Are we now officially in a dictatorship?

[Red]

Apparently, the Trump administration is attempting to extend dictatorial orders to European cities. This is insane.

Stockholm is latest city to refuse 'bizarre' US request to abandon diversity

The Stockholm City Council has rejected the US embassy's demand that it adopt the Trump administration's anti-diversity policies, with Stockholm’s vice-mayor for planning calling the request "bizarre".…

www.france24.com

The Stockholm City Council has rejected the US embassy's demands that it roll back diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) policies at the behest of the Trump administration.

In his inauguration speech, US President Donald Trump vowed to end what he sweepingly but vaguely called efforts to “socially engineer race and gender into every aspect of public and private life”.

This has translated into attempts to eliminate programmes in the United States that seek to encourage diversity and equality in education, the work force and beyond.

In an email to the city's planning office dated April 29, the US embassy asked that Stockholm officials sign a document promising that contractors would not operate any programmes promoting DEI that would violate current US law.

“It’s so bizarre,” Jan Valeskog, Stockholm’s vice-mayor for city planning, told the Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter on Tuesday.

The city council said Friday that it would not comply with the embassy's demands or offer an official response.

“We were really surprised, of course,” Valeskog told The Associated Press.

“We will not sign this document at all, of course not.”

Valeskog said that while the city wants to maintain a good relationship with the US embassy, it will follow Swedish law and current city policies even if they include DEI practices.

Countries and cities across Europe have received similar demands from US embassies – including France, Belgium and the city of Barcelona – all of which have lashed out at the attempt to expand anti-diversity policies to the continent.

US Embassy demanded Stockholm officials comply with Trump's anti-DEI policies. They refused

The U.S. Embassy in Sweden's capital requested the city's compliance with Trump's "anti-discrimination law."

www.snopes.com

Folks, DEI is not evil. It is not something that needs to be eradicated, like cancer. This effort is nuts. With all the problems, in our nation, in our world, on the only home we have, Earth, stamping out DEI the world over is a fairly glaring example of how this administration is completely off its rocker. The world will follow Trump’s orders? DEI is the greatest threat our planet faces, and Trump will lead us out of DEI’s valley of darkness? Oh yeah, the guy is our first truly “looney tune” leader.




View: https://x.com/Polytemple/status/1920599195548856377

 

[fishonjazz]

Apparently, the Trump administration is attempting to extend dictatorial orders to European cities. This is insane.

Stockholm is latest city to refuse 'bizarre' US request to abandon diversity

The Stockholm City Council has rejected the US embassy's demand that it adopt the Trump administration's anti-diversity policies, with Stockholm’s vice-mayor for planning calling the request "bizarre".…

www.france24.com

The Stockholm City Council has rejected the US embassy's demands that it roll back diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) policies at the behest of the Trump administration.

In his inauguration speech, US President Donald Trump vowed to end what he sweepingly but vaguely called efforts to “socially engineer race and gender into every aspect of public and private life”.

This has translated into attempts to eliminate programmes in the United States that seek to encourage diversity and equality in education, the work force and beyond.

In an email to the city's planning office dated April 29, the US embassy asked that Stockholm officials sign a document promising that contractors would not operate any programmes promoting DEI that would violate current US law.

“It’s so bizarre,” Jan Valeskog, Stockholm’s vice-mayor for city planning, told the Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter on Tuesday.

The city council said Friday that it would not comply with the embassy's demands or offer an official response.

“We were really surprised, of course,” Valeskog told The Associated Press.

“We will not sign this document at all, of course not.”

Valeskog said that while the city wants to maintain a good relationship with the US embassy, it will follow Swedish law and current city policies even if they include DEI practices.

Countries and cities across Europe have received similar demands from US embassies – including France, Belgium and the city of Barcelona – all of which have lashed out at the attempt to expand anti-diversity policies to the continent.

US Embassy demanded Stockholm officials comply with Trump's anti-DEI policies. They refused

The U.S. Embassy in Sweden's capital requested the city's compliance with Trump's "anti-discrimination law."

www.snopes.com

Folks, DEI is not evil. It is not something that needs to be eradicated, like cancer. This effort is nuts. With all the problems, in our nation, in our world, on the only home we have, Earth, stamping out DEI the world over is a fairly glaring example of how this administration is completely off its rocker. The world will follow Trump’s orders? DEI is the greatest threat our planet faces, and Trump will lead us out of DEI’s valley of darkness? Oh yeah, the guy is our first truly “looney tune” leader.




View: https://x.com/Polytemple/status/1920599195548856377

Wow. trump is such a douche

 

[Red]

Rewriting history is usually a priority for authoritarians. To justify their crimes. I’ve been of the belief that Trump would want high school American history texts to be revised to reflect the lie that Trump won the 2020 election. That has not happened, and may never, but the idea has supporters in one state.

Oklahoma high schools to teach 2020 election conspiracy theories as fact

State superintendent Ryan Walters tapped chief of Heritage Foundation, key player behind Project 2025, for curriculum

www.theguardian.com

 

[The Thriller]

Rewriting history is usually a priority for authoritarians. To justify their crimes. I’ve been of the belief that Trump would want high school American history texts to be revised to reflect the lie that Trump won the 2020 election. That has not happened, and may never, but the idea has supporters in one state.

Oklahoma high schools to teach 2020 election conspiracy theories as fact

State superintendent Ryan Walters tapped chief of Heritage Foundation, key player behind Project 2025, for curriculum

www.theguardian.com

But at least egg prices are down and our 401ks are up, right?

 

[PJF]

Great thread on why Trump is doing so well.


View: https://x.com/ProfKyleWelch/status/1924742180838445396?t=nTLYAiAcwO_l5oeSqe4KTg&s=19


Epiphany today: Trump didn’t just weaponize outrage—he weaponized partisanship.

He saw that many people treat political parties like religion. It’s not about policy—it’s about identity. No matter what changes, they stay loyal.

1/3

Trump hijacked the best parts of both parties—anti-war, pro-worker, pro-consumer—and made them his.

And the opposition? Forced to reject their own longtime values just to stay anti-Trump. It’s stunning.

2/3

It’s ruthless and brilliant.

The only way it breaks is if Democrats decide hating Trump 24/7 isn’t worth surrendering the values that once made them attractive.

Until then, Trump controls the board— because he’s playing a different game.

3/3

 

[Red]

Yikes…I don’t know if this was included in the House bill..

A Terrible Idea

Dean Chemerinsky discusses the reconciliation bill’s provision that would restrict federal courts’ authority to hold government officials in contempt for violating court orders

www.justsecurity.org

Now is not the time to limit the ability of federal courts to enforce their judicial orders. But in light of dozens of federal courts finding actions by President Donald Trump to be unconstitutional, some House Republicans are trying to do exactly that. A provision in the proposed spending bill would restrict the authority of federal courts to hold government officials in contempt when they violate court orders. Without the contempt power, judicial orders are meaningless and can be ignored.

There is no way to understand this except as a way to keep the Trump administration from being restrained when it violates the Constitution or otherwise breaks the law. The House and the Senate should reject this effort to limit judicial power. Hopefully recent public opinion survey data — showing vast majorities want the Trump administration to stop an action if a federal court ruled it illegal – will guide these legislators to the right outcome. If this anti-democratic legislation is adopted, the courts should declare it unconstitutional as violating separation of powers.

The provision in the proposed budget reconciliation bill states: “No court of the United States may use appropriated funds to enforce a contempt citation for failure to comply with an injunction or temporary restraining order if no security was given when the injunction or order was issued pursuant to Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 65(c), whether issued prior to, on, or subsequent to the date of enactment of this section.”

By its very terms this provision is meant to limit the power of federal courts to use their contempt power. It does so by relying on a relatively rarely used provision of the Rules that govern civil cases in federal court. Rule 65(c) says that judges may issue a preliminary injunction or a temporary restraining order “only if the movant gives security in an amount that the court considers proper to pay the costs and damages sustained by any party found to have been wrongfully enjoined or restrained.”

But federal courts understandably rarely require that a bond be posted by those who are restraining unconstitutional federal, state, or local government actions. Those seeking such court orders generally do not have the resources to post a bond, and insisting on it would immunize unconstitutional government conduct from judicial review. It always has been understood that courts can choose to set the bond at zero….

…..But the provision in the House bill would make the court orders in these cases completely unenforceable. Indeed, the bill is stunning in its scope. It would apply to all temporary restraining orders, preliminary injunctions, and even permanent injunctions ever issued. By its terms, it applies to court orders “issued prior to, on, or subsequent” to its adoption.

……This would be a stunning restriction on the power of the federal courts. The Supreme Court has long recognized that the contempt power is integral to the authority of the federal courts. Without the ability to enforce judicial orders, they are rendered mere advisory opinions which parties are free to disregard.

 

[PJF]

California sure is.. Democrats ruin everything they touch.


View: https://x.com/GrantCardone/status/1955038600996827393?t=Q7ODXlcezUhf7MIzw4osKw&s=19

 

[The Thriller]

I don’t know how one could argue that we’re not in a dictatorship. There aren’t any restrictions on Trump’s power given he controls the Supreme Court and congressional repubs have given up any attempts to stand up for themselves. I think what’s restricting Trump is his own attention span and disordered thinking.

 

[LogGrad98]

I don’t know how one could argue that we’re not in a dictatorship. There aren’t any restrictions on Trump’s power given he controls the Supreme Court and congressional repubs have given up any attempts to stand up for themselves. I think what’s restricting Trump is his own attention span and disordered thinking.

Don't worry, he has the Project 2025 authors, soon to all be in positions of authority in the government, to help keep it all on track. Won't be long and we will have segregation again. Back to the dream of the 40's and 50's, where people of color and women were seen (and hopefully not very often) and not heard. Back when the mexican family down the street was the only minority they were forced to see or **gasp** interact with. The whites will take full control, just like Jesus intended. Good old white western-looking Jesus, as God intended. It must have been weird for Jesus to be the only white guy in the entirety of Jerusalem way back then. Man would he have looked out of place!

 

[LogGrad98]

I don’t know how one could argue that we’re not in a dictatorship. There aren’t any restrictions on Trump’s power given he controls the Supreme Court and congressional repubs have given up any attempts to stand up for themselves. I think what’s restricting Trump is his own attention span and disordered thinking.

The only thing remaining is if he finds a way to stay in power or if he drops out and we have a free and fair election in the next presidential election cycle. Otherwise he is acting as a dictator, no doubt. But can he find a way to stay in power, that is the final straw, so to speak.

 

[Red]

Excerpts from what I felt was a great essay.


View: https://x.com/RealMikeKeaton/status/1954316695528427662


This very Greek tragedy — conservatives killing the Constitution they love because they hate the left more — is made more poignant by Trump’s utter cluelessness: he doesn’t even intend to end the American experiment in self-government and individual freedom. He isn’t that sophisticated. He is ending it simply because he knows no other way of being a human being. He cannot tolerate any system where he does not have total control. Character counts, as conservatives once insisted, and a man with Trump’s psyche, when combined with his demagogic genius, is quite simply incompatible with liberal democratic society. Unfit.

But the one thing we didn’t really know before now is that in the face-off between this man’s will-to-power and liberal democracy, liberal democracy would just … fold. Looking back at the resilience of the Constitution, the reaction of the other branches of government, the behavior of civil society, and the response of the public over the last decade: well, when I worried that the US was “ripe for tyranny” in 2016, I was obviously wildly understating the case.

The tyrant’s first textbook tactic, of course, is declaring an emergency to justify the seizure of arbitrary power. Trump has now done so over 30 times in various executive orders and directives in his first seven months.

And unlike, say, Putin, who capitalized on (and may well have orchestrated) an actual emergency — a terror attack — to make his first big move, Trump just declares non-existent ones real on Twitter — and presto! — they are real. He knows he doesn’t even have to bother to justify them. He rightly assumes that Americans have less resistance to bald-faced autocratic lies in 2025 than Russians did in 1999.
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Meanwhile, America is one-man rule. Resist and he’ll ruin you. He’ll destroy your law firm’s business; he’ll stop that corporate merger you want; he’ll put a tariff on your company; he’ll launch a DOJ investigation into you; he’ll get you fired for doing your job in government faithfully; he’ll sue you if you print something true about him; and if you’re a federal judge and rule against him, he’ll sic an online mob, and maybe a real mob, onto you. He has done all these things this year — and openly celebrated them.
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The next move of a tyrant is to address the discrepancies between his constant lies and the reality on the ground. Trump believes that the economy is booming, inflation is dropping, and growth is surging everywhere. If the data disprove that, the data must be wrong. Trump’s very public firing of the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics is a clear signal: there will be no reality outside Trump’s reality in this elected monarchy. The Federal Reserve will be next. The legitimacy of all the numbers on which a free society depends to make rational decisions will be dismantled — just as it was under Erdogan and Xi. L’état, c’est lui.

Alongside all this is an assault on the autonomy of universities, the targeting of law firms that may represent those targeted by Trump, the end of free speech protections for non-citizens, and the appearance on our streets of armed, masked, anonymous men and women, with powers to seize anyone they suspect of being an illegal immigrant, and detain them, often for long stretches, even if they turn out to be citizens, or engaged in perfectly legal activity.

This feels like a police state because only in police states do governments deploy masked anonymous armed men — now with no age limits! — patrolling the streets with the power to arrest and detain. And yet many Americans shrug. Just as they shrug at the construction of vast detention camps in the US — all proof that expediting deportations is not the real goal; the goal is the presence of an ominous gulag to deter would-be illegals, and, as a bonus, to hold over citizens as well. This is classic state terror: the amassing a huge punitive powers answerable only to one man, who is by definition never wrong. It was precisely against this kind of power Americans once staged a revolution. Now they want the king back — as long as he’s their king; their Red Caesar.
————————————————————————————————-

A tyrant makes it impossible to plan or predict a business or a life outside of his control or surveillance. He makes it impossible to get through the day without hearing his name or seeing his face. And Trump is fast dismantling neutral institutions, reality-based research, legal neutrality, and economic predictability ... in order to disorient, and in that disorientation, paralyze resistance. The relentless thoroughness of the campaign to end liberal democratic life and replace it with a strongman cult has been staggering.
—————————————————————————————

The question, it seems to me, is how Trump might respond to a real SCOTUS setback, or to a House he doesn’t totally control. And the answer to that we already know: he will assault the court’s legitimacy, threaten the Justices with mob violence, refuse to end the tariffs, and — of course! — claim the 2026 elections are rigged. The same, I think, applies to his term limits. He will attempt to defy them along the lines of his beloved thug-tyrant, Bukele. And if that open assault on a clear Constitutional amendment doesn’t fly, which may be a stretch even for MAGA vandals, it still won’t be over.

If a Democrat wins in 2028, Trump will call the election rigged and illegitimate, and will re-stage 2020 on behalf of a successor — with the full weight of the federal government behind him. If a Republican wins, Trump will remain POTUS the way Putin stayed president after making Medvedev “president” in 2008. Trump is an instinctual tyrant, and once those characters have tasted raw, arbitrary power, as he has, they can never let go. He must either have a family member succeed him or a puppet. Don Jr or JD — Trump’s Medvedev.

The stain of this will therefore be deep and permanent. It already is. Trump intends to use the 250th celebration next year as a Putin-style glorification of his reign. By then he’ll be riding in the Qatari jet that the Senate just allowed him to keep permanently. Tyrants also demand permanent monuments to their glory. So having paved over the Rose Garden, Trump is now intending to add a massive 90,000 square foot gilded ballroom to the White House itself, forever cementing it as a palatial symbol for his new monarchy.

I will be told I’m being excitable again. That I suffer from TDS. That this will pass, notwithstanding its horrendous precedents, its shredding of legal and constitutional and democratic legitimacy, its growing domestic army, its multiplying domestic internment camps, its delegitimization of the liberal democratic system, and its protean, venomous irrationalism. And I sure hope it will. God knows we have been through trials before. History is a great perspective.

But I recall that when I first wrote that I didn’t believe Trump would concede an election he lost, and thereby provoke a constitutional crisis, I was also told I was hyperventilating. But it happened. And Americans rewarded it four years later by re-electing the man who tried to destroy their democracy. That’s exactly as the ancient political philosophers predicted: as democracies enter their late, chaotic stage, the people want an autocrat. They yearn for one. And in America, they voted for one twice. The forces we are up against are far beyond Trump. They’re called the cycles of history and a critical mass of the American people, who no longer want to govern themselves, who are sick of this republic and no longer want to keep it if it means sharing power with those they despise.

But in history — as the Dishcast details this week — individuals and their characters are also critical. And have we ever had a president this hostile to the rule of law and constitutional government, to the legitimacy of the other party, to the norms of liberal governance, and to the most basic decency most humans are capable of? And with this stamina, energy, and demagogic talent?

I don’t think so. I think this is how a republic dies. If it is still, except on paper, alive.

 

[The Thriller]

The only thing remaining is if he finds a way to stay in power or if he drops out and we have a free and fair election in the next presidential election cycle. Otherwise he is acting as a dictator, no doubt. But can he find a way to stay in power, that is the final straw, so to speak.

He’s going to stay in power until he dies. Or attempt to stay in power. We already saw what he did in Trump 1.0. Imagine now, after another term of republicans blowing him. Not just republicans now, college presidents, business leaders, law firms, etc. he psychologically cannot give up the White House. Like a serial rapist, he can’t give it up. The presidency is “his.”

And voters knew all this before they voted for him. Or should’ve known this. Why did they put such a psychopath back into the White House? Perhaps they too are in mass psychosis

 

[PJF]

View: https://x.com/SenateGOP/status/1955367193648197944?t=Afm2W_LflC7U4zaTbu186A&s=19

 

[Red]

The President’s Police State

Trump is delivering the authoritarian government his party once warned about.

www.theatlantic.com