be enough to control the reappointment of the 12 regional bank presidents throughout the country who also have a say on rates and whose five-year terms are scheduled to expire in February.
And that, in effect, could give Trump control of the Fed’s policy-making Federal Open Market Committee, whose refusal to lower interest rates throughout his second term has put the president on the warpath with Fed Chair Jerome Powell. Any exertion of White House control over the reappointment process for regional bank presidents would represent an extraordinary break in precedent.”
https://www.politico.com/news/2025/08/27/how-cooks-dismissal-would-upend-the-fed-00527582
“The administration’s attempts to paint all university faculty as woke are misguided. Many leading scientists and scholars have continued to push the boundaries of knowledge while either ignoring ongoing culture wars or avoiding administrative activists on their campuses. Throwing the baby out with the bathwater is never a good idea, nor is schadenfreude worth risking the future of knowledge. The proper way to fight one form of intolerance is not to impose your own brand of intolerance.”
https://reason.com/2025/08/14/americas-two-front-war-on-science/