Here’s Donny!
President Donald Trump signs executive orders in the White House Oval Office, January 2025
Orange Godzilla’s Show-Stopping Return
A tsunami of breathtakingly spiteful executive orders signed in the White House in the first few days of Donald Trump’s presidency smashes home the unassailability of his power domestically and abroad. A stitched-up Congress and Senate, and a Supreme Court that’s already ruled the president can’t break the law, means checks and balances needed in a working democracy are gone.Less than a week in and King Trump is trampling the world like an orange Godzilla. Aided and abetted by his gang of ne’er-do-well drunks, sex bandits and the far right, all are welcome under the Death Star Big Top. The crazier his appointees, the more he likes it. Mundane power is so passé. Absolute Power is doing its thing. Hubris abounds. Imperialism removes its gloves.
We can take a little solace in the knowledge that those whom the gods wish to destroy they first make mad. Unfortunately, we’re no longer pampered popcorn eaters observing safely from the sidelines. This time we are firmly bit-part players in this disaster movie.
Donald Trump At Home And Abroad
His opening act was partly anticipated. Land-grabbing designs on Greenland, Canada and the Panama Canal were already sending shock waves through the global community. However, even though he’d previewed this madness loudly in the media, it could have been showbiz. It was 50-50 that he’d actually go for it formally. But on the day of his inauguration, here it was.Is it a negotiation gambit? He’s making crudely thuggish demands with menaces, grabbing the world by the pussy. Because he possesses zero self-knowledge and self-restraint. This is all seething id on a global scale and we wonder who can reel him back in.
Renaming parts of the world in his own flag-humping image, as if calling it the Gulf of America is going to raise its value in a cheap realtors’ trick, only makes the world outside the MAGA bubble laugh. And that’s at him, not with him.
He froze US aid to every country except Israel. Ethnically cleansing the Palestinians out of Gaza and dumping them on Egypt and Jordan may get him his Trump Tower on Gaza beach but not the love he craves.
Everyone – EVERYONE – is to be tariffed and sanctioned up to the eyeballs unless they move manufacturing to the US.
A Cheap Labour Solution For Donald Trump
And here’s the rub. To produce goods Americans can afford, if American workers are not paid Chinese/Asian wages, you need cheap labour. Otherwise, who buys the goods? The 13th Amendment makes slavery legal for prisoners in the US. Undocumented migrants held under the recent Laken Riley Act, in for-profit prisons, would make the perfect new serfs.At home, attacks on the Constitution by ripping up birth-right citizenship and perversely setting ICE on Native Americans, appear to be rounding up the new cheap labour force they’re going to need. The choice is prison slavery or being kicked out even if you have a family. Deportation flights have already begun. Mexico refused landing permission for one US army plane carrying expelled migrants.
Women were already suffering enough from his previous abortion laws passed by Trump’s Supreme Court appointees when they reversed Roe v Wade in 2022. On his second bite at the cherry, he’s gone completely Handmaid’s Tale on them, signing two more femicidal orders that deprive women of federal government funding for any abortions at all.
January 6th Capitol rioters have been pardoned. Even the ones that attacked serving police officers. And sacking seventeen independent watchdogs, government agency Inspectors General who guard against corruption, has cemented his kingpin immunity.
China Shakedown
China Shakedown developments are taking place more or less in secrecy. State Secretary Marco Rubio, a notorious China hawk, requested and was granted a phone call with Foreign Minister Wang Yi on Friday 24th. According to one unofficial translation, it appears to have resulted in Rubio agreeing that Taiwan is not independent after all.I am reminded of those videos of dogs snarling rabidly at each other through a gate until the gate slides open and, self-preservation taking over, the dogs calm down. Wang, of course, is more beautiful swan than XL Bully. He told Rubio that major powers have to act like major powers and, presumably unspoken, not like mobsters and street thugs.
One small victory for those on the side of the angels. China suddenly released a number of AI models that are many times more efficient and cheaper than the humongously expensive Stargate AI trumpeted last Wednesday by Trump and his Silicon Valley chums, for free on open source. Sam Altman’s $500 billion copyright-breaking OpenAI plans with Oracle and SoftBank just exploded and millions of creatives cheered. (See Suchir Balaji)
“This will be the most important project of this era,” said Altman, CEO of OpenAI.
This is hilarious. Reminds me of when greedy parties tried to sequence, copyright and privatise the human genome years ago. In a gripping international race against time, the good guys won in 2003 and made it open source for everyone.
Apart from Wang Yi, only Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum and Denmark’s Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen have stood up to Trump so far. But we won’t know what deals have been forced until they’re biting us on the bum. More news as it comes in.
Anna Chen analysis of US and UK-China relations
SHAKEDOWN: America’s 21st century war on China
WHAT WAS TRUMP’S TRADE WAR REALLY ABOUT? History repeats itself in the trade war: Trump’s fantasy trade-deficit was an excuse for carving up China. And that “deficit” was actually a surplus.
DONALD TRUMP SWORN IN AS 47TH PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: The Inauguration Of Donald Trump — MAGA On Steroids
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