Listen to a reading of this article (reading by Tim Foley):
It’s so funny how Trump has stopped even pretending to be a populist. As soon as he was re-elected he was just “Yeah okay so Israel comes first and forget everything I said about free speech and the Ukraine war is continuing and there will be no Epstein investigation, fuck you.”
It has long been obvious to anyone with half a brain that Donald Trump is just another Republican swamp monster playing on public discontent with the status quo to win votes and support, but it is genuinely surprising how completely he has stopped pretending to care about fighting the deep state and sticking up for ordinary Americans as soon as he got back into office. He’s just dropped the populist schtick entirely and is giving the finger to anyone who complains.
The president has been aggressively and repeatedly demanding that his entire base shut up about Jeffrey Epstein and move on after years of MAGAworld fixation on the story, bizarrely going as far as claiming that interest and attention on the Epstein files was a concoction of the Democrats. He is doing this even as his Department of Justice releases a video which it claims disproves conspiracy theories that the sexual predator was murdered in his prison cell — but the video is edited and missing minutes of footage.
This happens as the Financial Times reports that Trump is now encouraging Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky to ramp up deep strikes into Russian territory and asking whether it would be possible to hit Moscow. This would be the same President Trump who falsely promised on the campaign trail that he would end the Ukraine war in “no longer than one day.”
After pledging to restore and protect free speech in the United States, Trump has been aggressively stomping out speech that is critical of the state of Israel and its genocidal atrocities, scoring yet another win for government censorship on Tuesday with Columbia University’s announcement that it is adopting the IHRA definition of “antisemitism” which conflates criticism of Israel with hate speech against Jews, in accordance with the wishes of the Trump administration.
After promising to “restore peace, stability, and harmony all throughout the world,” Trump has bombed Iran, poured weapons into Israel and Ukraine, backed Israel’s genocide in Gaza and its numerous acts of war against its neighbors, slaughtered hundreds of civilians with a savage bombing campaign in Yemen, and conducted dozens of airstrikes in renewed operations in Somalia, all while leading the nation into the era of official trillion-dollar Pentagon budgets.
In 2023 Trump proclaimed that “if you put me back in the White House… I will totally obliterate the deep state.” In 2025 he’s advancing pretty much every longstanding deep state agenda in the book.
Every single part of Trump’s platform where he could have claimed to be standing up for the little guy against the powerful has been completely flushed down the toilet in the first six months of his second term, leaving only a standard George W Bush Republican in its place. If you wanted tax cuts for the rich and cruel treatment for immigrants then Trump is still your man, but if you were hoping he’d benefit ordinary Americans or do anything to drain the swamp in Washington he’s just peeing on you and writing a wall of text on Truth Social explaining why the pee is actually rain.
Which again should come as no surprise to anyone who’s been paying attention. No real change will ever come from either of America’s two power-serving major parties.
But what’s so funny is people are probably just going to fall for it again. Trump’s base is very upset about the Epstein thing and many of them might actually abandon Trump himself, but you know next election cycle someone like Tucker Carlson or JD Vance will run on his platform and these suckers will swallow it hook, line and sinker. I actually said this on Twitter the other day and got multiple people telling me that actually Tucker Carlson getting elected would be a major blow to the deep state, so you know they’re already primed for it. They can’t wait to fall in line behind the next phony Republican populism scam.
Whatever. People will be fed whatever slop they keep asking for. The lesson will keep on repeating until it is learned.
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Feature image by Shealah Craighead via The White House (Public Domain).
Nothing special about Trump. Just another temporary employee doing permanent damage to America and beyond.
The sad thing, for ordinary Americans, I presume, is that the entire world now views their country and population as idiotic, stupid, thick, trigger-happy, destructive, dangerous - and laughable. The UK is bad enough but I am relieved I'm not American.