Tag archive: Whitehouse

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Tesla:  Out of Gas?

OK, Tesla makes electric vehicles, which don’t run on gasoline, but you get the idea.  Once valued in excess of a trillion dollars, Tesla Motors stock has plunged in 2025, shedding some $380 billion in value since January, which, not coincidentally, is when founder Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, began his stint with the second Trump administration, as head of the now notorious DOGE, Department of Government Efficiency.  The extra-governmental task force, with no statutory authority beyond the President’s fiat, attempted to trim $2 trillion from the federal budget, but came up a bit short. 

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Donald Trump’s 79th Solar Return

US President Kim Jong Don will be celebrating his 79th birthday on Saturday, 14 June, 2025, with a North-Korean-style military parade in the nation’s capital, while simultaneously, 3000 miles away, US National Guard and Marines patrol the country’s largest city, ostensibly to quell “insurrectionists” protesting his administration’s immigration policies.  The dual displays of military power, both unprecedented and controversial, well encapsulate the leading feature of Dear Leader’s Solar Return, which occurs the day before:  a square between Mars, planet of the military, violence and war, and Uranus, planet of shocks, upsets, controversy, volatility, and extreme reactions.

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A Decade of The Donald

Hard to believe, but on June 16th, it will be ten years since Donald J. Trump rolled down that golden escalator in Trump Tower to announce his candidacy for US president, setting in motion a disruption in our political life as a nation the likes of which we’ve never seen before (to use one of Trump’s favorite catch phrases).  As always, the moment encapsulates the future, crystalizing latent potential into manifestation.

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tariff trump ride2

Mr. Trump’s Wild Ride

Investors of the world, unite!  You have nothing to lose but your gains!”  – Trumpunist Manifesto

If anyone doubted Donald Trump’s repeated campaign promises in 2024 that, if elected, he would impose sweeping, massive tariffs on foreign imports, all such doubts evaporated on April 2, 2025, when the US President kicked off a global trade war.  Trump’s so-called “Liberation Day” appears to be working just fine, if the goal was to liberate more cash from Americans’ pocketbooks.  With tariffs applied to virtually every country on Earth, even some unpopulated South Pacific islands (but excluding Russia – surprise!), increases in costs from 10% to 49% have roiled global financial markets.

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SCOTUS Smackdown:  Roberts Rebukes Trump

On 18 March 2025, Chief Justice of the US Supreme Court John Roberts made a rare statement on the politics of the day, when he waded into a controversy over the deportation of hundreds of undocumented Venezuelan immigrants who had been characterized by the Trump administration as violent, dangerous gang members.  The men were apprehended and removed from the country without due process, with no proof of guilt beyond the government’s say-so, then flown to a prison in El Salvador, which was paid to house them indefinitely. 

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T30 cover

Trump’s First Thirty Days:  Schlock & Awe

Donald J. Trump’s particular genius for creating chaos and mayhem was on full display in the first month after his second inauguration on 20 January 2025.  A flurry of executive orders mandating everything from the end of birthright citizenship (a constitutionally enshrined right which requires an amendment ratified by three-fourths of the states to alter) to the quixotic renaming of the Gulf of Mexico as “the Gulf of America” (and would you like Freedom Fries with that?) was just the beginning.  Most of the heavy lifting of dismantling the federal government was consigned to Elon Musk and his fabricated Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), who has proceeded to reflexively fire or eliminate thousands of workers with civil service protections and close entire agencies without congressional authority.  Freezes on funding, hiring, and dispensing approved funds have rounded out DOGE’s resume.

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