« Do you remember the days when the world already knew that there was a Covid-19 outbreak in Wuhan and that it was spreading rapidly, but you were not under lockdown yet? An in-between moment when it was clear a catastrophe was coming, but not what it meant. This stage of the US and Israel’s illegal attack on Iran is another such moment. The shock is here. The shockwaves are on their way. »
— Isabella Weber at The New Statesman.
That's a useful way of looking at it. We're at the Wuhan stage of the Trump oil crisis. So far we've only experienced a spike in the price of gasoline in the US. The effects have not yet spread through the rest of the economy.
Trump claimed that he's been negotiating with the Iranians and this has delayed his 48-hour timeline to "obliterate" Iran. The price of oil dropped after he said that. However, Iran denied any such talks existed and the oil price went up again. Trump is likely lying to manipulate the price of oil for political reasons.
Patriotic citizens are only beginning to battle against Trump's extreme agenda.
Jim Acosta at The Jim Acosta Show:
Just six days after he retired from his post as director of the National Institutes of Health, Dr. Francis Collins issued a plea to Donald Trump, Elon Musk and their minions at the Department of Government Efficiency. Remember the Hippocratic Oath: “Do no harm.”
The man who spent decades heading up the Human Genome Project and leading the U.S. response to the Covid-19 pandemic, then picked up his guitar and started singing.
[...]
The performance may not harken back to the days of The Beach Boys playing on the Mall on Independence Day. But pretty good for a federal retiree. All kidding aside, Doctor Collins’s subtle but stirring address commanded the attention of thousands of government scientists who gathered on the National Mall Friday to defend their lifesaving work.
One woman carried a sign that read: “Literally just trying to cure Multiple Sclerosis but okay.” Another quipped: “Got measles? No? Thank Science!”
Their messages, delivered near the steps of the Lincoln Memorial, served as yet another powerful chord, warning the White House that an increasingly loud, though still coalescing campaign against the extreme Trump/Musk agenda is finally mobilizing - a broad, ideologically diverse and growing political movement in America. Don’t want to call it the #resistance? Fine. I’ll refer to it as, “The Great American Pushback.” Or the GAP.
Over the past couple of weeks, the GAP appeared to include hundreds of Americans streaming into Republican town halls to lambaste GOP House members in ruby red strongholds. Trump and his allies attempted to brush off the raucous events as astroturfing from the left. But Republican leaders in Congress knew better and began instructing their side of the aisle to avoid such encounters with their constituents.
The clean-up on aisle DOGE is just one example that democracy can be slippery when wet. Just about every action taken by Trump and Musk has fallen flat in the latest public approval polls. Aaron Blake of the Washington Post neatly assembled some recent numbers in one damning post. Trump Agenda Unpopular
• Around 70 percent of Americans opposed the administration’s move to rename the Gulf of Mexico the “Gulf of America” (Ipsos and Marquette University Law School)
• 70 percent opposed dismantling the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (Ipsos)
• 62 percent in one poll and 74 percent in another opposed Trump’s plan to take control of Gaza (Quinnipiac University and Ipsos)
• 67 percent opposed freezing funds for public health agencies (Ipsos)
• As many as 65 percent opposed trying to take the Panama Canal (Marquette)
• 64 percent opposed his 25 percent tariffs on goods from Canada (Post-Ipsos)
• 60 percent in one poll and 64 percent in another opposed trying to make Canada the 51st state (Economist-YouGov and Reuters-Ipsos)
• 59 percent opposed his 25 percent tariffs on goods from Mexico (Post-Ipsos)
• 58 percent and 59 percent in two polls opposed dismantling the U.S. Agency for International Development (Ipsos and Washington Post-Ipsos)
• 58 percent opposed laying off large numbers of government workers (Post-Ipsos)
It’s not just Democrats and independent voters who are incensed by Trump’s policies. His own supporters have soured on his return to office as well. Reporters with Reuters recently visited Parkersburg, West Virginia, where they spoke with residents whose jobs were cut at the Treasury Department's Bureau of Fiscal Service. Dissatisfied Trump Supporters
Here’s just one quote from that Reuters report:
["‘Nobody that I've talked to understood the devastation that having this administration in office would do to our lives," Piggott, 47, told Reuters in an interview, saying she would not have supported Trump if she knew then what she knows now.”]
Of course, the Trump/Musk blitzkrieg, slashing the federal workforce to make way for a bureaucracy of loyalists, was previewed during the 2024 campaign. Press reports, including from yours truly, repeatedly warned voters that Trump would almost certainly follow the Heritage Foundation’s blueprint, “Project 2025,” to achieve a MAGA American makeover. You’ll recall Trump repeatedly lied, denying he had anything to do with it. But Musk and Russ Vought, the director of the White House Office of Management and Budget, have since put that conservative manifesto into action. Vought led OMB during Trump’s first administration and was a “Project 2025” architect.
Last week, green shoots in the “Great American Pushback” began to break through, presenting a few notable indicators that the building backlash against Trump’s agenda could be felt inside the White House. Press reports surfaced noting friction between Musk and Secretary of State Marco Rubio. Trump also reportedly told his cabinet secretaries they were ultimately the deciders on federal workforce cuts, not Musk. The comment, of course, contradicted Trump’s own words uttered only days earlier during his speech before a joint session of Congress, where he proclaimed the richest man in the world was in charge of DOGE, a statement that undercut his own administration’s claims in court. Trump’s spin was spiraling.
MAGA’s keeper of the populist flame, Steve Bannon has all but mounted billboards in Lafayette Square calling for Musk’s ouster from Trump world. The New York Times noted Bannon’s fierce criticism of the tech tycoon included a warning on his “War Room” podcast. Bannon on Musk
Former CNN host Jim Acosta wrote on Substack that we’re beginning to see the Great American Pushback against the Trump/Musk co-Presidency’s extreme and destructive agenda.
It’s wrong to indict a former president and presidential candidate, says the man who pushed for indictments of the last two Democratic presidents and last four Democratic nominees.
Trump ceded the moral high ground on this idea long ago.
He has advocated for the prosecutions of each of the last four Democratic presidential nominees — every single one since 2004. In two cases, he did it during the campaign, even suggesting they should be ineligible to run.
And that’s to say nothing of the many other political opponents he has suggested should be prosecuted. He even, in some cases, actually agitated for that outcome when he held sway over the Justice Department.
The “lock her up” chant leveled at Hillary Clinton is the most well-known entry in this long succession. Trump at times merely goaded his 2016 rally audiences to go down that road, but at other times he endorsed it. He said late in the 2016 campaign, “Hillary Clinton should have been prosecuted and should be in jail,” and he even told Clinton to her face at a debate that if he were president, “You’d be in jail.” He added at a later debate that “she shouldn’t be allowed to run.”
By 2020, Trump gave a similar treatment to both his predecessor as president, Barack Obama, and his then-opponent, Joe Biden.
A month before the election, Trump tweeted, “Where are all of the arrests?” He added: “BIDEN, OBAMA AND CROOKED HILLARY LED THIS TREASONOUS PLOT!!! BIDEN SHOULDN’T BE ALLOWED TO RUN - GOT CAUGHT!!!”
[...]
Former Trump White House chief of staff John Kelly summed up Trump’s posture this way to the New York Times’s Michael S. Schmidt and Maggie Haberman: “He was always telling me that we need to use the FBI and the IRS to go after people — it was constant and obsessive and is just what he’s claiming is being done to him now.”
Trump, his Republican enablers, and right-wing pundits who are outraged by Trump’s indictment are total hypocrites.
Ironically, it is the House “weaponization” committee that is now trying to “weaponize” the power of the U.S. House of Representatives to obstruct justice in New York State.
The media’s attempt to claim that the covert surveillance of and collection of information on American citizens tied to the Trump campaign does not constitute “spying” is as absurd today as it was when they first started attempting to claim that a year ago after it was revealed that the FBI had used an overseas intelligence asset in its anti-Trump operation.
The fact of the matter is that federal intelligence agencies spied on a rival political campaign. They illegally leaked information about that surveillance. They abused their authority to at best undermine the duly elected president and at worst to attempt a soft coup against him. They did so with the near-total cooperation of the American media establishment.
This is a scandal of epic proportions. It is one that threatens the foundations of constitutional government. It is a direct attack on American democracy.
If it is true, as the Washington Post asserts, that democracy dies in darkness, then every single improper deed done under the cloak of secrecy must be fully brought to light. The only way to restore the definitively lost credibility of the FBI and other intelligence agencies is through a thorough investigation of what happened, who was involved, and how they will be held accountable.
INDICTMENT
The Grand Jury for the District of Columbia charges:
Introduction
At all times relevant to this Indictment:
1. Defendants PAUL J. MANAFORT, JR., (MANAFORT) and RICHARD W. GATES III (GATES) served for years as political consultants and lobbyists. Between at least 2006 and 2015, MANAFORT and GATES acted as unregistered agents of the Government of Ukraine, the Party of Regions (a Ukrainian political party whose leader Victor Yanukovych was President from 2010 to 2014), Yanukovych, and the Opposition Bloc (a successor to the Party of Regions that formed in 2014 when Yanukovych fled to Russia), MANAFORT and GATES generated tens of millions of dollars in income as a result of their Ukraine work. In order to hide Ukraine payments from United States authorities, from approximately 2006 through at least 2016, MANAFORT and GATES laundered the money through scores of United States and foreign corporations, partnerships, and bank accounts.
The 12-count Manafort and Gates indictment, annotated - The Washington Post
^^^ The state of the Republican Party today. All we need are some sharks. 🦈
Republicans are in power in many cases because they've won by narrow margins. We need to sow more internal dissent in the ranks of the GOP.
The cracks in Trump’s base
Political writer Aaron Blake in that article identifies five areas where there is significant dissent in Trump's base from Trump's positions.
Jeffrey Epstein files
Inflation/cost of living
The Argentina bailout
Ukraine
Healthcare
Talk these up a lot and creatively combine issues like: "Trump gives bailouts to Argentine authoritarians but not to Americans in need of healthcare subsidies." OR "Jeffrey Epstein was in contact with the Kremlin in the years before he died."
And libertarian-leaning Republicans can't be terribly happy about Trump conducting an undeclared war off the coast of South America.
The 2026 midterms have the potential to save America. Instead of emphasizing our own favorite issues we should concentrate on those which will dampen GOP enthusiasm for Trump.
Trump's corruption is so blatant and extreme that it easily falls into the category of impeachable offencss.
Ari Melber mentions a Democratic former senator who is now serving time in federal prison for accepting gold bars. Donald Trump accepted gold bars from foreign nationals and he is still in office.
CNN published a major article on the extent of Trump corruption which fits in well with the vid above.
Some MAGA cultists claim that it is not Trump's signature on that 2003 birthday letter to convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein.
As fate would have it, Lawrence O'Donnell of MSNBC received a personal note from Trump in 2016 signed "Donald". The signatures from 2003 and 2016 match pretty clearly.
In the vid above, Lawrence tells the whole story of his unexpected correspondence with Trump.
CNN also threw cold water on Trump's claims that his birthday letter to BFF Jeffrey was "fake".
Trump’s Epstein letter denial just suffered another huge blow
Part of Trump’s denial rested on the idea that it wasn’t in his character to draw a picture like the one in the letter.
“I never wrote a picture in my life,” Trump said at one point. “I don’t draw pictures,” he added at another.
But it wasn’t hard to find doodles Trump had drawn around the same time. In fact, Trump donated an autographed doodle every year to a charity. A charity director also told CNN that Trump provided two signed drawings in 2004. That would have been the year after the 2003 birthday letter.
Further complicating Trump’s denials now is the signature that’s appended to the letter.
After the letter was made publicly available on Monday, the White House and prominent Trump allies quickly claimed the signature didn’t look like his.
[ ... ]
There’s a 1996 letter to then-New York Mayor Rudy Giuliani. There’s a 1995 letter to a member of a local Palm Beach commission. There’s a 1999 letter to former CNN host Larry King. There’s a 1984 letter to the executive editor of the New York Times, A.M. Rosenthal. Former MSNBC host Keith Olbermann on Monday produced a 2014 letter he received. There’s even an inscription from 1997 in a Trump book that Epstein owned.
All feature that loopier style, followed by a long tail coming off the final “d” in Trump’s first name.
Here's Donald's inscription on a copy of one of his books – given to Jeffrey Epstein.
^^^ It's dated "Oct '97" – more than 5½ years earlier than the Trump birthday letter.
The hardcore MAGA cultists won't care. They don't want to have to admit that they idolize a sex offender. But it may cause some concern among Trump's more squishy supporters who obsessed over the price of eggs last year.
