#President Warren

[just-seeing-everything]

President Warren was a vlogger 🧍

[qrjung]

I can't stop thinking about this but does anyone anywhere know if there's a DBH fic about what happens in Russia during the revolution or afterwards 🤔

I keep searching but I can't find a single thing

[seeliekid]

logan w/ a mutant reader BUUTTTTT

OK BUUUUUTT. imagine a reader w/ an angel mutation that’s been around since like the dark ages/medevial period and is lowkey the reason as to why christianity is a thing. like was just flying out in the open one day and people spotted em and was like “omg i love it” and bam.

BUUUUTT reader did in fact meet logan in the 70s and did in fact hook up with him but due to the fact logan doesnt remember shit — he doesnt recognize em when he “re-meets” them at xavier’s school. why is reader there, you ask? well after a life full of doing whatever the fuck they want and never dying, they figured they could have a somewhat peaceful life with other people like them!

BUUUUTTT theeeennn once logan and reader get together theyre the freakiest couple in existence because reader lowkey likes getting logan’s claws involved in bed. and each time logan manages to scratch reader, the rachis of each individual feather of their wings dig into logan’s skin!

aka logan with an older reader because mmmm i love when old meets older

𖤍

[starlight-tequila]

I'm probably extremely right and extremely wrong

[doodle-blight]

US President Cards

I started making cards of the US presidents a few months ago.

I still need to work on finishing the whole set. They’re a gift to my APUSH teacher ✨

[pranklinfierce]

Since like 11* people on Instagram either commented or SU'd when I posted this in a story, this image proved compelling enough to share elsewhere.

This is a real video that you can watch here

I immediately had too many thoughts to keep to myself so these are my notes:

*it used to say 9 but then more people SU'd

[barbossas-wench]

More slides

Part 1

[msachillelaurosfunnels]

I drew the US Presidents ⁉️⁉️

Constructive criticism is not allowed ⁉️⁉️(Because I only draw for fun lol, not mad or anything tho)

I couldn't tag anymore presidents 💔💔

[angelkeitai]

are we manifesting our destiny or returning to normalcy today because HOLY SHIT WE HAVE TWOOOOOO BIRTHDAAAAAYYYYYSSSSSSSSS

[aanews69]

Immerse yourself in a shocking twist of political allegiances as we delve into the unexpected shift in union politics. In a riveting turn, the mighty Teamste...

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

Matt Davies :: Shirk. http://Newsday.com/matt

* * * *

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

November 24, 2024

Heather Cox Richardson

Nov 25, 2024

Since the night of the November 5, election, Trump and his allies have insisted that he won what Trump called “an unprecedented and powerful mandate.” But as the numbers have continued to come in, it’s clear that such a declaration is both an attempt to encourage donations— fundraising emails refer to Trump’s “LANDSLIDE VICTORY”—and an attempt to create the illusion of power to push his agenda. 

The reality is that Trump’s margin over Democratic nominee Vice President Kamala Harris will likely end up around 1.5 points. According to James M. Lindsay, writing for the Council of Foreign Relations, it is the fifth smallest since 1900, which covers 32 presidential races. Exit polls showed that Trump’s favorability rating was just 48% and that more voters chose someone other than Trump. And, as Lindsay points out, Trump fell 4 million votes short of President Joe Biden in 2020. 

Political science professor Lynn Vavreck of the University of California, Los Angeles, told Peter Baker of the New York Times: “If the definition of landslide is you win both the popular vote and Electoral College vote, that’s a new definition” On the other hand, she added, “Nobody gains any kind of influence by going out and saying, ‘I barely won, and now I want to do these big things.’”

Trump’s allies are indeed setting out to do big things, and they are big things that are unpopular. 

Trump ran away from Project 2025 during the campaign because it was so unpopular. He denied he knew anything about it, calling it “ridiculous and abysmal,” and on September 16 the leader of Trump’s transition team, Howard Lutnick, said there were “Absolutely zero. No connection. Zero” ties between the team and Project 2025. Now, though, Trump has done an about-face and has said he will nominate at least five people associated with Project 2025 to his administration. 

Those nominees include Russell Vought, one of the project's key authors, who calls for dramatically increasing the powers of the president; Tom Homan, who as acting director of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) oversaw the separation of children from their parents; John Ratcliffe, whom the Senate refused in 2019 to confirm as Director of National Intelligence because he had no experience in intelligence; Brendan Carr, whom Trump wants to put at the head of the Federal Communications Commission and who is already trying to silence critics by warning he will punish broadcasters who Trump feels have been unfair to him; and Stephen Miller, the fervently anti-immigrant ideologue.

Project 2025 calls for the creation of an extraordinarily strong president who will gut the civil service and replace its nonpartisan officials with those who are loyal to the president. It calls for filling the military and the Department of Justice with those loyal to the president. And then, the project plans that with his new power, the president will impose Christian nationalism on the United States of America, ending immigration, and curtailing rights for LGBTQ+ individuals as well as women and racial and ethnic minorities.

Project 2025 was unpopular when people learned about it. 

And then there is the threat of dramatic cuts to the U.S. government, suggested by the so-called “Department of Government Efficiency,” or DOGE, headed by billionaires Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy. They are calling for cuts of $2 trillion to the items in the national budget that provide a safety net for ordinary Americans at the same time that Trump is promising additional tax cuts for the wealthy and corporations. Musk, meanwhile, is posturing as if he is the actual president, threatening on Saturday, for example: “Those who break the law will be arrested and that includes mayors.”  

On Meet the Press today, current representative and senator-elect Adam Schiff (D-CA) reacted to the “dictator talk,” with which Trump is threatening his political opponents, pointing out that "[t]he American people…voted on the basis of the economy—they wanted change to the economy—they weren’t voting for dictatorship. So I think he is going to misread his mandate if that’s what he thinks voters chose him for.”

That Trump and his team are trying desperately to portray a marginal victory as a landslide in order to put an extremist unpopular agenda into place suggests another dynamic at work. 

For all Trump’s claims of power, he is a 78-year-old man who is declining mentally and who neither commands a majority of voters nor has shown signs of being able to transfer his voters to a leader in waiting. 

Trump’s team deployed Vice President–elect J.D. Vance to the Senate to drum up votes for the confirmation of Florida representative Matt Gaetz to become the United States attorney general. But Vance has only been in the Senate since 2022 and is not noticeably popular. He—and therefore Trump—was unable to find the votes the wildly unqualified Gaetz needed for confirmation, forcing him to withdraw his name from consideration. 

The next day, Gaetz began to advertise on Cameo, an app that allows patrons to commission a personalized video for fans, asking a minimum of $550.00 for a recording. Gaetz went from United States representative to Trump’s nominee for U.S. attorney general to making videos for Cameo in a little over a week. 

It is a truism in studying politics that it’s far more important to follow power than it is to follow people. Right now, there is a lot of power sloshing around in Washington, D.C. 

Trump is trying to convince the country that he has scooped up all that power. But in fact, he has won reelection by less than 50% of the vote, and his vice president is not popular. The policies Trump is embracing are so unpopular that he himself ran away from them when he was campaigning. And now he has proposed filling his administration with a number of highly unqualified figures who, knowing the only reason they have been elevated is that they are loyal to Trump, will go along with his worst instincts. With that baggage, it is not clear he will be able to cement enough power to bring his plans to life.

If power remains loose, it could get scooped up by cabinet officials, as it was during a similarly chaotic period in the 1920s. In that era, voters elected to the presidency former newspaperman and Republican backbencher Warren G. Harding of Ohio, who promised to return the country to “normalcy” after eight years of the presidency of Democrat Woodrow Wilson and the nation’s engagement in World War I. That election really was a landslide, with Harding and his running mate, Calvin Coolidge, winning more than 60% of the popular vote in 1920.

But Harding was badly out of his depth in the presidency and spent his time with cronies playing bridge and drinking upstairs at the White House—despite Prohibition—while corrupt members of his administration grabbed all they could. 

With such a void in the executive branch, power could have flowed to Congress. But after twenty years of opposing first Theodore Roosevelt, and then William Howard Taft, and then Woodrow Wilson, Congress had become adept at opposing presidents but had split into factions that made it unable to transition to using power, rather than opposing its use.

And so power in that era flowed to members of Harding’s Cabinet, primarily to Treasury Secretary Andrew Mellon and Secretary of Commerce Herbert Hoover, who put into place a fervently pro-business government that continued after Harding’s untimely death into the presidency of Calvin Coolidge, who made little effort to recover the power Harding had abandoned. After Hoover became president and their system fell to ruin in the Great Depression, Franklin Delano Roosevelt took their lost power and used it to create a new type of government. 

In this moment, Trump’s people are working hard to convince Americans that they have gathered up all the power in Washington, D.C., but that power is actually still sloshing around. Trump is trying to force through the Senate a number of unqualified and dangerous nominees for high-level positions, threatening Republican senators that if they don’t bow to him, Elon Musk will fund primary challengers, or suggesting he will push them into recess so he can appoint his nominees without their constitutionally-mandated advice and consent. 

But Trump and his people do not, in fact, have a mandate. Trump is old and weak, and power is up for grabs. It is possible that MAGA Republicans will, in the end, force Republican senators into their camp, permitting Trump and his cronies to do whatever they wish. 

It is also possible that Republican senators will themselves take back for Congress the power that has lately concentrated in presidents, check the most dangerous and unpopular of Trump’s plans, and begin the process of restoring the balance of the three branches of government.

LETTERS FROM AN AMERICAN

HEATHER COX RICHARDSON

[thatsbelievable]

[thepastisalreadywritten]

TODAY IN HISTORY

22 November 1963

John F. Kennedy, the 35th President of the United States, was assassinated in Dallas, Texas.

Lee Harvey Oswald, a former Marine, was charged with the murder — shooting from the Texas School Book Depository.

Oswald was then killed two days later by nightclub owner Jack Ruby.

The Warren Commission concluded in 1964 that Oswald acted alone, but this sparked skepticism and numerous alternative theories about the day arose.

The new administration has promised to release the classified files regarding the assassination, so potentially we’ll know the true story very soon.

John Fitzgerald Kennedy 

(29 May 1917 – 22 November 1963)

22 November 1963

C.S. Lewis passed away at the age of 64 from kidney failure.

He was a scholar at Oxford and Cambridge, known for writing the Chronicles of Narnia and other Christian apologetics.

His death happened on the exact same day as John F. Kennedy's assassination, so he did not receive the attention he deserved.

His works were an incredible blend of imagination and theology, and remain influential in literature and religious thought to this day.

Clive Staples Lewis FBA 

(29 November 1898 – 22 November 1963) 

22 November 1963

It turns out that this was an extremely dark day in history in 1963.

Not only did John F. Kennedy's assassination and C.S. Lewis's passing occur, but Aldous Huxley also died at age 69 in Los Angeles from laryngeal cancer.

He’s best known for his 1932 novel Brave New World, which is a dystopian vision of the future.

Aldous Leonard Huxley 

(26 July 1894 – 22 November 1963)

22 November 1718

The notorious pirate Blackbeard, real name Edward Teach, died in a battle off North Carolina's Ocracoke Island.

He fought Lieutenant Robert Maynard in a sea battle and suffered multiple wounds before being killed and beheaded.

Blackbeard's death was a huge victory against piracy in the Atlantic.

He was the embodiment of the Golden Age of Piracy, and remains one of the most iconic and well-known pirates today.

Edward Teach 

(or Thatch; c. 1680 – 22 November 1718)

[sortanonymous]

Sectonia model by @none_ofbusiness on Twitter

[starlight-tequila]

Something I made ages ago