Trump this.

[rareboy]

 

[KaraBulut]

"Firing Line" reran an interview with Rob Reiner from April, 2019 this weekend. The host of the show, Margaret Hoover met Rob Reiner at a hearing for the overturning of Proposition 8, which had invalidated same-sex marriage in California. The case ultimately led to the Obergefell case in SCOTUS which is how same-sex marriage became the law of the land in the US. Reiner was a key financial backer of the Obergefell case and it is because of activists like him that we have the right to marry.

Reiner was to the left of where I am on many issues but it is eerie to hear his words 7 years later. He had it right on many issues. And he had it right on Donald Trump.

Rob Reiner

Rob Reiner reflects on decades of activism and warns of growing threats to American institutions.

www.pbssocal.org

 

[fallsguy]

 

[Alistair]

 

[NotHardUp1]

Thirty career ambassadors have been recalled, effective mid-January. It is unprecedented. Methinks this has something to do with Trump anticipating the midterms, or even the loss if his hold on Congress. Doubtful that he can get 30 ambassadors confirmed.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/12/22/us/politics/trump-administration-ambassadors-posts.html

Apologies to any getting the paywall. There are other articles about it.

 

[KaraBulut]

The Make-A-Wish President wants to build big expensive boats. So, the Pentagon is building them, spending billions on them and naming them after Trump.

https://www.cnn.com/2025/12/23/us/trump-new-battleships-analysis-intl-hnk-ml

President Donald Trump’s announcement of a new class of battleships bearing his name puts a fresh spotlight on a US naval shipbuilding program that has fallen short on delivering the new warships on time and on budget in recent years, something Trump himself pointed out in his speech from Mar-a-Lago on Monday.

“We make the greatest equipment in the world, by far, nobody’s even close. But we don’t produce them fast enough,” Trump said, as he announced he would meet soon with top US military contractors to ramp up production for the new battleships and other weapons programs.

But at least in the battleship plan, the Navy would seem to be swimming upstream, with construction of the vessels themselves and some of the weapon systems the service says would be aboard...

Those destroyers cost about $2 billion each. A Trump-class ship would have a price tag as high as $15 billion, according to a Monday report from USNI News.

 

[rareboy]

^ This is a long shot wish.

It doesn't matter what Trump wants...ships are a slow process because they are now much more complicated.

By the time one is completed, I have this feeling they won't be called Trump class unless they are real duds.

Great make work project though.

 

[fallsguy]

 

[KaraBulut]

^ This is a long shot wish.

I'm just waiting for when they start building pyramids, Ludwigian royal palaces and Babylonian towers...

 

[Thad1527]

I'm just waiting for when they start building pyramids, Ludwigian royal palaces and Babylonian towers...

Instead of new schools, repaired bridges, improved highways, and enhanced energy grids.
I read an article suggesting that some declining rural communities have themselves to blame. The example was Charles City. Iowa, with an old, asbestos-ridden, not fully handicapped-accessible high school voting down a school bond issue.

 

[NotHardUp1]

Cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs!!!

 

[KaraBulut]

Instead of new schools, repaired bridges, improved highways, and enhanced energy grids.
I read an article suggesting that some declining rural communities have themselves to blame. The example was Charles City. Iowa, with an old, asbestos-ridden, not fully handicapped-accessible high school voting down a school bond issue.

That's always in the back of my mind. In the last administration, we were talking about student loan forgiveness, infrastructure improvements and repairs. Now, we're talking about ballrooms, billions on concentration camps and blowing up boats all the time. No surprise that there's "no money" to help Americans with health insurance premiums.

 

[Norri]

^ This is a long shot wish.

It doesn't matter what Trump wants...ships are a slow process because they are now much more complicated.

By the time one is completed, I have this feeling they won't be called Trump class unless they are real duds.

Great make work project though.

I completely agree they won’t be called Trump and they probably will never be built. It’s just another 20th century thing Trump is nostalgic for.

 

[rareboy]

 

[KaraBulut]

Someone keeps bailing out Truth Social's parent when it gets close to dipping below $10/share. It has dropped $30/share in the past year.

 

[KaraBulut]

Has anyone told Trump these Christians are Black and live in a shithole country?

This is what happens when a President doesn't have a national security team or a strategy and when a billionaire donor is allowed to destroy aid programs that feed Muslims and Christians.

The irony- that Trump doesn't think giving millions of dollars of American-grown food to Africa is worth his time, but he'll spend billions to start wars with the same countries that he cut off food assistance to?

DOGE has blood on its hands. Trump's policies are killing thousands of people in Africa and will likely cause millions of deaths from war, famine and disease.

Some Christian pastor called Trump's cellphone and told him Nigerians are killing Christians, apparently.

Trump says Christians are being persecuted in Nigeria. Experts and residents say the reality is more complicated

Experts and residents say that in the West African nation's widespread violence, everyone is a potential victim, regardless of background or belief.

www.pbs.org

Trump says Christians are being persecuted in Nigeria. Experts and residents say the reality is more complicated

villagers say nearly every household has seen a relative, friend or neighbor killed or abducted. It's part of the longstanding security crisis in Nigeria — a place now singled out by U.S. President Donald Trump for "the killing of Christians" by "radical Islamists."

Victims and church leaders echo Trump's claims that Christians are persecuted. They say they've long been attacked, kidnapped or killed because of their faith.

But many insist the reality isn't as simple as Trump's narrative, which casts Christianity as facing an "existential threat" in Nigeria. Experts and residents say some attacks target Christians, but most emphasize that in the widespread violence that has long plagued the West African nation, everyone is a potential victim, regardless of background or belief.

"They don't ask you whether you are a Muslim or a Christian," 32-year-old Abdulmalik Saidu said of the gunmen regularly stalking his northwestern state, Zamfara. "All they want is just money from you. (Even) if you have money, sometimes they will kill you."

So, Trump got in front of a podium, beat his chest and ran his mouth about how "thousands of Christians are being killed in Nigeria" and how the US is going to send the US military to Nigeria "guns a-blazing".

Trump threatens to halt all US aid, conduct 'vicious' military attack in Nigeria over Christian persecution

President Donald Trump threatens military action against Nigeria over Christian killings, orders aid suspension and warns of "guns-a-blazing" response to Islamic terrorism.

www.foxnews.com

Trump threatens to halt all US aid, conduct 'vicious' military attack in Nigeria over Christian persecution
President Trump orders Department of War to prepare for possible action if Nigerian government doesn't stop religious persecution

President Donald Trump on Saturday announced the U.S. will immediately stop all aid and assistance to Nigeria if its government continues to allow the killing of Christians, and may even go into the country "guns-a-blazing" to "completely wipe out the Islamic terrorists" responsible.

"I am hereby instructing our Department of War to prepare for possible action," Trump wrote in a Truth Social post. "If we attack, it will be fast, vicious, and sweet, just like the terrorist thugs attack our CHERISHED Christians! WARNING: THE NIGERIAN GOVERNMENT BETTER MOVE FAST!"

The post comes after the president on Friday designated Nigeria as a "country of particular concern," citing the widespread killings of Christians.

The reality is that hungry people will kill each other over food and water. When the US withdraws food assistance from starving people, this is what happens. The deaths are Trump's fault.

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/11/08/opinion/trump-christians-nigeria.html

He has expressed such outrage at attacks on Christians in Nigeria that he has threatened military intervention there, and the Pentagon has obligingly prepared plans for attack. Trump’s concern for Nigerians is welcome, but here’s the awkwardness: Trump’s aid cuts are killing far more Nigerian Christians than Islamic terrorists are.

So if Trump wants to save the lives of Nigerian Christians, the good news is that he doesn’t need to spend billions of dollars on charging (as he put it) “into that now disgraced country, ‘guns-a-blazing.’” Rather, all Trump has to do is restore the American aid that was estimated to be saving the lives of more than a quarter-million Nigerians each year...

Trump might also reflect that while jihadists have been unable to kill tens of thousands of Nigerian Christians, his own administration appears to be doing just that. The Center for Global Development in Washington calculated earlier this year that before Trump took office, American humanitarian aid was saving about 270,000 lives a year in Nigeria.

It’s too soon to predict confidently just how many Nigerian Christian children will die because Trump cut off their access to vaccines, AIDS medications, food assistance and other essentials. But the number killed by jihadists is very likely to pale beside the number dying from Trump aid cuts. So if Trump cares about Christians or anyone else in Nigeria, all he needs to do is restore aid and let babies live.

 

[rareboy]

Someone keeps bailing out Truth Social's parent when it gets close to dipping below $10/share. It has dropped $30/share in the past year.

View attachment 3424095

After dropping into the mid tens range for the last few weeks, Trumpmedia had a bit of a bump with Trump's speechifying and is now back in the
$14.15 range again. Someone must have thrown some capital at it to prevent collapse below the ten $ benchmark but let's see what the Epstein file disclosures actually do.

 

[fallsguy]

 

[Alistair]

 

[rareboy]