snip ...

The 21st century began with America standing alone atop the world.

The United States possessed the world's strongest economy, military, universities, reserve currency, scientific institutions, technological ecosystem, alliance network and cultural influence.

No rival came close.

The United States accounted for nearly a third of global economic output after the Cold War. American universities dominated scientific research. Silicon Valley defined the digital age. NATO represented the greatest military alliance in human history. The dollar ruled global commerce. America's word mattered.

Today, all of that is under strain - not because China became strong, but because America became stupid.

snip ...

Donald Trump didn't invent American decline, but he has accelerated it with a fury and recklessness that will echo across the century.

There have been many presidents in American history who made mistakes. There have been weak presidents. There have been corrupt presidents. There have been presidents overwhelmed by events.

But there has never been an American president who has waged such sustained warfare against the sources of American strength itself.

Donald Trump is the author of American self-harm.

He's the vandal of American power.

While America convulses in madness, instability, corruption and grievance, the leadership of Communist China waits with patience and discipline as the balance of power tilts eastward.

The Chinese understand something that too many Americans refuse to see: empires rarely collapse because they're conquered from abroad.

They collapse because they rot from within.

That's what is happening to the United States of America.

#63 Speaks says, "And I see george soros nowhere on your list. So what's with the republican obsession over him?"

He's a Jew, but not their kind of Jew, apparently.

#5 My Trump Calculator is due any day now. :-)

BREAKING: Donald Trump is reportedly telling staffers he wishes he could just declare bankruptcy in Iran and let it be other people's problem like he has done in every other crisis of his life.

3.8% ?

** ANOTHER RICK WILSON PIECE ** ...

snip ...

Here is the menu they have already half-cooked.

Cleta Mitchell runs the operation. She already is, frankly, you just haven't been paying attention. The 73-year-old Oklahoman who sat on the "find me 11,780 votes" call with Brad Raffensperger now runs the Election Integrity Network out of the Conservative Partnership Institute, and the EIN has become the connective tissue between the White House, DHS, and the entire 2020-denier diaspora.

ProPublica's reporting from February laid it out: a 30-person summit convened by Michael Freaking Flynn, attended by White House lawyer Kurt Olsen and DHS "election integrity" official Heather Honey...who used to work for Cleta.

They sat in a room and openly war-gamed a "national emergency" executive order that would let Trump "get around the Constitution's directive that elections should be run by states," ban voting machines, kill mail-in ballots, and force everyone in America to re-register. Patrick Byrne, the Overstock weirdo, reportedly told the room Trump needed to do "the muscular thing." That draft EO is sitting on someone's desk right now.

Expect the DOJ to start indicting state election officials. Not maybe. Not eventually. Soon. The FBI raid on the Fulton County elections office in January, based on a ludicrously thin affidavit that echoed Cleta Mitchell's old 2020 fever dreams almost word-for-word, was the pilot episode.

snip ...

We need to talk about November.

By now, you know the Trump cycle as well as you know the back of your own hand.

It runs like this, every time, with the metronomic predictability of a Swiss train: Trump floats an egregious thing. A "joke." A musing. A Truth Social all-caps incontinence at 3:14 a.m.

The decent people of the republic react with appropriate horror. The MAGA media apparatus of Fox, Newsmax, CBS, the Twitter-poisoned podcast bros, and the MAGA Influencer-Industrial Complex fan out to tut-tut the horrified for being humorless scolds. He was kidding. You people are unhinged. Touch grass.

Then, a beat later: well, he was kidding, but you have to admit he has a point. Then, a draft executive order leaks. Then it's policy. Then it's the law. Then it's the new floor, and the next joke starts the cycle again, one rung lower.

We are now somewhere between phases three and four on stealing the 2026 midterms. And I want to walk you through, in plain Florida English, what is coming, because the political apparatus on our side keeps treating each new outrage as a one-off, when in fact it is a system, and the system has a name, and the name is the takeover.

The North Star is this: whatever they accuse the Democrats of, they are planning to do themselves. Always. It is a deeply reliable rule in MAGA politics, more reliable, certainly, than their spines. Rigged election? They are rigging it. Foreign interference? They are inviting it. Voter Fraud? You're soaking in it.

The Overton Window, as now utilized by Trump/MAGA:

By now, you know the Trump cycle as well as you know the back of your own hand.

It runs like this, every time, with the metronomic predictability of a Swiss train: Trump floats an egregious thing. A "joke." A musing. A Truth Social all-caps incontinence at 3:14 a.m.

The decent people of the republic react with appropriate horror. The MAGA media apparatus of Fox, Newsmax, CBS, the Twitter-poisoned podcast bros, and the MAGA Influencer-Industrial Complex fan out to tut-tut the horrified for being humorless scolds. He was kidding. You people are unhinged. Touch grass.

Then, a beat later: well, he was kidding, but you have to admit he has a point. Then, a draft executive order leaks. Then it's policy. Then it's the law. Then it's the new floor, and the next joke starts the cycle again, one rung lower.

#12 Your "well documented" seems nowhere to be found, bell boi.

Is the "well documented" in the room with you... right now?

#141 Obama: Was a better candidate than McCain/Palin and Romney/Ryan.

Tim Scott has something more advantageous in today's South Carolina: A "R" for his party affiliation.

#9 Nope. No such luck, bell boi.

#139 It is possible, that it is all three: she was a lousy candidate, and she lost due to racism and misogyny.

To lay the blame on one single issue is rationalizing.

Anti semitism fuels a large swath of the right and the far fringe left.