Ex-Bush Speechwriter Sounds Alarm On Trump 2.0 With Frightening Historical Comparison

Posted on 26/08/2025 by Boris Clair

David Frum — an ex-speechwriter for George W. Bush — used an op-ed in The Atlantic to share a frightening forecast of a post-Donald Trump America, underscoring the “terrifyingly clear message” he’s sending in his second term.

Frum looked back to the Teapot Dome corruption scandal under Warren G. Harding and the Watergate scandal under Richard Nixon, noting that the implicated president’s supporters “accepted that he had done wrong, that the guilty should be punished, and that these misdeeds should never be repeated.”

“Any aftermath of the Trump presidency seems more likely to resemble the aftermath of the Civil War: The reactionary losers who tried to overthrow the US Constitution may acknowledge themselves beaten, but they won’t acknowledge themselves wrong,” he wrote.

“If they won’t acknowledge that, what confidence can anyone feel that they won’t try again if they get the chance?”

Frum — a frequent critic of the president since the 2016 election — pointed to Trump’s revenge tour in his current administration, his recruitment of loyalists to the federal government and the recent FBI raid on the home of former National Security Adviser John Bolton.

“In this second Trump term, things keep happening that would have seemed outrageous—impossible—just a few months before. Every day, there’s a new movement away from the rule of law, toward arbitrary and corrupt personal rule,” wrote Frum, a staff writer for The Atlantic.

“Among the fearful questions pressing upon the country: How does America ever turn back?”

Frum stressed that the “government is changing fast” under Trump as well, with Immigration and Customs Enforcement morphing into an “an enormous paramilitary force staffed by people hired for pro-Trump zeal” and his family raking in “hundreds of millions of dollars in gifts, gratuities, and payoffs” while ignoring post-Watergate ethics rules.

“Even if the House changes hands in 2026—even if a president is elected in 2028 who possesses a healthy respect for the rule of law—Trump’s second-term perversion of the government will not be easily undone,” he wrote.

He went on, “Trump is teaching his many supporters that public office is just a game of revenge, that there’s no difference between the government pleading with an ex-president for 17 months to return stolen secret documents and a serving president using claims about documents to target a critic for retaliation.”

Read more of Frum’s op-ed in The Atlantic here.

Donald Trump Makes Bizarre Claim About What He’s Called In Europe

Posted on 26/08/2025 by Boris Clair

Donald Trump has made a truly bizarre claim about what he is supposedly known as in Europe.

The US president said the title – which he appears to have completely made up – is “an honour”.

Speaking in the Oval Office on Monday, he said: “They jokingly call me the president of Europe.

“They call me the president of Europe, which is an honour. I like Europe and I like those people.”

Trump appeared to be referring to his failed attempts to broker an end to the war in Ukraine.

After failing to win any concessions from Russia at a much-hyped summit with Vladimir Putin in Alaska earlier this month, European leaders, including Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy, held talks with Trump in Washington.

Trump said: “They’re great leaders and we’ve never had a case where seven, plus 28 – essentially 35, 38 – countries were represented here the other day.”

But despite his claims, there is no evidence of Trump ever being called the president of Europe by anyone.

Social media users were also quick to debunk the president’s claims.

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As a contributor, currently sitting in Europe, I’d like to confirm that we don’t call him that. At all.

Ever.

Ever.

There are many things we do call him but ‘president’ is not among them.

— Don McGowan (@donmcgowan) August 25, 2025

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As a contributor, currently sitting in Europe, I’d like to confirm that we don’t call him that. At all.

Ever.

Ever.

There are many things we do call him but ‘president’ is not among them.

— Don McGowan (@donmcgowan) August 25, 2025

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No they don’t. You embarrass the United States on a daily basis and the entire world is laughing at you.

— Marlene Robertson🇨🇦 (@marlene4719) August 25, 2025

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No they don’t. You embarrass the United States on a daily basis and the entire world is laughing at you.

— Marlene Robertson🇨🇦 (@marlene4719) August 25, 2025

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Trump claims European leaders jokingly refer to him as the \"president of Europe\" due to respect for his policies, but he hasn’t named specific individuals. No public statements from EU officials confirm this.

— Grok (@grok) August 25, 2025

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Trump claims European leaders jokingly refer to him as the “president of Europe” due to respect for his policies, but he hasn’t named specific individuals. No public statements from EU officials confirm this.

— Grok (@grok) August 25, 2025

Bill Maher says President Donald Trump might be planning another “slow-moving coup.”

The “Real Time” host on Friday pointed to the federal takeover of Washington, D.C., where Trump deployed the National Guard and federalised local police to combat the purported “bedlam” there, despite violent crime in the city being at a 30-year low.

Maher predicted an attempted power grab during the first Trump administration and has frequently cited the January 6, 2021 Capitol insurrection as evidence ever since. He noted that he’s used the phrase “slow-moving coup” since Trump was first elected in 2016.

“And people were laughing at it, whenever I said he was never going to concede power,” the comedian and political pundit said Friday. “They would say, ‘Oh, you smoke too much pot.’ Well, turned out I was smoking just the right amount of pot.”

Maher went on to argue that these people are actually the ones in a trance.

He said Trump “does this magic trick” by flooding the discourse with humorous trivialities, and handing out pizza to law enforcement or highlighting the assault of an ex-government staffer nicknamed “Big Balls” so “we’re all laughing about what’s going on in D.C.”

“If there was a slow-moving coup, let me just describe some of the steps and you tell me if I’m being paranoid,” said Maher. “First, create a masked police force — get people used to looking at that. Normalise snatching people off the street — get them used to that.”

He continued, “Normalise seeing the National Guard and the military on the street. Then, start talking about crime in the capital, which is basically, you know, has always been a fairly crime-ridden city, [but] this is our nation’s capital — where elections are decided.”

Maher noted that six states have already sent their own National Guard troops to D.C., which “Trump can then federalise,” and warned this “permanent police presence” controlled by a power-hungry administration forebodes potentially historic turmoil.

“So when an election dispute might come up, just hypothetically …” he said half-jokingly.

Trump had staffers hand out pizza Thursday to D.C.'s federalized law enforcement. — Trump had staffers hand out pizza Thursday to D.C.’s federalized law enforcement.

Trump has made numerous comments about potentially running for a third, unconstitutional term. He joked during a high-stakes summit last week with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy that a war could give him reason to suspend the 2028 election.

While Maher said Friday that he doesn’t want to be “a big pessimist,” many social media users are slamming him as a hypocrite, as Maher has decried Trump as a potential dictator for years — only to dine with him in March and call Trump “gracious and measured.”

“I’m going to pretend for the rest of the duration that the Democrats do have a chance of winning, and they might win the next election,” Maher said Friday. “I just don’t think they’re ever going to take power, because this is what’s going to happen.

“I think this coup is going to go off a lot smoother than the last one,” he warned.