It costs him nothing, but it also gains him nothing tangible. Instead, he will ask for direct payments before pardoning any of those folks. He’ll say something like “If you want this person pardoned, buy one of my NFTs and tag the name of the person on the blockchain, the top 10 names will get a pardon”.
It’s a direct abuse of power, but is totally legal, as long as half the House and at least 34 Senators are cut in on the grift don’t impeach him over it.
Hopefully it’s a metaphor for our politics. “Entitled person in power thinks rules don’t apply to him, bypasses guardrails, finds out (rather roughly) that physics applies to everyone.”
Texas is Iran with different hats.
The Joe Biden who showed up in 2020 would have beaten Trump. Joe Biden in 2024 is not the same guy.
The only real asset Joe had over Kamala, though, is a penis. For some voters, though, that’s enough to make them pick one and not the other.
No, Trump is qualified. He meets the qualifications set out in the Constitution, and has enough electoral votes for this second term.
He is unfit for the job, but will have it again anyway. The founders envisioned the Electoral College itself as the vehicle to prevent unfit people from assuming the office, but that isn’t working out so well.
Remember how the old Soviet Union had leadership which was very opaque, and there were a whole class of “Kremlinologists” who would figure out who was in favor by how closely they were standing to the Soviet Premier in photographs of public events?
This is similar, we can figure out who is close to our new Prime Minister by how he treats them on Twitter. “X-ologists”? It’s dumb, but so is everything in this timeline.
John Bolton is just pissed he won’t be the one instigating it.
If I were one of the writers for this upcoming season, I would give Trump a redemption arc. Musk’s millions of dollars of influence would render Putin’s influence unnecessary, and Trump comes out and pushes a hard line on Russia over Ukraine. Trump also sees the popular opinion against the health care system, pardons Luigi, and appoints him Secretary of Health once RFK Jr’s brain worm shoots out of his skull live on TV during his Senate hearing. And he finally has his Infrastructure Week, all these years later.
If he commuted those sentences, though, the narrative would focus on how Biden was being soft on mass murderers, and not on the death penalty itself.
I keep reminding people, Elon Musk did not become co-President by listening to experts…
On Jan 21, I fully expect the President to “pardon” the authors, even though that is meaningless, and personally sue the journal for having the wrong “ethics”.
The entire University of Florida Defensive Line that one game in 1980 when he ran for all those yards…
Ah, makes sense
Why would a reboot matter?
They need more room for bots
Oh snap
s/driver shortages/districts not willing to pay drivers enough to put up with snotnosed kids/g
An interesting thing I found out from this article is that the drop in demand is due to non-Chinese companies not being able to compete in the Chinese market. The incoming tariff war will only make this worse. Donald Trump may be thinking he is putting American Manufacturing first, but in reality he is cutting off American companies from the largest market in the world.
The problem is our investment economy that focuses only on the stock prices continually going up. It’s literally an unsustainable system.
Yup, this is the problem right here. Investments are supposed to generate returns, that’s the whole point. But Milton Friedman and Jack Welch decided that the sole mission of any company was to increase shareholder value, and the rest of the world rolled with that. So whenever these CEOs point to their Mission and Vision statements, unless they say “Our only priority is delivering returns to our Shareholders”, they are lying.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shareholder_value
Economist Milton Friedman introduced the Friedman doctrine in a 1970 essay for The New York Times, entitled “A Friedman Doctrine: The Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits”.[5] In it, he argued that a company has no social responsibility to the public or society; its only responsibility is to its shareholders.[6]
Meanwhile, we’ve decided that these corporations are people. Psychopaths who have no moral responsibilities to anyone but their shareholders, but people nonetheless.
Yeah, Clinton and Soros are the obvious trolls, but it goes deeper. He also awarded posthumous medals to Robert F. Kennedy (father of you-know-who) and George Romney (father of that other guy). Kind of a subtle reminder to those two that they didn’t get their political influence o their own merits.
Heck, even Bill Nye (the Science Guy) is getting one. Another’s the reminder that we can’t just ignore Science when it is inconvenient.
But still, nothing can top when Trump gave the medal to Rush Limbaugh a few years ago. That is when the award jumped the shark. It’s rather meaningless after that.