Donald Trump the Megathread part II - mod warnings in OP, Updated 18/03/25

Is this not pure extortion and using his power to settle scores with law firms he doesn't like for personal reasons.

https://www.msn.com/en-ie/news/world/top-democrat-affiliated-law-firm-offers-40m-in-legal-services-to-trump-administration-as-part-of-deal-to-end-executive-order/ar-AA1BlSU9

The Trump administration and a top, Democrat-affiliated law firm reached an agreement for the White House to drop an executive order targeting the firm in exchange for the company doing tens of millions of dollars in free legal work to support administration initiatives.

Under the agreement, Trump will drop his executive order last week aimed at the firm of Paul, Weiss, Rifkind, Wharton & Garrison LLP. The order suspended the firm’s security clearances, barred it from federal buildings, and threatened government contractors that did business with the firm.

In exchange for dropping the order, Paul, Weiss agreed to represent clients from “the full spectrum of political viewpoints,” commit to not using diversity hiring, and offer $40 million in pro bono legal services to support administration initiatives in areas like aiding veterans, promoting fairness in the justice system, and combatting antisemitism.

The president announced the deal on social media on Thursday evening and singled out Mark Pomerantz, a former Paul, Weiss partner who later helped the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office build a criminal case against Trump.

I hope not.

If I were a particularly sharp DoD person who knew that Donnie and his flock of Facism-buddies couldn't be trusted with important secrets, I would have created credible-looking mis-information to share with them.

An even sharper DoD person might even cook up mis-information designed to misdirect the Chinese from thier actual plans with the assumption that they know Musk would share anything he gets with Beijing / Moscow.

Add to all of that the likelyhood that spoofers like Musk or Trump simply don't pay anywhere near enough attention to realise if they've been handed a fabricated plan.

Trumps current approval rating in 47% to 48.2% depending on the source.

In his first term, this rating was between 49% just before the pandemic and 34% just after J6

I think you’re jumping to conclusions here. The obfuscation and selective provision of plans that Manic Moran mentioned meshes with a number of accounts I’ve recently read about US war planning and command & control. Basically, the US military has a long history of showing any civilians only a highly sanitised version of their actual plans, even when they claim to be providing full access.

The two sources that I’m primarily drawing on here are The Doomsday Machine - Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner by Daniel Ellsberg (of Pentagon Papers fame) and Command & Control by Eric Schlosser. Both books focus primarily on nuclear war planning, but both are in agreement that ever since the 1940s, the Pentagon has gone out of its way to resist any civilian control or oversight. One episode that sticks in my mind actually directly involves Daniel Ellsberg. In his early days as a defence consultant at RAND in the late 1950s, Ellsberg got to read a document called the Joint Strategic Capabilities Plan (JSCP), which outlined not just US nuclear posture and force disposition, but also the conditions for the use of nuclear weapons and the actual war plans. The Single Integrated Operational Plan (SIOP), the Cold War era “script” for nuclear war, is simply an annex to the JSCP.

As Ellsberg outlines, it was standing Pentagon Policy to never disclose this plan to the secretary of defence or even the president himself. It would be alluded to, but it was never named or even confirmed to be an actual document. Later on, in the early days of the Kennedy administration, Ellsberg delivered a briefing to McGeorge Bundy, national security adviser to JFK, in which he mentioned the existence of JSCP and suggested that Bundy ask the JCS (Joint Chiefs of Staff), the actual driving force behind JSCP to provide him with a copy, given that he had the appropriate clearance. Bundy did eventually get briefed on JSCP, but the document he received afterwards, and that he passed on to Ellsberg to read, had nothing to do with JSCP itself. The document was simply a transcript of the briefing he’d received.

If you take this and add it to the recalcitrance to any attempt at mechanical or electronic release control for nuclear weapons that Eric Schlosser outlines in Command & Control, Moran’s suggestion that the Pentagon brass only release a sanitized version of their China war plans to Musk seems less “conspiracy theory” and more like a prediction about what’s actually going to happen, especially since any war plans to deal with the PRC must, by its very nature, deal with Beijing’s nuclear weapons and thus have a nuclear option of its own. Musk might be driven by radicalism, but the US Department of Defense is a whole different kettle of fish to the government departments that his DOGE bros have taken on so far. And the senior commanders and civilian staffers will have decades of experience in seeing off ”nosy” civilians.

I really need to do something about my obsession with nuclear weapons & planning, don’t I? 🤔

I've never in my life seen a more blatant example of a criminal enterprise at the helm of a modern western democracy.

Shameful what America has done to itself.

You're working on the assumption that they have to whip up such a plan. Given what I outlined in my reply to thatsdaft, it's safe to say that such "sanitised" plans already exist, have existed for some time, and can be distributed to interested outsiders if requested. DOGe won't be dealing with a low-security organisation like the Veterans Administration, etc.. The Pentagon and the JCS have been doing this kind of obfuscation since the days of the Eisenhower administration, and they've faced much stronger scrutiny than whatever it is that Musk and his ketamine connection can muster. I feel that this is going to be a nut that is going to be too tough for Elon to crack, even with a SecDef that's supposedly on his side.

Narrator: Musk is shown war plans.

Just announced in the last few hours that student loans will be administered by the SBA -Small Business Administration.

Best thing I've seen said today….

When Vladimir Lenin was in exile in Germany before being sent to Moscow to "make the most of the Russian revolution," he famously said in November of that year "for decades nothing happens and then decades happen in weeks".

Right now, decades are happening in weeks.

So there is a modicum of ‘YES MINISTER’ in the pentagon as well . Praise be the Lord and a big relief if that is the case

This has to be a spoof from some very bad media person in the Daily Mail winding up the public soon after Trump asked SCOTUS to cancel the birth-rights of US citizens born in the US.

Trump weighs in on British Commonwealth offer. President Donald Trump on Friday indicated he would accept an offer from King Charles to join the British Commonwealth, strengthening America's ties to the United Kingdom. 'I Love King Charles. Sounds good to me!,' Trump wrote on his Truth Social account. Trump was responding to an exclusive report in DailyMail.com that the King would make a 'secret' offer to the president for the U.S. to become the next 'associate member' of the Commonwealth.

We're 10 days shy of April fools

I’ve on question for ye all- why is Trump continually mentioning WW3?
What’s his angle? There is as much threat today as there was 6 months ago - in other words low.
Is he preparing to hand Taiwan to the Chinese without interference and let them fight it out themselves ? In return for favourable trade? Under the guise of “stopping WW3”- cue Nobel Peace prize?

I don’t get it- he’s not saying it for no reason - he wants people to believe WW3 is a real threat right now. I can’t figure it out.