We'll know for sure on Jan 20, 2029 12:01PM EST.

Until the orange piece of shit is formally in direct violation of the judiciary and congress, he’s merely a power-mad executive. And this is important because it shows the importance of the coming midterms (if folks are still sitting on their asses come ‘26 then we get what we deserve, I guess).

Our form of government needs the other two branches of government to be completely inept for an obese sack of McDonalds to claim dictatorial control - let’s make sure that doesn’t happen.

Bravo, Charles.

swimming in De Nile's
already gotten Olde af

we'll Need Music:

Bob Dylan ‘Masters of War’
Tracy Chapman's 'Revolution'
Jimi ‘All Along the Watchtower’
Billie Joel ‘We Didn't Start the Fire’
Sam Cooke 'A Change is Gonna Come’
Neil Young ‘Ohio’ & ‘Rocking in the Free World’
Gil Scott-Heron 'The Revolution Will Not Be Televised’

for Starters

@1

we'll be
in Chains
by then, your
fantasy finally finished

or Perhaps* you'll get to be
a Concentration Camp Guard

*play your
Cards right!

@2 Buddhamat and @3 kristofarian: +2 WORD

He literally won a democratic election. He is your elected president, whether you like it or not.

Charles, last year, some of us commenters here warned that the Stranger's All Gaza All The Time coverage, especially as it determinedly ignored Hamas, should give way to warning about the dangers of another Trump administration. Instead, the Stranger joyfully supported every attack by Palestinian activists upon "Genocide Joe" and "Killer Kamala", as those activists unsuccessfully tried to bully them into removing support from Israel. Well, the Uncommitted Movement, the Abandon Harris movement, and Kshama Sawant all got the result they clearly said they'd wanted: liberal voters stayed away from the election in sufficient numbers for Trump to win.

Now, the very same publication which had pointedly ignored the danger Trump posed has taken to delivering tut-tutting lectures on how its readers just don't understand the danger Trump poses. You'll understand if we tell you to spare everyone the bother, right?

The far right will never give up power and we are becoming Russia because Putin owns Trump. I saw this coming in 2016, however delayed by 4 years of Biden, it is back and with full force. If you don't have a leg in another country, you are f**ked.

@6

the guilt for Supporting*
our Genocide in the
Middle East is
STRONG in
this one

and Right-
fully So.

*not to Mention a
blind Fealty to a most
Undemocratic "D"NC, LLC.

lololol.

but it's all
merely a Distraction
keeping Us focused on The
Past, rather than On an Exit Plan

sure, he'll say we must Learn
from the past! so's not to
Repeat it, which is Exact-
ly what he's gonna Con-
tinue to try & Do (re-
peat history), Again,
right Here on tS's
very same pages.

Ignore the
Wormtongue. or,
Welcome to trumpftopia.

@2: "And this is important because it shows the importance of the coming midterms (if folks are still sitting on their asses come ‘26 then we get what we deserve, I guess)."

I boldly predict the Stranger will again endorse a single-issue, no-accomplishment, no-support, no-hope candidate to replace Rep. Adam Smith (D-WA-09). (This candidate may even be both anti-choice, and anti-LGBTQ+ rights!)

People like Pramila Jayapal fueled Trump's momentum. Trump must be paying her to talk.

She's really hurt us badly.

Only thing that surprises me about this article is it took so long to write it.

@5: Putin was elected. are you going to argue he's not an autocrat?

@11
Yes. And FYI there is no guarantee that we will have elections in 2026.
After all Trump said; vote for me once and you won’t have to vote again.
Despite the publication of Project 2025, voters selected the GOP candidates.
We have met the enemy, and ……….

Sigh - these comments! Even Democrats will be moaning “but the Democrats” until the bitter end.

Trump single-handedly neutered the political right in Canada, the United States' closest and strongest ally. It gives me hope that he can do it here as well.

@1: Right.
Dems, please stop nominating candidates like it is some exercise in royal sucession. A nice, sane, middle of the road candidate would have been a shoo-in in 2024. Republicans don't like Trump much either. But the election was just a result of "don't punch to the right". Dems need to quit hanging on to the mirror image of that. Sometimes we have to cut our favorite parties looney faction off at the knees to benefit our country.

Drama queens

@16 doesn't seem likely. The progressive wing of the party is endlessly stuck in the "we were not extreme enough" cycle of excuse making. @8 always provides great examples of that.

https://www.newsweek.com/aoc-newsom-2028-democrats-election-nominees-2063835

Nah.

I mean honestly, with how radically far left the Stranger has been for the past 6 or 7 years, Obama could be president right now and Muede would be crying "Dictator!".

@16 The massive crowds that Bernie and AOC have been drawing in even red areas shows that the progressive message of focusing on working families is a winner. Obama had a smaller turnout for his reelection because he ran the first time on hope and change, and the only change he provided was a healthcare plan from the same right wing think tank that gave of Project 2025. People are tired of the Democratic Ratchet where each Republican administration since Nixon has pulled us further to the right, and then the Democrats fix the economy without moving us back towards the center.

There's hope. Today is the 80th anniversary of Hitler topping himself in the bunker.

"People are tired of the Democratic Ratchet where each Republican administration since Nixon has pulled us further to the right, and then the Democrats fix the economy without moving us back towards the center." --@Greenwood Bob

they think Bernie & AOC
are FAR LEFT. compared to
"Republicans" they are indeed
the Wormtongues keep pulling
tS's commentariat rightward with
nearly every comment so it MUST Be.

but it Ain't.
notice how they
always spit whenever
they type the word 'progressive"?

I do too

@21: “People are tired of the Democratic Ratchet where each Republican administration since Nixon has pulled us further to the right, and then the Democrats fix the economy without moving us back towards the center.”

Then everyone who is not a Republican needs to understand that Republicans must always be kept out of power. Instead, last year, the Stranger and supportive commenters (@23, etc.) put on a clinic in relentless leftist purity politics allowing a Republican to win. We warned them about this at the time, and they not only refused to listen, they snottily upped their output of “Genocide Joe” type smears against the Democrats. (And they’re still lying about all of that, as if it was a century ago.)

can the Wormtongue
not twist Anyting
Beyond Com-
perhension?

Anti-Zionism Is Anti-Semitism

Anti-Zionism is anti-semitism, you say? Sure, that makes sense. How someone prays and what religious beliefs they hold is exactly the same as supporting apartheid and genocide.

You can’t even tell them apart; the last time I tried to pray the rosary I got confused and bombed a children’s hospital.

It’s true: there is absolutely no difference whatsoever between opposing a political ideology and opposing the existence of a small religious minority.

That’s why it is universally considered racist to criticize an opposing political party. That’s why anyone who tries to engage in a political debate is immediately arrested for committing a hate crime.

Anti-Zionism is anti-semitism. If you don’t support the idea of dropping a western settler-colonialist state on top of a pre-existing civilization and then defending its status quo of apartheid, theft and abuse by any amount of violence necessary, then obviously you support the idea of exterminating millions of Jews in gas chambers.

If you don’t want anyone to commit genocide against Palestinians, then that means you want to commit genocide against Jews. There is no third possibility.

Don’t think we should be sending billions of dollars worth of military explosives to be dropped on hospitals, residential buildings and civilian infrastructure in Gaza?

That means you harbor extremely negative emotions toward a small Abrahamic faith.

Think it’s bad to deliberately starve millions of people who are trapped in a giant death camp? Then that means you want to start loading Jews onto trains.

Think it’s wrong to wage a systematic extermination campaign against an entire people because they are a different ethnicity?

Then you, sir, are no different from the Nazis.

Anti-Zionism is anti-semitism. Cats are ducks. The Declaration of Independence is spaghetti sauce. The Bronze Age is a foot fetish. There are no differences between any two things. All things are exactly the same as all other things.

The human mind is incapable of making any distinctions of any kind. Turning left is the same as turning right. Drinking water is the same as drinking bleach.

Going to the supermarket is the same as killing your dad. This is how we all live our lives. Everyone knows this.

Everything I just said makes perfect sense. Anyone who disagrees is Hitler.

--Caitlin Johnstone; May 01, 2025

https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/anti-zionism-is-anti-semitism

'snottily' wormmy?
quite the piece
of work you
are. jesus.

I just attended the Health Care Compliance Academy, which is a national conference run by a non-government organization that informs Compliance Professionals about regulatory changes to healthcare law. Sorry for that boring intro.

This year, the opening speaker was COO of Medicaid and Medicare Services Kim Brandt, who works under Dr. Oz for the Trump Administration. She literally opened the presentation by showing a video compilation of Fox News clips accusing the democrats (and of course they specifically showed AOC and Schumer) of lying about Republicans' plans to cut Medicaid, followed by clips of Dr. Oz calling democrats ridiculous for these claims. She used the rest of the hour as a political event in which she kept effusively praising Dr. Oz and DOGE and explaining that they're simply curbing "fraud, waste, and abuse." Ironically, in a different presentation, we then learned that the Supreme Court and Trump Administration have actually raised the standard for proving fraud to a degree that is pretty difficult to prove (what was in the mind of the accused at the time). She also took no questions from the attendees, although, as you can imagine, we had a lot.

Anyway, what was even more disturbing is that the conference organizers never addressed the concerns of those of us who voiced our dismay at what we had unwittingly paid for. I reached out to them directly twice and received a curt response that they were busy and would get back to me when they had time. They didn't even address it in the most basic of ways by having a representative say "We've heard your feedback, we will be meeting to address these concerns, and this is our plan to address them..." It was deeply disturbing on all levels. I'm hoping to get a copy of the tape to send to the Washington State Hospital Association legislators, as well as to journalists who have been covering Medicaid.

@27: Welcome to Trump's America, where even attendees at professional conferences must sing hymns of praise to Our Dear Great Leader. (Obviously, it worked so well that most of the regimes that practiced it in the 20th Century collapsed, so we're giving it a try now.)

@26: Another satisfied customer! You're welcome. Glad to be of service. (Amazing what one can do with words, eh?)

Still reading Johnstone? Wasn't the Social Media Gestapo going to cancel you for quoting her, or something? Didn't you whine about that repeatedly here, without getting anyone to listen? What's taking the On-Line Brownshirts so bloody long?

@26 One correction: This is not genocide. What Putin is doing in Ukraine is genocide. In Gaza and the West Bank, this is ethnic cleansing. That's bad enough, but does not fit the UN defintion of genocide. Using that term for this and other things loosely degrades its seriousness.

This is not just my view, but others who know what it really means, like the head prosecutor at Neuemburg who first used the term to successfully prosecute the Nazis. He has spoken about this in relation to Gaza.

I concur with
the 2/3 of the
Planet calling it
Genocide. perhaps
bibi's Keep-Outta-Prison
Gambit's not quite as yet Full-
Blown Genocide but it's Close Enough

when one considers
how Recently the
Shoe was on
the Other
foot

@30: "I concur with
the 2/3 of the
Planet calling it
Genocide."

Asked every one of earth's 8.2 billion humans personally, have you?

And of course you equate being popular with being right.

That's why you never, ever use the UN definition of genocide. No matter how many times others here cite it, it will never be popular enough for you.

ok,
wormmy.

@32: "wormmy."

Yep. Throw around a few insults. That's sure to motivate a willing cadre of disciples.

'insult'?

the Wormtongue
Wears it like a
Badge of
honor

@28; @31; ad nauseum
ad infitinum ad Vomitas

from Caitlin’s Newsletter:

It
Was
Never
About Hostages.
It Was Never About Hamas.

Benjamin Netanyahu said on Thursday that freeing the Israeli hostages in Gaza was not his top priority, suggesting instead that defeating Hamas should take precedence over a hostage deal.

“We have many objectives, many goals in this war,” Netanyahu said. “We want to bring back all of our hostages. That is a very important goal.

In war, there is a supreme objective. And that supreme objective is victory over our enemies. And that is what we will achieve.”

Nothing the prime minister said here is true or valid — unless by “enemies” he means “all Palestinians in the Gaza Strip”.

Netanyahu has been fairly transparent about the fact that Israel’s ultimate goal in Gaza is neither freeing the hostages nor defeating Hamas, but seizing Palestinian territory and removing its Palestinian inhabitants.

He has openly said that Israel will occupy Gaza via military force, completely ruling out the possibility of any form of Palestinian government for the enclave.

He has openly said he wants to enact President Donald Trump’s ethnic cleansing plan for Gaza, which explicitly entails removing “all” Palestinians and never allowing them to return.

So they’ve made this perfectly clear. This isn’t about Hamas, except insofar as an armed resistance group will make it difficult to forcibly remove all Palestinians from Gaza.

And it certainly isn’t about hostages.

And yet, bizarrely, this is how the western political-media class continues to frame this onslaught. They call it Israel’s “war with Hamas”, when it’s nothing other than an undisguised ethnic cleansing operation.

They prattle on about October 7, hostages, and terrorism, even though it has already been made abundantly clear that this has nothing to do with any of those things.

They act as though the admission was simply never made.

There is absolutely no excuse for continuing to babble about hostages and Hamas after the US and Israel said the goal is the complete ethnic cleansing of Gaza.

They told you what this is really about.

They said it. With their face holes.

They said it right to you.

End of debate.

--Caitlin Johnstone; May 03, 2025

Plenty More
where This came from:
https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/it-was-never-about-hostages-it-was

suck on it
Wormtongue.

@35: "Benjamin Netanyahu said on Thursday that freeing the Israeli hostages in Gaza was not his top priority, suggesting instead that defeating Hamas should take precedence over a hostage deal."

Well, yes. If Israel rescues all of the current hostages, it's possible for Hamas to kidnap more children out of Israel, and illegally imprison them in Gaza. If Israel defeats Hamas, then it will, by definition, free all of the current hostages, and also prevent future hostage-taking by Hamas. So seeking to defeat Hamas is the wiser choice. (Unless, of course, like the author you're quoting, you believe Hamas' kidnapping of Israeli children, and illegally imprisoning them in Gaza, was an act intended to further justice.)