#i should be back on a normal schedule now

[lazysoulwriter]

you said my name on live tv! - pedro pascal.

requested! thank you for sending, honey. hope you enjoy.

---

Pedro wasn��t supposed to say your name.

You both knew the rules — or at least, the one unspoken agreement that had kept your relationship safely under wraps for the last six months: no public mentions, no soft launches, no clues. You weren’t famous, and he liked it that way. Liked the quiet normalcy of it. Liked how no one in your world cared about red carpets or premiere dates, only if you were free for brunch or needed help picking out plants for the apartment.

But today, during a perfectly standard interview for a late-night show, Pedro forgot.

It started innocently. The host had asked a string of questions about Pedro’s chaotic schedule — something about jetlag and coffee addictions — and then, mid-laugh, the host joked:

“So who keeps you grounded when you’re not off being the internet’s daddy?”

Pedro, in all his charming glory, chuckled, eyes sparkling. “Oh, Y/N does,” he said, like it was the most natural thing in the world. “She reminds me to sleep like a human being.”

The studio audience didn’t catch it. Not really. Just a name dropped in a sea of Pedroisms.

But the internet did.

The clip hit Twitter before the show even ended. Zoomed-in, subtitled, slowed down.

“WHO IS Y/N AND WHY IS PEDRO PASCAL SMILING LIKE THAT WHEN HE SAYS HER NAME??”

“y/n… you better treat him right i swear to GOD.”

“do we think y/n is someone we know? a celeb?? no info anywhere. queen’s in hiding.”

“you guys she’s not famous. i did a deep dive. she’s just. a person. and he’s in love.”

—

Back in your shared apartment, you’re sprawled on the couch, one leg thrown over Pedro’s, a big hoodie drowning your frame and a bowl of popcorn slowly going stale between you.

Pedro looks sheepish, his phone buzzing non-stop. “I really didn’t mean to say it.”

You’re giggling, face tucked into his shoulder. “I told you that interview was live.”

“I forgot, baby. I was tired and they were being funny and then your name just… came out.”

You poke his side. “So now the whole world knows Pedro Pascal has a girlfriend named Y/N who tells him to go to sleep.”

He flips the phone so you both can see the flood of TikToks and tweets. One fan made a slideshow of blurry Pedro candids captioned “thinking about her” set to a Phoebe Bridgers song. Another user made a fake "Y/N Pascal" Vogue cover. Someone even made a fan edit of your blurry Instagram pictures that you thought were private, matched up with Pedro's, like they were connecting some conspiracy.

You both dissolve into laughter, tears welling up in your eyes from how ridiculous it all is.

Pedro wipes a crumb from your cheek and grins. “Should I post a picture of us now? Since it’s out?”

You raise an eyebrow. “What kind of picture?”

He shrugs. “Just… us. Normal. No face filters. No drama.”

You hum, pretending to think it over. “Okay. But I get to pick the caption.”

“And what are you gonna put?”

You grab your phone, snuggle back into his side, and type it out slowly.

“yes, it’s me. no, you can’t have him.”

Pedro bursts out laughing. “That’s evil.”

“That’s iconic,” you correct him, and press post.

The internet loses its mind again. But this time, you’re not just laughing from the sidelines. You’re in it. Together. On the same couch, eating popcorn, letting the world fall in love with a version of what you already have.

Just… a little more out loud now.

---

[thedivinevera]

Hear me out. Obsessive Oscar Piastri. He’s so calm and calculated all of the time, he’d have your schedules memorized the same way he memorized the tracks and other drivers

SILENTLY

DARK! ATTENTIVE! OSCAR PIASTRI X GN!READER.

Established relationship, no use of y/n, no mention of anything that indicates the readers gender or physical appearance, some sprinkle of angst and fluff but are mostly centered on Oscar’s behavior, tame.

Obsession (but it’s quite tame), unhealthy and creepy bahaviors, mention of stalking, possessiveness and ignorance of privacy and boundaries.

Dark-nometer 4/10

It would be a lie if you told yourself that Oscar is a normal boyfriend, yes while he was not those creeps or those alpha male, he has some quirk that often left you confused and borderline creeped out.

EVIDENCE #1

Oscar is very attentive. So attentive with your schedule to the point that Oscar is the person that reminds you of your doctor appointments or the start of your period. You think it's just him being such a meticulous boyfriend until you realize how much he knows about you and how much he demands you report everything to him. It’s a simple question such as “where are you going?” “Who is with you” “why you’re there” etc.. etc and while at first it didn’t disturb you as much, you now find yourself being irritated by it, every time he’s not joining you on your trips or just even a visit to the grocery store; you will end up with a bunch of miss calls from Oscar and if you answer him; it’s always just him asking about what are you doing and why you aren’t in the house yet. It didn’t also help the fact that he has CCTV around the house so he knows if you aren’t there, he also has a tracking device for each car he owns that he also uses. (He also had a tracking device in YOUR phone, he didn’t just want to tell you)

“CAN’T I JUST LEAVE THE HOUSE WITHOUT REPORTING ANYTHING TO YOU?!” You shouted to Oscar at the top of your lungs.

“Can’t I just be aware of the love of my life’s location? Is that a crime?” He asked with such calmness and composure that just irritated you more.

“That’s not the point, OSCAR!? You’re suffocating me! Have you realized how much you call me every time I’m not with you?!” You hate the fact that while you’re screaming on the top of your lungs Oscar is just there standing calm as ever, it feels like you’re the irrational one despite having a valid argument.

At the end, you just decided to enlighten yourself for a bit in your favorite hangout spot. Their guilt swept into your mind; what if you’re just being irrational? What if Oscar is just really being an attentive boyfriend and you’re just being paranoid and toxic. You’re lost in thought until someone hugs you in the back; it’s Oscar.

“I’m very sorry—I honestly didn’t know that you felt this way… I’m such a bad boyfriend. I promise you I would give you as much privacy and freedom if that’s what you want” Oscar kissed the top of your head, then your shoulders until he rested himself on your neck.

“No— Oscar… I should really be the one apologizing, you're just being attentive and caring and it's just me being irrational really…”

“Shh— we shouldn’t discuss that anymore… but always remember that no matter how much you try to leave me I will always find you” Oscar growled. If you just can see how his eyes darken.

As Oscar drives you two back to your home, you just realize… How did Oscar know your location? You looked at the Aussie and he just shot you with a Prince Charming smile.

EVIDENCE #2

Jealousy isn't visible in the action of Oscar Piastri but that doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist. As always you attend Oscar’s race. While lounging in his garage an engineer who you haven’t met strikes a chat with you. Without much to do you decided to strike a chat with one of the engineers. The two of you had gotten into a much deeper conversation that you didn’t realize that Oscar was in front of you waiting and losing his patience. Once you realize that Oscar is there you said your goodbye to the engineers and decide to attend to your now poker face boyfriend. Oscar had told you that you should wait in the car and he just had a short business to attend to.

Oscar walked to the office of Zak Brown. His brown frown and you can see the visible frustration in his face. It’s like magic how his facial expressions that is very gentle to you have melted to something that will throw off anybody who worked with Oscar before.

“Oscar!” Zak hugged his driver eagerly. “What mayhem did Lando caused today” he joked

“I want a certain engineer to be fired right now” Oscar demands, with much power to his voice.

“Oh well— why? We still haven’t gone to the racing week, what might be your issue with them”

“They just irritated me, can you just for the sake of my performance, get them to fuck out of my garage” Oscar claims.

“Oscar, do you think it's quite irrational to do that?” Zak frowns at now visibly frustrated Australia.

“It’s either they’re out or I’m out” the brute gives a reckless ultimatum to the older man. Clearly Oscar’s behavior is absolutely different than he was, which Zak finds very strange, but either way a job of an engineer is much easier to be filled than a seat of a driver.

It saddens you to realize that your new found friendship has been put to stop in such a short period of time, but thankfully your boyfriend manages to comfort you with his calm and composed smile.

EVIDENCE #3

you’re staying with Oscar this week, the Aussie always wants you to move in with him but you kept insisting that it's too early or you aren’t ready, but you still stayed at his place from time to time. You just got out of the shower when you see Oscar carrying a binder and pen, you watch him scan the bottle of your newest perfume in one of the pages of a dictionary-like binder.

“Oscar?” You asked a now frightened Australian.

“I— um… yes? I was just—ah…” Oscar stumbled in his words like has just got caught doing something he shouldn’t do.

Fortunately for the brunet you didn’t press on it much and just busied yourself with changing rather than seething an explanation from your boyfriend.

Curiosity gets the best of you obviously… scanning the content of the binder; you saw some of the pictures of your first date up to the latest all photographed with matching details from the time it started up to problems that occurred like traffic or sold out staple dishes with a hard reminder written on how to avoid it. You find it weird that everything is so detailed to the T even the brand and color of your dress is in it but you couldn’t deny that the thought of Oscar remembering your dates like the color of the sun doesn’t make your heart flustered.

Flipping the pages you saw a weird excel spreadsheet like page. Your brows curl up as you scan the content. It has the title of soap, perfume, shampoo and toothpaste etc. confusion is the first thing that settles in your mind but then as you saw the new freshly laid ink you remember that Oscar is holding your newest brought perfume and there it was— at the last tab of the perfume category there was the brand of your perfume, you also remember the last perfume you used in your last meeting and just above is the brand. Creep has crawled in your mind; your boyfriend is keeping a tab of everything, the dates, the product you use in a manner that can only be distinguished as weird and strange.

A hand touched your shoulder, which resulted in you quickly closing the book. It's Oscar groggily wiping his eyes.

“Why aren't you in the bed?” He asked. Eyes fixed to the binder in your hand and then to your face.

“Nothing” you lie to your teeth you smiled at him and he smiled at you an awkward moment had covered the entire room.

That night the two of you decided to just let it go and probably shouldn’t be talked about again.

While you’re sleeping in his chest, Oscar is just grateful that you haven’t flipped enough to see all the paparazzi shots he had taken before he dated you or the list of exes, friends, ex friends and blackmails he can use for them. How amateur of him, after many years of doing this to you.

[triistitia]

Getting Used To It || Oikawa Tooru

— just an old snippet. post-breakup. 700+

Letting people go is easy. But what is not is getting used to their absence in your life. Getting used to the fact that they won't no longer be in your schedule and day to day normality. 

You know it. 

Because, for you, this truth clenches, much synonymous to how your heart do with each morning you wake up to this illusion that the right side of your bed is not empty and Oikawa is there, breathing too close to your face like it used to be the case thirty days back in time. 

Working upon this realization that you don't need to rush to the bathroom to fight for the space before the washbasin to brush your teeth only after opening the door... this truth roars to you the thing that the color of the walls around you is not the same lightest shade of blue as it was the case with the walls of his apartment that's cities away from yours.

"He always liked it without onion."

It has been a month. But still, you haven't gotten used to this mere reality that you don't need to take out two juice glasses and plate two sandwiches when you're the only one sitting at the table.

How am I supposed to deal with it?

You questioned. To the air. To your own self. To the memories that are still alive in you.

Because it's not easy...

Getting used to it...

And Oikawa, too, knows it.

As, for him, this truth snarls, much synonymous to how the remains of his love for you do when each morning he wakes up to the sound of his alarm clock and not to the beating of your heart close to his chest like it used to be the case four weeks back in time.

Working upon this fact that the coffee which he made himself will never taste like yours used to do against his tongue, Oikawa on daily basis finds himself getting haunted by the smell of the detergent you always preferred to wash his clothes in with over the others.

He, every day, pulls out, never less than two single strands of your hair from his clothes and from his couch and from the places where they should not be and chuckles. For no particular reason but to crack some lame joke into the unknown.

"She would have rolled her eyes."

He mutters. Remembering how you never shied away from scoring his performance in negative.

What he shared with you, Oikawa believes is more precious than the stone on the ring he eyed at a jewelery shop down the way to his office one day. under a pastel sky, he dreamed of sliding it in your ring finger as you would say 'yes' like it's the last word you could manage out of your strained lungs.

In your teary eyes, he dreamed of seeing his future gleaming clear. Promises whispered to each other under the sheets, over the phone calls, and across the miles, bursting into reality and mingling with yours and his part of forevers.

Because, there before these thirty days plus some very rough weeks ago, was a time when today was just a laughable possibility. And you and him had more than several reasons to peer into the hours and think back on each other and fantasize about returning to home.

But now, with this reality cruel and unchanging, all there is this massive hole absence created to take care of. All there is waking up at odd hours and writing "I miss yous" in the air and wishing it will carry the message without distortion to the right person.

All there is looking sad in all the nice places. Driving with nowhere to go and picking the phone and scrolling through the gallery littered with images before time turned sour.

And getting used to friends telling that it'll be okay.

Parents telling you'll find someone better, so just smile for now. 

Nights telling it's getting late.

Work demanding to be completed.

Hearts feeling more stray than dogs or cats on the street.

That ring looking obnoxious in the display.

Forevers snickering in the background.

And dreams shattering.

To bits.

And pieces.

For, today's going to be another day. 

The second sandwich will not be eaten, and the second glass of juice will remain untouched.

Another day with the taste of the coffee not like how the taste buds prefer.

Finding your hair in the mug. 

Finding his lost watch blithering under your clothes.

Playing your smiles over the shouts of the crowds.

Craning neck into the direction of the road that can carry you to his home.

Watching the day set into soft colours as your eyes.

Waiting for the nights to turn rough like the scars on his hands

Missing you.

Missing him.

And getting used to reality.

[firstkanaphans]

Teacher's Pet, Chapter 4

Kant had spent years dreading the day Babe would start kindergarten. Then he met his teacher.

[mossy-paws]

Commission! (PHIGHTING)

Finished commission for @posipops of their Phighting oc! Honestly had a legitimate blast doing this one + it freed me from artblock HEHE! I hope you like it :3!

[notbecauseofvictories]

paige and hayward are having SO many crises both together and separately. hayward has 191493041 different things he deliberately refuses to think about or deal with at a given moment. paige is quickly alienating everyone who isn't dan (she wouldn't mind, but dan doesn't listen to her enough to be alienated) and hungover most of the time. she speaks mostly in poetry, especially when she's not paying attention; hayward goes silent and twitchy sometimes, washes his hands with water they can't spare until his cuticles bleed. items have been thrown. they are the only ones they can really trust. sometimes paige can't even look at him. I bet the sex is great and everyone involved categorically refuses to talk about it.

[otherkinpolls]

queue will be restocked tomorrow... been busy as hell lately

[gemharvest]

Lord. Give me the strength. To not play that song Ochre sent again I do Not need to listen to it again I'm trying to draw fluff,

[valentinesparda]

idk if I ever said but I'm really enjoying my new job at the library :D

[cuteniarose]

I'm bored and can't sleep because of cramps so I decided to mess around with an incorrect quotes generator using the latest OCs @katkastrofa and I created that I unfortunately cannot talk about in detail here because I'd get nerfed in an instant:

[cxpperhead]

Rate your muse’s traits 0-10!

Compassion: 2/10 Bitterness: 2/10 Happiness: 4/10 Politeness: 8/10 Chivalry: 3/10 Pride: 8/10 Honesty: 6/10 Bravery: 8/10 Recklessness: 5/10 Ambition: 9/10 Loyalty: 9/10* Love: 7/10 Sense of family: 1/10 Attractiveness: ?/10* Agility: 10/10 Sex drive: 5/10*

Tagged by: @belost-the-watcher (♡) Tagging: @ataviisms, @caestusvulpes, @celerem, @cxpedcrusxder, @question-marked, @qu-tipie, @messeduphood, @red-hemlock, @sanguine-salvation, @whxlmedwing, @the-arkham-librarian, @the-rorschach-mask, @twcfaces, @umbrellamedic and anybody else who'd like to do this?

[ji-lixie]

heartbreak so bad i will fix my sleep schedule over it-

[teamhawkeye]

after having nearly lost my mother last month, i am feeling especially grateful to have her this Mother’s Day and cherishing being able to sit across from her at a table for breakfast

happy Mother’s Day to any out there celebrating their mothers, or being a mother themself! to anyone else who doesn’t celebrate, may you have a happy Sunday! ❤️

[yesornopolls]

The article is under the cut because paywalls suck

This is an edited transcript of an audio essay on “The Ezra Klein Show.” You can listen to the conversation by following or subscribing to the show on the NYT Audio App, Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts.

If you want to understand the first few weeks of the second Trump administration, you should listen to what Steve Bannon told PBS’s “Frontline” in 2019:

Steve Bannon: The opposition party is the media. And the media can only, because they’re dumb and they’re lazy, they can only focus on one thing at a time. … All we have to do is flood the zone. Every day we hit them with three things. They’ll bite on one, and we’ll get all of our stuff done. Bang, bang, bang. These guys will never — will never be able to recover. But we’ve got to start with muzzle velocity. So it’s got to start, and it’s got to hammer, and it’s got to — Michael Kirk: What was the word? Bannon: Muzzle velocity.

Muzzle velocity. Bannon’s insight here is real. Focus is the fundamental substance of democracy. It is particularly the substance of opposition. People largely learn of what the government is doing through the media — be it mainstream media or social media. If you overwhelm the media — if you give it too many places it needs to look, all at once, if you keep it moving from one thing to the next — no coherent opposition can emerge. It is hard to even think coherently.

Donald Trump’s first two weeks in the White House have followed Bannon’s strategy like a script. The flood is the point. The overwhelm is the point. The message wasn’t in any one executive order or announcement. It was in the cumulative effect of all of them. The sense that this is Trump’s country now. This is his government now. It follows his will. It does what he wants. If Trump tells the state to stop spending money, the money stops. If he says that birthright citizenship is over, it’s over.

Or so he wants you to think. In Trump’s first term, we were told: Don’t normalize him. In his second, the task is different: Don’t believe him.

Trump knows the power of marketing. If you make people believe something is true, you make it likelier that it becomes true. Trump clawed his way back to great wealth by playing a fearsome billionaire on TV; he remade himself as a winner by refusing to admit he had ever lost. The American presidency is a limited office. But Trump has never wanted to be president, at least not as defined in Article II of the U.S. Constitution. He has always wanted to be king. His plan this time is to first play king on TV. If we believe he is already king, we will be likelier to let him govern as a king.

Don’t believe him. Trump has real powers — but they are the powers of the presidency. The pardon power is vast and unrestricted, and so he could pardon the Jan. 6 rioters. Federal security protection is under the discretion of the executive branch, and so he could remove it from Anthony Fauci and Mike Pompeo and John Bolton and Mark Milley and even Brian Hook, a largely unknown former State Department official under threat from Iran who donated time to Trump’s transition team. It was an act of astonishing cruelty and callousness from a man who nearly died by an assassin’s bullet — as much as anything ever has been, this, to me, was an X-ray of the smallness of Trump’s soul — but it was an act that was within his power.

But the president cannot rewrite the Constitution. Within days, the birthright citizenship order was frozen by a judge — a Reagan appointee — who told Trump’s lawyers, “I have difficulty understanding how a member of the bar would state unequivocally that this is a constitutional order. It just boggles my mind.” A judge froze the spending freeze before it was even scheduled to go into effect, and shortly thereafter, the Trump administration rescinded the order, in part to avoid the court case.

What Bannon wanted — what the Trump administration wants — is to keep everything moving fast. Muzzle velocity, remember. If you’re always consumed by the next outrage, you can’t look closely at the last one. The impression of Trump’s power remains; the fact that he keeps stepping on rakes is missed. The projection of strength obscures the reality of weakness. Don’t believe him.

You could see this a few ways: Is Trump playing a part, making a bet or triggering a crisis? Those are the options. I am not certain he knows the answer. Trump has always been an improviser. But if you take it as calculated, here is the calculation: Perhaps this Supreme Court, stocked with his appointees, gives him powers no peacetime president has ever possessed. Perhaps all of this becomes legal now that he has asserted its legality. It is not impossible to imagine that bet paying off.

But Trump’s odds are bad. So what if the bet fails and his arrogations of power are soundly rejected by the courts? Then comes the question of constitutional crisis: Does he ignore the court’s ruling? To do that would be to attempt a coup. I wonder if they have the stomach for it. The withdrawal of the Office of Management and Budget’s order to freeze spending suggests they don’t. Bravado aside, Trump’s political capital is thin. Both in his first and second terms, he has entered office with approval ratings below that of any president in the modern era. Gallup has Trump’s approval rating at 47 percent — about 10 points beneath Joe Biden’s in January 2021.

There is a reason Trump is doing all of this through executive orders rather than submitting these same directives as legislation to pass through Congress. A more powerful executive could persuade Congress to eliminate the spending he opposes or reform the civil service to give himself the powers of hiring and firing that he seeks. To write these changes into legislation would make them more durable and allow him to argue their merits in a more strategic way. Even if Trump’s aim is to bring the civil service to heel — to rid it of his opponents and turn it to his own ends — he would be better off arguing that he is simply trying to bring the high-performance management culture of Silicon Valley to the federal government. You never want a power grab to look like a power grab.

But Republicans have a three-seat edge in the House and a 53-seat majority in the Senate. Trump has done nothing to reach out to Democrats. If Trump tried to pass this agenda as legislation, it would most likely fail in the House, and it would certainly die before the filibuster in the Senate. And that would make Trump look weak. Trump does not want to look weak. He remembers John McCain humiliating him in his first term by casting the deciding vote against Obamacare repeal.

That is the tension at the heart of Trump’s whole strategy: Trump is acting like a king because he is too weak to govern like a president. He is trying to substitute perception for reality. He is hoping that perception then becomes reality. That can only happen if we believe him.

The flurry of activity is meant to suggest the existence of a plan. The Trump team wants it known that they’re ready this time. They will control events rather than be controlled by them. The closer you look, the less true that seems. They are scrambling and flailing already. They are leaking against one another already. We’ve learned, already, that the O.M.B. directive was drafted, reportedly, without the input or oversight of key Trump officials — “it didn’t go through the proper approval process,” an administration official told The Washington Post. For this to be the process and product of a signature initiative in the second week of a president’s second term is embarrassing.

But it’s not just the O.M.B. directive. The Trump administration is waging an immediate war on the bureaucracy, trying to replace the “deep state” it believes hampered it in the first term. A big part of this project seems to have been outsourced to Elon Musk, who is bringing the tactics he used at Twitter to the federal government. He has longtime aides at the Office of Personnel Management, and the email sent to nearly all federal employees even reused the subject line of the email he sent to Twitter employees: “Fork in the Road.” Musk wants you to know it was him.

The email offers millions of civil servants a backdoor buyout: Agree to resign and in theory, at least, you can collect your paycheck and benefits until the end of September without doing any work. The Department of Government Efficiency account on X described it this way: “Take the vacation you always wanted, or just watch movies and chill, while receiving your full government pay and benefits.” The Washington Post reported that the email “blindsided” many in the Trump administration who would normally have consulted on a notice like that.

I suspect Musk thinks of the federal work force as a huge mass of woke ideologues. But most federal workers have very little to do with politics. About 16 percent of the federal work force is in health care. These are, for instance, nurses and doctors who work for the Veterans Affairs department. How many of them does Musk want to lose? What plans does the V.A. have for attracting and training their replacements? How quickly can he do it?

The Social Security Administration has more than 59,000 employees. Does Musk know which ones are essential to operations and unusually difficult to replace? One likely outcome of this scheme is that a lot of talented people who work in nonpolitical jobs and could make more elsewhere take the lengthy vacation and leave government services in tatters. Twitter worked poorly after Musk’s takeover, with more frequent outages and bugs, but its outages are not a national scandal. When V.A. health care degrades, it is. To have sprung this attack on the civil service so loudly and publicly and brazenly is to be assured of the blame if anything goes wrong.

What Trump wants you to see in all this activity is command. What is really in all this activity is chaos. They do not have some secret reservoir of focus and attention the rest of us do not. They have convinced themselves that speed and force is a strategy unto itself — that it is, in a sense, a replacement for a real strategy. Don’t believe them.

I had a conversation a couple months ago with someone who knows how the federal government works about as well as anyone alive. I asked him what would worry him most if he saw Trump doing it. What he told me is that he would worry most if Trump went slowly. If he began his term by doing things that made him more popular and made his opposition weaker and more confused. If he tried to build strength for the midterms while slowly expanding his powers and chipping away at the deep state where it was weakest.

But he didn’t. And so the opposition to Trump, which seemed so listless after the election, is beginning to rouse itself.

There is a subreddit for federal employees where one of the top posts reads: “This non ‘buyout’ really seems to have backfired. I’ll be honest, before that email went out, I was looking for any way to get out of this fresh hell. But now I am fired up to make these goons as frustrated as possible.” As I write this, it’s been upvoted more than 39,000 times and civil servant after civil servant is echoing the initial sentiment.

In Iowa this week, Democrats flipped a State Senate seat in a district that Trump won easily in 2024. The attempted spending freeze gave Democrats their voice back, as they zeroed in on the popular programs Trump had imperiled. Trump isn’t building support; he’s losing it. Trump isn’t fracturing his opposition; he’s uniting it.

This is the weakness of the strategy that Bannon proposed and Trump is following. It is a strategy that forces you into overreach. To keep the zone flooded, you have to keep acting, keep moving, keep creating new cycles of outrage or fear. You overwhelm yourself. And there’s only so much you can do through executive orders. Soon enough, you have to go beyond what you can actually do. And when you do that, you either trigger a constitutional crisis or you reveal your own weakness.

Trump may not see his own fork in the road coming. He may believe he has the power he is claiming. That would be a mistake on his part — a self-deception that could doom his presidency. But the real threat is if he persuades the rest of us to believe he has power he does not have.

The first two weeks of Trump’s presidency have not shown his strength. He is trying to overwhelm you. He is trying to keep you off-balance. He is trying to persuade you of something that isn’t true. Don’t believe him.

You can listen to this conversation by following “The Ezra Klein Show” on NYT Audio App, Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts. View a list of book recommendations from our guests here.

[alittleemo]

girl i just dont give a gaf anymore this is so fucking funny. school portfolio submission originally due november 28 (middle of thanksgiving break) i could bet money barely anyone turned it in. extended to dec 6 (middle of finals). girl be serious who is doing all that during finals. extended to dec 20. just turned it in at 12:06 on the 21st. whooooo fucking cares anymore take it and go !

[coridallasmultipass]

Ugh, I started typing an informal essay on the event, but I hit the image limit for a text post, so idk. Maybe I'll just break it up into smaller posts and ramble more in detail about each instance I was showing? A problem for Future Cori.