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ACCORDING TO LIZ - Despite Tuesday’s reversals and perhaps because of the lawsuits, while mainstream media is still reporting, the sheer volume of the death and destruction sewn by this administration, the aggregate awfulness is being toned down. Or tamped down by corporate owners beholden to Trump.
Ironically, this is itself a reversal of how the same media magnified Trump coverage in the 2016 election cycle by focusing on his outrageous behavior at the expense of equally assessing the policies of the presidential candidates.
Competing for eyeballs with social media at that time did every American a disservice, as does currently avoiding the magnitude of newsworthy items about which voters now need to be constantly reminded.
Even if, especially if, they are depressing and overwhelming.
People need to move beyond overwhelmed to action. Not only in California and New York City, in New Jersey and Virginia, but all across the country. At every level of government in an effort to put barriers in place to curtail more misery to come.
To present an overview of the damage to date would take an entire treatise because we are talking in-context analysis not just soundbites. So, some selective recent low points:
Trump is now demanding Justice Dept. pay him $230 million for past cases; An ethics expert told the New York Times that such a request was “almost too outlandish to believe”
Senior department officials who were defense lawyers for the president and those in his orbit are now in jobs that typically must approve any such payout, underscoring potential ethical conflicts.
Trump has suggested that he might use funds from a settlement with his own government to pay for the building of his ballroom (and the destruction of the East Wing façade).
Moreover, he is already using donations, aka bribes, from Alphabet/Google, Amazon, Apple, Meta/Facebook, Microsoft, and Lockheed Martin to fund the demolition and building of a monument to his monumental ego.
Does anyone NOT think they will expect Trumpian favors in return?
Trump is wasting hundreds of millions in public funds on gilding his castle, on remaking the White House in his own excessive image, with renovations to the Oval Office, the Cabinet Room, the Rose Garden, the West Colonnade and the East Wing. Money that would be better spent on services for Americans.
Trump promised that his plan to build a 90,000-square-foot ballroom on the grounds wouldn’t “interfere with the current building. It’ll be near it but not touching it... “And pays total respect to the existing building, which I’m the biggest fan of.”
Not.
In fact, it is now being razed. Without permits. By the temporary lord of the manor.
Images of the demolition, which began on Monday to initiate the $300 million construction extravaganza just illustrate the out-of-control ego of the man who whose aspirations to be king were keel-hauled last Saturday by seven million Americans.
As Senator Elizabeth Warren posted on X: “This is Trump’s presidency in a single photo… Illegal, destructive, and not helping you” alongside a photo of roof tiles and windowpanes cascading from the East Wing.
He paved over the lawn in the Rose Garden to create a patio. He added gold filigree to the Oval Office and ornate chandeliers to the Cabinet Room, stamping the White House, the People’s House, with the gaudy embellishments of his grandiose ego.
Continuing the time-dishonored practice of autocrats’ destruction of the good that came before them, leaving evil standing in these new monuments to greed and selfishness.
Trump is clearly supreme at tearing things down, like longstanding alliances — something the Secretary General of NATO sought to bolster on Wednesday in Washington — or the guardrails intended to hem in his worst impulses as he seeks revenge on his enemies
Having run on a platform that climate change was a hoax, in April he fired most of the scientists who monitor global warming just as the A.I., cryptocurrency, burgeoning big data and cloud computing industries’ demand for energy and water spiraled out of control.
What Americans don’t know won’t hurt them? No, because it is and will continue to hit them hard in their pocketbooks.
His command of mathematics certainly doesn’t exceed his ability to comprehend and write in the English language. Just how far the $130 million dollar donation he has dedicated to paying the nation’s 1.3 million troops whose salaries have been suspended by the Republican blockade of the Democrats’ more humane government funding resolution.
Hmm. That comes to about $100 per soldier…
And could that have anything to do with a parts order from the Pentagon going to a small company that has only been manufacturing motors domestically for a few weeks… but has the president’s son as an adviser?
We can anticipate more seizures of dark-complected American citizens and those with accents in coming weeks as the White House Whiner demands a speed-up in deportations.
Trump claimed that Black Chicagoans welcomed his “Operation Midway Blitz.” But the vast majority of those living in the windy city as well as friends and families of deportees would disagree. As with Los Angeles and D.C., months into the federal crackdown in Chicago, the attack on crime promised by the president has had no noticeable effect while criminal abuses by ICE agents escalate.
Rampant and random pardoning of convicted criminals continue with less than salubrious consequences; a New York man set free by Trump after participating in the Jan. 6 attack has now been charged with threatening to assassinate House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries.
Assiduously courting the un-Christian Christian vote while his second-in-command voices publicly that he hopes his Hindu wife will convert to Catholicism.
Blissfully ignoring the damage, the shutdown has done to those who voted him into office, Trump is still rooting for the budget resolution that would maintain intact the devastation the Big Bastard Budget caused ordinary Americans.
For the sake of the TRILLION dollars shunted from public funds to gift his billionaire buddies with tax breaks, this outrageous resolution locks in loss of healthcare for 15 million Americans, potentially leading to 50,000 unnecessary deaths a year, and pumped-up premiums – double, triple and quadruple – for over 20 million Americans who rely on the Affordable Care Act.
The president’s response to the shutdown becoming the longest in American history? To threaten more pain, including the disruptions anticipated when his Transportation Department deliberately decreases flights on Friday at 40 major airports to punish the Senate Democrats – probably not the best approach to win friends and influence people.
Although Mike Johnson has gifted the House a six-week paid vacation to let what he initiated blow over, 14 Republican members – fearing the wrath of their own constituents – are now on record supporting the extension of Affordable Care Act tax credits.
They also face their fair share of the wrath of the 42 million Americans, including 16 million children, who are now going to bed hungry due to the White House refusing to use emergency monies designated for such situations to continue SNAP payments.
Food pantries are no longer a backup option given that cuts and firings from the federal government have already maxed out their increasingly meager resources, and more and more of the over 700,000 federal employees furloughed and unpaid during the shutdown – now until late November – have also joined those lines.
And the country’s Mean Maestro’s nascent plan to warehouse the homeless has unpleasant echoes of Rick Caruso’s failed mayoral campaign.
Trump choosing to keep some ballroom donors incognito presumably so they can’t be attacked for the gifts the get in return from the forever tit-for-tat president has raised the eyebrows and ire of many, including Republicans.
His own crypto-currency scam may have incited jealousy among selfish rivals, and he encouraged his acolytes to jump on board early to further buy their loyalty, but such actions may not fly as flavor-of-the-month for fiscally conservative Republicans.
Ones who are increasingly concerned about a casino economy built on speculation and risk.
And, although the house supposedly always rigs it to win… just how many businesses has Trump-a-Doodle bankrupted before grabbing the reins of the country’s economy?
As much as 80% of 2025’s Wall Street gains may have been driven by investor A.I. excitement... and that bubble may soon implode, taking an increasingly fragile American economy down with it.
Big names like Jeff Bezos (Amazon), Sam Altman (OpenAI), Jamie Dimon (JPMorgan) and David Solomon (Goldman Sachs) worry we’re on the cusp of a correction. They warn that valuations are getting too high and that eventually, reality may bite. And if those companies plunge, they’ll take the economy with them.
Seven tech companies alone account for over a third of the value of the S&P 500 and trade at prices averaging 70 times their earnings. Furthermore, nearly eight in ten businesses are already dabbling in generative A.I. although without any “significant bottom-line impact” even after making disproportionate investments with no proof of potential return.
The bursting of the dot.com bubble cost NASDAQ more than three-fourths of its value, and it took 15 years to recover. Four companies listed on NASDAQ – Google, Microsoft, Meta and Amazon – have invested $360 billion in capital costs just in the past twelve months in pursuing consumer A.I. dollars.
What is starting as small cracks in today’s economy such as recent spikes in auto loan defaults half-hidden in the background noise of Trump-onomic disruptions, may be but a bell-ringer of worse, much worse, to come.
Bailing out billionaires’ bad investments in Argentina instead of providing food and health care for American children certainly assisted Javier Milei’s commanding win in the recent Argentinian elections and are sure to further massage the big egos of both
Meanwhile, penalizing all Canadians with an additional 10% tariff for Ontario Premier Ford running an ad targeting conservative American viewers using Ronald Reagan’s documented opposition to tariffs as hurtful to Americans, is hurting domestic businesses and consumers and stiffening Canadian resentment against the United States.
Furthermore if Douggie Ford really wanted to piss off Trump, he would have used another Reagan quote, one from a 1988 presidential address specifically about Canada: “We should beware of the demagogues who are ready to declare a trade war against our friends — weakening our economy, our national security, and the entire free world — all while cynically waving the American flag.”
The administration’s whirling dervish approach to just about everything from health to the environment, from immigration to co-opting the courts to his personal ends is shielding corruption in a sandstorm of lies. And by destroying statistical measurements across the federal government and the country, little remains to hold him accountable for those crimes and injustices.
Proving that fascists target institutions that make their violence visible, will Trump – with his own history of hacking away at freedom of the press, become complicit in the Israeli disappearance of the Gazan genocide?
And days after Netanyahu vowed Israel would determine which foreign forces it would allow as part of an international force in Gaza, the Ego-in-Chief has gone way, bounced way over the top saying that HE would determine what was right for Israel. How the Israeli leader takes that uppercut may determine the future of the Middle East.
Both Hog’s-Breath and Trumpty-Dumpty deserve to be hauled into criminal court and convicted of their admitted murders as of Wednesday of 167 blown up in small boats in the Caribbean and off the Pacific coast that the administration claim don’t fall under the War Act
Despite Energy Secretary Chris Wright backing off that the new testing announced by Tinker-Toy Trump last week asserting this would focus on “other parts” of the nuclear arsenal, the Bomb-Bomb Boy is still fixating on American nuclear testing to keep up with favored Potentate Putin, seriously endangering the precarious balance of world peace.
While stepping down the rhetoric about land attacks on Colombia, then threatening to invade Nigeria, the Yo-Yo is now flipping through his courtiers’ proposals from overtly interdicting ports and airports used by cartels through the previously promised in-country covert operations, from seizing oilfields to full scale invasion using the ten thousand strong U.S. forces already in the region.
Even if he retreats from overt war with Colombia, Trump is still stuck on regime change.
The bounty offered for Maduro’s arrest and removal from office that his administration doubled to $50 million in August, still stands. $50 million is a lot of nose candy for a down-on-his-luck cog in the narco-trafficking cartels.
$50 million would fund an awful lot of food stamps here at home. How much are Americans willing to pay for the removal of Trump?
Undoubtedly on a knife-edge emotionally following his supporters’ disastrous showings at the polls on Tuesday, the forces for democratic rule must continue to pressure the Supreme Court justices to grow the balls necessary to stop enabling him, and remain on high alert themselves against more justified-in-his-mind-only retaliatory actions against the American people.
(Liz Amsden is a former Angeleno now living in Vermont and a regular CityWatch contributor. She writes on issues she’s passionate about, including social justice, government accountability, and community empowerment. Liz brings a sharp, activist voice to her commentary and continues to engage with Los Angeles civic affairs from afar. She can be reached at [email protected].)
