Kirk Hartley

🧵Three blacklisted supertankers holding 140,000 tons of Russian fuel are drifting in circles in the Atlantic because the White House begged US traders to buy Putin's diesel, and literally zero buyers answered the phone. 1/🧵

Resilience of reckoning? Real GDP soars over the summer, with gains in consumer spending, data centers, inventories and double-digit federal spending on defense and non-defense outlays propelling the economy forward. Housing slipped further into an ice age (🥶), while imports ballooned on the a surge in inputs to data centers. Hence, the breakdown between the investment boom and employment gains. Pockets of labor shortages with wage growth are occurring in states with a high concentration of data center construction but that is crowding out other infrastructure projects. Inflation picked up and showed up in the service sector as well as in energy prices. More to come on that front. It burns. The Fed has this data yesterday and had a good idea, as most economists did, what it would show prior to its two day meeting. The minutes will likely show a more hawkish lean than the Chair conveyed. The idea that the economy can cool around the edges without causing much pain may be fanciful. I hope it is correct but fear it is not. 💔 The economic averages explain everything and no one’s indiviual experience with the economy at once. There lies the rub. Here you go on the details: kpmg.com/us/en/articles/2026…

Imagine being a CEO of an US energy company and thinking that you work with close associates of the Trump family, only to find out that behind them is a sanctioned Russian company, really pulling the strings. This happened in Alaska. Polar Train LNG's CEO, Joel Riddle, stepped down after finding out that the Russian "Novatek" company, which is under US sanctions, has been involved in a $25 billion energy project in Alaska. The CEO thought that he was working with Gentry Beach, a close friend of Donald Trump Junior. Reportedly, that project was also discussed between Witkoff and Jared Kushner when they were with Putin. The White House admitted that the project was talked about "briefly". We are witnessing the greatest corruption scandal the USA has ever witnessed. It all leads to Trump, his family and the Russians, and apparently they were even ready to sell riches of Alaska to the Russians. The people in Alaska just need to look over to Russia, where the richest regions in terms of minerals and hydrocarbon resources have been stripped-mined, transferring all the wealth to Moscow and Saint Petersburg and leaving a scarred landscape in extreme poverty. That is the result of rampant corruption. We are starting to see more details why Trump and his friends are trying so strongly to bully Ukraine into surrender. This is most certainly only the tip of the iceberg.

“On Feb. 5, 2025, her first day in office, Attorney General Pam Bondi disbanded the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force, dismantled the department’s unit pursuing Russian oligarchs’ assets, and narrowed enforcement of the Foreign Agents Registration Act. CISA paused its election security work, abandoned the information sharing center that connected it to state and local election officials, and by mid-2025 had lost more than a third of its workforce. Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard gutted the Foreign Malign Influence Center, the State Department closed its office for countering foreign disinformation, and National Security Council working groups on Russian sabotage and disinformation stopped meeting. The next target was the people. In August 2025, Gabbard revoked the security clearances of 37 current and former officials, among them a senior Russia analyst who helped produce the 2017 assessment, citing the “politicization or weaponization of intelligence.” Comey was indicted on Sept. 25, 2025, over his 2020 Senate testimony, five days after Trump publicly demanded his prosecution. A judge dismissed the case, but the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit is currently hearing the department’s appeal. CIA Director John Ratcliffe referred former Director Brennan for prosecution for alleged perjury in his congressional testimony, and Brennan has been subpoenaed to appear at a Florida grand jury examining whether officials who investigated Trump conspired against him. The purge also reached below the senior level, and analysts who worked on the 2017 assessment also had their clearances stripped. The FBI forced out a veteran counterintelligence agent over his ties to an official in the original Russia investigation, and dozens of FBI agents and Justice Department prosecutors were fired or demoted for work investigating Trump or Russia.”

Now would be a good time to remind everyone of these Trump facts, because apparently some people still need the refresher. Please meet the President of the United States: Flew on Epstein’s plane at least seven times. Just friends, I guess. Pleaded the Fifth more than 400 times in a single deposition. Nothing says “innocent” like refusing to answer a single question about your own business. 34 felony convictions. A record most people would call disqualifying. And 91 criminal charges. Accused of sexual misconduct or assault by at least 26 women. But sure, tell me again how he’s a great guy. 6 corporate bankruptcies. The self proclaimed greatest businessman alive somehow keeps running out of money. 5 draft deferments. Funny how the toughest guy in the room never actually showed up for duty. 4 criminal indictments. Not two. Not three. Four. 2 impeachments. A club of exactly one president. 2 of his own companies convicted of criminal tax fraud. Convicted. Not accused. Convicted. 1 fake university shut down. 1 fake charity shut down. Even his charity was a grift. Paid 25 million dollars to settle the Trump University fraud lawsuit because scamming people who believed in you costs money eventually. Ordered to pay 5 million dollars in the first E Jean Carroll sexual abuse verdict, then hit with 83.3 million more in the second. A jury said it twice so nobody could pretend it was a fluke. Ordered to pay 2 million dollars for looting his own so called charity. Stealing from a charity with his own name on it. Found liable for business fraud and originally slapped with a penalty topping 450 million dollars, later thrown out on appeal while the fraud finding itself stuck to him anyway. First president in modern history to increase the deficit every single year of a full term. Fiscal responsibility, apparently, was always just a talking point. Kept the debt to GDP ratio above 100 percent for his entire first term. Presided over the largest single day point drop in Dow Jones history at the time. So much for the guy who claimed to be a genius with money. Set the record for the longest government shutdown in US history in his first term at 35 days, then couldn’t resist beating his own miserable record in his second term with a 43 day shutdown, followed by yet another shutdown just months later. Encore nobody asked for. Added roughly 2.25 trillion dollars to the national debt in his first year back in office alone, pushing the debt past 39 trillion dollars. Somebody remind me who the party of fiscal discipline is again. Pushed through the largest defense budget increase since World War Two while the debt kept climbing anyway. Purged more than 300,000 federal employees in his first year back. Efficient, if your goal is chaos. Pardoned nearly 1,600 January 6 Capitol rioters. At least 40 of those pardoned rioters have already been rearrested, charged, or sentenced for new crimes since walking free. Shocking absolutely nobody. His family’s crypto ventures, including a meme coin and World Liberty Financial, pulled in more than 1.4 billion dollars in disclosed earnings while he sat in the Oval Office. Draining the swamp was apparently code for filling his own pockets. Sent the National Guard into American cities at a cost of nearly 500 million taxpayer dollars in 2025 alone. His own tariffs are projected to cost the average American household more than 2,500 dollars this year. You’re paying for this. Not China. You. No more foreign wars. Peace deal with Russia and Ukraine on Day One. None of this is a conspiracy theory, a rumor, or something you saw in a group chat. It is the actual, documented record, sitting in plain sight for anyone willing to look. So the next time someone tells you to relax and give him a chance, ask them how many more indictments, judgments, and shutdown records he needs to rack up before that chance runs out. Credit: Charles Curtis Rone

This is illegal Notice the text at the bottom, “paid for by the US government”. Why the hell is the US government and our taxpayers paying for Trump political ad on Fox News?

We need to use the funds that are recovered from all of his illegal activities to pay for erasing his name from everything, demolishing any gaudy crap he erected, and repairing / rebuilding things he destroyed. He is a shit stain on this country.