Boddhisatva

Nobel laureate Paul Krugman warned that both Trump and Elon Musk have a history of not paying debts and that “if markets even suspect that this habit will extend to Treasuries, God help us.”

If any god were willing to help us a meteor would have taken out D.C. on inauguration day.

Yeah, because he and his buddies are shorting a bunch of stocks that are going to take huge hits. Don't worry though, once the prices tumble and they make their money, Trump will change his mind and drop the tariffs and let the market recover for a bit. Then he'll do it again with some other tariff.

That's not entirely true. I am not a psychiatrist but it has been claimed many times, and it seems clear to me, that Trump has narcissistic personality disorder. That combined with hordes of followers that appear to consider him a living god makes him very, very hard to shame. On the other hand, if someone like Musk were to throw a few 10s of millions or even hundreds of millions into a campaign to turn right wing media against Trump, that horde could be turned against Trump too. If the crowds withered and he were vilified in the media, Trump would quickly crumble.

The grandiose/oblivious subtype was characterized by exaggerated self-importance, lack of remorse, interpersonal manipulativeness, seething anger, pursuit of interpersonal power, and pursuit of privilege.

This description of the grandiose/oblivious subtype of narcissism could not be more accurate in describing trump. He also could be in the vulnerable/hypervigilant subtype as that describes him well too.

Persons in the vulnerable/hypervigilant subtype were characterized by an exquisite sensitivity to what others are saying, a tuning in to every comment that might be critical, a shyness to the point where NPD could be confused with Avoidant PD, a proneness to shame and hurt feelings and a masochistic conviction that they have suffered more than anyone.

The linked article further states that suicide is not uncommon in people with NPD when they feel shamed or vilified.

Shame is often at the core of narcissistic individuals, who struggle with an acute sense of having failed in many aspects of their lives. They feel certain that others are thinking badly about them. When “caught” by someone watching them, a sense of painful humiliation may emerge. Seeing and being seen are central to narcissistic patients. They may feel that their secret sense of being “phony” or “fake” is now exposed. Suicide may feel like the only way out, especially after a devastating humiliation.

Being mocked in the media that he thrives on combined with vanishing MAGA crowds could very well be enough to push Trump over the edge and Musk is perhaps the one person in the world that could make it happen.

No, you and I know he has done many things. The MAGA cultists only know what their right wing media sources are telling them. Everything from a left or middle news source is all "fake news." Musk has the financial resources to poison the well they are drinking from by getting Fox, et al to run endless stories about Trump's corruption and incompetence.

I think that it will last as long as Musk wants it to. Trump spent years spewing his idiocy across Twitter for years. You can bet he was spewing the most damning stuff in DMs. Musk, having bought Twitter, now has every DM that Trump ever sent on that platform. Trump is not smart. He certainly sent things he shouldn't have in those DMs. I would be completely shocked if he hadn't sent DMs that included evidence of criminal activities by him or others. I'd be shocked if he hadn't sent classified information to other via Twitter DMs. Musk now has all of that dirt on Trump and the resources to use it if he chooses to.

I find it hard to believe that Musk spent between a quarter and a half a billion dollars to get Trump in office just because he loves Trump "as much as a straight man can love another man." I think he knew he had leverage on Trump and would be able to use it to do absolutely anything he wants. Now Trump is stuck with Musk because if he tries to dump him, Musk can suddenly find some of those DMs and drop a few tens of millions to make sure Trump gets roasted over it in the media and even in Congress.

Why can’t we work together to enjoy what we have left or invent something new. This is the real travesty to me.

I am with you 100% on this brother.

Stop saying we're an empire in decline. I don't want to hear the truth.

This is nothing Republicans in other states haven't done already. Nothing illegal about it.

Someone somewhere in one of those agencies should have arranged for Musk to have an accident. The fact that he is still breathing tells me that all the alphabet agencies have been compromised. The Secret Service showed that they were all-in on supporting Trump by deleting all their phone data surrounding the Jan-6 insurrection rather than turning it over to congressional investigators. Now, the inaction of the rest of our intelligence and national security agencies in this time of crisis makes them complicit in this new attack. They were the last line of defense against this sort of assault. Democracy has fallen.

Statement on beyer.house.gov (https://beyer.house.gov/news/documentsingle.aspx?DocumentID=6370)

Rep. Don Beyer, who represents a Northern Virginia congressional district with one of the largest concentrations of federal employees in the country, issued the following statement today on the reported resignation of racist “DOGE” employee Marko Elez, who had previously been granted access to U.S. Treasury payment systems:

“This is a scandal.

“Elon Musk gave a self-described ‘racist’ and eugenicist access to a system that controls all financial payments from the U.S. Treasury. That system also contains the personal information including Social Security info of every American.

“This is why we have a process to vet civil servants, and why we hire and promote them based on merit, not their personal relationship to some rich guy. How dare Elon Musk bully and threaten good people who spent their careers serving the American people when he brings this level of gross incompetence to his work.

“Everyone involved in hiring Marko Elez should be fired and ‘DOGE’ should be deleted.”

If you had read the article you would know that they are talking about two instances with house cats and their owners. House cats appear to be highly susceptible to this strain of H5N1 and it is highly lethal to them. If a new strain has appeared that can spread from people to cats and from cats to people, that is a very, very bad thing.

People who let their cats go outside would be as serious risk because cats can easily catch it from wild birds and then infect their owners. And every single human who catches the virus is a billion rolls of the dice for the virus to further mutate to spread from human to human.

Yes, we need to actively protect the 80% of America that identifies as Christian from the 20% who are oppressing them by refusing to let themselves be oppressed by the Christian majority.