Tag: donald trump

Authoritarian Clickbait: Trump’s Spectacle Distracts From His Corporate Power Grab

Traditionally, authoritarian regimes were defined by their capacity to control information. Critics were silenced, press outlets were shuttered, and opposition voices were imprisoned or worse. Power was exercised through fear, secrecy, and violence. But in President Donald Trump’s America, authoritarianism has evolved. It no longer hides behind walls of censorship—it thrives in plain sight.

Trump’s political style isn’t about suppressing attention. It’s about seizing it. Whether threatening to annex Greenland “one way or another,” mocking Canada as the “51st state,” or pressuring Columbia University to abandon free speech protections, the goal isn’t to avoid controversy. The aim is to create it.

This shift reflects a deeper transformation in how power is exercised in the 21st century. In a world governed by algorithms, virality, and information overload, authoritarianism no longer seeks silence—it seeks spectacle. Trump’s provocations are not mere outbursts. They are designed and timed to dominate headlines, crowd out serious scrutiny, and keep the public in a state of reactive agitation.

These performances are not without precedent. But in Trump’s case, the provocation is the point. His administration has leaned into fascist-style imagery, with symbolic salutes, rallies drenched in nationalism, and open threats against political dissidents—both foreign and domestic. But this isn’t authoritarianism for the sake of totalitarian control. It’s authoritarianism repurposed for an attention economy—where outrage drives clicks, and distraction enables deeper, quieter abuses of power.

Keep reading

“Those Are Some Really Sh*tty War Plans”: Hegseth Ridicules Atlantic ‘Bombshell’ After Signal Chats Released

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has responded to the growing calls among Dems for him to step down. This is hours after The Atlantic published the fuller chat logs, alleging that he’s discussing ‘war plans’ in an insecure and unclassified setting – also with a journalist inadvertently added to the group chat.

Hegseth emphasized on X that there were No names. No targets. No locations. No units. No routes. No sources. No methods. And no classified information.” And he said sarcastically these these make for “some really shitty war plans.”

Still, this is unlikely to appease the Trump White House’s enemies, who are also now claiming that national security officials ‘lied’ before the Senate yesterday.

Keep reading

GREAT NEWS: Trump Energy Department Rolling Back Biden Admin’s Regulations on Home Appliances

Over the last four years, the Biden administration repeatedly tried to control what kinds of home appliances Americans would be allowed to buy.

They tried to outright ban gas stoves, then denied it and mocked anyone who suggested this was happening.

Then, the Biden administration was caught working with outside groups to do this.

Now, all of that is finally changing. Check out this tweet from the Trump Energy Department…

From the Energy Department website:

U.S. Secretary of Energy Chris Wright today announced the Department of Energy (DOE) has further postponed the implementation of three of the Biden-Harris administration’s restrictive mandates on home appliances. These actions, taken in accordance with President Donald Trump’s Executive Order, “Unleashing Prosperity through Deregulation,” marks a key step in lowering costs, enhancing performance, and expanding options for American consumers.

“Under President Trump’s leadership, the Department of Energy is taking critical steps every day to help American families prosper,” said Secretary Wright. “By removing burdensome regulations put in place by the Biden administration, we are returning freedom of choice to the American people, ensuring consumers can choose the home appliances that work best for their lives and budgets. This power should not belong to the federal government.”

Keep reading

Trump Vows To Probe Ashli Babbitt Homicide, Consider Comp Fund For Pardoned J6ers

President Trump on Tuesday vowed that he would bring new scrutiny to the Department of Justice’s handling of the killing of Ashli Babbitt by a Capitol police officer during the Jan 6, 2021 riot, and to explore the possibility of a compensation fund for the 1,500 Capitol riot defendants he pardoned.   

Trump’s promises came in a Roosevelt Room interview with Newsmax’s Greg Kelly. When Kelly asked Trump about the DOJ continuing to mount a defense against a $30 million wrongful death claim filed by Babbitt’s husband, Trump said he wasn’t aware of it but would look into the matter: 

“Well, I’ll look into that. I mean, you’re just telling me that for the first time, I haven’t heard that. I’m a big fan of Ashli Babbitt. And Ashli Babbitt was a really good person who was a big MAGA fan, Trump fan. And she was innocently standing there; they even say trying to sort of hold back the crowd. And a man did something to her that was unthinkable when he shot her. And I think it’s a disgrace. I’m going to look into that. I did not know that.”

Babbitt was shot and killed by US Capitol Police (USCP) Lieutenant Michael Byrd as she attempted to climb through a broken window that was part of an interior doorway close to the House chamber. Though the unarmed, 5’2″, 115-pound Babbitt posed no imminent threat of inflicting death or serious injury as she awkwardly navigated the narrow space — with a furniture barricade still ahead of her —  Boyd opted against using any type of nonlethal force, and instead shot her from an ambush position, killing her with a bullet that perforated her trachea and lung. 

Keep reading

Trump to declassify Crossfire Hurricane documents exposing FBI’s ‘Russia hoax’ against him

President Donald Trump on Tuesday signed an order to finally declassify documents related to the FBI‘s ‘Crossfire Hurricane’ investigation, which probed whether there was ‘collusion’ between the president’s 2016 campaign and Russia.

Trump has long called the FBI ‘Russia, Russia, Russia’ probe a ‘hoax’ and it sucked up months of media attention during his first term. 

During an event with ambassadors Tuesday, Trump took time at the top to sign several executive orders, including the Crossfire Hurricane declassification memo. 

‘It gives the media the right to go in and go and check it, you probably won’t bother because you’re not going to like what you see,’ the president explained. ‘But this was total weaponization. It’s a disgrace.’ 

The order declassified everything to do with the investigation that the FBI hadn’t marked for redaction days before Trump departed the White House in January 2021. 

It also didn’t apply to materials protected by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, the order read. 

‘Is anybody going to look? What about you, are you going to look?’ Trump asked the reporters in the room. 

‘Frankly the FBI should be ashamed of themselves and so should the Department of Justice and so should Biden,’ he added. 

Keep reading

Trump Admin Ends Taxpayer-Funded Housing For Illegal Immigrants

The Trump administration on Monday announced that it would be ending taxpayer-funded housing for illegal immigrants.

Housing and Urban Development (HUD) Secretary Scott Turner and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem revealed a joint partnership to curtail what they describe as an “exploitation” of the country’s housing programs.

As Rachel Acenas reports for The Epoch Times, Turner and Noem together signed the “American Housing Programs for American Citizens” memorandum of understanding (MOU).

“We’re here signing a partnership to ensure that the wasteful misappropriations that have been going to assist the illegal aliens in our country will no longer go to assist them but instead to assist the American people,” Turner said in a video statement on X.

American citizens have taken a back seat to illegal immigrants for too long, according to Turner, who said that American tax dollars should be used to benefit only U.S. citizens, especially when it comes to an issue as pressing as the nation’s housing crisis.

As part of the new memorandum, HUD will provide a full-time staff member to assist in operations at the Incident Command Center (ICC) to facilitate data-sharing and ensure taxpayer-funded housing programs are not used to benefit or harbor illegal immigrants.

Noem accused the Biden administration of failing to prioritize Americans.

“This memorandum is going to be a partnership that we will form to make sure that these housing programs are going to only people who deserve it, people who are in this country who need assistance, who want a better life for their family,” Noem said in the video.

The HUD and DHS partnership comes after Trump signed an executive order in February to direct federal agencies and departments to identify all federally-funded programs that provide financial benefits to illegal immigrants and to take corrective action.

The order seeks to “ensure taxpayer resources are not used to incentivize or support illegal immigration,” according to a fact sheet on the order.

Keep reading

Tulsi Gabbard is sure to anger Trump with major admission about Canada’s fentanyl trafficking

Tulsi Gabbard on Tuesday struggled to explain why Canada was left off a list of countries that pose a major drug threat to the United States.

President Donald Trump has repeatedly blasted Canada as a national security threat for the amount of fentanyl that comes over its border, which he used as one of reasons he sparked a tariff war with Ottawa.  

Gabbard, Trump’s director of national intelligence, was testifying before the Senate Intelligence Committee on the Annual Threat Assessment (ATA) when she was asked about the omission of Canada from that portion of the threat list. 

‘The focus in my opening and the ATA was really to focus on the most extreme threats in that area. And our assessment is that the most extreme threat related to fentanyl continues to come from and through Mexico,’ she said.

Democratic Senator Martin Heinrich of New Mexico said he was surprised by the omission of Canada ‘given some of the rhetoric’ from officials in the Trump administration.

Keep reading

NASA says Trump is responsible for stranded astronaut saga ending: ‘It would not have happened’

NASA is crediting President Donald Trump for spearheading the mission to bring back its stranded astronauts.

Bethany Stevens, a spokeswoman for the agency, spoke glowingly about the new administration’s role.

‘It would not have happened without President Trump’s intervention,’ she told Fox News Digital, adding that it was a ‘huge win for the Trump administration.’

The extended space mission entered the political spotlight in January, when Trump said he told Elon Musk to ‘go get’ the astronauts who had been ‘virtually abandoned’ by the Biden administration. 

Musk echoed this statement, and in February, the two of them doubled down on their claims by blaming the astronauts’ delayed return on ‘political reasons.’ 

Sunita Williams and Barry Wilmore were only supposed to be on the ISS for eight days, but ended up staying for more than nine months due to technical issues with their spacecraft, Boeing’s Starliner.

Williams and Wilmore finally returned to Earth on March 18, splashing down off the coast of Tallahassee, Florida inside the SpaceX Crew-9 Dragon capsule.

Once the two astronauts were on the ground, NASA officials praised the Trump administration for the success and timing of their return. 

Keep reading

Marijuana Industry PAC Attacks Biden And Canada In New Ads Designed To Appeal To Trump

A marijuana industry-funded political action committee (PAC) is attacking former President Joe Biden’s cannabis policy record as well as the nation of Canada, with new ads promoting sometimes misleading claims about the last administration while making the case that President Donald Trump can deliver on reform.

The American Rights and Reform PAC–which launched in 2023 under a different name, Legalize America, and lists an executive at the major marijuana company Curaleaf as its treasurer—has two ads on its site that appear designed to appeal directly to Trump.

The ads aim to accomplish that by sharply criticizing the president’s predecessor and also emphasizing that American cannabis businesses are losing out to Canada, a more recent target of Trump’s ire, because of prohibitionist U.S. laws.

But with respect to the Biden-centered ad, the PAC’s attempt to draw a sharp contrast between the two administrations included inaccurate characterizations of Biden’s record—at one point stating that Biden was personally involved in criminalizing marijuana while completely ignoring his direct role in initiating a federal marijuana rescheduling review.

“Millions of American patients depend on medical cannabis, but Joe Biden and Democrats classified their medication as a dangerous narcotic like heroin, eliminating their access to relief,” the ad says.

“President Trump is fighting to make America healthy again,” it continues. “He did it before by giving patients life saving treatments with the Right to Try, and he can do it again by rescheduling cannabis. Ask President Trump to end Biden’s war on medical cannabis and put patients first.”

To be sure, advocates have widely criticized Biden for championing punitive anti-drug laws during his time in the Senate and not doing more to release people still incarcerated over federal cannabis-related convictions while in the White House.

But it was under the administration of Republican President Richard Nixon that marijuana was placed in Schedule I of the Controlled Substances Act (CSA) in 1970, before Biden joined the Senate. That was also before any states had legalized medical cannabis, despite the ad suggesting that patients were criminalized while legal programs existed.

Keep reading

Trump DOJ Invokes State Secrets Privilege, Tells Judge Boasberg it will Provide Him No More Info on Deportation Flights

The Trump DOJ said it is exercising the State Secrets Privilege and informed Judge James Boasberg it will no longer provide him with any information related to deportation flights.

Boasberg, an Obama appointee, has been grilling DOJ lawyers about the Trump Administration’s move to deport dangerous Venezuelan aliens under the Alien Enemies Act.

Judge Boasberg said Trump’s invocation of the Alien Enemies Act to deport criminal aliens is “incredibly troublesome and problematic” and threatened the Trump Admin with consequences if they violate his order in the future.

On Monday evening, the DOJ had enough of Judge Boasberg’s intrusive orders and invoked the State Secrets Privilege.

“The Executive Branch hereby notifies the Court that no further information will be provided in response to the Court’s March 18, 2025 Minute Order based on the state secrets privilege and the concurrently filed declarations of the Secretary of State and the Secretary of Homeland Security,” the DOJ wrote.

US Attorney General Pam Bondi told the judge that President Trump has plenary authority under Article II to remove from the homeland designated terrorists.

“This is a case about the President’s plenary authority, derived from Article II and the mandate of the electorate, and reinforced by longstanding statute, to remove from the homeland designated terrorists participating in a state-sponsored invasion of, and predatory incursion into, the United States. The Court has all of the facts it needs to address the compliance issues before it. Further intrusions on the Executive Branch would present dangerous and wholly unwarranted separation-of-powers harms with respect to diplomatic and national security concerns that the Court lacks competence to address,” the DOJ said.

The DOJ straight up told Boasberg you will get no more information related to the deportation flights and that’s the end of the story.

“No more information is needed to resolve any legal issue in this case. Whether the planes carried one TdA terrorist or a thousand or whether the planes made one stop or ten simply has no bearing on any relevant legal issue. The need for additional information here is not merely “dubious,” or “trivial,” it is non-existent. The Executive Branch violated no valid order through its actions, and the Court has all it needs to evaluate compliance. Accordingly, the Court’s factual inquiry should end,” the DOJ said.

Keep reading