"I think it's frankly ridiculous that anyone in this room would even suggest that President Trump is doing anything for his own benefit. He left a life of luxury and a life of running a very successful real estate empire for public service." — Baghdad Barbie
PUBLIC SERVICE
and he only helps himself … to everything
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Businesses are crunching the numbers and realizing that, despite Donald Trump’s insistence, they aren't adding up.
“Manufacturers who had plans to open factories in the country say the new duties are only adding to the significant obstacles they already faced,” Bloomberg reported.
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— The New Republic (@newrepublic.com) May 9, 2025 at 1:33 PM
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BREAKING: Radar screens at Newark Airport went black early this morning.
Air traffic controllers told a FedEx plane that their screens went dark around 3:55 a.m.
They then asked the aircraft to tell their company to apply pressure to fix the problem.
abcnews.go.com/US/radar-scr...
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— More Perfect Union (@moreperfectunion.bsky.social) May 9, 2025 at 11:18 AM
How will Americans know when we have lost our democracy?
Authoritarianism is harder to recognize than it used to be. Most 21st-century autocrats are elected. Rather than violently suppress opposition like Castro or Pinochet, today’s autocrats convert public institutions into political weapons, using law enforcement, tax and regulatory agencies to punish opponents and bully the media and civil society onto the sidelines. We call this competitive authoritarianism — a system in which parties compete in elections but the systematic abuse of an incumbent’s power tilts the playing field against the opposition. It is how autocrats rule in contemporary Hungary, India, Serbia and Turkey and how Hugo Chávez ruled in Venezuela.
The descent into competitive authoritarianism doesn’t always set off alarms. Because governments attack their rivals through nominally legal means like defamation suits, tax audits and politically targeted investigations, citizens are often slow to realize they are succumbing to authoritarian rule. More than a decade into Mr. Chávez’s rule, most Venezuelans still believed they lived in a democracy.
How, then, can we tell whether America has crossed the line into authoritarianism? We propose a simple metric: the cost of opposing the government. In democracies, citizens are not punished for peacefully opposing those in power. They need not worry about publishing critical opinions, supporting opposition candidates or engaging in peaceful protest because they know they will not suffer retribution from the government. In fact, the idea of legitimate opposition — that all citizens have a right to criticize, organize opposition to and seek to remove the government through elections — is a foundational principle of democracy.
www.nytimes.com/...
