Trump's focus since his return to Washington has centered around his insatiable thirst for power and profits . . . and

[riversedge]

Moe Davis (U.S. Air Force, Retired)
@ColMoeDavis
·
1h
There are a lot of things to be concerned about when it comes to Donald Trump. Two of them — which are related — are highlighted in two articles in today’s New York Times.

The first one is about Trump’s Department of Personal Retribution . . . sorry, Department of Justice . . . showing up at the homes of four New York Times reporters with subpoenas following their story about Trump leaving the NATO summit in Turkey using an old Air Force One because his Sky Palace lacks adequate defensive security protections. Here’s an excerpt:

“Mr. Trump has long been a harsh critic of the news media. But in his second term in office, he has moved aggressively to use the immense powers of the federal government in his efforts to attack the press.”

The second article is about the massive increase in Trump’s wealth since he returned to the White House. In his first year back in the White House in 2025, Trump’s earnings increased 250 percent from the year before, as I’m sure was the case for you as well. Here’s an excerpt from the article:

“Some of Mr. Trump’s most lucrative ventures seemed to intersect directly with his administration’s policies like cryptocurrency and dealings with foreign governments.”

“But, Mr. Trump has argued, his personal financial gains reflected a stock market benefiting everyone; his investments and business dealings were in a blind trust, not unlike other presidents; and unlike his predecessors, he donated his presidential salary.”

“Except none of those assertions are true.”

What? All lies? Say it ain’t so!

Trump’s focus since his return to Washington has centered around his insatiable thirst for power and profits . . . and he has been wildly successful.

Thanks to a supine Congress and a servile Supreme Court, Trump has been empowered to do essentially anything he wants to do, from tearing down the East Wing of the White House to firing career civil servants who didn’t display sufficient loyalty to him, to obtaining a luxurious personal Sky Palace from a foreign government and upgrading it at taxpayer expense . . . and he’s taking it with him when he leaves. He also banked 2.2 billion dollars, mostly through means that would have sent others on the federal payroll to prison for public corruption.

And controlling the news media is part and parcel of his personal empowerment and enrichment strategy. In fact, as the article notes, he made 87 million dollars in 2025 off of settlements with news organizations he sued for publishing articles that upset him.

As the saying goes, whoever controls the narrative controls the people, and Trump and his billionaire oligarch cronies have largely consolidated their control over the major means of distributing information to the public. That’s a handy weapon to pump out propaganda to manipulate the masses. And the news outlets that refuse to bend the knee to King Donald get sued, harassed by the government, and their journalists threatened as is the case with the reporters on the weak and defenseless Sky Palace story.

It says a lot that during the war with Iran, when the U.S. Government and the Iranian Government put out conflicting statements, it was a coin toss on which one was telling the truth because both lie incessantly. Remember what happened when the Bureau of Labor Statistics issued economic data that Trump didn’t like? He fired the head of the Department. And we have a White House Press Secretary who makes Baghdad Bob look like a fumbling neophyte.

I’m not telling you anything you don’t already know when I say our country is not in a good place. We spent 250 years working to achieve a more perfect union and now there’s a concerted effort by some to make it increasingly imperfect; a Golden Age for the oligarchs and a Golden Shower for the rest.

We have our work cut out for us.

Link to tweet

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[tanyev]

1. Money, power, revenge.

Money, power, revenge.
Money, power, revenge.
Money, power, revenge.
Money, power, revenge.
Money, power, revenge.
Money, power, revenge.
Money, power, revenge.

etc.