I think America finally understands they may be completely f*cked

These days I often think of Paul Simon's American Tune:

...For we lived so well so long
Still, when I think of the
Road we're traveling on
I wonder what's gone wrong
I can't help it, I wonder what's gone wrong...

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So on Friday this happened:

Is he allowed to do this? A huge clunky building - a “ ball room” that dwarfs the White House. We don’t need it. It ruins the graceful beauty of the White house.

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— Mia Farrow (@miafarrow.bsky.social) August 1, 2025 at 8:37 PM

The extravagant plans for that grotesque ballroom finally made Americans realize Trump intends to stay president forever.

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And this happened:

Yesterday we learned The Smithsonian removed Trump from the impeachment exhibit. Erasing his impeachments. Today we learned the FBI removed Trump from the Epstein Files. Erasing his involvement.

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— LorennaCleary.bsky.social (@lorennacleary.bsky.social) August 1, 2025 at 12:21 PM

Smithsonian's American History museum does a White House "content review" then rewrites history, removing Trump's impeachments. A spokesperson says "it became clear that the ‘Limits of Presidential Power’ section ... needed to be addressed" wapo.st/3HhfyxU @janaykingsberry.bsky.social

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— Drew Harwell (@drewharwell.com) July 31, 2025 at 5:19 PM

And these:

MAGA, MAGA.👇

- Joe Walsh

Read on Substack

People are missing the real story here. If Trump is being serious he has basically neutered all US strategic submarines activity around Russia before this. He was doing exactly what Putin would have wanted.

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— Phillips OBrien (@phillipspobrien.bsky.social) August 2, 2025 at 1:38 AM

I wonder if Maxwell also has a million dollars for the King?

NEW: FEC records show Elizabeth Fago donated $1 million to MAGA Inc, the Trump super PAC, in April. She attended a fundraising dinner with Trump at Mar-a-Lago on April 4. She lobbied Trump to pardon her son, who had pleaded guilty to tax crimes. 3 weeks later, Trump issued the pardon.

— Ken Vogel (@kenvogel.bsky.social) July 31, 2025 at 8:18 PM

And this happened:

A July jobs report way below expectations.

May and June revised down as well.

Unemployment rate ticked back up to 4.2%.

We haven’t seen conditions like these since 2020.

Don’t let Donald Trump gaslight you. He is failing Americans and crashing our economy. pic.twitter.com/niJs2h0tyu

— Gavin Newsom (@GavinNewsom) August 1, 2025

Trump's response? Fire the messenger:

Wow. Trump announces he is firing the U.S. Labor Statistics Commissioner for reporting that jobs numbers are weak under his watch.

This is what dictators do. https://t.co/4Thho7SdaU pic.twitter.com/wg95tLVWoO

— No Lie with Brian Tyler Cohen (@NoLieWithBTC) August 1, 2025

Paul Krugman

Caracas on the Potomac
Goodbye, reliable economic data
...Over the past six months we’ve watched institution after institution corrupted by the Trump administration. Institutions that might produce inconvenient information, from those tracking climate change to those tracking infectious disease, have been special targets.
And now they’ve come for the economic data.
As I and many others have pointed out, this mornings jobs report was very bad:


It didn’t signal a recession — not yet — but it showed a rapidly slowing economy. And it was presumably especially disturbing for Trump and those around him, who have been boasting about how hot the economy is and sneering at critics pointing to the harm being done by chaotic policy. For this report seems to validate the critics.
So there was only one thing to do: Trump summarily fired the commissioner of the Bureau of Labor Statistics, accusing her without evidence of manipulating the numbers for political purposes.
...People who don’t follow these things closely may not realize how important the Bureau of Labor Statistics is. But it’s our prime source of short-term information about economic developments. The BLS conducts a monthly survey of households that is, among other things, how we estimate unemployment. It conducts another survey, of employers, which is where we get estimates of payroll growth like the one above. A third survey, of prices, is the basis for the Consumer Price Index, and supplies the basic data for other inflation measures too.
The BLS isn’t always right, nor should you expect it to be. It’s trying to track a complex economy, and sometimes it revises its past estimates — as it did this morning. But it is extremely professional, rigorously nonpartisan, and everyone in the business considers it the gold standard for economic data.
... we can no longer treat BLS data as the gold standard. (Maybe, just maybe, the staff at the BLS will hold to their principles and continue to report honestly. But how can we trust what they report — especially if Trump flunkies are put in charge, filtering what gets released?
From here on, I’m going to be paying a lot more attention to private surveys. And when they tell a different story from the official numbers, there will no longer be a reason to take the official data more seriously.
It’s one more step on our rapid descent into banana republic status.

"If I replace the Labor Statistics Commissioner, the job numbers will be great!" is the new "If we stop testing, we'll have fewer Covid cases!"

— Randi Mayem Singer (@rmayemsinger.bsky.social) August 1, 2025 at 1:04 PM

And so here we are. Tonight, Americans are worried, upset, profoundly depressed. They know what is happening to their country.

- Serena Fossi

Read on Substack

And here is the beautiful and terrible thing: even if this is right and Trump will just fully consolidate power because nobody else has the power and will to stop him, life will continue. There is no curtain that will fall to end the tale until your funeral shroud.

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— How Beautiful the Stars Are (@seed-corn-thoughts.bsky.social) August 1, 2025 at 2:07 PM

JoJoFromJerz / Are you f'ng kidding me? 

There Was Truth, and There Was Untruth 

The Trump Administration isn't Debating the Facts, They're Erasing Them 

 “Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows.” Orwell, 1984 

 ...They never kick down the door first.
That’s the mistake we always make in the stories we tell ourselves. That tyranny will arrive in jackboots and bayonets, that we’ll hear it coming, that we’ll know.
But it never starts with force. It starts with forgetting.
A footnote disappears from a museum wall. A statistic vanishes behind a firing. A historian is told to revise. A reporter is told to soften. A professor is told to omit. A memory gets redacted. And then another. And another. Until the ground beneath your feet—the very texture of what is real—has been scrubbed and repainted until you can’t tell which way is forward.
This is the shape of what’s happening now.
Today, Donald Trump fired the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics because she told the truth. Not a dramatic truth. Not a political hit piece. A jobs report. A set of numbers. A neutral analysis of labor conditions that—unfortunately for him—made his presidency look like the economic sludge pit it is.
So he destroyed the messenger. Just like that. No evidence of wrongdoing. No violation of protocol. Just the president of the United States, snapping his fingers like a bored king, removing a data scientist because her numbers bruised his ego.
The emperor is buck naked. And everyone knows it. But if you say it out loud, he’ll take your head.
...This is the scaffolding of fascism.
And it is being built in plain sight.
There is no “slippery slope.” We are halfway down it, gaining speed. The slope is greased with cowardice—by CEOs who say nothing, by university presidents who acquiesce, by news anchors who dull their language, by politicians who trade spine for survival.
This is how it happens.
Not all at once. Not with a bang. But with a collective sigh. With a million tiny yeses. With an avalanche of “what can we do?” and “at least he’s not…” and “maybe it won’t be that bad.”
But it IS that bad.
This is not the future we imagined.
But it is the one we inherit if we do not fight.
And by fight, I do not mean violence. I mean resistance.
I mean truth spoken, relentlessly, even when it’s inconvenient. I mean refusing to revise the story just because it offends a tyrant’s vanity. I mean protecting journalists, funding public historians, demanding data transparency, calling lies what they are.
I mean clinging to reality with both fucking hands.
Because when the machinery of state becomes allergic to the truth, the only antidote is us.
Our memory. Our voices. Our refusal to forget.
Because if we forget this—if we normalize this—then it’s not just the past that’s gone. It’s the future that gets rewritten.
And it will not be kind.
So, let us cling to the truth. Together.

 “There was truth and there was untruth, and if you clung to the truth even against the whole world, you were not mad.” Orwell 

 Canada has to keep on ducking and covering:

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