How much money you have doesn’t determine what your values are,

Having more wealth than you could ever possibly need while people all around you can't even afford basic necessities is very much an indication of exactly what your values are. They're shit and so are you.

Trump has never had a "deportation" agenda.

What he's had, from the start, is a "send anyone who opposes me to a concentration camp" agenda.

The "deportation" of immigrants was just a cenvenient base from which to start establishing precedents.

I've never understood Microsoft's design and marketing strategy.

They appear to exist in some sort of mirror universe in which quality is a bad thing, so they mostly build OSes that are bloated, clunky garbage and do everything they can to fool/coerce/force people into using them. But then every once in a while it's like they accidentally let an actually decent OS slip through, and they immediately panic and start trying to kill it. Like they can't cope with having an OS that people actually want to use, and can't wait to get back to where they're comfortable - fooling/coercing/forcing them to use bloated, clunky garbage.

I'm afraid it's too late though.

It's possible - arguably even likely - that the Dem establishment still won't get the message and will instead continue to try to con us into supporting corrupt neolib hacks and will continue to undermine actual leftists.

In fact, I sort of half expect the New York party to abandon Mamdani and instead back a write-in campaign for Cuomo.

I wish I was kidding.

Even if they show never-before-seen integrity and determination and actualy shift back toward supporting actual leftists (or get replaced by a new generation of leaders who will), I still think it's likely going to be too late. The longer Trump and his ilk remain in office, the more likely it becomes that opposing them will just get you on the next flight to some overseas concentration camp, or dead, or both.

Oh look - a blatant quid pro quo.

Supreme Court apologists have weakly been trying to excuse the Court's "gifts aren't bribes" ruling by pointing out that it still counts as corruption if the thing of value is given in advance and if there's an overt quid pro quo involved.

Both of those are the case here, so even by the Court's new abysmally weak standards, this counts as official corruption.

So who thinks anything will come of it?

Yeah - me neither.

At the least, that should qualify as manslaughter.

That'd be about par for the course. When too much attention is focused on their abject evil in Gaza, one of their strategies is to suddenly go stir the shit in Iran or Lebanon or Syria and get attention focused there instead.

Presumably his advisors determined that he needed to Overton more and faster if he wanted to ensure that he'd be the neolib weasel the DNC shoves down our throats in 2028.

I have zero doubt of both of those things.

I think he saw tariffs as something that would provide him with leverage, and that's it. I don't think he's ever had a clear goal or an end game, and I'm pretty sure he's never even been entirely clear on just what tariffs are or how they work. He just saw a weapon to hold over other countries' heads in order to swing some kind of deal, and grabbed ahold for that reason alone.

And while he prides himself on his supposed deal-making prowess, never forget that this is a man who couldn't even keep a casino running in the black.

And broadly - he's really rather obviously insane. It's debatable how much of his brazen disconnect from consensual reality is delusion and how much is lies, but it works out to insanity either way.

It sucks to even be in partial agreement with the broligarchs, but as a rural American, I have zero sympathy for this fuckhead or anyone else involved in the broadband fund.

The government has been pouring money into broadband expansion for decades, and for decades, internet providers have been sopping up that money while doing exactly nothing to actually earn it.

Is there any one quality that more of the people surrounding Trump share than being serial sex abusers?

I can't think of one.

That's what Daddy Putin wants, so that's what Daddy Putin gets.