Trump claims he is 6’3″, 235 lbs. As we know, he wears 2-inch shoe lifts and his belly flops over his belt. Let’s check out others who are really 6’3″, 2235 lbs.
Tim Tebow — 6’2″, 236 lbs


The United States is now facing the greatest threat to our free way of life in our history. Even the US Civil War was not the danger that is Donald Trump. In the Civil War, the South wanted to separate from the rest of the Union. Today, Trump does not want to separate from the US, he seeks to destroy the fundamental functions and purpose of the US. He seeks to destroy the Constitution, replacing the Judiciary and Legislative Branches with puppets of the Executive. Plainly stated, Trump seeks to establish himself as a dictator . . . and as of May 2025, he may succeed.
Trump claims he is 6’3″, 235 lbs. As we know, he wears 2-inch shoe lifts and his belly flops over his belt. Let’s check out others who are really 6’3″, 2235 lbs.
Tim Tebow — 6’2″, 236 lbs
The order requires signs throughout the parks to have the following message:
(Name of property) belongs to the American people, and (name of land management bureau) wants your feedback. Please let us know if you have identified (1) any areas of the (park/area, etc. as appropriate) that need repair; (2) any services that need improvement; or (3) any signs or other information that are negative about either past or living Americans or that fail to emphasize the beauty, grandeur, and abundance of landscapes and other natural features.
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The Trump administration is enlisting national park visitors into the Republican president’s fight to rewrite American history, with a new directive that forces all park units to display signs that encourage guests to report any information that is critical of American history.
On May 20, U.S. Interior Secretary Doug Burgum directed all park units to display the signs to comply with President Donald Trump’s earlier executive order, which claims that U.S. history has been distorted by ideology and seeks to counter what it describes as revisionist narratives that portray the country’s past in a negative light.
Burgum’s order directs federal agencies and cultural institutions to remove content that “inappropriately disparage[s] Americans past or living,” and to instead highlight the nation’s progress and achievements. It also calls for the removal of what it terms “improper ideology” from museums, monuments and public exhibits under federal control.
In a statement released in March, the American Historical Association, or AHA, condemned the order, defending the importance of historical integrity in public institutions and places. Thirty-six other organizations also signed on to the AHA statement.
“The stories that have shaped our past include not only elements that make us proud but also aspects that make us acutely aware of tragedies in our nation’s history,” they wrote. “No person, no nation, is perfect, and we should all — as individuals and as nations — learn from our imperfections.”
https://www.sfgate.com/california-parks/article/national-parks-negative-history-trump-20343308.php
Burgum’s order implements President Donald Trump’s executive order called “Restoring Truth and Sanity to American History,” which aims to remove any stories or information that “inappropriately disparage Americans past or living (including persons living in colonial times)” from national parks and monuments.
The parks in question include many historic locations central to slavery, Civil War battles, the imprisonment of Japanese Americans, and other ugly chapters of American history.
Denver7 reached out to the National Parks Conservation Association, the 100-year-old nonprofit created to protect America’s national park system. President and CEO Theresa Pierno called Secretary Burgum’s order “outrageous” and “frightening.”
“A lot of our history is difficult to hear, but these are the places where people are educated about many issues in our past, and it’s so important,” said Pierno. “How do you tell that story accurately, but you can’t describe anything that might negatively impact the history? History is full of good and bad, and mistakes were made. And we try to understand that history so we don’t repeat those mistakes.”
The world is watching in disbelief as the President of the United States goes full Aryan. After coaxing black and brown voters into his tent, Trump loaded a gun, trained it at their heads, and blocked the exits.
Trump’s racism surprises exactly no one, but his unprecedented aggression in arresting black membersof Congress and sending brown migrants to a torture prison without legal process hints at real strategy from an administration otherwise known for incompetence.
Political writers often quip that Trump’s racial animus is performative: red meat thrown to a carnivorous base, a little candy to keep MAGA extremists standing back and standing by. Plus, daily outrage keeps media focus where Trump wants it: on him.
But Trump is not just feeding and entertaining his base, he’s simultaneously trying to goad democrats– racial minorities in particular– into violence. He’s deliberately trying to incite race riots in the streets, complete with looting and mayhem, as predicate to martial law.
(NOTE: “MAGAt” rhymes with “maggot” — they are the same creature — putrid and vile.)
Because they are absolute ghouls, House Republicans are opening an investigation into former President Joe Biden’s health, including demanding that his doctor testify about Biden’s private medical information. Meanwhile, current President Donald Trump is so flagrantly and consistently incoherent that the only way for his administration to deal with it is to ensure no transcripts of his rambling remarks are available.
This latest probe is technically more of a reopening. House Republicans investigated Biden’s alleged cognitive decline last year, but thanks to Alex Thompson and Jake Tapper making the rounds with their book about how Biden getting old is the biggest threat to American democracy, they’ve got an excuse to do it again. And of course, after Biden announced his prostate cancer diagnosis, the door was wide open for Rep. James Comer to continue his unhealthy vendetta against the Biden family.
Not that Comer really needs an excuse. The fever swamp that is his brain likely means that pretty much any time anyone even mentions the Biden name, he spins up the House Oversight Committee to “investigate” something, anything. After Biden pardoned his son, Hunter, Comer ran to Newsmax to say that meant it was time to open another investigation into Hunter’s laptop. That was after he spent 15 months fruitlessly trying to invent some corruption for which Biden could be impeached.
The one-two punch of Tapper’s media blitz and Biden’s cancer diagnosis must have been a dream come true for Comer, who dashed off letters to Biden’s doctors and former aides. He wants Biden’s doctor to prove that his “financial relationship with the Biden family” didn’t affect his assessment of Biden’s fitness to serve, while also basically saying that the doctor helped cover up Biden’s decline from the public. Inquiries to former aides are so that Comer can “understand who made key decisions and exercised the powers of the executive branch during the Biden Administration,” with the implication there being, of course, that it was not Joe Biden.
Hilariously, Comer is pretending that one of the reasons Biden’s physician has to share the former president’s private medical information is that the Oversight Committee needs that to “explore whether the time has come for Congress to revisit potential legislation to address the oversight of presidents’ fitness to serve pursuant to its authority under Section 4 of the Twenty-Fifth Amendment.”
Comer has no actual interest in fitness to serve. This is just him building on Trump’s 2024 campaign rhetoric saying the 25th Amendment should be “modified” to allow for the removal of a vice president because Kamala Harris was part of a conspiracy to cover up Biden’s decline. Any real query into the capacity of a president to do his job would have to grapple with not just Trump’s inability to do the job but also his obvious handoff of vast chunks of decision-making.
Trump routinely makes things up out of thin air, but that’s always been the case. That makes it difficult to tell whether he’s lost the plot or is just lying. When he showed South African President Cyril Ramaphosa pictures from the Democratic Republic of Congo and insisted they were instead evidence of white genocide in South Africa, it’s just as likely that Trump knew the truth but didn’t care as it is that he genuinely didn’t have any idea what he was looking at.
But even if you set aside all the times in which Trump blatantly lies in service of a political point, you’ve still got all the other times where it seems like he doesn’t know what he’s doing. He told the press he didn’t sign the Alien Enemies Act proclamation that paved the way for the mass deportation of Venezuelan migrants, despite his signature appearing on it.
And he routinely admits he doesn’t know about major decisions. Earlier this month, The Washington Post compiled the most recent ones. He said he didn’t know his nominee for surgeon general, but had listened to a recommendation from Robert F. Kennedy Jr. He said he hadn’t been briefed on U.S. soldiers killed in Lithuania. He wasn’t aware the administration was considering deporting people to Libya. He’s not the person responsible for the failure to bring Maryland man Kilmar Abrego Garcia home from a Salvadoran prison, because, “We have lawyers that don’t want to do this.”
It’s a cliche to say that every accusation is a confession, but that’s pretty much what happens every time Republicans open their mouths.
On May 8, political scientists Steven Levitsky, Lucan Way, and Daniel Ziblatt published an op-ed in the New York Times reminding readers that most modern authoritarian leaders are elected. They maintain their power by using the power of the government—arrests, tax audits, defamation suits, politically targeted investigations, and so on—to punish and silence their opponents. They either buy or bully the media and civil society until opposing voices cave to their power.
Levitsky, Way, and Ziblatt call this system “competitive authoritarianism.” A country that has fallen to it still holds elections, but the party in power has so weighted the system in its favor that it’s virtually impossible for it to lose.
The way to tell if the United States has crossed the line from democracy to competitive authoritarianism, the political scientists explain, is to see if people feel safe opposing those in power. Can they safely protest? Publish criticism of the government? Support opposition candidates? Or does taking a stand against those in power lead to punishment either by the government or by government supporters?
Looking at the many ways the Trump administration has been harassing critics, law firms, universities, judges, and media stations, they conclude that “America has crossed the line into competitive authoritarianism.”
Since they made that observation less than a week ago, there has been more evidence of the administration’s attempt to consolidate power.
. . . Read more here
He cites Dornbusch’s Law:
The crisis takes a much longer time coming than you think, and then it happens much faster than you would have thought.
He’s been looking at this for at least a month, and has this to say about the present moment:
So a U.S. sudden stop still looks quite possible, indeed considerably more likely given the grotesquely cruel and irresponsible budget bill Republicans are trying to ram through. It doesn’t help that key players are being utterly dishonest about what they’re doing: House Republicans have been denying that the bill will increase the budget deficit, while Trump claims that “We’re not touching anything” on Medicaid, just eliminating waste, fraud and abuse (and somehow taking away health care for millions in the process.) Low-information voters may be fooled for a little while, but bond markets won’t.
What exactly would it look like? We can cover the debt that’s being run up with trade deficits because the U.S. looks like a good place for foreigners to safely invest, and that keeps money coming in — or did. What happens if the U.S. no longer looks like a safe place to park money?
A sudden stop to capital flows into America would mean that there would no longer be money to cover those big trade deficits — and this would mean a sharp drop in the foreign exchange value of the dollar. On the eve of its 2001 sudden-stop crisis Argentina had a trade deficit, as a share of GDP, similar to that of the United States now — and when the crisis hit the peso lost more than half its value. A U.S. sudden stop would probably be less severe because our foreign debts are overwhelmingly in dollars, which insulates us from some of the fallout Argentina faced. Still, this could be ugly.
Interest rates would go up — long term rates are heading that way. Higher interest rates would likely cause a housing crash, leading to a recession. The dollar would get weaker, driving up inflation — which would also force interest rates higher.
So a sudden stop would be a very ugly experience for America — a recipe for lots of economic pain and a bout of stagflation. And recovery would be difficult. The Fed’s hands would be tied by stagflation. And to recover the world’s confidence, American policymakers wouldn’t just have to become far more responsible than they are, but they’d have to convince the world that they’d changed, a very tall order.
Krugman notes that this has never happened to the U.S. before — but then we’ve never had a criminally incompetent regime like the current one before either.
Meanwhile:
Trump’s up and down, on again-off again, tariffs are making it impossible for businesses to plan. Small businesses in particular are questioning if they’ll still be in business a year from now.
Jamelle Bouie at The NY Times takes a broader look at the destruction being caused by Trump and the Republican Party.
…This war has four theaters of conflict. In the first, Trump is waging war on constitutional government, with a full-spectrum attack on the idea of the United States as a nation of laws and not men. He hopes to make it a government of one man: himself, unbound by anything other than his singular will…
…In the second theater of conflict, the MAGA movement is waging war on the nation’s economic future, rejecting two generations of integration and interdependency with the rest of the world in favor of American autarky, of effectively closing our borders to goods and people from around the world so that the United States might make itself into an impenetrable fortress — a garrison state with the power to dictate the terms of the global order, especially in its own hemisphere. In this new world, Americans will abandon service-sector work in favor of manufacturing and heavy industry…
…Not content to leave Americans without a meaningful democratic future or one of broad economic prosperity, the White House is also fighting a pitched battle against a sustainable climate future.
In the same way that Trump and his allies have rejected the obligation to pass the nation’s tradition of self-governance on to the next generation, they have also rejected the obligation to pass a living planet on to those who will inherit the earth…
[Duplicate paragraphs removed, correct ones added. 8:03 est 5/23/25]
…The fourth and final theater of the MAGA movement’s war on the future is adjacent to the third one: an assault on the nation’s capacity to produce scientific, technological and medical breakthroughs.
Whether under the guise of ending diversity efforts or in disciplining institutions of higher education or commandeering the federal administrative state for the president’s corrupt purposes, the White House has taken a buzz saw to billions of dollars in federal grants for research in medicine and the hard sciences…
And, while all this is going on, Trump is trashing any good will we might have left with our traditional foreign partners. ETTD: Everything Trump Touches Dies.
Circling back to Krugman for the closer, his take on the budget bill is about the Attack of the Sadistic Zombies.
As I see it, right-wingers’ rhetoric about the budget deficit is a lot like their rhetoric about antisemitism. It’s not something they actually care about. It’s just a club they can use to bash their opponents.
But in that case, why the cruelty toward less-fortunate Americans? Well, as I see it the cruelty, as opposed to the dollars saved, is actually the point. Inflicting harm on the vulnerable isn’t something they do with regret, it’s something they do with a sense of satisfaction.
OK, I’ll probably get a lot of grief for saying that — but maybe not as much grief as I would have gotten a few months ago. For does anyone doubt that the people now running America are bullies completely lacking in any kind of compassion?
And why do bullies beat up people who can’t defend themselves? Because they can.
As I have said elsewhere, the Republican Party has become a death cult demanding human sacrifice. They aren’t even trying to hide it.
Remember when everyone was holding their breath over Y2K? We survived that because people did a huge amount of work to fix things before it arrived, and it worked. Too bad too many of us didn’t acknowledge the threat building on the Right for decades and act to head it off..