The Donald Trump Score Card

'He Will Be Thrown’: Conservatives Turn on Trump In Fury After He Declares Himself Above the Law in Napoleon-Inspired Rant

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“He who saves his country does not violate any law,” Trump wrote on his social media site, Truth Social, and Elon Musk’s X platform on Saturday. Musk reposted it along with 14 American flag emojis, and The White House account on X also shared the message alongside Trump’s official presidential photograph.

On Sunday, he doubled down, calling on lawyers and judges to be “tough” and protect the country as his administration faces a series of court battles over his bid to end birthright citizenship and his gutting of the federal bureaucracy.

 

'He Will Be Thrown’: Conservatives Turn on Trump In Fury After He Declares Himself Above the Law in Napoleon-Inspired Rant

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New York Times columnist Jamelle Bouie, on the social media platform Bluesky, called it “the single most un-American and anti-constitutional statement ever uttered by an American president.”

Democratic California Sen. Adam Schiff responded to Trump on X: “Spoken like a true dictator.”

Conservative commentator Bill Kristol took it a step further, likening the quote to a 1929 declaration from Adolf Hitler that became a Nazi principle: “The authority of the Führer is not limited by laws or statutes.”

 

Trump's presidency is a mess of contradictions
Trump's policies and pronouncements are at risk of colliding head-on. Fulfilling one could snuff out another.
By Peter Nicholas
February 20, 2025

Trump's policies are at risk of head-on collisions

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"WASHINGTON — Douglas Irwin is a New Hampshire college professor who has spent decades studying tariffs. On Feb. 2, he got a painful lesson in how they work in the real world.

His utility company sent him a letter alerting him that with President Donald Trump planning to slap tariffs on Canada, his heating bill would rise. Trump later postponed the tariffs for a month, but the point had been made: New tariffs meant Irwin and other customers would be paying more to heat their homes in frigid New England winters with propane coming down from Canada."

 

Trump's presidency is a mess.

 

Trump says Ukraine 'should have never started' war in Ukraine

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"I think I have the power to end this war, and I think it's going very well. But today I heard, 'Oh, well, we weren't invited.' Well, you've been there for three years," Trump told reporters at his Mar-a-Lago resort. "You should have never started it. You could have made a deal."

Trump went on to say: "I could have made a deal for Ukraine that would have given them almost all of the land, everything, almost all of the land, and no people would have been killed, and no city would have been demolished, and not one dome would have been knocked down. But they chose not to do it that way."

 

Trump orders all Biden U.S. attorneys to be fired.


Trump orders all Biden-era US attorneys to be fired: 'We must clean house immediately'

 

Trump supporter Actor Zachary Levi now realizes that people who voted for Trump are losing their jobs.

He seems to think that Trump is going to make exceptions for those who voted for him, such as his forgotten people that he has forgotten.


Pro-Trump ‘Shazam’ star to Musk: People who voted for Trump are losing their jobs

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He likened the cuts by DOGE to cancer patients undergoing surgery, saying, “You lose some good healthy tissue along with that. [Doctors] don’t want to do that, but it’s a part of extracting that darkness out of there. And right now, that’s what’s happening.”

 

Trump is cutting out mostly healthy tissue that he claims is cancer.

The mass firings are probationary workers who haven't yet received civil service protections. They are the most vulnerable. They aren't the corrupt people in government that Trump claims without evidence. Trump is simply hell-bent on firing government workers to retaliate against what he deems to be corrupt workers.

 

Musk's move to take on Social Security tests the 'third rail of American politics'

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"Elon Musk's DOGE and its White House compatriots are now taking on the Social Security Administration after gaining access to the most sensitive data held by the $1.3 trillion organization.

The move apparently led to a leadership shakeup this past weekend as the woman who had been the acting head of America's social safety net was replaced.

The rapid-fire developments raised immediate alarm bells across Washington about the program's short-term stability and the Musk team's access to Social Security numbers, medical histories, and earnings histories of every American.

"This is a fishing expedition," Nancy Altman, president of Social Security Works and a critic of Musk's move, charged in an interview Tuesday morning.

Altman said she is in touch with current Social Security employees and was told Musk's team has gained "access to everything." In her view, he could accomplish his stated goals of rooting out fraudulent claims without the blanket access he now appears to enjoy.

"I don't know what they want, but whatever they want, that's why we have privacy laws," she added."

 

Trump 2nd term live updates: Agencies caution federal workers on Musk's email

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"In an affidavit filed in federal court on Tuesday, a White House official clarified that Elon Musk is not the administrator of the newly formed entity -- seemingly contradicting public statements by Trump. Since announcing DOGE in December 2024, he has routinely referred to Musk as its leader."

 

Judge appears inclined to deny request to block DOGE's mass firings, access to data

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Chutkan noted that what she called DOGE's "unpredictable and scattershot" tactics made it harder for the state attorneys general to prove a concrete, immediate harm -- though she acknowledged the seriousness of the allegations levied by state attorneys general.

"DOGE appears to be moving in no sort of predictable and orderly fashion," Chutkan said. "This is essentially a private citizen directing an organization that's not a federal agency to have access to the entire workings of the federal government, fire, hire, slash, contract, terminate programs, all without apparently any congressional oversight."

 

https://www.npr.org/sections/shots-...5300052/federal-employees-layoffs-cdc-nih-fda

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"On Friday, CDC leadership told staff that 10% of the agency's workforce — about 1,300 employees — would be notified they'd be losing their jobs.

"I'm going to work tomorrow and I don't know who's employed," said one of the CDC staffers, who had yet to receive any official notification about exactly which employees in their division had lost their jobs.
President Donald Trump signs an executive order withholding federal funding from schools and universities that impose a COVID-19 vaccine mandate in the Oval Office on Feb. 14, 2025. Many of Trump's executive actions are facing legal challenges in the courts.
Politics
Courts block Trump's DOGE actions — chaos, panic not proving to be best legal strategy

At the National Institutes of Health, between 1,000 and 1,200 employees received notification Saturday night that they were being cut, two staffers with knowledge of the situation told NPR. This is a few hundred less than was expected."

 

European collective security drive.


U.K., Sweden say troops could head to post-war Ukraine as Trump fuels a European "collective security" drive - CBS News

 

Adams case and other Trump moves threaten to open corruption floodgates, experts say

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"Everett Kelley, the president of the American Federation of Government Employees representing federal workers, said the administration “abused” the probation status of workers “to conduct a politically driven mass firing spree, targeting employees not because of performance, but because they were hired before Trump took office.”"

 

Federal workers now risk losing their jobs if they accept a promotion. It could make their status probationary which Musk can use to fire them.

 

Adams case and other Trump moves threaten to open corruption floodgates, experts say

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"Coinciding with the shift on anti-corruption cases, the Trump administration has sought to undermine or ignore government offices Congress created in the aftermath of the Watergate scandal in the 1970s to check abuse and corruption inside federal agencies. Trump has fired 18 inspectors general, who probe possible fraud and abuse across the government. He dismissed the head of the Office of Government Ethics, which reviews possible financial conflicts of interest for high-level officials, as well as the head of the Office of Special Counsel, which is supposed to protect federal government whistleblowers from retaliation. Those moves are being challenged in court."

 

Adams case and other Trump moves threaten to open corruption floodgates, experts say

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"In a series of unprecedented actions, President Donald Trump and his deputies have scaled back or eliminated the government’s tools to ferret out and prosecute corruption, including efforts by foreign actors to interfere in American politics, experts and former officials say.

The administration’s actions, which come after years of mostly bipartisan support for an anti-corruption agenda, have shocked former prosecutors and anti-corruption advocacy groups. They say the administration’s approach threatens to open the floodgates to a surge in corruption in the United States and beyond.

“In his first weeks in office, Donald Trump has taken unprecedented action to invite corruption in the federal government and to undermine the guardrails meant to protect against it,” said a former federal corruption prosecutor, Noah Bookbinder, president of Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington, a nonprofit organization that says it works to expose corruption by government officials. “This is beyond troubling — it is an emergency,” he added."

 

When the pain hits home, Republicans balk at Trump's spending cuts and tariffs

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"Sen. Katie Britt, R-Ala., recently pushed back on the administration’s funding reductions under the National Institutes of Health. The University of Alabama at Birmingham is a major recipient of that money, which has helped make it the state’s largest employer.

Britt told AL.com that “a smart, targeted approach is needed in order to not hinder life-saving, groundbreaking research at high-achieving institutions like those in Alabama.”

Sen. Susan Collins, R-Maine, said the cap on indirect costs under NIH grants was “poorly conceived” and would impose “arbitrary cuts in funding for vital research at our Maine institutions.”

And Sen. Bill Cassidy, R-La., warned that universities that lack “big endowments” would lose out the most due to the NIH cuts."

 

Trump says he will impose 25% import tariffs on Mexico and Canada that he had delayed for 30 days.


Trump says tariffs on Canada and Mexico 'will go forward'

 

Britt told AL.com that “a smart, targeted approach is needed in order to not hinder life-saving, groundbreaking research at high-achieving institutions like those in Alabama.”

This is a place where the minimum wage is $7.50 per hr.