This is the weird and bad timeline.

I don't see any goatees.

Satire has been defeated by reality once again.

This is some Baudrillardian meta-humor.

The books still say "Berenstain Bears" so yeah, it's the weird timeline.

When the Department of Justice has been taken over by sycophants and the Supreme Court has surrendered, nothing is illegal for Trump.

It’s certainly illegal. I believe the law allows administrative fees, etc to cover costs. It doesn’t authorize fees as a source of income.

But who would have standing to challenge someone else’s visa in court? Maybe existing people trying to get a green card? Or other immigration rights activists?

The Burrito Supreme Court said that they and no other are the sole arbiter of what constitutes an "official act" by The President. And, that he is immune from prosecution for "official acts". Congress has simultaneously abdicated lawmaking and has decided to let the president make policy via executive orders. I think most people have forgotten E.O.s are merely directives to the executive branch departments about how to implement the laws congress passes. Or, at least they were. Now apparently they're royal decrees.

If the (Republican) president does it, it's not illegal.

You cant be arrested for white collar crime in America. Getting charged with a crime is for poor people only

Ok to be fair the eagle looks just as confused and distressed to be there as the rest of us

Yes, if you haven't scrolled to the bottom I highly recommend it.

Looks like the eagle is hundreds of PNG files on a javascript timer, and it's dropping frames.

Idiocracy was the good timeline. Where are you President Comancho? He at least knew when to let the smartest person in the room talk and had the best interest of his country at heart.

Nothing about this administration is serious.

Hello, time traveler from 2010

> Regardless of what side you are on, this country is bigger than one man.

Not anymore. It is now precisely the size, shape and texture of one man's ego.

> This branding seems flippant and unserious.

A groyper script kiddie named "Big Balls" had root access to the government's entire data infrastructure and just deleted shit at will, Trump's tariff policies were written by Grok using imaginary math, the head of the CDC doesn't think germs are real, the DOJ says Epstein never had a client list and Trump is definitely not a pedophile, the head of American intelligence is a Putin apologist, the Secretary of Defense is a lunatic podcaster trying to purge the military of "woke" and Trump is so much more rotten cabbage than man that he has to appear on tv by GenAI just so people still think he's a functioning human being. And he's definitely a pedophile.

We passed "flippant and unserious" miles and miles back. Can't even see it in the rear view mirror anymore.

Well he's gonna rename the USA to the UST, so then the Trump Gold Card makes sense right!?

The US has one of the largest militaries in the world and has nearly 75 year of experience in force projection around the world. No one is escaping what happens. It's just that he's turned the beast on it s people first. When it's done gorging itself on "traitors" it'll turn to empire building soon enough. Greed cannot be satisfied.

Yeah but that takes away from immigrants of those countries going through non-Trump-meme immigration paths?

weird they dont accept $Trump coin for this. it should be the only accepted form of payment, in fact.

Yeah it’s going to pretty badly screw up S Korean investment in US manufacturing. A pretty big own goal.

Technically, these guys aren’t residents since they’re only allowed to stay 270 days a year. Not sure what the deal is though.

9 months residency. They seem like very different products to me.

And we still have a little over three years to go.

All this because eggs were expensive and a black woman in the White House was unthinkable.

Don't fret too much. This has been in the making since at least [1933](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Business_Plot). Nixon moved it forward, but found enough conscience or fear to give in. Ford's pardon and the DoJ's failure to prosecute rounding out the idea of not actually holding our leaders materially accountable. Then Reagan comes in and torches the economic basis of the federal government, gutting its ability to audit the wealthy or effectively regulate white collar crime. He also quietly deregulates broadcast media leading to a massive consolidation throughout the 90's and oughts. Clinton, the centrist he was, let critical economic safeguards lapse. The gaslighting begins in earnest with Newt Gingrich leading. Then the world changed and a document written at least as far back as the 80s but never successfully adopted was renamed "The Patriot Act" and rammed through on an "emergency" basis and which laid the groundwork for the erosion of civil rights. "Free speech zones" enters the American lexicon, anywhere within 100 miles of the US international border is now subject to searches without a warrant. All the while media consolidation makes it possible for organization to push a fantastical right-wing agenda. The Overton window slides to the right. "Terrorism" becomes not just household but daily word. People became comfortable with the military, they were everywhere and in everything. And then the internet exploded in popularity and network connections and the meme wars began.

The battle was lost because only one group understood the battle was occurring.

We didn't start the fire.

This has been going on for 10 years. I'm actually surprised it has withstood as much as it did. As they say, these things tend to move slowly, and then all at once.

The main problems seems to be that in order to stop these things, you have to recognize them well ahead of when the metastasize (what's happening now). We had several obvious opportunities where the call was easy, and we couldn't make the right call every time.

The first was in 2016 when Trump revealed his abject racism and sexism, two qualities that are necessarily required for a fascist movement. If we had rejected him on the basis that he sexually assaulted women, which we knew in 2016 before the first election, we could have averted this whole disaster.

Then we had another opportunity in 2020, when he had organized an insurrection against his own government to prevent the peaceful transfer of power. At that time, we could have arrested him, convicted him, and also impeached him, barring him from office forever. If we had done that, we could again have averted this whole disaster.

Then we had a THIRD opportunity in 2024. I don't need to go over that recent history, but it suffices to say at that time we knew he was a racist, sexist, insurrectionist and we STILL voted him into power.

So I don't think the system was all that fragile. It's just, it can't bear the load of so much stupidity and self sabotage. No matter how robust the system it can't survive if you just invite the vampires in the front door!

This is new. The president's face is on it. That alone should scream, "Something's very much not right!"

That’s part of the law.

If we want a $5m visa then propose a law. Trump by himself doesn’t make laws. Bonus for a law: it keeps the policy going after this administration.

Who exactly is that good for?

Maybe it’s a great idea. But we make changes like this through laws. Not imperial fiat from dear leader.

Another argument for why it's good: if you're rich, you can either pay lots of money to an immigration lawyer to make sure your visa gets approved, or you could cut out the middleman and pay the government directly. Why wouldn't they just cut out the middleman?

I have a feeling Trump has a lot of crooked buddies that can pay $1m and will get preferential treatment.

And if it’s a good idea, make it a law so it’s harder for future administrations to undo.

This is bad. Borders should be open.

Sorry, no. Malta and Portugal had similar programs. The people who came were rent seekers an oligarchs in their own countries. Portugal had a massive amount of Chinese, and not the kind who build an electric vehicle factory.

Trump of course is familiar with these circles, so it is no problem for him.

> if you can afford to pay $1 million, then you are almost certainly going to be a net benefit

Have a look at the outcomes in other countries that do this.

There's usually so many loopholes that any economic benefits just don't materialise.

Specifically govts usually specify investment, but then the applicants just buy assets or property that doesn't actually help the recipient country.

NZ gave a passport to Peter Thiel. I can only hope our government introduces a taxation law specific to him!

Why would getting a lot of millionaires to your country be better than getting a lot of hard working but poor people? Wouldn't it matter mostly how they got their money?

Because I am willing to bet that Donald Trump will be able to attract mostly crooked people who know how to game the system, not people who have amassed their fortunes by hard work.

So the son of some oligarch more worthy to immigrate than a poor but brilliant PhD?

Wealth = merit?

MAGA - Make animations great again

Can I reuse the eagle animation on my own website, using trumpcard.gov to serve the images? A PoC would help.

And it's clearly AI-generated. As if one couldn't find a video of a bald eagle.

As the animation loops it uses the same set of images over again. But as they all have a Cache-Control header with a value of "public, max-age=0, must-revalidate" the browser makes another request for every one of the images, every loop of the animation. It results in transfer of something of the order of 0.6MB/sec, with no end.

> I don't really see why we shouldn't have programs like this if there is vetting

We should, but the program shouldn't be named after a current president. Note that it's an official .gov site, not a .com site.

Also, the payment should of course go to the Treasury, not to Trump or his party.

Yeah, if you peel off Trump's name, the insane branding, and the fact that this seems to have been implemented completely extra-legally, I don't hate it.

Why should we have programs that specifically allow wealthy people to cut the line?

It's not that people like Ghadaffi or Sadam were known for their good taste haha. Trump's affinity for dictator chic is not entirely out of step.

Me too. Reminds me of the Apple Garamond family Apple used to use in the 90s, though I'm too sleepy by now to check if they're the same. No idea why they stopped using it, it's beautiful.

He's been talking about doing it since he was inaugurated.

More golden toilets.

I remember watching the movie Idiocracy and laughing, thinking something like that could never happen to us. I can’t watch it anymore because it’s too close to reality