TRUMP REGIME NOW KIDNAPPING TODDLERS | The Kyle Kulinski Show

"they're coming for your kids!" -Republicans 2024
"We're coming for your kids!" -Republicans 2025

60 Minutes chief resigns over Gaza censorship, with Ali Abunimah

60 minutes had a decent run, I guess I can skip that now as well.

Report that Trump waved off Israeli strike on Iran inflames the lobby

The Grayzone's Max Blumenthal and Aaron Mate on the NY Times report that Trump followed the advice of "restrainers" in his cabinet and waved off Israeli plans to strike Iran, and the backlash from the Israeli lobby in Washington following the article's release.

It's been about 100 days since the start of Trump's second term now. In the press, that's always a time for reflection on how a president's term has gone so far and therefore I will update you. As of this writing, the president's average job approval rating stands in net negative territory by a margin approaching six percentage points, with 45.8% of Americans approving of his job performance so far and 51.7% disapproving. The honeymoon's definitely over and things are quickly getting back to normal, in other words. Matter-of-factly, I've never seen a newly-elected president's support erode quite this much this quickly before. It took Biden until well into September of his first year in office to achieve the same feat, for example, with the catalyst being the Taliban expelling our world's strongest military from Kabul using tanks and other assorted weaponry they stole from us. What the new administration has achieved so far, in just three months or so, in other words, appears to be worse than that -- worse than the Taliban retaking the Afghan capital -- in the minds of the American people overall. That is the point of comparison here.

In related news if you didn't catch it, Tesla's profits plunged 71% in the first quarter of this year compared to the same period last year, corresponding to Elon Musk's his time in the White House. Coincidentally, immediately after this revelation, Musk in turn announced that he plans to scale back his direct involvement in DOGE to one or two days a week or so starting next month in order to devote more time and focus to his companies. Chainsaw man claims that his "Department of Government Efficiency" has saved taxpayers some $160 billion so far, but the actual situation looks more like DOGE's work has instead cost taxpayers over $100 billion on balance after one accounts for the costs associated with putting tens of thousands of federal employees on paid leave, re-hiring mistakenly fired workers, the lost productivity resulting from large-scale job reductions and under-staffing, the expense of defending against multiple lawsuits challenging DOGE's actions, and the impact of lost tax collections due to staff cuts at the IRS. So, in other words, the whole thing appears to have simply been an exercise in counter-productive cruelty rather than a more efficient delivery of public services to the public. A total bust, in other words, if the aim was to save taxpayers money. For Musk being such a genius, that's quite an outcome both for his personal fortune and for his role in the government! He scales back his role in Washington with a personal favorability rating averaging below 40%.

I say all of this about Elon Musk because in many ways the first 100 days of the Trump's second term may well go down as the Musk era thereof. In this connection, it may be worth pointing out that the Republican Party electoral coalition is at all times composed of two basic factions: the social conservatives and the fiscal conservatives. There are of course innumerable smaller groupings within those two, but that is how they group up together overall. The DOGE-aligned side of that equation -- people who are bigger fans of Elon Musk than of Donald Trump -- are today's fiscal conservatives, or libertarians; the business-aligned section of the coalition. They are essentially the next generation of the old GOP establishment. They've made their peace with MAGA, but hold some distinct views here and there and are different people from the core MAGA crowd at the end of the day. They're younger, richer, and more lopsidedly male. They are the predominant group in the so-called online "manosphere" of male podcast listeners and generally less politically involved or partisan. They care more about balanced budgets and anti-feminism than anything else (well and Covid restrictions back when those were a thing) and are tech futurists. MAGA is, at its core, older, more middle class, and more concerned with globalism than other issues. Core MAGA is more socially conservative overall (the religious right can also be considered part of core MAGA at this point, having completely made its peace with the original movement) and less concerned with taxation rates and balanced budgets and may even support common sense ideas like raising the minimum wage and legislation to make labor organizing easier. They are in fact disproportionately represented in some male-dominated labor unions today. MAGA and DOGE are formally allied in the current administration, but there is at least some natural tension between their goals out in the wilds of the real world beyond the White House.

In a commentary I posted last month, I also highlighted that...

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"...I mean it quite literally when I say that the biotech oligarchy is the power really running things in Washington right now. You may have seen a lot of activity from the White House lately -- a lot royal decrees being signed by our self-proclaimed "king" -- but much like Charles, Trump's actually much more of a figurehead than a supreme ruler. He's spent most of his presidency so far on the golf course, attending the Super Bowl and the Daytona 500, and just generally partying and living it up while his poll numbers sink. Meanwhile, the world's richest person is, by stark contrast, constantly in the White House and all over Washington, placing his cronies in key positions of power over agency after agency systematically, stealing your personal information, and scaling down every government body that could possibly hold his businesses to account for faulty products, unfair practices, or for any other reason, and then some. Notice who is standing over Trump, often interrupting and talking over him without rebuff, when he gets around to signing those royal decrees, and who stands to benefit from so many of them. Notice who's usually there with him for interviews despite being elected by no one and running a fake government department that wasn't created by either Congress or the constitution and yet presides over all the others. Who is the real president of this country: the man who won our last election...or the one who almost singularly bankrolled his whole campaign? We all know the answer.

Elon Musk, incidentally, is distinctly less popular than Donald Trump. A recent CNN poll, for example, finds that just 28% of Americans believe it a good thing that Musk has a prominent role in the Trump administration while nearly twice as many -- 54% -- view his role negatively. Musk is most popular with young, rich white men (the demo that forms the tech sector) and least popular with working class women of color, and especially the older ones. He's extremely unpopular with women in general though really. Being more often possessed of sufficient emotional intelligent to notice the difference between people and machines, there aren't too many female transhumanists out there. (Transhumanism, for those not in the know, is an elitist belief fashionable amongst biotech millionaires that argues people should evolve into cyborgs. Hence Neuralink.)"

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All of this still holds true. To update my assessment to account for intervening developments though, let us consider Trump's global trade war. We know that the larger part of it that scared the markets and the public the most flamed out when the bond market started collapsing on the day the elevated tariffs were first set to go into effect. Once that happened, Trump backed off within hours, announcing that most of the new tariffs would be put on hold, but what you may not have noticed was Elon Musk's role in that whole episode. He spent much of the week between "Liberation Day" and the onset of the steeper set of tariffs attacking Peter Navarro and Howard Lutnick -- the chief architects of and apologists for the new protectionist policy -- and posted a video featuring famed libertarian economist Milton Friedman championing international free trade. (Example 1, example 2, example 3.) Whether coincidentally or not, it's notable which side of that argument prevailed in the end, or at least came closer to prevailing than the other; that Musk basically got his way in this area too in the end, and that the entirety of the public disagreement between the two sides was voiced by Musk and Musk alone. In connection to my above analysis of the class divide between the core MAGA and DOGE factions of current right wing thinking, one notes that while Trump and his protectionist trade advisors have been motivated by a (misguided) neo-mercantilist sensibility that holds itself to be the salvation of American manufacturing, and of the corresponding, often unionized, workers from the threat of outsourcing, chainsaw man on the other hand has an ambition to eliminate the use of factory workers entirely by replacing them with robots, in keeping with both a more tech-futurist and neoliberal, business-oriented mindset. Witness in contrast Trump's support earlier this year of striking dock worker's demand for limits to the automation of their jobs, reflecting a different, more skeptical orientation than Musk holds toward both free trade and the role of automation in workplaces. And so the waning of the Musk era comes with this added significance as well.

If it's even necessary to get into what the polling says is unpopular about Trump, Musk, and the policy choices and erratic fluctuations thereof at this point, there seem to be few areas of ongoing popularity left. Most of the newer surveys out there (including even the most recent Fox News poll) suggest that even the administration's immigration policies -- traditionally its strongest area -- are becoming unpopular overall these days and it's not tough to figure out why when the public is hearing about multiple American citizens without criminal records being deported to foreign countries, and in at least one or two cases to foreign prisons with reputations for deprivation and torture! The accumulation of cases like those is starting to scare Americans and make more and more wonder if, through no fault of their own, perhaps they could be next. In short, cracking down on illegal immigration is one thing, but when you start deporting American citizens, the public starts to become convinced that you're being too harsh. And probably violating the constitution. I don't even need to say what the Trump administration's reputation is on the cost-of-living issue at this point, do I? After the whole "Liberation Day" fiasco and chaos especially? It's not good. Traditionally a pillar of strength for Trump during his first term that helped carry him to a new electoral victory last year, economics now rank among Trump's biggest political vulnerabilities, as people broadly feel his actions not only won't bring down the cost of living, but stand to actively elevate it further instead, to which end American consumer confidence is now approaching record lows.

The only hope for a midterm election victory the Republicans have right now lies in this point that the Democratic Party brand is very unpopular today and that Democrats seem to feel at something of a loss for direction. Democrats don't have to be loved to beat Republicans though and that's just what they've been doing in a raft of special elections this year so far. What's more, digging just below the topline numbers of this data on Democratic unpopularity reveals that much of the dissent today comes from the party's own younger base, which is dissatisfied with what they perceive as the timidity of their elected officials. They want to see their party challenge Trump more, not less. In other words, much of this dissent isn't coming from people who think the Democrats are too woke or too left wing, but rather from younger people who want the Congressional Democrats to stand up to Trump more and be more partisan. What that suggests is that generational change may be in store for the Democratic Party in next year's Congressional primaries; generational change that will likely shift the balance of their candidate list further to the left, especially in say urban areas and college towns that are considered safely Democratic territory. Expect the Congressional Progressive Caucus to grow as a result. There's a reason why it's specifically Bernie Sanders' and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez's Fighting Oligarchy rallies that are drawing some of the biggest crowds (often in the tens of thousands) these days.

What I'm trying to say is that some 100 days into the new administration, you are seeing the culture in general shift back in a leftward direction, led by younger, more disaffected Americans, in reaction to the increasingly unpopular, chaotic, and authoritarian trajectory of the present.

To close this out, I'll add this: Canada holds an election of its own this week. The governing Liberal Party, once behind in the polls by some 25 points until last December, is now poised to win the most seats because the Canadian public trusts them to stand up for their country's national interests in the wake of a certain new trade war and more direct threats to its sovereignty coming from the United States more than they trust the Conservative Party to do so. It's one more example of how his royal pain is indeed great at inspiring a surge of national pride and general patriotic sentiment...in other countries.

Old news but interesting Pakistan is now airing the dirty laundry. US is pissing off its allies left and right.

US Backed Islamist Terrorists ADMITS Pakistan In BOMBSHELL Interview

• Deporting Innocent People to Foreign Prisons.
• Arresting Judges.
• Blocking Entry to America to Those Critical of Trump.
• Deporting American Citizens and Children.
• Deporting American Citizens and Children With Cancer.

Overwhelmingly low Trump approval ratings from Fox

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— FactPost (@factpostnews.bsky.social) 28 April 2025 at 14:20

Donald Trump Demands Investigations Into Negative Approval Rating Polls - Newsweek

Today is election day in Canada and Trump seems to be suggesting that they vote to make him their leader and become the 51st state of the United States.

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— PatriotTakes 🇺🇸 (@patriottakes.bsky.social) 28 April 2025 at 13:49

Oh please, cry harder, snowflake!

Man would this guy love to shut down any newsstation and newspaper in USA and only have his only media company spreading "the truth". Just like every other dictator. Only high approval rates can be true after all!

Even Musk lost some poll(s) on Ex-Twitter. Hence why he didn't do any anymore, actual truth hurts them like sunshine a vampire.

Great, it will only push more people to vote against Pollievre.

We already have a record advance vote count, 7.3 million (up from 5.8 million 2021, total 28.2 registered voters)

Record 7.3 million Canadians voted during advance polls: Elections Canada
https://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/elections-canada-record-advanced-polls-1.7515477

It could be more people simply vote in advance but it was also noticeably more busy where we voted this morning, compared to the provincial elections in February.

The weather is also great today, not excuse not to vote!

Living through something tends to make you more harsh or positive on it than not, but I think it's safe to say the First 100 Days of Trump 47 are the worst of any president in US history. Even Trump 45 and other bad presidents like Bush 43, Andrew Johnson, Pierce, and Buchanan seem to have less authoritarian, greedy, and awful First 100 Days (at least using historical relativism).
The USA is rapidly heading toward Orban's Hungary in the best-case scenario and in the worst-case scenario stuff like Putin's Russia, Communist China, and other dictatorships aren't completely off the table.