Donald Trump is making it abundantly clear that he is not the president of the United States of America. He is president of the Red States of America. He doesn't give a rat's a** about the blue states. They are the internal enemy to be crushed like a bug. No previous president, of either party, has acted this way in a moment of crisis. Even Lincoln, while he was waging war against the Confederate states, regarded himself as president of them, and wanted to bring them back into the fold. All previous presidents have tried to bring the country together when there was a crisis. Trump sees this as a weakness. He sees the country as divided into two camps: his supporters and his enemies.
This is an actual plaque Mr. Trump has just put on the White House wall. No joke.
Biden was the only president that did NOT get a gilded portrait. Instead, it's a photo of an autopen.
Mr. Trump's constant pathological partisan hatred and bashing of Biden and the left is despicable, disgusting, and complete trash. The main reason MAGA is deplorable is because Mr. Trump is deplorable.
And criminal. And to put his grade school whining about the Democrats on the wall of the White House makes me sick.
They should be torn down and fed to him immediately. Make him eat the frames, too.
His delusional megalomania influences his actions. These plaques are embarrassing and treasonous.
This also proves there is no such thing as Trump Derangement Syndrome. There are just too many logical and rational reasons to hate him.
Fuckface von Clownstick Spins Dinner Shooting for Ballroom Agenda and Blitzer Is CNN's One-Shoed Hero
Jon Stewart dives into the chaos at the White House Correspondents' Dinner: After a shooter interrupted mentalist Oz Pearlman revealing Karoline Leavittâs baby name, cabinet members abandoned their wives to rush to safety, Wolf Blitzer reported on the scene without a shoe, and Fuckface von Clownstick insisted none of this wouldâve happened in his larger, more secure, East Wing ballroom. Plus, Triumph the Insult Comic Dog recounts his traumatic night of dodging bullets while trying to avoid having his carcass eaten by RFK Jr.
Jodi Kantor - Supreme Court Coverage & How to Start: Discovering Your Life's Work
Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Jodi Kantor sits down with Jon Stewart to discuss The New York Timesâ Supreme Court coverage and her latest book, How to Start: Discovering Your Lifeâs Work. They talk about getting a behind-the-scenes look at the Supreme Courtâs internal documents and private correspondence that detail the expansion of shadow docket cases, how the partisan results of rulings benefit President Fuckface von Clownstick more than previous Democratic presidents, and Kantor advises young graduates on approaching their lifeâs work in a positive, productive way in How to Start.
Ming Pao newspaper will end its operations in Canada at the end of the month, citing financial concerns.
Canada's last Chinese-language daily paper to cease operations, January 15, 2026
Chinese-language newspaper Ming Pao is ceasing Canadian operations at the end of the month. As JP Gallardo explains, the paper served a vital role in the Chinese-Canadian community.
Chinese-language paper, Ming Pao, closing down in Canada, January 16, 2026
Ming Pao Daily News has published its final issue Friday in Metro Vancouver. The publication, which started in Hong Kong, is shutting down its Canadian operations by the end of the month. The paper has been serving the Chinese-speaking community in Metro Vancouver for over three decades.
Only Chinese-language daily paper in Canada prints final editions, January 16, 2026
Ming Pao, the only Chinese-language daily newspaper in Canada printed its final editions and is closing offices in Richmond, B.C. and Toronto after more than thirty years. Some warn it may create news deserts for Chinese speakers and immigrants.
I have to stress this shrinking of Hong Kong/Chinese diaspora media isn't just about being left behind in the digital landscape. Every Chinatown had to have at least a couple bookstore/stationery /periodical racks filled with imported and domestic Chinese newspapers and magazines for every interest, age, and most political persuasions.
The retreat of Sing Tao and now Ming Pao in Canada is part of a deeper unwinding of generations of a specific, broader mass media intake. These are the connections that made and kept Canto-pop and dramas popular, an entire rental media and fast-paced dub/sub industry that moved new anime and manga out to the far reaches, bringing imported fandom merch and, just as important, the bootleg and blatant rip-offs with them. Television and radio stations seem to still be kicking, but clearly better at adjusting to a changing audience--one that probably isn't following the rise of pageant stars like a Maggie Cheung or Michelle Yeoh or the latest HK films.
Ming Pao is famously co-founded by Louis Cha (Jin Yong) of wuxia novel series fame. These kinds of printed media were a vehicle for the diaspora popular culture which included said serialized novels, politics, editorials, celebrity gossip, current events, comics, satire, the list goes on. They are an important tangible connection to the broader local and international culture for native Chinese readers.
Not only has the space moved online and on to phones, the remaining dailies and weeklies are reduced to only paid subscriptions, or finally completely online and have become mostly advertising and classifieds.
It is depressing to see the domestic papers reduced to barely a handful of articles, some obviously copy-pasted from syndication, and very little about anything current especially politically. The remaining print media that do have something to say are often hyper-partisan to the exclusion of much else--I'm looking directly at you Epoch Times. Since 1997, much of the Chinese-language media has moved to pro-PRC editorial stances and ownership, both implicitly and explicitly, meaning much less variety of perspective or even conspicuous silence from sources and journalism that used to command a great deal of trust.
Short of the occasional recipe, festive season or health article, and the local obit section, it feels like we've vacated the printed expression and exercise of a richer identity that kept us linked and aligned as a community.
Watching the clips from Trumpâs Madison Square Garden rally, what struck me more than anything else is how utterly unrecognizable the Republican Party has become under Trump. A party that once stressed the importance of honesty and integrity is gone. The rally speakers engaged in unrestrained vitriol and bigotry.Â
Itâs not all happening on stage either.Â
The Washington Post interviewed Craig Dumas, a T-shirt vendor at one of Trumpâs campaign events. His best seller? âSay No to the Hoe.â Variations of this message can be found at Trump rallies around the country. When the Post reporters talked with Brian Howard, a Trump rally-attendee, about his âJoe and the Hoe Gotta Goâ T-shirt, he replied: âWe can joke. We can wear crude shirts. Everybody here is having a good time.âÂ
Hilarious.Â
How much is Trump to blame for the type of nasty, derogatory rhetoric that has become a mainstay of American politics? I would argue more than a little. Â
But worse than the normalization of casual cruelty is the way Trump has subverted the importance of character in politics. In our late summer poll, we found that 44 percent of Americans believe he committed sexual assault. A Marquette Law School poll conducted over the summer found that 62 percent of voters believe Trump is corrupt. Only 41 percent of voters believe Trump could be described as honest and trustworthy. Even a quarter of Republicans do not believe Trump is honest.Â
Most Americans who are supporting Trump recognize that he has deep personality flaws, that he is not a good role model. The central animating question of the Trump era has always been: How can so many Americans support Trump for the countryâs highest office when so many Americans have such a low opinion of his character?Â
All Politicians Are Corrupt and DishonestÂ
From the very beginning of Trumpâs political career, he has sought to position himself as a brash outsider against a corrupt, effete establishment. At the same time, he never promised to restore honor and dignity to the presidency. Rather, he promised to wade into the swamp and fight dirty. Plenty of Americans were receptive to the message.Â
Itâs not hard to see why.Â
Trust in government has plummeted over the past few decades. Part of the reason this happened is that Americans increasingly view their elected leaders as unethical. This is a fairly recent phenomenon. Twenty years ago, only about one in four Americans rated the honesty of members of Congress as low or very low. Most Americans rated the honesty of their elected officials as average, and one in five rated it as above average. Today, most Americans do not believe members of Congress are honest or ethical. In 2023, seventy percent of the public rated the honesty and integrity of congressmembers as low or very low. Thatâs a massive change and it has profound implications on the voting decisions Americans make. If elected officials are viewed as universally dishonest, then integrity is no longer a useful metric in assessing their worthiness for public office.Â
Who benefits the most from this? The candidates who are most ethically compromised. Officials who engage in the most egregious acts of public corruption.Â
[...]
Polarized Voters Want Pugilistic PoliticiansÂ
It's been well documented that Americans have become more polarized over the past couple decades. This has been especially evident in the negative views partisans have about those across the aisleâa phenomenon political scientists define as affective polarization. Republicans and Democrats have come to dislike each other much more in the modern era.Â
A couple years ago I wrote about the dramatic change occurring among partisans during the Trump presidency. Republicans and Democrats not only believed their opponents were simply wrong or misguided, but that they presented a threat to the nation. In 2017, only about half of Democrats and Republicans believed their opposition represented a threat to the countryâa worryingly high number. By 2020, three-quarters of Republicans and nearly two-thirds of Democrats said the other side posed a threat to the country.Â
More recent polling suggests things may be getting worse. A new poll by Johns Hopkins University found that nearly half of Republicans and Democrats believe the opposing party is âdownright evil.â And a recent NBC News survey found that 8 in 10 Democrats and Republicans said their opponents are so dangerous they pose a threat that would destroy America as we know it.Â
The growing hostility that partisans feel towards their opponents has altered the way voters respond to deficiencies in their partyâs candidates. As partisan animosity toward their political opponents grows, Democrats and Republicans become less concerned about the behavior of their own leaders. It becomes easier to overlook disqualifying attributes, because the political alternative is always worse. Â
It has also led partisans to prioritize candidates who would go after their opponents. If character no longer matters amidst heightened partisan hostilities, an ability and willingness to destroy the other side does. Trump excels at this type of combative politics. He relishes it.Â
The real tragedy is that more Americans have come to believe that honesty and integrity donât matter. Trump has convinced many Americans that being a good guy in politics is not only unnecessary, but undesirable. Itâs a sign of weakness or capitulation. An unsurprising result is that more Americans discount a candidateâs character when making political choices. In 2011 most Americans believed that elected officials who engaged in immoral acts in their personal lives would not behave ethically in carrying out their public duties. Now, most Americans believe the opposite. The shift is far more pronounced among Republicans, but itâs not exclusive to them. Â
Whether he wins or loses, Trumpâs legacy will be forever wrapped up in his bizarre, belittling and bullying behavior, and how he transformed our expectations for political leaders. When Jeffrey Goldberg, editor in chief of The Atlantic, talked with Jared Kushner about Trumpâs behavior, he received a startling reply. âNo one can go as low as the president,â Kushner said. âYou shouldnât even try.â It was a compliment.Â
Daniel Cox of American Storylines wrote a stark reminder that character and morals were jettisoned with the rise of Donald Trump in GOP politics.
The fact that every president and VP has a garage or filing cabinet or shoebox full of classified documents isn't (merely) evidence of political impunity - it's also the latest absurd turn in the long-running true scandal: the American epidemic of overclassification and excessive secrecy.
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
Thousands of American bureaucrats have unilaterally classified tens of millions of unremarkable documents without any legitimate basis for shielding them from public view. Meanwhile, millions of people have "Top Secret clearance" and can view these documents, making a mockery of their supposed secrecy.
Writing for The American Prospect, David Dayen crystallizes the incentives, problems and corruption that we should be paying to, and laments that instead, we're scoring cheap political points about the recklessness of presidents and ex-presidents, heavily salted with paranoid fantasies about the Danger to National Security (TM) posed by letting these docs escape the airless chambers of official secrecy:
Overclassification is a well-documented (ahem) problem, used by bureaucrats to cover up corruption, crimes and incompetence, as well as out of the lazy reflex to declare everything to be secret. This is abetted by members of the vast "Intelligence Community" who have rotated into the private sector and have a lucrative side-hustle as TV talking heads who spin spy-thriller fantasies about the risks of these paper broken arrows.
Dayen points to Senator Moynihan's 1997 report on "Protecting and Reducing Government Secrecy," and its conclusion that if you declare everything secret, then nothing ends up being truly secret. It's a brilliant, readable, devastating critique of official secrecy. Nothing has been done about its recommendations:
https://sgp.fas.org/library/moynihan/
In 2016, the House Oversight Committee concluded that 90% of classified documents should not be classified, the same figure that the DoD came up with in its own report, 60 years earlier:
Meanwhile, the Information Security Oversight Office - which oversees classification - keeps ringing alarm bells about overclassification, with 50m+ documents being classified in a typical year. Rather than listen to the ISOO, Congress has cut its staff in half over the past decade. 620 ISOO employees oversee the three million Americans empowered to classify documents:
In 2010, the Washington Post's Dana Priest and William Arkin took stock of the post-9/11 explosion in state secrets in their "Top Secret America" report: "No one knows how much money it costs, how many people it employs, how many programs exist within it or exactly how many agencies do the same work."
Attempts to liberate classified docs using FOIA requests fail repeatedly, with US agencies returning heavily redacted documents, even blacking out a report on the plans of the "Group of the Martyr Ebenezer Scrooge [to hijack the Christmas Eve flight of] Prime Minister and Chief Courier S. Claus."
As Dayen says, the talking point from ex-spooks on TV that "overclassification is no excuse for bad document handling," is the equivalent of the old saw that "mass shootings are not the time to talk about gun control." And yet, the press keeps buying it.
Take the Politico op-ed by an ex-FBI spook, who turned the fact that "a foreign leader might like turnip-flavored ice cream into a classifiable scenario," proving that there is no overclassification excuse too absurd to get an airing:
Partisan split on booting the congresswoman from committees is more than a symptom of political civil war. It illustrates the normalization of anti-Zionism.
Pro-Israel Democrats could have taken a stand against her and Tlaib. But, intimidated by the rise of the intersectional movement that has seized control of the left-wing base of the Democratic Party, and fearing that they will be branded as racists if they speak out, they have refused to ostracize them.
In doing so, they have essentially legitimized Omarâs views. Her anti-Zionist and antisemitic ideas are now routinely published in the pages of liberal mainstream outlets like The New York Times and The Washington Post. And the ranks of the âSquadâ have vastly expanded in the last two election cycles, with even more sympathizers among those who identify as progressive Democrats.
Republicans have their outliers, like Greene and others. They routinely make outrageous and often indefensible statements, although Democrats are equally guilty of the promiscuous use of inappropriate Holocaust analogies.
But they are not guilty of seeking to normalize antisemitism by masquerading as mere âcriticsâ of Israel. And, unlike Omar, they lack the influence that comes with being part of a movement that already dominates academia and much of the media with its toxic myths about white privilege and lies about Israelâs being an âapartheidâ state.
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In giving Omar a pass for antisemitism, Democrats have crossed a line that no party or its supporters can transgress without being rightly accused of enabling Jew-hatred. By rallying around her, either out of party loyalty or hypocritical opposition to cancel culture that they never apply to embattled conservatives, is to make antisemitism a partisan issue. This is a historic development that may make it impossible to ever put the genie of intersectional hate for Jews back in the bottle. Itâs also an unforgivable betrayal of their Jewish voters and the principles of tolerance that they claim to uphold.
