The List

[Dr. Sunstoned]

Yeah because they'd been there/done that before, had all their assets seized, and they don't want to invest in an unstable country. As for future agreements, by the time, if ever, the country becomes stable and they want to invest, Trump will be long dead but that doesn't even cross his "mind" does it? Him being a successful businessman himself and all.

I hope that it is sooner rather than later.

[canpakes]

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Trump’s promised retribution campaign now includes withholding public assistance funds from 5 states that all coincidentally happen to have Democratic leadership.

5 states sue Trump administration for withholding billions in social safety net funds

BY MORIAH BALINGIT
Updated 8:21 PM MST, January 8, 2026

WASHINGTON (AP) — Attorneys general in five Democratic-led states filed a lawsuit Thursday against President Donald Trump’s administration after it said it would freeze money for several public benefit programs, citing concerns about fraud in the programs designed to help low-income families.

The states — California, Colorado, Minnesota, Illinois and New York — called the move an unconstitutional abuse of power. The Trump administration announced earlier this week it was withholding their social safety net funding. The funding went toward three federal programs, two of which focus on lifting families with children out of poverty.

New York Attorney General Letitia James, who is leading the lawsuit, said the Trump administration is overstepping its authority by freezing billions of dollars in funds that were already approved for the states by Congress.

The lawsuit filed in the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York asks the courts to order the administration to halt the freeze and release the funds.

“Once again, the most vulnerable families in our communities are bearing the brunt of this administration’s campaign of chaos and retribution,” James said.

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services this week told the five states it was freezing their money for the Child Care and Development Fund, which subsidizes child care for children from low-income families; the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families program, which provides cash assistance and job training; and the Social Services Block Grant.

HHS officials did not immediately respond to a request for comment on the lawsuit.

https://apnews.com/article/social-servi ... 45454498af

[Dr. Sunstoned]

He is nothing more than a petty tyrant. Of course, Fox and Friends will not cover this, or they will spin it. This is why most of MAGA is way under informed.

[canpakes]

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Sometimes, Trump’s retribution campaign and disregard for the 1st Amendment runs over a wee speedbump.

Trump Cabinet secretaries conspired to violate Constitution, judge says

“The Cabinet secretaries and, ostensibly, the president of the United States, are not honoring the First Amendment,” U.S. District Judge William Young declared.

The Washington Post
January 15, 2026 at 9:57 p.m. EST


A federal judge Thursday decried what he said were “breathtaking” constitutional violations by senior Trump administration officials and called the president an “authoritarian” who expects everyone in the executive branch to “toe the line absolutely.”

In remarks laced with outrage and disbelief, U.S. District Judge William Young said Donald Trump and top officials have a “fearful approach” to freedom of speech that would seek to “exclude from participation everyone who doesn’t agree with them.”

Young, who was appointed to the federal bench by President Ronald Reagan, leveled the searing critique during a hearing in Boston to determine the appropriate remedies for the administration’s detentions of pro-Palestinian students last year. The judge had ruled in September that senior administration officials engaged in an illegal effort to arrest and deport noncitizen students based on their activism.

On Thursday, he again denounced the administration’s conduct in unusually stark terms. “Talking straight here,” he said. “The big problem in this case is that the Cabinet secretaries and, ostensibly, the president of the United States, are not honoring the First Amendment.”

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi L. Noem and Secretary of State Marco Rubio engaged in an “unconstitutional conspiracy” to deprive people of their rights, Young said. “The secretary of state,” he said, his voice full of incredulity, “the senior Cabinet officer in our history, involved in this.”

On Thursday evening, White House spokesperson Anna Kelly said via email that “it’s bizarre that this judge is broadcasting his intent to engage in left-wing activism against the democratically-elected President of the United States.”

Tricia McLaughlin, assistant secretary for public affairs at the Department of Homeland Security, said in an email that “there is no room in the United States for the rest of the world’s terrorist sympathizers.” A spokesperson for Rubio did not respond to a request for comment.

The government actions at the core of the case date to early March, when the Trump administration launched a campaign to detain and deport noncitizen students at U.S. universities who had been active in opposing Israel’s war in Gaza. Though not accused of any crime, those arrested spent weeks confined in Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention facilities, at times hundreds of miles from where they lived, before being released on bail.

The plaintiffs in the case are the American Association of University Professors and the Middle East Studies Association. The groups of scholars accused the administration of having an unconstitutional policy of deporting people based on their political views, a policy intended to chill the free-speech rights of their members.

[Jersey Girl]

He is nothing more than a petty tyrant. Of course, Fox and Friends will not cover this, or they will spin it. This is why most of MAGA is way under informed.

I second that. I hear FOX News in the house almost every day here. Though I have to say, not lately. Their video coverage is edited and their intro and commentary tell the listener/viewer what to think from the get.

[Gunnar]

Racism Is The Only Campaign Promise Trump Has Kept

It was never about the economy.
Nathalie Baptiste
By
Nathalie Baptiste

When Donald Trump most recently ran for president, he made scores of promises to the American people — but he’s only kept one.

In 2024, political pundits and operatives saw affordability as the key issue of the presidential campaign. Trump certainly played it up: On the campaign trail, he pledged that he would bring down inflation and make groceries cheaper again, and when he won, observers credited that strategy for his victory.

One year into his second term, his approval numbers are in the tank, and inflation persists.

But that’s because the president’s real campaign promise wasn’t about the economy. Instead, it was all about racism.

He spouted dehumanizing lies about immigrants, dabbled in eugenics and pledged to conduct mass deportations. “When I win on November 5, the migrant invasion ends, and the restoration of our country begins,” Trump said at a rally in October 2024.

When he got back to the White House, he immediately began delivering on both the explicit promises and the tacit implications.

In the last year, Trump has deported immigrants without so much as a trial, defunded government programs dedicated to diversity and inclusion, and deployed thousands of federal agents to blue cities to wreak havoc on people of color and their allies.

“This is the government weaponizing the social and political views of the president,” William Roberts, the senior vice president for rights and justice at the Center for American Progress, a think tank that promotes liberal policies, told HuffPost.

“It’s not just ‘Donald Trump is a racist,’” Roberts said. “It’s Trump’s government engaging in policy-making to harm certain people.”

There has been a clear through-line between Trump’s campaign rhetoric and the worst excesses of his second term: During the 2024 presidential campaign, a viral claim about Haitians in Springfield, Ohio — where approximately 10,000 Haitians had arrived in recent years — also caught Trump’s attention. He repeated the racist rumor during a presidential debate with his Democratic opponent Kamala Harris.

“In Springfield, they’re eating the dogs,” Trump said. “The people that came in, they’re eating the cats. They’re eating the pets of the people that live there.”

Trump’s running mate, JD Vance, repeated the rumor and added claims of his own, including saying Haitians were bringing diseases to Ohio. But Vance also essentially admitted that he was lying.

“If I have to create stories so that the American media actually pays attention to the suffering of the American people, then that’s what I’m going to do,” he said in a September 2024 interview with CNN.

Suddenly, Haitian immigrants across the U.S. were targets. Springfield, Ohio, school children were subjected to bomb threats, and in small towns in Pennsylvania and Alabama with significant Haitian populations, residents worried for their safety.

The fact that Trump faced no consequences and instead was rewarded with another shot at the presidency has enabled even more blatant lies about marginalized, often immigrant, populations — with deadly results.

In December 2025, a viral video alleging fraud at Somali-run day cares in the Minneapolis area caught the attention of the Trump administration. Nick Shirley, the right-wing agitator who made the video, claimed that he had uncovered $100 million worth of fraud. (Minnesota officials investigated his claims and, during surprise inspections, found that all the day cares featured in his videos were operating as expected.) But still, Trump sent federal officers to “investigate.”

It is particularly outrageous to me that they openly and unapologetically admit that they lie to accomplish their ends, oblivious to the fact that makes them the bad guys, not those they had to lie about to make them look bad! This is not only evil, but abysmally stupid!

Despite his lofty promises about the economy, affordable groceries and ushering in a new golden age, there appears to be only one true constant of the Trump administration.

“People sometimes have a tendency to overthink and overanalyze because we don’t want to accept the most obvious explanation that’s right in front of us,” Levi said.

“But when the administration is tweeting out Nazi memes and songs, I don’t really think there’s a nuanced hot take on that,” he continued. “They’re being pretty clear about what some of their beliefs are.”

Anyone who agrees with and approves of these policies and racist tactics is every bit as evil and abysmally stupid as the Trumpist goons who carry them out!

[canpakes]

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The promise of DOGE long ago fizzled, but it turns out - probably to no-one’s surprise - that an ulterior motive was part of the plot.

Trump administration concedes DOGE team may have misused Social Security data

Some DOGE personnel had more access to data than previously acknowledged, according to a court filing.

KYLE CHENEY

01/20/2026 01:43 PM EST


Two members of Elon Musk’s DOGE team working at the Social Security Administration were secretly in touch with an advocacy group seeking to “overturn election results in certain states,” and one signed an agreement that may have involved using Social Security data to match state voter rolls, the Justice Department revealed in newly disclosed court papers.

Elizabeth Shapiro, a top Justice Department official, said SSA referred both DOGE employees for potential violations of the Hatch Act, which bars government employees from using their official positions for political purposes.

Shapiro’s previously unreported disclosure, dated Friday, came as part of a list of “corrections” to testimony by top SSA officials during last year’s legal battles over DOGE’s access to Social Security data. They revealed that DOGE team members shared data on unapproved “third-party” servers and may have accessed private information that had been ruled off-limits by a court at the time.

Shapiro said the case of the two DOGE team members appeared to undermine a previous assertion by SSA that DOGE’s work was intended to “detect fraud, waste and abuse” in Social Security and modernize the agency’s technology.”

“SSA believed those statements to be accurate at the time they were made, and they are largely still accurate,” Shapiro wrote, adding “At this time, there is no evidence that SSA employees outside of the involved members of the DOGE Team were aware of the communications with the advocacy group. Nor were they aware of the ‘Voter Data Agreement.’

Shapiro, a longtime DOJ veteran, said it’s not yet clear whether either of the two DOGE team members — who are not identified in her filing – actually shared data with the advocacy group, which is also unidentified. But she said emails “suggest that DOGE Team members could have been asked to assist the advocacy group by accessing SSA data to match to the voter rolls.”

The White House and SSA officials did not immediately respond to requests for comment.

[canpakes]

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While not explicitly stated as a goal during the election, erasing the factual but uncomfortable history of minorities has since become another of the Administration’s priorities.

Philadelphia sues over removal of slavery exhibit at Independence National Historical Park
One visitor, Karen Oliver, said she was “heartbroken” at the removal of references to slavery. “You show all of it,” she said. “The good, the bad, and the ugly.”

By ASSOCIATED PRESS
01/24/2026 02:00 AM EST



A person views posted signs on the locations of the now removed explanatory panels that were part of an exhibit on slavery at President's House Site in Philadelphia, Friday, Jan. 23, 2026. (AP Photo/Matt Rourke) | AP


PHILADELPHIA — Outraged critics accused President Donald Trump of “whitewashing history” on Friday after the National Park Service removed an exhibit on slavery at Philadelphia’s Independence National Historical Park in response to his executive order “restoring truth and sanity to American history” at the nation’s museums, parks and landmarks.

Empty bolt holes and shadows are all that remains on the brick walls where explanatory panels were displayed at the President’s House Site, where George and Martha Washington lived with the people they owned as property when Philadelphia was the nation’s capital. One woman cried silently at their absence. Someone left a bouquet of flowers. A hand-lettered sign said “Slavery was real.”

Workers on Thursday removed the exhibit, which included biographical details about the nine people enslaved by the Washingtons at the presidential mansion. Just their names — Austin, Paris, Hercules, Christopher Sheels, Richmond, Giles, Oney Judge, Moll and Joe — remain engraved into a cement wall.

Karen Oliver, a retired Philadelphian who was visited the exhibit Friday, said she was “heartbroken” at the removal of references to slavery and a chance for visitors to learn from the nation’s history.

“You show all of it,” she said. “The good, the bad, and the ugly.”

Seeking to stop the display’s permanent removal, the city of Philadelphia on Thursday sued Interior Secretary Doug Burgum and acting National Park Service Director Jessica Bowron.

“Let me affirm, for the residents of the city of Philadelphia, that there is a cooperative agreement between the city and the federal government that dates back to 2006,” Philadelphia Mayor Cherelle Parker said during a press conference Friday. “That agreement requires parties to meet and confer if there are to be any changes made to an exhibit.”

Slavery is central to the site’s story, Philadelphia’s lawsuit argues: The people enslaved at the mansion included Oney Judge, who famously ran away and remained free despite Washington’s attempts to return her to bondage.

The panels came down because Trump’s order requires federal agencies to review interpretive materials to “ensure accuracy, honesty, and alignment with shared national values,” an Interior Department statement said. It called the city’s lawsuit frivolous, aimed at “demeaning our brave Founding Fathers who set the brilliant road map for the greatest country in the world.”

The department did not answer questions about what will replace the exhibits that were removed.

Critics condemned the removals as confirmation the Trump administration seeks to erase unflattering aspects of American history.

“Their shameful desecration of this exhibit raises broader, disturbing questions about this administration’s continued abuse of power and commitment to whitewashing history,” said Rep. Dwight Evans, a Democrat whose district includes the city.

“America’s history, as painful as some chapters are, isn’t disparaged by telling the whole truth. Trying to whitewash American history, however, disparages who we are. This is yet another egregious example of revisionist history that will be reviled for generations,” said Philadelphia state Rep. Malcolm Kenyatta.

More at:

https://www.politico.com/news/2026/01/2 ... 11?cid=apn

[canpakes]

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It appears that Trump’s promise to make housing more affordable has been tossed aside, in favor of making houses less affordable.

Democrats knock Trump’s pledge to ‘drive housing prices up’



BY ELLIOTT DAVIS 01/29/26 07:58 PM ET

Democratic lawmakers on Thursday slammed President Trump over comments he made about wanting to “drive housing prices up” for people who own their homes, with one congresswoman telling followers that he “doesn’t care about making your life more affordable.”

During a Cabinet meeting earlier Thursday, the president said he wants to keep homeowners “wealthy.”

“We’re not going to destroy the value of their homes so that somebody that didn’t work very hard can buy a home,” he said. “I don’t want to drive housing prices down. I want to drive housing prices up for people who own their homes. And they can be assured that’s what’s going to happen.”

Several Democrats in both the House and Senate clapped back at the president.

“Are you trying to buy your first home? Trump wants your prices to go up,” Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D-Ill.) wrote on the social platform X. “But sure Donald, keep saying affordability is a hoax.”

Rep. Jason Crow (D-Colo.), who previously clashed with the president over his appearance in a video in which he and other lawmakers told members of the military they can refuse illegal orders, also criticized Trump’s remarks on X.

“Millions of hardworking folks can’t afford to buy—and the President’s tariffs are making it even more expensive,” Crow wrote.

Rep. Suzan DelBene (D-Wash.) added in her own post, “Millions of families are struggling to afford a roof over their heads & Trump’s response is to increase the price of housing. He doesn’t care about making your life more affordable.”

Housing prices have spiked recently, outpacing overall inflation. The median sale price of a home in December was $429,000, up by more than 28 percent relative to December 2020, according to data compiled by Redfin.

https://thehill.com/business/5714094-tr ... crats/amp/

[Dr. Sunstoned]

This guy has absolutely no discernible strategy. It seems he is like an adolescent who takes on the opinion of whoever spoke to him last.