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Kitchen Table Kibitzing Friday: Revenge is a dish best served like Turkey Tacos [1]
['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']
Date: 2025-05-30
Nothing better than leftover Turducken.
"Mr. President, Wall Street analysts have coined a new term, the TACO trade. They say Trump keeps backing off on your tariff threats, and that's why the stock market is up this week. What's your response?"
Did Pam Bondi actually say if people called Trump "TACO" that they would be arrested? n this context, "TACO" stands for "Trump Always Chickens Out." It's a satirical term coined by a Financial Times journalist to critique former President Trump's pattern of threatening high tariffs and then reducing or delaying them.
‘Trump Always Chickens Out”: Wall Street coins new term ‘TACO trade’, mocking Trump’s tariff policy
Palantir's fascist recruiting pitch: "we build to dominate".
x “.. raising questions over whether [Trump] might compile a master list of personal information on Americans that could give him untold surveillance power.” @nytimes.com $PLTR
www.nytimes.com/2025/05/30/t...
[image or embed] — Carl Quintanilla (@carlquintanilla.bsky.social) May 30, 2025 at 5:53 AM
In March, President Trump signed an executive order calling for the federal government to share data across agencies, raising questions over whether he might compile a master list of personal information on Americans that could give him untold surveillance power.
Mr. Trump has not publicly talked about the effort since. But behind the scenes, officials have quietly put technological building blocks into place to enable his plan. In particular, they have turned to one company: Palantir, the data analysis and technology firm.
The Trump administration has expanded Palantir’s work across the federal government in recent months. The company has received more than $113 million in federal government spending since Mr. Trump took office, according to public records, including additional funds from existing contracts as well as new contracts with the Department of Homeland Security and the Pentagon. (This does not include a $795 million contract that the Department of Defense awarded the company last week, which has not been spent.)
Representatives of Palantir are also speaking to at least two other agencies — the Social Security Administration and the Internal Revenue Service — about buying its technology, according to six government officials and Palantir employees with knowledge of the discussions.
www.nytimes.com/...
In fact, the White House is the third residence that Trump has tried to make resemble Versailles. Interior designer Angelo Donghia incorporated some gold elements into his initial vision for the penthouse apartment at Trump Tower, and Henry Conversano added much more in a later redesign, with the result being something New York Times architectural critic Paul Goldberger described in a 2017 talk as a “pseudo-Versailles in the sky.” But it’s less well known that the ghosts of Versailles also haunt Mar-a-Lago, where, when adding a ballroom, Trump ditched the Spanish theme of the original building and chose instead to mimic the Sun King’s Hall of Mirrors. A 2007 appraisal of Mar-a-Lago made for the Trump Organization by the firm Callaway and Price described the ballroom as “in the style of Versailles, in a Louis XIV gold and crystal finish, with huge crystal chandeliers and floor-to-ceiling mirrors on one wall.” Apparently it’s this ballroom at Mar-a-Lago, with its $7 million of gold leaf, that Trump wants now to re-create in the East Wing; the gold cherubs have already been brought up from Florida. No doubt, if it’s ever completed, this third Versailles revamp will have a ceiling painting to rival the original by Charles Le Brun depicting Louis XIV’s military victories. (Perhaps, instead, “Donald Trump vanquishes DEI”?)
More disturbing, of course, than the president’s taste is the administration’s view of executive authority. This evokes the absolutist rhetoric of Louis XIV’s worst sycophants, which Saint-Simon despised. One can almost hear the echoes of the Versailles courtiers in the Trump Cabinet’s paeans to the president’s leadership, and Saint-Simon’s description of the Sun King’s appetite for adulation, found in the writer’s secret Mémoires, published after his death, surely suggests our own leader’s vulnerability to such praise: “The self-effacement, the self-abasement, the look of admiration, subjugation, supplication, most of all the look of negation except through him, were the sole means of pleasing him.” (That translation is my own.) Saint-Simon knew that when kings embrace their own flattery, they open themselves to manipulation, and the writer viewed Louis XIV as an illusory absolutist who was in fact controlled by fawning scoundrels. Sort of like if an American president were to be hoodwinked by a Russian dictator offering him a complimentary portrait.
slate.com/...
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