Mega-Thread: Trump Focused Discussion

[gondrin]

So, here is Trump stating he knows what is best for you. Remember the outrage when Michelle Obama said that there should be healthy meals in schools.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/polit...55759460&ei=17

Donald Trump on Sunday raged against the Wall Street Journal, this time for a report about deliberations with his Cabinet members.

Trump has been recently dogged by the WSJ's blockbuster report on a purported birthday letter sent from Trump to disgraced financier and convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein. Trump has denied writing it.

He weighed in on a different story over the weekend.

"The Wall Street Journal ran a typically untruthful story today by saying that Secretary of the Treasury, Scott Bessent, explained to me that firing Jerome 'Too Late' Powell, the Worst Federal Reserve Chairman in History, would be bad for the Market," Trump wrote. "Nobody had to explain that to me."

Trump continued:

"I know better than anybody what’s good for the Market, and what’s good for the U.S.A. If it weren’t for me, the Market wouldn’t be at Record Highs right now, it probably would have CRASHED!"

He concluded, "So, get your information CORRECT. People don’t explain to me, I explain to them!"

Someone should tell Trump that the Dow Jones isn't at a record high right now. It is about 750 points off its highest point. NASDAQ is about 700 points above its previous high. S&P is about 150 points above its previous high.

[Edge-]

So, here is Trump stating he knows what is best for you. Remember the outrage when Michelle Obama said that there should be healthy meals in schools.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/polit...55759460&ei=17



Someone should tell Trump that the Dow Jones isn't at a record high right now. It is about 750 points off its highest point. NASDAQ is about 700 points above its previous high. S&P is about 150 points above its previous high.

guy who bankrupted a casino and thinks foreign countries pay tariffs "understands the economy" uh huh

[Breccia]

Someone should tell Trump that the Dow Jones isn't at a record high right now. It is about 750 points off its highest point.

And, funny story, it would have been higher, but Trump's specific and direct actions taken on purpose in public damaged it.

- - - Updated - - -

FOX News predicts *ding* that Trump plans to renegotiate the USMCA.

Lutnick called the move a logical step during an appearance on CBS’ "Face the Nation."

"It makes perfect sense," the billionaire businessman said, referring to the trade agreement’s upcoming joint review.

"I think the president is absolutely going to renegotiate USMCA, but that’s a year from today," Lutnick said, pointing to the scheduled July 2026 review. The review, part of the agreement’s sunset clause, allows the deal to be assessed every six years and sets it to expire after 16 years unless all parties agree to an extension.

"He wants to protect American jobs," Lutnick said of Trump. "He doesn't want cars built in Canada or Mexico when they can be built in Michigan and Ohio. It's just better for American workers."

"Wait, if it's that bad, why did Trump sign it?"

He didn't say.

"What if Canada and Mexico don't agree to the terms, which Trump will clearly make less favorable to them?"

Then nothing happens. Or, Trump unilaterally breaks the contract (which he's allowed to do giving six month's notice) further damaging trade. The role of the US as a reliable trading partner goes from "nothing" to "less than nothing since they don't honor the deals they wrote themselves". Meanwhile US auto makers flood to Mexico because there'll no longer be a reason not to.

"But what about tariffs?"

US autos are already made out of imported parts. They're already being tariffed. The gap from parts->whole car is less than the price of labor between the two countries. As long as no law prevents them, they'll just fire everyone and shut down US plants.

Incidentally, as per usual, this was someone getting on FOX News to speak to Trump. How do I know?

Lutnick praised Trump’s approach to trade and tariffs, saying the president is "doing it the right way."

"The president’s got the American workers’ back," he said. "That’s why they elected him. That’s why the stock market is at all-time highs."

Because that's an objective lie flattering to Trump. As discussed mere minutes ago, no, the stock market is not at all-time highs, and it isn't because of Trump. He also does not have workers' backs, he is working to destroy unions and their medical care. Getting them fired is just the next logical step.

Speaking of getting people fired, Q1 2025 saw more farms filing Chapter 12 bankruptcy than Q1 of 2024. And 2024 apparently wasn't great. Trump's key demographics are being destroyed by Trump's actions that they voted for. Lutnick got that part right.

- - - Updated - - -

I may put a restriction on them that if they don’t change the name back to the original ‘Washington Redskins,’ and get rid of the ridiculous moniker, ‘Washington Commanders. I won’t make a deal for them to build a Stadium in Washington.

Pettiest human being on Earth throws a hissy fit that other people aren't as racist as he is.

[Edge-]

Pettiest human being on Earth throws a hissy fit that other people aren't as racist as he is.

weird that he's trying to distract from his cover-up of his fellow pedophile friend jeff epstein by doing the racism

[Endus]

I mean, under normal circumstances the US government disappearing a lawful resident would be a fucking scandal.

But it's just another in the nonstop stories of abject, white supremacist cruelty.

The stupidest principle is anyone getting legal immunity for actions that aren't lawful.

It's one thing if it's an honest accident (two people, same name, grabbed the wrong one because they fit the warrant kind of thing), but if there is any kind of lack of process or oversight that leads to something like this, the people involved need to be up on criminal charges.

You deported someone unlawfully? That's kidnapping, at a minimum, assault and battery if anyone ever put hands on them, human trafficking most likely, and so on.

Not only should the people involved be facing prison, the liability in civil terms should be seven figures, minimum. More likely 8.

The biggest issue facing the USA in general is a lack of basic accountability, if you're on the side of oligarchic power.

Accountability and standards have to go up alongside privilege and power, not down.

[Captain N]

The biggest issue facing the USA in general is a lack of basic accountability, if you're on the side of oligarchic power.

Well we can't have the working class thinking that they have any sort of power. If they ever figure out that they outnumber the oligarchs by a large margin they might do what those French people did with that big head removing device.

[Breccia]

The stupidest principle is anyone getting legal immunity for actions that aren't lawful.

That sounds like what Acosta did for Epstein. Trump hired him on purpose.

[Endus]

That sounds like what Acosta did for Epstein. Trump hired him on purpose.

Oddly, trading legal immunity for testimony is the one exception I can make. I'm more pointing at things like qualified immunity for LEOs or that members of Congress can't be sued for defamation for "political" statements, plus all the nonsense about legal immunities for POTUS, who doesn't need any such protections whatsoever.

A cop who crosses a line in a stop and grabs someone who doesn't warrant an arrest should be prosectuted for assault and battery and unlawful confinement, and that's presuming the encounter stops with uncuffing the guy and letting him go. And without justification, he should be facing the maximum sentences for those crimes automatically, because he's a cop. The unions should be tripping over themselves to get this guy prosecuted and thrown in prison, because he's a bad cop and makes all cops (their members) look bad.

The whole system's upside down from how it should be. And the only purpose is protecting abusive assholes from consequences.

[Breccia]

Oddly, trading legal immunity for testimony is the one exception I can make.

True, but from the top down?

[Rasulis]

Trump threatens to hold up stadium deal if Washington Commanders don't switch back to Redskins

No. Not an Onion piece.

[Dontrike]

To no surprise an Epstein victim had named Trump twice to law enforcement.

Disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein’s first accuser says she warned the Federal Bureau of Investigation on two occasions to look into President Donald Trump’s conduct as an associate of the disgraced sex offender.

In an interview with The New York Times, Maria Farmer, who in 1996 was the first to report Epstein’s sexual offenses, recalled a 1995 encounter with Trump after she was summoned to see Epstein at his luxurious Manhattan offices.

Farmer, who was preparing to do some work for Epstein, said she was wearing running shorts when she turned up at the building to find Trump in a suit. Farmer told the Times that she started feeling scared as Trump allegedly stared at her bare legs, but Epstein came into the room and broke the tension. Farmer said Epstein reportedly said to Trump, “No, no. She’s not here for you.”

The incident left Farmer shaken, with her alleging that she could hear Trump tell Epstein in the other room that he thought she was a teenager, the Times reported.

The next year, Farmer told the FBI that she was sexually assaulted by Epstein and his alleged accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell, who is serving a 20-year prison sentence, and warned that the two had “committed multiple serious sex crimes” against her and other girls, including her then-15-year-old sister, Annie.

Although Farmer, now in her mid-50s, said she has not seen Trump engage in any inappropriate behavior and has had no other uncomfortable encounters with the MAGA figurehead, the incident was enough for her to tell the FBI to look into the people in Epstein’s orbit, including Trump.

According to Farmer, she was alarmed by what she saw working at Epstein’s mansion, including his pursuit of young girls and using them to gain favor with prominent people, including the likes of Alan Dershowitz and former President Bill Clinton.

Farmer also spoke to the Sixth Precinct of the New York Police Department in 1996, police records show, the Times reported.

White House Communications Director Steven Cheung denied Farmer’s claims in a statement to the the , saying, “The president was never in his office.” He added, “The fact is that the president kicked him out of his club for being a creep.”

Farmer filed a lawsuit against the federal government on May 29 on the grounds that it failed to protect her and other victims of Epstein and Maxwell. Farmer said she warned of Epstein’s associates again in a 2006 FBI interview, but nothing allegedly came of it, the Times reported.

Epstein was indicted in 2006, later pleading guilty to two felony charges, including soliciting a minor. Then in 2019, he was charged again and accused of trafficking dozens of girls as young as 14 years old. He then committed suicide and was found dead in his jail cell at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in New York.

As Trump looks to bury his alleged connections to Epstein in the press—filing a $10 billion lawsuit over a Wall Street Journal report on a lewd drawing he allegedly sent Epstein for his 50th birthday—Farmer’s testimony has picked up new steam as MAGA demands that the Trump administration unseal all Epstein files.

Previously, Trump referred to Epstein as a “terrific guy” in a 2022 New York magazine article, with one of Epstein’s exes also describing Trump as Epstein’s “bro.”

Yet in a lengthy Truth Social post on July 16, Trump ripped some of his followers for believing what he called the “Jeffrey Epstein Hoax.”

“Their new SCAM is what we will forever call the Jeffrey Epstein Hoax, and my PAST supporters have bought into this ‘bullshit,’ hook, line, and sinker. They haven’t learned their lesson, and probably never will, even after being conned by the Lunatic Left for 8 long years,” he wrote. “Let these weaklings continue forward and do the Democrats work, don’t even think about talking of our incredible and unprecedented success, because I don’t want their support any more!”

[Breccia]

Reports are starting to come in that Trump is going to tariff Russia to end the Ukraine war.

"I think you mean sanction."

No. You heard me the first time.

While I'm waiting for a credible source (or, you know, Trump doing it) here's a NYTimes piece.

Trump’s pledge to “Make America Great Again” appears to be having an unexpected side effect: He is bringing Europeans together again.

I'll sum up: we all remember Brexit. The EU was banged up, until Trump declared trade war on them, and they banded together to defend against Trump. Not the US. Trump.

But even in member states like Denmark, which has long been skeptical of the European Union’s budget and border policies, feelings toward the bloc have turned decidedly more positive.

“Support toward the E.U. has never been higher,” Marie Bjerre, Denmark’s minister for European Affairs, said in an interview.

About 74 percent of Danes said that they trusted the European Union in a recent public opinion survey conducted for the European Commission, up from 63 percent five years ago. That shift is far from isolated — across member states, citizens are feeling more trusting toward the European Union, continuing a trend that outside polls have found.

The article does say that the EU pulled together harder to defend against COVID, which makes sense, and Putin, Trump's favorite sexual partner that isn't a small child.

[gondrin]

I am going to put this here. This is a short so, as far as I know, there is no way to actually embed the video like it normally is possible with youtube. So I am just going to give a direct link to it.

https://www.youtube.com/shorts/3dbgzmGFnKc

This video is a clip of the one posted earlier of the guy questioning 20 far-right conservatives. The clip shows one of them openly admitting they are a fascist when it gets pointed out to them what they want is fascism. The guy actively wants selective enforcement of the rules. The guy believes that if democrats were in power, they should never be allowed to amend or change the laws in any way but believes that Trump(or someone similar) should be allowed to change them as they see fit, only if it benefits said fascists.

This is why I keep saying Trump isn't a conservative. Because this is his die-hard supporters. They don't care about the Constitution. They don't care about the laws. They only want to project power onto others. Because they think they will be part of the "in group".

- - - Updated - - -

So, the Washington Post just published a little history lesson about the anti-immigration stances in the United States.

They say history repeats itself. Well, it is about ready to repeat itself majorly.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/in...df35cff8&ei=12

Roy McNutt was 17 when he spent a summer picking pickles for America.

“It was lousy,” he said.

McNutt, now 77, joined thousands of high school teens harvesting cucumbers, melons, strawberries and carrots during the summer of 1965. That was after Congress cut off the pathway for millions of migrant workers from Mexico to cross the border and bring that food to the nation’s tables.

The Mexican Farm Labor program had been created in 1942 to address the World War II labor shortage. Known as the bracero program. it allowed generations of manual laborers to work in the United States and was set to expire in 1964. A revival of the program, the Bracero 2.0 Act, was introduced in Congress last week.

“It was a time of both heightened xenophobia and heightened critique of foreign guest workers,” said Lori Flores, associate history professor at Columbia University. The migrant workers were “either taking jobs away from citizens in various spheres or draining public aid and resources.”

So U.S. officials let the program die. They were convinced that unemployed, domestic workers would fill those jobs. They did not.

The fields of unpicked produce began rotting.

“Farm Work Builds Men!” read one of the fliers that the Labor Department began sending to schools, with the image of Heisman Trophy winner John Huarte urging high school jocks to spend the summer saving the 1965 crop.

The government plan was for thousands of athletes to sign up for “Join A-TEAM” (Athletes in Temporary Employment as Agricultural Manpower). The Labor Department urged the coaches to become field supervisors and bond with the players, who would surely get stronger and more disciplined toiling in the hot sun. As the school year ended, hometown papers ran glowing stories about the boys, capturing their toothpaste smiles as they prepared to set off on a noble adventure.

“We were getting away from our parents for the summer,” said Randy Carter, who was 17 when he got on a bus with his Catholic school pals in San Diego and headed to Blythe, California, to pick cantaloupes. “We thought, maybe there would be some girls! Maybe we could get beer!”

Carter wanted to earn money for a surfboard. One of the guys had a guitar.

It would be fun, they hoped. But the entire program was a disaster.

The article in McNutt’s hometown paper, the Springfield, Ohio, News-Sun, said his group would be in the Heinz cucumber fields.

The group left the farm in Michigan after only a week.

The labor was slow, and growers quickly complained that the cucumbers grew faster than the boys could pick them and got too big to pickle.

“That’s a truckload of garbage I’ve got,” Hank Keytylo told the Detroit Free Press that August, pointing to a load from his 20-acre cucumber patch.

“I’ll get $50 for the whole truckload,” Keytylo said. “Any other years, I’d get $150 for a truckload.”

Meanwhile the boys, stunned at the living conditions and the backbreaking work in fields from Michigan to Texas to California, complained.

“They were fed food that was unfit for human consumption,” Rep. Teno Roncalio (D-Wyoming) said of his state’s A-TEAM members who were sent to Salinas, California. In a speech on the House floor on June 29, 1965, he said that they “lived in beds filthy with bedbugs; they had to associate with switchblade knife carriers.”

At least one of his colleagues was thrilled with this testimony.

“I am delighted to hear the gentleman from Wyoming give this report to the House, because the conditions he described are the conditions I and others have been describing and deploring over many years as they applied to other workers,” said Rep. Jeffery Cohelan (D-California).

The 37 boys all paid their own way back to Wyoming, and Roncalio wanted the growers or the government to pay them back.

Most of the program went like this.

And because America’s corn-fed boys complained about working conditions, the nation finally listened to the grim reality about the way food gets to the table.

“In denouncing these conditions as unacceptable for U.S. workers, Roncalio failed to acknowledge that braceros had endured these exact conditions since 1942,” Flores wrote in “Grounds for Dreaming,” her book about Mexican workers and immigrants in the California farmworker movement.

“It had taken young citizen athletes complaining of similar sufferings to alert him and others to the mistreatment of farmworkers,” she said.

That was just as Cesar Chavez was beginning to organize farmworkers to protest the low pay and deplorable working conditions they faced.

The influx, then rejection of migrant labor forces is a familiar cycle in the United States.

During the late 1900s, most farmworkers in the U.S. came from China, Japan and the Philippines. Xenophobic hysteria spawned the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, and the U.S. turned to Mexico and South America to replace the banned Chinese workers.

During the Great Depression, President Herbert Hoover ordered the deportation of nearly 2 million migrant workers who had come from Mexico. The creation of a border patrol in 1924 tightened the U.S.-Mexico border.

Then, during World War II, the government changed its mind. Farm labor was desperately needed to harvest the crops, which is what spawned the bracero program to bring Mexican laborers to the U.S. on short-term contracts. It lasted until 1964, when America again became averse to migrant labor.

So, Congress let the program die. And growers again pleaded for help, saying the domestic workforce was uninterested in their minimum-wage jobs. Extensions of the visa programs for non-U.S. workers would be the only things that would save the American produce aisle.

“Crops are rotting, and they are rotting because of a genuine labor shortage in spite of all the efforts by responsible growers to recruit and maintain a domestic labor force,” O.W. Fillerup, executive vice president of the Council of California Growers, said to the Associated Press for an article published May 5, 1965.

W. Willard Wirtz, the U.S. secretary of labor, said the growers weren’t trying hard enough to hire domestic labor and announced his A-TEAM program.

Carter was among the 3,300 boys who were all in.

Sandy Koufax, Rafer Johnson — “big athletes did these press conferences,” he said.

So he got on the bus to Blythe, a stretch of agricultural nowhere far from the ocean and closer to the Colorado River.

The program promised good pay, good food, good housing conditions. But the first meal they were served was boiled tongue, which many weren’t used to eating. The bunks were made of hard metal.

“You’re wearing an overcoat before dawn, since it’s chilly,” said Carter, who went on to work in Hollywood and has written a screenplay about his time as a melon picker. “And by 9 o’clock, it’s 120 degrees.”

More than half the kids quit. And only one high school team — the guys from Cresco, Iowa — finished with all 31 boys who started, the AP reported in the autumn of 1965.

The boys were horrified by the food and living conditions. Some got milk after making demands for more nutrition. One boy from Utah, Ed Carlson, said his cafeteria had a riot after they all threw down their trays filled with slop. In some cases, the growers ended up having to foot the bill at local cafes, which served the only palatable food for miles.

Growers complained of flying melons and strawberries — food fights in the fields. They were teens, after all.

Many of the boys said they were never paid.

“Not a dime,” said McNutt, the pickle picker.

After most of the crew of boys from Wichita quit, one of the bosses was circumspect about the program. He said that part of the failure was undervaluing the work of the braceros.

“It takes skill,” Bill Pihl told the Beacon. “It’s cold in the morning and hot in the afternoon. It’s rough work.

“And for kids who never did it, it’s impossible.”

Remember, this was in the 1960s. And guess what? Americans didn't want to do the work then either. And once again, the crops were left to rot in the fields.

I guess this is a lesson we will have to repeat every few decades. Because has been a thing that literally happens every few decades.

[Breccia]

TIME Magazine and Lord of the Dings FOX News report that Team Trump is working to have Obama jailed for...uh...

This was politicized intelligence that was used as the basis for countless smears seeking to delegitimize President Trump’s victory, the years-long Mueller investigation, two Congressional impeachments, high level officials being investigated, arrested, and thrown in jail, heightened US-Russia tensions, and more

-- Tulsi Gabbard

Specifically, the 2017 release of a-

"Obama wasn't President in 2017. Barring a few days."

I know, but the attempt to deligitimize-

"And they found actual evidence. Nothing in any of the claims was manufactured."

Look, stop trying to bring logic and evidence to a Team Trump discussion. Basically, because Trump says the charges against them are a hoax, he's allowed to arrest-

"Didn't Trump specifically get SCOTUS to say specifically that anything the President does is assumed to be okay?"

Again, don't bring logic to a hypocrisy-off. There is no evidence of an illegal conspiracy to keep Trump down, because none such existed or exists. This is a distraction to keep the people cheering for a senile retarded fraud racist terrorist pedophile who's destroying the country from slowly coming to grips of the damage they've done to themselves and their own lives. Let's also add that 2017 was more than seven years ago, and I'm pretty sure the statute of limitations has run out on anything they can think of.

[Draco-Onis]

Reports are starting to come in that Trump is going to tariff Russia to end the Ukraine war.

"I think you mean sanction."

No. You heard me the first time.

While I'm waiting for a credible source (or, you know, Trump doing it) here's a NYTimes piece.



I'll sum up: we all remember Brexit. The EU was banged up, until Trump declared trade war on them, and they banded together to defend against Trump. Not the US. Trump.



The article does say that the EU pulled together harder to defend against COVID, which makes sense, and Putin, Trump's favorite sexual partner that isn't a small child.

Trump is just bringing people together... against America granted not a good thing for Americans but he is at least bring other countries together. He is doing things no one has done before like making South Korea, Japan and China to join hands against us truly a historic president.

[Malkiah]

This is why I keep saying Trump isn't a conservative. Because this is his die-hard supporters. They don't care about the Constitution. They don't care about the laws. They only want to project power onto others. Because they think they will be part of the "in group".

(insert "they're the same picture" meme here)

political cynicism aside i do want to ask you something...
when have US political conservatives ever not been (collectively) fascist regressives? this isn't some rhetorical gotcha, this is a legit question.
i became politically activated in the early 2000s during bush's era and have been a politics hound ever since then, and both republicans in general and the US conservative movement writ large has been a theocratic nightmare for the last 25 years, and were basically just state department ghouls for US imperialism for the 50 years before that.

i understand the general concept of having a pure notion of what a "conservative" is (much akin to how i don't consider democrats to be liberals in any way) but what i don't get is how anyone can think that version of a conservative has existed in the US zeitgeist since uh... jfc... roosevelt?

[fwc577]

Friendly Reminder that all the antics over the last week are all nothing burgers and meant to distract from the fact that Trump is probably heavily implicated within the Epstein Files he's refusing to release because he's probably a sick, kiddy diddling Pedo who probably sexually molested his daughter and he's supported by sick, sick, cult members who love to defend his pedophilia, some of which continue to post on these forums.

[Rasulis]

If you are planning to get solar panel/battery, geothermal heat exchange, heat pump, new high efficiency window, insulate your home, etc., better do it before December 31, 2025. The federal tax credit is going away. The same with electric cars. The $7,500 tax credit is also going away.

[Edge-]

so we found out donald enlisted the DOJ and 1,000 FBI agents to comb through the files looking for mentions of him?

yeah, he absolutely raped a lot of kids

the evidence is now all probably garbage since the chain of custody has been obliterated at this point.

wild what happens when a plurality of americans vote republican and elect rapist/child rapist.

- - - Updated - - -

https://www.the-independent.com/news...-b2789412.html

did y'all know bill o'reilly is still doing news stuff?!?!

well he is!

And he thought the epstein stuff was all the fault of joe biden and merrick garland

At the same time, though, O’Reilly confidently asserted that the deceased sex offender had been prosecuted and found guilty by Biden’s DOJ – despite Epstein dying a year-and-a-half before the 46th president took office.

“This is what infuriates me about these people! Jeffries knew the Biden administration had exactly the same thing the Trump administration has on Epstein. Exactly! Because Epstein was convicted during the Biden administration,” O’Reilly exclaimed.

he had to be reminded that he was convicted under donald trump

and died while donald trump was in office

“Hold on, Bill! You said Epstein was convicted during the Biden administration. Epstein committed suicide during the Trump administration,” the NewsNation anchor noted.

“Yeah, so?!” O’Reilly indignantly retorted.

“How do you convict a guy that is dead?” Vittert wondered.

a real hum dinger of a question

O’Reilly went on to insist that Epstein was “convicted under Merrick Garland’s Justice Department” and then “incarcerated” before killing himself in jail, prompting Vittert to explain that his guest had his facts completely wrong.

“Bill, I think this is important,” the On Balance host noted. “He was arrested in 2019, and he committed suicide in 2019. He died August 10, 2019. So the Biden administration was not involved in a conviction or a trial of him. They were with his madam, Ghislaine Maxwell.”

bill o'reilly, who didn't know how tides work and thought it was a mystery and proof of a higher power (we do, it's gravity and the moon, we've known this for a very long time now), thinks time travel exists, apparently

the conservative mind is really, truly broken

[Zemini7]

Is the epstein scandal finally sticking? Is the base of uneducated low iq maga echo chambers faltering? I see a lot infighting going on. I am out of popcorn.

I don't know if its been posted; Founder of Right-Wing Group Behind Project 2025 Dies at 83

I never want to cheer about a death, but…I believe he's finding out what Hell is like.

No problem, ill do the cheering for you.