Why Democrats and the media are struggling to capture the insanity—and danger—of the new Trump administration.

Elon Musk has vowed to unilaterally cancel hundreds of millions of dollars' worth of government grants after apparently gaining access to review the US Treasury’s vast payments system, a move that prompted the sudden resignation of one of the department’s most senior officials.
The world’s richest man, who bankrolled Donald Trump’s re-election campaign and was tasked by the president with running the cost-cutting Department of Government Efficiency, boasted on his social media site X that he was “rapidly shutting down . . . illegal payments” after a list of grants to Lutheran organisations was posted online.
The threat came after Musk appeared to confirm on Saturday that DOGE had access to the Treasury system, which disperses trillions of dollars each year, including social security payments.

Trump claimed that he had changed Obama’s criteria for hiring air traffic controllers with greater diversity — when in fact he left it unchanged. Moreover, he decried the fact that FAA hired controllers with a range of disabilities that he listed at the news conference. But that program was launched during his first term.
The June 2019 webpage for the Aviation Development Program (ADP) — also now removed but still visible on the Wayback Machine — said the program “provides an opportunity for Persons with Targeted Disabilities (PWTD) to gain aviation knowledge and experience as an air traffic control student trainee.” The announcement said the program was conceived when an air traffic manager met a quadriplegic student who had assumed he would never qualify to be a controller because of his condition. The FAA stressed that participants must meet the same qualifications as any other air traffic controller student.

Trump lost. That is, if all legal voters were allowed to vote, if all legal ballots were counted, Trump would have lost the states of Wisconsin, Michigan, Pennsylvania and Georgia. Vice-President Kamala Harris would have won the Presidency with 286 electoral votes.

"“Had we not done that [stopped Houston from sending out ballots], Donald Trump would’ve lost the election”"

"The crucial statistic is that not everyone’s ballot gets disqualified. One study done for the United States Civil Rights Commission found that a Black person, such as Maj. Turner, will be 900% more likely to have their mail-in or in-person ballot disqualified than a white voter."

when breaking the law is so common, we don't even bother

"That he broke the law is obvious. He didn’t give 30 days’ notice. He didn’t provide any “substantive rationale.” He didn’t provide any reason at all. He just did it. And he told reporters Saturday that it was all fine. “It’s a very common thing to do,” he said. Once he says that, we know that basically every Republican, and Fox News and Sinclair and the rest of the propaganda chamber, are going to say the same thing. Lindsey Graham on Sunday hilariously admitted that “technically, yeah,” Trump broke the law but Graham wasn’t losing any sleep over it."

they use this phrase "the sex that produces the large/small reproductive cell" which is being criticized because the fetus doesn't produce reproductive cells at conception, so it doesn't work for the first ~6 weeks. afterward, it seems like it does a better job of fitting people into a sex binary, since exceptions to this classification are rarer than chromosomal aberrations, it would seem.

“The finding that Ms. Carroll failed to prove that she was ‘raped’ within the meaning of the New York Penal Law does not mean that she failed to prove that Mr. Trump ‘raped’ her as many people commonly understand the word ‘rape,’ ” Kaplan wrote.

Tom Gambrel, the superintendent of Bell County, Kentucky, schools, joined most of his neighbors and cast his vote for Trump with his students in mind, but he told CNN that he hopes the president-elect doesn't carry through with his plan to cut federal education funding.

“I don’t think that anyone in our county wants to cut our school funding," Gambrel said, "and I don’t think that anyone voted for that."

Gambrel said the proposed cuts would be “catastrophic," forcing teacher layoffs, packing more students into classrooms and getting less attention for vulnerable students.

A CNN analysis found that all 15 of the states that rely most heavily on federal support for public schools in 2022 backed Trump in November, while all but two of the 15 that receive the fewest federal dollars as a percentage of their overall revenue supported Kamala Harris.

“This is one of these cases where (Republican) policies are stabbing their base right in the heart and will directly impact their kids,” said Will Ragland, vice president of the Center for American Progress.

Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu may whine all he likes about how U.S. President-elect Donald Trump made him do it. He is already selling the "I had no choice, we managed to postpone this for months" message to his ultranationalist, messianic, warmongering ruling coalition partners. But the truth is very clear: he has agreed to a deal he could and should have signed many months ago.

The deal that may – and still may not – be agreed and signed on Tuesday or Wednesday was on the table last May, again in July and practically ever since. But Mr. Netanyahu, in the name of "an existential war" that will produce a "total victory," waited for the U.S. election and then for the presidential inauguration before agreeing to a deal.

Explaining why he opposes the deal, far-right National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir specifically recalled how he previously prevented a deal by threatening Netanyahu, validating the claim that the prime minister's entire calculus was politically motivated. He never intended to end the war even when since-dismissed Defense Minister Yoav Gallant and the Israel Defense Forces stressed that all military goals had been achieved. The "strategic importance" of the Philadelphi corridor along the Gaza-Sinai border, meanwhile, was a bogus and cynical argument he had concocted.

Last Thursday, appearing on the state TV program 60 Minutes, the Americanist Malek Dudakov said, “Trump will create many problems for the Europeans, not to mention that he will unload the expenditures for the Ukrainian project upon them. Let us wish success to both sides of the conflict.”

Ironically, a 2022 report by the Danish Security and Intelligence Service accused Russia of forging a letter purporting to be from Greenland’s foreign minister to Sen. Tom Cotton (R-AR). The letter falsely claimed, “Our government is going to overcome all legal and political barriers... and to organize the referendum on independence of Greenland from Denmark as fast as possible.” In response, the Arkansas Republican boasted of being the one to float the idea of buying Greenland to Trump.

The goal of the forged document might have been to create a rift between NATO allies, but since Trump is enamored with the idea of taking over Greenland, Moscow’s initial plot might spectacularly backfire.

It made me feel like a worm had eaten my brain, too.

Trump also said he will move to end birthright citizenship — long enshrined in the 14th Amendment of the Constitution — which would strip rights from those born in the country to undocumented parents.

“Behind closed doors, people think she might be compromised. Like it’s not hyperbole,” one GOP aide told The Hill. “There are members of our conference who think she’s a [Russian] asset.”

“It’s not just that they’re totally unqualified, it’s that they’re anti-qualified. They are qualified to do the opposite of the thing that they are supposed to do,” Snyder said.

“Tulsi Gabbard is talking about a moment when Russian forces are approaching the Ukrainian capital. When Russian assassination squads are attempting to kill the Ukrainian head of state, and she’s advising people that all we have to do is summon up a magic word, and in effect surrender all of Ukraine to Russia,” Snyder continued. “And it’s not naïve. It sounds naïve but it’s not. What it’s doing is trying to prepare the way for more Ukrainian suffering. It’s saying, he who invades is right.”

“He’s behaving as if he’s a co-president and making sure everyone knows it,” one source said, adding that Musk is “sure taking lots of credit for the president’s victory. Bragging about America PAC and X to anyone who will listen.

“He’s trying to make President Trump feel indebted to him. And the president is indebted to no one.”

Elon Musk’s super political action committee (Pac) spent about $200m to help elect Donald Trump to a second presidency, according to a person familiar with the group’s spending, funding an effort that set a new standard for how billionaires can influence elections.

Musk’s net worth jumped $70bn since Trump’s victory in the 5 November election.

The plan worked. Trump saw key turnout surges in battleground states.

if the race were solely about their policies, Harris would win handily

A September Wall Street Journal report said the SpaceX founder and Putin have been in “regular contact” since late 2022, saying they had discussed “personal topics, business and geopolitical tensions.”

It raised national security concerns as SpaceX’s relationships with NASA and the US military may have granted Musk access to sensitive government information and US intelligence.