The Official "Damned Trump" Thread: Phase II

[Ravenshire]

President Donald Trump says vandals are to blame for large swaths of dead grass on the National Mall near the World War II Memorial — in the spot where he had a stage built and hosted crowds for his July 4 celebration.

Trump made the accusation in a social media post on Sunday without saying why he believes it’s the work of vandals instead of trampled turf from the Independence Day festivities. The Republican president posted a photo showing a once-grassy area by the World War II Memorial, now patchy and brown across much of the sprawling turf.

“Look what VANDALS did to the grass connecting the vandalized World War II Monument and the vandalized Reflecting Pool, which will be opened again, and better than ever, shortly,” Trump said on his Truth Social platform.

Seriously, a ten-year-old could have told him this would be the result.

To be fair, the Toddler-in-Chief probably doesn't remember what was on that patch of grass such a short time ago. With his steel sieve memory, gnat-like attention span, and love of blaming others for everything, it's not surprising to hear him make these kinds of claims.

[BrianSoddingBoru4]

^Trump blaming other people for things Trump did is practically Trump's raison d'etre, almost as much as Trump taking credit for things done by people who are not Trump.

Boru

[Angrboda]

A database of federal law enforcement officer misconduct records. A survey measuring physical, sexual and emotional violence against children and youth. Real-time pollution readings collected by air quality monitors from US embassies around the world.

These are among the hundreds of federal datasets that the Trump administration has taken down or altered as part of its aggressive campaign to wipe all mentions of data findings that do not align with the administration’s priorities.

Over the past year and a half, at least 28 federal datasets have been deleted and another 338 data collections have been modified, according to an online tracker released last week from dataindex.us, a group of data policy experts, researchers and developers that formed last year to monitor changes to government data.

“We’re at a very vulnerable point as a nation,” said Denice Ross, former US chief data scientist under the Biden administration and a co-founder of dataindex.us. “We’re facing a future where we are not going to have the information that we need to make decisions that will save lives and benefit American communities.”

The tracker includes detailed information about deleted or altered datasets from more than 60 federal agencies that span the environment, labor, law enforcement and other topics. But datasets on health appear to be the most affected by the Trump administration’s crackdown, comprising about 40% of the total number of terminated or altered data collections tracked by dataindex.us.

Trump 2.0 has deleted or altered nearly 400 US datasets, endangering public health, education and more

[The Grand Nudger]

You’ll have fewer cases if you stop counting.

[Angrboda]

Sargent: I think there’s a through line that connects the story you’re talking about here, which is the complete gutting of the civil service and diplomatic corps and all that, with the other stuff involving Trump’s constant threats of force. And it’s this.

It’s that Trump doesn’t think he needs to understand Iran’s rulers. He doesn’t think he needs a diplomatic corps to tell him how Iran’s rulers, and how Iran, understand the world. He can just use force, and because he’s infinitely strong and powerful, he will always get his way by definition. So why bother understanding anybody? Isn’t that sort of the story here?

Tabatabai: Yeah, and it’s not just about adversaries, right? I mean, I think you’re exactly right that he thinks that he can pick up the phone. I mean, just this week too, we had the story about how he’s talked to Kim Jong-un—or he thinks that he has a good relationship with Kim Jong-un, so we can just not do the joint exercises we typically do with one of our closest allies, South Korea. So yeah, he thinks that he can talk to people, and then he gets them, and then he can just, you know, make policy on his own.

But it’s not just about adversaries. It’s also about the fact that he doesn’t understand, as we would say in the Department of Defense, blue, right? The U.S. side of things. He thinks about readiness as something that can be replenished, right? It’s a video game. You go in, you fight a bunch of bosses, and then you can just press this button and you get your health back, you get your weapons back, everything gets replenished, and you can continue your quest. And that’s just not how the military works in the real world.

You need to have maintenance. You need to have exercises and training. You need to—you know, you have the morale things that we’ve been talking about. And so there is just this fundamental, I think, misunderstanding, and lack of interest in understanding trade-offs, understanding, the pros and cons of different courses of action, and then making decisions based on what you have in your toolkit, instead of what you wish you had in your toolkit. And the unfortunate thing, going back to the cost, is that we’re all paying it.

Sargent: Well, I will tell you, when I was a kid, you needed to have quarters to play video games. And so he’s kind of like the kid with an infinite number of quarters, being a rich kid.

https://newrepublic.com/article/214446/t...truth-lost

[Angrboda]

Donald Trump is getting a major warning from his own party as a string of new polls show Republican support for the president slipping sharply ahead of the midterms.

An Economist/YouGov poll released Tuesday put Trump’s approval among Republicans at 79 percent, down 12 points from January 2025.

The share who “strongly approve” has fallen even more sharply, dropping from 68 percent to 48 percent.

The erosion is particularly pronounced among Republicans who do not identify with the MAGA movement.

Just 51 percent of non-MAGA Republicans approved of Trump, compared with 47 percent who disapproved. Their approval rating plunged 13 points in a single week.

Trump Suffers Polling Shocker as Republicans Turn on Him

[BrianSoddingBoru4]

^It used to be said, and with some justification, that Republicans couldn’t win a primary without Trump and they couldn’t win a general election with him.

The first part of that no longer appears to be the case.

Boru