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Paulie's Pixel Palace
Don't underestimate the GOP players willingness to fuck each other in the face.
And enjoy the irony from Rama Lama Ding Dong on the subject of mediocrity, overlooking as he does the screaming, flaming, mediocrity of Trump, his supporters and especially his cabinet picks.
“Our American culture has venerated mediocrity over excellence for way too long (at least since the 90s and probably longer). That doesn’t start in college, it starts YOUNG,” Ramaswamy wrote on X last month. “A culture that celebrates the prom queen over the math olympiad champ, or the jock over the valedictorian, will not produce the best engineers.”
Nor the best presidents.
The Great MAGA Schism of 2025 is only getting uglier
War of words between Musk and Bannon shows gap between rhetoric and reality
January 13, 2025 at 5:42 p.m. EST Yesterday at 5:42 p.m. EST
Left: Elon Musk gives a presentation on SpaceX's Starship rocket in 2019. Right: Steve Bannon at a 2022 rally for Arizona gubernatorial candidate Kari Lake. (Musk photo by Jonathan Newton/The Washington Post; Bannon photo by Caitlin O’Hara for The Post)
https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2025/01/13/musk-bannon-maga/
Donald Trump hasn’t been inaugurated yet, and already two bellicose titans of the MAGA universe are waging total war — against each other.
Stephen K. Bannon, Trump’s rumpled onetime chief strategist, vowed last week in an interview with the Italian newspaper Corriere Della Sera that he will “get Elon Musk kicked out” of Trump’s inner circle by the time Trump is sworn in on Jan. 20. “He is a truly evil guy, a very bad guy,” Bannon said of Musk.
And that was one of the nicer things Bannon said about the world’s richest man, who spends so much time at Trump’s side that he might be mistaken for a member of the Secret Service detail, minus the earpiece and the muscle tone.
“He should go back to South Africa,” Bannon said of the immigrant tycoon. “Why do we have South Africans, the most racist people on earth, White South Africans … making any comments at all on what goes on in the United States?” Bannon added that Musk “has the maturity of a child,” which indeed might be provable in a court of law.
Is Bannon’s rage simply over the fact that Musk has replaced him at the Mar-a-Lago dinner table? I wouldn’t discount jealousy as a motive, but there is also a substantive issue involved. Bannon, whose credentials as a MAGA warrior are genuine — he served four months in federal prison for defying a subpoena from the Jan. 6 committee — has long been a hard-liner against immigration. Musk is an equally fierce defender of the H-1B visa program that allows tech firms to bring skilled foreign workers into the country.
“The reason I’m in America along with so many critical people who built SpaceX, Tesla and hundreds of other companies that made America strong is because of H1B,” Musk declared on X last month, responding to a post critical of the program. “Take a big step back and F--- YOURSELF in the face. … I will go to war on this issue the likes of which you cannot possibly comprehend.”
Bannon responded on his podcast with a playground taunt of his own, telling Musk that longtime MAGA true believers will “rip your face off” if he continues to back a program that Bannon claims takes good, high-paying jobs away from American citizens.
“They’re recent converts,” Bannon said of Musk and the other tech moguls who supported Trump in the November election. “We love converts. But the converts sit in the back and study for years and years and years to make sure you understand the faith and you understand the nuances of the faith and understand how you can internalize the faith.” Musk and the others, he said, should not “come up and go to the pulpit in your first week here and start lecturing people about the way things are going to be.”
This war of words between two insufferable blowhards reveals a consequential schism in the MAGA world — and the yawning gap between MAGA rhetoric and objective reality.
It is an article of faith among some of Trump’s most loyal and avid supporters that immigration is a bad thing, period. In this view, the H-1B program is nothing more than a way for tech companies to hire foreign workers who can be paid less than American citizens and who cannot complain or quit because of their immigration status. Bannon speaks for this group when he calls for “a 100 percent moratorium on all immigration until we get this thing sorted.”
Musk and other tech leaders see the program as a way to maintain U.S. technological primacy by attracting the most creative and talented engineers from around the world. Vivek Ramaswamy, Musk’s partner in the advisory “Department of Government Efficiency,” goes much further.
“Our American culture has venerated mediocrity over excellence for way too long (at least since the 90s and probably longer). That doesn’t start in college, it starts YOUNG,” Ramaswamy wrote on X last month. “A culture that celebrates the prom queen over the math olympiad champ, or the jock over the valedictorian, will not produce the best engineers.”
Trump, typically, is trying to have it both ways. He sounded like Bannon during his first campaign in 2016, vowing to “end forever the use of the H-1B as a cheap labor program, and institute an absolute requirement to hire American workers first.” Then he sounded like Musk last month, telling the New York Post that “I’ve always liked the visas, I have always been in favor of the visas.” And then, with a straight face, he claimed that “I didn’t change my mind.”
Meanwhile, the Musk and Bannon factions — call them “New MAGA” and “MAGA Classic” — definitely are not changing their minds. This is ugly, and it promises to get uglier.
Trump Is Treating the Globe Like a Monopoly Board
Well, he's certainly worked the shit out of this card.
By Philip Elliott
January 7, 2025 5:54 PM EST
https://time.com/7205320/trump-panama-greenland-canada/?utm_source=roundup&utm_campaign=20230202&itm_source=taboola.&itm_version:control
President-elect Donald Trump on Tuesday openly mused about using U.S. military might to retake the Panama Canal and to claim Greenland, while threatening to use economic pressure to force 40 million Canadians into seeing their country demoted to an American state. He also called for changing the name of The Gulf of Mexico to The Gulf of America, and, just for good measure, casually suggested NATO member states set aside 5% of their economies for defense spending, a sharp jump from the current 2% non-binding guideline.
Only on the globe of Trump’s imagination does this Godzilla-esque trampling of sovereignty make any rational sense. It’s like the incoming Leader of the Free World is treating the map like a real-life Monopoly board to be dominated. Trump’s boasts may be as reliable as play money, but that does not mean the world beyond his gilded Florida club can treat his pronouncements as musings meant to be ignored.
Any of the wide-ranging comments on their own should be enough to give any U.S. ally indigestion, but packaged together as part of a bravado-driven posturing just weeks before he returns to power demands nothing short of a complete rethinking about how to approach the second Trump era. It is obvious that every assumption of global partnerships is now up for review and Trump is finding his own satisfaction in testing the sturdiness of each and every one of them.
Speaking to reporters at his Florida club, Trump seemed ever as certain about his influence. He even took credit for Meta’s announcement hours earlier that the social media giant would stop fact-checking posts, a move he said was “probably” in response to past threats he made against the company and its founder, Mark Zuckerberg.
Or witness Trump’s rant about the Panama Canal, a key shipping lane between the Atlantic and the Pacific that the United States opened in 1914 and transferred fully to a Panamanian transportation authority in 1999. “Jimmy Carter gave it to them for $1 and they were supposed to treat us well. I thought it was a terrible thing to do,” Trump said just hours before the 39th President’s body was due to arrive in Washington ahead of his state funeral on Thursday.
Typically light on details, Trump nevertheless said he wanted to have control over the 51-mile piece of infrastructure in Panama. Asked if he would rule out using the military to accomplish that, he refused. “I’m not going to commit to that,” he said. “It might be that you’ll have to do something. The Panama Canal is vital to our country.” (Of note: Panama does not have a standing army.)
The President-elect sounded similarly expansionist when it came to Greenland, an autonomous part of Denmark that Trump sought to claim during his first term. Trump said Tuesday that he would “tariff Denmark at a very high level” if it does not cede Greenland to the United States. The Arctic island has its own Prime Minister and parliament, but its national security interests are handled by Copenhagen. Greenland is represented in Washington at the Danish Embassy.
Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen said in an interview Tuesday that the island is still not for sale. His comments came as Donald Trump Jr. and incoming White House personnel chief Sergio Gor arrived in Greenland on Tuesday for what can only be imagined as next-level trolling.
It was roughly the same grace Trump offered Canada, where Prime Minister Justin Trudeau announced his sudden exit as his party’s leader with his vacating of 24 Sussex to follow. Trump has long needled the progressive darling of Canada and suggests that perhaps residents of the U.S. neighbor to the north would find a home as an annexed 51st state. On Tuesday, Trump even boosted hockey legend Wayne Gretzky to replace Trudeau. In true style, Trump suggested Gretzky would be a great leader of his fellow Canadians as their Governor, not necessarily a P.M. of an independent nation.
This style of throwing around America’s might is expected from the Trump orbit. Heck, apropos of nothing, Trump said he would be changing the name of the body of water bordering Texas to Florida, plus Mexico and Cuba, to The Gulf of America. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, a primo Trump enabler in the House, quickly sent out notice that she was preparing renaming legislation as the President-elect wished.
Finally, Trump sought to double the kitty available to NATO with the pronouncement that each country’s baseline for defense spending should be bumped to 5% of its gross domestic product. Trump has long confused the 2% suggestion as a dues-based system among the 32 member states. No country—including the United States—currently hits spending at 5%; Poland tops the list at 3.9% of GDP on defense spending and the U.S. slice hits roughly 3.5%.
Trump’s obsession with perceived free-loading alliance members was a standard riff during his first term and he seems ready to bully nominal allies into spending even more on the joint project designed after World War II to keep Soviet—and now Russian—aggression in check. (Or, if Trump is to be believed, his own country. Greenland falls under Denmark’s NATO membership, which means NATO nations could be obligated to fight one of its charter members if Trump moved ahead with his military spasm.)
Which brings us to this uncomfortable reality: the objects of Trump’s ire are more than the casual U.S. ally. Denmark and the United States have long been reliable partners, with a history of working together in conflicts in Bosnia and Herzegovina, in Afghanistan and Iraq. Panama is a lynchpin to U.S. trade, with American ships accounting for roughly three-quarters of its canal traffic; about 40% of all U.S. container ships make their way through the channel.
Canada and the United States share the longest border between any two countries on the planet, its economies and cultures are deeply enmeshed, and the relationship between Washington and Ottawa is one of the most durable in the hemisphere. Trump largely got his way on NATO spending in his first term, yet is continuing to hector comrades in arms to spend even more on an alliance he isn’t exactly known to champion.
So to see the incoming President pick such self-defeating fights with allies is as confounding as it is numbing. Trump’s apologists say the bluster is just part of the package, and insist he is more substantive when the TV cameras are not present. Still, the signal beaming out of Florida on Tuesday was sprayed globally, and it would be mighty irresponsible for allies sitting in foreign ministries to ignore them. For some, the actions taken by Meta make sense: just give the bully what he wants and hope he moves to harass someone else.
The United States—and, here, Trump is the United States when it comes to foreign dealings—can effectively browbeat most nations to heel. The flex has a long history of accidental shrapnel and long-bruised feelings, but it works at least for a while. It doesn’t help America’s image as a top-down dictator in global matters, but sometimes such niceties prove to be a drag. Among allies, a phone call will usually do, but here Trump wants a public showing of force.
But Trump is not looking to harangue second-tier capitals with third-tier interests. He is going straight at some of the United States’ most reliable and critical friends. Trump may think of Greenland as an under-leveraged piece of real estate with a trove of rare natural resources buried under the melting piles of ice, but the strategic thinkers heading back into the National Security Council see it as a vital defense bulwark.
After all, a U.S. base there is its northernmost outpost and uses its position exactly between Moscow and New York as a missile defense monitor. Similarly, Panama and Canada alike are major players in the U.S. trade ecosystem. NATO is one of the reasons Vladimir Putin’s ambitions to restore the Russian Empire have stayed (mostly) in check.
Unlike his first ascent in 2017, Trump now has a pretty fulsome understanding of the real power he has and how to wield it. How he is so far choosing to do so, just shy of two weeks from moving back into the White House, is as telling as it is maddening. With all that is stacked on Trump’s to-do list, picking fights with friends seems like an indulgent distraction that will soon grow tiresome. And in the meantime, he is fraying relationships with allies he hopes will just pull a Meta and bend to his whims.
AI
