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Trump In Charge: Wrecking Ball

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The US House of Representatives has voted against a Donald Trump-backed funding measure, bringing a government shutdown this weekend a step closer.

A revised spending plan failed to reach the two-thirds majority needed in the lower chamber of Congress, with 38 Republicans voting against the bill on Thursday night, defying the president-elect.

Trump had thwarted a previous cross-party funding deal that the Republican House leadership had struck with Democrats, after heavy criticism of the measure by tech billionaire Elon Musk.

After the bill failed by 174 votes to 235, Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson said he would come up with another solution before government funding lapses at midnight on Friday.

The Trump-approved replacement bill would have tied government funding to a two-year suspension of the federal debt limit, which determines how much the government can borrow to pay its bills.

Republican rebels objected because they oppose increases in government spending, while Democrats voted against it because they said the extra borrowing would be used to give tax cuts to the wealthy.

When Biden is in offcice: Oh noes, do not raise the dept ceiling!
But when Trump is: Just suspend the whole thing!

That last sentence is just beautiful irony: Republican rebels objected because they oppose increases in government spending.
It's the rebels in the Republican party who oppose increases in government spending.
Rebels! :crazyeye:

Oh well, now some smart American will come in and tell this dumb Yurp how MAGA and Trump is just a continuation of the Republican Party :)

After Musk drummed up opposition for the spending bill, Trump and JD Vance, the incoming vice-president, dealt the final blow to Johnson's deal that evening.

They said in a joint statement they wanted streamlined legislation without the Democratic-backed provisions that Johnson had included.

They also called for Congress to raise or eliminate the debt ceiling, which determines how much the government can borrow to pay its bills, and limit the funding legislation to temporary spending and disaster relief.

They called anything else "a betrayal of our country".
Well, if president Musk says so.

It also poses a challenge for Speaker Johnson, as the House is set to vote in just 15 days on who will serve as the House Speaker for the next Congress.

What previously looked like a secured position for Johnson is now seeming less of a sure thing.

Facing backlash from Trump and Mr Musk, the Louisiana Republican is now under scrutiny from those in his own party over his handling of government funding.

Several Republicans have indicated they will not vote for Johnson to lead the chamber. He cannot afford to lose the support of many Republicans, given that the party holds a slim majority of only five seats in the next Congress.

The threat to Johnson is serious, given Republicans' recent history.
 

'We have to straighten out the press': Trump's plan to sue media critics into submission​

The First Amendment offers scant protection from costly lawsuits

Lock up political critics? Donald Trump is open to it. But his prevailing tactic entering his second term is suing the media into submission.

We're not just talking about run-of-the-mill libel lawsuits.

We're talking about Trump now suing an Iowa newspaper for a bad poll. And suing the pollster for consumer fraud. He's suing 60 Minutes for how it edited a video — a video he wasn't even part of. He's demanding $10 billion. He's also suing the Pulitzer Prizes for rewarding newspapers that covered his alleged collusion with Russia.

This after he sued ABC News for claiming he'd been found liable for rape; in fact, he'd been found liable for sexual abuse, but not rape.

A number of media analysts this week expressed shock that ABC's parent company settled the rape-claim case without a trial. The Disney conglomerate paid out $15 million.

One global expert on free-speech called this a well-worn playbook used in autocratic countries: To sue, sue and keep suing, regardless of whether lawsuits have merit.

Winning the suit is almost beside the point, said Eric Heinze. What's key is to keep potential critics terrified of offending you, as it could result in ruinous legal fees.

"That's how autocrats work," said Heinze, law professor at the University of London, head of the Centre for Law, Democracy and Society, and author of a book about international lessons learned from free speech.

"Not by telling you how they're going to oppress you, but keeping you unclear about how or whether they will, or when they will. That's the secret of the autocrat. It's not clarity, it's vagueness."

The point of chilling the press, he said, is to make it financially risky for people to say things they know are perfectly legal.

The practice has an acronym: SLAPP​

The practice is so widespread it has an acronym: SLAPP, short for Strategic Lawsuits Against Public Participation. And it's used in all sorts of places, including in democracies by wealthy plaintiffs.

Cherian George is from a country notorious for the practice: Singapore. He said defamation cases are part of the ruling party's stock response to public debate.

In one famous case, a now-defunct magazine published an interview with an opposition leader who accused Singapore's government of abusing libel lawsuits to conceal corruption. How did the government respond? By suing the magazine for libel.

A former journalist, George is now an academic who studies free speech and teaches at Hong Kong Baptist University.

He tells his students — who are mostly from mainland China — that a big difference with the U.S. is that, because of how the First Amendment has been interpreted by courts, it's so difficult for politicians to win a defamation case that they rarely even try.

"I will have to update that lecture," George said.

He says a lot will hinge on the willingness of media owners to defend press freedom — the stuff of Hollywood movies, as with The Washington Post's battle to publish a massive leak of documents on the Vietnam War.

He called the ABC case a failed test, not the sort of moment Disney will ever want to commemorate in one of its own movies.

Profit-driven media owners are vulnerable to this political pressure, he said.

Just two days after Disney settled, there was another example of a wealthy media owner scrambling to get on Trump's good side.

Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, who also happens to own the Washington Post, donated $1 million to Trump's inauguration fund and flew to Mar-a-Lago.

During the recent election, he stunned his own newspaper staff by cancelling an editorial that endorsed Trump's opponent Kamala Harris.

Trump remarked in a cryptic social-media post Thursday that he's suddenly popular with certain unnamed people, in an all-caps message: "EVERYBODY WANTS TO BE MY FRIEND!!!"

Disney's desire to make nice with Trump has drawn ample criticism.

NBC host Chuck Todd complained that his ABC peer George Stephanopoulos was abandoned. The anti-Trump conservative news outlet The Bulwark fretted that media will start self-censoring, and stop platforming the hardest-hitting Trump critics.

Trump once acknowledged motive for suing media​

But some reports say the case was more complicated.

The New York Post suggested Disney settled to avoid an awkward discovery process, including evidence that Stephanopoulos was warned several times before going on the air to avoid using the word, "rape," then used the word repeatedly.

The New York Times said Disney's lawyers were worried the case could go all the way to the Supreme Court and wind up becoming a pretext to weaken First Amendment case law.

As it stands, it's extraordinarily difficult for a public figure in the U.S. to sue successfully for libel. Media are protected unless they publish speech that is knowingly malicious and recklessly indifferent to the truth.

It's the legacy of a court case in which the New York Times was sued over a 1960 ad opposing segregation. An Alabama police commissioner said it contained errors and maligned him unfairly, and he was initially awarded $500,000, but the Supreme Court overturned it in New York Times v. Sullivan, the foundation of current U.S. libel law.

There have been efforts to challenge it. And a couple of Supreme Court justices, especially Clarence Thomas, support revisiting that 1964 decision.

In the meantime, most suits like these get thrown out of court.

Trump is on the record explaining, to Heinze's earlier point, that, when it comes to libel suits, winning isn't everything.

Trump acknowledged this after suing a journalist in 2006 who questioned his claim of being a billionaire; he sued, lost, and then said it was worth it.

"I spent a couple of bucks on legal fees, and they spent a whole lot more," Trump said.

"I did it to make his life miserable, which I'm happy about."

He's now aiming to render a few more people's lives difficult.

A summary of Trump's lawsuits​

This includes suing one of the most-respected pollsters in the U.S. under the Iowa Consumer Fraud Act. The reason? A catastrophically bad poll conducted by Ann Selzer, who has since retired after what had been a stellar career.

A few days before the November election, she shocked the country with a survey showing Kamala Harris leading in Iowa, a result that pointed to a potential national landslide for her, and it got considerable media attention because of her track record.

Trump ultimately won Iowa by 13 points; in his court filing, he said the poll forced his campaign to unnecessarily expend resources in Iowa, and he argued that an error of that magnitude was not statistically possible, but was in fact a malicious act.

He's seeking unspecified financial damages from her and is also suing the newspaper that published the survey, the Des Moines Register.

That's after Trump sued CBS over 60 Minutes editing clips of an interview with Kamala Harris. The show ran a shortened clip of her grappling with an uncomfortable topic for her: the Middle East. It then resisted calls to publicly release a full interview transcript. He's seeking $10 billion.

But CBS denies Trump's accusation of malice. It says it ran one clip of the Harris answer on its show, and shared a different clip from that same answer with another CBS show.

e's also suing the Pulitzer Prize board over awards to newspapers for their coverage of his 2016 campaign's alleged collusion with Russia — "the Russia, Russia, Russia hoax," as Trump calls it.

The 2016 affair resulted in criminal charges against some of Trump's senior campaign staff and the Pulitzers have defended the awards they gave to the New York Times and Washington Post.

In reaction to the pollster lawsuit, Columbia University's free-speech Knight Institute called Trump's effort a non-starter under the First Amendment and urged the court to dismiss it quickly, recognizing it for what it is: An attempt to intimidate and silence.

But Trump expressed his full-fledged support for these suits during a media conference this week.

In fact, he said, he shouldn't even have to be funding these cases — the U.S. Justice Department should be doing it; in other words, the Justice Department he's about to start leading in one month.

"We have to straighten out the press," Trump said.
https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/trump-suing-media-analysis-1.7415493
 
I read it and kind of agree but I also have a feeling like nah, not really. It's difficult to tell with Trump just what he is actually willing to do. There are substantial questions about the distance he is willing to travel.

He's lazy. If he encounters moderate resistance, is he going to diligently organize a movement of supporters capable and motivated to engage in paramilitary action? We shall see. That's work. Comparisons are occasionally made to Julius Caesar too, who led men into battle personally, whereas, in the riot Trump incited, he reportedly sat watching while sipping on diet Coke. His courage to do that may even be reasonably doubted.

When comparisons are made to Hitler or Mussolini, both guys have a diligence that Trump does not. I think consequently what Trump is likely to do is (probably) rightly perceived as a making of a sort of showmanship of politics. he may promise to deport millions, and will have genuine ideologues whispering in his ear how to do so, people who use the word "degenerate" regularly and with glee, but at the end of the day, he is likely to simply make a show of it and call it a day.

This is basically what I think the common wager of the Trump voter is. It's a flirtation with authoritarianism, made by people sympathetic to attacks on modernity(which shouldn't be stunning, it itself is often attacking values traditionalists cherish successfully), so it is dangerous, but claims Trump is fascist aren't really taken seriously by many people. Some ingredients are there but only strident anti-Trump partisans are likely to think he can actually turn them into a meal.
He likes getting people's goats more than actual work.
 
Was charisma why Biden won?
Biden was more popular, probably because lots of voters wanted COVID to end and the BLM protests to end and all the Trump scandals and drama to end and for things to go back to normal. Biden was offering a return to normalcy, from the insanity that we'd all endured, and that stability and competence came across in his tone while he was campaigning. If you want to call that "charisma" I wouldn't argue against that.
 
Biden was more popular, probably because lots of voters wanted COVID to end and the BLM protests to end and all the Trump scandals and drama to end and for things to go back to normal. Biden was offering a return to normalcy, from the insanity that we'd all endured, and that stability and competence came across in his tone while he was campaigning. If you want to call that "charisma" I wouldn't argue against that.
I wouldn't call it charisma. I would claim instead that Biden personally was basically irrelevant to the outcome of that election. It was instead a referendum on Trump's ability to govern. He would be vulnerable again if prices go up under his administration.

The two poles are mostly created and maintained by value differences, but there is plenty of room for the winds of fortune to push on sailboat across the line first.
 
He would be vulnerable again if prices go up under his administration.
He cannot run again. The GOP House may be vulnerable in 2026 if Trump comes across as a failure (loser).
 
Well, he's gonna try to run again, I expect
 
I wouldn't call it charisma.
Ah, so your question was a rhetorical one/strawman. No worries.

I see now, that when you brought up "charisma", I should have declined by noting that I didn't say anything about "charisma", and left it at that. You got me to take that bait:p Good one.;)
 
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Ah, so your question was a rhetorical one/strawman. No worries.

I see now, that when you brought up "charisma", I should have declined by noting that I didn't say anything about "charisma", and left it at that. You got me to take that bait:p Good one.;)
He cannot run again. The GOP House may be vulnerable in 2026 if Trump comes across as a failure (loser).
Yeah, rhetorical. Charismatic Dem is not strictly necessary for Trumpism to lose support. It'd just help.

Its loss of support is pretty likely if he tries to deliver on tariffs and deportations, and it flops, with further price hikes. Nor will he take state actions increasingly necessary to redistribute wealth(he will not set off the trend reversal light bulb in the anti-status quo'ers). It can still fail as a project, even with an ineffective opposition, really.

I suppose its relevant beyond the already mentioned midterms because Trump's ability to remain in power personally(and Trumpism in general) is pretty much dependent on support for him directly. He has no real avenue to run again. To arrange circumstances so that he could would require substantial domestic support. Everything from bureaucratic resistance(or alternatively, bureaucratic willingness) to deny or advance his agenda, to SC decisions will definitely be influenced by his support. Hinges on it, really.
 
There is an actual law against it now. Trump will be way too old and likely unhealthy enough to be unable to run. To open that door for an 80+ year old would be dangerous if a young, charismatic Dem won and then proceeded to go for 3 or more terms.

As the boatswain says: "stroke, stroke, stroke...."
 
There is an actual law against it now. Trump will be way too old and likely unhealthy enough to be unable to run. To open that door for an 80+ year old would be dangerous if a young, charismatic Dem won and then proceeded to go for 3 or more terms.
Yeah, but he will want to hang on to keep immunity from all the crimes he did in his second term.
 
Yeah, but he will want to hang on to keep immunity from all the crimes he did in his second term.
Of course he wants to. I'd like to have better hearing also. "You can't always get what you want."
 
Yeah, but he will want to hang on to keep immunity from all the crimes he did in his second term.
Judge Merchan already declined to vacate Trump's conviction on immunity grounds. If Judge Merchan announces that he is delaying sentencing until Trump's term as POTUS ends, you can bet your bottom dollar that Trump is going to pull another gambit to try and stay in office.
 
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