What does a TRUMP presidency look like?

[Grey Fox]

The Stantead's library (the one where the border is inside) will close the Canadian side access, and will apparently need extensive remodeling to accommodate that unilateral decision from the US. ie a Wall.

Fascist state speed run.

[Zoupa]

DoorDash and Klarna have signed a deal where customers can choose to pay for food deliveries in  interest-free installments or deferred options aligned with payday schedules.

lol. Wtf is going on down there.

[Razgovory]

He signed an executive order to dismantle the department of education.

Get ready for an avalanche of "the leopards ate my face" from Trump voters with special needs kids.

See, we aren't suppose to post stuff like that.  Oex said so.

[Oexmelin]

Paul Weiss capitulates to autocrat.

[Syt]

Trump announced a deal with Paul Wiess, one the nation's most pre-eminent law firms.

In return for rescinding an executive order directing a "review" into Paul Weiss' security clearances (necessary to do national security related legal work) and government contracts, Paul Weiss agreed to cancel all DEI policies in hiring and pay $40 million in protection money in the form of free legal services for favored administration initiatives.

The country's top litigation firm folded without filing a single court pleading.

It's even worse than it sounds because most firms have associates do a certain amount of pro bono work.  Much of this involved defending indigent litigants in housing or benefits work, people accused of crimes, and asylum applicants. Under the Paul Weiss agreement much of this work will be shifted towards Muslim bashing ("combatting antisemitism) and further undermining the rule of law ("fairness in the justice system").

So Democrats, universities, corporations, law firms etc. are all just dropping their pants and bending over for the Orange King? 

[fromtia]

So Democrats, universities, corporations, law firms etc. are all just dropping their pants and bending over for the Orange King? 

No one is coming to save us. Best I can do is John Roberts.

[The Brain]

I am shocked that academia, corporations, and politicians cozy up to the new Leader instead of fighting him. Unprecedented.

[Syt]

I am shocked that academia, corporations, and politicians cozy up to the new Leader instead of fighting him. Unprecedented.

I assume I was just expecting a bit more pushback.

[Syt]

Saw the bit from the Laura Ingraham interview with Trump where he rants about Canada again. It seems really bad when Ingraham looks like the sane person in the room, pushing back against him and questioning why he treats allies so much worse than the actual adversaries, calling him out that his actions give a push to the liberals over conservatives in Canada and fact checking his trade deficit numbers.

[mongers]

Saw the bit from the Laura Ingraham interview with Trump where he rants about Canada again. It seems really bad when Ingraham looks like the sane person in the room, pushing back against him and questioning why he treats allies so much worse than the actual adversaries, calling him out that his actions give a push to the liberals over conservatives in Canada and fact checking his trade deficit numbers.

I think a lot of right-wringers will find this, it's not until they're in the room with him for an extended period of time that the full derangement* of his 'ambition' becomes apparent, it was in her face, you couldn't turn away from the obvious immediate outcomes of his actions.

Of course plenty of conservatives/right-wing type have that experience and go away thinking, 'how best can I use it to my own advantage' or further my political 'ideas'.

* I won't say insanity, as this is grossly unfair to people struggling with mental illness.

[Syt]

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/03/20/us/politics/musk-pentagon-briefing-china-war-plan.html

Pentagon Set Up Briefing for Musk on Potential War With China
The access would be a major expansion of Elon Musk's government role and highlight his conflicts of interest.

The Pentagon was scheduled on Friday to brief Elon Musk on the U.S. military's plan for any war that might break out with China, two U.S. officials said on Thursday.

Another official said the briefing would be China focused, without providing additional details. A fourth official confirmed Mr. Musk was to be at the Pentagon on Friday, but offered no details.

Hours after news of the planned meeting was published by The New York Times, Pentagon officials and President Trump denied that the session would be about military plans involving China. "China will not even be mentioned or discussed," Mr. Trump said in a late-night social media post.

It was not clear if the briefing for Mr. Musk would go ahead as originally planned. But providing Mr. Musk access to some of the nation's most closely guarded military secrets would be a dramatic expansion of his already extensive role as an adviser to Mr. Trump and leader of his effort to slash spending and purge the government of people and policies they oppose.

It would also bring into sharp relief the questions about Mr. Musk's conflicts of interest as he ranges widely across the federal bureaucracy while continuing to run businesses that are major government contractors. In this case, Mr. Musk, the billionaire chief executive of both SpaceX and Tesla, is a leading supplier to the Pentagon and has extensive financial interests in China.

Pentagon war plans, known in military jargon as O-plans or operational plans, are among the military's most closely guarded secrets. If a foreign country were to learn how the United States planned to fight a war against them, it could reinforce its defenses and address its weaknesses, making the plans far less likely to succeed.

The top-secret briefing that exists for the China war plan has about 20 to 30 slides that lay out how the United States would fight such a conflict. It covers the plan beginning with the indications and warning of a threat from China to various options on what Chinese targets to hit, over what time period, that would be presented to Mr. Trump for decisions, according to officials with knowledge of the plan.

A White House spokesman did not respond to an email seeking comment about the purpose of the visit, how it came about, whether Mr. Trump was aware of it, and whether the visit raises questions of conflicts of interest. The White House has not said whether Mr. Trump signed a conflicts of interest waiver for Mr. Musk.

The chief Pentagon spokesman, Sean Parnell, initially did not respond to a similar email seeking comment about why Mr. Musk was to receive a briefing on the China war plan. Soon after The Times published this article on Thursday evening, Mr. Parnell gave a short statement: "The Defense Department is excited to welcome Elon Musk to the Pentagon on Friday. He was invited by Secretary Hegseth and is just visiting."

About an hour later, Mr. Parnell posted a message on his X account: "This is 100% Fake News. Just brazenly & maliciously wrong. Elon Musk is a patriot. We are proud to have him at the Pentagon."

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth also commented on X late on Thursday, saying: "This is NOT a meeting about 'top secret China war plans.' It's an informal meeting about innovation, efficiencies & smarter production. Gonna be great!"
Roughly 30 minutes after that social media post, The Wall Street Journal confirmed that Mr. Musk had been scheduled to be briefed on the war planning for China.

Whatever the meeting will now be about, the planning reflected the extraordinary dual role played by Mr. Musk, who is both the world's wealthiest man and has been given broad authority by Mr. Trump.
Mr. Musk has a security clearance, and Mr. Hegseth can determine who has a need to know about the plan.

Mr. Hegseth; Adm. Christopher W. Grady, the acting chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; and Adm. Samuel J. Paparo, the head of the military's Indo-Pacific Command, were set to present Mr. Musk with details on the U.S. plan to counter China in the event of military conflict between the two countries, the officials said.

The meeting had been set to be held not in Mr. Hegseth's office — where an informal discussion about innovation would most likely take place — but in the Tank, a secure conference room in the Pentagon, typically used for high-level meetings of members of the Joint Chiefs, their senior staff and visiting combatant commanders.

Operational plans for major contingencies, like a war with China, are extremely difficult for people without extensive military planning experience to understand. The technical nature is why presidents are typically presented with the broad contours of a plan, rather than the actual details of documents. How many details Mr. Musk had wanted or expected to hear was unclear.

Mr. Hegseth received part of the China war plan briefing last week and another part on Wednesday, according to officials familiar with the plan.

It was unclear what the impetus was for providing Mr. Musk such a sensitive briefing. He is not in the military chain of command, nor is he an official adviser to Mr. Trump on military matters involving China.

But there is a possible reason Mr. Musk might have needed to know aspects of the war plan. If Mr. Musk and his team of cost cutters from the Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, want to trim the Pentagon budget in a responsible way, they may need to know what weapons systems the Pentagon plans to use in a fight with China.

Take aircraft carriers, for example. Cutting back on future aircraft carriers would save billions of dollars, money that could be spent on drones or other weaponry. But if the U.S. war strategy relies on using aircraft carriers in innovative ways that would surprise China, mothballing existing ships or stopping production on future ships could cripple that plan.

Planning for a war with China has dominated Pentagon thinking for decades, well before a possible confrontation with Beijing became more conventional wisdom on Capitol Hill. The United States has built its Air Forces, Navy and Space Forces — and even more recently its Marines and Army forces — with a possible fight against China in mind.

Critics have said the military has invested too much in big expensive systems like fighter jets or aircraft carriers and too little in midrange drones and coastal defenses. But for Mr. Musk to evaluate how to reorient Pentagon spending, he would want to know what the military intends to use and for what purpose.

Mr. Musk has already called for the Pentagon to stop buying certain high-priced items like F-35 fighter jets, manufactured by one of his space-launch competitors, Lockheed Martin, in a program that costs the Pentagon more than $12 billion a year.

Yet Mr. Musk's extensive business interests make any access to strategic secrets about China a serious problem in the view of ethics experts. Officials have said revisions to the war plans against China have focused on upgrading the plans for defending against space warfare. China has developed a suite of weapons that can attack U.S. satellites.

Mr. Musk's constellations of low-earth orbit Starlink satellites, which provide data and communications services from space, are considered more resilient than traditional satellites. But he could have an interest in learning about whether or not the United States could defend his satellites in a war with China.

Participating in a classified briefing on the China threat with some of the most senior Pentagon and U.S. military officials would be a tremendously valuable opportunity for any defense contractor seeking to sell services to the military.

Mr. Musk could gain insight into new tools that the Pentagon might need and that SpaceX, where he remains the chief executive, could sell.

Contractors working on relevant Pentagon projects generally do have access to certain limited war planning documents, but only once war plans are approved, said Todd Harrison, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, where he focuses on defense strategy. Individual executives rarely if ever get exclusive access to top Pentagon officials for such a sensitive briefing, Mr. Harrison said.

"Musk at a war-planning briefing?" he said. "Giving the CEO of one defense company unique access seems like this could be grounds for a contract protest and is a real conflict of interest."

Mr. Musk's SpaceX is already being paid billions of dollars by the Pentagon and federal spy agencies to help the United States build new military satellite networks to try to confront rising military threats from China. SpaceX launches most of these military satellites for the Pentagon on its Falcon 9 rockets, which take off from launchpads SpaceX has set up at military bases in Florida and California.

The company separately has been paid hundreds of millions of dollars by the Pentagon that now relies heavily on SpaceX's Starlink satellite communications network for military personnel to transmit data worldwide.

In 2024, SpaceX was granted about $1.6 billion in Air Force contracts. That does not include classified spending with SpaceX by the National Reconnaissance Office, which has hired the company to build it a new constellation of low-earth orbit satellites to spy on China, Russia and other threats.

Mr. Trump has already proposed that the United States build a new system the military is calling Golden Dome, a space-based missile defense system that recalls what President Ronald Reagan tried to deliver. (The so-called Star Wars system Mr. Reagan had in mind was never fully developed.)

Perceived missile threats from China — be it nuclear weapons or hypersonic missiles or cruise missiles — are a major factor that led Mr. Trump to sign an executive order recently instructing the Pentagon to start work on Golden Dome.

Even starting to plan and build the first components of the system will cost tens of billions of dollars, according to Pentagon officials, and most likely create large business opportunities for SpaceX, which already provides rocket launches, satellite structures, and space-based data communications systems, all of which will be required for Golden Dome.

Separately, Mr. Musk has been the focus of an investigation by the Pentagon's inspector general over questions about his compliance with his top-secret security clearance.

The investigations started last year after some SpaceX employees complained to government agencies that Mr. Musk and others at SpaceX were not properly reporting contacts or conversations with foreign leaders.

Air Force officials, before the end of the Biden administration, started their own review, after Senate Democrats asked questions about Mr. Musk and asserted that he was not complying with security clearance requirements.

The Air Force, in fact, had denied a request by Mr. Musk for an even higher level of security clearance, known as Special Access Program, which is reserved for extremely sensitive classified programs, citing potential security risks associated with the billionaire.

In fact, SpaceX has become so valuable to the Pentagon that the Chinese government has said it considers the company to be an extension of the U.S. military.

"Starlink Militarization and Its Impact on Global Strategic Stability" was the headline of one publication released last year from China's National University of Defense Technology, according to a translation of the paper prepared by the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

Mr. Musk and Tesla, an electric vehicle company he controls, are heavily reliant on China, which houses one of the auto maker's flagship factories in Shanghai. Unveiled in 2019, the state-of-the-art facility was built with special permission from the Chinese government, and now accounts for more than half of Tesla's global deliveries. Last year, the company said in financial filings that it had a $2.8 billion loan agreement with lenders in China for production expenditures.

In public, Mr. Musk has avoided criticizing Beijing and signaled his willingness to work with the Chinese Communist Party. In 2022, he wrote a column for the magazine of the Cyberspace Administration of China, the country's censorship agency, trumpeting his companies and their missions of improving humanity.

That same year, the billionaire told The Financial Times that China should be given some control over Taiwan by making a "special administrative zone for Taiwan that is reasonably palatable," an assertion that angered politicians of the independent island. In that same interview, he also noted that Beijing sought assurances that he would not sell Starlink in China.

The following year at a tech conference, Mr. Musk called the democratic island "an integral part of China that is arbitrarily not part of China," and compared the Taiwan-China situation to Hawaii and the United States.

On X, the social platform he owns, Mr. Musk has long used his account to praise China. He has said the country is "by far" the world leader in electric vehicles and solar power, and has commended its space program for being "far more advanced than people realize." He has encouraged more people to visit the country, and posited openly about an "inevitable" Russia-China alliance.

[Maladict]

PSA for everybody, American border security can request that you provide them with your phone and they can plug it in and retrieve data from it, including all your posts on language so if you are at all concerned about the American authorities, learning that you've said anything critical about their dear leader you might want to keep your phone at home when crossing into the US.

Thanks. I'm getting a burner phone for upcoming US trips. But I wonder whether that will only get me into more trouble if they actually check it and there's nothing on it.

[mongers]

PSA for everybody, American border security can request that you provide them with your phone and they can plug it in and retrieve data from it, including all your posts on language so if you are at all concerned about the American authorities, learning that you've said anything critical about their dear leader you might want to keep your phone at home when crossing into the US.

Thanks. I'm getting a burner phone for upcoming US trips. But I wonder whether that will only get me into more trouble if they actually check it and there's nothing on it.

Yes it's almost like a smartphone has become a form of offical ID, by carrying around a selection of our lifestyle, it's there for 'authorities' to identify that you're the type of person you say you are or indicate you're hidding part of yourself from them.

[Syt]

Of course it potentially becomes more complicated if you're transsexual:

https://www.cntraveler.com/story/what-to-know-if-you-are-a-trans-traveler-applying-for-a-visa-to-the-us

What to Know If You Are a Trans Traveler Applying for a Visa to the US
The State Department's new policy on issuing visas for transgender athletes could have broader implications for travelers, immigration lawyers say.

Travelers applying for visas to visit the United States could be rejected if the gender selected on their visa application does not match their sex at birth, according to a memo issued by US Secretary of State Marco Rubio that was first reported by independent journalist and transgender-rights activist Erin Reed on February 25, 2025.

The memo, titled "Guidance for Visa Adjudicators on Executive Order 14201: 'Keeping Men Out of Women's Sports,'" outlines how the US government plans to prevent transgender athletes from traveling into the country to compete in women's sports events. The directive comes as Los Angeles prepares to host the 2028 Summer Olympics.

Some experts are concerned that one particular section of the memo could be used to restrict travel of all transgender visa applicants, even if they are not competing athletes. It states that "all visas must reflect an applicant's sex at birth," and gives consular officials the right to deny applications if "reasonable doubt" is cast on an applicant's listed gender marker.

With 17 countries allowing their citizens to self-select gender markers that may not match their sex assigned at birth on official travel documents such as passports, legal experts say the policy could effectively bar transgender travelers who don't meet these new criteria from entering the US. The policy does not apply to US citizens traveling back to the States or travelers from the 40-plus nations participating in the US Visa Waiver Program.

"It's really hard to see how this is just limited to sports," says Ava Benach, an immigration lawyer based in Washington, DC. "What jumps out to me is the threat of finding people to be inadmissible for misrepresentation or fraud—the misrepresentation is misrepresenting your gender as the Department of State sees it, and I think this has absolutely nothing to do with sports and is simply a way to stop the admission of trans people into the United States."

Whether or not the new policy will be applied to all transgender travelers who apply for US travel visas is not yet clear. When asked whether the State Department policy applies to all visa applications to the US or only transgender athletes traveling to participate in a women's sports competitions, a State Department spokesperson said the memo "instructs the Department of State and Department of Homeland Security to review and adjust, as needed, policies permitting admission to the United States of men seeking to participate in women's sports."

"Whenever an individual applies for a US visa, a consular officer reviews the facts of the case and determines whether the applicant is eligible for that visa based on US law," the spokesperson said in a statement. "Visa applications are adjudicated on a case-by-case basis, and we cannot speculate on whether someone may or may not be eligible for a visa."

For now, Benach says, "trans travelers certainly seem to be banned for the purpose of coming to participate in athletic events, and I think [the new policy] could easily bar trans people from coming into the United States for any other reason whatsoever."

Concerned travelers may be able to meet the new guidelines by selecting the sex that matches their birth certificate on their visa application, even if it doesn't match the gender marker they've selected on their passport. "The memo says that the passport is presumptive, but when the consular has reason to believe that the passport gender marker is something other than the gender assigned at birth, the officer can request additional documentation," Benach explains. "It would seem that the gender on the birth certificate would then control [visa approval], unless it is a late issued birth certificate, as many are. It may very well be a workaround to mark on the application the birth certificate gender even if it conflicts with the passport gender, but then you are bringing lots more documents to an interview and facing lots more scrutiny."

The State Department memo follows President Donald Trump's February 5 executive order "Keeping Men Out of Women's Sports." The order builds on policies established in the earlier executive order "Defending Women From Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government," which made it the policy of the United States to recognize two sexes, male and female, which are "not changeable" from birth. The State Department soon after suspended the processing of US passport applications marked with the X gender marker and applications with gender markers that do not match the sex reported on an applicant's supporting documents, such as a previous passport, a driver's license, or a birth certificate.

The impact of the former executive order on trans travelers most recently made headlines after Euphoria actor Hunter Schafer reported finding her passport's gender marker changed from F to M after requesting a renewal on February 23, 2025. "No part of the process was different," she said in the TikTok video discussing the incident. "I filled everything out just like I normally would. I put female, and when it was picked up today and I opened it up, they had changed the marker to male."

Schafer said in the video that she believes this change is a direct consequence of the current administration. "I just feel like it's important to share that it's not just talk, that this is real, and it's happening and no one, no matter their circumstance, no matter how wealthy or white or pretty or whatever, is excluded," she said.

[mongers]

Of course it potentially becomes more complicated if you're transsexual:

https://www.cntraveler.com/story/what-to-know-if-you-are-a-trans-traveler-applying-for-a-visa-to-the-us

What to Know If You Are a Trans Traveler Applying for a Visa to the US
........

......and gives consular officials the right to deny applications if "reasonable doubt" is cast on an applicant's listed gender marker.

... snip ....

No one act surprised when stories emerge of US officials or TSA goons wanting to view people's genitalia.