It's interesting to me how, with every election of my lifetime, the closer we get to The Big Day, the more people start putting crazy amounts of faith in the grand political promises of the candidates on both sides.
The truth is, virtually none of these promises ever come true. Maybe once a decade, kinda sorta maybe.
The closest we've seen in the last 30 years is Obamacare, and in this light the story couldn't be more hilarious. Obamacare was supposed to be socialized medicine. Instead, we got this giant corporatist abortion written by powerful multinationals like HMOs and Big Pharma, based on ideas from a major conservative think tank (The Heritage Foundation), promoted by conservatives like Newt Gingrich in the 1990s, and first implemented by the Republican governor Mitt Romney. It should have been called Conservative RepublicanCare, and all of the Republicans would have cheered like good little serfs and would be defending it to this day if Romney had passed it instead of Obama.
Harris is going to end free speech? Bitch, please.
Trump is going to destroy the deep state? Sure, Jan.
And yet virtually everyone outside of maybe half the people here assume all of this will happen in one direction or the other next Janauary.
It's all so retarded.
Don’t worry!
His “very smart people” are totally right about things this time when it comes to trade.
There is zero - I repeat, zero - moral difference between the people who pushed for "experimenting" with lockdowns because "we have to do something!" and the people who push for "experimenting" with trade wars because "we have to do something!"
Musk is out.
Musk put himself in a corner where he can't rip into Trump and he has to play nice probably at least through the midterms, but just look at the guy's face and watch him refuse to give a straight answer here. He put a lot on the line with endorsing Trump and starting DOGE, and Trump absolutely stabbed him in the back. Trump's supporters will blame congress, but Trump has very openly and loudly endorsed all of the DOGE-defying moves that congress has made, and has viciously attacked the one congressman (Thomas Massie) who has stood against it.
The reason is simple: Trump cares about trophies. Cutting the budget is not a trophy. DOGE trying to take a chainsaw to government was a trophy, but as soon as DOGE became more of Musk's than Trump's trophy, Trump stopped caring about it because congress offered him a Big, Beautiful Bill as a trophy instead. Just like the FBI offered the opportunity to build a Big, Beautiful new headquarters building for them (Trump loves buildings!). ...
As comedy slowly slides into unfunny wokeness hell, the last comedian standing (assuming he doesn't drop dead first, I mean just look at the guy; he's a trainwreck) will be Doug Stanhope. He closed out his recent special "The Dying of the Last Breed" with this bit on how important it is that we be able to make fun of anything. Because making fun.
Language warning, duh.
Preliminary Q2 numbers for Argentina are in. This is still subject to adjustment but so far their preliminaries have been pretty accurate under the Milei administration.
Slashing spending works. Trump and Bessent are very optimistically projecting economic growth of 3% doing the opposite of what Milei is doing to deliver 7.6% - and climbing!
