Rip van Simple again demands Denmark give him Greenland.
Yeah, right. It’s surrounded by exactly zero Russian and Chinese ships. See above about how you can tell he’s lying.
Continuing from the same link, he still gets in a bigoted shot.
Paul Krugman’s Substack today (free to read and subscribe):
Europe is officially done with the USA.
…
As far as I can tell, our erstwhile allies are now treating Trump as the senile uncle who says crazy, outrageous things, but shouldn’t be taken seriously.What has changed? According to the Journal, European leaders have largely given up on hopes that they can bring back the America they used to know, and are quietly, in effect, declaring independence:
American allies have begun pushing the gas pedal on an unprecedented experiment in de-Americanization. Authorities from France to the Netherlands are quietly removing American tech from their systems, adopting European open-source software and urging civil servants to no longer use Microsoft Teams or Office. Belatedly, they are spending hundreds of billions of dollars to try to boost Europe’s own private space firms, AI companies, and data centers, to avoid leaning on U.S. juggernauts.
Europeans are running studies on where they would store their data or process their payments should friction with the U.S. escalate, and how well their American-made weaponry would operate without Washington’s authorization. Nations whose empires once spanned the globe are now stuck trying to extricate themselves from their humbling dependency on American technology and military power, without provoking the U.S.
Their willingness to de-Americanize partly reflects recognition that reconciliation is hopeless: Trump is who he is, and a nation that elected him twice simply can’t be trusted.
…
And other nations — even Canada and Mexico, which have historically been highly dependent on the U.S. market — are moving to reduce their dependence. Canada’s move to build a new pipeline that will let it sell Alberta oil to Asia rather than the Midwest is just a highly visible symbol of a general world move toward bypassing America now that we have become an unstable, unreliable economic partner.
The combined effect of these humiliations for Trump and his minions has been a drastic reordering of America’s place in the world. For most of last year foreign leaders kept trying, desperately, to appease Trump. These days they’re mostly just humoring him, building a world in which his sundowning won’t matter.
…
My bold.
Grandpa is still allowed to sit at the head of the table, wearing his underpants on his head, while the rest of the family humors him, but mostly ignores him. Thus endeth 250 years of the USA.
[Created by ChatGPT with my instructions]
That’s not how you wear underpants on your head!
Those seem to be actually designed as head-underpants, which is just all kinds of wrong.
Well duh, the idiot POTUS fucked around with the soccer. Europeans can put up with a lot, but not that.
That’s not news. It’s been at least a year since we here on the right side of the pond realized that we can’t trust our previous good friend on the left side of the pond. And probably can’t in the future either, because you’ve elected a madman and a moron twice, so you’ll probably do so in the future, too.
Thanks for the ride, it’s been nice knowing you.
Watch this space. Republicans will all be wearing them soon. Trump-branded head-pants or does head-shorts sound better…
I feel like advertising “Buy Trump Shorts” could destroy the entire stock market.
Surely he isn’t THAT stupid & is just trying to troll all of us, right?
Americans don’t seem to realize that. Outside of the US, it’s stunningly obvious, but a lot of Americans are seriously thinking things will just somehow reset if the Democrats do well in November. I thought the Krugman piece was good, but I’m afraid that the denial in America runs really, really deep.
The USA got beaten by Begium, but managed to beat Bosnia/Herzegovina.
USA population: 349 million
Belgium population: 11.9 million
B/H population: 3.11 milion
One would think that the USA - although “football” (the stupid kind) appears to be the national sport - could win in the less popular soccer against countries that have less than an order of magnitude of their population.
Suck it, Trump. Of course he will not acknowledge this, nor make himself available when, inevitably, a third world country wins, to attend the match and ensuing prize-giving.
After all, he has his own FIFA cup.
That is an area where he can look China in the eye as an equal. Wonder if that feels good for him.
The U.S. does…in women’s soccer, of course.
Youth soccer is huge in the U.S., among both boys and girls, but my suspicion is that a lot of athletic boys who could, potentially, succeed in soccer at a higher level wind up focusing on other sports when they become teens.
To some extent, but really the answer is that it’s early days. There was an explosion in youth boy’s soccer over the last couple decades, and it’s helped build the core of the current team, but it’s probably another cycle or two at minimum before we’re consistently producing top talent.
Yeah, after his first administration I could see leaders and diplomats saying, “Well that was a misstep – could happen to anybody,” but his second victory tore it. Even if he and his sycophants are tossed out on their collective asses in 2026 and especially 2028 they have no earthly reason to think it won’t happen again when some charismatic snake who tells the disaffected what they want to hear comes along.
Pax Americana lasted from 1945 to 2016, not a bad run but it’s not coming back in even a hundred years.
Edit: What @Dr.Drake said.
It’s a little like finding out your spouse cheated on you. You can think, well, that’s a one-off, they came back, still love me, they’re going to straighten up and fly right.
But when they go back to the person they cheated with four years later… that one’s gonna take a long time to heal.
“The Islamic Republic of Japan”
Trump commands the Supreme Court to reverse their decision on birthright citizenship.
“I will be asking for a Rehearing by the United States Supreme Court, IMMEDIATELY. This miscarriage of justice will destroy America if they don’t change their absolutely insane decision.”
Soccer won’t get bigger in the USA so long as the majority of college scholarships are in basketball and gridiron football.
Parents are making a rational decision to point their kids to where the money is.
As far as Donald at Ankara: this is one of the few times I actually feel sorry for Fox News hosts. Imagine having to defend the “Islamic Republic of Japan” remark?!?!?
with “Deliveries starting at $4000.”
They’re undercutting the price he was charging for citizenship.
Paul Krugman posted a second Substack comment today and has come up with a new name for trump:
…
What we have is President Sundowner. I mean, this this is completely insane stuff. In any kind of normally functioning political system, in any kind of normally functioning party environment we would have a massive bipartisan call across the aisle, across almost everybody except for a handful of members of congress who are themselves crazy, to say okay this guy is non compos mentis. We cannot leave the fate of the United States or the world in the hands of somebody who is completely irrational, who is making demands and believing himself to have powers that he does not.
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My bold.