Tag: Donald Trump

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Donald Trump Elon Musk GOP

Trump Tosses Elon Musk Under The Bus While Republicans Chuckle

On Wednesday, president-elect Donald Trump decided he’d let Twitter CEO Elon Musk know that he’s growing tired of his company, humiliating him in front of House Republicans during a conference.

Lawrence O’Donnell of MSNBC noted that Trump has a “twisted psyche” and has to “humiliate everyone around him to demonstrate his dominance over them.”

Trump told the GOP lawmakers, “Elon won’t go home. I can’t get rid of him.”

“Everyone laughed,” O’Donnell noted. “They laughed that uncomfortable laugh. But they laugh when Donald Trump makes a joke about someone on his team, a joke that everyone knows is true, a joke that paints that person as pathetic, as Donald Trump’s personal sense of superiority demands that he do.”

Earlier this week, Trump announced that Musk would be the co-head of a new agency tasked with cutting bureaucratic waste in government.

That too is a slap in the face to Musk, O’Donnell added, because it’s a “fake” job with no actual power.

In other words, O’Donnell concluded, Trump is now officially “Elon’s daddy.”

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Donald Trump Elections GOP

Trump’s Fragile Political Coalition ‘May Not Survive’ For Long – Here’s Why

 

According to some in the Republican Party, Donald Trump’s unexpected win last week and the gains made by the GOP suggest that a “political realignment” is underway in the country that will make their party a permanent majority.

However, according to political scientists John Judis and Ruy Teixeira, the coalition Trump assembled for his win is incredibly fragile and may not last long.

Writing in the New York Times, Judis and Teixeira warn that Trump’s new GOP has a “great potential for a crackup.”

“He might try to carry out his promise of deporting millions of illegal immigrants, a project that could not just wreak havoc among families and in communities but also cause economic chaos. Or take tariffs… Unlike most Republican initiatives, tariffs, if successful, work by imposing short-term costs in prices in order to achieve long-term gains in jobs from otherwise endangered industries. It’s the short-term costs — another round of inflation, this time imposed by Mr. Trump — that might endanger the Republican coalition.”

Additionally, they write, there’s the fact that Trump is an incredibly self-destructive and unstable person, which doesn’t exactly bode well when you’re trying to lead people.

“The final obstacle to a strong realignment is Mr. Trump himself, who is consumed with the quest for power and self-aggrandizement, and appears eager to seek revenge against his detractors. Many of his difficulties during his first term stemmed from his own misbehavior, and he continues to revel in division and divisiveness.”

“Trump’s dream of a historic Republican realignment may not survive his second term,” they conclude, and it’s hard to argue against such a prediction. After all, we’ve all seen how the twice-impeached president-elect causes chaos everywhere he goes.

Here’s a personal prediction: Within six months, the U.S. economy will be in a deep recession, Trump will be mired in personal scandal, and the GOP will be looking for a way to excuse his actions.

Check back in May and let’s see if I’m right.

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Donald Trump Elections Kamala Harris Uncategorized

Claims That Trump Won In A ‘Landslide’ Are BS – He’s On Track To Win By About 1%

Within 24 hours of Donald Trump being named winner of the 2024 presidential election, headlines began circulating that suggested he’d done so by a “landslide.”

But the truth is that the election between Trump and Vice President Kamala Harris will be decided by about 1 percentage point, which is nowhere near landslide proportions.

MSNBC host Lawrence O’Donnell expertly laid out the case against a landslide on his show Monday evening, noting:

“Ballots received in the mail tomorrow will be counted in California. So there are literally millions of ballots yet to be counted in this country, including in the state of Pennsylvania, where thousands of votes remain to be counted to determine the balance of the United States Senate.”

“Republicans will probably have 52 senators next year or 53 if Republicans win the Pennsylvania Senate election. The Democrats will probably have 47 members of the Senate or 48 if Democrat Bob Casey wins the Pennsylvania Senate race.”

The GOP will also have a narrow margin of control in the House.

“We still don’t know which party will control the House of Representatives, but we do know that it will be very close. As of tonight, Republicans have 214 seats in the House and Democrats have 205 seats in the House, according to NBC News, with 16 remaining to be decided.”

And then there’s the Trump-Harris margin of victory, which is getting smaller by the second as more ballots are tabulated.

“In the presidential vote. Donald Trump currently has 50.2% of the vote to Kamala Harris, 48.1% of the vote. But that margin will probably narrow after all the California votes are finally counted, and it is possible that Kamala Harris will end up with only one– 1% of the vote less than Donald Trump, a 1% gap. Right now, she’s at 2% less than Donald Trump.”

“If you hear anyone calling this election a landslide, please stop listening to that person! About elections, at least.”

What qualifies as a landslide? Well, when Bill Clinton won reelection in 1996 by a whopping 9%, even that wasn’t considered to be a landslide.

O’Donnell concluded his summary with this historical reminder of what a landslide looks like:

“The last landslide we had was Ronald Reagan’s reelection in 1984, where he won 49 states in the Electoral College, with only the state of Minnesota voting for Walter Mondale, who was from Minnesota. Ronald Reagan beat Walter Mondale by 18 points. That’s what a landslide looks like.”

Here’s the video from MSNBC:

 

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Donald Trump

Trump’s First Policy Moves May Destroy His Presidency

As he begins preparations for his second term in office, Donald Trump is facing a dilemma that could doom his presidency immediately, leading to a collapse of his administration and a massive blowback from voters.

That’s the warning from Jennifer Rubin of the Washington Post, who notes that Trump and his top advisers are in a no-win situation.

“He could, for example, enact draconian, across-the-board tariffs; begin massive roundups and deportations of law-abiding ‘dreamers;’ repeal the Affordable Care Act and major bipartisan legislation passed under President Joe Biden; and enact a new round of massive tax cuts for big corporations and wealthy individuals.”

However, if that’s the road Trump chooses to take, he would “make himself extremely unpopular, induce economic and social chaos, and create political problems for his party in the 2026 midterms,” Rubin adds.

Keep in mind that Trump tried to repeal the Affordable Care Act in 2017. That led to the GOP losing badly in the 2018 midterm elections.

The very same thing could happen again, this time with the issue of immigration, Rubin continues.

“Nothing was as near and dear to the hearts of legions of white supremacists and aggrieved MAGA supporters looking for a scapegoat for their economic ills.

“That said, the price tag could be in the hundreds of billions; a dragnet of this size would require a sweeping police state, deprive Americans of millions of workers, upset economic progress, and create images as devastating as those we saw during the child separation debacle (which, if you recall, he eventually had to abandon).”

However, the immigration issue is a major priority for many hardliners in the Republican Party, meaning Trump will have no choice but to start down a path that could quickly backfire on him.

Rubin explains: “A false start and failure could well color the remainder of his presidency, leaving him politically weakened, reviled, and coping with a self-made economic crisis.”

There’s also the matter of tariffs, which could send the U.S. economy into a tailspin.

“Trump can choose to follow his radical ideological backers or he can choose to be politically and economically successful. He cannot do both,” Rubin concludes.

Given that Trump has never been good at making the right choices when it comes to governing and building coalitions, the chances of his self-immolation would appear almost guaranteed.

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Donald Trump education Elon Musk Social Media

Historian: Elon Musk Will Soon Be ‘Casually Discarded’ By Egotistical Trump

Even though he donated untold millions of dollars to get Donald Trump elected for the second time, Twitter CEO Elon Musk is about to be unceremoniously thrown overboard by the incoming president, according to a historian, because Trump is not about to share the spotlight with anyone. His massive ego won’t him.

In an article published by the New York Times, David Nasaw predicts Musk’s shelflife as an influencer to the Trump administration will be brief.

“Mr. Trump may be mercurial, but in this situation he is highly unlikely to break historical precedent,” Nassaw notes. “I predict that you will probably join the long list of genius businessmen donors who were casually discarded after they had served their purpose.”

Another reason for Musk’s fading influence is that his promise of cutting trillions from the federal budget would cause an economic meltdown and likely throw the United States into a second Great Depression. That would be political suicide for Trump and the GOP.

“I’m not sure what you were thinking — or if you were thinking — when you clambered on that Madison Square Garden stage and claimed that as chief of the Department of Government Efficiency… you would cut at least $2 trillion of government spending,” Nasaw writes. “The results of such a gutting would, even conservative think-tank analysts predicted, be catastrophic. It is nearly impossible to imagine a majority of Republican lawmakers endorsing your plans to slash a third of all federal spending. To do so would be political suicide.”

So what exactly does Musk get out of his alliance with Trump? More money, of course, as Nasaw predicts his investments — especially Twitter/X — will increase in value, adding to his already massive fortune.

Then again, maybe that was Musk’s plan all along.