He tore it down to create a crisis he'd be paid to fix

Clio2 of the Daily Kos community has started posted a weekly LGBTQ world news summary. Some of it is great to hear, some is hard to take. From the December 7 post here are a few of the stories: Biden was a highlight speaker at the LGBTQ+ Victory Institute, which helps us run for office, then Biden was given an award. As part of his speech he said we need to keep fighting. And, “There’s nothing more American than the notion of equality. Nothing, nothing, nothing.” I like his thinking but it’s never been true. Carla Antonelli is the first trans woman elected to the Spanish Senate. Gay couple Matthew and Allan Marreno went to an interview for a marriage-based green card. Allan was detained for deportation. Georgia’s prison system is refusing to let trans inmates continue to get their hormone therapy, forcing a detransition with severe mood swings along the way. That overloaded the mental health caseload. The detransitioning regime has been halted by the courts. Puberty blockers, used to delay puberty in trans youth, are facing claims they are harmful. New Zealand recently prohibited their use. First gay Miss England has been crowned. Over 400 trans flags were stolen from a Trans Day of Remembrance memorial in Boston. A trans teen in Iowa committed suicide after severe bullying by classmates and teachers. Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis banned rainbow colored crosswalks. One had been near the Pulse Nightclub massacre site. Two men were arrested for “aggressively chalking” to fill in that crosswalk. A Pew survey shows only 31% of trans people report being accepted by their parents. That prompted Alejandra Caraballo to tweet:

One of the most perverse ideas on the anti-trans side is that trans people are instantly affirmed and celebrated by everyone when they come out and that acceptance is driving a social contagion. It's the ultimate form of gaslighting against our community.

The Royal Canadian Air Force answered questions associated with their Trans Day of Remembrance post and did a fine job of it. They gave a good definition of transgender.

“Transgender” describes someone whose gender – who they know themselves to be – doesn’t match the sex they were assigned at birth. It’s not new, and it’s certainly not a fad. People have lived this experience for as long as people have existed; we’re just finally talking about it openly. You don’t have to fully understand it right away, most learning takes time, but we can always start from a place of respect. That’s how decent folks handle things they’re still getting used to.

Here’s a link to the December 14 post. One story in that post is related to the soccer World Cup tournament to be held next year in various cities in the US. One city is Seattle. The city’s organizing committee said the game on June 26 will be its “Pride Match.” The two nations who drew that game are Egypt and Iran, and homosexuality is illegal in Iran and frequently prosecuted in Egypt under “debauchery” laws. They want the “Pride Match” designation changed. Seattle says they’re keeping it. Ryan in FL of the Kos community, working from an article in Salon, reported the nasty guy’s White House Ballroom will never be built.

Basically, it’s skyrocketed in cost, had judicial rulings against it’s construction, and the paths to easy grift in terms of him making a giant windfall off the whole process have been short-circuited. He just tore it down, hoping he’d created a crisis he could extract a giant paycheck for fixing. ... So… in a truly apt metaphor, Trump had a plan to tear down America, and replace it with a golden vision, but that plan was only a self-serving mess that hurt the nation, and failed even in the earliest planning phases. ... Republicans just come in, create as many crises as they can, tear down our shared public commonwealth and welfare (in all the senses), then if they can’t be paid an enormous ransom to fix it, they wipe their hands of it, and call the damage itself success.

Maybe we should plan a federal highway that just so happens to pass through the nasty guy’s golf courses. Eminent domain will allow us to grab up the land. Demolition could begin immediately. Oh, look at that, the actual construction schedule is slipping. By a dozen years. In today’s pundit roundup for Kos Greg Dworkin quoted The Bulwark saying the nasty guy’s prime time speech on Wednesday was pointless but gave him a sense of relief.

Why? Because Trump didn’t use the network prime time he’d requested to announce we were going to war in Venezuela. After all his bellicose rhetoric, after all his bluster in press gaggles, Trump had a chance to make his case for war to the nation. He failed to take it. He didn’t even mention Venezuela.

Zack Beauchamp of Vox also said there was no point to the speech.

So why am I writing about it at all? Because the fact that it happened at all tells us something much more important: that the Trump administration is sinking, and his White House has no idea what to do about it.

Matt Johnson, also of The Bulwark:

The Trump era has forced Americans to reconsider and reaffirm first principles: Why is the peaceful transfer of power important? What is the purpose of judicial independence? Why is corruption corrosive to democratic governance? The same applies to the public understanding of the liberal international order: Why is free trade important? How do immigrants contribute to the country? Why does NATO matter? Trump’s failures are rapidly piling up. The bill is already coming due on the tariffs, from farm bailouts to sticky inflation. Americans are quickly turning against the mass deportation campaign. It has become increasingly clear what unrestrained Trumpism means for the country: corruption and cruelty at home, incompetence and anarchy abroad. Trump likes to present himself as the reckoning for decades of elite failures, but he’s in for a reckoning of his own.

A tweet from Rep. Thomas Massie (and yes, I have a good reason to quote a Republican):

If the 2020 elections involved widespread coordinated fraud and conspiracy, why hasn’t this administration arrested or indicted anyone yet?

Defense One reported that the nasty guy is issuing checks of $1,776 to members of the military as a “Warrior dividend.” The problem is the checks come from a Congressionally-allocated fund for subsidized housing allowances for service members. He gets his name on a check to look benevolent while also screwing over the recipients. Bill in Portland, Maine, in his Cheers and Jeers column for Kos from Friday a week ago quoted late night commentary. Here’s one of them:

“Basically, all the bulls--- reasons we used to justify the disastrous war in Iraq, the 'non-interventionist' Trump regime is trotting out to justify war in Venezuela. … America's new foreign policy is basically this: don’t kill people over there, kill them over here in your own time zone. It's classic advice: s--- where you eat. That's the new Trump Doctrine. It's not in any way about stable democracies. It's about spheres of influence. Russia can have their sphere of influence. China can have theirs. And we get South America. America is no longer the shining city on the hill, it is merely just one of the five crime families splitting up the territories.” —Jon Stewart

In the comments of Monday’s pundit roundup rebel ga posted a meme:

Donald Trump, a rich guy convincing poor people to vote for the rich guy by telling the poor people that the other poor people are the reason they’re poor.

In the pundit roundup for Friday a week ago Dworkin explains “Lorem Ipsum” and its use in the House. The phrase is Latin nonsense. Both Republicans and Democrats in the House are tired of Speaker Johnson’s repeated efforts to thwart anything getting done. So they are going around him with discharge petitions and doing so almost weekly. The bill to force the release of the Epstein files was passed through a discharge petition. There are rules for discharge petitions. They must be ignored by a committee for a certain length of time, I think months. So the House has set up “Lorem Ipsum” bills that get ignored by committees. The actual content of the bills is filled in when needed.