Tag: Donald Trump

Trump Blames Autism on Tylenol While Americans Prep for the Rapture on TikTok | The Daily Show

Posted on by Lone Candle

The president of the United States rambled falsities about important health science. Not good. Bad.

I’m all for a serious evidence-based discussion on the risks and benefits of different medications, but the nation’s leader ad libbing bullshit is not helpful.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RTf2MdntsF0

Ezra Klein: When A Shutdown is the Only Option | The Bulwark Podcast

Posted on by Lone Candle

“I think you’re having a shutdown because there are masked men in the streets; I think you’re having a shutdown because the FCC is using its powers to silence comedians; I think you’re having a shutdown because Donald Trump is weaponizing the workings of the federal government into something that is like what we see in Hungary; I think you’re having a shutdown because we are in fundamentally abnormal political circumstances and a shutdown is one of very few ways for Democrats to yell really loudly, ‘stop, this is some kind of emergency…we are going to try to throw ourselves in front of this truck’. Even if healthcare polls well…I think on some level, both your people and the public…know that this is not really about healthcare.”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iUAGkuq48zY

Trump’s WILD Address to the United Nations and His U-Turn on Ukraine

Posted on by Lone Candle

Trump defines him ending a war as a war or conflict ending or having a cease fire if the U.S. was involved in some way, even if Trump’s involvement had no impact on the outcome or if the participants say that Trump’s involvement wasn’t important.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=otQ1hXjKRxs

American Democracy Might Be Stronger Than Donald Trump

Posted on by Lone Candle

“Trump does all the same things as the authoritarians Levitsky and Ziblatt studied: He has refused to accept electoral defeats; called political opponents criminals and tried to jail them even while backing his own violent supporters; and lashed out at opponents and the media as “enemies of the people” — a chilling phrase that echoes Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin and the Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels.

But Trump’s authoritarianism also resembles that of dangerous populists who failed to kill democracy. Careful studies that never seem to get much press find that only about a fifth of dangerous populists actually kill democracy, including in different regions and across different time spans. If you’re serious about weighing the Trump threat, you should be asking what makes the difference between countries where democracy died and countries where it survives.”

https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2025/09/19/american-democracy-resilience-00548910

Don’t Be Fooled by a Trump-Xi Deal on TikTok

Posted on by Lone Candle

“Over the last eight months, the Trump administration has run roughshod over Congress and its constitutional prerogatives. Trump’s decision to ignore the TikTok ban on his first day in office may seem minor in the grand scheme of things, but it foreshadowed a series of far more aggressive moves to usurp much of lawmakers’ constitutional authority: dismantling congressionally-created agencies, redirecting congressionally appropriated funds and implementing a massive tax hike on the American public in the form of Trump’s chaotic tariff regime.

The vast majority of this was made possible by congressional Republicans, who have largely turned a blind eye to all of Trump’s gambits, and by the Republican appointees on the Supreme Court, who have handed Trump a series of victories this year in his wide-ranging efforts to both unilaterally slash the federal government while dramatically expanding the powers of the presidency.

The acquiescence to Trump’s TikTok reprieve this year has been a far more bipartisan affair, but it has been a constitutional farce all the same, and it is not over yet.”

https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2025/09/19/tiktok-trump-xi-deal-law-column-00571832

Supreme Court keeps in place Trump funding freeze that threatens billions of dollars in foreign aid

Posted on by Lone Candle

Why have a Congress if the president can just ignore its laws? Why have a Constitution if the president can just ignore it? The power to spend is clearly given to Congress. The President is supposed to execute that spending. This is the president refusing to faithfully execute those laws, clearly violating the division of powers spelled out in the Constitution.

“The Supreme Court on Friday extended an order that allows President Donald Trump’s administration to keep frozen nearly $5 billion in foreign aid, handing him another victory in a dispute over presidential power.

With the three liberal justices in dissent, the court’s conservative majority granted the Republican administration’s emergency appeal in a case involving billions of dollars in congressionally approved aid. Trump said last month that he would not spend the money, invoking disputed authority that was last used by a president roughly 50 years ago.

The Justice Department sought the high court’s intervention after U.S. District Judge Amir Ali ruled that Trump’s action was likely illegal and that Congress would have to approve the decision to withhold the funding.”

https://www.yahoo.com/news/articles/supreme-court-keeps-place-trump-204620328.html

Donald Trump Is Not the Bitcoin President

Posted on by Lone Candle

“Trump’s Nashville speech discussed bitcoin interchangeably with “crypto,” but bitcoin is fundamentally different from other cryptocurrencies. It runs on a decentralized, peer-to-peer software network and issuance schedule that, by design, can’t be tampered with by centralized authorities. It provides a way to send value over the internet without trusting third-party intermediaries. Like the gold standard, it’s a neutral monetary system; unlike gold, it has no physical properties, making it harder to seize or censor. If bitcoin fully succeeds, governments will no longer be able to steal from their citizens by printing money, and they’ll no longer be able to cut people off from payment networks and banking services.

“Crypto,” on the other hand, typically describes a set of centrally issued tokens, usually administered by foundations, neobanks, and tech companies. Most “crypto” projects are outright scams or pyramid schemes; most have failed to find (or never looked for) real-world adoption.

The major exception is “stablecoins,” which have emerged as the crypto industry’s killer application. They work like casino chips: a stablecoin company issues $100 worth of digital dollar tokens and simultaneously backs them with $100 of “high-quality” assets, typically U.S. Treasuries. Stablecoins aren’t routed through the conventional banking system, so they move easily across borders and are readily accessible in parts of the world where the dollar is in high demand.

Stablecoins’ key innovation isn’t technical; it’s regulatory arbitrage. They mean dollars for anyone, with no rules. Like bitcoin, they’re a quasi-permissionless, internet-native form of money; unlike bitcoin, they rely on the U.S. dollar for their value and are almost entirely administered by companies.

…

As early as 2018, millions of people in Iran, Turkey, Nigeria, and Argentina began using Tether as an “offshore” dollar that local authorities couldn’t easily confiscate. With stablecoins, a refugee in a war zone can access dollars just as easily as a London bank. A recent study from ARK Invest estimated that there are 200 million stablecoin holders, compared to a billion holders of paper dollars. As countries like Russia and Iran attempt to coerce their citizens into using collapsing local currencies, the people are increasingly turning to stablecoins, which are hard to ban.

There is significant bitcoin adoption in authoritarian countries and collapsing economies as well, but many prefer stablecoins to mitigate price volatility. Stablecoins track the dollar, while bitcoin floats. Like the dollar, stablecoins gradually lose value over time, but they don’t experience wild price swings.

…

unlike bitcoin, stablecoins require users to trust the companies that issue them. The tokens can be frozen, inflated, or remotely confiscated—and if the company issuing them commits fraud, they can become worthless. They’re a useful tool, but they aren’t in the same category as bitcoin, which is essentially freedom money.”

https://reason.com/2025/09/12/donald-trump-is-not-the-bitcoin-president/