Donald Trump’s latest activities have even some in his administration worried about his physical and mental health. Mind you, no one wants to talk about it openly — though there are a few who will spend the holiday break speculating.

A member of Trump’s team bluntly told me, “I’d lose my job if I talked about this publicly. Or worse.”

The causes for concern, according to a couple of members of Trump’s circle, are his recent lackluster public appearances, his gait, his apparent befuddlement, his propensity to govern via Truth Social postings, his sloppy attire and his lack of engagement at the White House with others.

Trump hasn’t shown up in the Oval Office on Mondays in about a month. His recent golf outings have been at a course in Sterling, Va., instead of at Mar-A-Lago or Bedminster, “and that’s because he doesn’t have to be gone from the White House as long,” I was told. “I don’t think he’s in good physical health.”

If Trump is having cognitive difficulties, do not expect the press to be there to report on much of it. On Wednesday, Paramount settled a nuisance lawsuit to the tune of $16 Million on Tuesday night over the editing of a Kamala Harris interview on “60 Minutes.” The suit was both specious and ridiculous. ……………….(more)

https://www.salon.com/2025/07/03/trumps-befuddled-behavior-sparks-health-concerns/

Watch this.  It’s 19 minutes of powerful truth.

The most horrible thing in the recent poll results . . .

 . . . for the approval rating of Trump.

 The 1st is that 40% of our fellow Americans approve of what is being done.

• They approve of depriving people of healthcare and leaving them to illness, pain and needless death.
• They approve of profiling people based on ethnicity and grabbing them off the streets.
• They approve of stripping food from the mouths of hungry children and giving that money to Bezos, Zuckerberg, Thiel and other billionaires.
• They approve of the President of the United States taking bribes.
• They approve of the President of the United States extorting businesses, countries, law firms and universities.
• They approve of the people they detain dying in custody.
• They approve of the POTUS using the military to throw a parade for himself for his birthday.
• They approve of doctors and nurses being watched and hunted by police for providing medical care.
• They approve of ending suicide hot-lines that save people’s lives.
• They approve of overt discrimination against LGBTQ+ people.
• They approve of Supreme Court Justices lying to Congress and also hiding their corruption. 

So many more awful and despicable things have been done and yet 40% of those polled approve of these things. That such a large percentage of the population of this country appears proud to be pure scum of the earth is a shocking percentage. Sure we have always known that a percentage of the population was despicable. But this level of support for the horrors going on now isn’t explained by just attributing it to their personal selfishness and them feeling it’s OK because it’s not happening to them.

In this large of a percentage it demonstrates that these people enjoy the misery being inflicted upon people by the actions of Trump.

These are the people who would smile while torturing animals. These are the people who would slam their door shut if an accident victim came to them needing help. These are the people who abuse their children and claim nobody should be able to step in. These are the people who want rapist athletes to get a pass. These are the people that say victims of police violence had it coming. These are the people who also seem to be OK people living in decent neighborhoods and attending churches etc.

So at it’s heart it isn’t explained by just latent racism and hate left over from previous decades and passed down. There is a malevolence inside those nice homes in the suburbs of America, inside some cops and some military veterans. Inside a huge percentage of the people in those categories and those wearing suits and ties and nice clothes is a sickness that has a need to inflict pain and suffering on people and they like knowing that the pain and suffering is going on and it feeds that malevolence inside them.

Decent people in America always knew we had people who were like this. But we mostly thought it was a small percentage. We were wrong and now the ones they chose to do horrible things to the rest of us in order to feed their malevolence are in control. They wanted this. They needed this. They’re feeding on it. They counted on it.

Her finger is on the trigger.  A drill sergeant would have reamed her a new asshole.  YOUR FINGER DOES NOT GO ON THE TRIGGER UNTIL YOU ARE READY TO FIRE.

“All that matters is he has a piece of paper to sign that cuts taxes for him and his wealthy friends and donors…”

The real reason Republicans are rushing to pass the Trump megabill

https://www.msnbc.com/opinion/msnbc-opinion/senate-republicans-big-beautiful-bill-vote-rcna215558

And remember, the bill is massively unpopular, and it becomes even less popular the more voters learn about its provisions. Eight years ago, Republicans thought a tax cut bill would save them in the midterms; instead, that bill was so unpopular that they largely stopped talking about it before that campaign was even finished. Surely Republicans want to avoid reprising that disaster, so why not take a beat over the holiday, reassess and see whether there are other bills to give the president a legislative victory?

The answer is: There is no plan B. The megabill is not just the most important legislation of Trump’s first year; at this point, it is the only major legislation of Trump’s first year. If the bill is “big” and “beautiful,” that is by default. Republicans have to pass it because Trump wants them to pass something.

What that something looks like does not matter to the president, who has been consistently incurious as to the bill’s contents. Earlier this month, Sen. Josh Hawley, R-Mo., said Trump was surprised to learn the Senate bill would limit a tax on health care providers that states use to fund Medicaid — a provision that was a key source of savings. On Thursday, as my colleague Steve Benen noted, the president claimed: “Your Medicaid is left alone. It’s left the same.” In fact, the bill would kick millions off Medicaid. On Friday, he claimed — for the second time in two days — that the bill would eliminate taxes on Social Security. It would not.

But whether this bill would cut taxes on Social Security — or throw millions off their health care or batter rural hospitals — is ultimately immaterial to the president. All that matters is he has a piece of paper to sign that cuts taxes for him and his wealthy friends and donors. Trump has his wish, and in today’s Republican Party, everything else comes second to making his wish come true.

Kristi Noem Secretly Took a Cut of Political Donations

by Justin Elliott, Joshua Kaplan and Alex Mierjeski
June 30, 2025, 5 a.m. EDT

In 2023, while Kristi Noem was governor of South Dakota, she supplemented her income by secretly accepting a cut of the money she raised for a nonprofit that promotes her political career, tax records show.

In what experts described as a highly unusual arrangement, the nonprofit routed funds to a personal company of Noem’s that had recently been established in Delaware. The payment totaled $80,000 that year, a significant boost to her roughly $130,000 government salary. Since the nonprofit is a so-called dark money group — one that’s not required to disclose the names of its donors — the original source of the money remains unknown.

Noem then failed to disclose the $80,000 payment to the public. After President Donald Trump selected Noem to be his secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, she had to release a detailed accounting of her assets and sources of income from 2023 on. She did not include the income from the dark money group on her disclosure form, which experts called a likely violation of federal ethics requirements.

Experts told ProPublica it was troubling that Noem was personally taking money that came from political donors. In a filing, the group, a nonprofit called American Resolve Policy Fund, described the $80,000 as a payment for fundraising. The organization said Noem had brought in hundreds of thousands of dollars.

https://www.propublica.org/article/kristi-noem-political-donations-income-dark-money-dhs-ethics

 

Remember when Noem staged a visit to a prison in El Salvador where she posed in front of a cell jammed with prisoners while she was wearing a $60,000 Rolex watch?  Now we know how she could afford the watch.

President Donald Trump was brutally mocked over the weekend after he referred to Japan’s leader as “Mr. Japan.”

The president made the statement during an interview with Fox News host Maria Bartiromo about tariffs. As his July 9 deadline for tariff deals approached, Trump said he would rather send a letter to countries instead of negotiating.

“But I’d rather just send them a letter, a very fair letter, saying, congratulations, whether it will allow you to trade in the United States of America,” Trump told Bartiromo. “You’re going to pay a 25% tariff, or 20% or 40% or 50%. I would rather do that.”

“We’ll send a letter and we’ll say we would consider it a great honor, and this is what you’ll have to do to shop in the United States,” he opined. “We’re like a department store to shop in the United States, and you’ll pay a 25% tariff, or we wish you a lot of luck, and that’s the end of the trade deal.”

“I could send one to Japan. Dear Mr. Japan, here’s the story. You’re going to pay a 25% tariff on your cars.

‘Brain is peanut butter’: Trump mocked for calling Japanese leader ‘Mr. Japan’ – Raw Story https://share.google/xVJmpN2djtr3kj3VV

COMMENT:

Why is Trump sending letters to something like 40-50 countries, telling them what tariffs the US will impose on them?  I thought he was going to “from Day One” negotiate beautiful tariff deals” because, of course, he is the world’s greatest deal maker — which is why he declared bankruptcy seven times and went broke running a casino.

Time for the Blue donor states to stand up to this tyranny and time for the Red dependent states to get off the public dole.

 There is a movement going on where a number of blue states who subsidize the federal government are taking steps to withhold money from the feds if Trump illegally cuts off federal revenue.

Several states, predominantly led by Democrats, are exploring ways to withhold payments to the federal government as a countermeasure against potential federal funding freezes, particularly those attributed to the Trump administration. This approach is described as a novel and untested gambit.
States with such legislative proposals:

Connecticut: Has introduced legislation to withhold federal payments under certain circumstances.
Maryland: Similar to Connecticut, it’s considering measures to withhold federal payments.
New York: Has also introduced bills to withhold federal payments.
Wisconsin: Bills have been introduced, but their progress is uncertain due to the state’s Republican-controlled legislature.
Washington: Lawmakers are in the process of drafting similar legislation.
California: Governor Gavin Newsom has suggested the possibility of withholding federal taxes if federal funding is reduced.
I say, go for it. Stop paying for this tyranny of the minority.

Top Donor States:

California: Contributed $83 billion more than it received, according to a report from the Governor of California.
New York: Contributed $89 billion more than it received, according to USAFacts.
New Jersey: Contributed $70 billion more than it received, according to USAFacts.
Massachusetts: Contributed $9 billion more than it received, according to the Baltimore Sun.
Connecticut: Contributed $8 billion more than it received, according to the Baltimore Sun.
Colorado: Contributed $2 billion more than it received.
Minnesota: Contributed $725 million more than it received.
Delaware: While not in the top 10 by total contribution, USAFacts reports Delaware had the highest per capita net contribution at $10,505 in 2023.

Top States Who Are Sucking at the Public Tit:

Alaska, Kentucky, Vermont, West Virginia, , Arkansas, Louisiana, Arizona, South Dakota, and Mississippi, according to USAFacts.

Eight out of nine voted for Trump —   let’s see how they do without Blue State money!

 

There are four political stories people should know about tonight.

First, President Donald Trump’s tariff war and weaker consumer spending translated to a contraction of 0.5% in the U.S. economy in the first quarter, even more of a drop than the 0.2% economists expected. The economy Trump inherited from President Joe Biden led the world in productivity.

Second, John Hudson and Warren P. Strobel of the Washington Post reported today that intercepted communications showed that senior Iranian officials said the U.S. attacks on Iran’s nuclear facilities caused less damage than they had expected and that they wondered why the strikes were so restrained.

Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo also called out that at a press conference in the Netherlands last Wednesday, Trump said he had given Iran permission to bomb a U.S. air base in Qatar in retaliation for the U.S. strikes on Iran’s nuclear weapons program sites. “They said, ‘We’re going to shoot them. Is one o’clock OK?’ I said it’s fine,” Trump said. “And everybody was emptied off the base so they couldn’t get hurt, except for the gunners.”

Marshall expressed astonishment that this admission has attracted very little attention. He suggested that, if it is true, it represents “the most shocking dereliction of duty one could imagine for the commander-in-chief,” and he wondered how Republicans would have reacted if a Democratic president had said he had let “a foreign adversary fire on an American military installation.”

Third, Jeff Stein of the Washington Post reported today that the Republicans’ budget reconciliation bill makes the biggest cut ever to programs for low-income Americans. Those cuts have made many Republicans skittish about supporting the measure.

After Trump attacked him yesterday for not supporting the budget reconciliation bill, Senator Thom Tillis (R-NC) has announced he will not run for reelection next year, indicating his unwillingness to face a primary challenger backed by Trump. This puts the seat in play for a Democratic pickup.

In a statement, Tillis said: “In Washington over the last few years, it’s become increasingly evident that leaders who are willing to embrace bipartisanship, compromise, and demonstrate independent thinking are becoming an endangered species.” He wrote: “I look forward to having the pure freedom to call the balls and strikes as I see fit and representing the great people of North Carolina to the best of my ability.”

Tonight, Tillis told the Senate: “What do I tell 663,000 people in two years or three years, when President Trump breaks his promise by pushing them off of Medicaid because the funding’s not there anymore, guys?… [T]he effect of this bill is to break a promise.”

Fourth, the Senate parliamentarian has told senators that several of the provisions added to the Republicans’ budget reconciliation bill violate the rules for budget reconciliation bills. Those provisions include the ones added to the bill to win the support of Republican senator Lisa Murkowski of Alaska.

Today, Trump pushed Republican senators to ignore the Senate parliamentarian, who judges whether proposed measures adhere to Senate rules. Trump posted on social media: “An unelected Senate Staffer (Parliamentarian), should not be allowed to hurt the Republicans Bill. Wants many fantastic things out. NO! DJT.”

The nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office today said the tax cuts in the budget reconciliation bill the Republican senators are trying to pass will increase the national debt by $3.3 trillion over the next ten years despite the $1.2 trillion in cuts to Medicaid, Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, the National Institutes of Health, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and other programs over the same period. Senator Raphael Warnock (D-GA) called the measure “Robin Hood in reverse…stealing from the poor in order to give to the rich, this massive transfer of wealth from the bottom to the top…. This is socialism for the rich.”