Streamer,

I don't agree that my arguments have been disproved. FP said I got the definition of inflation wrong, but I've since read more articles by economists and financial experts who say that the increased prices caused by tariffs are inflationary. I have to give these experts at least as much credence as I give FP. What you call disproved seems more like differences of opinion than differences of fact.

I'm still a scientist. Show me clear, cogent, and convincing evidence and I'll accept it every time.

Tug,

Yes, onward and hopefully upward, but how about this for your accountability, transparencey, and lawfulness:

“The same people who’ve spent the last several years decrying ‘unqualified DEI hires’ are now shoehorning through Cabinet nominations who can’t even pass a basic background test.”
Trump’s transition team is skipping background checks by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, claiming that they are slow and intrusive.

Trump nominated Pete Hegseth, an Army National Guard veteran and co-host on the weekend edition of Fox & Friends, to become the secretary of defense. Since then a fellow service member who was the unit’s security guard and on an anti-terrorism team flagged Hegseth to their unit’s leadership because one of his tattoos is used by white supremacists. Extremist tattoos are prohibited by army regulations.

A woman accused Hegseth of sexually assaulting her after a Republican conference in Monterey, California, in 2017. According to the Washington Post, the woman who made the allegation said the alleged victim had signed a nondisclosure agreement with Hegseth.

Immediately after Trump said he would nominate Gaetz, the representative resigned his congressional seat, forestalling the release of a House Ethics Committee report concerning allegations of drug use and that Gaetz had taken a minor across state lines for sex.
It is reported that the victim, who was a seventeen-year-old high-schooler at the time, testified before the committee. House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) said that publishing the report would be “terrible” and that he would “strongly request that the Ethics Committee not issue the report because that’s not the way we do things in the House.” (Unless it’s a Democrat.)

Trump’s picked former Hawaii representative Tulsi Gabbard to be director of national intelligence (DNI). Gabbard’s ties to US adversaries like Russia’s president Vladimir Putin and Syrian president Bashar al-Assad, have raised serious questions about her loyalty. Making her the country’s DNI would almost certainly collapse ongoing U.S. participation in the Five Eyes intelligence alliance in which the U.S., the U.K., Canada, Australia, and New Zealand have shared intelligence since World War II.

As former Illinois representative Joe Walsh wrote: “Donald Trump just picked someone to oversee our intelligence who, herself, couldn’t pass a security clearance check. She couldn’t get security clearance. She couldn’t get a job in our intelligence community. Because she’s too compromised by Russia. Yet Trump picked her to run the whole thing.”

When Texas senator John Cornyn said he would like to see the Gaetz report, Trump sycophant Steve Bannon said: “You either get with the program, brother, or you're going to finish third in your primary.” A member of Trump’s transition team said that Trump wants to bend Republican senators to his will “until they snap in half.”

Trump demanded that the Senate recess in order for him to push through his choices as recess appointments. Even the right-wing Wall Street Journal editorial board came out against this scheme, calling it “anti-constitutional” and noting that it would “eliminate one of the basic checks on power that the Founders built into the American system of government.”

Aside from political calculations, hopefully enough Senate Republicans take seriously their oaths to “support and defend the Constitution of the United States” as well as the Senate’s role in the constitutional system of checks and balances that they will judge Trump’s antics with that in mind.

How's that for not being a dictator? I just love accountability, transparency, and lawfullness, but that ain't Trump.