Make America Medieval Again
Trump administration purges U.S. health agency leaders
Reassignment letters come as reductions in force begin at NIH, FDA, and CDC

 black321 wrote:

Today is actually April 2. Your calendar may show April 1 but late last night President Trump issued an executive order making all months 30 days long. That means March actually ended Sunday, March 30, and yesterday was April 1. “This will give dangerous aliens one fewer day each month to cross our borders illegally” Trump said.

“It’s more efficient to do away with the 31st’s,” added Elon Musk, whose Department of Government Efficiency has been cutting days out of the calendar for months.

But scientists are criticizing the move. “It leaves the earth six days short of a full cycle around the sun each year,” said Dr. Earnest Won, a Nobel Prize-winning geophysicist at the Berkeley Geodesic Laboratory.

In a second executive order issued late last night seemingly in response to Dr. Won, Trump mandated that the six extra days be devoted to himself.

Henceforth, what had been known as January 31, March 31, July 31, August 31, October 31, and December 31 will be known as “Trump Days,” in which “the nation can show its gratitude to the 45th and 47th president.”

“It still doesn’t add up,” said Dr. Won, “What about February?”

That was Dr. Won’s last comment before government agents forcibly took the geophysicist from his home in Berkeley, California, early this morning.

(Happy April 1.)

BREAKING NEWS: Trump Plans New Approach To Driving Down Retail Prices

WASHINGTON, DC, April 1, 2025 - President Donald Trump, in a late night post on Truth Social, expressed his continuing annoyance that grocery prices have not come down during the first several months of his administration, and said he plans to take extraordinary measures to drive prices down.

"I am planning to sign an executive order today, April 1, that will initiate a government takeover of Walmart, Amazon and Costco, at which time I will become the CEO of the combined company, which we will call 'WamazonCo,'" he said in the social media posting. "As one of the century's greatest and most stable marketing geniuses, I've also come up with a great slogan for the new business: We Trump Everyone Else's Prices."

Trump went on to say in his Truth Social posting that he believed this was the only surefire way to deal with persistent inflation, and that he would instruct Elon Musk to immediately go to work updating Amazon's, Walmart's and Costco's IT and logistics systems," which he described as "woefully out of date."

An added benefit of the move, Trump said, would be that he could end Costco's continued policy of investing in diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives that the company has said play a role in making its retail business stronger and more sustainable. He applauded Walmart and Amazon for eliminating DEI efforts on their own.

In addition, Trump said, nationalizing three of the nation's biggest retailers would allow the government to more quickly and efficiently assess new tariffs that will bring in revenue from foreign countries, allowing the US to retire its debt, reduce its deficit and end the national income tax.

Trump says 'not joking' about possible third term as US president: NBC
🤡

This Is America
Donald Trump’s authoritarian second term has led critics to describe him as a fascist in the mold of Adolf Hitler. But Trump’s reactionary politics are all-American — and the path to defeating him runs through reform of America’s antidemocratic institutions.

(...)

All-American Authoritarianism

The reality is that everything Trump is doing has antecedents in the history of the United States, and that the best way to apprehend Trump’s radicalism, and organize to stop it, is to place his behavior in the context of this longer history. Trumpism, in other words, is an intensification of long-standing, antidemocratic, and profoundly American trends. There is hardly a need to use the term fascism to understand it. This is America, and Trump is nothing if not deeply American.

Let’s begin with Trump’s attempted dismantling of the administrative state. To appreciate what’s going on, one doesn’t have to point to any foreign Führerprinzip; one only has to investigate the actual history of the US presidency.

Since the founding of the American republic in 1776, the presidency has grown in power while Congress, the supposed representative of the people’s will, has abdicated its responsibilities. This is most evident in the realm of foreign policy. The US Congress is constitutionally responsible for declaring war, but it has only done so eleven times, the last being in 1942.

Since that moment, though, the United States has been in a state of near-constant war. In addition to the well-known Korean, Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq Wars, in the decades after World War II, the United States has intervened against foreign societies, according to the political scientists Sidita Kushi and Monica Duffy Toft, with “the threat, display, or direct usage of force” over two hundred times. And what is true in foreign policy is true in other issue areas — the president has increasingly become the equivalent of an elected monarch. Put another way, there has been an ongoing, if usually ignored, constitutional crisis since at least the 1940s.

Most dramatically, in the last several decades, a radical and antidemocratic theory of presidential power, dubbed “the theory of the unitary executive,” has gained increasing sway in right-wing legal circles. As the political scientist Richard W. Waterman notes, this theory “posits that the president has sole responsibility for the control and maintenance of the executive branch” and concomitantly claims “that Congress does not have the right to enact laws that limit the president’s powers as chief executive or commander in chief” and “that the president has the same authority as the courts to interpret laws that relate to the executive branch.”

The theory of the unitary executive, which according to Waterman “represents a quantum expansion of the president’s administrative authority,” proved especially useful during the George W. Bush administration, and it is the one upon which many of Trump’s attempts to undo the administrative state rests. In deploying this theory, right-wing jurists have moved beyond the “imperial presidency” to embrace an “autocratic presidency” in which the president has become a kind of dictator.

To construct the argument for the autocratic presidency, jurists like John Yoo did not refer to fascist or Nazi law; they relied on US jurisprudence. The autocratic presidency is a very American invention. (...)

We have a second victim! Assistant Vice President JD Vance

Vance Lands in Greenland, a Place That Doesn’t Want Him

Mr. Vance waved in puzzled frustration for the plane to come back and pick him up, but the pilot had strict orders to depart without him. Minutes later, Mr. Vance was eaten by wolves. 

Elise Stefanik Is the First Casualty of the Great Trump Disillusionment

The decision to drop Representative Elise Stefanik’s nomination as ambassador to the United Nations could not have been an easy one for a White House that is loath to acknowledge any misstep, and it was clearly a humiliation for Stefanik. She had already begun a social-media farewell retrospective for her upstate New York district and stepped down from a leadership position, and as recently as Wednesday she posted a photo of herself with people she presumptuously called her “cabinet colleagues.”

Instead, it was most likely because Republicans knew they might struggle to keep her congressional seat in a special election. The warning signs are everywhere: As Nate Cohn of The Times wrote Friday morning, Trump has already blown his post-election honeymoon; more Americans disapprove of his performance than approve of it. A Democrat flipped an Iowa State Senate seat in January, and in Pennsylvania on Tuesday, another Democrat startled the political world by winning a State Senate district that Trump took by 15 points last November. Politico reports that Republicans are worried about an upcoming special congressional election in a deep-red Florida district.

It’s not that voters are suddenly drawn to the Democratic Party, which has yet to coalesce around a message or even a strategy. But as a series of raucous town halls around the country have demonstrated, voters are both angered and disillusioned by the administration’s early priorities. There are dozens of possible reasons: Consumer prices have yet to go down, and Trump’s love of tariffs is likely to push them up further. The stock market has sunk, along with the retirement savings of many voters, and the White House seems unperturbed by the prospect of a recession. The administration is doing real damage to middle-class foundations like Social Security, and red states will pay the heaviest price.

Most voters simply want competence from public officials, and the gross negligence shown by the use of personal phones to discuss war plans demonstrates the opposite. They want changes in their lives, not changes to the exhibits at the Smithsonian. They aren’t getting that, and Stefanik is one of the first to pay a price for it. There will be many others.

— David Firestone, ed writer, NYT 3/28/25

 islander wrote:
Aw shucks... *kicks can* I can't have any fun. 

 Isabeau wrote:

These have all been special elections with exceptionally low turnout, and turnout that is typically the kind of person who is not likely to be a trump supporter.  I wouldn't take special elections as any kind of broader measure.

 rgio wrote:
Big op for Democrats filling the void and letting millions of Americans voice their displeasure at their 'rallies.' Nothing makes people happier than a chance to be heard. Republicans are screwing up on this one. So far, democrats are winning elections in other parts of the country. One where Trump won by 16% and another that hasn't voted for a Democrat in 100 years.
The fear and anger is palpable.

 Red_Dragon wrote:
I wish Miyazaki would sue the shit out of them but unfortunately, this isn't the case I'd want to live forever. It's tasteless and evil and way beneath the office of the White House and that alone will cause a lot of damage to America BUT: she needs to be gone from here for good. If only this weren't an outlier that they're using to justify all the other shitbaggery they're doing.

 Steely_D wrote:

You don't have to be psychic to see the approval rating cliff Trump's falling off.  He's actually insulated a bit by all of the Musk anger, but inflation is going to start growing quickly... and even those who have recently approved are gonna start jumping off. (Nate Silver numbers below)

The fact that Republicans won't even host town halls because they don't have answers for the stupidity is proof they know things aren't good.

"President Trump on Thursday said he had asked Representative Elise Stefanik, Republican of New York, to stay in Congress rather than serve as ambassador to the United Nations, amid concern about the minuscule voting margin that Republicans hold in the House."

They're reading the room. Things must be changing there.

 Proclivities wrote:
You really believe that 47 won't tempt a military conflict? After the DEI purges, our Military is swiss cheese, and not in the least due to lax communication security.
Act of Congress? Surely, Proclivz, you know that's never going to happen: King Henry IX is in charge now, not elections, or voters. There is no longer a rule of law or judiciary. These boys are going to plow forward until someone loses an eye. 

"The exact sentence of Project 2025's "Mandate for Leadership 2025: The Conservative Promise" document, reads: "Improve military recruiters' access to secondary schools and require completion of the Armed Services Vocational Aptitude Battery (ASVAB) — the Military Entrance Examination — by All Students in Schools that receive Federal Funding."
Project 2025 requires that all Public high school students take the ASVAB exam for entrance into the military, yet Private school students will be exempt.

Gee. I wonder why.

It's been widely circulated around The American Enterprise Institute, Americans for Prosperity, House Freedom Fund, and National Defense PAC that #47 and Hegseth (aka, WhiskeyLeaks) plan to implement it during a National Emergency. But surely Trump and his highly competent staff won't let that happen. Right?

 ColdMiser wrote:
It's a feature, not a bug.

 Steely_D wrote:

 Proclivities wrote:
who the f**k cares about the price of eggs still? That ship sailed, what is going on now is far more worthy of attention. Wait till the first of next month when Social Security checks start being missed. 

 Proclivities wrote:

Among his faithful, anything he says is gospel. They will ignore the evidence of their eyes and wallets.

Trump wildly claims egg prices have dropped 50% as Americans grapple with bird flu crisis
Despite Trump's claims on Wednesday, data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics indicate that the average costs of a dozen eggs has actually increased since Trump took office amid the ongoing bird flu crisis.
According to the BLS, the cost of dozen eggs rose from $4.95 a dozen on average in January 2025, to $5.89 in February 2025.