Very Trump-era story. 1. The sword has no meaning for Charles, but matters for the Eisenhower Museum. 2. Illegal for the museum to give away US property! 3. Trump makes no distinction between personal/public property. 4. The person who did the right thing was fired. www.nytimes.com/2025/10/02/a...

We are now in the domain of not just illegal impoundments, but targeted illegal impoundments to punish liberal spaces. Not different from what Trump is doing to to universities.

The Trump regime is dissolving the Union unilaterally, that's what these actions *are*—repudiation of the American constitutional order vis-a-vis federalism.

13yo boys. All these guys. Their emotional & intellectual development stopped at 13. They want big bangs & cool boom booms that make them feel vicarious thrills, like on TV.

Want an example of something Democrats can do that’s not a strongly worded letter? DO NOT SAVE REPUBLICANS FROM THE CRISIS THEY CREATED. Their budget bill is going to increase healthcare premiums for 22 million Americans by 75% while financing a massive tax cut for billionaires.

“We are arresting the Mayor, per the Deputy Attorney General of the United States.” Read that again. This wasn't about trespassing. It was a direct order from the highest levels of the Trump administration to silence and punish a political opponent.

NEW: Rachel Maddow drops unseen bodycam footage of feds coordinating the arrest of Newark Mayor Baraka. I REPEAT: the feds ordered his arrest even though he wasn’t breaking any laws. Federal agent: “We are arresting the mayor right now per the Deputy Attorney General of the United States.”

I keep using the term "non compos mentis" to describe Trump because that's how he's acting. It's beyond his longstanding history of total ignorance, habitual lying, and constant exaggeration. He's genuinely disconnected from reality and often incapable of expressing coherent thoughts.

Trump is building a personalist regime where every university must bend the knee or lose funding and every business must bend the knee or face tariffs, H-1B fees, and regulatory blackmail. You can't cover each domain in isolation; they are all the same story.

"The effect is a line-item veto for the president over spending... Once again, the rules magically change when Trump is in office... This is not behavior that a healthy democracy tolerates from its judiciary. It is the kind of constitutional rot that precedes the rule of law’s collapse."

the evidence in favor of the traditional understand of the birthright citizenship clause is so overwhelming that a bunch of conservative legal hacks had to conjure a fake literature int existence to create the appearance of dispute. i expect the court to side with trump, of course.

A pattern is developing where everyone who fights back against a Trump attack inevitably wins with their reputation much better than before, and everyone who caves to him looks like shit and has Trump coming back for more a month later.

JD Vance appropriating the term "blood libel" to describe legitimate criticism of ICE agents is one of the most antisemitic things I have heard in US politics in the past few weeks. Yet this administration has somehow managed to convince a lot of people it actually cares about fighting antisemitism.

This is an infuriating and shameful scandal. The Roberts Court is condoning Trump’s law breaking, again, pure and simple. There is no serious path forward for democratic government without Supreme Court reform.

Yet again, the GOP supermajority steps in to allow Trump to break the law. The case will be decided on the merits later, it says, when the damage cannot be undone. But in the meantime it is giving the Trump administration a green light to engage in impoundment.

It’s hard to explain how bad you have to be acting to get all of these people on the same side.

I’m starting to notice a trend in the polling data… —Top Public Worry: Corruption —Biggest problem in Fed Gov: Corruption —Top fear: Corruption —What one word would you use to describe American government?: “Corrupt” It’s almost like voters are trying to tell us something.

DC is plurality black and 1 in 7 residents are immigrants

Scenes from an authoritarian regime

Also: when a government acts brutally and lawlessly and immorally, but tells you that pointing those things out incites violence and terrorism, that government and its agents are entitled to no respect or credence.

This is really bad. It won’t get the popular opposition the Kimmel incident did, but it’s way more sweeping and authoritarian. This is an effort to bring the full force of government down on any and all opposition to this administration. www.whitehouse.gov/presidential...

Trump cut U.S. military aid to Taiwan the *same day* he made a TikTok deal with Xi Jinping. And it turns out the financial benefits of Trump's TikTok deal are going to his own billionaire allies. Insanely corrupt.

A police officer was killed in the attack on the CDC by an antivaxxer. Trump did not mention it. Use this as a benchmark to compare how the Trump administration responds to an attack on an ICE facility to judge which federal employees are deemed worth protecting. abcnews.go.com/US/1-week-af...

Nothing says “land of the free” like armed agents of the state saying “show me your papers if you want your daughter back” bsky.app/profile/nbcb...

In December 2023, Special Counsel Jack Smith asked SCOTUS to grant cert before judgement to hear Trump’s immunity appeal. The court rejected that request and didn’t issue its immunity decision until July 2024. Trump’s federal cases never made it to trial before the November 2024 election.

Certiorari "before judgment" is how #SCOTUS takes up a full appeal *before* the intermediate federal courts have heard it. It used to be exceedingly rare. For instance, there wasn't a *single* grant of such expedited review b/w August 2004 & February 2019. This is the *23rd* such grant since then.

At the Nuremberg trials, Karl Dönitz was convicted of war crimes for the sinking of civilian vessels. This is not a complicated question, it's been illegal for centuries.

I lay this at the feet of DOGE and all of their enablers.

For my friends, everything; for my enemies, the law

This clear declaration that Trump views the DOJ to be an entity designed to impose his political retribution - alongside the clear evidence that it is already being used in this way - is impeachable.

In a less insane time, if it was discovered that the President of the United States said this privately to their AG, it would’ve triggered an all-encompassing, impeachable corruption scandal. Here, Trump is saying it publicly and it’s just another Saturday.

There is no world in which it is normal for the president to publicly call upon his attorney general to hurry up and prosecute his political foes. It’s like the Watergate tapes but posted on social media. Let’s get a grip on what’s happening here.

Critical part of the President's new $100,000 charge for H1-B visas: The Administration can also offer a $100,000 discount to any person, company, or industry that it wants. Replacing rules with arbitrary discretion. Want visas? You know who to call and who to flatter.

Trump has done more to establish a unitary executive than all the judges or legal scholars in the world could ever do. And Trump has done more to discredit and expose the unitary executive theory as lawless authoritarianism than any judge or legal scholar could ever do.

The new $100k/year H1B fee is pure economic self-harm—workers making **5 times the median US income**, who contribute massively to the US, would still basically be unable to afford this fee Oh, but never fear, the White House reserves the right to dish out exemptions as favors!

if I were a member of the current Trump administration I would not be excited about the concept of “illegal pardons”

Googling “which president negotiated crappy exit agreement with Taliban”

At least Trump's dropped the pretense that this is about Charlie Kirk and is instead really just about him not wanting to be made fun of.

It’s been sad this year watching how the White House press corps refuses to back each other up. Here a female journalist is insulted and denigrated and the next male reporter just moves on to a new question. You’re all in this together, folks. Time & again, they won’t stand up for their colleagues.

How many "cancel culture is bad, both left and right do it" pieces like this are we going to get that minimize the GIANT FIRST AMENDMENT VIOLATIONS this time? www.natesilver.net/p/the-politi... Cancel culture can be bad; liberals should reflect. But this is more than just a reversal of 2020.

The Republican reaction to Kirk’s murder has been a campaign of state repression that ends with Trumpist toadies deciding what Americans are allowed to think, do and say. www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archiv...

The US president saying "Comedians and the news are not allowed to criticized me" should be giant front-page news in every outlet in America, by the way. It's him repudiating the First Amendment and the Constitution. Unambiguously and clearly.

Incredible achievement that the one price that the Trump administration has brought down notably is "cocaine."

It's a crony capitalism nightmare: somehow, the most influential social media app in the country will be controlled by a hellish corporate amalgam of fascist tech oligarchs AND the Chinese government, after the president of the US specifically ignored the law to allow his allies to seize it

You know, it's hard to outdo previous Trump scandals, but not even pretending to follow the law in order to practice a system of cronyism entirely inconsistent with the American tradition of free enterprise has a strong case for number 1.

NYT: gone. WaPo: gone. LA Times: gone. CBS: gone. CNN: gone. MSNBC: going. Plus almost all local newspapers & local TV news stations. Plus almost all of social media. The information environment is utterly dominated by the right & everything else is downstream of that.

staring straight into the camera and lying. just a despicable person and a poor excuse for a national leader.