Editor's Choice: Scroll below for our monthly blend of mainstream and December 2025 news and views
Note: Excerpts are from the authors' words except for subheads and occasional "Editor's notes" such as this.
Dec. 21
New York Times, News Analysis: Trump Takes America’s ‘Imperial Presidency’ to a New Level, Peter Baker, Dec. 21, 2025. In his first year back in the White House, President Trump has greatly expanded executive power while embracing the trappings of royalty in ways not seen in the modern era.
When President Trump hosted the crown prince of Saudi Arabia last month (as shown above in a New York Times photo), he pulled out all the stops. To the traditional pomp of a formal White House visit, he added a few even fancier touches: a stirring military flyover, a procession of black horses and long, regal tables for the lavish dinner in the East Room instead of the typical round tables.
For surprised White House veterans who were paying attention, the unusual flourishes looked a little familiar. Just two months earlier, King Charles III of Britain welcomed Mr. Trump for a state visit that included, yes, a stirring military flyover, a procession of black horses and a long, regal table for the lavish dinner in St. George’s Hall at Windsor Palace.
In his first year back in office, Mr. Trump has unabashedly adopted the trappings of royalty just as he has asserted virtually unbridled power to transform American government and society to his liking. In both pageantry and policy, Mr. Trump has established a new, more audacious version of the imperial presidency that goes far beyond even the one associated with Richard M. Nixon, for whom the term was popularized half a century ago.
He no longer holds back, or is held back, as in the first term (as shown above in a relatively subdued ceremony with autocrat rulers of Saudi Arabia and Egypt celebrating their global power).
Trump 2.0 is Trump 1.0 unleashed. The gold trim in the Oval Office, the demolition of the East Wing to be replaced by a massive ballroom, the plastering of his name and face on government buildings and now even the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, the designation of his own birthday as a free-admission holiday at national parks — it all speaks to a personal aggrandizement and accumulation of power with meager resistance from Congress or the Supreme Court.
Nearly 250 years after American colonists threw off their king, this is arguably the closest the country has come during a time of general peace to the centralized authority of a monarch. Mr. Trump takes it upon himself to reinterpret a constitutional amendment and to eviscerate agencies and departments created by Congress. He dictates to private institutions how to run their affairs. He sends troops into American streets and wages an unauthorized war against nonmilitary boats in the Caribbean. He openly uses law enforcement for what his own chief of staff calls “score settling” against his enemies, he dispenses pardons to favored allies and he equates criticism to sedition punishable by death.ImagePeople seated at three long banquet tables in the White House.President Trump hosted the crown prince of Saudi Arabia for a dinner at the White House that had all the trappings of his visit with King Charles III of Britain.Credit...Kenny Holston/The New York Times
Mr. Trump’s reinvention of the presidency has altered the balance of power in Washington in profound ways that may endure long after he departs the scene. Authority once seized by one branch of government is rarely given back willingly. Actions that once shocked the system can eventually become seen as normal. While other presidents pushed the limits, Mr. Trump has blown right through them and dared anyone to stop him.
“His second term in many respects represents not simply a break from presidential norms and expectations,” said Matthew Dallek, a political historian at George Washington University. “It’s also a culmination of 75 years in which presidents have reached for more and more power.”
It is also a culmination of four years of planning between Mr. Trump’s first term and his second. The last time around, he was a political novice who did not understand how government worked and surrounded himself with advisers who tried to restrain his most extreme instincts. This time, he arrived in office with a plan to accomplish what he did not in his first term, and a team of like-minded loyalists intent on remaking the country.
“The president knew exactly what he wanted to do coming into office this time,” said Jason Miller, a longtime Trump adviser. “Now the president had four years under his belt. He knows exactly how everything works. He knows all the international players. He knows all the national players. He knew what strategies and tactics worked the first go around and what strategies didn’t work.”
Epstein-Trump Scandals, Cover-ups
Everyone Is Entitled To My Own Opinion, Commentary: The DOJ is already playing games with the Dead Pedo Bestie files, Jeff Tiedrich, 
right, Dec. 21, 2025. Sleazy photos of Dear Leader are mysteriously disappearing from the Epstein website
NEW YORK (AP) — At least 16 files disappeared from the Justice Department’s public webpage for documents related to Jeffrey Epstein — including a photograph showing President Donald Trump — less than a day after they were posted, with no explanation from the government and no notice to the public.
Stuff that was already on line is now disappearing — ‘with no explanation.’
Fortunately for us, the internet never forgets — so we can give you at least one explanation:
Someone .... accidentally posted a photo of Dear Leader posing with bikini-clad teenagers. Here’s ‘photo 468’ from the original collection that was posted on Friday. Let’s zoom in on the bottom left of that pic.
Oh my. some bleary-eyed FBI Special Agent who’d spent a month working 20-hour days, scouring every photo for appearances of Dear Leader, missed this one.
Photo 468 is now gone. if you click on the directory listing for it, you get an error message.
Hey, it’s pretty weird how Jeffrey Epstein kept photos of Donny with teenage girls in his desk drawer, isn’t it? You don’t suppose Donny’s dead pedo bestie was planning on using that shit as kompromat, do you?
Donald Trump and his future wife Melania, a former nude model and beauty contestant granted U.S. citizenship on a special "genius" immigration grant. They pose along with their friends Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell, with the latter now imprisoned as Epstein's recruiter, lover and fellow rapist of young girls but granted special VIP privileges in her minimum security federal facility (photo via Getty Images).
Here’s another photo (above) that got scrubbed from the DOJ web site. Why? This photo has been in the public domain for years. we’ve all seen it a hundred times.
Meanwhile, Donny’s minions are doing their best to smear Bill Clinton as the real criminal in the Epstein Saga. They front-loaded the first batch of the Dead Pedo Bestie Files with as many photos of Bill as they could. [In the version of the photo released by Trump's Justice Department, the face of the children in the below right-hand corner are blacked out, as if they were victims of Clinton and/or Jackson. As shown in the photo released below, they were actually Jackson's own children attending a public fundraiser with him.]
Here’s White House Deputy Press Secretary Abigail Johnson, gleefully implying that Clinton and Michael Jackson were cavorting with ‘victims and/or minors.’
“Per the Epstein Files Transparency Act, DOJ was specifically instructed only to redact the faces of victims and/or minors. Here is a picture of Bill Clinton with his arm around Michael Jackson, and redacted individuals.”
This photo doesn’t even have anything to do with Jeffrey Epstein. It’s Clinton with Michael Jackson and his children, and Diana Ross and her son, taken at a fundraiser in DC in 2003.
Look, if Bill Clinton was doing sick shit with minors, nail his ass to the wall. Chuck him the fuck into prison and throw away the key. I don’t think you’ll find one person on the left who would say anything different. But don’t you dare gun up fake evidence.
That’s the difference between us and them. we want justice, no matter where the chips fall. They want Dear Leader protected at all costs.
Tell me, when Donny sent that birthday card (above) to his dead pedo bestie with the poem about the ‘wonderful secrets they shared,’ do you think this is what he was talking about?
Here’s another question: do words even have meanings any more? I ask, because look at the twaddle Pam Bondi, right, posted to Elon’s Nazi Bar. .
...She’s calling the release of heavily-redacted documents ‘transparency.’
Attorney General Pamela Bondi@AGPamBondiPresident Trump is leading the most transparent administration in American history. By moving to unseal these documents, we hope to give the American people more answers about that fateful day in Butler, Pennsylvania. WDPAnews @WDPAnews Earlier today, the Department of Justice received court approval to disclose to Congress documents gathered as part of the FBI’s investigation of Thomas Crooks and his attempt to assassinate President Trump. The Department of Justice is committed to transparency, following the12:52 AM · Dec 20, 2025 · 6.1M Views14K Replies · 1.67K Reposts · 9.33K Likes
Cool story, Pam. let’s fact-check your claim of ‘transparency.’
Congratulations are in order — because Pam’s outdone George Orwell. To ‘war is peace,’ ‘ignorance is strength,’ and ‘freedom is slavery,’ we can now add ‘censorship is transparency.’
Look at what else? They forced Jake Tapper to commit a journalism.....come on, people. Jake doesn’t want to be scrolling though his phone, showing you redacted files. He’s got sixteen more books to write about how Joe Biden is icky and old and smells bad and probably doesn’t even realize that he’s already dead.
“Talk about blacking out," Tapper said. "I don’t know if we can get a close-up of my phone. this is one of the documents that the Justice Department released. it’s a hundred pages. this is what it looks like. it’s all black. it’s just one hundred pages of redaction. that’s the ‘transparency’ we’re getting here.”
Let’s gif .... for posterity’s sake:
Pam Bondi’s DOJ was required by law — one that Dear Leader signed — to release everything by December 19. there were no if, and, or buts. the law didn’t say if it was too hard to get the job done in time — let’s say because there were so many references to Donny that had to be scrubbed — they get a mulligan.
They’re not supposed to crap out some unreadable tiny fraction of the files and pinky-swear to release the rest of it any day now.
Unfortunately, legal accountability for suppressing the Dead Pedo Bestie Files is going to be hard to come by. sure, Congress could submit a criminal referral for obstruction of justice — but do you know who any such referral would be sent to? Pam Bondi. good luck with that.
But here’s one workable option that’s already on the table: impeach ..... Bondi.
“DEVELOPING: Reps. Ro Khanna and Thomas Massie say they’re drafting articles of impeachment against AG Pam Bondi over the illegal handling of the Epstein files. This just escalated fast. Accountability is coming.”
Sounds like a plan.
Mobology, Commentary on Mob Tactics: The Republicans are now using Bill Clinton as their foil in the Epstein scandal, Dan E. Moldea, Dec. 21, 2025. History shows that when the GOP demands showdowns on the issue of morality, the Democrats should gladly oblige. With the help of AI, here are lessons learned from my role in the motherlode of opposition research during the Clinton impeachment drama 27 years ago.
To be clear, during the impeachment drama, Flynt and I had no communication—directly or indirectly, on or off the record—with anyone at the White House.
For my full explanation of the events leading to the impeachment battle and its immediate aftermath, see:
* The suicide of Vincent Foster: Investigating the political firestorm that followed this tragedy
* Ken Starr and the OIC leaks: A prosecutorial goon squad targets President Clinton
* The Clinton Impeachment and The Flynt Project: At play in the fields of scandal
Also, in a separate matter, see:
* On the tragic D.C. Madam (3): “So tell me about David Vitter”
Lesson learned? . . . . Amid its “investigation” of the Jeffrey Epstein scandal, the Republican-controlled U.S. House Oversight Committee, led by Rep. James Comer (R-Kentucky), has targeted Bill and Hillary Clinton in a blatant attempt to deflect any and all attention away from Donald Trump and/or whomever he is attempting to protect.
Advice to the Democrats: When the Republicans demand a public showdown on the issue of morality, give it to them.
A question posed to the top AI sites—ChatGPT, Claude, Copilot, Gemini, Grok, and Perplexity: “Did Dan Moldea help President Clinton during the 1998-1999 impeachment process?”
Below, the first site, Perplexity, had the most accurate summary, which is followed by statements about my related work that appeared in four published books by well-known and respected authors. The comments from the other AI sites follow. All of these AI summaries—none of which come close to telling the whole story—are unedited.
* Perplexity
Yes. Dan Moldea actively aided Clinton’s defense effort during the impeachment fight, but he did so as an outside investigative journalist rather than a formal White House adviser or staffer.
Public defense of Clinton
Moldea emerged as a vocal defender of Clinton after researching and writing about Vince Foster’s death, concluding it was a suicide and that a network of anti‑Clinton activists and journalists had tried to weaponize the case against the administration. When the Lewinsky scandal broke in 1998, Moldea “decided to take sides” and publicly backed the president while attacking the fairness and legality of Independent Counsel Kenneth Starr’s investigation in media appearances and speeches.
Letters from an American, Historical Commentary: December 12, 2025 [Scoffing at Epstein Transpanerncy Act and Epstein victims], Heather Cox Richardson, right, 
Dec. 21, 2025. On November 19, 2025, Congress passed H.R. 4405, the Epstein Files Transparency Act, and although there was none of the usual publicity and fanfare President Donald Trump enjoys around a bill signing, the White House said that Trump signed it the same day, making it a law.
It required the United States Attorney General to “release all documents and records in possession of the Department of Justice relating to Jeffrey Epstein” no later than 30 days after the date the measure became law. It required that the Department of Justice “make publicly available in a searchable and downloadable format all unclassified records, documents, communications, and investigative materials in the possession of the Department of Justice, including the Federal Bureau of Investigation and United States Attorneys’ Offices, that relate to: Jeffrey Epstein including all investigations, prosecutions, or custodial matters…. Ghislaine Maxwell…. Flight logs or travel records, including but not limited to manifests, itineraries, pilot records, and customs or immigration documentation, for any aircraft, vessel, or vehicle owned, operated, or used by Jeffrey Epstein or any related entity…. Individuals, including government officials, named or referenced in connection with Epstein’s criminal activities, civil settlements, immunity or plea agreements, or investigatory proceedings…. Entities (corporate, nonprofit, academic, or governmental) with known or alleged ties to Epstein’s trafficking or financial networks.”
It required the release of “[a]ny immunity deals, non-prosecution agreements, plea bargains, or sealed settlements involving Epstein or his associates” and “[i}nternal DOJ communications, including emails, memos, meeting notes, concerning decisions to charge, not charge, investigate, or decline to investigate Epstein or his associates.”
It required the Department of Justice to produce “[a]ll communications, memoranda, directives, logs, or metadata concerning the destruction, deletion, alteration, misplacement, or concealment of documents, recordings, or electronic data related to Epstein, his associates, his detention and death, or any investigative files.” It demanded “[d]ocumentation of Epstein’s detention or death, including incident reports, witness interviews, medical examiner files, autopsy reports, and written records detailing the circumstances and cause of death.”
The law established that the Department of Justice could withhold only information that was classified or that contained “personally identifiable information of victims or victims’ personal and medical files and similar files the disclosure of which would constitute a clearly unwarranted invasion of personal privacy”; images that “depict or contain child sexual abuse materials… [or] would jeopardize an active federal investigation or ongoing prosecution, provided that such withholding is narrowly tailored and temporary”; images that “depict or contain images of death, physical abuse, or injury of any person; or…contain information specifically authorized under criteria established by an Executive order to be kept secret in the interest of national defense or foreign policy and are in fact properly classified pursuant to such Executive order.”
The law required that the Department of Justice must justify all redactions with “a written justification published in the Federal Register and submitted to Congress.”
Otherwise, it said, records could not be “withheld, delayed, or redacted on the basis of embarrassment, reputational harm, or political sensitivity, including to any government official, public figure, or foreign dignitary.”
The deadline for the release of that information was yesterday, December 19.
In the afternoon, the department began to release the required materials. But despite the law’s specification that the department release ALL the records, it released just a fraction of the required materials, saying it would release more later. Missing were any of the FBI interviews with survivors or internal Justice Department memos about charging decisions.
There are very few images of Epstein with Trump, despite their close relationship. Instead, the files focused on former Democratic president Bill Clinton, whose office responded with a statement saying: “The White House hasn’t been hiding these files for months only to dump them late on a Friday to protect Bill Clinton. This is about shielding themselves from what comes next, or from what they’ll try and hide forever. So they can release as many grainy 20–plus-year-old photos as they want, but this isn’t about Bill Clinton. Never has, never will be. Even Susie Wiles said Donald Trump was wrong about Bill Clinton.”
And then there were the redactions. So much of the material was redacted that, in front of television cameras, Jake Tapper of CNN scrolled through an entirely-blacked-out 100-page document on his phone and said: “That’s the transparency we’re getting here.”
Today observers caught that for all that the Department of Justice had omitted materials the law required they produce, Justice Department staffers had inserted unrelated material: a photo of former Democratic president Bill Clinton, pop music star Michael Jackson, and music legend Diana Ross, with children, suggesting that the three were associated with sex abuser Jeffery Epstein. The image was quickly identified by social media users not as a private image from the Epstein files, but as a publicly available image from a 2003 fundraiser. The children were not Epstein victims, but rather Jackson’s and Ross’s own kids.
Then it turned out, as Michael R. Sisak and David B. Caruso of the Associated Press reported, at least 16 files that had initially been posted on the Justice Department’s public website have disappeared without explanation, including one that showed multiple photographs of Trump with Epstein.
Democratic lawmakers Representative Robert Garcia of California, the top Democrat on the House Oversight Committee, and Representative Jamie Raskin of Maryland, released a statement yesterday after Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche said that the Department of Justice would not meet the deadline for the release of the Epstein files established by law.
“Donald Trump and the Department of Justice are now violating federal law as they continue covering up the facts and the evidence about Jeffrey Epstein’s decades-long, billion-dollar, international sex trafficking ring,” the two wrote. “For months, [Attorney General] Pam Bondi has denied survivors the transparency and accountability they have demanded and deserve and has defied the Oversight Committee’s subpoena. The Department of Justice is now making clear it intends to defy Congress itself, even as it gives star treatment to Epstein’s convicted co-conspirator, Ghislaine Maxwell.
“Courts around the country have repeatedly intervened when this Administration has broken the law. We are now examining all legal options in the face of this violation of federal law.”
Officials in the Trump administration have been treating members of Congress with contempt since Trump took office, deliberately flouting the 1974 Impoundment Act that prohibits presidents from unilaterally deciding to withhold funds Congress has appropriated, for example, and ignoring the 1973 War Powers Act that requires congressional approval for military actions that last more than 60 days.
Now, with their disregard for the Epstein Files Transparency Act, they are also treating voters, especially their own MAGA voters who stood behind Trump because he promised to release the Epstein files, with outright contempt.
New York Times, Live Updates: Trump Administration Live Updates: Justice Dept. Reposts Epstein Files Image Showing Trump Picture, Devlin Barrett, Dec. 21, 2025. Where Things Stand:
Epstein files: The Justice Department reposted an image containing a photo of President Trump that it had removed from an online collection of files on the convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. The department said it reposted the image on Sunday after it was re-examined and found not to contain images of Mr. Epstein’s victims. Todd Blanche, the deputy attorney general, said earlier that department officials were “not redacting information around President Trump.” Read more ›The Justice Department has republished an image from the Epstein files that it had released in an online collection on Friday and then removed, which showed a number of photographs on a credenza in one of Epstein’s houses, including one of Donald J. Trump. The removal of the image had raised questions about whether the department was trying to shield the president.
Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche said on Sunday that the image was pulled down over concerns that it might contain images of victims.
“After the review, it was determined there is no evidence that any Epstein victims are depicted in the photograph, and it has been reposted without any alteration or redaction,” the Justice Department said in a statement on social media.
The U.S. Coast Guard is pursuing an oil tanker linked to Venezuela.
The U.S. Coast Guard on Saturday tried to intercept an oil tanker linked to Venezuela that is now fleeing in the Caribbean Sea, according to three U.S. officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive operation, days after President Trump said he would crack down on sanctioned vessels involved in the country’s oil trade.
The tanker, called the Bella 1, was en route to pick up oil in Venezuela and was not carrying cargo, according to one of the officials and ship-tracking data. The tanker has been under U.S. sanctions since last year for transporting Iranian oil, which federal authorities say is sold to finance terrorism.
When U.S. forces approached the Bella 1 late on Saturday, it was not flying a valid national flag, the officials said, making it a stateless vessel liable to be boarded at sea under international law.
American authorities had obtained a seizure warrant from a federal magistrate judge, which would allow them to take possession of the ship, two of the officials said. The warrant had been sought because of the Bella 1’s previous involvement in the Iranian oil trade, not because of its links to Venezuela.
But the ship did not submit to being boarded and continued sailing, one of the officials said. A second official referred to the situation as “an active pursuit.” The Coast Guard had successfully boarded another tanker earlier on Saturday, and the United States had taken possession of a third tanker on Dec. 10 that is now at port in Texas.
The U.S. actions represented a significant escalation of Mr. Trump’s pressure campaign against President Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela. They come as Mr. Maduro has ordered Venezuelan Navy vessels to accompany some oil tankers leaving his country — raising the possibility of an armed confrontation at sea. The Bella 1 had not yet reached Venezuelan waters and did not have such an escort, according to one of the officials and ship-tracking data.
Mr. Trump has accused Mr. Maduro of flooding the United States with fentanyl and of stealing oil from American companies, without providing evidence. Venezuela’s economy depends on exporting oil, and the seizures are an attempt to squeeze this vital trade.
Earlier on Saturday morning, the Coast Guard had stopped and boarded a second vessel, the Centuries, which had recently picked up oil in Venezuela and was headed east. Two people inside Venezuela’s oil industry said the cargo belonged to an oil trader based in China.
Unlike in the Bella 1 case, U.S. forces did not have a warrant to seize the Centuries. It was unclear how long the United States intended to detain the vessel, which was flying under a Panamanian flag. A U.S. official said that the Coast Guard was trying to determine whether the ship’s Panama registration was valid.
Mr. Trump signaled on Tuesday that more seizures were coming, announcing a “complete blockade” on oil tankers that were traveling to and from Venezuela and were under U.S. sanctions. But the Centuries does not appear on a public list of entities under U.S. sanctions maintained by the Treasury Department.
The events have added to the uncertainty surrounding the Trump administration’s ultimate intentions. If the United States continues to allow most vessels to freely enter and leave Venezuelan ports, it is not a real blockade, which would constitute an act of war. Instead, the operation would more closely resemble a law enforcement action.
Kristi Noem, the homeland security secretary, said in a social media post on Saturday afternoon that the Coast Guard had “apprehended” a tanker that had been docked in Venezuela, seemingly referring to the Centuries.
“The United States will continue to pursue the illicit movement of sanctioned oil that is used to fund narco terrorism in the region,” she wrote. “We will find you, and we will stop you.”
Ms. Noem also posted a video that appeared to show U.S. forces rappelling from a helicopter onto the ship’s deck.
The White House declined to comment on the boarding of the Centuries and did not immediately respond to questions about the interception of the Bella 1.
In response to the boarding of the Centuries, the Venezuelan government said that the country “denounces and categorically rejects the theft and hijacking of another private vessel transporting Venezuelan oil, as well as the forced disappearance of its crew.”
The ships being targeted are part of a ghost fleet of tankers that move oil from Iran, Venezuela and Russia in violation of sanctions imposed by the United States and other countries. Shipping and energy experts estimate that these ghost tankers make up as much as 20 percent of the global tanker fleet.
MeidasTouch Network, Analysis: Sunday Morning Message from MeidasTouch Founder, Ben Meiselas, right, Dec. 21, 2025. It’s the Sunday before Christmas. As you know, the Sunday post is my favorite, where I get to grab a cup of coffee with you and reflect on the week.
Obviously, I am reflecting on Trump’s awful cover-up of the Epstein files. In my prior career as a litigator, when I brought down billion-dollar Ponzi schemes or exposed corruption inside police departments with officers actually selling drugs, the cover-ups were far more sophisticated. In those instances, the criminals knew that if they were caught, they would be brought to justice, so they went through intricate ways to hide their schemes.
This is not the case with this criminal Trump regime. They have destroyed the Justice Department. They have a supine right-wing Supreme Court that gave Trump “absolute immunity.”
The criminal regime shows no concern for the laws they don’t enforce and openly break. In plain view, criminal Trump has violated the Epstein Transparency Act. In the small batch of documents they did produce—which is about 5 percent of the overall files, and where most of what was produced was entirely redacted—they have now deleted documents made public that included a photo of Trump. The criminal Trump regime has said the men who are implicated in Epstein’s child sex trafficking ring are the “new victims” and must be protected at all costs.
We have a criminal regime in the White House that is openly and willfully covering up a child sex trafficking ring. We have a criminal regime in the White House led by a convicted felon. Led by someone who has been found liable for sexual abuse and who is on tape bragging about sexually assaulting women. Led by someone who has been a lifelong fraud. Led by someone who has bankrupted company after company.
We know Trump’s name is in the files. We know Trump, Epstein, and Ghislaine Maxwell were close friends. This is not a point that can be disputed. What do you think they were doing together during that period of time—a period when they were also hanging out with other men who led so-called model agencies that were being used for grooming girls, with some of those men also dying under unusual circumstances?
It’s not just the cover-up of the Epstein files on display this week. It’s the cover-up of everything this week. There’s the cover-up of Trump’s health, with the refusal to turn over his MRI reports and credible medical information. Some are speculating he has dementia or early signs of Alzheimer’s, and his performance at a speech in North Carolina at the end of the week raised even more red flags. The White House’s claim that the bandages on his hand and the discoloration are from “many handshakes” is yet another example of how bad their lies are.
Then, of course, there is the cover-up of the video showing the United States military murdering survivors of a boat strike on September 2 off the coast of Venezuela. And speaking of Venezuela, the gangster Trump regime continues to seize tanker ships off the coast, trying to provoke a response that could be used as a pretext for war. The criminal regime desperately wants war to distract from its failures at home.
The American people don’t want war. The American people want healthcare. The American people want affordable things. The American people want to be paid a wage with dignity and be able to afford a home. We also want transparency and a government that follows the Constitution and supports democracy. The Trump regime and MAGA have betrayed the American people. Trump and MAGA literally shut down Congress and took an early vacation to deprive the American people of needed extensions of the Affordable Care Act subsidies.
With all of this going on, and as I finish my cup of coffee, the word I continue to think about in how the people have responded to all of this is “resiliency.” It’s remarkable how our institutions have largely bent the knee or been complicit in this madness and criminality—but what never bent or gave an inch was the people of this country.
Over the past year, the people of this country have made it clear we don’t want a dictatorship. We don’t want an oligarchy that subjugates us. We don’t want our books banned or our neighbors disappeared off the streets. We don’t want a mad king ruling by social media post and bragging about passing cognitive exams by recognizing the distinction between a giraffe and a hippopotamus. We don’t want to be allies with Putin. We don’t want to pull out of NATO or cancel funding for pediatric cancer. We don’t want this.
What I am most proud of is working with you to build a new force for good that stands up to these criminals. It was critical that we get the truth out and keep the people informed and united. I am thrilled we inspired a new generation of independent media that is meeting the moment. I am thrilled that we held the line—and will continue to hold the line—with you by our side.
Now I am getting all emotional on this Sunday post. You see what happens when I write these a little later than usual… OK, on that note, I have to record my next video. Thanks for all you do. I appreciate all you do, and I’m honored to call you a friend.
If you aren’t yet a subscriber, please become a subscriber today and help grow this platform. We are still leading Fox, and we know next year the competition will be fierce. We need all the help we can get. Let’s keep fighting.
MeidasTouch Network, Analysis: Lawyer For Eleven Epstein Survivors Has Warning for Trump, Ben Meiselas, right, Dec. 21, 2025. My interview with Arick Fudali, who represents eleven Epstein survivors, about his the survivors' response to Trump’s cover-up of the files.
I spoke this week with attorney Arick Fudali, who represents eleven survivors of Jeffrey Epstein’s abuse, about what the Trump administration has labeled its “release” of the Epstein files. It was a devastating account of how power continues to protect itself by hiding behind the very people it harmed.Subscribed
As many predicted, the Trump administration did not meet the requirements of the Epstein Files Transparency Act. The law is not ambiguous. It requires the release of all unclassified Epstein-related records in a searchable format, with any redactions narrowly tailored and legally justified. What the Department of Justice produced instead was a nonfunctional website, thousands of unlabeled files, and a vague promise that this was merely an “initial” step.
The DOJ has attempted to justify this failure by claiming it is acting to protect victims. That assertion is not only legally incorrect. It is morally offensive.
As Fudali told me, survivors’ names are being invoked as a shield for secrecy rather than as a mandate for transparency. The result is that survivors are once again used, not supported. “This is nothing new for them,” Fudali said. “They’ve been wronged by administration after administration, Justice Department after Justice Department, for decades.”
The administration’s conduct is particularly glaring given what we know about the scope of the material being withheld. Public reporting confirms that the FBI and DOJ possess terabytes of Epstein-related data and that tens of thousands of hours were spent reviewing those materials earlier this year. Additional teams of national security lawyers were reportedly pulled into the process. After all of that, the public was handed a digital maze that, at least initially, did not even allow basic name searches.
For survivors, this is a continuation of trauma. Fudali described the current moment as psychologically torturous, reopening wounds for people who have already endured the worst forms of abuse and intimidation. The release was supposed to offer closure. Instead, it has become the beginning of another long battle.
That pattern extends beyond documents. Survivors were not consulted when the DOJ transferred Ghislaine Maxwell from a maximum-security prison to a minimum-security facility. She remains the only person convicted in connection with Epstein’s trafficking operation, despite decades of credible allegations and investigations. The message to survivors is unmistakable: accountability is negotiable.
Fudali’s work underscores how deep that failure runs. One of the survivors he represents, known publicly as Rosa, was trafficked from Uzbekistan by Jean-Luc Brunel under the guise of modeling opportunities, Fudali says. When she arrived in the United States, she was introduced to Epstein while he was wearing an ankle monitor, the product of a plea deal that should never have existed. Had Epstein been fully prosecuted years earlier, Rosa would never have encountered him.
Instead, Epstein used her immigration status, isolation, and fear as tools of control. According to Fudali, that kind of coercion was not incidental. Epstein identified each victim’s vulnerabilities and exploited them relentlessly, threatening family members, livelihoods, and legal status. Many survivors, he said, continue to live in fear long after Epstein’s death, still convinced that his power extends beyond the grave.
What is often lost in the public discourse is the scale and nature of Epstein’s abuse. While there were instances involving other powerful men, Fudali said that Epstein primarily trafficked victims for himself, sometimes abusing multiple girls a day for years. The fixation on political scorekeeping obscures the reality that this was a system built on serial violence, intimidation, and impunity.
The administration’s document dump mirrors that abuse in form, if not in kind. Thousands of files with no context, no organization, and massive redactions that extend far beyond what is legally permissible are not transparency. They are obfuscation. In civil litigation, such tactics are recognized for what they are: attempts to hide the truth in plain sight.
The question now is enforcement. What happens when the very institutions charged with upholding the law are the ones violating it? Fudali made clear that litigation is not off the table. He has already sued the FBI over its historic failures and is exploring further legal action to compel compliance, including possible intervention before federal judges who already have jurisdiction over related matters.
The survivors are not backing down. “They’re the only reason we’ve gotten this far,” Fudali said. “And we’re not going to stop fighting.”
That, ultimately, is the point the administration seems to misunderstand. Survivors are not a convenient excuse for secrecy. They are the reason the law exists. Transparency is not a threat to justice here. It is the only path to it.
Global News
New York Times, Land Grab: Israel’s Escalating Campaign for Control of the West Bank, Michael D. Shear, Daniel Berehulak, Leanne Abraham and Fatima AbdulKarim, Dec. 20, 2025 (interactive). Israeli seizure of Palestinian lands, often brutally, has accelerated, raising doubts about the prospects of a peaceful solution to the conflict.
Every Saturday, sheep owned by Jewish settlers march through the olive groves that Rezeq Abu Naim and his family have tended for generations, crushing tree limbs and damaging roots. The extremist settlers, armed and sometimes masked, lead their herds to drink from the family’s scant water supplies while Mr. Abu Naim watches from the ramshackle tents of Al Mughayir, where he lives above the valley.
“I beg you, I beg you. God, just let us be,’” Mr. Abu Naim recalled telling settlers during a recent confrontation. “Just go away. We don’t want any problems.”
Vast stretches of his family’s farm and wheat have been seized by Israeli settlers who have set up outposts, illegal encampments that can eventually grow to become large settlements, on the nearby hills.
New roads cut through the land on which his own flock of sheep graze — and settlers routinely steal the animals, he said. Six months ago, a masked settler armed with a gun broke into his family home at 3 a.m., he recalled. He described raiders tearing through his son’s nearby home at night last December, slashing tents and stealing solar panels.
The family takes turns at night guarding their sheep against attacks from settlers. On a recent day, we found Mr. Abu Naim resting on pillows, a portable radio pressed to his ear listening for regional news.
Fair Observer, EU to freeze €210bn in Russian assets indefinitely, Dec. 21, 2025. Frozen Russian Assets And The Moment Of Truth For The World Order
Frozen Rubles: How did we get here? What has the US done?
On Friday, December 12, the European Union decided to freeze Russian central bank assets indefinitely. This decision is the result of a process that started right after Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine back in February 2022.
In the immediate aftermath of the invasion, Western governments acted quickly, freezing about $300 billion in Russian government reserves held overseas. Most of that — about $246 billion — is held in Europe, mainly at Euroclear, the Belgium-based financial firm that settles cross-border securities. Freezing the funds proved relatively straightforward; determining their long-term status did not.
At first, Europe played it safe. Legally, they had to renew the sanctions every six months. There was a reluctance to block a country’s central bank reserves permanently — these assets have always seemed to be almost untouchable. European officials expressed concern that moving beyond a temporary freeze could unsettle markets, weaken confidence in the euro or expose European institutions to legal and financial risk.
But the war waged on. In February 2025, the United Nations estimated Ukraine’s reconstruction costs in the hundreds of billions of dollars. European Council President António Costa later recalled a commitment by EU leaders to keep the assets immobilized until Russia ends its war of aggression and compensates Ukraine for the damage inflicted.
This week, EU officials removed the requirement that sanctions be renewed every six months; the freeze is now indefinite. Europe has sent a strong signal to Russia and the rest of the world, signaling it is now ready to accept legal and diplomatic risks to maintain control of the funds. This decision comes even as Moscow continues to threaten Euroclear and other European financial institutions.
The US has had its own role in all this. The Biden administration imposed tough financial sanctions on Russia and kept reiterating that Russia should pay for Ukraine’s recovery. That position diverged from a reported 28-point peace plan later advanced by President Donald Trump’s administration officials and Russian envoys. Their proposal would have taken control of the frozen assets away from Europe and handed most of the money to a US-run investment scheme.
European governments rejected the plan. By making the freeze indefinite, they kept the assets under EU control and ditched the old system of time-limited renewals. Whether the funds are used to support Ukraine’s recovery or remain tied to a future settlement remains unresolved, but Europe has now made clear that the assets will not automatically return once the war ends.
What are the reactions?
Responses to this new freeze have been varied. Russia, as one would expect, is vehemently against the move, saying it undermines peace efforts and that the EU’s leaders are hiding the fact that EU citizens will be paying a price for this. Moscow has filed suit against Euroclear, seeking $230 billion in damages. Ukraine, of course, supports the action, as any blow against Russia supports their cause and their own badly depleted coffers need filling.
However, things have taken a step further. The EU has begun talks to use the frozen money to directly fund Ukraine by sending €90 billion ($105 billion) to the war-torn nation. As of December 19, 2025, leaders have still failed to agree on and use the frozen Russian assets. This proposal comes at a time when the US says it will host a peace summit with Russia in Florida. The Trump administration has been pressuring the EU to back off on this new proposal, according to several officials from Ukraine and within the EU.
This is not the first time the EU has floated such an action, but it is the next logical step to discuss. Among leaders, a number of countries have said they want Russia to pay for the damage it has caused, but several key members oppose the move.
U.S. Media, Culture, Education, High-Tech, Religion
New York Times, Media Year In Review: 329 Days of Trump, Trump, Trump, Michael M. Grynbaum and Stuart A. Thompson, Dec. 21, 2025 (print ed.). The president dominates the collective consciousness. The Times broke down how he has relentlessly pursued attention in his second term.
To understand how Mr. Trump has achieved this omnipresence, The New York Times reviewed the first 329 days of his second term, finding at least one instance each day when he attracted the public’s attention to himself and his actions.
The review encompassed more than 250 media appearances, more than 320 official appearances, and more than 5,000 Truth Social posts or reposts. The analysis shows that while Mr. Trump has lagged his predecessors in his number of official appearances, he has pursued a raft of innovative methods to force himself into the public consciousness on a daily, and sometimes even hourly, basis.
The battery of activity started from the moment he was inaugurated, when he traveled from the Capitol Building to the Capital One Arena to publicly sign a flurry of executive orders.
The Daily, Top Senate Democrat Vows That Trump's Name Will Be Removed From The Kennedy Center, Sarah Jones and Jason Easley, Dec. 20, 2025. While speaking to protesters outside the Kennedy Center, Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-MD) said that it doesn't matter if it takes weeks or months, Trump's name will come off the Kennedy Center
The Kennedy family is outraged that Donald Trump has decided to illegally slap his name on the national monument to honor the late President John F. Kennedy.
Many Kennedy family members have released statements expressing their dismay and outrage.
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One example came from JFK’s niece Maria Shriver:
The Kennedy Center was named after my uncle, President John F Kennedy. It was named in his honor. He was a man who was interested in the arts, interested in culture, interested in education, language, history. He brought the arts into the White House, and he and my Aunt Jackie amplified the arts, celebrated the arts, stood up for the arts and artists.
It is beyond comprehension that this sitting president has sought to rename this great memorial dedicated to President Kennedy. It is beyond wild that he would think adding his name in front of President Kennedy’s name is acceptable. It is not.
Next thing perhaps he will want to rename JFK Airport, rename the Lincoln Memorial, the Trump Lincoln Memorial. The Trump Jefferson Memorial. The Trump Smithsonian. The list goes on.
Can we not see what is happening here? C’mon, my fellow Americans! Wake up! This is not dignified. This is not funny. This is way beneath the stature of the job. It’s downright weird. It’s obsessive in a weird way. Just when you think somone can’t stoop any lower, down they go…
The next logical step is for Trump to rename the Lincoln Memorial, the Trump Lincoln Memorial, and plop himself on Honest Abe’s lap.
The good news is that Trump can’t legally change the name of the Kennedy Center, and one senator already has a plan to get the president’s name off of the building.
U.S. Politics, Governance
New York Times, How the Supreme Court’s Mail-In Ballot Ruling Could Affect Voters, Nick Corasaniti and Christine Zhang, Dec. 21, 2025 (print ed.). Hundreds of thousands of Americans in rural and urban areas alike could see their votes rejected if the court decides that ballots must arrive by Election Day.
The Supreme Court is set to decide this term whether states can count mail-in ballots received after Election Day. The case centers on a law in Mississippi, but a total of about 18 states and territories accept such late-arriving ballots as long as they are postmarked by Election Day.
Should the court rule that all ballots nationwide must be received by Election Day, it could lead to the rejection of tens, if not hundreds, of thousands of ballots in the future, affecting a swath of American voters in rural and urban areas.
In 2024, at least 725,000 ballots were postmarked by Election Day and arrived within the legally accepted post-election window, according to election officials in 14 of the 22 states and territories where late-arriving ballots were accepted that year. (Four of these states — Kansas, North Dakota, Ohio and Utah — have since changed their policies and will accept only mail ballots that arrive by Election Day.)
Another roughly 104,000 mail ballots were rejected nationwide for arriving after the deadline, according to a federal report on election data.
The roughly 725,000 ballots represent a sliver of the total number of mail ballots cast in the 2024 election across the 14 states and territories — about 24 million, according to federal election data. Nonetheless, 725,000 voters constitute nearly the population of a congressional district, a significant number to be potentially left uncounted.
Of course, a decision by the court eliminating late-arriving ballots would not effectively cause 725,000 votes to be left uncounted. Voter education efforts by election officials, and potential changes in policies and procedures, would most likely help the vast majority of voters avoid having their ballot rejected based on the court’s ruling.
But education and policy changes can go only so far. During the 2020 election, the State Supreme Court in Pennsylvania, a top political battleground, ruled that ballots postmarked by Election Day should be counted if they arrived within three days after the closing of polls. Roughly 10,000 ballots arrived and were counted in those three days, according to the secretary of state at the time.
That onetime allowance wasn’t codified into law, and the current law requires all ballots in Pennsylvania to be received by Election Day. In 2024, 6,816 ballots were rejected by the state for arriving after the date. (Because the total number of mail ballots cast was lower than it was in 2020, the share of voters who sent in late ballots in 2024 was basically unchanged.)
A majority of Pennsylvania’s late ballots came from younger voters, who generally vote less frequently than older ones.
“For people who are voting once every four years, or once every two years, they’re not familiar with all these procedures and changes, and this could have a big impact on them,” said David Becker, the executive director of the Center for Election Innovation and Research, a nonpartisan group that advises election officials. “And by the way, those people broke for Trump in 2024.”
Determining whether Democrats or Republicans would suffer greater harm as a result of an Election Day deadline is a murky task. Democrats still far outpace Republicans in their use of mail voting, a trend intensified by the 2020 election.
So, in most states, the rejected ballots are likely to lean more Democratic than Republican. In Virginia, 73 percent of the ballots that arrived after Election Day and were counted in 2024 were cast for Vice President Kamala Harris, compared with just 23 percent for Donald J. Trump. Mail ballots that arrived before Election Day had almost the same partisan breakdown.
Lincoln Square Media, Weekly Wrap Political Commentary: The Reiner Tragedy, Susie’s Plea Deal with History, & Can Dems Recover from ‘24? Susan Demas & Edwin Eisendrath, Dec. 21, 2025. Catch up on all the best shows and interviews you may have missed on Lincoln Square.
Trump’sVile Attacks on Rob Reiner
Rob Reiner and his wife, Michele, were murdered last week in a horrific act of violence that saw their son Nick Reiner arrested for the crime. The very next day, the President of the United States made a sadistic post on his social platform blaming Reiner’s political beliefs on his death. Susan and Edwin tackle this disgusting reaction and more in this Live.
Susan J. Demas: Well, I know this week our list of topics was particularly long – but I think we need to start with Trump managing to outdo himself in cruelty with his response to actor and director Rob Reiner’s death. I mean, this tweet was one for the books. As usual, it has to be all about him.
And you know, I just want to get real here. If you have a member of your family who has Alzheimer’s, you know this behavior and you don’t want that person having the keys to the car, much less having the nuclear codes. And this just strikes me as tirades that I have heard from folks in my life at family gatherings where you just have to sit there and endure it if you love this person. But as a country, I think we’re all tired of enduring this.
Edwin Eisendrath: Let’s start with this: Rob Reiner was a national treasure, and his wife. They have a family tragedy. They have a son with serious mental illness, a terrible tragedy, something that would be painful for any family and now terribly tragic with this kid at least charged with murdering his parents in a brutal way.
This is heartbreaking for anybody and shocking. And any reaction that’s different from that is not a normal human reaction. I mean, go back to Charlie Kirk. You know, I wrote a piece when he was shot about how much I hope he lived because that’s not how we want to do things, right?Subscribed
And that’s not a guy I agree with about anything. Donald Trump’s reaction to this tragedy is: me, me, me, me, me. You just want to say, “We all know it’s about you, Donald.” I mean, there’s no news here, but you’re just showcasing what a terrible human being you are. I mean, every story we have has been about what a terrible human being he is. This one was just revolting. Just personally revolting. And I’m pleased that some of the Republicans said so. I mean, it’s nice to know – and we’re finding this inch by inch all over the country.
And I don’t want to give them more credit than they deserve, but now that his poll numbers are in the tank, we’re finding that people are willing to say, “oh, there are other things to value. You may not be the God we thought you were. Indiana said no. And I think Republicans, a couple of them have come out and said, “Yeah, no, we think this was a tragedy.”
New York Times, Turning Point’s Annual Gathering Turns Into a Gripefest, Richard Fausset and Ken Bensinger, Dec. 20, 2025. At AmericaFest, conservative leaders insulted one another, revealing serious rifts over conspiracy theories, antisemitism and who belongs in America.
Since 2021, Turning Point USA’s annual gathering, AmericaFest, has featured a star-studded roster of conservative influencers and politicians who have been virtually unified in their focus on a common foe, one that Charlie Kirk, the group’s co-founder, called the “woke” left.
But this weekend in Phoenix, speakers at AmericaFest have scarcely mentioned Democrats and other liberal foils. Instead, some of the most prominent right-wing leaders in the country have been criticizing members of their own movement, accusing them of being “frauds,” “pompous” and a “cancer.”
Driving the enmity have been some of the most explosive and unresolved issues confronting the MAGA movement: resurgent antisemitism, the prevalence of conspiracy theories and the rise of the concept of “heritage Americans” and what that concept — considered by some to be a thinly veiled racist dog-whistle — means for nonwhite conservatives.
Notably, in the wake of the revolt against left-wing “cancel culture,” there have also been questions about what kinds of ideas might be grounds for cancellation within conservatism itself.
It has been a snapshot of a powerful movement in an uncharacteristic state of discord just three months after the assassination of Mr. Kirk, a gifted communicator who had helped construct a big tent under which American conservatives of many stripes could coexist in the Trump age.
Without Mr. Kirk, the movement’s boldface names have appeared to be jockeying this weekend to influence the direction of the MAGA movement at a time when its most towering figure, President Trump, is in his second term.
For some true believers, it has been hard to watch.
More U.S. Politics
New York Times, Elise Stefanik Tried Everything to Please Trump. He Still Jilted Her, Annie Karni, Dec. 19, 2025. The G.O.P. congresswoman who ran as a moderate but became an “ultra MAGA” Trump acolyte ultimately found herself undermined by the president and politically adrift.
Representative Elise Stefanik, Republican of New York, was willing to be the team player with the stiff upper lip.
But everyone has their limits.
After a series of public humiliations delivered to her by President Trump — his yanking of her nomination to serve as U.N. ambassador; his Oval Office love fest with New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani, during which the president undercut her; and the coup de grâce of his refusal to endorse her in the Republican primary for governor — Ms. Stefanik on Friday afternoon announced she’d had enough.
She was done with the governor’s race, for which she had raised more than $12 million from donors who may now be frustrated with her decision to pull out. And done with Congress altogether: She said she would not seek re-election next year.
Now, at war with Speaker Mike Johnson, privately livid at Mr. Trump and deeply frustrated with her job in Congress, it is not clear whether Ms. Stefanik even has any interest in finishing her term, although people close to her said she planned to stay until the end of her term.
“My most important title is Mom,” she wrote in a long post on social media on Friday.
People close to Ms. Stefanik said she was not upset with the president, noting that the two had spoken multiple times, including in person, over the past few weeks, conversations in which they saw eye to eye about Ms. Stefanik’s decision and her future.
To detractors, Ms. Stefanik’s shoddy treatment by the president amounted to karmic comeuppance for a Republican lawmaker who came to Congress as a Harvard-educated moderate but tacked unapologetically to the MAGA right when it suited her political purposes. They said she personified the opportunistic shape-shifting that gripped her party.
“My greatest disappointment is Elise Stefanik, who should know better,” Representative Don Beyer, Democrat of Virginia, said in an interview last year, describing her as a one-time friend. “She went off the deep end.”
Her tumble from grace crystallized the limits of MAGA loyalty and the risks of building a political identity around Mr. Trump, who can turbocharge or torpedo a career — sometimes both. Once one of the president’s most stalwart defenders, Ms. Stefanik, who referred to herself as “ultra MAGA” and styled herself after Mr. Trump, ultimately found herself undermined by him and politically adrift.
In truth, Ms. Stefanik, first elected in 2014 as the youngest woman to serve in the House, has been burned out on Congress for years.
Instead of seeking to rise in the House, Ms. Stefanik set her sights on serving in a second Trump administration. When every other member of House Republican leadership ran for speaker in 2023, she sat it out. Instead, she looked in the mirror and saw a cabinet secretary looking back.
Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, the hard-right Georgia Republican who was a true believer but dared to break publicly with the president on a variety of issues, recently experienced the inevitable falling out with him for doing so.
But Mr. Trump’s treatment of Ms. Stefanik was more surprising because no one had ever viewed her as a true believer, and she still never dared to vent frustration or disagreement with the president.
U.S. Jobs, Immigration, Affordability, Economy, Markets
New York Times, ‘It’s Just Us’: The Firefighter, His Son and a Treacherous Choice, Hannah Dreier, Photographs by Loren Elliott, Dec. 21, 2025. For two decades, Luis Martinez has fought wildfires for the U.S. government. Now he faces cancer, debt and the threat of separation from his 11-year-old.
He worked for a private firefighting company, but in the field, everyone took orders from U.S. Forest Service supervisors. He was usually assigned “mop-up,” one of the smokiest parts of the job. After flames had died down, he would get on his hands and knees to feel for spots that were still smoldering. When he found lingering embers, he smothered them with dirt.
The Forest Service’s own researchers warned in 2016 that supervisors were assigning mop-up more often than needed, endangering firefighters’ health. The agency’s policy is to limit mop-up to only what is strictly necessary. In practice, though, that work is still frequently being done — it has just fallen to immigrants.
Dozens of the firefighting companies that the government relies on are built on immigrant labor. Worker advocates and the Forest Service’s internal watchdog have estimated that as many as 70 percent of these firefighters are undocumented.
Meidas Touch Network, Commentary: Ice Kills Thirty In Custody, Michael Cohen, Dec. 21, 2025. Four people died in ICE custody this week, proving the cruelty isn’t the arrest itself — it’s the neglect, indifference, and silence that follow once the doors lock.
I’ve been out of federal custody for a while now, but the memories don’t fade. They linger. They itch. They wake you up at night like a phantom pain from a limb you didn’t even know the government could amputate. Since my release from FCI Otisville, I’ve been very clear — borderline annoying, if you ask my former captors — about what it means to be human warehoused by the United States government.Subscribed
Fifty-one days in solitary confinement. Three days without food. A sink and toilet that didn’t work, which is a polite way of saying I lived with my own waste. A broken window that let rain soak my bed like I was camping, minus the fun and marshmallows. Gnats. No ventilation. Temperatures pushing 100 degrees. And this wasn’t some secret black site in a failed state. This was a federal facility in the United States of America.
And here’s the part that matters: I am a U.S. citizen. I was the former personal attorney to the sitting President of the United States. I had a megaphone — family, friends, journalists, celebrities, members of Congress — people who noticed when I coughed, sneezed, or didn’t get fed. If that’s how the system treated someone with visibility, resources, and a last name people recognize, let me ask you something uncomfortable: what do you think happens to the people nobody is watching?
Now imagine you’re in ICE detention.
This month alone, four people died in immigration detention over the span of four days. December 12. December 14 — twice. December 15. That’s not a coincidence. That’s a pattern. Or, as the ACLU’s Eunice Cho accurately put it, a “red-hot crisis.” When four human beings die in government custody in less than a workweek, the problem isn’t bad luck. It’s bad conditions.
The names matter. Jean Wilson Brutus, 41, Haitian, dead one day after entering ICE custody in Newark. Nenko Stanev Gantchev, 56, Bulgarian, died in Michigan. Delvin Francisco Rodriguez, 39, Nicaraguan, died in Mississippi. Fouad Saeed Abdulkadir, 46, Eritrean, died in Pennsylvania. ICE says two died of “natural causes” and two from “medical complications,” which is bureaucratic shorthand for “please don’t ask follow-up questions.”
Thirty people — THIRTY — have died in ICE custody in 2025 alone; the highest number since 2004. That tally includes two people killed in a shooting at a Dallas ICE facility, because apparently even detention centers now need active-shooter disclaimers. Nearly 66,000 people are currently detained, a record high, while the Trump administration is asking Congress for $45 billion to expand immigration detention. More beds. More bodies. More risk. More death.
At the same time, oversight has been quietly strangled. Watchdog agencies closed, then half-reopened after public backlash. Lawyers and advocates say conditions are deteriorating unchecked. ICE, meanwhile, insists deaths are “less than 1%,” a statistic offered without math, methodology, or shame. Detention, they remind us, isn’t supposed to be punitive. Funny — because the people inside keep dying like it is.
Several of these deaths occurred within days of people being taken into custody, raising serious concerns about trauma, medical neglect, and the shock of arrest itself. If you’ve never experienced the moment when the state decides it owns your body, let me assure you — it’s not calming. It’s violent, even without bruises.
Members of Congress like Pramila Jayapal and Patty Murray are calling for oversight and accountability, describing the deaths as “appalling and unacceptable.” Lawsuits allege overcrowding, lack of beds, inadequate food, nonexistent medical care. ICE officials respond with press releases and confidence bordering on satire, claiming they maintain “higher standards of care than most prisons that hold U.S. citizens.”
Let me translate that for you: Don’t believe your lying eyes.
Here’s the truth they don’t want to say out loud. Immigration detention has become a business model built on volume, speed, and indifference. People are processed, parked, and ignored until something goes catastrophically wrong; and then it’s labeled unavoidable. Natural. Complicated.
I survived my time in custody only because people were watching. ICE detainees don’t get that luxury. No book deals. No TV hits. No army of reporters asking why the sink doesn’t work or why my medication didn’t arrive.
If this is how America treats the most vulnerable people in its care, then the problem isn’t immigration. It’s us. Because silence isn’t neutral; it’s permission. And history has never been kind to societies that confuse detention with justice and cruelty with control.
New York Times, Immigration Crackdown Creates Fault Lines Among Baptists, Elizabeth Dias and Shannon Sims, Dec. 21, 2025. An increasingly loud contingent supports the Trump administration’s efforts to deport illegal immigrants.
When federal agents descended on Louisiana this month to pursue their aggressive deportation campaign, a group of Roman Catholic priests privately brought the Eucharist to the homes of immigrants too worried to step outside.
But Lewis Richerson, the pastor of Woodlawn Baptist Church in Baton Rouge, planned to take an opposite approach.
“I would not knowingly extend communion to an illegal immigrant who is visiting our church,” he said. “That person would be in sin by being in 
this country illegally, and Christians should obey the law of the land.”
Instead, the main way he would minister to them would be “to help them submit themselves to the authorities,” he said. “They should absolutely deport themselves.”
Mr. Richerson’s church is part of the Southern Baptist Convention, the largest Protestant denomination in the United States, with about 12.7 million members. For years, the denomination has supported immigration reforms, especially given its extensive missionary work and theological commitments to helping “the least of these,” as Jesus says in the gospel of Matthew.
But while Catholic bishops this year have repeatedly rebuked the Trump administration over its deportation actions, Southern Baptists are contending with an increasingly loud contingent in their ranks that, like Mr. Richerson, supports the immigration crackdown. Even as many rank-and-file churches continue to support immigrant ministries, signs of fracture are emerging.
In April, leaders of 13 Southern Baptist ethnic groups came together to ask the denomination’s leaders “to stand firm for religious liberty and speak on behalf of the immigrant and refugee,” and to request that the Trump administration consider penalties other than deportation.
At the Southern Baptists’ annual convention in June, the topic was largely absent. Delegates considered resolutions with positions on abortion, pornography and sports betting, not immigration.
But delegates also held a vote on dismantling the Southern Baptists’ public policy arm, the Ethics and Religious Liberty Commission, which has spearheaded action on immigration for the convention.
Dec. 20
Convicted sex trafficker and rapist of underaged girls Ghislaine Maxwell and Donald Trump (file photo).
MeidasTouch Network, Trump's Cover-up Saturday, Ben Meiselas, right, Dec.20, 2025. Donald Trump is having what can only be described as an awful Saturday, and the public can feel it in the silence. The president has effectively shut down press access, retreating to Mar-a-Lago after a brief, deranged, low-energy appearance in North Carolina before what he labeled a “rally.” He took no questions, offered no accountability, and then disappeared.
This retreat comes as his administration faces mounting scrutiny over its handling of the Epstein files, which by law were required to be released in full. Instead, the Department of Justice has produced only a fraction of the records in its possession, and even that small slice is overwhelmingly redacted. Roughly 5 percent of the files were turned over, and of that, nearly everything is blacked out. This is blatant obstruction.
And it gets worse. Among the materials briefly posted to the Department of Justice website was an image from Epstein’s home that included photographs of Donald Trump in a drawer in Epstein’s credenza. That image, identified as file 468 in the DOJ’s own index, was visible long enough for the public to notice. Then, without explanation, it vanished. The file numbering now skips directly over it, as if it never existed. Poof. Gone.
Deleting a file after it has been produced is a serious act with legal implications. The law governing the Epstein records was explicit: all unclassified materials were to be released by a set deadline, with redactions permitted only to protect victims’ identities. There is no legal basis for erasing records because they are embarrassing or politically damaging to powerful men.
Yet that is precisely the rationale the Trump administration has embraced. The Justice Department has taken the extraordinary position that the perpetrators named in the Epstein files are themselves “victims” who must be shielded from exposure. In other words, the men accused of participating in a sex trafficking network are being protected from reputational harm, while the public is denied the truth.
The manipulation did not stop there. The administration was also caught inserting a decades-old, publicly available photograph of Bill Clinton, Michael Jackson, and Diana Ross into the Epstein materials, with faces redacted to imply the presence of underage victims. In reality, the photo shows Ross with her own children at a fundraiser, entirely unrelated to Epstein. One of Ross’s children publicly identified themselves in the image. The implication was false, but the damage was intentional: confuse the public, muddy the waters, and redirect attention away from Trump.
As the president sealed himself off from reporters, his grift op—I mean, political operation—continued unabated. Fundraising emails went out, urging supporters to donate money while the White House refused to answer basic questions about compliance with federal law.
Even within Trump’s own political orbit, the backlash has been sharp. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene publicly slammed the administration’s approach, citing the plain language of the statute. The law, she noted, explicitly prohibits withholding or redacting records due to embarrassment, reputational harm, or political sensitivity, including for government officials and public figures. That provision was designed for this exact moment.
Conservative commentator Joe Walsh argued that the only plausible explanation for Trump’s willingness to absorb such a massive political hit is fear of what the files reveal about him personally.
Meanwhile, right-wing media has largely looked away. While most outlets focused on the administration’s failure to release the Epstein files, Fox News filled airtime with trivial distractions, from viral animal clips to culture-war detours. This is not accidental. It is how propaganda works. Flood the zone with nonsense long enough to evade accountability.
The stakes here extend beyond Epstein. This pattern of secrecy includes withheld military footage of alleged war crimes, unanswered questions about Trump’s own medical records, and a broader governing philosophy rooted in secrecy and cover-ups.
We deserve sunlight. When that light is deliberately blocked, erased, or replaced with manufactured distractions, the damage is real. We’ll continue shining out light on the darkness of this administration, and with your help, our messages will continue to be spread far and wide.
Proof, Investigative Commentary: Itemizing Every Violation of the Epstein Files Transparency Act By the Trump Administration, Seth Abramson, left, Dec. 19, 2025. 
Major media reports confirm that (a) Trump is personally overseeing the case—and thus all violations of federal law now known—and (b) those running the show day-to-day are all his lawyer-agents.
Violation of Federal Law #1
The full Epstein Files were supposed to be released today. Instead, only ~30% were.
Violation of Federal Law #2
The released documents were supposed to be searchable, but they are not.
Violation of Federal Law #3
Anyone undergoing criminal investigation for their association with Jeffrey Epstein—a group that at this point includes exclusively powerful Democrats, by Donald Trump’s own order to his personal lawyers DOJ and the FBI—must be redacted from the Files.
But in fact Trump appears to have had his team do exactly the opposite, deliberately focusing today’s releases on under-investigation Democratic Party politicians like Bill Clinton—even though his own chief of staff, Susie Wiles, just publicly exonerated Clinton following her own review of the Files.
Violation of Federal Law #4
The Act lists the acceptable bases for redaction. CNN now reports that Trump and his team ignored the law, with “redactions of the files [that] are vast—and [with] reasons for redaction that go beyond what the law [allows].”
Violation of Federal Law #5
The Act was written in a way that aims to make the document release apolitical. But Trump’s team devised entirely elective, non-prescribed internal “protocols,” per CNN, that are apparently intended to politicize the document dump in a very particular way—by focusing media attention on Democrats.
CNN reports that Trump’s personal lawyer Todd Blanche, right, “instructed DOJ attorneys to report to Congress any ‘government officials and politically exposed persons named or referenced’ in the documents that were released,” even though this entirely artificial and elective protocol now has the effect—because it’s coupled with the above Violation of Federal Law #3—of giving congressional Republicans documents they can wave about that are littered with the very names Trump protected from disclosure by placing them under active federal criminal investigation(s) for partisan reasons.
Violation of Federal Law #6
The Act says that if Trump releases an Executive Order protecting certain classified information in the Files from being released for “national security” or even “foreign policy” reasons, that’s acceptable. But despite Trump never issuing any such Order, and there being no indication that there’s any classified intelligence in the Files, and the Epstein case allegedly (per the Trump administration) having nothing to do with either national security or foreign policy, Trump’s personal lawyer now says that there were redactions of this sort (namely, “classified national defense or foreign policy information”) in today’s releases.
It’s worth noting that Trump is running the redaction operation himself, has said before that he can classify and declassify documents with his mind in an instant, is willing to author unreleased and non-public executive orders, deems any information that could be seen as harmful to him as a national security threat or a congressional interference with foreign policy promulgation, and therefore may well have used this non-existent, self-crafted exemption of certain Epstein Files documents from release to form a massive black hole at the center of the Files that no one can ever see inside.
In fact, Trump could even have used this method to separate out certain documents from the Files and hide them in classified storage facilities without leaving a paper trail or other record indicating what was taken out, why it was removed, or where it is.
Violation of Federal Law #7
Despite previously claiming that all Epstein victims had been identified—meaning that there is only a single “list of Epstein victims” and not a “list of potential Epstein victims”—Trump and his team have pretended that there’s an ongoing effort at DOJ and the FBI to identify Epstein victims (though there is not) so that they can illegally redact entire pages identifying Epstein employees… all on the claim that these persons are “potential Epstein victims.”
But that ideational status only exists if there is an active probe of Mr. Epstein’s crimes, which Trump personal lawyer Pam Bondi assured us in July 2025 there is not (and any new investigation opened at Trump’s request wouldn’t entail discovering new victims but rather new perpetrators who may have victimized already-known persons). All of these 254 name redactions, minus the less than half that number identified previously by Team Trump as bona fide Epstein victims, are therefore illegal. Because many of these persons may have been recruited from President Donald Trump’s own employ at Mar-a-Lago, hiding their names has the effect of hiding his involvement in Epstein’s crimes.
Violation of Federal Law #8
As someone who (while working as a federal criminal investigator in D.C. in the 1990s) had to deal with formalized redactions, this author knows that federally mandated (and for that matter proscribed) redactions must be consistent: one cannot sometimes protect and sometimes not protect a given name, for the obvious reason that federal redactors might then choose to protect someone when knowing their name would lead to new evidence against (say) Donald Trump but not protect that same person when the release of their name in a given document wouldn’t hurt him.
Inconsistent redaction is even more dangerous than this, however, as for obvious reasons it can be very hard to detect—giving bad-faith redactors reason to engage in this odious practice strategically.
CNN now reports that the documents Trump just released are filled with inconsistent redactions “across” tens of thousands of pages. This constitutes a willful violation of the Act, as the volume of these errors and the amount of time Trump’s DOJ and FBI had in advance to avoid them renders them either deliberate error or gross negligence.
New York Times, Epstein Victims Upset About Lack of Transparency in Newly Released Files, Matthew Goldstein and Mike Baker, Dec. 20, 2025 (print ed.). Several victims said they were frustrated by the heavy redactions of photos and documents that the Justice Department released on Friday.
Disappointed. Frustrated. Suspicious.
Several of Jeffrey Epstein’s victims said Friday that Justice Department failed them with its partial release of files related to the federal investigations into Mr. Epstein’s decades-long sexual abuse of teen girls and young women. They said the release of thousands of pages of photographs and heavily redacted documents did little to shed new light on the investigations and the scope of Mr. Epstein’s crimes or conspirators.
“They are proving everything we have been saying about corruption and delayed justice,” said Jess Michaels, one of the earliest known victims of Mr. Epstein. “What are they protecting? The coverup continues.”
Ms. Michaels has said she was sexually assaulted by Mr. Epstein in 1991 when she was 22 years old and training to be a dancer. She was among the victims who lobbied for the bipartisan law that directed the Justice Department to release virtually everything it had gathered during its sex trafficking investigations of Mr. Epstein and one of his main enablers, Ghislaine Maxwell.
But the more than 13,000 files released on Friday were heavily redacted and not easily searchable.
“If everything is redacted, where is the transparency?” said Marijke Chartouni, who has said she was sexually abused by Mr. Epstein when she was 20 years old.
Among the tens of thousands of pages was one document that did provide a long-sought window into the F.B.I.’s handling of Mr. Epstein’s case: The file showed that Maria Farmer, another of Mr. Epstein’s earliest victims, filed a federal “child pornography” complaint against him in 1996. But investigators did not begin to thoroughly scrutinize Mr. Epstein until about a decade later.
Ms. Farmer, who fought for years to get the F.B.I. to make public her complaint, said she felt “vindicated” to finally see the document but also was heartbroken at the knowledge that the F.B.I. did not act on her complaint.
“It’s a tremendous relief that she doesn’t have to continue to fight to prove her truth,” said Ms. Farmer’s sister, Annie Farmer. She noted, though, that she was disappointed by the general lack of transparency with Friday’s release.
“So many of the photos are irrelevant,” said Marina Larcerda, who has said Mr. Epstein sexually abused her when she was 14. She was an important witness in the 2019 federal investigation that led to the filing of sex trafficking charges against Mr. Epstein. But she only recently went public with her story.
“We have been let down,” Ms. Larcerda said. “We waited for this day to bring these other men who have been protected to justice.”
New York Times, Epstein Files Include 1996 Child Porn Complaint That F.B.I. Ignored, Mike Baker and Matthew Goldstein, Updated Dec. 20, 2025. Newly released files show how Maria Farmer, above, who worked for Mr. Epstein in the 1990s, had urged the F.B.I. to investigate him. The case went nowhere for years.
A woman who once worked for Jeffrey Epstein filed a complaint to the F.B.I. about his interest in “child pornography” in 1996, about a decade before investigators began scrutinizing his predatory behavior.
The woman, Maria Farmer, has for years said that she had called federal investigators in the summer of 1996, but the F.B.I. had never publicly acknowledged her original report, even to Ms. Farmer. Some people following the Epstein case had accused her of inventing the story. After the release of thousands of Epstein files on Friday, The New York Times contacted Ms. Farmer about a report stamped with the date of Sept. 3, 1996. She broke down in tears.
“I’ve waited 30 years,” she said. “I can’t believe it. They can’t call me a liar anymore.”
Ms. Farmer said she was grateful to be “vindicated” but heartbroken that the F.B.I. did not take steps to stop Mr. Epstein until years after her report.
“They should be ashamed,” Ms. Farmer said, adding: “They harmed all of these little girls. That part devastates me.”
The F.B.I. did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Brad Edwards, a lawyer who has represented many Epstein victims, said Friday night that if the F.B.I. had listened to Ms. Farmer, the government could have stopped Mr. Epstein in the 1990s and prevented hundreds of victims from being abused. He said the government until now has denied the existence of Ms. Farmer’s report, and that it was “shameful” that it was kept secret.
“There should be a full fledged investigation into every government employee who knew about this document and allowed a narrative to be publicized that it did not exist,” Mr. Edwards said.
An internal investigation of the Department of Justice’s handling of the Epstein case, released in 2020, made no mention of Ms. Farmer’s original complaint.
The newly released report leaves Ms. Farmer’s name redacted, describing her only as a professional artist. She had been hired by Mr. Epstein to acquire art on his behalf.
The complaint says that she had taken photos of her younger sisters — ages 16 and 12 — for her personal art work, and Ms. Farmer clarified in an interview that the photos included nude images. “Epstein stole the photos and negatives,” the handwritten F.B.I. report says. The report also says that Mr. Epstein had asked Ms. Farmer to take pictures of young girls at swimming pools and threatened to “burn her house down” if she told anyone about the photos.Editors’ PicksShe Put the Heat in ‘Heated Rivalry’3 Make-Ahead Holiday Brunch Recipes for a CrowdOnce a Year the French Literary Scene Goes to the Dogs (Cats, Too)
Ms. Farmer said she did not hear from the F.B.I. until a decade later, when a fuller investigation ensued, ending in a 2008 plea deal for Mr. Epstein in Florida. She said she had lived in fear after trying to report Mr. Epstein.
Ms. Farmer said that while the complaint captured part of her concerns, it did not capture all of them. She said she urged investigators to take a larger look at Mr. Epstein’s orbit, citing his relationship with powerful people such as Bill Clinton — then the sitting president — and Donald J. Trump. She said much of her concern was about Mr. Epstein’s companion, Ghislaine Maxwell, but the document does not include Ms. Maxwell’s name or the names of other powerful people.
Ms. Farmer said she saw Mr. Trump in 1995 at Mr. Epstein’s offices in Manhattan. She was in running shorts and said Mr. Trump came into the office and began hovering over her, staring at her bare legs.
Then Mr. Epstein entered the room, and she recalled him saying to Mr. Trump: “No, no. She’s not here for you.” After the two men left the room, Ms. Farmer said, she could hear Mr. Trump commenting that he thought she was 16 years old. The White House has denied her account.
Ms. Farmer eventually broke from Mr. Epstein after what she described as a sexual assault at the hands of Mr. Epstein and Ms. Maxwell. It was then that she discovered that the nude photographs of her sisters were missing.
Ms. Farmer later spoke to her sister, Annie, who had her own problems with Mr. Epstein. Annie Farmer later testified at Ms. Maxwell’s trial about she had been invited to Mr. Epstein’s ranch in New Mexico when she was 16. There, he climbed into bed with her one morning to “cuddle.” Ms. Maxwell, she said, had at one point given her a massage, rubbing her bare chest.
Justice Department Special Prosecutor Jack Smith, left, and former President Donald Trump, shown in a collage.
Esquire, Opinion: Jack Smith Just Gave Trump Another Reason to Fear Him, Charles P. Pierce, 
Dec. 18, 2025. Judging by statements he made in a recent closed session, the former special counsel isn’t backing down from a fight against the president.
On Wednesday, former special counsel Jack Smith met with the clowns and mountebanks of the House Judiciary Committee in a special closed session. He also met with the Democratic members of the committee. Judging by his opening statement, which was obtained by Politico and a number of other outlets, Smith gave a vivid demonstration of 
why you never will see him in a public hearing.
“The decision to bring charges against President Trump was mine, but the basis for those charges rests entirely with President Trump and his actions, as alleged in the indictments returned by grand juries in two different districts,” said Smith, according to a copy of portions of that statement. He maintained that this team found evidence to prove “beyond a reasonable doubt that President Trump engaged in a criminal scheme to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election and to prevent the lawful transfer of power. Smith also said his team found “powerful evidence” in the classified documents case and alleged that the president “repeatedly tried to obstruct justice.”
He’s daring them now. Go ahead. Put me on television and you’ll see that, by comparison, John Dean was a piker. Please. Do it, so I can tell Jim Jordan (R-Van Heusen) to his face what a jacketless putz he is. Let the nation watch as I bury them all in receipts. And, oh, by the way, can you tell America’s Hysterical Auntie, Lindsey Graham, to stop bellyaching about his telephone?
He added that he would have made the same decision if Trump had been a Democrat or a Republican—a nod to the GOP members of the committee who believe Smith was pursuing a partisan witch hunt against the president.
Their fury has only intensified in the wake of recent revelations Smith secretly obtained phone records of at least eight Republican senators in his election interference probe. Smith also defended that decision to request lawmakers’ phone data, for which Smith’s team did not receive the content of the calls. “Exploiting that violence, President Trump and his associates tried to call Members of Congress in furtherance of their criminal scheme, urging them to further delay certification of the 2020 election,” Smith said. “I didn’t choose those Members; President Trump did.”
Though any testimony Smith gives Congress in any setting is necessarily circumscribed by the rules and statutes regarding grand jury testimony, that last quote is a thunderous shot across the bows of Republican legislators. If El Caudillo del Mar-a-Lago called you in those perilous days and you didn’t immediately throw your telephone out a window, you were accessorial to the violence that came later. And if you didn’t vote to impeach him when he was powerless to keep you from doing so, then Jack Smith is going to embarrass you in public too. Hear the bell tolling, you passel of feckless cowards.
I suspect that the ass-covering, out-of-context leaks regarding what Smith told the committee will soon be forthcoming. To which the only proper reply is to demand they call a public session. I think three or four days of television would be about right.
The Contrarian, Opinion: Will Trump Pardon Ghislaine Maxwell? Norman Eisen, right, 
Dec. 2025. What His 10 Worst Pardons Teach Us; Also, Publisher's Roundup 48.
No president in American history has used–and abused–the constitutional clemency power quite like Donald Trump. It’s not just that he’s used his authority to pardon people who probably shouldn’t be pardoned; other presidents have done that, although in smaller quantities. What’s unique about Trump’s abuses is the sheer number–and how brazenly self-
interested they’ve been. Thus far in his second term, he’s used the constitutional pardon prerogative in support of his larger vision of a government that’s set up to help him make money, reward loyalty, and undermine his perceived political enemies.
For our final Top 10 Worst of 2025, we detail the most egregious of Trump’s abuses of the pardon and other clemency powers. They are atrocious–so much so that we cannot rule out even worse pardons ahead, such as of Jeffrey Epstein’s co-conspirator Ghislaine Maxwell. Neither does Trump rule it out; when asked after the Supreme Court rejected her final appeal in October whether he would consider a pardon for her, Trump dodged the question by stating “I’d have to take a look at it.”Subscribed
As the country reviews the Justice Department’s most recent Epstein files document release, more light might be shed upon the matter. Or not, if as it so far appears, material has been overwithheld. Thanks to you, we won’t have to take the DOJ’s word for it; your paid subscriptions support our democracy litigation and related work, including our pending case to force the release of all the Epstein files. With your support, we stand ready to go to court as needed to ensure full transparency.
In the meantime, let’s have a look back at Trump’s 10 worst pardons of 2025, followed by our usual round up of all the Contrarian coverage of the week.
Capitol Clemency Catastrophe
We begin our putrid pardon-palooza on Day One of Trump, when he granted clemency to over 1,500 insurrectionists who stormed the capitol in his name on Jan. 6, 2021. Among those pardoned for their crimes on the “day of love,” as he puts it, were 608 people who were charged with violent crimes and approximately 174 who were “charged with using a deadly or dangerous weapon or causing serious bodily injury to an officer.” Trump defended the pardons on the grounds that “these people have already served a long period of time” and that many sentences were “ridiculous and excessive.” Tell that to the cops who were targeted.
Juan Orlando Hernández
Despite all his bluster about fighting drug trafficking in Central and South America, Trump pardoned former Honduran president Juan Orlando Hernández, above, who was serving a 45-year sentence for pumping poison on a “cocaine superhighway” into our communities. Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said the prosecution was the result of a “weaponized” Justice Department, which brought the case because Hernández was “opposed to the values of the previous administration.” But the case was pushed by then-prosecutor Emil Bove, later Trump’s defense lawyer, senior DOJ official, and now Third Circuit judge!
Ross Ulbricht
More drug hypocrisy: Ross Ulbricht, (right, in a Gage Skidmore portrait), who operated the Silk Road, a notorious underground online market used by drug dealers, landed one of the first pardons Trump signed. Ulbricht was sentenced to life in prison for his role in facilitating the flow of heroin and other illicit drugs into our communities. Trump defended the pardon because Ulbricht was put in jail by “the same lunatics who were involved in the modern day weaponization of the government against me.” Yet Trump just declared that illicit fentanyl is a “weapon of mass destruction.”
Changpen “CZ” Zhao
As we discussed last week, CZ is one of Trump’s crypto cronies. That includes CZ’s crypto exchange Binance using a Trump-supported tablecoin, USD1, to finance a $2 billion transaction (potentially generating huge revenue for the Trumps). CZ, who spent nearly four months in jail for money laundering issues at Binance, scored clemency a few months after the USD1 deal. Binance announced that it would launch trading of the USD1 stablecoin and another Trump-linked crypto product on its exchange a week after Trump signed CZ’s pardon. When asked about the pardon, Trump said, “I have no idea who he is. I was told that he was a victim, just like I was and just like many other people, of a vicious, horrible group of people in the Biden administration.” Sure.
Giuliani, Meadows, and the Election Co-Conspirators
Shown above are mug shots of then-former President Trump, his former White House aide Mark Meadows, his counsel Rudy Giuliani, and 11 other co-defendants accused of election-related crimes.
Trump’s decision to issue pardons for 77 people involved in the scheme to overturn the 2020 election results and keep Trump in power was no surprise. His pardon attorney, Ed Martin, revealed the clemencies by replying to his own May post on X in which he said, “No MAGA Left Behind.” The only real shock here is that it took so long for Trump to protect Rudy Giuliani, John Eastman, Mark Meadows, Sidney Powell, and company from future accountability (none is facing federal charges). Just like the Jan. 6 mass pardons, this grant of clemency was yet another attempt to re-write the history of the attempted coup–and convey to future would-be plotters that they will not face consequences if they try again.
Rep. Henry Cuellar
Trump suggested that his decision to pardon Rep. Henry Cuellar (D-TX), right, and his wife for allegedly engaging in a bribery scheme was mostly about politics: namely, hoping the congressman would switch parties or retire. But when Rep. Cuellar refused to jump ship, Trump exploded in a Truth Social rant, accusing Cuellar of “a lack of LOYALTY, something that Texas Voters, and Henry’s daughters, will not like.” For his part, Cuellar clapped back by paraphrasing the words of his fellow Texan and former president Lyndon B. Johnson, with Cuellar saying, “I’m an American, I’m a Texan, and I’m a Democrat, in that order … and I think anybody that puts party before their country is doing a disservice to their country.”
Todd and Julie Chrisley
It is possible that Trump saw some of himself in Todd and Julie Chrisley, former millionaire stars of the reality show Chrisley Knows Best, who received pardons after being convicted of fraud by an Atlanta jury in federal court in 2022? The pardon follows lobbying from the Chrisleys’ daughter Savannah, including a prime-time appearance at the 2024 Republican National Convention, where she argued that her parents were the victims of (you guessed it) political persecution. Trump’s pardon also fully relieved the Chrisleys of the more than $22 million they owed to victims of their tax fraud and tax evasion scheme. Not a bad deal– except for the victims.
BitMEX Co-Founders–and BitMEX
Trump appears to have made history in March when he used the pardon power to grant clemency to a corporation: crypto exchange BitMEX. The exchange pleaded guilty to “wilfully” failing to “establish, implement, and maintain an adequate anti-money laundering” program; Trump’s pardon coincided with a surge of activity on the exchange. The grant also extended to the exchange’s founders, Ben Delo, Arthur Hayes, and Samuel Reed, and employee Gregory Dwyer for their participation in similar schemes to flout U.S. laws. For its part, the company celebrated the pardon, thanking the president and boosting itself as “the safest, most trusted, financially-stable, and professionally operated crypto derivatives exchange.”
Scott Jenkins
Trump’s decision to pardon Scott Jenkins, an ardent MAGA supporter who was convicted of bribery and honest services fraud for running a “cash for badges” scheme, is one of the best examples of Trump’s putrid pardon philosophy. If you’re a MAGA official convicted of corruption offenses, you’re pardon eligible. Jenkins “displayed a shocking disregard for his ethical and legal responsibilities,” according to prosecutor Zachary T. Lee (who was then Trump’s acting U.S. Attorney before resigning in October). No matter. The day before the pardon was announced, Martin dropped his infamous “No MAGA left behind” post on X. Trump, as usual, defended the pardon because Jenkins “is a victim of an overzealous Biden Department of Justice”--even though it was his DOJ that secured Jenkins’ 10-year sentence.
Trevor Milton
Trevor Milton
, right, convicted of defrauding investors in his electric car startup in 2022, received a pardon in March. Trump labeled Milton, who was represented at his trial by Attorney General Pam Bondi’s brother, Brad Bondi, as yet another victim of persecution: “the thing that he did wrong was he was one of the first people that supported a gentleman named Donald Trump for a president.” He certainly did support Trump and his agenda–to the tune of at least $930,000 to the Trump campaign or Trump-aligned PACs and $750,000 to the MAHA Alliance, a PAC designed to convince Robert F. Kennedy Jr. supporters to vote for Trump in 2024. Milton bombastically declared that the pardon is really about “every American who has been railroaded by the government.”
Dishonorable mention: George Santos
Trump loves those who have made their support for him clear. And few people have been better at that than George Santos, the disgraced former congressman and conman whose sentence Trump commuted in October. Santos was serving a seven-year sentence for wire fraud and identity theft. The commutation also relieved him of his requirement to pay more than $370,000 in restitution to his victims. Trump even called him “somewhat of a ‘rogue’” who “lied like hell”--but there are “many rogues throughout our Country that aren’t forced to serve seven years in prison.” This commutation, despite not technically being a pardon, makes the list as a dishonorable mention.
More On Epstein Files
New York Times, Epstein Files Photos Disappear From Government Website, Including One of Trump, Alan Feuer, David Enrich and Dylan Freedman, Dec. 20, 2025. A total of 16 photos were taken down at some point on Saturday from the website that the Justice Department created. One featured an open drawer containing other photos, including at least one of President Trump.
More than a dozen photos — including one featuring President Trump — were removed without explanation from the large collection of files connected to the investigations of Jeffrey Epstein that the Justice Department released on Friday.
A total of 16 photos were taken down at some point on Saturday from the website that the department created to house files — among them, one of the few that contained Mr. Trump’s image. It was a photo of a credenza in Mr. Epstein’s Manhattan home, with an open drawer containing other photos, including at least one of Mr. Trump.
The Justice Department did not explain on the site why the images had been removed, and a department spokesman did not respond to a message seeking comment.
Democrats on the House Oversight Committee immediately seized on the missing photo of Mr. Trump, reposting it on social media and asking Attorney General Pam Bondi if it was true that the image had been removed.
“What else is being covered up?” the post said. “We need transparency for the American public.”
Twelve of the other missing photos pictured the infamous massage room on the third floor of Mr. Epstein’s mansion in New York. The room, which sat down the hall from Mr. Epstein’s bedroom, was where investigators say that many of his sexual assaults occurred — some of them against teenage victims. The shelves in the room were stocked with lubricants and a silver ball and chain, among other things.
The massage room images that were removed depicted paintings and photographs of nude women, some with their faces redacted. But other images and artwork featuring nude women remained on the site. And some photos of the massage room — including the nude imagery — also remained.
The missing photos were part of a vast collection of materials that the Trump administration was compelled to release after the passage last month of a law mandating that the Justice Department disclose all files in its possession related to Mr. Epstein, a convicted sex offender who died in jail in 2019 while awaiting trial on charges of trafficking minors.
Despite mounting expectations, the released files, which included thousands of photographs and investigative documents, were something of an anticlimax. They added little to the public’s understanding of Mr. Epstein’s conduct, and also did not provide much additional insight into his connections to wealthy and powerful businessmen and politicians who associated with him.
Mr. Trump has, uncharacteristically, said nothing about the files, which contained far more material about one of his political adversaries, former President Bill Clinton, than about him. Still, the Justice Department has said that more disclosures from its files about Mr. Epstein would be coming in the next few weeks.Editors’ Picks‘Avatar: Fire and Ash’: What to Remember Before Seeing the New MovieAn Engine of Fossil Discovery Fights Its Own Extinction2025 Holiday Gift Guide
On Saturday, the department released a second tranche of files that included transcripts from the closed-door grand jury proceedings in the federal investigations into Mr. Epstein and his close associate, Ghislaine Maxwell.
While those documents had never before been made public, they added little to what has already been known about the cases.
The Real Michael Cohen, Fifty Shades Of Black Marker, Michael Cohen, right, 
Dec. 20, 2025. The files were due, the law was clear, but truth arrived censored, delayed, and carefully curated to spare those who mattered most.
Yesterday was the moment we were promised the Epstein files; fully released, completely transparent, no more excuses. Not a teaser. Not a cliffhanger. Not a “wait for the sequel.” Just sunlight, disinfectant, and the truth… right before someone turned off the lights.
What we got instead was a federal arts-and-crafts project titled Fifty Shades of Black Marker.
This Substack is reader-supported. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.Subscribed
I’ve seen this movie before. Literally.
Back in 1992, when I was prepping for a medical malpractice trial; back when facts still mattered and photocopiers were the backbone of justice, I had to duplicate thousands of pages of hospital records. Charts, notes, reports, the whole bloody mess. The copier malfunctioned. The technician shrugged and told me the roller was faulty. Every page came out pitch black. Not “hard to read.” Not “a little smudged.” Just pure, existential darkness. A legal blackout.
Apparently, that same technician now works for the Department of Justice.
Because yesterday’s “release” of the Epstein files looked like someone fed the truth into a Xerox machine, slammed the lid shut, and said, “Good enough; ship it.” Thousands and thousands of documents. Entire pages redacted. Not lines. Not names. Pages. Black slabs of nothingness. Even Kafka would’ve asked them to tone it down.
Let’s be clear: this wasn’t some rushed FOIA request that landed on a bureaucrat’s desk 30 days ago. This process has been dragging on for more than 9 months. Congress passed a law mandating the release. Trump signed it. A deadline was finally set. Friday came. And instead of disclosure, we got performance art masquerading as transparency.
The Justice Department insists this was progress. Proof of commitment. Exhibit A in the case of See, We Tried. What they actually released was a recycling bin of deja vu: photos already public, flight logs already dissected, documents already litigated in the court of public opinion for years. The same story, reheated; just darker.
The anticipation was extraordinary. The expectation? A comprehensive look at two decades of government scrutiny into one of the most grotesque abuse scandals in modern history. What emerged was a document dump so aggressively redacted it made the Pentagon Papers look chatty.
And then there’s the selective “transparency,” which is where the satire writes itself.
Bill Clinton? Oh, he’s in there. Photos on planes. Photos in pools. Photos in hot tubs. Faces redacted, context missing, meaning unspecified; but plenty of imagery for social media interns to circle like sharks. Senior Trump aides gleefully blasted those images online, complete with emojis, as if they’d just discovered a new meme instead of a decades-old national disgrace.
Donald Trump, meanwhile, appears like Bigfoot: rumored, blurry, and somehow always just out of frame. A few well-known photos from the public domain. Nothing new. Nothing revealing. Nothing that might cause discomfort at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.
Funny how that works.
Trump’s relationship with Epstein is not speculative; it’s documented. Flights, parties, Mar-a-Lago overlap, public quotes. Yet the files somehow managed to treat him like a background extra who wandered onto the wrong set. The White House calls this transparency. I call it careful curation.
Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche assures Congress that the Department is “still reviewing” documents and that more may come by the end of the year. Translation: Please stop bothering us; we’re still deciding what the public can handle.
Attorney General Pam Bondi has gone one step further, ordering an investigation into Epstein’s connections to Trump’s political foes. Because when confronted with a bipartisan demand for truth, the instinct is not accountability; it’s opposition research.
And now lawmakers are openly discussing impeachment. Not because the files revealed too much, but because they revealed too little. Because missing deadlines isn’t the real offense here; missing honesty is.
The most haunting part of this story isn’t the redactions. It’s the familiarity. We’ve seen this before. Survivors begging for answers. Institutions stalling. Power protecting itself while pretending to comply. Marina Lacerda, one of Epstein’s survivors, said it best: “Just put out the files. And stop redacting names that don’t need to be redacted.”
That’s the part the DOJ seems incapable of grasping. Transparency without enforcement isn’t transparency. It’s theater. Redactions become weapons. And the truth depends entirely on who’s holding the marker.
After nearly twenty years, we know the broad strokes. Epstein abused girls. Authorities failed them. Deals were cut. Silence was purchased. What we still don’t know; and what yesterday was supposed to illuminate, is who else knew, who else benefited, and who else was protected.
Instead, we got black pages and a press release.
Emptywheel, Analysis: The Most Complex Friday Night News Dump, Ever? Emptywheel (Marcy Wheeler, Ph.D), right, Dec. 20, 2025. There's a lot 
of shit going down with Todd Blanche's name on it. He still seems to believe he can juggle his way through politicizing the Department of Justice.
President Trump arrived late to a healthcare announcement yesterday and didn’t take any questions. Starting around the same time, DOJ launched some of the most complexly executed Friday Night News dumps going.
Epstein Limited Hangout
The big attraction was the release of the first batch of the Epstein files. The limited release violates the law, which required all files to be released yesterday.
Instead, there were a whole bunch of Bill Clinton photos, the document reflecting Maria Farmer’s complaint from 1996, that went ignored for years, and redacted grand jury transcripts that clearly violate the law. The government did not release the proposed indictment and prosecution memo for the indictment that should have been filed in 2007; that may be sealed as deliberative.
Todd Blanche’s wildly dishonest letter (particularly with regards to his claimed concern for victims, after being admonished repeatedly by judges for failing to take that responsibility seriously and a last minute bid that promised but failed to put Pam Bondi on the phone) explaining the release emphasizes how Bondi, right, took over a hundred national security attorneys off their job hunting hackers and spies to conduct a second review; it does not mention the even bigger review the FBI accomplished in March.
The review team consisted of more than 200 Department attorneys working to determine whether materials were responsive under the Act and. if so, whether redactions or withholding was required. The review had multiple levels. First, 187 attorneys from the Department’sNational Security Division (NSD) conducted a review of all items produced to JMD for responsiveness and any redactions under the Act. Second, a quality-control team of 25 attorneys conducted a second-level review to ensure that victim personally identifying information wasproperly redacted and that materials that should not be redacted were not marked for redaction.The second-level review team consisted of attorneys from the Department’s Office of Privacy and Civil Liberties (OPCL) and Office of Information Policy (OIP)—these attorneys are experts in privacy rights and reviewing large volumes of discovery. After the second-level review team completed its quality review, responsive materials were uploaded onto the website for public production as required under the Act. See Sec. 2(a). Finally, Assistant United States Attorneys from the Southern District of New York reviewed the responsive materials to confirm appropriate redactions so that the United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York could certify that victim identifying information was appropriately protected.
That John Eisenberg’s department was in charge of a second pass on these documents is of some interest; there’s no specific competence Nat Sec attorneys would have, but Eisenberg has helped Trump cover stuff up in the past, most notably the transcript of his perfect phone call with Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
Thus far the limited hangout has shifted the focus onto Clinton and away from Trump, but as Kyle Cheney lays out, it risks creating a WikiLeaks effect, in which a focus remains on Epstein for weeks or even months.
Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, right, confirmed Friday that the documents would be released on a rolling basis through the holidays — and possibly beyond. And, in court papers filed shortly after Friday’s partial release, the Justice Department emphasized that more files are still undergoing a review and redaction process to protect victims and new Trump-ordered investigations before they can be released.
The daily drip is a remarkable result for President Donald Trump, who has urged his allies to move past the Epstein files — prompting jeers from Democrats who say he’s trying to conceal details about his own longtime relationship with Epstein. Trump has maintained for years that he and Epstein had a falling out years ago, and no evidence has suggested that Trump took part in Epstein’s trafficking operation. Trump advocated for the release of the files only after Republicans in Congress rebuffed his initial pleas to keep them concealed.
New York Times, 6 Takeaways From the First Batch of the Epstein Files, Alan Feuer, Updated Dec. 20, 2025. Many of the Justice Department documents were heavily redacted, and President Trump’s name was rarely mentioned. The White House also sought to make political hay of the release of photos of Bill Clinton.
The Justice Department, rushing under pressure from Congress to comply with a law signed by President Trump last month, released more than 13,000 files on Friday arising from investigations into Jeffrey Epstein, the financier and convicted sex offender who died in jail in 2019 while under indictment on federal charges of sex trafficking minors.
The release of the files had been long awaited by those who believed the materials could shed light on Mr. Epstein’s activities and his ties to prominent and powerful men. The Justice Department said more documents would be released in the coming weeks.
Here are six takeaways about what the first batch of files divulged — and did not.
The documents produced no major revelations.
The released files, which included thousands of photographs and investigative documents, added little to the public’s understanding of Mr. Epstein’s conduct. The materials also did not provide much additional insight into Mr. Epstein’s connections to wealthy and powerful businessmen and politicians who associated with him.
The materials were mostly drawn from investigations into Mr. Epstein reaching back to an initial inquiry opened by the police in Palm Beach, Fla., in 2005. There were also files from a subsequent investigation conducted by federal prosecutors in Florida that ended in 2008 with a plea deal, and from a final inquiry by prosecutors in Manhattan in 2019 that was never resolved, after Mr. Epstein died in jail while the case was still proceeding.
Many of the documents, which included phone records, travel logs and what appeared to be case files with interviews featuring some of Mr. Epstein’s female victims, were heavily redacted. One of the redacted files, amounting to 119 pages and entitled “Grand Jury NY,” was entirely blacked out.The reaction from the right was muted.
Mr. Trump’s right-wing supporters have traditionally been among the most ardent advocates for releasing the Epstein files. They have long been convinced that the documents would contain evidence that a cabal of prominent men — in their telling, mostly Democrats — had joined Mr. Epstein in abusing young women and covering up their crimes.
But those same supporters were largely silent as the files came out, perhaps in response to the dearth of new incriminating information. Mr. Trump on Friday conspicuously refrained from commenting on the release of the materials, even though the case has haunted him politically.
Whether those who have woven elaborate conspiracy theories around Mr. Epstein and the government’s handling of the investigation will be satisfied by anything the Justice Department releases seems open to question.Bill Clinton was featured prominently.
Whether by design or chance, many of the photographs included in the files were of one of Mr. Trump’s most prominent political adversaries: former President Bill Clinton.Editors’ PicksThis Simple Brisket Deserves a Place at the Holiday Table2025 Holiday Gift GuideCan Science Win on Social Media? Ask Dr. Noc.
One image depicted Mr. Clinton reclining in a hot tub with a person whose face had been blacked out. In many of the photos of Mr. Clinton, he was the only person whose identity could be discerned. The files provided little or no context for the pictures.
The photos of Mr. Clinton were made public after Mr. Trump ordered the Justice Department last month to investigate any ties between the former president and other Democrats to Mr. Epstein. Attorney General Pam Bondi immediately followed up on Mr. Trump’s instructions by directing Jay Clayton, the U.S. attorney in Manhattan, to undertake the case.
The White House on Friday sought to make political hay of the release of the photos of Mr. Clinton.
“We did see something,” Abigail Jackson, a White House spokeswoman, wrote in a social media post on Friday above the image of Mr. Clinton in the hot tub. “Just not what you wanted.”
A spokesman for Mr. Clinton suggested that the White House had engineered the release of the photos to distract from Mr. Trump’s own relationship with Mr. Epstein.
“The White House hasn’t been hiding these files for months only to dump them late on a Friday to protect Bill Clinton,” said the spokesman, Angel Urena. “This is about shielding themselves from what comes next, or from what they’ll try and hide forever.”There were few mentions of Trump.
For months, Mr. Trump actively fought the release of the Epstein files, calling them a Democratic “hoax” and threatening to punish members of Congress who voted to allow them to be made public.
But his name was mentioned rarely in the materials released on Friday. It remained unclear, though, whether he would figure more in the release of files still to come and whether the Justice Department selected the initial batch with politics in mind.
Mr. Trump and Mr. Epstein were close friends for years, and the president’s earlier reluctance to release the files prompted speculation about whether they prominently featured him.
Most of the photos of Mr. Trump released on Friday had already been made public, including images of him and his wife, Melania, with Mr. Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell, who is serving a federal prison sentence for helping Mr. Epstein traffic underage women.
Written references to Mr. Trump came up in Mr. Epstein’s address book and flight logs, as well as a message book in which Mr. Epstein’s assistants let him know about missed phone calls. Versions of those documents were already public.
Mr. Trump’s name also comes up in interviews with Ms. Maxwell, transcripts that the Justice Department had previously made public and rereleased on Friday.Epstein attracted the rich and famous.
The files showed how Mr. Epstein attracted a remarkably broad spectrum of famous people into his orbit, from the rock stars Michael Jackson and Mick Jagger to the legendary newsman Walter Cronkite.
While the materials bore no suggestion that these celebrities had any knowledge of or involvement in Mr. Epstein’s illicit activities, they stood nonetheless as a remarkable testament to his ability to attract attention from the rich and famous.
Still, the documents and photos were largely silent about a roster of other well-known people who have long been associated with Mr. Epstein and his finances, including businessmen like Leon Black and Leslie H. Wexner.There’s more to come, eventually.
In an interview on Fox News on Friday morning, Todd Blanche, the deputy attorney general, acknowledged that the Justice Department was not finished releasing files. Thousands more would be made public “in the coming weeks,” he said.
The delay meant that the Trump administration would apparently violate the law signed by the president in November ordering the complete release of all unclassified materials about Mr. Epstein in the Justice Department’s possession within 30 days, with limited exceptions.
Under the law, the administration can withhold records that identify victims or include images of child sexual abuse. The legislation also allows the Justice Department to withhold records if they are otherwise classified or would “jeopardize an active federal investigation.”
Several members of Congress quickly moved to criticize Mr. Blanche, saying that the department’s partial release of the Epstein files meant it had failed to meet its legal obligations.
New York Times, Bill Clinton, a Main Character in the Epstein Drop, Just Can’t Escape Scandal, Lisa Lerer, Dec. 20, 2025. The Republican-led Justice Department’s release of photos of the former president with Jeffrey Epstein will introduce yet another generation to his flaws and controversies.
One photo shows him sitting on a private plane, smiling and slightly red-faced, with a young blonde draped across the arm of his chair. In another image, he is relaxing, shirtless, in a hot tub with his arms behind his head, the face of the person beside him redacted in a black box.
There he is, grinning next to Mick Jagger in a button-down shirt and blazer. And again, swimming in a luxuriously marble-tiled indoor pool alongside Ghislaine Maxwell, who helped run Jeffrey Epstein’s sex trafficking operation.
And smiling broadly in a silky patterned shirt, standing shoulder to shoulder with Mr. Epstein.
Former President Bill Clinton and Jeffrey Epstein, left, in one of the photos released by the Justice Department on Friday. Information was not provided on when or where it was taken.
The photos were released without context by President Trump’s Justice Department, and lacked information about where they were taken, when and why.
But the man in them is unmistakable: Bill Clinton, the former two-term president, globe-trotting philanthropist and one of the most recognizable symbols of the Democratic Party.
Over the quarter-century since he left the White House, he has painstakingly worked to overcome the personal scandals that marred his presidency. At 79, Mr. Clinton has been enjoying the lifestyle of an elder statesman, traveling the world to deliver speeches and eulogies, writing memoirs and political thrillers, and continuing his philanthropic work.
But the Justice Department’s avalanche-like release on Friday of more than 13,000 files related to Mr. Epstein served as a powerful reminder of Mr. Clinton’s long-scrutinized ties to the disgraced financier as well as some of the former president’s less statesmanlike traits — his womanizing, reckless judgment and impulsivity.
The rise of the #MeToo movement in 2017 prompted a new generation of Democrats to grapple with the accusations made by women against Mr. Clinton. The party confronted uncomfortable questions about its complicity in defending him from allegations that included groping, exposing his genitals without consent and rape — which Mr. Clinton has denied.
Now, thanks to the Republican-led Justice Department, the never-before-released images in the Epstein files will introduce yet another generation to the former president’s flaws, scandals and misconduct.
Notably, the collection of documents, photographs and files disclosed on Friday included many photos of Mr. Clinton but few mentions of Mr. Trump, himself a longtime friend of Mr. Epstein’s.Editors’ PicksShe Put the Heat in ‘Heated Rivalry’3 Make-Ahead Holiday Brunch Recipes for a CrowdOnce a Year the French Literary Scene Goes to the Dogs (Cats, Too)
The Justice Department said more documents would be released in the coming weeks. But the political motivations of the White House in this first drop were obvious and well-worn: Distract from Mr. Trump’s involvement in the scandal by pointing the finger at Mr. Clinton.
“Slick Willy! @BillClinton just chillin, without a care in the world. Little did he know…,” Steven Cheung, the White House communications director, wrote on X, posting the photo of Mr. Clinton in the hot tub and using an epithet that dates back to his time as governor of Arkansas.
The New York Post, a longtime antagonist of Mr. Clinton’s, resurrected another moniker for him on its front page, which blared, “Tubba Bubba.”
A spokesman for Mr. Clinton said the Justice Department was releasing photos of the former president to try to deflect from whatever might be coming in future disclosures.
“It’s obvious what the Republicans in the White House and at Justice and their desperate congressional cronies are doing,” said Angel Ureña, deputy chief of staff for Mr. Clinton. “What they’re hiding is not obvious. But it must not be good.”
The photographs are unlikely to be the end of Mr. Clinton’s troubles surrounding his involvement with Mr. Epstein. The Clintons have spent months trying to avoid appearing in person before the House Oversight Committee to testify in the Epstein investigation. Such an appearance would be highly unusual: No former president has appeared before Congress since 1983, when President Gerald Ford did so to discuss the celebration of the 1987 bicentennial of the enactment of the Constitution.
The release of these images could intensify public pressure on the couple to publicly participate and raise fresh questions about Mr. Clinton’s description of the relationship. He has said that he did not know about Mr. Epstein’s crimes and that he stopped contact after reports began to emerge in 2005 that the financier was being investigated.
“There are two types of people here,” Mr. Ureña said in a statement posted on X. “The first group knew nothing and cut Epstein off before his crimes came to light. The second group continued relationships with him after. We’re in the first. No amount of stalling by people in the second group will change that.”
While the photographs may be striking, the political back-and-forth over Mr. Clinton’s personal conduct is by now familiar. In the decades since he left office, Republicans have wielded the accusations that Mr. Clinton abused women as a political cudgel, a way of deflecting the claims from more than a dozen women who have accused Mr. Trump of sexual misconduct.
At times, Republicans have injected not only the accusations but also the women themselves into the highest-profile moments in American political life.
In 2016, less than two hours before the second presidential debate, Mr. Trump and his campaign chief executive, Stephen K. Bannon, staged an impromptu news conference with three women who said that Mr. Clinton and Hillary Clinton had minimized and belittled their claims of sexual misconduct.
In 2019, hours after Mr. Epstein was found dead by suicide in his prison cell, Mr. Trump posted a conspiracy theory on social media claiming without evidence that Mr. Clinton had been connected to his death.
Since then, Mr. Trump has maintained a steady drumbeat of claims that Mr. Clinton spent significant time visiting Mr. Epstein on his private island — an accusation Mr. Clinton denies. Those claims have also been undercut by Susie Wiles, the White House chief of staff, and Ms. Maxwell.
But Republicans aren’t the only ones who see the accusations of sexual assault and harassment against Mr. Clinton as a political liability.
While only a handful of prominent Democrats have publicly distanced themselves from Mr. Clinton’s behavior, their party has quietly tried to leave the former president and his baggage behind.ImageBill Clinton, looking down and smiling, is walking away from a lectern in a crowded arena.Former President Bill Clinton at the 2024 Democratic National Convention in Chicago. He has written about “brief meetings” with Mr. Epstein.Credit...Todd Heisler/The New York Times
He has been welcomed on the campaign trail far less than he once was, with some candidates avoiding his presence altogether. At the party’s convention in 2020, Mr. Clinton was little more than an afterthought, speaking for less than five minutes in a prerecorded message that aired before prime time. He returned to the stage four years later and spoke for 27 minutes — 15 more than his allotted time.
With the latest disclosure of the photographs, Mr. Clinton’s detractors appear to have new leverage on an old chapter that he has long struggled to close.
In a memoir published in 2024, Mr. Clinton said he had only two “brief meetings” with Mr. Epstein, one at his office in Harlem and another at Mr. Epstein’s house in New York.
He flew on Mr. Epstein’s plane with his staff and Secret Service detail several times in 2002 and 2003 to “support the work of his foundation,” Mr. Clinton said. On each trip, in exchange for the flight, the former president would take “an hour or two” to discuss politics and economics with Mr. Epstein.
“That was the extent of our conversations,” Mr. Clinton wrote. “Even though it allowed me to visit the work of my foundation, traveling on Epstein’s plane was not worth the years of questioning afterward.”
He ended the brief section of his book with a line that was more revealing, perhaps, than even the photographs.
“I wish I had never met him,” he wrote.
U.S. Politics, Elections, Governance
New York Times, Koch Political Operation Spent Nearly $550 Million During 2024 Cycle, Theodore Schleifer, Graphic by Ashley Cai, Dec. 20, 2025. The huge sum shows that while the Koch network may not hold significant power at high levels of the Republican Party, it remains a financial juggernaut. The Koch family network now downplays its commitment to campaigns and elections, but it has continued to spend money on politics.
The political operation founded by Charles and David Koch raised and spent well over half a billion dollars during the 2024 election cycle, showing that the family unit remains a financial juggernaut despite its opposition to President Trump’s re-election.
Mr. Trump is no fan of the libertarian politics long pushed by Charles Koch, left, now 90, and David Koch, who died in 2019. But their network’s huge 2024 spending, revealed in new tax filings provided to The New York Times, points to the operation’s staying power even in a party in which it has diminished influence.
During the two-year 2024 election cycle, the family’s network raised about $578 million and spent about $548 million, the documents show. The two flagship Koch political and policy organizations, the nonprofit group Americans for Prosperity and a sibling super PAC, Americans for Prosperity Action, took in $397 million and $181 million from donors over that period.
Much of the overall money raised appears to stem from more than $5 billion in Koch Industries stock that Charles Koch directed into the network between 2020 and 2022.
The figures in this article are based on a Times analysis of tax filings and a review of Federal Election Commission records.Sign up to get Theodore Schleifer's articles emailed to you. Theodore Schleifer is a political reporter covering billionaires and their impact on the world. Get it sent to your inbox.
Last year alone, Americans for Prosperity raised $215 million, its biggest annual total in its two decades of existence. The organization largely spent its money on its grass-roots field operation, employing 616 people in the calendar year.
Notably, the Koch network pursued a failed mission to try to stop Mr. Trump from claiming the Republican presidential nomination. Americans for Prosperity Action endorsed Nikki Haley in late 2023 and spent over $40 million on her behalf, records show. That deepened the Koch operation’s rift with Mr. Trump, who has long considered the network too opposed to his agenda on tariffs and immigration.
The Koch operation reportedly spent about $250 million during the 2016 cycle. That is a rough estimate because some of the operation’s political work is done quietly through nonprofit groups.Editors’ PicksShe Put the Heat in ‘Heated Rivalry’3 Make-Ahead Holiday Brunch Recipes for a CrowdOnce a Year the French Literary Scene Goes to the Dogs (Cats, Too)
The Koch operation retooled its political philanthropy in the wake of Mr. Trump’s victory in 2016. In 2019, the network renamed itself Stand Together and centralized its operations. The death that year of David Koch, the more politically active brother, also shifted the network’s footing.
Beyond its spending on campaigns and elections, the Koch family has continued to lavish money on organizations aligned with its libertarian agenda, such as the Cato Institute and other think tanks. The Kochs prefer to draw attention to their nonprofit work, such as on criminal-justice reform and artificial intelligence.
A Stand Together spokeswoman, Corinne Clark, said in a statement that the network’s “community includes hundreds of organizations in more than 1,300 communities across the country,” adding, “Public policy, while important, is just one part of our work.”
Presidential campaign cycles are typically when political groups are at their largest, and allow for the most clarity on their operations. And a review of the Koch operation’s newly filed tax returns for 2024 shows that the network now revolves around several large “dark money” nonprofit groups, which often pass hundreds of millions of dollars between them, and one allied super PAC.
Only the super PAC is required to disclose its donors. But the nonprofit groups’ yearly tax returns do disclose the grants they give out, and the operation can be roughly pieced together that way.
The nonprofit groups are technically social-welfare groups, organized under section 501(c)(4) of the tax code, and they can spend only a fraction of their money on clear political advocacy. But years ago, the Kochs pioneered a new model of political influence, in which they set up a labyrinth of nonprofit groups that passed millions among one another to maximize the operation’s political flexibility while also abiding by the law.
A relatively new daisy chain emerged in the 2024 cycle, the filings show.
First, between 2020 and 2022, the more than $5 billion in Koch Industries stock was directed to two relatively new nonprofit groups, Key Change Inc. and Believe in People Inc. They are run by Charles Koch’s son, Chase Koch, who largely oversees the family giving but also focuses on venture capital and his passion for live music.
During the 2024 cycle, those groups funneled at least $630 million total to a separate, new nonprofit group, Stand Together C4 Fund. It functions largely as a bank account: It says it has no employees and appears to exist largely to spread money to other Koch organizations.
In turn, the fund sent just under $350 million total in turn to Americans for Prosperity and the Kochs’ core organization, called the Stand Together Chamber of Commerce, according to the filings. The chamber financed Americans for Prosperity and its super PAC with just under $330 million in cash and services total during the cycle, the filings say. Charles Koch’s company also gave the super PAC an additional $40 million.
In January, Americans for Prosperity said it would spend $20 million to push for a renewal of Mr. Trump’s first-term tax cuts. But relations remain tense: A few days before his inauguration, Mr. Trump posted online that he did not want any recommendations for new administration staff members who were supported by the Kochs, or what the president-elect called “Americans for No Prosperity.”
Politico, DOJ appeals ruling that tanked Comey, James criminal cases, Kyle Cheney, Dec. 19, 2025. The Justice Department is challenging the dismissal of prosecutor Lindsey Halligan.Lindsey Halligan fixes an earring at the end of an interview outside of the White House.
The Justice Department is appealing the ruling that resulted in the dismissal of criminal charges against former FBI Director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James.
The appeal, lodged in both cases, challenges a judge’s finding that the lead prosecutor, Lindsey Halligan, was illegally appointed to her position.
Attorney General Pam Bondi, at President Donald Trump’s urging, appointed Halligan in September as interim U.S. attorney in the Eastern District of Virginia. Halligan, a former personal attorney to Trump with no prosecutorial experience, secured criminal charges against Comey and James within days.
But U.S. District Judge Cameron Currie concluded that Halligan should never have been in the role in the first place because her predecessor, Erik Siebert, had already filled the interim position for a legal maximum of 120 days. And because Halligan was the only prosecutor who signed the Comey and James indictments, Currie concluded that the indictments were defective and had to be tossed.
Comey was indicted in late September on charges that he lied to Congress in 2020, during a hearing related to the FBI’s investigation of the 2016 Trump campaign’s contacts with Russia. James was charged with mortgage fraud related to a property she purchased in Virginia. Both pleaded not guilty and noted that they were indicted by Halligan just days after Trump demanded that his Justice Department quickly bring charges against his political adversaries.
The decision to appeal followed two failed efforts by Justice Department prosecutors to re-indict James — extraordinary rebukes by grand juries amid widespread indications that the charges against Comey and James were driven by Trump’s personal animus against them for his own legal travails.
Comey’s case is more complicated to revive because he was initially indicted just days before a five-year statute of limitations that expiredHis team contends that the failure to bring a valid indictment by the deadline suggests he can no longer be charged.
The Daily, Top Senate Democrat Vows That Trump's Name Will Be Removed From The Kennedy Center, Sarah Jones and Jason Easley, Dec. 20, 2025. While speaking to protesters outside the Kennedy Center, Sen. Chris Van Hollen (D-MD) said that it doesn't matter if it takes weeks or months, Trump's name will come off the Kennedy Center
The Kennedy family is outraged that Donald Trump has decided to illegally slap his name on the national monument to honor the late President John F. Kennedy.
Many Kennedy family members have released statements expressing their dismay and outrage.
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One example came from JFK’s niece Maria Shriver:
The Kennedy Center was named after my uncle, President John F Kennedy. It was named in his honor. He was a man who was interested in the arts, interested in culture, interested in education, language, history. He brought the arts into the White House, and he and my Aunt Jackie amplified the arts, celebrated the arts, stood up for the arts and artists.
It is beyond comprehension that this sitting president has sought to rename this great memorial dedicated to President Kennedy. It is beyond wild that he would think adding his name in front of President Kennedy’s name is acceptable. It is not.
Next thing perhaps he will want to rename JFK Airport, rename the Lincoln Memorial, the Trump Lincoln Memorial. The Trump Jefferson Memorial. The Trump Smithsonian. The list goes on.
Can we not see what is happening here? C’mon, my fellow Americans! Wake up! This is not dignified. This is not funny. This is way beneath the stature of the job. It’s downright weird. It’s obsessive in a weird way. Just when you think somone can’t stoop any lower, down they go…
The next logical step is for Trump to rename the Lincoln Memorial, the Trump Lincoln Memorial, and plop himself on Honest Abe’s lap.
The good news is that Trump can’t legally change the name of the Kennedy Center, and one senator already has a plan to get the president’s name off of the building.
New York Times, Ramaswamy Challenges Conservatives on Surging Bigotry on the Right, Pooja Salhotra, Updated Dec. 20, 2025. The leading Republican candidate for Ohio governor is calling out his party for rising intolerance, including against Indian American immigrants and their children, like him.
Vivek Ramaswamy, the front-running Republican candidate for Ohio governor, challenged a gathering of conservative activists in Arizona on Friday to denounce a rising tide of bigotry on the political right and reject the idea that ancestry or “heritage” defines what makes an American.
“The idea that a ‘heritage American’ is more American than another American is un-American at its core,” Mr. Ramaswamy, a wealthy entrepreneur and candidate for the presidency in 2024, told an audience at AmericaFest, a conservative conference organized by Turning Point USA, the organization founded by the slain activist Charlie Kirk.
He added, “The online comment threads of Twitter might preach that our lineage is our strength. No, I’m sorry, our lineage is not our strength. Our true strength is what unites us across that diversity and through that lineage.”
Mr. Ramaswamy, who shaped his political identity with a series of books and media appearances denouncing left-wing “woke” ideology, has become perhaps the most visible target of a right-wing ideology — sometimes labeled “blood and soil” nationalism, a Nazi slogan that was used in Germany and has resurfaced among white supremacists globally. It is a worldview shaped by intolerance of immigrants, and those from India are one of the latest targets.
“Older Republicans who may doubt the rising prevalence of the blood-and-soil view should think again,” he wrote in an opinion article in The New York Times this week. “My social media feeds are littered with hundreds of slurs, most from accounts that I don’t recognize,” he wrote.
He went further on Friday, saying that people who cannot denounce hateful ideas toward any ethnic group “without stuttering” do not have a “place as a leader at any level in the conservative movement.”
In recent weeks, mainstream conservatism has been rocked by a series of incidents that have highlighted bigotry within its ranks. In mid-October, flagrantly racist, antisemitic and homophobic texts exchanged by young Republicans came to light. Weeks later, the conservative commentator Tucker Carlson, who remains close to President Trump and Vice President JD Vance, sat down for a friendly interview with Nick Fuentes, an openly racist and antisemitic white nationalist.
When the president of the Heritage Foundation, Kevin Roberts, released a video refusing to criticize Mr. Carlson, senior officials and board members at the conservative think tank resigned in protest.Editors’ Picks‘Avatar: Fire and Ash’: What to Remember Before Seeing the New MovieWhen a Performer Met a PlaywrightA Study Linked Cheese to Lower Dementia Risk. Is That Too Good to Be True?ImageNicholas Fuentes, a 27-year-old white nationalist and late night streaming show host, in his home studio in Berwyn, Ill.Credit...Jamie Kelter Davis for The New York Times
Now, Mr. Ramaswamy is highlighting a new pressure point facing his party, surging intolerance toward Indian Americans.
“This is deeply personal to me,” he said in a text to The Times. “It isn’t really about defending Jews, Indians, or any other minority group. It’s about defending the essence of America itself.”Sign up for the Race/Related Newsletter Join a deep and provocative exploration of race, identity and society with New York Times journalists. Get it sent to your inbox.
Corbin Wills, 25, a student at Arizona Christian University who attended AmericaFest, called Mr. Ramaswamy “a great leader in the
New York Times, Cynthia Lummis, a One-Term G.O.P. Senator, Will Not Seek Re-election, Catie Edmondson, Dec. 20, 2025. A conservative who has served in the Senate since 2021, Ms. Lummis attributed the decision to the “difficult, exhausting session” this fall on Capitol Hill.
Senator Cynthia Lummis, Republican of Wyoming, said on Friday that she would not seek re-election next year after serving one term.
In a statement, Ms. Lummis, who has served in the Senate since 2021, attributed the decision to the grueling weeks in session this year on Capitol Hill. Her departure will tee up a primary in the conservative state of Wyoming.
“Deciding not to run for re-election does represent a change of heart for me, but in the difficult, exhausting session weeks this fall I’ve come to accept that I do not have six more years in me,” Ms. Lummis, 71, said. “I am a devout legislator, but I feel like a sprinter in a marathon. The energy required doesn’t match up.”
Her comment, unusually candid by the standards of staid Washington statements, came after a year on Capitol Hill that included the nation’s longest government shutdown and multiple all-night sessions of votes, including to pass President Trump’s marquee tax and spending cuts legislation. Senators took more than 600 roll call votes this year alone, the most in modern history, according to a G.O.P. leadership aide.
She is one of a growing number of Republicans who have indicated they have little interest in staying in Congress. Two of her colleagues, Senators Tommy Tuberville of Alabama and Marsha Blackburn of Tennessee, are running for governor in their respective states; two others, Senators Joni Ernst of Iowa and Thom Tillis of North Carolina, have declined to run for re-election altogether.
In 1978, Ms. Lummis became the youngest woman elected to Wyoming State Legislature, at 24. She went on to win a seat in the House, serving from 2009 to 2017. Ms. Lummis then joined the Senate in 2021, where she was often seen with a smile on her face and a Celsius energy drink in hand.
She quickly became known for her support of the crypto industry, earning the moniker of “Crypto Queen” on Capitol Hill. An early adopter of Bitcoin, she went so far as to edit “laser eyes” into her social media avatars, an image associated with Bitcoin enthusiasts.
More On U.S. Law, Crime, Justice
Lawfare, Why the Government Keeps Failing to Re-Indict Letitia James, Molly Roberts,
right, Dec. 19, 2025. Prosecutors are satisfying the definition of insanity—doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results.
Not-really-U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia Lindsey Halligan and her ragtag team of prosecutors seem to have taken the old adage very literally: If at first you don’t succeed, try, try again.
After their case against Letitia James was dismissed on the grounds that Halligan was improperly appointed, they attempted to indict the New York attorney general again in Norfolk—and again in Alexandria the following week. These efforts failed. (The possibility remains that the government may add another “try” to the time-worn saying on any given Thursday.)
This series of events invites the question: Why can’t the office Halligan is continuing to pretend to lead seem to earn a second true bill? After all, when Halligan presented to the first grand jury herself two months ago, she emerged victorious … for about a month, at least.
Arriving at a conclusive answer is impossible without seeing three separate grand jury transcripts. Informed speculation, however, is suddenly easier than ever.
That’s because the most recent grand jury, in Alexandria, made the unusual decision this week to present the indictment it rejected in open court, and U.S. Magistrate Judge William Porter issued an order Dec. 15 denying the government’s request to keep those records sealed. A comparison of this failed indictment to the version from the original prosecution may help explain why the U.S. attorney’s office’s tenacity isn’t yielding results.
What’s Old Is New Again
The essentials of the two indictments are the same: alleged violations of the bank fraud law (18 U.S.C. § 1344) and a law prohibiting false statements to a financial institution (18 U.S.C. § 1014). To have committed a crime under these statutes, James would have to have knowingly made a false statement that was intended to deceive as well as either intending, or tending, to influence the decision of a bank.
The later indictment also focuses on the same property as the earlier—a three-bedroom, one-bathroom house in Norfolk on Peronne Avenue (though this is spelled alternately as “Peronne” and “Perrone” in the document, only the former of which corresponds to the spelling on Google Maps). The basic allegation of occupancy fraud carries over into this go-around, too. The government argues that James misrepresented herself to her lender, OVM Financial, when she indicated in mortgage forms that she would treat the property as a secondary residence.
And once again, a “Second Home Rider” is central to the case. This is a form Fannie Mae statement that bars borrowers from entering into “a timesharing or any other shared ownership arrangement” that requires them “either to rent the property or give any other person control over the occupancy or use of the property.” What was odd—or obfuscatory—about the initial indictment was that it never claimed that James breached that rule. It simply said she rented “the property to a family of (3),” implying that the terms of the rider weren’t honored, when really the rider explicitly allows short-term renting during the first year so long as the property remains under the borrower’s control and “available” for the borrower’s personal use.
The new indictment, similarly, zeroes in on the rider as the basis of one of its false statement counts. This time, it doesn’t mention rental to a family of three—probably because the family in question, as the New York Times reported shortly after the initial indictment, has turned out to be James’s own grandniece and her children, who appear to have lived in the house for years almost entirely rent-free. Indeed, when the indictment introduces the existence of the rider, it doesn’t mention rental at all; it merely says that James “never had any intention of occupying and using” the property “as a second home.”
This focus on occupancy frames the rest of the new indictment. But in this instance, it doesn’t resolve the old indictment’s central problem: There’s no evidence that James acted contrary to the rider’s specific requirements. And to have made a false statement to a financial institution, she would have to have actually stated or certified something false.
What’s New Isn’t Much Help Either
The most obvious difference between the revised indictment and its previous incarnation is the addition of another—third—count: also alleging false statements to a financial institution but based on a separate document.
That document is an “Affidavit of Occupancy” that James signed when applying for the loan. Assuming that affidavit is the same one the government eventually submitted as supporting documentation in the now-dismissed case, this allegation has bones even barer than the allegation regarding the rider. Next to the line, “Second Home: At least one borrower will occupy the property as a second home (vacation, etc) while maintaining a principal residence elsewhere,” James has ticked a box.
The indictment says that James’s checking of this box constituted a false declaration of her “intent to occupy” the property “as a second home…when in truth and fact…she never had any intention” of doing so. And, as with the rider, there is scant discussion of how exactly James failed to occupy the property as a second home. The relevant Fannie Mae guidelines more or less mirror the second-home rider—and they state that the borrower must occupy the property “for some portion of the year.”
The prosecutors suggest James didn’t occupy the property at all, pointing to Schedule E tax forms on which she indicates zero “personal use days.” They also reference reservations she made at hotels in the area. The New York Times, however, reports that James makes “regular visits” to the property—and the credit card receipts for hotel reservations the government produced while its abortive case was still active cover only a single week around the time of purchase.
But the government’s trouble is deeper than just this. Prosecutors not only need to show the willful violation of rules for secondary residences—they also need to show that those violations influenced the decision of a bank. And the shift in focus away from allegedly renting the property to allegedly failing to occupy it renders that task even trickier. The old indictment sought to meet the bar by avowing, based on the Schedule E tax forms, that James had received “thousand(s) of dollars in rents” and was therefore treating her home as an investment property. Lying about whether the home was an investment property might have influenced the bank—because a mortgage for an investment property would have carried a higher interest rate.
The new indictment doesn’t do that. Indeed, it dispenses with the “thousand(s) in rent” language entirely, perhaps because the Schedule E forms include only $1,350 in rents received and reveal a matching $1,350 in utilities paid. Read carefully, the Schedule E forms indicate that after taking into account mortgage interest, taxes and depreciation, James lost money on the property in 2020.
Yet the truth can hurt, and in this matter the indictment’s (relative) honesty may harm the government’s case in the eyes of a reasonable grand juror. After all, if this house wasn’t a second home, what was it—and how did James’s alleged misrepresentations of her occupancy of it influence the decision of a bank to issue a loan at a given rate? The government does eventually say the property would have been “accurately represented…as an investment property.” But, because this time around prosecutors didn’t include any facts even remotely suggesting James was profiting from her ownership, they haven’t come close to demonstrating that she viewed the house as an investment at all.
Prosecutors rely instead only on the Schedule E forms and New York financial disclosures. The Schedule E forms report income or losses from “rental real estate”; the New York disclosure forms instruct respondents not to list property that is their primary or secondary residence, and James has indicated that the general nature of the property is “investment.” These filings, however, don’t necessarily mean that the home wasn’t “available” for James’s use (as the second home rider requires) or that she did not use it “for some portion of the year” (as the affidavit of occupancy attests). Quite possibly, James was attempting to cross “i”s and dot “t”s by disclosing the origin of any income she was receiving that would otherwise be unaccounted for, rather than accidentally admitting to having defrauded a financial institution when she obtained her loan.
(The closest the indictment comes to catching James in anything that looks even a little like a lie is when it introduces an insurance policy James signed, not featured in the previous indictment, that indicated the total number of residents in the household including children would be one. But, besides the fact that James isn’t charged with insurance fraud, it’s unclear whether she would have been obligated to include the family members who eventually lived in her property as members of the economic unit that makes up her household. Arguably if the residents actually were tenants rather than household members, they should have obtained their own policy.)
Ultimately, the indictment betrays its lack of confidence in its own contention that the “Peronne Property” was legally an investment property—waffling over whether James was perpetrating a money-making ploy or doing a family member a favor by “secur[ing] a mortgage…that her family member could not have qualified for.” The latter would be illegal if the family member were secretly responsible for the home and the mortgage payments. But, as far as we know and apparently as far as the government knows either, the family member was not.
What’s the Story?
So why did Assistant U.S. Attorney Roger Keller—who took charge of this case, including the presentation of the indictment to the grand jury, after the improper appointment debacle—fail not once, but twice now, to do what Lindsey Halligan in all her inexperience managed to do two months ago?
One possible explanation is random variance in the grand jury pool. Different grand juries have different grand jurors, and these latter grand jurors may have been less persuadable than the earlier ones, even though persuading 12 or so people of probable cause is notoriously, and historically, easy.
Another possible explanation resides in the indictment itself: This time, the government has done even less than last time to demonstrate that the house was anything other than a second home according to Fannie Mae’s malleable guidelines; or that Letitia James knew as much; or that any gap between her representations and reality had any influence on her lender’s decisions. And at least some of the reason it has done less may be that it feels more bound by normal procedure than it did last time.
The defense submitted a motion for the disclosure of certain grand jury materials in the since-dismissed case questioning whether Halligan may have “infected” the grand jury proceedings with “instructional error”—as the record shows she did in former FBI Director James Comey’s case. A grand jury in Norfolk originally heard testimony from the grandniece; but the grand jury that returned the indictment was seated in Alexandria, and the niece wasn’t asked to testify again. The inspector general for a key housing agency was ousted after he reportedly attempted to provide constitutionally required information to EDVA—suggesting there may have been exculpatory evidence that prosecutors should have but did not present to the Alexandria grand jury.
In other words, the case may look weaker this time around, because the case always was weaker but now the government is doing less to hide that weakness.
The final possible explanation: Grand jurors have been reading the news. In declining the government’s request to seal the rejected indictment after the grand jury presented it in open court, the judge said he wouldn’t speculate why the grand jury had taken that extraordinary step. But he also said that making the no bill public “serves the interest of transparency when an individual has already suffered the stigma of public criminal charges.” The grand jury—aware of President Trump’s efforts to punish a political opponent come hell, high water, or dismissal on the basis of improper appointment—may have thought along the same lines. It, or some members of it, may also have been aware of prior grand jury rejection of charges. And grand jurors may have been aware of the judicial dismissal of the previous charges.
The full explanation could be some combination of the above. But the inability of the Department of Justice to secure the retribution it has been ordered to seek suggests that trying, trying again doesn’t always lead to success. Sometimes, it just leads to repeated failure.
All Rise News, Dugan's split verdict: A guide for the perplexed, Adam Klasfeld, right, Dec. 20, 2025. Ex-prosecutor Glenn Kirschner and I explain the possible reasons why a federal jury convicted Judge Dugan of obstructing, but not concealing, an immigrant's arrest.
Judge Hannah Dugan is guilty of obstructing an arrest of an undocumented immigrant, but she is not guilty of concealing the same undocumented immigrant from his arresting federal agents.
If you find that verdict confusing, you’re not alone.
Dugan’s lead attorney Steven Biskupic signaled during a press conference held immediately after the trial that the seeming disconnect could figure in the judge’s appeal.
“How can you find guilty there and not go to the first?” Biskup asked reporters, noting that his client’s sentencing and post-trial briefings have not yet been scheduled.
“I would just say the case is a long way from over,” he added.
In a roughly half-hour conversation on Friday, former federal prosecutor Glenn Kirschner and I hashed out how the jury’s notes could have explained the seemingly inconsistent verdict. In two separate notes, jurors asked whether Judge Dugan needed to know the identity of the subject of the warrant and the identity of the subject of the pending immigration proceeding in order to convict her.
The question about the warrant pertained to Count One, the misdemeanor, and the one about the pending proceeding used the statutory language of Count Two, a felony.
U.S. District Judge Lynn Adelman provided varying standards for the different counts: The judge made clear that Dugan needed to know the identity of the subject of the warrant, but he also instructed the jury that Dugan only needed sufficient knowledge about the nature of the pending proceeding.
The distinction was crucial because prosecutors did not present evidence that federal agents showed Dugan their warrant or mentioned the name Eduardo Flores-Ruiz, the man they were trying to arrest.
In legal jargon, a “repugnant verdict” is one that is internally inconsistent, but Dugan might have a challenge overturning her conviction on that basis.
“The Supreme Court has said, ‘Inconsistent verdicts are just fine,’” Glenn noted.
New York Times, Brooklyn Man Accused of Stealing $16 Million in Crypto From Victims, Hurubie Meko, Dec. 20, 2025 (print ed.). From a house in Sheepshead Bay, Ronald Spektor bilked about 100 people across the United States, prosecutors say. Then, he went online to brag.
The Coinbase users’ phones would get flooded with alerts. They would panic, thinking their cryptocurrency accounts had been compromised.
Then, they would get an email saying an employee with the company, the largest crypto exchange in the United States, would call with help. Sometimes, the email included the name “James Wilson.”
The users would follow the caller’s instructions, moving money to what they were told was a new, safer account that would be controlled only by them. At that point, prosecutors said, their funds vanished into the control of Ronald Spektor, a 23-year-old man who lived in his father’s home on the edge of Brooklyn in Sheepshead Bay.
The Brooklyn district attorney’s office says about 100 users fell prey to his scheme, losing nearly $16 million in cryptocurrency, but they believe there could be more victims. Mr. Spektor emptied crypto wallets, the authorities said, recruited helpers, laundered the money and laughed about it online.
On the encrypted app Telegram, Mr. Spektor posted as @lolimfeelingevil. He bragged, according to prosecutors, of how he lost $6 million in crypto by gambling but made millions more through swindles.
On Friday, Mr. Spektor appeared in State Supreme Court in Brooklyn in khaki pants and an oversize brown jacket, his hands cuffed behind him. He was quiet while he was arraigned on a 31-count indictment charging him with first-degree grand larceny, first-degree money laundering and other counts.
ABC-TV (WLS, Chicago), Bulgarian Chicago business owner dies in ICE custody, sparking calls for 'immediate investigation,' Mark Rivera and Barb Markoff, Christine Tressel and Tom Jones, Dec. 19, 2025. Nenko Gantchev, 56, lived in Chicago for 30 years, died Monday at North Lake Correctional Facility in Baldwin, Michigan: Officials.
A Bulgarian man from Chicago arrested during the recent fall immigration enforcement 'blitz' has died while in the custody of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) at a Michigan private prison.
Nenko Gantchev, 56, died Monday at the North Lake Correctional Facility in Baldwin, MI, which is contracted by ICE to hold undocumented migrants.
After multiple inquiries from the ABC7 I-Team, a DHS statement published online said Gantchev's death is "suspected to be from natural causes," but "the official cause of death is still under investigation."
But Gantchev's family and friends tell the I-Team questions are mounting surrounding his deteriorating medical condition the past few months while he was in custody at North Lake, leading up to what happened the day he died.
"I want people to know what happened to him, a man who lived 30 years here, hardworking, paid taxes, and they treated him like an animal," said Gantchev's wife, a U.S. citizen who asked the I-Team not to use her name as she fears retaliation from federal officials. "They are so rude to him... They treated him like he was a murderer."
Chicago Congresswoman Delia Ramirez has called for an "immediate, transparent investigation into the circumstances of Mr. Gantchev's death, including an investigation into reports from other detainees that he asked for medical assistance and did not receive it in time to save his life."
"We are aware of at least 30 deaths at ICE detention centers this year, making 2025 the deadliest year for immigrants in ICE custody," Ramirez said in an online statement.
Nenko Gantchev was pronounced dead this week in an ICE detention facility in Baldwin, MI.Nenko Gantchev was pronounced dead this week in an ICE detention facility in Baldwin, MI.BGVoice
Gantchev was one of hundreds of people that a federal judge in Chicago ordered released on bond last month, after his warrantless arrest was flagged as possibly violating the Castañon Nava consent decree in place. In court records, federal officials indicated Gantchev's release was not considered a high risk to public safety.
New York Times, Crypto Fraudster Sam Bankman-Fried Has New Pursuit: Jailhouse Lawyer, Jonah E. Bromwich, Dec. 20, 2025. The man convicted of taking billions has advised the former president of Honduras and Sean Combs, among others. He said in an interview that he helps in ways overwhelmed lawyers cannot.
Twenty months ago, Mr. Bankman-Fried was sentenced to more than two decades in prison and ordered to pay $11 billion in restitution after being found guilty of a multibillion-dollar fraud in a case that upended the cryptocurrency industry. During the trial, he testified on his own behalf — a risky move that did not pay off — and appeared at odds with his own lawyers. But since then, he has become a prolific jailhouse lawyer himself, dispensing advice to his fellow prisoners, several of whom have since expressed their gratitude.
Carmine Simpson, a former police officer convicted of soliciting nudes from a minor, said that while his sentence was “unreasonable and excessive,” he was “confident that I would be in a worse spot now if not for Sam’s help.”
Global News
New York Times, With Attacks on Oil Tankers, Ukraine Takes Aim at Russia’s War Financing, Kim Barker, Ephrat Livni and Valerie Hopkins, Dec. 20, 2025. Strikes on four vessels signal that Kyiv is willing to expand the maritime theater of the conflict in an effort to crimp Moscow’s military funding.
Ukraine has used drones four times in the past few weeks to hit oil tankers from Russia’s shadow fleet, escalating the war in the seas and showing that Ukraine’s security services agency feels increasingly emboldened to launch audacious attacks and claim them publicly.
One ship was struck by aerial drones on Thursday night in the Mediterranean Sea, more than 1,200 miles from Ukraine. The other three were hit by sea drones in the Black Sea. The attacks are the first on Russia’s sanction-defying oil tankers that Ukraine has acknowledged since Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022.
The security agency also said it had attacked Russian oil production platforms in the Caspian Sea four times in the past 10 days, including on Thursday.
The oil business fuels Russia’s economy and its war, and throughout the conflict, the West has tried to crack down on its profits with sanctions.
“No money, no war machine,” said Benjamin Jensen of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a nonpartisan think tank in Washington.
To evade those sanctions, Russia has developed its so-called shadow fleet, a clandestine network of hundreds of dilapidated oil and gas tankers with hard-to-trace owners that covertly shuttle fuel to countries like India and China. Ukraine believes that if it can disrupt this business through attacks on the shadow fleet, as well as on oil refineries, it may gain leverage in peace talks now being pushed by President Trump by appearing to be on the attack against Russia.
In addition, Ukraine hopes to force Russia to the negotiating table by cutting its oil profits.
So far, President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia has given no indication that he is interested in ending the war. He says he is winning, and on Friday, he said Kyiv’s attacks on the shadow fleet would not have any effect. He also threatened retaliation. “We will definitely respond,” he said during his end-of-year news conference.
The recent attacks are part of a new front in the conflict. For years, the Biden administration had warned Ukraine against hitting Russia’s oil industry because of fears of driving up global prices and escalating the war. Ukraine’s public claims suggest that Mr. Trump might have known about them, as Ukraine would not risk angering Mr. Trump at this stage of negotiations.Editors’ Picks6 New Movies Our Critics Are Talking About This WeekMy Ex-Lover Lied About His Marriage Being Over. Should I Tell His Wife?They Sang, They Danced, They Camped Out: What Fans Did for Bad Bunny
The White House did not respond to a request for comment.ImageA cityscape with only a few lights showing in scattered windows.Odesa, Ukraine, on Wednesday during a power cut. Russia has been pounding the port city for almost a week.Credit...Laetitia Vancon for The New York Times
All four tankers disabled by Ukraine’s security services were empty. The security agency, known as the S.B.U., said the three vessels in the Black Sea were on their way to fill up with oil in Novorossiysk, the busiest port in Russia, on the sea’s northeastern coast.
The attack on Thursday night in the Mediterranean Sea, on a tanker identified as the Qendil, was the most surprising, as the vessel was so far from Ukraine. Officials did not say where the aerial drones were launched from.
Experts said the attacks were a signal to Russia that Ukraine was willing to escalate the war, and a message to Europe to enforce sanctions or face more problems in shipping lanes.
Ukraine “will pursue a decisive policy,” said Andrii Klymenko, who runs a group monitoring the shadow fleet for the Black Sea Institute of Strategic Studies, a Ukrainian think tank. He added, “That is, we will hit everyone who goes to Novorossiysk or to other Russian ports for oil — before they get the oil.”
New York Times, U.S. Coast Guard Boards Tanker Carrying Venezuelan Oil, Nicholas Nehamas and Anatoly Kurmanaev, Dec. 20, 2025. The vessel, which was flying a Panamanian flag, was not on a list of tankers under U.S. sanctions.
The U.S. Coast Guard stopped and boarded a Panamanian-flagged tanker carrying Venezuelan oil early Saturday, according to a U.S. official and two people inside Venezuela’s oil industry.
All three spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive topic. The boarding represents the United States’ second action this month against a tanker carrying Venezuelan crude oil to Asia, escalating President Trump’s pressure campaign against the Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro. Mr. Trump has accused Mr. Maduro of flooding the United States with fentanyl and of stealing oil from American companies, without providing evidence.
On Tuesday, Mr. Trump had announced “a total and complete blockade of all sanctioned oil tankers going into and out of Venezuela.”
But the vessel boarded on Saturday, called the Centuries, is not on a list of tankers under U.S. sanctions that is publicly maintained by the Treasury Department. The people inside Venezuela’s oil industry said the cargo belongs to an established China-based oil trader with a history of taking Venezuelan crude oil to Chinese refineries.
The ship had recently left Venezuela and was in Caribbean waters.
Kristi Noem, the homeland security secretary, said in a post on X Saturday afternoon that the Coast Guard had “apprehended” a tanker that had been docked in Venezuela.
“The United States will continue to pursue the illicit movement of sanctioned oil that is used to fund narco terrorism in the region,” she wrote. “We will find you, and we will stop you.”
Ms. Noem also posted a video that appeared to show U.S. forces rappelling from a helicopter onto the ship’s deck.
It was unclear if the United States intended to seize the Centuries, as it did another tanker carrying Venezuelan oil last week. The U.S. official said that American authorities did not have a seizure warrant to take possession of Centuries or its cargo.
The Pentagon referred questions to the White House, which did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
New York Times, U.S. and Venezuela Jam Caribbean GPS Signals to Thwart Attacks, Raising Flight Hazard, Riley Mellen and Anatoly Kurmanaev, Dec. 20, 2025. Military brinkmanship between President Trump and Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela has led to an increase in electronic warfare in the region.
An escalating standoff between the United States and Venezuela has led both countries’ militaries to jam satellite navigation signals in the Caribbean to guard against a potential attack, data show, putting air and sea traffic in the region at greater risk of a collision or accident.
At least some of the U.S. warships that have deployed to the Caribbean in recent months have been jamming GPS signals in their vicinity, according to an analysis of data provided by Stanford University and a U.S. official who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss operational matters.
The Trump administration says the warships, which include the Navy’s most modern aircraft carrier, the U.S.S. Gerald R. Ford, are targeting drug trafficking to the United States orchestrated by the Venezuelan government.
In response to U.S. military pressure, the armed forces of President Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela have jammed the GPS signals around the country’s critical infrastructure, including military bases, oil refineries and power plants, according to an analysis by Spire Global, a satellite data firm.
Signals experts said both militaries appeared to be trying to protect assets against attacks by drones and precision munitions, which can be guided by GPS or similar positioning systems.
“It is defensive in nature,” said Logan Scott, a radio frequency expert who helped build the world’s first digital GPS receivers in the 1980s, referring to the sources of jamming shown in the data. “You’ve got a military emplacement and you want to keep drones, and whatnot, from getting to it.”
The similar tactics employed by the two adversaries, he added, are amplifying the range and intensity of the jamming. “The only difference is which side of the line you’re on,” Mr. Scott said.
These military tactics have come at the cost of disrupting civilian transport that relies on GPS.
The Steady State, Analysis: Why Are We in Venezuela? Jonathan Winer, Dec. 20, 2025. The Enemy Abroad, The Enemy Within.
The Trump executive order [designating Fentanyl as a Weapon of Mass Destruction] asserts that fentanyl’s lethality renders it a “chemical weapon,” and links it—without specifying any evidence—to assassinations, terrorist acts, insurgencies, and the potential for use by America’s adversaries in concentrated, large-scale terror attacks, implicitly invoking the logic of September 11. These assertions are presented as justification for elevating fentanyl from a public health and law-enforcement challenge into a top-tier national-security threat.
Notably, the order cites no evidence that the two unnamed cartels it references—almost certainly the Sinaloa Cartel and the Jalisco New Generation Cartel, both Mexican criminal organizations—have engaged in, or are planning, acts of terrorism, assassination, or mass-casualty attacks against the United States using fentanyl. Nor does it acknowledge that these groups pose a far greater violent threat to Mexico than to the United States. In reality, fentanyl has not been deployed as a weapon of terror. It has been trafficked for profit, consumed individually, and rendered lethal through misuse and adulteration—not through organized attacks designed to produce mass casualties or public spectacle.
“…That distinction matters. Terrorism, chemical warfare, and weapons of mass destruction are defined not only by lethality, but by intent and mode of use. Chemical weapons regimes were built to prohibit substances designed, produced, and deployed for the purpose of inflicting indiscriminate mass harm. Fentanyl’s legitimate medical uses, its regulation under narcotics law, and the absence of evidence of state-directed or cartel-directed weaponization all place it squarely outside that category.
“Yet by declaring fentanyl a WMD, President Trump instantaneously transforms what has long been treated as a law-enforcement and public-health problem into an existential national-security threat.Military–Civilian Fusion
“This rhetorical transformation has sweeping consequences. It recasts drug trafficking as a matter not merely for criminal investigation and prosecution, but for sanctions, intelligence operations, homeland security measures, and military support. The order directs the Department of Homeland Security and the newly rebranded Department of War to “support the full spectrum of counter-fentanyl measures,” without defining the limits of that spectrum.
“In principle, that ambiguity opens the door to actions that extend far beyond traditional counternarcotics policy: the use of U.S. military assets in foreign operations; the portrayal of migrants as vectors or enablers of WMD threats; the expansion of detention and removal authorities; and the characterization of opposition to administration policy as interference with national security. Military and civilian authorities are thus integrated as two arms of a single campaign—the federal state mobilized against perceived enemies abroad and at home.
Jonathan M. Winer is the former Special Envoy for Libya and Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for International Law Enforcement and a Distinguished Diplomatic Fellow at MEI.
President Trump with Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed Bin Salman, left, and Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa earlier in 2025.
New York Times, U.S. Strikes on Syria Underscore Scale of Challenge for Its President, Abdi Latif Dahir, Dec. 20, 2025. The Syrian government did not comment directly on the extensive American strikes targeting the Islamic State on Friday, but said it was intensifying its own efforts to fight the group.
The barrage of airstrikes launched by the United States across Syria late on Friday underscored the challenges facing the country’s president, 
Ahmed al-Sharaa, left, as he struggles to assert control over the nation and navigate a fragile, nascent relationship with President Trump.
American fighter jets, attack helicopters and artillery attacked more than 70 suspected Islamic State positions across central Syria, targeting the group’s infrastructure and weapons sites, according to the U.S. military’s Central Command. Jordanian warplanes assisted in the operation, it said.
The Syrian government did not comment directly on the extensive strikes but said in a statement early on Saturday that it was intensifying its own military operations against the Islamic State, which is also known as ISIS.
Since Syria joined a global coalition to defeat the Islamic State last month, the group has ramped up its attacks, according to American and Syrian officials, as well as security experts.
“The Syrian Arab Republic invites the United States and member states of the international coalition to support these efforts in a manner that contributes to the protection of civilians and the restoration of security and stability in the region,” the Syrian government said.
Nanar Hawach, senior Syria analyst at the International Crisis Group, a think tank, said that Mr. al-Sharaa’s government wanted to project authority over Syria’s affairs, while balancing that with a need to engage with its international partners.
Some of Mr. al-Sharaa’s more hard-line supporters could bristle at a Western country carrying out strikes on their homeland, Mr. Hawach added. “The government is trying very hard to walk a thin line,” he said.
The U.S. strikes came a week after Mr. Trump said he would retaliate against ISIS for killing two American soldiers and a civilian U.S. interpreter in the ancient city of Palmyra.
No group has yet claimed responsibility for that attack, though initial assessments suggest that it was most likely carried out by the Islamic State, according to the Pentagon and American intelligence officials.
Syrian officials said the gunman was a member of the country’s security forces who was slated to be removed from duty because of his extremist beliefs. The killings exposed persistent weaknesses within Syria’s security structure. Some supporters of Mr. Trump have called for a withdrawal of U.S. troops.
Mr. al-Sharaa and his rebel forces swept to power just over a year ago after toppling Bashar al-Assad, Syria’s longtime dictator. The country has since grappled with a shattered economy, rising sectarian violence, political instability and the growing threat of terrorism..
U.S. Media, Culture, Education, Religion
New York Times, Opinion: Candace Owens Is the Conservative Movement’s Frankenstein Monster, Michelle Goldberg, right, 
Dec. 20, 2025. This week, Charlie Kirk’s widow, Erika Kirk (shown above in a file photo), traveled to Nashville to meet with Candace Owens, a podcaster who has become the premier purveyor of conspiracy theories about her husband’s murder. If the summit was meant to convince Owens to back off her paranoid and fantastical speculations, it failed.
On Thursday, Owens (shown below at left) had on her show a man who claimed to have seen Erika Kirk at an army base the day before Kirk’s assassination, implying that Erika was somehow part of the plot against her husband. That plot also involves, in Owens’s telling, the French Foreign Legion, the federal government and leaders of Turning Point, Kirk’s organization, all somehow masterminded by demonic Zionists.
Owens musings are unhinged, but Erika Kirk’s trip to Nashville, brokered by the conservative star Megyn Kelly, demonstrates that they’ve become too influential for right-wing leaders to ignore. Kelly herself — a former Fox News host who’d never been known for her outré views — has refused to denounce Owens, insisting her ideas are legitimate. On her podcast on Tuesday, Kelly said that she buys the official story that Kirk was murdered by Tyler Robinson, the Utah man charged with the crime. But, she added, “many people believe there’s more to this story, that we’re being lied to by our F.B.I., that there are too many inconsistencies around the official story. And those people are more than entitled to that belief.”
The aftermath of Kirk’s assassination should have been a unifying moment for the right. The facts of the case — Robinson is said to have had a trans partner and was angry about Kirk’s demonization of sexual minorities — would have been easy for conservatives to exploit in their fight against gender nonconformists. But Robinson evidently wasn’t a grand enough enemy for some on today’s right, which is increasingly built on conspiracies and the content they generate. So Kirk’s killing, far from knitting the movement together in grief and anger, has precipitated a bitter, squalid internecine feud.
“Today the conservative movement is in serious danger,” Ben Shapiro said in a blistering speech on the opening night of Turning Point’s AmericaFest conference on Thursday, the first since Kirk’s death. That danger comes not just from the left, Shapiro said, but “from charlatans who claim to speak in the name of principle but actually traffic in conspiracism and dishonesty.” He went on to denounce Owens by name, as well as his fellow Turning Point speakers Tucker Carlson and Steve Bannon.
Shapiro, however, doesn’t have the power to excommunicate Owens. Maybe no one does. Her audience is simply too big. As of this writing, she is ninth on Spotify’s podcasts charts, ahead of every other right-wing podcast except Carlson’s. (Shapiro is at 48, right behind Oprah Winfrey.) A TikTok video she posted after her meeting with Erika Kirk was viewed over 14 million times. Her fandom extends beyond political junkies; on TikTok, you’ll find Owens followers who otherwise post mostly about celebrities and wellness, both subjects she talks about often. In a world where traditional gatekeepers have lost most of their power, she’s a star.
U.S. Inflation, Jobs, Economy, Markets
New York Times, These Young Adults Make Good Money. But Life, They Say, Is Unaffordable, Sabrina Tavernise, Dec. 20, 2025. Economists say that a typical middle-class family today is richer than one in the 1960s. Americans in their 20s and 30s don’t believe it.
A nerdy economics essay recently went viral. It asserted that the federal measure for the poverty line was woefully outdated and that for a family of four, the income needed today to function in American society was $140,000.
The essay, by Michael Green, a financial market strategist, struck a nerve and set off another round of debate about affordability, focused this time on whether people with six-figure incomes should feel strapped.
Economists derided the essay. They pointed out that the typical middle-class family today is actually much richer than its counterpart in the 1960s, when the poverty measure came about. And, they added, most Americans eat out, have smartphones and take flights, unimaginable luxuries generations ago.
President Trump has tried to dismiss the issue of affordability, saying in a speech last week that it was “a hoax” and “you don’t need 37 dolls for your daughter.” On Wednesday, he returned to the topic, defending his record and asserting that gas and drug prices had come down.
But in interviews with Americans in their 20s and 30s, they said that the raw numbers did not come close to capturing the reality of their lives. They were all what economists regard as middle class, some making well over $63,360, the median for full-time, year-round workers.
Dec. 19
In this undated photograph from the personal collection of convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, President Donald Trump is seen talking to a woman and standing next to Epstein. The photo, from Epstein’s estate, was released Dec. 12 by the Democrats on the House Oversight Committee. In a 2010 sworn deposition below, Epstein declined to answer questions about his involvement with Trump, Epstein's onetime close friend. Trump's Justice Department released heavily redacted files Dec. 19 regarding Epstein's involvement with crimes and colleagues, with redactions allegedly violating or delaying implementation of a new law requiring full disclosure except for narrowly drawn exceptions.
The Parnas Perspective, Epstein Files Heavily Redacted as DOJ Covers Up the Truth, Aaron Parnas, right, 
Dec. 19, 2025. I have just finished reviewing roughly 2,000 Epstein documents, one thing has become immediately clear: the scale of material is far smaller than initially expected, and the review process itself is moving much faster than anticipated.
The reason for this speed, however, is not efficiency or transparency—it is extensive redaction. An overwhelming majority of the files, approximately 80 percent, are either partially or completely redacted. In many cases, entire pages are obscured, leaving little more than black bars and vague headings. I am going to finish going through them by the end of the night at this pace, but I am not stopping now.
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This level of redaction raises serious questions about the intent and scope of the release. While thousands of pages technically exist, the usable information contained within them is minimal. Names, dates, locations, and contextual details are routinely hidden, making it difficult—if not impossible—to draw firm conclusions from many of the documents. What remains visible often feels fragmented, stripped of the very details that would provide accountability or clarity.
Before outlining what has been observed so far, it is important to state a key principle: accountability should apply universally. It does not matter who appears in these documents or photographs. Political affiliation, celebrity status, or public perception should offer no protection. Everyone should be held to the same standard, without exception.
Based on the review thus far, one notable observation stands out. Despite widespread public discussion and speculation, Donald Trump appears in very few—if any—of the non-redacted files released in this batch. This is notable not because it clears anyone of wrongdoing, but because it highlights a discrepancy. It is already publicly acknowledged that his name exists somewhere within the broader collection of files. That reality naturally raises the question: if some names and images are visible, why are others still withheld? What criteria is being used, and what information is the Department of Justice choosing not to release?
Among the materials that are visible, there are photographs showing Jeffrey Epstein alongside Bill Clinton. These images, while not new to public discourse, reinforce known associations and underscore why transparency matters.
There are also photographs of Epstein with Michael Jackson. As with other materials, the context surrounding these images is limited, and in many cases accompanying information is heavily redacted. Without context, such images invite speculation rather than understanding, which again highlights the problem created by incomplete disclosure. Image
Beyond photographs, the document set contains numerous pages of written material that are almost entirely blacked out. These include what appear to be logs, notes, correspondence, and administrative records. In their current form, they offer little more than confirmation that information exists—but remains hidden.
Perhaps the most disturbing items encountered are scrapbook-style pages. These are described as graphic and deeply troubling, yet they too are heavily redacted. The fragments that remain visible suggest content of a horrific nature, but the extent and details are obscured. This selective visibility creates an unsettling dynamic: enough is shown to shock the reader, but not enough to fully understand or confront what is being documented.
Taken together, this release feels less like transparency and more like controlled exposure. While some information has been made public, much of what could provide real answers remains concealed. The result is a document dump that raises more questions than it resolves—about who is being protected, why certain materials are withheld, and whether full accountability is truly being pursued.
Until the redactions are meaningfully addressed, the public is left with fragments, shadows, and unanswered questions—hardly the standard of openness that such a serious matter demands.
New York Times, Justice Dept. Won’t Meet Friday Deadline to Release All Epstein Files, Alan Feuer and Michael Gold, Dec. 19, 2025. Several members of Congress criticized the department’s No. 2, Todd Blanche, after he said more documents would be coming weeks late.
The Justice Department will not release all of its files related to Jeffrey Epstein, the financier and convicted sex offender who died in prison, by its congressionally mandated deadline of Friday, Todd Blanche, the deputy attorney general, said.
Appearing on Fox News, Mr. Blanche, the department’s No. 2 official, said that while the Trump administration would release “several hundred thousand documents” related to Mr. Epstein by Friday, officials would make public “several hundred thousand more” in the coming weeks.
“There’s a lot of eyes looking at these, and we want to make sure that when we do produce the materials we are producing,” Mr. Blanche added, “that we are protecting every single victim.”
The delay meant that the administration would apparently violate a law signed by President Trump in November ordering the complete release of all unclassified materials about Mr. Epstein in the Justice Department’s possession within 30 days, with limited exceptions.
Under the law, the administration may withhold records that identify victims, that include images of child sexual abuse, or are otherwise classified. The legislation also allows the Justice Department to withhold records if they would “jeopardize an active federal investigation.”
Attorney General Pam Bondi ordered federal prosecutors in Manhattan to investigate ties between Mr. Epstein and prominent Democrats shortly after Mr. Trump directed her to do so last month.
Mr. Blanche, in his interview, said he was aware of the 30-day window, adding that department officials had been “working tirelessly” to review and make public “every single document that we have within the Department of Justice.”
Several members of Congress quickly moved to criticize Mr. Blanche, saying that the department’s partial release of the Epstein files meant it failed to meet its legal obligations.
Representative Thomas Massie, the Kentucky Republican who broke from Mr. Trump to push for the release of the files, voiced his discontent in a social media post, sharing a photo of the law in which he highlighted the language requiring the department to release “all” of its files by Friday“Time’s up. Release the files,” Mr. Massie wrote in a follow-up post.
Senator Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York and the minority leader, accused the White House of breaking the law and assailed Mr. Trump and Attorney General Pam Bondi as being “hellbent on hiding the truth.”
Representative Ro Khanna, Democrat of California and one of the lawmakers who introduced the Epstein files law, criticized the Trump administration as well, saying it had ample time to prepare for the full release. But Mr. Khanna said that if the Justice Department clarified its timeline to release the rest of the material, it would be “a positive step.”
New York Times, Trump Administration Live Updates: Kennedy Center Adds Trump’s Name to Facade, Staff Reports, Dec. 19, 2025. Where Things Stand:
In other news, President Trump on Friday announced deals with nine pharmaceutical companies to reduce some drug prices, the latest step in his bid to try to align U.S. costs with the lower drug prices in European countries. Mr. Trump has now reached deals with 14 of the 17 drugmakers to which he sent letters in July demanding that they lower prices. Under the arrangements, the manufacturers will offer some of their drugs through websites where Americans can bypass insurance and use their own money to buy the products.
To help patients navigate that process, the Trump administration plans to create a site called TrumpRx.gov, which will direct patients to the manufacturers’ direct-buy websites. Officials put up a promotional version of the TrumpRx website this fall and said they plan for it to be operational in January.
The U.S. military on Thursday killed another five people accused by the Trump administration of trafficking narcotics by sea, Pentagon officials said. The two strikes bring the known death toll in the administration’s lethal campaign to 104 people since early September. The strikes are the 27th known lethal operation since President Trump authorized military action against drug cartels. U.S. Southern Command announced the strike on social media with an accompanying video that showed a boat apparently being blown up.
President Trump delivers a nationwide address from the Oval office carried on all four major television networks Wednesday, Dec.17, 2025 (New York Times pool photo by Doug Mills).
Paul Krugman via Substack, Political-Economy Commentary: Damned Lies and Trump Speeches, Paul Krugman, right, 
Dec. 19, 2025. What MAGA genius thought that Trump’s “affordability” speech was a good idea?
The main topic that I want to talk about is uncomplicated: the speech that Donald Trump gave on Wednesday night. The purpose of the speech was to turn around Trump’s cratering public approval on his handling of the economy. I will also address a slightly more complicated topic: health insurance and the complete inability of Trump and Republicans in general to address public concerns about healthcare affordability.
To paraphrase Thomas Hobbes, Trump’s speech was nasty, brutish, but, mercifully, short. Apparently it was short because the networks told him that they would only give him 15 minutes (although they didn’t cut away when he went over). It was a blizzard of lies. I can’t find a single factual assertion Trump made that was true.
So many lies, so little time, as well as reader patience. However, the major media organizations are doing a decent job of fact-checking, so I won’t inflict upon you another laundry list of his mendacities.
Yet one hallucination I will highlight — in this case I say “hallucination” rather than lie because Trump, surrounded by sycophants, may actually believe it — is his persistent claim that the world despised the US economy a year ago and now admires his achievements. From the speech:
One year ago, our country was dead. We were absolutely dead. Our country was ready to fail. Totally fail. Now we’re the hottest country anywhere in the world. And that’s said by every single leader that I’ve spoken to over the last five months.
What was the world actually saying about America a year ago? From The Economist, in October 2024:A person on a unicycle with a flag in front of a crowd of people AI-generated content may be incorrect.
Furthermore, truth wasn’t the only thing completely lacking in Trump’s diatribe. Also lacking was anything resembling an actual policy to deal with concerns about affordability.
It was notable that while making the false claim that overall prices are coming down, the specific prices Trump highlighted (with fake numbers) were turkeys, eggs and gasoline — all prices over which policy has very little influence. Egg prices, for example, fluctuate wildly over time, not because of anything the government does, but because of the vagaries of bird flu. And, by the way, the Trump Administration has shut down a research project that was developing a bird flu vaccine.
Healthcare, by contrast, is an area where policy has a huge effect on affordability. It’s also an area in which Trump talked utter nonsense.
Here’s what you should know: The Affordable Care Act, aka Obamacare, offers Americans who aren’t covered by Medicare, Medicaid or through their employers the ability to purchase insurance coverage from private insurers, with the federal government subsidizing most enrollees’ premiums. However, enhanced subsidies put in place under the Biden administration will expire on January 1st, 2026, leading to large cost increases for many families.
Costs will soar for two reasons. There’s the direct effect of losing subsidies. But there’s also an indirect effect, because the loss of subsidies will lead millions of people to drop their coverage — and those who drop coverage will, on average, be healthier than those who don’t, worsening the risk pool. Insurers, anticipating this effect, have already sharply raised premiums.
Charts from KFF [Kaiser Family Foundation] show the effects on some representative couples. More than 20 million would be affected, but the worst hit will be older, moderately well-off Americans who are earning just a bit too much to remain eligible for subsidies. For example, a 60-year-old couple with an income of $85,000 will face a premium hike equal to more than a quarter of their pre-tax income:
What should the Trump Administration do? Here’s Trump:
I’m also taking on the gigantic health insurance companies that have gotten rich on billions of dollars of money that should go directly to the people. The money should go to the people. That’s you, so they can buy their own health insurance, which will give far better benefits at much lower costs.
So Trump says that he’ll replace the current system, in which people buy their own health insurance with the aid of government subsidies, with a system in which the government gives people money they can use to buy their own health insurance. How is that different?
In fact, it isn’t different except for one devastating detail: Republicans in Congress will never approve subsidies adequate to make health insurance affordable. Because the Republican plan would be far stingier than the one currently in place, millions of people will be forced to drop their insurance. And as I said, because it’s the younger and relatively more healthy that will drop their coverage, the pool of those who keep their coverage will be older and sicker. And you know what happens next – premiums go up even further. No wonder that four Republican congressmen in purple districts defied Mike Johnson and voted to extend the Obamacare subsidies.
So what should we make of Trump’s speech? Many commentators are describing it as a nothingburger, because it’s unlikely to do anything to move the political needle. (PS: The price of nothingburgers has risen 18 percent since Trump took office.)
Let me say something about the latest report on consumer prices, which showed lower inflation than expected. The general view among economists I follow is that this report was seriously distorted by the effects of the government shutdown, although we don’t know by how much. For now, the best guess is that troubling inflation, and with it public concern about affordability, will persist.
But leaving the short-run politics aside, the speech revealed something important: Namely, Trump has no idea how to govern. Faced with adversity, he’s unable to propose policies to improve the situation. All he can do is continue to gaslight the public and claim that everything is great, while smearing his opponents.
That was a short speech, but it presages a very long next three years for ordinary Americans. And for congressional Republicans, it presages a very ugly November 2026.
Musical Coda: "Everything's Coming Up Roses (From "Gypsy," 1958).
New York Times, Europe Agrees to $105 Billion Funding Plan for Ukraine, Jeanna Smialek, Dec. 19, 2025 (print ed.). European Union officials wanted to use Russia’s frozen assets to back a major loan to Ukraine. Unable to overcome opposition, they settled on another way to lend the money
European leaders agreed early on Friday morning to keep Ukraine funded for two years with a loan of 90 billion euros, or about $105 billion, though they failed to agree on their first-choice option of using Russian state assets frozen on the continent as backing for the loan.
That ambitious frozen-asset plan was killed at the 11th hour as European heads of state and government met in Brussels — a show of division that risked making the European Union appear indecisive at a key moment.
Instead, European leaders announced that they will funnel money to Ukraine with a loan backed by the E.U. budget. Because the plan does not leverage the large stash of Russian savings immobilized in Europe, it is likely to cost more and could prove more difficult to quickly scale up than the original idea.
But because it will still get needed cash to Kyiv, officials celebrated it as a win.
“This will address the urgent financial needs of Ukraine,” Antonio Costa, the president of the European Council, said at an early morning news conference in Brussels.
He added that the European Union would reserve its option to eventually use Russia’s immobilized assets. European nations took action last week to freeze those savings indefinitely.Want to stay updated on what’s happening in Russia and Ukraine? Sign up for Your Places: Global Update, and we’ll send our latest coverage to your inbox.
For months, European leaders had hoped to overcome Belgian concerns to clinch a deal on using the 210 billion euros of frozen Russian assets held in Europe to back the massive loan to Ukraine. The setup was supposed to fund much of Ukraine’s governing and war expenses in 2026 and 2027.
But the idea of such a loan was always risky: Russia is already taking legal action over what it paints as the unlawful seizure of its assets. After weeks of back-and-forth, Belgium — where most of the assets frozen in Europe are held — remained unconvinced headed into Thursday’s meeting, worried that it could be on the hook for Russian retaliation.
The guarantees that Belgium demanded to protect against that threat, however, proved too much for some other European countries to quickly accept.
The funding plan comes at a crucial moment, as Ukraine negotiates potential peace terms with the United States. And timing was important. Ukraine is expected to begin running out of money early in 2026.
European officials had painted the funding decision as an opportunity to show that they are powerful actors on the global stage — and strong partners for President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine.
Europeans want a voice in determining how to end the biggest war on their continent in 80 years and secure peace afterward. But President Trump and the Kremlin have frequently left Europe out of discussions over Ukraine’s future.
In fact, the Trump administration has recently made it clear how negatively it views the European Union. The administration warned in a national security strategy that Europe faces “civilizational erasure,” charging that the bloc and other transnational bodies “undermine political liberty” and national sovereignty, allow uncontrolled immigration and place the continent on a path that will leave it “unrecognizable in 20 years or less.”
The weeks spent wrangling over the frozen asset plan that ultimately failed may suggest to the world that the European Union’s clunky structure and diverse voices remain barriers to rapid action — even at urgent moments.
Mr. Zelensky of Ukraine met with European leaders in Brussels on Thursday as they tried to push the frozen-asset deal toward completion. He called it “one of the clearest and most morally justified decisions that could ever be made,” speaking at a news conference.
The collapse of the frozen asset loan plan was a political stumble for both Friedrich Merz, left, the German chancellor, and Ursula von der Leyen, the head of the European Commission, the bloc’s executive arm. Both had championed it.
Still, leaders argued that the agreed-upon alternative would serve its purpose. They emphasized that Ukraine will still not be asked to pay back the loan unless Russia pays reparations.
“This is a decisive message for an end to the war,” Mr. Merz said in a statement. “Putin will only make concessions once he realizes his war will not pay off.”
A split image shows Claudio Neves-Valente, identified as the Brown University gunman, wearing the same jacket as a man identified earlier as a person of interest in the case. (Providence Police Department)
New York Times, Updates: Suspect in Brown University Shooting Is Found Dead in New Hampshire, Glenn Thrush, Chelsia Rose Marcius, Maria Cramer and Alan Blinder, Dec. 19, 2025 (print ed.). The man, a 48-year-old former Brown student, was found with a self-inflicted gunshot wound in a storage unit, officials said.
The body of a man suspected in the killing of two students at Brown University and a Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor was found in a storage unit in New Hampshire on Thursday night, law enforcement officials said.
The authorities had swarmed the storage facility, in Salem, N.H., earlier in the evening in pursuit of a man wanted in connection of with the two deadly attacks, which had stunned New England and set off days of frustrated searching.
Federal investigators obtained a warrant for a unit that they believed was linked to the person they were seeking, according to one official with knowledge of the situation who requested anonymity to discuss an ongoing matter. Col. Oscar Perez, the police chief in Providence, R.I., where Brown’s campus is, said the suspect had died by suicide.
Colonel Perez identified the person as Claudio Manuel Neves Valente. He said the man was a 48-year-old former Brown student whose last known address was in Miami, and that the motive was not clear for the attack at Brown or the shooting Monday night of the M.I.T. professor in Brookline, Mass.
But Christina H. Paxson, Brown’s president, said it was “safe to assume” that the suspect had, during a brief stint as a graduate student in the early 2000s, spent considerable time in the campus building where the Brown attack unfolded.
Law enforcement’s rush to Salem on Thursday had raised hopes that officials might be near ending a search that began on Saturday, after a masked gunman dressed in black burst into a lecture hall in the Barus and Holley science building at Brown and opened fire on students who had gathered for a review session before final exams. Two students were killed, and nine others were injured.
Two days later, the authorities in Brookline were called to the home of the M.I.T. professor, Nuno F.G. Loureiro, who had been shot. He was pronounced dead on Tuesday morning. Ted Docks, the special agent in charge of the F.B.I. in Boston, initially said there seemed to be “no connection” between the attack at Brown and Dr. Loureiro’s death.
Nuno F.G. Loureiro, a professor and the director of the Plasma Science and Fusion Center at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, died after the shooting at his home (MIT Photo).
The manhunt: The search focused on video clips of a figure seen walking past doorbell cameras in the neighborhood east of Brown’s campus in Providence, R.I., whose face was largely obscured behind a medical mask. It is unusual for a suspect in a shooting attack to evade capture for days. Read more ›
Two students lost: The two students killed at Brown were MukhammadAziz Umurzokov, whose family arrived in the United States in 2011 from Uzbekistan and who earned a scholarship to attend the university, and Ella Cook, a talented pianist who became vice president of the campus Republican Club.
A scholar killed in Massachusetts: Dr. Loureiro was the director of Plasma Science and Fusion Center at M.I.T., home to more than 250 researchers, staff members and students. Dr. Loureiro, who was born and raised in Portugal, had researched the generation and amplification of magnetic fields in the universe. On Thursday night, the F.B.I. said it believed that the suspect had attended the same Lisbon university as Dr. Loureiro.
Threats Against Judges
Milwaukee County Circuit Court Judge Hannah Dugan has been found guilty of a felony and cleared of a misdemeanor following a four-day trial on accusations that she helped an undocumented immigrant in her courtroom evade arrest.
On April 18, six federal agents showed up in the hallway outside the judge’s courtroom to arrest Eduardo Flores-Ruiz, who faced misdemeanor domestic violence charges in Dugan’s court. Flores-Ruiz was deported to Mexico in November.
Once informed about Immigration and Custom Enforcement’s presence, Dugan walked into the hallway with fellow Judge Kristela Cervera to confront the agents and referred them to Chief Judge Carl Ashley after they said that they had an administrative warrant, not a judge-signed one. Two federal agents stayed behind in the hallway, and Dugan called Flores-Ruiz’s case.
After an off-the-record conference, Dugan sent the defendant and his attorney through the jury door into a restricted hallway with two exits: a private stairwell and a public hallway, where agents were waiting.
Flores-Ruiz and his attorney took the latter option and walked by two federal agents, but prosecutors claimed that the plan was to send him down the stairs.
The jury’s first question during deliberations sought exhibits concerning Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s notification requirements before and after issuing a warrant.
Shortly after, the jury asked a second question: “We desire clarity as to whether or not Judge Dugan needed to know the identity of [the subject of] the arrest warrant — for example, his specific name."
Dugan’s attorney Nicole Masnica argued that the answer that her client needed to know the identity of the subject, noting that the indictment specifically alleged that she did.
"There was no warrant issued for anyone else," Masnica said.
Over the prosecution’s objection, U.S. District Judge Lynn Adelman largely agreed, drafting an instruction incorporating the crux of the defense’s position. The final instruction read that the “defendant needed to know the identity of the subject of the warrant."
Dugan stood up and smiled broadly after hearing Adelman’s ruling, but that questions related only to the first misdemeanor count.
The verdict came in at 8:26 p.m. Central Time, after six hours of deliberations.
New York Times, Opinion Video: Threats Against Judges Could Lead to a Judicial System Crisis, Esther Salas, Video by Francesca Trianni and Ingrid Holmquist, Dec. 18, 2025.
“The Domino’s pizzas arrived at the homes of federal judges without explanation,” the Times editorial board wrote earlier this year. “The message was clear: We know where you live.”
In the Opinion Video above, Esther Salas, right, a federal district judge in New Jersey, describes the stakes of increasingly frequent threats against members of the judiciary, which, in Judge Salas’s view, are fueled by today’s sharply divisive political rhetoric.
If a judge is forced “to think about a safer choice” when weighing the verdict of a case, she asks, “is that justice?” For Judge Salas, the issue is personal: Her husband was shot and her son was killed by a man seeking to kill her. And now those pizzas are being delivered in her dead son’s name.
More On U.S. Justice, Crime, Law
Nuno F.G. Loureiro, a professor and the director of the Plasma Science and Fusion Center at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, died after the shooting at his home (MIT Photo).
New York Times, Suspect in Death of M.I.T. Professor Was a Former Classmate, Prosecutors Say, Pooja Salhotra and Francesca Regalado, Dec. 19, 2025. Nuno F.G. Loureiro, the professor, attended the same physics program in Portugal as the man suspected in his killing.
Federal prosecutors said Thursday that the suspect in the killing of a Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor was his former classmate.
Claudio Manuel Neves Valente had attended the same academic program in Portugal as Nuno F.G. Loureiro, the M.I.T. professor, from 1995 to 2000. Dr. Loureiro, 47, graduated with a degree in physics from the Instituto Superior Técnico in 2000, according to his M.I.T. profile.
Mr. Neves Valente, 48, entered the United States on a student visa in 2000, enrolling briefly in a graduate physics program at Brown University until the spring of 2001, according to the university. The U.S. attorney in Massachusetts, Leah Foley, said that Mr. Neves Valente became a permanent resident in 2017, with his residence registered in Florida.
In Portugal, Dr. Loureiro worked as a researcher at the institute until 2016, when he came to the United States to join M.I.T. as a professor of nuclear science and engineering, according to his profile. In 2024, he was appointed the director of M.I.T.’s Plasma Science and Fusion Center, one of the school’s largest labs.
On Dec. 1, Mr. Neves Valente rented a Nissan Sentra sedan from an Alamo rental agency in Boston and drove to Brown University in Providence, R.I., according to an affidavit filed by the Providence police. License plate readers captured the car in Brown’s vicinity in the days leading up to the campus shooting, according to the affidavit.ImageA man in a suit sits in a gray easy chair.Dr. Loureiro in an undated photo. He and Mr. Neves Valente had attended the same academic program in Portugal.Credit...Jake Belcher/M.I.T., via Associated Press
As he traveled across states, Mr. Neves Valente took pains to conceal his identity and movements, including changing the rental car’s Florida license plate to an unregistered plate from Maine and using a phone that disguised his location, Ms. Foley said.
“He was sophisticated in hiding his tracks,” she said.
The car was seen around the Brown campus until Dec. 12, the day before Mr. Neves Valente allegedly opened fire on an auditorium full of students reviewing for final exams. Two students were killed and nine others were injured in that shooting on Saturday.
Three days later, on Tuesday, Dr. Loureiro was found with gunshot wounds by his neighbor at his home in Brookline, Mass., a suburb of Boston near the M.I.T. campus. He was taken to a hospital, where he was pronounced dead. Security footage showed Mr. Neves Valente within a half mile of Dr. Loureiro’s residence, the authorities said.
Ms. Foley said Mr. Neves Valente drove to Salem, N.H., and entered a storage facility within hours of shooting Dr. Loureiro. He was seen in security footage entering a storage unit, wearing the same clothes he had worn in Brookline.
The police found Mr. Neves Valente dead of a self-inflicted gunshot wound in a storage unit on Thursday. It was unclear when he had died.
With his death, the authorities said that both cases in Providence and Brookline were closed. “He is the person responsible not only for the Brown shootings, but for the Brookline shooting,” Ms. Foley said in a news briefing on Thursday evening.
“We hope that this outcome tonight brings an increased sense of safety for our community,” said Christina Paxson, the president of Brown University.
New York Times, A Reddit Post Led to a Breakthrough in the Brown Shooting Investigation, Ashley Ahn and Qasim Nauman, Dec. 19, 2025. A Reddit user provided information that helped identify Claudio Manuel Neves Valente as not only the suspect in the campus shooting, but also the murder of an M.I.T. professor.
Three days after the deadly shooting at Brown University, officers received an anonymous tip that stuck out from a flood of information. It directed the authorities to a post on Reddit.
“I’m being dead serious. The police need to look into a grey Nissan with Florida plates, possibly a rental,” the Reddit user posted, according to an affidavit filed by the police in Providence. R.I.
That tip would later lead to a breakthrough in not only the search for the campus attacker but also the suspect in the murder of a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It also ended the dayslong manhunt that had put both the Brown and M.I.T. communities on edge.
A day after the Reddit post was made, the writer approached law enforcement officials and told them about his encounter with a suspicious man in Brown University’s Barus and Holley building. The information “blew this case right open,” Attorney General Peter F. Neronha of Rhode Island said in a news conference Thursday.
The tipster, whom the police referred to only as John, said that he had encountered the suspect inside a bathroom on the ground floor of the building between 1:45 p.m. and 2 p.m., around two hours before the first shots were reported. John said the suspect’s clothing was inappropriate for the weather and that they had made eye contact.
More On U.S. Governance, Politics, Democracy Advocacy
Lincoln Square Media, Bad Polling Won’t Stop Trump’s Authoritarian Project, Andrew Wilson, Dec. 19, 2025. With the GOP's grip on the House slipping and voters increasingly angry at the White House, Democrats have a rare opening to repair their brand and own the affordability argument.
Throughout Donald Trump’s second term, we have seen bad poll after bad poll. His favorability among moderate and independent voters has collapsed. Hispanic voters, disturbed by Trump’s deportation campaign and a faltering economy, have done a complete 180. Even Republicans—especially within the core MAGA constituency—are starting to show cracks.
All of that is disastrous for Trump and for Republicans. But bad numbers alone will not miraculously stop us from careening toward the black hole that is Trump 2028. Polling doesn’t tell whether we win or lose elections. It measures public mood as best it can—a game of telephone where voters tell pollsters, pollsters tell us, and meaning is often distorted along the way.Subscribed
Voters are angry about prices. Trump, in his dotage, cannot change his mind. Inflation driven by tariffs is here to stay, regardless of what the Supreme Court does. High prices in cities are nothing new, but Trump’s tariffs have nationalized the problem, dragging it into the smallest corner of rural America. This is Trump’s economy now. He owns it and voters know it.
To their credit, Democrats are largely nailing the affordability argument. But a trust gap still lingers after the Joe Biden presidency. That’s why the combination of affordability and Epstein matters. It isn’t just scandal-mongering; it’s a narrative that’s been missing. Trump promised the moon but delivered only oozing corruption and incompetence. Democrats finally have an opportunity to repair a badly damaged brand by making the contrast unavoidable.
You can tell Trump knows he’s failing by the manic, flailing “address” he gave Wednesday night. Nothing telegraphs confidence like a breathless rant. Unfortunately for Americans, things are about to get worse. ACA subsidies are expiring. Prices are still rising. And voters are directing their anger exactly where it belongs: at Trump and at Congress.
Mike Johnson’s house is on fire. The shutdown and Epstein have pushed more vulnerable districts into play, and Democrats should exploit that relentlessly. This is where affordability becomes a weapon. Democrats can—and should—hammer the Republican “moderates” who have meekly gone along with Project 2025. GOP retirements and defections are no longer isolated incidents; they’re a full-blown crisis. Mike Johnson’s grip on the House is nonexistent, and his prospects even worse.
Meanwhile, MAGA voters feel abandoned. For a year, they’ve watched Trump fete foreign dictators and tech billionaires. While their bills kept rising, Trump played architect and interior decorator. That said, MAGA is not a spent force in electoral politics, but without Trump’s name on the ballot, there is nothing to redeem Republican hopes.
Trump knows his polling is grim, but he has pinned his hopes on a fantasy: some future economic miracle, when the tax cuts finally kick in and your rich uncle dies. He is just as delusional as his most loyal minions. Remember, Biden managed to stabilize and grow the economy, yet his polling never recovered. Trump is headed for the same fate, only with far less patience from voters and far more damage along the way.
As Trump’s star wanes, Democrats do not automatically benefit. Across every survey, the economy and inflation remain the abiding concerns of the American people. The path forward is narrow but clear. Democrats should stay relentlessly focused on affordability—prices, rent, healthcare, and energy—and treat everything else as noise.
Not because polls say so—but because voters already have.
New York Times, R.F.K. Jr. Likely to Swap U.S. Childhood Vaccine Schedule for Denmark’s, Apoorva Mandavilli, Dec. 19, 2025. The shift would mean fewer shots recommended for children. But a Danish health official found the idea baffling, saying the United States was getting “crazier and crazier in public health.”
Over the last year, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., right, and his appointees have taken tentative steps toward his longstanding goal of remaking the childhood vaccination schedule.
But emboldened by a directive from President Trump, Mr. Kennedy is now poised to make a seismic shift. He is expected to announce in the new year that American children should be immunized according to a different schedule with fewer vaccines, used by the much smaller, largely homogenous country of Denmark.
A wholesale revision of the schedule would bypass the evidence-based, committee-led process that has underpinned vaccine recommendations in the country for decades, and could affect whether private insurance and government assistance programs will cover the shots.
And many medical experts worry that losing strong endorsements of some vaccines will create financial and logistical hurdles to obtaining them, further erode Americans’ confidence in immunizations and increase the chances of disease outbreaks. Measles and whooping cough are already resurgent in multiple states because of dropping vaccination rates.
It is states, not the federal government, that decide which shots are mandated for children to attend day care or kindergarten. And the specifics of changes in the vaccine schedule are as yet unclear.
Also unclear is whether any changes will still protect vaccine manufacturers from being sued for claims of harm. Without that guarantee, companies might face “frivolous” lawsuits and flee the American market as they did before such protections were instituted in the 1980s, some vaccine experts warned.
Mr. Trump directed Mr. Kennedy to align recommendations for childhood vaccines with “best practices from peer, developed countries,” calling the United States “a high outlier in the number of vaccinations recommended for all children.” He pointed to Denmark, Germany and Japan as examples of nations that immunize against fewer diseases.
The directive said that health officials should make the changes “while preserving access to vaccines currently available to Americans,” suggesting to some public health experts that those who wish to get them may still be able to do so in consultation with a health care provider.
Still, even if only some Americans follow a reshaped schedule that includes fewer immunizations, medical experts said, it is almost certain to lead to more cases of infectious disease.
“They’re going to bring back suffering and death,” said Dr. Sean O’Leary, chair of the infectious disease committee for the American Academy of Pediatrics. “I don’t say that with any hyperbole, that’s exactly what’s going to happen.”
The Health and Human Services Department did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Public health experts challenged the notion that United States is an outlier when it comes to the childhood immunization schedule.
With one or two exceptions, the schedule in the United States is nearly identical to those of Canada, Britain, Australia and Germany. Japan omits some vaccines in the American schedule but includes others, like a shot against Japanese encephalitis, that are not routinely administered in the United States.
On the contrary, they said, it is Denmark, a country with a population the size of Wisconsin’s and universal health care, that is the outlier among richer nations.
New York Times, Elise Stefanik Drops Out of N.Y. Governor’s Race and Will Leave Congress, Nicholas Fandos, Dec. 19, 2025. Ms. Stefanik, a Republican congresswoman (shown above in a file photo) and staunch ally of President Trump, abruptly ended her bid to unseat Gov. Kathy Hochul and said she would not seek another House term.
Representative Elise Stefanik of New York, a conservative Republican with close ties to President Trump, abruptly announced on Friday that she was suspending her campaign for governor and would give up her seat in Congress next year.
“While spending precious time with my family this Christmas season, I have made the decision to suspend my campaign for governor and will not seek re-election to Congress,” she wrote in a post on X. “I did not come to this decision lightly for our family.”
The decision was a stunning turn in fortune for one of Republicans’ biggest stars and upended one of the nation’s top governor’s races.
Ms. Stefanik, 41, was a Harvard-educated phenom when she took office a decade ago, becoming the youngest woman to serve in the House in its history. Over the years she transformed herself from a moderate Republican into a full MAGA warrior, shot up through House leadership ranks and was nearly ambassador to the United Nations.
Now, she will join a growing list of Republican lawmakers headed to the exits of the Capitol as they openly bristle under the leadership of Speaker Mike Johnson. She is the second high-profile Republican who had been close to Mr. Trump to call it quits in about a month, following Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, who is leaving office in January.
Ms. Stefanik said Friday she would serve out her term in Congress.
In New York, she was widely viewed as the front-runner for the Republican nomination for governor when she entered the race in November. A Fox News regular with an aggressive style and a national fund-raising machine, she lined up state party leaders behind her as she relentlessly attacked Democrats.
But her hopes of running unopposed in a primary were dashed in recent weeks when Bruce Blakeman, the Nassau County executive, joined the contest and began to compete for Mr. Trump’s blessing.
Allies said Ms. Stefanik, who represents New York’s North Country, had always believed she would have a steep uphill fight to defeat Gov. Kathy Hochul, a Democrat, in a state where Democrats outnumber Republicans and have held the governor’s mansion for two decades.
Surveys showed her far behind Ms. Hochul in a head-to-head contest, with a recent poll by Siena University showing her trailing by 19 points.
Mr. Blakeman’s entrance into the race, though, raised the prospect of a potentially costly and damaging intraparty fight. An ally familiar with Ms. Stefanik’s thinking said she was not interested in running a “suicide mission” and blamed Mr. Blakeman and his supporters in Nassau County Republican circles for squandering the party’s shot at beating Ms. Hochul.
The announcement by Ms. Stefanik that she would quit the governor’s race and leave her seat in Congress caps a remarkable political run, at least for now.
Her loyalty to Mr. Trump — which involved defending him during his first of two impeachment inquiries and amplifying his lies about the 2020 election — appeared to pay off after he won back the White House in 2024. Mr. Trump nominated her to be ambassador to the United Nations, a cabinet-level post.
But Mr. Trump rescinded the invitation in March, fearing Republicans would go on to lose her House seat if a special election were held. Ms. Stefanik returned to the House in frustration, and has openly clashed with Mr. Johnson in the months since.
Mr. Trump, who holds huge sway over Republican primary voters, had initially encouraged Ms. Stefanik to run for governor. Yet with Mr. Blakeman in the race, Mr. Trump pointedly declined last week to take sides.
Robert Reich via Substack, Political Opinion: After almost a year of Trump II: What’s it REALLY all about? Robert Reich, Dec. 19, 2025. The fundamental choice is democracy, the rule of law, social justice, and equal political rights VERSUS white male Christian nationalism.
Today, after almost a year of Trump’s second regime, I want to talk about the challenge Trump and his regime pose to America’s moral purpose. The best way into the subject is, I think, to ask a few questions about what’s been happening, and then offer an answer to all of them.
Questions:
— Why does Trump’s latest National Security Strategy, released this month, make no distinction between despotism and democracy?
— Why is Trump abandoning Europe and siding with Putin over Ukraine?
— Why is Trump also solicitous of Saudi Arabia’s Crown Prince MBS, Hungary’s Viktor Orban, and Benjamin Netanyahu?
— Why is the Trump regime so intent on detaining or deporting undocumented people in the United States who have not committed any crimes and have been productive members of their communities for years?
— Why is the Trump regime barring people from even entering the United States whose home countries are predominantly Muslim or whose inhabitants have mostly black or brown skin?
— Why has the Trump regime allowed Andrew and Tristan Tate — arrested in Romania in 2023 on charges of human trafficking, rape, and forming an organized criminal group to sexually exploit women — to come to the United States?
— Why is the Trump regime admitting into the U.S. white South Africans as refugees, but not Black or brown people who are in grave danger around the world?
— Why has the Trump regime cracked down on diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives in universities, the public sector, and the private sector?
— Why has Trump targeted for prosecution or intimidation so many women of color who are now in, or have recently occupied, positions of power in the United States?
Answer to all of the above:
Trump and the people around him are not interested in protecting America’s democratic ideals from the global enemies of those ideals. They reject the progress America and the rest of what used to be called the “free world” have achieved in advancing democracy, the rule of law, social justice, and human rights.
The world they seek is one of white supremacy, male dominance, the superiority of the Judeo-Christian tradition over all other creeds, and America-first nationalism.
White male Christian nationalism is about power. It seeks to give white Christian men power over Black and brown people, over women, over people who are not Judeo-Christians, over people born outside the United States, and over anyone who does not fit neatly into the structure and roles of a traditional family.
White male Christian nationalism has more in common with Vladimir Putin, who condemns LGBTQ+ people and scoffs at human rights; with Saudi Arabia, which confines women to second-class status and murders critics of the regime; and with Viktor Orban, who views Muslim immigrants as direct threats to Europe’s Christian values, than it does with America’s traditional allies.
So, when Trump and his regime refer to America’s “national security,” they are not talking about security against authoritarian regimes that eschew democracy, the rule of law, and human rights. Their view of “national security” is security against forces — both inside America as well as abroad — that advocate democracy, the rule of law, and human rights (which they describe derisively as “woke” or “diversity, equity, and inclusion”) rather than white male Christian nationalism.
White male Christian nationalism is a throwback to the world before the enlightenment of the 18th century took root in the West; before the core ideals expressed in the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, and the Bill of Rights provided a beacon to America and the world; before Thomas Paine wrote The Rights of Man.
America has not always lived up to these core enlightenment ideals, but it has at least striven to face its shortcomings and overcome its moral hypocrisies. It fought a horrendous civil war that ended the scourge slavery. It extended voting rights to women. It enacted the Civil Rights and the Voting Rights Acts to guarantee equal political rights to Black and brown people. It committed itself to equal marriage rights.
Our system of rights has rested on a civic culture that demands mutual respect, adherence to the egalitarian principles enshrined in the Constitution and the Bill of Rights, rejection of bigotry and hatred, dedication to freedom and justice, and deep suspicion of centralized power whether in government or in the economy.
Letters from an American, Historical Commentary: December 18, 2025 [Founders' American Idea], Heather Cox Richardson, right, Dec. 19, 2025. “These are the times that try men’s souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands by it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman.”
These were the first lines in a pamphlet that appeared in Philadelphia on December 19, 1776, at a time when the fortunes of the American patriots seemed at an all-time low. Just five months before, the members of the Second Continental Congress had adopted the Declaration of Independence, explaining to the world that “the Representatives of the United States of America, in General Congress, Assembled…do…solemnly publish and declare, That these United Colonies are, and of Right ought to be Free and Independent States; that they are Absolved from all Allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain, is and ought to be totally dissolved.”
The nation’s founders went on to explain why it was necessary for them “to dissolve the political bands” which had connected them to the British crown.
They explained that their vision of human government was different from that of Great Britain. In contrast to the tradition of hereditary monarchy under which the American colonies had been organized, the representatives of the united states on the North American continent believed in a government organized according to the principles of natural law.
Such a government rested on the “self-evident” concept “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.” Governments were created to protect those rights and, rather than deserving loyalty because of tradition, religion, or heritage, they were legitimate only if those they governed consented to them. And the American colonists no longer consented to be governed by the British monarchy.
This new vision of human government was an exciting thing to declare in the heat of a Philadelphia summer after a year of skirmishing between the colonists and British regulars, but by December 1776, enthusiasm for this daring new experiment was ebbing. Shortly after colonists had cheered news of independence in July as local leaders read copies of the Continental Congress’s declaration in meetinghouses and taverns in cities and small towns throughout the colonies, the British moved on General George Washington (shown in a 1795 portrait by Gilbert Stuart) and the troops in New York City.
By September the British had forced Washington and his soldiers to retreat from the city, and after a series of punishing skirmishes across Manhattan Island, by November the Redcoats had pushed the Americans into New Jersey. They chased the Continental Army all the way across the Delaware River into Pennsylvania.
By mid-December, things looked bleak for the Continental Army and the revolutionary government it backed. The 5,000 soldiers with Washington who were still able to fight were demoralized from their repeated losses and retreats, and since the Continental Congress had kept enlistments short so as not to risk a standing army, many of the men would be free to leave the army at the end of the year, further weakening it.
As the British troops had taken over New York City and the Continental soldiers had retreated, many of the newly minted Americans outside the army were also having doubts about the whole enterprise of creating a new, independent nation based on the idea that all men were created equal. Then things got worse: as the American soldiers crossed into Pennsylvania, the Continental Congress abandoned Philadelphia on December 12 out of fear of a British invasion, regrouping in Baltimore (which they complained was dirty and expensive).
“These are the times that try men’s souls.”
The author of The American Crisis was Thomas Paine, whose January 1776 pamphlet Common Sense had solidified the colonists’ irritation at the king’s ministers into a rejection of monarchy itself, a rejection not just of King George III, but of all kings. In early 1776, Paine had told the fledgling Americans, many of whom still prayed for a return to the comfortable neglect they had enjoyed from the British government before 1763, that the colonies must form their own independent government.
Now he urged them to see the experiment through. He explained that he had been with the troops as they retreated across New Jersey and, describing the march for his readers, told them “that both officers and men, though greatly harassed and fatigued, frequently without rest, covering, or provision, the inevitable consequences of a long retreat, bore it with a manly and martial spirit. All their wishes centred in one, which was, that the country would turn out and help them to drive the enemy back.”
For that was the crux of it. Paine had no doubt that patriots would create a new nation, eventually, because the cause of human self-determination was just. But how long it took to establish that new nation would depend on how much effort people put into success. “I call not upon a few, but upon all: not on this state or that state, but on every state: up and help us; lay your shoulders to the wheel; better have too much force than too little, when so great an object is at stake,” Paine wrote. “Let it be told to the future world, that in the depth of winter, when nothing but hope and virtue could survive, that the city and the country, alarmed at one common danger, came forth to meet and to repulse it.”
In mid-December, British commander General William Howe had sent most of his soldiers back to New York to spend the winter, leaving garrisons across the river in New Jersey to guard against Washington advancing.
On Christmas night, having heard that the garrison at Trenton was made up of Hessian auxiliaries who were exhausted and unprepared for an attack, Washington and 2,400 soldiers crossed back over the icy Delaware River in a winter storm. They marched nine miles to attack the garrison, the underdressed soldiers suffering from the cold and freezing rain. Reaching Trenton, they surprised the outnumbered Hessians, who fought briefly in the streets before surrendering.
The victory at Trenton restored the colonists’ confidence in their cause. Soldiers reenlisted, and in early January they surprised the British at Princeton, New Jersey, driving them back. The British abandoned their posts in central New Jersey, and by March the Continental Congress moved back to Philadelphia. Historians credit the Battles of Trenton and Princeton with saving the Revolutionary cause.
There is no hard proof that Washington had officers read The American Crisis to his troops when it came out six days before the march to Trenton, as some writers have said, but there is little doubt they heard it one way or another. So, too, did those wavering loyalists.
“Tyranny, like hell, is not easily conquered,” Paine wrote in that fraught moment, “yet we have this consolation with us, that the harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly: it is dearness only that gives every thing its value.”
Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., with President Trump and Mehmet Oz, the Medicaid and Medicare services administrator, in the White House in September (New York Times photo by Tierney L. Cross)
New York Times, Trump Moves to End Access to Gender-Related Care for Minors, Azeen Ghorayshi, Amy Harmon and Reed Abelson, Dec. 19, 2025 (print ed.). Proposed new rules would pull all federal financing from hospitals that continue to provide gender treatments for adolescents.
The federal government on Thursday acted to put an end to gender-related care for minors across the nation, threatening to pull federal funding from any hospital that offered such treatment.
The move reflects the laserlike focus on the issue by President Trump, who in his first days in office called gender treatments for minors “a stain on our Nation’s history.” The administration’s action is not just a regulatory shift but the latest signal that the federal government does not recognize even the existence of people whose gender identity does not align with their sex at birth.
If finalized, the proposed new rules, announced by Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. at a news conference Thursday morning, would effectively shut down hospitals that failed to comply. Medicare and Medicaid account for nearly 45 percent of spending on hospital care, according to KFF, a nonprofit health policy research group.
It follows other efforts by the administration to pull back from or eliminate policies that recognize gender identities beyond being born male or female.
The new rules come one day after a divided House of Representatives voted to approve legislation that would criminalize gender transition treatments for minors and would subject providers to up to 10 years in federal prison. The House is expected to pass another bill Thursday that would bar Medicaid payments for gender-related treatments for minors. The two bills have little chance of passing in the Senate but showed how far the ultraconservative Republican majority was willing to go to deliver on President Trump’s campaign promise to end such medical treatment.
But the proposed rules go much farther: by trying to force hospitals nationwide to stop providing the treatments altogether. The proposed rules for Medicare and Medicaid will be followed by a 60-day public comment period and will most likely be subject to legal challenges before going into effect.
If finalized, the rule would be “a death sentence — hospitals have such razor-thin margins as it is,” said Caroline Farrell, a former lawyer in the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services division of the Health and Human Services Department’s office of the general counsel, and now a lawyer with the firm Foley Hoag. The proposed rule “means just forcing them to stop the care,” she said.
Gender-related treatments for minors, which can include puberty-blocking drugs, hormone therapies and, in rarer cases, surgeries, have been a subject of fierce debate worldwide but are endorsed by most medical groups in the United States.
The announcement on Thursday also included other actions: Another C.M.S. rule would prevent Medicaid from paying for the treatments for minors. And the Food and Drug Administration announced that it was issuing warning letters to 12 manufacturers of breast binders, tight garments used to flatten and masculinize chest appearance under clothing, for “illegal marketing” of the products to children as a treatment for gender dysphoria.
Kelley Robinson, president of the Human Rights Campaign, said, “These rules are proposals, not binding law.” She added, “Community members, health care providers, administrators and our allies should be vocal in pushing back by sharing the ways these proposals would be devastating to their families and the health care community at large.’’
Thursday’s announcement follows a clear road map set out by Mr. Trump in executive orders issued in his first days in office that denied the very existence of transgender people. “It is the policy of the United States to recognize two sexes, male and female,” the president wrote, demanding that the department of Health and Human Services produce a report reviewing the evidence for such treatments.ImageAn exterior view of Children's Hospital Los Angeles on a rainy winter day.Children’s Hospital Los Angeles, one of several pediatric gender clinics that stopped providing puberty blockers and hormone therapies for gender transition this year, citing threats from the administration to withhold federal funds.Credit...Robyn Beck/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
A final version of that report, which was written by several vocal critics of the medical treatments on both sides of the political aisle, was released in November. It concluded that while the benefits of medical interventions were uncertain, the harms, which can include loss of fertility, were more known. The report instead prioritized the role of psychotherapy, an intervention that is also supported by little evidence, but that the authors wrote argued had fewer risks.
The health department report formed the centerpiece of the new rules on Thursday: Mr. Kennedy cited its conclusions to argue that the treatments do not meet professionally recognized standards for medical care, and that hospitals providing such treatments will therefore be considered to be violating the conditions of participation for hospitals to receive federal funding.
That conclusion is “unprecedented,” Ms. Farrell said. Regarding abortion, a statute called the Hyde Amendment, passed by Congress in 1976, stipulates that hospitals may not use federal funds to pay for abortions for patients, except in rare cases. But the proposed rule, which does not stem from legislation, goes even further, issuing an existential threat to hospitals that accept any federal funding, even if that money is not used to pay for the treatments themselves.
U.S. Inflation, Jobs, Economy
The Bulwark, Political Commentary: Trump Is Walloping Construction Businesses. The Industry Stays Quiet, Catherine Rampell, Dec. 18-19, 2025. I’m slightly obsessed with the question of why corporate America has stayed mum even as President Trump destroys everything they need to survive.
I’m not looking for private industry to stand up for democracy or the rule of law, per se; I’m just wondering why businesses don’t stand up for their own self-interest. Tariffs, arbitrary changes to regulations, weaponization of government tools like antitrust and audits, etc. are bad for business. And yet, the industry groups that are supposed to protest these things, and shield individual members from possible retaliation, have been eerily quiet.
This week’s newsletter looks at one industry in particular: the construction industry. Construction sites have increasingly been targeted in warrantless immigration raids, which seem to be rounding up anyone who looks vaguely Latino, including some U.S. citizens:
WHEN LEO FELER GOT HOME, there was blood everywhere. On his front door, the window sills, the foyer. This wasn’t some tragic accident or a murder scene; rather, while he was out of town to run a marathon, immigration agents had decided to attack the workers replacing windows on his house.
Footage from Ring surveillance cameras around the house, as well as cell-phone videos from protesters outside, tells the story: Masked agents sent to Chicago as part of “Operation Midway Blitz” saw workers taking items to a dumpster in front of Feler’s home. The agents then hopped his locked gate. They trampled his property, aggressively manhandled at least one worker, and entered Feler’s garage. They even tried to pull a bleeding worker out of a second-story window.
They did it all without ever presenting badges, identification, or a warrant.
“It was violent. There’s blood all over the house. It’s insane,” Feler, who is a U.S. citizen, told me the day after this happened in October. “It’s complete lawlessness. How does the government have impunity to jump into my home without a warrant?”
As far as Feler has been able to discern, his house and the crew working on it were targeted at random. The Department of Homeland Security did not reply to detailed questions about agents’ actions or why they were there, but did send me a statement complaining about “agitators” (i.e., protesters) in the street who “obstructed federal law enforcement and ignored multiple warnings to disperse.”
This wasn’t an isolated incident. Rather, it was just one of a rash of warrantless raids on private, residential construction sites recently—raids that are sweeping up basically anyone who looks Latino, including U.S. citizens, and subjecting them to dangerous and sometimes life-threatening conditions.
In a Minneapolis suburb this week, masked men wearing ICE vests—who refused to present a warrant or identify themselves—roped off a construction site, trapping two workers on a partially built roof for hours in subzero temperatures. It was so dangerously cold that “at least 30” masked federal agents present took shifts rotating in and out of their cars to stay warm, a state representative on the scene told local media.
Protesters gathered; some said they were prevented from bringing the trapped, shivering workers warm blankets and extra coats. In one dramatic video, a bystander climbed the spindly rafters herself to hand a worker a cup of hot coffee.
Eventually the masked men left, and one worker on the roof was taken away by ambulance.
There is no question that this wave of deportation operations has hurt workers who are just trying to do their jobs. But it’s also terrible for the contractors and construction companies that employ them. So why hasn’t the construction industry, ya know, done anything?
Here’s what I found when I attempted to get an answer to this question.
First, some background: The construction industry has been facing headwinds for a while now, thanks to high interest rates, tariffs, overall inflation, permitting challenges, and labor shortages. Needless to say, these raids are not exactly helping.
Recruiting workers for construction jobs, particularly in the skilled construction trades, is hard. The work itself is physically demanding and often dangerous. Roofers, for instance, have among the highest fatal work injury rates of any occupation in America.
Immigrants (both legal and undocumented) also make up about a quarter of construction workers overall. They are particularly overrepresented in some trades essential for homebuilding; 61 percent of plasterers and stucco masons are immigrants, as are about half of roofers. The heavy concentration of immigrants in this industry is among the reasons why policy wonks have been warning that mass deportations might worsen the housing crisis.
And yet, the construction industry has been curiously mum about it all.
Earlier this week, I requested an interview with the National Association of Home Builders, an organization I’ve talked with many times over the years about various challenges facing the residential construction industry. I asked to speak with someone about the recent rise in raids and how they have affected the industry. I was told they “do not have anyone available who would be able to address what you are looking for.”
More Global News
New York Times, Putin Reaffirms Broad Military Goals for Russia in Ukraine, Ivan Nechepurenko and Paul Sonne, Updated Dec. 19, 2025. President Vladimir V. Putin spoke at an annual news conference that highlights his grip over Russia and often sets the Kremlin’s tone for the next year.
President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia began his annual news conference on Friday by reaffirming the Kremlin’s determination to continue the war in Ukraine until all of its conditions were met.
Mr. Putin immediately boasted about Russia’s recent battlefield successes and said that the country was not ready to settle the conflict diplomatically unless its maximalist demands, including territorial ones, were fulfilled by Ukraine and its allies.
“The strategic initiative is completely in the hands of the Russian forces,” Mr. Putin said. He added that Russia was “ready to end the conflict peacefully” on the basis of principles he stated in June last year, a reference to the demand that Ukraine cede large swaths of its eastern territories. That is a nonstarter for Kyiv.
But even as he accused Ukraine of refusing to end the conflict peacefully or to negotiate on the question of territory, Mr. Putin said that there were “certain signals” that Kyiv was “ready to engage in some kind of dialogue.”
Russia said this week that it was waiting to meet with President Trump’s representatives to review amended peace proposals after discussions among Ukrainian, American and European officials.Want to stay updated on what’s happening in Russia? Sign up for Your Places: Global Update, and we’ll send our latest coverage to your inbox.
Mr. Putin’s year-end news conference, an annual tradition, is an hourslong marathon where journalists and citizens pose their questions to the Russian leader. It has become an elaborately orchestrated television show and a demonstration of how, over the past three decades, Mr. Putin has solidified his position as the ultimate decision maker in the country. He is portrayed as personally engaged in everyday issues like leaking pipes in small cities, even as he oversees major matters of foreign conflict.
A dedicated studio was built in a giant exhibition center next to the Kremlin for the news conference, which started at midday. It usually sets the tone for the coming year, reflecting the Kremlin’s primary concerns and the messaging it aims to send to the world.
During past news conferences, reporters came with large posters and even fluffy toys to draw Mr. Putin’s attention. This time, only small sheets of paper were allowed, giving the event a more reserved feel. Mr. Putin’s spokesman, Dmitri S. Peskov, asked audience members not to yell out to be chosen to ask a question.
U.S. Religion, Media, Culture, Education
New York Times, Pope Leo Names Illinois Bishop to Replace Cardinal Dolan in New York, Elizabeth Dias and Maya King, Dec. 19, 2025 (print ed.). The appointment of Bishop Ronald A. Hicks is expected to bring a markedly different leadership style to New York’s archdiocese
Pope Leo XIV on Thursday named an Illinois bishop to replace the powerful conservative Cardinal Timothy Dolan as leader of New York’s Roman Catholic archdiocese, a selection that signals his embrace of a more mild and unifying style after the political upheaval of Pope Francis’s papacy, while preserving the spirit of the late pope’s reforms.
Bishop Ronald A. Hicks, shown preaching at the 75th Anniversary Regional Mass at Lewis University(By Matschreiner23 - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0)
The naming of Bishop Ronald A. Hicks to be the next Roman Catholic archbishop of New York is one of the most anticipated decisions of Pope Leo’s young papacy, his first major move indicating the direction he wants the church to take in his home country.
The appointment echoes Pope Leo’s own ascent earlier this year, the unexpected elevation of a little-known bishop from Chicago with a longtime focus on pastoral work and smooth governance.
Soft-spoken and steady, Bishop Hicks, 58, has led the Diocese of Joliet, Ill., since Pope Francis appointed him in 2020. The bishop has largely avoided outspoken politics, unlike Cardinal Dolan, who has boldly championed conservative causes, appeared often on Fox News and prayed at both of President Donald Trump’s inaugurations.
The choice suggests a significant shift in leadership style for New York’s archdiocese, the country’s second largest and one of its most influential, serving 2.5 million Catholics across the city’s five boroughs and northern suburbs. The selection also comes at a pivotal moment in the city’s political and religious life.
From his start early in the Obama era, Cardinal Dolan has called for Catholic leaders to become more politically involved amid national debates about abortion and same-sex marriage. He became a favorite of center-right Catholics, particularly after he fought the Obama administration’s rule requiring some religious groups to provide contraception for employees. Recently, he described the assassinated conservative activist Charlie Kirk as “a modern-day Saint Paul.
Cardinal Dolan 
(shown at left during the entrance procession of mass at the University of St. Thomas in Minnesota in 2019) turned 75 in February, the age when bishops formally submit their resignations to the pope for him to accept or ignore. But Pope Francis’ death and the following papal transition put many such major ecclesial changes on hold, leaving them for the new pontiff.
Bishop Hicks has advanced under the leadership of more progressive church leaders, including Cardinal Blase Cupich of Chicago, an ally of Pope Francis who has prioritized immigrants and a welcoming stance toward L.G.B.T.Q. people. In Chicago before going to Joliet, Bishop Hicks served as an auxiliary bishop.
But in the diocese of Joliet, he also has found support from conservative priests and parishioners who observe the traditional Latin Mass, an old form of worship that Pope Francis attempted to discourage.
Before his election, Pope Leo led an influential Vatican post that selects and manages bishops globally. On a smaller scale, Bishop Hicks currently chairs the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops’ committee responsible for clergy and vocations, a position that helps bishops and priests navigate pastoral needs.
In June, Bishop Hicks helped organize a seminar at the University of Notre Dame to help newer bishops learn how to govern a diocese, with 
sessions on decision making, oversight and communications.
His pastoral messages, in English and in Spanish, have stressed the value of unity and the importance of peacemaking across divides and of listening to one another with respect.
“I’ve been told that I have a gentle spirit, yet I’m able to also be strong and to try to set vision and agendas,” Bishop Hicks once told a Catholic diocesan publication.Editors’ PicksHe’s Only 4 Feet Tall, but Paddington Is London’s Biggest New Musical StarA Study Linked Cheese to Lower Dementia Risk. Is That Too Good to Be True?The Most Memorable Wines of 2025
The high-profile nature of the position is a drastic change from the diocese of Joliet: With about 520,000 Catholics, it is just a quarter of the size of the archdiocese of New York. Being elevated from a small diocese to a major seat is fairly rare, especially after a relatively short tenure of about five years. The archbishop of New York is historically also elevated to become a cardinal, the church’s top clerical position below the pope.
The change in leadership also comes as the church is speaking out vocally in support of immigrants under deportation threat.
New York, which is home to one of the nation’s largest immigrant populations, has contended with a marked increase in immigration enforcement activity, and parts of the city have been scouted as possible detention centers. Though houses of worship have long been considered off limits for immigration enforcement, clergy have been under outsize pressure to protect their congregations. Catholic leaders have been particularly critical of the Trump administration’s crackdowns.
Zohran Mamdani, who will be the city’s first Muslim mayor on Jan. 1, met with Cardinal Dolan this fall, shortly before the November mayoral election.
Cardinal Dolan, who was appointed to lead the archdiocese of New York by Pope Benedict XVI in 2009, has held the position through some of the city’s most tumultuous eras. The cardinal has wielded particular influence over the church’s real estate holdings and archdiocesan schools, in part to help fund the church’s legal defense against sexual assault claims. He was made a cardinal in 2012.I
Last week, Cardinal Dolan said that the archdiocese would raise at least $300 million to settle claims brought forth by more than 1,300 people who said they were sexually assaulted by priests and lay staff members. To raise the funds, the archdiocese has weighed selling some of its real estate holdings, including its First Avenue headquarters in Manhattan, which sold for more than $100 million last year.
Both Bishop Hicks and Pope Leo grew up in Chicago’s south suburbs — the bishop at 155th and Woodlawn, and the pope seven minutes’ drive north at 141st and Indiana. They each spent years in Latin America as missionaries.
But they did not meet until last year, when Cardinal Robert F. Prevost spoke at an Illinois parish before he became Pope Leo, Bishop Hicks later told a local television station. They celebrated Mass together at an event with the Midwest Augustinians, the Pope’s home order.
As a priest in El Salvador, Bishop Hicks led Nuestros Pequeños Hermanos, an organization that cares for orphaned children in nine Latin American countries. His favorite saint is Archbishop Óscar Arnulfo Romero, the Salvadoran who championed the poor and was assassinated as he said Mass in 1980.
On Christmas Day three years ago, Bishop Hicks visited inmates at the Joliet Treatment Center. Last month, he returned and baptized four.
This understated leadership style reflects Pope Leo’s own sensibilities.
“I really, as the shepherd of the entire diocese, have to take a number of voices and perspectives and opinions all into context,” Bishop Hicks said in a video for the United States Conference of Catholic Bishops last year. “The way to remedy that is surround myself with some really good people and try to collaborate and get the best advice and never make decisions just on my own.”
But unlike Pope Leo, Bishop Hicks roots for the Chicago Cubs, not the White Sox.
The Contrarian, Opinion: Undaunted in Faith, Jennifer Rubin, right, Dec. 19, 2025. 
Three religious leaders provide inspiration: Pope Leo XIV; Reverend Mariann Edgar Budde; and Pastor Jamal Bryant.
In our warped political era, bullies and bigots with the chutzpah to flash their White evangelical Christian credentials get rewarded for vile behavior. The worse they behave, the more attention and power they seem to accumulate
Evangelical Peter Wehner wrote this week: “Many of the people who claim to follow Jesus are instruments of a merciless leader and a merciless movement. They have chosen their political loyalties over their faith, even while using the latter to validate the former. There is something morally twisted and discrediting in this.”
We therefore desperately need reminders of how leaders of true faith should act. Providing a compelling counterpart to religion-spouting hypocrites, three faith leaders stood out this year as undaunted proponents of decency, empathy, and social responsibility.
Pope Leo has certainly met the moment. This year, he castigated xenophobia, challenged hateful rhetoric, and rebuffed phony excuses to ignore the plight of our neighbors. NPR reported on his discussion with journalists in November:
We have to look for ways of treating people humanely; treating people with the dignity that they have. If people are in the United States illegally, there are ways to treat that. There are courts. There’s a system of justice.
Treating people who have been here for decades, he said “in a way that is, to say the least, extremely disrespectful, and with instances of violence, is troubling.” His plea to care for immigrants inspired or impressed upon Catholic interfaith organizations, non-religious community activists, and ordinary individuals to aid and defend their neighbors.
Demonstrating his adeptness on social media, he tweeted after Australia’s massacre on Chanukah: “Today I particularly wish to entrust to the Lord the victims of the terrorist massacre carried out yesterday in #Sydney against the Jewish community. Enough with this antisemitic violence! Let us eliminate hatred from our hearts.”
Pope Leo also consistently spoke out against Russia’s invasion of Ukraine (even decrying efforts to impose Russia-friendly terms on Ukraine and Europe) and denounced starvation in Gaza. He insisted that concern for the poor get translated into action. “It is my hope, then, that this Jubilee Year will encourage the development of policies aimed at combating forms of poverty both old and new, as well as implementing new initiatives to support and assist the poorest of the poor,” he said. “Labor, education, housing and health are the foundations of a security that will never be attained by the use of arms.”
Pope Leo sounds as if he is directly criticizing Trump, because Trump exemplifies evils that the pontiff decries—neglect of the poor, crass materialism, embrace of violence, and bigotry. While Trump oppresses; the pontiff stands with the oppressed, bringing light and hope to the dark Trump reign.
In the U.S, the National Cathedral’s Reverend Mariann Edgar Budde captured Americans’ attention shortly after the inauguration by telling Trump:
In the name of our God, I ask you to have mercy upon the people in our country who are scared now. There are gay, lesbian, and transgender children in Democratic, Republican and Independent families, some who fear for their lives. And the people, the people who pick our crops and clean our office buildings, who labor in poultry farms and meat packing plants, who wash the dishes after we eat in restaurants and work the night shifts in hospitals, who wash the dishes after we eat in restaurants and work the night shifts in hospitals. They, they may not be citizens or have the proper documentation, but the vast majority of immigrants are not criminals. They pay taxes and are good neighbors.
After reminding Trump these are people of faith, she implored him to “have mercy, Mr. President, on those in our communities whose children fear that their parents will be taken away and … those who are fleeing war zones and persecution in their own lands, to find compassion and welcome here.”
In our interview, I witnessed how Rev. Budde models grace, humility, and kindness. She affirmed, as Contrarians have grasped, that “courage is contagious.” She continued: “[W]e sort of pass it around to each other when we need it, or you may have it for a day, I may need it tomorrow. It’s communal,” she said. “[T]there is a power that moves through us and allows us to step into that space, and it’s just so encouraging to know that we’re not alone.” As I wrote in January, Rev. Budde certainly channeled Americans’ fears, but she also provided emotional and spiritual armor to fight for the vulnerable.
Another religious leader, Pastor Jamal Bryant of Georgia’s New Birth Baptist Missionary Church, also personified faith in action. The Contrarian’s April Ryan interviewed him twice this year. One central topic he spoke about with notable passion was his leadership in the national boycott against Target. While he did not start the boycott, he quickly became the face of the movement responding to Target’s cowardly compliance with Trump’s assault on DEI. “I wanted to bring a spiritual dynamic to it,” he told April. The movement had a stunning impact, inflicting $12B in losses and prompting the CEO’s exit (unfortunately, the COO replaced him), although Target persists in its anti-DEI stance.
Pastor Bryant recently posted on Instagram:
I’m amazed how @target is willing to do everything except the right thing. Making the staff smile won’t do it! Fake sale prices won’t do it! Giving checks to black churches won’t do it! Paying black influencers to post won’t do it and bribing HBCU students with discount cards won’t do it. … We don’t want to hand you violins to play on the Titanic. This is fixable … just do the right thing!
Beyond Target, Pastor Bryant hammered away at the regime’s attacks on history and inclusivity. When Trump replaced Martin Luther King Jr. Day and Juneteenth with Flag Day/Trump’s birthday as a free day at National Parks, Pastor Bryant blasted Trump’s gob-smacking move. “This is a slap in the face, not just to African Americans but to Americans at large,” he said. “The narcissism unleashed to take it away from Dr. King and laud it upon himself says that America is going backward, is in tremendous danger.”
In sum, when MAGA politicians cloak themselves in religious platitudes while simultaneously spouting hatred toward immigrants, taking SNAP benefits from children, and cheering grandmothers’ deportation, many Americans are desperate for hope, insight, and compassion from authentic religious leaders.Subscribed
Providing spiritual guidance and inspiration, Pope Leo, Rev. Budde, and Pastor Bryant showed us that true faith leaders do not oppress or demonize others and certainly do not deify a noxious politician (one whose conduct and rhetoric revolts even other MAGA pols). Whether religious or not, Americans can be grateful for genuinely religious voices who reiterate that faith without deeds is useless and remind us that silence in the face of hateful actions and words is abhorrent. We honor each of them, in addition to all courageous leaders who seek to bring us together.
Dec. 18
President Trump delivers a nationwide address from the Oval office carried on all four major television networks Wednesday, Dec.17, 2025 (New York Times pool photo by Doug Mills).
The Hartmann Report, Political Commentary: Was That a Speech or a Breakdown? Thom Hartmann, 
Dec. 18, 2025. A stark 
look at the speech that blurred the line between leadership and losing control on the world stage…
Let me take off my psychotherapist hat and simply speak as a parent, an adult, a businessman, a citizen, and a human being.
There is something deeply and fundamentally wrong with Donald Trump.
Last night’s speech demonstrated it. (Excerpt continued below.)
New York Times, A Bellicose Trump Points Fingers in Defending His Record on the Economy, David E. Sanger, Dec. 18, 2025. In an 18-minute address, President Trump said the economy was booming despite the public’s consistent concerns about prices. Here are six takeaways from the speech.
President Trump gave an 18-minute speech intended to defend his accomplishments in the first year, and argue that the “Golden Age” he promised in his presidential campaign last year was building steam.
The speech was, in typical form, largely strung together from familiar lines he uses at White House events, rallies and speeches. And, in Trumpian style, there were a long list of exaggerations and misleading statements.
But notably absent from the president’s remarks was his argument from recent weeks that “affordability” was nothing but a “hoax” and a “con job” by Democrats — a line that made his own advisers cringe.
Here are six takeaways from his speech.
The president’s tone was combative.
Mr. Trump, always more comfortable with what he calls his “weave” of free association rather than reading from a teleprompter, raced through his talk as if he was late to an important dinner. There were no digressions, unlike his speech in Pennsylvania a week ago when he repeatedly veered from the topic. At times he seemed to be yelling — almost as if he didn’t believe he had to take the time to convince his audience of how well his first 11 months had gone.
Not surprisingly, he blamed former President Joseph R. Biden Jr. from the first sentence: “I inherited a mess.” He described a country that a year ago, he said, was overrun by illegal immigrants, its manufacturing base hollowed out, its cities ridden with crime. All these problems had been solved, he said, and he vowed more relief if people will wait to see their paychecks fatten.
But the message was a bit overshadowed by his angry tone, which seemed to belie his recognition that he was under pressure to show results fast, before a narrative settles that he has mismanaged the economy.
He risked repeating a Biden mistake of arguing with voters about how they feel.
Mr. Trump was propelled to victory in 2024 by voters who thought Mr. Biden was out of touch and too old for the job, and who were repelled by Mr. Biden’s insistence that they should be feeling better. Now it is Mr. Trump who runs the same risk.
Just as Mr. Biden often argued that the economy was in far better shape than the public believed, Mr. Trump was essentially shouting that they should be grateful to him for bringing back manufacturing jobs and getting illegal immigrants out of the work force.
At moments it sounded as if the man who just threw a Gatsby-themed party at Mar-a-Lago did not realize what the job market feels like to ordinary Americans. In fact, the country continues to lose manufacturing jobs. But most importantly Americans appear unconvinced about tariffs — “my favorite word, tariffs.”
He described foreign investment pouring into the United States but cited a figure twice as high as his own White House has estimated. Perhaps he will be right in the long term, though he was having a hard time closing the sale based on what has happened so far, including overstating the pace at which foreign companies determine they must move facilities to the United States to avoid tariffs.He made highly selective — and often misleading — use of statistics.
Mr. Trump argued he cut drug prices by 400, 500 or 600 percent, all mathematical impossibilities. He claimed that inflation had dropped significantly since he became president, without mentioning that in September, the last month for which the government has numbers, it had returned to 3 percent, exactly where it was on Mr. Biden’s last weeks in office. He argued that gasoline was now under $2.50 a gallon in much of the country; his own department of energy reports it was $2.90. And he claimed there were states where gas was $1.99; in fact, no state average gas price was that low, AAA reports.
He failed to mention that the latest unemployment numbers — which were boosted by government layoffs executed by his administration — showed the unemployment rate at 4.6 percent, the highest in four years, since the nation was just pulling out of the Covid-19 pandemic. Spending on factory construction has fallen in recent times.
All presidents bend statistics to their advantage but Mr. Trump has turned exaggeration into an art form. There was an air of desperation to the president’s arguments, perhaps reflective of polls showing that even those who voted for him believing he would manage the economy well, were having second thoughts.
New York Times, F.C.C. Chair Says Agency ‘Isn’t Independent,’ Breaking From Tradition, Cecilia Kang, Dec. 18, 2025 (print ed.). The comment from Brendan Carr, a Republican, raised concerns from lawmakers about how President Trump might use the agency.
The chairman of the Federal Communications Commission said in a hearing on Wednesday that the agency was not independent, stunning Democratic lawmakers concerned that President Trump could use the government office as a tool for censorship.
The Republican chair, Brendan Carr, said in an agency oversight hearing by the Senate Commerce, Science and Transportation Committee that “formally speaking, the F.C.C. isn’t independent.”
Democrats grilled Mr. Carr in the hearing over a series of threats he had made to broadcasters about revoking local broadcast licenses for content that is not in the public’s interest. In September, he threatened to take away local licenses of ABC stations that aired Jimmy Kimmel’s late-night show because of Mr. Kimmel’s remarks about the killer of the right-wing activist Charlie Kirk.
Sinclair and Nexstar briefly suspended Mr. Kimmel’s show on local ABC stations that they own, and ABC, which is owned by Disney, temporarily pulled it off the air. Mr. Carr has also opened investigations into all of the major broadcasters, including NPR, for content decisions and advertising.
Mr. Carr has argued that local stations that carry the television and radio content are held to a “public interest” standard. Mr. Trump has pushed for the F.C.C. to use its powers over the broadcast industry to retaliate against coverage that he has deemed unfavorable to him. The agency’s main power over the industry lies in its approvals of mergers and of licenses to broadcasters to use the public airwaves.
In Wednesday’s hearing, Mr. Carr, a career telecommunications lawyer, said the 1934 Communications Act did not explicitly describe the president’s authority over the agency. “So I can be fired by the president for no reason or any reason at all,” he said.
Democrats balked at his remarks. Senator Edward J. Markey of Massachusetts said the use of broadcast license renewals to pressure media that have mergers and other regulatory matters before the agency would be “weaponizing the public interest standard.”
Several Democrats noted that the F.C.C. website’s mission statement describes it as an independent agency. As of Wednesday afternoon, the word “independent” did not appear on the agency’s mission page.
“Trump is not your boss, so the American people are your boss,” said Senator Andy Kim, Democrat of New Jersey.
Popular Information, Accountability Journalism: Breaking precedent, networks interrupt prime time for Trump political diatribe, Rebecca Crosby, Noel Sims, and Judd Legum, right, Dec. 18, 2025. 
On Wednesday night at 9 PM Eastern, President Trump (shown above) delivered a prime time address to the nation that was aired by all major broadcast networks. It preempted the season finale of “Survivor” on CBS, one of the network’s most highly-rated shows, the season finale of “The Floor” on Fox, and holiday specials on ABC and NBC.
Typically, networks will interrupt their primetime schedule for presidents to address wars, crises, or very significant new policies. In his remarks on Wednesday, Trump delivered his standard talking points, bragging about his mass deportation policies and tariffs and attacking Democrats and the Biden administration. The only crisis was Trump’s sagging approval ratings.
“Over the past 11 months, we have brought more positive change to Washington than any administration in American history,” Trump said during the speech. “There’s never been anything like it.”
Trump blamed the Democrats for the increased cost of health insurance. “You see that now in the steep increase in premiums being demanded by the Democrats, and they are demanding those increases, and it’s their fault,” he said. Millions of Americans will see their insurance rates increase after Republicans refused to extend government subsidies that will expire at the end of the year.
The speech's partisan political content was not a surprise.
White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, right, said that Trump would address the country “about all of his historic accomplishments over the past year” and “all that he’s done to bring our country back to greatness.” Specifically, Leavitt stated that Trump would likely discuss “border security and lower gas prices.”
The networks decided to break precedent and air it anyway.
The networks have declined to air prime time speeches from the last two Democratic presidents, claiming they were too political. In 2022, for 
example, broadcast networks declined to air a prime time speech by former President Joe Biden where he warned about threats to democracy, deciding the speech would be too “political.” Instead, NBC ran a rerun of “Law & Order” and CBS aired a rerun of “Young Sheldon.”
In 2014, major networks also refused to air a speech by former President Barack Obama about immigration reform, claiming it was too partisan. The speech outlined a plan to protect millions of undocumented immigrants from deportation, which the Washington Post called “the most significant presidential intervention to alter the U.S. immigration system in nearly three decades.” But instead of airing the speech, CBS opted to air “The Big Bang Theory” and NBC aired “The Biggest Loser: Glory Days.”
The Obama White House made a comparison to a decision by networks to air a 2006 speech by former President George W. Bush that also covered immigration policy, but networks argued that Bush’s announcement was “bipartisan,” while Obama’s speech was an “overtly political move by the White House,” a network insider told Politico at the time.
But major broadcast networks did air a 2019 speech by Trump about the border wall, which did not have bipartisan support. Network officials argued that the speech should be aired because of its “newsworthiness.” One official told the Washington Post that while the Obama speech was “very political” and had “no crisis around it,” Trump’s speech happened during the “backdrop of the crisis of a government shutdown.”
After then-House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) and then-Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) demanded equal airtime, networks gave Pelosi and Schumer less than five minutes of airtime directly following Trump’s speech. The networks did not air any Democratic response to Trump’s Wednesday night address.
A pattern of capitulation
During his second term, the networks have consistently capitulated to Trump’s demands.
In December 2024, ABC settled a defamation lawsuit brought by Trump, agreeing to contribute $15 million to his presidential library and pay $1 million in legal fees. Trump sued ABC after anchor George Stephanopoulos incorrectly said on air that Trump was found liable for raping E. Jean Carroll, when he was actually found liable for sexual abuse. Legal experts believed Trump’s case was weak.
Another concession to Trump came in July when CBS settled a lawsuit over the editing of an October 2024 “60 Minutes” interview with former Vice President Kamala Harris for $16 million. Trump’s lawyers alleged that he experienced “mental anguish” over the interview and that it had been edited to make Harris look better.
After the settlement, Paramount, CBS’s parent company, got Federal Communications Commission (FCC) approval for a proposed merger with Skydance Media. The merger made David Ellison — son of billionaire Trump ally Larry Ellison — Paramount’s CEO. Since then, CBS has made changes favorable to Trump.
As a condition of approval for the merger, CBS appointed an ombudsman to evaluate “any complaints of bias or other concerns involving CBS.” The network chose Kenneth Weinstein — the former president of a right-wing think tank and frequent defender of Trump — for the job. Then, Paramount made Bari Weiss, an anti-woke pundit with no broadcast news experience, the editor-in-chief of CBS News.
Fox’s broadcast channel shares the same corporate parent as Fox News, which airs hours of pro-Trump programming daily. Comcast, the corporate parent of NBC News, donated $1 million to Trump’s inauguration and an undisclosed amount to finance the Trump ballroom.
Epstein-Trump Files Updates (Part 1, Continued Below)
The Parnas Perspective, Important Epstein Files Update, Aaron Parnas, Dec. 18, 2025. Trump had a much closer relationship with Epstein as we are getting even more photos released by the Oversight Committee.
With just 24 hours remaining before the U.S. Department of Justice is required to release the long-anticipated Epstein files, new material is already shedding light on what the public may soon confront. Today, the House Oversight Committee released an additional 70 photographs connected to the Epstein investigation.
Warning, before you click the next link, some of the images can be very triggering for anyone who is a survivor of abuse. I will link to those images here and highlight several that stand out for their significance and gravity.
As the DOJ release approaches, today’s photographs and the accumulating reporting serve as a sobering reminder of what is at stake: accountability for powerful figures, transparency from institutions, and—above all—justice and protection for survivors. The coming days will not answer every question, but they may finally begin to illuminate a system that for too long operated in the shadows.
New York Times, ‘Don’s Best Friend’: How Epstein and Trump Bonded Over the Pursuit of Women, Nicholas Confessore and Julie Tate, Dec. 18, 2025. Documents and interviews reveal a complicated relationship in which chasing women was a game of ego and dominance, and female bodies were currency.
The president has tried to minimize their friendship, but documents and interviews reveal an intense and complicated relationship. Chasing women was a game of ego and dominance. Female bodies were currency.
The Times interviewed more than 30 former employees of Jeffrey Epstein, victims of his abuse and others who crossed paths with Mr. Epstein and President Trump. The Times also obtained new documents that illuminate their relationship.Dec. 18, 2025, 5:00 a.m. ET
Jeffrey Epstein was a “terrific guy” and “a lot of fun to be with.” He and Donald J. Trump also had “no formal relationship.” They went to a lot of the same parties. But they “did not socialize together.” They were never really friends, just business acquaintances. Or “there was no relationship” at all. “I was not a fan of his, that I can tell you.”
For nearly a quarter-century, Mr. Trump and his representatives have offered shifting, often contradictory accounts of his relationship with Mr. Epstein, one sporadically captured by society photographers and in news clips before they fell out sometime in the mid-2000s. Closely scrutinized since Mr. Epstein died in a Manhattan jail cell during Mr. Trump’s first term, their friendship — and questions about what the president knew of Mr. Epstein’s abuses — now threatens to consume his second one.
The controversy has shaken Mr. Trump’s iron hold on his base like no other. Loyal supporters have demanded to know why the administration has not moved more quickly to unearth the convicted sex offender’s remaining secrets. In November, after resisting months of pressure to release more Epstein-related documents held by the federal government — and facing an almost unheard-of revolt among Republican lawmakers — Mr. Trump reversed himself, signing legislation that requires their release beginning this week.
Mr. Epstein had a talent for acquiring powerful friends, some of whom have become ensnared in the continuing scrutiny of his crimes. For months, Mr. Trump has labored furiously to shift himself out of the frame, dismissing questions about his relationship with Mr. Epstein as a “Democrat hoax” and imploring his supporters to ignore the matter entirely. An examination of their history by The New York Times has found no evidence implicating Mr. Trump in Mr. Epstein’s abuse and trafficking of minors.
But the two men’s relationship was both far closer and far more complex than the president now admits.
Beginning in the late 1980s, the two men forged a bond intense enough to leave others who knew them with the impression that they were each other’s closest friend, The Times found. Mr. Epstein was then a little-known financier who cultivated mystery around the scope and source of his self-made wealth. Mr. Trump, six years older, was a real estate scion who relished publicity and exaggerated his successes. Neither man drank or did drugs. They pursued women in a game of ego and dominance. Female bodies were currency.
Over nearly two decades, as Mr. Trump cut a swath through the party circuits of New York and Florida, Mr. Epstein was perhaps his most reliable wingman. During the 1990s and early 2000s, they prowled Mr. Epstein’s Manhattan mansion and Mr. Trump’s Plaza Hotel, at least one of Mr. Trump’s Atlantic City casinos and both their Palm Beach homes. They visited each other’s offices and spoke often by phone, according to other former Epstein employees and women who spent time in his homes.
With other men, Mr. Epstein might discuss tax shelters, international affairs or neuroscience. With Mr. Trump, he talked about sex.
“I just think it was trophy hunting,” Stacey Williams, who rose to fame as a star of the Sports Illustrated swimsuit editions during the 1990s, said in an interview with The Times. In social media posts and interviews with news outlets in recent years, Ms. Williams has described how Mr. Trump groped her in 1993 at Trump Tower while Mr. Epstein — whom she was then dating — watched. “I think Jeffrey liked that he had this Sports Illustrated model who had this name, and that Trump was pursuing me,” she said. Mr. Trump has denied her account
To shed light on their friendship, The Times interviewed more than 30 former Epstein employees, victims of his abuse and others who crossed paths with the two men over the years. The Times also obtained new documents that illuminate their relationship and scoured court documents and other public records.
Many of the people interviewed by The Times asked to share their stories anonymously, saying they feared for their safety at the hands of supporters of Mr. Trump, a president who has deployed the might of the federal government to target and punish his political opponents. Some Epstein victims have already received death threats for demanding a full accounting of the government’s investigations, according to a statement released by more than two dozen of them last month.
Over the years, Mr. Epstein or his partner, Ghislaine Maxwell, introduced at least six women who have accused them of grooming or abuse to Mr. Trump, according to interviews, court testimony and other records. One was a minor at the time. None have accused Mr. Trump himself of inappropriate behavior.
One of the women, who has never before spoken publicly about the experience, told The Times that Mr. Epstein had coerced her into attending four parties at Mr. Epstein’s home. Mr. Trump attended all four, the woman said. At two of them, she said, Mr. Epstein directed her to have sex with other male guests.
More On U.S. Governance, Politics
Paul Krugman via Substack, Opinion: Why Trump’s Viciousness Matters, Paul Krugman, right, He wants to destroy our values, not just our democracy.
My first reaction upon reading Donald Trump’s despicable statement on the murders of Rob Reiner and his wife Michele was a sense of both shock and lack of surprise. It wasn’t news to me that the president of the United States is a vicious shmuck. My second reaction was the thought that I have nothing new to contribute here, as plenty of other people were already denouncing yet another example of Trump’s vindictive narcissism.
Yet, on reflection, I realized that there’s a story here that’s bigger than Trump, a story in which Trump is one especially egregious example of a larger pattern. What is that pattern? That being vicious and bigoted is cool, is based in current slang. Trump is one data point in the midst of an epidemic of performative hatemongering in America. And while most of this is emanating from right-wing extremists, not all of it is.
I am not going to present some rose-tinted, Pollyannaish view of America’s past here. There were people who crowed over the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. For most of our history there were Americans who reveled in harming, subjugating and dispossessing those who were considered of the wrong race, ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation or gender identity. But we, as a country, changed. Over time, Americans on the whole became more humane and tolerant.
It’s true that significant numbers of Americans were never fully on board with liberal humanism. For example, a majority of white American’s didn’t approve of interracial marriage until 1997. However, we were slowly becoming a country in which open bigotry was frowned upon. Although we were never perfect, there was a growing sense of norms that contained any underlying hatred.
Now the impulse to hate is back. For example, according to a long-running survey conducted by NORC and the ADL, antisemitism has been making a big comeback: Antisemitic Attitudes in America 2024
And Trump has made innumberable crudely racist comments about Black Americans, particularly about Black American women. He’s demonized immigrants and Muslims, and suggested Democratic politicians should be executed. But the resurgence of hate speech isn’t just about Trump, nor is it solely about politics. Grown men — it’s mostly, although not only, men — now feel free to be publicly cruel and vindictive, spouting childish insults against whomever they dislike.
Why is this happening? The rise of social media is one significant factor in making it far easier for the like-minded to find one another and magnify their hate.
The app formerly known as Twitter is thoroughly infested with bigots and bots, and all too many people who immerse themselves in that toxic environment end up internalizing the viciousness. Even right-wing activists like Chris Rufo are complaining that X has been “increasingly hijacked by bad actors who peddle baseless conspiracies and indulge their personal psychopathologies.” And G. Elliott Morris’s Substack “Strength in Numbers” has an excellent post on how Fox News polarized American voters and helped break American politics.
However, media alone are not to blame. I’ve been reading the British economist Simon Wren-Lewis, who has been writing about “the growing acceptability of xenophobic discourse” in the UK. His thesis is that there have always been a substantial number of people in Britain — and, surely, in every Western nation — who are socially reactionary and racist. In the past, however, mainstream political parties refused to associate themselves with anyone espousing such views. Eventually the cynical search for votes led to a breakdown of this cordon sanitaire — the Germans call their equivalent the Brandmauer, or firewall — and the latent viciousness broke into the open.
In a follow-up post Wren-Lewis, citing the work of the political scientist Vicente Valentim, acknowledges thatbroader social norms, largely established after World War II, also made overt racism and other forms of bigotry unacceptable in the public sphere. Even people who were privately cruel and bigoted – some of them in influential positions – felt obliged to be hypocrites and hide their true nature.
In time, however, events, ranging from the Syrian refugee crisis in Germany to the election of America’s first Black president, loosened the grip of these social norms. The already-existing pool of cruelty and bigotry, which had previously been veiled by hypocrisy, came back into full view.
A similar phenomenon is occurring in the US, where some Trump supporters are gleeful that Trump’s presidency will allow them to drop the veil of hypocrisy. For example, the Financial Times reported on the reasons some on Wall Street were welcoming Trump’s return:
“I feel liberated,” said a top banker. “We can say ‘retard’ and ‘pussy’ without the fear of getting cancelled . . . it’s a new dawn.”
Now, Trump is purposely breaking norms and engaging in open expressions of hate and bigotry. And among a set of people, this serves as a signal that it’s now socially acceptable to do the same – look, for example, atthe extremely racist and Nazi-praising chats among young Republican activists leaked to Politico. While these young MAGA-landers were outed and chastised, it’s clear that within MAGA-world emulating Trump’s hate-filled rhetoric is considered a way of signaling that you are loyal to the movement.
And it’s also clear that if Trumpism persists, we are facing a future in which such behavior is no longer publicly unacceptable. Because Trump’s remarks about the murder of the Reiners weren’t just his personal venting. They were a symptom and a symbol of his systematic destruction of our norms, our humanism, just as he tried to destroy the norms of American democracy on January 6, 2021. It’s a profoundly nihilistic vision for America.
And one of these days, I predict, history will judge harshly those who stayed silent.
Addendum: Trump gave a speech on the economy last night. It was nasty, brutish but mercifully short. It was, of course, full of lies. Were there any true factual claims? So far I haven’t found any. And it closed out with ugly claims about immigrants. A few more words about it tomorrow.
More On Trump's Speech
Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: Can We Get Those 18 Minutes Back? William Kristol, right, Dec. 18, 2025. What to think of Donald Trump’s speech from the White House last night?
I’m with Tim Miller: “I was embarrassed. It’s really unbelievably stupid that we’re here, that this person is the president, and that that was real—that was not a spoof.”
I’d only add that it’s unbelievably stupid that we’re stuck with this person as president for three more years. And we’re stuck with apologists like Newt Gingrich, once a formidable figure. Last night, Newt made this unbelievably stupid statement: “Some day, people will say it was one of the most important speeches of his career . . . I think it’s a very, very important speech.”
No, it wasn’t a very, very important speech. It wasn’t even a slightly important speech. It was a pointless speech. It was a waste of 18 minutes of prime time.
But it also left me with a sense of relief. Only perhaps temporary relief, to be sure—but still, you take what you can get these days.
Why?
Because Trump didn’t use the network prime time he’d requested to announce we were going to war in Venezuela. After all his bellicose rhetoric, after all his bluster in press gaggles, Trump had a chance to make his case for war to the nation. He failed to take it. He didn’t even mention Venezuela.
I suppose Trump could still launch an attack soon. He surely doesn’t think a president has some kind of obligation, if he’s going to use military force, to explain the rationale to the public—let alone to get authorization for it from the people’s representatives in Congress. Perhaps he’s just waiting until Congress is out of town next week, so there’s less chance of effective pushback.
Still, the idea of a war with Venezuela is already unpopular. It’s hard to see why it’s going to get any more popular. Perhaps Trump will continue to bluff rather than fight. So maybe we’ll be spared an unauthorized and unjustified foreign war.
Which would be good.
There’s another reason for my sense of relief. Last night’s speech reveals Trump has no sense of how he might save his foundering presidency, or even much of an inclination to try to do so. Indeed, yesterday’s Republican meltdown in the House in the face of increased health insurance costs, a faltering economy, and the deadline for the release of the Epstein files tomorrow—all of these suggest a rough holiday season for the administration.
Which is good. A weaker Trump administration is better for America.
One more point. A normal president, speaking after this past week—in which two U.S. soldiers were killed in Syria, after the shooting of the students at Brown, after the terrible attack on Jews celebrating Hanukkah in Sydney, and after the horrible murder of Rob and Michele Reiner—would have said something about how we mourned these tragedies. He might have asked for prayers for victims and their families in this holiday season.
Of course, this never even occurred to the pathological narcissistic we have as our president. Indeed, I doubt people thought he’d bother mentioning this at all: The soft bigotry of low expectations.
In any case, Trump is an embarrassment. And he will be a failed president. The question is how much more damage he’ll be able to do to our polity, our society, and our country.
The Hartmann Report, Political Commentary: Was That a Speech or a Breakdown? Thom Hartmann, Dec. 18, 2025. A starklook at the speech that blurred the line between leadership and losing control on the world stage…
Let me take off my psychotherapist hat and simply speak as a parent, an adult, a businessman, a citizen, and a human being.
There is something deeply and fundamentally wrong with Donald Trump.
Last night’s speech demonstrated it. He didn’t need to trash-talk Joe Biden, or try to claim that the country was “dead” when he came into office, or exaggerate his accomplishments, or lie about the state of things. None of that was necessary.
He didn’t need to put depreciating comments under the pictures of prior presidents in the White House, or replace Joe Biden’s picture with a autopen. These are the kind of things junior high school boys do. And not even most junior high school boys; just the really dysfunctional ones. The bullies. The ones who are desperate to be part of the in crowd, but always on the outside looking in. The ones no one wants as friends.
This man is sick. And he’s inflicting his sickness on our country. And he’s surrounded himself with sick people, or at least with people willing to tolerate his mental, emotional, and spiritual sickness.
As well as people who share his sickness: there’s also clearly something wrong with man-children like Stephen Miller, Pete Hegseth, and Kash Patel. With these men, it goes beyond the normal sellout-type of person willing to do anything for wealth and power, the kind of behavior we see in people like Pam Bondi or the administration members who’ll swear that the 2020 election was stolen.
There’s a deep cruelty combined with a pathological insecurity and a level of hate and intolerance for others that’s shocking. Anybody who’s ever played any sort of role in leadership is looking at this administration aghast. The leaders of the rest of the rest of the world must be in shock.
There’s a deep sickness at the head of this government. The childishness. The violence. The bloodlust that we see off the coast of Venezuela. The willingness to sanction rape and murder and land grabs in Ukraine. The enthusiasm to bring our country to the brink of war. Plastering gold-painted geegaws all over it the White House.
And then last night Trump goes off for 20 minutes quite literally shouting at the country like an old man yelling at kids on his lawn. Ranting about Black Somalis. Bragging about nonexistent victories and peace deals. Just making shit up.
No president of the United States has ever behaved this way. Probably no governor or mayor has ever gotten away with this kind of psychopathology and obscene behavior.
It’s embarrassing. It’s humiliating America.
It’s setting a terrible example for our young people. Children who were just entering the early years of public school when Trump first ran based on a racist rant in 2015 are now graduating from high school thinking that this is normal.
That, in and of itself, is a disaster for their and America’s future.
And now he has an “armada” poised off the coast of Venezuela trying to provoke a war with that nation.
It’s also becoming increasingly clear that he was right in the middle of it all with Jeffrey Epstein, and is now frantically trying to avoid questions about the teen modeling agency and talent show he owned back in those days.
He’s gutted America’s principal agencies of soft power, The Voice of America and USAID, strung Ukraine along for almost an entire year as their people get slaughtered, and accepted hundreds of millions of dollars worth of naked bribes from foreign autocrats and American business leaders.
He’s deployed masked, secret police into our cities who are gleefully brutalizing brown-skinned people and anybody who tries to document their hugely unAmerican activity.
He kowtows before Vladimir Putin and China’s president Xi, and embraces murderous dictators who’ve ordered the killing of an American journalist and routinely cut the heads off of their own people. He tore down the East Wing of the White House in defiance of federal and local law, history, and respect for “The People’s House.”
It’s reached the plant where we’re now confronted with a hard truth: this isn’t about left versus right anymore or even politics as usual. It isn’t about tax policy or border policy or whose yard sign we prefer.
This is now about whether we’re willing to normalize sickness in power.
Whether we tell ourselves comforting stories because confronting the actual reality in front of us is frightening.
Whether we allow cruelty, lying, and instability to become the cultural baseline simply because calling it out makes dinner conversations awkward or costs us friends or clicks or donors.
Turning points in history don’t usually announce themselves with marching bands. They creep in while decent people look away, hoping the fever will break on its own.
But it never does. Fevers break only when the body fights back. Democracies survive only when citizens decide that character still matters, that truth still matters, that children deserve better examples than tantrums and threats and gold-plated vulgarity.
Silence is not neutrality: It’s consent.If you’re reading this, you still have agency. Use it. Talk to your neighbors. Support journalists and organizations willing to tell the truth. Show up, vote, organize, refuse to laugh it off, refuse to excuse it, refuse to become numb.
Demand leaders who are adults, not bullies. Who are steady, not sick. Who see power as a responsibility, not a toy.
The future is watching us right now, and one day our children will ask what we did when it mattered. Let’s make sure we have an answer we can live with.
President Trump (New York Times file photo by Kenny Holston).
New York Times, Fact-Checking Trump’s Prime-Time Address on the Economy, Linda Qiu, Dec. 17, 2025 (print ed.). The president cited misleading statistics to insist, wrongly, that prices were coming down.
President Trump praised what he portrayed as the economic gains under his administration in an address from the White House on Wednesday, even as consumers express concerns about affordability and voice discontent over how he has handled the economy.
“I am bringing those high prices down and bringing them down very fast. Let’s look at the facts,” Mr. Trump said, before ticking off a litany of misleading claimsl. Here’s a look at those facts.
What Was Said
“When I took office, inflation was the worst in 48 years, and some would say in the history of our country.”
False. Inflation had already fallen to 3 percent in January, when Mr. Trump took office. Inflation did reach a four-decade high in the summer of 2022, at about 9.1 percent that June, but had declined since then. That number was also not a record; inflation reached higher points in the 1910s, 1970s and 1980s.
What Was Said
“The price of a Thanksgiving turkey was down 33 percent compared to the Biden last year. The price of eggs is down 82 percent since March, and everything else is falling rapidly, and it’s not done yet.”
This is exaggerated. Mr. Trump may have been referring to, and overstating, a report from the American Farm Bureau, which estimated that the cost of a turkey at the grocery store before Thanksgiving had declined by 16 percent this year from last year. But wholesale turkey prices had actually risen this year, according to data from the Agriculture Department and a Purdue University report. This is likely because turkeys are known as loss leaders, or items that retailers may sell at a loss to entice consumers to the store.
On eggs, Mr. Trump is correct that the wholesale price of eggs had fallen from more than $8 a dozen in late February to $1.45 last week, a decline of more than 80 percent. The retail price of eggs declined less sharply, about 44 percent, from March to September, the month with the most recent data available.
Mr. Trump was also wrong that “everything else is falling rapidly.” In fact, the Consumer Price Index rose by 3 percent in September.
What Was Said
“Gasoline is now under $2.50 a gallon into much of the country. In some states, it, by the way, just hit $1.99 a gallon.”
Emptywheel, Analysis: Rent-Seeking: Trump Sells Patriotic Fraud to Boost His Tariff Lies, Emptywheel (Marcy Wheeler, Ph.D), right, Dec. 18, 2025. Among the blizzard of lies Trump told last night is that the $1,776 check he's sending to service members has anything to do with his tariffs.
I was going to write about how Trump’s promise, last night, to send a bunch of service members a $1,776 checks, was actually a confession that there will be no tariff rebates for civilians.
Two paragraphs after Trump introduced his false claims about tariffs — “my favorite word” — he said that because of tariffs, along with the Big Ugly, Trump was sending some number (he bolloxed the number repeatedly) service members would get a check.
This historic trend will continue. Already, I’ve secured a record-breaking $18 trillion of investment into the United States, which means jobs, wage increases, growth, factory openings and far greater national security. Much of this success has been accomplished by tariffs, my favorite word, tariffs, which for many decades have been used successfully by other countries against us, but not anymore. Companies know that if they build in America, there are no tariffs, and that’s why they’re coming home to the U.S.A. in record numbers. They’re building factories and plants at levels we haven’t seen. A.I., automobiles, we’re doing what nobody thought was even possible, not even remotely possible. There has never, frankly, been anything like it.
[snip]
Because of tariffs, along with the just passed One Big, Beautiful Bill, tonight I am also proud to announce that more than 1,000, 450,000, think of this, 1,450,000 military service members will receive a special, we call warrior dividend before Christmas, a warrior dividend. In honor of our nation’s founding in 1776, we are sending every soldier $1,776. Think of that. And the checks are already on the way. Nobody understood that one until about 30 minutes ago. We made a lot more money than anybody thought because of tariffs, and the bill helped us along. Nobody deserves it more than our military. And I say congratulations to everybody. And by the way, we now have record enlistment in our military, and last year we had among the worst recruitment numbers in our military’s history. What a difference a year makes.
He once was offering bigger refunds — $2,000 — for everyone but high income people. That was, as Dean Baker did the math at the time, totally unaffordable, even ignoring that Trump is likely to have to pay some portion of the tariffs back, only to importers, not the consumers who have paid increased prices for consumer goods.
Doing the simple arithmetic, the country has 340 million people. If 10 percent of these people fit Trump’s definition of high-income, and therefore don’t get the rebate, roughly 300 million people would get the checks.
At $2,000 a piece it would come to $600 billion, more than twice what Trump is collecting from us with his import taxes. Since he’s already $330 billion short, how can Trump think he has money to pay down the national debt? Also, he seems not to know that our deficit this year is projected to be $1.8 trillion, so he is actually adding considerably to the debt and would be adding even more with his $600 billion tariff “rebate.”
So, I figured, promising a smaller number (but hiding the smaller amount in patriotic shlock) to a far smaller number of people would serve the purpose of the rebates — to generate public support for keeping the tariff revenue rather than paying them back — in a way that would be hard to oppose.
Who would begrudge service members a check, after all.
But once you give that $2.5 billion away (assuming the larger number is the correct one), you’ve started eating into the $100 billion you might be able to use to give money away.
The service members were going to get the check instead of everyone.
But according to Defense One, even that is not what is going on. Trump is taking money Congress allocated to expand housing allowances and paying it as a direct check instead.
President Donald Trump’s $1,776 checks for more than a million troops, announced Wednesday, come from Congressionally-allocated reconciliation funds intended to subsidize housing allowances for service members, a senior administration official confirmed.
During a prime-time TV address, Trump said he was “proud to announce” that “1,450,000 military service members will receive a special, we call ‘warrior dividend,’ before Christmas.” He added that to honor the nation’s founding, “we are sending every soldier $1,776. Think of that. And the checks are already on the way.”
The senior administration official told Defense One in an emailed statement late Wednesday evening that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, right, directed the Pentagon to “disburse $2.6 billion as a one-time basic allowance for housing supplement” to all eligible service members ranks 0-6 and below.
“Congress appropriated $2.9 billion to the Department of War to supplement the Basic Allowance for Housing entitlement within The One Big Beautiful Bill,” the senior official said. “Approximately 1.28 million active component military members and 174,000 Reserve component military members will receive this supplement.”
It has nothing to do with tariffs (though was provided, without enough guidance to prevent such a gimmick, in the Big Ugly bill). Trump just told that lie along with his $18 trillion lie in order to claim his tariffs have been less disastrous than they have been.
Who knows? Maybe Trump will bankrupt the country to send rebates to cover over how much consumers have paid for these tariffs.
For now, though, Trump is simply piling lie on top of lie about it all.
Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: His Glory Is He Has Such Friends, Will Saletan, Dec. 18, 2025. Donald Trump’s central goal in his prime-time address on Wednesday night was to reconnect with his voters. Many of them have said he’s spending too much time on foreign affairs and not enough on domestic concerns, especially the cost of living.
So it was odd to hear the president, in his remarks, reassure America that the country is doing well because his foreign buddies say so.
“One year ago our country was dead. We were absolutely dead,” Trump said. But “now we’re the hottest country anywhere in the world. And that’s said by every single leader that I’ve spoken to over the last five months.”
During those months, Trump has named many of the autocrats and VIPs he claims have said this to him: Vladimir Putin, Xi Jinping, “the king of Saudi Arabia,” “the emir of Qatar,” the prime minister of Hungary, and “every leader of NATO.”
Trump is, of course, lying. Some foreign leaders, to flatter him and mitigate their risk of exorbitant tariffs, have probably told him he’s doing a great job. But it’s absurd to imagine that all the presidents and prime ministers of NATO countries have told him (as Trump has alleged more than once) that America was dead a year ago. To say such a thing wouldn’t just overtax their tolerance for self-abasing dishonesty, it would damage their post-Trump relations with the United States.
So why does Trump keep boasting that they said it? Because he’s a pathological narcissist. And because he thinks it will impress Americans.
Last month, Trump hosted a White House dinner to honor a man for whom he has expressed glowing affection. It wasn’t a Pennsylvania miner or a Michigan auto worker. It was Mohammed bin Salman, the crown prince of Saudi Arabia. In his remarks, Trump said the crown prince was the first to tell him, “One year ago, we thought your country was dead. And now you have the hottest country anywhere in the world.”
Then Trump told the crown prince why he was so grateful for those words: “I want to thank you for giving me one of the most effective lines that I have.”
That’s how Trump thinks about the praise he extracts—or fabricates—from foreign leaders. It’s material he can use to manipulate American voters.
In his speech last night, Trump insisted, as he always does, that he’s bringing prices down. That’s a lie, and Americans know it. He’s more interested in starting wars and chasing phony peace prizes than he is on fixing health care or inflation.
So he assures Americans that everything’s fine and they’re doing really well, because guys like Putin, Xi, and MBS have told him so. He’s not refuting the accusation that he cares more about those dictators than he does about you. He’s proving it.
AROUND THE BULWARK
Quick Hits
JACK SMITH SPEAKS: Former special counsel Jack Smith testified yesterday to a closed-door meeting of the House Oversight Committee that his team had “proof beyond a reasonable doubt” that Trump’s stop-the-steal efforts were “criminal” and that he had “willfully retained highly classified documents” and “repeatedly tried to obstruct justice” to keep them secret. Portions of Smith’s testimony were obtained by NBC 
News. His prosecutions were cut short when Trump was reelected last year, but Smith seems confident that if the election had gone the other way, he would have secured a conviction.
Smith, right, has been repeatedly targeted by Republicans this year. GOP lawmakers have been incensed by revelations that his investigators pulled some of their phone metadata during his investigation; Trump has said Smith belongs in jail. In his testimony, however, Smith told the committee that those phone records “were lawfully subpoenaed and were relevant to complete a comprehensive” investigation. Trump had called lawmakers to try to further a criminal scheme to steal an election, Smith argued. “I didn’t choose those members. President Trump did.”
WALL OF SHAME: Donald Trump has spent a lot of time this year trying to get revenge on various political enemies. But with various attempts to prosecute the likes of James Comey and Letitia James continually blowing up on the launchpad, he’s lately had to find more creative outlets for his endless spleen. Yesterday, the White House revealed the latest: a series of puerile “biographies” of recent presidents displayed on plaques beneath their portraits on Trump’s White House “presidential wall of fame.”
Many long-ago presidents have normal biographies. Those Trump personally likes or dislikes, however, got a different treatment. “Barack Hussein Obama” was “one of the most divisive political figures in American history” who “passed the highly ineffective ‘Unaffordable’ Care Act,” “crippled small businesses with crushing regulation and environmental red tape,” allowed ISIS to “spread across the Middle East,” and “presided over the creation of the Russia, Russia, Russia Hoax.” “Sleepy Joe Biden”—whose portrait is not even displayed, with Trump having framed a picture of an autopen instead—is “by far the worst President in American History,” who was elected “as a result of the most corrupt Election ever seen in the United States” and “oversaw a series of unprecedented disasters that brought our Nation to the brink of destruction.”
If you think you detect a certain authorial presence behind these descriptors—well, you’re right. “The plaques are eloquently written descriptions of each president and the legacy they left behind,” White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters yesterday. “As a student of history, many were written directly by the president himself.”
Such are the projects on which the president of the United States decides to fritter away his precious time in office.
MINT CONDITION MAGA: The U.S. Mint has nixed Biden administration designs for special commemorative quarters for the nation’s 250th birthday of the American nation. Treasurer of the United States Brandon Beach derided them as “DEI and critical race theory” stuff, and the designs have been replaced.
On the scrap heap: designs commemorating women’s suffrage, the abolition of slavery, and the Civil Rights movement. Also, the Constitution commemorative coin will now feature Philadelphia’s Independence Hall instead of the Statue of Liberty. (None of those “huddled masses,” please.) New Trump designs celebrate the Mayflower pilgrims and the Revolutionary War, while abolition is obliquely referenced in a “Gettysburg Address” coin with two clasped arms on one side and Abraham Lincoln on the other. The Biden abolition coin would have had hands breaking shackles—and Frederick Douglass.
U.S. Justice, Law, Courts, Crime
The New Republic, Legal Commentary: The Trump Judge Who Tried to Rewrite the Bill of Rights, Matt Ford, Dec 18, 2025. Trump appointee Amul Thapar unleashed an appalling judicial broadside against the constitutional rights of noncitizens that amounts to a wholesale negation of our judicial history.
A federal judge in Kentucky proposed in a judicial opinion this week that the Bill of Rights does not protect more than 50 million immigrants in the United States. Judge Amul Thapar, who serves on the Sixth Circuit Court of Appeals, argued that originalism required him to exclude all noncitizens from the Constitution’s protections.
“Originally understood, neither the First nor Fourth Amendment clearly extends to noncitizens,” he wrote in a concurring and dissenting opinion on Monday. “And, properly read, the Supreme Court’s guidance on these amendments is far from consistent, in part due to the drift of First and Fourth Amendment caselaw from the original public meaning of the text.”
Thapar’s opinion is a train wreck, to put it mildly. Though the case only concerned the scope of the Second Amendment as it applies to undocumented immigrants, the Trump appointee goes far beyond the facts and briefs to forcefully argue that millions of people living lawfully in the United States can be silenced and seized at the government’s whims. To build his case, Thapar commits a series of profound moral and legal errors that disprove his argument altogether.
The case at hand, United States v. Escobar-Temal, involves a Guatemalan man who illegally crossed the U.S. border some time before 2012. According to court documents, he has lived in the Nashville area for the past 13 years, where he married a woman and had two children with her. Police searched his home in 2022 after his wife alleged that he had abused their daughter and found three guns that Escobar-Temal owned.
Federal law makes it a felony offense for people unlawfully present inside the United States to possess a firearm, and federal prosecutors charged him accordingly. Escobar-Temal then challenged the constitutionality of his indictment, claiming that provision in question violates the Second Amendment. This is unsurprising: Escobar-Temal’s challenge is one of dozens, if not hundreds, of legal challenges to existing gun regulations that have arisen since the Supreme Court rewrote its test for Second Amendment cases in 2022.
At issue in this particular case is who counts as “the people” for Second Amendment purposes. Escobar-Temal argued that he fell within that category and pointed to two grounds to justify this interpretation. First, he argued, the Constitution’s Framers saw no distinction between the Bill of Rights’ protections for citizens and for “aliens” present inside the United States. Escobar-Temal pointed to language from the Framers to support that view, but we’ll come back to that later.
Additionally, Escobar-Temal argued that Supreme Court precedent supports his interpretation. He pointed to a 1990 case, United States v. Verdugo-Urquidez, where the justices concluded that foreign nationals could invoke the Fourth Amendment’s protections against unreasonable searches and seizures. “The people,” the court reasoned, includes both those who are U.S. citizens and those who have “developed sufficient connection with this country to be considered part of [the national] community.” The Justice Department and the federal district court disagreed.
The Sixth Circuit took a more nuancd view than Escobar-Temal. Judge Stranch, writing for the panel, concluded that the government’s “ample historical evidence” did not conclusively show that “unlawfully present individuals are excluded from ‘the people.’” She pointed to some of the precedents invoked by Escobar-Temal, as well as related rulings that suggested unlawfully present immigrants might enjoy some measure of the Bill of Rights’ protection.
Ultimately, however, Stranch rejected the defendant’s challenge on Second Amendment grounds. The Supreme Court’s history-and-tradition test for gun restrictions, she noted, allows them to survive if they are part of a long-standing historical tradition. Stranch cited numerous examples where colonial and post-independence legislatures disarmed entire groups of people presumed to be dangerous and outside the normal “political community,” such as Catholics or Native Americans. “While many individual liberties were preserved for resident aliens, the right to bear arms was restricted to those who had a special relationship with the United States government,” she concluded.
I doubt any side in the gun control debate would disagree with the outcome of this case. Even those who favor a broad reading of the Second Amendment appear to have their limits: No gun rights groups filed friend-of-the-court briefs to side with Escobar-Temal, unlike in similar cases. Gun control advocates would also likely find this debate to be pointless since they generally don’t believe the Second Amendment protects an individual right to bear arms at all, contra the Supreme Court’s 2008 ruling in District of Columbia v. Heller.
While Thapar joined the other two judges in their ultimate conclusion—that Escobar-Temal’s challenge had failed—he categorically rejected the notion that an “illegal alien” might be entitled to Second Amendment rights. “Plain and simple, ‘the people’ refers to the American citizens who consented to the government of the United States,” he wrote in a separate opinion. “Since illegal aliens aren’t citizens, they can’t assert ‘the right of the people to keep and bear arms.’”
From there, Thapar argued that his narrow reading of “the people” to only mean citizens extended to the entire Bill of Rights. This would be a seismic shift in the American constitutional landscape. If Thapar’s opinion became the law of the land, it would instantly strip the rights from roughly 52 million people currently living in the United States, most of whom are lawfully present in the country. Roughly one out of every seven people in the country would lose their rights to free speech, to not face unreasonable searches and seizures, and more. It would immediately create an underclass of millions of people who could be lawfully subjected to official abuses without any opportunity for relief or recourse.
To justify that reprehensible outcome, Thapar engages in some interpretive bait and switch. He leans heavily on precedents that suggest that not every constitutional right applies with equal force to noncitizens. Most notably, he pointed to rulings that upheld campaign finance restrictions against noncitizens. As then-Judge Brett Kavanaugh noted in a 2011 opinion while serving on the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, for example, Congress “may exclude foreign citizens from activities that are part of the democratic self-government of the United States.”
“The majority errs in assuming that modern caselaw guarantees First Amendment rights to noncitizens, let alone illegal aliens,” Thapar claimed. “The Supreme Court has consistently found that noncitizens may assert speech protections in more limited circumstances than American citizens.” But there is a vast gulf between arguing that someone possesses a slightly narrower set of First Amendment rights than a U.S. citizen does and arguing that they possess no First Amendment rights at all.
Thapar also rejected the courts’ clear presumption that constitutional rights apply to noncitizens unless convincingly argued otherwise. Those cases are amply and favorably cited to chastise the majority for assuming that the Bill of Rights applies to noncitizens with equal force. When other Supreme Court precedents clash with Thapar’s understanding, however, they are brushed aside in favor of the “original understanding” from the Founding era that he has supposedly unearthed.
Thapar’s historical excavation is not remotely persuasive. Most disturbing of all are his citations of the Alien and Sedition Acts as evidence of the original public understanding of the Bill of Rights. Those laws, which were enacted by the John Adams administration, were vehemently criticized at the time and arguably led to Adams’s defeat in the 1800 election. The Thomas Jefferson administration either allowed them to expire or repealed them outright, with the exception of the Alien Enemies Act.
Since then, the rest of the Alien and Sedition Acts have taken on a sort of anti-canonical status in constitutional law. While judges often look to Founding-era practices to understand how early Americans thought the government should operate, the acts are typically seen as an exception to that principle—and a warning for future generations. In 2018, for example, fellow originalist Justice Clarence Thomas argued in a dissenting opinion in Sessions v. Dimaya that noncitizens might not be entitled to the due process clause’s protections.
Thomas favorably cited the Federalists’ arguments in favor of the Alien Friends Act, which gave the president broad deportation powers to target anyone that he deemed “dangerous.” Thomas noted that the Federalists believed that the “rights of aliens were governed by the law of nations, not the Constitution.” He also argued that deportations did not fall under the banner of “life, liberty, or property,” which he described as a “relatively narrow set of core private rights.”
New York Times, For Families Fighting Addiction, Reiner Tragedy Strikes a Nerve, Sonia A. Rao, Dec. 18, 2025. Nick Reiner, charged with murdering his parents, Rob and Michele Singer Reiner, spent much of his life battling drug addiction, an affliction that millions of Americans face.
He went to drug treatment 18 times as a teenager. He had a heart attack on a plane after doing cocaine. He tormented his family with violent outbursts, stints living on the streets and a never-ending cycle of relapse.
Nick Reiner, 32, struggled with drug addiction for nearly two decades, something he and his family shared with the public. This week, he was charged with murder in the death of his parents, the director Rob Reiner and his wife, Michele Singer Reiner.
His ordeal, and its impact on his parents and family, has resonated with millions of people, including Pattie Vargas. Her daughter isolated herself and lived on the streets while battling addiction to alcohol and drugs. Her son developed a heart condition from drug use and died of heart failure in 2017 while intoxicated, just one month shy of turning 36.
“As a parent, I would have cut off both my arms to save my kids,” said Ms. Vargas, of Vacaville, Calif. She took out a second mortgage and eventually lost her home covering treatment costs, she said. “This is a health crisis. It’s not a moral failing, it’s not a family screw-up. It’s an illness.”
Some 50 million Americans struggle with drug and alcohol addiction. It can require multiple stints in rehab before people truly begin the recovery process, according to experts. Others may never reach that point — drug overdose is the leading cause of death for Americans between 18 and 45 years old.
“It’s really hard to know whether or not someone is going to recover,” said Colleen Berryessa, a Rutgers University professor who studies addiction.
Though rare, drug use and related mental health disorders can sometimes lead to violent and deadly actions, usually while a person is under the influence of some types of drugs or trying to obtain them. In 2021, a man whose family said he was addicted to opioids — and grew angry when doctors wouldn’t prescribe them — was sentenced to life in prison for a deadly shooting at a Minnesota health clinic.
Prosecutors in the Reiners’ killing have not indicated whether they believe substance use played a role in the murders, and no information about Nick’s mental health history has emerged.
As the celebrity son of a prominent Hollywood filmmaker, Nick Reiner and his family had access to the highest-end resources to treat his addiction. But sometimes money and resources aren’t enough, said Gary Mendell, a hotel executive whose son, Brian, killed himself in 2011.
His son was 25 and had struggled with addiction for over a decade, said Mr. Mendell, who lives in Westport, Conn. Mr. Mendell founded Shatterproof, an addiction crisis nonprofit, after his son’s death.
“I had all the resources that anyone could have,” he said. “I could afford anything related to the treatment of my son.” But shame and stigma still drove Brian to die by suicide, he said.
The Reiners also struggled with how to treat Nick’s addiction. In 2015, Rob Reiner told The Los Angeles Times that he regretted not listening to his son, who said a drug-treatment program was not working for him.
“We were desperate, and because the people had diplomas on their wall, we listened to them when we should have been listening to our son,” Rob Reiner said.
Global News
Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: Reflections on Bondi Beach, Mona Charen, right, 
Dec. 18, 2025. When I go to synagogue, I always smile and wave at the armed police officers stationed outside.
I want them to know they’re appreciated, but also, at some level, I guess it’s fair to say that I’m trying to ingratiate myself so that the cop will want to put his or her life on the line to save us if a gunman decides to open fire on or torch our congregation, as happened in Pittsburgh (2018), Poway ( 2019), Miami (2019), Monsey (2019), Halle, Germany (2019), Colleyville (2022), Jerusalem (2023), Djerba, Tunisia (2023), Berlin, Germany (2023), Yerevan, Armenia (2023), Rouen, France (2024), Athens, Greece (2024), Melbourne, Australia (2024), Los Angeles (2024), Manchester, UK (2024), and New York (2025).
That list contains only the successful attacks on houses of worship in recent years. It omits the thwarted ones, as well as attacks like the sniper killings of a young engaged couple (one an Israeli diplomat, the other an American-citizen employee of the Israeli embassy) who were exiting the Jewish Museum in Washington, D.C., the arson attack on Gov. Josh Shapiro’s home, the desecration of cemeteries, the harassment of Jewish students, the Boulder, Colorado man who attacked a demonstration calling for the release of hostages with a spray of Molotov cocktails, or of hundreds of menacing threats like the London “pro-Palestine” demonstration that featured loudspeakers broadcasting “Fuck the Jews. Rape their daughters.”
Antisemitism is a poison like radon, always present below the surface in low doses, but sometimes rising to lethal concentrations. Except that radon, being colorless and odorless, is hard to detect without special equipment. Antisemitism, by contrast, is unsubtle and requires deliberate choices to unsee.
We have whole industries devoted to unseeing antisemitism and other outrages perpetrated by our ideological allies, and those same industries instantly become rage machines ready to exploit every act of violence when committed by ideological foes.
In this competitive atrocity era, no good massacre goes to waste. In the hours after the mass killing of Jewish Australians at Bondi Beach on the first night of Hannukah, right-wing rage merchants like Sen. Tommy Tuberville called for the mass deportation of all Muslims from the United States. In a characteristically nuanced take, he tweeted: “Stop worrying about offending the pearl clutchers. We’ve got to SEND THEM HOME NOW or we’ll become the United Caliphate of America.” Lindsey Graham blamed Obama and Biden. And Rep. Randy Fine weighed in with this analysis: “It is time for a Muslim travel ban, radical deportations of all mainstream Muslim legal and illegal immigrants, and citizenship revocations wherever possible.”
It’s possible that these guys are letting their amygdalas overwhelm their prefrontal cortexes. Violence does excite the fear/anger receptors in our brains and prepare us to respond in kind. When we see blood, we see red.
But people also have judgment and self-control. They aren’t lab rats robotically responding to stimuli. So unless they respond to every episode of violence—say, Dylan Roof’s murders, or the Christchurch massacre—with similar extreme proposals, it’s safe to assume that they are atrocity opportunists.
The left’s atrocity detectors are tuned to a different channel. They are activated by Israeli wrongdoing (which is real) but quiescent in the face of anti-Israel massacres such as October 7th or the antisemitic attacks that have erupted worldwide in the years since. It wasn’t hard to imagine—and many of us warned—that some people who heard and chanted “Globalize the Intifada” had in mind what was done at that Australian beach. Some on the left object that Jews are using the claim of antisemitism to attempt to silence criticism of Israel. But please tell me what Alex Kleytman, the 87-year-old Holocaust survivor who died shielding his wife, Larisa, from bullets on Bondi Beach, had to do with criticism of Israel? What did ten-year-old Matilda [surname withheld at family’s request] have to do with events in Gaza?
Perhaps some overwrought Israel defenders do overuse accusations of antisemitism, but it’s also true that antisemites use any perceived crime or error by Israel as permission for open season on Jews worldwide.
The murderers in Australia were Muslims who had been radicalized by ISIS. But the hero of the day, Ahmed Al Ahmed, was also a Muslim, a bystander who wrestled the gun away from one of the terrorists and was then shot multiple times by the other. Al Ahmed, who is recovering in the hospital, is a Syrian refugee and father of two girls. His story defies the atrocity mongers who want to exploit this crime to quicken hatred in the world. His shining example is a beacon at a time of year when we celebrate miracles.
More On U.S. Inflation, Economy, Markets
New York Times, Live Updates: Inflation Unexpectedly Slowed to 2.7% in November, Colby Smith, Dec. 18, 2025. The latest Consumer Price Index was below what economists had expected and likely reflects what they called distortions caused by the government shutdown.
U.S. inflation eased in November in what economists said likely reflected distortions caused by the government shutdown, creating an uncertain picture for the Federal Reserve as it simultaneously contends with rising unemployment.
The latest Consumer Price Index, released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics on Thursday, rose 2.7 percent from the same time last year. That fell short of the previous 3 percent pace and was well below economists’ expectations for a 3.1 percent rise.
“Core” inflation, which the central bank tracks as a gauge of underlying inflation since it strips out volatile items like energy and food prices, rose at an annual rate of 2.6 percent. It last stood at 3.1 percent.
The latest inflation report arrives at a pivotal political moment for the White House. With prices still stubbornly high, voters increasingly say that they are unhappy with President Trump’s handling of the economy and frustrated with the slow pace of improvement, according to recent polls.
Mr. Trump has tried to argue that conditions have improved under his watch. He took that message to the American public last night, insisting in a highly combative speech that inflation is under control, wages are rising and any current turbulence in the economy is the fault of his predecessor, President Joseph R. Biden Jr. “I am bringing those high prices down and bringing them down very fast,” he said.
New York Times Magazine, How ‘Affordability’ Became a New Magic Word for Politicians, Nitsuh Abebe, Dec. 18, 2025. You know exactly how Democrats feel about “affordability” right now, because they will not stop telling you.
It’s “the story of this moment” (per Raphael Warnock) and “definitively the decisive issue” (Hakeem Jeffries) and “the central reason to be a Democrat” (Elizabeth Warren). A database tracking newsletters from members of congress shows the party’s use of the word approaching talismanic levels of repetition, nearly tripling in the months leading up to a very successful Election Day.
You can also tell how Donald Trump feels about this. He won the presidency with promises to lower prices and “make America affordable again,” and greeted Election Day by posting that “if affordability is you issue, VOTE REPUBLICAN!” After the races were called, though, he started talking about the concept as if halfway through a tumultuous breakup. Sometimes he tried to win it back, calling himself “the affordability president” and Republicans “the Party of Affordability.” Sometimes he contemplated his rivals: “You know, they have this new word called ‘affordability,’ and we don’t talk about it enough.” But mostly he’s been irritated — snapping that “I don’t want to hear about the affordability,” posting that the issue was “DEAD! STOP LYING!!!,” calling it “a con job created by the Democrats.” “They just say the word,” he complained. “It doesn’t mean anything to anybody.”
Can you be against affordability? As with “crime,” it’s tough to stake out a contrary position; the word’s too modest and common-sensical, redolent of an era when political ads depicted median suburbanites at kitchen tables frowning over checkbooks. Trump is right to call it new, though. A phrase like “affordable housing” would not have made those suburbanites think hopefully about their own mortgages; it would have made them picture low-income units denting their property values. “Affordability” was about somebody else’s problems.
With housing, “affordable” started off as a pleasant substitute for “low rent” or “public,” but it still pointed squarely at somebody else’s struggles.
Advertising recognized this. For decades, it deployed “affordable” with care: Like “value” or “budget,” the word could easily suggest that a product was bare-bones or second-rate, better suited to somebody poorer than you. It wasn’t until the 1990s that marketers found a way to invert that dollar-store aura with concepts like “affordable luxury” — “high end” brands selling a few mid-price items, letting consumers feel like they’re accessing goods of somebody richer.
Policymaking has its own way of reframing things. With housing, “affordable” started off as a pleasant substitute for “low rent” or “public,” but it still pointed squarely at somebody else’s struggles. That changed as public housing policy shifted its focus toward private markets, as with the National Affordable Housing Act and, later, George W. Bush’s “ownership society” push to increase home buying, with its frequent talk of single-family home affordability. The research that informed the Affordable Care Act pointed down a related path: Language about “universal” coverage, it found, made people picture government bureaucracy and expensive handouts to the undeserving. “Guaranteed affordable choice” suggested coverage being purchased, now at a reasonable price.
With housing and health care, of course, costs had risen enough to trouble even the middle class. In every other realm, Americans did not much talk about affordability; we talked about “the economy,” a vast network of phenomena we assumed would, if dutifully appeased and ministered to, provide us with jobs and homes and good deals on groceries. Today’s voters, by contrast, seem hyperaware that “the economy” can thrive even as their own lives worsen — a gap that “affordability” easily steps into. G. Elliott Morris, a data journalist who does polling research, told me that he sees fewer and fewer Americans echoing concerns about broad economic issues like “growth” and “jobs”; they talk about their specific experiences of “affordability,” “prices” and the “cost of living.”
Epstein-Trump Files Updates (Part 2)
The Parnas Perspective, Important Epstein Files Update, Aaron Parnas, right, Dec. 18, 2025. Trump had a much closer relationship with Epstein as we are getting even more photos released by the Oversight Committee.
With just 24 hours remaining before the U.S. Department of Justice is required to release the long-anticipated Epstein files, new material is already shedding light on what the public may soon confront. Today, the House Oversight Committee released an additional 70 photographs connected to the Epstein investigation.
Warning, before you click the next link, some of the images can be very triggering for anyone who is a survivor of abuse. I will link to those images here and highlight several that stand out for their significance and gravity.
First, the newly released photographs include further documentation of Epstein’s interactions with Steve Bannon, who served as a senior advisor to Donald Trump. The nature, frequency, and context of that relationship raise questions that warrant far deeper scrutiny. These images add to a growing body of evidence that Epstein’s social and political reach extended well into influential circles, underscoring the need for a comprehensive accounting of who knew him, who associated with him, and under what circumstances.
Second, a substantial portion of the new material consists of photographs of heavily redacted passports belonging to young girls who are survivors of Epstein’s trafficking operation. While the redactions are necessary to protect victims’ identities, the images themselves are a stark reminder that this case is not abstract or historical—it centers on real children whose lives were profoundly harmed. The presence of these documents within congressional records underscores the international dimensions of the trafficking network and the vulnerabilities exploited by Epstein and his associates.
Third, among the most disturbing releases is a WhatsApp text chain. The messages (below) appear to discuss the movement and trafficking of a young girl, offering a chilling glimpse into how Epstein’s operation may have functioned in real time.
The casual tone of the messages, juxtaposed with their apparent subject matter, is deeply unsettling and illustrates why so much of the forthcoming DOJ release will necessarily be redacted. Child sexual abuse material cannot—and should not—be made public, even as the public seeks accountability.
These 70 photographs likely represent only a small fraction of what will emerge when the DOJ files are released tomorrow. There will be extensive redactions, both to protect survivors and to comply with the law. Still, the scope and seriousness of what remains visible should help clarify the scale of Epstein’s network and the failures that allowed it to persist for so long.
I plan to spend the entire weekend reviewing the released materials in detail and speaking directly with survivors and lawmakers. The goal is to provide as complete and accurate an account as possible, grounded in verified documents and firsthand testimony, so that the public receives the full truth rather than fragments taken out of context.
All of this comes as new reporting adds further context to Epstein’s social world. The New York Times reported this morning that Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein had a far closer, longer, and more intertwined relationship from the late 1980s through the early 2000s than Trump has publicly acknowledged. According to dozens of interviews, along with documents, photographs, calendars, and emails, the two men socialized frequently, shared party circuits in New York and Florida, and maintained regular contact. Epstein reportedly often acted as Trump’s “wingman,” particularly in social settings involving young women.
Witnesses cited by the Times recall Trump being a routine presence in Epstein’s life, with meetings and encounters at Mar-a-Lago, Trump Tower, Epstein’s Manhattan mansion, and various social events. These accounts stand in tension with later denials that minimized the relationship.
The reporting also notes that at least six women who later accused Epstein or Ghislaine Maxwell of grooming or abuse were introduced to Trump through Epstein or encountered him at Epstein-hosted gatherings. None of these women accuse Trump of abusing minors. However, several describe Trump attending events where Epstein allegedly directed women to have sex with other men.
Additionally, multiple women and former employees describe a broader culture of sexualized behavior surrounding Epstein, in which Trump is alleged to have participated—through leering, groping, or explicit conversations. Trump has denied these accounts. At the same time, nearly 20 women have publicly accused him of sexual misconduct over the years, including in the civil case brought by E. Jean Carroll.
As the DOJ release approaches, today’s photographs and the accumulating reporting serve as a sobering reminder of what is at stake: accountability for powerful figures, transparency from institutions, and—above all—justice and protection for survivors. The coming days will not answer every question, but they may finally begin to illuminate a system that for too long operated in the shadows.
New York Times, ‘Don’s Best Friend’: How Epstein and Trump Bonded Over the Pursuit of Women, Nicholas Confessore and Julie Tate, Dec. 18, 2025. Documents and interviews reveal a complicated relationship in which chasing women was a game of ego and dominance, and female bodies were currency.
The president has tried to minimize their friendship, but documents and interviews reveal an intense and complicated relationship. Chasing women was a game of ego and dominance. Female bodies were currency.
The Times interviewed more than 30 former employees of Jeffrey Epstein, victims of his abuse and others who crossed paths with Mr. Epstein and President Trump. The Times also obtained new documents that illuminate their relationship.Dec. 18, 2025, 5:00 a.m. ET
Jeffrey Epstein was a “terrific guy” and “a lot of fun to be with.” He and Donald J. Trump also had “no formal relationship.” They went to a lot of the same parties. But they “did not socialize together.” They were never really friends, just business acquaintances. Or “there was no relationship” at all. “I was not a fan of his, that I can tell you.”
For nearly a quarter-century, Mr. Trump and his representatives have offered shifting, often contradictory accounts of his relationship with Mr. Epstein, one sporadically captured by society photographers and in news clips before they fell out sometime in the mid-2000s. Closely scrutinized since Mr. Epstein died in a Manhattan jail cell during Mr. Trump’s first term, their friendship — and questions about what the president knew of Mr. Epstein’s abuses — now threatens to consume his second one.
The controversy has shaken Mr. Trump’s iron hold on his base like no other. Loyal supporters have demanded to know why the administration has not moved more quickly to unearth the convicted sex offender’s remaining secrets. In November, after resisting months of pressure to release more Epstein-related documents held by the federal government — and facing an almost unheard-of revolt among Republican lawmakers — Mr. Trump reversed himself, signing legislation that requires their release beginning this week.
Mr. Epstein had a talent for acquiring powerful friends, some of whom have become ensnared in the continuing scrutiny of his crimes. For months, Mr. Trump has labored furiously to shift himself out of the frame, dismissing questions about his relationship with Mr. Epstein as a “Democrat hoax” and imploring his supporters to ignore the matter entirely. An examination of their history by The New York Times has found no evidence implicating Mr. Trump in Mr. Epstein’s abuse and trafficking of minors.
But the two men’s relationship was both far closer and far more complex than the president now admits.
Beginning in the late 1980s, the two men forged a bond intense enough to leave others who knew them with the impression that they were each other’s closest friend, The Times found. Mr. Epstein was then a little-known financier who cultivated mystery around the scope and source of his self-made wealth. Mr. Trump, six years older, was a real estate scion who relished publicity and exaggerated his successes. Neither man drank or did drugs. They pursued women in a game of ego and dominance. Female bodies were currency.
Over nearly two decades, as Mr. Trump cut a swath through the party circuits of New York and Florida, Mr. Epstein was perhaps his most reliable wingman. During the 1990s and early 2000s, they prowled Mr. Epstein’s Manhattan mansion and Mr. Trump’s Plaza Hotel, at least one of Mr. Trump’s Atlantic City casinos and both their Palm Beach homes. They visited each other’s offices and spoke often by phone, according to other former Epstein employees and women who spent time in his homes.
With other men, Mr. Epstein might discuss tax shelters, international affairs or neuroscience. With Mr. Trump, he talked about sex.
“I just think it was trophy hunting,” Stacey Williams, who rose to fame as a star of the Sports Illustrated swimsuit editions during the 1990s, said in an interview with The Times. In social media posts and interviews with news outlets in recent years, Ms. Williams has described how Mr. Trump groped her in 1993 at Trump Tower while Mr. Epstein — whom she was then dating — watched. “I think Jeffrey liked that he had this Sports Illustrated model who had this name, and that Trump was pursuing me,” she said. Mr. Trump has denied her account.
To shed light on their friendship, The Times interviewed more than 30 former Epstein employees, victims of his abuse and others who crossed paths with the two men over the years. The Times also obtained new documents that illuminate their relationship and scoured court documents and other public records.
Many of the people interviewed by The Times asked to share their stories anonymously, saying they feared for their safety at the hands of supporters of Mr. Trump, a president who has deployed the might of the federal government to target and punish his political opponents. Some Epstein victims have already received death threats for demanding a full accounting of the government’s investigations, according to a statement released by more than two dozen of them last month
Over the years, Mr. Epstein or his partner, Ghislaine Maxwell, introduced at least six women who have accused them of grooming or abuse to Mr. Trump, according to interviews, court testimony and other records. One was a minor at the time. None have accused Mr. Trump himself of inappropriate behavior.
One of the women, who has never before spoken publicly about the experience, told The Times that Mr. Epstein had coerced her into attending four parties at Mr. Epstein’s home. Mr. Trump attended all four, the woman said. At two of them, she said, Mr. Epstein directed her to have sex with other male guests.
In an email among those released by Congress in November, Mr. Epstein boasted that he “gave” Mr. Trump a 20-year-old woman whom Mr. Epstein dated in the 1990s. During a flight together in the early 1990s, Mr. Trump came on to another Epstein employee traveling with them, telling her that he could have anyone he wanted, according to a different Epstein worker who learned of the incident. A separate Epstein employee from that era recalled that Mr. Trump would occasionally send over modeling cards for Mr. Epstein to peruse, like a menu.
Mr. Epstein, who claimed he required three orgasms a day, exploited or abused hundreds of women and girls before dying in what was ruled a suicide. Mr. Trump does not stand accused of sexually abusing a minor. But over the course of his friendship with Mr. Epstein and beyond, he left a trail of alleged abuse and assault, many details of which began to surface publicly during his successful 2016 presidential campaign.
Close to 20 women have publicly accused Mr. Trump of groping, forcibly kissing or sexually assaulting them — behavior that he once bragged he could get away with because of his celebrity but later denied ever engaging in. In 2023, the writer E. Jean Carroll won a $5 million civil judgment against Mr. Trump for sexual abuse and defamation.
In response to a detailed list of questions from The Times, the White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, issued a statement: “This fake news story, which is not worth the paper it’s printed on, is just another stale regurgitation of decades-old false allegations against President Trump. The truth will remain the same no matter how many times The New York Times tries to change it. President Trump did nothing wrong, and he kicked Jeffrey Epstein out of Mar-a-Lago for being a creep.”
It is unclear what new information may emerge under the new law passed by Congress. The statute allows the Trump administration to withhold records that identify victims, including images of child sexual abuse, or documents that are otherwise classified. His appointees can also hold back records that could jeopardize an active federal investigation — such as a new inquiry ordered by Mr. Trump into Democrats associated with Mr. Epstein. In a statement in late November, a group of Epstein accusers wrote, “Other than redacting victim names, we want all the files disclosed.”
Mr. Trump has denied knowing of Mr. Epstein’s abuse of underage girls. But in a tranche of emails released in November, Mr. Epstein suggested otherwise. In a 2019 message to the journalist Michael Wolff, he wrote of Mr. Trump, “of course he knew about the girls as he asked ghislaine to stop.” The full context of Mr. Epstein’s remark is unclear.
In a 2010 deposition, Mr. Epstein was asked if he had ever socialized with Mr. Trump with girls under 18. As he did more than three dozen times during the deposition, Mr. Epstein invoked his constitutional right not to answer.
“Though I’d like to answer that question, at least today, I’m going to have to assert my Fifth, Sixth and 14th Amendment rights, sir,” he replied.Sex Talk and Office Hours
Sometimes the phone would ring in Mr. Trump’s office at Trump Tower. The caller — “the mysterious Jeffrey,” as Mr. Trump described him in a 2004 book of business advice — never gave a last name, nor did he need to, Mr. Trump wrote. A few times a week, the phone would ring in Mr. Epstein’s office in the Villard Houses on Madison Avenue. Mr. Trump would be on the line. On one occasion, recalled an Epstein assistant from the mid-1990s, Mr. Trump refused to give any name at all.
The White House spokeswoman declined to say whether Mr. Trump’s book was referring to a different Jeffrey. But the two talked at least three times a week during the mid-to-late 1990s, according to a second Epstein assistant from that period.
The first assistant, who often worked late, recalled that sometimes, when the office emptied out, Mr. Epstein would check to see that she was at her desk and put Mr. Trump on speaker. Mr. Trump, she said, seemed to enjoy regaling Mr. Epstein with tales of his sexual exploits. And Mr. Epstein seemed to delight in how uncomfortable it made her to overhear them.
She remembered one call in the mid-1990s on which the two men discussed how much pubic hair a particular woman had, and whether there was enough for Mr. Epstein to floss his teeth with. On another, Mr. Trump told Mr. Epstein about having sex with another woman on a pool table, the former assistant said.
A woman known in court records as Jane Doe, whom Mr. Epstein trafficked during the mid-1990s, beginning in her early teens, testified in Ms. Maxwell’s criminal trial in 2021 that Mr. Epstein often put famous friends on speakerphone in front of other people.
The calls with Mr. Trump continued through the later years of the men’s friendship, according to a third former employee, who worked for Mr. Epstein on and off through most of the 2000s and also recalled him putting Mr. Trump on speaker. They would talk about pageants or modeling shows or which countries’ women were in vogue in the fashion world. Sometimes, the third employee said, Mr. Trump went on so long that Mr. Epstein — whose attention span was famously short — would leave the room while his friend was still talking.
Maria Farmer, an artist who has said she was sexually assaulted by Ms. Maxwell and Mr. Epstein during the mid-1990s, told The Times in 2019 that Mr. Epstein had once summoned her to meet Mr. Trump at the Villard Houses office. Mr. Trump leered at her, she said, before Mr. Epstein informed him that “she’s not for you.”
This summer, a spokesman for Mr. Trump denied that the president had ever set foot in Mr. Epstein’s office. The first former assistant, though, recalled Mr. Trump meeting there briefly with Mr. Epstein at least several times during the mid-1990s. Her account was supported by Mark Epstein, Mr. Epstein’s brother, who said that Jeffrey had told him that Mr. Trump visited him frequently.
“He was in the office all the time back then,” Mr. Epstein said in an interview with The Times.
Daily handwritten notes kept by the first former assistant and reviewed by The Times suggest that Mr. Trump was a regular presence in Mr. Epstein’s life. The notes, spanning several months in late 1994, have not been previously reported.
Some pages contain instructions to call Mr. Trump or return his call. One note reminded the assistant to call Mr. Trump’s office to see if he was “flying to Fla tomorrow.” Another recorded that a package would be arriving with an invitation to a Mar-a-Lago event.
On one page are instructions about invitations for an upcoming party. Mr. Trump was to be invited — but only if his ex-wife Ivana, with whom Ms. Maxwell was friendly, declined.
Their relationship was riddled with undertones of envy and disdain. Mr. Epstein seemed to hold a low opinion of his friend’s business acumen, according to the former employees and others who knew him. On one occasion around 2001, the third former employee said, Mr. Epstein was annoyed after Mr. Trump called him. He later told the employee that Mr. Trump was short on cash and wanted a ride on Mr. Epstein’s plane.
During the early years of their friendship, Mr. Trump was racing toward a reckoning over the billions of dollars he had borrowed to assemble his struggling empire, including casinos, hotels, an airline and a yacht. According to former Epstein employees, Mr. Trump seemed attracted to the financier’s wealth and business network.
It is unclear whether Mr. Epstein — who ostensibly specialized in offering tax and estate planning for wealthy clients — helped Mr. Trump navigate his financial problems. But in his 2020 memoir of representing Epstein victims, “Relentless Pursuit,” the Florida lawyer Bradley J. Edwards wrote that Mr. Epstein had claimed to some young women that he had bailed his friend out of bankruptcy.
Even as he dismissed Mr. Trump’s deal-making, Mr. Epstein — who could be socially awkward at other people’s parties — seemed to admire his friend’s brash confidence and access to higher realms of nightlife and celebrity. He frequently mentioned his friendship with Mr. Trump, according to several accusers, telling one he had a bedroom reserved at Mar-a-Lago. Even after they fell out, Mr. Epstein kept a framed photo of himself with Mr. Trump and his future third wife, Melania, on a credenza in his Upper East Side dining room.The Party Circuit
A few years into Mr. Trump’s friendship with Mr. Epstein, Ivana Trump filed for divorce. Mr. Trump’s affair with Marla Maples, a former pageant contestant, was running hot and cold. In 1992, he invited NBC to Mar-a-Lago to shoot video for a feature about his post-divorce life on the talk show “A Closer Look.”
“I love beautiful women, I love going out with beautiful women and I love women in general,” he said in the footage.
The cameras captured him and Mr. Epstein at the Palm Beach estate, surrounded by cheerleaders from the Miami Dolphins and Buffalo Bills. In the video, Mr. Trump grabs a smiling woman from the rear and pats her on the behind; in another clip, he appears to point toward women on the dance floor, and Mr. Epstein doubles over laughing at something his friend has whispered.ImageMr. Trump speaking and pointing to Mr. Epstein.Mr. Trump and Mr. Epstein appeared at Mar-a-Lago, in Florida, during an NBC feature in 1992.Credit...via YouTube
In January 1993, Mr. Trump held another party at Mar-a-Lago, this one to kick off a beauty pageant he was bringing to Atlantic City with two business partners, George Houraney and Jill Harth. Two dozen or so potential contestants were flown in to meet Mr. Trump. The only other guest at the party, Mr. Houraney told The Times in 2019, was Mr. Epstein.
During dinner that night, Ms. Harth alleged in a 1997 lawsuit, Mr. Trump groped her under the table, then cornered her in a bedroom normally used by his daughter Ivanka and “forcibly kissed, fondled and restrained” her from leaving.
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Later, in the predawn hours, she alleged in the suit, Mr. Trump also sneaked into a bedroom being used by a 22-year-old contestant. Climbing into her bed uninvited, he groped her, too, according to the suit.
Mr. Trump has denied the allegations by Ms. Harth, who declined to comment. The pageant partnership later fizzled, leading Mr. Houraney to separately sue Mr. Trump in 1995 for breach of contract. Ms. Harth said she withdrew her subsequent harassment lawsuit as a condition for settling the contract dispute. She went on to briefly date Mr. Trump.
According to Mr. Epstein, he and Mr. Trump partied at his house, too. In a 2015 email exchange with Landon Thomas Jr., then a Times reporter, he recounted a moment when Mr. Trump was so focused on young women swimming in his pool that he walked into a glass door. Mr. Epstein also referred to the 22-year-old contestant from that night in 1993, indicating she had pictures of “donald and girls in bikinis in my kitchen” and providing her email address.
The emails, among those released by Congress last month, came as Mr. Trump led in the polls for the Republican presidential nomination. Mr. Thomas, who had once pitched Mr. Epstein on a sympathetic profile, said he was being approached by people who thought he had “juicy info on you and Trump.”
It is unclear whether the photos Mr. Epstein referenced exist. The former contestant could not be reached for comment. The Times is withholding her name because she has not publicly come forward with her own account of the events. (Mr. Thomas has said he never received any photographs; he left The Times in 2019 after disclosing that he had solicited a charitable contribution from Mr. Epstein.)
In November 1993, Mr. Trump’s chosen pageant contestants flew in from around the world for a week of events at his properties in New York and Atlantic City. At one point, Ms. Harth said in her lawsuit, Mr. Trump demanded that she provide him with “access” to a 17-year-old Czech contestant. The suit does not say if she complied or if Mr. Trump met the contestant.
Toward the end of the week, the contestants joined Mr. Trump for a press luncheon at the Plaza. One contestant, Béatrice Keul, then a bank employee and part-time model from Switzerland, said in an interview with The Times that during the event, one of Mr. Trump’s employees asked her to meet privately with him in a suite upstairs. Almost as soon as she arrived, Ms. Keul said, Mr. Trump began groping her, kissing her and trying to lift her dress. “I yelled, I screamed, I pushed him,” she said. “He didn’t want to give up.”
She said she was withholding some details of what happened because she had been subject to anonymous threats. Ms. Keul first described aspects of the episode to The Daily Mail last year. A friend, Pascal Claivaz, told The Times that Ms. Keul recounted the episode at the Plaza to him around 2004. Ms. Keul also provided The Times with pictures of documents corroborating her participation in the pageant and of herself with Mr. Trump.
Before the private meeting, she was also approached by Mr. Epstein.
“I’m Jeffrey. I’m Don’s best friend,” she recalled him saying. She was confused at first, Ms. Keul said, because he didn’t seem to be affiliated with the pageant. She didn’t understand why he had been allowed into the press luncheon. “He said, ‘Don likes you very much,’ and that they were organizing parties at Mar-a-Lago and he would love me to join,” Ms. Keul said. He would take care of her, her flights, her hotel. “You just need to pack and come to the party at Mar-a-Lago,” she recalled him saying.
When Ms. Keul demurred, Mr. Epstein tried other tactics — going on about the wealth he kept in Swiss banks, then about famous friends with whom he could arrange meetings.
“Epstein knew exactly what he was doing,” she said. “He had a hunting method. It was a routine.”
The first of Mr. Epstein’s former assistants interviewed by The Times said that on dozens of occasions in the mid-1990s, the financier instructed her to call a pageant winner from somewhere in the world and invite her to visit him in Florida. His standing offer, the assistant said, was an all-expenses-paid trip and $5,000 in cash to go shopping on Worth Avenue, Palm Beach’s famed shopping destination.
In December 1993, not long after the pageant, Mr. Trump married Ms. Maples at the Plaza. Photos show Mr. Epstein in attendance. But the parties continued.‘Dress Sexy’
In the early 2000s, guests mingled in the library or dining room of Mr. Epstein’s Upper East Side mansion as their host held court. The women were beautiful and numerous. The men were older and few. Occasionally, one of the women would head toward the bedrooms. One of the men would shortly follow.
One woman, then a model and college student in her early 20s living in Manhattan, said she attended four parties at the mansion. She cannot recall the names of most of the men she met at the gatherings, not even those Mr. Epstein directed her to “take care of” at two of them. Recruited by Ms. Maxwell and then abused by Mr. Epstein, she buried her shame and kept their secrets for years. But Mr. Trump’s presence stood out, she told The Times. He was a household name, someone Mr. Epstein often bragged about to the women around him, yet also seemed to compete with.
“It was like a pissing contest — who had the most women,” she recalled. She requested anonymity to describe her experiences in detail, saying she feared for her family’s safety after Mr. Trump said some of his critics could be executed for sedition.
To people in the modeling business, men like Mr. Trump and Mr. Epstein were a familiar part of the scene: wealthy men who used their money, clout and personal connections in fashion to meet the young women who worked in the industry. “Two days a week, you’d be at a model dinner at a restaurant,” said Heather Braden, a model and filmmaker. “And there’d be these men we didn’t know.” Ms. Braden, who now lives in Utah, said she often saw Mr. Trump and Mr. Epstein at the same parties or dinners during the 1990s in New York and South Florida, including at Mar-a-Lago, which Mr. Trump converted to a members’ club in 1995.
Each man cultivated relationships that in turn put them in proximity to young women in the industry. Mr. Epstein exploited his close relationship with Les Wexner, the owner of Victoria’s Secret, sometimes telling women he could get them meetings or bookings. Photographers or camera crews captured Mr. Epstein and Mr. Trump together at Victoria’s Secret events in 1997 and 1999.
Mr. Trump befriended the Hawaiian Tropic founder Ron Rice, who told The Boston Globe that he would send models and pageant contestants to Mar-a-Lago for parties at Mr. Trump’s request, and John Casablancas, the founder of Elite Model Management, whose Look of the Year contest Mr. Trump sponsored and helped judge in the early 1990s.
For Mar-a-Lago gatherings, groups of models were sometimes bused in from Miami, often with help from Mr. Trump’s friend Jason Binn, a co-founder of the society magazine Ocean Drive. Mr. Binn did not return calls and emails seeking comment.
Dec. 17
New York Times, House Rejects Measure to Bar Strikes Inside Venezuela, Robert Jimison, Dec. 17, 2025. The Democratic measure was defeated mostly along party lines, along with another resolution that would have halted the military’s escalating campaign of boat attacks.
The House on Wednesday rejected a pair of resolutions that would have forced President Trump to go to Congress for approval before attacking Venezuela and to continue his campaign of striking vessels in the Caribbean Sea and Pacific Ocean.
The mostly party-line votes came as lawmakers in both parties have expressed grave concern about the nature and legality of the boat strikes, as well as the administration’s lack of consultation with Congress about the offensive, and worries that Mr. Trump’s moves in the region could lead to a wider conflict.
It unfolded one day after the president ordered what he called a “complete blockade” on sanctioned oil tankers arriving and departing from Venezuela, an escalation of his administration’s pressure campaign against President Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela.
The votes were a victory for Mr. Trump and Speaker Mike Johnson, Republican of Louisiana, who have struggled to contain dissent within their conference and have taken extraordinary measures to avoid votes that directly challenge the president’s authority.
In forcing the House to weigh in on the matter, Representatives Jim McGovern of Massachusetts and Gregory W. Meeks of New York, both Democrats, invoked a provision of the 1973 War Powers Act, which requires that resolutions to terminate hostilities be considered under expedited procedures.
The resolution by Mr. Meeks, the top Democrat on the Foreign Affairs Committee, aimed to end the strikes against vessels in the Caribbean or Pacific “unless authorized by a declaration of war or a specific congressional authorization for use of military force.”
The United States has carried out at least 25 strikes on vessels accused of ferrying narcotics to U.S. shores since the campaign began in September, killing at least 95 people in the Caribbean and Pacific.
The measure offered by Mr. McGovern, a leading antiwar voice in Congress, sought to force the Trump administration to ask Congress for authorization to use military force before engaging in hostilities “within or against Venezuela.”
For months, the U.S. military has been building up a large naval force in the Caribbean as Mr. Trump continues to threaten to strike inside Venezuela. Tuesday's announcement of a blockade appeared aimed at targeting a crucial economic lifeline to inflict more pain on the Maduro government.Editors’ PicksWhat Happened to the American Dream? Will It Ever Come Back?A Fiery Coat and Socks to MatchWhat Can I Watch With My Kids?
“I do not want any war in Venezuela” Mr. McGovern said ahead of the vote. “I am deeply troubled by the idea of endless wars of America spending more of its treasure on wars that are not clearly defined,” he added, “at a time when we cannot even provide health care in this country”
Just two Republicans, Representatives Thomas Massie of Kentucky and Don Bacon of Nebraska, joined nearly all Democrats in backing the proposal to end the boat strikes, which was defeated on a 216-to-210 vote.
Representatives Henry Cuellar and Vicente Gonzalez, both from Texas, were the only Democrats to vote against Mr. Meeks’s resolution. Mr. Bacon and Mr. Massie were joined by Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia as the three Republicans backing the measure to bar an attack on Venezuela, which was rejected 213 to 211. Mr. Cuellar was the sole Democrat to reject it.
Letters from an American, Historical Commentary: December 16, 2025 [News Roundup], Heather Cox Richardson, right, Dec. 17 2025. While President Donald J. Trump was gloating over the horrific murders of Hollywood legend Rob Reiner and his wife, photographer and producer Michele Singer Reiner, the U.S. military yesterday struck three small boats in the eastern Pacific, killing eight people.
U.S. Southern Command announced the strikes on social media, saying they were conducted “at the direction of [Secretary of] War Pete Hegseth.” It claimed that intelligence had confirmed that the vessels were “engaged in narco-trafficking.”
This brings the number of people killed in the U.S. strikes to at least 95.
As Piper Hudspeth Blackburn of CNN reports, the administration maintains the U.S. is in an “armed conflict” against drug cartels. But legal experts dismiss this claim and say the U.S. has no legal basis for the deadly attacks on the small boats. Notably, as Bill Kristol, right, of The Bulwark pointed out on December 11, the government has gotten legal justification for its actions when it can: before the U.S. seized an oil tanker off the coast of Venezuela last week, the government apparently secured a warrant for the seizure from a federal judge because the Treasury Department had sanctioned the ship in 2022 for illegal activities related to smuggling Iranian oil.
In the case of the strikes on the small boats, though, the administration has not provided evidence of its claims either to the public or to Congress, whose permission to continue the strikes is required by the 1973 War Powers Act if indeed the country is engaged in an armed conflict.
Today, Hegseth and Secretary of State Marco Rubio briefed the House and the Senate on the strikes but continued to refuse to show the lawmakers an unedited version of the video of a strike of September 2 that killed two survivors of a previous strike, an event that legal analysts suggest is a war crime or murder. 
After he left the briefing, Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT) said “that the administration had no legal justification for these strikes and had no national security justification for these strikes.” He noted that the officers admitted that the drugs going through Venezuela were not fentanyl, as the administration has suggested, but rather primarily cocaine headed for Europe.
Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortes (D-NY) called the briefing “a joke.… There was not a single piece of intelligence that was shared that even rises to the level of any other briefing that we’ve seen on Ukraine, China, anything…. This was not a serious intelligence briefing; this was a communication of an opinion.”
Hegseth later told reporters that members of the House and Senate Armed Services committees will be able to see the unedited video tomorrow, adding: “Of course, we’re not going to release a top-secret, full, unedited video of that to the general public.”
Ashley Murray of News from the States quoted Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY), who said after the meeting: “The administration came to this briefing empty handed. If they can’t be transparent on this, how can you trust their transparency on all the other issues swirling about in the Caribbean? Every senator is entitled to see it.” Senator Chris Coons (D-DE) said: “It is hard to square the widespread, routine, prompt posting of detailed videos of every strike, with a concern that posting a portion of the video of the first strike would violate a variety of classification concerns.”
The Department of Justice today argued in court that Trump’s ballroom project must go forward for reasons of national security despite the lawsuit filed on Friday. The National Trust for Historic Preservation is suing to stop the project from going forward without legally required reviews and public input. Secret Service deputy director Matthew Quinn told the court that when Trump tore down the East Wing in October, he destroyed the security infrastructure under the building. Now, he said, “any pause in construction, even temporarily, would…hamper the Secret Service’s ability to meet its statutory obligations and protective mission.”
But while Trump focuses on his architectural projects, the administration seems unable to meet other obligations.
Federal Bureau of Investigation director Kash Patel, right, is facing criticism for announcing on social media that the FBI had detained a person of 
interest in Saturday’s mass shooting at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, that killed two and injured nine others. That individual was released hours later. This is not the first time Patel has rushed to make an announcement that later turned out to be incorrect.
When asked why the FBI is having trouble locating the suspect, Trump tried to blame the university. “You’d really have to ask the school a little bit more about that because this was a school problem,” he said. “They had their own guards. They had their own police. They had their own everything, but you’d have to ask that question really to the school, not to the FBI. We came in after the fact, and the FBI will do a good job, but they came in after the fact.”
An interview with White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles published in Vanity Fair today reinforces the impression that the administration is chaotic. In eleven interviews with Wiles over the course of Trump’s second term so far, journalist Chris Whipple, left, examined the administration’s 
handling of major issues: the destruction of USAID, 
deportations of immigrants, Trump’s tariff war, the deployment of National Guard troops in Democratic-dominated cities, Trump’s “revenge” against those he perceives as enemies, the destruction of Gaza, and the administration’s attack on small boats from Venezuela.
Wiles told Whipple that Trump “has an alcoholic’s personality,” suggesting he cannot imagine limits on his behavior, and quoted him as judging people “by their genes”; that Vice President J.D. Vance converted from being a Never Trumper to a major MAGA booster for political reasons; that director of the Office of Management and Budget Russell Vought, a key author of Project 2025, is “a right-wing absolute zealot”; that Musk’s reposting of a tweet about public sector workers killing millions under Hitler, Stalin, and Mao was a reflection of his drug use; and that Trump is, indeed, embarked on a project to use the power of the government to hurt people he hates.
After the article appeared, Wiles issued a statement that did not say Whipple had misquoted her, but called the article “a disingenuously framed hit piece on me and the finest President, White House staff, and Cabinet in history.” She continued: “Significant context was disregarded and much of what I, and others, said about the team and the President was left out of the story. I assume, after reading it, that this was done to paint an overwhelmingly chaotic and negative narrative about the President and our team.”
Apparently to demonstrate unanimity, the White House got senior officials to put out on social media statements supporting Wiles.
One of the things Wiles, right, discussed with Whipple was the administration’s strikes against the small boats from Venezuela. Wiles suggested that, 
for all his talk about drug dealers, Trump is primarily interested in regime change. “He wants to keep on blowing boats up until Maduro cries uncle,” Wiles told Whipple. “And people way smarter than me on that say that he will.”
This afternoon, Trump announced he would address the nation tomorrow night.
Then, at 6:46 this evening, he posted on social media: “Venezuela is completely surrounded by the largest Armada ever assembled in the History of South America. It will only get bigger, and the shock to them will be like nothing they have ever seen before—Until such time as they return to the United States of America all of the Oil, Land, and other Assets that they previously stole from us. The illegitimate Maduro Regime is using Oil from these stolen Oil Fields to finance themselves, Drug Terrorism, Human Trafficking, Murder, and Kidnapping. For the theft of our Assets, and many other reasons, including Terrorism, Drug Smuggling, and Human Trafficking, the Venezuelan Regime has been designated a FOREIGN TERRORIST ORGANIZATION. Therefore, today, I am ordering A TOTAL AND COMPLETE BLOCKADE OF ALL SANCTIONED OIL TANKERS going into, and out of, Venezuela. The Illegal Aliens and Criminals that the Maduro Regime has sent into the United States during the weak and inept Biden Administration, are being returned to Venezuela at a rapid pace. America will not allow Criminals, Terrorists, or other Countries, to rob, threaten, or harm our Nation and, likewise, will not allow a Hostile Regime to take our Oil, Land, or any other Assets, all of which must be returned to the United States, IMMEDIATELY. Thank you for your attention to this matter!”
Senator Andy Kim (D-NJ) noted that the “threatened military action directly contradicts what Secretaries Rubio and Hegseth told my Senate colleagues and I today about the mission and goals of their operations in the Caribbean. This is a dangerous escalation, and this administration must come before Congress for public hearings and explain to the American people why they are risking pulling us into another forever war.”
New York Times, Trump Administration Live Updates: 4 Republicans Buck Party to Force House Vote on Obamacare Subsidies, Staff Reports, Dec. 17, 2025. Where Things Stand:
force a House vote in 2026 on a three-year extension of expiring Affordable Care Act subsidies. The subsidies are set to lapse at the end of the year, but the Republicans’ action guaranteed that the House will have to address them. Democrats called on House Republicans to scrap alternative legislation being debated Wednesday and vote on the extension before year’s end. Read more ›right, the former special counsel, was testifying behind closed doors before the House Judiciary Committee. According to his prepared remarks, he planned to say that his investigation had developed “proof beyond a reasonable doubt” that Mr. Trump had engaged in a criminal scheme to overturn the 2020 election.President Trump’s blockade on sanctioned oil tankers near Venezuela will almost certainly make it more difficult for the country to export oil. But it was unclear on Wednesday how sweeping the prohibition would prove to be.
More than 400 tankers have moved Venezuelan oil or related products since 2019, according to Samir Madani, co-founder of TankerTrackers.com. These vessels are part of a bigger fleet of ships that trade oil illicitly, often by disguising their whereabouts. But only about 40 percent of such tankers that have transported Venezuelan crude have been placed under U.S. sanctions, said Mr. Madani, whose firm monitors global shipping.
Analysts have interpreted the blockade Mr. Trump announced late Tuesday as applying only to those designated vessels, meaning Venezuela would continue to have ways to export its oil, at least theoretically.
Administration officials did not immediately respond to questions seeking clarification on the scope of the U.S. blockade.
Venezuelan oil reaches the global market on tankers engaged in illicit trade and also via Chevron, which pumps oil in the country and is allowed to export it under a license from the U.S. government. Other Western oil and gas companies operating in Venezuela are no longer getting paid for the fuel they produce there.
That said, the U.S. seizure of a sanctioned oil tanker and other activities in the Caribbean Sea appear to be making fleet operators more reluctant to move Venezuelan oil. Several tankers that had been headed toward Venezuela recently turned around, said Matt Smith, an analyst at Kpler, another shipping data firm. Vessels are likely to proceed with “extreme levels of caution here,” Mr. Smith said.
Venezuela produces around 850,000 barrels of oil a day, according to S&P Global Energy, which is less than 1 percent of what the world consumes. U.S. oil prices rose modestly after Mr. Trump said he was ordering a blockade, trading around $56 a barrel on Wednesday, up less than 2 percent.
White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, seated at center, is surrounded by other top Trump Advisors of his second term ("Trump 2.0") as portrayed by a major two-part Vanity Fair portrait based on months of interviews by Chris Whipple (Photos by Christopher Anderson).
The Parnas Perspective, White House "Extremely Demoralized" as Wiles Interview Backfires and Cracks Within GOP Widen, Aaron Parnas, right, Dec. 17, 2025. Today is shaping up to be an extremely busy and consequential news day. This evening, the President will deliver a live address to the nation, which I will be covering in real time and updating you immediately if any major developments emerge during the speech. At the same time, the White House is reeling after yesterday’s Vanity Fair interview with Susie Wiles, with insiders describing the mood as “extremely demoralized” as visible cracks inside the Republican Party widen.
Staff sounds off on the crises of Trump 2.0 (Part 1 of 2). Reactions:
For those who have asked, I’m feeling better—thank you sincerely for all the well wishes—and the timing couldn’t be more critical. We are now just two days away from the release of the Epstein files, while tensions continue to escalate toward a potential conflict with Venezuela. This is a volatile moment in the news cycle, and the stakes are only rising.
Continuing he Parnas Perspective, here’s what you missed:
A sweeping Vanity Fair profile of White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles triggered private alarm and frustration among Republicans and West Wing aides, who described the interview, according to Politico, as “extremely demoralizing” and questioned why the administration granted such extensive access.
The article featured pointed critiques of President Donald Trump and senior officials, fueling concerns about internal discipline and media strategy at a time of falling approval ratings and political setbacks. Despite the backlash, Trump publicly reaffirmed his confidence in Wiles, while allies dismissed the story as a biased hit piece and closed ranks around her leadership.
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, right, said cracks are widening within the GOP against President Donald Trump, calling his response to filmmaker Rob Reiner’s death “classless,” warning he is out of touch with voters on affordability, and expressing doubt that Republicans can win the midterms if internal frustration with Trump continues to grow.
President Donald Trump ordered a total blockade of all sanctioned oil tankers entering or leaving Venezuela, sharply escalating pressure on President Nicolás Maduro by targeting oil revenues, prompting Venezuela to accuse the U.S. of violating international law and threatening to take the dispute to the United Nations.
President Donald Trump announced a 9 p.m. live White House address to the nation, saying he will highlight his administration’s accomplishments and preview possible policy actions for the coming year, according to statements from press secretary Karoline Leavitt. I will be watching it and will cover it for you so that you don’t have to watch if you do not want to.
Overnight, Trump suggested arresting former FBI Director Christopher Wray, left, and former Attorney General Merrick Garland, below right.
USA Today is reporting that the Trump administration is moving to dismantle the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, labeling it a hub of “climate alarmism” and planning to eliminate or relocate programs it deems “woke,” while preserving core weather modeling functions. The move would shutter key facilities, threaten hundreds of research jobs, and mark a major escalation in Trump’s broader effort to roll back federal climate science, drawing sharp criticism from scientists who call NCAR a cornerstone of U.S. weather and climate research.
The New York Times has confirmed that Harvard secretly opened a disciplinary investigation into two students who filmed and shared videos of former president Larry Summers discussing his ties to Jeffrey Epstein, focusing on possible violations of rules against unauthorized recording and attending classes they were not enrolled in, with potential penalties up to withdrawal from the university.
Warner Bros. Discovery urged shareholders to reject a hostile takeover bid from Paramount Skydance and the Ellison family, saying the offer undervalued the company and that its previously announced deal to sell its studio, HBO and HBO Max to Netflix is superior and in shareholders’ best interests.
Democrat Gary Clemons won a special election to fill Kentucky’s 37th Senate District seat with about 73% of the vote, becoming the first union leader elected to the General Assembly and set to be sworn in at the start of the 2026 legislative session. This was a 42 point over performance year over year in favor of the Democrats.
According to Politico, Denver’s City Council voted 11–1 to block an expansion lease for Key Lime Air at Denver International Airport, citing opposition to the airline’s role in operating ICE deportation flights and using the decision as a symbolic stand against the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement.
A federal judge rejected preservationists’ bid to immediately halt President Donald Trump’s $300 million White House ballroom project, allowing below-ground construction to continue while signaling he will later consider whether the project violates federal preservation and environmental laws.
Maryland lawmakers overrode Gov. Wes Moore’s veto to create a commission that will study possible reparations for slavery, arguing further analysis is needed to design legally sound and meaningful remedies, even as Moore said he prefers immediate action and pledged to work with legislators.
According to the Wall Street Journal, a Chinese citizen-journalist who documented alleged abuses against Uyghurs is being held by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement in New York and faces possible deportation to China, prompting warnings from activists at Human Rights in China that he could face severe punishment if returned; supporters, including Rep. James P. McGovern, are urging U.S. officials to grant him asylum as an immigration judge prepares to hear his case.
Reuters has confirmed that Russian President Vladimir Putin warned that Moscow will expand its territorial gains and a “buffer security zone” in Ukraine if peace talks fail, saying Russia prefers a diplomatic solution but is prepared to achieve its goals militarily, while Kyiv and its Western allies reject Kremlin demands as violations of Ukraine’s sovereignty amid ongoing U.S.-led negotiations.
Australian authorities charged the surviving suspect in the Bondi Beach shooting with terrorism and 15 counts of murder, alleging the ISIS-inspired attack targeted a Hanukkah celebration and killed members of the Jewish community, as funerals were held under heavy security and investigators probed possible extremist links abroad.
Everyone Is Entitled To My Own Opinion, Commentary: Susie Wiles s___-talks sewer clowns. Hilarity ensues, Jeff Tiedrich, right, Dec. 17, 2025. Is Wiles a Russian asset?
Oh look, White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles (above) is a bit of a blabbermouth. Who knew?
It seems that over the last eleven months, Overly Talkative Suze has sat for eleven interviews with Vanity Fair’s Chris Whipple, which VF just published in a two-parter here and here.
Here’s the beauty part: this Vanity Fair two-parter ain’t some rote, by-the-numbers snoozefest about how honored Susie Wiles is to be working with some of the finest minds yadda yadda yadda zzzzzzzzzzzz.
She actually takes a big stinky s___ all over her co-workers.
The Dem Party’s social media team has put together a lovely highlight reel.
So, Donny Convict ‘has an alcoholic’s personality.’ Couchf____ McGee is ‘a conspiracy theorist.’ Pamnesia Pam Bondi has ‘completely whiffed.’ And the Space Nazi is an ‘avowed ketamine user.’
To which I say: tell us something we don’t already know, Suze.
All this is old-hat to anyone who’s been paying attention from the get-go.
So, you’d figure the reaction from the White House would be thermonuclear, and that Susie Wiles would already be the former Chief of Staff — but you’d figure wrong. because what happened next is that every sewer clown simultaneously tweeted statements of undying support for Wiles.
Look at this. not only did Donny laugh off Wiles’ remarks, he said he agreed with them.
Trump even admitted to having an “alcoholic personality,” which some around the president considered among Wiles’ most incendiary remarks because of the president’s long and well-known aversion to alcohol and his brother’s struggle with alcoholism.
“I’m fortunate I’m not a drinker,” Trump told the New York Post.
What the f___is going on? Did Putin give Susie Wiles a copy of the pee-tape to use as job insurance?
it’s not a silly question — because it seems that Chatty Suzie has been working with Russian oligarchs for since like forever. Look at this, from the Byline Times, published a year ago.
Trump’s newly appointed Chief of Staff, Susie Wiles, brings a complex political profile, with ties to Russian oligarchs and Chinese surveillance firms.
Before joining Trump’s 2024 campaign, Wiles was a co-chair at a firm that lobbied for sanctioned individuals and companies. A lobbyist who recommended Wiles to lead U.S. President-Elect Donald Trump’s campaign represented a Russian-born oligarch connected to the Russian President Vladimir Putin and a state-owned oil corporation Rosneft.
Wiles’ ex-husband has ties to a Kremlin-linked lobbyist known for attending the 2016 Trump Tower meeting, where “dirt” on [Democratic presidential contender Hillary] Clinton was offered on the Russian Government’s behalf. Wiles’ daughter failed the White House background check.
Russian leader Vladimir Putin meets his China counterpart Xi Jinping in Beijing (2022 file photo via by Sputnik via Reuters).
That’s all pretty convenient.
What does Susie know, and why is her job being protected? And who is she really working for?
As always with All Things Donny, there are a thousand questions, and zero satisfying answers.
Lincoln Square Media via Substack, Political Commentary: Susie Wiles' Plea Deal with History, Rick Wilson, right, Stuart Stevens and Joe Trippi, Dec. 16-17, 2025. Susie and The Banshees.
The Trump administration now operates through internal sabotage and public self-preservation rather than discipline or loyalty. The cruelty on display has become aesthetic as much as political, signaling rot instead of strength. Attacking cultural figures like Rob Reiner fractures a 
coalition that once rationalized anything.
It’s the holidays, so you’re getting a special sneak peek at Strategy Session, which is a special show for our Lincoln Loyal paid subscribers. Never miss the inside scoop from Rick, Joe, and Stuart. Upgrade your subscription today.
Rick, Stuart, and Joe circle the same unsettling conclusion from different angles: this is what a system looks like when everyone knows the ending and starts freelancing their own alibis.
Rick’s focus on imagery and power reveals how decay announces itself visually before it collapses institutionally, while Stuart sharpens the moral indictment by treating these moves as intentional acts of historical positioning. Joe keeps returning to how abnormal this is — how no previous White House tolerated this level of self-exposure without consequences — because the abnormality is the point.
Together, they sketch a culture that no longer believes in governance, only exits, where cruelty is rewarded, loyalty is transactional, and the final fight is over who gets to say they weren’t really part of it.
Tune in for a conversation that strips away the excuses and asks what responsibility looks like when everyone can see the collapse coming.
New York Times, Trump Administration Live Updates: Venezuela’s Navy Begins Escorting Ships as U.S. Threatens Blockade, Staff Reports, Dec. 17, 2025. President Trump said he would impose a blockade on all “sanctioned oil tankers” going to and from Venezuela Where Things Stand:
House Republicans pressed the former special counsel Jack Smith over his investigations of Trump.ImageJack Smith, the former special counsel, during a break in a closed-door deposition with the House Judiciary Committee.Credit...Anna Rose Layden for The New York Times
House Republicans grilled Jack Smith, the special counsel who twice indicted Donald J. Trump, in a closed-door deposition on Wednesday that began with Mr. Smith’s blistering declaration that Mr. Trump’s actions — and not political bias — prompted the prosecutions.
The stakes for Mr. Smith, a former anticorruption and war crimes prosecutor, were high. Republicans, acting on Mr. Trump’s demand to pursue those who pursued him, pelted Mr. Smith with detailed questions in hopes of catching him in a misstep that would justify a prosecution by the Justice Department, according to lawmakers in both parties.
But even Mr. Smith’s adversaries conceded that his tight-lipped, painstaking approach made tripping him up particularly difficult. And Mr. Smith quickly made it clear on Wednesday that he intended to take the fight to Mr. Trump.
“If asked whether to prosecute a former president based on the same facts today, I would do so regardless of whether the president was a Republican or Democrat,” Mr. Smith said in his opening remarks, according to excerpts provided to The New York Times.
Mr. Smith said that his team of investigators had “developed proof beyond a reasonable doubt” that Mr. Trump had tried to overturn the 2020 presidential election. He also told House Judiciary Committee lawmakers and staff members that he had “developed powerful evidence that showed President Trump willfully retained highly classified documents after he left office in January 2021” and that Mr. Trump “repeatedly tried to obstruct justice.”
The committee has already referred one of Mr. Smith’s top deputies, Thomas Windom, to the Justice Department for not fully answering similar questions. Mr. Windom, now Mr. Smith’s law partner, has denied those allegations.
Mr. Smith requested that his appearance before the committee take place in public, and picked up an unlikely ally in that cause: Mr. Trump himself. But Republicans opted to keep his deposition private out of concern that Mr. Smith would use a hearing as an opportunity to make the case against Mr. Trump that two courts had denied him.
Wednesday’s session opened with a barrage of questions about Mr. Smith’s decision to subpoena the metadata phone records of Republican senators as part of his investigation of a White House effort to marshal support for reversing Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s lawful election, according to two people with knowledge of the situation.
Mr. Smith held his own, according to Representative Jamie Raskin of Maryland, the top Democrat on the committee, who said Mr. Smith “schooled” his questioners.
Republicans have accused Mr. Smith, who was appointed by Attorney General Merrick B. Garland in November 2022, of conducting a politically motivated witch hunt against the president.
In the hours before the deposition, the Justice Department and F.B.I. turned over to Congress selective internal communications from the summer of 2022 showing that some F.B.I. agents expressed concerns about conducting a search of Mar-a-Lago, the president’s resort and residence in Florida.
Trump allies and administration officials promoted that report as a “bombshell” — proof that the Biden Justice Department had raided Mar-a-Lago without first gathering evidence of wrongdoing.
In fact, the initial internal debate over the search was already previously known. Senior F.B.I. officials eventually agreed that the search was justified because of video showing Trump associates moving around boxes believed to contain classified materials.
The search, which was approved by a magistrate judge, uncovered a substantial trove of sensitive government documents stored in places accessible to the public, including a bathroom.
Mr. Smith’s testimony came in the middle of an ongoing court battle over whether to release the portion of his prosecutorial work that still remains under seal: a report detailing the investigation into Mr. Trump’s mishandling of highly sensitive classified documents.
That report could contain undisclosed and embarrassing details about how Mr. Trump brought the documents from the White House to Mar-a-Lago, then obstructed efforts by the Justice Department to retrieve them.
Judge Aileen M. Cannon, a Trump appointee who handled the documents case, has sat on requests to release Mr. Smith’s report for months. But a federal appeals court, concerned by her slow-walking, recently ordered her to make a decision about the volume by early January.
Two weeks ago, Mr. Trump filed court papers asking Judge Cannon not to release the report, saying that doing so would only “perpetuate Jack Smith’s unlawful criminal investigations and proceedings.”
New York Times, Trump Administration Aims to Strip More Foreign-Born Americans of Citizenship, Hamed Aleaziz, Dec. 17, 2025. The Trump administration plans to ramp up efforts to strip some naturalized Americans of their citizenship, according to internal guidance obtained by The New York Times, marking an aggressive new phase in President Trump’s immigration crackdown.
The guidance, issued on Tuesday to U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services field offices, asks that they “supply Office of Immigration Litigation with 100-200 denaturalization cases per month” in the 2026 fiscal year. If the cases are successful, it would represent a massive escalation of denaturalization in the modern era, experts said. By comparison, between 2017 and this year to date, there had been just over 120 cases filed, according to the Justice Department.
Under federal law, people may be denaturalized only if they committed fraud while applying for citizenship, or in a few other narrow circumstances. But the Trump administration has shown a zeal for using every tool at its disposal to target legal and illegal immigrants, leading activists to warn that such a campaign could sweep up people who had made honest mistakes on their citizenship paperwork and sow fear among law-abiding Americans.
The guidance comes as Mr. Trump has spent much of this year closing loopholes in the immigration system and throwing up roadblocks for people seeking to enter and stay in the country. The sweeping campaign, which has gone further than purging the country of unlawful migrants, has included blocks on asylum at the southern border, a pause on asylum applications inside the United States, and a ban on entry for travelers from predominantly African and Middle Eastern nations. Officials say their actions will make the country safer and preserve the country’s values
A targeted campaign to increase the number of American immigrants stripped of their citizenship represents an escalation of an already ambitious campaign.
“It’s no secret that U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services’ war on fraud includes prioritizing those who’ve unlawfully obtained U.S. citizenship — especially under the previous administration,” said Matthew J. Tragesser, a U.S.C.I.S. spokesman. “We will pursue denaturalization proceedings for those individuals lying or misrepresenting themselves during the naturalization process. We look forward to continuing to work with the Department of Justice to restore integrity to America’s immigration system.”
In interviews, some former agency officials expressed concern at the scale of the case goals for denaturalization pushed by U.S.C.I.S. leadership.
“Imposing arbitrary numerical targets on denaturalization cases risks politicizing citizenship revocation,” said Sarah Pierce, a former U.S.C.I.S. official. “And requiring monthly quotas that are 10 times higher than the total annual number of denaturalizations in recent years turns a serious and rare tool into a blunt instrument and fuels unnecessary fear and uncertainty for the millions of naturalized Americans.”
Proponents of stricter immigration laws said it was necessary to more aggressively root out people who had been improperly granted citizenship.
New York Times, ICE Arrests Disrupt Schools, Prompting Fear Among Families, Madeleine Ngo, Dec. 17, 2025. President Trump’s immigration crackdown has at times resulted in arrests near schools, setting off concerns among parents, educators and students.
Last month, Adam Gonzalez, a lawyer at a nonprofit in Chicago, pulled into his son’s day care and noticed something unusual. Two cars were parked directly in front of the school, blocking the entrance.
Worried about bringing his 17-month-old son into a potentially dangerous situation, he locked his car and walked toward the building. He said his “heart sank” when he saw officers with tactical gear indicating that they were with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and he started recording with his phone. A
The Independent, White House adds plaques below Biden and Obama portraits, calling them ‘the worst President in American history’ and ‘divisive,’ Ariana Baio, Dec. 17, 2025. Newest additions appear to be part of the administration’s ongoing ‘troll’ campaign against former presidents and Trump’s opponents.
White House staff updated the so-called “Presidential Walk of Fame” Wednesday by adding lengthy descriptions of each former president, in rhetoric that aligns with President Donald Trump’s – such as calling former President Joe Biden “the worst President in American History.”
As part of the president’s ongoing effort to customize the White House to his liking, Trump set his well-known opinions of each former president in stone by adding plaques underneath the portraits that now hang along the colonnade.
But rather than neutrally describing each president, Trump chose to invoke more color – claiming former President Barack Obama is “one of the most divisive political figures” and asserting former President Ronald Reagan “was a fan.”
White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt said, “The plaques are eloquently written descriptions of each President and the legacy they left behind. As a student of history, many were written directly by the President himself.”
“Sleepy Joe was, by far, the worst President in American History,” the plaque underneath Biden’s portrait, which is an autopen as opposed to his official portrait, reads. “Taking office as a result of the most corrupt Election ever seen in the United States.”
Fani Willis, wearing a white outfit, sits at a table with a microphone in a hearing room.District Attorney Fani T. Willis assailed Republican adversaries and stumped for political allies at the hearing on Wednesday, Dec. 17 (Associated Press photo by Brynn Anderson). Shown below her are mug shots of then-former President Trump and 13 other co-defendants accused of election-related crimes.
New York Times, Fani Willis Calls Trump and Allies ‘Criminals’ at Georgia Senate Hearing, Richard Fausset and Danny Hakim, Dec. 17, 2025. The district attorney in Atlanta addressed a Republican-led committee created to investigate her conduct during her prosecution of President Trump last year.
Fani T. Willis, the district attorney of Fulton County, Ga., was unrepentant about her failed elections case against President Trump during a combative hearing on Wednesday, calling Mr. Trump and his former co-defendants “criminals” and “crooks” before members of the Republican-led State Senate.
The hearing, in a packed room at the State Capitol in Atlanta, took place a few weeks after a state judge dismissed Ms. Willis’s election interference case. She was removed from the case last year, following revelations that she had a romantic relationship with the lawyer she had hired to oversee it.
For Ms. Willis, an elected Democrat, the dismissal was a humiliating end to what had begun as one of the most significant cases against Mr. Trump after he sought to overturn his 2020 election loss in the state — one that might have culminated in the trial of a lifetime for the longtime Georgia prosecutor.
But if state Republicans hoped to use the hearing to embarrass her, Ms. Willis appeared equally intent on turning the tables. She used her time to assail a number of Republican adversaries, stump for political allies and criticize the lawmakers for their fealty to Mr. Trump.
The committee of five Republicans and two Democrats was created early last year to investigate Ms. Willis, following the revelations of her relationship with Nathan Wade, the lawyer she had hired. Defendants in the elections case had accused her of “self-dealing” because she took a number of vacations with Mr. Wade after hiring him, while using public funds to pay him more than $650,000 for his work on the case.
Ms. Willis walked into the hearing room on Wednesday cheered on by supporters holding signs, one of which read “Fearless With Fani.” She took her place before the committee alongside her lawyer, the former Democratic governor Roy Barnes, who repeatedly advised Ms. Willis not to answer questions and cast doubt on the powers of the committee to pursue some lines of inquiry.
She was in no mood to sit quietly. She accused the Republican members of being racist, divisive and unconcerned about the Jan. 6, 2021, assault on the U.S. Capitol. She also accused them of holding the hearing to help their own political campaigns.
Three of the Republicans on the committee are running for lieutenant governor, and a fourth, Bill Cowsert, the committee chairman, is running for attorney general of Georgia. Mr. Cowsert did not attend the meeting because of a medical issue.
In a fund-raising social media post in June, Mr. Cowsert said that if he was sworn in as attorney general, Ms. Willis would have a “rude awakening coming.”
Ms. Willis asked Mr. Dolezal, “You and Jim Jordan working together?” She was referring to Representative Jim Jordan, an Ohio Republican and Trump ally who chairs the House Judiciary Committee, which has been conducting its own investigation of Ms. Willis’s office in the wake of her Trump investigation.
Mr. Dolezal said he had “never talked to Mr. Jordan.”
Mr. Trump has referred to Ms. Willis as a “criminal.” And he has directed the Department of Justice to prosecute his perceived enemies, in a sharp break from norms. The New York Times reported earlier this year that the department has issued several dozen subpoenas in an investigation related to Ms. Willis.
On Wednesday, Ms. Willis referred to the defendants in her failed case as “criminals” more than once, saying at one point that she had “no way of knowing that these criminals were going to commit a crime.”
She also criticized Pete Skandalakis, left, a veteran Georgia prosecutor who took over the Trump case after she was removed from it by the state courts. In November, Mr. Skandalakis determined that no charges were warranted against Mr. Trump, the final nail in the coffin on the matter.
She said that Mr. Skandalakis, who last ran for office as a Republican, had not taken a close enough look at the huge amount of evidence that had been amassed.
“There is no way he read the entire file,” she said. “There’s no way that he reviewed all the evidence.”
Ms. Willis also defended the charges in the case, which accused Mr. Trump and a number of his allies of organizing a criminal racketeering enterprise to reverse the 2020 election results in Georgia. “They got charged because they came into my community and committed a crime, and two grand juries passed forth an indictment,” she said.
At one point, the committee members appeared to cut her microphone. Ms. Willis could still be easily heard from the back of the room.
Ms. Willis’s eagerness to publicly excoriate the Republican committee members tracks with Georgia Democrats’ broader calculation that Mr. Trump will prove to be a weight around the necks of Republican candidates in the swing state in next year’s midterm elections.
New York Times, Bongino to Step Down From F.B.I., Glenn Thrush, Maggie Haberman and Adam Goldman, Dec. 17, 2025. Dan Bongino, the No. 2 official at the F.B.I., said on Wednesday that he would step down next month, bringing an end to his brief but tumultuous stint at the bureau, where he was known for his volcanic temper, missteps and hyperactive presence on social media.
“I will be leaving my position with the FBI in January,” Mr. Bongino wrote on social media, shortly after President Trump appeared to confirm earlier news reports that Mr. Bongino planned to step down by mid-January.
Mr. Bongino, a Trump political ally with minimal experience, at times struggled with the immense demands of a job that required running the day-to-day operations of the bureau — particularly his awkward efforts to square a previous embrace of conspiracies with F.B.I. investigations that often debunked them.
He served less than a year in a post responsible for overseeing dozens of field offices around the country and world. He has suggested he would return to his previous job as a pro-Trump podcaster and social media personality.
Mr. Bongino had planned to announce his departure on Friday but accelerated his announcement after Mr. Trump addressed his status with reporters on Wednesday, according to a person with knowledge of the situation who requested anonymity to discuss internal deliberations.
The Long Island native was one of several political appointees — including Kash Patel, the F.B.I. director — installed into senior positions at the bureau, a first in the agency’s history. It signaled the White House’s intent to wrest control of the law enforcement agency’s once proud independence.
Mr. Bongino’s departure seemed inevitable after the White House in August hired the Missouri attorney general, Andrew Bailey, to share his job as deputy director. It was an unusual arrangement at the bureau for a job that had never been shared nor held by someone other than a veteran F.B.I. agent.
New York Times, Trump Orders Blockade of Some Oil Tankers to and From Venezuela, Edward Wong, Simon Romero, Charlie Savage and Julian E. Barnes, Updated Dec. 17, 2025. The move is an escalation of military operations and a pressure campaign against Nicolás Maduro, Venezuela’s leader. But its scope and economic impact are not clear.
President Trump on Tuesday ordered a “complete blockade” on sanctioned oil tankers going to and from Venezuela, an escalation of his administration’s monthslong pressure campaign against Nicolás Maduro, the leader of Venezuela.
“Venezuela is completely surrounded by the largest Armada ever assembled in the History of South America,” Mr. Trump wrote on social media. “It will only get bigger, and the shock to them will be like nothing they have ever seen before.”
The move could hobble Venezuela’s oil exports, which are the lifeblood of the country’s economy. Venezuela relies entirely on tankers to export its oil to world markets. There were more than 30 vessels operating in Venezuela earlier this month that had been sanctioned by the United States, according to the independent tracking service Tanker Trackers.
Last Wednesday, the United States seized a tanker in the Caribbean Sea that was carrying Venezuelan oil for Cuba and China. A federal judge had issued a warrant for the seizure based on the fact that the tanker had recently transported oil from Iran.
The U.S. military has been building up a large naval force in the Caribbean in recent months, and Mr. Trump has threatened strikes inside Venezuela. Since September, the U.S. military has been carrying out airstrikes on boats in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific, many of them near Venezuela, in a campaign that has killed at least 95 people in 25 attacks.
Mr. Trump has said those attacks are aimed at stopping drug trafficking to the United States. But Venezuela is not a drug producer, and the cocaine that transits through the country and the waters around it is generally bound for Europe. Many legal experts say that the attacks are illegal and that the military is killing civilians.
Behind the scenes, Trump administration officials have also focused intently on Venezuela’s oil reserves, the largest in the world.
In his social media announcement on Tuesday, Mr. Trump wrote in all capital letters that he was ordering a “a total and complete blockade,” which by itself would have been a substantial step. In international law, a blockade prevents all vessels from entering and leaving the ports of an enemy country during an armed conflict. But Mr. Trump added the qualifier “of all sanctioned oil vessels,” which changed the meaning.
Mr. Trump appeared to be threatening to enforce existing sanctions against some of the tankers exporting oil. If the U.S. Navy continues to allow most vessels to freely enter and leave Venezuelan ports, it is not a real blockade.
Still, any threat of seizure may be enough to scare off many companies that transport Venezuelan oil.
Mr. Trump also wrote that the U.S. operation would continue until Venezuela returned to the United States “all of the Oil, Land, and other Assets that they previously stole from us.”
Mr. Trump did not define what he meant by those assets. He might have been referring to the changes in Venezuela’s oil industry after leaders there put it under state control in the 1970s.
American oil companies had been prominent players in the industry for decades before that. During nationalization, Exxon, Mobil, Shell and Gulf Oil lost $5 billion in assets and were compensated only $1 billion, according to a New York Times article from that time. Until then, foreign companies accounted for 70 percent of the oil production in Venezuela.
Some American companies re-entered the industry in the 1990s during a period of loosening by Caracas. But they were later forced by Hugo Chávez, who became leader of Venezuela in 1999, to limit their investments to minority shares in joint ventures with the main state-owned enterprise, Petróleos de Venezuela, S.A., or PDVSA.
Chevron is the one American company that stayed in Venezuela through all those decades and through the recent era of U.S. sanctions, and it continues to operate there with a newly extended confidential license from the U.S. government. Mr. Trump’s announcement of a blockade is not expected to have an effect on Chevron, the company said.
More On U.S. Politics, Governance
Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: Why Aren’t Dems Going After Trump’s Tariffs? Bill Kristol, Andrew Egger and Jim Swift, Dec. 17, 2025. They don’t work and Americans hate them. Layup.
Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene’s “f— it, we ball” tour continues! In a CNN interview last night, the former diehard Trump ally took swing after swing at the president. She called his lunatic post about murdered director Rob Reiner “absolutely, completely below the office of the president of the United States,” “classless,” and “just wrong.”
Greene, right, suggested he lacks empathy for economically uneasy Americans: “When he looks into a camera and says affordability is a hoax and just totally tries to make nothing out of inflation, he’s talking to Americans that are just suffering.” And she took aim at his air of invulnerability with the GOP base: “I think the dam is breaking. . . . Lame duck season has begun.”
Will all this hurt Trump? Or will the venue for Greene’s attacks—a series of suddenly sympathetic mainstream media platforms—burn down her own credibility with the MAGA base faster than Trump himself ever could? Guess we’ll see. Happy Wednesday.
U.S. Economy, Markets, Inflation, Jobs
Paul Krugman via Substack, Political-Economy Commentary: An A+++++ Economy, My A++, Paul Krugman, right, Dec. 17, 2025. Trump made big boasts but he isn’t delivering.
When Politico recently asked Donald Trump to grade the current U.S. economy, he replied “A-plus-plus-plus-plus-plus.” He made this boast at a time when actual economic data were still scarce, a consequence of the government shutdown that stopped or delayed key information about the state of the job market.
Yesterday the report on employment during the month of November finally arrived. And the message of the report on the state of the US economy was clear: A+++++ my A++. While it’s too soon to declare that we’re in a recession, the data are at least pre-recessionary: that is, the numbers are weak enough that we should be seriously worried that a recession is coming. And that’s a state of affairs completely at odds with Trump’s rose-colored — spray-tanned? — picture.
I’ll talk about the reasons the gap between Trump’s big boasts and the glum reality matters in a minute. First, however, let’s talk about what we learned from yesterday’s report.
Most importantly, the data show a weak labor market. Employment isn’t falling off a cliff, but job growth has been weak and hasn’t kept pace with the number of people seeking work. The headline unemployment rate in November was 4.6 percent, up from an average of 4 percent in 2024. That number is close to triggering the Sahm Rule, an economic rule of thumb devised by Claudia Sahm, a former economist at the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve, that has historically been highly successful at identifying the early stages of a recession.
We can’t do a strict application of the Sahm Rule yet because Sahm’s method is based on the average unemployment rate over the past three months. Unfortunately, the shutdown prevented the Bureau of Labor Statistics from collecting key data in October. But if we do an interpolation of October’s unemployment rate by averaging over September’s rate of 4.4% and November’s rate of 4.6%, we can estimate that October’s unemployment rate was 4.5%. And those 3 months of unemployment numbers bring us within a whisker of the unemployment rise that, according to the Sahm Rule, signals that a recession is on the horizon.
The state of the economy looks even worse if we take a wider view of the labor market. The BLS calculates 6 different measures of unemployment. The most commonly cited number is U-3 — the number of workers who are actively seeking jobs but haven’t found them. But the broadest measure is U-6, which includes underemployed workers stuck in part-time employment and discouraged workers who have temporarily given up job search. And U-6 has risen sharply since January, when Trump took office:
Further evidence consistent with a poor and deteriorating job market is data showing that the number of job-seekers who are long-term unemployed – that is, have been unemployed for 27 weeks or more – has risen by almost a third (from 1.45 million to 1.91 million) since 2024. This means that the unemployed are finding it harder to find jobs.
In addition to collecting data from workers, the BLS surveys employers. Interpreting the employer-side numbers is a bit tricky right now, because there are technical challenges in how the BLS models the birth of new firms and the deaths of old ones. None other than Jerome Powell has suggested that official job growth is probably overstated by around 60,000 a month. Yet even if we ignore this likely overstatement of the number of jobs created, yesterday’s numbers are definitely pointing to a troubled economy.
In particular, the Trumpian project of bringing “masculine” blue-collar jobs back is going badly. I’m going to steal a chart from Joey Politano, whose Substack you should be reading: A graph on a black background AI-generated content may be incorrect.
So while yesterday’s job report wasn’t a cause for outright panic, it does reveal real reasons to worry that the economy is deteriorating.
And Trump owns this economy — because he broke it.
Normally, when a president experiences a troubled economy during his first year he dispatches his flying monkeys minions to declare that it’s all his predecessor’s fault. And some Trump officials, like Scott Bessent, are indeed trying to play the blame game. But this standard political tactic is unlikely to work for this president.
Politics aside, it’s important to understand that the bleak economic news we’re getting is only the beginning. “Populist” leaders like Trump — I don’t like the term, but it has come to mean politicians who have disdain for responsible policy and the rule of law — do long-term economic damage. One comprehensive comparative study found that, on average, such leaders leave GDP 10 percent lower after 15 years than it would otherwise have been. So Trumpism is reducing our future living standards.
Trump is going to make a prime-time address to the nation tonight. The details of his speech haven’t been announced, but it’s a good guess that he intends to gaslight Americans yet again, claiming that things are going well. They aren’t.
New York Times, Trump Dangles Cash Payments to Buoy Voters’ Views of the Economy, Tony Romm and Andrew Duehren, Dec. 17, 2025. With tariffs unpopular and prices still high, the White House has teased the promise of tariff rebates and large tax refunds next year.
Tariffs are unpopular, prices remain stubbornly high and Americans are souring on President Trump’s handling of the economy.
So Mr. Trump has reprised a familiar political strategy: promise people cash.
The White House is trying to tamp down Americans’ economic anxieties by dangling the prospect of checks and other paydays next year, hoping that the money might assuage voters who blame the president for their rising cost of living.
Mr. Trump, who is set to address the nation on Wednesday night, has repeatedly teased the idea of sending one-time $2,000 rebate checks to many families, funded using money collected from his sweeping global tariffs. But he has not devised a detailed plan for providing the rebates, an expensive policy that Republicans in Congress must approve and one that they have not yet considered.
The president has also begun hyping up the tax refunds that Americans are slated to receive in 2026. For many people, these cash payments are expected to be larger than they were last year, after Republicans adopted a sprawling set of tax cuts in July.
Both Mr. Trump and members of his administration have periodically drawn an equivalence between the supposed tariff rebates and the enacted tax law. They have claimed the money could bolster the economy and alleviate some of the financial strains on families, even at a time when Mr. Trump maintains that much of the talk about affordability is a “hoax.”
“Next year is projected to be the largest tax refund season ever, and we’re going to be giving back refunds out of the tariffs, because we’ve taken in literally trillions of dollars,” Mr. Trump said at a cabinet meeting last week. “And we’re going to be giving a nice dividend to the people, in addition to reducing debt.”
But economists take a dimmer view. Even if Americans were to delight in a series of new government-issued checks, the payments would hardly address the reasons that prices remain so high — including a shortage in housing that has driven up rents and mortgages and the global tariffs that have made imports more expensive. And the money that may soon be sloshing around the economy could end up worsening inflation, undermining Mr. Trump’s own economic goals.
Alex Durante, a senior economist at the Tax Foundation, said that simply “pumping money” into the economy — without any other underlying changes — threatened to “just generate a cycle where you continue to get higher prices.”Listen to this a
New York Times, What Trump’s Embrace of Crypto Has Unleashed, David Yaffe-Bellany and Eric Lipton, Dec. 17, 2025. A boundary-pushing array of new crypto ventures have reached the stock market, enticing investors and leading to more risk taking.
This summer, a group of executives pitched a business plan to Anthony Scaramucci, the Wall Street financier and short-lived adviser to President Trump.
They wanted Mr. Scaramucci to join a publicly traded company with a peculiar strategy: accumulating enormous quantities of cryptocurrency to make its business more appealing to investors.
They “didn’t really have to pitch it to me,” said Mr. Scaramucci, who was soon unveiled as an adviser to three little-known companies with this same plan. “It was a pretty easy conversation.”
The excitement did not last. The crypto market cratered this fall, sending shares of all three of Mr. Scaramucci’s ventures tumbling. The worst performer plunged more than 80 percent.
The businesses were part of a frenzy of crypto activity driven by Mr. Trump, who has turned the once obscure world of digital currencies into a major force in the global economy. Declaring himself the first “crypto president,” Mr. Trump ended a regulatory crackdown on crypto companies, promoted crypto investments from the Oval Office, signed pro-crypto legislation and even launched a “memecoin” called $TRUMP.
Now the consequences of that advocacy are coming into focus.
An array of boundary-pushing new crypto ventures have emerged this year, exposing more people to the volatile world of virtual currencies. More than 250 publicly traded companies are now stocking up on cryptocurrencies, which are digital assets that fluctuate in price like stocks, bonds or other investments.
New York Times, Heating Costs Expected to Rise 9.2% This Winter, Ivan Penn, Dec. 17, 2025. Colder weather and rising electricity and fuel costs will lead to a big jump in costs for individuals, according to estimates from a group representing state energy officials.
Consumers already tapped out from rising home energy costs face yet another strain on their pocketbooks — surging heating costs.
Higher electricity and natural gas prices coupled with forecasts for unusually cold temperatures across parts of the country are expected to drive up bills as winter takes hold. The average U.S. household is projected to spend nearly $1,000 this winter to heat its home, up 9.2 percent from a year earlier, according to the National Energy Assistance Directors Association, which represents state governments in securing federal money.
Even as costs rise, the federal government is offering states less money to help low-income residents pay for heat. The budget for a critical federal program has been cut by about a third this year compared with two years ago.
“These increases may not sound dramatic to higher-income households, but for families already struggling, they are devastating,” said Mark Wolfe, executive director of the energy assistance association. “Millions of households are being pushed deeper into utility debt and closer to shut-offs simply because they cannot afford to keep their homes warm.”
Home energy costs have steadily increased over the last few years as utility companies have spent more money on electric grids after devastating wildfires and extreme weather and to make up for deferred maintenance. Power providers are also spending billions of dollars on upgrades in anticipation of rapid growth in electricity demand from data centers used for artificial intelligence services.
The cost of energy has emerged as one of the nation’s leading consumer concerns and played a critical role in recent statewide elections in Georgia, New Jersey and Virginia.
New York Times, Next Fed Chair in ‘No-Win Scenario’ as Selection Process Draws to a Close, Colby Smith, Dec. 17, 2025. The person picked to replace Jerome H. Powell will be thrust into a credibility problem that will be difficult to escape.
It was always going to be one of the Kevins. At least that was the impression among many across Wall Street and Washington when it came to President Trump’s selection for the next chair of the Federal Reserve.
Mr. Trump had hinted for months that he wanted his Treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, for the job. But Mr. Bessent kept declining the offer.
That placed Kevin A. Hassett, a longtime loyalist and economic adviser to Mr. Trump, and Kevin M. Warsh, a former Fed governor who had been in spitting distance of becoming chair during the president’s first term, in leading positions to take over for Jerome H. Powell in May.
The decision comes down to who Mr. Trump believes will be more successful in delivering the substantially lower borrowing costs that he has long struggled to get from the Fed under Mr. Powell. Mr. Trump, who elevated Mr. Powell to chair in 2017, appears haunted by that decision. He has made it clear that this time he wants someone more malleable who will take his advice.
That prerequisite creates a credibility problem for whoever is selected, one that will be difficult to escape. A chair who is seen as beholden to the president risks eroding the public’s confidence that the Fed is making decisions in the best interest of the economy, not the White House. If that crumbles, borrowing costs could move higher, not lower as the president wants.
“Anyone who gets the job is damaged goods,” said Andy Laperriere, head of U.S. policy research for Piper Sandler.
“You’re either going to be the guy who succeeds in getting what the president wants, which will not bode well for your treatment in the history books,” Mr. Laperriere said, “or you’re going to be the guy who doesn’t get what the president wants, and he’s going to probably turn on you.”
Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: Time To Twist the Knife on Tariffs, Andrew Egger, Dec. 17, 2025. Donald Trump sees his tariffs as an economic panacea that will supercharge the economy, pay down the national debt, and breathe new life into the manufacturing sector.
But in the eight months since “Liberation Day,” they’ve done the opposite. The economy is stagnant. The federal debt keeps growing. And yesterday, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported that the economy lost manufacturing jobs for the seventh straight month.
Trump’s tariffs are a bust. So why do Democrats seem oddly reluctant to twist the knife?
In one sense, Democrats are spending a lot of time these days talking about Trump’s tariffs. But they tend to do so broadly and obliquely—passing over the specific issue of the trade wars to talk in more general terms about Trump’s failure to deliver on affordability. There are plenty of reasons for this. Some Democrats, particularly in the upper Midwest, still have a protectionist streak themselves: They might not like these tariffs, but they’re not opposed to tariffs in principle. And at any rate, talking about tariffs is wonkier and more complicated than talking about rising prices.
“People know tariffs raise costs. Costs are the overriding issue,” Democratic strategist David Axelrod told The Bulwark last week. “You don’t [have] to be the master strategist in this one.”
There’s little doubt that Trump’s tariffs are damaging him politically, even without Democrats’ help. They may be tempted to simply sit back and watch it happen. But it’s unclear just how poised Democrats are to benefit from Americans’ tariff remorse. Writing in the Argument last week, Lakshya Jain noted that while voters don’t like how Trump is handling the economy, many “simply aren’t sold on Democrats as the alternative.” Despite Trump’s flailing on the issue, Jain pointed out, Democrats are still having a harder time reaching voters who say that cost-of-living is a top-two issue than with voters who don’t.
This is hardly surprising: It wasn’t long ago that voters turned hard against Democrats as inflation flared out of control on Joe Biden’s watch. But what better way to get that bad taste out of voters’ mouths than by declaring war on Trump’s most preposterous economic policies?
One of the most resounding lessons Democrats learned—or, at least, should have learned—from 2025 is that they have more agenda-setting power when opposing Trump than when trying to cooperate with him. Trump and congressional Republicans are still flailing in the face of expiring Affordable Care Act subsidies, which they have repeatedly refused to renew while failing to put forward a workable replacement plan. Millions of Americans are set to see their health-insurance premiums spike in a matter of days. All this has damaged Trump and been a political win for Democrats.
On messaging, at least, Democrats came out ahead after the last shutdown battle. So with government funding again just weeks from expiring, why not move on to another pain-point issue? Why not refuse to fund the government unless Republicans agree to claw back some of Trump’s economy-killing tariffs?
While Democrats seem to be gliding toward huge wins in next year’s midterms, there’s one possible event that could do major damage to their prospects. If the Supreme Court rules in the weeks ahead that Trump’s tariffs are broadly unconstitutional, it would change the economic landscape of the country immediately—not only taking a pillow off the face of the economy, but giving it a massive adrenaline shot in the form of corporate refunds for tariffs collected so far.
Even if Trump were to try to put tariffs back in place under other emergency authorities—as he and his allies have suggested they’d do—they’d still likely be obliged to return more than $100 billion in duties collected this year. And if the Court is willing to push back on Trump’s tariff-authority claims in one area, they may be willing to do the same in others.
The result could be a world where the economy escapes Trump’s tariffs despite his best efforts—and where, as Catherine Rampell has written, Trump perversely reaps the political reward, standing to take credit for a suddenly “HOT” economy even when he was the one singlehandedly keeping it cold before.
In a world where this outcome is a real possibility—and it sure seems like it is—then “cost talk is better than tariff talk” suddenly becomes terrible advice for Democrats. They should be out there screaming from the rooftops that it’s the trade wars that are responsible for America’s economic malaise. If the Supreme Court ends up saving the economy from Trump’s tariffs, Democrats will need to convince the electorate that the Court saved them from Trump. The best time to start would have been months ago. The second-best time is right now.
Mass Shootings, Other Gun Murders
Brown University Shooting Suspect: Video footage shows a man in black walking near lawn hedge. The Providence Police Department released enhanced security camera footage of a person they are looking for in the Brown University shooting (Photo via Providence Police and Reuters).
New York Times, One Way the Brown Attack Was Unusual: The Gunman Escaped, Shaila Dewan, Dec. 17, 2025. It is rare for a gunman in a high-profile shooting to get away, and many are apprehended within days. The authorities shared grainy video and begged for tips as the search stretched into its fourth day.
He could be so many people on the street: dark winter hat, dark zippered jacket, black pants. Even the gun the police say he used to open fire in a Brown University classroom on Saturday was one of the world’s most common types, a 9-millimeter handgun.
The man who carried out a rampage that killed two students and wounded nine seemed to have left little behind, other than shell casings and video snippets of a portly figure pacing past doorbell cameras in the neighborhood east of campus, his facial features concealed behind a medical mask.
The hunt has put the city, and the authorities, in a tense situation, with a high-profile case and a killer in the wind. On Tuesday afternoon, as the three-day manhunt inched toward four, they released yet another grainy image of the suspected gunman and said that they were confident that once he was identified, he could be found.
“We just need a little bit of patience, as hard as it is to say that in this really horrible context,” Peter Neronha, Rhode Island’s attorney general, said at a 5 p.m. news conference where the centerpiece was not an investigative breakthrough but a new compilation of “enhanced” surveillance video that, he admitted, was not great.
It is unusual, but not unprecedented, for manhunts in high-profile attacks to stretch on, dangerous as any delay may be. Three days passed before the F.B.I. released photos of the Boston Marathon bombers in 2013, and during the ensuing search, the fugitives shot three police officers, two fatally. It took five days to capture Luigi Mangione, now accused of killing the C.E.O. of United Healthcare one year ago.
But in apparently random, public shootings like the one at Brown, the majority of attackers kill themselves or are killed by law enforcement officers at the scene.
In cases where they do not, some suspects are at least identified well before they are found, like the man accused of a mass shooting in a bar in Anaconda, Mont., who was found a week later. In 2023, the man who carried out a shooting spree that began at a bowling alley in Lewiston, Maine, was found in a tractor-trailer, dead from a self-inflicted gunshot wound, after more than two days had elapsed.
If witnesses from the day prove unhelpful, investigators may still find hope in the fact that between 60 and 90 percent of mass attackers communicate their intent to a third party in advance, a behavior known as leakage. “There is likely to be planning and preparation and research,” said J. Reid Meloy, a forensic psychologist who has studied such attacks. “There will be others that will be aware of the movement on the pathway to violence.”
But as days pass, people’s memories become clouded by news coverage and social media, said Tyrone Powers, a retired F.B.I. agent who worked on fugitive squads. “It’s just a matter of catching somebody as quick as you can,” he said.
In Rhode Island, there is no indication that the authorities know whom they are looking for, where he may be or even whether he is alive. They do not know, they said, what motivated him or whether he had any connection to Brown.
They are analyzing ballistic evidence and parsing what Chief Oscar L. Perez Jr. of the Providence Police Department described as “terabytes” of video. Yet they also made it clear that they were banking on the chance that someone would come forward with information.
They have offered a $50,000 reward, asked anyone who was in the engineering and physics building on Saturday to submit to an interview and canvassed the neighborhood for witnesses. Chief Perez urged the public to study the new video compilation with an eye to the suspect’s posture, gait and arm gestures.
“We are relying on the press and public to help get us there,” Mr. Neronha said.
The videos show the suspect in the neighborhood as early as 10:30 a.m., hours before the shooting began shortly after 4 p.m.
There have been many questions about why there was not more security video from inside the Barus and Holley engineering building, where the shooting occurred in an amphitheater-style classroom. Mr. Neronha said that the classroom was in an older part of the building, while the cameras were in the newer part. “They show things like chaos after the shooting,” he said. “What they don’t show is this person of interest.”
Still, Mr. Powers, the former F.B.I. agent, said, things were far from hopeless. “This is not some high-level operative from some intelligence agency in some foreign country” who could conduct a lethal operation without a trace, he said. “Somebody knows something, and we’re going to find out who that is.”
The Contrarian, Opinion: Two Countries, Jennifer Rubin, right, Dec. 17, 2025. Two responses to gun massacres.
The side-by-side comparison between Australia’s response to a gun massacre and the United States’ non-response to the mass shooting at Brown University highlights the contrast between a functional democracy and a dysfunctional one, between one governed by a grown-up and one ruled by a self-obsessed man-child with aspirations of autocratic control. From the start, we saw the vivid contrast in both competence and compassion between the two governments. In the United States, the Trump regime played the role of crank commentator. In the middle of the emergency, with students and faculty hunkering down in closets, cafes, and dorms, Donald Trump falsely announced that the suspect was in custody.
Brett Smiley, the mayor of Providence, Rhode Island, on Saturday effectively told residents to ignore the White House. “In this day and age, there is a lot of misinformation that can spread.” He told them that if an update did not come from the city government, “then it is not official.” Ponder that: For our own safety we need to ignore Trump’s impulsive posts.
Later, Trump effectively blamed the university for “reversing” its warning. You would think the president would have the latest facts. On Monday, Trump continued to blame Brown for not finding the culprit, as if this were not the FBI’s job. (Brown University is absent from the national security org. chart.) The FBI was no help. Director Kash Patel got slammed for posting about the person in custody just hours before he was released. Critics pointed out that Patel made the very same blunder (prematurely declaring a suspect in custody) in the Charlie Kirk murder. Patel also claimed credit for technological wizardry in locating the person (who wasn’t a suspect at all), when in fact a local tip alerted police. The New York Times reported:
Mr. Patel’s impulse to seize the spotlight and publicize the work of the bureau under his leadership has revived questions about his competence and his future in the administration. …It has added to the growing criticism over his recreational travel, his use of a SWAT team to protect his girlfriend and his handling of the Epstein files.
Until Trump decides to remove his embarrassing pick, Patel will persist in destroying the institution formerly regarded as the gold-standard in law enforcement. (Fortunately, the regime’s utterly irresponsible utterances did not result in any further injuries or deaths at Brown—but the deterioration in the federal government’s credibility will surely intensify under this crowd.)Subscribed
In Australia, information about the slaughter of 15 Jews (with scores more injured) was released in a formal, dignified appearance by top officials once they had solid information. Within hours of the mayhem, the police commissioner declared it was a terrorist attack; New South 
Wales Premier Chris Minns said the shooting was a targeted assault on Sydney’s Jewish community. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese, right, spoke with dignity and authority at a press conference:
This afternoon, there has been a devastating terrorist incident at Bondi at the Chanukah by the Sea celebration. This is a targeted attack on Jewish Australians on the first day of Chanukah, which should be a day of joy, a celebration of faith.
He emotionally embraced the Jewish community. “An attack on Jewish Australians is an attack on every Australian, and every Australian tonight will be like me, devastated by this attack on our way of life,” he said. “There is no place for this hate, violence and terrorism in our nation. Let me be clear—we will eradicate it.” He continued: “Amidst this vile act of violence and hate will emerge a moment of national unity where Australians across the board will embrace their fellow Australians of Jewish faith.”
When asked about criticism that his government had not acted sooner to stop a spate of antisemitic violence, he did not insult the reporter. He replied calmly, “Yes, we have taken it seriously and we’ve continued to act. We’ve continued to work with Jewish community leaders. We’ve continued to take all the advice from the security agencies to put in place special measures, and we will continue to do so.”
The contrast between Australia and the U.S. sharpened in subsequent days. In Australia, the press, public, and politicians all operated with the assumption that something would be done about guns. (Australia already has tough gun laws enacted after the Port Arthur mass shooting; it had not experienced anything comparable in the intervening 30 years.)
Within a day, Albanese announced that “the Government is prepared to take whatever action is necessary.” He added: “Included in that is the need for tougher gun laws. … I will put on the agenda of the National Cabinet tougher gun laws, including limits on the number of guns that can be used or licensed by individuals, and a review of licenses over a period of time.”
Moreover, Albanese acknowledged that former prime minister John Howard’s “gun laws have made an enormous difference in Australia and a proud moment of reform, quite rightly, achieved across the Parliament with bipartisan support.” (Imagine praising your predecessor!) He added, “If we need to toughen these up, if there’s anything we can do, I’m certainly up for it and I hope to get National Cabinet on board for that this afternoon as well.”
That is how a responsive and responsible government behaves in the wake of a devastating event: It acts.
In the U.S., just as we tragically have come to expect (our expectations attest to the severity of our political dysfunction) there was little to no talk of new gun laws or mental health funding (slashed in the big ugly bill’s Medicaid cuts and endangered when people lose Obamacare coverage).
Instead, Trump declared: “Things happen,” an appalling admission that MAGA forces have no interest in protecting Americans from mass killings. Trump’s callousness and fatalism reflect his own warped mind, but also the attitude of a rightwing movement that insists on denouncing any limitation on their rights (you’re not the boss of me!) for the greater good (e.g., stop mass killings of kids). This does not include women’s reproductive rights, unsurprisingly.
In other words, the gun lobby only partially accounts for failure to enact national common sense gun laws. We cannot ignore the role played by a reactionary ideology antithetical to American progress and reform, one badly ignorant of our own history and dependent on judicial fiat to get its way.
We have a popular consensus on many gun safety measures (e.g., red flag laws). However, we have a democracy problem preventing their enactment. So long as one party (insulated from accountability by gerrymandering) remains in the thrall of a paranoid anti-government cult allergic to social responsibility, we will be stuck in the endless loop of death, finger pointing, and paralysis.
Australia shows us there is another way for democracies to function. Perpetual slaughter of our children is a choice—one no civilized country should make.
Actor-Director Rob Reiner and his wife, photographer Michele Singer Reiner (File photo via Getty Images).
New York Times, Reiner Family Associate Details Events Before and After Killings Were Discovered, Shawn Hubler and Matt Stevens, Dec. 17, 2025 (print ed.). A person close to the family provided a detailed account of what occurred in the Reiner house after a massage therapist received no response at the gate.
It was Sunday afternoon when a massage therapist arrived at the white-gated home in the affluent enclave of Brentwood for a scheduled appointment with Rob and Michele Singer Reiner. The couple was scheduled to have dinner with Barack and Michelle Obama and others in just a few hours.
Getting no answer at the gate, the massage therapist called the couple’s daughter, Romy Reiner, who quickly came by with a roommate. She walked in and found her father’s body and the gruesome scene of his death.
The account of what transpired is based on an interview on Tuesday with a person who is close to the Reiner family. The person, who provided one of the first detailed descriptions of the tragedy from the family’s perspective, spoke to The New York Times on condition of anonymity because the immediate family was not yet ready to speak publicly.
Nick Reiner, left, who is in custody but has not been charged with a crime, has openly discussed his battles with heroin and cocaine in interviews and podcasts (Aude Guerrucci photo via Reuters)
On Tuesday, prosecutors in Los Angeles charged Nick Reiner, the couple’s younger son, with two counts of first-degree murder in connection with the death of his parents, who were luminaries in show business and Democratic Party politics. The second of three grown children the couple had together, he had been living with his parents in a guesthouse on the property.
A spokesman for the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s office declined to comment Tuesday on the details of the investigation.
What you should know. The Times makes a careful decision any time it uses an anonymous source. The information the source supplies must be newsworthy and give readers genuine insight.Learn more about our process.
In a news conference, however, the district attorney, Nathan Hochman, said that “prosecuting these cases involving family members are some of the most challenging and heart-wrenching cases that this office faces because of the intimate and often brutal nature of the crimes involved.”
The person close to the family said that nothing in recent weeks suggested that Nick Reiner, 32, would be capable of such violence.
The person disputed accounts that suggested the family had been especially apprehensive in recent weeks about Nick Reiner’s behavior. Nick Reiner had struggled for more than half of his life with drug addiction, but the person close to the family said they were accustomed to working through his problems together.
In 2016, the father and son had made and released a film together that was loosely based on their experience with the son’s battles with cocaine and heroin.
In fact, the person pointed out, just the night before, the family had attended a Christmas party together. The gathering, at the home of the comedian Conan O’Brien, had been crowded with people in show business and neighborhood friends.
The Times reported on Monday that Nick Reiner had behaved erratically that evening and had alarmed guests with his behavior, according to two people who attended the party. One of those two guests, who spoke on condition of anonymity to preserve relationships, said Rob Reiner had rebuked his son, telling him that his behavior was inappropriate for a guest in someone else’s home.
The person close to the family was not in a position to dispute that account, but said that Rob and Nick Reiner did not have a heated argument and that the episode was being overblown. The intensity of any conversation that might have taken place between father and son may have been misinterpreted, the person said.
He took issue with news accounts that suggested the family might have left the party early because of the son’s behavior. Nick Reiner’s behavior at the party, the person said, was not unusual to the Reiners, who had grown used to it over the years.
The day after the party on Sunday afternoon, Romy Reiner, 28, fled the house in anguish upon encountering her father’s body inside the house. Her roommate, waiting outside, called 911, the person said.
When the paramedics arrived, the person said, Romy Reiner told them that her brother lived on the property also, but she did not suggest to the authorities that her brother might be a suspect, as some news outlets have reported.
Romy Reiner did not see her mother’s body in the house and learned from the paramedics outside that she was dead, too, the person said.
Investigators did not find the son in the guest house. He was arrested without incident later that evening around 9:30 p.m. by officers from the Los Angeles Police Department Gang and Narcotics Unit who had located him about 15 miles away near the neighborhood of Exposition Park southwest of downtown. It was not clear how the police found him.
On Tuesday, the Los Angeles police chief, Jim McDonnell, said the coroner had not yet determined whether the Reiners had died on Saturday night or Sunday.
Trump Family Fortunes
Popular Information, Accountability Journalism: Kushner’s Serbian boondoggle collapses amid corruption scandal, Judd Legum, right, Dec. 17, 2025. This week, Jared Kushner, above right, abruptly canceled his plans to build Trump Tower Belgrade after the project became enmeshed in a criminal corruption scandal involving Serbian government officials.
Kushner, President Trump’s son-in-law, has resumed his role as one of Trump’s top foreign policy advisers — representing the Trump administration in high-stakes negotiations over Gaza and Ukraine. But Kushner has also continued to run his private equity firm, Affinity Partners.
In 2024, armed with billions of dollars from Saudi Arabia and other foreign governments, Kushner inked a deal with the Serbian government to redevelop the former headquarters of the Yugoslav Army in Belgrade into a luxury hotel and residences. The building was damaged by NATO in 1999 during an aerial bombing campaign.
The deal included extremely favorable terms for Kushner, left. The Serbian government agreed to grant Affinity Partners a 99-year lease to the property, which is a prime location in central Belgrade, for free. Kushner also had the option to convert the lease to full ownership at no cost. Affinity Partners would then keep 78% of the profits from the $500 million development, with the Serbian government entitled to 22%.
In January 2025, shortly before Trump’s second inauguration, Kushner reached a deal with the Trump Organization to brand the development as a Trump Tower. That agreement meant Trump would directly profit from the successful development of the site.
There was one big problem: the property was designated a culturally protected site by Serbian law. It could not be developed unless the Serbian government changed its status.
The deal struck between the administration of Serbian President Aleksandar Vucic and Kushner required the Serbian government “to remove the cultural designation of the complex and to complete demolition work of the existing buildings” by May 2026. Failure to do so would entitle Affinity Partners to millions in penalty payments from the Serbian government.
Beyond the economic penalties, the Serbian government was eager to keep the project moving as it sought improved relations with the Trump administration. American sanctions have effectively shuttered NIS, Serbia’s “only oil importer and refiner of oil,” which is majority-owned by Russia. The New York Times reported that Vucic has “been seeking [Trump’s] help all year on economic issues.”
According to Serbian organized crime prosecutors, however, the Serbian agencies empowered to lift the designation on the property refused to do so. Serbian officials, prosecutors allege, then forged documents claiming that the property was no longer culturally protected.
The allegation was first made public in May 2025, when prosecutors announced “the arrest of Goran Vasic, the acting director of the Republic Institute for the Protection of Cultural Monuments, and said he had admitted fabricating an expert’s opinion.” Vucic was undaunted. He said there were no forgeries and vowed that the Kushner development would continue.
In November, in an effort to circumvent the forgery issue, the Serbian parliament passed emergency legislation to remove the cultural designation and allow the Trump Tower project to proceed. The passage of that legislation prompted a wave of youth protests. Thousands “symbolically formed a human shield… around a bombed-out military complex, vowing to protect it from redevelopment.”
Nevertheless, the Trump Tower project continued until Monday when prosecutors criminally charged Nikola Selakovic, one of Vucic’s closest political allies, and three other officials. Selakovic and the others were accused of “falsification of an official document” and other crimes.
Hours after the charges were announced, Affinity Partners released a statement saying it was pulling out of the project. “Because meaningful projects should unite rather than divide, and out of respect for the people of Serbia and the City of Belgrade, we are withdrawing our application and stepping aside at this time,” the company said.
The collapse of the deal is a case study in how Kushner’s dual role as an international investor and top Trump foreign policy advisor puts immense pressure on foreign governments. In Serbia, according to prosecutors, the pressure to deliver Kushner what he wanted was so great that top government officials were willing to violate the law.
Kushner’s luxury development in Albania required new law
In Albania, Kushner’s Affinity Partners is building an ultra-luxury resort on Sazan Island, which is owned by the Albanian government. Sazan 
Island, however, is part of Karaburun-Sazan National Marine Park. It is home to an endangered seal species, serves as a key feeding ground for turtles, and contains marshlands that are important to the health of the Mediterranean Sea.
A 2010 Albanian law made Sazan Island off-limits to development because of the park’s role in preserving marine life and promoting biodiversity. The island is currently completely uninhabited and has no access to fresh water. A luxury resort would likely require constructing a desalination plant and a sewage system.
In 2024, shortly after Kushner’s interest in developing the island became public, the Albanian legislature passed a law creating an exception to Sazan Island’s protected status for “strategic investments.” Subsequently, the Albanian government granted Affinity Partners “Strategic Investor” status, allowing Kushner to take advantage of the new law.
An Albanian NGO, the Protection and Preservation of Natural Environment, argues that the new law violates the Albanian Constitution by ignoring international law. The European Union (EU) has criticized the law, calling it a “negative development.” The EU believes that the revised law may violate the Bern Convention, an international treaty on wildlife. The issue could complicate Albania’s effort to join the EU.What happens when you send billions of dollars to Kushner
In addition to an international scandal, the collapse of Trump Tower Belgrade also highlights Kushner’s inexperience as a private equity manager and businessman. His prior business experience involved nearly bankrupting his family’s real estate company. Kushner’s pitch to investors was that his government experience enabled him to navigate geopolitical risk effectively.
In Serbia, however, Kushner tied up $500 million for several years in a project that will never earn a profit. During that time, Saudi Arabia and other sovereign wealth funds paid Kushner tens of millions in fees to hold their cash. The lost time is a massive opportunity cost.
This is exactly why the investment committee of Saudi Arabia’s sovereign wealth fund (PIF) argued against investing with Kushner’s fund in 2021. This is a summary of their objections, based on internal documents, that was published in the New York Times:
[O]bjections included: “the inexperience of the Affinity Fund management”; the possibility that the kingdom would be responsible for “the bulk of the investment and risk”; due diligence on the fledgling firm’s operations that found them “unsatisfactory in all aspects”; a proposed asset management fee that “seems excessive”; and “public relations risks” from Mr. Kushner’s prior role as a senior adviser to his father-in-law, former President Donald J. Trump…
Ultimately, these objections were overruled by Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, and PIF invested $2 billion with Kushner. That investment appears indefensible on economic terms. But, viewed as the cost of buying influence with the Trump administration, it is still a bargain.
Senior U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly, above, is a Republican-nominated judge sitting in Washington, DC. She issued an important ruling regarding the Trump administration's federal prosecution of former FBI Director James Comey, shown in a file photo below, in the Eastern District of Virginia (EDVA) regarding messages seized by the FBI from Comey's lawyer and friend Daniel Richman, also shown below.
Emptywheel, Analysis: Colleen Kollar-Kotelly's Attempted Baby-Splitting Leads to Exploding Diaper, Emptywheel (Marcy Wheeler), right, Sept. 24, 2024. Jim Comey and Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly have a history of producing problematic Fourth Amendment precedent. And that seems to be happening again with Kollar-Kotelly's attempt to craft a neat solution to a problem caused by the government's unlawful searches of Comey's communications.
I suppose I should have reminded readers, somewhere in my close tracking of Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly’s attempt to craft a nifty solution to a difficult Fourth Amendment question, that she authored a 2004 FISA opinion from which a decade of bulk collection on Americans arose.
I delayed doing so, in part, because Tulsi Gabbard has deprecated the link to the official version and so I need to go find a copy. But this post describes the substance of the opinion. This post describes how subsequent phone dragnet opinions relied on it. And this timeline explains 
how, after Kollar-Kotelly was just the second FISA Judge read into the unconstitutional Stellar Wind program, and after she raised concerns about it, a guy named Jim Comey (shown at right) refused to reauthorize it in its then current form, which led to a famous standoff in a hospital, much drama, but only limited (and still largely undisclosed!) changes in the program, before Kollar-Kotelly wrote an opinion authorizing bulk collection that would be the cornerstone for 11 more years of bulk collection.
When we last reviewed this difficult Fourth Amendment question, Kollar-Kotelly had simply waved her hands over the original sins of unscoped 
seizures and overseized data targeting Dan Richman, right — which she deemed plausible Fourth Amendment violations but not something she had to deal with, she said, because she had found the later search of that likely unscoped data was itself a violation of the Fourth Amendment and so could apply a bunch of DC precedents that all addressed property that was, in the initial seizure, lawfully collected to data she agreed was plausibly also unlawfully collected. Then she ordered the government to send that unlawfully searched data to EDVA, where different precedents would apply, and where the government could get a warrant to access what they wanted.
In a motion to modify and clarify that was also, in a footnote, a motion for reconsideration, the government deftly asked to change the rules such that they would be able to keep the fruits of several iterations of unlawful searches, and Dan Richman would be gagged from revealing that’s what happened.
So here’s what Kollar-Kotelly — she of the history of difficult Fourth Amendment decisions and she with the two decade history with Jim Comey — has done since.
First, she issued an order bitching about the government’s last minute request and complaining that they didn’t raise these issues on the first go-around, but giving the government permission to keep anything derivative of those three iterations of unlawful seizures.
The Government’s [22] Motion, which was filed approximately one hour before the deadline for the filing of a certification of compliance set forth in this Court’s [20] Order, raises a variety of issues related to the handling of classified information and information that may be subject to the Government’s own privileges, including the attorney-client privilege and the deliberative process privilege. The Government could have -- and should have -- raised many of these issues earlier in its initial Response to Petitioner Richman’s [1] Motion for Return of Property, but it did not do so. The Court will clarify its [20] Order at greater length by separate order and, if appropriate, will request further briefing from the parties. For now, the Court notes three important clarifications:
[snip]
Further, this Court’s Order directed the return of Petitioner Richman’s own materials (and any copies of those materials), not any derivative files that the Government may have created. See Order, Dkt. No. 20, at 1 (directing the return of the original materials, copies of those materials, and any materials “directly obtained or extracted” from them); see also id. at 41 (explaining that the Court would not bar the Government from “using or relying on” the relevant materials in a separate investigation or proceeding). Accordingly, compliance with the Court’s Order will not intrude upon any of the Government’s privileges.
This order, by itself, would amount to permitting the government to use stuff tainted by a breach of attorney-client privilege (Jim Comey’s attorney-client privilege), something she has not dealt with at all.
Then yesterday, Kollar-Kotelly issued an order noting (in a footnote) the government request for reconsideration they buried in a footnote, but blowing it off …
1 In a footnote, the Government requests reconsideration of this Court’s merits ruling that the Government’s retention of the materials at issue violates Petitioner Richman’s Fourth Amendment right against unreasonable seizures. See Gov’t’s Mot., Dkt. No. 22, at 7 n.5. However, the primary focus of the Government’s [22) Emergency Motion is the proper scope of the remedy to be awarded. Accordingly, the Court focuses here on issues that are directly relevant to the issue of remedy.
… But also requiring (among other things) the parties to explain three things, with the following deadlines:
By 9:00 a.m. ET on Wednesday, December 17, 2025, the government should share its great ideas on how to keep all this data secure at EDVA. By 10:00 a.m. ET on Wednesday, December 17, 2025, the government should explain what it has from the original searches. By 2:00 p.m. ET on Wednesday, December 16, 2025, Richman should explain what he wants back, some of which may be influenced by the 10AM briefing.
The order pertaining to that 10AM explanation betrays how inadequate the original baby-splitting solution was, not least because Kollar-Kotelly doesn’t unpack that the stuff the government originally seized from Richman is evidence — or at least includes it.
Second, the Government argues in its [22] Emergency Motion that the Court’s Order “appears to require the Government to delete or destroy evidence originally, and lawfully, obtained pursuant to search warrants issued by the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia in 2019 and 2020.” Gov’t’s Mot., Dkt. No. 22, at 5. To be clear, the Court has not ordered the Government to delete or destroy any evidence; instead, it has ordered the Government to return certain materials to Petitioner Richman, while depositing others with a third-party custodian for safekeeping. However, to ensure that the remedy awarded in this case is appropriately tailored to the facts, the Court would benefit from more factual details regarding the Government’s execution of the search warrants issued in this District in 2019 and 2020. Id. Accordingly, it is ORDERED that, no later than 10:00 a.m. ET on Wednesday, December 17, 2025, the Government shall file with the Court a brief response to the following questions:
(1) Does the Government have in its possession a complete copy of any of the following:
(i) the “forensic image” of Petitioner Richman’s personal computer hard drive that the Government was authorized to search under the warrant issued in this District on August 27, 2019;
(ii) the information disclosed by Columbia University to the Government pursuant to the warrant issued in this District on October 22, 2019;
(iii) the information disclosed by Apple to the Government pursuant to the warrant issued in this District on January 30, 2020; or
(iv) the “contents of a hard drive … containing backup files of one Apple iPad 4 and one Apple iPhone 5S” that the Government was authorized to search under the warrant issued in this District on June 4, 2020?
(2) Under each of the four search warrants at issue, the Government was authorized to seize only responsive material, which constituted a subset of the information it was permitted to search. Did the Government create a separate file, disk, hard drive, or any other segregated collection of responsive material for any of the following:
(i) the material seized from Petitioner Richman’s personal hard drive pursuant to the warrant issued in this District on August 27, 2019;
(ii) the material seized from Petitioner Richman’s Columbia University email accounts pursuant to the warrant issued in this District on October 22, 2019;
(iii) the material seized from Petitioner Richman’s iCloud account pursuant to the warrant issued in this District on January 30, 2020; or
(iv) the material seized from the backup files of Richman’s Apple iPad 4 and Apple iPhone 5S pursuant to the warrant issued in this District on June 4, 2020? [my emphasis]
As Kollar-Kotelly alludes to elsewhere, these questions should have been answered before she made her original decision. But she doesn’t acknowledge that she would have needed this information, in part, to understand whether the first two seizures violated the Fourth Amendment, which — if they do — would mean her application of multiple precedents that all assume the initial seizure was lawful would be totally inapt.
But there are two reasons why even these belated questions are inadequate to her purpose.
First, as Kollar-Kotelly noted in her own opinion, which she cited via William Fitzpatrick’s opinion which in turn cited this FBI declaration, when the FBI searched all this data in September, they searched a full extraction of Richman’s phone and iPad.
For this search, an FBI agent was instructed to review “a Blu-ray disc that contained a full Cellebrite extraction and Reader reports” for two of Petitioner Richman’s devices to identify “conversations between [Petitioner Richman] and [Mr. Comey].”
As the full quote from the FBI declaration explained, when Francis Nero did that search, he received a Blu-ray sealed with red evidence tape.
On or about September 12, 2025, while assigned to the Director’s Advisory Team, I was requested by Special Agent Spenser Warren to review a Blu-ray disc that contained a full Cellebrite extraction and Reader reports of an iPhone and iPad backups. I was requested to review the Cellebrite extraction for conversations between RICHMAN and JAMES COMEY. SA Warren handled this agent a manilla envelope sealed with red evidence tape that contained the Blu-ray disc with the Cellebrite extraction.
We know this full extraction contained attorney-client communications. Kollar-Kotelly doesn’t ask, in her second question above, how privileged communications were treated back in 2019 and 2020. She needed to ask whether the FBI only scoped the data not covered by Richman’s privilege declarations (which is what happened, if they scoped it at all) or whether they gave him scoped materials on which to make privilege declarations. Whichever it is, though, there needs to be a question 3, because the government never had the right to search privileged materials (except, arguably, on the original image itself, because such searches were not yet explicitly prohibited).
More importantly, if Spenser Warren handed Nero the full extraction, then it doesn’t matter what happened in step 2 of Kollar-Kotelly’s question above, because the government simply searched, without a warrant, unscoped data that should have been destroyed. That red evidence tape may well be what the government did to ensure that the FBI didn’t snoop on unscoped data. If so, the smoking gun in this chain of unlawful seizures was the decision, by someone on the Director’s Advisory Team, to search unscoped data without a warrant. That’s not covered by Kollar-Kotelly’s questions at all.
The other reason Kollar-Kotelly’s questions are inadequate is because of this disclosure (which didn’t make Fitzpatrick’s opinion and so may not be before her).
5 The Order also required the government to provide, in writing, by the same deadline: “Confirmation of whether the Government has divided the materials searched pursuant to the four 2019 and 2020 warrants at issue into materials that are responsive and non-responsive to those warrants, and, if so, a detailed explanation of the methodology used to make that determination; A detailed explanation of whether, and for what period of time, the Government has preserved any materials identified as non-responsive to the four search warrants; A description identifying which materials have been identified as responsive, if any; and A description identifying which materials have previously been designated as privileged.” ECF No. 161 at 1-2.
Despite certifying on November 6 that it had complied with the Court’s Order, ECF No. 163, the government did not provide this information until the evening of November 9, 2025, in response to a defense inquiry. The government told the defense that it “does not know” whether there are responsive sets for the first, third, and fourth warrants, or whether it has produced those to the defense, and said that in that regard, “we are still pulling prior emails” and the “agent reviewed the filtered material through relativity but there appears to be a loss of data that we are currently trying to restore.” [my emphasis]
On November 9, in response to the same questions Kollar-Kotelly asked in her order but posed by Fitzpatrick, the government told Comey — but not in writing! — that they had no fucking clue what happened with the first, third, and fourth warrants, because something happened with Relativity, the software on which these distinctions would have been preserved. So they had to pull prior emails to figure out what the fuck they were doing searches on.
The government may still have no fucking clue what they’re dealing with, because they asked for a 48-hour extension on both their own deadlines.
Richman agreed to that delay but only if he also got an extension.
Counsel for Petitioner has informed the Government that he takes no position on this request, but respectfully requests that the Court provide Petitioner an equivalent extension of time to file his brief, see ECF No. 27 at 3, should the Court grant the Government’s motion.
Late yesterday, Kollar-Kotelly issued a docket order granting the government its two-day extension on the easier question — how to keep this data secure at EDVA — but just a two hour extension to the harder deadline — what the fuck happened with this data. She did not, however, grant Richman an extension at all, so his response must now be filed two hours after the government’s response.
The Court is in receipt of the Government’s 28 Motion for Additional Time to Respond to this Court’s 27 Order for supplemental submissions, which the Government filed at 6:28 p.m. ET this evening. The Government’s 28 Motion is GRANTED IN PART and DENIED IN PART. The Government’s Motion is GRANTED as to the 9:00 a.m. deadline for the submission of “best practices on safekeeping evidence,” which is CONTINUED to 9:00 a.m. ET on Friday, December 19, 2025. The Motion is GRANTED IN PART and DENIED IN PART as to the Government’s deadline to respond to the factual questions presented in this Court’s 27 Order. The Government shall file brief responses to these questions no later than 12:00 p.m. ET on Wednesday, December 17, 2025. The Motion is otherwise DENIED. Petitioner Richman’s response deadline is unchanged.
Again, Kollar-Kotelly needed answers to these questions before she crafted the baby-splitting solution. Because if the original data was overseized and then not preserved in its scoped form (or if someone fiddled with Relativity in the interim to muddle what data was properly seized in the first search), then her application of DC precedent was inappropriate. At least some of this data was — as far as we know (though there may be other warrants) — always unlawfully seized.
That 2004 opinion Kollar-Kotelly wrote was an attempt to solve an enormous problem caused by unlawful government spying, but it served as the cornerstone for 11 more years of unlawful government spying. This particularly baby-splitting solution may lack the gravity of that earlier opinion, but in its currently muddled form, has the potential of causing another decade of problems.
U.S. Media, Culture, Education
American neoconservative theorist and writer Norman Podhoretz at home in New York City. (Photo by David Howells/Corbis via Getty Images)
Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: Norman Podhoretz, 1930–2025, William Kristol, Dec. 17, 2025. Norman Podhoretz—perhaps the last of the New York intellectuals, one of the great magazine editors of our time, a gifted and powerful writer—died last night at age 95. His son John reports in his lovely eulogy that he died peacefully, “with a new translation of The Odyssey on his desk that had been sent to him by his friend Roger Hertog. It sat next to a copy of Alexander Pope’s legendary translation, which he had asked my sister Naomi to order for him so he could compare the two.”
I would have liked to hear Norman reflect on the relative merits of the Homer of Alexander Pope and of Daniel Mendelsohn. He would certainly have had interesting thoughts, most likely idiosyncratic ones. He surely wouldn’t have been bashful in judging the work of the translators—or for that matter, in judging the work of Homer himself.
Norman Podhoretz was perhaps best known for his firm judgments, expressed powerfully and compellingly. He was a leading and unapologetic participant in the war of ideas—actually, in several wars of ideas. I’d point in particular to his engagement on three fronts: the Cold War, Israel, and America.
Defending the necessity and justice of fighting the Cold War was more controversial in the 1970s and 1980s than we now tend to remember. Norman was an unwavering and unapologetic Cold Warrior, and he emboldened many of us to stay the course in that fight. And not only here in the United States. Many former dissidents from the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe have volunteered how important Norman’s articles, and the pieces he edited and published in Commentary, were to them in their struggle.
Speaking of Commentary, I should say that Norman’s tenure there from 1960 to 1995 ranks as one the most distinguished and important magazine editorships in our history. Take a look at some issues from that period. What a combination of argument, polemic, criticism, and appreciation! And at what a high level!
Norman and Commentary were of course well known as leading voices in making the case for Israel. Norman’s own contributions were distinctive, forceful—and crucial. The defense of Israel was controversial fifty years ago. It remains so today. Which is why his contributions, as writer and editor, were so important.
And Norman was a proud defender of America. His own odyssey from left to right began with a revulsion at what he saw as the left’s anti-Americanism in the 1960s. From then until the end of his life, he went to war for American decency and greatness when that cause was by no means popular in intellectual circles.
But Norman was more than a warrior for ideas. He was a man of ideas. As John put it, “At the very end of his life, Norman Podhoretz was his truest self, a man of letters.” Which meant that even if you didn’t always agree with him, you could always learn something from him, and from the magazine he edited with such distinction.
When I think of Norman, though, I won’t think first of his writing, or his editing, or his many contributions to our public life. I’ll think of him as a friend. And I’ll remember especially the wonderful Passover seders hosted by his daughter Rachel, which would culminate in Norman and Midge agreeing to sing the remarkable Yiddish song, “What Will Happen When the Messiah Comes?” This conclusion to the Seder, at once joyful and melancholy, is a memory Susan and I, and our children, will always cherish.
I don’t know what will happen when the Messiah comes. I am sure that if and when he comes, Norman will be grateful. But he’ll also have many challenging questions. He’ll make some combative arguments. What a scene that will be!
But until then, may Norman’s memory here on earth be a blessing.
Dec. 16
White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, seated at center, is surrounded by other top Trump Advisors of his second term ("Trump 2.0") as portrayed by a major two-part Vanity Fair portrait based on months of interviews by Chris Whipple (Photos by Christopher Anderson).
New York Times, Trump Administration: Live Updates: Trump Announces Blockade on Some Oil Tankers Going to and From Venezuela, Staff Reports, Dec. 16, 2025. Where Things Stand:
Blockade: President Trump announced that the United States would impose a blockade on all “sanctioned oil tankers” going to and from Venezuela, in an escalation of the administration’s monthslong pressure campaign against Nicolás Maduro, the leader of Venezuela. The move could lead to a drop in revenues that the Venezuelan government and its state-owned oil company get from oil exports. But the announcement left much unclear, including how many oil tankers would be affected. Read more ›
Boat strikes: Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth refused to share video of a heavily scrutinized Sept. 2 military strike on a suspected drug boat during briefings with Congress on Tuesday. Mr. Hegseth faced calls to share unedited video of the attack, in which a follow-up strike killed two survivors, but said he would play it only for the House and Senate Armed Services committees. Mr. Hegseth added that it would not be made public. Read more ›
Travel ban: President Trump expanded his broad travel restrictions to 20 more countries on Tuesday, limiting travel from several African nations and fully blocking travel from Syria and four other countries, as well for people with travel documents issued by the Palestinian Authority. Earlier this month, officials blocked immigration applications for people from the 19 initial travel ban countries, causing panic and canceling citizenship ceremonies.
In other news,President Trump announced that he is nominating a senior Department of Homeland Security official to be his ambassador to El Salvador. In a social media post, Trump praised his nominee, Troy Edgar, for his “deep understanding of Border Security and Western Hemisphere challenges.” El Salvador has factored prominently in the Trump Administration’s border security approach, working with D.H.S. to detain more than 200 Venezuelan men who were swept up in Trump’s immigration crackdown in a notorious Salvadorian prison.L
Speaking in the East Room at a Hanukkah ceremony, President Trump said the cost of his planned new ballroom has doubled from its original estiimate. He described the ballroom as costing $400 million, which he is raising from business interests and wealthy donors. He previously said the ballroom will cost $300 million, and before that $200 million. Earlier today, a judge said he would refrain from ordering construction on the ballroom to be immediately halted, as had been requested by the National Trust for Historic Preservation, which has sued over the project.
U.S. oil prices climbed modestly after President Trump said he was ordering a “blockade of all sanctioned oil tankers” entering and leaving Venezuela. Prices briefly topped $56 a barrel Tuesday evening after trading around $55 earlier in the day. The market has largely shrugged off the U.S. government’s efforts to isolate Venezuela’s oil industry because the country produces less than 1 percent of the crude the world uses.Edward WongDec. 16, 2025, 7:57 p.m. ET2 hours ago
A judge declined to immediately halt Trump’s ballroom project.ImageA large crane next to the White House.Construction equipment for the new ballroom at the White House in November. President Trump’s vision for the project has steadily grown in scale from more modest proposals discussed in October.
The Trump administration told a federal judge on Tuesday that it would submit plans for a new White House ballroom to be built in place of the East Wing to two federal oversight entities for review by the end of the month.
With that pledge in hand, Judge Richard J. Leon said he would refrain from ordering construction on the ballroom to be immediately halted, as had been requested by the National Trust for Historic Preservation, which has sued over the project.
But Judge Leon said that after the plans were delivered, he would hold a follow-up hearing in mid-January in which he would revisit whether the government was following protocol on construction.
“Let me assure you of something: The court will hold them to that,” he said. “They have until then to get it done.”
A lawyer for the administration told Judge Leon that it would file plans for the new 90,000-square-foot ballroom to the National Capital Planning Commission and the Commission of Fine Arts and, in the meantime, limit construction to underground preparatory work.
The two bodies, both established by Congress, play distinct roles in the review of certain federal projects on public lands. The National Capital Planning Commission, established in 1924, has a statutory authority to review and approve federal development projects. It is chaired by an appointee of the president but its membership includes non-Trump appointees, including residents selected by Washington’s mayor.
Shortly after Mr. Trump forged ahead with demolishing the East Wing, he also fired all six members of the Commission of Fine Arts. At Tuesday’s hearing, a lawyer for the government said Mr. Trump would need to appoint new members to the group.
The hearing came in response to a lawsuit filed last week by the National Trust, which argued that federal law requires the president to seek “express authorization” from Congress to proceed with such major changes to the White House and make its plans open for public comment.
During the hearing, Adam Gustafson, a Justice Department lawyer, said that plans for the ballroom were still in flux, and that Mr. Trump himself was “directing this process.” He told Judge Leon that with the East Wing already fully demolished, there was little the court could do to intervene in the next steps.
In a filing on Monday, the Trump administration said the changes were designed to adapt to the “evolving needs of the presidency.” The White House hosts major events and, without a large ballroom space, events routinely spill outside or must cap attendance. The administration sought to equate the project to other, far more minor renovations and additions that presidents have made throughout American history.
But Judge Leon appeared skeptical at times about the project’s rapid progression, pressing for details about its final scope.
Lawyers representing the National Trust argued in filings that the construction of the proposed structure, which is intended to accommodate as many as 1,000 people, had ballooned in scope to such an extent that it could overshadow much of the White House complex.
They described the president’s goal as “perhaps the most substantial exterior alteration to the country’s most recognizable and historically significant building since it was reconstructed after being burned during the War of 1812.”
In a filing before the hearing, the lawyers had asked the court to slam the brakes on “any and all actions in furtherance of the physical development of the ballroom project,” including further demolition, laying foundations and altering the surrounding landscape.
A nonprofit organization chartered by Congress to manage preservation of historical areas, the National Trust said the administration had violated a number of clear requirements in a secretive rush to realize Mr. Trump’s vision. It argued the White House had proceeded without soliciting public comment or submitting an environmental review, as required under the National Environmental Policy Act.
Tad Heuer, a lawyer representing the National Trust, told Judge Leon that at every stage of the project, starting with the initial demolition of the East Wing in October, groups concerned about the fate of the White House had been flying blind. He said the White House had consistently ignored past promises to release more details about the projects, and that the judge could not trust the new vow to submit the ballroom’s plans before the end of the month.
“It’s always going to happen in ‘the next two weeks,’” Mr. Heuer said of the pledge.
Since October, Democrats in Congress and media outlets have homed in on the corporations and wealthy donors who financed the project’s costs, which have ballooned and which Mr. Trump newly estimated at $400 million on Tuesday night. The lawsuit also documented the president’s evolving public statements about the project, which he once pledged would not involve demolition of existing structures and which has steadily grown in scale from more modest proposals discussed in October.Tyler PagerHamed AleazizDec. 16, 2025, 6:50 p.m. ET4 hours ago
President Trump on Tuesday expanded travel restrictions to include 20 more countries, just weeks after he promised to do so when authorities arrested an Afghan national in the shooting of two National Guard troops in Washington.
The revised policy, which takes effect on Jan. 1, fully blocks travel for individuals from five additional countries — Syria, South Sudan, Niger, Mali and Burkina Faso — and also for people with documents issued by the Palestinian Authority. The Trump administration also added partial travel restrictions for individuals from 15 additional countries, predominantly in Africa. With the expansion, there are now more than 35 countries with U.S. travel restrictions.
Mr. Trump first instituted a travel ban on 12 countries, including Afghanistan, in June and vowed after the shooting last month to “permanently pause migration from all third world countries.” Kristi Noem, the homeland security secretary, said she recommended to Mr. Trump “a full travel ban on every damn country that’s been flooding our nation with killers, leeches, and entitlement junkies.”
The partial travel restrictions apply to people from Angola, Antigua and Barbuda, Benin, Ivory Coast, Dominica, Gabon, Gambia, Malawi, Mauritania, Nigeria, Senegal, Tanzania, Tonga, Zambia and Zimbabwe.
The new policy also applies to spouses, children and parents of U.S. citizens as well as to Afghan Special Immigrant visas, which were set up for people who had helped the U.S. military and government during the war in Afghanistan.
Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: The Psych-Ward Presidency, Mona Charen, Mark Hertling, and Jim Swift, Dec. 16, 2025.The president has no moral core. And, according to his own chief of staff, he’s surrounded by amateurs, opportunists, and drug users.
Another tranche of sour economic data came down from the Bureau of Labor Statistics today. Jobs rose by 64,000 in November, but fell in October by 105,000, thanks in part to DOGE-induced federal layoffs that finally took effect. Worse: The economy is now losing blue-collar jobs—for the first time since the pandemic— and the unemployment rate ticked up more than expected, to 4.6 percent, the highest in four years. Happy Tuesday.
New York Times, Updates: U.S. Unemployment Rate Rises, a Warning Sign for Economy, Rebecca Davis O’Brien, Dec. 16, 2025. Employers added 64,000 jobs in November, according to data delayed by the government shutdown. The unemployment rate ticked up to 4.6 percent, its highest level since September 2021.
The unemployment rate rose in November, a warning sign for the health of a labor market that has been strained by federal layoffs and rising costs.
Unemployment last month rose to a rate of 4.6 percent up from 4.4 percent in September, the last month in which officials had a full picture of the labor force before the weekslong government shutdown. Employers added 64,000 jobs in November, but the federal government lost 105,000 jobs since September as workers hit by deferred resignations came off the payroll.
The data offered the first official snapshot of the U.S. labor market since the government shutdown, information that analysts and policymakers hoped would help clarify the state of the economy after months of conflicting signals. The report also included some belated data on October, collected from a survey of employers after the government shutdown ended.
Here’s what to know about the report:
Map of Terrorist Attack at Australia's most popular beach (New York Times graphic).
New York Times, Live Updates: Sydney Gunmen Were Motivated by ISIS, Australia’s Leader Says, Victoria Kim, Jin Yu Young, Yan Zhuang and Livia Albeck-Ripka, Dec. 16, 2025. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said two gunmen who killed 15 people at a Jewish holiday celebration were motivated by the Islamic State.
Here’s the latest.
“Radical perversion of Islam is absolutely a problem,” Prime Minister Anthony Albanese of Australia said at a news conference.
At the news conference, officials named the older gunman, who was shot and killed at the scene, as Sajid Akram. They did not name his son, who was injured and remains in a coma.
Sajid Akram was an Indian citizen from Hyderabad, in southern India, who moved to Australia in 1998 in search of a job, according to a statement released Tuesday by police in the southern Indian state of Telangana. The statement said that Mr. Akram had married in Australia, where he had two children who are Australian citizens: a son, Naveed, and a daughter.
Mr. Akram’s family in India told police there that he had rarely been in touch with them, visiting six times since his departure, the statement said, adding that Mr. Akram did not have a criminal record.
Australian officials said Tuesday that both the father and son had traveled to the Philippines last month, and that the reasons for that trip were being investigated.
The Philippine Bureau of Immigration said they had arrived in the country together on Nov. 1, reporting their final destination as Davao, a city considered the gateway to the south of the country. Parts of the southern Philippines remain a center for Islamic State militant activity. The two men left the country on Nov. 28.
The father was a licensed holder of six firearms that were registered to him legally, according to the authorities.
Officials previously said the son had come to the authorities’ attention in 2019, but that it was determined that he did not pose an immediate threat. His father was also interviewed at the time, officials have said.
The Australian news media has reported, citing unnamed police sources, that the 2019 investigation was over Naveed Akram’s links to Isaac El Matari, a self-proclaimed Islamic State commander based in Sydney who was convicted of plotting a terrorist attack. He was sentenced to seven years in prison in 2021.
Here’s what else to know:
Nick Reiner, who is in custody but has not been charged with a crime, has openly discussed his battles with heroin and cocaine in interviews and podcasts (Aude Guerrucci photo via Reuters).
New York Times, Reiners’ Son Formally Charged With Murder in Parents’ Deaths, Staff Reports, Dec. 16, 2025. Nick Reiner, 32, is accused of killing his parents, the director Rob Reiner and Michele Reiner. He faces two counts of first-degree murder.
Nick Reiner, a son of the beloved Hollywood fixtures Rob Reiner and Michele Singer Reiner, was formally charged Tuesday with two counts of first-degree murder in the death of his parents, prosecutors said.
Nathan J. Hochman, the Los Angeles County district attorney, said that prosecutors would request that the murder charges be considered under “special circumstances,” in part because there were multiple murders, meaning that the maximum sentence could be the death penalty or life in prison without parole.
Although Gov. Gavin Newsom of California has put a moratorium on executions, Mr. Hochman said that his office was still weighing whether to pursue the death penalty in this case.
The charges came two days after the couple were found stabbed to death on Sunday afternoon in their home in the Brentwood section of Los Angeles.
Nick Reiner, 32, did not appear in court on Tuesday because he had not been medically cleared to be transferred to the courthouse from the jail, his lawyer told reporters at the courthouse. The screening is a requirement to ensure that detainees do not need medical treatment, and Nick Reiner, once medically cleared, will be brought to court for arraignment, Mr. Hochman said. At that time, Nick Reiner will enter a plea. Nick Reiner is being represented by Alan Jackson, one of the most well-known criminal defense lawyers in the region.
Deputy Chief Alan Hamilton of the Los Angeles Police Department said Nick Reiner was arrested without incident Sunday night near Exposition Park, not far from the campus of the University of Southern California.
New York Times, Death of Rob Reiner: Nick Reiner’s Struggles With Drugs Left His Parents ‘Desperate,’ Julia Jacobs and Nicole Sperling, Updated Dec. 16, 2025. Mr. Reiner, who was arrested in connection with the deaths of Rob and Michele Reiner, once estimated he had been in drug treatment 18 times as a teenager.
After Nick Reiner entered his first drug treatment program around the age of 15, his turbulent life veered between rehab and homelessness, sobriety efforts and relapse.
At times, it appeared as though he had achieved more stability in adulthood. But any semblance of equilibrium was shattered when Mr. Reiner’s parents, the Hollywood director Rob Reiner, 78, and Michele Singer Reiner, 70, were found stabbed to death in their Los Angeles home on Sunday.
Nick Reiner, 32, was arrested on suspicion of murder and is being held without bail.
For many years, Rob Reiner, the creator of beloved movies such as “When Harry Met Sally …” and “The Princess Bride,” was contending with a child in crisis. The family struggle was largely kept private when Nick Reiner was young, but as an adult he openly discussed his battles with heroin and cocaine in interviews and podcasts. He once estimated he had been in drug treatment 18 times during his teenage years.
In the public interviews, Nick Reiner told anecdotes about his crises and his volatile behavior. Once, awake for days on cocaine in his parents’ guest house, he “started punching out different things,” including a television and a lamp, he recalled on the podcast “Dopey” in 2018. “Everything in the guest house got wrecked,” he said.
Another time, he said, he had a heart attack on a plane because of cocaine use and woke up in a hospital.
And he once threw a rock through a window at a treatment center to convince officials that he needed medication, he said on another podcast about addiction in 2016.
“I was so lost — I didn’t know anything about myself or the world,” Mr. Reiner said on the podcast. “And that’s all I knew as a coping mechanism.”
New York Times, Trump Seizes on Rob Reiner’s Death to Attack the Hollywood Director, Luke Broadwater, Dec. 16, 2025 (print ed.). The president attributed the killing to “Trump derangement syndrome,” but his disparaging comments drew backlash even from conservative allies (such as U.S. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, below) who said they were inappropriate.
President Trump seized on the stabbing death of Rob Reiner and his wife to make a baseless attack on the Hollywood director less than a day after reports of his killing, suggesting that Mr. Reiner’s criticism of Mr. Trump may have led to his murder.
The attack on Mr. Reiner, so soon after his death, prompted a rare backlash against the president from some MAGA-aligned Republicans, some of whom urged the president to retract his comments.
Mr. Trump wrote on Truth Social on Monday that Mr. Reiner’s death was “reportedly due to the anger he caused others through his massive, unyielding, and incurable affliction with a mind crippling disease known as TRUMP DERANGEMENT SYNDROME.”
Asked by reporters later in the day whether he stood by those comments, Mr. Trump was unapologetic: “Well, I wasn’t a fan of his at all. He was a deranged person.” He added, “I thought he was very bad for our country.”
The Reiners’ 32-year-old son has been booked on suspicion of murder, the police said. There was no indication from the authorities that the couple’s political beliefs had anything to do with their deaths. Mr. Reiner was found dead on Sunday alongside his wife, Michele Singer Reiner, at their home in Los Angeles.
Mr. Trump’s attack brought immediate outrage, including from close allies who said the attack undercut Republicans’ calls for civility after the assassination of Charlie Kirk. Prominent conservatives called for public shaming, firings and the threat of prosecution for those who spoke ill of Mr. Kirk.
“A man and his wife were murdered last night. This is NOT the appropriate response,” Jenna Ellis, right, Mr. Trump’s former lawyer who is now a 
conservative radio host, wrote on social media on Monday. “The Right uniformly condemned political and celebratory responses to Charlie Kirk’s death. This is a horrible example from Trump (and surprising considering the two attempts on his own life) and should be condemned by everyone with any decency.”
Over the years, Mr. Trump has shown little empathy over the deaths of perceived rivals. He criticized Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, after his death and suggested a deceased Democratic lawmaker, John D. Dingell of Michigan, was looking up from hell.
His attack on the Reiners came as many were still in shock over their violent deaths.
Sage Steele, the former ESPN host and Trump ally, responded online, calling the president’s post “so disappointing.” She added: “It’s comments like this that take away from the countless great things @realDonaldTrump does for America.”
Representative Thomas Massie, Republican of Kentucky, wrote on social media that “regardless of how you felt about Rob Reiner, this is inappropriate and disrespectful discourse about a man who was just brutally murdered.” He added: “I guess my elected GOP colleagues, the VP, and White House staff will just ignore it because they’re afraid? I challenge anyone to defend it.”
More On U.S. Politics, Governance
Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: The President Is Morally Sick, Mona Charen, right, Dec. 16, 2025. Yesterday, the world reacted in horror to the news of the murder of Rob Reiner and his wife, apparently at the hands of their own troubled son. Donald Trump had a more unique response. The post is deranged, pathologically narcissistic, crude, stupid, and cruel. No human adult outside a psych ward expresses such thoughts. To have them at all is evidence of a twisted soul.
A couple has been murdered in their own home, their throats slit. Rob Reiner was a Hollywood giant who played a huge part in American culture for half a century and brought pleasure to millions around the globe. One might think that Trump’s admiration for fame and money alone might have stayed his hand in celebrating this tragic crime.
But no. Reiner was a Democrat and an opponent of Trump, so our commander in chief, who evidently fantasizes about the violent death of every critic, took time out of his busy TV-watching schedule to gloat that Reiner had been murdered because of his “raging obsession” with Trump.
Take a minute just to marvel at this. For most people, the idea of political violence committed by one’s own side is so psychologically uncomfortable that many would prefer to pretend it doesn’t exist. When such violence does break out, many prefer to retreat into comfortable lies rather than face the fact that their allies might stoop to such lows. And when the evidence is overwhelming that their confederates have done something despicable, they reach for crutches like “false flag.”
Trump is the opposite. So powerful is his thirst for political violence that he not only fails to recoil from it when it breaks out; he fantasizes that it’s taking place even when it isn’t. There’s zero reason to believe Reiner’s murder had anything to do with his political opposition to Trump. But the president says this is true for the same reason he says many false things are true: because he wants it to be true.
Has there ever been a simpler encapsulation of the Trump era? We suffer through daily reminders of the weakness of the president’s mind, but the United States has muddled along with other dim presidents.
Where Trump occupies a category all his own is in his breathtaking moral depravity.And witness the devoted cheering section who insist upon overlooking this man’s monstrousness. Trump’s immorality has been on vivid display for a decade, but the response by his defenders has always been to treat attention to the matter either as pure partisanship or as class condescension. For those whose minds were not nailed shut, however, the brutality of his actions comes as no surprise. Yes, a man who could rouse a crowd to murderous fury to attack Congress and his own vice president can assassinate people in boats, starve and kill hungry mothers and children in poor nations, pardon powerful drug runners, and send hapless immigrants to foreign gulags.
During these ethical swamp years, Trump’s denizens have fallen back again and again to excusing his evil as a matter of manners. Sorry, no. This is not a matter of style. The man is a moral abomination, and so are his defenders.
Not only that—notice how he continually makes his lackeys worse. Before Trump weighed in yesterday, most of the right wing’s social media discourse over Reiner was taking place in an odd, sanctimonious register—genuine shock and mourning over the tragedy paired with a million self-congratulatory little soliloquies about how Republicans, unlike those deranged leftists, don’t dance on the graves of their opponents. But then Trump posted, and the tone swung round at once: Suddenly dancing on Reiner’s grave was very much in style.
It is hard to be surprised. When you’ve spent ten years allowing your conscience to atrophy, there’s no muscle left. The president has no moral core. And, according to his own chief of staff, he’s surrounded by amateurs, opportunists, and drug users.
And witness the devoted cheering section who insist upon overlooking this man’s monstrousness. Trump’s immorality has been on vivid display for a decade, but the response by his defenders has always been to treat attention to the matter either as pure partisanship or as class condescension. For those whose minds were not nailed shut, however, the brutality of his actions comes as no surprise. Yes, a man who could rouse a crowd to murderous fury to attack Congress and his own vice president can assassinate people in boats, starve and kill hungry mothers and children in poor nations, pardon powerful drug runners, and send hapless immigrants to foreign gulags.
During these ethical swamp years, Trump’s denizens have fallen back again and again to excusing his evil as a matter of manners. Sorry, no. This is not a matter of style. The man is a moral abomination, and so are his defenders.
Not only that—notice how he continually makes his lackeys worse. Before Trump weighed in yesterday, most of the right wing’s social media discourse over Reiner was taking place in an odd, sanctimonious register—genuine shock and mourning over the tragedy paired with a million self-congratulatory little soliloquies about how Republicans, unlike those deranged leftists, don’t dance on the graves of their opponents. But then Trump posted, and the tone swung round at once: Suddenly dancing on Reiner’s grave was very much in style.
It is hard to be surprised. When you’ve spent ten years allowing your conscience to atrophy, there’s no muscle left.
The Triad via The Bulwark, Trump's Consigliere Just Stepped In It, Jonathan V. Last, above, Dec. 16, 2025. No one will ever pay for this.
Someday this will be over.
I can’t tell you how it will resolve, or in which direction. Maybe America sinks into illiberal democracy, like Hungary. Or maybe we roll back the autocratic push and reestablish a stable democracy. But three years from now, or seven years from now, or twelve years from now, this intermediate period will end.
Here’s what I can tell you: If we get lucky enough save democracy, then the people who did this to America—the people who excused, and covered, and enabled Trump’s autocratic attempt—will take it as proof that Trump was never a real danger to begin with.
Look how overwrought you were, they’ll say. You spent a decade telling us that Trump was trying to overturn democracy. But the fact that we don’t live in a dictatorship proves that Trump was normal and that we should never listen to you hysterics.
Our success will be used to discredit us, like a quantum theory of suicide:¹ If democracy survives, then that is proof that it was never under threat in the first place.
That’s just something for you to meditate on this holiday season. The people who did this to America will never pay a price. And if we defeat them, our success will be used as an argument against us.
It will be an approximation of our post-COVID experience. The Americans who made it through COVID took their survival as proof that the pandemic was never that serious and the real villains were the people and protocols that saved, and thereby inconvenienced, them.
2. Susie Suzie Suzy
White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, seated at center, is surrounded by other top Trump Advisors of his second term ("Trump 2.0") as portrayed by a major two-part Vanity Fair portrait based on months of interviews by Chris Whipple (Photos by Christopher Anderson).
Speaking of people who will never pay a price, Trump’s chief of staff, Susie Wiles, sat for a long series of interviews with Vanity Fair’s Chris Whipple and holy motherforking shirtballs.
I’ve read the entire thing and it’s an astonishing document.
People will say that this piece is devastating because Wiles is so candid. I disagree. The most devastating aspect is the extent to which Wiles contradicts herself and is an unreliable narrator. For instance:
Wiles said Trump has “an alcoholic’s personality.” He “operates [with] a view that there’s nothing he can’t do. Nothing, zero, nothing.”
Then there’s this section in which she insists that Trump isn’t seeking retribution:
Back in March, on the 56th day of Trump’s presidency, I’d asked Wiles: “Do you ever go in to Trump and say, ‘Look, this is not supposed to be a retribution tour?’”
“Yes, I do,” she’d replied. “We have a loose agreement that the score settling will end before the first 90 days are over.”
In late August, I asked Wiles: “Remember when you said to me months ago that Trump promised to end the revenge and retribution tour after 90 days?”
“I don’t think he’s on a retribution tour,” she said. “A governing principle for him is, ‘I don’t want what happened to me to happen to somebody else.’ And so people that have done bad things need to get out of the government. In some cases, it may look like retribution. And there may be an element of that from time to time. Who would blame him? Not me.” . . .
Which brings Whipple to Trump’s attempts to indict his enemies:
“So all of this talk,” I said, “about accusing Letitia James of mortgage fraud. . . .”
“Well, that might be the one retribution,” Wiles replied. . . .
In November, it was Comey’s turn in the dock. “So tell me why the Comey prosecution doesn’t just look like the fix is in,” I asked her.
“I mean, people could think it does look vindictive. I can’t tell you why you shouldn’t think that.” Wiles said of Trump: “I don’t think he wakes up thinking about retribution. But when there’s an opportunity, he will go for it.”
And then to the question about a third term:
“Will the president run for a third term?” I asked in November.
“No,” she said and then added, “But he sure is having fun with it.” Wiles said he knows it’s “driving people crazy.”
“So that’s why he talks about it,” I said.
“Yeah, 100 percent.”
“Would you say categorically no, and that the 22nd Amendment rules out [a third term]?”
“I do. Yeah. And I’m not a lawyer, but based on my reading of it, it’s pretty unequivocal.”
“And has he told you that in so many words?”
“Yes. Oh, a couple times, yeah.”
And then she went on. “Sometimes he laments, ‘You know, gosh, I feel like we’re doing really well. I wish I could run again.’ And then he immediately says, ‘Not really. I will have served two terms and I will have gotten done what I need to get done, and it’s time to give somebody else a chance.’ So, you know, any given day, right? But he knows he can’t run again.”
So according to Wiles:
How does that work?
Also: She lies. Here’s Wiles claiming that when everyone saw Trump fall asleep, he wasn’t asleep:
In December, when asked about Trump falling asleep in Cabinet meetings, Wiles said, “He’s not asleep. He’s got his eyes closed and his head leaned back . . . and, you know, he’s fine.”
And here’s Wiles insisting that Republicans will actually win the midterm elections:
I asked Wiles for her prediction [on the 2026 elections]. “We’re going to win the midterms,” she said crisply.
Keep these instance in mind when evaluating everything this woman says.
Another recurring theme is the extent to which Trump has no idea what his administration is doing. Here’s Wiles on the dismantling of USAID:
Trump’s chief was shocked when [Elon Musk] eviscerated USAID, the United States Agency for International Development. “I was initially aghast,” Wiles told me. “Because I think anybody that pays attention to government and has ever paid attention to USAID believed, as I did, that they do very good work.”
In his executive order freezing foreign aid, Trump had decreed that lifesaving programs should be spared. Instead, they were shuttered. “When Elon said, ‘We’re doing this,’ he was already into it,” said Wiles. “And that’s probably because he knew it would be horrifying to others. But he decided that it was a better approach to shut it down, fire everybody, shut them out, and then go rebuild. Not the way I would do it.”
Wiles knew that fixing this was on her. “The president doesn’t know and never will,” she told me. “He doesn’t know the details of these smallish agencies.”
The president also seems not to know anything about what the government is doing with Ghislaine Maxwell:
In July, Todd Blanche, the deputy attorney general and Trump’s former lawyer, traveled to a Tallahassee, Florida, courthouse to interview Epstein’s longtime associate, Ghislaine Maxwell. Convicted on sex trafficking charges in 2021, she received a 20-year prison sentence. “It’s not typical, is it,” I asked Wiles, “to send the number two guy in the DOJ and the president’s former defense lawyer to interview a convicted sex trafficker?” According to Wiles, “It was [Blanche’s] suggestion.”
Wiles said that neither she nor Trump had been consulted about Maxwell’s transfer to a less restrictive facility after Blanche’s visit. “The president was ticked,” according to Wiles. “The president was mighty unhappy. I don’t know why they moved her. Neither does the president.” But, she said, “if that’s an important point, I can find out.” (At press time, Wiles said she still had not found out.)
So: Trump is completely keyed in on what regional federal prosecutors are doing on mortgage fraud investigations, but he has no idea what happens with USAID or Ghislaine Maxwell.
Sure.
Wiles says that Trump says factually incorrect things:
Wiles told me she’d read what she calls “the Epstein file.” And, she said, “[Trump] is in the file. And we know he’s in the file. And he’s not in the file doing anything awful.” Wiles said that Trump “was on [Epstein’s] plane . . . he’s on the manifest. They were, you know, sort of young, single, whatever—I know it’s a passé word but sort of young, single playboys together.” . . .
Trump has claimed, without evidence, that Bill Clinton visited Epstein’s infamous private island, Little St. James, “supposedly 28 times.” “There is no evidence” those visits happened, according to Wiles; as for whether there was anything incriminating about Clinton in the files, “The president was wrong about that.”
So: The Epstein files aren’t a hoax. Trump is in them. He was on Epstein’s plane. And contra Trump’s assertions, there is no evidence putting Bill Clinton on Epstein’s island.
Good to know.
But it’s interesting that Wiles’s modified, limited hang-out draws the line at Trump’s birthday note to Epstein, which Wiles insists—without evidence—is fake:
What about the birthday greeting featuring a sketch of a nude woman, which, according to The Wall Street Journal, bore Trump’s name and was sent to Epstein for his 50th birthday? “That letter is not his,” Wiles said. “And nothing about it rings true to me, nor does it to people that have known the president a lot longer than I have. I can’t explain The Wall Street Journal, but we’re going to get some discovery because we sued them. So we’re going to find out.”
How could Wiles possibly know if the letter is authentic? She can’t.
That she draws the line here tells us about where Trump’s defenders are going to make their stand on Epstein.
I am not particularly interested in the disposition of Wiles’s soul. But I am interested in understanding how this woman operates, because that knowledge guides our preparations for future events.
And here is all you need to know about Susie Wiles as a chief of staff:
After an hour, as I got up to go, I told her about how President Barack Obama’s chief Rahm Emanuel used to complain to visitors about how thankless his job was: “This is nice,” he said, pointing to the wood-burning fireplace, “and this is nice,” gesturing toward the outdoor patio. “And everything in between sucks.” Wiles replied: “I don’t feel that way at all.”
To the left of the fireplace was a freestanding video monitor: a live feed of Trump’s Truth Social posts. . . .
Wiles told me in March that she had difficult conversations with Trump every day. “They’re over little things, not big,” she said. “I hear stories from my predecessors about these seminal moments where you have to go in and tell the president what he wants to do is unconstitutional or will cost lives. I don’t have that.”
The unmistakable conclusion is that this is not an administration that can be counted on to stop itself from doing terrible things. Un-American things. Even illegal things. And Trump’s chief of staff just said so, out loud.
The Vanity Fair piece is a long two parts, but it’s worth your time. I just want to mention one minor aspect, about Elon Musk.
When I asked her what she thought of Musk reposting a tweet about public sector workers killing millions under Hitler, Stalin, and Mao, she replied: “I think that’s when he’s microdosing.” . . .
Wiles says she called Musk on the carpet. “You can’t just lock people out of their offices,” she recalls telling him. At first, Wiles didn’t grasp the effect that slashing USAID programs would have on humanitarian aid. “I didn’t know a lot about the extent of their grant making.” But with immunizations halted in Africa, lives would be lost. Soon she was getting frantic calls from relief agency heads and former government officials with a dire message: Thousands of lives were in the balance. . . .
“Elon’s attitude is you have to get it done fast. If you’re an incrementalist, you just won’t get your rocket to the moon,” Wiles said.
Two observations:
(1) Musk has never put a rocket on the moon.
(2) To date, the only American group which has put rockets on the moon was NASA, a government-run organization staffed with careful, diligent engineers who absolutely built the American space project incrementally.
It is one thing to make up ahistorical nonsense to cover for your principal. It’s quite another to do it to excuse someone who caused the deaths of hundreds of thousands of poor people.
What a fucking monster. Both of them.
More On Epstein-Trump Scandals
Emptywheel, Analysis: The Epistemology of the Epstein Scandal, Emptywheel (Marcy Wheeler), right, Dec. 16, 2025. In her interviews with Vanity Fair, Susie Wiles and an anonymous White House official who might be conspiracy theorist JD Vance claim that only newer Trump voters really care about Jeffrey Epstein.
One of the longest part of Vanity Fair’s two-part (one, two) interview with Susie Wiles focuses on Jeffrey Epstein. It goes like this:
¶1: Chris Whipple’s explanation of why it’s important.¶2: Wiles’ admission she underestimated the import of it.¶3: A review of Pam Bondi’s binder fiasco, with Wiles commenting on Bondi’s fuck-up.¶4: A report on how many FBI agents reviewed the files, with Wiles’ claim they weren’t just searching for Trump.¶5: Wiles’ claim there was nothing bad on Trump in the files, just him and Epstein being “young, single playboys.”¶6: Wiles debunking Trump’s false claims about Clinton’s ties to Epstein.¶7: Wiles describing that Kash Patel and Dan Bongino really understood Epstein, except Kash was wrong.¶8: Wiles’ failure to offer an explanation for Todd Blanche’s interview with Ghislaine Maxwell.¶9: Wiles’ claim that Trump was pissed Ghislaine got moved.¶10: Wiles’ claim that the birthday letter to Epstein is not from Trump.¶11 – ¶12: Wiles’ claim that Trump would sit for a deposition in his WSJ lawsuit if necessary.¶13: Whipple explaining the threat of the Epstein files again, then quoting Wiles on who cares about it.¶14: Someone at the White House who might be JD Vance explaining who cares about it.¶15: A specific mention of Vance, with further explanation of those who care about Epstein.
Elsewhere, Wiles credits herself with a great read of electoral outcomes (even while describing her own prediction that Jack Ciattarelli might beat Mikie Sherill last month): She was certain they would win last year, she didn’t think November would be that bad, they’re going to win midterms.
Her confidence (even if feigned) is why I’m so interested in Wiles’ description of the relative knowledge about Epstein. As noted, she admitted to Whipple that she didn’t understand how important this scandal could be, deferring knowledge on such issues to Kash Patel, Dan Bongino, and JD Vance — two of whom she describes as conspiracy theorists.
Wiles told me she underestimated the potency of the scandal: “Whether he was an American CIA asset, a Mossad asset, whether all these rich, important men went to that nasty island and did unforgivable things to young girls,” she said, “I mean, I kind of knew it, but it’s never anything I paid a bit of attention to.”
[snip]
The people that really appreciated what a big deal this is are Kash [Patel] and [FBI deputy director] Dan Bongino,” she said. “Because they lived in that world. And the vice president, who’s been a conspiracy theorist for a decade…. For years, Kash has been saying, ‘Got to release the files, got to release the files.’ And he’s been saying that with a view of what he thought was in these files that turns out not to be right.” [brackets original]
But then six paragraphs after describing that longtime Trump loyalist Kash Patel was totally into [a false belief] about the Epstein files, first Wiles and then someone who might be JD Vance (who is mentioned in the following paragraph) describe their understanding of who cares about this: “people that are sort of new to our world.”
The Epstein files debacle poses a dire political threat to Trump and the future of the GOP. “The people that are inordinately interested in Epstein are the new members of the Trump coalition, the people that I think about all the time—because I want to make sure that they are not Trump voters, they’re Republican voters,” Wiles said. “It’s the Joe Rogan listeners. It’s the people that are sort of new to our world. It’s not the MAGA base.”
A senior White House official described the mindset of an overlapping bloc of voters who are angered by both Trump’s handling of the Epstein files and the war in Gaza. It’s as much as 5 percent of the vote and includes “union members, the podcast crowd, the young people, the young Black males. They are interested in Epstein. And they are the people that are disturbed that we are as cozy with Israel as we are.”
Susie Wiles, who has been around Trump since he was first elected, claims “the people that are inordinately interested in Epstein” are “not the MAGA base”!!!
And then that anonymous White House official who might be JD Vance (whom Wiles explains is a conspiracy theorist) describes that the “young Black males” are the ones who care about Epstein.
To be fair, it is the case that the MAGAt base voters who do care deeply about this — people like Charlie Kirk, Benny Johnson, and Jack Posobiec — quickly fell in line when Trump demanded they stop talking about Epstein in July.
But like Kash and Bongino themselves, these are the people who made Epstein specifically and conspiracy theories about pedophiles more generally some of the central glue of Trump’s coalition.
As I wrote for TPM’s anniversary series, the superpower of reclaiming attention which Trump has honed with these same far right trolls has always been developed in parallel with the use of conspiracy theories about pedophilia — from Posobiec’s Pizzagate, to QAnon, to Epstein — to keep that attention.
On July 8, something happened to Donald Trump that I’ve not seen happen in the entire decade he has dominated presidential politics. As his base clamored for more disclosures about sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, his superpower — his ability to grab and redirect attention — briefly failed him. “Are you still talking about Jeffrey Epstein?” he whined when a journalist asked about the Justice Department’s decision to abort any further disclosure of documents related to the case. “This guy’s been talked about for years.”
[snip]
Two things had disrupted Trump’s superpower. First, after Trump’s top DOJ appointees — Attorney General Pam Bondi, FBI Director Kash Patel, and his deputy Dan Bongino – had fueled, then disappointed, MAGA’s demand for Epstein disclosures, the failure to fulfill their promises fed the conspiracy itself. By thwarting the conspiracists’ demands, Bondi, especially, created rifts and distrust in Trump’s own base.
Conspiracy theories about Epstein were always non-falsifiable; the mob will never be satisfied. But Bondi made that dynamic worse.
More important for understanding what happened in July: the very same online trolls who’ve been critical partners in Trump’s success managing attention were precisely the same people who had spun those conspiracy theories. There is a direct through-line from a relatively small set of social media accounts that helped Trump win the 2016 election to PizzaGate and, after that, QAnon. QAnoners played a key role in Trump’s 2021 insurrection attempt, and its adherents remain a substantial portion of Trump’s base. Since 2016, pro-Trump trolls’ exploitation of social media algorithms to redirect political news coverage — whether from legacy media or newer outlets — has disrupted traditional news cycles.
And while some of what Wiles says about Epstein — her claim Trump was pissed Ghislaine got moved, her feigned certainty that the birthday letter is not from Trump — is clearly bullshit, Wiles and the anonymous person who might be JD nevertheless offered a very specific, and very inaccurate, description of which Trump voters care about Epstein.
Maybe they’re telling this tale because it’s the same thing they told House members in a bid to kill the Massie-Khanna discharge petition. Maybe they’re telling this tale because everyone Wiles thinks knows about Epstein is a conspiracy theorist and the guy who really knows is just a former young playboy.
But even though Trump got Kirk and Benny and Posobiec to give up their sustained demand for Epstein materials, it remains the case that Trump has never fully recovered from the fiasco in July. First Mike Johnson had to flee a week early in July or risk embarrassing votes, then Bondi’s desperate bid — using the White House situation room — to convince Lauren Boebert to defect from the discharge petition backfired, then the Epstein fiasco ultimately led Marjorie Taylor Greene to break with Trump more substantially.
And tomorrow, DOJ will be forced to hand over the Epstein files themselves.
For five months, Epstein has remained at least a low-level burn undermining Trump’s ability to manage the public’s focus and his own policy goals. The Epstein thing was the first thing that led Republicans to defect, and now they’re defecting left and right.
And yet Wiles (and her anonymous friend who might be conspiracy theorist JD Vance) professes to believe the only people who care about Epstein are the young Black voters that Trump just won over last year?
That’s either a fantastic lie. Or a confession that explains far more about why Trump has bolloxed Epstein so badly.
Jeffrey Epstein posed for a photo when Cosmopolitan magazine named him its “bachelor of the month” in July 1980 (PhotoCredit: Stephen Ogilvy).
New York Times Magazine, Scams, Schemes, Ruthless Cons: The Untold Story of How Jeffrey Epstein Got Rich, David Enrich, Steve Eder, Jessica Silver-Greenberg and Matthew Goldstein, Dec. 16, 2025. For years, rumors swirled about where his wealth came from. A Times investigation reveals the truth of how a college dropout clawed his way to the pinnacle of American finance and society.
The reporters, who have been investigating Jeffrey Epstein since 2019, interviewed dozens of his former colleagues, girlfriends, business partners and others. They also dug through archives, reviewed photos, notes and emails and scoured thousands of pages of public records.
One evening in early 1976, a bushy-haired Jeffrey Epstein showed up for an event at an art gallery in Midtown Manhattan. Epstein was a math and physics teacher at the city’s prestigious Dalton School, and the father of one of his students had invited him. Epstein initially demurred, saying he didn’t go out much, but eventually relented. It would turn out to be one of the best decisions he ever made.
At the gallery, Epstein bumped into another Dalton parent, who had heard tales of the 23-year-old’s wondrous math skills. The parent asked if he’d ever thought about a job on Wall Street, according to an unreleased recording of Epstein and a document prepared by his lawyers. Epstein was game. The parent dialed a friend: Ace Greenberg, a top executive at Bear Stearns. Epstein, the friend told Greenberg, was “wasting his time at Dalton.”
Greenberg invited Epstein to the investment firm’s offices at 55 Water Street at the southern tip of Manhattan. Epstein showed up in a turtleneck. Greenberg was impressed — even though the young man didn’t have the foggiest idea of how Wall Street worked. Greenberg had helped build Bear Stearns into one of the industry’s scrappiest firms by eschewing the traditional investment-banking practice of hiring Ivy Leaguers with M.B.A.s. He preferred what he called P.S.D.s: those who were poor, smart and had “a deep desire to become rich.”
Epstein fit the bill. He grew up in a working-class family in Coney Island. Friends described him as a math whiz and a piano virtuoso. And, as Greenberg and his colleagues would soon learn, he yearned for wealth. That trait had been apparent as early as ninth grade: A classmate told us that Epstein predicted to her that one day he would be very rich.
Before offering Epstein a job, Greenberg had him meet another senior executive, Michael Tennenbaum. His son happened to be a Dalton student, who reported to his father that Epstein was popular with students and the school’s young female staff members. Epstein went to Tennenbaum’s office overlooking New York Harbor for an interview. “He was just a hell of a salesman,” Tennenbaum told us. Epstein was hired.
It was an extraordinarily lucky break for him — the first of many. Administrators at Dalton, unimpressed with Epstein’s teaching, had asked him to leave the school after the academic year ended. Now, just like that, he had a new job that paid about $25,000 a year (roughly $140,000 in today’s dollars).
Greenberg viewed the young man as a protégé. Early on, he invited Epstein to a dinner party and seated him next to his 20-year-old daughter, Lynne, who told us that she suspected it was a setup. The two hit it off and started dating. Word of the new guy’s romance with the boss’s daughter spread quickly, granting Epstein something akin to protected status at the firm.
Tennenbaum soon became Epstein’s supervisor. “He was proving to be quite talented,” Tennenbaum told us. But in late 1976, he received a disconcerting phone call from the head of Bear Stearns’s personnel department. Employees had belatedly gotten around to checking Epstein’s résumé, which stated that he had received degrees from two California universities
“Are you sitting down?” the H.R. official asked Tennenbaum. “Neither school has heard of him.”
Tennenbaum was in a delicate spot. He asked Greenberg what to do. The response, Tennenbaum told us, was that he should treat Epstein as if he were a normal employee — an instruction that made clear that, thanks to his relationships, Epstein was in fact not a normal employee.
He summoned Epstein to his office. “You lied about your education,” he said.
“Yes, I know,” Epstein calmly replied. He had never graduated from college. Tennenbaum recalls being disarmed by the admission. Decades later, he would regard it as an example of Epstein’s ability to manipulate his marks — in this case, him.
“Why did you do it?” Tennenbaum stammered.
Without an impressive degree or two, Epstein said, “I knew nobody would give me a chance.”
This resonated with Tennenbaum. He had benefited from his own share of second chances over the years. And so he agreed to give Epstein one as well.
It was perhaps the first example of Epstein getting caught cheating — and then avoiding punishment thanks to his uncanny ability to take advantage of those in positions of power. This would become a lifelong pattern, one that largely explains Epstein’s remarkable success at amassing wealth and, eventually, orchestrating a vast sex-trafficking operation.
Nearly five decades later, and more than six years after his death, Epstein has become an American obsession. The public fascination only intensified after President Trump initially refused this year to release federal investigative records about the infamous sex offender — before reversing himself under pressure.
Much of the last quarter-century of Epstein’s life has been carefully examined — including how, in the 1990s and early 2000s, he amassed hundreds of millions of dollars through his work for the retail tycoon Leslie Wexner. Yet the public understanding of Epstein’s early ascent has been shrouded in mystery. How did a college dropout from Brooklyn claw his way from the front of a high school classroom to the pinnacle of American finance, politics and society? How did Epstein go from nearly being fired at Bear Stearns to managing the wealth of billionaires? What were the origins of his own fortune?
We have spent months trying to pierce this veil. We spoke with dozens of Epstein’s former colleagues, friends, girlfriends, business partners and financial victims. Some agreed to speak on the record for the first time; others insisted on speaking confidentially but gave us access to never-before-seen records and other information. We sifted through private archives and tracked down previously unpublished recordings and transcripts of old interviews — including one in which Epstein gave a meandering account of his personal and professional history. We perused diaries, letters, emails and photo albums, including some that belonged to Epstein. We reviewed thousands of pages of court and government records.
What emerged is the fullest portrait to date of one of the world’s most notorious criminals — a narrative that differs in important respects from previously published accounts of Epstein’s rise, including his arrival at Bear Stearns.
In his first two decades of business, we found that Epstein was less a financial genius than a prodigious manipulator and liar. Abundant conspiracy theories hold that Epstein worked for spy services or ran a lucrative blackmail operation, but we found a more prosaic explanation for how he built a fortune. A relentless scammer, he abused expense accounts, engineered inside deals and demonstrated a remarkable knack for separating seemingly sophisticated investors and businessmen from their money. He started small, testing his tactics and seeing what he could get away with. His early successes laid the foundation for more ambitious ploys down the road. Again and again, he proved willing to operate on the edge of criminality and burn bridges in his pursuit of wealth and power.
Rung by rung, Epstein climbed a social and financial ladder, often using young women as a potent form of currency. His girlfriends, lovers and even exes helped elevate his status inside a bank, got him hired to track down missing assets and gained him entree to prestigious organizations. And deliberately or not, some of them enabled him as he constructed a sex-trafficking operation that would later ensnare hundreds of teenage girls and young women.
That story starts at Bear Stearns, the place where Epstein learned how to win and use power. The institution continued to enable him long after he had shown his true colors.
More than four decades later, Tennenbaum still regrets that he didn’t end Epstein’s career when he had the chance.
“I didn’t realize,” he said, “that I was creating one of the monsters of Wall Street.”
More On U.S. Politics
The Contrarian, Opinion: Words & Phrases That Have Lost All Meaning, Jennifer Rubin, right, Dec. 16, 2025. During the last two weeks of 2025 we will post special columns (lists, the year in review, etc.) so this is our final “Words & Phrases” of the year. In thinking about which canard has dominated and distorted coverage of Donald Trump’s first year of autocratic rule, one phenomenon stands out: The myth that there is still something called the “Republican Party.”
The “Republican Party” today most resembles a cult—its members may be properly characterized as Trump idolaters, followers, zealots, sycophants, or devotees—but this assemblage of supplicants lacks not just a concrete policy agenda but all other fundamental elements of a political party.
For starters, an empty political shell based exclusively on fidelity to a decrepit, unhinged autocrat does not qualify as a political “party” (“a group of persons organized for the purpose of directing the policies of a government”). Trump’s congressional allies have no interest in controlling the purse strings or conducting oversight—i.e., the main ways in which Congress advances policy. At the command of Trump, MAGA lawmakers passed just one significant piece of legislation – the big, ugly bill, which several members later denounced while others frantically tried to reverse course or correct their own refusal to include extension of the Obamacare subsidies.
They have no consistent ideology. “States rights”? Well, they rail against federal regulatory overreach, but they condone federal troops’ invasion of U.S. cities. Indiana’s right-wing governor has threatened his own Republican state lawmakers for not capitulating to Trump’s gerrymander demands, just as MAGA Texas Governor Greg Abbott leaned on his state legislators (at Trump’s behest) to pass a redistricting grab that Texas lawmakers disliked. And while the MAGA contingent nominally supports “law and order,” it cheers the pardon of Jan. 6 felons and the dismissal of those who prosecuted them. Invariably, policy inconsistencies (e.g., America First but start a war with Argentina, fiscal hawkishness but run up the debt) swallow any cogent dogma. The only consistency is subservience to Trump. (Recall that the “party” platform boiled down to “whatever Trump wants.”)
Likewise, unlike normal political parties, the MAGA crew has no minimum standards for membership. Racists, misogynists, xenophobes, conspiracy mongers, criminals, antisemites, insurrectionists, and adjudicated sexual assaulters are all welcome—indeed, they can rise to highest rungs of the party! The days when conservatives ejected the John Birch Society are long gone.Subscribed
If the current Trump cult lacks the attributes of a “party” it surely bears no resemblance to the Party of Lincoln, the so-called Grand Old Party. (Which is why I try to avoid “GOP” whenever possible.) In 1856, that party’s presidential platform included this:
Resolved: That the maintenance of the principles promulgated in the Declaration of Independence, and embodied in the Federal Constitution are essential to the preservation of our Republican institutions, and that the Federal Constitution, the rights of the States, and the union of the States, must and shall be preserved.
Well, the current gang worships Trump, who declares that Article 2 means he can do whatever he wants. It disdains the creed set forth in the Declaration (“all men are created equal”) in favor of White nationalism. Today’s MAGA sect surely does not subscribe to the 1856 platform nor any subsequent platform that extolled limits on executive power, judicial humility, free markets (vs. crony socialism), clean government, defense of freedom around the world, or opposition to Russian aggression.
Frankly, a group that wants to erase a critical section of the post-Civil War 14th Amendment (birthright citizenship) and strike down the Voting Rights Act, really has no grounds to claim Lincoln as its founding father.
Likewise, the current crowd is about as supportive of free markets as Karl Marx. It condones Trump dictating which company should own Warner Bros., enacting massive unilateral taxes (“tariffs”), stymieing legal immigration, and extracting a cut of chips deals.
No one should think Trump cultists are the inheritors of a party that for decades defended Europe against the “Evil Empire,” helped sustain a rules-based international order, upheld bilateral and multilateral free trade agreements, punished aggressive nations that attacked neighbors with no legal justification, worked cooperatively with neighbors in our hemisphere to stop the influx of narcotics, cracked down on international corruption, and saved millions of lives through PEPFAR.
And certainly, a gang that cheers a president’s retaliation for protected 1st Amendment activity, investigation of political adversaries, pursuit of charitable organizations he dislikes; who resorts to nonstop censorship cannot claim to be members of a party founded on fidelity to the Constitution. (No Republican president would have countenanced dictator-style cultural capture such as taking over an independent arts facility or defacing the White House’s interior and exterior.)
Let’s face it, the current crowd bears no resemblance to the party with a policy legacy that includes such achievements as the Emancipation Proclamation, the post-Civil War amendments, the Land Crant Colleges and Homestead Act, civil service reform, the Sherman Anti-Trust Act, the National Park system, the first food and drug safety act, the interstate highway system, the EPA, the peaceful integration of Germany at the end of the Cold War, and the Americans With Disabilities Act. Indeed, no doubt Trumpists would condemn all that as part of a “woke,” communist agenda.
Looking at the broader picture, the Republican Party used to conceive of America as a “Shining City on the Hill,” rooted in the belief we were on the side of goodness, decency, and fairness. (That surely was not practiced consistently, but hypocrisy is the compliment vice pays to virtue.) Now, Trump and his flock openly delight in brutality, cruelty, raw exercise of power, bullying, and rudeness.
In short, the Trump cult, headed by a leader who emulates the current leader of Russia’s Evil Empire, has become what the Republican Party used to despise. So, let’s do away with the “Republican Party” label, since the Trumpists have certainly done away with anything resembling a normal political party, let alone one founded on an anti-slavery platform that stood for a coherent conservative ideology (as opposed to one with a reactionary, extreme, and ethno-nationalistic bent). Trump likes to stamp his name on everything, so why not change the name to the “Trump Party,” and the elephant iconography to his mug shot? At least that would accurately mark the end of the once serious party.
Global News
New York Times, Ukraine Says It Hit a Submarine With Underwater Drones, Maria Varenikova, Updated Dec. 16, 2025. As it tried to demonstrate its continuing ability to fight, Ukraine said it had used drones to inflict serious damage on a Russian Kilo-class submarine at a Black Sea port.
Ukrainian underwater drones struck a Russian submarine for the first time on Monday, causing critical damage to the vessel and making it the first publicly acknowledged use of the new class of Ukrainian weapons, according to Ukraine’s domestic intelligence agency.
At the time of the attack, the Kilo-class submarine was docked in a Russian Black Sea port near the city of Novorossiysk and carried four launchers for Kalibr cruise missiles, which Moscow regularly uses to attack across Ukraine, the agency said. Kilo-class vessels are not nuclear-powered and do not carry nuclear-armed ballistic missiles.
Russia confirmed the attack but denied that its submarine had been damaged.
The Ukrainians said the operation had been conducted by the Security Service in cooperation with the Navy, on a day when President Volodymyr Zelensky met with U.S. negotiators and European leaders in Berlin to discuss peace proposals. The strike appeared intended to bolster Mr. Zelensky’s argument that Ukraine can continue to fight back and pose a threat to Russia’s superior forces if no agreement is reached.
“Today, achieving results on the front line is crucial so that Ukraine can achieve results in diplomacy,” Mr. Zelensky said on Friday while visiting Ukrainian positions near the northern frontline town of Kupiansk, where Ukraine said its forces had recently encircled dozens of Russian soldiers. “This is exactly how it works: strong positions inside the country translate into strong positions in negotiations to end the war.”
The Security Service said the drones involved were of a type called Sub Sea Baby, but provided no more details about them. Ukraine has been developing a fleet of unmanned, miniature submarines ranging from about a foot to more than a yard in diameter. The weapons are essentially long-range torpedoes, looking like black cylinders with fins, some capable of traveling hundreds of miles.
Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: Ukraine Is Still Fighting to Win, Mark Hertling,Dec. 16, 2025. Despite the waning attention of many Americans, the war in Ukraine continues unabated. And the events of each day shape how—and whether—it can end.
This weekend, Ukraine reported damaging a Russian submarine at the port of Novorossiysk with a sea drone. Open-source reporting confirms that Ukraine appears to have damaged a Kilo-class diesel-electric submarine tied to a pier in that port. The name of the sub has not been confirmed, but the identity matters less than the role the platform plays.
Kilo-class submarines assigned to Russia’s Black Sea Fleet are designed to operate quietly in confined waters. They can launch cruise missiles against land targets, and that’s largely the role they’ve played in this war. They allow Moscow to hit Ukrainian cities while limiting risk to the Russian Navy’s surface fleet and the Russian Air Force’s long-range bombers.
Even if the Ukrainians didn’t sink the sub, just damaging it could have strategic implications. A damaged boat tied to a pier does not launch missiles, threaten shipping, or force Ukraine to divert air defenses. But it does represent one less instrument available to attack Ukraine. And that matters.
The port’s location matters, too. Novorossiysk, 500 kilometers east of Crimea, is where the Russian Black Sea Fleet fled to after previous rounds of Ukrainian attacks made its desired home port, Sevastopol in Crimea, unsafe. A successful strike in Novorossiysk undermines Russian assumptions about fleet security and forces Moscow to allocate more resources to defending its own assets. It also reaffirms that Ukraine can fight and win in the Black Sea, which is vital for its exports and its future economic viability.
Contrast Ukraine’s strike against a missile-launching submarine and other military targets with Russia’s actions over the same weekend.
Russia continued to launch waves of strikes against Ukraine’s civilians, battering energy infrastructure and towns with no military significance. These were not battlefield strikes. They are continuing and deliberate efforts to degrade electricity and heat, specifically targeting civilians in winter—and meeting the definition of a war crime according to the Geneva Convention. This pattern is not accidental. It reflects the continuation of a campaign that is central to the Russian approach, aimed at making the daily life of Ukraine’s citizens so difficult that resistance weakens and pressure builds for concessions. It is also designed to create the appearance of victory where none exists, a deception intended as much for the Russian public as for the White House.
This distinction between Ukraine’s and Russia’s strategies is essential. One side is attacking the war-fighting capacity. The other is attacking society.
This is where those emphasizing a “deal”—including American envoys who are former business negotiators—get it wrong. Calls for Ukraine to accept military disadvantage in the name of cessation of hostilities assume Russia will respond with restraint. But experience suggests the opposite. Anyone who has dealt with Russia on any issue knows when they gain breathing room, they use it to escalate pressure. Concessions are interpreted not as goodwill but as opportunity.
Most wars do not end because both sides want peace. They end when one side can no longer achieve its objectives at an acceptable cost. While envoys talk, Russia continues to strike civilians—and Ukraine attempts to dismantle the machinery that makes those strikes possible. That contrast hasn’t changed. We’ve just stopped paying attention to it.
AROUND THE BULWARK
It’s Still Not Too Late to Do Something About Those Obamacare Premiums… People are already seeing price spikes—and many will have to give up health insurance. But Congress could enact a retroactive fix, reports JONATHAN COHN in The Breakdown.
Remembering The Best of Rob Reiner… In a special livestream, SONNY BUNCH, BILL KRISTOL, RICHARD RUSHFIELD, and DAVE WEIGEL celebrate the life and work of Rob Reiner.
Forget ‘Double Tap.’ The First Strike Was a Crime… Georgetown professor ROSA BROOKS joins MONA on The Mona Charen Show to discuss the legality (or the lack) of Trump’s drug boat attacks as well as the bonkers National Security Strategy document.
America Is an Unserious Country Filled With Unserious People… In The Triad, JVL shares some stories about revealed preferences and who we really are.
Don’t Blame the Australia Attack on Palestinian Statehood… Advocates for Israel are claiming that support for Palestinian statehood entails violence against Jews. That’s wrong—and it’s a recipe for terrorism, writes WILL SALETAN.
More On Media, Culture, Politics
Actor-Director Rob Reiner and his wife, photographer Michele Singer Reiner (File photo via Getty Images).
Popular Information, Accountability Journalism: What Rob Reiner believed, Judd Legum, right, and Noel Sims, Dec. 16, 2025. Rob Reiner, an actor, writer, and director, and his wife, Michele Singer Reiner, a photographer and producer, were found dead at their home in Los Angeles on Sunday. Their son, Nick Reiner, who has struggled with drug addiction, was booked for murder and is currently being held without bail.
Reiner was best known for his involvement in iconic television shows and movies, including All in The Family, When Harry Met Sally, and The Princess Bride. He was also a progressive political activist.
Just hours after his death, President Trump attacked Reiner. In a post on Truth Social, Trump said Reiner’s death was “due to the anger he caused others through his massive, unyielding, and incurable affliction with a mind crippling disease known as TRUMP DERANGEMENT SYNDROME.” According to Trump, Reiner “was known to have driven people CRAZY by his raging obsession of President Donald J. Trump, with his obvious paranoia reaching new heights as the Trump Administration surpassed all goals and expectations of greatness.”
Reiner was an outspoken critic of Trump. But he leaves behind a rich political legacy that began long before Trump’s political career. Reiner redefined celebrity political advocacy, not only lending his voice to important causes, but also implementing strategies that brought change.
Reiner, who played the character “Meathead” on All in the Family, said his activism was influenced by Norman Lear, the creator of the show. “What I learned from Norman was that you could use your fame, your celebrity, whatever, to actually do some things in the political sphere,” Reiner said in a 2024 interview. “Norman was a tremendous inspiration to me.”
Reiner was a champion for young children
In 1997, Reiner created the I Am Your Child Foundation to raise awareness about the importance of the first three years of childhood development. That year, Reiner was invited to speak at the White House Conference on Early Development and Learning , where he made the case for supporting children from age zero to three.
If we want to have a real significant impact, not only on children’s success in school and later on in life, healthy relationships, but also an impact on reduction in crime, teen pregnancy, drug abuse, child abuse, welfare, homelessness, and a variety of other social ills, we are going to have to address the first three years of life. There is no getting around it. All roads lead to Rome.
In 1998, Reiner was the driving force behind California’s Proposition 10, which imposed a tax on cigarettes and other tobacco products to support early childhood development. He recruited Republican Michael Huffington as a co-chair to ensure it would be a bipartisan effort. After the initiative passed, Reiner served as chairman of the California Children and Families Commission, now known as First 5 California Ca, for seven years.
Twenty percent of the revenue generated by the tobacco tax goes to First 5 California to advance “early care and education, child health and development, family resiliency, research, and community awareness” statewide. The remainder of the revenue is distributed to California’s 58 counties to fund programs tailored to each area. In fiscal year 2023-24, the tax generated over $300 million in revenue.Reiner played a critical role in establishing marriage equality as a federal right
After the 2008 passage of Proposition 8, which banned same-sex marriage in California, Reiner established the American Foundation for Equal Rights (AFER). Reiner used the group to finance the legal battle challenging the ban. Bucking much of the liberal establishment, Reiner insisted on a high-risk legal strategy that sought to challenge Proposition 8 as unconstitutional.
AFER recruited Ted Olson, a prominent conservative lawyer, and David Boies, a top liberal lawyer, to lead the legal effort. Olson and Boies had squared off against each other in the Supreme Court case Bush v. Gore, which decided the 2000 election.
In an appearance on MSNBC, Reiner argued marriage equality was a core civil rights issue. “We don’t believe in separate but equal in any other legal position except this,” Reiner said. “We feel that this is the last piece of the civil rights puzzle being put into place.”
The couples represented by AFER lawyers won their case in federal district court. The Supreme Court eventually dismissed the appeal on standing grounds, effectively restoring same-sex marriage in California. The case paved the way for the eventual establishment of a federal right to same-sex marriage in 2015.
After the victory, Reiner continued to speak out for equal rights for all people. “We have to move past singling out transgender, LGBTQ, Black, white, Jewish, Muslim, Latino. We have to get way past that and start accepting the idea that we’re all human beings,” Reiner said at a Human Rights Campaign event in 2019. “We’re all human beings, we all share the same planet, and we should all have the same rights, period.”Reiner opposed the Iraq War, saying protesters were patriots
“This is the greatest support we could ever give to our troops because what we are trying to do is protect them from going into harm’s way needlessly,” Reiner said in a 2003 CNN interview. “There is no God-awful reason to go to war at this moment. There is no reason to rush into this war, and what we are trying to do is protect our troops from sending them into harm’s way.”
Reiner frequently compared the Iraq War to the Vietnam War. “I just couldn’t believe we were going to war twice based on lies in my lifetime,” Reiner told The Independent in 2018. Reiner produced a movie, Shock and Awe, that highlighted the work of Knight Ridder journalists who were among the few that questioned the official Bush administration narrative.Reiner warned of the rise of Christian Nationalism
One of Reiner’s last projects was God & Country, a 2024 documentary about the growing Christian Nationalist movement. Reiner sought to distinguish Christianity, the religion, from Christian Nationalism, which is a political ideology.
“We have experts in the film, very conservative, devout Christians, leaders, thinkers, pastors, who talk specifically about how this movement is completely antithetical to the teachings of Jesus,” Reiner explained in a February 2024 podcast. “And that really is what you have to focus in on, because the idea that you could promote a political agenda in the name of God and that would give you permission to resort to any means, to get what you want up to and including violence, which we saw on January 6th, is completely antithetical to the teachings of Jesus, which is love thy neighbor, do unto others, and so on.”
Associated Press, How an AM radio station in California weathered the Trump administration’s assault on media, Byron Tau, Dec. 15-16, 2025. Before Jimmy Kimmel, there was KCBS.
Just six days into President Donald Trump’s new administration, the San Francisco Bay-area radio station KCBS-AM reported that immigration agents were in the area — driving “unmarked vehicles including a black Dodge Durango, a gray Nissan Maxima and white Nissan truck.”
The brief story — also reported by other outlets — quickly drew the ire of conservative influencers who attacked KCBS’ report as endangering agents’ lives, sparking a deluge of complaints from listeners and callers.
That was just the start of KCBS’ troubles. The Trump administration’s top broadcast regulator, Brendan Carr, soon accused KCBS of failing to operate in the public interest and said he was opening an investigation.
By targeting KCBS, Carr revealed his willingness to expand the Republican administration’s offensive on perceived media foes beyond major broadcasters like ABC, CBS and NPR. In KCBS’ case, the radio station took steps to mitigate the potential of drawing further attention from conservative influencers or Carr, the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, according to eight current and former station employees who insisted on anonymity out of fear of reprisal.
KCBS demoted a well-liked anchor and dialed back on political programming, people said. For months, reporters were dissuaded from pursuing political or controversial topics and instead encouraged to focus on human interest stories, according to the current and former staffers.Related Stories
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When journalists were given permission to pursue politics or Trump administration policies, some of the staffers said, the tone of the stories was heavily scrutinized.
Doug Sovern, a veteran political journalist at the station, said he was sidelined after Carr announced his investigation.
“‘Chilling effect’ does not begin to describe the neutering of our political coverage,” said Sovern, who retired in April. He said his retirement was not related to the controversy.
FCC scrutiny has eased in recent months, and the station has been increasingly willing to tackle more topics that might draw attention from the administration and conservative critics, the staffers said. The station, for example, assigned a reporter in October to cover the No Kings Day protests of the Trump administration, which the staffers described as a welcome change.
In a statement, KCBS said it would not “comment on internal personnel matters.”
“There has been no change in policy or editorial direction at KCBS,” the station added. “We remain committed to providing our Bay Area listeners with trusted news, including our political coverage, that is balanced and objective.”
The FCC did not respond to a request for comment.
Trump’s enforcer
In Trump’s second term, Carr has emerged as a top enforcer of Trump’s agenda, using his perch to take on one of the president’s favorite targets: media outlets.
His threat to ABC in September that “we can do this the easy way or the hard way” led to Kimmel, a late-night host and comedian, being briefly pulled off the air by parent company Disney over statements in one of his monologues about the political reaction to the slaying of Charlie Kirk, a conservative activist. ABC and CBS settled what some experts said were long-shot libel lawsuits by Trump at the same time their parent companies had significant interests before the FCC. NPR and PBS affiliates came under scrutiny over whether they were crossing the line into commercial advertising.
When the FCC later approved a merger involving CBS’ parent company, the network’s new owners committed to making “significant changes” at the broadcast network — a move the FCC chairman praised in his statement approving the
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deal. And in November, Carr reshared a Trump social media post that called for comedian Seth Meyers to be fired from NBC.
New York Times, At Many Top Law Schools, Black Student Enrollment Continues to Drop, Stephanie Saul, Dec. 16, 2025. The New York Times examined data from 18 of the nation’s top law schools and found that first-year Black enrollment had increased at only four, including at Harvard.
The number of Black students entering many of the nation’s most elite law schools declined this year, according to data released on Monday by the American Bar Association.
The drops, including at the University of Virginia and Northwestern University, continue a trend that began in fall 2024 after the U.S. Supreme Court banned the use of affirmative action in university admissions a year earlier.
The New York Times examined the A.B.A. admissions data from 18 of the nation’s top law schools and found that first-year Black enrollment had increased at only four, including at Harvard, which enrolled 50 Black law students this fall compared with 19 last year. At Georgetown University, first-year Black enrollment jumped to 67 this year compared with 30 last year. Two other elite law schools, Columbia and Stanford, saw a slight upward tick in the number of Black students.
The changes have implications for the long-term racial make up of the profession, including who oversees and argues cases in the nation’s top courtrooms. Top-ranked schools typically supply graduates to the nation’s elite law firms and federal courts, where they serve as clerks and go on to be judges. Currently, all but one member of the Supreme Court attended either Harvard or Yale Law.
David Wilkins, a law professor at Harvard, who has argued that diversity in law is important because most of the world is not white, celebrated the increase in Black first-year students at his school.
“The Supreme Court decision is clearly making things more difficult,” Professor Wilkins said. He also attributed the broader declines to the “mood in the country from the administration and others,” referring to President Trump’s campaign to end diversity programs and preferences in schools.ImageYale Law School in New Haven, Conn.Credit...Christopher Capozziello for The New York Times
The American Bar Association recently suspended the use of law school diversity standards in accrediting schools, under pressure from the Trump administration.
Opponents of diversity efforts in university admissions argue that they undermine merit and create an unlevel playing field, and that they could possibly stigmatize those they are seeking to help by suggesting they are inferior.
Edward Blum, whose nonprofit organization, Students for Fair Admissions, filed the lawsuit that reached the Supreme Court, argued for expanding opportunities for students early in life, not racial preferences, as the solution to increasing diversity.
“Law schools applicants should be evaluated on their academic qualifications, personal achievements and economic background — not on their race or ethnicity,” he said in a statement.
The demographic shifts at law schools mirror broader admissions trends at selective undergraduate programs that previously relied on race to create more diverse freshman classes.
But law school classes are typically small, complicating efforts to measure trends, even as experts caution that one or two years of data may not reflect long term trends. Still, several top law schools saw changes this year that, on a percentage basis, were significant.
At the Carey Law School at the University of Pennsylvania, 10 Black first-year students enrolled this year compared with 19 last year and 22 in fall 2023, according to the A.B.A. data.
Emptywheel, Analysis: The Government Attempts to Gag Dan Richman from Speaking about His Own Data, Emptywheel (Marcy Wheeler), right, Dec. 15, 2025. In addition to demanding treatment inconsistent with what Todd Blanche and Lindsey Halligan demanded for Donald Trump in similar situations in his stolen document prosecution, DOJ wants an order preventing Dan Richman from using his data for any purpose other than the legal challenge he has launched to get it back.
There’ve been a flurry of government filings in the Dan Richman case.
In addition to correcting Lindsey Halligan’s confusion over her own identity and that of Robert McBride, the government has written an emergency request asking for a week to comply with Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly’s order to destroy all evidence after depositing a copy with EDVA.
Only, the entire motion reneges on that claim.
Some of the government requests are reasonable — they’ll promise not to access the data in the interim week, they don’t want to return the Jim Comey memo that was up-classified after he sent it to Richman in 2017 because it is now classified, and they don’t want Pam Bondi to make promises herself (which is different from Todd Blanche doing so).
To that latter end, though, they cannot imagine any reason why it’d be necessary for someone at Main DOJ — and not someone at EDVA — to certify compliance, not even given Pam Bondi’s repeated intrusion in this matter.
The Attorney General has directed appropriate Department of Justice personnel to seek clarification of the obligations imposed by this Court’s order and to take steps to comply with those obligations. But there is no practical or legal reason to require the Attorney General to immediately and personally certify compliance on the unusually expedited timeframe imposed by the Court’s order, rather permit her to rely on any of her hundreds of attorneys and officers, including any attorney employed by the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Virginia or the Department of Justice, generally.
The reason why, of course, is that lawyers have shared this information between — at least — EDVA, WDVA, and SDFL. And the only people with authority over all those offices are Pam Bondi and Todd Blanche.
In a footnote, the DOJ request preserves a request for reconsideration, which makes you wonder whether there’s not more going on.
5 The Government maintains its position that the Government did not engage in an impermissible search in the 2025 investigation, nor did the Government engage in an unreasonable seizure by continuing to hold the documents obtained by the Government through a lawful search warrant in 2019. Petitioner Richman voluntarily provided these documents pursuant to consent, and while the consent agreement with Petitioner Richman includes limitations on searches, it does not provide, in the event of a prohibited search, for return of property or render continued possession of the property an unlawful seizure. Accordingly, this Court erred in treating any impermissible search as authorizing this Court’s order under Rule 41(g)—which addresses unlawful or harmful seizures—and the Court should grant reconsideration on that basis.
In a paragraph that could invite estoppel considerations, half of Trump’s defense team from his Florida prosecution (in which Todd Blanche and Lindsey Halligan, right, argued the government had no business seizing records because their retention violated the Federal Records Act) argued that they can’t turn over the materials because … they’re covered by the Federal Records Act.
The Government is simultaneously complying with a litigation hold put in place pursuant to a preservation letter from counsel for James Comey.3 See Gov. Ex. 1 at 19. The Government further understands that copies of portions of the relevant files are in the possession of government personnel (e.g., having been printed, saved locally, or emailed). Finally, the Government understands that the relevant files may include e-mails and other electronic communications between Petitioner Richman and James Comey, when both individuals were employed at the FBI, and regarding government business. 4 Such files are undoubtedly property of the Government and are likewise required to be maintained by the Government, and in the Government’s possession, pursuant to the Federal Records Act of 1950.
3 The Government’s compliance with the order may also implicate the Government’s obligation to maintain files pursuant to the Federal Records Act. See 44 U.S.C. § 3301 et seq.
4 Indeed, as the Court noted in its December 12, 2025 opinion, the Arctic Haze investigation in part concerned alleged “theft and conversion of public records.” See ECF No. 19 at 8; see also 18 U.S.C. § 641.
Nothing about this claim is consistent with a goddamn thing Blanche and Halligan argued before Aileen Cannon in 2022.
Not.
A.
Thing.
As noted, the government wants to avoid giving Richman, right, the stuff they’ve copied and emailed, deeming those government records.
It repeats this concern in its request for clarification.
b. It is similarly unclear to the Government whether the Court means for the Government to provide Richman with all copies of portions of the covered materials that are in the possession of government personnel (e.g., having been printed, saved locally, or emailed) in addition to a full and complete copy of the covered materials, or whether the Court intended that such documents be destroyed by the Government. The provision of such documents to Richman might in some cases (e.g., if a document from the covered materials was attached to an email sent by an attorney for the Government) seriously implicate the Government’s attorney-client privilege, the attorney work-product doctrine, attorney-client confidentiality, the deliberative process privilege, and, potentially, other applicable law, including, but not limited to, sealing orders accompanying the search warrants and any potential grand jury material subject to Rule 6(e) of the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure.
And then it repeats it in the order itself!
3. Other than providing full and complete copies of the covered materials to Richman (not including any classified information) and the Classified Information Security Officer for the United States District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, the Government shall maintain the original evidence (and any other portions of the covered materials in the possession of the Government) and shall not access the covered materials or share, disseminate, or disclose the covered materials to any person without first seeking and obtaining a Court order.
This is the opposite of what Kollar-Kotelly ordered. They’re asking only for the protective order, not the return — or at least destruction — of Richman’s property!
Most interestingly, though, the proposed order seeks to prevent Richman from using the hypothetically returned data — his own data!!! — for any purpose other than “this proceeding,” which would permit him to expand his Fourth Amendment complaints, but not to bitch (or sue) about what they did with his data.
8. Materials produced to Richman pursuant to this Order may be used solely for purposes of this proceeding and shall not be disclosed, disseminated, or used for any other purpose absent further order of the Court.
The problem, of course, is that it is his data. DOJ would be returning this data because … it is his data. While this may be in the order for no reason other than boilerplate, this would gag Richman from talking about what the FBI did when they conducted unlawful searches of his data (which evidence would be withheld anyway on the other complaints).
Sorry, FBI, maybe you shouldn’t have conducted warrantless searches of someone’s data if you wanted to withhold evidence of the unlawful searches of Dan Richman’s data you did.
But a judge has ruled it is his data — it belongs to him. And the notion that you’re going to gag him about what the data looked like after being returned from six years of FBI custody defies the very claims of property rights that Judge Kollar-Kotelly, above, has already granted.
Update: Judge KK clarified her order on these two issues, while granting the delay (but complaining that DOJ didn’t raise them in briefing).
Further, this Court’s Order directed the return of Petitioner Richman’s own materials (and any copies of those materials), not any derivative files that the Government may have created. See Order, Dkt. No. 20, at 1 (directing the return of the original materials, copies of those materials, and any materials “directly obtained or extracted” from them); see also id. at 41 (explaining that the Court would not bar the Government from “using or relying on” the relevant materials in a separate investigation or proceeding). Accordingly, compliance with the Court’s Order will not intrude upon any of the Government’s privileges.
Finally, it was not the Court’s intention to require a personal certification of compliance by the Attorney General of the United States. The Court’s Memorandum Opinion makes clear that a designee of the Attorney General could discharge this responsibility. See Mem. Op., Dkt. No. 21, at 4 (“The Court shall further ORDER the Attorney General of the United States or her designee to certify …. “). The Court also understood the certification of compliance to be among the responsibilities that the Attorney General may delegate in the routine performance of her duties. Consistent with these understandings, the Court shall clarify its Order to specify that a designee of the Attorney General may certify compliance.
Dec. 15
Actor-Director Rob Reiner and his wife, photographer Michele Singer Reiner (File photo via Getty Images).
New York Times, Live Updates: Reiners’ Son Arrested After Director and His Wife Found Stabbed, Matt Stevens, Shawn Hubler, Nicole Sperling and Jill Cowan, Dec. 15, 2025. The Los Angeles Police Department said it was investigating an “apparent homicide” at the home of Rob Reiner and his wife, Michele. Nick Reiner, 32, is being held in jail on $4 million bail.
A son of the celebrated Hollywood director Rob Reiner and Michele Singer Reiner has been arrested after the couple were found dead in their Los Angeles home, according to online jail records viewed on Monday.
The couple were found stabbed to death on Sunday in an apparent homicide, according to the police, friends of the family and two people who were briefed on the case but not authorized to speak publicly.
The son, Nick Reiner, 32 (right, shown in a file photo via Getty Images), was arrested on Sunday night and is being held in a jail in Los Angeles County on $4 million bail, according to county jail records. No information about criminal charges was immediately available.
Rob Reiner, 78, was a popular sitcom actor before directing a slate of beloved films, including “This Is Spinal Tap,” “When Harry Met Sally …” and “The Princess Bride.” He went on to become a force in California and national Democratic politics, championing gay marriage and other causes. Ms. Reiner, 70, was a photographer and later a producer.
Nick Reiner had spoken over the years about his struggles with drug abuse and bouts of homelessness beginning with his teenage years. He worked with his father on a movie, “Being Charlie,” that was loosely inspired by his early life.
Police officials said on Sunday that officers had responded to a death investigation at the Reiners’ home in the upscale Brentwood neighborhood at about 3:40 p.m. local time and found two bodies. They said then that investigators were trying to get a search warrant for the home.
New York Times, Live Updates: Hollywood Director Rob Reiner and His Wife, Michele, Are Found Dead, Matt Stevens, Shawn Hubler, Nicole Sperling and Jill Cowan, Dec. 15, 2025. The Los Angeles Police Department said it was investigating an apparent homicide at the Reiners’ home. The couple’s family said they were “heartbroken by this sudden loss.”
Here’s what else to know:
New York Times, Live Updates: Police Renew Search for Gunman in Deadly Brown University Attack, Mitch Smith, Qasim Nauman, Mark Arsenault and Thomas Gibbons-Neff and Mark Arsenault, Dec. 15, 2025. Officials released a person of interest late Sunday after they could not find enough evidence connecting him to the shooting that killed two people.
Here’s the latest.
Law enforcement officials on Monday urgently renewed their search for the gunman who killed two people at Brown University in Rhode Island over the weekend, after investigators released a person of interest because they could not find enough evidence connecting him to the shooting.
Mayor Brett Smiley of Providence, R.I., said Sunday night that officials had no way of knowing if the attacker, who killed at least two students and injured nine others in the attack on Saturday, was still in the city.
The turn in the investigation came hours after the authorities said they had detained a person of interest. Kash Patel, the F.B.I. director, said that federal investigators had found the person in a town near Providence after receiving a lead from the city police.
But investigators could not charge that person in connection with the shooting, Col. Oscar Perez, the Providence police chief, said at a news conference on Sunday night.
The Brown University campus was placed on lockdown after a person entered a lecture hall and started shooting with a rifle on Saturday afternoon.
Law enforcement officials have not named any other suspects or mentioned potential motives. The police released a video of the possible shooter in the hopes that someone might recognize him. Attorney General Peter F. Neronha of Rhode Island said there was a lack of video footage from the campus. “There just weren’t a lot of cameras in that Brown building,” he said, referring to the engineering building where the shooting took place.
Here’s what we’re covering:
New York Times, Gunshots, Then 12 Hours of Fear at Brown University, Mark Arsenault and Dana Goldstein, Dec. 15, 2025 (print ed.). Students sheltered in place in classrooms and basements, waiting for the all clear.
Map of Terrorist Attack at Australia's most popular beach (New York Times graphic).
New York Times, Shooting in Australia: Live Updates: Australian Police Plan to Charge Suspect in Bondi Massacre, Victoria Kim, Yan Zhuang and Livia Albeck-Ripka, Dec. 15, 2025. Officials said a father and son killed at least 15 people at a Jewish holiday celebration. More than three dozen others were hospitalized, including a surviving suspect.
Australian police said on Monday that they expected to bring criminal charges against the surviving gunman in a deadly shooting spree that targeted a Jewish holiday celebration in Sydney.
The authorities said they had concluded that the attack on Sunday at Bondi Beach, which they said was carried out by a father and son, was an act of terrorism. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation that they had acted alone and that there was no evidence that they were part of a wider terror cell.
But officials declined to provide additional details, including the suspects’ ideology or exact motive.
At least 38 people remained hospitalized following the mass shooting. Hundreds of people had gathered at the beach, a famed half-mile crescent of sand, for a Hanukkah event. Children played as music and bubbles filled the air until the attackers emerged from a silver hatchback near a pedestrian bridge and opened fire. Gunshots ripped through the celebration.
Danny Ridley, a photographer who was documenting the gathering, said one attacker fired at him as he was hiding behind a parking meter, leaving him with a light gash on his left rib. “It was just carnage,” he said.
Investigators did not release the names of the suspects, but described them as a 50-year-old man and his 24-year-old son. The older man died after being shot by officers. The younger man sustained critical injuries and is in a coma, the authorities said on Monday.
Officials said that the father was an immigrant who came to Australia in 1998 on a student visa and stayed in the country for decades on different kinds of visas. It was unclear what country he was from. The son is an Australian-born citizen, officials said.
Mr. Albanese said that the younger suspect had first come to the attention of the police in 2019 because of his connections to two other people, whom he did not identify. Police also interviewed his father at the time. But Australia’s intelligence service had determined that there was no evidence that they had been radicalized, Mr. Albanese said.
Neither of them were known to have any history of previous criminal offenses, according to the police.
Politico, Rand Paul says partisan gerrymandering 'might lead to violence in our country,' Jacob Wendler, Dec.15, 2025 (print ed.). The Republican warned that the escalating redistricting wars could have grave consequences for political violence.
Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), shown above in a file photo, said Sunday that partisan gerrymandering will “lead to more civil tension and possibly more violence in our country,” urging restraint in the ongoing redistricting wars playing out in more than a dozen states.
“I think there is the potential that when people have no representation, that they feel disenfranchised, that it can lead, it might lead to violence in our country,” Paul said in an interview with Kristen Welker on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”
Paul’s warning comes as state lawmakers across the country consider redrawing congressional lines at the insistence of President Donald Trump, with Democratic-led states like Virginia and Maryland weighing mid-cycle redistricting to counter GOP gains in Texas, Missouri and North Carolina.
The Kentucky Republican predicted that eliminating minority seats in Congress could lead to voters feeling disenfranchised and empowering them to “resort to other means.”
“I’m concerned if there are no representatives, like no Republican representatives in California or no Democrats in Texas, that it will be so thoroughly one-sided that people will feel like their vote isn’t counting,” Paul said, adding: “It’s a mistake of both parties.”
State legislators in Indiana delivered a brutal blow to Trump’s push to redraw maps in the GOP’s favor ahead of next year’s midterm elections, voting down a new map that would have potentially gerrymandered two additional seats for Republicans despite an immense pressure campaign from the White House and anonymous death threats.
Illinois Democrats, who had promised to respond with a tit-for-tat gerrymander if Indiana Republicans moved forward with the effort, momentarily backed off in the wake of the rebuke, signaling that Indiana’s retreat could lead to a temporary ceasefire in the escalating redistricting wars.
Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker left the door open for redistricting in his state during an interview with Crooked Media’s Jon Lovett that aired Sunday on “Pod Save America” even though he said he’s “generally opposed” to mid-cycle redistricting.
“I don’t want to change the districting mid-decade in Illinois, but we will if we have to,” he said.
Trump has repeatedly threatened to support primary challengers to Indiana Republicans who rebuffed the gerrymandering push, vowing on Thursday to “do everything within my power” to have Indiana Senate Republican leader Rodric Bray and others pushed out of the party for their defiance.
Speaking to host Jacqui Heinrich on “Fox News Sunday,” Sen. Jim Banks (R-Ind.) called the failure of Indiana’s redistricting effort “a missed opportunity,” adding that “you don’t want to be on the other side of Donald Trump.”
“Those primaries will happen, but it’s not about Donald Trump, it’s about the country. It’s about keeping the Republican majority in the House of Representatives and addressing issues like health care affordability and saving this country from those who want to tear it down,” Banks said.
Trump Watch
Hopium Chronicles, A Corrupt And Malevolent Monster, Greg Sargent On Stephen Miller and "Determination," My Report From Los Angeles, Simon Rosenberg, right, 
Dec. 15, 2025. Let’s start with this from Punchbowl News:
The big picture. With just 17 days until the Obamacare tax credits expire, we can say definitively that Congress — and the country — is going over the Obamacare cliff. Even if the House passes something, the Senate isn’t going to move anything by the deadline.
The Punchbowl story then goes on to describe the chaos, incoherence, and buffoonery of Mike Johnson’s House as they desperately, and pathetically, scramble to make it appear as if somehow they give a shit about the American people. For we need to be clear: The savaging of our health care system was THE CENTRAL AIM of their big ugly bill this summer. They took money from the health care of working people and gave it to large corporations and wealthy people. That was the policy. While also raising utility bills for all of us by eliminating energy subsidies and raising prices on everything else through their illegal and unconstitutional tariffs and inhumane mass deportation program.
Helping the rich and privileged and making it harder for working people to get ahead is Trump’s overarching governing strategy, one we call here “more for me and less for all of you” or “they are for the oligarchs, and we are for the people.”
Of course this represents an extraordinary betrayal of what the flim-flam confidence man promised the American people when he ran last year. This sense of betrayal is captured in a new and truly remarkable Washington Post story this morning, "MAGA leaders warn Trump the base is checking out. Will he listen?" A passage (gift link) from that article:
a growing chorus of faithful MAGA supporters who have begun raising concerns over what they see as Trump’s second-term shortcomings. In recent weeks, pockets of the president’s base — well-known for its unwavering dedication to Trump and his MAGA agenda — have accused the president of focusing too much on foreign affairs, failing to address the cost of living issues he pledged to fix, aligning himself too closely with billionaires and tech moguls, and resisting the release of more investigative files on the deceased sexual predator Jeffrey Epstein.
Across the conservative spectrum, a steady drumbeat of commentators have warned that Trump’s coalition is weakened, and the party is headed for defeat in November’s midterms elections. There are concerns that the base won’t show up over frustrations that Trump hasn’t pursued the MAGA agenda aggressively enough. And others worry economic concerns could threaten his standing with the independent voters key in next year’s midterms.
Now let’s spend time with the comments for this story from Mark Mitchell, the lead pollster for Rasmussen, the most important of the right-aligned red wave pollsters, a man whose blood flows as MAGA red as anyone in America:
As Donald Trump ate his crab cake lunch inside the White House last month, conservative pollster Mark Mitchell tried to explain that there was a disconnect between what the administration seemed to be focused on, and what Trump’s passionate base of supporters want to see.
“Sir, you got shot at the Butler rally,” Mitchell said, invoking the “really strong optics” of Trump raising his fist in defiance after the attempted assassination in July 2024.
“You said, ‘Fight, fight, fight.’ But nobody ever clarified what that means,” Mitchell continued. “And right now, you’re fight-fight-fighting Marjorie Taylor Greene, and not actually fight-fight-fighting for Americans.”
The head pollster at Rasmussen Reports warned Trump that many of his supporters believe he hasn’t “drained the swamp” in Washington, and suggested the president refocus with a plan to embrace “pragmatic economic populism.”
“To the extent to which we were talking about the economic populism message, he wasn’t as interested as I would have hoped,” Mitchell said, adding that it was a “long-ranging conversation.”
And…..
Mitchell was invited to the White House by Vice President JD Vance, who follows him on X and has communicated with Mitchell about polling in recent months. Before lunch with Trump, Mitchell met with Vance, White House chief of staff Susie Wiles and Secretary of State Marco Rubio. Mitchell is not part of the president’s political operation, but Trump’s advisers were interested in hearing his outside perspective, a White House official told The Post.
Mitchell said Trump listened to his concerns and asked questions, but eventually pivoted to one of his favorite conversation topics: golf. He gushed about two of his golf partners, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-South Carolina) and Fox News host Bret Baier, both of whom are the subject of MAGA-faction ire. Trump also bragged about how much money he had raised during a golf fundraiser for Graham the weekend before, a day after he declared he was rescinding his support for Greene.
In an interview, Mitchell suggested that it would have been better for the administration to acknowledge early on that repairing the economy would take significant changes and would not occur overnight.
“The very first thing they shouldn’t have done is lower gas prices one dollar and then say, ‘The Golden Age is here,’ ” he said.
And……
Many supporters like her have been turned off seeing what was once a full calendar of rallies in Middle America replaced with opulent events with business leaders, deal-signings with billionaires and travel to other continents. While meeting with Trump, Mitchell told the president his base of supporters wanted to see him “smash the oligarchy, not be the oligarchy.”
“Building billionaire-funded ballrooms and jet-setting around the world and trillion-dollar investment deals looks a lot like oligarchy stuff,” Mitchell told The Post.
Crab cakes, golf outings, fundraising, gilded ballrooms and oligarchy - just OMFG!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
They are figuring it out. Even the loyalists. That Trump only cares about himself, his power, his cronies and does not give a shit about any of us. Why else would they let measles rage in South Carolina without the Federal government lifting a finger? Or keep the tariffs in place despite the harm they are doing to working people, small businesses, and farmers? Or trample the rights and liberties of citizens and sell out the West for Russian bribes, as we discussed on Saturday? Or literally do nothing to try to address their intentional breaking of the health care system? Or post deranged stuff like this? Image
In the Capital this Washington Post story is something, for it gets to the heart of the matter: that his own supporters are figuring out what a corrupt and malevolent monster he is. Here’s another passage:
In Georgia, 36-year-old Jessie Meadows, a Trump voter who describes herself as “MAGA,” grew frustrated this year as prices remained high and the president responded dismissively to the push to release more files on Epstein. Her disappointment hardened as Trump attacked Greene and Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Kentucky), who also pushed for the files’ release. Trump’s online posts touting favorable polls and success bringing down inflation seemed like his own version of “fake news,” Meadows said.
She voted for Democratic candidates in November’s Public Service Commission elections in Georgia that flipped the seats from the GOP, and said that going forward, she will back candidates she considers “America First,” regardless of party.
“If I had known what Trump was going to turn into now, I would have stayed home,” Meadows said.
Everyone's Entitled To My Own Opinion: ‘Things can happen’ — Donny is incapable of a human response to tragedy, Jeff Tiedrich, right, Dec. 15, 2025. Here’s what we know so far:
On Saturday afternoon, some f___ obtained a weapon of mass death, just as our founders intended. He took that weapon into Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, and opened fire, just as our founders intended, indiscriminately spraying bullets, just as our founders intended, and sending nine people to the hospital and two to the morgue, just as our founders intended.
The unknown shooter then ran off and, as of this writing, is still at large, just as our founders intended.
Terrified students spent the entire night barricaded in their classrooms, just as our founders intended.
It was the 465th mass shooting in America this year, just as our founders intended.
Before we get to Donny Convict’s disgracefully callous response to this tragedy, here’s how a real president mourns.
Joe Biden: “Students should have the freedom to learn in school without having to fear for their lives. Period. We must never accept senseless violence that leaves families and communities shattered. It pierces the very soul of our nation. We can and must do more to prevent gun violence and save lives. Jill and I are grieving the lives lost and those wounded at Brown University, and we are keeping the victims, their loved ones, and all of Providence in our prayers.”
Thank you. I miss this guy every day.
Now let’s compare that with the reaction of the diaper-____ sociopath ever to befoul the Oval Bordello.
“And, uh. Brown University. Great school. Great— great, really one of the greatest schools anywhere in the world. Things can happen."
First of all, excellent job on the makeup, Mister President. My compliments to your embalmer.
Not one single shred of humanity. just a dispassionate, monotone ‘things can happen.’ Donny puts more emotion into talking about Arnold Palmer’s dick.
We got the same f___uip response last month, as Donny sat next to the Crown Prince of Bone Saw Arabia and rationalized away the murder of Jamal Khashoggi: ‘Things happen.’
This isn’t how a president talks. This is how a mob boss talks.
But at least Donny switches it up every now and then. When schoolchildren were gunned down in their classrooms in Perry, Iowa, he didn’t tell us that ‘things happen.’ Instead, it was ‘we have to get over it.’
The Contrarian, Political Commentary: Trump is Losing it, Jennifer Rubin, right, Dec. 15, 2025. A wounded, humiliated Trump may be the most dangerous of all.
Donald Trump is losing it. He is losing more court cases (e.g., Letitia James, Kilmar Abrego Garcia, California national guard deployment), losing the aura of invincibility; losing the power to convince members of Congress they should fear him more than the voters and to convince voters not to believe their own life experience (“affordability is a hoax!”); and losing the strength to bend state legislatures to his will. Most vividly, he has lost control over himself. The result is a presidency and a MAGA movement in free fall.
In the Senate, he lost 4 Republicans on the vote to extend the Affordable Care Act subsidies. While the Senate mounted a feeble attempt to provide a transparently useless alternative (healthcare spending accounts), no Democrat went along, even Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.) bought it, and Republicans utterly failed to convince anyone outside the MAGA cult that they have a serious solution to the healthcare crisis they created. Voters will hold them singularly responsible for pricing millions out of healthcare insurance. (The House is so chaotic it is not clear what, if any, measure will come to the floor.)
Over in the House, Speaker Mike Johnson, right, is also in a tailspin. His members are in revolt (regularly resorting to discharge petitions, a previously unimaginable challenge to leadership). They are more eager to distance themselves from the sinking 
Trump-Johnson ship. We saw stark evidence of precisely that when Republicans joined in a discharge petition and then a lopsided vote to override Trump’s union busting executive order purporting to strip thousands of government workers’ bargaining rights. A discharge petition on healthcare may come this week.
Trump’s most humiliating defeat to date came in deep red Indiana, where Trump had huffed and puffed and threatened lawmakers unless they passed a re-re-redistricting plan. When they refused, the headlines were harsh. From Daily Beast: “Trump Power Grab Foiled in Humiliating Republican Revolt.” From the Washington Post: “Trump’s redistricting effort fails in Indiana as GOP lawmakers deliver rare rebuke.” And these: “Indiana Republicans defy Trump and reject his House redistricting push in the state” (Associated Press), “The State That Handed Trump His Biggest Defeat Yet,” (Atlantic), and “Indiana Redistricting Plan Rejected in Rebuke to Trump” (Wall Street Journal).
Aside from Texas, therefore, Trump does not appear able to carry out more re-redistricting power grabs. (Missouri’s plan likely will be reversed by a ballot measure.) Worse, his bullying spurred Democrats to create more seats in California and perhaps in Illinois, Virginia, and Maryland. Moreover, with MAGA’s collapse in support among Hispanics, some of those 5 new “Republican seats” in Texas may well wind up in Democratic hands. His 2026 midterm strategy is worse than a wash: It backfired, and even in states where no redistricting battle raged, it galvanized Democrats.Subscribed
That might not have been his biggest blunder. Trump’s insistence that Americans do not really have an affordability crisis has gone over like a lead balloon. He no doubt provided clips for many 2026 Democratic ads with a cringeworthy speech in Pennsylvania, garnering headlines like “Trump lashes out during Pennsylvania rally, hurls hate speech and racist insults.” Quite apart from the crazed digressions and unhinged rants, he tried to skate by on lies about prices and “spent most of the time mocking the term ‘affordability’ and insisting that Americans were doing better than they had ever done before,” as the New York Times reported.
Recycling his austerity hectoring did not help his cause. He babbled: “You can give up certain products, you can give up pencils because under the China policy, you know, every child can get 37 pencils. They only need one or two.” The guy who has flocked the Oval Office in gold, wants a Versailles-style ballroom and used his office to lard up on crypto insisted: “You don’t need 37 dolls for your daughter. Two or three is nice, but you don’t need 37 dolls.” Austerity for thee, but not for me, much?
Unsurprisingly, Trump’s cavalier attitude and contempt for voters’ lived experience and receipts have freaked out smarter Republicans. At least former president Joe Biden acknowledged people’s pain as the economy recovered; Trump will not do even that—that would suggest he has failed. Judging from the 2025 election results, his strategy will flop.
From all this, a picture of a decrepit, flailing, desperate man-child emerges. The latest AP-NORC poll, which shows his overall approval rating at a dismal 36%, is nothing short of disastrous for Trump and MAGA Republicans who have tied themselves to him. “Only 31% of U.S. adults now approve of how Trump is handling the economy…That is down from 40% in March and marks the lowest economic approval he’s registered in an AP-NORC poll in his first or second term.” His approval has also sunk on critical issues such as managing the federal government, where he “has not seen an approval bump even after congressional Democrats effectively capitulated to end a record-long government shutdown last month.”
Moreover, Trump’s strengths have become liabilities. “Just a few months ago, 53% of Americans approved of Trump’s handling of crime, but that’s fallen to 43% in the new poll. There’s been a similar decline on immigration, from 49% approval in March to 38% now.”
Despite his bravado, Trump’s more frequent and extreme temper tantrums reveal he is also losing his ability to ignore criticism, control himself, and manage pressure. He blew up at the New York Times for covering his declining physical condition. He went on a wild Truth Social barrage after his miserable Pennsylvania speech, and went nuts over his bad polls. He routinely lashes out at female reporters who have the temerity to ask basic questions. (The White House staff might want to lock up the ketchup bottles.)
Trump is in a dangerous downward spiral. As Americans come to terms with his chaotic reign, they increasingly recoil at (and protest) his cruelty, incompetence, and recklessness. That leads to electoral defeats, which prompt Republicans to see their own political survival at risk. They are emboldened to revolt, revealing him to be a paper tiger. His base then perceives him as weaker. Naturally, his own volcanic narcissism then explodes.
Matters are likely to get worse. The release of graphic images from the Epstein files will prey on his psyche, frighten his lackeys, and send more Republicans racing for the exits. And even the Supreme Court appears poised to throw out his tariff scheme, while signs of dismal growth and rising unemployment will surely prompt him to rail against “phony” data (from his own bureaucracy?!). He therefore will be even more motivated to distract voters with a war or more crazed domestic gambits.
The legacy media’s refusal to recognize Trump’s mental and emotional unraveling cannot conceal a stark reality: Trump has lost it. That might spell misfortune for MAGA Republicans, but it also poses new dangers to our democracy and security.
Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Numbness in Providence, Hannah Yoest, Dec. 15, 2025. The doors are not the problem.
In the aftermath of the mass school shooting at Brown University on Saturday, in which two died and nine were injured, many have started to call for the school to follow Columbia and Yale in completely locking down and gating the campus. This willful avoidance of the real issue says a lot about how we deal with these tragedies. The continued failure to address gun violence has engendered learned helplessness. We treat the Second Amendment—and a questionably broad reading of it—like an immutable commandment rather than a matter of policy.
The Rhode Island School of Design, where I’m a graduate student, shares much of Brown’s campus. The security measures in place are already extensive. Most buildings require you to swipe an access badge to get through multiple locked doors.
In a press conference Sunday morning at the local fire station, one reporter mentioned the two Brown students who were already survivors of a mass shooting from their time in high school. She pressed Providence Mayor Brett Smiley, “What do you feel needs to be done to keep this from happening, to stop that cycle of violence?”
Smiley declined to address her concern directly, admonishing her that, so soon after the murders, the time for advocacy was not yet right. But he recalled what one student in the hospital who “showed tremendous courage” told him: ”You know that active-shooter drill they made me do in high school actually helped me in the moment.”
That observation, Smiley said, “provided me hope, and was so sad. We shouldn’t have to do active-shooter drills, but it helped, and the reason it helped and the reason we do these drills is because [mass shootings are] damn frequent.”
Active-shooter drills are a way of hardening our softest targets. They’re also a way of hardening our hearts, accepting that to be a student in America is to be a victim-in-waiting.
After so many years and so many young deaths, it’s not hard to see why America has become such a low-trust society. But it’s jarring to be treated as if reporting on a mass shooting is to be an accomplice after the fact. Walking around campus and at the hospital, asking people if they’d be willing to share their experience, I was met with a range of suspicion, and even hostility.
There was a time when the families and friends of victims—and the survivors—wanted their stories told. Not anymore. Maybe in past years they knew the power of their experiences, but since then they’ve seen their impotence.
The problem is threefold: First, after Sandy Hook, we saw the families of victims targeted, smeared, and plagued by lies and conspiracy theories promoted by charlatans posing as “journalists,” with little recourse but the glacial judicial system.
In the dozen years since, things have gotten worse. At the top, we have a leader who has made lying the foundation of his movement while attacking the media at every turn, weakening a once-robust force for accountability.
And on the opposite end of the spectrum, there is a streak of political correctness, especially among people my age or younger, whose sensibilities about media gatekeeping and the morality of telling someone else’s story is, to borrow a term, “problematic.” The net effect is that no one seems to believe in the power of the truth anymore.
Those few who were willing to open up showed grace in the wake of the tragedy. I spoke with a pair of sophomores on the main quad who asked to not be named because their parents had warned them never to trust the press. They were building a snowman.
“It’s a terrible situation, and we’re all shocked,” one said, “Brown, though, is the ‘Happy Ivy.’ It’s in our nature to be out on the green here doing fun things, but it’s obviously not the same now.”
Later in the evening, at a vigil held by the Providence City Council in lieu of a planned holiday celebration, more than 200 people gathered to light candles and mourn together. The Red Cross provided hot drinks and blankets as snow fell on the crowd. Two other sophomores, who had known one of the victims, encapsulated the feeling of helplessness attendant to grief: “Vigils always help,” one said.
U.S. Media, Technology, Politics, Culture
Top Tech Titans and Authoritarians (Source: The Authoritarian Stack).
Paul Krugman via Substack, Political-Economy Commentary: MAGA, the Broligarchs and the Media, Paul Krugman, right, Dec. 15, 2025. This isn’t just about business; it’s about democracy.
Warner Bros. Discovery, which among other things controls CNN, has agreed to sell itself to Netflix.But it isn’t a done deal, because Paramount has made a rival, hostile bid.
Now, most Americans, even those like me who pay a lot of attention to the economy, don’t usually take much interest in insider baseball about corporate wheeling and dealing. But this is a bigger story than usual, for three reasons.
First, there’s an antitrust issue. In an earlier era, when the U.S. government took monopoly power seriously, both proposed acquisitions would probably have been blocked by regulators.
Second, there’s a financial issue. On its own, there is no way that Paramount, which is deeply in debt and whose credit rating is “a notch below ‘junk’” could afford to buy Warner. It’s able to make a semi-credible bid only because of assurances of support from Larry Ellison, one of the world’s richest men thanks to his stake in the software giant Oracle. But when analysts look closely at the details, they find that Ellison’s promises of support are more than a bit squirrely:
[T]he Warner Bros. Discovery board worried that Mr. Ellison did not personally guarantee the bid under his name and is planning to contribute equity for the deal through a trust with holdings that could be modified at any time.
Adding to the risk of Oracle’s deal is the fact that Oracle is itself shaky according to the estimation of gimlet-eyed financial markets due to its huge, debt-financed bets on AI.
As Bloomberg reports, its investment grade debt now “trades like junk.”
But it’s not just about the money. For the average American, there is something fundamentally important about this corporate cage-match to win Warner Bros. Discovery. And it’s not about entertainment, it’s about democracy. You should understand that Paramount’s hostile bid is, above all, a political move in the pursuit of cementing the dominance of MAGA-supporting tech billionaires and further eroding American democracy.
Back in 2018, during Trump I, the political scientists Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt published How Democracies Die, which described how nations like Hungary had descended into one-party authoritarianism although the formal, but now toothless, institutions of democracy remain. In the latest edition of Foreign Affairs Levitsky, Ziblatt and Lucan Way say that this process is already well underway here in the U.S.:
In Trump’s second term, the United States has descended into competitive authoritarianism—a system in which parties compete in elections but incumbents routinely abuse their power to punish critics and tilt the playing field against their opposition. Competitive authoritarian regimes emerged in the early twenty-first century in Hugo Chávez’s Venezuela, Recep Tayyip Erdogan’s Turkey, Viktor Orban’s Hungary, and Narendra Modi’s India. Not only did the United States follow a similar path under Trump in 2025, but its authoritarian turn was faster and farther-reaching than those that occurred in the first year of these other regimes.
Now, in some ways America is unusually well-positioned to resist this authoritarian push. As Levitsky et al note, we have a “well-organized and rich civil society” — ranging from law firms to universities to nonprofits — that can push back. And while some of these institutions are led by cowards, not all are. We also have unified political opposition in the form of the Democratic Party, which is very different from the splintered opposition that faced Viktor Orban in Hungary, for example.
Yet, ominously, Trump and Trumpism have powerful allies that had no counterpart in previous competitive authoritarian regimes. Namely, there is a network of deeply anti-democratic tech billionaires, of which Ellison is a very significant player. The Authoritarian Stack project, which tracks that network, calls it the “Authoritarian Tech Right”. I’ve put their chart of some of the keyplayers at the top of this post. Some of us refer to that network, less formally, as the “broligarchy.”
As I have written recently, the broligarchy has deep antipathy to liberal principles in general and to democracy in particular, which they don’t try to hide. Peter Thiel has declared, “I no longer think that freedom and democracy are compatible.” Musk has derided empathy and made common cause with the German neo-Nazi party AfD. Alex Karp, head of the Pentagon contractor Palantir, has said that he hopes killing helpless shipwrecked sailors will be made constitutional so that he can make more money selling equipment to the Pentagon. And Joe Lonsdale says that public executions should come back.
Consistent with their agenda of disabling a pluralistic, democratic society, the broligarchy is engaged in an effort to seize control of media, both traditional and social. With Donald Trump’s blessing, they are trying to control media so that, as in Orban’s Hungary or Chavez’s Venezuela, the only political news that we see is what the authoritarian powers want us to see.
Elon Musk’s purchase of Twitter and Jeff Bezos’s purchase of The Washington Post were early stages in this campaign. Since Musk’s acquisition, the app formerly known as Twitter has become a bot- and Nazi-infested hellhole. My own account was hijacked by an entity in Saratov, Russia, and I have never attempted to reclaim it.
Then there is the sad story of the Washington Post. While it first appeared that Bezos would continue to run it as a quality news source, the owner’s increasingly blatant political agenda has led the once-great paper to hemorrhage both talent and readers.
Under Trump II, the broligarch campaign to take down independent media has gone into overdrive. And Larry Ellison is at the wheel.
This last summer Paramount merged with Skydance Media, whose CEO is David Ellison, Larry Ellison’s son. The main prize the Ellisons sought via the merger was control of Paramount-owned CBS News. Likewise, in Paramount’s hostile bid for Warner, the prize that the Ellisons are seeking is control of CNN. And they are not even trying to hide their Trump-serving agenda. CNN has been among the major outlets most critical of Trump, in direct, unvarnished and courageous reporting. As a result, Trump has openly called for drastic changes at CNN. When a CNN reporter asked why the Pentagon isn’t releasing footage of airstrikes on boats allegedly carrying drugs, he denounced it as “an arm of the Democrat Party”.
The true intent of the broligarchs’ actions is revealed by the financial numbers: these media outlets make only very modest amounts of money, yet the broligarchs are throwing billions at them. Moreover, previous takeovers have shown that the outlets make even less money when they are forced to serve a right-wing agenda. The Washington Post is bleeding talent and subscribers, while X/Twitter has lost so many advertisers as well as readers that Musk has sued former advertisers, claiming that their decision not to spend money on his platform is an illegal boycott.
Yet another example of the decline of a media outlet in the aftermath of a Tech Right takeover is CBS. After the Ellison takeover, Paramount put Bari Weiss — whose career was built on attacking mainstream media for alleged left-wing bias — in charge of CBS News. How’s that going? On Saturday, when Weiss led a news special featuring an interview with Charlie Kirk’s widow, major advertisers were conspicuously absent. Instead, as Variety put it,
commercial breaks were largely filled with spots from direct-response advertisers, including the dietary supplement SuperBeets; the home-repair service HomeServe.com; and CarFax, a supplier of auto ownership data.
And let’s not forget the recent episode in which Trump’s FCC chair, Brendan Carr, tried to force Jimmy Kimmel off the air. Disney immediately capitulated and suspended Jimmy Kimmel, but quickly backtracked in face of widespread subscriber backlash.
So there’s every reason to expect a financial debacle if the Ellisons succeed in capturing Warner and degrading CNN. But financial losses on media capture are immaterial to the broligarchs because the money is irrelevant. What they are after is buying favor with Donald Trump and, more broadly, advancing their own authoritarian agenda.
However, there are reasons for hope in stopping the destruction of CNN. One, both mergers – the one proffered by Netflix as well as the one proffered by Paramount – are very likely illegal under an objective assessment of their anti-competitive consequences. Clearly, this is something that should not go unnoticed by a future Democratic administration, which could quite plausibly reverse the merger. And, second, the shaky terms of Paramount’s bid along with the Oracle’s dire financial condition appear to have put off Warner’s shareholders.
But it’s a terrifying prospect that we are so close to authoritarian media capture. Just take a look at Hungary or Venezuela to see what that leads to.
Morning Shots via The Bulwark, The Murder of Innocents, William Kristol, right, Dec. 15, 2025.
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned.
—William Butler Yeats, “The Second Coming”
The cascade of murders of innocents this past weekend—students preparing for final exams at Brown, Jews celebrating the festival of Hanukkah in Sydney, Rob and Michele Reiner in Los Angeles—hit home for me, as I imagine it did for many of us, with particular force.
And so this morning, though I’d jotted down notes last night on several possible topics for this newsletter, I find I don’t really want to address any of them yet. I’m not quite ready to move on.
Mind you, it’s not that I have any great insights to share on the terrible events of the past weekend. It’s not as if I have compelling or comforting words to offer in the face of these tragedies.
And it’s not as if I claim especially close connections here. I’ve been friendly with Brown students and faculty, and I very much admire the Australian Jewish community. I’ve enjoyed getting to know Rob Reiner a bit in the last decade. But there are so many others who have been and who are so much closer to those worlds than I. They’re speaking eloquently about their loss, and ours. They’re offering moving tributes to those who are gone. They’re discussing the various policy issues raised by the events.
I respect and admire those contributions.
For my part, words fail me when I read that Alex Kleytman, an 87-year-old Ukrainian Holocaust survivor, was celebrating Hanukkah at Bondi Beach with his wife of 57 years, also a Holocaust survivor. He was killed while shielding Larisa from the bullets with his own body.
What can one say? We can bow our heads in respect—to him, and to all this weekend’s victims and their families and friends. We can take a moment to reflect. We can vow to remember. And then we can move forward, re-dedicating ourselves to creating a world in which such horrors are less likely in the future.
Our community is dedicated to trying to make our politics a little less horrible. If you’ve been reading Morning Shots for a while, we’d love for you to join us. Start a free trial today. You can also give Bulwark+ memberships as gifts this holiday season. And as always, money should be no impediment to membership, so if you want to join but can’t swing it right now, send us an email and we’ll work something out.
More On U.S. Goverance, Politics
Popular Information, Accountability Journalism: As measles ravages South Carolina, RFK Jr. undermines the vaccine, Judd Legum, right, Dec. 15, 2025. There is a massive measles outbreak spreading rapidly in Upstate South Carolina. Already, 111 people, mostly in Spartanburg County, have contracted the virus. People have been exposed to measles at church, in health care facilities, and at schools.
According to the South Carolina Department of Public Health, 254 people are currently in quarantine, including 43 children. Dr. Linda Bell, the state epidemiologist, says the measles outbreak is “accelerating.”
Measles was “declared eliminated from the United States in 2000.” But that is due to the effectiveness of the Measles, Mumps, and Rubella (MMR) vaccine. In Spartanburg County, the immunization rate in schools is 90%, and many large schools have vaccination rates in the low-80s. According to the CDC, “[o]ne person infected with measles can lead to a dozen other people becoming infected in any community where less than 95% of people have been vaccinated against measles.”
Measles is a dangerous disease. Symptoms of the disease include a high fever, cough, and a rash. In severe cases, the disease can cause “blindness, pneumonia or encephalitis, swelling of the brain.” Twenty percent of measles cases among the unvaccinated result in hospitalization and “between one and three of every 1,000 children who get measles die from respiratory or neurologic complications,” Forbes reported. Before vaccines became widely available, “measles was the single leading killer of young children globally.”
As Bell noted, increasing vaccination rates now could slow the spread of measles in South Carolina. “If people are willing to be vaccinated, receiving an MMR vaccine within 72 hours of exposure has been shown to prevent measles infections,” Bell said.
In response to the South Carolina measles outbreak, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., left, the nation’s top public health official, has said nothing. Kennedy Jr. has a long history of promoting dangerous misinformation about the MMR vaccine, which has contributed to lower vaccination rates.
In his 2023 book, Vax-Unvax, Kennedy Jr. promoted debunked research from Andrew Wakefield, a former English doctor, who linked the MMR vaccine to autism. (The study was retracted by Wakefield’s co-authors nearly 20 years earlier.) In 2019, while leading the anti-vaccine organization Children’s Health Defense, Kennedy Jr. wrote that MMR vaccines have an “unconscionably high injury rate.” A 2024 study published in Lancet found the measles vaccine prevented “93.7 million deaths globally between 1974 and 2024.”
As HHS Secretary, Kennedy Jr. removed language from the CDC website which stated that vaccines did not cause autism.
Kennedy has simultaneously downplayed the danger of the measles virus. “If you look at the kids in Africa who get measles, these other diseases, they’re all malnourished. It’s hard for the disease to affect a healthy kid. It’s easy for the disease to affect an unhealthy person with a ragged immune system,” Kennedy said in a 2023 interview with Joe Rogan.
In response to an outbreak earlier this year in Texas, Kennedy Jr. has issued a boilerplate statement encouraging people to get vaccinated against measles. But, as HHS Secretary, Kennedy Jr. has simultaneously continued to promote false claims about the dangers of the MMR vaccine.
In a March 11 interview with Fox News’ Sean Hannity, Kennedy Jr. claimed the MMR vaccine “does cause deaths every year,” including “all the illnesses that measles itself causes, encephalitis and blindness, et cetera.” As a result, Kennedy Jr. said, whether or not to vaccinate is a personal choice.
According to the Infectious Diseases Society of America, Kennedy’s claims are false. To the contrary, there are “no deaths shown to be related to the MMR vaccine in healthy people.” The MMR vaccine only poses a risk to immunocompromised individuals, who already do not receive the vaccine.
In a March 3 interview on Fox Nation, Kennedy Jr. said that it is “very very difficult for measles to kill a healthy person.” Therefore, the best way to prevent measles is “to keep themselves healthy.” Children died in Texas from measles this year with no underlying health conditions. In the same interview Kennedy Jr. promoted “cod liver oil” for the treatment and prevention of measles. Cod liver oil is not a substitute for vaccination. Vitamin A may be useful for the treatment of measles but it is impractical to get a therapeutic dose of Vitamin A from cod liver oil. To do so, “you would have to ingest 45 teaspoons of cod liver oil per day for 2 days.”
Kennedy appoints anti-vax conspiracy theorists to key roles
The Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) is “a federal advisory committee that develops recommendations on the use of vaccines in the civilian population of the United States.” On June 9, Kennedy removed all 17 voting members of ACIP.
In their place, Kennedy selected some of the leading purveyors of anti-vaccine misinformation. Kennedy appointed Vicky Pebsworth, the research director of the National Vaccine Information Center, an anti-vaccine advocacy group. For decades, Pebsworth has argued that the MMR vaccine caused her son to develop autism.
The new vice-chair of ACIP is Robert Malone, who the New York Times dubbed a “COVID misinformation star.” When a child died after contracting measles early this year, Malone published a newsletter claiming the child had died from other causes. A statement from the hospital disputed Malone’s framing of the tragedy. “The child was receiving treatment for complications of measles while hospitalized,” the hospital said in a press release. “It is important to note that the child was not vaccinated against measles and had no known underlying health conditions.” In a December 2025 ACIP meeting, Malone suggested that administering multiple vaccines to children at the same time, as the MMR vaccine does, could be dangerous. “My point of view is that this topic has merit,” Malone said. “It’s the whole reason why we now have a childhood vaccine schedule working group.”
In August, Kennedy appointed Jim O’Neill as the acting head of the CDC. O’Neill, who is also the deputy HHS Secretary, has no medical or scientific training.
In October, O’Neill called for the MMR vaccine to be divided into three separate vaccines, echoing a call by Trump from September. Breaking up the MMR vaccine has been a priority of the anti-vax movement for many years, even though there is no evidence that the combination poses any danger. It is a major priority of Wakefield, who has made a career falsely linking vaccines to autism.
Three separate vaccines would require every child to receive six shots, making it much more difficult to be fully protected. Further, individual vaccines for measles, mumps and rubella are not currently available or licensed in the United States. In the meantime, O’Neill’s statements suggest the current combination vaccine is unsafe at a time when increasing the vaccination rates in South Carolina and other hot spots is critical.
Former President Bill Clinton and former First Lady and Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, shown in a file photo by Karen Smith via Flickr.
New York Times, Inside the Clintons’ Fight to Avoid Testifying in the House Epstein Inquiry, Annie Karni, Dec. 15, 2025 (print ed.). Bill and Hillary Clinton have repeatedly offered to provide sworn statements, but Representative James R. Comer has threatened to hold them in contempt of Congress if they fail to appear.
A quiet, monthslong battle between Representative James R. Comer of Kentucky, the Republican chairman of the Oversight Committee, and Bill and Hillary Clinton over the panel’s Jeffrey Epstein investigation could come to a head this week. Mr. Comer has threatened to begin contempt of Congress proceedings against them if they fail to appear in person for depositions.
The threat is the starkest example yet of the attempt by House Republicans to shift the focus of the Epstein affair away from President Trump and his administration and onto prominent Democrats who once associated with the convicted sex offender and his longtime companion, Ghislaine Maxwell.
After Democrats on his panel effectively forced him to subpoena the Justice Department for its files, Mr. Comer also issued subpoenas in August to the Clintons, as well as to eight former top law enforcement officials. Since then, the chairman has withdrawn the subpoenas for five former attorneys general who wrote in statements to the panel that they had no knowledge relevant to the investigation. The committee also excused former F.B.I. directors James B. Comey and Robert S. Mueller III from giving live depositions. Only one person, former Attorney General William P. Barr, has appeared to testify.
But Mr. Comer has refused to excuse the Clintons, even though they have repeatedly offered to provide the same kind of sworn statement to the committee.
Instead, Mr. Comer has falsely accused them of ignoring his subpoenas and continued to demand that they appear for live depositions or face the possibility of being held in contempt, typically a first step in referring someone to the Justice Department for prosecution.
For months, the Clintons have been engaging with Mr. Comer far more than was previously known to respond to his requests and avoid having to appear on Capitol Hill. Their longtime attorney, David Kendall, has sent three letters explaining in detail his argument that the Clintons should be required to provide only sworn statements to the committee. On Sept. 30, Mr. Kendall met in person with Mr. Comer’s staff to discuss the requests.
Mr. Comer, in response, has only amped up his threats to penalize the Clintons if they fail to show up in person.
“The former president and former secretary of state have delayed, obstructed and largely ignored the committee staff’s efforts to schedule their testimony,” Mr. Comer said in a statement on Friday night. He again threatened to start contempt proceedings against them if they did not appear before his committee on Dec. 17 and 18, or schedule a date in early January to do so.
In a letter last week, Mr. Kendall accused Mr. Comer of going after the Clintons with “weaponized legislative investigations and targeted criminal prosecutions,” and said that it was neither appropriate or tenable for them to appear and be held to a different standard than others who had been excused.
“President Trump has consistently sought to divert attention from his own relationship with Mr. Epstein and unfortunately the committee appears to be complicit,” Mr. Kendall wrote in the letter, one of three that were provided to The New York Times by a Democratic lawmaker and have not been previously disclosed. He said Mr. Comer’s only reason for targeting the Clintons was “to catalyze a public spectacle for partisan purposes.”
Mr. Clinton was acquainted with Mr. Epstein — an association the former president described in his memoir — but never visited his private island and cut off contact with him two decades ago. Mr. Clinton took four international trips on Mr. Epstein’s private jet in 2002 and 2003, according to flight logs, and an undated photograph of Mr. Clinton and Mr. Epstein signed by the former president was part of a batch of images released by House Democrats last week highlighting Mr. Epstein’s ties to powerful men.
“Given what came to light much after,” Mr. Kendall wrote to Mr. Comer in one of his letters, “he has expressed regret for even that limited association.”
Angel Urena, a spokesman for Mr. Clinton, said that “for months, we’ve been offering the same exact thing he accepted from the rest, but he refuses and won’t explain why.”
He added, “Make of that what you will.”
More On U.S. Law, Justice, Crime
Brian J. Cole, Jr., shown above, is a purported Trump supporter recently arrested on federal charges of planting pipe bombs (which failed to explode) at the headquarters of the Democratic National Committee and the Republican National Committee on Jan. 5, 2021, just prior to the insurrection at the nearby Capitol that sought to stop the certification of the 2020 election results that forced then-President Trump to leave office later that month.
Emptywheel, Analysis: Four Years and 345 Days, Emptywheel (Marcy Wheeler), right, Dec. 15, 2025.The people involved in the Brian Cole prosecution are likely involved in a delicate game of chicken having to balance weaknesses of the case, a ticking clock, and the political disinterest in learning too much more about this case.
As originally scheduled, Magistrate Judge Michael Harvey would have held a detention hearing today for Brian Cole, the guy accused of planting pipe bombs on January 5, 2021.
We might have learned more about evidence and motive at such a hearing, but now we’ll have to wait until December 30, if at all.
Last Wednesday, the AUSA in the case, submitted a filing basically saying, “Regarding your question about whether we still need a detention hearing on December 15, I respond that the defense wants another two weeks to review discovery before such a hearing, and we’d like an exclusion of time under Speedy Trial Act.”
The United States respectfully moves the Court to exclude time under the Speedy Trial Act from the date of defendant Brian J. Cole, Jr.’s arrest on December 4, 2025, through the date of the detention hearing, which the defense has requested to continue. 1
In response to the Court’s inquiry, the government conferred with defense counsel. Defense counsel has requested that the government represent the following to the Court in this motion: The defense requests that the Court continue the detention hearing in this case currently set for December 15, 2025, to allow the defense additional time to review the significant amount of discovery provided by the government to date. The defense consents to the exclusion of time under the Speedy Trial Act from December 4, 2025, through the date of the rescheduled detention hearing.
The government does not oppose a defense continuance of the detention hearing. The parties jointly request that the detention hearing be reset for December 30, 2025.
1 For administrative efficiency, the government is submitting a single motion reflecting the relief sought by both parties.
Before I unpack what this means — and what we can or cannot assume from this — let me point to this WSJ story that explains why it took so long to find Cole: Basically, an FBI Agent wrote code to be able to read cell tower dumps T-Mobile provided, which the government had claimed — for years! — was corrupted.
For four years, a tranche of cellphone data provided to the FBI by T-Mobile US sat on a digital shelf because investigators couldn’t figure out how to read it, people familiar with the matter said. The data turned out to be essential to cracking the case, the people said, a breakthrough that happened only recently when a tech-savvy law-enforcement officer wrote a new computer program that finally deciphered the information. That move led to the arrest of 30-year-old Brian Cole Jr. at his home in Northern Virginia, where he had been quietly living with his mother and other relatives.
[snip]
Increasingly desperate and under pressure to make progress, supervisors urged agents and analysts to take a new look at what they had, including the data from T-Mobile—reflecting phone locations based on internet usage—that investigators had set aside years earlier.
Once investigators were finally able to read the data, they said it led them to Cole’s phone number because his cellphone’s movements tracked what investigators had seen in surveillance footage.
I have no doubt that the government believed they couldn’t access some or most of the T-Mobile data; it is a problem that has shown up in court filings for years. How well-founded that belief was is something we may learn in the months ahead.
WSJ also describes why we’re getting — and why we should expect to continue get — so much leaking from this investigation: Because Kash Patel is claiming credit and accusing the FBI of sandbagging before now.
In a four-hour interview with investigators, Cole acknowledged placing the bombs, people familiar with the probe said. He expressed support for Trump and said he had embraced conspiracy theories regarding Trump’s 2020 election loss, the people said. He had thrown out the Air Max sneakers, he said. Cole hasn’t entered a plea, and his lawyer didn’t respond to requests for comment.
Inside the Justice Department, agents and prosecutors have privately expressed widespread relief that an arrest has finally been made, but also resentment over FBI Director Kash Patel, right, who has suggested that they didn’t work doggedly on the probe until Trump administration leadership arrived.
The assertion that Cole is a Trump supporter, which was always the most likely explanation for his actions, adds to the likelihood of leaks. All the people crowing about the Cole arrest — Pam Bondi, Kash, and Dan Bongino — could well get fired if they find proof of another Trump- supporting terrorist. So they’re no doubt trying to minimize the chances that becomes public via official channels.
The fact that the FBI had to write code simply to read the T-Mobile data may explain something that I allude to here: The language the complaint uses to refer to location data is not described in the normal way, usually expressed as a percentage likelihood that a device was within a certain rage at the time in question.
The seven transactions between the COLE CELLPHONE and Provider’s towers occurred at approximately 7:39 p.m., 7:44 p.m., 7:59 p.m., 8:14 p.m., 8:23 p.m., and 8:24 p.m. Two transactions took place at 7:39 p.m. During this time period, the COLE CELLPHONE had transactions with five different sectors on Provider’s cell towers.
a. At approximately 7:39:27 p.m., the COLE CELLPHONE interacted with a particular sector of Provider tower 59323, which faces southeast (approximately 120˚) from its location at 103 G Street, Southwest in Washington, D.C. (“Sector A”). Also at 7:39:27 p.m., the COLE CELLPHONE interacted with a particular sector of Provider tower 126187, which faces east1 (approximately 90˚) from its location at 200 Independence Avenue, Southwest in Washington, D.C. (“Sector B”). Video surveillance footage shows that at approximately 7:39:32 p.m., the individual who placed the pipe bombs walked westbound on D Street, Southeast and then turned southbound on South Capitol Street, Southeast. These locations are consistent with the coverage areas of Sector A and B.
b. At approximately 7:44:36 p.m., the COLE CELLPHONE interacted with Sector B of Provider tower 126187. Video surveillance footage shows that at approximately 7:44:36 p.m., the individual who placed the pipe bombs walked east on Ivy Street, Southeast. This location is consistent with the coverage area of Sector B.
Here, the complaint claims only that the cell tower data is consistent with Cole’s presence in a certain cardinal directions from the cell towers; it doesn’t even explain how far that cell site is.
Even without the hack of the data needed to read the T-Mobile data, this case might have been vulnerable on Fourth Amendment grounds in any case. While the geofences for the Capitol itself have been sustained in a series of court orders, these tower dumps did not (as the Capitol-focused geofences did) collect data of people who were by definition culprits or victims. But if the T-Mobile data showing Cole’s location comes from some untested code, it would be far more vulnerable to challenge, with the likelihood of dueling experts about whether the software hack faithfully rendered the location data.
Sure, there’s the confession, but any good defense attorney will attempt to challenge any Miranda waiver, particularly in the case (as here) where a suspect is reportedly on the spectrum or is otherwise vulnerable to pressure.
Meanwhile, consider the implications of DOJ finding a way to read T-Mobile data that had been unavailable for years. What else might that data reveal? Might that data reveal a meeting between Cole and someone else on Capitol Hill on December 14?
Approximately three weeks before the pipe bombs were placed, on or about December 14, 2020, COLE made a purchase at a restaurant located near First and D Streets, Southeast. The restaurant is located across the street from the entrance to Rumsey Court on D Street, Southeast.
I think it inconceivable that Cole placed those bombs at the perfect location set to explode at the perfect time for an attack the following day. Which means any investigation into Cole could break open (or reopen) an investigation into the far more coordinated attack that was evident in movement that day but — for whatever reason — not charged.
Imagine the possibility that the FBI could find proof — and a witness — to explain how January 6 was an exceedingly well-coordinated terrorist attack? That would be sure to get Bondi, Kash, and Bongino fired!
As noted, DOJ asked for and got an exclusion of the 15-day delay in detention hearing time from the Speedy Trial Act (STA). That’s actually a very big deal, because when DOJ arrested Cole on December 5, the month they had to indict Cole under the STA coincided with the month that existed before the normal 5-year statute of limitations on most crimes expired.
The charges against Cole, 18 USC 844(d) & (i), actually have an extended (at least ten year) statute of limitations, as would some other charges, but some other possible charges (or conspiracy charges) might not.
So several things are likely going on:
First, while I think it likely FBI got their guy, if Cole’s confession is at all vulnerable to challenge, the case might be exceedingly weak, not least because the data has been manipulated.
Meanwhile, DOJ really is in crunch time regarding both the charges and any further investigation. That likely suits Trump’s appointees, who could be fired if the arrest of Cole provides cause to investigate further.
And that’s all on top of any colorable claim that Cole is entitled to the pardons Trump has already given his mob (not least if he had contact with someone else who has already been pardoned).
That’s the kind of mix that gives DOJ strong incentive to push for a plea, using as leverage the possibility of further charges, on top of an already draconian possible 40-year sentence.
Everyone else may be focused on holidays. But the people involved in this prosecution are likely involved in a very delicate game of chicken, as the ticking clock of dual deadlines threatens to explode.
Legal AF, Legal Commentary: Trump DOJ Dragged Into Court by Federal Judge for Emergency Hearing, Michael Popok, Dec. 15, 2025. Judge Richard Leon has ordered that the Trump 
Administration account for itself and explain by tonight at 5 pm ET, how it can demolish the East Wing and build a 90,000 square foot golden ballroom in its place, without obtaining any public comments, Congressional approval or approval from 4 different boards.
Popok briefs the audience on the emergency injunction hearing set for Tuesday and what the National Trust is asking for and what Judge Leon can do about it.
News Round-ups
Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: Shock. Horror. Tragedy, Bill Kristol, Andrew Egger and Jim Swift, Dec. 15, 2025. Murder and terror at opposite ends of the world.
It was a weekend of horrible news, with appalling outbreaks of violence both here in America and abroad. We’re praying for all those affected by the attacks at Brown University and on the Jewish community in Australia. It’s not a happy Monday.
The Parnas Perspective, Major Fractures Emerge in MAGA as Republicans Struggle to Coalesce the Party Around Affordability, Aaron Parnas, right, Dec. 15, 2025. Trump officials celebrates cuts that led to Cholera deaths with cake. Ahmed el Ahmed is out of surgery and recovering.
This is a heavy morning. We have seen tragedy after tragedy. From the Brown shooting, where the person of interest has now been released, to the Bondi Beach terrorist attack, where the man who stopped the attacker is out of surgery, to the devastating news of Rob and Michele Reiner’s deaths, it has been a horrifying weekend.
At the same time, major fractures inside the Republican Party are coming into clearer view as costs rise and the party struggles to present a coherent direction for what comes next.
Thank you to everyone for the warm Hanukkah wishes, and for the messages checking in after my mild concussion. This platform is the best gift I could ask for this holiday season because we are reaching people across America, including many who will never sit down with traditional news. We are doing it together, and we are not backing down or selling out.
Here’s what you missed:
As he heads toward the 2026 midterms, President Trump faces growing voter frustration over high living costs that undercut his populist image—once symbolized by his McDonald’s campaign stop—with polls showing low approval of his economic handling, mixed price trends, and concern even among Republicans that denying affordability struggles while blaming Biden risks making Trump appear out of touch unless he pairs empathy with a credible case that his policies will eventually ease household financial pressure.
A fracture is growing within the Republican Party over it’s future as more Republicans self-identify as “traditional” versus “MAGA” than ever before:
Meanwhile, Republicans are growing weary over the direction of the country, as a growing number of Republicans now say the country is heading the wrong direction:
ProPublica reports that Trump appointees and DOGE-linked officials celebrated deep USAID cuts even after being warned they would worsen South Sudan’s cholera outbreak, and that funding delays and terminations left clinics and sanitation programs shuttered during the crisis—contributing to a surge in cases and uncounted deaths—while senior officials publicly insisted lifesaving aid remained active and that no one died because of the cuts.
The race to find a healthcare plan is on. With enhanced Obamacare subsidies set to expire soon, Democrats have coalesced around a straightforward push to extend them to avoid sharp premium hikes and coverage losses for millions, while Republicans are split between conservatives opposing any extension and moderates fearing electoral backlash, leaving GOP leaders advancing a narrow, fragmented health care package with no unified message or guaranteed path to prevent a looming insurance cost shock.
After a mass shooting during a Hanukkah celebration at Bondi Beach that killed at least 16 people, Ahmed al-Ahmed, a 43-year-old Australian citizen of Syrian origin, is being hailed as a hero after risking his life to tackle and disarm an alleged gunman; now in critical but stable condition after being shot multiple times, al-Ahmed’s family says he acted purely out of conscience and humanitarian instinct, drawing praise from Australian leaders and becoming a symbol of courage, unity, and selflessness amid national grief and fear of backlash toward Muslim communities.
A JetBlue flight traveling from Curaçao to New York narrowly avoided a midair collision near Venezuelan airspace after a U.S. Air Force aircraft without an active transponder crossed directly into its flight path, forcing the pilot to halt the plane’s climb, as JetBlue and U.S. military officials investigate the incident and stress that flight safety remains a top priority.
A Syrian official told Politico that the gunman who killed two U.S. service members and an American civilian near Palmyra was a recent recruit to Syria’s internal security forces who had raised suspicions of possible Islamic State ties and was reassigned before the attack, underscoring both a major security breach and the fragility of the expanding U.S.–Syrian partnership as authorities launch sweeps to root out IS infiltration.
The Washington Post confirmed that the Trump administration moved to potentially take control of Washington, D.C.’s three municipal golf courses by issuing a notice of default to their nonprofit manager, National Links Trust, escalating a quiet power struggle over prominent public land and opening the door for the president to operate the city’s public golf properties.
Axios is reporting that Trump advisers are angrily criticizing Sen. Josh Hawley for launching a new anti-abortion group, viewing it as a politically damaging move that could hurt Republicans in the 2026 midterms and as a self-serving attempt by Hawley to raise his profile and position himself for a potential 2028 presidential challenge against Vice President Vance.
Erika Kirk, the widow of far-right activist Charlie Kirk and new CEO of Turning Point USA, is set to confront Candace Owens in a private, face-to-face meeting after Owens fueled conspiracy theories about Kirk’s death, a clash that highlights deepening rifts and personal power struggles within the post-Kirk MAGA movement.
Russia’s central bank is seeking about $230 billion in damages from Euroclear over frozen sovereign assets, a legal move meant to warn the EU against plans to use tens of billions of euros in seized Russian funds to back loans for Ukraine, as Brussels presses ahead with the scheme despite Moscow’s threats of retaliation and legal challenges abroad.
Hong Kong media tycoon and pro-democracy figure Jimmy Lai was convicted of national security and sedition charges and now faces a possible life sentence, a ruling widely condemned by rights groups and Western governments as a politically motivated “sham conviction” that underscores the erosion of press freedom, judicial independence, and civil liberties under Beijing’s national security law.
More On U.S. Governance, Politics
New York Times, Trump’s Cuts to U.S. Labor Board Leave Festering Disputes and a Power Struggle, Rebecca Davis O’Brien, Dec. 15, 2025. Advocates fear damage to labor protections if the Supreme Court upholds the president’s move to control federal agency staffing.
The agency charged with overseeing U.S. labor relations has been largely sidelined for the past year, mired in a legal limbo that has delayed the handling of major cases and fueled deep uncertainty about the future of federal labor law.
The agency, the National Labor Relations Board, has for months had merely a single member on its five-seat board, two short of the required number to hear cases. Even if the vacancies are filled — the Senate could vote to confirm two nominees from President Trump as soon as this week — the board could fundamentally change if the Supreme Court rules in coming months that the president has wide powers to fire appointed officials at federal agencies.
“The inability of the board to function for the last year has highlighted, for people who care about labor relations in this country, how broken the system is,” said Lauren McFerran, a Democrat and former chairwoman of the N.L.R.B. “Anyone could have seen this coming, but a year of nonfunctional labor law is a crisis point.”
In one case, which grew out of unfair labor practice claims against SpaceX and two other companies, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit ruled in August that the N.L.R.B.’s structure was unconstitutional, and granted the companies an immediate hold on the cases against them. This means that labor law is effectively unenforceable in Texas, Louisiana and Mississippi, which make up the circuit.
With the N.L.R.B.’s future uncertain, New York and California have moved to strengthen their own labor oversight agencies, prompting legal challenges by the N.L.R.B. and Amazon, moves supported by trade groups.
“There is no room for parallel or complementary state legislation,” said William B. Cowen, the labor board’s acting general counsel.
Mr. Cowen said the agency remained effective despite the lack of a sitting board, because the vast majority of cases are resolved in earlier stages. In the 2024 fiscal year, according to the board’s data, regional offices settled 96 percent of cases that advanced past filing.
More On U.S. Justice: Examining The Comey Prosecution In Depth
Senior U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly, above, is a Republican-nominated judge sitting in Washington, DC. She issued an important ruling regarding the Trump administration's federal prosecution of former FBI Director James Comey, shown in a file photo below, in the Eastern District of Virginia (EDVA) regarding messages seized by the FBI from Comey's lawyer and friend Daniel Richmanlly, above, is a Republican-nominated judge sitting in the Washington, DC-suburb of Alexandria and who issued an important ruling regarding the Trump administration's federal prosecution of former FBI Director James Comey, shown in a file photo below, in the Eastern District of Virginia (EDVA).
Emptywheel, Analysis: Colleen Kollar-Kotelly's Baby-Splitting with Dan Richman's Devices, Emptywheel (Marcy Wheeler), right, Dec. 15, 2025. It's true that Judge Kollar-Kotelly's decision requiring the government to get a warrant if it wants to use stuff seized from Dan Richman to prosecute Jim Comey may cause headaches for the dream of further prosecution. But it's not at all clear that it's a sound decision.
Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly issued an order that — if DOJ abides by it — should have the effect of forcing DOJ to do what they should have done in the first place before charging Jim Comey: Obtain a warrant for materials it claims supports their imagined crime.
At first, this looks like a tidy solution — and (as Politico notes) it may well present unbridgeable barriers to a renewed indictment of Jim Comey in EDVA, to say nothing of the Grand Conspiracy in SDFL. It’s also a solution that may prove resilient to appeal and because of that, avoid further scrutiny of its apparent tidiness.
But I’m not sure it is a just solution.
Start with the end result: DOJ has to destroy all copies of Dan Richman’s data in its possession, but first, Kollar-Kotelly ordered, they must give a copy of it all under seal to EDVA.
[T]he Court shall further ORDER that, before returning the covered materials to Petitioner Richman, the Government may create one complete electronic copy of those materials and deposit that copy, under seal, with the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, which shall have supervisory authority over access to this material, for future access pursuant to a lawful search warrant and judicial order. The U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia may then exercise its discretion to decide whether to allow Petitioner Richman an opportunity to move to quash any such warrant before it is executed.
Kollar-Kotelly describes this as a balancing solution, protecting Richman, right, but preserving the government’s ability to use this data against Comey.
Allowing the Government to retain a copy in its own possession therefore would not provide adequate redress to Petitioner Richman. Meanwhile, requiring the Government to return all copies of the files to Petitioner Richman could unduly impede the Government’s interests in pursuing future investigations and prosecutions if—as the Government strongly suggests in its briefing—it intends to pursue further prosecution of Mr. Comey. See supra Section III.C. The appropriate way to balance these interests, and to provide redress to Petitioner Richman without transforming his motion into a “collateral (and premature) motion to suppress evidence in another criminal proceeding,” see Gov’t’s Opp’n & Mot. at 7, is to allow a copy of the files to be retained for
As noted, this solution may well pose grave problems for the government, at least its hopes of reindicting in EDVA.
When Magistrate Judge William Fitzpatrick first laid out the Fourth Amendment violations involved in the searches targeting Jim Comey, he speculated that the reason DOJ did not get a warrant to access the material is because they were rushing to beat the statute of limitations.
That may be part of it, but there’s another reason. The theory of crime behind the indictment is that Jim Comey lied in September 2020 when he said that he had never authorized anyone at the FBI to leak anonymously. But as Comey laid out as part of his bid for a Bill of Particulars, none of the exhibits presented to the grand jury match that theory: they either involve stuff Richman did publicly or stuff he did after he left the FBI.
Here, the government has repeatedly failed to provide a coherent factual basis for its theory that Mr. Comey authorized Mr. Richman to be an “anonymous source” in news reports regarding the Midyear Exam investigation while Mr. Richman was “at the FBI.” Of the communications following Mr. Comey’s October 28, 2016 letter that the government cites in both briefs, none reflect Mr. Comey authorizing Mr. Richman to be an anonymous source. For instance, the communications show Mr. Richman discussed materials that were already public, like Mr. Comey’s letter to Congress. See, e.g., Opp. at 3 (“Wittes and I are spending a lot of time saying your letter means exactly, and only what it says.” (emphasis added)); id. at 3-4 (quoting the defendant as telling Mr. Richman that Richman’s contributing to a New York Times Opinion piece “would [be] shouting into the wind,” and “that they would ‘figure it out’” without Richman’s contributions). And even where the government alleges that Mr. Comey encouraged Mr. Richman to speak to the press in late October and early November 2016, there is no indication that Mr. Richman did so anonymously; to the contrary, one of the exhibits the government cites references Mr. Richman’s televised interview with Anderson Cooper. Opp. at 4 (citing ECF No. 138-6, 138- 7). The remaining communications cited by the government in its Opposition to Defendant’s Motion to Dismiss Indictment Based on Vindictive and Selective Prosecution suffer from numerous defects, but most critically, all occurred after February 7, 2017, when Mr. Richman left the FBI. This alone makes the government’s theory that Mr. Richman was “at the FBI” when these communications occurred incomprehensible. [Emphasis original]
To get a warrant — at least for the theory of the case presented in the EDVA indictment — DOJ would have to lay out what it failed to here, that there’s probable cause that Comey intentionally had Richman leak stuff anonymously while still at the FBI. Worse, in a warrant affidavit, unlike in a grand jury, the FBI would have to be honest about all the exculpatory evidence, such as the date Richman left. And even assuming DOJ could get that warrant, they would have to adhere to the terms of it; the warrant likely would not permit them to access materials that post-date Richman’s FBI departure, for example, which is the stuff they want the most.
Putting the materials at EDVA — where DOJ claims, unpersuasively, any and all ongoing investigation is — would ensure that prosecutors from WDVA or SDFL have to go there to obtain this information for other investigations. Even if Aileen Cannon approved an outrageous warrant for the Grand Conspiracy investigation, EDVA would have some visibility on it, most notably on any claim that there’s something criminal about releasing a memo showing Trump’s corruption when John Durham couldn’t find a crime in that after four years of looking.
And putting the material at EDVA would ensure that prosecutors do what they tried to avoid with their bid for a filter protocol: ignoring Fourth Circuit precedent by excluding courts from any privilege determination. They will not get a warrant in EDVA that does not provide Comey an opportunity to assert his own privilege claims.
Where I have some discomfort with Kollar-Kotelly’s opinion, though, is in limiting her holding to how badly DOJ fucked Richman’s Fourth Amendment rights.
As she laid out, Richman described three ways DOJ violated his Fourth Amendment rights: (1) by seizing data outside the temporal limits of the warrants, (2) by failing to scope the data specific to the crimes under investigation and sealing or destroying the rest, and then (3) by searching the raw data without a warrant five years later.
To obtain the return of his property under Rule 41(g), Petitioner Richman must show that “the property’s seizure was illegal.” United States v. Wright, 49 F.4th 1221, 1225 (9th Cir. 2022) (citation modified). Petitioner Richman contends that the Government’s seizure of his property violated his Fourth Amendment rights “in at least three ways.” Pet’r’s T.R.O. Mem., Dkt. No. 9- 1 at 17. First, he argues that the Government “exceeded the scope” of the prior warrants it obtained in 2019 and 2020 to search his property by “seizing both responsive and non-responsive materials.” Id. at 17–20. Second, he argues that the Government has continued to retain his materials for an “unreasonable” period of time. Id. at 17, 20–22. Third, he argues that the Government executed an unreasonable warrantless search of the retained property in 2025. Id., at 17, 22–23.
William Fitzpatrick, in ruling these were likely Fourth Amendment violations, put the fault on the original Arctic Haze investigators more than on the current Jim Comey team.
There is nothing in the record to suggest the government made any attempt to identify what documents, communications or other materials seized from Mr. Richman constituted evidence of violations of 18 U.S.C. § 641 and § 793. To be clear, ensuring that agents and prosecutors seize only those things which a court has authorized is a critical early step in the execution of any warrant and an elemental responsibility of all government agents.
But having laid those out as three problems, Kollar-Kotelly then flattens item one and two into one issue: the initial seizure. Her initial discussion discusses only whether or not the government scoped the material it seized within the two crimes at question; it ignores the question of the temporal overseizure, which (unless there are warrants DOJ is hiding) should be clearcut.
Petitioner Richman’s motion concerns the Government’s seizure of his property pursuant to four different search warrants executed in 2019 and 2020. Petitioner Richman claims that the Government’s execution of these warrants violated his Fourth Amendment rights because the Government seized more material than the warrants authorized. Pet’r’s Mem., Dkt. No. 2-1 at 13. Petitioner Richman neither contests the validity of the four search warrants nor disputes the fact that the warrants permitted the Government to search his property “broadly.” Id. Petitioner Richman, however, claims that the warrants only authorized the Government to seize information that constituted “evidence and/or instrumentalities of” a violation of either 18 U.S.C. § 641 (theft and conversion of government property) or 18 U.S.C. § 793 (unlawful gathering or transmission of national defense information).
But then she just waves her hands and says she doesn’t have enough information to hold that that is a Fourth Amendment violation.
In light of Magistrate Judge Fitzpatrick’s findings, the Court concludes that Petitioner Richman has established a reasonable basis for his claim that the Government exceeded the scope of the 2019 and 2020 “Arctic Haze” warrants when seizing his property. On the present record, however, the Court shall not determine whether Petitioner Richman has conclusively established a violation of his Fourth Amendment rights based on his claim that the 2019 and 2020 “Arctic Haze” seizures at issue were overbroad. Magistrate Judge Fitzpatrick’s findings raise a substantial question as to whether Petitioner Richman’s Fourth Amendment rights were violated when the Government executed the 2019 and 2020 warrants at issue. However, the parties have not provided the Court with additional information in the record that would enable the Court to make a conclusive determination of Petitioner Richman’s Fourth Amendment claim about over-seizure as to the 2019 and 2020 “Arctic Haze” warrants.
So Kollar-Kotelly bases her baby-splitting ruling exclusively on DOJ’s search in 2025 without a warrant.
The Court will address each of Richman’s arguments in turn. In doing so, the Court concludes that, although the Government’s initial seizure of Richman’s property and its continued retention of that property did not violate Richman’s Fourth Amendment rights, the Government’s warrantless search of his property in 2025—approximately five years after it initially seized that property—did violate those rights. The Court further concludes that the Government’s mishandling of Petitioner Richman’s property renders its continued retention of that property an unreasonable Fourth Amendment seizure.
My guess is Kollar-Kotelly did this because she didn’t need to pursue the question further to achieve her Solomonic outcome. Simply finding a clear Fourth Amendment violation — here, in searching Richman’s data without a warrant — proved enough to find him aggrieved and injured.
There are several problems with this.
Having dispensed with the mystery overseizure by date and the failure to seize the data pertinent to two suspected crimes and seal the rest, Kollar-Kotelly then applies four different decisions to this data:
United States v. Jacobsen: A 1984 case about the test of white powder after having seized it. Asinor v. DC: An effort to get a bunch of physical cell phones (one belonging to an independent journalist) back years after DC’s Metropolitan Police Department seized them at an August 13, 2020 George Floyd protest. Last year, Greg Katsas ruled for the protesters. In the Matter of the Search of 26 Digital Devices: A set of opinions in which first Magistrate Judge Michael Harvey and subsequently then-Chief Judge Beryl Howell considered a warrant to access a bunch of devices. Harvey first held that the government could not go back into data retractions after closing an investigation. Howell reversed that.
Here’s how Kollar-Kotelly incorporated these decisions.
Judge Howell noted two critical procedural requirements for searches of stored extracts of digital device data from prior investigations, both of which had been satisfied in the case before her. First, and most fundamentally, “in order for the [G]overnment to search a cell phone’s digital data[,] the [G]overnment must get a probable cause warrant.” Digital Devices II, 2022 WL 998896, at *15 (citing Riley v. California, 573 U.S. 373 (2014)). Second, “[o]nce the government’s investigation unearths the likelihood that evidence of offenses not covered by the initial warrant exists, the government must set forth adequate probable cause and particularity to secure a warrant expanding the scope of its search of previously seized evidence.” Id.
Although nearly all of Judge Howell’s reasoning remains powerfully persuasive, one aspect of her analysis appears to have been altered by the D.C. Circuit’s intervening decision in Asinor v. District of Columbia, 111 F.4th at 1262. Judge Howell’s decision that the closure of the prior investigation did not preclude the Government from obtaining a warrant to search the stored extracts for a later proceeding rested in part on a conclusion that “[t]he Fourth Amendment does not operate as an arbiter of law enforcement retention policies for lawfully seized evidence.” Digital Devices II, 2022 WL 998896, at *1. Although Judge Howell’s conclusion on this point is consistent with the law of many circuits, the D.C. Circuit recently held in Asinor that the Fourth Amendment does regulate the Government’s retention of evidence by requiring “continuing retention of seized property to be reasonable.” 111 F.4th at 1261. The court reasoned that although it is not clear from the text of the Fourth Amendment’s protection of the right to be “secure” against “unreasonable . . . seizures” whether the provision regulates retention after an initial lawful seizure, history and common-law tradition from the Founding era support the conclusion that the reasonableness requirement governs not only the “taking possession” but also the “continued retention” of property. Id. at 1254–55.
[snip]
Applying each of these principles, the Court concludes that it was reasonable for the Government to retain Petitioner Richman’s files after it closed the “Arctic Haze” investigation, but only so long as the Government adequately protected those files by refraining from accessing or searching them without a warrant.
But let’s go back and look at the problems. The most direct precedent, the 26 Digital Devices, involves warrants served the same year (2021) as the phones were originally seized. There’s a difference between retention for a matter of months and for years.
And all of these rulings assume the initial seizure was legal; by hand-waving over the two claimed overseizures in 2020 (one based on temporal overseizure, another based on failure to scope and seal), Kollar-Kotelly has applied potentially inapt precedents to this case, and in so doing simply said that the government needed a warrant and the government needs a warrant.
And then she sent the data to EDVA in the Fourth Circuit, where a different set of precedents apply which … now that part of the decision looks especially reckless.
From there, Kollar-Kotelly goes further, refusing to adopt Richman’s application of taint to the data the government already unlawfully seized (Kollar-Kotelly dodges all discussion of DOJ’s attorney-client violations in this opinion as well).
Finally, Petitioner Richman requests an order barring the Government from “using or relying on in any way” the information derived from the image of his laptop. See Pet’r’s Rule 41(g) Mem. at 26; see also id. at 19 (arguing that the Government should be “barred from using evidence obtained from” the image in its case against Mr. Comey). This remedy would be broader than an order for return of property to which Petitioner Richman is entitled. It would not only deprive the Government of the opportunity to use Petitioner Richman’s materials as evidence, but it would also presumably bar the Government from presenting testimony or Finally, Petitioner Richman requests an order barring the Government from “using or relying on in any way” the information derived from the image of his laptop. See Pet’r’s Rule 41(g) Mem. at 26; see also id. at 19 (arguing that the Government should be “barred from using evidence obtained from” the image in its case against Mr. Comey). This remedy would be broader than an order for return of property to which Petitioner Richman is entitled. It would not only deprive the Government of the opportunity to use Petitioner Richman’s materials as evidence, but it would also presumably bar the Government from presenting testimony or pursuing investigative leads based on what Government agents learned by reviewing those materials before returning them. Such a broad order might also bar the Government from seeking to obtain the materials again in the future by obtaining a valid search warrant from a judicial officer
Here, too, Kollar-Kotelly’s initial scope — accepting just one of Richman’s three claimed injuries — allows her a baby-splitting solution. The searches that got into Jim Comey’s privileged communication would have been illegal on the scope issue, but Kollar-Kotelly is making it available the government (pending a warrant and privilege review) in a way in which Comey would not have Fourth Amendment injury.
As I said, perhaps Kollar-Kotelly adopted this solution because she just wants an answer that is far easier than the data provides. Perhaps she adopted the solution because something that the unnamed AUSA with whom she was in communication (who might be Jocelyn Ballantine) explained — at least — the temporal overcollection but did so in such a way that renders the AUSA’s testimony unavailable to Richman.
First, although the Court has been in communication with attorneys from the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia, 1 the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia has not yet entered an appearance to make representations on behalf of the Government, and counsel for the Government has not yet been identified. See Pet’r’s Ex. A, Dkt. No. 9-2.
1 These attorneys have helpfully facilitated communication on administrative matters. The Court appreciates counsel’s prompt assistance on these matters.
And maybe it’ll work? Maybe this will result in Richman’s entire digital life collecting dust in EDVA, where his standing to challenge it is much less clear.
Or maybe DOJ will give the data to Richman (as opposed to simply destroying it) and he’ll have basis to prove the two underlying Fourth Amendment injuries and be able to (and willing to) ask for more.
But while it is an interesting ruling for the Comey case, it is a highly unsatisfying ruling from a Fourth Amendment.
Global News
New York Times, Zelensky Meets U.S. Envoys and European Leaders in New Push to End War, Christopher F. Schuetze, Dec. 15, 2025. For the second day running, President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine met in Berlin with American diplomats, seeking to bridge divides over how to end the war.
President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine met in Berlin on Monday with senior American and European leaders, his office said in a brief statement, in the second day of high-level talks aimed at ending the war in Ukraine.
The meeting followed a five-hour discussion on Sunday between Mr. Zelensky; Steve Witkoff, an envoy for President Trump; and Jared Kushner, President Trump’s son-in-law, in which, Mr. Witkoff’s office said, “a lot of progress was made.”
Mr. Zelensky also met on Monday with Alexander Stubb, the Finnish president, who had also talked with Mr. Kushner on Sunday, according to Mr. Stubb’s office. Other European leaders, including Prime Minister Keir Starmer of Britain, President Emmanuel Macron of France and Secretary General Mark Rutte of NATO, were scheduled to join Mr. Zelensky on Monday evening. Russia was not expected to send representatives.
The Americans and Europeans are scrambling to overcome wide divides over what concessions Ukraine should make to persuade Russia to agree to a cease-fire. The United States has proposed that Ukraine cede some territory that Russia has yet to occupy. Ukraine has said it will not give up more land, a position largely backed by European leaders, who are wary of rewarding Russia for the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022.
Ukraine raised hopes of a compromise on Sunday when Mr. Zelensky reiterated that Kyiv would suspend its goal of joining NATO, at least for now. In return, Mr. Zelensky said, Ukraine would need strong guarantees that the United States would step in if Russia attacked again.ImageFour men in suits stand in bright sunlight next to a car.Steve Witkoff, left, and Jared Kushner, second from right, leaving the U.S. Embassy in Berlin on Monday.Credit...Christian Mang/Getty Images
Mr. Zelensky also met on Monday with Frank-Walter Steinmeier, the German president, and Julia Klöckner, speaker of the German Parliament, and was expected to also attend a gathering about Ukrainian-German economic ties.
Leaders from Denmark, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Poland and Sweden, as well as Ursula von der Leyen, the president of the European Union’s executive branch, were all scheduled to arrive in Berlin by Monday evening for a dinner at the chancellery with Mr. Merz, Mr. Starmer, Mr. Macron and Mr. Rutte.
The diplomatic gathering was put together hastily by German, Ukrainian and U.S. officials as pressure mounts to find a compromise to end the war. Mr. Trump said during his presidential campaign that he could stop the fighting in 24 hours, but the reality has proved different.
On Sunday, after receiving both the Ukrainian and U.S. delegations, Mr. Merz posted on social media: “We want lasting peace in Ukraine. Difficult questions lie ahead, but we are determined to move forward.”
The flurry of diplomatic activity comes after American negotiators presented a 28-point peace plan last month that Ukrainians dismissed as being too aligned with Russian interests. European leaders did not dismiss that plan outright, but they have supported Ukraine’s coming up with a counterproposal in which Kyiv would hold onto the territory it currently controls and receive security guarantees from Washington.
European leaders, especially Mr. Merz, Mr. Macron and Mr. Starmer, have been trying to bolster Kyiv’s position and involve themselves in the negotiations because the outcome affects Europe’s broader security as well as Ukraine’s.
Highlighting broader European efforts to restrict Russia and its allies, the European Union announced on Monday that it had sanctioned several people and companies involved in Russian oil sales. The bloc also said that it had made it easier to place sanctions on Belarus, a key ally of Russia.
Dec. 14
Map of Terrorist Attack at Australia's most popular beach (New York Times graphic).
New York Times, Live Updates: 15 Victims and a Gunman Dead After Attack on Hanukkah Festival in Sydney, Yan Zhuang and Victoria Kim, Dec. 14, 2025. Prime Minister Anthony Albanese of Australia called the shooting on Bondi Beach a terrorist attack targeting the Jewish community during a Hanukkah celebration. At least one gunman is dead and another is in custody.
The death toll in the mass shooting at a celebration in Australia marking the first night of the Jewish holiday of Hanukkah rose to 15 on Monday morning. The authorities described the attack, which they said was carried out by a father and son, as an act of terrorism.
The New South Wales police said more than three dozen more remained hospitalized following the attack on Bondi Beach, one of Sydney’s most famous destinations. Victims ranged in age from 10 to 87.
Investigators did not release the names of the suspects, but described them as a 50-year-old man and his 24-year-old son. The older man died after being shot by police and the younger man sustained “critical injuries,” the New South Wales Police Force said on Monday morning. Hours after the shooting, law enforcement officials swarmed a home in Bonnyrigg, a suburb west of Sydney. Two people were escorted out of the house, which was surrounded by a heavy police presence.
On Sunday evening, Police Commissioner Mal Lanyon of the New South Wales Police Force said that officers had found what they believed to be several improvised explosive devices in a vehicle linked to the slain suspect, who was previously known to the police. The vehicle had been parked near the scene of the attack, and bomb disposal units were deployed, he said, adding that the police were still looking into the possibility that other people had been involved.
Video verified by The New York Times shows a bystander sneaking up on one of the attackers from between two cars and tackling him from behind before wrestling a long gun from his hands. Chris Minns, the premier of the state of New South Wales, called the man “a genuine hero.” Mr. Minns said he had “no doubt that there are many, many people alive tonight as a result of his bravery.”
Hundreds of people had gathered at Bondi, Australia’s best-known beach, for a Hanukkah event, where children played as music and bubbles filled the air. Then gunshots ripped through the celebration. Danny Ridley, a photographer who was documenting the Hanukkah gathering, said one attacker fired at him as he was hiding behind a parking meter, leaving him with a light gash on his left rib. “It was just carnage,” he said.
The mass shooting, a rarity in Australia, sent the crowd scattering. Video from the scene aired by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, the country’s public broadcaster, shows police officers fanning out across an area where a gun was lying near a tree.
“This is a targeted attack on Jewish Australians on the first day of Hanukkah, which should be a day of joy,” said Australia’s prime minister, Anthony Albanese, right. He added, “An attack on Jewish Australians is an attack on every Australian.”
Here’s what else to know:
Times Now News, Who Is Naveed Akram? Sydney Man Named as Bondi Beach Shooting Suspect, Arpita Ghosh, Dec. 14, 2025. Authorities have identified Naveed Akram as one of the gunmen linked to the deadly shooting at Bondi Beach in Sydney. The attack occurred during a Hanukkah celebration, resulting in at least 12 fatalities and numerous injuries.
Australian law enforcement officials have identified one of the gunmen involved in the deadly shooting at Sydney’s Bondi Beach as Naveed Akram, a man from the city’s south-west, a senior security source said Sunday, ABC news reported.
The official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said police were conducting a raid at Akram’s home in the Bonnyrigg suburb as part of the investigation.
Times Now News, Sydney Brave Man Ahmed-al-Ahmed Who Disarmed Bondi Beach Gunman in Heroic Takedown, Shashwat Bhandari, Dec. 14, 2025. Shot Twice: Who Is He? A video has surfaced from Sydney's Bondi beach in Australia capturing how a brave man disarmed one of the gunman | Source: @jpthepower Screengrab.
Actor-Director Rob Reiner and his wife, photographer Michele Singer Reiner (File photo via Getty Images).
TMZ, Rob Reiner, Wife Michele Found Dead in Their L.A. Home with Knife Wounds , Staff Report, Dec. 14, 2025. Rob Reiner -- the legendary director -- and his wife Michele Singer Reiner have died ... TMZ has learned.
Two bodies were found in Rob and Michele's Brentwood home Sunday afternoon -- and law enforcement sources tell us it is the Reiners
Our sources say the two suffered lacerations consistent with a knife. The LAPD's Robbery Homicide Division is still investigating.
Dispatch audio captures a firefighter calling for backup to the Brentwood mansion around 3:30 PM, though it doesn't provide any further information about the circumstances in the abode.
Rob -- the son of famed comedian Carl Reiner, who passed away in 2020 -- started his career in show business as a comedy writer in the 1960s ... working as Steve Martin's writing partner on the Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour in 1968 and '69.
Throughout the 1970s, Rob starred as Michael Stivic -- also known as "Meathead" -- on the hit sitcom "All in the Family" ... for which he won two Primetime Emmy Awards for Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Comedy Series.
"All in the Family" ran for 205 episodes ... coming to a close in 1979 -- at which point Reiner's focus shifted more toward directing. His rock mockumentary "This is Spinal Tap" marked his first big hit in the director's chair.
Over the next decade, Reiner directed iconic films like "Stand By Me," "The Princess Bride," and "When Harry Met Sally..." -- the last of which led him to the love of his life.rob-reiner-michele-singer-reiner-sub-getty-2Getty
While directing "When Harry Met Sally," Rob met Michele, a photographer ... and, the two married in 1989. Their relationship actually convinced Rob to change the ending of the rom-com to have Billy Crystal and Meg Ryan's characters end up together.
Rob continued directing during their more than 35 years married ... helming projects like "Misery," "A Few Good Men," "The American President," "The Bucket List" and "Spinal Tap II: The End Continues.
Rob has one more directorial project which, according to his IMDb, has been completed ... live concert footage of the fictional band Spinal Tap playing at Stonehenge along with other massive names in music. The film is set to come out next year.
Younger fans may recognize Rob from his acting role as Jess' father Bob on "New Girl" ... or his last part in season 4 of "The Bear" as businessman Albert Schnur.
Rob was also politically minded ... regularly taking to social media to espouse his views on hot-button issues which some found controversial.
Prior to the 2020 election, we asked Reiner about who he might support ... and he made it clear he was riding with anyone who could defeat then-incumbent President Donald Trump.M
Michele and Rob had three kids together -- Jake, Nick and Romy. Rob also has a daughter, Tracy, from his first marriage to director Penny Marshall.
Rob was 78. Michele was 68.
RIP
New York Times, Brown University Shooting Live Updates: Person of Interest Detained After Deadly Shooting at Brown, Yan Zhuang, Thomas Gibbons-Neff, Mark Arsenault and Mitch Smith, Dec. 14, 2025. The authorities in Rhode Island were still searching for a gunman who killed two people and injured nine others at Brown University, after a man who had been detained was released, the mayor of Providence, R.I. announced at a news conference late Sunday night.
Officials at the news conference said the investigation was continuing. They provided no details about the man who they released, who had been taken into custody early Sunday in Coventry, R.I., about 20 miles from Brown’s campus in Providence.
They said the search for a suspect was ongoing.
The shooting occurred Saturday afternoon inside a final exam review for a Principles of Economics class on campus, Christina Paxson, the Brown University president, said on Sunday. “It’s devastating,” she said.
A shelter-in-place order was lifted across the campus early Sunday, the university said.
Joseph Oduro, 21, a teaching assistant, said he had been wrapping up an economics revision session when a man with a face mask and rifle burst into the classroom, he said. The man shouted something Mr. Oduro could not make out and started shooting, he said, describing how he hid behind a desk with some students.
Some news outlets identified by name the person of interest.
Here are the details:
Crypto firms have hailed what Paul S. Atkins, Mr. Trump’s newly appointed S.E.C. chairman, has called “a new day” for their industry. New York Times photo by Doug Mills).
New York Times, Investigation: The S.E.C. Was Tough on Crypto. It Pulled Back After Trump Returned to Office, Ben Protess, Andrea Fuller, Sharon LaFraniere and Seamus Hughes, Graphics by Elena Shao, Dec. 14, 2025. An investigation by The Times found the administration’s change in enforcement benefited the industry, including companies that had ties to the president.
The Times conducted a first-of-its-kind analysis of thousands of government documents and court records from the three most recent 
presidential administrations. The reporters also interviewed more than two dozen current and former government officials.
A cryptocurrency firm run by the billionaire Winklevoss twins was facing a punishing federal lawsuit. After Donald J. Trump returned to the White House, the Securities and Exchange Commission moved to freeze the case.
The S.E.C. had also sued Binance, the world’s largest crypto exchange, but then dropped the case altogether under the new administration.
And after a yearslong legal fight with Ripple Labs, the new S.E.C. tried to reduce a court-ordered penalty against the crypto firm, seeking to soften the blow of the punishment.
The agency’s pullback from these cases illustrated a wide-ranging transformation in the federal government’s treatment of the crypto industry during President Trump’s second term, a New York Times investigation has found.
It is unheard-of for the agency to retreat from a swath of lawsuits against a single industry. And yet, The Times found that the S.E.C. had eased up on more than 60 percent of the crypto cases that were ongoing when Mr. Trump returned to the White House, moving to pause litigation, lessen penalties or outright dismiss the cases.
The dismissals were particularly unusual, The Times found. Under Mr. Trump, S.E.C. dismissals came at a far higher rate for crypto firms than other cases.
And although the particulars of the crypto lawsuits differed, many of these firms had something in common: financial ties to Mr. Trump, the self-described crypto president.
The S.E.C., the top federal regulator that polices wrongdoing in the financial markets, is no longer actively pursuing a single case against a firm with known Trump ties, The Times found. It backtracked against every firm that either has relationships with the Trump family’s crypto businesses or has donated to his political causes. The agency’s only remaining crypto cases are against little-known defendants without clear ties to Mr. Trump.
New York Times, How The Times Analyzed the S.E.C.’s Cryptocurrency Enforcement, Andrea Fuller, Ben Protess, Sharon LaFraniere, Seamus Hughes, Julie Tate and Alex Klavens, Dec. 14, 2025. The New York Times set out to understand — and quantify — just how much things had changed within the agency after President Trump resumed office.
When Donald J. Trump was campaigning to return to the White House, he promised a major policy shift toward cryptocurrencies. It was a reversal for Mr. Trump. He had once been a skeptic of digital currencies, but by 2024 his family had become a crypto-industry player.
He set his sights on the Securities and Exchange Commission, the top federal regulator that polices wrongdoing in the financial markets. During the campaign, Mr. Trump promised crypto enthusiasts that he would stop the “persecution” and that “on Day 1, I will fire Gary Gensler,” the S.E.C.’s chair at that time.
The New York Times set out to understand — and quantify — just how much things had changed within the agency’s glass-walled facade after Mr. Trump resumed office.
To do so, The Times compiled a database of all crypto-related enforcement actions from the three most recent presidential administrations.
The reporters spent several months examining more than 10,000 agency announcements and hundreds of federal court cases. The reporters also conducted dozens of interviews with current and former government officials and industry players.
Reporters reviewed all news releases and litigation releases issued by the S.E.C. since Jan. 20, 2017, the beginning of the first Trump administration. They also searched CourtListener, a database maintained by the nonprofit Free Law Project, for cases not announced in those releases. In addition, The Times examined enforcement actions brought through the agency’s administrative proceedings, which are cases overseen by its own administrative law judges.
Reporters manually reviewed each case’s material to determine if it met The Times’s definition of a crypto case. That would be any enforcement action the S.E.C. brought against a person or company that produced, sold or facilitated the loan or sale of a crypto asset, or a case in which the S.E.C. classified crypto assets as securities. Cases that met this definition included those against token issuers, crypto exchanges, crypto brokers and dealers, as well as crypto lenders and established crypto mining ventures.
This definition included both prominent crypto firms as well as some small-time operators accused of operating fraudulent schemes. The definition excluded a case the S.E.C. filed this year against a firm that planned to issue crypto assets but never did. The Times also excluded cases against defendants who merely invested in or traded crypto.
All told, The Times identified 27 crypto-related federal court cases initiated under Mr. Trump’s first administration and 69 under President Joseph R. Biden Jr., but none under the second Trump administration as of Sept. 30, 2025, the end of the federal fiscal year. Reporters also identified 23 crypto-related administrative proceedings filed under the first Trump administration, 36 under Mr. Biden and, again, zero under the second Trump administration.
But the reporters also wanted a benchmark. How has the current administration’s S.E.C. handled the crypto cases it inherited differently than other cases left over from the Biden administration?
U.S. Politics, Culture, Economy, Opportunity
Politico, Rand Paul says partisan gerrymandering 'might lead to violence in our country,' Jacob Wendler, Dec.14, 2025. The Republican warned that the escalating redistricting wars could have grave consequences for political violence.
Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), shown above in a file photo, said Sunday that partisan gerrymandering will “lead to more civil tension and possibly more violence in our country,” urging restraint in the ongoing redistricting wars playing out in more than a dozen states.
“I think there is the potential that when people have no representation, that they feel disenfranchised, that it can lead, it might lead to violence in our country,” Paul said in an interview with Kristen Welker on NBC’s “Meet the Press.”
Paul’s warning comes as state lawmakers across the country consider redrawing congressional lines at the insistence of President Donald Trump, with Democratic-led states like Virginia and Maryland weighing mid-cycle redistricting to counter GOP gains in Texas, Missouri and North Carolina.
The Kentucky Republican predicted that eliminating minority seats in Congress could lead to voters feeling disenfranchised and empowering them to “resort to other means.”
“I’m concerned if there are no representatives, like no Republican representatives in California or no Democrats in Texas, that it will be so thoroughly one-sided that people will feel like their vote isn’t counting,” Paul said, adding: “It’s a mistake of both parties.”
State legislators in Indiana delivered a brutal blow to Trump’s push to redraw maps in the GOP’s favor ahead of next year’s midterm elections, voting down a new map that would have potentially gerrymandered two additional seats for Republicans despite an immense pressure campaign from the White House and anonymous death threats.
Illinois Democrats, who had promised to respond with a tit-for-tat gerrymander if Indiana Republicans moved forward with the effort, momentarily backed off in the wake of the rebuke, signaling that Indiana’s retreat could lead to a temporary ceasefire in the escalating redistricting wars.
Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker left the door open for redistricting in his state during an interview with Crooked Media’s Jon Lovett that aired Sunday on “Pod Save America” even though he said he’s “generally opposed” to mid-cycle redistricting.
“I don’t want to change the districting mid-decade in Illinois, but we will if we have to,” he said.
Trump has repeatedly threatened to support primary challengers to Indiana Republicans who rebuffed the gerrymandering push, vowing on Thursday to “do everything within my power” to have Indiana Senate Republican leader Rodric Bray and others pushed out of the party for their defiance.
Speaking to host Jacqui Heinrich on “Fox News Sunday,” Sen. Jim Banks (R-Ind.) called the failure of Indiana’s redistricting effort “a missed opportunity,” adding that “you don’t want to be on the other side of Donald Trump.”
“Those primaries will happen, but it’s not about Donald Trump, it’s about the country. It’s about keeping the Republican majority in the House of Representatives and addressing issues like health care affordability and saving this country from those who want to tear it down,” Banks said.
Associated Press via Politico, 2 people found dead at Rob Reiner’s home and homicide detectives are investigating, Staff Report, Dec.14, 2025. Authorities have not confirmed the identities of the people found at the residence in the Brentwood neighborhood of Los Angeles. Homicide detectives were investigating Sunday after two people were found dead at director-actor Rob Reiner’s Los Angeles home, authorities said.
The Los Angeles Fire Department said it responded to a medical aid request shortly after 3:30 p.m. and found a 78-year-old man and 68-year-old woman dead inside.
Detectives with the Robbery Homicide Division were investigating an “apparent homicide” at Reiner’s home, said Capt. Mike Bland with the Los Angeles Police Department. Authorities have not confirmed the identities of the people found dead at the residence in the upscale Brentwood neighborhood on the city’s west side that’s home to many celebrities.
Reiner is long one of the most prolific directors in Hollywood, and his work includes some of the most memorable movies of the 1980s and ’90s, including “This is Spinal Tap,” “A Few Good Men,” “When Harry Met Sally” and “The Princess Bride.”
His role as Meathead in the 1970s TV classic “All in the Family” alongside Carol O’Connor’s Archie Bunker catapulted him to fame.
Reiner turned 78 in March.
Messages to his representatives were not immediately returned Sunday night.
The son of comedy legend Carl Reiner, Rob Reiner has been married to photographer Michele Singer Reiner since 1989. The two met while he was directing “When Harry Met Sally” and have three children together.
Reiner was previously married to actor-director Penny Marshall from 1971 to 1981. He adopted her daughter, Tracy Reiner. Carl Reiner died in 2020 at age 98 and Marshall died in 2018.Filed Under:
Hopium Chronicles, Advocacy: A Generation Under Profound Strain: A Conversation with John Della Volpe, Director Of The Harvard Youth Poll, Simon Rosenberg, right, Dec. 13. 2025. In the November elections Democrats restored their pre-2024 margins with young people. It's an encouraging development, but we have a lot of work ahead of us.
I intended to write about my trip to the DNC/State Chairs meeting today but the news this morning was awash with tragic stories about the shootings at Brown and in Sydney, Australia. So I’ve ended up with a different post today as my heart is heavy on this first day of Hanakkuh, a celebration of resilience and light prevailing over darkness…….
Two of my daughter’s closest high school friends, young adults who have been in our home many, many times over many years, attend BrownUniversity. One of them was locked in a basement on campus last night for hours and hours, terrified about what happened and worried whether her friends were among the killed and wounded. When I last talked to my daughter last night she was angry, emotional, and just like what the fuck is wrong with everything……
So today I am sharing today a thoughtful - and challenging - conversation I had before the November elections with John Della Volpe, right, 
who has run the Youth Poll at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Institute of 
Politics for the last 25 years. John also writes a very good Substack, "JDV on GenZ+."
In the crush of events, I just never got around to posting our conversation but today seems like the right day for us to wrestle with John’s message to us in this discussion (video above, transcript below) and in the Fall 2025 edition of the IOP’s youth poll that was released last week.
Here are some excerpts from the poll summary:
Americans report deep economic insecurity, eroding trust in democratic institutions, and growing social fragmentation. The 51st Harvard Youth Poll finds that for many 18- to 29-year-olds, instability — financial, political, and interpersonal — has become a defining feature of daily life, shaping their outlook on the country and their own futures.As the father of three Gen Z adults, two in college right now, I can tell you that we have a lot of work to do with young people. They have been through so much - the extraordinary disruption of COVID, the harms of social media, the ugliness of ten years of Trumpism, political assassinations, school shootings, making it in this economy……
Here is something John said in our discussion that still sticks with me:
if you’re not able to envision yourself owning a home and having potentially a family and children—in terms of your mental health, that gives you real anxiety. And if you think about the different subgroups of Americans—when you think about the Hispanic, Latino folks I spend a lot of time with—in terms of their family name, their surname is everything to them, in terms of wanting to make their parents and their grandparents who sacrificed so hard to give them an opportunity in this country, to do better.
And when they’re not able to—even with a college degree—to provide for their family, like their father, who oftentimes was a laborer or painted houses or worked in city services in some way—again, that eats at you. And when Democrats essentially don’t address that, don’t recognize that in terms of what it means to your identity, they’re not able to have a meaningful conversation about any policy, right, if you don’t recognize the humanity.
And that’s just kind of one subgroup. We could do a similar thing with virtually every other subgroup. And that’s what I think is this opportunity—is to listen, is to internalize some of those experiences, because we’ve all had them in our lives, and begin to kind of rebuild the bonds of trust to have more meaningful conversations about what Trump is doing or not doing and what Democrats could or would like to do moving forward. But you need to establish that trust. It needs to start with listening. They need to start, you know, with just showing up in places—whether it’s a coffee shop, on a college campus, on a Discord channel, wherever folks are most comfortable—on podcasts, on conservative TV—wherever young people are, show up, be yourself, be authentic, and leave the talking points to somebody else.
As our interview took place before the November elections we did not know whether our candidates would be able to take advantage of the growing disappointment in Trump we’ve seen in polling of young people. As this Exit Poll data shows the good news is that our candidates were able to restore our pre-2024 margins with young people in the November elections. A promising development for the mid-term elections next year.
This is a very comprehensive discussion about a really important and challenging set of topics, ones that are also very personal for me. There is a lot in here. Spend time with it all, wrestle with it as we do in this discussion, and keep working hard everyone. We’ve had a good electoral year, Trump is weaker but we must keep acting with great urgency for the young people of America deserve to have the same opportunities that we all had, and today, that is very much in doubt. We can and must do better - for them, and for our future.
Sending love and optimism on a tough day -- Simon
Global News
Associated Press via Politico, Merz compares Putin to Hitler: ‘He won’t stop,’ Eliza Gkritsi, Dec.14, 2025. “Just as the Sudetenland was not enough in 1938, Putin will not stop,” Merz told a party conference in Germany.
Germany’s Chancellor Friedrich Merz, below, compared Russian President Vladimir Putin to Adolf Hitler in a speech Saturday evening, warning that the Kremlin leader’s ambitions won’t stop with Ukraine.
“Just as the Sudetenland was not enough in 1938, Putin will not stop,” Merz said, referring to a part of Czechoslovakia that the Allies ceded to the Nazi leader with an agreement. Hitler continued his expansion into Europe after that.
“If Ukraine falls, he won’t stop there,” Merz said, referring to Putin. “This is a Russian aggressive war against Ukraine — and against Europe.”
Putin’s aim is “a fundamental change to the borders in Europe, the restoration of the old Soviet Union within its borders,” the German chancellor warned.
Merz, along with French President Emmanuel Macron and U.K. Prime Minister Keir Starmer, has pushed European efforts to support Kyiv. German, British and French officials are reportedly discussing this weekend proposals to end the war in Ukraine, ahead of a meeting on Monday that’s to include the leaders.
U.S. envoy Steve Witkoff is also expected to meet with Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, who will be received by Merz in Berlin on Monday.
A U.S.-backed 20-point peace plan is in the works, which includes territorial concessions on Ukraine’s part. Under one proposal being discussed, the Donbas region would be made into a free-trade zone were American companies can freely operate.
Merz was speaking at a party conference of the Christian Social Union of Bavaria, which is closely aligned with his own party, the Christian Democrats.Related Tags
Associated Press via Politico, Attacker who killed US troops in Syria was a recent recruit to security forces, official says, Staff report, Dec.14,2025. The attacker was among 5,000 members who recently joined a new division in the internal security forces.President Donald Trump speaks with reporters.
President Donald Trump speaks with reporters as he and first lady Melania Trump depart on Marine One from the South Lawn of the White 
House, April 25, 2025, in Washington. | Alex Brandon/APBy Associated Press12/14/2025 05:06 PM EST
A man who carried out an attack in Syria that killed three U.S. citizens had joined Syria’s internal security forces as a base security guard two months earlier and was recently reassigned amid suspicions that he might be affiliated with the Islamic State group, a Syrian official told The Associated Press Sunday.
The attack Saturday in the Syrian desert near the historic city of Palmyra killed two U.S. service members and one American civilian and wounded three others. It also wounded three members of the Syrian security forces who clashed with the gunman, interior ministry spokesperson Nour al-Din al-Baba said.
Al-Baba said that Syria’s new authorities had faced shortages in security personnel and had to recruit rapidly after the unexpected success of a rebel offensive last year that intended to capture the northern city of Aleppo but ended up overthrowing the government of former President Bashar Assad.
“We were shocked that in 11 days we took all of Syria and that put a huge responsibility in front of us from the security and administration sides,” he said.
The attacker was among 5,000 members who recently joined a new division in the internal security forces formed in the desert region known as the Badiya, one of the places where remnants of the Islamic State extremist group have remained active.Attacker had raised suspicions
Al-Baba said the internal security forces’ leadership had recently become suspicious that there was an infiltrator leaking information to IS and began evaluating all members in the Badiya area.
U.S. Profiteering, Crime, Scandal, Justice
The Contrarian, Political Commentary: Trump & Cronies Top 10 Worst Presidential Profiteering Scandals, Norman Eisen, right, and Gabriel Lezra, Dec. 13-14, 2025. No president in American history has profited off the presidency the way Donald Trump has—and it’s not close.
In his first term, he benefited to the tune of millions of dollars in shady schemes, such as foreign governments using his properties for their events. But his second term has been orders of magnitude worse, as we document in this second installment of our series on Trump’s Top 10 Worst. From the Qatari plane scandal to selling access to purchasers of his meme coin to his family members raking in riches, Trump and co. are openly dangling special treatment for those who are willing to pay. The White House denies any wrongdoing, stating “the American public believe it’s absurd for anyone to insinuate that this president is profiting off of the presidency.” Meanwhile, the president has reportedly increased his net worth by over $3 billion so far during the first year of his second term.
That’s why we’ve had a hard time picking the worst instances of his corrupt self-enrichment, not to mention that of his cronies and family. So if you don’t see your favorite scheme on this list, don’t worry—there are too many! Here’s our latest Top 10 Worst list, followed, as usual, by this week’s brilliant Contrarian coverage.
If these incidents infuriate you, there is something you can do about it. As a paid Contrarian subscriber, you support our efforts to push back against all of this wrongdoing through litigation, such as our complaint to fight the very first gold-plated item on our list.Subscribed
Trump’s Qatari Boeing
In May, Qatar presented Trump and his administration with a $400 million Boeing 747, ostensibly to use as Air Force One—a present reportedly worth more than all foreign gifts bestowed on all former American presidents combined. As my colleagues and I noted in a legal complaint, the Trump administration is apparently illegally transferring the nearly $1 billion from a nuclear weapons program at the Defense Department to retrofit the jet, a gross mismanagement of key federal funds. And it will barely have time in the air before Trump’s term ends and it gets “donated” to Trump’s presidential library for his continued use. Meanwhile, after the transfer, Qatar got a guarantee that the United States will defend Qatar through “diplomatic, economic, and, if necessary, military” measures and a new “military facility” for Qatar’s Air Force at the Mountain Home Air Force Base in Idaho. Trump has defended the transfer of the plane as a legitimate “gift” and the White House said that “any gift given by a foreign government is always accepted in full compliance with all applicable laws. President Trump’s administration is committed to full transparency.”
Current Status: We’re waiting for the Government Accountability Office to act on our complaint—but it’s hard to imagine a clearer conflict of interest.
World Liberty Financial
After the Trump family helped promote cryptocurrency company World Liberty Financial (WLFI), it began encouraging foreign investors to buy into the venture. The conflicts of interest have since gotten only worse, as we discuss in our report on Trump’s crypto conflicts. This includes the involvement of alleged fraudster Justin Sun (see No. 6 below). Then there is “shadowy” United Arab Emirates-based Aqua1 Foundation, which invested $100 million in WLFI in June. WLFI also sold its tokens to at least 62 users that also used TornadoCash, an Office of Foreign Asset Control-sanctioned crypto mixing service that the Justice Department alleged helped criminals and hackers “launder more than $1 billion of illicit assets.” The Biden administration sanctioned Tornado Cash in 2022, but the Trump administration lifted the sanctions in March 2025. Donald Trump Jr. has said that the idea that WLFI investors may be seeking favor with the Trump administration is “complete nonsense.”
Current Status: Not only is WLFI—and Trump’s crypto empire—flourishing, but Congress is rushing to pass legislation creating a market structure for cryptocurrency without any checks on Trump’s ability to influence the market to his benefit. Our legal team is working night and day to stop that from happening.
The Meme Coin Grift
Trump’s meme coin represents perhaps his most brash self-enrichment scheme, one unlike anything we have ever seen from an American president. According to the website, the token is “intended to function as an expression of support for, and engagement with, the ideals and beliefs embodied by the symbol “$TRUMP“—and not as an investment or security. But of course this slice of code was listed on various crypto exchanges and immediately surged in price. Since its launch, the coin’s value closely followed Trump’s announcements, with wild fluctuations. The president even hosted an exclusive dinner for meme coin “investors” who spent tens of thousands to buy the digital token. This access auction was a scheme so brazen—even for Trump—that it left ethics experts like us stunned. The White House denies any conflicts of interest.
Current Status: The Trump-dominated Securities and Exchange Commission has shown zero interest in examining Trump’s meme coin activities. This makes defeating the new crypto market bill even more important. Our fight continues.
Trump’s Foreign Real Estate Boom
Trump is set to more than triple his foreign properties during this term, as real estate developers are working on at least 23 Trump-branded projects. These projects are a global feeding frenzy for foreign governments looking to curry favor with the president. To take only a few examples, Trump is building a hotel, golf course, and residences in Oman on property owned by the government. A Saudi real estate firm (with close ties to the Saudi government) is the Trump Organization’s partner in various real estate deals, including a new Trump Hotel in Dubai and a residential tower in Jeddah. In November, the Trump Organization announced a project in the Maldives with the same Saudi firm. The very 
next day, Trump met with Saudi Crown Prince and Jared Kushner buddy Mohammed bin Salman, right, and announced an “Economic and Defense Partnership” with the kingdom. Hard to come up with better reasons why the Constitution prohibits the president from accepting foreign emoluments. When asked about possible conflicts of interest in the context of Trump’s then-upcoming trip to the Middle East, Press Secretary Karoline Levitt claimed that it was, “ridiculous that anyone in this room would even suggest that President Trump is doing anything for his own benefit.”
Current Status: Each individual property may constitute an emoluments clause violation. We at Democracy Defenders Fund include leaders of the team that won multiple emoluments cases against Trump in his first term, and we are evaluating how to fight back now. Watch this space!
The USD1 Binance-UAE Deal
Less than two months after Trump’s WLFI launched USD1, its stablecoin, a UAE state-backed investment firm announced that it would use USD1 to finance a $2 billion investment in crypto exchange Binance, which was then under SEC investigation. In May, Binance decided to list USD1–and, days after the announcement, Trump’s SEC dropped its securities case against the exchange. And then there’s Trump’s treatment of Binance’s head Changpen “CZ” Zhao. He pleaded guilty to money laundering in 2023 and got a Trump pardon in October of this year. The White House defended Zhao, criticized his prosecution, and blamed the Biden administration for creating a “war on cryptocurrency.“
Current Status: Expect to keep hearing about this one—especially as campaign season approaches.
Justin Sun’s “Investment” in Trump Crypto
Justin Sun is a cryptocurrency entrepreneur facing SEC fraud charges. Sun loudly bought $75 million of WLFI tokens starting in November 2024. The SEC in March 2025 delayed its fraud case against Sun. Come May 2025, Sun—also loudly—purchased $20 million of Trump’s meme coin, gaining entrance to a personal dinner with the president. The timing and scale of the investments raise questions about whether Sun is trying to buy his way out of federal trouble—and into Trump’s good graces. When pressed about the ethics of the crypto dinner, Leavitt attempted to assuage fears, “I can assure you, the president acts with only the interests of the American public in mind.”
Current Status: Sun continues expanding his cryptocurrency empire while his case remains delayed according to the most recent entry in the court docket.
Tom Homan’s $50,000
In September 2024, before Trump’s election, his future Border Czar Tom Homan, right, allegedly accepted a $50,000 payment from undercover 
federal agents posing as business executives. Homan reportedly indicated he could assist them to secure government contracts should Trump win—and there is said to be a tape in government hands. After the Trump team took over, the investigation was reportedly closed. Homan says that he did “nothing criminal” and that “I recused myself from any discussions of any contract or any monetary decisions like that….”
Current Status: My Democracy Defenders colleagues and I stepped in, launching an investigation in September. It is continuing and all legal remedies are on the table.
The $300 Million Ballroom Boondoggle
In the middle of the longest government shutdown ever, as federal workers were going without pay and standing in bread lines, Trump ordered the destruction of the historic East Wing to build a massive, $300 million-plus ballroom. Trump says he’s funding the ballroom through private sponsorships. What a kind, altruistic gesture from the corporate donors, who have over the years received billions in federal contracts–and 14 of whom are currently facing federal enforcement actions. The White House has advised journalists concerned about the lack of oversight to, “trust the process,” and said that, “a submission is not required legally,” to tear down the East Wing.
Current Status: A lawsuit has just been filed to stop construction because of alleged legal violations and a TRO hearing is set for next week.
The Executive Branch Club
After his father was sworn in, Donald Trump Jr. and business partners Zach and Alex Witkoff (the sons of Trump envoy Steve Witkoff) and others, launched a new private club in D.C. They brazenly named it “The Executive Branch.” This tacky tavern–whose “coat of arms” is topped by an ersatz presidential eagle–raises serious ethics concerns. Members are lining the pockets of the Trump and Witkoff families with reported huge initiation fees (said to be up to $500,000) plus additional annual dues for the well-heeled to mingle with government officials and their kin–not unlike its likely inspiration, Mar-a-Lago.
Current Status: The venue continues to serve as a potential influence-peddling hotspot.
Amazon Prime Video Presents: Melania
About two weeks before Trump’s inauguration, Amazon Prime Video announced that it was releasing a documentary about Melania Trump—a 
$40 million bargain for Amazon. It’s hard to imagine Amazon picking up this project at this hefty price point without considering the company’s relationship with the Trumps. Amazon just settled one major case brought against it by the Biden Federal Trade Commission for $2.5 billion, with another potentially even larger case ongoing, and the company is also a large federal contractor (it received another $1 billion in expanded cloud computing contracts in August). An Amazon spokesperson stated, “We licensed the upcoming Melania Trump documentary film and series for one reason and one reason only—because we think customers are going to love it.”
Current Status: The film is set to hit theaters in January, kicking off what promises to be another year of the Trump family’s shameless profiteering off the presidency. Amazon has released a still image of Melania peering out a car window onto a nondescript tarmac—not exactly a $40 million view.
And now, onto a much nicer list…the best of this week’s Contrarian coverage!
Trump & Kennedy’s Healthcare Hell
The Contrarian covers the Democracy Movement: This week, we saw protests in Oregon, North Carolina, Bulgaria, Iran, and Honduras, and more. Get help organizing from Indivisible, find protests in your area at mobilize.us, and send us your protest photos at
New York Times. News Analysis: In Trump’s Justice Dept., Failing in Court Might Be Better Than Bucking the Boss, Glenn Thrush and Alan Feuer, Updated Dec. 14, 2025 (print ed.). This week demonstrated an emerging reality for President Trump: Commanding the Justice Department is not the same as controlling the justice system.
Revenge, it turns out, is a dish best served with evidence.
On Thursday, federal grand jurors in Virginia rejected the Justice Department’s push to indict Letitia James, above, the New York attorney general, on mortgage-related charges for the second time in a week. It handed a humiliating loss to President Trump, who has publicly demanded the prosecution of enemies he has singled out for retribution.
It was a moment worth marking. Federal grand juries almost never decline to bring an indictment once, much less twice. Such rejections, known as “no true bills,” have been exceedingly rare, a misfire that often stigmatizes the prosecutors involved.
They are becoming more common, and accepted, in a department where face-planting in court might be preferable to facing down the boss.
The rejection in the James case was not the only notable legal rebuke this week of actions demanded by the White House.
A few hours earlier, a federal judge in Maryland freed Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia from immigration custody, dealing a blow to the department’s monthslong effort to prosecute and deport an immigrant in a test of Mr. Trump’s claim that he can expel whomever he wants, wherever and whenever he wants, with minimal or no due process.
The very next night, a judge in Washington threw a wrench into the administration’s plans to bring a new indictment against another of Mr. Trump’s foes, James B. Comey, the former F.B.I. director. The judge determined that federal prosecutors had “inexplicably” failed to get a search warrant before sifting through a trove of evidence they used to charge Mr. Comey the first time, ordering them — in an unusual reprimand — to get rid of the materials until they could properly obtain a warrant.
“I think many of these cases are nationalized for the public and there is a pushback on Trump and his targeting of individuals,” said John P. Fishwick, who served as U.S. attorney for the Western District of Virginia from 2015 to 2017.
“This is a major shift,” he added.
All of this demonstrated an emerging reality for Mr. Trump and his aide Stephen Miller, a driving force behind the maximalist approach to presidential power: Commanding the Justice Department is not quite the same as controlling the justice system.
Increasingly, federal juries and judges have rejected cases presented by the department for lack of sufficient supporting evidence, or because prosecutors committed major procedural or legal errors in their scramble to appease the White House.
In recent months, grand jurors in Washington spurned efforts to indict or ultimately convict anti-Trump activists: a woman who posted a threat against Mr. Trump on Instagram and, most famously, a Justice Department employee who tossed a sandwich at federal officers.
The prosecutors in the James case do not even hold the administration’s swing-and-miss record. That distinction appears to belong to Jeanine Pirro, the U.S. attorney in Washington, whose office failed three times to obtain an indictment against a woman who pushed an F.B.I. agent against a wall during a protest over the summer.
Even when Ms. Pirro’s subordinates changed course and moved forward on misdemeanor charges that did not require an indictment, a trial jury shut them down again, acquitting the woman altogether.
It is hard to know how many no-true-bill decisions have been rendered because grand jury deliberations are shielded by secrecy laws. But in cases brought in other cities where Mr. Trump has flooded the streets with federal officers, grand jurors have also declined to bring charges. In Los Angeles, a MAGA-aligned prosecutor failed to obtain charges against an activist who had protested the administration’s immigration enforcement.
Politics USA, Trump Is So Unpopular That He's Caused The Texas Gerrymander To Backfire, Sarah Jones & Jason Easley, Dec.14, 2025. Republicans thought that if they gave themselves a 10-point cushion in the Texas gerrymander, it would net them 5 House seats, but Trump is so unpopular that 10 points isn't enough.
The idea to risk House districts to make the midterm election a sham came from Donald Trump.
Trump demanded that Texas Republicans redraw the maps to give him five more House seats. Republicans in the state complied, but as with many things in life, the devil is in the details.
Texas Republicans made two assumptions. First, they assumed that Trump’s gains with Latino voters in 2024 were real, and they assumed that giving themselves a ten-point advantage in the gerrymandered districts would be enough to flip the seats from red to blue.
Both Republicans’ assumptions have turned out to be wrong.
News Roundup
The Parnas Perspective, News Summary: Lot's of big things happeningNews Summary: Lot's of big things happening,.Aaron Parnas, right, Dec.14, 2025. Good evening everyone—I wanted to come to you tonight to preview what will be an exceptionally busy and consequential week ahead. (News updates from today below).
This is the week we are told the Epstein files will be released—more accurately, whatever portion of those files the Justice Department ultimately decides to make public. When that happens, expect tens of thousands of documents to drop at once. I will be working around the clock, speaking directly with survivors and lawmakers, and reviewing every available file. I will read them so you don’t have to, and I will bring you clear, honest summaries without spin or delay.
Many are going to try to silence this reporting, and others are going to sane-wash it (like CBS News did with the Bari Weiss/Erika Kirk town hall) and so, before I go any further, I want to ask you directly: if you are able, please consider subscribing tonight.
Tonight is also the first night of Hanukkah. Anyone who knows me knows it’s my favorite time of year. My wife and I just lit the candles and are getting ready to eat donuts. Looking back to this same moment last year, I never could have imagined that we would be here today. And that’s why I want to pause and say this clearly: I am incredibly proud of what we have built together.
At a moment when the White House is publicly targeting journalists by name, and coordinated bot networks are working overtime to intimidate and silence independent reporters, your support is what keeps this operation alive. It is the foundation that allows us to keep asking the hard questions—and to keep publishing the stories others are unwilling or afraid to touch.
Let us keep going. Let us keep digging. Let us keep fighting back—together.
Tomorrow, I’ll be speaking with Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear on his podcast. On Wednesday, I have a call regarding a major project that I’m hoping to launch soon. My commitment to you is simple: this week will be intense. There will be a lot of news and a lot of chaotic headlines. While much of the media ecosystem lurches from one story to the next, we remain focused. Because of our reporting, tens of millions of households have heard stories that otherwise might have been buried. We accomplished that together—and we are only getting started.
We are living in an era where chaos is no longer accidental. It is deliberate. Political strategy has become an exercise in exhaustion. The truth still exists, but it is constantly buried beneath a tidal wave of noise.
But here’s what I know: they can flood the zone. They can try to exhaust the public. They can attempt to bury the truth under endless distractions. And we will still be here. We will still be reporting. We will still be cutting through the noise—together.
I am working on new projects that will strengthen this platform even further. Yes, we face resistance. Trump’s political allies and MAGA influencers have tried to discredit us, overwhelm us, and shut us down. But they cannot erase a movement that millions of people are watching. They cannot silence a community that refuses to look away.
We are here. We are growing. And we are not done. Here’s what you missed:
A terrorist mass shooting at Sydney’s Bondi Beach during a Hanukkah celebration killed at least 15 people aged 10 to 87 and injured dozens more, with authorities identifying the attackers as a father and son and calling the assault an act of antisemitic violence. The victims included a Holocaust survivor and the rabbi who organized the event, while one suspect was killed by police, the other hospitalized in critical condition, and officials confirmed the older gunman legally owned multiple firearms.
In the U.S., a shooting inside Brown University’s engineering and physics building killed two people and wounded at least nine others, prompting campus lockdowns and widespread fear among students. Police detained a 24-year-old as a person of interest in the Brown shooting and later released him.
The Guardian reports that a JetBlue flight from Curaçao to New York narrowly avoided a midair collision near Venezuelan airspace after a U.S. Air Force refueling tanker crossed its flight path without a transponder on, forcing the commercial pilot to halt the plane’s ascent and prompting reports to federal authorities.
President Donald Trump said his domestic policy chief’s main focus is building a Paris-style triumphal arch near the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, DC, a priority he touted at a White House event despite rising criticism that his administration is failing to address worsening affordability issues such as surging health insurance premiums and living costs.
Major advertisers largely avoided sponsoring CBS News’ first Bari Weiss–led town hall, opting out amid concerns about political polarization and brand risk, leaving the broadcast reliant on lower-cost direct-response and ideologically aligned sponsors and raising questions about the commercial viability of the network’s new town hall format.
Rep. Ilhan Omar said her son was pulled over by ICE agents in the Twin Cities and asked to prove his citizenship before being released, an incident she says reflects racial profiling tied to a recent federal enforcement surge targeting Somali communities following inflammatory remarks by President Trump.
Health policy experts warn that the expiration of Affordable Care Act subsidies after failed Senate legislation will more than double average premiums in 2026, push millions toward high-deductible plans or no coverage at all, strain hospitals—especially in rural areas—and trigger a destabilizing “death spiral” across the U.S. health insurance system.
A new NBC News poll shows President Donald Trump’s approval rating remains underwater as economic anxiety persists, with inflation and high costs shaping everyday spending decisions. While Trump remains popular among core MAGA supporters, the poll indicates declining strong approval and fewer Republicans identifying with the MAGA movement ahead of the 2026 elections.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy said Ukraine is willing to drop its long-standing ambition to join Nato in exchange for binding Western security guarantees, marking a major shift as part of U.S.-led talks in Germany aimed at ending the war with Russia and securing a ceasefire along current frontlines.
Another Democrat and frequent Trump target appeared to get caught in the crosshairs as well. Schumer said on Dec. 1 that “multiple bomb threats” had been sent to his offices around New York with “the email subject line ‘MAGA’ and from an email address alleging the ‘2020 election was rigged.’”
Dec. 13
New York Times, Live Updates: 2 Killed and Eight Others Shot at Brown University, Hannah Ziegler Rylee Kirk and Mitch Smith, Dec. 13, 2025. The eight victims were in critical condition, the mayor of Providence said, and no suspect was in custody. Here’s what to know.
Two people were killed and eight were injured in a shooting at Brown University on Saturday, officials said. Three hours after it began, students continued to hide in their dorms and classrooms on the campus in Providence, R.I., as police officers searched for a man dressed in black.
The injured people were in critical but stable condition at local hospitals, officials said during an evening news conference. It was unclear how many of them were students. Rodney Chatman, Brown’s police chief, described the shooting investigation as “a very fluid situation.”
Here are the details:
The shooting was a horrifying episode in a year that had already been extraordinarily turbulent for Brown.
The Trump administration moved in the spring to pause $510 million in research funding to Brown, ostensibly because of civil rights concerns. The move was a significant threat to the school, which has among the biggest research operations in the country but, like other top universities, relies on federal support to pay for that work.
President Trump (New York Times file photo by Kenny Holston).
Hopium Chronicles, Pro-Democracy Advocacy: In 2026 Democrats Can Be Both Warriors For Working People Against Oligarchy AND Proud Patriots Fighting For Democracy Here and Abroad, Simon Rosenberg, right, Dec.13, 2025.
I am back from the DNC/State Chairs meeting in Los Angeles and will be reporting in on my trip in the coming days. As we’ve been discussing we’re closing out 2025 on a high note, with more consequential electoral wins and a further weakening of Trump and the regime (here, here, here). It’s why I believe we should view 2026 as a year of opportunity for our pro-democracy movement, and work hard to stay relentlessly focused on our 3-part core mission:
As we are stronger and they are weaker more is possible for us now, and we must act with far greater ambition in 2026. For as weakened and unpopular Trump now is I think things could get far worse for him, personally, in the coming weeks. First, he is clearly seriously ill. I think we have stop pretending otherwise. This is a photo from yesterday. He is now looking ill most days, not just occasionally.
The cover up of his declining health has reached comical levels. Listen to the press secretary on Thursday. They aren’t even attempting to come up with a plausible story for what we are witnessing with our own eyes…..
Next, the Epstein files. I just don’t know he survives what is about to happen. DOJ must, by law, release all the Epstein files by this coming Friday. The small release from the Oversight Committee yesterday put Trump himself right in the middle of it all (again), including this incredible photo: New Epstein photos show Trump, Clinton and Andrew (above).
House Oversight Committee Members who went on TV yesterday seemed shocked by what they received this week from the Epstein estate.
For among the tens of thousands of photos they received were ones that showed people in sex acts, and this now infamous one of Epstein and top Trump advisor Steve Bannon. Note the passed out woman in the photo on Epstein’s desk (circled in red at lower left). What we know about the creepy photo Jeffrey Epstein had of a lounging woman on his desk https://t.co/vdlcNYBorY
A reminder of how Epstein responded to questions about Trump in his 2010 filmed deposition:
As part of our enhanced ambition next year I think there are two areas that Dems must develop a clearer and louder voice: on Trump’s deeply dangerous selling out of Ukraine and Europe to Putin, and his turning of America into a police state. We simply can and must talk about more than affordability and health care. We can be warriors for working people against greedy oligarchy and proud patriots standing up for democracy here and abroad. It’s not an “or.” It’s an “and.”
I’ve written about the Trump regime’s recent taking sides with Russia against our Ukrainian and European allies so I won’t go into in depth here this morning. The bottom line: Trump is attempting to unravel the American led global order, dramatically weaken America itself, and align the US with Russia and China against Europe. It is arguably the single most dangerous thing an American leader has ever done, and we must fight it with far greater ambition. I believe the escalation in the Americas is a side show, designed to distract us from the true play here which is to rip the US out of our historic alliance with Europe and make America Putin’s global lapdog. While we should be challenging Trump’s recklessness and war crimes we cannot lose sight of the far more serious events unfolding in Europe and Ukraine.
In recent weeks the regime’s malevolent designs to turn America into a police state have become more clear. In Minneapolis this week, and in court filings, we’ve learned that DHS no longer believes Real IDs, the IDs we all carry, are sufficient proof of legal status. Operationally, on the ground, they are only trusting their own internal system, which apparently requires a fingerprint taken in ICE detention facilities. So in other words they are asserting the right to detain ANYONE in America indefinitely without probable cause, even people who have proof of their citizenship and legal status in their possession. This is why, as we learned in the Blumenthal-Garcia hearing this week so many citizens are being detained for days at a time without access to lawyers or contact with the outside world. For DHS has decided that the Constitution no longer exists, and their powers are without limits.
We also learned this week that the regime is working to implement Orwellian (or perhaps Palantirian) requirements to enter America for all potential visitors, including from our European allies:
The performance by Democrats in the Noem hearing this week, and the power of the Blumenthal-Garcia hearing on detained Americans, were exactly where we need to be going as a movement. We simply must be doing more to stand up for the rights and freedoms of all Americans, and we must keep repeating - the loss of rights of any one in America is a loss of fights for all.
Finally, we know from polling data Americans have grown alarmed at these clear threats to our democracy and to our rights and liberties. They see the videos every day of innocent people having their windows smashed in, children being separated from their mothers, businesses being raided. We have also seen millions marched under the “No Kings” banner.
Here are results from a new Yale University poll:
A reminder of what that last CNN poll before the November election found (No Kings): Registered voters who are Democrats or Democratic-leaning independents are far more likely than Republican-aligned voters to say they are extremely motivated to vote next year (67% compared with 46%). Those Democratic-aligned voters who consider the state of democracy to be a top concern are perhaps the most fired up within the party: 82% in that group say they are deeply motivated to vote, compared with 57 % among Democratic-aligned voters who call the economy their top concern.
Here’s a round up of polls from September showing “threats to democracy” at the upper level of concern for voters across in the country and in November, 2025 battleground states.
As part of our fight for democracy here and abroad pro-democracy forces should also join the fight against Trump’s ongoing desecration of the White House and the Capital city, the world’s most important symbol of democracy. We should join the new effort by the National Historic Preservation Trust to stop the illegal building of the gilded ballroom; and do everything we can to prevent Trump for seizing three of DC’s public golf course for this own malevolent designs. From the Washington Post this morning:
The Trump administration issued a notice of default to the group that manages Washington’s three municipal golf courses, escalating a behind-the-scenes struggle over who will control some of the District’s most visible public land and effectively positioning the president to operate its public golf properties.
The move could imperil National Links Trust’s 50-year lease with the National Park Service and clear the way for President Donald Trump to advance his own vision for redeveloping the courses, particularly the East Potomac property that includes views of the Washington Monument and for years has been a popular destination for tourists and residents alike.
In 2026, in a our year of opportunity, when we can and should be acting with far greater ambition, we can be both warriors for working people against oligarchy and proud patriots fighting for democracy here and abroad.
It’s an “and” not an “or.”
Pro-Trump, imprisoned voting machine tamperer Tina Peters, left, and Colorado Secretary of State Jena Griswold
New York Times, Trump Administration: Colorado Officials Reject Trump’s ‘Pardon’ of a Convicted Election Denier, Jack Healy, Dec. 13, 2025. The president’s stated intention to pardon Tina Peters, jailed for tampering with election machines in 2020, has set off a legal fight over the extent of Mr. Trump’s pardon powers.
President Trump’s pledge to pardon Tina Peters, a former Colorado county clerk convicted of tampering with voting machines, touched off a new battle on Friday over the fate of perhaps the last high-profile 2020 election denier still behind bars.
Democratic leaders in Colorado dismissed the pardon as an empty attempt to bully a Democratic state into freeing one of the president’s political allies. They argued that Mr. Trump had no legal power to overturn Ms. Peters’ conviction in state court.
“There’s no legal merit,” Attorney General Phil Weiser of Colorado, a Democrat, said in an interview on Friday.
Ms. Peters, the former clerk in conservative-leaning Mesa County, a ranching and oil-and-gas region on the western edge of the state, was sentenced to nine years in prison last year after being found guilty of interfering with voting machines in an effort to prove falsehoods that they had been used to rig the 2020 election against Mr. Trump.
The prison sentence made Ms. Peters, 70, a martyr for the election-denial movement, and launched a so far fruitless campaign by Mr. Trump’s followers to win her release from state prison.
Since Mr. Trump’s return to power, his administration has joined in that effort, which is part of a broader push to grant clemency to those convicted in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, end prosecutions of Mr. Trump and allies who were accused of subverting the 2020 election and rewrite the history of that election and its aftermath.
In March, the Justice Department intervened on Ms. Peters’ behalf after she challenged her conviction in federal court. Last month, the U.S. Bureau of Prisons sought to have Ms. Peters transferred to federal custody and out of the state prison where her lawyer said she is being held in solitary confinement.
Those efforts have all failed, and on Friday, some Colorado officials said Mr. Trump’s promise to pardon Ms. Peters felt like last-ditch frustration.
“He is continuing to escalate out of desperation,” Colorado’s Democratic secretary of state, Jena Griswold, said in an interview.
But a lawyer for Ms. Peters said he was planning to make a legal argument that Mr. Trump did have the power to pardon Ms. Peters.
“For all I know, the president may send a marshal to the prison to have her released,” Peter Ticktin, a lawyer for Ms. Peters and longtime friend of Mr. Trump, said in an interview.
Mr. Ticktin argued that Mr. Trump has the power to free Ms. Peters under an untested legal theory that the Constitution’s language allowing the president to pardon people for offenses “against the United States” applied not just to federal crimes but also to state-level charges.
“The President of the United States has the power to grant a pardon in any of the states of the United States,” Mr. Ticktin wrote in a letter to Mr. Trump last week that portrayed Ms. Peters as a political prisoner who could be a witness to investigations into the false claims that the election was stolen from Mr. Trump.
Legal scholars and Colorado officials were incredulous. They said the notion that the president could intervene in state courts clashed with the plain language of the Constitution, as well as its fundamental principles of federalism and states’ rights.
“This is so far beyond the pale,” Mr. Weiser, the attorney general, said. “No one has thought to do this because it is so clearly against our constitutional system of government.”
Some of Ms. Peters’ most ardent supporters appeared to be spoiling for a fight between Mr. Trump and a deeply Democratic state that has earned his ire over immigration and elections. They suggested in social-media posts that Mr. Trump’s grant of clemency set the stage for a “battle” between the president and Colorado, and that Colorado officials could be arrested if they failed to heed Mr. Trump’s pardon.
Colorado officials said they had not received any notice related to the pardon since Mr. Trump announced it on his Truth Social platform on Thursday. It was posted on Justice Department’s list of clemency grants late on Friday, declaring that Ms. Peters had been cleared of “offenses she has or may have committed or taken part in related to election integrity and security” in 2020 and 2021.
Although the Supreme Court has expanded some of Mr. Trump’s powers, broadly protected him from prosecution for official acts as president and agreed to hear a case over whether he can strip birthright citizenship from the children of immigrants, Mr. Weiser said he did not see any credible legal argument for Mr. Trump’s pardon of Ms. Peters.
“We are ready to go before a court on this,” he said. “Our position is as strong and clear as any constitutional case I can imagine.”
“He is continuing to escalate out of desperation,” Colorado’s Democratic secretary of state, Jena Griswold, said in an interview.
But a lawyer for Ms. Peters said he was planning to make a legal argument that Mr. Trump did have the power to pardon Ms. Peters.
“For all I know, the president may send a marshal to the prison to have her released,” Peter Ticktin, a lawyer for Ms. Peters and longtime friend of Mr. Trump, said in an interview.
Mr. Ticktin argued that Mr. Trump has the power to free Ms. Peters under an untested legal theory that the Constitution’s language allowing the president to pardon people for offenses “against the United States” applied not just to federal crimes but also to state-level charges.
News Roundups
President Trump (New York Times file photo by Kenny Holston).
Medias Touch Network, Saturday Afternoon News, Ben Meiselas, right, Dec.13,2025. Our researchers at MeidasTouch and I have been tracking all the latest news Saturday, and it’s been just one crisis another the other for the Trump regime.
Trump is still reeling from the newly released images from the Epstein estate. Rather than confront the substance of what those materials reveal and just be honest with the American people, the administration accused Democrats of “selectively releasing photos” to make the president “look bad.” It’s hard to square that accusation with the fact that in the release, there were images of Democrats, including a former Democratic president, with Jeffrey Epstein as well. But Trump’s response says everything about where we are
If the president truly had no meaningful relationship with Jeffrey Epstein, transparency would be the obvious remedy. Release the full files. Let the public see the record. Instead, the White House is attempting to discredit disclosure itself. The images, drawn from Epstein’s own materials, raise disturbing questions about Trump’s proximity to Epstein and the world he inhabited.
Blaming others for exposing evidence is not a defense. Claiming you had “nothing” to do with Epstein despite all the evidence to the contrary just raises suspicion. That panic was compounded by grim developments abroad.
In Syria, we’ve just learned that two U.S. service members and an interpreter were killed in an ambush by an ISIS-affiliated group. It was a sobering reminder that the world does not pause for presidential theatrics. Just because Trump repeatedly says he’s “defeated ISIS,” that does not make it true. Trump’s approach to foreign policy continues to be defined by spectacle and self-promotion rather than seriousness. The consequences are measured not in headlines, but in lives.
The same pattern played out in Southeast Asia. Just days ago, Trump boasted online that he had personally brokered a ceasefire between Thailand and Cambodia, declaring that “they have agreed to cease all shooting, effective this evening.” The claim was false. Thai officials publicly denied it as clashes continued along the border, with dozens killed and many more injured. Regional diplomacy had been led by other actors, including Malaysia and China. Trump did not just exaggerate his role; he injected confusion into an already volatile situation.
This is not an isolated incident. We have seen similar claims about Gaza, where Trump heralded a “historic peace deal” that never materialized. There was no ceasefire agreement, no signatures, no binding commitments. Israeli airstrikes continued, including attacks reported just this weekend.
In Ukraine, Russia launched new ballistic and drone strikes against ports in Odesa, damaging civilian infrastructure. None of this aligns with the president’s self-portrait as a global peacemaker. The wars rage on. And Trump’s lies about “peace” are making the world a more dangerous place.
At home, the administration’s moral vacuum is even clearer. In a matter of days, enhanced Affordable Care Act subsidies are set to expire, threatening sharp premium increases for roughly 24 million Americans. This is an imminent harm that could be prevented with a simple extension. Instead, Republicans in power are allowing it to lapse. When asked about the millions facing higher costs or loss of coverage, Trump dismissed the concern, telling reporters to “stop being so dramatic.”
That response captures the cruelty at the heart of this moment. A governing party is openly advancing a platform that strips health care away from working families. Right-leaning media outlets have largely ignored the story, while centrist and left-leaning outlets report the obvious reality: higher costs and worse coverage are coming unless action is taken.
Even as Americans brace for that impact, the president’s political operation continues to solicit money as if he were perpetually campaigning. Supporters receive messages crafted to feel personal and urgent, asking for donations to meet artificial “deadlines.” It is a familiar grift, one that persists despite the fact that Trump already occupies the Oval Office. Governance, it seems, is secondary to fundraising.
Layered on top of all this are growing concerns about the president’s health and fitness, fueled by visible signs that the White House waves away with implausible explanations. Transparency would serve the public interest. Deflection only deepens distrust.Taken together, these threads form a coherent picture. A president under pressure from revelations about his past responds not with accountability, but with attacks on those revealing the truth. A president confronted with war and instability abroad responds with false boasts and misinformation. A president facing a preventable domestic crisis responds with mockery.
Democracy depends on an informed public and leaders willing to face facts, however uncomfortable. What we are witnessing instead is a presidency that treats truth as an enemy and accountability as optional. The Epstein files, the false ceasefires, the looming health-care cliff, all of it points in the same direction. We will continue to insist on transparency, reality, and humanity in the face of a presidency that has abandoned all three, no matter how enraged that makes the regime
Lincoln Square Media, Political Opinion: Is Trump Dying? Rick Wilson, right, Dec 13, 2025. In every way that matters, absolutely.
Of course Donald Trump is dying. In fact, we all are, technically speaking, slogging onward toward our inevitable appointments with the undertaker.
But this particular question, when posed today, carries implications far richer and stranger than the mere physical breakdown of an obese septuagenarian lardbottom who treats exercise like vampires treat sunlight.
Trump is dying this week, all right, but not merely in the banal, biological sense. He’s dying in that uniquely Trumpian way, with spectacular explosions of flame, betrayal, scandal, and rage. He's dying politically, spiritually, psychologically, and perhaps neurologically, too. And, true to form, he's going down kicking, screaming, and bleeding orange foundation onto the White House carpets.
Politically speaking, Trump’s iron grip over the party he seized in a fit of populist fever back in 2015 cracked this past week in ways previously thought impossible. For those of us hardened veterans of the Never Trump wars, those weary souls who lived through the hundreds of premature declarations that “this will finally end Trump” in 2015, 2016, 2018, 2020, and, well, you get the idea, skepticism comes naturally. We've grown accustomed to watching Trump’s voters gaze upon the charred wreckage of their illusions, shrug, and ask politely for more gasoline.
Yet something profound shifted with this Epstein fiasco. The Epstein affair landed like a hand grenade in the middle of Trump’s MAGA picnic, scattering the faithful, burning the drapes, and utterly ruining dessert. For nearly a decade, the Jeffrey Epstein files have achieved a kind of mystical, holy-grail status within Trump’s political base. His allies built their grift on tantalizing hints about dark conspiracies, whispered secrets, and imagined perversions of every liberal figure they despised. Hillary Clinton was evil incarnate, a dark sorceress in the bowels of Comet Pizza. Joe Biden was an irredeemable deviant, Barack Obama surely must've been in there somewhere, the villainous rogues’ gallery was complete and ready-made, and Trump voters lapped up every drop of conspiratorial nonsense like starving raccoons in a roadside trash bin.
But then, suddenly, the files are no longer safely hypothetical.
The Epstein revelations landed in Trump’s backyard, a radioactive payload of awful truths threatening to incinerate Trump’s carefully curated narrative of victimhood. Trump's desperate cries of “hoax” and “Democrat plot” fall flat, a symphony of pathetic excuses losing their audience mid-performance. Trump supporters (the same tribe that proudly chanted “Lock her up!” at every gathering from arena rallies to casual Sunday church services for a decade) find themselves forced into the painful awareness that their orange savior might be more of a villainous amusement park manager, whose Scooby-Doo mask is finally ripped off to reveal the predictable face of a small-time crook.
Admit it: There’s something undeniably pleasurable, something deliciously ironic, in watching MAGA-world implode under the weight of reality. Even their dopamine-addled, Facebook-poisoned neurons sense that Trump’s absurd denials ring hollow. You can almost see the gears turning, slowly and painfully, in their small, fevered minds: "Wait ... have we been had?"
Yes, folks, you have. Trump has played you as surely as a Times Square hustler working the three-card Monte table. And now you're left holding a losing hand, wondering where your wallet went.
Then came Trump’s health diversion, a transparent attempt to distract the nation with a new shiny object … or rather, a swollen, bruised, and frankly disturbing object. The physical evidence has been obvious to anyone with working eyeballs: Trump’s legs look as though someone inflated them with a bicycle pump, his ankles swollen grotesquely with edema.
His tiny hands — those infamous lemur paws — show alarming bruises and crusty sores usually reserved for medieval plague victims or late-stage Bourbon kings. The official line from the White House? Insufficient venous return from standing too long, compounded by “excessive handshaking.” That's right. Handshaking. Trump’s medical spin would be laughable if the implications weren't so pathetic. Trump, after all, hates admitting weakness so much that he would rather have you believe he's suffering from "vigorous diplomacy syndrome" rather than confront mortality honestly.
Let’s be clear: Trump would sooner die than admit that he's anything less than an immortal political gladiator, the forever-young warrior king who drives liberals crazy and rallies his minions in ecstatic praise. But he is less than superhuman. Far less. He’s human enough to experience frailty, to suffer decay, (and this is the kicker) to feel fear. Oh yes, fear. That’s what's really haunting Donald Trump today.
For Trump, this past week has been nothing less than catastrophic. The Epstein revelations don't just tarnish his carefully maintained façade of alpha male strength; they threaten to reveal him as a morally bankrupt coward complicit in the very same sexual exploitation cesspool he and his allies weaponized against their enemies.
And if there’s anything Trump cannot abide, it's humiliation. Physical frailty he can mask with oversized suits, bizarre posture adjustments, and industrial-grade spray tans. But humiliation? Exposure as a hypocrite and liar of monumental proportions? That’s worse than death.
This frantic desperation has spilled into Trump’s inner circle, now clumsily attempting to silence the Trumpist influencers who built their brands on Epstein conspiracies. Pam Bondi, right, Kash Patel, Dan Bongino (women and men) accustomed to barking like trained seals on command, were suddenly instructed in no uncertain terms to "shut the hot fuck up." That silence you hear from the MAGA media world is the sound of panic-stricken compliance.
But we should not be fooled or distracted. Last night’s Wall Street Journal story was the first leak, not the last. This is, in fact, a cover-up worthy of Nixon, except without Nixon’s subtlety or charm. And yes, Nixon had charm compared to Trump. Nixon at least had the good sense to resign in disgrace. Trump would rather set fire to the entire republic than accept personal defeat.
Why does all this matter now? Because the Epstein affair has triggered something different this time, a fracture in the Trumpian armor no amount of ranting or tweeting can mend. Trump knows it. His terrified eyes and panicked tantrums betray that he sees the political Grim Reaper coming closer. This is the twilight of Trump as an unbeatable demigod of American populism. It is the unraveling of a decade-long con, a slow-motion realization among millions that their chosen god-king is a mere mortal, and worse, a fraud.
Watching Trump implode like a collapsing star unable to maintain the gravitational pull of his bullshit any longer is perversely satisfying. Yet there's a lesson here deeper than mere schadenfreude: the lesson of hubris, vanity, and cynical exploitation finally coming home to roost. Trump is indeed dying, politically and reputationally, his myths unraveling faster than Rudy Giuliani's hair dye.
Of course, the great irony remains: Trump spent years mocking weakness, illness, and decay. He mocked his opponents' age, health, and mental clarity, projecting his insecurities outward with glee. Now the bitter cosmic joke is on him, as the chickens come home to roost with efficient and sinister cruelty.
So yes, Trump is dying. But not simply because his body is failing. He's dying because his brand, built on a foundation of lies, cruelty, and performative machismo, is finally collapsing under the crushing weight of hypocrisy and reality. The spectacle is Shakespearean, Menckenesque, and delightful in its absurdity.
We’re watching the great man die … not heroically, but petulantly, chaotically, and above all else, pathetically. Couldn't happen to a nicer guy.
NBC News, Donald TrumpTrump attacks on political opponents spur a surge of threats, Dareh Gregorian and Jiachuan Wu, Dec. 13, 2025. In recent weeks, nearly two dozen elected officials on both sides of the aisle said they were targeted after getting caught in the president's crosshairs.
President Donald Trump’s heated rhetoric against his perceived political enemies has resulted in a blizzard of threats against at least 22 officials on both sides of the aisle in recent weeks, according to an NBC News tally.
Among those who’ve been targeted with threats after being mentioned in social media posts by the president are numerous Democrats, including Sens. Chuck Schumer of New York and Elissa Slotkin of Michigan — but even more Republicans, including Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia and over a dozen Indiana state lawmakers.
Three of the members of Congress that Trump accused of sedition, meanwhile, have filed complaints against him with the U.S. Capitol Police. The Capitol Police declined to comment on the complaints, saying in a statement, “For safety reasons, we cannot discuss any potential investigations.”
The threats come amid an ugly spike in political violence, including the November shooting of two National Guard members in Washington, D.C. One, Sarah Beckstrom, died.
They also come as threats have been on the rise against federal lawmakers. The Capitol Police said in an assessment in February that threats against lawmakers, their families and staff increased in 2024 for the second year in a row, going from about 8,000 concerning statements and direct threats in 2023 to nearly 9,500 last year.
Criminally charged threats and attacks against members of Congress jumped more than 600% during Trump’s first term compared to President Barack Obama’s second term — 148 in the Trump years compared to 21 during the later Obama years, according to a study by the Chicago Project on Security and Threats (CPOST), a nonpartisan research center at the University of Chicago.
The number of charged threats remained relatively unchanged during President Joe Biden’s four years in office, with 140 people charged, the study found.
While the bulk of the legislators threatened from 2000 to 2012 were Democrats, the survey found the victims have been split nearly 50-50 from 2013 to the end of last year.
“We are in a new era of political violence,” the study’s author, University of Chicago professor Robert Pape, told NBC News, pointing to the assassination attempts on Trump, the assassination of conservative activist Charlie Kirk, the assassination of Democratic Minnesota state Rep. Melissa Hortman and the firebombing of the home of Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, a Democrat.
Americans are broadly trending toward seeing overheated rhetoric as a factor in episodes of political violence, as opposed to just seeing those incidents as the acts of individual disturbed perpetrators, according to NBC News polling on five instances of political violence in the last 15 years, the most recent being Kirk’s murder in September. Sixty-one percent of respondents in a poll earlier this year said that extreme political rhetoric was a significant factor in Kirk’s death, compared to just 24% who said rhetoric was to blame for the 2011 shooting of then-Rep. Gabby Giffords.
Law enforcement has not identified the sources of the new wave of threats, but many of Trump’s targets say the president provoked them with over-the-top accusations of criminality on the part of Democrats and betrayal on the part of his fellow Republicans.
A spokeswoman for the White House, Abigail Jackson, said the president is concerned about political violence and hasn’t done anything wrong.
“As the survivor of two assassination attempts — and recently watching his dear friend Charlie be assassinated — no one understands the dangers of political violence more than President Trump,” Jackson said in a statement.
“But President Trump, and the entire Administration, will not hesitate to speak the truth and call out Democrats for smearing their opponents as Nazis, encouraging members of the military to ignore lawful orders, and enabling violent criminals to invade our country. Sharing these facts is not inciting violence and the media would be wrong to make such an accusation,” she added.Trump accuses Democrats of sedition
The video that led Trump to accuse the six Democrats of sedition encouraged members of the military and intelligence agencies to “refuse illegal orders,” not lawful ones.
The lawmakers, Sens. Mark Kelly of Arizona and Elissa Slotkin of Michigan, and Reps. Jason Crow of Colorado, Chrissy Houlahan and Chris Deluzio of Pennsylvania and Maggie Goodlander of New Hampshire, are all veterans of military or intelligence agencies.
“Like us, you all swore an oath to protect and defend this Constitution. Right now, the threats coming to our Constitution aren’t just coming from abroad but from right here at home. Our laws are clear. You can refuse illegal orders. You must refuse illegal orders,” they said in their Nov. 18 video.
Two days later, on Nov. 20, Trump responded with a barrage of attacks on Truth Social, accusing the six of “seditious behavior at the highest level.”
Trump told Fox News the next day, “I’m not threatening death, but I think they’re in serious trouble. In the old days, it was death.”
The Parnas Perspective, Political Commentary: Republicans Will Let ACA Subsidies Lapse as Party Infighting Deepens and Speaker Johnson’s Hold on the House Erodes, Aaron Parnas, right, Dec. 13, 2025. Republicans have unveiled a health care plan that does not extend ACA subsidies, virtually guaranteeing higher premiums for millions. Turmoil inside the administration is intensifying, with growing signs that Kristi Noem’s tenure at DHS may be nearing its end. And new polling shows that a clear majority of Americans, including most Republicans, believe Donald Trump knew about Jeffrey Epstein’s crimes before they became public.
NBC News reports that escalating White House pressure to dramatically increase deportations has triggered deep internal strife at the Department of Homeland Security, with Secretary Kristi Noem and top adviser Corey Lewandowski blaming ICE and CBP leaders for missing arrest targets, prompting fears of email monitoring, threats of resignation, sidelining of senior officials, and leadership instability as deportation numbers fall far short of the administration’s stated goals.
Amid the release of new Epstein-related photos and ahead of a major DOJ document deadline, polling from Reuters shows most Americans—and a sizable share of Republicans—believe Trump likely knew about Epstein’s alleged crimes, reflecting longstanding public suspicion fueled by Trump’s past statements, disclosures, and associations, and underscoring the political danger of continued Epstein revelations even without proof of criminal involvement.
Asked about newly released Epstein photos showing him alongside figures like Bill Clinton and Steve Bannon, Trump downplayed their significance, saying Epstein “had photos with everybody” and insisting he knew nothing about it, brushing off the revelations without addressing broader concerns about his past association.
House Republicans unveiled a narrow health care package that avoids extending the enhanced Affordable Care Act subsidies set to expire at year’s end—signaling Congress is unlikely to prevent sharp premium hikes for millions—opting instead for smaller GOP priorities like association health plans, cost-sharing reduction payments, and pharmacy benefit manager transparency, even as nonpartisan estimates warn premiums could more than double for many enrollees and millions could lose coverage if the subsidies lapse
When asked about the estimated 24 million Americans facing higher insurance premiums, Trump dismissed the concern and attacked the reporter as a “sycophant for Democrats,” sidestepping the substance of the question rather than addressing the potential impact on consumers.
CBS has confirmed that House Speaker Mike Johnson, right, is facing growing internal rebellion as frustrated Republicans increasingly bypass his leadership through discharge petitions—defying him on issues ranging from Epstein-related disclosures and health care subsidies to labor rights and stock trading—fueling doubts about his control of the narrow GOP majority and raising questions about his long-term hold on the speakership, even as outright efforts to remove him have not yet coalesced.
CNN reports that the Trump administration plans to radically reshape U.S. coinage by issuing a $1 coin bearing Trump’s likeness—breaking long-standing precedent against featuring living presidents—while abandoning previously recommended quarters honoring abolition, women’s suffrage, and the Civil Rights movement in favor of designs centered on white male founders and early American history.
Trump appears to be retreating from his aggressive effort to install loyalist U.S. attorneys without Senate approval, shifting instead to attacking the Senate’s “blue slip” process after multiple court rulings disqualified his picks and forced high-profile resignations, underscoring both judicial resistance to his Justice Department strategy and growing limits on his ability to bypass traditional confirmation norms.
Kamala Harris criticized Trump’s economic record, arguing that prices, unemployment, and inflation have all risen under his leadership, and mocked Trump for giving the economy an “A+++++,” saying there is “nothing A+” about current economic conditions.
NBC News reports that the Justice Department is considering a novel federal hate-crime case in the killing of Charlie Kirk, in part based on evidence that the suspect—whose partner is trans—expressed hostility toward Kirk over his views, but career prosecutors are pushing back, arguing that equating anti-trans motives with an anti-Christian hate crime may not fit existing federal statutes, leaving the prosecution primarily in state court for now.
The Trump administration has quietly launched a sweeping data-sharing program in which the TSA provides passenger lists multiple times a week to ICE, allowing immigration agents to identify, detain, and rapidly deport travelers with final removal orders at U.S. airports—a major break from past practice that has already led to arrests like that of a 19-year-old college student in Boston, intensified fears among immigrants, and drawn criticism that routine air travel is being transformed into a tool of mass deportation.
Trump is openly pressing the Federal Reserve to heed his views as he prepares to name a successor to Chair Jerome Powell, right, signaling an 
unprecedented push for White House influence over monetary policy; he has floated former Fed governor Kevin Warsh and adviser Kevin Hassett as leading candidates, criticized the Fed’s reluctance to slash interest rates, and argued that as president he is a “smart voice” who should be listened to.
A California jury ordered Johnson & Johnson to pay $40 million to two women who said decades of using its talc-based baby powder caused their ovarian cancer, finding the company knew for years about potential dangers but failed to warn consumers—another setback for J&J as it faces tens of thousands of similar lawsuits and repeated court rejections of its attempts to resolve the litigation through bankruptcy.
NPR reports that some Head Start programs have been instructed by the Trump administration to remove nearly 200 words—including “disability,” “women,” “Black,” “minority,” “tribal,” and “inclusion”—from federal funding applications or risk denial.
Good news:
More On U.S. Crime, Courts, Law, Justice
Emptywheel, Analysis: Cowardice Like Michael Glasheen's Is How January 6 Happened, Emptywheel (Marcy Wheeler, right), Dec. 12, 2025. Michael Glasheen, above -- the guy in charge of national security at the FBI -- falsely claimed that Antifa was the biggest terrorist threat facing the US, he was probably just trying to keep his job. But the kind of cowardice he displayed yesterday is how January 6 was allowed to happen.
Yesterday, the guy in charge of FBI’s National Security Branch, Michael Glasheen exhibited the same kind of cowardice that allowedJanuary 6 to happen, when he delivered the scripted lines that Kash Patel and Donald Trump permit him to say at the Global Threats Hearing. First, he sustained the bullshit claim that Antifa was the greatest threat to the US, then he played dumb when asked about the Proud Boys.
This is precisely the kind of cowardice that allowed January 6 to happen.
To be sure, there are several layers of cowardice built into this. Glasheen shouldn’t have been testifying in the first place; Kash [Patel] should have been. But unusually for the Global Threats hearing, Kash, right, blew off the committee entirely and Kristi Noem left early after one and then another Democrat personalized the veterans her goons have targeted and the Americans she arrested.
Then early in the hearing, Bennie Thompson (after making a clear misstatement to call the shooting of two National Guards members in DC only to have Noem refuse to admit that Rahmanullah Lakhanwal received asylum under Trump) asked Glasheen about terrorist threats. Here’s how USA Today described the exchange.
“When you look at the data right now, you look at the domestic terrorist threat that we’re facing right now, what I see from my position is that’s the most immediate violent threat that we’re facing on the domestic side,” he said.
But when Rep. Bennie Thompson, D-Mississippi, the ranking chairman of the House Homeland Security committee, asked whether the group is headquartered or how many members it has, Glasheen did not have answers.
“We are building out the infrastructure right now,” Glasheen said.
“So what does that mean?” Thompson replied. “We’re trying to get the information. You said antifa is a terrorist organization. Tell us, as a committee, how did you come to that? How many members do they have in the United States, as of right now?”
Glasheen said the number is “very fluid” and that the investigation into the movement and its members is ongoing, comparing it to al-Qaeda and ISIS.
[snip]
“Well, the investigations are active,” Glasheen responded, pausing before closing his mouth.
Thompson shook his head.
“Sir, you wouldn’t come to this committee and say something you can’t prove. I know you wouldn’t do that. But you did,” the congressman said, ending the exchange.
The exchange was one of the most-reported stories from the hearing yesterday (the advantage Ranking Members have for going first).
But few provided the background.
It was this kind of cowardice — it was precisely this kind of politicized threat focus — that allowed January 6 to happen. Bill Barr, too, was pushing the Antifa myth in advance of Trump’s insurrection. Trump even prepared precisely the kind of terrorist designation in advance that he rolled out in the wake of the Charlie Kirk killing, no doubt anticipating clashes that didn’t arise.
More troubling, a bunch of people in the Proud Boys network were treated as informants on Antifa rather than used to collect awareness of the militia. There was Jenny Loh, as Brandi Buchman described in her coverage of the trial.
Tarrio’s next witness is teed up for Monday after much commotion: FBI informant Jennylyn Salinas, also known as “Jenny Loh.”
Loh’s anticipated appearance threw proceedings into disarray last week as defense attorneys claimed they had no idea Loh was an informant. Loh maintains she told her handlers nothing about her interactions with the Proud Boys and that once the government became aware that she could be called to testify in the case, her informant relationship ended completely.
Prosecutors say Loh, who was associated with Latinos for Trump, was an informant from April 2020 through this January and only received a single payment from the bureau after sharing footage with agents of people harassing her at home. Loh has said that her communications with the FBI were not about Proud Boys but the threat that antifa posed.
More troubling still, there was “Aaron,” whose participation in the Kansas City cell made it incredibly difficult for prosecutors to prosecute those participants. WaPo described his testimony while describing the larger problem.
[A]t least four FBI sources were approached by the defense. Two others are on trial. And it was federal prosecutors who undermined the credibility of a federal informant, suggesting that the man — who only pronounced his name as “Aaron” — had deleted evidence and eliciting testimony that he repeatedly understated his own participation in the riot.
[snip]
On cross-examination, “Aaron” — who did not spell his name into the trial record — acknowledged that a member of his Kansas City Proud Boys chapter “had said some pretty wild things” about violence in advance of Jan. 6 that he did not share with the FBI. He admitted entering the Capitol without FBI authorization and not revealing that he helped prop open a gate for other rioters.
He later tried to justify his actions to agents by saying he thought he could help stop the destruction of “items of historical significance or historical artifacts,” according to the testimony.
The evidence shown in court indicates that many of the FBI sources inside the Proud Boys were asked only about their ideological opponents on the left, even as the right-wing group was implicated in threats and violence at protests across the United States.
[snip]
“Aaron” testified Wednesday that before Jan. 6, the FBI never asked him to look for information about the Proud Boys. When he informed his handler that he was coming to D.C. for the protest, he was asked only “to try to see if I could locate someone in D.C. that had nothing to do with the Proud Boys,” he testified.
The FBI missed an attack on the Capitol in significant part because they treated right wing threat actors as informants rather than a far more urgent threat.
I have no doubt Glasheen knows he’s chasing ghosts, which explains his discomfort. I have no doubt that Glasheen, as Chris Wray did before him, is treading carefully to avoid being fired. He probably calculates, correctly, that if he gets fired, a less competent whack job would replace him.
This is all by design: The fearmongering at FBI did, already, and will, again, blinds the FBI to real threats.
Epstein-Trump Files
"Katie Johnson" is the pseudonum for the woman shown above who alleged in 2016 that she had been raped at age 13 by Donald Trump at the home of Jeffrey Epstein in 1994. She withdrew her lawsuit following what her attorney described as death threats by unidentified persons.
Robert Morrow Blog, Transcript of Katie Johnson, age 35 in 2016, telling of Donald Trump's Savage sexual molestation of both her (age 13) and a Hispanic girl Maria (age 12) in 1994 in NYC, Robert Morrow, Texas-based blogger, author and activist, Dec. 12-13, 2025. Tonight's email is a doozy!
This is a newly formatted and annotated transcript of Katie Johnson's February 2016 interview [as part of her civil case, which she withdrew after death threats] in which she recounts Donald J. Trump's savage rape of her when she was an aspiring model and 13-year-old virgin and she recounts Donald J. Trump's brutality with a 12-yea-old Puerto Rican girl named Maria (not her real name).
Maria's child services were not up to Trump's standards. So way back in 1994, Trump THREATENED TO CALL IMMIGRATION on Maria if she did not perform better to satisfy his twisted criminal sexual needs.
The major media -- liberal, conservative, establishment, Democratic, Republican -- all of these bastards -- have suppressed the Katie Johnson story and the reason for that is that it is like a guided missile directly headed for Trump's rolling fat belly.
On social media, Katie Johnson's story is there, but it is consistently "shadow banned" by the social media platforms. Although the story is supremely blockbuster, the owners of the social media platforms don't want it to go viral. These tech executives are either sex criminals themselves or they are personal power friends with the Epstein-VIP child molesters.
Remember, folks, I wrote the Clintons' War on Women with Roger Stone.
I broke hard with Trump on June 21, 2016 when I read a PDF of the Katie Johnson lawsuit, which someone emailed me immediately after it was filed in NYC. I found it to be extremely credible. I am friends with some of the top reporters in the world who have expertise on the Jeffrey Epstein Child Raping Machine and Network and I have known a lot of inner circle secrets about Epstein and his child-raping VIP pals since about 2012.
An undated photograph from Jeffrey Epstein's estate of Donald Trump with unidentified women, released on Dec. 12, 2025, by the House Oversight Committee as part of the Jeffrey Epstein files. | House Oversight Committee.
Politico, Trump, Clinton, Gates included in Epstein photo trove, Hailey Fuchs, Dec. 13, 2025. The House Oversight Committee Democrats released photos from the Epstein estate linking powerful men to the late convicted sex offender.Donald Trump poses for a photo with six women, whose faces have been redacted.
Photos from the estate of Jeffrey Epstein tie the convicted sex offender to President Donald Trump, former President Bill Clinton, tech billionaire Bill Gates and former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers.
These men and others are featured in the roughly 95,000 photos the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee has received from the Epstein estate as part of its ongoing investigation. House Democrats released batches of photos on Friday.
“It is time to end this White House cover-up and bring justice to the survivors of Jeffrey Epstein and his powerful friends,” the Oversight 
Committee’s top Democrat, Rep. Robert Garcia of California, said in a statement. “These disturbing photos raise even more questions about Epstein and his relationships with some of the most powerful men in the world. We will not rest until the American people get the truth. The Department of Justice must release all the files, NOW.”
When asked about the latest photos, Trump said he had not seen them.
“There are hundreds and hundreds of people that have photos with him. So that’s no big deal,” he told reporters Friday in the Oval Office. “I know nothing about it.”
White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson in a statement accused Democrats of “selectively releasing cherry-picked photos with random redactions.”
“The Democrat hoax against President Trump has been repeatedly debunked and the Trump Administration has done more for Epstein’s victims than Democrats ever have by repeatedly calling for transparency, releasing thousands of pages of documents, and calling for further investigations into Epstein’s Democrat friends,” she continued. “It’s time for the media to stop regurgitating Democrat talking points and start asking Democrats why they wanted to hang around Epstein after he was convicted.”
Jackson also accused House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-N.Y.) and Del. Stacey Plaskett, Democratic delegate for the Virgin Islands, of maintaining ties with Epstein following his sex trafficking charges. Plaskett was found in a recent release of Epstein emails to have been texting with Epstein during a congressional hearing to get information about the panel’s witness, Trump’s ex-fixer Michael Cohen.
A Jeffries spokesperson pointed to a recent CNN interview where the leader said he had no knowledge of email outreach to Epstein, nor did he receive a donation.
A spokesperson for Plaskett did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Other individuals in the photographs beyond Trump also did not respond to requests for comment Friday.
The Justice Department is required to release the full tranche of Epstein-related documents by Dec. 19, per the terms of legislation Congress passed last month.
Of the photos shared Friday, one features Trump alongside someone who appears to be a young woman (her face has been redacted). Another shows Trump standing beside Epstein — who died by suicide in his jail cell in 2019 — chatting with a woman, while a third has Trump grinning among a half-dozen women whose faces have also been redacted. In that shot, he appears to have his arm around one woman’s waist.
There is another photo in the tranche showing pictures of “Trump condoms” being sold for $4.50 each, branded with the words, “I’M HUUUUGE!”
There is a signed photo from Clinton depicting him smiling alongside Epstein and Epstein’s associate Ghislaine Maxwell, who is serving 20 years for her part in the sex trafficking scheme. While Clinton’s association including travel on Epstein’s plane after the former president left office is well-documented, Clinton has said he cut ties with Epstein before his 2019 arrest and had no knowledge of his crimes.
The images underscore Epstein’s long and storied network of connections to powerful men across industries, from filmmaker Woody Allen to conservative strategist Steve Bannon. They were sent to Capitol Hill after a subpoena from the Oversight panel for materials from the late financier’s estate, separate from the documents demanded from the Justice Department by legislation.
In this undated photograph from the personal collection of convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, President Donald Trump is seen talking to a woman and standing next to Epstein. The photo, from Epstein’s estate, was released Friday by the Democrats on the House Oversight Committee.
PBS, New photos from Epstein’s personal collection show Trump, Clinton and much more, Liz Landers, Dec. 12, 2025. A newly released batch of images shows the rich and powerful people with whom convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein socialized, and other glimpses of his lifestyle.
The undated photographs are from Epstein’s email account and computer, according to Democrats on the House Oversight Committee, who published the photographs on Friday.
One image shows Donald Trump before he became president standing with six women, whose faces have been redacted, at a party wearing Hawaiian-inspired leis. 
Former British prince Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor stands with Microsoft magnate Bill Gates in another photograph (shown above). Virgin Group founder and billionaire Richard Branson with Epstein and another man. Political strategist and Trump ally Steve Bannon with Epstein.
Several images show movie director Woody Allen, photographed with Epstein on what appears to be a movie set, another seated with Epstein and a woman, and a third of him standing and speaking with Steve Bannon.
Wall Street Journal, New Epstein Photos Released by Democrats Show Donald Trump, Bill Clinton, Khadeeja Safdar and Joe Palazzolo, Dec. 12, 
2025. The images are undated selections from thousands turned over by Epstein’s estate to Congress.Congressional Democrats have released a selection of photos obtained from Jeffrey Epstein’s estate that include pictures of President Trump and former President Bill Clinton.
The estate has turned over thousands of photos in response to a subpoena from the House Oversight Committee. On Friday, Democrats on the committee, led by Rep. Robert Grdcia, released images showing some of Epstein's famous associates in undated photos.
host Ben Meiselas and Talking Feds host Harry Litman report on a lawsuit filed by the National Trust for Historic Preservation to block the construction of Trump’s golden ballroom and the breaking news that a federal judge has now scheduled an emergency hearing that might block the construction.Global News
New York Times, 3 Americans Killed in Attack in Syria, Abdi Latif Dahir, Christina Goldbaum and John Ismay, Dec. 13, 2025. The Pentagon said two soldiers and a civilian interpreter were killed while supporting counterterror operations. They are the first U.S. casualties in Syria since the fall of the dictator Bashar al-Assad
Two U.S. Army soldiers and a civilian U.S. interpreter were killed in central Syria on Saturday, the Pentagon said, in the first American casualties in the country since the fall of the dictator Bashar al-Assad last year.
The soldiers were supporting counterterrorism operations to counter the Islamic State group in Palmyra when they came under fire from a lone gunman, according to American officials. The gunman was subsequently killed, the officials said.
Three American military personnel and two members of Syrian security forces were also wounded in the attack, according to American officials and Syrian state media. In the aftermath, American helicopters were deployed to evacuate the wounded to the al-Tanf U.S. base in southeastern Syria, Syrian state media said.
No group has yet claimed responsibility for the attack. Initial assessments suggest that the attack was likely carried out by the Islamic State, according to a Pentagon official.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, right, forcefully condemned the attack, saying in post on X that “if you target Americans — anywhere in the world — you will spend the rest of your brief, anxious life knowing the United States will hunt you, find you, and ruthlessly kill you.”
About 2,000 American service members were in Syria as of last December, according to the Pentagon.
Those forces have been deployed across various U.S. bases, including al-Tanf. For years, their main objectives have included combating the Islamic State, guarding strategic areas like oil fields and curbing Iranian influence.
New York Times, Russian Bombs Plunge Odesa Into Darkness Amid Peace Talks, Kim Barker, Dec. 13, 2025. Much of Ukraine’s largest Black Sea port was without power, heat and water on Saturday after strikes from Russia, which has shown little appetite for a deal to end the war.
Russian drones and missiles pummeled Odesa, Ukraine, overnight on Friday into Saturday in one of the biggest attacks of the war on the southern port, causing major power outages that plunged parts of the city into darkness.
The attack targeted energy, industrial and other infrastructure in several regions of southern Ukraine, leaving much of Odesa, the country’s largest Black Sea port, without power, heat and water, Ukrainian officials said. Hospitals and public drinking water stations were switched onto generators. Officials did not report any deaths.
The overnight attacks caused more than one million people in Ukraine to lose power, officials said.
The bombardment came amid a flurry of diplomatic talks to end the war, which started nearly four years ago with Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, or to at least secure a limited cease-fire. Ukrainian, European and American officials have shuttled across the globe in recent weeks for negotiations over a U.S. push to quickly end the conflict.
President Trump, arguing that Ukraine is losing, wants President Volodymyr Zelensky to agree to a deal that would require the country to cede land for peace. Mr. Zelensky and his European allies are resisting while also trying to ensure that the United States does not walk away from Ukraine.
Negotiators from Europe, the United States and Ukraine will meet over the weekend in Berlin, a senior German government official said on Saturday, speaking on the condition of anonymity. Mr. Zelensky and European leaders are expected to hold talks on Monday.Want to stay updated on what’s happening in Russia and Ukraine? Sign up for Your Places: Global Update, and we’ll send our latest coverage to your inbox.
Steve Witkoff, Mr. Trump’s special envoy, and Jared Kushner, Mr. Trump’s son-in-law, will also be meeting with officials on Sunday and Monday, according to a White House official speaking on the condition of anonymity to share plans that were not yet public.
“It is important that everyone now sees what Russia is doing — every step they take in terror against our people, all their attacks, for this is clearly not about ending the war,” Mr. Zelensky said on social media after the strikes on Saturday. “For all our diplomatic efforts to yield results, pressure must be applied to the aggressor so that they end the war they started,” he added.
But President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia has shown little appetite for any peace deal at this stage.People wearing winter jackets fill up water bottles.Filling up bottles with fresh drinking water on Saturday in Odesa.Credit...Nina Liashonok/Reuters
On Friday, President Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey told Mr. Putin in a meeting on the sidelines of a summit in Turkmenistan that a limited cease-fire for energy facilities and ports “could be beneficial” and a step toward a broader peace deal in the war, according to a statement from Mr. Erdogan’s office.
Mr. Erdogan has called Mr. Putin his “dear friend” in the past, and Turkey has tried to broker a truce between Russia and Ukraine on attacks in shipping lanes in the Black Sea, which endanger Turkey’s own interests.
But Moscow has resisted those calls. After Ukraine hit two vessels of Russia’s so-called shadow fleet in late November in the Black Sea, Mr. Putin threatened to cut off Ukraine from the sea. Russia is thought to use these tankers to transport oil covertly, avoiding sanctions and raising money to fund its war. Ukraine hit another vessel in the fleet on Wednesday.
New York Times, Israel Says It Killed Senior Hamas Commander, Despite Cease-Fire, Aaron Boxerman and Adam Rasgon, Dec. 13, 2025. Hamas said the attack on Saturday was a breach of the truce. The militant group did not comment on Israel’s claim to have killed one of its members.
The Israeli military said it killed one of Hamas’s top commanders in Gaza in a targeted strike on a car on Saturday, in what would be the most high-profile assassination of a senior figure in the militant group since the cease-fire began two months ago.
The target of the attack was Raed Saad, a senior commander in the Qassam Brigades, Hamas’s armed wing, according to the Israeli authorities. Mr. Saad helped plan the Hamas-led Oct. 7, 2023, attack on southern Israel that ignited the two-year war in Gaza, the Israeli military said.
Hamas did not immediately comment on Israel’s claim to have killed Mr. Saad, leaving his fate unclear, but said in a statement that the attack was another “criminal breach of the cease-fire agreement.” The group has frequently taken weeks or months to publicly confirm the deaths of senior figures killed by Israel.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel said in a statement that he and the country’s defense minister had personally ordered Mr. Saad’s assassination in response to an explosive device that had wounded two Israeli soldiers earlier on Saturday.
A longstanding member of Hamas, Mr. Saad had slowly risen in the ranks to become the armed wing’s second-in-command, according to two Arab intelligence officials. He spent much of the war deep underground in Hamas tunnels beneath Gaza City, they said on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly.
New York Times, Behind the Seized Venezuelan Tanker, Cuba’s Secret Lifeline, Anatoly Kurmanaev, Nicholas Nehamas and Farnaz Fassihi, Updated Dec. 13, 2025. Firms with ties to Cuba are getting a larger share of Venezuelan oil exports, as the island’s security agents boost President Nicolás Maduro’s defenses.
The oil tanker seized by the United States off the coast of Venezuela this week was part of the Venezuelan government’s effort to support Cuba, according to documents and people inside the Venezuelan oil industry.
The tanker, which is called Skipper, left Venezuela on Dec. 4, carrying nearly two million barrels of the country’s heavy crude, according to internal data from Venezuela’s state oil company, known as PDVSA. The ship’s destination was listed as the Cuban port of Matanzas, the data shows.
Two days after its departure, Skipper offloaded a small fraction of its oil, an estimated 50,000 barrels, to another ship, called Neptune 6, which then headed north toward Cuba, according to the shipping data firm Kpler. After the transfer, Skipper headed east, toward Asia, with the vast majority of its oil on board, according to a U.S. official briefed on the matter.
President Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela and his predecessor, Hugo Chávez, have for decades sent oil to Cuba at highly subsidized prices, providing a crucial resource at low cost to the impoverished island.
In return, the Cuban government over the years has sent tens of thousands of medics, sports instructors and, increasingly, security professionals on assignments to Venezuela. That exchange has assumed special importance as Mr. Maduro has leaned on Cuban bodyguards and counterintelligence officers to protect himself against the U.S. military buildup in the Caribbean.
More On U.S. Poliics, Governance
President Joe Biden launches his 2024 re-election campaign on Jan. 5, 2023 (New York Times photo by Pete Marovich).
New York Times, Biden Has Raised Little of What He Needs to Build a Presidential Library, David A. Fahrenthold, Shane Goldmacher, Tyler Pager and Theodore Schleifer, Dec. 13, 2025. His library foundation has told the I.R.S. that by the end of 2027 it expects to bring in just $11.3 million — not nearly enough for a traditional presidential library.
Former President Joseph R. Biden Jr. has raised only a small fraction of the money needed to construct a presidential library, leaving uncertainty about when a library might be built and its viability as a stand-alone project, according to public filings and interviews with his donors.
In filings with the Internal Revenue Service, Mr. Biden’s library foundation revealed that it had not received any new donations in 2024, the final year of his presidency. The foundation was instead seeded entirely with $4 million left over from his 2021 inauguration.
The library foundation declined to say what it had raised in 2025. It said that Mr. Biden was only now beginning to actively raise money. He is holding the first event for potential library donors on Monday in Washington’s Georgetown neighborhood.
Still, Mr. Biden’s foundation told the I.R.S. this year that it expected to bring in just $11.3 million, total, by the end of 2027. That would be far below the pace set by other recent presidents, and far less than the $200 million that Mr. Biden’s aides say they want to raise eventually.
Partly because of that poor fund-raising, discussions are underway about consolidating a potential Biden library with pre-existing Biden institutions at the University of Delaware, according to four people who were granted anonymity to talk about the private planning process. That might allow the library to take advantage of the millions of dollars that the university, the former president’s alma mater, has already raised to build a “Biden Hall.”
So far, some of Mr. Biden’s most loyal contributors said they had not been contacted by anyone about giving to the library. Other Democratic donors have said that even if Mr. Biden asks them, they are unlikely to give money because they are focused on fighting President Trump or are embittered by Mr. Biden’s term in office.Sign up to get Theodore Schleifer's articles emailed to you. Theodore Schleifer is a political reporter covering billionaires and their impact on the world. Get it sent to your inbox.
John Morgan, a longtime Democratic donor who was one of Mr. Biden’s top bundlers, said he would not give “a penny” to the former president’s library, citing poor treatment from Mr. Biden’s staff.
“The Biden staff, they ruined any type of good library for him,” Mr. Morgan said. “He’ll be lucky to have a bookmobile.”
As a point of contrast, Mr. Morgan said he had dinner with former President Bill Clinton last week to discuss a possible donation to his library for an expansion. Mr. Morgan said Mr. Clinton and former President Barack Obama kept much better relations with their donors and supporters, which has enabled them to build large foundations and libraries.Aides to Mr. Biden declined to make him available for an interview.
His library foundation said in a statement that it had delayed holding fund-raisers until now to allow for “intensive research,” including visits to other presidential libraries. Mr. Biden, who turned 83 this fall, has also been distracted. He has undergone radiation therapy for prostate cancer and had skin cancer lesions removed. And he has been working with the historian Ted Widmer on his memoir, according to people close to Mr. Biden.
The chair of the foundation is Rufus Gifford, a longtime Democratic fund-raiser who also served as the chief of protocol of the United States in the Biden administration. The two co-executive directors are Annie Tomasini and Anthony Bernal, two of the Biden family’s most fiercely loyal lieutenants. Ms. Tomasini also serves as the secretary and Mr. Bernal as the treasurer. Its board is filled out by other Biden aides and appointees.
Over the summer, the foundation contracted with a private firm, CCS Fundraising, to assess the financial prospects for the future library.
In late September, Mr. Biden and his wife, Jill, sent a letter to donors asking them to set up 45-minute meetings with the firm, to “help us assess potential support for our vision.”
“We would be grateful for your participation,” the Bidens wrote.
On Monday, the Bidens will meet with supporters for a reception in Washington hosted by Elizabeth Frawley Bagley, a Democratic donor who served as ambassador to Brazil under Mr. Biden.
Modern presidential libraries are enormous, including museums, event spaces and other add-ons. Mr. Obama’s still-unfinished “presidential center” in Chicago — not technically a presidential library, since it will not include hard copies of White House documents — will include a vegetable garden, a branch of the city library, and a basketball gym.
That requires hundreds of millions of dollars, which presidents must raise on their own. (The National Archives, a federal agency, can pay some operating costs — but only after the library is finished.)
Mr. Obama has raised $1.5 billion so far, according to new filings. He posted a video on social media this week announcing that his presidential center would open in June. Mr. Trump, who plans a library in Miami, says he wants to raise more than $950 million before he leaves office.
Mr. Biden has said little about his plans, beyond that he wants his library to be somewhere in Delaware, his home state. Aides say he envisions something smaller and cheaper than Mr. Obama’s center.
Even so, he appears far short of the $200 million goal.
Mr. Biden’s library foundation was incorporated in December 2024. Its only fund-raising for that year was the $4 million transfer from Mr. Biden’s presidential inaugural committee, according to tax filings and the committee’s president, Jeffrey Peck, a former Biden aide. That was more than half of the committee’s $6.9 million in leftover funds. Mr. Peck said the inaugural committee had not decided what to do with the remainder.
That has led some Biden donors to urge another idea: merging the president’s library with the University of Delaware’s existing Joseph R. Biden Jr. School of Public Policy and Administration.
That school, named in Mr. Biden’s honor in 2018, already has a Biden Institute and plans to build a large “Biden Hall” on the campus in Newark, Del. The university has raised at least $22 million for that building, state documents show — including $20 million that the Democratic-led Delaware state government agreed to pay this summer. The university has not said when the hall will be built.
For now, the Biden Hall and the Biden library are separate projects, competing for the same pool of donors. But many loyalists say they hope that the library could be housed inside the hall, turning two projects into one.
That might mean that Mr. Biden ends up with a much more modest library than Mr. Obama, or other recent presidents with huge free-standing buildings. But it could sharply reduce the amount Mr. Biden needs to raise.
The University of Delaware said it had not transferred any money to the Biden library foundation, and declined to comment about the prospect of a merger. The Biden library foundation also declined to say whether it was considering that prospect.
“We continue to be in an exploratory and planning phase,” said Kelly Scully, a spokeswoman for Mr. Biden.
ABC News, Work continues on the construction of the ballroom at the White House, Tuesday, Dec., 9, 2025 (AP photo by Martinez Monsivais). The National Trust for Historic Preservation, the privately funded nonprofit designated by Congress to protect historic sites, is suing in an attempt to stop the construction of the White House ballroom.
In a complaint filed Friday in the U.S. District Court for DC, the organization is asking for the project to be stopped until it completes the federal review process standard for federal building projects and seeks public comment on the proposed changes.
Politico, DOJ skewers judge as it seeks to quash contempt proceedings, Josh Gerstein and Kyle Cheney, Dec.12, 2025. The bitter showdown follows President Donald Trump’s call to impeach Judge James Boasberg.James Boasberg sits.
U.S. District Court Judge James Boasberg sought to hold a hearing next week exploring whether Trump administration officials deliberately defied an order he issued in a high-profile deportation fight. | Drew Angerer/AFP via Getty ImagesBy
The Trump administration’s showdown with Judge James Boasberg escalated further on Friday, as the Justice Department asked a federal appeals court to block the judge from holding a hearing next week to determine whether the administration deliberately defied his orders.
The months-long clash began in March, when Boasberg ordered officials to halt a series of deportation flights, which were not halted. The Justice Department on Friday also asked to have Boasberg removed from that case altogether.
Boasberg “is engaged in a pattern of retaliation and harassment, and has developed too strong a bias to preside over this matter impartially,” DOJ lawyers wrote in an emergency petition filed with the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals.
The judge’s planned hearing on whether officials intentionally violated his orders “portends a circus that threatens the separation of powers and the attorney-client privilege alike,” DOJ attorneys said.
“The forthcoming hearing has every appearance of an endless fishing expedition aimed at an ever-widening list of witnesses and prolonged testimony. That spectacle is not a genuine effort to uncover any relevant facts,” DOJ lawyers wrote, complaining that Boasberg is “doggedly pursuing an idiosyncratic and misguided inquiry.”
The appeals court stepped in Friday evening with a divided three-judge panel issuing an “administrative” order pausing the hearing Boasberg planned to convene Monday.
D.C. Circuit Judges Neomi Rao and Justin Walker, both Trump appointees, joined in granting the pause sought by the government. Judge Michelle Childs, a Biden appointee, dissented. No detailed explanation was offered, but the court’s order contained boilerplate language saying the ruling was intended to “allow the court time to render a decision” on the legal issues involved.
The fight stems from an order Boasberg issued in March after President Donald Trump invoked a two-century-old law, the Alien Enemies Act, to try to rapidly deport more than 130 alleged gang members to a notorious, high-security prison in El Salvador.
During a hearing held by video-conference, Boasberg gave an oral order that the deportees not be unloaded and that the planes be turned around, if necessary. But the flights continued and the men were led from the planes to the Salvadoran prison in shackles in an operation choreographed for TV cameras.
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem said in a recent court filing that she made the decision to carry on with the controversial deportations, based on legal advice from lawyers at DOJ and her department. Boasberg is working to determine whether Noem’s decision amounted to criminal defiance of his order.
Boasberg’s March order angered many Trump supporters, and the president himself, who joined calls for the judge’s impeachment.
Almost immediately, Boasberg began pressing DOJ lawyers for answers about who was informed about his order and who decided to disregard it. At a hearing in April, the judge began a process that could lead to officials being charged with criminal contempt of court.
The D.C. Circuit put a stop to that specific process, but was divided over what Boasberg could do next.
Boasberg, an Obama appointee, said the appeals court ruling did not preclude him taking further action and he set a hearing, which was to begin Monday, with witnesses who could describe how the administration responded to his March 15 order.
The judge ordered two witnesses to testify: Erez Reuveni, a former senior immigration attorney at DOJ, who was fired in April by Attorney General Pam Bondi; and Drew Ensign, a deputy assistant attorney general who handled the initial proceedings in the lawsuit brought on behalf of the deportees.
Reuveni later filed a formal whistleblower disclosure accusing a top DOJ official, Emil Bove, of crudely urging defiance of court orders. Bove, who has since been confirmed as a judge on the 3rd Circuit Court of Appeals, denied the thrust of Reuveni’s claims but was vague about some specifics.
In filings attempting to stave off next week’s hearing, the Justice Department emphasized that Noem’s decision was made after consultations with Bove, Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche and DHS counsel Joseph Mazzara. Bove and Blanche indicated in declarations to the court that their advice to Noem was “privileged.” Boasberg described their statements as “cursory.”
The Justice Department has argued that a written docket entry Boasberg issued after his oral order superseded that order, and that the written order only applied to potential deportees still in U.S. territory or airspace. DOJ has also argued that even if its interpretation of the orders is wrong, they were not clear enough to allow anyone to be charged with criminal contempt.
Before the appeals court ruled Friday, Boasberg turned down last-ditch requests DOJ made to him to cancel or postpone the hearing he planned for next week.
“This inquiry is not some academic exercise. Approximately 137 men were spirited out of this country without a hearing and placed in a high-security prison in El Salvador, where many suffered abuse and possible torture, despite this Court’s order that they should not be disembarked,” Boasberg wrote. “The question the Court must now answer is whether this occurred via contumacious conduct by Government officials.”
EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin, right, speaks early in 2025 with U.S. Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. by his side.
New York Times, MAHA Moms Are Angry at the E.P.A. Lee Zeldin Is Trying to Win Them Back, Dec. 13, 2025. A split is emerging within Trump’s base as health activists accuse Mr. Zeldin of leading the agency to prioritize chemical industry interests over public health.
Lee Zeldin, the administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency, flashed a smile as he addressed a webcast hosted by the Make America Healthy Again movement.
“We want to make sure,” Mr. Zeldin said, “that your members have a seat at the table, and that we’re able to directly engage and communicate.”
It was in many ways a hostile audience. Just last week, several prominent MAHA activists circulated a petition urging President Trump to fire Mr. Zeldin, saying that he was prioritizing the interests of chemical manufacturers over the well-being of American children.
They point to the agency’s efforts to loosen restrictions on harmful chemicals, and to approve new pesticides, including two that contain what are internationally recognized as “forever chemicals” linked to serious health risks. And they say the E.P.A. is breaking Mr. Trump’s promises to make America healthy again.
“I’m horrified by what’s happening at the E.P.A. right now,” said Courtney Swan, a MAHA activist and nutritionist, and a petition organizer. “The agency’s gone in the completely wrong direction. It’s completely anti-MAHA.”
In recent days, Mr. Zeldin, a seasoned politician, has gone on a charm offensive.
On Monday, he made a surprise appearance at a MAHA holiday reception. There, he invited activists to visit him at E.P.A. headquarters the following day. There, he introduced them to senior department heads and promised that the agency would adopt a “MAHA agenda.”
In a statement, Brigit Hirsch, the E.P.A. press secretary, said Mr. Zeldin had been “engaging with the broader community and those open lines of communication have never ceased.”
She added, “We greatly value these relationships, and are committed to total transparency and continued MAHA engagement as we implement the president’s agenda.”
Under Mr. Trump, the E.P.A. has also been working to loosen limits on pollution from smokestacks, tailpipes and producers of oil and gas. But the MAHA activists are focused on pesticides and chemicals, worried about potential links to rising cancer rates, as well as infertility. It’s a concern shared by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
The tension between the MAHA activists and the E.P.A. threatens to create a rift within Mr. Trump’s base. Some of the movement’s leaders say they will work to make children’s exposure to pesticides and other toxic chemicals an issue in next year’s midterm elections.
“Listen, I’m a die-hard conservative,” said Alex Clark, who hosts a health and wellness podcast for young conservative women on Turning Point USA, the late Charlie Kirk’s media network. “I voted for Trump every single time. I want the Republicans to win the midterm. One reason we won’t is if the E.P.A. continues to mess it up for moms.”
Ms. Clark and other activists are particularly upset by the E.P.A.’s appointment of several former chemical industry executives and lobbyists to senior roles overseeing pesticides and toxic chemicals.
Nancy Beck, a former senior director at the American Chemistry Council, which represents chemical manufacturers, is running the office that oversees chemical safety. Her deputy, Lynn Dekleva, is also a former senior director at the same organization. Kyle Kunkler, the top lobbyist for the soybean industry, now oversees pesticides at the E.P.A.
MAHA activists see evidence of corporate influence. For example, an action plan released by Mr. Kennedy’s Make America Healthy Again Commission excluded ways to reduce exposure to pesticides. That was after an earlier report singled out as harmful two widely used pesticides, glyphosate and atrazine, that have been linked to adverse health outcomes, especially in children.
Politico, Indiana GOP’s Trump rebuke could lead to temporary redistricting detente, Brakkton Booker, Dec. 12, 2025. It doesn’t mean the redistricting wars are over.Annette Groos holds a sign reading "Protect the vote" at a rally at the Indianapolis Statehouse.
Indiana Republicans’ redistricting rejection marks a rare ceasefire in the gerrymandering wars — and could lead to other state leaders backing off their own plans.
The result gives cover for some Democratic-leaning states to stand down, even as the party’s base is frenzied over the issue. Lawmakers in Illinois and Maryland have for months had internal debates about whether to move forward with redrawing their maps. Indiana’s outcome relieved some of the mounting pressure they anticipated facing had Republicans in Indiana further gerrymandered their maps.
Illinois Democrats have long said they would only gerrymander if the Indiana GOP bowed to Trump’s demands and redid their own map. In the wake of Hoosier Republicans’ move Thursday, their Democratic neighbors don’t seem eager to change their minds.
Meanwhile in Maryland, one Democratic leader is rebuffing entreaties from top Democrats to eliminate the state’s lone remaining GOP seat.
Maryland Democratic Senate President Bill Ferguson has exchanged phone calls with Indiana Senate Republican leader Rodric Bray, four people familiar with the two leaders, granted anonymity because they weren’t authorized to speak publicly, told POLITICO. Each resisted pressure from top officials in their party to move on redistricting. Bray’s success could now lessen the pressure on Ferguson. Bray’s spokesperson, Molly Swigart, said no deal was ever made between Bray and Ferguson on redistricting in their respective states.
Officials in Virginia, where Democrats gained 13 seats in their House of Delegates in November’s statewide elections, are poised to make drastic changes to their congressional maps that could net the party upwards of four seats. But Democratic Gov.-elect Abigail Spanberger sounded reluctant to the idea of making wholesale changes to congressional lines at a POLITICO event earlier this week.
There are headwinds elsewhere for Trump and his allies. In Kansas and Kentucky Republicans have so far failed to move forward with their redistricting pushes that are complicated by opposition from Democratic governors. Ohio Republicans struck a compromise with Democrats for a less aggressive gerrymander than what some national leaders wanted. And a judge picked a map in Utah that drew a safe Democratic seat; and Republicans are facing a potential setback for Missouri.
That doesn’t mean the redistricting wars are over. Lawmakers in a number of other states are still weighing their own maps, with GOP-led Florida and Democratic-controlled Virginia remaining the biggest question marks on the board. Republicans are still eyeing Kentucky and Nebraska as well.
The Atlantic, It’s one thing for Republicans to deny hypothetical care. It’s another to take this tangible benefit away, Jonathan Chait, Dec. 12, 2026. Here are some data points that Republicans ought to bear in mind as they contemplate their health-care strategy.
Donald Trump is unpopular for many reasons, not least of which is the public perception that he has failed to bring down costs, as promised. Next month, more than 20 million Americans may see their health-insurance premiums spike, some by double or more, when expanded Affordable Care Act subsidies expire. Also, American support for the 2010 health-care law, otherwise known as Obamacare, has reached a new high of 57 percent, according to a recent Gallup poll.
Despite these facts, Republicans just voted to let ACA subsidies expire. How is the public likely to respond to this between now and the 2026 midterm elections? Probably not by warming up to Republicans.
Fifteen years after its passage, the ACA is a gigantic political pain point for the GOP. You would think Republicans would have made their peace with the law by now and turned their attention to other issues. But unlike pretty much every other conservative party in the industrialized world, where the legitimacy of universal health coverage is largely a given, the GOP seems resigned to bleed out on health care.
A largely unspoken article of faith for Republicans is that access to medical care is a matter of personal responsibility. They don’t generally advertise this belief, because it is not popular—a growing share of Americans believe that it is the government’s duty to ensure all citizens have health-care coverage, according to Gallup. So the party’s strategy instead was to fight proposals to expand coverage. Until the ACA, this proved effective.
Read: ‘We are looking at a massive crisis’
The United States has two features that have made enacting universal health insurance especially difficult. One is its legislative system, which, unlike parliamentary forms of government, requires multiple concurrent majorities, including a Senate that gives conservatives disproportionate representation.
The second is the nature of America’s employer-based insurance, which sprang up during World War II and gave working-age Americans a stake in a privatized status quo. The fear that health-care reform might compromise this insurance complicated the politics, and ensured that Congress cared more about preserving insurance for those who had it (particularly as they tended to be educated and engaged voters) than extending benefits to those who didn’t.Recommended Reading
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The ACA broke through decades of gridlock by keeping the employer-based system intact and building up coverage options for people who couldn’t access it. Low-income workers, whose jobs mostly didn’t provide health care, would get Medicaid. People with higher incomes who didn’t have access to employer coverage would get subsidized coverage on individual exchanges, which would have to sell plans to customers regardless of health status.
Passing the law proved challenging. Republicans made all sorts of terrifying claims about its effects: The exchanges would collapse; health-care costs would skyrocket; insurers would employ “death panels” to decide which patients were worthy of care. None of those things happened. The death panels were imaginary, the health-care-cost curve bent downward, and the exchanges drew millions of willing customers and worked just fine.
Republicans never reckoned with the failure of their doomsaying prognostications to come true. Nor have they fully assimilated how the politics of health insurance have changed since the law’s passage. It was easy enough for Republicans to block health-care reform when a program to expand coverage didn’t exist. Taking insurance away from people who have it, or jacking up the price they pay to get it, is a completely different matter.
Some Republicans recognize that their impulses are unpopular, but they are not interested in accommodating public opinion. House Speaker Mike Johnson, who appears to represent the majority of Republicans on the issue, has called the ACA marketplace “a broken system,” as if the predictions of its collapse had come true, and treats its beneficiaries—who are now at a record high of 24 million people, or 7 percent of the U.S. population—as if their numbers are slight enough to be ignored.
“You’re going to see a package come together that will be on the floor next week,” he told reporters Wednesday, “that will actually reduce premiums for 100 percent of Americans who are on health insurance, not just the 7 percent.” Before the Affordable Care Act, the needs of uninsured people could be brushed aside. Johnson’s dismissive reference to “the 7 percent” seems nostalgic for that political world.
Trump has generally attempted to bluff his way through the problem. In his first term, he repeatedly promised to “repeal and replace” the ACA with a terrific system that would give everybody much better insurance for less money. This worked as a campaign promise but has proved impossible as policy.
In his second term, Trump’s approach to wishing away the trade-off between paying less and getting better care has been to claim that he can bypass the insurance market completely by giving people money directly, thereby allowing them to get more for less. “I want to give the people better health insurance for less money,” Trump told Politico’s Dasha Burns on Monday. “The people will get the money and they’re going to buy the health insurance that they want.”
Annie Lowrey: How are we still fighting about Obamacare?
Trump’s plan seems to invoke the hazy concept that people can buy their own medical services like items at a grocery store. That does not work with medical care, because people rely on doctors for advice on what services they need, and because medical costs frequently spike far beyond what anybody can reasonably afford, which is why almost everybody pays for it through insurance.
The president inadvertently confirmed this when he attempted to describe his concept to reporters on Tuesday. “I love the idea of money going directly to the people, not to the insurance companies, going directly to the people. It can be in the health savings account; it can be a number of different ways,” he said. “And the people go out and buy their own insurance, which can be really much better health insurance, health care.”
So Trump’s “plan” is to stop giving money to people to buy insurance, because that enriches insurance companies, and instead give it to people to go buy … insurance. This sort of nonsense talk may work well enough when Trump wants to just get through interviews without admitting a problem. But it isn’t a workable solution to soaring insurance-premium fees come January.
Perhaps the GOP will one day recognize that its aversion to widening access to health-care coverage is just too politically costly, too untenable, to so stubbornly maintain. Until then, Republicans act like they are operating in a world where the ACA hasn’t already given millions of Americans this essential benefit, and where these same Americans won’t be bothered when this benefit is taken away.iphone playing audio of Trump World Order
U.S. Media, High-Tech, Culture
Robert Reich, Political Opinion: What Happens When a Bonkers President Takes Over the Private Sector, Robert Reich, 
right, Dec. 12-13, 2025. We need independent regulatory agencies to contain him.
What’s really at stake in the fight between Netflix and Paramount for Warner Bros Discovery?
Let me make it clear I’m against Netflix acquiring Warner Bros Discovery. That would concentrate corporate power in ways that harm consumers and distort American politics.
But Paramount’s acquisition of Warner Bros would be just as bad, if not worse.
What’s at stake in all of this is Trump’s — or any president’s — power over the private sector of the American economy.
The back story here is that Warner Bros Discovery owns CNN, and Trump loathes CNN. He frequently complains that its coverage of him has been too negative. He’s termed those running CNN “corrupt and incompetent” and has told top aides he wants new ownership of CNN, along with changes in CNN programming and personnel.
Last week, Trump declared he would involve himself in any proposed sale of Warner Bros, and on Wednesday he said it was “imperative” that the transaction result in the sale of CNN and replacement of its leadership.
Another part of the back story involves Larry Ellison — one of the richest people in America and the largest individual shareholder of Paramount, whose son runs it, and whose operation on Monday launched an unfriendly tender offer for Warner Bros Discovery, to counter Netflix’s friendly offer.
Ellison is an ally of Trump. He has assured Trump and his top aides that if Paramount gains control of Warner Bros and CNN, it will get rid of CNN personnel whom Trump apparently detests, including Erin Burnett and Brianna Keilar. (Paramount already owns CBS.)
Paramount is portraying itself as the best bid for Warner Bros Discovery because it will have an easier time “getting regulatory approval” of the deal than will Netflix — even though Paramount is relying on financial backing from three Middle East sovereign-wealth funds (along with Jared Kushner).
Who in their right mind would give Middle East wealth funds any leverage over CBS and CNN? Answer: Trump, whose family business is already deeply dependent on financing from the Middle East.
Trump trusts the Ellisons because they pushed Paramount to settle Trump’s frivolous $16 million lawsuit against CBS and cancel Stephen Colbert — much to Trump’s delight.
Trump loyalist flak Brendan Carr, the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, then promptly approved the $8 billion merger of Paramount with Skydance Media.
Trump’s alliance with Larry Ellison goes back to 2020, when Ellison hosted a fundraiser for Trump at his home. According to court records, after the 2020 election, Ellison participated in a phone call to discuss how Trump’s defeat could be contested. In June 2025, he and his firm, Oracle, were co-sponsors of Trump’s military parade in Washington.
Now in charge of Paramount and its CBS division, Larry’s son, David Ellison, has gutted DEI policies at CBS, put right-wing hack Kenneth R. Weinstein into a new “ombudsman” role there, and made anti-“woke” opinion journalist Bari Weiss editor-in-chief of CBS News, despite her lack of experience in either broadcasting or newsrooms.
The FCC’s Carr has already effectively blessed the Paramount deal. What other “regulatory approval” might be needed? Theoretically, the Federal Trade Commission could object on antitrust grounds. But, as Trump did at the FCC, he planted loyalists at the FTC to do his bidding. (Pam Bondi has asserted that she and the Justice Department’s antitrust division will oversee the merger.)
This past week, the Supreme Court heard arguments about whether Trump had a right to fire an FTC commissioner (the FTC, like the FCC, is supposed to be an “independent” regulatory agency).
Chief Justice John Roberts — who believes that the framers of the Constitution intended a “unitary” executive rather than one whose authority might be shared with independent regulatory agencies established by Congress — suggested during the oral argument that Trump’s removal power should be the norm.
But if Trump’s maneuvers over Warner Bros Discovery has any lessons for the future, the independence of regulatory agencies may be more important than ever before. Otherwise, a wannabe tyrant sitting in the Oval Office can interfere in any business transaction he wishes, to enlarge his own power and stifle criticism.
MeidasTouch Network, Commentary: Did You See What Fox Just Did to My Brother? Ben Meiselas, Dec. 13, 2025. Fox did an entire segment attacking Jordy for what he said on the latest MeidasTouch Podcast episode, where he called out the White House for lying about Trump’s health.
Jordy said that it was ridiculous and insulting for the White House to claim the discoloration on the back of Trump’s hand and the constant bandages on that discolored hand are caused by “shaking a lot of hands.” Jordy said that things like this shouldn’t be a Democrat or Republican issue — it should just be about facts versus lies.
Well, Fox had major problems with what Jordy said. Fox devoted an entire panel to attacking him. First, the Fox panel claimed that it was Jordy who was lying. Fox said that everybody knows that shaking hands leads to discoloration and the need for bandages on a person’s hand. Next, Fox lied about what Jordy said and claimed Jordy said Trump had a “zombie disease” on his hand. Jordy never said that. Third, Fox brought up Joe Biden as a way to deflect. Fourth, they called Jordy by the name Jordan, which pisses me off.
MeidasTouch Editor-in-Chief Ron Filipkowski just wrote, “Wait, wait, wait. Fox is SERIOUSLY, ACTUALLY trying to get their audience of lemmings to believe that the heavy makeup & band-aids on Trump’s hand for months are from shaking hands?!? They are attacking Meidas for disputing that? They have nothing but contempt for their viewers.”
As you all know, MeidasTouch is living rent-free inside the headquarters of Fox and inside the heads of Rupert and Lachlan Murdoch. They’ve consistently attacked our hosts and have even called for the DOJ to look into them for reporting on ICE raids. They’ve tried to have us shut down. They are pouring in billions of dollars into their digital newsroom to try and take us down — and we still beat them each day.
It’s good to know Fox is feeling the heat as MeidasTouch has become the most-watched news network on digital in the United States.
New York Times, Woody Allen Is Not Sorry About His Friendship With Jeffrey Epstein, Ginia Bellafante, Dec. 13, 2025. The nonagenarian director is taking a slightly different tack than many of the other powerful people associated with the disgraced former financier.
Over the course of the past three months, Woody Allen published his first novel, “What’s With Baum?”; turned 90; mourned the death of his friend and former muse, Diane Keaton; and participated in a rare series of interviews, among them an exchange in which he described Jeffrey 
Epstein as “charming and personable.”
For several years, the filmmaker and his wife Soon-Yi Previn were regular guests at the Epstein townhouse on the Upper East Side, not far from their own. “Always accept. Always interesting,” he said of these dinners in a letter to his host, on the occasion of Mr. Epstein’s 63rd birthday.
For a while it seemed as if Mr. Allen had emerged from a long period of tempered cancellation, one that began in the 1990s when his former partner, Mia Farrow, accused him of sexually abusing their daughter, Dylan — allegations Mr. Allen has always denied and for which no criminal charges were ever filed.
But to the extent that collective memory of the scandal had faded, the Epstein connection revives and deepens questions about the sexual morality and social judgment of a man who married his girlfriend’s adopted daughter and can count in his prolific, creative output a romantic comedy about a middle-aged writer’s involvement with a 17-year-old girl (to say nothing of his screenplay for “Annie Hall,’’ in which the Tony Roberts character jokes about having sex with 16-year old twins.)
On Friday, Democrats on the House Oversight Committee released a trove of photographs from the Epstein estate, images of him with famous and influential men, Mr. Allen included. In the pictures, the two are seen enjoying each other’s company in settings more intimate than a house party. In one picture, they sit across a table from each other, seemingly lingering after a long meal. There are coffee cups and water glasses between them and the only other person around is an unidentified woman. Mr. Epstein, who is not often photographed wearing glasses, here has on black frames similar to the style Mr. Allen has worn for years.
(Reached for comment about these newly distributed pictures, a representative for Mr. Allen did not respond.)
In another instance, Mr. Allen, seated in a director’s chair with headphones around his neck, looks up at Mr. Epstein who is gazing into his monitor, presumably visiting him on a film set. Still another picture has the filmmaker seated in a private plane next to Larry Summers, the former Harvard president, who was recently revealed to have mined Mr. Epstein for dating advice, in a run of poorly punctuated correspondence, as he pursued a protégé.
After those texts and emails were made public, Mr. Summers expressed shame around his continued communication with Mr. Epstein, which he called “misguided.” But when asked by a reporter for the British newspaper The Sunday Times, in September, about his relationship with the man who officials say killed himself in a federal detention center as he faced sex trafficking charges, Mr. Allen made no similar gesture toward embarrassment or contrition, calling him, instead “a substantial character.” The dinners were full of “illustrious people, college professors, scientists, Nobel laureates — accomplished people who were fun to listen to,” in Mr. Allen's view.
“He told us he’d been in jail and that he had been — I can’t remember the word — but that he’d been falsely put in jail in some way,” Mr. Allen said, suggesting a gullibility not often associated with Manhattan’s sophisticate class or, alternately, a sympathy for someone he thought might be a fellow traveler in the world of the wrongfully accused.
“Extorted?” the reporter asked. “Right, extorted,” Mr. Allen said. “He told us he was trying to make up for it now by being philanthropic and giving money to cutting-edge scientists and universities. He couldn’t have been nicer.”
The images suggest that the two men, both children of postwar working-class Brooklyn, were better acquainted than previously believed. They also indicate just how taken the culturally privileged can be with the financially extravagant, felony sentencing be damned. By his own account, Mr. Allen began going to the Epstein house in 2010, two years after Mr. Epstein had been sentenced for soliciting sex from teenage girls. What appeared to override any concerns that might have existed about these transgressions was the company, even when the company did not include the faculty of MIT, but rather people like the magician David Blaine, who once showed up “swallowing live goldfish and then regurgitating them.”
Transactional relationships take many forms and a way to regard this one perhaps demands the lens of content. Over his long career, Mr. Allen has made two films — “Crimes and Misdemeanors” in 1989 and “Match Point,” 16 years later — about deceitful men who murder women and get away with it. The evasion of consequence has been an enduring source of fascination. In the end, perhaps Mr. Epstein provided Mr. Allen with something even more valuable than cachet: potential material.
Dec. 12
New York Times, Indiana Lawmakers Reject Trump’s New Political Map, Mitch Smith, Dec. 12, 2025 (print ed.). Republicans hold an overwhelming majority in the Indiana Senate, but more than a dozen of them defied the president’s wishes, voting against a map aimed at adding Republicans in Congress.
Republican members of the Indiana Senate bucked President Trump on Thursday and joined Democrats in voting down a new congressional map that would have positioned Republicans to sweep the state’s U.S. House seats.
The 19 to 31 vote was a highly public defeat for Mr. Trump, who has spent significant political capital pushing for redrawn maps in Republican-led states and who repeatedly threatened political consequences for Indiana Republicans who did not fall in line. The defiance of Mr. Trump comes as he faces other signs of rifts within his own party.
Speaking to reporters in the Oval Office after the vote, Mr. Trump downplayed the result in Indiana, saying that “we won every other state.” He also said that he hoped the president pro tem of the Indiana Senate, who voted against the map, loses his next primary.
The rejection of the map in the State Senate, where Republicans hold 40 of the 50 seats, followed months of presidential lobbying that turned increasingly pointed in recent weeks as it became clear that some holdouts were not budging. Mr. Trump had called some of them out by name on social media, openly questioning their loyalty to the party and pledging to back primary challengers against them.
As the debate turned more tense, several Republicans, both for and against the new map, reported threats or swatting. Long-simmering ideological and stylistic divides among Republicans in Indiana spilled into the open, with many long-serving or institutionalist figures who opposed the map clashing with Trump-aligned conservatives who favored the plan. Republicans would have been expected to flip the only two Democratic-held congressional seats among the state’s nine districts if the new map had passed.
In the end, a slim majority of the Senate’s Republican caucus voted against the map.
That Indiana lawmakers voted at all showed the enduring power that Mr. Trump holds over his party. Many in the State Senate did not want to debate the map, which was proposed outside the usual once-a-decade redistricting cycle, and the chamber’s leadership relented and brought the bill to the floor only after the president and his allies stepped up their pressure campaign. The map’s defeat, though, showed the limits of Mr. Trump’s power to bend Republican officials to his will.
“I believe the bill on its face is unconstitutional,” said State Senator Greg Walker, a Republican who opposes redistricting and who recently reported a swatting incident at his home, a form of harassment in which law enforcement was called to respond to a nonexistent emergency.
Among the images President Trump released in the days before the 2025 Thanksgiving holiday portraying himself as a America's supreme ruler was the above via his Truth Social Network, portraying himself as King, with three Senate Democrats, Sens. Charles Schumer, left, Elizabeth Warren and Adam Schiff, kneeling at his feet, , seemingly awaiting the punishment he has long threatened against them.
Paul Krugman via Substack, Political-Economy Commentary: Donald Trump, Security Threat, Paul Krugman, right, Dec. 12, 2025. The call is coming from inside the White House.
According to Donald Trump, anything he doesn’t like is a threat to national security. Question his clearly illegal tariffs? You’re a dark and sinister force trying to undermine America. When the New York Times reported on signs that age may be taking a toll on Trump’s stamina, he denounced the reporting as “seditious, maybe even treasonous.”
But some of America’s allies — and many of us here at home — are becoming increasingly open about saying that the real danger is coming from inside the White House: Trump himself has become the biggest security threat facing the U.S. and, indeed, all the world’s democracies.
On Wednesday a new report from Denmark’s military intelligence service contained the most explicit statement of the growing alarm. It pointed out that, under Donald Trump, America is no longer acting like a friendly partner:
The United States uses economic power, including threats of high tariffs, to enforce its will, and no longer rules out the use of military force, even against allies.
Without a doubt, Denmark’s concerns have been heightened by Trump’s repeated assertions that he wants to “get” Greenland, which is a Danish territory. In August the Danish government summoned the head of the U.S. embassy to protest about “covert influence operations” in Greenland undertaken by Americans with ties to Trump.
However, Denmark is certainly not alone in raising concerns and acting on them. Several of America’s closest traditional allies, including Canada and the UK, have reportedly acted to limit intelligence-sharing with the U.S. One cited concern is the risk of being complicit in unlawful acts or war crimes arising from the deadly strikes on boats in the Caribbean.
Sotto voce, it’s also clear that the Canadians and the Europeans are alarmed by the presence of Putin sympathizers and conspiracy theorists like Tulsi Gabbard, the Director of National Intelligence, in sensitive positions within the Trump administration. After hearing the leaked tape of Steve Witkoff’s fawning and borderline treasonous conversation with Yuri Ushakov, Putin’s foreign policy adviser – in which Witkoff coached him on how to manipulate Trump -- who would want to share sensitive information with this American president?
More broadly, in a world of growing geopolitical conflict, it has become increasingly clear whose side the Trump administration is on — the side of Trump’s personal interests, grudges and biases. Trump’s new National Security Strategy, released last week, made this dynamic clear. There was no condemnation of Russian aggression against Ukraine and hardly any mention of the US rivalry with China. Yet it lambasted Europe and openly supported right-wing extremist parties that are trying to undermine European democracy.
Trump’s proposed “peace plan” for Ukraine not only reads like a Russian wish list, but it also uses some odd phrasing and syntax suggesting that it was translated from a Russian original. Moreover, the Wall Street Journal reports that the plan includes a number of undisclosed appendices that would unlock frozen Russian assets and bring Russia’s economy “in from the cold,” effectively ending the sanctions Putin has faced since he invaded Ukraine.
As odious as Witkoff’s actions were, they revealed the truth of the matter: Trump’s foreign policy is not about securing the safety and well-being of the United States. It’s about playing to Trump’s ego, about appealing to his incessant psychodrama of domination and sycophancy. Anyone who believes otherwise is living in La-La-Land.
This betrayal of America’s security interests extends to Trump’s international economic policy and his clear misuse of tariff laws. Under Section 232 of the Trade Expansion Act of 1962, a president is given considerable discretion to impose tariffs to protect industries deemed crucial to national security. And national security tariffs are legal under international law.
The Trump administration has, however, made a mockery of Section 232, using it to justify tariffs on many goods that have no conceivable relationship to national security. In October, for example, Trump imposed Section 232 tariffs on upholstered furniture and kitchen cabinets. In Trump’s mind America would be put at great risk if it were dependent on foreign suppliers of new sofas in the midst of an international conflict.
Even as he imposes 50 percent tariffs to limit the menace of Chinese kitchen cabinets, Trump has decided to allow China to buy the advanced Nvidia semiconductor chips that power many AI models. Bear in mind that the U.S. lead in cutting-edge technology is one of our few advantages in geopolitical competition with China, and this gift to the Chinese has been strongly criticized by every genuine national security expert that I know. (Our other big advantage used to be that we had so many strong allies, but Trump has ended that.)
Yet Trump is now, for a modest fee, letting the Chinese have access to our most advanced semiconductors. As the Wall Street Journal — not exactly a left-wing rag — put it,
The Indians struck a better deal when they sold Manhattan to the Dutch. Why would the President give away one of America’s chief technological advantages to an adversary and its chief economic competitor?
But the answer is simple: Trump doesn’t care at all about national security, or for that matter America’s national interests. Instead, it’s all about him: reportedly Trump took the decision to allow the Chinese to have the advanced Nvidia chips after personal lobbying by Jensen Huang, the CEO of Nvidia. Clearly Chinese exporters of furniture and kitchen cabinetry need to get coached by Steve Witkoff.
Just to be clear, I am not a free trade purist. I am not saying national security should be ignored or underplayed when setting economic policy. On the contrary, in a world in which China is arguably the world’s leading superpower, in which Putin feels free to launch a war of conquest on Europe’s doorstep, national security considerations are critically important. In fact, it’s arguable that the twin threats from China and Russia have rendered the US far more vulnerable than at any other period in our lifetimes.
Yet the biggest threats to U.S. national security aren’t coming from Beijing or Moscow. They’re coming straight out of the Oval Office.
Musical Coda: Johnny Cash with "Ragged Old Flag" (Official Audio)
The Contrarian, Opinion: Undaunted Investigators of ‘Extrajudicial Killings,’ Jennifer Rubin, right, Dec. 12, 2025. Representatives Jim Himes and Adam Smith shine.
The U.S. military’s murder without legal justification of two shipwrecked people clinging to part of their destroyed boat in the Caribbean on September 2 should outrage Americans. The double-strike has shaken the U.S. military (present and former), the public, and lawmakers on both sides of the aisle. It has also focused attention on Donald Trump’s apparent scheme to use an illegal, unauthorized, and reckless military operation to gin up a full-scale regime change war against Venezuela. (On Wednesday, Trump further escalated tensions with Venezuela by seizing an oil tanker.)
Two Democratic congressmen have distinguished themselves in their dogged search for a full accounting of the incident, including disclosure of the complete videotape of the Sept. 2 strike. Proof of their effectiveness: Chairman of the House Armed Services Committee Rep. Mike D. Rogers (R-Ala.) told reporters he wants to end the whole oversight effort.
An early critic of Trump’s extrajudicial killing scheme, Rep. Jim Himes (D-Conn.), right, ranking member on the Intelligence Committee, in frequent statements and interviews, has illuminated key details about the strike and given voice to the legitimate fear that Trump is dragging us into a war.
Well before the Sept. 2 double-strike atrocity came to light, Himes warned about indiscriminate use of military power in lieu of ordinary drug interdiction. He told The Bulwark’s Bill Kristol in late September: “Having the Defense Department kill alleged drug runners in the Caribbean is illegal...These folks are committing murder — murder defined as killing without a legal basis. I am mystified over why the rest of the chain of command is quite comfortable with it.”
Later, on Oct. 30 on MSNBC, he challenged Republicans: “If Lindsey Graham and other Republicans want to go the route of saying, ‘It’s OK to kill people illegally, just so long as the American public supports it,’ the American public needs to really think that through. There will be a Democratic president someday.”Subscribed
Himes then scolded Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth: “[The strikes] have not been authorized by the Congress, and even if because you’re Pete Hegseth and you get really jazzed up on the testosterone rush that comes from blowing up a boat with a couple of guys on it, that is not the way you’re going to interdict drugs.” He clarified that the rationale for the attack, fentanyl smuggling, is bogus since that drug comes from Mexico. “There is cocaine coming out of Colombia, not so much Venezuela, so what we see there is massive numbers of military assets deployed for purely performative reasons,” he explained.
Since we learned about the Sept. 2 double-strike, Himes has kept up a constant drumbeat on both old and new media. He reiterated in numerous appearances that killing shipwrecked persons who pose no threat is illegal. He put it bluntly after viewing the video: “What I saw in that room is one of the most troubling scenes I’ve ever seen in my time in public service. You have two individuals in clear distress without any means of locomotion with a destroyed vessel who were killed by the United States.” (He wisely avoided getting bogged down in the debate over whether it should be identified as a murder or a war crime.)
Like Himes, Rep. Adam Smith (D-Wash.), above, ranking member on the House Armed Services Committee, has been on top of the issue for months. On Sept. 16, he released a statement with Himes and other ranking chairmen of relevant committees on the next lethal strike:
As was the case with the first strike on September 2, 2025, the Trump Administration failed to secure authorization for the use of force from Congress. Yet again, the president has made the unilateral decision to carry out a lethal military strike on the premise that a small boat holding three people located off the coast of Venezuela somehow posed an emergency created by an attack upon the United States and warranted lethal military force rather than a law enforcement response. While we agree that the flow of drugs into the United States is a horrific public health crisis that must be addressed, we believe that essential mission should be led by law enforcement.
Smith, Himes and the other ranking chairmen warned that “expansion and abuse of presidential risk dragging us into another endless war,” deplored the regime’s lack of transparency, and demanded congressional briefings. They’ve also restated the constitutional principle that Congress “has the constitutional responsibility to declare war and authorize or limit the use of force, poses an even greater threat to our democratic system of government.”
Again on October 7, Smith, Himes, and other ranking chairmen issued a statement demanding Trump release “the list of designated terrorist organizations (DTOs) he has unilaterally declared as such and provide evidence for his justifications used in several recent lethal U.S. military strikes in the Caribbean Sea.”
Since the Sept. 2 revelation, like his fellow congressman, Smith has appeared on old and new media platforms to highlight the Sept. 2 strikes’ illegality and the larger policy outrage. In an interview with The Contrarian, he reviewed the briefings he had received and dissected the specious reasoning and out-and-out lies Republicans put forward to justify Trump’s recklessness.
In every outing, Smith has stressed that releasing that video is critical. When Trump made an about-face and refused to release it, Smith pounced, arguing this proved his point that Republicans have been lying about it. He no doubt correctly surmised that Trump is scared it will make the regime “look bad.”
Himes and Smith have given a multi-part masterclass in defending democratic principles and skewering dishonest MAGA Republicans:
Himes and Smith’s undaunted and uncompromising campaign to stop Trump’s endless quest for dictatorial power and prevent a full-scale war has earned our respect and deserves our praise. They have proven that, even in the minority, Democrats can move public opinion, put the screws on Trump’s regime, reveal MAGA lawmakers’ dishonesty, and defend the rule of law. Armed Service Chairman Rogers can try to shut this down, but thanks to the likes of Smith and Himes, the public, press, Democratic House and Senate members, and even some Republican lawmakers will continue pressing for answers.
Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: Trump’s Hand-Picked RNC Chair Predicts Doom, Andrew Egger and Jim Swift, Dec. 12, 2025. This is not your usual party committee script.
Another day, another discharge petition short-circuiting the power of House Speaker Mike Johnson, right. Yesterday, the House passed a bill overturning a Trump executive order stripping union protections from some federal workers, a bill that began as a petition circulated by Rep. Jared Golden (D-Maine).
It came as some surprise to everyone that Johnson, thrust unexpectedly into the speaker’s job in 2023 at a moment of maximum intra-conference chaos, managed to keep things ticking along as smoothly as he did for a while.
Now, however, he seems to be landing pretty much where many people expected him to be from the jump: a weak speaker whose fractious conference increasingly ignores his playbook to do what they want. Happy Friday.
New York Times, Republicans Undercut Johnson, Circumventing Him to Force Votes, Michael Gold, Dec. 12, 2025 (print ed.). The speaker has repeatedly lost his grip on the House floor thanks to a once rare parliamentary maneuver that G.O.P. members are increasingly using to force action on legislation.
In the House of Representatives, the speaker controls everything, from office space to what legislation can get a vote on the House floor. Butlately, time and again, Speaker Mike Johnson appears to have lost his grip.
It happened on Thursday, when Mr. Johnson was forced to stand by, powerless to stop a group of breakaway Republicans from teaming up with Democrats to pass what amounted to a rebuke of President Trump, delivered by a legislative body run by his own party.
In a 231-to-195 vote, the House approved a bill by Representative Jared Golden of Maine, a conservative Democrat, that would overturn a Trump executive order that stripped union protections from scores of federal workers.
The measure faces long odds in the Senate. But its success in the House was the latest indication that Mr. Johnson’s hold on his razor-thin majority has become increasingly slippery, as rank-and-file Republicans flout his wishes.
They are doing so not just by refusing to vote for the party position on important bills, but also, increasingly, by using a once-rare parliamentary maneuver to steer around the speaker and commandeer the House floor to bring up legislation that he does not want considered at all. The tactic has undercut Mr. Johnson’s leadership and diminished his power over the chamber’s agenda at a time when some rank-and-file Republicans are questioning his approach and complaining that he is disregarding the will of his members.
That has led more and more Republicans to resort to what is known as a discharge petition, a procedural tool that allows lawmakers to bypass House leaders and force legislation to the floor if a majority of the chamber’s members — 218 of them — sign on.
Mr. Golden used one on Thursday to get his labor bill to the floor, where 20 Republicans joined Democrats in supporting it, and more are pending on other issues that Mr. Johnson has yet to address.
Discharge petitions were once rare and had little chance of success, especially since signing one is one of Congress’s more publicly visible acts. When members launch such an effort, they place physical copies of the petition on the House clerk’s desk at the front of the chamber. Even as Congress has become increasingly digitized, lawmakers must sign their names in person, and their signatures are reported online.
Historically, members of the majority hesitated to embarrass their party’s leaders, and lawmakers feared retaliation for publicly supporting efforts to subvert the speaker. The petitions were viewed more as public statements of discontent than viable legislative vehicles.
But Thursday was the third time this year that Republican leaders, who with a slim majority can afford only a few defections, have been forced to contend with runaway discharge petitions that they could not stop. When they succeed, they can be particularly painful for leaders of the majority, teeing up politically tricky votes on matters that divide the party.
“I am not a fan of discharge petitions,” Mr. Johnson told reporters this week. “It is typically used as a tool against the majority.”
The highest-profile example was the bipartisan push that forced a vote that Mr. Johnson had toiled for months to avoid on legislation to compel the Justice Department to release its investigative files on the convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. It sailed through the House and Senate and quickly became law.
Letters from an American, Historical Commentary: December 11, 2025 [Trump Tour On Consumer Costs], Heather Cox Richardson, right, Dec. 12, 2025. On Tuesday, President Donald J. Trump kicked off his nationwide tour to assure Americans that the Republicans are focused on bringing down costs.
Voters turned to Trump in 2024 in large part because he promised that his understanding of the economy would enable him to bring down the prices that had risen in the global inflation spike after the Covid-19 pandemic shut down the world economy.
Within weeks of the election, Trump began to back off on that promise, telling a reporter for Time magazine in December 2024 that “it’s very hard” to bring down prices. Then in April he launched a tariff war that began to raise prices, while his on-again, off-again tariff rates discouraged businesses from investing while they waited to see what made economic sense.
Americans are not impressed with Trump’s handling of the economy. A poll by AP/NORC, which stands for Associated Press/National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago—a very reputable polling collaboration—released today shows that only 31% of American adults approve of Trump’s management of the economy, with 67% disapproving. Among Independents, that number breaks down to 15% approving and 80% disapproving.
Trump’s overall numbers are not much better. Just 36% of American adults approve of his job performance, with 61% disapproving. Among Independents, just 20% approve, while 74% disapprove. With them, he is underwater by an astonishing 54 points.
So Trump’s advisors have sent him off on a tour to convince Americans the administration shares their concerns about the economy.
On Tuesday, in Mount Pocono, Pennsylvania, Trump addressed the question of affordability by telling the crowd, “You’re doing better than you’ve ever done.” He blamed higher prices on former president Joe Biden, confirming the observation of CNN’s Stephen Collinson that Trump’s answer for everything is to blame Biden.
Trump defended the tariffs that have raised prices by suggesting that the tariffs are protecting major items and that if people are feeling the pinch of higher prices, they “can give up certain products. You could give up pencils. That’s under the China policy, you know, every child can get 37 pencils. They only need one or two, you know, they don’t need that many. But you always need, you always need steel. You don’t need 37 dolls for your daughter. Two or three is nice. But you don’t need 37 dolls. So, we’re doing things right.”
Otherwise, Trump delivered his usual rally speech. Rambling for more than an hour and a half, he attacked immigrants and confirmed that in 2018 he did, in fact, call Haiti and African nations “sh*thole countries.” He attacked the board of the Federal Reserve and, while boasting of his administration’s strikes on small boats in the Caribbean, said: “And now we’re going to do land, because the land is much easier.” Anthony Zurcher of the BBC noted that Trump told the crowd his chief of staff, Susie Wiles, had told him to focus on the economy but boasted: “I haven’t read practically anything off the stupid teleprompter.”
After the speech, at 9:00 on Tuesday night, Trump’s social media account posted:
“There has never been a President that has worked as hard as me! My hours are the longest, and my results are among the best. I’ve stopped Eight Wars, saving many millions of lives in the process, created the Greatest Economy in the History of our Country, brought Business back into the United States at levels never seen before, rebuilt our Military, created the Largest Tax Cuts and Regulation Cuts, EVER, closed our open and very dangerous Southern Border, when previous Administrations were unable to do so, and created an ‘aura’ around the United States of America that has led every Country in the World to respect us more than ever before. In addition to all of that, I go out of my way to do long, thorough, and very boring Medical Examinations at the Great Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, seen and supervised by top doctors, all of whom have given me PERFECT Marks—Some have even said they have never seen such Strong Results. I do these Tests because I owe it to our Country. In addition to the Medical, I have done something that no other President has done, on three separate occasions, the last one being recently, by taking what is known as a Cognitive Examination, something which few people would be able to do very well, including those working at The New York Times, and I ACED all three of them in front of large numbers of doctors and experts, most of whom I do not know. I have been told that few people have been able to ‘ace’ this Examination and, in fact, most do very poorly, which is why many other Presidents have decided not to take it at all. Despite all of this, the time and work involved, The New York Times, and some others, like to pretend that I am ‘slowing up,’ am maybe not as sharp as I once was, or am in poor physical health, knowing that it is not true, and knowing that I work very hard, probably harder than I have ever worked before. I will know when I am ‘slowing up,’ but it’s not now! After all of the work I have done with Medical Exams, Cognitive Exams, and everything else, I actually believe it’s seditious, perhaps even treasonous, for The New York Times, and others, to consistently do FAKE reports in order to libel and demean ‘THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES.’ They are true Enemies of the People, and we should do something about it. They have inaccurately reported on all of my Election Results and, in fact, were forced to apologize on much of what they wrote. The best thing that could happen to this Country would be if The New York Times would cease publication because they are a horrible, biased, and untruthful ‘source’ of information. Thank you for your attention to this matter. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!”
Trump’s performance seems unlikely to reassure Americans that he is prioritizing their economic concerns.
Congressional Republicans are not helping. The Republicans’ budget reconciliation bill of July—the one they call the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act”—did not extend the premium tax credits for healthcare insurance bought on the Affordable Care Act market that subsidizes that insurance. Today, Senate Republicans voted against the Democrats’ measure to extend the premium tax credits for three years. The vote was 51–48, nine votes short of the 60 votes needed to avoid a filibuster. Only four Republican senators—Susan Collins of Maine, Josh Hawley of Missouri, and Lisa Murkowski and Dan Sullivan of Alaska—voted yes.
Senate Democrats, joined by Rand Paul (R-KY), then voted against a Republican bill that would have let the credits expire but would have given adults who earn less than 700% of the federal poverty line access to $1,000 annually to put toward healthcare costs if they are under 50, and $1,500 a year if they are between 50 and 65, if they are on lower-cost ACA plans with an annual deductible of $7,500. The money could not be used for abortion or “gender transition procedures” and would require verification of immigration and citizenship status.
In the House, Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) has rejected the idea of extending the premium tax credits but is facing a revolt from some members of his conference who recognize that the American people overwhelmingly want to see the credits extended. Representative Brian Fitzpatrick (R-PA) has launched a discharge petition to force Johnson to bring a bill to extend the credits to a vote. The measure would only pass with Democratic votes, making Johnson and other Republican leaders scramble to create their own plan. Ever since the Affordable Care Act became law fifteen years ago, a Republican alternative has remained elusive.
Jake Sherman, John Bresnahan, and Laura Weiss of Punchbowl News reported today that Johnson has said he will keep the fight over healthcare going into next year. They note that no Republican “thinks it’s a good idea for the [Republicans] to be talking about health care—their worst issue—during an election year.”
Democrats are likely to emphasize that the cost for extending the ACA premium tax credits—which benefit everyday Americans and which the Republicans did not extend in their One Big Beautiful Bill Act—would be about $350 billion over ten years. The cost for extending the 2017 tax cuts, which overwhelmingly benefit the wealthy and corporations and which they did extend, will be more than $4 trillion over the same time period.
The Punchbowl reporters note that Republican confusion over healthcare is just one more sign of trouble for Republicans in the House. “[W]e won’t say that the House is in total chaos,” they wrote this morning. “Total chaos is when members unleash censure resolutions against each other or a trio of House Republicans publicly claim Speaker Mike Johnson has no business running the chamber. That was last week.” They note that fear of Trump kept Republicans in line earlier in the year, but with Trump’s numbers falling and voters turning to Democrats, Republicans are either planning to leave the House or protecting their own political prospects.
Concerned about control of Congress after 2026, Trump and members of his administration are pressuring state legislatures to redraw their congressional districts in order to favor Republicans. In Indiana, Republican state senators have resisted their pressure, along with death threats, to pass a map that would give Republicans two districts currently dominated by Democrats, giving Republicans the entire congressional delegation.
Vice President J.D. Vance and Don Trump Jr. have jumped into the struggle, and today the lobbying arm of the right-wing Heritage Institute, Heritage Action, posted on social media that “President Trump has made it clear to Indiana leaders: if the Indiana Senate fails to pass the map, all federal funding will be stripped from the state. Roads will not be paved. Guard bases will close. Major projects will stop. These are the stakes and every NO vote will be to blame.” Indiana Lieutenant Governor Micah Beckwith confirmed that “[t]he Trump admin[istration] was VERY clear about this.”
Political observer John Collins commented: “Nothing shows confidence like threatening your own party.” Another Hoosier seemed unconcerned with the threat that Trump would illegally withhold federal funding, posting: “We know how to roll with potholes better than any other state,” with a laughing emoji.
This evening, the Indiana senate rejected the new gerrymandered congressional map by a vote of 31 to 19. The vote wasn’t close: Twenty-one Republicans—that is, a majority of the Republican senators—joined the 10 Democratic senators in voting no.
This evening, Megan Messerly and Myah Ward of Politico reported that the White House is looking to send surrogates like Vance and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent on the road instead of Trump to carry the message of affordability to the American people, leaving Trump to focus on “motivating his die-hard supporter who might not otherwise vote when he isn’t on the ballot.”
New York Times, From Chips to Security, China Is Getting Much of What It Wants From the U.S., Lily Kuo, Dec. 12, 2025. For China, President Trump’s moves to loosen chip controls, soften U.S. rhetoric and stay silent on tensions with Japan amount to a rare string of strategic gains.
In its rivalry with the United States, China has racked up a series of wins in recent weeks.
The Trump administration has softened its criticism of China’s Communist Party in a strategy document. It has reopened a channel for high-end chip sales that Washington once treated as untouchable. And President Trump has held his tongue as a key U.S. ally in Asia faces Chinese intimidation for backing Taiwan.
For Beijing, the shifts in Washington’s approach suggest that Mr. Trump has less of an appetite for confronting China over ideology, technology and diplomacy. Some commentators in China have hailed these developments as irrefutable signs of American decline and Chinese ascendancy.
Mr. Trump’s decision on Monday to allow some advanced chips to be sold to China, the prominent Chinese technology executive Zhou Hongyi said on social media, showed how China’s unstoppable technological rise had “pushed the United States against a wall.”
The Global Times, a Communist Party newspaper, pointed to the White House’s new national security strategy, which focuses more on the Western Hemisphere than China, as “evidence of the U.S. acknowledging its relative decline in power.” Washington has realized “it cannot afford the costs of prolonged confrontation” with China, the nationalist blog Jiuwanli similarly concluded.
And Mr. Trump has remained publicly silent as China has mounted a pressure campaign against Japan, a U.S. ally, over that country’s support for Taiwan. Beijing has summoned Japanese diplomats, canceled flights, curbed tourism and stepped up military flights near Japanese airspace, including with Russia, to highlight its displeasure.
More Global News
New York Times, Historic Shift Underway in China’s Economy as Investment Slump Deepens, Daisuke Wakabayashi and Amy Chang Chien, Dec. 12, 2025. Investment in manufacturing, infrastructure and property is expected to fall this year, a remarkable turn for an economy whose growth reshaped the world.
For the past three decades, as China’s economy has developed into a global powerhouse, investment has grown reliably each year.
That is about to change. This year, China’s investments in assets like new factories, public infrastructure and housing are expected to fall for the first time since the late 1980s, ushering in a more conservative era for an economy that has reshaped the global order with years of robust growth.
The shift also signals that investing in China is no longer a surefire bet, even as Beijing continues to project confidence with economic growth estimates of 5 percent. But, as is often the case with the country’s economic data, the investment slump has raised more questions than answers.
A real estate crisis in China has dragged on for five years with no end in sight, sapping the strength from one of the economy’s pillars. Local governments, strapped for cash because of the property downturn, are not pouring money into infrastructure projects as they did during previous periods of economic malaise. Beijing’s crackdown on excessive competition among Chinese manufacturers has chilled the climate for capital investment to fuel expansion.
From January to October, a broad measure called fixed-asset investment has fallen 1.7 percent from the same period last year. The slide began in the second half of this year and accelerated with a sharp, double-digit decline in October. Analysts believe that investment dipped again in November, with that data scheduled to be released on Monday.
Dec. 11
New York Times, U.S. Steps Up Campaign Against Maduro in Seizing Tanker Off Venezuela, Tyler Pager, Eric Schmitt and Nicholas Nehamas, Updated Dec. 11, 2025. President Trump has labeled President Nicolás Maduro a drug cartel leader and has suggested that U.S. strikes could expand to Venezuelan soil.
The United States seized an oil tanker off the coast of Venezuela on Wednesday, a dramatic escalation in President Trump’s pressure campaign against Nicolás Maduro, the leader of Venezuela.
Speaking at the White House before an event on a new luxury visa program, Mr. Trump announced the operation and said it was “a large tanker, very large,” adding, without elaboration, that “other things are happening.”
When asked about the ship’s oil, Mr. Trump said, “Well, we keep it, I guess.” He declined to say who owned the tanker. “It was seized for a very good reason,” he added.
Three U.S. officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe a law enforcement operation, said the ship was carrying Venezuelan oil. They said there was no resistance from the crew and no casualties.
Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: Trump Approval? And the Caribbean Killings Were Unnecessary. Trump Just Proved It, Bill Kristol, Andrew Egger and Jim Swift, Dec. 11, 2025. If we can seize an oil tanker, why did eighty people have to die?
Donald Trump has never been popular. But after spending most of his first term with approval in the low 40s, and hovering around 40 percent for much of this year, he is now starting to get some of his grimmest numbers ever. His approval rating on the economy, per the latest AP-NORC poll, is a grisly 31 percent—the lowest number he’s ever gotten in that category in that poll. The poll also shows him slipping in areas that he considers strengths: He’s seen double-digit hits to public opinion of his handling of crime (53 percent approval in March, 43 percent now) and immigration (49 percent in March, 38 percent now).
The AP notes that “the good news for Trump is that his overall approval hasn’t fallen as steeply.” That’s a real glass-half-full way to note that his overall approval rating is down “only” six points since March—to an abysmal 36 percent. Happy Thursday.
Politico, Don’t meddle in European democracy, von der Leyen tells Trump, Ketrin Jochecová, Dec. 11, 2025. Commission president hits back at U.S. plan to undermine the European orthodoxy it says will lead to “civilizational erasure.”
Donald Trump should not get involved in European democracy, Ursula von der Leyen, right, said Thursday, days after the U.S. president launched a stinging attack on Europe.
“It is not on us, when it comes to elections, to decide who the leader of the country will be, but on the people of this country … That’s the sovereignty of the voters, and this must be protected,” the European Commission president said in an interview at the POLITICO 28 gala event in Brussels.
“Nobody else is supposed to interfere, without any question,” the Commission chief added in response to a question about the U.S. National Security Strategy, which was published last week and caused uproar in Europe.
The strategy claims Europe is facing “civilizational erasure” within the next 20 years, a narrative that has resonated well with Europe’s far-right leaders, including Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, as well as in Russia. The document also bashes European efforts to rein in far-right parties, calling such moves political censorship, and speaks of “cultivating resistance to Europe’s current trajectory within European nations.”
Von der Leyen said this is one of the reasons why the EU proposed the Democracy Shield, meant to step up the fight against foreign interference online, including in elections.
The Commission chief said she has always had “a very good working relationship” with U.S. presidents, and ” this is also the case today.” However, she stressed that Europe should focus on itself rather than making comparisons with others. David Trone launches primary bid for old House seat.
Meidas Touch Network, Kristi Noem Caught Lying About Why She Left Committee Hearing Early, Aaron Parnas, Dec. 11, 2025. Congressman Moskowitz has confirmed that the FEMA meeting Noem (shown above in a Twitter photo) left today's hearing for was cancelled.
In a surprising development this afternoon, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem left a scheduled committee hearing on the Department of Homeland Security earlier than expected, citing the need to attend a meeting related to FEMA. The decision quickly raised questions after a member of Congress claimed that the meeting she referenced was not actually taking place.
Secretary Noem informed those present that she needed to depart in order to chair a meeting of the FEMA review council. However, Moskowitz later stated that he was told the meeting in question had been canceled.
“Noem said she had to go chair the FEMA review council meeting. BUT I’m told that meeting was canceled,” Moskowitz said.
The conflicting accounts immediately drew attention, particularly given the importance of the DHS committee hearing and the sensitive nature of FEMA oversight. The abrupt departure, combined with the report that the meeting was not happening, left some lawmakers and observers seeking clarification about why the Secretary left and whether another obligation prompted her exit.
As of now, no further details have been provided about the circumstances surrounding the cancellation of the FEMA meeting or the reason for Noem’s unexpected departure. The lack of clarity has fueled ongoing discussion on Capitol Hill, and additional information may emerge as officials respond to inquiries.
New York Times, Trump Administration Opens Applications for Million-Dollar Visas, Madeleine Ngo, Dec. 11, 2025 (print ed.). President Trump has framed the program as a way for the government to raise billions of dollars and prioritize the admission of successful entrepreneurs and investors.
The Trump administration debuted a website on Wednesday that opens up applications for a “gold card,” an expedited visa that the federal government plans to provide to people who pay at least $1 million.
To apply for the card, people have to pay a nonrefundable $15,000 processing fee, according to the site. After applicants are vetted and approved by the Department of Homeland Security, they will then have to pay $1 million to “receive U.S. residency in record time” and become lawful permanent residents.
“A $1 million gift upon completion of the individual’s vetting is evidence that the individual will substantially benefit the United States,” the website says. “An individual may also need to pay small, additional fees to the U.S. Department of State depending on his or her circumstances.”
The website also provided a depiction of the card, which features a portrait of President Trump against the backdrop of an American flag and his signature under the words “TRUMP GOLD CARD.”
Businesses can also apply for a “corporate gold card” to sponsor their employees. Firms will owe a $15,000 processing fee and $2 million for each employee approved for the card, according to the site.
New York Times, As the Price of Beef Soars, Restaurants Are in ‘Code Red’ Mode, Julie Creswell, Dec. 11, 2025 (print ed.). Midpriced steakhouses and fine-dining establishments are trying to figure out how to cover their rising costs without scaring away customers.
In early November, as Halls Chophouse was heading into the critical holiday season, its president, Tommy Hall, made a tough call: Prices at his steakhouse chain would go up.
The price of the popular eight-ounce filet mignon rose to $61 from $57. A rib-eye, to $85 from $82.
Beef prices had been climbing all year, and Halls found itself in a “code red,” said Mr. Hall, who heads up Halls Chophouse, which is family-owned and has five steakhouses in the Southeast. “We had to raise prices or we weren’t going to be able to cover costs,” he said. “Every time we do a price increase, I have butterflies in my stomach wondering how customers will take it.”
For steakhouses like Halls, December is the biggest month of the year. It’s when companies rent out private back rooms for lavish parties; corporate expense accounts cover two-martini lunches; and families treat themselves to a night of steaks, bottles of cabernet sauvignon and sides of creamed spinach, truffle mac and cheese and au gratin potatoes.
But this holiday season, many steakhouses — from fine-dining restaurants to midpriced chains like Texas Roadhouse and LongHorn Steakhouse — are walking a tightrope. They have to balance raising menu prices enough to cover at least some of their expenses, but not so much that consumers stop walking through their doors.
With the nation’s cattle inventory at its lowest level since the 1950s, ground beef, chuck roasts and steaks have surged in price over the last two years. Restaurants that specialize in steak are feeling the same sticker shock as consumers in grocery stores, as the price of USDA choice boneless steak has soared 20 percent in the past year to an average of $14.13 a pound, according to September data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. (The steak hit a record high of $14.32 in August.)
Legal AF, Legal Commentary: Grand Jury REBUKES Trump AGAIN Trying to INDICT NYAG Tish James, Michael Popok, Dec. 11, 2025. In breaking news, the Trump DOJ has utterly failed for the SECOND TIME IN A WEEK to convince a Grand Jury in Virginia that NY Attorney General Letitia James committed any crime, despite moving around the state to try in vain to find a more friendly grand jury, and using career prosecutors rather than Trump's novices to do it.
U.S. Politics, Governance
Popular Information, Accountability Journalism: The AI industry’s $100 million play to influence the 2026 elections, Judd Legum, right, Rebecca Crosby, and Noel Sims, Dec. 11, 2025. As the 2026 midterms approach, President Trump is facing headwinds.
Trump’s job approval is low and has declined rapidly since September. A recent Gallup poll found that only 32% of Americans approve of how Trump has managed the economy. Even in the best of times, the party in power typically loses seats in a midterm election. In 2026, Trump and the Republicans are at risk of losing the House and, potentially, the Senate.
The most straightforward way to try to buck these trends is money. Cash for candidates to promote their strengths and exploit their opponents’ weaknesses. Likely the biggest source of cash in the 2026 election will come from Leading the Future (LTF), a group formed just a few months ago.
LTF has already secured more than $100 million, including $50 million from venture capitalists Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz and another $50 million from OpenAI co-founder Greg Brockman. Other known supporters include Joe Lonsdale, the co-founder of Palantir who recently advocated for the return of public hangings, and the AI company Perplexity. The full list of donors to LTF is unknown because the organization is so new it has not yet had to make a substantive filing with the Federal Elections Commission.
According to its website, LTF is “focused on advancing a positive, forward-looking agenda for AI innovation.” It plans to do that by “identifying, maintaining, and growing pro-AI candidates.”
The effort, at least at the outset, was nominally bipartisan. LTF indicated it would “back candidates of both parties who support a national framework for artificial intelligence regulations.” In addition to Zac Moffatt, a prominent Republican operative, LTF hired Josh Vlasto, a Democratic operative who has worked for Senator Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and former New York Governor Andrew Cuomo.
This did not go over well with the Trump White House. “AI has no better ally than President Trump, so it’s inexplicable why any company would put money into the midterms behind a Schumer-operative who is working against President Trump to elect Democrats,” a person “familiar with Trump’s thinking” told NBC News in October. “It’s a slap in the face, and the White House has definitely taken notice.”
This shot across the bow appears to be working.
On Wednesday, LTF released its first two television ads. The first ad promotes Republican Chris Gober, a candidate for Congress in Texas’ 10th District. Gober is in a crowded field seeking to replace Congressman Michael McCaul (R-TX), who is retiring.
The ad promotes Gober as a “Trump Conservative” who “knows what it takes to win a fight.” It claims that “as a lawyer, Gober defended President Trump against the radical left.” This is not exactly true, but Gober did represent Elon Musk’s pro-Trump Super PAC, America PAC.
The ad does not mention AI, but says Gober supports “American technology investment right here in Texas, so we can defeat China.”
The second ad attacks Alex Bores, a Democrat running for Congress in New York. Bores, who is currently serving in the New York Assembly, sponsored the RAISE Act. Bores’ bill, which passed the legislature, requires AI companies with more than $100 million in revenue to publish security protocols, disclose serious safety incidents to the New York Attorney General, and ensure their models do not create an unreasonable risk of mass casualties or economic losses in excess of $1 billion.
The LTF ad accuses Bores of empowering “dysfunctional bureaucrats” to regulate AI, which would “crush innovation,” “cost New York jobs,” and “fail to keep people safe.” The ad also claims that Bores is “backed by groups funded by convicted felon Sam Bankman-Fried.”
That last claim is not accurate. Bores has received donations from people associated with the effective altruist movement, which is concerned with AI safety. Bankman-Fried, prior to his arrest, supported effective altruist groups.
The larger point is that LTF is currently attacking Democrats and promoting Republicans. That is exactly how Trump and his allies want it to operate. If the pattern continues, it could potentially have a significant impact on the 2026 election.Trump’s leverage
This year, OpenAI and Andreessen Horowitz have “aggressively lobbied” for Congress to pass legislation that would ban state-level AI regulation. They are not having much success.
Over the summer, Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) introduced a proposal to include a 10-year moratorium on state AI legislation in the Republican “Big, Beautiful Bill,” but the Senate voted 99-1 to remove the provision. More recently, Trump pushed for lawmakers to include a provision preempting AI laws into the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), but text for the defense bill released this weekend did not include the AI proposal. House Majority Leader Steve Scalise (R-LA) said last week that the NDAA “wasn’t the best place for this to fit,” The Hill reported.
Now, Trump is taking a different approach. On Monday, Trump posted on Truth Social that he will be signing an executive order this week that will preempt state AI laws. “There must be only One Rulebook if we are going to continue to lead in AI,” Trump wrote. “You can’t expect a company to get 50 Approvals every time they want to do something. THAT WILL NEVER WORK!”
A leaked draft of the executive order teased by Trump draws directly from a policy memo published by Andreessen Horowitz in September. The Andreessen Horowitz memo argues that the Commerce Clause prohibits states from regulating AI companies because it “prevent[s] states from imposing excessive burdens on interstate commerce.”
The leaked executive order would require that the Attorney General assemble an “AI Litigation Task Force” to overturn state laws regulating AI, arguing such laws violate the Commerce Clause. It would also withhold federal broadband grants from states that implement AI regulations.
This is a novel and controversial interpretation of the Commerce Clause. Practically all business conducted in 2025 has some connection to the internet. If any state regulation impacting internet commerce were prohibited, states would be virtually powerless to impose any commercial regulations. The director of U.S. policy at LawAI told Politico “that states have the authority to regulate technology within their borders and that the laws passed so far don’t run afoul of federal powers under the Commerce Clause.”
Notably, while Trump has talked about a new AI executive order and a draft was leaked, Trump has not signed it yet. This gives him substantial leverage over LTF and other powerful players in the AI industry.The practical case for AI guardrails
Setting aside speculation that AI models pose an existential risk to humanity, the technology, as it exists today, can cause real-world harm.
AI tools can have a deleterious impact on mental health, especially for users who are using chatbots for hours a day. A November New York Times investigation reviewed 50 cases of people having mental health crises while talking to ChatGPT. Of these 50 people, nine were hospitalized, and three died. One person who died by suicide was a teenager.
Researchers posing as teen users found that several popular AI companions (chatbots specifically designed to be “friends”) encouraged risky behavior during mental health crises, instead of directing users to support. The AI companions also readily shared information about how to build deadly weapons, provided sexually explicit content that sometimes included child abuse, and promoted cyberbullying.
Other dangerous use cases involve using AI to create bioweapons or generate fake pornographic images with another person’s likeness.
While AI companies have promised to self-regulate, they are more focused on getting their most powerful models to the public as quickly as possible. In the absence of federal regulations, state-level action is the only alternative.
In recent months, California has passed several new laws regulating AI. The most prominent, the Transparency in Frontier Artificial Intelligence Act, requires companies to create and disclose safety protocols and provides whistleblower protections. Other bills require age verification for certain AI products and safety measures for minors using AI companions.
News Roundup
The Parnas Perspective Kristi Noem Accused of Lying Under Oath and Trump Officials Fail to Answer Basic Questions in Explosive Hearing, Aaron Parnas, right, Dec. 11, 2025. Noem (shown above in a file photo by the New York Times) and senior DHS officials struggled to answer basic questions during the hearing, with Noem accused of lying to Congress under oath and Trump-era officials unable to explain anything about Antifa.
A contentious congressional oversight hearing on the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) erupted into controversy today after lawmakers accused DHS Secretary Kristi Noem of providing lying under oath and abruptly leaving the session under disputed circumstances.
The hearing on DHS operations and domestic security policy quickly escalated into a series of sharp confrontations between members of Congress and senior department officials. Before continuing, platforms such as TikTok have repeatedly restricted the circulation of this reporting. I am working intensively to ensure this Substack breaks through those barriers and reaches the widest audience possible. If you find this work valuable, please consider subscribing so I can continue producing rigorous, around the clock coverage.
One of the most heated exchanges came when Rep. Seth Magaziner (D-RI) pressed Secretary Noem on whether DHS had deported any U.S. military veterans.
Magaziner: “How many U.S. military veterans have you deported?” Noem: “Sir, we have not deported U.S. citizens or military veterans.”
Magaziner then introduced, via Zoom, an Army combat veteran who had been wounded twice while serving in Panama in 1989. According to Magaziner, the veteran — identified as Mr. Park — was deported earlier this year to South Korea.
Magaziner: “Earlier this year, you deported him to Korea. Can you tell Mr. Park why you deported him?”
DHS officials did not offer additional explanation during the session.
Trump-Era DHS Official Declines to Label Proud Boys as Extremists
Another tense exchange involved senior DHS official Michael Glasheen, who was questioned by Rep. Robert Walkinshaw over whether the department still considers the Proud Boys an extremist organization — a designation used by federal agencies during President Donald Trump’s first term.
Walkinshaw: “Are you familiar with the Proud Boys?”
Glasheen: “I’m familiar with the name.”
Walkinshaw: “Does the FBI still designate them as an extremist organization?”
Glasheen: “We are in the process right now of changing our, uh, categories for domestic terrorism.”
Glasheen did not directly answer whether the group remains classified as extremist, prompting criticism from several committee members.
Official Unable to Provide Basic Information After Labeling Antifa the “Number One Threat”
Glasheen, right, faced additional scrutiny when he asserted that Antifa posed the most significant immediate threat to domestic security — yet struggled to answer basic questions about the movement.
Glasheen: “Antifa is our primary concern right now. That’s the most immediate violent threat we’re facing.”
Rep. Bennie Thompson: “Where is Antifa headquartered?”
Glasheen: (long pause) “We are building out the infrastructure right now.”
Thompson: “What does that mean?”
The exchange fueled criticism that DHS officials were relying on political rhetoric rather than defined intelligence assessments.
Noem’s Abrupt Departure Sparks Confusion Over FEMA Meeting
Midway through the hearing, Secretary Noem unexpectedly left, telling the committee she needed to chair a meeting regarding FEMA. Minutes later, Rep. Jared Moskowitz (D-FL) publicly cast doubt on that explanation.
Moskowitz: “Noem said she had to go chair the FEMA Review Council meeting. BUT I’m told that meeting was canceled.”
The contradictory accounts immediately raised concerns on Capitol Hill, particularly given the high-profile nature of the DHS oversight session and the ongoing scrutiny of FEMA operations.
As of this afternoon, DHS had not clarified whether a FEMA meeting had been scheduled or why the secretary departed early. The lack of transparency has prompted further questions from lawmakers and is expected to generate additional follow-up inquiries.
Talking Feds with Harry Litman, Trump BEGS Senate to Rescue HALLIGAN After HUMILIATING FIRING, Harry Litman, Dec. 11, 2025.
Politico, David Trone launches primary bid for old House seat, Gregory Svirnovskiy, Dec. 11, 2025. The wealthy wine magnate is challenging April McClain Delaney, whose campaign he publicly promoted in 2024.
Maryland Democrat David Trone, right, 
a former three-term House lawmaker who left his seat to launch an ill-fated Senate run in 2024, is making a play for his old job in a primary challenge against first-term Rep. April McClain Delaney, he announced Thursday.
The battle — in a blue-leaning district Republicans have targeted in the past — could set up an extraordinarily expensive primary between Trone and Delaney, both of whom have multimillion-dollar fortunes.
Trone hopes his opposition to President Donald Trump will help drive his campaign.
“Watching Trump and Republicans’ assault on our democracy — weaponizing the government and tearing apart families — is intolerable and goes against everything we stand for,” he said in a statement. “Our fundamental freedoms are being dismantled piece by piece. The people of Maryland’s 6th District need a fighter who will stand up against these attacks every single day.”
The wealthy wine magnate has self-funded his runs for office before. Trone spent some $17 million in his successful 2018 House campaign. He then parted ways with more than $60 million in the 2024 Senate primary, which he lost by more than 10 points to then-Prince George’s County Executive Angela Alsobrooks.
But McClain Delaney, the wife of former House lawmaker and onetime presidential candidate John Delaney, isn’t ready to go quietly. “David Trone thinks I should ‘step aside’ so he can have his old office back after he abandoned the district to run and lose for Senate,” she said in a statement Thursday. “He has the arrogance of a Trump. But not so fast. On behalf of my district, I stand up to bullies.”
Politico, Henry Cuellar will retake key spending post after Trump pardon, Nicholas Wu, Dec. 11, 2025. The Texas Democrat faced some opposition inside the House Appropriations Committee.
Democrats on the House Appropriations Committee voted Thursday to return Rep. Henry Cuellar to his leadership position on a powerful spending panel following his pardon on federal corruption charges.
“We got ratified,” Cuellar told reporters following the vote.
The veteran Texas lawmaker, right, overcame private concerns inside his party about restoring him as the top Democrat on the Homeland Security subpanel after President Donald Trump granted him clemency in a surprise move last week.
But Cuellar remains popular in the Democratic Caucus, particularly among longtime colleagues — some of whom argued that with the pardon wiping away his bribery indictment, the legal process had run its course and there was no reason to bar Cuellar from the post under caucus rules.
“Just look at the rules,” said Rep. Lois Frankel (D-Fla.). “There’s nothing more to say.”
Still, the fact that the vote even happened meant that at least one Democratic appropriator privately objected to reappointing Cuellar by acclamation. If his party retakes the House majority next year, Cuellar would be in line as subcommittee chair to directly oversee more than $60 billion in annual spending on agencies including Customs and Border Protection and ICE.
More Global News
New York Times, Congo-Rwanda Conflict: Days After Trump-Led Peace Talks, New Congolese City Falls to Rebels, Saikou Jammeh and Ruth Maclean, Dec. 11, 2025 (print ed.). The fighting in Congo continues despite Washington’s claims to have brokered an end to the conflict.
A rebel militia backed by
Rwanda announced on Wednesday that it had seized the city of Uvira in the Democratic Republic of Congo, just days after President Trump hosted the leaders of both countries to sign a peace deal.
By capturing Uvira, the militia, M23, now controls both the North and South Kivu regions in eastern Congo. Uvira was the last city under government control in South Kivu. The rebel group occupied Goma, the capital of North Kivu, in January.
“We confirm that the city of Uvira is now liberated,” the rebel group announced on social media.
Thousands of people had fled to Uvira in recent days amid intense fighting between Congolese security forces and M23. Now, thousands more are escaping the city and crossing the border into neighboring Burundi.
Mr. Trump last week declared that he had ended the decades-old conflict between Congo and Rwanda when he gathered several African leaders, [including Rwandan President Paul Kagame], for the signing of the Washington Accord, a peace and economic deal that includes millions in U.S. investments.
Letters from an American, Historical Commentary: December 10, 2025 [Human Rights], Heather Cox Richardson, right, Dec. 11, 2025. Today is Human Rights Day, celebrated internationally in honor of the day seventy-seven years ago, December 10, 1948, when the United Nations General Assembly announced the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR).
In 1948 the world was still reeling from the death and destruction of World War II, including the horrors of the Holocaust. The Soviet Union was blockading Berlin, Italy and France were convulsed with communist-backed labor agitation, Greece was in the middle of a civil war, Arabs opposed the new state of Israel, communists and nationalists battled in China, and segregationists in the U.S. were forming their own political party to stop the government from protecting civil rights for Black Americans. In the midst of these dangerous trends, the member countries of the United Nations came together to adopt a landmark document: a common standard of fundamental rights for all human beings.
The United Nations itself was only three years old. Representatives of the 47 countries that made up the Allies in World War II, along with the Byelorussian Soviet Socialist Republic, the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic, and newly liberated Denmark and Argentina, had formed the United Nations as a key part of an international order based on rules on which nations agreed, rather than the idea that might makes right, which had twice in just over twenty years brought wars that involved countries around the globe.
Part of the mission of the U.N. was “to reaffirm faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person, in the equal rights of men and women and of nations large and small.” In early 1946 the United Nations Economic and Social Council organized a nine-person commission on human rights to construct the mission of a permanent Human Rights Commission. Unlike other U.N. commissions, though, the selection of its members would be based not on their national affiliations but on their personal merit.
President Harry S. Truman had appointed Eleanor Roosevelt, widow of former president Franklin Delano Roosevelt and much beloved defender of human rights in the United States, as a delegate to the United Nations. In turn, U.N. Secretary-General Trygve Lie from Norway put her on the commission to develop a plan for the formal human rights commission. That first commission asked Roosevelt to take the chair.
“[T]he free peoples” and “all of the people liberated from slavery, put in you their confidence and their hope, so that everywhere the authority of these rights, respect of which is the essential condition of the dignity of the person, be respected,” a U.N. official told the commission at its first meeting on April 29, 1946.
The U.N. official noted that the commission must figure out how to define the violation of human rights not only internationally but also within a nation, and must suggest how to protect “the rights of man all over the world.” If a procedure for identifying and addressing violations “had existed a few years ago,” he said, “the human community would have been able to stop those who started the war at the moment when they were still weak and the world catastrophe would have been avoided.”
Drafted over the next two years, the final document began with a preamble explaining that a UDHR was necessary because “recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world,” and because “disregard and contempt for human rights have resulted in barbarous acts which have outraged the conscience of mankind.” Because “the advent of a world in which human beings shall enjoy freedom of speech and belief and freedom from fear and want has been proclaimed as the highest aspiration of the common people,” the preamble said, “human rights should be protected by the rule of law.”
The thirty articles that followed established that “[a]ll human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights…without distinction of any kind, such as race, colour, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status” and regardless “of the political, jurisdictional or international status of the country or territory to which a person belongs.”
Those rights included freedom from slavery, torture, degrading punishment, arbitrary arrest, exile, and “arbitrary interference with…privacy, family, home or correspondence, [and] attacks upon…honour and reputation.”
They included the right to equality before the law and to a fair trial, the right to travel both within a country and outside of it, the right to marry and to establish a family, and the right to own property.
They included the “right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion,” “freedom of opinion and expression,” peaceful assembly, the right to participate in government either “directly or through freely chosen representatives,” the right of equal access to public service. After all, the UDHR noted, the authority of government rests on the will of the people, “expressed in periodic and genuine elections which shall be by universal and equal suffrage.”
They included the right to choose how and where to work, the right to equal pay for equal work, the right to unionize, and the right to fair pay that ensures “an existence worthy of human dignity.”
They included “the right to a standard of living adequate for…health and well-being…, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond [one’s] control.”
They included the right to free education that develops students fully and strengthens “respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms.” Education “shall promote understanding, tolerance and friendship among all nations, racial or religious groups, and shall further the activities of the United Nations for the maintenance of peace.”
They included the right to participate in art and science.
They included the right to live in the sort of society in which the rights and freedoms outlined in the UDHR could be realized. And, the document concluded, “Nothing in this Declaration may be interpreted as implying for any State, group or person any right to engage in any activity or to perform any act aimed at the destruction of any of the rights and freedoms set forth herein.”
Although eight countries abstained from the UDHR—South Africa, Saudi Arabia, and six countries from the Soviet bloc—no country voted against it, making the vote unanimous. The declaration was not a treaty and was not legally binding; it was a declaration of principles.
Since then, though, the UDHR has become the foundation of international human rights law. More than eighty international treaties and declarations, along with regional human rights conventions, domestic human rights bills, and constitutional provisions, make up a legally binding system to protect human rights. All of the members of the United Nations have ratified at least one of the major international human rights treaties, and four out of five have ratified four or more.
Indeed, today is the forty-first anniversary of the U.N.’s adoption of the Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, more commonly known as the United Nations Convention Against Torture (UNCAT), which follows the structure of the UDHR.
The UDHR remains aspirational, but it is a vital part of the rules-based order that restrains leaders from human rights abuses, giving victims a language and a set of principles to condemn mistreatment. Before 1948 that language and those principles were unimaginable.
Last year, under President Joe Biden, the White House celebrated Human Rights Day by recommitting to “upholding the equal and inalienable rights of all people.” The State Department bestowed the Human Rights Defender Award on eight individuals who have defended migrant workers, LGBTQ+ individuals, women, and democracy. The recipients came from Kuwait, Bolivia, the Kyrgyz Republic, Burma, Eswatini, Ghana, Colombia, and Azerbaijan.
The U.S. government did not recognize Human Rights Day this year.
Instead, Humeyra Pamuk of Reuters reported, administration officials are threatening to place sanctions on the International Criminal Court to guarantee it will not investigate Trump and his top officials. “There is growing concern...that in 2029 the ICC will turn its attention to the president, to the vice president, to the secretary of war and others, and pursue prosecutions against them,” a Trump administration official told Pamuk. “That is unacceptable, and we will not allow it to happen.”
The official did not tell Pamuk which of the administration’s actions its officials think the ICC would investigate, but said there was “open chatter” that the court might target administration officials. On social media, opponents of the administration have begun to refer to U.S. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth as “Hagueseth,” after The Hague, Netherlands, where the ICC holds its official meetings.
Legal analysts have expressed grave concern that the administration’s attacks on small boats in the Caribbean are unlawful, and many have called a September 2 strike that killed shipwrecked survivors from a previous strike either murder or a war crime.
Yesterday, Damien Cave, Edward Wong, and Maria Abi-Habib of the New York Times reported that lawyers for the Pentagon proposed sending two survivors from an October strike against a small boat in the Caribbean to the notorious CECOT terrorist prison in El Salvador, where prisoners previously rendered there reported widespread torture and abuse. Defense Department officials were keen to make sure survivors didn’t end up in a U.S. court where the administration’s insistence that the men were an immediate danger to the U.S. because they were trafficking drugs would come under legal scrutiny.
Shocked, lawyers for the State Department refused, and the two men were sent back to their home countries of Colombia and Ecuador.
New York Times, Britain Releases New Data on ‘Grooming Gangs’ and Child Sexual Abuse, Lizzie Dearden, Dec. 11, 2025 (print ed.).The police in Britain warned that the threat from online predators has been rising while political attention has been focused elsewhere.
Online predators present the “fastest growing” sexual abuse threat toward British children, the police in Britain said on Wednesday.
In an annual report on child sexual abuse and exploitation, the police also warned that a focus on the so-called “grooming gangs” scandal in Britain risked obscuring the prevalence of other forms of abuse, which make up the vast majority of sexual offenses against children.
The grooming gangs scandal unfolded more than a decade ago, when it emerged that groups of men, many of them of Pakistani heritage, had been exploiting and raping vulnerable girls in several towns and cities in Britain, and that the authorities had failed to protect victims and properly investigate their abusers. Numerous criminal prosecutions and inquiries have taken place but the crimes were brought to renewed international attention in January by Elon Musk, in a series of vitriolic and inaccurate tirades on X.
Richard Fewkes, director of Britain’s national child sexual exploitation taskforce, acknowledged the threat posed by grooming gangs, while expressing concern about the intense public attention on the issue as opposed to other, more common forms of child abuse.
“If you were a member of the public, you would actually think that grooming gangs is the biggest threat to children in our country today,” Mr. Fewkes told a news conference in London. “It is a threat, we know it’s a threat, and we’re very robust in terms of our response to that. But in the overall statistics, that particular typology of offending represents just over one half of a percent of offending.”
Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: We Didn’t Have to Kill Any of Them, William Kristol, right, Dec. 11, 2025. Yesterday the Trump administration released a new video of the U.S. military engaging a vessel off the coast of Venezuela.
It wasn’t footage of the September 2 killing of two shipwrecked survivors of a missile attack on an alleged drug-smuggling boat.¹ It was of a new military action in support of U.S. law enforcement agencies: seizing an oil tanker involved in illicit activities. This action was apparently taken pursuant to a warrant issued by a federal judge, as the ship had been put under sanctions by the Treasury Department in 2022 for illegal activities linked to the smuggling of Iranian oil.
Many questions remain about the operation and its justification, and the government should provide clear answers to them. Still, here’s what we’ve been reminded of by yesterday’s action: The U.S. government has the ability to seize boats, sailors, and cargo without killing anyone. The Coast Guard does this routinely and has for years. The military is able to coordinate with and support law enforcement in such efforts. Steps can be taken ahead of time to ensure such efforts are legal.
But the Trump administration has chosen to do none of these things as, over the past three months, it has conducted strikes against at least 22 vessels, killing more than 80 helpless civilians. The administration has provided no evidence to support its claims about the boats and those aboard, and in fact, the original rationale that they were smuggling fentanyl to the United States seems to have been abandoned.
What’s more, the administration has chosen in one case to kill shipwrecked survivors and to try to cover up the fact there were such survivors, and in another instance to return survivors to their home countries rather than risking legal proceedings in the United States that might force the administration to provide a justification for its actions.
And now the administration is stonewalling on releasing the full video of the September 2 strike, despite President Trump’s statement last week he’d be happy to do so. House Intelligence Committee chair and Trump ally Rep. Rick Crawford—installed in that position at the beginning of this year in place of the independent-minded Rep. Mike Turner to ensure congressional acquiescence rather than oversight—said yesterday that he doesn’t want video of the second strike released. His rationale? “What the trained eye can detect from these videos may reveal sources and methods that would imperil troops.” This is implausible on its face. But it becomes a risible excuse for a cover-up when one recalls that the administration was perfectly happy to release the first part of the September 2 video—and then many subsequent videos—for “trained eyes” to inspect.
As Sen. Ruben Gallego (D-Ariz.) noted, “This administration, since they started striking these boats illegally, has been very happy to show their snuff films every time they took out one of these boats. Now suddenly they’re willing to show the first hit but not the second. Why is that?”
We know why. The second strike in particular is horrifying and indefensible.
Meanwhile, Donald Trump is bored by the whole matter. He was asked yesterday, “Has Hegseth told you why he hasn’t released the video of the second strike?” His answer: “No, he hasn’t told me. I thought that issue was dead.”
No, that issue isn’t dead. But more than 80 people are dead. Their deaths seem to have been unnecessary, unjustified, and unlawful. President Trump may not care. We should.
María Corina Machado at a news conference in Oslo, Norway, on Thursday after spending more than a year in hiding (Photo by Heiko Junge/NTB, via Reuters).
New York Times, Nobel Peace Prize Winner Machado Says U.S. Helped Her Leave Venezuela, Anatoly Kurmanaev and Henrik Pryser Libell, Dec. 11, 2025. María Corina Machado appeared in Oslo as the Trump administration ramped up its pressure campaign against President Nicolás Maduro.
María Corina Machado, the Venezuelan opposition leader, said she was able to leave the country after spending more than a year in hiding with the help of the United States.
“We had support from the United States government,” she told reporters in Oslo on Thursday, hours after arriving in Norway to join the festivities surrounding her receipt of the Nobel Peace Prize.
Ms. Machado declined to disclose the details of her departure, explaining that she wanted to protect her collaborators. The Trump administration has not publicly commented on Ms. Machado’s departure from Venezuela.
Ms. Machado went into hiding soon after last year’s presidential election, in which the candidate she supported won a landslide victory, according to international monitors, despite concerted government efforts to intimidate and disable the opposition. President Nicolás Maduro claimed he was the winner and held on to power by repressing those who opposed him.
Earlier on Thursday, Ms. Machado said that the Venezuelan government had not known where she had been staying and would have tried to prevent her from traveling to Norway, where her daughter accepted the Peace Prize on Wednesday on her behalf.
Venezuela’s interior minister, Diosdado Cabello, claimed on Wednesday, without providing evidence, that the government was aware of her movements. Venezuelan officials also previously said that Ms. Machado would be considered a fugitive if she left the country.
New York Times, News Analysis: The Challenges to Europe’s Security Go Beyond Trump’s Lack of Support, Steven Erlanger, Dec. 11, 2025 (print ed.). Europeans find themselves stranded between hostile powers, Russia and the United States, with key decisions looming over the future of Ukraine.
Europe, stranded between the United States and Russia, faces its second, epoch-changing event of the past few years.
The first was the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine, the first major land war on the European continent since World War II. The second is the United States’ abandonment of its commitment to the continent’s security, European officials and experts said.
They argued that President Trump’s main goal is not peace in Ukraine but rapprochement with a Russia that is actively trying to undermine NATO and the European Union, which would jeopardize Europe’s security.
And while Mr. Trump’s dismissiveness of what he called a “decaying” Europe has drawn much attention, it is only part of the problem facing European leaders. They are also confronting challenges that include budget shortfalls, worsening public opinion and the far right as they try to maintain their security and help Kyiv.
“For the first time since the end of World War II, America is not on our side on a matter of war and peace in Europe,” said Norbert Röttgen, a senior legislator in the conservative party of Chancellor Friedrich Merz of Germany. “It has sided with the aggressor against the interests of the attacked country, Ukraine, and against European security interests in general. It wants to mediate between NATO and Russia, which means the U.S. no longer defines itself as the leading member of NATO and defines Europe as a strategic target.”
The future of Ukraine is at the heart of the debate. Mr. Trump is pressing for a settlement to the war on largely Russian terms, and the Europeans see Ukraine as crucial to their own security and are encouraging Kyiv to fight for a better deal.
European leaders, who met again this week with President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine, are relieved that so far President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia is unwilling to cash in his chips and continues to resist Mr. Trump’s effort to end the fighting. That means Ukraine will need to continue the war, with European support.
Given the stakes, Europe has much to do to be a credible counterpoint. As one weary European official said, outrage is enjoyable, but not a policy.
U.S. Media, Culture, High Tech, Education
The Triad via The Bulwark, Trump and the Oligarchs Are Killing Corporate Media, Jonathan V. Last, Dec. 11, 2025. The oligarchs only care about money. The dictator only cares about power. They can make that arrangement work.
1. This Is CNN
Our oligarchs and our strongman operate on two different incentive structures that happen to be in total alignment.
Remember when David Ellison bought Paramount Global? Why did he want to own that corporation? Because it gave him a bunch of valuable assets:
A viable streaming platform in Paramount+
A vast library of intellectual property—including famous franchises like Mission: Impossible, Top Gun, Star Trek, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, and Paranormal Activity—which can be monetized for decades
A broadcast television network with a vast advertising business and live TV assets, such as rights to NFL broadcasts
A movie studio that generates new intellectual property and vertically integrates with the rest of the pipeline
Did David Ellison give a shit about the CBS News division? No. If you listed the top thirty pieces of the Paramount Global business, CBS News would not be in it. Qua business, it was an afterthought.
But why did Donald Trump direct his government to approve Ellison’s purchase? Trump did not give a shit about Paramount+, the Paramount film catalogue, or any of that stuff. The only thing Trump cared about was that CBS News be put under the thumb of a reliable owner who was beholden to him.
Trump and Ellison had entirely different interests—yet they were completely aligned.
And now it’s happening again.
You have probably seen the story about Ellison attempting a hostile takeover of Warner Bros.-Discovery. Why does Ellison want to own this business, too?
By merging HBO Max with Paramount+ he could have a true third competitor to the Netflix/Disney goliaths, and so would own the last seat at the streaming table.
The Warner Bros. film library is even more valuable than the Paramount library and by combining the two his streaming service would have a major point of differentiation from Netflix and Disney+.
The addition of Warner-owned cable networks would give the ad business he now owns (via CBS) more inventory and more leverage over advertisers.
Every act of consolidation in the entertainment sector advantages the surviving players by eliminating competition, giving them more power to control costs and dictate terms.
One of the pieces of Warner-Discovery is CNN. Like CBS News, CNN is a tiny piece of the overall business. It is also a declining piece. CNN is the last-place cable news network and its revenue is (a) modest and (b) in free fall.
I want to be very clear about this: CNN is a small player in a dying category. In a world where David Ellison only cared about economics, I suspect he’d pay good money not to own CNN.
Yet if Ellison is to succeed in his takeover of Warner-Discovery, he will need President Trump’s help. And the only thing Trump cares about in this deal is getting CNN under Ellison’s control. Don’t take my word for it. Here’s the president yesterday:
“I think CNN should be sold, because I think the people that are running CNN right now are either corrupt or incompetent,” Trump told reporters during a roundtable with business executives at the White House.
“I don’t think they should be entrusted with running CNN any longer. So I think any deal should — it should be guaranteed and certain that CNN is part of it or sold separately,” he added. “I think CNN should be sold along with everything else.”
That’s how oligarchs and autocrats work. The oligarchs want political power to advantage their businesses. The autocrat wants key businesses to be controlled by allies in service of strengthening his regime.
These arrangements work out nicely for everyone until the oligarch accidentally falls out of a window.Subscribed
2. Size as Vulnerability
I do not mean to impugn the character of journalists at CBS News and CNN. Many of them do fine work. But it is a fact of life that unless a media company owns itself, its independence is conditional.
CBS News is already changing under the direction of its Trump-approved editor-in-chief. Spoiler: It is not changing in ways that challenge el presidente. If Ellison gets control of CNN, it, too, will change.
I spend a lot of clock cycles obsessing over the business side of The Bulwark—not because I want to buy a yacht but because revenue leads to control, control leads to independence, and independence leads to honesty.¹
We’ve grown more slowly than we could have. But we didn’t want to blitz scale because that would have left us vulnerable. We grew step by step, bringing in new voices, establishing new products, and rationalizing the products into mini-businesses of their own.
There is a drawback to this model: It’s hard to get really big when you’re independent. The reason people take corporate money is because it gives them the resources to do important work. You can send reporters into the field. You can throw an entire news team at a breaking story. You don’t have to pick and choose; you can flood the zone.
Independent media companies don’t have that ability. It’s a tradeoff. You work with scarce resources, but you’re allowed to say exactly what you think without your owner and his Dolores Umbridge trying to screw you.
You trade resources and scale for control and independence.
In normal times, the corporate media side of this trade can be pretty reasonable. When liberalism is bedrock, good journalists can do great things when they get corporate-scale resources. And whatever marginal independence they lack might be worth the sacrifice.
But in illiberal times, it’s a foolish, dangerous trade. When the power of the state is wielded by an autocrat, the decline of independence isn’t be marginal.
Here’s the thing, though: Independent media companies can get bigger. The Bulwark has gone from two email newsletters and a podcast to something like a genuine media company. In the last couple of years we’ve added real reporters who break news. We’ve created a podcast empire and a wildly successful video channel. If the business keeps growing, our capabilities will keep growing, too.
But corporate media can’t get more independent. There’s no path to independence for them, no way to get out from under an oligarch. Once you hand someone else control, it’s gone. For forever.
I doubt David Ellison either realizes this fact or cares about it. But I promise you Donald Trump does.
3. Dept. of Cucks
Mother Jones (another independent media company) has a piece about what happened after a reporter submitted a question to the DoD press office about Pete Hegseth’s mentor:
Mother Jones Magazine, Personal Commentary: I Asked the Pentagon About Pete Hegseth’s Mentor. Then the Threats Started, Dan Friedman, Dec. 11, 2025. Journalism in the second Trump administration gets personal. After the author contacted the Pentagon for comment, he heard from far-right influencer Jack Posobiec.
Six weeks ago, Jack Posobiec, right, asked me to comment on whether I have a “creepy fetish for Asian women.”
That was one of several false and wildly personal allegations that the far-right pundit and newly minted member of the Pentagon press corps said that he planned to include in “a story that I’m writing about you.”
I immediately understood his October 28 email to be a threat, though it was not made explicit. The day before, I had sent the Pentagon press office a series of questions concerning Eric Geressy, a senior Pentagon adviser to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. Geressy, who served with Hegseth during a tour in Iraq in the mid-2000s, is part of the Pentagon effort to instill a “warrior ethos” within the US military. He now leads a team reviewing the role of women in the armed forces.
Read the whole thing here.
Mother Jones Magazine, Personal Commentary: I Asked the Pentagon About Pete Hegseth’s Mentor. Then the Threats Started, Dan Friedman, Dec. 11, 2025. Journalism in the second Trump administration gets personal. After the author contacted the Pentagon for comment, he heard from far-right influencer Jack Posobiec.
Six weeks ago, Jack Posobiec, right, asked me to comment on whether I have a “creepy fetish for Asian women.”
That was one of several false and wildly personal allegations that the far-right pundit and newly minted member of the Pentagon press corps said that he planned to include in “a story that I’m writing about you.”
I immediately understood his October 28 email to be a threat, though it was not made explicit. The day before, I had sent the Pentagon press office a series of questions concerning Eric Geressy, a senior Pentagon adviser to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. Geressy, who served with Hegseth during a tour in Iraq in the mid-2000s, is part of the Pentagon effort to instill a “warrior ethos” within the US military. He now leads a team reviewing the role of women in the armed forces.
Calling Geressy “my toughest critic and my best mentor,” Hegseth in March presented him with the Distinguished Service Cross, the Army’s second-highest award for valor, for Geressy’s conduct following an ambush in Baghdad in 2007.
Posobiec’s email arrived the day after my inquiries…This was either an incredible coincidence or a deliberate message: Publish your article and get smeared.
I had discovered that Geressy’s email address was linked to a public Goodreads page with a “currently reading” list that included various books featuring stories about “Asian wife sharing.” These pornographic works, with titles such as “Asian Wife Went With Her Dad’s Friend: A Cuckold Story,” appeared on the list alongside two books by Hegseth and a handful of military histories. They contain detailed descriptions of cuckolding, group sex, and scenes involving “ladyboys”—a term used to refer to Thai transgender women. The page, active since 2021, was taken down the day after I contacted the Pentagon and Geressy about it.
I also asked about a 1997 domestic violence allegation against Geressy, about his dating habits, and past relationships with foreign women. I inquired if the Pentagon had assessed those relationships as part of Geressy’s security clearance process, and, more broadly, if his personal life might create concerns about his susceptibility to foreign influence operations.
The Pentagon repeatedly asked for more time to address those questions. Eventually chief Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell responded, in part: “Geressy has served for 38 years in the government, has been vetted numerous times by the relevant agencies, and has never posed a security risk or engaged in improper behavior as this piece tries to suggest. Mother Jones has stooped to a new low with this shoddy hit piece and should be ashamed of itself.”
Posobiec’s email arrived the day after my initial inquiries. The false claims he asked about, particularly the Asian fetish thing, seemed to mirror my questions. Posobiec, who in 2016 promoted the bogus Pizzagate conspiracy theory, gave me a deadline, 5 p.m. on October 29, that was the same as the one I had given the Pentagon press office. A Pentagon spokesperson and Posobiec both denied coordination. Geressy declined to comment. But considering the questions, timing, and Posobiec’s links to Defense Department officials, the situation seemed clear. This was either an incredible coincidence or a deliberate message: Publish your article and get smeared.
Posobiec’s email claimed I have “a history of objectifying women,” and that I had engaged in some kind of misconduct. The email also included questions about my marriage.
Posobiec’s questions suggested one of his “two sources” may have been a real woman with whom I did have a brief relationship nearly a decade ago. Contrary to the email’s depiction, that relationship was perfectly amicable at the time. But it was part of some personal messiness, especially around the end of my first marriage, that is embarrassing.
My first instinct was to laugh this off. Who cares what the Pizzagate guy writes? But getting lied about by someone with 3 million X followers is not that funny. Comet Ping Pong never housed a Democratic pedophilia ring in its basement. But that didn’t make it less dangerous when the restaurant was targeted by QAnon crazies, including a guy who fired an AR-15 into a room that had just been full of kids.
I have done reporting that angered other well-known figures on the right—Roger Stone, Miles Guo, Steve Bannon—and that drew some doxxing and half-assed personal attacks from their allies. But I am not famous. Who cares about me?
The threatened audience for the smear, clearly, was my peers—and my wife. It seemed meant to scare me into spiking my own story. That is not journalism, but an attack on journalism.
This apparent threat became more explicit as the possible publication date we had given the Pentagon approached. In tweets, Posobiec asked his followers if he should publish a story about mistreatment of women by a “DC-area liberal reporter.” After our possible publication date passed, though, he went quiet.
That left my editors and me with a problem. Here was what we believed to be an attempt to strong-arm Mother Jones, and perhaps an expansion of the administration’s war on the press. This was news. But the development also complicated an already tricky story. And if we delayed publication, or decided the story was not important enough to run, we risked leaving the impression that we, and I, had been intimidated into silence.
We knew that we would not drop the article because of Posobiec’s ploy, nor rush into running it before we were ready. Instead, we did what reporters are supposed to do when confronted with a journalism dilemma: more journalism.
My emails to the Pentagon and Geressy were part of an effort to check the information we had gathered. We wanted their side of the story. My questions went largely unanswered, but I kept asking. I talked to more people. And I worked to verify the information we had.
We had linked the Goodreads account to Geressy based on various pieces of identifying information, including an email address he had used. The account was listed under the username Eric J—Geressy’s middle name is Joseph. At one point, the page noted that Eric J lived in a specific Florida town, which matched Geressy’s known residence. Also, some of the non-erotic books displayed on the account were seemingly of interest to him; they included books, like Hegseth’s The War on Warriors, that mention Geressy’s military service. These titles appeared on the page between 2021 and July of this year.
A screenshot of the Goodreads "Currently Reading" page for user Eric. The list includes six books: "The Key West Wife Swap" by Macy Townes, "The War on Warriors" by Pete Hegseth, "Memoir of a Peacetime Soldier" by B.T. Smith, "American Warfighter" by J. Pepper Bryars, "Living in Thailand 2" by Dante x, and "Thai Wife Sharing And Watching" by Dante x.Screenshot of the Goodreads page linked to Geressy’s email address. The page was deleted after we asked him and the Pentagon about it.
The same email address was also linked to other apps, including Yelp and MyFitnessPal, that appeared to be Geressy’s, along with a MySpace page that includes what looks like a photograph of him.
Geressy declined to comment, and did not confirm he had a Goodreads account. In theory that made it possible, if highly unlikely, that someone could have used his email account, obtained through a hack or other means, to set up the Goodreads account. So we tried to rule out that possibility.
I spoke to Nathaniel Fried, the CEO of OSINT Industries. That’s a British organization whose platform matches personal information such as emails and phone numbers to online accounts; we had relied on this platform to connect Geressy’s email address to the Goodreads account. Fried said that while OSINT can’t tell you for sure who signed up, “it’s 100 percent that that email has an account.” In other words, either Geressy or someone using his email and personal information created the account.
I also asked Amazon, which owns Goodreads, about the account. After much back and forth, the company said it did not currently have a record of an account linked to Geressy, or the email address he appears to have used. But they also said that they do not retain identifying information for deleted Goodreads accounts. Since the account linked to Geressy had been deleted weeks before, right after I reached out to the Pentagon and Geressy for comment, this statement gave us little new information. Overall, Amazon’s carefully parsed response did nothing to refute the connection.
“It’s all about whether you are susceptible to a foreign service getting any leverage against you. It may not be disqualifying, but it should be looked at.”
Still, none of that fully bore on the main consideration. That is, whether personal reading tastes, past relationships, or apparent dating habits are worth reporting on. After extensive discussion, we decided that in this case, they are.
For one thing, former national security officials told us that for Pentagon personnel in particular, relationships with foreign partners are a major concern.
Geressy lived in 2016 with a woman who evidence suggests may be a Chinese national. That woman started a limited liability company during that time with a name that references Chinese investment. It was registered at Geressy’s home address, then dissolved a few months later. (I am omitting some specifics to avoid including identifying information.) The Pentagon said that Geressy has never been deemed a security risk. But it did not provide verifiable answers to questions about whether that relationship and company were examined as part of Geressy’s security clearance review. Neither did Geressy.
Geressy has had what appears to be a stormy personal life that has included three marriages. In 1997, a jury acquitted him of a domestic violence charge after an accusation by his then-wife, according to court records.
Email addresses Geressy used, and other identifying information, including his first name and biographical information, also appeared in three data breaches, between 2011 and 2016, of adult websites geared toward finding sexual partners, according to databases that include the hacked data. Those sites are Fling, AdultFriendFinder, which then called itself “the World’s Largest Sex & Swinger Community,” and Ashley Madison, which billed itself as “the most famous name in infidelity.”
The presence of Geressy’s email and other information in these data breaches does not confirm he used these sites, according to cyber researchers.
But as John Sipher, a former senior CIA officer, told Mother Jones, in normal circumstances, a government official who might be involved with such websites and who had romantic relationships with foreigners would draw scrutiny. “It’s all about whether you are susceptible to a foreign service getting any leverage against you,” Sipher said. “It may not be disqualifying, but it should be looked at.”
And there is a second point. Geressy is a top official in a Defense Department that has booted trans people from the military based on President Trump’s executive order that argues that “adoption of a gender identity inconsistent with an individual’s sex conflicts with a soldier’s commitment to an honorable, truthful, and disciplined lifestyle, even in one’s personal life.” Geressy is not responsible for trans policy, but he is part of a Pentagon leadership that is concerns itself with subordinates’ private lives.
Trump’s Pentagon wants reporters to be not just docile recipients of the administration’s preferred narratives but active propagandists. That is a direct attack on the free press. It is also an insidious danger.
In The War on Warriors, one of the books on the Goodreads page linked to Geressy, Hegesth cited his mentor to support the position that women should not serve in combat roles. “From my perspective,” Hegseth quoted Geressy as saying, circa 2007, “overwhelmingly most females want nothing to do with combat arms.” According to Hegseth, Geressy had argued that the Army had unfairly awarded medals to some women who had served in combat. “If SGM Geressy was a transvestite—or gay, or black, or a woman,” Hegseth wrote, “he would have three Distinguished Service Crosses and be on the front of a Wheaties box.”
The Pentagon is already beset by scandals in which top officials, most notably Hegseth himself, have been accused of conduct that falls short of the standards it demands of other Defense Department officials and service members. Critics have argued that for lower-ranking personnel, actions like Hegseth sharing military plans outside of approved channels, or the adultery he acknowledged during confirmation hearings, would result in firing. The racy selections on the Goodreads account linked to Geressy’s email may be comparatively minor. But that a public page listing such titles existed until we flagged it adds to the impression that the department’s leadership is not only hypocritical, but inept.
Hegseth has reacted furiously to reporting on some of his missteps. He has raged over coverage of his sharing of plans for bombing targets in Yemen with a Signal group that included the editor of the Atlantic. (The department’s inspector general reported that Hegseth’s actions could have put US troops at risk.) He fired aides accused of leaking news of a plan to give Elon Musk a top-secret briefing on US war plans versus China. Posobiec’s email came as the Pentagon took an increasingly hostile stance toward the media.
Kingsley Wilson, a former conservative influencer who is the department’s press secretary, told me that she did not speak to Posobiec about my story and did not believe Parnell did either. Posobiec also denied coordinating with the Pentagon. Geressy did not respond to a question about it.
But it came amid broader pushback to our reporting. “This is a garbage story made up of false allegations, decades-old claims that proved untrue, and disgusting innuendo aimed at smearing a man who was awarded the Army’s second-highest military honor for extraordinary heroism in combat,” Parnell said.
That response is consistent with the combative press relations posture of the second Trump administration. Shortly before, when a reporter asked the White House press secretary to identify who had suggested Trump meet with Russian President Vladimir Putin in Budapest, she responded: “Your mom did.”
Similar truculence drives the Defense Department’s recent decision to force outlets that assign reporters to the Pentagon to agree to a policy that bars reporters from revealing news the department does not authorize. Most news organizations refused. (The New York Times recently sued the Pentagon, arguing that the policy violates the First Amendment.) Posobiec is among a group of pro-Trump influencers who accepted the restrictive terms. The result is that the new press corps the Pentagon grants access to is largely composed of far-right activists.
The Pentagon press shop maintains close ties to its newly constituted press corps. Wilson, the department’s press secretary, occasionally appears on a program Posobiec hosts. In an October episode, she thanked him for agreeing to the department’s restrictions. “Now we get to have incredible journalists like yourself who are going to be here in the Pentagon reporting on what the Department of War is doing every single day,” she said.
On Wednesday night, after weeks of silence, I heard from Posobiec again. He said he was “finalizing my story,” and wanted to know if me, my wife, “or your in-laws” wished to comment. His message arrived an hour and forty minutes after I wrote to Geressy, posing some last questions and telling him I was “finalizing this story.”
Trump’s Pentagon wants reporters to be not just docile recipients of the administration’s preferred narratives but active propagandists. That is a direct attack on the free press. It is also an insidious danger. It threatens to make us bad at our jobs. It can be harder work to treat people whom we cover critically like complete human beings, people who deserve empathy and a real chance to explain themselves. If the department yanks credentials for tough reporting, if a press secretary just attacks a story without engaging with questions, and if inquiries draw personal attacks, why give spokespeople, or the officials they work for, any opportunity to respond at all?
The answer, I think, is that in journalism, like everywhere else, we should treat people the way we want to be treated. This story, with its weird personal twist, drove home that necessity. By proposing to smear me, Posobiec inadvertently provided a reminder of how responsible reporters ought to act.
I have worked to be fair—and honest. This attempt won’t appease the Pentagon or the people who threatened me. And the choice here, between appearing to be coerced into silence or maybe getting slandered, lacks an option that doesn’t feel shitty.
But what I can control are the standards I aim for. Those are ultimately up to me. But they reflect the values of Mother Jones, and the influence of other journalists, one of whom is my wife. She makes the judgment I’ll live with.
Erika Kirk speaking during a CBS News town hall.Erika Kirk’s message to Candace Owens.
New York Post, Erika Kirk’s blunt, one-word response to Candace Owens’ nonstop attacks, conspiracy theories about Charlie Kirk’s assassination, Patrick Reilly, Dec. 11, 2025. Erika Kirk had a blunt one-word plea when asked to respond to conservative podcaster Candace Owens, below right, 
who has been attacking the widow since her husband was killed and spreading conspiracy theories about his murder.
“Stop. That’s it. That’s all I have to say. Stop,” Kirk told CBS Editor-in-Chief Baris Weiss during a tell-all town hall on Wednesday, the outlet reported.
Kirk has been on a media tour pushing back on unfounded theories spread around the internet about her husband’s death — many comingfrom Owens, whom Charlie Kirk once considered a close friend.
In the weeks since Charlie Kirk was shot dead at Utah State University, Owens has spouted outrageous conspiracy theories about his death — including that Kirk was “betrayed,” that the federal government lied about the investigation, and even that Israel may have been involved in his death.
Owen has also attacked Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point USA, where she once worked.
False Flag via The Bulwark, Right Win Media: How Do You Solve a Problem Like Candace? Will Sommer, This week, the big story in right-wing media isn’t affordability, or a pending war with Venezuela, or even Secretary of State Marco Rubio banning Calibri from department documents for being woke. It’s—surprise!—Candace Owens, and how her former friends in MAGA media just can’t stop her from profiting from Charlie Kirk’s murder.
Today, I’m going deep on conservative media’s thorny Candace Owens Problem.
ERIKA KIRK WENT ON FOX NEWS on Wednesday to mark the three-month anniversary of her husband Charlie’s assassination.
But her goal wasn’t just to commemorate that tragic moment. It was to staunch the cataracts of conspiracy theories that have been promoted by Candace Owens, who’s earned tens of millions of YouTube views for her wild, unfounded speculation about Kirk’s death.
Without naming Owens, Erika Kirk, right, jabbed at an unnamed person making “hundreds and thousands of dollars every single episode going after the people that I love.”
“My message to them is to stop—to stop,” Kirk said, turning directly to the camera.
As the segment ended, Kirk held up her late husband’s new, posthumously published book and said its title, giving it an imperative intonation to reinforce the apparent message to Owens: “Stop, in the Name of God.”
If the message rang familiar that may be because two days earlier, podcaster Tim Pool had launched his own, somewhat less rousing salvo against Owens.
Fuming after an unidentified person allegedly fired shots at his rural West Virginia compound, Pool blamed Owens for injecting a new level of mania into MAGA media, even slamming his hand on his table for emphasis.
Describing in detail what he believed to be Owens’s own minimal security setup, Pool raged that he, by comparison, is forced to live in the middle of nowhere in West Virginia to deter assailants.
“Candace Owens is a fucking evil scumbag,” Pool said. “She is a degenerate cunt. She is burning everything down, and she’s gloating and smiling while she does it.”
Pool and Erika Kirk are parts of a broad new coalition coalescing on the right with the goal of stopping Owens and her conspiracy theories, many of which have targeted Charlie Kirk’s friends and the organization he founded, Turning Point USA. Their efforts are a testament to the tremendous clout Owens now wields. But timing is a major factor, too: TPUSA’s big annual AmericaFest conference in Phoenix is kicking off next week, and prominent conservative figures have been open that they fear the proceedings could go sideways because of Owens’s claims.
Personalities as disparate as pro-Israel commentator Ben Shapiro, antisemitic and white-nationalist podcaster Nick Fuentes, and even the Internal Revenue Service have all attempted to debunk Owens’s claims this month. The groypers and the evangelical tradmoms have united in distaste for her.
It’s hard to understate how broad the stop-Candace coalition has become. Conservative pundit Will Chamberlain dubbed her “the single most evil person” on the right. Multiple media figures, including one former member of the Pussycat Dolls, have suggested Owens may be a victim of demonic oppression. Alex Clark, a TPUSA host prominent in the Make America Healthy Again movement, has dubbed Owens’s ideas “psychosis” and “Q anon level mind rot.”
But so far, Owens has been undeterred. In the eyes of her fans, she is the only person asking real questions about the assassination. Efforts to debunk her are only further proof that there is a conspiracy to hide the true nature of Kirk’s death. And Owens can defend herself, too—she was unmoved by Pool’s diatribe, for example, quipping on her own show that the perpetually beanied podcaster was merely making a “display of estrogen.”
THE BACK-AND-FORTH has some parallels to how Democrats have long struggled to find the proper way to push back against Donald Trump, oscillating among direct confrontation, dismissiveness, mockery, and just trying to ignore him. And it raises a troubling question, in the modern media age, especially on the right: Can you stop a charismatic charlatan?
And Owens certainly has charisma, albeit with a heavy heap of recklessness added on top. Less than a week after Kirk’s death, she started putting forward conspiracy theories about the assassination, implying that Israel was somehow behind his murder. Numerous red herrings followed—that there were too many attendees at Kirk’s Utah Valley University event in military-esque maroon shirts, or that an Egyptian plane had been tracking Erika Kirk’s movements.
Since late November, though, the storyline she’s promoted has converged on the real star of this story: Owens herself. Owens is already being sued by French president Emmanuel Macron and his wife Brigitte over Owens’s claims that Brigitte is transgender and both Macrons are part of a centuries-old criminal cabal. In late November, Owens started to claim that, actually, it was a multinational team of assassins dispatched by the Macrons who were involved in Kirk’s death—and further, that the team was now out to kill Owens.
Owens claimed she notified the Trump administration about the attempts on her life. The FBI, the White House, and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence did not respond to my requests for comment. A Pentagon spokeswoman was oddly noncommittal when asked whether France, a NATO ally, was trying to murder a high-profile American media figure on American soil.¹
And Owens has lately turned her focus on yet another supposed culprit in the Kirk assassination: the organization he founded and led. Charlie Kirk (shown above in a file photo) was “betrayed by the leadership of Turning Point USA,” she tweeted last week. Owens also launched numerous attacks on specific TPUSA employees, claiming that one senior employee was having gay relationships with younger men and alleging that Charlie Kirk was concerned about how the organization’s finances were being managed. Last week, the Treasury Department took the unusual step, at Erika Kirk’s request, of issuing a letter confirming that TPUSA and its affiliates are not under IRS investigation.
Owens at first shied away from explicit attacks on Erika Kirk. (In fact, she said early on that the widow was the only person, aside from Owens’s own husband, who could tell Owens to stop looking into Charlie Kirk’s murder.) But after Erika Kirk slammed her on Fox News on Wednesday, Owens made clear on her own show that the widow would now be fair game, too. She compared Erika to Meghan Markle—a reviled figure on the right—and said “You don’t just get to be widowed into the position of chairman and CEO.”
“It feels elite,” Owens said of Erika Kirk’s refusal to answer theories about the assassination. “‘I don’t have time for the little people, I don’t have time for small-pocket donors.’”
ONE GROWING WORRY on the right now appears to be that Owens’s rantings won’t just harm TPUSA but could hurt Republicans’ chances in the midterm elections by depressing voter turnout. After Pool voiced this concern, Owens shrugged it off. “They killed Charlie Kirk in broad daylight, and we don’t care about your stupid midterms,” Owens said on a December 4 episode of her show. “We just don’t care.”
Geoffrey Martin, a far-right ideologue who posts on X under the name “Captive Dreamer,” approvingly posted a message from an unnamed friend blaming Owens for channeling “literally generational hatred towards the left” away from real political goals and toward momentum-killing speculation and nonsense.
“When you say ‘Who cares about the midterms,’ you’re saying ‘Who cares about Charlie’s vision?’” said conservative business-bro podcaster Patrick Bet David.
“Truly pathetic stuff,” moaned TPUSA contributor Savanah Hernandez. “We deserve to lose.”
OWENS’S CAVALIER ATTITUDE—and the audience she has grabbed with it—has been a green-light signal to others of that ilk. Provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos,.below left, has also begun raising questions about the Kirk assassination, including where he was buried. It prompted Erika Kirk to acknowledge in her Fox News appearance that decisions about her husband’s body are being kept private—an understandable disclosure, but 
one that could end up fueling even more conspiracy theories.
In an effort to stop Owens’s conspiracizing once and for all, TPUSA challenged her to an in-person broadcast meeting this coming Monday in Phoenix. But Owens is, for now, unwilling to appear in person.
The coordinated TPUSA backlash to Owens may not convince grassroots Republicans of the official FBI narrative of the shooting, but it could still serve to warn conservative media elites that associating with Owens will carry heavy penalties, much as Charlie Kirk did when he tried to blacklist Fuentes years ago.
If that’s the measure, there’s already been one victory. On Tuesday, Tucker Carlson made comments on comedian Theo Von’s show that seemed broadly supportive of Owens’s conspiracy theories. That was a surprising move, since Carlson is still set to speak at AmericaFest. But on Wednesday, just a few hours after Erika Kirk’s Fox News appearance essentially put Owens’s theories beyond the pale of acceptable discourse, Carlson walked back his support for Owens’s
IF THE TPUSA SHOWDOWN doesn’t demolish Owens, Fuentes—a one-time Owens fellow traveler who has so far stayed away from her conspiracy theories about Kirk’s killing—has vowed to “put [Owens] in a coffin, metaphorically speaking.”
“If they don’t do a good enough job, I think I’m going to have to step up,” Fuentes said on his show. “And I think I’m going to have to expose Candace Owens for what she really is.”
There are a lot of reasons to think this won’t work. For one, Owens may have a bigger audience than Fuentes, and almost all her other critics. For another, pushing back can be difficult because many of Owens’s conservative critics do not always operate in the realm of reality themselves. As Pool raged against Owens on Monday night, his guest was Gary the Numbers Guy, a sort of manosphere numerologist who provides astrology readings for macho far-right figures.
Pool asked Gary the Numbers Guy for his thoughts on Owens.
“I think Candace Owens is born in 1989, the Year of the Snake,” Gary said. “And 2025 is the Year of the Snake. And I think that’s why she’s Number 1 right now.”
Thanks, Gary. That explains it!
Horoscopes aside, there is another explanation for why Owens is causing so much trouble for MAGA right now: Charlie Kirk himself platformed her within TPUSA and at its conferences, and allowed her irrationality, antisemitism, and conspiracy theories to flourish within the Republican party.
Last week, Rochel Leah Boteach Taktuk, the daughter of celebrity rabbi Shmuley Boteach (himself a longtime Owens nemesis), dared to raise this uncomfortable point when she called Kirk’s alliance with Owens his “fatal flaw.” Now, she said, TPUSA was paying for Kirk’s mistake.
“When you don’t stop the evil immediately—call it out, say it’s wrong—that evil will eventually come to you, too,” she said. “And that’s what we’re seeing now.”
The Opposition via The Bulwark: Dems Struggle to Make Their Moderates Go Viral, Lauren Egan, Dec. 10-11, 2025. Searching for a candidate who can be Mamdani in the streets and Manchin in the seats.
With just a few weeks left in December, Democrats are eager to turn the page on 2025 and officially be in a midterms year. In a sign of their growing confidence, the campaign arm of the House Democratic caucus announced today that it was expanding its battleground map to include five new Republican-held seats. But being competitive in these red and purple parts of the country will, of course, require picking the right candidates. And that’s easier said than done. Today’s edition is a look at how some moderate operatives are trying to make sure that the most electable candidates emerge. Let’s get into it.
AS DEMOCRATS EARLIER THIS YEAR began mapping out their narrow path to a Senate majority, a group of moderate-minded members of the party looked at the field of expected candidates for the Texas Senate seat and were unimpressed.
There was nothing glaringly objectionable about Colin Allred, a former NFL player who outperformed Kamala Harris in his 2024 race against Sen. Ted Cruz. But they worried that he had already run and lost once. There was a lot of buzz about state Rep. James Talarico, but they believed he was too liberal to win statewide. They thought that Democrats would be better off with someone more conservative who came from outside the political arena and had more of an anti-establishment flair. With the possibility of MAGA extremist Ken Paxton winning the GOP nomination, and the Democrats’ hopes to flip the Senate hinging on states like Texas, the stakes were incredibly high.
And so, they took a hard look at Terry Virts.
On paper, he hit the benchmarks. A retired NASA astronaut, without the stench of having been in politics, he was able to combine a good bio, an outsider’s image, and a moderate approach. When Virts launched his bid for Senate in June, he did so with an ad slamming both political parties. He argued that Republicans were corrupt and Democratic leadership was “M.I.A.” He went after Talarico for his past comments about how “God is nonbinary.” Behind the scenes, some national strategists began offering campaign advice to Virts in hopes that a strong introduction could make him a serious contender for the nomination.
But Virts fizzled on stage. Rather than being a moderate force, he was awkward and stilted on the trail. His social media acumen was choppy with direct-to-camera videos that felt labored and inauthentic. He didn’t seem to have a clear vision for why he was running. On November 6, Virts announced he was dropping out of the Senate race and would instead run for Congress in a newly drawn Houston-area seat.
Since then, developments in the Texas Senate race have alarmed those moderate operatives even further. Allred, who was the closest ideologically to them, announced on Monday that he was going to run for the House instead. The same day, Rep. Jasmine Crockett, one of the party’s most viral firebrands, jumped in to the Senate race. All of which leaves voters with a choice between Crockett and Talarico in the March 3 primary.
Virts spelled out the paradox: “The key is not so much your politics as it is your ability to generate viral content. . . . It is a skill and a challenge to become viral,” he told me in a phone call. “The problem with Jasmine—and I love the takedowns she has of Trump; that makes me feel good—but that’s just not going to win in Texas.”
This saga isn’t unique to the Lone Star State: It’s part of a larger problem facing Democrats nationwide. Everyone from elected officials to junior strategists knows that the party must learn to dominate the attention economy and aggressively engage in online content wars. Yet the candidates who are best at doing so are often either more liberal or face more difficult paths to winning a general election.
Virts seemed great on the surface. But he lacked the skills to break through in the modern political ecosystem. On paper, virtually everyone in the party agrees, Crockett’s candidacy is a harder proposition in a Trump +14 state. But while she may not be a down-the-line progressive, as she is often portrayed, she is among the most social media–savvy members of the party in large part because she’s provocative.
This dynamic has proved challenging for the centrist wing of the party to confront. In my conversations with center-left officials and operatives across the country over the past few weeks, many argued that more moderate or non-traditional candidates would deliver majorities in the House and Senate. The average voter, they say, is more conservative than the national Democratic party cares to acknowledge. But as the 2026 elections near—and remember, the earliest primaries are less than three months away—they are trying to figure out not just how to recruit and run moderate candidates, but how to get them to connect with voters without shifting their ideology or altering their personalities in ways that could cause problems in a general election.
It’s a difficult balance. One seasoned party strategist advising a slate of moderate candidates told me that their clients tended to be more reserved and more scripted. In general, they had less panache and less comfort with self-promotion inherent to politicking. It wasn’t unusual for them to clam up as soon as a staffer pulled out a camera. The candidates this operative advised all wanted to know how to replicate the viral success of Zohran Mamdani’s New York City mayoral race, but it was tough to do with more risk-averse politicians. Their shyness (by politician standards) wasn’t helped by their ideological disinclination to embrace policy ideas—like government-run grocery stores or freezing rent—that would garner attention precisely because they’re beyond the usual political confines.
“I can’t tell you how many times I sit down with new candidates and the first thing they say is, ‘How do I make videos like Mamdani?’” said the operative, who asked I not publish their name to protect client relationships. “And the truth is that many of them can’t.”
But just because they can’t doesn’t mean they won’t try.
Over the past few months, a number of prominent centrist groups have attempted to recruit and train candidates who can combine ideological moderation with internet savvy. WelcomePAC, which supports Democrats in congressional districts Trump won, has interviewed nearly a hundred candidates around the country. Over hours of Zoom conversations and many trips to congressional districts, they’ve tried to find moderates who are natural communicators and have a personality or story that can translate and even stand out in the modern media environment.
Adam Frisch, a former Colorado congressional candidate and director of electoral programs at WelcomePAC, told me that one way for moderates to break through was by finding a few heterodox positions and points of genuine disagreement with the Democratic party that they could talk about. One of the first questions he asks prospective candidates is, “What about the Democratic party drives you crazy?” And if they don’t have a good answer, “they’re probably not what we’re looking for.”
“We’re trying to find people that authentically, sincerely have some fire in their belly,” Frisch said. “We’re not going to get firebrands, but we can get bold and aggressive.”
Frisch said he can usually tell after just a ten-minute conversation whether someone has the “anti-establishment fighter mentality” that he believes is needed to win. If the campaign manager does most of the talking, it’s an immediate red flag. They try to make gut judgments about whether the candidate in front of them is someone who could be handed a microphone and speak without any notes.
“You can get attention by telling your story and doing it really well. And there are candidates across the country—Jamie Ager, Sarah Trone Garriott, Cait Conley in New York, I could go on—who are really good at this,” said Andrew Mamo, a Democratic strategist who works with a wide range of candidates, including some backed by WelcomePAC. “It is not just owned by the left to be dynamic and compelling online or in person.”
But the uncomfortable reality is that moderate-minded operatives might be searching for unicorns that simply don’t exist. After interviewing candidates for the Democratic primary for the special congressional election in Tennessee’s 7th district, WelcomePAC decided not to get involved. They were not convinced that any of the moderates in the race had the juice. State Rep. Aftyn Behn, a progressive organizer, ended up winning the primary and losing the general election.
The reaction to that race has been mixed, with some party members celebrating Behn’s performance in a loss and others bemoaning that more ground could have been made up had the candidate been more moderate. For the latter, the fundamental question remains whether you align with the values of your district, and not so much whether you can do that and still go viral. After all, being too online has its downsides, too.
“It’s a mixed bag. I think there’s probably a lot that Ms. Behn would like back from her onlineness,” said Matt Bennett, a vice president at the center-left group Third Way, referring to past comments Behn made (such as supporting defunding the police and calling Tennessee a “racist” state).
“Tell me a viral moment from either New Jersey or Virginia,” Bennett added. “I can’t name them. And both [Mikie Sherrill and Abigail Spanberger] beat the living shit out of their opponents. . . . Fighting the last war is very dangerous in politics and reaching for viral moments can be a mistake.”
Leave a comment🫏 Donkey Business:
— Rahm Emanuel, a potential 2028 candidate, posted a video on Tuesday calling for children under 16 to be banned from social media, mirroring a law in Australia that went into effect this week. “When it comes to our adolescents, it’s either going to be adults or the algorithms—one of them is going to raise the kids. And I think we need to help the parents,” Emanuel said in the video. “Our kids are way too vulnerable. It’s too addictive, too alluring.”
I wrote last week about how Democratic leaders are becoming more aggressive against powerful tech companies, believing that the economic and cultural issues surrounding AI will dominate our politics in the coming decades. Emanuel is marking himself as a leader of that trend by putting out specific policy ideas.
— In even more wonky corners of the party, Democratic leaders are also debating what a compelling policy response to AI could look like. Bharat Ramamurti, who was deputy director of the National Economic Council in the Biden White House, posted a Substack article this week arguing that Americans value work and policymakers should “spend more time exploring what a workable jobs guarantee program could look like” over other policy solutions for potential job loss, like universal basic income.
New York Times, How a Manosphere Star Accused of Rape and Trafficking Was Freed, Megan Twohey and Isabella Kwai, Dec. 11, 2025 (print ed.). Barred from leaving Romania, Andrew Tate courted powerful figures on the American right, from Tucker Carlson to Barron Trump. Then an extraordinary order let him go.
Days before Donald J. Trump’s return to the White House, Andrew Tate got some good news.
Mr. Tate and his brother, Tristan, swaggering influencers in the so-called manosphere, had been under criminal investigation in Romania since 2022, accused of coercing women into pornography. Andrew was also accused of rape and of having sex with and beating a 15-year-old. The brothers, American and British citizens, had been barred from leaving Romania while prosecutors built their case.
Now, in a Jan. 14 text message, Mr. Tate indicated that help was on the way.
“I had word from The Trump admin that theyre on top of things,” Mr. Tate wrote to someone close to him, in a message reviewed by The New York Times. “Ive been told ill be free soon but Trump needs to see me in Miami,” he added.
The next month, an extraordinary order came down from the highest levels of the Romanian government, a Times investigation found. The prosecutors were told to find a compromise with the Tates. Despite their misgivings, they lifted the travel restrictions, a move that Romania’s prime minister thought would appease the Trump administration.
“We’re massively back,” a grinning Mr. Tate announced in a video recorded for his followers on Feb. 27, as a private plane whisked the brothers to Florida.
Their arrival in the United States opened a rare rift among conservatives and raised suspicions over whether the White House had intervened. The Times found that support from Trump administration officials played a crucial role.
Interviews with dozens of people in Romania, the United States and Britain, as well as a review of hundreds of pages of court documents and private messages, offer the fullest account yet of how the Tates rose from a fringe corner of the internet to become a cause célèbre on the right. The brothers’ release from Romania was the culmination of a yearslong effort by Andrew to forge alliances with Mr. Trump’s advisers and family members.
The Tates have helped propel a brazenly chauvinistic movement around the world, even as they racked up allegations of human trafficking and physical violence in multiple countries. They deny criminal wrongdoing. But Andrew, 39, and Tristan, 37, have boasted about recruiting women to make lucrative sexual content, and have sold courses teaching young men how to follow in their footsteps.
New York Times, Tony Dokoupil Is Named Anchor of ‘CBS Evening News,’ Michael M. Grynbaum, Dec. 11, 2025 (print ed.). He replaces John Dickerson and Maurice DuBois in one of the most high-profile decisions of Bari Weiss’s early tenure as the network’s editor in chief.
CBS News on Wednesday named Tony Dokoupil, one of the hosts of its morning show, as the next anchor of the “CBS Evening News.”
His appointment is the first significant shake-up at the broadcast news division under its new editor in chief, Bari Weiss, an opinion journalist who entered the job with little background in television news.
“CBS Evening News” is the network’s flagship nightly newscast, drawing several million viewers each night, although it lags its competitors at ABC and NBC. Mr. Dokoupil, 44, is set to replace the dual-anchor team of John Dickerson and Maurice DuBois, both of whom have said they are leaving the network.
“We live in a time in which many people have lost trust in the media; Tony Dokoupil is the person to win it back,” Ms. Weiss said in a statement on Wednesday. “That’s because he believes in old-school journalistic values: asking the hard questions, following the facts wherever they lead and holding power to account.”
Ms. Weiss, who founded the independent news and opinion site The Free Press shortly after she quit the Opinion section of The New York Times, began her job at CBS in October. She was hired by David Ellison, the billionaire who acquired CBS’s parent company, Paramount, this year. Paramount made a hostile takeover bid for Warner Bros. Discovery, the parent of CNN, on Monday.
Reshaping the “Evening News” has been on Ms. Weiss’s agenda, and she previously mused about the idea of hiring the Fox News anchor Bret Baier to take up the anchor chair. (Mr. Baier is on contract at Fox through the end of 2028.)
Mr. Dokoupil is a veteran TV journalist who joined CBS as a correspondent in 2016. (He is married to the MS NOW anchor Katy Tur.) He is also a keen student of television history, and on Wednesday he called “Evening News,” the former home of Walter Cronkite and Dan Rather, “the oldest, boldest, most storied, battle-scarred show in television news.”
“It’s a really important show at an important time,” he said as his “CBS Mornings” co-hosts, Gayle King and Nate Burleson, toasted his new job on Wednesday’s program.
Ms. Weiss is a skeptic of old-line news organizations, and an incident last year involving Mr. Dokoupil, before she joined the network, led to some of her loudest criticisms of CBS News.
U.S. Law, Courts, Crime, Justice
Emptywheel, Analysis: Donald Trump Will Piss Away the Western Order Investing in Jared Kushner’s Imagined Business Savvy, Emptywheel (Marcy Wheeler, right), Dec. 11, 2025. Throw enough goodies at my son-in-law (above right) and I will betray Europe, Donald Trump seems to be saying. And that's all it took.
It is just over nine years to the day since Jared Kushner naively asked Russian Ambassador Sergei Kislyak to use Russian secure facilities to communicate in such a way that US spies wouldn’t find them (shown below).
President Trump hosts Russian diplomats Sergei Lavrov, left, and Sergei Kislyak, right, in a White House meeting in May 2017 from which Western news media were blocked from attending but which Russian media promoted, as in this photo via the Russian government's Tass outlook, as evidence of Russia's warm relations with the then-incoming U.S. president.
As summarized by the Mueller Report (authored by then Special Counsel Robert Muellar, right)
:
Kushner went forward with the meeting that Kislyak had requested on November 16. It took place at Trump Tower on November 30, 2016.1139 At Kushner’s invitation, Flynn also attended; Bannon was invited but did not attend.1140 During the meeting, which lasted approximately 30 minutes, Kushner expressed a desire on the part of the incoming Administration to start afresh with U.S.-Russian relations.1141 Kushner also asked Kislyak to identify the best person (whether Kislyak or someone else) with whom to direct future discussions—someone who had contact with Putin and the ability to speak for him.1142
The three men also discussed U.S. policy toward Syria, and Kislyak floated the idea of having Russian generals brief the Transition Team on the topic using a secure communications line.1143 After Flynn explained that there was no secure line in the Transition Team offices, Kushner asked Kislyak if they could communicate using secure facilities at the Russian Embassy.1144 Kislyak quickly rejected that idea.1145
Shortly after Kushner indicated his enthusiasm for back-channel discussions that US spies couldn’t find, Sergei Kislyak threw Sergey Gorkov at him — someone who would dangle financial goodies that would require overturning sanctions to collect, someone functionally analogous to Kirill Dmitriev.
The accounts from Kushner and Gorkov differ as to whether the meeting was diplomatic or business in nature. Kushner told the Office that the meeting was diplomatic, with Gorkov expressing disappointment with U.S.-Russia relations under President Obama and hopes for improved relations with the incoming Administration.1157 According to Kushner, although Gorkov told Kushner a little bit about his bank and made some statements about the Russian economy, the two did not discuss Kushner’s companies or private business dealings of any kind.1158 (At the time of the meeting, Kushner Companies had a debt obligation coming due on the building it owned at 666 Fifth Avenue, and there had been public reporting both about efforts to secure lending on the property and possible conflicts of interest for Kushner arising out of his company’s borrowing from foreign lenders.1159)
In contrast, in a 2017 public statement, VEB suggested Gorkov met with Kushner in Kushner’s capacity as CEO of Kushner Companies for the purpose of discussing business, rather than as part of a diplomatic effort. In particular, VEB characterized Gorkov’s meeting with Kushner as part of a series of “roadshow meetings” with “representatives of major US banks and business circles,” which included “negotiations” and discussion of the “most promising business lines and sectors.”1160
It’s all there in the Mueller Report, plain as day: From the very start Jared Kushner planned to use his role in Trump’s White House for his own benefit. It was in the background of his dealings with Mohammed bin Salman, who has domesticated him since. It was the plan for Russia, too, until Mike Flynn’s shitty OpSec scuttled the plan.
Even in the first iteration of this fraud, Jared was hiding what he was doing from the Secretary of State — at that point Rex Tillerson.
And then Kirill Dmitriev picked right up where he left off eight years earlier, finding the weak venal levers for Trump and, ultimately, Jared. The plan didn’t succeed in February. It came closer but didn’t succeed in August. In November, once Dmitriev finally got Kushner on board, it seems to be succeeding.
It’s all worth revisiting again given this important (but nauseating) report from WSJ– one they themselves suggest is the follow-up to their report, Make Money Not War: Trump’s Real Plan for Peace in Ukraine.
The way the Russians succeeded in getting Trump to sell out Ukraine and the West (and I promise you, Trump has no fucking clue the ramifications of this and probably doesn’t give a fuck anyway) was by taking the $300 billion seized by Europe as punishment for their invasion of Ukraine — money Europeans were hoping to use to arm Ukraine — and instead used it to bribe Trump, effectively.
The Trump administration in recent weeks has handed its European counterparts a series of documents, each a single page, laying out its vision for the reconstruction of Ukraine and the return of Russia to the global economy.
The proposals have sparked an intense battle at the negotiating table between America and its traditional allies in Europe. The outcome stands to profoundly alter the economic map of the continent.
The U.S. blueprint has been spelled out in appendices to current peace proposals that aren’t public but were described to The Wall Street Journal by U.S. and European officials. The documents detail plans for U.S. financial firms and other businesses to tap roughly $200 billion of frozen Russian assets for projects in Ukraine—including a massive new data center to be powered by a nuclear plant currently occupied by Russian troops.
Another appendix offers America’s broad-strokes vision for bringing Russia’s economy in from the cold, with U.S. companies investing in strategic sectors from rare-earth extraction to drilling for oil in the Arctic, and helping to restore Russian energy flows to Western Europe and the rest of the world.
[snip]
If the U.S. vision prevails, it would override Europe’s own plans to shore up Ukraine’s wartime government and further cement Russia’s economic isolation. The result is what several officials described as a frenzied race to move ahead before the U.S. imposes its own arrangements.
U.S. officials involved in the negotiations say Europe’s approach would quickly deplete the frozen funds. Washington, on the other hand, would tap Wall Street executives and private-equity billionaires to invest the money and expand the amount available to invest. One official involved in the talks said the pot could grow to $800 billion under American management. “Our sensibility is that we really understand financial growth,” the official said.
On Wednesday, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky said he had held productive conversations with the investment firm BlackRock’s chief executive, Larry Fink.
The U.S. negotiating team sees shared economic activity and energy interdependence as the cornerstone of its business-for-peace philosophy: Ukrainian data centers would draw power from the currently Russian-occupied Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant, Europe’s largest, for example.
Some European officials who have seen the documents said they weren’t sure whether to take some of the U.S. proposals seriously. One official compared them to President Trump’s vision of building a Riviera-style development in Gaza. Another, referring to the proposed U.S.-Russia energy deals, said it was an economic version of the 1945 conference where World War II victors divvied up Europe. “It’s like Yalta,” he said.
Just as pitching Trump on a Riviera where millions of Gazans once lived, Bibi Netanyahu solicited Trump’s assistance in genocide, so has Dmitriev convinced Trump to sell out the Western order by turning the nuclear plant they stole into fuel for a data center.
As Judd Legum, right, lays out, this is all happening via a guy, Jared, effectively serving as an agent of the Saudis.
Kushner is engaged in activities that can only be conducted by government officials. The Logan Act bars private citizens from engaging in negotiations with foreign governments without authorization. Kushner is acting in an authorized capacity, under Trump’s direction, and that creates a host of legal issues.
As a de facto SGE with substantial authority, the Foreign Emoluments Clause of the Constitution prohibits Kushner from accepting “any present, Emolument, Office, or Title, of any kind whatever, from any King, Prince, or foreign State.”
Since leaving the White House in 2021, Kushner has raised at least $4.8 billion for Affinity Partners, his private equity firm. Nearly 99% of Affinity Partners’ funding comes from foreign sources. The largest investment, $2 billion, came from the Public Investment Fund of Saudi Arabia (PIF).
The Saudi government pays Kushner 1.25% of its investment, or $25 million annually. Other investors, including the governments of Qatar and the United Arab Emirates (UAE), pay annual fees of up to 2%. As of September 2024, Affinity Partners had collected $157 million in fees, 
mainly from Middle Eastern governments.
Kushner is continuing to collect these fees as he serves in a top foreign policy role for the Trump administration. This is precisely the kind of behavior the Foreign Emoluments Clause was designed to prevent.
See also Legum’s assessment of Jared’s role in Paramount’s effort to buy Warner using foreign (and Jared’s) money.
Horse trading away a half century alliance is bad enough.
But remember: These people are horrible businessmen. There’s no sign that Jared has any competence to judge these deals on the merits. He’s not a competent businessman, he’s a captured one.
And Trump was vastly more successful as a businessman when reality TV show producers controlled the plot than he every was IRL.
Throw enough goodies at my son-in-law and I will betray Europe, Donald Trump seems to be saying.
And that’s all it took.
Emptywheel, Analysis: DOJ Withheld Proof They Knew Their Assault of LaMonica McIver Was “Bad” before They Charged Her, Emptywheel (Marcy Wheeler, right), Dec. 9, 2025. DOJ withheld Signal texts showing that before DHS started claiming that LaMonica McIver had assaulted two DHS guys, they had circulated video observing that their own actions look "bad."
Today was a big day in New Jersey. It was the day that both Congresswoman LaMonica McIver, left, and DOJ had to submit 
supplemental fillings in McIver’s case about whether the second of three charges against her fit entirely within her duties of oversight as a Congressperson.
It was also the day after Alina Habba finally gave up play-acting as US Attorney in the wake of the Third Circuit ruling that such play-acting was unlawful, something that sane-washing journalists inaccurately called a resignation.
Indeed, the most interesting thing about the government’s response was that it was signed by the guy, Phillip Lamparello, Pam Bondi installed to oversee criminal matters as part of her contemptuous refusal to permit a US Attorney be appointed in a legal manner (which may be why Todd Blanche remains on these filings, because this is still bullshit).
Otherwise, that motion complained that, “the Defendant had not included among her exhibits the video footage that most clearly depicted the events described in Count Two.” It argued that physical contact initiated by ICE was just a continuation of what happened outside the gate.
The Defendant’s actions as alleged in Count Two were simply the continuation of her actions in Count One, albeit with a different individual being subject to her ongoing efforts to interfere with the Mayor’s arrest.
And it argued that when ICE assaults members of Congress it still must be treated as an assault on ICE unprotected by Speech and Debate.
The Government respectfully asserts that any assault upon a federal officer should qualify as an act that is “clearly non-legislative” given that such an act is clearly an “illegitimate activity.” And it would be clearly non-legislative whether the arrest that triggered the assault took place outside the Security Gate or inside of Delaney Hall.
By contrast to the government’s terse 9-page response, McIver’s 19-page supplemental brief cites ten videos and two sealed Signal chats.
2. Exhibit X is a true and correct copy of a signal chat produced by the U.S. Attorney’s Office as part of a folder titled USA-000353, including participants from DHS and HSI. This exhibit will be filed under seal pursuant to a protective order signed by the parties and entered by the Court. See ECF No. 38.
3. Exhibit Y is a true and correct copy of a signal chat produced by the U.S. Attorney’s Office as part of a folder titled USA-000334, including participants from HSI. This exhibit will be filed under seal pursuant to a protective order signed by the parties and entered by the Court. See ECF No. 38.
Most of McIver’s filing conducts a second-by-second analysis of the video, showing that when she got back inside the gate she immediately headed towards the facility and not to where Mayor Baraka was being arrested without probable cause.
But a footnote describes one of the things in those Signal chats (another appears to have been notice that McIver and her colleagues said they were there to conduct oversight).
It wasn’t until November 26 — almost two weeks after Judge Jamel Semper ruled on McIver’s immunity bid — that DOJ turned over texts copying this video, observing that it looked bad.
5 The Spotlight News video came to light during the course of supplemental briefing only because it was referenced in a May 9, 2025, text message that the government finally turned over on November 26, 2025. HSI special agents exchanged the video in that May 9 conversation, where the agents also acknowledged that the evidence in the video was “bad.” Ex. Y at 2-3. The prosecution team therefore clearly knew about the text messages (and thus the video) when disclosures were due in July.
McIver’s lawyer, Paul Fishman, says he will address this delayed discovery in a follow-up letter.
Inexplicable delays in the government’s discovery productions mean that the record continues to be developed.1
1 Congresswoman McIver will detail these shortcomings in a forthcoming letter to the Court.
But the implication of this is clear.
DOJ was never going to turn over these discussions — conducted on Signal — until Judge Semper ordered this supplemental briefing. They were sitting on evidence that shows that before DHS first started calling McIver’s actions an assault on May 10 (McIver had to ask to have these Tweets taken down, but the timeline is in her motion to do so), they had shared video noting that their own actions looked bad.
Over and over this year, DHS has assaulted opponents of ICE and then charged them for it. And these Signal texts sure seem to support that they knowingly did the same thing with Congresswoman McIver.
And then buried it in a discovery violation.
Update: At the status hearing pertaining to these filings, which was on November 17. McIver’s attorneys complained they were getting screen shots of Signal texts collected by Agents rather than texts with actual metadata from the posts.
Your Honor, I will just tee up that we have, you know, that there is certainly going to be an issue with respect to the government’s messages. We have received a partial production of the messages. I believe it is 54. And, you know, we are going to be, you know, we are preparing a letter to send to Your Honor. We have had some dialogue —
THE COURT: The text messages between the agents on the day in question?
MR. CORTES: That is correct, Your Honor. We have gotten 54 of them. They are a mish-mash of things of what appear to be Signal chats. Some of which seem like text messages. We have gotten a few emails.
But the broader issue I think, Your Honor, and just to preview it, obviously, I will put this in writing because I don’t — I want Your Honor to have the complete take, and, obviously, the government is going to have responses; but just as an overview, Judge, the messages that we have gotten, appear to be messages that the agents themselves searched for on their devices, applying search terms that the government tells us that they supplied to the agents, but they would not share with us the entirety of what those search terms were.
And then the agents took their devices and took photographs, screen shots of the messages that were responsive to the search terms that they applied. And then provided that to the government. And the government provided us a selection of those screen shots.
This led the AUSA to ask Judge Semper to provide clear guidelines of what they should be turning over, which led to this colloquy.
MR. CORTES: That I — One, the government, that the prosecutor, the A.U.S.A. should be the one conducting this search, applying the search term, applying, you know, conducting the review. Right? They should be the ones conducting the review.
THE COURT: Yes.
MR. CORTES: The other thing I would add is, if there is material before and after the visit that is dealing with how to deal with the members of the congress that are showing up or in the wake of the experience that is, that is, right, that is material, that deals with it, that deals with reactions, all of that as well.
THE COURT: Then I think we are in search term land.
MR. CORTES: Sure.
THE COURT: But for this period of time 12 and 5, Ijust think we are in, you know, what do the videos show, what do the text messages show land. And if there is something beyond that that you see, counsel, you are an officer of the court, I respect whatever representation you put before me.
You can do your search terms on the other areas outside of the block that I’ve mentioned. If there are things that relate to the congressional delegation and the visit, procedures that would occur, obviously, I’m very focused on 527, so anything that relates to that, would be fair game.
But for right now, let’s just do it quick and dirty; 12 to 5. And then anything that floats from that, that you think needs individualized assessment, come to me. I’m here
So one explanation for the late disclosure of these messages are that the Agents were withholding them in their own searches.
Emptywheel, Analysis: Other Nations are Updating their Threat Assessments, Too, Peterr, Dec. 10, 2025. Denmark updated their annual threat assessment, and there's a new name on their list of threats and challenges. I'll give you 3 chances to guess who it is. Hint: one Danish academic analyst uses the analogy of a "painful divorce," saying this country is no longer "an eternal, reliable ally."
It’s not just the US updating its national threat assessments, in public and in private.
From the NYT:
Denmark’s military intelligence service raised concerns for the first time about the United States in its annual threat assessment, saying in a report released Wednesday that shifts in American policy are generating new uncertainties for Denmark’s security.
The report points to the United States’ use of tariffs against allies and its intensified activity in the Arctic, and raises many of the same concerns that European leaders have voiced about the direction of President Trump’s America-first foreign policy.
“The United States uses economic power, including threats of high tariffs, to enforce its will, and no longer rules out the use of military force, even against allies,” the report said.
More from the Danish news site Politiken (Firefox translation):
Particularly one specific sentence stands out in the annual threat assessment, where the Danish Defence Intelligence Service (FE) lists external threats and security policy challenges for Denmark.
And notably, it is not about Russia or China. For the first time, the intelligence service in the report titled ’Udsyn 2025’ also focuses on the United States under Donald Trump’s leadership.
»The US is now using its economic and technological strength as a means of power, even against allies and partners«, the main conclusion states.
In an interview with Politiken, the head of FE cites examples such as the threats and imposition of tariffs, the belligerence over Greenland (including US-Greenland talks that exclude Denmark), and attempting to make Denmark (and others) dependent on US technologies.
But with Donald Trump’s statements about wanting to take over Greenland, are you as a service then forced to be interested in the U.S.’s actions in the same way as you do with Russia and China?
»The U.S. has for many years been and remains our most important ally when it comes to our security. So we work closely with the U.S. and with the American services in several areas. That is no secret. It is also clear that we are concerned with how the U.S. acts and also have dialogue with the U.S. regarding American interests«.
But doesn’t it almost go without saying that if someone wants to take over part of Denmark’s territory, it is your job to keep track of it?
»There is no doubt that it interests us and falls within our task. What instruments we use, we do not comment on«.
Is the U.S. our friend or enemy?
»I think that is a political question. We do not focus on friends and enemies; our task is to look at what security policy challenges and threats Denmark faces«.Someone who presents security challenges and threats.
Politiken goes on:
According to Professor of International Politics Ole Wæver from the University of Copenhagen, it is remarkable that FE »finally« suggests that the U.S. and Europe are no longer two sides of the same coin. For Denmark, he describes it as a »painful divorce« because, compared to many other European countries, we have been »hyper-Atlantic«.
»One thing is that we cannot take for granted that the U.S. is our eternal, reliable ally when we need to counter a threat from Russia and China. The next is how to relate to the fact that the U.S. itself can be a threat. Not least in Greenland. If the service really delved into that question, they would need to write an entire chapter about it in Udsyn«, he says.
Those are not exactly the words any US ambassador or US Secretary of State wants to hear said about the US. The US poses challenges and threats like an ex-spouse, rather than being an eternal, reliable ally? Ouch.
[Let us pause to remember that Trump is the ex-spouse of not one, but two women. Post-Stormy Daniels, we can only speculate on the status of his relationship with wife #3. One can only imagine how much money it has cost Trump to minimize the challenges and threats posed by ex-spouses. But I digress.]
How close was this relationship before? It wasn’t that long ago that the NSA and the FE cooperated in tapping the phones of European leaders like Angela Merkel, and now it’s come to this.
Trump has taken the US relationship with the rest of the world from being the “Leader of the Free World” to “America First” to “America Against the World.” Lovely.
Perhaps Trump might understand this if I put it another way: We’re talking about the Ryder Cup, with Nukes. (And Trump will recall how the Ryder Cup without nukes turned out.)
More On U.S. Inflation, Markets, Jobs
Paul Krugman via Substack, Political-Economy Commentary: Of MAGA and Monetary Policy, Paul Krugman, right, Dec. 11, 2025. On interest rates, the fault lies not in r-star but in ourselves.
Yesterday the Federal Reserve cut the federal funds rate — the interest rate on overnight loans between banks, which the Fed effectively controls — by a quarter point. There are four things you should know about that cut:
· Although Donald Trump has been screaming at the Fed, demanding big rate cuts, there isn’t actually a compelling case for cuts right now
· On the other hand, this cut is unlikely to do any harm
· In fact, Fed policy over the next few months barely matters
· The important questions now are political: Will Trump destroy the Fed’s independence, and do to monetary policy what he has done to health policy — put it in the hands of charlatans and cranks?
Why do I say that there isn’t a compelling case for a rate cut? The Fed has a “dual mandate”: It’s supposed to seek both price stability and full employment. To fulfil this mandate as best it can, the Fed normally cuts interest rates when the job market is weak, raises rates when inflation is running hot.
Right now, however, the job market and the inflation rate are giving conflicting signals. Unemployment is somewhat elevated — 4.4 percent compared with an average of 4 percent last year — and other indicators, like the time it takes workers to find jobs, are showing weakness. On the other hand, inflation is running at around 3 percent, above the Fed’s target of 2 percent. So you can make the case either for or against yesterday’s cut.
Indeed, the Fed’s official statement about the interest rate decision highlighted the ambiguity, noting the risks on both sides and justifying its move with a guarded reference to rising “downside risks to employment.”
For the wonkishly inclined: We can get more specific about the dual mandate by invoking the Taylor Rule, devised by the economist John Taylor in the 1990s, which offers a formula for setting the fed funds rate based on unemployment and inflation. Or actually I should say Taylor Rules, plural, since there are a number of variants. The Atlanta Fed offers a “Taylor rule utility,” which lets you pick among the variants or roll your own. But most versions say that the current level of rates is more or less right. Here’s what one comparison looks like: A graph of a fed fund rate AI-generated content may be incorrect.
Source, version FOMCTaylor93UR
On the other hand, nobody thinks these estimates are precise, and as the Fed statement suggested, there are hints in the data that the labor market is weakening. So a 25 basis point cut is defensible too.
And none of this matters very much. Short-term interest rates, like the fed funds rate, have very little impact on the real economy.
And long-term rates, which matter a lot more than short-term rates, especially for housing, mostly reflect market expectations of Fed policy over the next few years, not the next few months. As a result, long-term rates and short-term rates can diverge. They can even move in opposite directions. The Fed began its current cycle of rate-cutting in September 2024. Since then the fed funds rate has come down significantly but the benchmark 10-year interest rate has gone up from a low of 3.6% to the current level of just under 4.2%: A graph of a stock market AI-generated content may be incorrect.
What’s that about? Because the Fed tries to fulfil its dual mandate, it normally tries to set interest rates neither too high, which can lead to unnecessary unemployment, nor too low, which can lead to excessive inflation. If you ask me, the Fed should call its target the “Goldilocks rate.” Sadly, however, it’s usually referred to, unpoetically, as r* or r-star.
R-star can’t be observed directly, only estimated. And what has happened since last year is that many estimates of r-star have been marked up, for at least two reasons. First, the tax cuts in the One Big Beautiful Bill will lead to larger budget deficits — no, tariff revenues won’t make up the difference, even if the Supreme Court lets Trump’s clearly illegal tariffs stand. And these deficits will put upward pressure on long-term rates. Second, the AI boom has led to huge spending by tech companies, especially on data centers, which also puts upward pressure on long rates.
So if the Fed continues to operate normally – that is, without political interference -- movements in r-star will be the main driver of future interest rates. In particular, long rates will come down if AI is a bubble and that bubble bursts.
But will the Fed continue to operate normally? Or will monetary policy, like so much else in America these days, end up being ruled by Donald Trump’s whims?
I wrote last week about Kevin Hassett, Trump’s likely pick as the next Federal Reserve chairman, whom I described as an “ideological DEI hire” who is intellectually and morally unqualified for the job. It turns out that I’m not alone in that assessment, although I may be using unusually blunt language. CNBC regularly surveys financial experts for their views on Fed-related matters. According to their latest survey, featured in the chart at the top of this post, almost all their experts believe that Hassett will get the job, but almost none of them think he should.
And even if Hassett doesn’t get the job, whoever does is almost certain to be totally subservient to Trump. And this will be a negative for the economy. First, if Trump succeeds in controlling monetary policy, he can exact a policy according to his whims, which are both incoherent and dangerous. He is demanding massive interest rate cuts even as he insists that the economy is A+++++ — in which case why does it need these cuts? Nor can we expect him to show proper concern about the inflationary consequences of big rate cuts given that he keeps claiming that overall prices are falling, which is simply false.
And second, even if Trump isn’t able to capture full control over monetary policy through his pick for Fed chair, the effects will still be negative. Because as I pointed out in my critique of Hassett, in times of crisis the Fed chair has to be capable of showing leadership and gravitas, as well as garnering trust. Given that the Fed’s future task has been made especially difficult by Trump’s chaotic policies, higher-than-desired inflation, a weakening job market, very high future deficits, and a falling dollar, installing a Trump sycophant as Fed chair would mean facing any future crisis without any of the reserves of credibility that got us through the global financial crisis in 2008 and the Covid crisis in 2020.
So however this turns out, politics is now what matters for the future of the Fed — not whether we have one or two rate cuts in 2026.
Special note: At 11 today I’ll be doing a Substack live with the inimitable and incomparable Heather Cox Richardson.
New York Times, Focus on Discounts and Debt Consumer Prices Up November Job Cuts A.I. Bubble Fears, Colby Smith, Dec. 11, 2025. Trump Gets to Pick a New Fed Chair but a Divided Board Still Gets a Say.
President Trump wants significantly lower borrowing costs and has been clear that he expects his pick to replace Jerome H. Powell as chair of the Federal Reserve to follow through on that.
But intense divisions inside the central bank about the path forward for interest rates suggest that could be hard to deliver, setting up a challenge for whomever Mr. Trump selects for the top job.
The Fed voted on Wednesday to reduce interest rates by a quarter of a percentage point. It was the third straight cut since September, one that brought interest rates down to a range of 3.5 percent to 3.75 percent. Yet the decision was far from unanimous. Six of the Fed’s 19 policymakers expressed disapproval of the cut, indicating their preference to stand pat.
New projections for interest rates released by the central bank also highlighted how little consensus there appears to be about additional cuts next year. Seven officials forecast none, while eight wanted at least half a percentage point’s worth of cuts.
That left Mr. Powell to explain at a news conference on Wednesday that such a wide range of views was only natural at a time when the Fed’s goals of low, stable inflation and a healthy labor market are in tension. But that degree of dispersion could morph into a major impediment for the next chair, who is set to take over in May.
New York Times, Tariffs Shrank Trade Deficit in September, New Data Show, Ana Swanson, Dec. 11, 2025. U.S. imports and exports ticked up from lows the previous month when the president’s global tariffs went into effect, while the trade deficit continued to fall.
The Trump administration’s tariffs continued to weigh on trade in September, as imports grew just 0.6 percent from August to $342.1 billion, newly released data from the Commerce Department showed Thursday.
Exports rose 3 percent in the month, to $289.3 billion. Because exports grew by more than imports, the U.S. trade deficit shrank, in line with the Trump administration’s goals. The trade deficit in goods and services narrowed by more than 10 percent from the previous month, to $52.8 billion.Trade deficit
The data, which is compiled by the U.S. Census Bureau, showed trade recovering slightly from a sluggish month in August, when newly imposed tariffs weighed on trade. Mr. Trump has imposed sweeping tariffs on imports from countries around the world this year, including cars, metals and furniture, in an effort to encourage more U.S. manufacturing.
The recent drop in the trade deficit has moved the country toward accomplishing one of Mr. Trump’s biggest goals. The president has long seen the trade deficit as a sign of economic weakness, although plenty of economists have criticized his focus on the measure as overly simplistic or wrong. In September, the trade deficit in goods and services hit its lowest level since June 2020, when the United States was in the midst of the Covid pandemic.
But while the trade deficit has narrowed since tariffs were imposed, trade experts also caution against drawing too many conclusions from a few months of data. Trade patterns recently have been distorted by businesses’ efforts to avoid paying tariffs.
New York Times, The Fed Cut Rates Again but Deep Divisions Cloud Path Ahead, Colby Smith, Dec. 11, 2025 (print ed.). The central bank’s decision to lower interest rates for a third straight meeting was highly contentious, reflecting an internal divide that will likely limit how much borrowing costs will fall next year.
The Federal Reserve lowered interest rates by a quarter of a percentage point on Wednesday in a highly contentious decision. The split among policymakers suggested that the central bank may be done lowering borrowing costs for the time being unless there are clear signs that the labor market is weakening further.
The decision to cut for a third meeting in a row shifted interest rates to a new range of 3.5 percent to 3.75 percent. It marked the fourth straight vote that was not backed by all members of the 12-person Federal Open Market Committee, underscoring how fractured the central bank has become as it grapples with the risk of both rising unemployment and sticky inflation.
Stephen I. Miran, a member of the Board of Governors, opposed the decision in favor of a larger, half-point reduction. It is the third meeting in a row that Mr. Miran, who was tapped by President Trump to join the Fed in September and is on a temporary leave of absence from the White House, has dissented.
Dec. 10
Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: Voters Got Us Into This Mess. They’re Getting Us Out, Bill Kristol, Andrew Egger and Jim Swift, Dec. 10, 2025. Georgia on our minds.
At a speech in Pennsylvania last night, in the midst of a remarkably racist rant about Somali Americans and Democratic Rep. Ilhan Omar, Donald Trump said something interesting: “We had a meeting and I said, ‘Why is it we only take people from shithole countries,’ right? ‘Why can’t we have some people from Norway, Sweden?’”
He was recounting a controversy from 2018, during his first term—and admitting saying something he point-blank denied when it was first reported. “This was not the language used,” he tweeted at the time.
“Hey, this guy lies” isn’t exactly a huge revelation. But it’s a remarkable sign of how far things have deteriorated that the sort of bigotry even Trump used to try to walk back he now deploys as a rally applause line. Happy Wednesday.
Meidas Touch Network, News Roundups: Important Wednesday Updates After a Disastrous Night for Trump, Ben Meiselas, right, Dec. 10, 2025. As I watched the events of the past twenty-four hours unfold, from Donald Trump’s confused rally in a cramped Pennsylvania banquet hall to the frantic, closed-door meetings among MAGA lawmakers this morning, it became painfully clear that the Trump and his allies are running out of room to hide. They are scrambling, improvising, and blaming everyone but themselves as the consequences of their governance crash into reality.Subscribed
At the center of the panic is Trump’s continuous off-script claim that “affordability is a hoax,” a message so profoundly out of touch with the lived experiences of Americans that even his most reliable surrogates struggled to spin it. So Republicans convened an urgent, secret meeting on Capitol Hill in hopes of finalizing a health care plan they have promised since Trump’s first term. After hours of posturing, they emerged with the same announcement they have delivered for years: no plan, no vote, no answers, only vague assurances that something “may emerge soon.” When? In two weeks?
While lawmakers scrambled, Trump turned to his preferred tactic when cornered: attack someone else. This morning, he declared that Mexico must address its “water and sewage problem immediately,” an assessment that not only lacked diplomatic seriousness but ignored the fact that Mexico’s president had been in Washington only days earlier. Trump could have engaged in real diplomacy. He chose instead to rant online like the little keyboard warrior he is.
His other post was even more revealing. In a message dripping with authoritarian menace and psychological projection, Trump wrote that anybody who talks about his health declining or his physical and mental slow-down is engaging in seditious and treason. I don’t know about you, but this only makes me question his health more. At the MeidasTouch Network, we’ve made Trump’s health a major focus of our coverage, and the more he threatens us with prosecution over it, the harder we will dig to uncover the truth.
Meanwhile, MAGA’s internal fractures were on full display. MAGA friendly CNBC host Joe Kernen revealed that Speaker Mike Johnson is refusing to appear on his show until Republicans can produce a health care plan. Johnson instead held a brief and bizarre press conference to blame former President Biden for destroying the economy, despite every major economic indicator showing Trump inherited one of the strongest post-pandemic recoveries in the world. Falling inflation, record job creation, and durable consumer confidence were all handed to Trump like a turnkey operation. Trump chose to blow it up.
When Johnson was asked whether the long-promised Republican health care package would include new federal abortion restrictions, he all but confirmed it would. It was an admission that even after the national backlash to Dobbs, the Trump Johnson agenda is to take reproductive autonomy even further away from women.
Other MAGA stalwarts attempted to put a gloss on the chaos. Senator Joni Ernst claimed Trump was offering “a message of optimism,” a characterization hard to reconcile with his threats of treason charges and relentless culture-war attacks.
But voters are not buying it.
CNN’s analysis this morning showed a measurable shift of Latino voters back toward Democrats, driven by the reality of Trump’s mass detention plans and his administration’s increasingly explicit dehumanization of migrants. Miami’s mayoral race underscored the shift: Democrat Eileen Higgins became the first member of her party in thirty years to win the city’s top job. In 2017, fourteen of America’s fifty largest cities had Republican mayors. With Higgins’s victory, that number is now seven.
And in Georgia, Democrats flipped HD-121, a district Trump won by 12 in 2024 that was heavily gerrymandered to favor the Republican candidate.
Trump’s detachment from everyday economic pain was captured succinctly by Senator Bernie Sanders, who warned that if Trump’s “A+++++” economy grade were true, “God help us if we ever get to a B or C.” Across the country, families are receiving notices that their ACA premiums may double or triple. Grocery, housing, and education costs continue to rise. Nearly 60 percent of Americans are living paycheck to paycheck. Trump can declare victory on social media, but people know what they feel in their wallets. And his spiking of the football is only adding insult to injury.
Instead of addressing these crises, the Trump administration is rolling out two new proposals: forcing all foreign tourists to submit five years of their social media history, a policy more aligned with authoritarian surveillance states than democratic norms (not even nation’s like China do this), and installing pull-up bars and “micro-workout stations” in airports. It is difficult to imagine policy ideas more divorced from the urgent needs of the public. And just think of the chaos this will create as the World Cup comes to Los Angeles next year.
And then came the most telling deflection of all. Rather than confront drivers of the housing affordability crisis, such as a lack of affordable housing or private equity firms buying up the nation’s housing stock, Trump’s HUD secretary blamed immigrants, claiming “illegal aliens” are responsible for rising rents. HUD even launched a “crime hotline” encouraging Americans to report “illegal aliens” in public housing, a tactic pulled directly from the playbooks of regimes that rely on neighbor-against-neighbor suspicion.
The global ramifications of Trump’s behavior are becoming impossible to ignore. When Pope Leo XIV was asked about Trump’s new “peace plan” for Ukraine, he issued a rare public rebuke, warning that Trump’s rhetoric appears aimed at “breaking apart what I think needs to be a very important alliance” between the United States and Europe.
That is the theme running through every development this morning: a President openly threatening critics, undermining alliances, scapegoating the vulnerable, and ignoring the economic distress of millions, while the American people grow increasingly unwilling to accept it.
Here are couple of other stories on my radar:
More On U.S. Governance, Politics
President Trump delivers remarks promoted as advocating "Affordability" in Pennsylvania on Dec. 9, 2025 but instead focused on his boasts and grievances, including at ungrateful Americans who complain about him.
Paul Krugman via Substack, Economic Policy Commentary: Trump Says That You Are the Problem, Paul Krugman, right, Dec. 10, 2025. Everything is perfect. Why aren’t you grateful?
Trump's speech on combating inflation turns to grievances about immigrants : NPR
Last night Donald Trump gave an important speech on the economy in Pennsylvania — supposedly in a working-class area, although the actual venue was a luxury casino resort. The event was initially touted as the start of an “affordability tour,” the first of a series of speeches intended to reverse Trump’s cratering approvalon his handling of inflation and the economy. A number of news analyses suggested that he would use the occasion to blame Democrats for the economy’s troubles.
That was never going to happen. Trump did, of course, take many swipes at Joe Biden, as well as attacking immigrants, women and windmills. But to blame Democrats for the economy’s problems he would have to admit that the Trump economy has problems. And the speech was important because it revealed that he won’t make any such admission, and will continue to gaslight the public.
On Monday Politico interviewed Trump, asking him, among other things, what grade he would give the current economy. His answer: “A-plus-plus-plus-plus-plus.”
In fact, until very recently Trump wouldn’t even accept the reality that ordinary Americans don’t share his triumphalism. When Fox News’s Laura Ingraham asked him a month ago why people are anxious about the economy, Trump replied
"I don’t know they are saying that. The polls are fake. We have the greatest economy we’ve ever had."
Since then Trump and his minions seem to have come around to admitting that Americans are, in fact, unhappy with the state of the economy. But if the economy is A+++++, why don’t people see it? The problem can’t possibly lie with him — so it must lie with you. “The American people don’t know how good they have it.”
I put that line in quotes because it isn’t a caricature or a paraphrase. It is, in fact, literally what Scott Bessent, the Treasury secretary, said the other day:
We’ve made a lot of gains, but remember, we’ve got this embedded inflation from the Biden years, where mainstream media, whether it’s Greg Ip at the Wall Street Journal, toxic Paul Krugman at New York Times or former Vice Chair, Alan Blinder, all said it was a vibecession. The American people don’t know how good they have it.
Incidentally, I appreciate the personal plug. Trump has already called me a “deranged bum.” Now Bessent says I’m “toxic.” Give me a fake peace prize, and I’ll have all the honors anyone could ask for.
Anyway, I may not be a political strategist, but I don’t think “You’re all a bunch of ingrates” is a winning message. It was, however, really the only message Trump could deliver, given his utter lack of empathy or humility.
At this point I could bombard you with a lot of data showing that the economy is not, in fact, A+++++. But it isn’t a disaster area, at least not yet. So why are Americans feeling so down? The main culprit is Trump himself.
First, during the 2024 campaign Trump repeatedly promised to bring consumer prices way down beginning on “day one.” We’re now 11 months in, prices are still rising, and voters who believed him feel, with reason, that they were lied to. Last night Trump insisted that prices are, in fact, coming way down. Again, “Who you gonna believe, me or your lying eyes?” is a self-destructive political strategy.
Second, Trump would be in much better political shape right now if he had basically continued Biden’s policies, with only a few cosmetic changes. When he took office inflation was on a declining trajectory. Consumer sentiment was relatively favorable at the start of 2025. Americans were still angry about high prices, but the inflation surge of 2021-3 had happened on Biden’s watch and was receding into the past. My guess is that many voters would have accepted Trump’s claims that high prices were Democrats’ fault and given him the benefit of the doubt about the economy’s future if he had simply done nothing drastic and left policies mostly as they were.
Instead, he brought chaos: Massive and massively unpopular tariffs, DOGE disruptions, masked ICE agents grabbing people off the street, saber-rattling and war crimes in the Caribbean. Many swing voters, I believe, supported Trump out of nostalgia for the relative calm that prevailed before Covid struck. They didn’t think they were voting for nonstop political PTSD.
And there’s more to come. Health insurance costs are about to spike, because Republicans refuse to extend Biden-era subsidies. Inflation may pick up in the next few months as retailers, who have so far absorbed much of the cost of Trump’s tariffs, begin passing them on to consumers.
So the “affordability tour” is off to a disastrous start. And it won’t get better, because while Trump insists that the problem is you, it’s actually him. And he isn’t going to change.
CODA: Gaslight (1944 film classic).
New York Times, Trump Says Americans Are Doing Great, Even as Views on the Economy Sour, David E. Sanger, Updated Dec. 10, 2025. President Trump’s speech in Pennsylvania was meant to alleviate concerns about affordability. But he kept wandering off script and dwelling on his favorite targets, like immigration.
President Trump on Tuesday night gave the first of a series of speeches intended to alleviate Americans’ concerns about the cost of living, but spent most of the time mocking the term “affordability” and insisting that Americans were doing better than they had ever done before.
Speaking to an enthusiastic group of supporters in a casino in Mt. Pocono, Pa., Mr. Trump plunged immediately into the case that Americans, and Pennsylvanians in particular, were actually doing very well, gliding by the evidence about reduced spending power for the middle class.
In a winding presentation that ran for 90 minutes, he episodically talked about economic initiatives, but also wandered into discussions of shutting down immigration, at one point comparing the country’s sealed borders to North Korea’s.
He also boasted of saving U.S. Steel, which was sold to Nippon Steel, the Japanese giant, last summer under a deal that gave a “golden share” to the government and Mr. Trump an outsized voice in the running of the company.
The president repeatedly confused slowing inflation down with bringing down prices — which would be deflation, with its own risks. “Our prices are coming down tremendously,” he insisted, before wandering off topic. Later, he said that “inflation is stopped.” His own Bureau of Labor Statistics indicated that as of September, inflation was running close to 3 percent, almost exactly where it was at the end of the Biden administration.
Mr. Trump’s political advisers are clearly concerned that merely telling voters they are doing well could repeat a mistake made by Mr. Trump’s nemesis and predecessor, former President Joseph R. Biden Jr.
Mr. Trump came armed with a raft of statistics carefully selected to make his case, and blamed Mr. Biden for leaving him “the highest inflation in history.” But then he acknowledged that Susie Wiles, his chief of staff, told him recently, “We have to start campaigning, sir.” (Inexplicably, the president called Ms. Wiles “Susie Trump.”)
Mr. Trump was supposed to focus entirely on the economy, but he often ignored the script flashing before him and returned over and over again to his favorite targets.
He attacked transgender Americans, repeatedly blamed Mr. Biden for inflation and illegal immigration — “he’s a sleepy son-of-a-bitch who destroyed our country,” he said — and roused the crowd by demanding that Representative Ilhan Omar, the Minnesota Democrat, leave the country.
Later in the speech, he attacked electric cars and revived the call to “drill, baby, drill.” He praised himself for saving coal mining, even though coal mining jobs declined during his first term.
He brought with him a number of cabinet members, including Chris Wright, the energy secretary, and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, whose predecessors usually avoided showing up at heavily partisan events. When Mr. Trump introduced Mr. Bessent, he did not talk about Mr. Bessent’s economic initiatives, but instead said, to applause, “He is in charge of the investigation of Somalia and the billions of dollars they have robbed” from Minnesota.
“If they don’t go to jail, Scott Bessent is toast!” he later told the Treasury secretary, laughing.
Mr. Trump was not wrong about the scandal: Federal prosecutors have charged dozens of people with felonies, accusing them of stealing hundreds of millions of dollars from a government program designed to feed children during the Covid-19 pandemic. But the prosecutions were underway long before Mr. Trump seized on the topic.
He raised the possibility — without evidence — that Mr. Biden signed the appointments of members of the Federal Reserve board with an autopen, suggesting that he may argue that they are not legally in their posts.
New York Times, Live Updates: House Passes $900 Billion Bill That Would Put Trump’s Stamp on Military, Staff Reports, Dec. 10, 2025.
Defense bill: The House on Wednesday approved a $900 billion defense policy bill that would give U.S. troops a raise and codify much of President Trump’s national security agenda. It also seeks to curb his pullback from Europe and mandate more Pentagon consultation with Congress, including sharing unedited videos of attacks on suspected drug boats that officials have so far been unwilling to show lawmakers. The bill goes next to the Senate, which is also expected to approve it overwhelmingly, sending it to Mr. Trump for his signature. Read more ›
Gold card: The Trump administration launched a website that opens up applications for a “gold card,” an expedited visa that the federal government plans to sell for at least $1 million to visitors who provide a “substantial benefit” to the country. It costs a nonrefundable $15,000 processing fee, then $1 million to “receive U.S. residency in record time” and become lawful permanent residents. Read more ›
National Guard deployment: A federal judge said the Trump administration must end its deployment of California National Guard troops in Los Angeles. The Trump administration is expected to appeal the order, which was stayed until Monday. Read more ›
The Hill, Democrats flip Miami mayor’s office, winning control for first time in nearly 30 years, Caroline Vakil, Dec. 10, 2025 (print ed.). Democrat Eileen Higgins has flipped the Miami mayor’s office, defeating Republican Emilio Gonzalez (shown above in AP file photos) and marking the latest sign of the party’s momentum heading into next year’s midterms, according to Decision Desk HQ.
Higgins is the first Democrat to become mayor of Miami since 1997. She bested Gonzalez, a former Miami city manager who served on President Trump’s Homeland Security Department transition team, to succeed incumbent Mayor Francis Suarez (R). The race is technically nonpartisan.
The win is the latest boost for Democrats, who are coming out of better-than-expected elections in November and a strong showing in this month’s special House election in Tennessee. The party hopes that an energized base and a focus on issues like affordability will help them flip the House and possibly even the Senate in next year’s midterms.
Higgins and Gonzalez were both forced into a runoff after neither candidate was able to receive at least half the vote. Higgins, who has become known as “La Gringa,” received 36 percent support in the November election, while Gonzalez received close to 20 percent.
The Miami race attracted prominent figures from both sides: Former U.S. Ambassador to Japan Rahm Emanuel, former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg and Sen. Ruben Gallego (D-Ariz.) were some of the Democrats who campaigned or endorsed Higgins ahead of the runoff.
Meanwhile, Republicans including Trump, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and Sen. Rick Scott (Fla.) have endorsed Gonzalez in the race.
The city narrowly went for former Vice President Kamala Harris last year, but Trump flipped Miami-Dade County, which includes the city of Miami. One reason the race attracted attention is because Miami-Dade County is one example of the many blue and purplish areas where Trump made gains in 2024.
But the county is also important because of its Latino and Hispanic demographic, which make up 70 percent of the population. The president made impressive inroads with Latino and Hispanic voters last cycle. Harris narrowly won Latino voters by 5 points in November, according to exit polling from CNN — a far cry from the 33 points former President Biden won the demographic by in 2020.
But recent polling had suggested Latino voters were souring on the president, raising questions around how that might impact Republicans down the ballot.
Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: We the People, Bill Kristol, right, Dec. 10, 2025. “We the People.” It’s a grand phrase. But what, really, is one to think of them? Or to put it better, what is one to think of us?
On the one hand, you can be a firm, even an ardent supporter of Lincolnian “government of the people, by the people, for the people” without bowing unquestioningly to claims made on the people’s behalf. After all, it was Lincoln himself who in the 1850s fought against the allure of the slogan of “popular sovereignty” as a solution to the question of slavery expansion.
On the other hand, you can have a firm grasp of the deficiencies of public judgment without embracing the attitude of the Roman poet Horace: “Odi profanum vulgus”—“I hate the common crowd.” You can be willing to stand against popular sentiment without endorsing the supposed remark of Alexander Hamilton: “Your people, sir,—your people is a great beast.”
So which is it? Are the people the problem? Or the solution?
A little of both. But right now, I’m pro-people. They, not our elites, seem to be our best hope to save the American experiment in free government.
On November 4, voters in Virginia and New Jersey voted against Trump and Trumpism in gubernatorial contests, as did voters in Pennsylvania and Georgia in less high-profile races. Last week, in a special congressional election in Tennessee, popular support for Trumpism was markedly lower than it was a year ago.
And yesterday, in South Florida and northeastern Georgia, the public administered Trump’s party resounding defeats.
In its mayoral runoff election, for the first time in nearly thirty years, the city of Miami elected a Democrat as mayor. Eileen Higgins, the Democrat, defeated a Trump-endorsed Republican, Emilio Gonzalez, by 59 percent to 41 percent. A year ago, Kamala Harris defeated Donald Trump in the city by just a single point, 50 percent to 49 percent.
Meanwhile, Democrat Eric Gisler narrowly defeated Republican Mack Guest IV in a special election in the 121st state house district of Georgia. The district had been held by a Republican state legislator, and Trump carried it in 2024 by 12 points. Guest outraised Gisler, and was endorsed by the popular Republican Gov. Brian Kemp. But he couldn’t survive the anti-Republican wave.
So in repeated results over the last five weeks, we’ve seen Democrats running about ten points ahead of their 2024 results. Not coincidentally, an average of current polling shows Donald Trump’s approval at about 42 percent, almost ten points behind his approval when he was sworn in almost eleven months ago. (His net approval rating has fallen by some 24 points, from +12 to -12.)
God knows, there will be endless political zigs and zags over the next eleven months. All kinds of factors, local and national, will interact unpredictably. All kinds of events, big and small, will surprise us.
But it’s a pretty safe bet—maybe as safe as any in politics—that Trump’s approval rating will be a very good predictor of next November’s results. If Trump’s approval doesn’t rebound over the next year, Democrats should do well—or, to put it better perhaps, Republicans should do poorly. If Trump’s approval declines further, into the 30s, Democrats should do very well next November, and Republicans very poorly.
So the public is turning against Trump and his party. The political priority for the next year is to help them continue to do so.
I’ll add one lament: Our elites—from Republican senators to business big shots to reputable civic leaders—seem less willing than the people to turn against Trump. Among the elites, accommodation is still outstripping resistance. The acquiescence of the powerful and the cowardice of the fortunate in the face of Trumpism are pushing me to my own version of Horatian disgust: Odi timidos electos. I do kind of hate the cowardly elites.
But that’s a topic for another day. For now, let’s enjoy last night’s results. And let’s offer a tip of the cap to the American people.
U.S. Democracy -- And Trend To Dictatorship?
Democracy Docket, The greatest threat to democracy, Marc Elias, right, Dec. 10, 2025. 
For the last several weeks, I have been preparing for oral argument before the U.S. Supreme Court in a critical campaign finance case. Yesterday morning, I finally had the opportunity to stand before the nine justices and argue why the Republican Party’s lawsuit would undermine campaign finance law and facilitate corruption.
I will have more on that experience soon, but I hope this explains why you haven’t heard from me as much recently. Thank you for your support, patience and understanding.
Ever since Donald Trump took office earlier this year, we have watched our democracy pitch toward one crisis after another. One week, it might be the administration's abuse of the criminal justice system. The next, it’s the deployment of troops to our cities.
Over the last 11 months, however, one crisis has been ongoing. I have repeatedly warned that the Republican voter suppression and election-subversion machine continues to grind on.
It rarely breaks into national headlines, but its persistent attacks on free and fair elections serve as a constant hum in the background. It remains, in my opinion, the greatest threat to democracy because it is the gravest threat to free and fair elections.
Its most obvious manifestation this year has been the GOP’s effort to rig congressional maps to prevent voters from kicking them out of the House majority. Recognizing how deeply unpopular Trump is among voters, Republicans have waged a multipronged assault on fair districting.
This includes not only midcycle redistricting in states like Texas, Missouri and North Carolina, but also a legal strategy designed to make redressing racial discrimination verboten while elevating partisan considerations as a positive good. And as we watch state-by-state skirmishes, we must remember to keep a wary eye on the Supreme Court for a decision that could gut what remains of the Voting Rights Act and potentially flip a dozen or more seats.
But redistricting is only the tip of the iceberg: a symptom of a deeper pathology within a party committed to disenfranchising voters rather than persuading them. In another case headed to the Supreme Court for argument next spring, the Republican National Committee has targeted mail-in ballots. This war on mail-in voting is not new, but many might be surprised to learn that it remains under constant attack by Trump, his party and his supporters.
In many respects, all this pales in comparison to the Department of Justice’s obsession with collecting voter data on more than 175 million Americans — every person who has voted or registered to vote in recent decades. I have previously written about the DOJ’s demand that states turn over their full voter rolls. Democracy Docket reported that the DOJ sued eight states for this data, and last week it updated that reporting when the DOJ sued another six states — bringing the total to 14.
But aside from Democracy Docket and a handful of reporters and outlets, most legacy media have given this story short shrift. Donald Trump’s Department of Justice is seeking a full database of sensitive voting information on virtually every person who might vote in 2026 and 2028.
This includes full names, addresses, Social Security numbers and dates of birth. In some states, it includes a voter’s race. In most places, it also includes party registration, which elections a person has voted in, the method of voting they used, and whether they have moved. The DOJ could also learn whether a person’s ballot has previously been questioned, challenged or rejected, as well as whether they voted from overseas or while in the military.
MeidasTouch Network, Trump Accuses MeidasTouch of Treason, Ben Meiselas, right, Dec. 10, 2025. Donald Trump is accusing MeidasTouch of treason and wants us thrown in prison.
He is attacking us on social media for reporting on his declining physical and cognitive health and is saying our reporting constitutes treason. Donald Trump has ordered others at the White House to come up with a plan for how to shut us down on YouTube and other platforms. Just as when Trump blamed his criminal conviction on us “prejudicing the jury” against him in a formal court filing, he is now blaming MeidasTouch for ruining his presidency.
We are not backing down. We expect the death threats to escalate, and we’ve bolstered security. If he takes legal action, we are prepared to crush him on that front.
If he has Fox or other right-wing regime media run more hit pieces on us, we are prepared to respond as well. I don’t want to go into the full details of our responses since I don’t want to give our strategy away, since Trump has his team monitoring us each day. 
Suffice to say, our resolve to grow this network and expand rapidly has only been further motivated by Trump’s actions.
This year did not go as Donald Trump and MAGA planned. One of the main reasons for that was the rise of independent media, a movement that was led by the MeidasTouch Network. Trump is seeking vengeance and retribution on us. We will never back down!!
We expect more attacks by Trump and his regime as they try to shut us down. We need your help more than ever as we approach this new year. One of the best ways to help is by subscribing to this Substack now.
Talking Feds Substack, Legal Commentary: The Supreme Court’s Faint-Hearted-Embrace of the Unitary Executive Theory, Harry Litman, right, with Steve Vladeck, Dec. 10, 2025. 
The seismic impact of Trump v Slaughter on constitutional law and American lives.
With the oral argument in Trump v. Slaughter and other big legal developments of the last few days, it was time to connect again with Steve Vladeck, left, Georgetown Law professor and CNN Supreme Court analyst. As always with Steve, the discussion was chock-full of key insights absent from other coverage, thoughtful predictions about where the decision 
will leave the country, and some funny moments.
We explored how the conservative supermajority is reaching the peak of a several-year project to apply the unitary executive theory to strike down modest congressional control of the President’s removal authority. But the Court seems poised to shrink from a complete application of the theory, which reveals that the cases are more politically driven than the Court lets on. In any event, the expected decision will again sharply arrogate to Trump the power to corrupt administrative regulations at his whim while disempowering Congress’s efforts to rein in political capture of agencies.
For anyone trying to understand the Court’s trajectory—and the stakes for the future of federal law—Steve’s analysis is essential, clear, and sobering. You can find more of his work on his vital Substack, One First, and his New York Times bestselling book, The Shadow Docket: How The Supreme Court Uses Stealth Rulings To Amass Power And Undermine The Republic.
The Triad via The Bulwark, Political Commentary: Trump’s Wager and the Authoritarian Shift, Jonathan V. Last, above, Dec. 10, 2025. Is Trump getting weaker, or is the authoritarian danger increasing? Yes.
Today I want to unpack a something from TNL yesterday.
Tim and Sarah think Donald Trump is weakening, quickly. Bill agrees. They point to his declining popularity, high-profile Republican defections, and the likelihood Democrats could win some federal power next year.
I want to grant all of that. Yes, Trumpism might be falling apart before our eyes. But there’s another possibility.
What if Trump is executing the Authoritarian Shift?
Many authoritarian regimes begin as popular movements.¹ They win a couple elections, ride waves of discontent, and seize power through legitimate, or at least quasi-democratic, means.
It’s only later that they become authoritarian. After gaining power the aspiring authoritarian assaults the democratic system itself, seeking to remove the need for popular support. The regime tames the legislature, sidelines or steamrolls the courts, co-opts the business class, exerts control over the media and universities, and begins nibbling away at electoral machinery.
At some point the regime has consolidated so much power that its popularity no longer matters. The Authoritarian Shift is the process of trading popular legitimacy for structural control.
Hungary's strongman leader Viktor Orbán and his admirer and friend, Donald J. Trump (File photo).
Sometimes this process takes years, as it did for Viktor Orbán in Hungary. Sometimes it takes weeks, as it did for Adolf Hitler in Germany.
Whatever the case, the end result is a regime hated by its subjects but wielding so much internal power that it cannot be displaced by ordinary democratic means. If you wish to see living examples of regimes that successfully executed the Authoritarian Shift, look to Orbán, Alexander Lukashenko, left, Vladimir Putin, and Nayib Bukele [one of whose prisons and its prisoners are shown below).
Members of the "Mara 18" and "MS-13" gangs are seen in custody at a maximum security prison in Izalco, Sonsonate, El Salvador, on Sept. 4, 2020 (AFP Photo by Yuri Cortez via Getty Images).
I stipulate to all of the points Sarah, Tim, and Bill make about Trump’s popular decline. His approval numbers are way down. Republicans keep losing elections. There are schisms within MAGA. All of this is very real.
But there have been . . . other developments.
The giant media companies that control television and internet platforms have made their peace with Trump.
In some cases the oligarchs who run these companies—Musk (shown above left), Zuckerberg, the Ellisons—have formally allied with Trump.
In other cases—Disney, Bezos—they have merely tried to placate him by becoming more favorable to him or making friendly gestures toward his family.
Elsewhere in the economy, major businesses from Apple to OpenAI have openly courted favor with Trump.
Maybe Trump’s Authoritarian Shift will fail. I don’t know. But the regime is trading popularity for institutional power. Sometimes these trades work.
2. The Other Side
At the same time, I don’t want to overstate what’s going on. The group CIVICUS is about to release a report in which it downgrades America’s democratic freedom index from “narrowed” to “obstructed.”
That sounds bad. And it’s clear that civic freedom has been degraded in America this year: Look at how protesters—including clergy members and opposition political candidates—have been treated. Look at how sitting members of Congress have been denied access to federal facilities that they are required by law to be allowed into.
But I’m not sure we should take this report at full face value.
First, CIVICUS downgraded France and Germany in the exact same way—from “narrowed” to “obstructed.” The report blames these downgrades on German and French laws that obstructed pro-Palestinian activists and protests in the last year. Whatever real harms these laws may have caused—and I know very little about the subject—it is difficult to believe that this is substantially similar to the ongoing authoritarian attempt in the United States.
Any objective evaluation that groups the slide of 2025 America with the problems in 2025 France and Germany is suspect.³
My point here is that we should be clear-eyed without overstating either Trump’s weakness or the precariousness of our position.
One final thought: People often retreat into saying that democracy hasn’t fallen yet. That we still live in a liberal society with the rule of law. We say this out loud to stave off defeatism and remind ourselves that all is not lost.
This is important to remember. And it’s true. But it’s not true for everyone currently living in America.
Some people in America are already living under conditions that resemble dictatorship.
If you are a law-abiding non-citizen resident who speaks out of turn, the regime can arrest you on the street and attempt to deport you.
If you are an American citizen, masked agents of the state are now permitted to demand to see your papers and to assault and detain you based on the color of your skin or the language you speak
This regime may sound familiar: We are witnessing the despotism of the Jim Crow South being recreated all across America. If you or I are not personally feeling those effects? Mazel tov. But millions of people are, right now.
The curtain of authoritarianism rarely drops on everyone, everywhere, all at once.
3. Almost Famous
This Mike Nagel essay is delightful.
Not long ago, I was sitting on the tarmac at Sea-Tac waiting for the plane to take off when a thin, grey smoke started billowing out of the air vents. Later I’d learn that it was harmless condensation, common for planes sitting on hot runways. At the time, though, it seemed like the end.
I looked around the plane to see how my fellow passengers were handling their fates. I’m proud to report that they were handling it well. The nerve of the interstate American traveler remains steadfast. Nobody seemed to mind that our plane was on fire. They were too busy playing on their iPads. iPads have come a really long way in the past few years. I’ve heard you can play Call of Duty on them now.
I was sitting back in economy class with the rest of the nobodies. Back where your comfort is not a major priority for the flight crew or airline. Back where you only get one complimentary drink and the wi-fi costs $10. Back where the plane can be on fire and you know better than to complain. They don’t know your name back here. They know your seat number.
“22b needs something again,” I would hear one of the flight attendants whisper between drink services, rolling her eyes at the sheer nerve of someone asking for what turned out to be a cup of water.
This kind of abuse takes some getting used to. Most of us have been building up a tolerance to it our entire lives, but I’d made the mistake of adjusting to a certain level of VIP treatment over the weekend. Now I was finding the detached attitudes of our flight crew a little off putting.
AROUND THE BULWARK
Quick Hits
PARDON ME?:
Friends and foes of Donald Trump alike might reasonably wonder: Just how much thought is he putting into these pardons, anyway? Asked by Politico’s Dasha Burns to justify his pardon last week of Honduran ex-president Juan Orlando Hernández, Trump returned to a bizarre old habit: a grumpy “I don’t know him.”
New York Times, Inside the Pentagon’s Scramble to Deal With Boat Strike Survivors, Damien Cave, Edward Wong and Maria Abi-Habib, Dec. 10, 2025 (print ed.). Officials initially weighed sending survivors of U.S. attacks on boats suspected of drug smuggling to a notorious prison in El Salvador, to keep them away from American courts.
The Pentagon was in a bind. The military had plucked two survivors from the Caribbean Sea in mid-October after striking a boat that U.S. officials said was carrying drugs, and it needed to figure out what to do with them.
On a call with counterparts at the State Department, Pentagon lawyers floated an idea. They asked whether the two survivors could be put into a notorious prison in El Salvador to which the Trump administration had sent hundreds of Venezuelan deportees, three officials said.
The State Department lawyers were stunned, one official said, and rejected the idea. The survivors ended up being repatriated to their home countries of Colombia and Ecuador.
A little under two weeks later, on Oct. 29, Pentagon officials convened another session about boat strike survivors, a video conference involving dozens of American diplomats from across the Western Hemisphere. The message was that any rescued survivors should be sent back to their home countries or to a third country, said three other officials, who, like others interviewed for this article, spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal deliberations.
Behind that policy was a quieter goal: to ensure survivors did not end up in the U.S. judicial system, where court cases could force the administration to show evidence justifying President Trump’s military campaign in the region.
The previously unreported calls demonstrate the haphazard and sometimes tense nature of the process within the Trump administration to weigh what to do with the survivors of U.S. attacks on boats that the military asserts — without presenting evidence — are drug-smuggling vessels posing an immediate threat to Americans.
Pentagon officials largely kept State Department counterparts in the dark about strike operations, then scrambled to try to enlist diplomats to help deal with survivors, whom military officials referred to by specific terms that included “distressed mariners.” That phrase is usually used in a peacetime and civilian context.
The talks took place after the first attack on Sept. 2, when the U.S. military killed two survivors with a second strike. Pentagon officials have not fully explained the process for handling survivors to other agencies or Congress, even as the campaign has continued, killing at least 87 people in 22 attacks.
New York Times, Democrats Say Hegseth Balked at Call for Full Video of Boat Strike, Megan Mineiro and Julian E. Barnes, Dec. 10, 2025 (print ed.). Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth briefed congressional leaders on Tuesday about the monthslong military campaign targeting people suspected of being drug traffickers at sea.
Democratic lawmakers said on Tuesday that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, right, in a classified briefing, declined to commit to showing the full Congress unedited video of the U.S. military’s attack on a boat in the Caribbean on Sept. 2.
The attack, which included a follow-up strike that killed two survivors, has been the subject of intense scrutiny on Capitol Hill and among military experts, who have raised questions about its legality.
“His answer: We have to study it,” Senator Chuck Schumer, Democrat of New York and the minority leader, said of Mr. Hegseth’s response on Tuesday. “Well, in my view, they’ve studied it long enough.”
Mr. Schumer added: “Congress ought to be able to see it.”
The closed-door discussion also included Secretary of State Marco Rubio; John Ratcliffe, the C.I.A. director; and Gen. Dan Caine, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. It mostly centered on the 22 known boat strikes in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific that the Trump administration has carried out since early September, according to a U.S. official briefed on the meeting. The attacks have killed at least 87 people.
Mr. Hegseth and the other top officials provided no information on possible land strikes in Venezuela, and there was no discussion of any effort to replace the leadership in the country, according to the official.
The meeting, in which administration officials briefed congressional leaders and the top members of the House and Senate Intelligence Committees, was “very unsatisfying,” Mr. Schumer added.
The Pentagon has said that because President Trump designated certain drug cartels as terrorist organizations, the military can target boats that the administration says are trafficking narcotics as though they are war combatants. But lawmakers, particularly Democrats, are wary of that legal rationale.
Senator Mark Warner of Virginia, the top Democrat on the Intelligence Committee, said after the briefing on Tuesday that he had asked top military officials to provide key documents related to the strikes. He said that he wanted to see the so-called after-action report on the Sept. 2 strike and the legal opinion underlying the open-ended military campaign, and to determine whether that opinion “was in any way changed after the Sept. 2 attack.”
The annual defense policy bill, on track to clear Congress in the coming days, includes bipartisan language intended to force the Pentagon to hand over the command orders that initiated the strikes — and the full, unedited videos of them — to the House and Senate Armed Services Committees.
The provision in the must-pass bill “shows that both Republicans and Democrats” are concerned about the Pentagon’s transparency around the operation, said Senator Jack Reed of Rhode Island, the top Democrat on the Armed Services panel.
Some Republicans have defended the strikes, saying the Pentagon has been eliminating traffickers ferrying drugs that kill Americans. But the Pentagon has told lawmakers it is targeting boats with known cargos of cocaine, something that Mr. Warner highlighted on Tuesday.
“We’re not talking about fentanyl,” he said after the briefing. “Let’s be clear, that is still — that comes into Mexico. That is the item that kills the most Americans. This is about cocaine.”
Adm. Alvin Holsey, the military commander who initially oversaw the Pentagon’s attacks against the suspected drug boats, also briefed top lawmakers on the House and Senate Armed Services Committees on Tuesday.
“We got some clarity on the chain of command and who made decisions at what point, but on the legality of it we didn’t get a lot of clarity,” said Representative Adam Smith of Washington, the top Democrat on the House panel.
Adm. Frank M. Bradley, the Special Operations commander who oversaw the Sept. 2 attack, is expected to return to Capitol Hill next week to brief the House Armed Services Committee. He spoke with lawmakers last week, along with General Caine, in a closed-door meeting in which a handful of members of Congress viewed the Sept. 2 strike video.
Mr. Smith added on Tuesday that it was “pretty clear” that the follow-up strike on Sept. 2 was “Admiral Bradley’s call, based on the rules of engagement given to him by Hegseth.”
Health Care, Insurance
Popular Information, Accountability Journalism: The concept of a plan (to sabotage Obamacare), Judd Legum, right, Rebecca Crosby and Noel Sims, Dec. 10, 2025. In three weeks, many of the government subsidies that help people afford health insurance will expire. If the subsidies are not extended before the end of the year, the impacts will be cataclysmic.
The 22 million Americans who currently receive these subsidies will see their premiums increase by an average of 114%. According to an analysis by the Urban Institute, families with incomes below 250% of the poverty line will pay premiums that are more than four times higher — rising from $169 to $919.
Meanwhile, an estimated 4.8 million people will lose coverage completely because they are priced out of the market. Uninsured people, of course, continue to get sick and require emergency medical care. The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation projects “a $7.7 billion spike in uncompensated care in 2026” if the subsidies expire.
The impact will be most severe in large Republican-leaning states that have not expanded Medicaid, including Florida and Texas, because they rely on the Obamacare marketplace to cover many of their low-income residents. Those states will see their uncompensated care costs rise by as much as 25%.
A study by the Commonwealth Fund also estimates that failing to extend the subsidies will result in the loss of 339,100 jobs due to reduced health care spending.
In an interview with Politico published on Tuesday, President Trump was asked if he planned to let the subsidies expire. This was his response:
I want to give the money to the people to buy their own health care. That’s a good thing, not a bad thing. The Democrats don’t want to do that. They want the insurance companies to continue to make a fortune. The Democrats are owned by the insurance companies. They want the insurance companies to get these trillions of dollars. We spent ... we spend trillions of dollars [that] goes to the insurance companies. I want that money to go to the people and let the people go out and buy their own health care. It works like magic. But you know who doesn’t want it? The Democrats, because they’re corrupt people because they’re totally owned and bought by the insurance companies.
Trump makes a compelling case that the private insurance industry has excessive profits. But the core of his argument makes no sense.
If you give Americans money to “buy their own health care,” they will have to use those funds to buy insurance from insurance companies. Later in the interview, Trump says, “The people will get the money and they’re gonna buy the health insurance that they want.”
Trump’s plan is not “magic.” It will not divert money from the insurance industry. But, if enacted, it could destroy Obamacare — a longtime goal of the Republican Party.
No corporate overlords. No capitulation. No BS. This is truly independent journalism. And it is only possible thanks to the support of readers like you.Subscribed“Death spiral and ultimate collapse”
While Trump claims that he will be giving money back to “the people,” his plan will actually lead to “a premium death spiral“ and the “ultimate collapse” of Obamacare, according to Larry Levitt, KFF’s vice president for health policy.
What experts believe will happen under Trump’s plan is that healthier people will buy much cheaper plans that are not ACA-compliant. In order to be on the ACA marketplace, insurance plans must cover things like maternal care and pre-existing conditions. With less comprehensive coverage, healthier people will pay less month to month, but could face exorbitant medical bills if their health worsens.
When the healthiest people leave, the people still in the ACA marketplace will be sicker on average and need more care, meaning providers will increase premiums. Eventually, even some people who need more robust coverage will be unable to afford the higher premiums, dropping their ACA coverage and leaving only the very sickest. This cycle will continue until the remaining people in the pool are so sick, no insurer is willing to offer them coverage.
Ultimately, this will destroy Obamacare and make finding a health insurance plan incredibly difficult.
Trump and other Republicans who support this plan argue that giving Americans funds to choose their own health insurance plans will lead to a more transparent system with more consumer choice. However, this assumes that the health insurance market, absent a regulated exchange, makes it easy for Americans to identify and compare plans.
In reality, the health insurance market is very opaque — an issue Obamacare was created to help mitigate — and it can be difficult to ascertain the costs and benefits of any plan. As one health insurance policy expert, Mona Shah, told CNN, “The reality is even if that [price] information is accessible, how many people could navigate that, understand the differences, have the time to do that and then make informed decisions?”The doomed vote
While Republicans have floated multiple health care proposals to address the expiring subsidies, they have struggled to coalesce behind one plan.
On Tuesday, Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-SD) announced that the Senate would vote Thursday on a proposal by Senator Mike Crapo (R-ID) and Senator Bill Cassidy (R-LA), known as the Health Care Freedom for Patients Act. “In line with President Trump’s call, Republicans propose redirecting money going to insurance companies back to patients,” a summary of the proposal reads.
Crapo and Cassidy’s plan would allow the subsidies to expire and instead provide funds directly to health savings accounts — but only to people who purchase bronze and catastrophic plans, the worst coverage available. Under the plan, eligible enrollees aged 18 to 49 “earning less than 700 percent of the federal poverty level would receive $1,000” in 2026 and 2027, while those aged 50 to 64 would receive $1,500. The plan also includes restrictions on abortion coverage and gender transition services.
Thune said that the proposal “delivers the benefit directly to the patient, not to the insurance company.” But, in reality, the proposal does this by dramatically increasing the costs to patients first. Catastrophic coverage plans offer very high deductibles that are “equal to the annual limit on out-of-pocket costs under the ACA,” which will be $10,600 for an individual in 2026. Catastrophic coverage is currently only available to people under 30 with few exceptions, although the bill would expand eligibility. Bronze plans offer only slightly more robust coverage.
It is unlikely that Senate Republicans will have the votes to pass Crapo and Cassidy’s proposal. On Tuesday, Thune said he “can’t say 100%,” but that he thinks Senate Republicans are “united” around the proposal. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) called the bill “dead on arrival.” House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) has said that House leaders also plan to introduce a health care plan this week, although the details are sketchy.
One likely outcome is that Republicans do not pass any legislation ahead of the subsidies expiring and costs dramatically increase for millions of Americans starting in the new year.
U.S. Immigration Enforcement, Law, Justice, Race
The Contrarian, Opinion: Trump Invades New Orleans, Jennifer Rubin, right, Dec. 10, 2025. Immigration is now a MAGA liability.
The federal anti-immigrant crackdown in New Orleans once again belies the notion that Donald Trump is focused on deporting the “worst of the worst.” CNN reports: “Immigration authorities have insisted the sweeps are targeted at ‘criminal illegal aliens.’ But the law enforcement records detail criminal histories for less than a third of the 38 people arrested in the first two days of the operation.”
Local officials, including New Orleans City Council President J.P. Morrell, are irate:
“If the goal was for them to come here and augment existing law enforcement, to pursue violent criminals or people with extensive criminal histories, why wouldn’t you be more transparent about who you’ve arrested and why?”
Morrell and other officials have said the crackdown appears to be a dragnet focused on people with brown skin, citing viral videos of encounters such as masked agents chasing a 23-year-old U.S. citizen returning home from the grocery store.
New Orleans Mayor-elect Helena Moreno is also insisting feds take off masks and give officials regular briefings. Despite denials from the Department of Homeland Security, it appears racial profiling is in full force.
In addition, a creepy intelligence surveillance plan raises serious questions about violations of fundamental First Amendment rights. The Associated Press reports, “State and federal authorities are closely tracking online criticism and protests against the immigration crackdown in New Orleans, monitoring message boards around the clock for threats to agents while compiling regular updates on public ‘sentiment’ surrounding the arrests, according to law enforcement records reviewed.”Subscribed
All this comes as we see new evidence of the public’s overwhelming disapproval of a disruptive, cruel, violent, chaotic, and lawless crackdown that snares not only undocumented workers but U.S. citizens. PRRI, in a survey of 5,543 adults in all 50 states (with a margin of error of +/- 1.79 pts.), found support for Trump’s handling of immigration is cratering, dropping 5 points overall and 11 points among independents since March.
“Most Americans say that the way the federal government is dealing with undocumented immigrants is going in the wrong direction (57%), including majorities of Democrats (89%) and independents (64%),” PRRI reports, while just 18% of Republicans think so. “With the exception of white Christian groups, majorities of all other religious groups say that the way the federal government is dealing with undocumented immigrants is going in the wrong direction.”
A narrow majority says that “the increase in funding for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to speed up efforts to arrest, detain, and deport undocumented immigrants has gone too far, compared with one-third who say this change seems about right (33%), and only 12% who say it has not gone far enough.” Not only do Democrats agree, but nearly 60% of independents say funding has gone too far, too fast.
By a margin of 56 - 42% Americans say they lack confidence in ICE. And despite Trump’s attempt to demonize immigrants and conduct mass deportations, his policies seem to have had the opposite effect. “[S]upport for a pathway to citizenship increased among all Americans in the past year, with Republican support gaining 4 points (36% to 40%) and Democratic support up 5 points (77% to 82%),” the poll found. “The increase in support for a path to citizenship was larger for independents, from 55% to 61%.”
Similarly, support for legalizing DACA recipients has risen. “Today, six in ten Americans (60%) favor this policy, compared with 52% in 2024. Majorities of Democrats (84%) and independents (64%) are in favor of DACA.” Two-thirds favor birthright citizenship, a right explicitly spelled out in the 14th Amendment of the Constitution.
Large majorities also support due process for all immigrants and a prohibition on agents wearing masks. A similarly large percentage is opposed to arresting and detaining undocumented immigrants with no criminal record and to deporting migrants to third countries.
There are several important takeaways to be gleaned from all this data.
In sum, as the Trump regime invades yet another American city over the objections of local officials and the public, Democrats should recognize that in this arena good policy (e.g., target criminals, unmask agents, create pathways for citizenship) and good politics coincide. What was once political strength for Trump is now an albatross around his and MAGA politicians’ necks. It is long since past the time for Democrats to go on offense, demanding a sane, sensible, and humane immigration policy.
U.S. Markets, Economy, Jobs
White House advisor Stephen Miller, above left.
New York Times, Stephen Miller’s Stock Sale Raises Questions, Ethics Experts Say, Ana Swanson, Dec. 10, 2025 (print ed.).Mr. Miller, one of President Trump’s top advisers, sold shares in the mining company MP Materials following a lucrative deal between the company and the government.
Stephen Miller, one of the president’s top advisers, sold shares of a mining company after it had begun negotiations with the government, raising concerns among ethics experts.Credit...Doug Mills/The New York TimesAna Swanson
By Stephen Miller, a top adviser to President Trump, sold shares worth $50,000 to $100,000 in the mining company MP Materials following a July announcement of a lucrative deal between the Las Vegas company and the Trump administration, government filings show.
The sale came one month after the Trump administration announced an extraordinary series of measures to support MP Materials, which produces valuable rare earth minerals and magnets. The deal, which included the government purchasing shares in the company and committing to buy its products, led MP Materials’ share price to skyrocket.
The company’s stock price rose to $45.23 on July 10, the day the deal was announced, from $30.03 a share on July 9. The share price climbed to $76.58 on Aug. 14, the date Mr. Miller sold his shares — a historic high. The stock peaked at just under $99 on Oct. 14, after the company reported earnings. It closed at $59.82 on Tuesday.
Mr. Miller’s sale, which has not been previously reported, was part of a collection of trades that he made in August when he sold stakes in nearly two dozen companies. That included others in which the Trump administration subsequently committed to take an equity stake, including Intel and Westinghouse.
Mr. Miller does not appear to have participated directly in government negotiations with MP Materials. But as Mr. Trump’s deputy chief of staff, he oversees a broad and diverse portfolio of policy and security issues, and has spoken publicly about U.S. minerals.
Ethics experts said that the sales raised a number of questions and concerns, and that they could have been done more quickly to resolve any apparent conflicts of interest, given the Trump administration’s own equity stake.
New York Times, U.S. Plans to Scrutinize Foreign Tourists’ Social Media History, Christine Chung, Updated Dec. 10, 2025. Even visitors from countries like Britain and France, whose citizens don’t need visas, would have to share five years’ worth of social media.
Travelers visiting the United States from countries like Britain, France, Germany and South Korea could soon have to undergo a review of up to five years of their social media history, according to a proposal filed on Tuesday by U.S. Customs and Border Protection.
The change would affect visitors eligible for the visa waiver program, which allows people from 42 countries to travel to the United States for up to 90 days without a visa as long as they first obtain electronic travel authorization.
In a document filed on Tuesday in the Federal Register, C.B.P. said it plans to require applicants to provide a long list of personal data including social media, email addresses from the last decade, and the names, birth dates, places of residence and birthplaces of parents, spouses, siblings and children.
Under the current system, applicants from visa waiver countries must enroll in the Electronic System for Travel Authorization program. They pay $40 and submit an email address, home address, phone number and emergency contact information. The authorization is good for two years. Listing your social media has been optional on the application since 2016, Xiao Wang, co-founder and chief executive of Boundless, a visa- and immigration-assistance company, said in a statement.
Mr. Wang said that C.B.P. previously didn’t clarify how skipping the question affected applications. Now, he expects the government to increasingly view the absence of social media records as “a sign that the applicant is hiding something,” and that could have a negative impact on the application.
This move from C.B.P. follows similar actions by the U.S. government to conduct social media reviews for some visa applicants, including seekers of the H-1B visas awarded to skilled foreign workers, as well as applicants for student and scholar visas. It also follows the government’s pending plans to collect a new $250 visa integrity fee from many visitors, though visitors from visa waiver countries are exempt from that fee.
The travel industry has pushed back on the visa integrity fee. In November, a coalition of more than 20 tourism and travel businesses signed a letter of opposition, citing concerns that the fee would discourage millions of prospective international visitors to the United States, including those traveling to events like next year’s World Cup.
Global News
New York Times, Venezuela’s Nobel Winner Says She Will Appear in Oslo After Missing Ceremony, Simon Romero and Henrik Pryser Libell, Dec. 10, 2025. María Corina Machado, the Venezuelan opposition leader (shown above in a file photo), said she was on her way to Norway after living in hiding in her country, where officials have threatened her with arrest.
María Corina Machado, the Venezuelan opposition leader who won this year’s Nobel Peace Prize, said on Wednesday that she was on her way to Oslo after failing to appear at the ceremony to collect the prize. Her trip, she told a member of the Nobel committee, required people torisk their lives to ensure her safe transit.
“As soon as I arrive, I will be able to embrace all my family and my children that I have not seen for two years,” Ms. Machado told Jorgen Watne Frydnes, the chair of the Nobel committee, according to an audio clip of a phone call released by the prize’s organizers.
Ms. Machado’s intention to go to Norway immediately raised questions about her future, since returning to Venezuela would place her at risk of being arrested.
Ms. Machado’s daughter, Ana Corina Sosa, accepted the prize on her mother’s behalf in Oslo, the Norwegian capital. The Norwegian Nobel Institute had awarded Ms. Machado the prize in October for her contributions to advancing democracy in Venezuela.
The confusion surrounding Ms. Machado’s whereabouts made this year’s Nobel ceremony in Oslo the most unpredictable in recent years. Controversy also shrouded Ms. Machado’s selection for the peace prize because she has been an enthusiastic supporter for using U.S. military force to remove Nicolás Maduro, Venezuela’s authoritarian president.
Ms. Machado is thought to have been living in hiding in Venezuela since Venezuela’s government embarked on a campaign of repression against opposition leaders and protesters angered over Mr. Maduro’s move to fraudulently declare himself the winner of a presidential election last year.
Russell Bonner Bentley III visiting a memorial to victims of Nazi killings, in Donetsk, Ukraine, in 2017 (Photo by Brendan Hoffman).
New York Times, 4 Russian Soldiers Sentenced to Prison for Killing Texan Who Fought for Moscow, Neil MacFarquhar, Dec. 9, 2025 (print ed.). Russell Bonner Bentley III, 64, who was living in the occupied Donbas region of Ukraine, was beaten and tortured to death after he was suspected of being an American saboteur, investigators said.
A military court in a Russian-occupied region of Ukraine sentenced four soldiers on Monday to prison terms of up to 12 years for the gruesome murder of a self-avowed American Communist from Texas who had spent a decade as a mercenary and propagandist for Moscow.
The killing proved embarrassing for the Kremlin because the victim, Russell Bonner Bentley III, 64, who moved to the Donbas region of Ukraine in 2014 after Moscow started a separatist conflict there, had been a regular guest on state television, extolling Russia’s case in his Southern drawl.
Mr. Bentley, who called himself the “Donbas Cowboy,” disappeared in April 2024 after going to survey the aftermath of an artillery strike in downtown Donetsk, the city in the eastern region where he lived. Two of the convicted soldiers had found him preparing to film the scene and suspected he was an American saboteur, according to an investigation cited in court.
When the men demanded identification, Mr. Bentley explained that he was working for Russia’s state-run Sputnik news agency, the court heard. The two soldiers drove him to their command post, where he was detained, beaten and tortured to death, investigators said.
The perpetrators then put him in a car and blew it up, trying to make it look like an artillery strike, and the next day two other men burned the corpse, according to the investigation.Want to stay updated on what’s happening in Russia and Ukraine? Sign up for Your Places: Global Update, and we’ll send our latest coverage to your inbox.
The Donetsk Garrison Military Court convicted the soldiers under the Russian criminal code and sentenced two of them, Maj. Vitaly Vansyatsky and Lt. Andrei Iordanov, to 12 years in a penal colony, while another, Sgt. Vladislav Agaltsev, received an 11-year sentence, according to the official Tass news agency. The three were also stripped of their military ranks. A fourth soldier was sentenced to 1.5 years in prison for helping to cover up the crime.
In addition, the court awarded Mr. Bentley’s widow, Lyudmila Bentley, a local English teacher whom he married in 2017, the equivalent of more than $65,000 in civil damages, Tass reported. Ms. Bentley has denied all interview requests.
Mr. Bentley called himself a Communist and became something of a folk hero in the Donbas, according to Western news media, including Texas Monthly and Rolling Stone, which interviewed Mr. Bentley during his years in the region and described his life in the United States and after he moved to the occupied territory. One of his trademark phrases was “I hate Nazis.”
In the United States, he had been a marijuana legalization activist and carried out a quixotic campaign for the U.S. Senate from Minnesota in 1990, garnering almost 30,000 votes. He was imprisoned after a conviction for felony marijuana trafficking, according to a profile in Texas Monthly magazine.
He later grew convinced from reading pro-Russia social media posts that the government in Kyiv was a den of Nazis, and he decided that he wanted to fight them, according to several profiles of him in Western news outlets.
He emigrated from Round Rock, Texas, a town just north of Austin, in December 2014, the profiles said. Using the call sign “Texas,” he fought for Russia’s Vostok Battalion, which accepted foreign fighters, for three years, and then decided that, at his age, he was better suited for the information wars. He became a Russian citizen in 2020.
At the time of the full-scale Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, he was producing a flood of posts about the conflict brimming with disinformation. In a YouTube post later deleted by the platform, he extolled Russian soldiers as liberators.
In a separate post on Vkontakte, the Russian equivalent of Facebook, quoted by Rolling Stone, Mr. Bentley wrote that he was “heading west with the Liberators of Ukraine.”
“We may stop in Kyiv, we may stop on the English Channel,” he said. “We may liberate the USA.”
Activisit: Igor Rogov in the Polish Parliament building (Photo by Danila Buzanov).
New York Times, He Was a Russian Activist in Exile. His Own Wife Accused Him of Spying, Nataliya Vasilyeva, Dec. 9, 2025 (print ed.). Poland has charged a little-known Russian opposition figure with espionage and participating in a bomb plot. His friends are perplexed.
The Russian political exile and his wife were fighting. This was painfully clear to their roommate, who could hear them through the thin walls of the dormitory they shared in the southern Polish city of Sosnowiec.
In the heat of the couple’s argument on April 21, 2023, the wife sent a text message to the roommate, a fellow Russian exile, he said.
“Do you know that Igor has been reporting on you and another guy to the F.S.B.?” she wrote, according to the fellow exile, Danila Buzanov.
The F.S.B. is the Russian domestic security agency, the main successor to the K.G.B. Irina Rogova, the wife of Igor Rogov, a little-known opposition activist who had left Russia days after Moscow’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, was accusing her husband of spying on other exiles for the Russian government.
She made the same accusation in a group message to friends. As rumors spread, Mr. Rogov and Ms. Rogova tried to brush it off, saying she had made an unfortunate joke while they were going through a divorce.
Now, more than two years later, Mr. Rogov sits in a Polish jail, charged with espionage and with participating in a bombing plot. His wife has also been charged with spying and with being an accessory.
A lawyer for Mr. Rogov declined to discuss details of the case, saying that its files were not yet public. It is unclear whether Mr. Rogov has entered a plea. A preliminary hearing in the case is scheduled for Monday.
European nations have exposed several Russian spies since the start of the war in Ukraine. If the Polish accusations against Mr. Rogov are true, he would be the first to have been planted within the ranks of Kremlin opponents and then given shelter in Europe.
Mr. Rogov, 29, was arrested in July 2024 after, prosecutors say, an explosives-filled parcel that had been addressed to him was found in a warehouse in central Poland. In their indictment, the prosecutors say that during their investigation into the package they established that Mr. Rogov had cooperated with the F.S.B.
In addition to spying, he was accused of participating in a Russian plot to send incendiary packages on flights around Europe. Fires last year at shipping hubs in Britain and Germany were linked to the alleged plot, part of a broader Russian campaign of hybrid attacks against Europe that Western officials say have included drone incursions, cyberwarfare and acts of sabotage.Want to stay updated on what’s happening in Poland and Russia? Sign up for Your Places: Global Update, and we’ll send our latest coverage to your inbox
Seymour Hersh via Substack, Commentary: ARE WE STILL FIGHTING IRAN? Seymour Hersh, right, Dec. 10, 2025. American experts think the regime in Tehran is teetering while Israelis believe it’s rebuilding its defenses—another confrontation is looming.
I’ve been writing about Iran for decades. I’ve focused on its efforts to become a nuclear power, which the United States and Israel have found worrisome, to say the least.
I was always aware that something bizarre was going on because every time I wrote about Iran for the New Yorker experts the State Department and the Central Intelligence Agency invariably depicted the country as being no more than five years away from the bomb. I understood that the large Israeli nuclear arsenal had been built with covert help authorized in secrecy by US presidents and had been stored for decades in underground bunkers or deployed in strategically placed underground silos. The weapons always posed an immediate danger to Iran’s security, even its existence.
Last June a group of American B-2 bombers flew around the globe and struck the major nuclear-enrichment plant at Fordow, Iran’s most important weapons facility, with deep-penetrating bunker-buster bombs while other aircraft and Tomahawk missiles, launched from sea, hit other vital nuclear-related facilities throughout the nation. In a televised address, President Donald Trump told the nation that Iran’s nuclear sites were “completely and fully obliterated” and warned Iran not to carry out any retaliatory strikes: the leadership in Tehran had a choice between “peace or tragedy.”
There has been no significant Iranian retaliation since then, but the old cliché that you are where you sit is very much at play in US-Iranian 
relations today. The joint US-Israeli attacks went far beyond merely targeting known nuclear sites and caused enormous damage to military bases, government facilities, and military and civilian housing. There were numerous successful and attempted assassinations of key government officials as well as scientists linked to nuclear activity and other vital military and intelligence specialists. Some of the killings were carried out by Israeli agents who, I was told by an Israeli source, had been planted on the ground months or years earlier or smuggled across the border at the last minute.
I was told that one major Israeli plan—to bomb the Iranian parliament building and kill or injure all or most of the religious leaders at work there—was stopped due to US fears of unforeseen consequences.
In recent months Iranian opposition groups have reported an ongoing water-supply crisis throughout the nation as well as increasing inflation and diminishing air quality in Tehran and other major cities. Iran is still a major producer of oil, and international sanctions have led the government to offer heavy discounts. 
The religious government headed by Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, right, remains in control, but there have been published reports that many women, especially young women in Tehran and other major cities, are increasingly going out in public without head coverings, in direct violation of the regime’s dicta.
Some well-informed officials in Washington believe the Iranian leadership is confronted right now with an existential crisis. “Iran is about to have a revolution,” one experienced intelligence expert on the Middle East told me. He then listed the reasons: “Not enough water. Nothing to eat. No money. No public services, no buses . . . in the major cities. No organization—no one is in charge and the key military leadership is dead,” a reference to the success of Israel’s assassination program last summer...
U.S. Culture, Education, Sports, Media
New York Times, Michigan fires coach Sherrone Moore due to inappropriate relationship with staff member, Austin Meek, Dec. 10, 2025. Michigan fired football coach Sherrone Moore for cause Wednesday, citing an inappropriate relationship with a staff member.
“Following a university investigation, credible evidence was found that Coach Moore engaged in an inappropriate relationship with a staff member,” athletic director Warde Manuel said in a statement. “This conduct constitutes a clear violation of University policy, and U-M maintains 
zero tolerance for such behavior.”
Moore, 39, just completed his second season as head coach after serving as an assistant coach on Jim Harbaugh’s staff from 2018-2023. The Wolverines were 17-8 during his tenure, including a 9-3 finish this season. Associate head coach Biff Poggi will be Michigan’s interim head coach for the Citrus Bowl against Texas on Dec. 31..
New York Times, Jubilant Sykes, Celebrated Opera Singer, Is Stabbed to Death, Derrick Bryson Taylor, Upated Dec. 10, 2025. After the police found the Grammy-nominated performer in his home with fatal wounds, his son was taken into custody, the authorities said.
Jubilant Sykes, a celebrated opera singer, was fatally stabbed on Monday night in his home in Santa Monica, Calif., and his son was arrested in the attack, police officials said.
After the Santa Monica Police Department responded to a call about an assault at a house around 9:20 p.m., officers found Sykes, 71, with critical injuries consistent with a stabbing, the authorities said in a news release. He was pronounced dead at the scene.
Micah Sykes, the singer’s 31-year-old son, was found inside the home and was taken into custody without incident.
It was unclear what led to the stabbing. “The circumstances surrounding the incident remain under investigation,” the police said in the news release, adding, “The suspect will be booked for homicide, and the case will be presented to the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office for filing consideration.”
Lt. Lewis Gilmour, a spokesman for the Santa Monica Police Department, said in a statement that Sykes’s wife, Cecelia Sykes, had called 911 on Monday to report an assault at their home and that his family had told the authorities that Micah Sykes had a history of mental illness. The police have not determined if that played a role in the attack.
Sykes, a baritone, performed at some of the world’s most prominent stages, including Carnegie Hall, the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington and the Barbican Center in London. In 1990, he performed the role of Jake in a production of “Porgy and Bess” at the Metropolitan Opera.
Sykes also sang jazz and spiritual music and performed with many orchestras, including the Atlanta Symphony, the Los Angeles Philharmonic and the New York Philharmonic, according to his website.
Letters from an American, Historical Commentary: December 9, 2025 [U.S. Cultural, Media, AI, Political Trends], Heather Cox Richardson, right, Dec. 10, 2025. When G. Elliott Morris of Strength in Numbers asked ChatGPT to fact-check an article for him yesterday, the chatbot couldn’t get its head around modern America.
It told him there were “multiple factual impossibilities” in his article, including his statements that “[t]he current Secretary of Defense is a former talk show host for Fox News,” “[t]he Deputy Director of the FBI used to guest-host Sean Hannity’s show,” and “Jeanine Pirro is the U.S. District Attorney for DC.”
“Since none of these statements are true,” it told Morris, “they undermine credibility unless signposted as hyperbole, fiction, or satire.”
But of course, Morris’s statements were not “factual impossibilities.” In the United States of America under President Donald J. Trump, they are true.
Trump has always been a salesman with an instinctive understanding of the power of media. That sense helped him to rise to power in 2016 by leveraging an image Republicans had embraced since the 1980s: that the reason certain white Americans were being left behind in the modern world was not that Republican policies had transferred more than $50 trillion from the bottom 90% of Americans to the top 1%, but that lazy and undeserving Black and Brown Americans and women were taking handouts from the government rather than working.
When he got his disheartening fact-check from ChatGPT, Morris was preparing an article, published today, exploring “how cable news fueled the culture war and broke U.S. politics.” The article notes that most people care about and interact with the government through economic or affordability issues—prices, jobs, health care, social programs, and taxes—and that most laws are also about these issues. But, he points out, political rhetoric overwhelmingly focuses on issues like race, crime, immigration, LGBTQ+ rights, and guns: the so-called culture war.
Morris highlights a new academic paper by Shakked Noy of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Aakaash Rao of Harvard that links America’s culture war to changes in the media in the 1980s. Their research shows that “a distinctive business strategy” in cable news led it to emphasize culture over economic issues. Noy and Rao found that cable emphasizes culture because it “attracts viewers who would otherwise not watch news,” and attracts more viewers than an outlet can find by poaching viewers from other networks that emphasize economic issues. Cable channels have an incentive to produce culture war content, which in turn influences politics, as “constituencies more exposed to cable news assign greater importance to cultural issues, and politicians respond by supplying more cultural ads.”
“In other words,” Morris writes, “when cable news producers decide to cover an issue more, voters subsequently say it is more important to them, and that issue is more predictive of how they’ll vote. TV news coverage, and cable in particular, has the power to choose which issues are most ‘salient’ for upcoming elections.” He notes that “this effect is almost entirely, or maybe even entirely, driven by Fox News,” and that right-wing politicians benefit most from it. Democrats get their highest marks from voters on issues not covered by cable news.
Morris concludes that “more than the Republicans or Democrats, left or right, it’s the companies that abuse our attention for profit that are the real winners of American politics.”
This conclusion echoes a 2006 conversation a reporter for Financial Times held with Fox News Channel founder Rupert Murdoch and chief executive officer Roger Ailes. In that conversation, when asked if running the Fox News Channel was “like running a political campaign,” Ailes responded: “No more than running a Dairy Queen. You have a customer, you have to market it to help them get to your product, the product has to be good, you can’t drop too many on the floor or in the sprinkles or you’ll lose money. All business is basically about customers and marketing and making money and capitalism and winning and promoting it and having something someone really wants.”
Ailes came to the Fox News Channel from his work packaging presidential candidate Richard Nixon in 1968. One Nixon media advisor explained how they could put their candidate over the top by transforming him into a media celebrity. “Voters are basically lazy,” the advisor told reporter Joe McGinnis. “Reason requires a high degree of discipline, of concentration; impression is easier. Reason pushes the viewer back, it assaults him, it demands that he agree or disagree; impression can envelop him, invite him in, without making an intellectual demand…. When we argue with him, we…seek to engage his intellect…. The emotions are more easily roused, closer to the surface, more malleable.”
Ailes presented Nixon in carefully curated televised “town halls” geared to different audiences, in which he arranged the set, Nixon’s answers to carefully staged questions, Nixon’s makeup, and the crowd’s applause. “Let’s face it,” he said, “a lot of people think Nixon is dull. Think he’s a bore, a pain in the ass.” But, carefully managed, television could “make them forget all that.”
Ailes found his stride working for right-wing candidates, selling the narrative that Democrats were socialists who wanted to transfer wealth from hardworking white Americans to undeserving minorities and women. He produced the racist “Willie Horton” ad for Republican candidate George H.W. Bush in 1988, and a short-lived television show hosted by right-wing shock jock Rush Limbaugh in 1992. It was from there that he went on to shape the Fox News Channel after its launch in 1996.
Ailes sold his narrative with what he called the “orchestra pit theory.” He explained: “If you have two guys on a stage and one guy says, ‘I have a solution to the Middle East problem,’ and the other guy falls in the orchestra pit, who do you think is going to be on the evening news?”
This is a theory Trump has always embraced, and one that drives his second term in office. He has placed television personalities throughout his administration—to the apparent disbelief of ChatGPT—and has turned the White House into, as media ally Steve Bannon put it, a “major information content provider.” What Trump does “is the action, and we just happen to be one of the distributors,” Bannon told Drew Harwell and Sarah Ellison of the Washington Post. The administration has replaced traditional media outlets with right-wing loyalists and floods the social media space with a Trump narrative that is untethered from reality. Communications director Steven Cheung says their goal is to create “FULL SPECTRUM DOMINANCE.”
Their attempt to convince Americans to accept their version of reality is showing now in Trump’s repeated extreme version of the old Republican storyline that the economy under him is great and that the country’s problems are due to Democrats, minorities, and women.
Since voters in November elections turned against the Republicans, citing their concerns about the economy, Trump has doubled down on the idea that the idea of “affordability” is a “Democrat con job.” In an interview yesterday with Politico’s Dasha Burns, Trump said he would grade his economy “A-plus-plus-plus-plus-plus.” Any problems with it, he and his loyalists say, stem from former president Joe Biden’s having left them an economy in shambles. But in fact, in October 2024, The Economist called the American economy “the envy of the world.”
As news cycles have turned against his administration on the economy—as well as the Epstein files, immigration sweeps, strikes on small boats in the Caribbean, and his mental acuity—Trump has tried to regain control of the narrative by diving into the orchestra pit. He has turned to an extreme version of the racism, sexism, and attacks on Americans who use the social safety net that have been part of Republican rhetoric for decades. He has gone out of his way to attack Somali Americans as “garbage,” to attack female reporters, and to use an ableist slur against Minnesota governor Tim Walz, whose son has a nonverbal learning disability, prompting imitators to drive by the Walz home shouting the slur.
The fight to control the media narrative is on display this week in a fight over a media merger. As Josh Marshall explained in Talking Points Memo yesterday, the media conglomerate Warner Bros. Discovery, which used to be called Time Warner and includes news division CNN, had agreed to be acquired by Netflix. But, as the deal was moving forward, Paramount Skydance launched a hostile takeover to get Warner Bros. Discovery for itself.
David Ellison, son of right-wing billionaire Larry Ellison, who co-founded software giant Oracle, bought Paramount over the summer and appears to be creating a right-wing media ecosystem dominated by the Trumps. Part of the financing for his purchase of Warner Bros. Discovery would come from the investment company of Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner, as well as from Saudi and Qatari sovereign wealth funds. Paramount told Warner Bros. Discovery shareholders they should accept its offer because Trump would never allow the Netflix deal to happen, and as Marshall notes, Trump appeared yesterday to agree with that suggestion.
The Paramount merger gave Ellison control of CBS, which promptly turned rightward. At stake now is CNN, which Netflix doesn’t particularly want but Paramount does, either to neuter it or turn it into another version of Fox News. Joe Flint, Brian Schwartz, and Natalie Andrews of the Wall Street Journal reported that Ellison told Trump he would make “sweeping changes” to CNN if Paramount acquires Warner Bros. Discovery. The Wall Street Journal reporters note that “Trump has told people close to him that he wants new ownership of CNN as well as changes to CNN programming.”
During the Gilded Age, a similar moment of media consolidation around right-wing politics, a magazine that celebrated ordinary Americans launched a new form of journalism. S.S. McClure, a former coffee pot salesman in the Midwest, recognized that people in small towns and on farms were interested in the same questions of reform as people in the cities. He and a partner started McClure’s Magazine in 1893 and in 1903 published a famous issue that contained Ida Tarbell’s exposé of the Standard Oil Company, Lincoln Steffens’s exposé of the corruption of the Minneapolis municipal government, and Ray Stannard Baker’s exposé of workers’ violence during a coal strike.
Their carefully detailed studies of the machinations of a single trust, a single city, and a single union personalized the larger struggles of people in the new industrial economy. Their stories electrified readers and galvanized a movement to reform the government that had bred such abuses. McClure wrote that all three articles might have been titled “The American Contempt of Law.” It was the public that paid for such lawlessness, he wrote, and it was high time the public demanded that justice be enforced.
“Capitalists, workingmen, politicians, citizens—all breaking the law, or letting it be broken. Who is left to uphold it?” McClure asked. “The lawyers? Some of the best lawyers in the country are hired, not to go into court to defend cases, but to advise corporations and business firms how they can get around the law without too great a risk of punishment. The judges? Too many of them so respect the laws that for some ‘error’ or quibble they restore to office and liberty men convicted on evidence overwhelmingly convincing to common sense. The churches? We know of one, an ancient and wealthy establishment, which had to be compelled by a Tammany hold-over health officer to put its tenements in sanitary condition. The colleges? They do not understand.”
“There is no one left,” McClure wrote, “none but all of us.”
Dec. 9
The Triad via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: "Heritage Americans" and the Nazi Horse, Jonathan V. Last, above, Dec. 9, 2025. Carl Schmitt comes to America.
One of the recurring characters on Sarah’s Focus Group show is the Republican Good Immigrant. This person will talk about how Joe Biden let the border become a mess. About how unfair it is that all of these illegal immigrants streamed into the country. About how he (or she)followed the rules and came the right way.
This person will then explain that he (or she) voted for Trump because of his commitment to border security and his promise to deport all of the criminals.
I often wonder what these voters think about Trump today as the administration’s immigration policy objectives have progressed from:
Do the Republican Good Immigrants finally understand that Trump and his administration want them gone, too? That when Trump talked about the border and immigration it was never just about deporting murderers and rapists?
They should have known. Because immigration politics are never just about securing borders. They’re about ethnic purity and creating an illiberal order. And to understand this we’re going to have to talk about Carl Schmitt and the triumph of Nazi philosophy, right here in America.
Buckle up.
Everyone should have a mental Google alert set for the name “Carl Schmitt” (shown at left in a 1932 photo) because as soon as you hear a conservative reference him approvingly, it’s a tell.
Born in 1888, Schmitt was a German legal theorist and political philosopher whose work focused on the many things he disliked about liberalism. From the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: “Schmitt was an acute observer and analyst of the weaknesses of liberal constitutionalism and liberal cosmopolitanism.”
Schmitt did not critique liberalism with an eye toward reforming it; he wasn’t looking for its weaknesses so they could be shored up. Oh no. His project was figuring out ways to use the law and political systems to overthrow liberalism and replace it with an illiberal order.
Schmitt had been working on this little project by giving lectures and writing papers for twenty years when National Socialism came around. The Nazis went looking for a godfather to provide an intellectual framework for Nazism. Schmitt raised his hand.
When you read about Schmitt’s ideas you see a lot of contemporary American politics prefigured.
In his detestation of liberalism, he resembles a smarter and more honest Ross Douthat. In his demand for expansive executive power that bends all bureaucracy to the leader’s will, he resembles the Supreme Court’s unitary executive cult. In his belief that the sovereign may unilaterally decide on exceptions to the law, he resembles Trump.
But the most striking resemblance is Schmitt’s understanding that a country’s borders can be used as a path to political power. Here’s Robert Evans summing up Schmitt’s understanding of the politics of immigration:
[T]he basic idea was that . . . every society, no matter how liberal . . . draws a line between who are members of the community and who aren’t. Who is a citizen and who isn’t. And wherever you find that line—anytime there’s a border—that’s the thing you can use to destroy that liberal democracy. Because you figure out where that is and you start pushing it inward and you start trying to define other groups as not part of the community.
That’s kind of the fundamental weak point that all liberal democracies have. . . .
What Schmitt was saying is the existence of a border is an opportunity to carve groups of people out of the body politic in order to gain authoritarian political power.
Look back at that list of bullet points up top 👆. What you see is the real-time drawing and redrawing of those lines, with Trump and Republicans pushing them inward so as to exclude more people from the body politic.
Which is how all political projects involving immigration go: The restrictionists start by talking about foreign rapists and murders.¹ But they always wind up talking about the Aryan race—or “heritage Americans.”
And along the way these villains are often aided by useful idiots who credulously believe that they will never be cut out of the majority.
2. Springfield
If you want to see an example of the line being pushed inward, look at what has happened to Haitian immigrants.
During the campaign, JD Vance created a lie about Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio. He said that they steal and eat their (white) neighbors’ pets.² Donald Trump repeated this lie.
These Haitian immigrants were not in Springfield illegally—they were legal residents who worked, created economic benefits for the entire community, and came here “the right way,” through a grant of temporary protected status.
First Trump and Vance demonized them. Then, in November, they revoked the legal status of these Haitian immigrants, which will force them to either “remigrate” or become illegal immigrants.
Not that I have to spell this out for you, but: America talked extensively about the Trump-Vance lies and their attempt to scapegoat and carve Haitians out of the body politic. And America nonetheless rewarded Trump and Vance with political power—not in spite of this project, but because of it.
Just like Carl Schmitt drew it up.
Why is immigration such an effective suicide machine for liberal democracies?
That’s an expansive question and I’m interested in your thoughts. But to prime the discussion I’ll offer an idea:
Now it may be the case that society needs borders and lines, both for practical and sociological reasons, and that a borderless society would be even less just and home to even more human suffering. I’m open to that idea. I think it’s probably correct.
But we should be honest about the nature of borders. Once you start talking about them, you are already in the violence and supremacy business.
Liberal democracies don’t like to think too hard about that reality. They prefer to pretend that borders are just value-neutral facts of life. Like gravity, or the boiling point of water.
This sentimentality gives people like Carl Schmitt and his bruderschaft an advantage in the political arena because they understand how to use ideas about strength and supremacy to play to voters’ instinctual attraction to being part to the dominant group.
I am not an open-borders guy, because I suspect that a world without borders would create more harms than it would salve. But I appreciate the moral logic of the position. And I am pretty firm in my belief that every political project that centers borders and immigration is a Nazi Horse for Carl Schmitt’s illiberal project.
Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: Trump Pardon, Bill Kristol, Andrew Egger and Jim Swift, Dec. 9, 2025.
Trump may have pardoned Juan Orlando Hernández, former president of Honduras, but that doesn’t mean the convicted fraudster and money launderer who helped move tons of cocaine into the United States is home free.
The government of Honduras issued its own international arrest warrant for Hernández yesterday, apparently determined to administer the justice the American government suddenly has so little concern for.
If that’s not a good metaphor for all this nonsense, we don’t know what is. Happy Tuesday.
Ghislaine Maxwell, the convicted sex trafficker and co-conspirator of her consort Jeffrey Epstein in rape of underage girls, is shown in a photo with Epstein, center, and French modeling agent, human trafficker, and serial rapist Jean-Luc Brunel, shown at right during an airplane trip released by the U.S. Justice Department. Both Epstein and Brunel died in U.S. and French custody, respectively. The Trump Administration has bestowed minimum security conditions on the convicted perjurer Maxwell after she reportedly minimized Donald Trump's complicity with wrongdoing during her private meeting with former Trump attorney Todd Blanche, right, who was installed this year as the second-in-command at the U.S. Justice Department.
New York Times, Judge Grants Request to Unseal Grand Jury Records in Maxwell Case, Benjamin Weiser, Dec. 9, 2025. The ruling cited a law signed last month by President Trump requiring the Justice Department to release its files on Jeffrey Epstein and his longtime companion, Ghislaine Maxwell.
A Manhattan federal judge on Tuesday granted the Justice Department’s motion to unseal the records of the grand jury investigation of Ghislaine Maxwell, the longtime companion of Jeffrey Epstein who is serving a 20-year prison sentence after being convicted in 2021 of sex trafficking a minor and other counts.
The ruling by Judge Paul A. Engelmayer cited a new law passed by Congress requiring the Justice Department to release all of its files on Mr. Epstein by Dec. 19.
The motion seeking the unsealing of the records was made last month by Attorney General Pam Bondi, who had asked the judge to expedite a ruling given the upcoming deadline set by the law, known as the Epstein Files Transparency Act.
Ms. Bondi had also asked a different judge to unseal the grand jury materials from the investigation of Mr. Epstein, who was indicted on sex-trafficking charges in July 2019 and detained pending trial; he was found dead in his jail cell the following month, and his death was ruled a suicide.
The judge in Mr. Epstein’s case, Richard M. Berman, has not yet ruled on that request.
This past summer, Judge Engelmayer and Judge Berman each denied similar requests by Ms. Bondi for the Maxwell and Epstein materials, citing grand jury secrecy. Ms. Bondi renewed her request to both judges for the materials after the new law passed last month.
The request, submitted by Ms. Bondi and her deputy, Todd Blanche, was signed by Jay Clayton, the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York. The motion argues that the new law demonstrates a congressional intent “to override some of the underlying bases for grand jury secrecy.”
The motion notes, for example, that one purpose of the secrecy rule is to protect people who have not been charged “from the anxiety, embarrassment and public castigation that may result from disclosure.”
The new law mandates that materials may not be “withheld, delayed or redacted on the basis of embarrassment, reputational harm, political sensitivity, including to any governmental official, public figure or foreign dignitary,” the motion says.
The new law also allows for withholding certain information like records that could identify victims or contain personal medical information, or that could jeopardize an active federal investigation, the motion noted.
Ms. Maxwell was convicted in December 2021 after a monthlong trial of sex-trafficking conspiracy, sex trafficking of a minor and other counts.
A federal judge in the Southern District of Florida on Friday granted the Justice Department’s request to unseal grand jury materials from an investigation there of Mr. Epstein that began in 2005 into allegations he was abusing teenage girls. As part of a deal to avoid federal charges, Mr. Epstein pleaded guilty in 2008 to Florida state charges that included soliciting minors for prostitution, a deal that has been harshly criticized as overly lenient.
New York Times, Trump Administration Live Updates: President Calls European Nations ‘Weak’ and ‘Decaying,’ Staff Reports, Dec. 9, 2025. Where Things Stand.
Stephen Miller, a top adviser to President Trump, sold shares worth $50,000 to $100,000 in the mining company MP Materials following a July announcement of a lucrative deal between the Las Vegas company and the Trump administration, government filings show.
The sale came one month after the Trump administration announced an extraordinary series of measures to support MP Materials, which produces valuable rare earth minerals and magnets. The deal, which included the government purchasing shares in the company and committing to buy its products, led MP Materials’ share price to skyrocket.
The company’s stock price rose to $45.23 on July 10, the day the deal was announced, from $30.03 a share on July 9. The share price climbed to $76.58 on Aug. 14, the date Mr. Miller sold his shares — a historic high. The stock peaked at just under $99 on Oct. 14, after the company reported earnings. It closed at $59.82 on Tuesday.
Mr. Miller’s sale, which has not been previously reported, was part of a collection of trades that he made in August when he sold stakes in nearly two dozen companies. That included others in which the Trump administration subsequently committed to take an equity stake, including Intel and Westinghouse.
Mr. Miller does not appear to have participated directly in government negotiations with MP Materials. But as Mr. Trump’s deputy chief of staff, he oversees a broad and diverse portfolio of policy and security issues, and has spoken publicly about U.S. minerals.
Ethics experts said that the sales raised a number of questions and concerns, and that they could have been done more quickly to resolve any apparent conflicts of interest, given the Trump administration’s own equity stake.
“Stephen fully divested from stock holdings early in the administration in proactive coordination with the Office of Government Ethics on the timeline guidance they provided,” she said.
A White House official who spoke on the condition of anonymity in order to describe the details of the purchase said that Mr. Miller had consulted with the Office of Government Ethics before entering the White House, and had ordered his broker to divest of any apparent conflicts of interest. The official said that it took several months for the office to respond to Mr. Miller with a divestment plan and the required forms. The office on Tuesday did not respond to requests for comment by phone or email.
The White House official added that Mr. Miller was not involved in negotiating the government’s deal with MP Materials. Mr. Miller did not remember exactly when he purchased the MP Materials stock, the official said, adding that the purchase had been made several years earlier.
Robert Weissman, co-president of Public Citizen, a government ethics watchdog group that has been critical of the Trump administration, said it was not obvious that any ethics laws or rules were violated in the acquisition or sale.
“That said, this is a large investment in an obscure company that just happened to massively benefit from the unusual interventions of the Trump administration,” Mr. Weissman added. “At minimum, it’s a really bad look.”
Mr. Miller in August also sold between $15,000 and $50,000 of shares in Cameco, which owns Westinghouse, the nuclear company, according to his disclosure form. In October, the Trump administration gained the option to take an 8 percent stake in Westinghouse as part of a deal to help facilitate the construction of nuclear reactors.
The disclosure form shows that Mr. Miller in August also sold shares worth at least hundreds of thousands of dollars in other companies that have had dealings with the Trump administration, including GE Aerospace, Palantir Technologies, Amazon and Intel Corporation, in which the Trump administration has also taken a stake. Some of those sales have previously been reported. Mr. Miller’s wife, Katie Miller, also owned between $15,000 to $50,000 of shares in MP Materials, the disclosures show.
The Trump administration began discussions with MP Materials in April, amid a U.S. trade clash with China that involved the type of minerals the company produces. After Mr. Trump imposed hefty tariffs on China earlier this year, Beijing responded with restrictions on exports of rare earth minerals and the magnets made from them. Automakers, defense contractors and other U.S. manufacturers rely on those minerals, and the restrictions jump-started an effort in the Trump administration to increase rare earth mineral production.
A group of Chicago investors formed MP Materials in 2017 to buy a struggling rare earths mine that faced tough competition from Chinese exports. In July, MP Materials announced that the Trump administration had agreed to invest $400 million in the company in exchange for a 15 percent stake, including warrants that would give the government the right to make future stock purchases.
The Defense Department also offered the company a $150 million loan and agreed to establish a price floor for the company’s minerals for a decade. It also agreed to ensure that all of the magnets produced by a newly constructed facility would be purchased by the government or commercial customers.
The announcement made the government the company’s largest shareholder. Since January, the company’s stock price has risen 269 percent.
In other news:
With a looming deadline to extend health insurance subsidies for millions of Americans that are set to expire at the end of the year, President Trump again attacked the Affordable Care Act as “a scam to make the insurance companies rich” and threw his support behind a rival proposal by Republican senators to instead spend the money on tax-free health savings accounts, an approach that Republicans have long embraced.
Senate Republicans, trying to counter Democrats on rising health insurance premiums, intend to hold a vote this week on a plan that would allow Affordable Care Act tax credits to expire at the end of the year and instead send money for health care costs directly to Americans who purchase bare-bones health insurance coverage.
Senator John Thune, the South Dakota Republican and majority leader, said on Tuesday that Republicans would offer the legislation, written by the Republican senators Bill Cassidy of Louisiana and Mike Crapo of Idaho, as their alternative to a Democratic proposal for a three-year extension of tax credits enacted during the pandemic.
Both proposals are expected to come to a vote on Thursday, part of a commitment that Republicans made to Democrats last month in exchange for ending the government shutdown. But neither is likely to draw the 60 votes necessary to advance, making it all but certain that the subsidies will expire at the end of the year with no action by Congress.
Letters from an American, Historical Commentary: December 2, 2025 [Trump Seeks More Power], Heather Cox Richardson, right, Dec. 9, 2025. Last Wednesday, December 3, a reporter asked President Donald J. Trump if he would release the video of the September 2 strike on a small boat off the coast of Venezuela that killed two survivors of a previous strike that had split their boat, capsized it, and set it on fire. He answered: “I don’t know what they have, but whatever they have, we’d certainly release. No problem.”
Today, just five days later, a reporter began to ask Trump a question, beginning with the words: “You said you would have no problem with releasing the full video of that strike on September 2nd off the coast of Venezuela. Secretary Hegseth announced that….” Trump interrupted her. “I didn’t say that. You said that. I didn’t say that.” Turning slightly to make a side comment to someone else, he said: “This is ABC fake news.”
As G. Elliott Morris of Strength In Numbers estimates that 56.1% of Americans disapprove of the job Trump is doing as president while only 39.7% approve, and as his agenda appears more unpopular by the day, Trump and his loyalists appear to be trying to cement his power over the United States of America.
On Sunday, Trump appeared to pressure the Supreme Court to let his tariffs stand, despite the fact that the Constitution gives to Congress alone the power to regulate tariffs. Trump’s justification for seizing the power to impose them is the 1977 International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA), which permits a president to regulate financial transactions after declaring a national emergency. Trump declared a national economic emergency in April before launching his tariff war.
Observers expect the Supreme Court to hand down a decision about the constitutionality of Trump’s tariffs later this week, and the justices’ questioning during oral arguments suggests they are not inclined to accept Trump’s assumption of such dramatic economic power over the U.S.
Last night, on social media, Trump tried to position tariffs as central to national security, an area where the right-wing justices on the Supreme Court have tended to uphold the president’s authority. He posted, “While the United States has other methods of charging TARIFFS against foreign countries, many of whom have, for YEARS, TAKEN ADVANTAGE OF OUR NATION, the current method of Tariffing before the United States Supreme Court is far more DIRECT, LESS CUMBERSOME, and MUCH FASTER, all ingredients necessary for A STRONG AND DECISIVE NATIONAL SECURITY RESULT. SPEED, POWER, AND CERTAINTY ARE, AT ALL TIMES, IMPORTANT FACTORS IN GETTING THE JOB DONE IN A LASTING AND VICTORIOUS MANNER.”
Trump continued: “I have settled 8 Wars in 10 months because of the rights clearly given to the President of the United States. If countries didn’t think these rights existed, they would have said so, LOUD AND CLEAR! Thank you for your attention to this matter. President DONALD J. TRUMP”
Last Wednesday, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, above, told Andrew Ross Sorkin of CNBC’s Squawk Box that the administration believes it can continue its tariff agenda using different laws even if the Supreme Court strikes down its current policy.
Trump’s tariffs have hit farmers particularly hard, making imported goods like machinery and fertilizer more expensive while destroying the markets for products like corn, soybeans, and wheat to create what economists estimate could be losses of $44 billion in net cash income for farmers from their 2025–2026 crops.
Today Trump announced the administration intends to give farmers one-time payments totalling $12 billion. At an event at the White House, Trump told reporters: “[W]e love our farmers. And as you know, the farmers like me, because, you know, based on, based on voting trends, you could call it voting trends or anything else, but they’re great people.”
Utah County Democratic Party chair Darin Self commented: “The President of the United States unilaterally levied a tax on all of us and is redistributing our taxes to a core segment of his supporters.” “A bailout is like putting a Band-Aid on a bullet wound,” corn and soybean farmer John Bartman said on a press call for the Democratic National Committee in mid-October. “Government bailouts do not make up for our loss of income. We don’t want a bailout. We want markets for our crops. We want to be able to work hard every year and enjoy the fruits of our labor and know that we did it on our own.”
Administration officials are calling the program the “Farm Bridge Assistance” program, saying it is designed to help farmers until Trump’s economic policies become successful, a promise Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins echoed later in the day when she told Larry Kudlow of the Fox News Channel: “The relief is coming…. It really is a golden age just right around the corner.”
But Trump spent $28 billion bailing out farmers during his first term, during his first trade war with China, without creating a “golden age,” and Matt Grossman of the Wall Street Journal reported today that the administration has announced it will not publish an already-delayed October report on wholesale-price inflation, saying it will roll those figures into another delayed report due in November and release them in mid-January. It’s probably safe to assume those numbers will not tell a story the administration likes.
The right-wing justices on the Supreme Court might refuse to support Trump’s bid to take control of the country’s economic system, but in arguments today they appeared poised to give him the power to take control of the modern American government by stacking the independent agencies that do much of the government’s work with officials loyal to him.
In March, Trump fired the last remaining Democratic member of the Federal Trade Commission, Rebecca Slaughter. Since 1935, the Supreme Court has said the president does not have the power to fire members of independent agencies created by Congress except for “inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office.” Although Trump himself initially appointed Slaughter, he claimed he fired her because her continued service on the independent commission was “inconsistent with [the] Administration’s priorities” and that he had the right to do so under the authority granted to him by Article II of the Constitution despite the fact Congress set up the position in such a way that it would be shielded from presidential politics.
This argument is an attempt to establish the idea of the “unitary executive,” a theory the right wing has pushed since the 1980s, when it began to distrust the will of voters as they expressed it through Congress, and thus tried to find ways to assert the power of the president and reduce the power of Congress.
The theory of the unitary executive says that since the president is the head of one of the three independent branches of government—those are the legislative branch, the executive branch, and the judicial branch—he has sole authority over the executive branch and cannot be reined in by the other two branches. Trump has leaned into this idea since 2019, when he told attendees at the Turning Point USA Teen Student Action Summit being held in Washington, D.C.: “I have an Article II, where I have…the right to do whatever I want as president.”
The Supreme Court’s 2024 Donald J. Trump v. United States decision supported Trump’s radical reading of the powers of the president when it took the radical position that a president could not be prosecuted for crimes committed in the course of official presidential duties. In his second term, Trump has worked to fit his power grabs within the contours of that decision. Now the Supreme Court appears primed to hand him another win by finding the president has complete control over the officers in the executive branch, including the independent agencies established by Congress but which Congress has been placing in the executive branch since the administration of President George Washington.
Representing the government, Solicitor General John Sauer told the court that the president must be able to remove officials in the agencies because “the President must have the power to control and…the one who has the power to remove is the one who…is the person that they have to fear and obey.”
Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson suggested that this political destruction of the independent agencies Congress had established to provide nonpartisan expertise on issues like how to regulate pollutants would hurt the country. “[H]aving a president come in and fire all the scientists, and the doctors, and the economists and the PhDs, and replacing them with loyalists and people who don’t know anything is actually not in the best interest of the citizens of the United States,” she said.
Law professor Deborah Pearlstein wrote: “It is really, really hard to get your head around the raw hubris of the majority. They really will be destabilizing the operating structure of the entire U.S. government. Why? Because they believe they have a better idea about how the past century should’ve been done.”
The court should decide the case in June.
But there are signs that Republican lawmakers are finally joining the Democrats to push back against Trump’s quest for power. CNN’s Natasha Bertrand reports that tomorrow, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, along with Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Dan Caine and Secretary of State Marco Rubio, will brief the Gang of Eight, presumably on the military strikes against small boats in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific, especially the strike of September 2. The Gang of Eight is made up of the leaders from both parties in both chambers of Congress, and the chair and ranking member of each chamber’s intelligence committees.
Bertrand also reports that the head of U.S. Southern Command Admiral Alvin Holsey, right, who will retire two years ahead of schedule on 
December 12 after disagreements with Hegseth over the strikes, will meet virtually with members of the Senate and House Armed Services committees.
Lawmakers will be voting this week on the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) that lays out priorities and funding authorization for the Defense Department, funding that is then appropriated in different legislation. When the lawmakers released their final version of the bill on Sunday, they had put into it a measure to withhold 25% of Hegseth’s travel budget until the Defense Department hands over the “unedited video of strikes conducted against designated terrorist organizations in the area of responsibility of the United States Southern Command” to the House and Senate Armed Services committees.
NOTUS, Political Commentary: An ‘AstroTurf Recruitment Process’: National Republicans Propped Up Jasmine Crockett to Push Her Into a Senate Run, Reese Gorman, Dec. 9, 2025. The NRSC started including Crockett’s name in polling and conducted “a sustained effort” to get Crockett, the party’s preferred candidate to run against, into the race.
Republicans’ Senate campaign arm has actively worked behind the scenes to encourage Rep. Jasmine Crockett to jump into the Senate Democratic primary in Texas, believing she will be the easiest opponent to beat.
Just a month ago, there was grave concern among Republicans about the Senate race, where incumbent Sen. John Cornyn is running for reelection. Democrats were running two formidable candidates, and Cornyn was caught in the middle of a bruising three-way primary that Republicans were concerned would weaken the eventual nominee.
The National Republican Senatorial Committee put out a poll in July with Crockett’s name included, which showed her as the leading Democrat in a hypothetical matchup.
“When we saw the results, we were like, ‘OK, we got to disseminate this far and wide,’” a source familiar with the process told NOTUS.
The fact that Crockett was included in the poll was no accident.
In June news broke that Texas Democrats Colin Allred, James Talarico, former Rep. Beto O’Rourke and Rep. Joaquin Castro met to discuss the 2026 election. Operatives at the NRSC realized that Crockett — whose political stock had been rising — wasn’t included in that meeting and also hadn’t been included in any credible poll. So they decided to change that.
Following the NRSC’s polls, other surveys began to include Crockett and showed similar results: She was surging in the primary.
The NRSC then worked to amplify those polls and is taking credit for helping “orchestrate the pile on of these polling numbers to really drive that news cycle and that narrative that Jasmine Crockett was surging in Texas,” the source said.
Crockett herself even admitted she was encouraged to jump into the race by all the positive polling she was seeing ahead of her announcement.
“The more I saw the poll results, I couldn’t ignore the trends that were clear,” Crockett said during her announcement speech.
Crockett did not return a request for comment.
But the Republican efforts didn’t stop there. In what the source dubbed an “AstroTurf recruitment process,” the NRSC had “allies that were seeding these new polls pretty aggressively into progressive digital spaces.”
There were several recruitment phone calls and text messages that went out to Democrats and high-propensity voters across the state that would urge voters to contact and advocate for Crockett to join the race, the source said.
“That was really a sustained effort that we orchestrated across the ecosystem for several months,” the source said. “Not only was it getting positive news coverage, but her office was directly having traffic driven to it in terms of phone calls urging her to run.”
Cornyn was trailing significantly in the polls to Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, and Rep. Wesley Hunt was creeping up on him. Polls also showed Paxton faring worse against Allred and Talarico, the Democrats who had announced they were running, in the general election.
Then, this past week, Allred dropped out of the Senate race, opting instead to run for the House, and Crockett, whose brand of anti-Trump, anti-Republican virality has made her popular with the progressive base, announced she would run for Senate in Texas.
The NRSC also worked to ensure they were “communicating” to donors and others in the Republican campaign ecosystem what they were seeing in the polling, the source said.
Now that Crockett is in the race, the work is not done. There have been conversations with outside groups and conservative figures about the possibility of working to “stand up independent expenditure arms and offshoot brands that aren’t necessarily overtly Republican entities, but that would prop her candidacy up to try and give us a better shot at facing her.”
“It’s not all too different than what we’re kind of already doing on a daily basis as the party committee, which is helping quarterback support for Republicans. And in this case, you know, the recruitment process is as much a recruiting of strong Republicans as it is trying to find ways to prop up, you know, very vulnerable Democrats,” the source said.
Media, High-Tech, Political Impacts
Elon Musk, left, and Donald Trump shown in separate file photos via Instagram and YouTube.
Paul Krugman via Substack, Political-Economy Commentary: America Has Become a Digital Narco-State, Paul Krugman, right, Dec. 9, 2025. Social media giants have bought our government, and are trying to bully Europe.
Imagine what would happen if the United States were to legalize the distribution and sale of heroin — and do so without any restrictions or regulations on how the drug is marketed and who can buy it.
Heroin distribution and sales would quickly become a huge, multibillion-dollar industry. They would become a significant part of GDP, even though heroin harms and often kills those who consume it. Given the increasingly naked corruption of U.S. politics, the heroin industry would be able to purchase massive political influence, enough to block any attempts to limit the harm it does — the harm it knows it does, because heroin industry executives would surely be aware of the damage their products inflict.
Through massive political donations — enabled by the Supreme Court’s 2010 Citizens United ruling — and de facto bribery enabled via cryptocurrency deals, the industry would be able to enlist the U.S. government as an ally in its efforts to block regulation in other countries. For example, U.S. officials might threaten punitive tariffs against countries that try to limit and regulate heroin use.
If this story strikes you as extreme and implausible, here’s what you should know: replace “heroin” with “social media,” and this is a description of actual events.
Yesterday I wrote about how hostility to Europe is a central theme of the Trump administration’s recently released National Security Strategy. The main driver of that hostility appears to be MAGA fury at the nations of Europe for being excessively protective of civil liberties and insufficiently racist.
A secondary source of anti-Europe sentiment, however, is the tech broligarchy’s fury at the European Union’s Digital Services Act. The Act obliges large platforms to self-police a variety of potential injurious effects ranging from “dissemination of illegal content” to “negative consequences” for “physical and mental well-being.”
Is comparing social media to a dangerous drug over the top? Not according to the U.S. Surgeon General’s office, which in 2023 released an advisory titled “Social Media and Youth Mental Health” (download it now before RFK Jr. suppresses it!), which summarized extensive evidence of mental health damage to children and adolescents who consume excessive amounts of social media.
Furthermore, the operators of these platforms know that they’re doing harm. In 2021 the Wall Street Journal published an article titled “Facebook Knows Instagram is Toxic for Teen Girls, Documents Show: Its own in-depth research shows a significant teen mental-health issue that Facebook plays down in public.” In 2024 Meta finally introduced some relatively ineffectual limits on what teens can see.
Nor are children and adolescents the only victims. Last month Reuters, after reviewing a cache of internal Meta documents, reported that
Meta internally projected late last year that it would earn about 10% of its overall annual revenue – or $16 billion – from running advertising for scams and banned goods, internal company documents show.
A cache of previously unreported documents reviewed by Reuters also shows that the social-media giant for at least three years failed to identify and stop an avalanche of ads that exposed Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp’s billions of users to fraudulent e-commerce and investment schemes, illegal online casinos, and the sale of banned medical products.
At the same time, Elon Musk’s X has become a huge promoter of hate speech, with many of its major MAGA accounts based overseas while posing as American patriots.
So social media clearly do considerable harm. But social media giants have been able to use the power of money to block regulation. Last year Congress seemed on the verge of passing the Kids Online Safety Act, legislation intended to, yes, protect kids online. The legislation, which would have been the first ever to impose rules on social media, had overwhelming bipartisan support. Ninety-one senators supported it. But then Mark Zuckerberg and his billions came to town, and the legislation died.
Other countries’ governments are less easily corrupted. Australia has passed a law, which goes into effect tomorrow, intended to prevent anyone under 16 from having a social media account. While no one knows yet how well the law will work, it is a worthy attempt to protect Australia’s youth from the pernicious effects of social media.
Under the auspices of its Digital Services Act, the European Commission imposed its first fine last week — 120 million euros, basically a tiny slap on the wrist — on Musk’s X. The Commission’s case is straightforward:
· X’s “Blue checks” are a fraud. X claims that a blue check means that the poster’s identity has been verified. But in fact X sells them without making any effort to verify that posters are who they say they are.These are clear violations of European law, and the fine, as I said, was little more than a slap on the wrist. Yet Musk, right, went berserk, declaring that the EU should be abolished and threatening personal retribution against the “woke Stasi commissars” responsible for the fine.
I’m not an expert on European law, but isn’t threatening to take personal revenge against government officials whose decisions you don’t like itself likely illegal?
What makes this episode especially disturbing is that the U.S. government appears to be using its power to support the broligarchy’s fight against European regulation. Howard Lutnick, the commerce secretary, has explicitly linked U.S. tariffs on European steel to demands that Europe weakens its digital regulations. If the EU tried to make comparable demands on the United States, we’d consider it an outrageous infringement on our national sovereignty. And I’m pretty sure that making this linkage violates U.S. trade law too. But rule of law is for the little people.
The key point is that if you think of unregulated social media as dangerous drugs, as you should, then we’ve become a nation in which drug lords control much of government policy. Social media billionaires have enough power to prevent us from protecting our own children. They have enough power to dictate U.S. foreign policy, punishing our erstwhile allies for daring to limit their ability to push their product.
America has, in practice, become a digital narco-state.
Popular Information, Accountability Journalism: Kushner and Saudis back hostile takeover of Hollywood giant, Judd Legum, right, Rebecca Crosby and Noel Sims, Dec. 9, 2025. Jared Kushner, above right, is funneling $24 billion from Middle Eastern governments to back a hostile bid for Warner Bros. Discovery — all while advising President Trump on foreign policy.
On Monday morning, Paramount announced a $77.9 billion hostile takeover offer of Warner Bros. Discovery (WBD), an American media conglomerate that owns an iconic movie studio, HBO, and other news and entertainment properties. The offer is meant to upend Netflix’s deal to purchase WBD for $72 billion, which WBD accepted last Friday.
Paramount’s press release announcing the offer says that the $40 billion in equity financing will be “backstopped by Ellison Family and RedBird Capital.” The CEO of Paramount is David Ellison, the son of Oracle co-founder Larry Ellison, the second-wealthiest person in the world. RedBird Capital is an investment fund based in New York. (The rest of the cash for the purchase will be raised as debt from American banks.)
What is not mentioned in the press release is that while the equity financing is “backstopped” by American individuals and entities, the majority of the equity financing — $24 billion — comes from the sovereign wealth funds of Saudi Arabia, Abu Dhabi, and Qatar. That fact is buried on page 42 of a separate SEC filing.
$24 billion is a massive investment by foreign governments on Paramount’s behalf. To put it in perspective, the current value of Paramount is just $15 billion.
Also participating in the deal is Affinity Partners, the private equity firm run by President Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner. Nearly all of Affinity Partners’ assets come from the same sovereign wealth funds bankrolling the proposed Paramount takeover of WBD. Kushner collects tens of millions in fees from Saudi Arabia and other Middle Eastern countries annually.
Kushner’s involvement in the deal highlights the ongoing legal and ethical problems with his dual role. On the one hand, Kushner is operating as a high-ranking official representing the Trump administration in the most sensitive foreign policy matters. On the other hand, he is being paid by and partnering with Middle Eastern governments as they seek to expand their political, economic, and cultural interests.
Any acquisition of WBD requires the approval of multiple federal agencies. On Sunday, the day before Paramount’s hostile takeover bid was announced, Trump warned that Netflix’s planned acquisition “could be a problem“ because the combined company would have too much market share. It was a somewhat surprising comment from a president who has not made antitrust a central issue of his presidency. Trump also emphasized that while he would consult “some economists” he would also personally “be involved” in the decision.
Ted Sarandos, Netflix’s CEO, reportedly “wooed Trump“ at the White House in advance of the company’s WBD offer. Netflix agreed to pay WBD $5.7 billion if the deal did not receive regulatory approval, one of the largest breakup fees ever. This reflected Netflix’s confidence that the deal would win Trump administration approval — at least before Kushner became involved.
A reporter asked Trump on Monday if Kushner’s involvement with Paramount’s deal could influence his views. “I don’t know,” Trump responded. “I’ve never spoken with him about it.”Paramount is willing to conform to Trump’s ideological agenda
Trump may be more amenable to Paramount’s bid for WBD, because Paramount has a history of bowing to Trump’s political demands, especially since David Ellison became CEO in August.
In September, CBS News announced that it hired a Trump loyalist, Kenneth R. Weinstein, to “receive and evaluate any complaints of bias or other concerns involving CBS” as the company’s new ombudsman. Paramount had promised to create the job to secure approval for itsmerger with Skydance. Weinstein had no experience with producing or overseeing news coverage and previously was the president of the Hudson Institute, a right-wing think tank. Weinstein has an extensive record of praising Trump, and in July 2024, Weinstein donated $20,000 to a committee supporting Trump’s campaign.
In October, Paramount announced that it was hiring anti-woke crusader Bari Weiss as the new editor-in-chief of CBS News and purchasing Weiss’ The Free Press for a reported $150 million. Weiss, a former New York Times opinion editor and writer, had no experience in broadcast news. In 2021, Weiss founded The Free Press, a right-leaning publication that often criticizes what it deems the “woke” left and efforts to promote diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). A Popular Information review of The Free Press’ articles found that it repeatedly distorted the truth in order to conform to a right-wing ideological agenda.
Larry Ellison is also a close ally of Trump. In 2020, he held a “six-figure-per-person campaign fundraiser” for the president at his California estate, where guests could pay $100,000 to golf and take a photo with Trump or $250,000 to “also participate in a round-table discussion.” He has also dined with Trump at Mar-a-Lago, sat in on a transition meeting at Mar-a-Lago, and has reportedly met with Trump frequently this year.The foreign ownership problem
Having foreign governments own such a large stake in a company like WBD — which has sensitive financial information about millions of Americans — creates significant regulatory uncertainty. Such transactions frequently require an additional layer of approval by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS).
In the SEC filing regarding the offer, Paramount claims that it has structured the deal to be outside of CFIUS’s jurisdiction:
Our other outside financing partners (the Public Investment Fund (Kingdom of Saudi Arabia), L’imad Holding Company PJSC (Abu Dhabi), Qatar Investment Authority (Qatar) and Affinity Partners (Jared Kushner)) have agreed to forgo any governance rights – including board representation – associated with their non-voting equity investments. Accordingly, the Transaction will not be within CFIUS’s jurisdiction.
It is telling that Affinity Partners, a U.S. company owned by an American, is lumped into this group. Paramount is tacitly acknowledging that Kushner is using Affinity Partners as a vehicle for foreign influence.
But Paramount’s claim that CFIUS no longer has jurisdiction over the deal is false. A company cannot extinguish concerns about foreign ownership simply by nominally giving up governance rights. There are many other ways that entities providing $24 billion in equity investment can influence the operations of a company.
That’s why CFIUS has jurisdiction to investigate the deal between Paramount and WBD to determine what influence the sovereign wealth funds have and whether that influence raises national security concerns.The creative and economic concerns about Netflix’s takeover bid
Netflix’s bid to buy WBD is also controversial.
Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle have raised anti-trust concerns about the deal. Senator Mike Lee (R-UT), who leads a Senate subcommittee on antitrust, said on X that the deal raised “a lot of antitrust red flags” and that he would hold “an intense antitrust hearing.” Meanwhile, Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) said that the deal “looks like an anti-monopoly nightmare.” If Netflix were to buy WBD, it would own two of the top three largest streaming services, Netflix and HBO Max. This market power could allow Netflix to raise prices for its subscription services, which are already increasing rapidly.
The Writers Guild of America said the Netflix deal would “eliminate jobs, push down wages, worsen conditions for all entertainment workers, raise prices for consumers, and reduce the volume and diversity of content for all viewers.”
Another issue is the impact that the Netflix purchase could have on movie theaters. Netflix typically does not show its movies in theaters. Netflix’s CEO has said that declines in box office sales show that going to the movie theater is “an outmoded idea” and consumers would prefer to watch movies at home. With WBD films making up roughly a quarter of box office sales in North America, a theater-owner trade group said “the negative impact of this acquisition will impact theaters from the biggest circuits to one-screen independents.” Netflix has said that it would continue showing WBD movies in theaters, although this was met with skepticism from many in the industry.
Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: Donald Owes Larry. Can Larry Collect? Andrew Egger, right, Dec. 9, 2025. I have watched in fascination over the last few days as the negotiations have been ensnared in the court politics of obtaining the personal blessing or disapproval of one Donald J. Trump.
Netflix’s top competitor in the bid to acquire the Warner Bros. studio and HBO Max has been Paramount, the media company owned by one of Trump’s inner-ring tech billionaire pals, David Ellison. Ellison had thought the Warner Bros. deal was as good as his, but somehow Netflix managed to outmaneuver him, announcing their deal last week.
Over the weekend, though, Trump cracked the door open. The Netflix–Warner Bros. deal “could be a problem,” he said Sunday from the red carpet at his Trumpified Kennedy Center Honors ceremony—standing in front of a backdrop conspicuously featuring the logo of the event’s main sponsor, Ellison’s CBS. Netflix already has “a very big market share” in streaming, Trump said (correctly). “When they have Warner Bros., that share goes up a lot. . . . I’ll be involved in that decision, too.”
It was the last bit—Trump’s promise to get personally involved rather than leaving matters up to his underlings at the Justice Department and/or the Federal Trade Commission—that likely caused Ellison’s heart to sing. On Monday, he seemed to take the president at his word, launching a $108 billion hostile takeover bid for Warner Bros. designed to go around the company’s board by appealing directly to its shareholders. Ellison was offering more money than Netflix, but he also offered a remarkable argument: Shareholders should go with him, he wrote, because he believed Netflix’s bid would face “a challenging regulatory approval process.”
Both Netflix and Paramount have plainly known for a while that getting Trump’s personal buy-in was key to the deal. But while both companies did what they could to curry favor—both courted former Trump adviser Jason Miller to come aboard as an adviser to the deal, for instance—there’s little question Ellison came out better in that department. Part of the financing he lined up for his bid was ponied up by Affinity, the investment group of Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner. And Ellison has spent the first year of Trump’s term coming through for the president in all sorts of remarkable ways—settling Trump’s ridiculous lawsuit against CBS News’s 60 Minutes, then handing over editorial control of the entire news outlet to contrarian conservative Bari Weiss.
And here, after all that, was Ellison coming to reap his reward, in plain English: Netflix, not Paramount, was the party likely to face regulatory blowback from the White House. Trump wants ME to get it, Ellison might as well have said, not THEM.
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But the court politics can cut both ways. Trump loves being sucked up to, and he loves distributing head-pat rewards to the suck-ups. What Trump does not love is powerful people starting to treat those rewards as something they’ve earned. The largesse of the emperor is never earned—it is freely bestowed by his gracious will and graciously received by the unworthy! The baldness of Ellison’s pitch seems to have rankled at least some in Trump’s orbit, who offered some real howlers of complaint to Semafor: The Paramount team seems to “believe the worst tropes” about corruption in the administration, they groused. They’re “leaning into all the stereotypes.”
Where did those tropes and stereotypes come from, one wonders?
Ellison’s brazenness may have complicated Trump’s decision tree, but there’s little question the president is still the guy whose say-so will be final.
“In a normal administration, maybe the president would actually have [control of the deal], but he’d never say anything. He’d probably just, like, wink and nod—‘Well, we’ll let the enforcers do what the enforcers do’—and then not claim responsibility,” an administration official familiar with antitrust issues told The Bulwark. “In this administration, the president wants responsibility and wants everyone to know that he blocked the deal or whatever. . . . If the president is dictating, he’s gonna get what he wants. So we’ll see what he wants.”
Status, Ellison's Endgame, Oliver Darcy, Dec. 8-9, 2025. What began as quiet courtship by David Ellison has morphed into a hostile takeover attempt of Warner Bros. Discovery—with the battle only likely to get messier in the days ahead.
David Ellison on CNBC. (Screen shot via SnapStream)
Earlier this fall, on the second Sunday of September, David Zaslav welcomed David Ellison to his Beverly Hills home. Only weeks earlier, Ellison had closed the tortured, much-drawn-out acquisition of Paramount, cementing the Oracle scion’s status as Hollywood’s newest mogul. But if Zaslav didn’t fully grasp Ellison’s ambitions that afternoon, it didn’t take long for the picture to come into focus.
At the meeting, Ellison disclosed that he wanted to buy all of Warner Bros. Discovery. His opening offer: $19 a share, split between 60% cash and 40% stock—a 52% premium at the time. He laid out the strategic rationale for a combined company and left behind a letter for Zaslav detailing Paramount proposal.
It was merely the first overture aimed at courting Zaslav. Two days later, David’s father Larry Ellison met virtually with Zaslav and influential shareholder John Malone, reiterating the family’s desire for WBD. And as their offers for the sprawling media conglomerate climbed, the Ellisons kept up the charm offensive…
U.S. Foreign Policy, National Security
The Steady State, Trump’s Un-American National Security Strategy, Adam Wasserman, Dec. 9, 2025. The Trump administration’s National Security Strategy (NSS) dropped on December 4, 2025. The NSS is mandated by the Goldwater-Nichols Act (1986) that requires each administration to produce a public statement of its goals and strategies.
A criticism of these efforts is that they end up being watered-down consensus documents that say little and try to cover every foreign policy 
base. However, they can also reveal key assumptions and changes in strategic direction. They are authoritative expressions of the President and his senior staff that are taken seriously abroad, and can be cited to justify decisions and win interagency debates.
A lead author of this NSS was Michael Anton. Anton was head of the State Department’s Policy Planning Staff until September, when he resigned (apparently because he was upset that he was denied a senior position at the NSC). While there are many fingerprints on this kind of document, Anton’s are the most visible.
Anton is an intellectual who embodies the nationalist and nativist side of the MAGA movement, along with Stephen Miller, Steve Bannon, Russell Vought and JD Vance. He became famous in 2016 for his (initially anonymous) essay in which he argued that electing Donald Trump was an existential necessity comparable to the decision by airline passengers on 9/11 to storm the cockpit of the hijacked jet over Pennsylvania. After Trump was defeated in 2020, he was notorious for entertaining the idea of a ‘red Caesar’, a dictator who would do the necessary work of restoring order to a corrupt society. His home port is the Claremont Institute, a right-wing thinktank that also harbors John Eastman, the recently pardoned legal architect of Trump’s attempt to overthrow the 2000 election.
The 2025 NSS reflects many of the positions held by Anton and his wing of the MAGA movement. For them the central goal of all policy, including foreign policy, is to fight what they see as the “real enemy:” an insidious leftism that seeks to weaken our traditions and values through immigration, DEI, globalization, free trade, environmentalism and the like. The section of the NSS titled ‘What We Want Overall’ climaxes with a call for “the restoration and reinvigoration of American spiritual and cultural health, without which long-term security is impossible. We want an America that cherishes its past glories and its heroes, and that looks forward to a new golden age.” They believe that our culture and heritage are under attack from within, and our foreign policy must be structured accordingly.
To win this fight, Anton and other ‘neo-nationalists’ argue it is appropriate for nations to nakedly pursue their own interests with little regard for any broader global order or the type of regime in other nations—‘America First.’ Supporting democracy abroad is a mistake—in fact, the word ‘democracy’ hardly appears in the entire NSS.
It astonishingly argues that our founding document, the Declaration of Independence, teaches that every nation’s distinct way of life should be respected; a sharp break with traditional American interpretations that say the rights to ‘life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness’ are universal and always worthy of support.
The NSS criticizes American interventionism, but with telling exceptions. One is Europe. Europe is described as declining and in danger of ‘civilizational erasure’, due largely to immigration. Here the NSS echoes the criticism of Europe made by Vice-President Vance at the Munich Security Conference in February, as he chastised European leaders for supposedly suppressing populism. The NSS calls for the US to help Europe ‘correct its current trajectory’ by supporting ‘patriotic European parties’ and movements.
Behind this approach we can detect the ‘civilizationalist’ view, highly influential in Moscow and Beijing, that the best of all possible worlds is one where distinct nations with different cultures and values protect and enhance these differences. Powerful civilizations have a right to their own sphere of influence. Diversity is a weakness. It is dangerous to mix peoples via immigration, or weaken sovereignty via multinational institutions, or meddle abroad by trying to turn authoritarian regimes into democracies. Europeans are exhorted to fight the ‘loss of national identities and self-confidence’.
This view of Europe translates into US policy on Ukraine, which centers on a peace settlement and restoring ‘strategic stability’ with Russia. The NSS claims the European people “want peace without further assistance to Ukraine, but are being blocked by European elites who continue to support that assistance.” The US must defend genuine democracy in Europe by pushing for a peace settlement over the head of Ukraine and against the wishes of Europe’s elected leaders.
While there is little discussion of Russia, it is easy to draw conclusions. Russia is a model for the West in this administration’s view. Russia is an example of a nation that, unlike Europe—and the US—is unabashedly nationalistic and proud of its history. It apologizes for nothing in its pursuit of security and territory. It spurns immigrants and asks its people to bear more children for the motherland. (The NSS calls for Americans to have “growing numbers of strong traditional families that raise healthy children.”)
While past administrations have put forward win-win strategies that aim for an interdependent global system, the world of the NSS is decidedly zero-sum. There is no discussion of transnational issues—terrorism, non-proliferation, global warming, pandemics—that might require global cooperation, even with adversaries. The portrayal of China is entirely as a threat and a competitor.
In contrast to longstanding US policy that has brought relative peace and prosperity to the US for the last 80 years, the NSS sees the world as divided into spheres of influence dominated by major powers: “The outsized influence of larger, richer, and stronger nations is a timeless truth of international relations.” It calls for a balance of power, with the US making sure no other nation encroaches on our domain. The NSS makes this domain clear: “The United States must be preeminent in the Western hemisphere.” It describes in detail a ‘Trump corollary’ to the Monroe Doctrine: the US must dominate militarily and economically, and prevent any other power from making inroads in the region.
While not explicitly granting China and Russia their own similar spheres, this is the conclusion America’s allies can appropriately draw. You are on your own.
The Trump NSS attempts to draw a close to an era of American multilateralism and openness to the world that made the United States the strongest, wealthiest, and most respected nation on earth. It makes selfishness a virtue and willfully ignores the long-term consequences for global stability, the American economy, and the well-being of the planet. It withdraws support from liberal democracies, which it explicitly rejects, and advocates helping anti-liberal, populist forces. For Trump, the United States is not conceived as a country founded on universal principles, on natural rights to ‘life liberty, and the pursuit of happiness’. We are just a country like any other with our own culture, interests and norms that aren’t relevant to anyone else. .
It is, simply, un-American.
Adam Wasserman is a retired CIA analyst with experience on failing democracies in the former Soviet Union, the Middle East, and Southeast Asia. He served on the State Department Policy Planning Staff, the CIA Red Cell, and the National Security Council staff. He is a member of The Steady State. All statements of fact, opinion, or analysis expressed are those of the author and do not reflect the official positions or views of the US Government. Nothing in the contents should be construed as asserting or implying US Government authentication of information or endorsement of the author’s views.
Founded in 2016, The Steady State is a nonprofit 501(c)(4) organization of more than 360 former senior national security professionals. Our membership includes former officials from the CIA, FBI, Department of State, Department of Defense and Department of Homeland Security. Drawing on deep expertise across national security disciplines including intelligence, diplomacy, military affairs and law, we advocate for constitutional democracy, the rule of law and the preservation of America’s national security institutions.
White House advisor Stephen Miller, above left.
Emptywheel, Analysis: White Man's Burden: Trump Is Failing Six of Ten Metrics on His Own Open Book Test, Emptywheel (Marcy Wheeler, right), Dec. 9, 2025. The self-imagined competent boys who wrote Trump's National Security Strategy effectively wrote a list of standards they're affirmatively failing to meet.
One reason I laid out what Stephen Miller and Trump’s other sad little advisors think they’re doing in their National Security Strategy is because once you do that, it makes it even more clear that their overestimation of their own competence is dooming the United States.
Fully seven pages of the short (33 pages as compared to Trump’s 68-page 2017 NSS and Sleepy Joe Biden’s 48-page 2022 one) document blather about what it is trying to accomplish: two pages announcing the adoption of utilitarianism over values, two laying out what the US should want, another laying out what Trump thinks the US wants from the world, and two more laying out what means the US has to get there.
This is the work of a bunch of men who imagine they are competent telling everyone who came before them that they were doing things wrong.
Yet by laying all that out — by writing down what they imagine competence would deliver — they make it clear how badly they’re screwing up.
Effectively, Donald Trump has already done significant, if not grave, damage to six of the ten things that Trump claims America wants:
Continued survival of US sovereignty Protect the country from human trafficking, foreign influence, propaganda, and espionage “A resilient national infrastructure that can withstand natural disasters, resist and thwart foreign threat” The most dynamic economy A robust industrial base Unrivaled soft power that “believe[s] in our country’s inherent greatness and decency”)
Start with the obvious ones.
Donald Trump and Marco Rubio and Elon Musk spent the first six months of this Administration trashing America’s soft power. These boys seem to imagine they can replace it with something that “believe[s] in our country’s inherent greatness and decency.” Except no one else will believe in American decency after it suddenly withdrew funding that resulted in the deaths of 600,000 people, two thirds of them children. People won’t trust you after you renege on paying the bills.
Or consider that 2nd bullet, which reads this way:
We want to protect this country, its people, its territory, its economy, and its way of life from military attack and hostile foreign influence, whether espionage, predatory trade practices, drug and human trafficking, destructive propaganda and influence operations, cultural subversion, or any other threat to our nation.
Of course, Trump claims to combat drug trafficking with his murderboat killings, even while he lets increasingly major drug criminals out of prison.
As for the rest? On her first day in office, the Attorney General stopped policing foreign influence, destructive propaganda, and influence operations; then Kristi Noem piled on by shutting down other programs combatting foreign influence and propaganda.
And, as an endless stream of stories reveal, both Pam Bondi and Noem have reassigned those who would hunt spies and human traffickers to go hunt undocumented grannies and day laborers instead.
Worse, the priority on weaponization has resulted in the loss of those people. Just the firing of a bunch of people who took a knee during the George Floyd protests to deescalate resulted in the firing of a counterintelligence Deputy Assistant Director and a supervisor.
a. In late March 2025, Plaintiff Jane Doe 5 was informed that she was being removed at the direction of Defendant Patel from her position at FBI Headquarters as a Deputy Assistant Director for the FBI overseeing counterintelligence at the direction of Defendant Patel because she kneeled on June 4, 2020. Plaintiff Jane Doe 5 had been specifically identified in then-Representative Gaetz’s letter. Plaintiff Jane Doe 5 retained her SES status but was demoted to a Section Chief position.
b. In April 2025, Plaintiff Jane Doe 6 was serving as the Legal Attache for the FBI based overseas along with her family. In that capacity, Plaintiff Jane Doe 6 had previously provided briefings to Defendant Patel with which he said he was very impressed. Nevertheless, on April 3, 2025, an FBI senior leader informed her that she was being removed from her term position in the Senior Executive Service to a non-Senior Executive Service position, abruptly uprooting her entire family and resulting in a significant pay decrease. The FBI senior leader informed Plaintiff Jane Doe 6 that Defendant Patel had indicated that his mind was made up and could not be changed.
c. In April 2025, Plaintiff Jane Doe 9 was demoted from her position as a supervisor overseeing all FBI ransomware and malware investigations. An FBI senior leader informed her that the demotion came straight from top level FBI leadership.
d. In April 2025, Defendant Patel directed the removal of Plaintiff Jane Doe 8 from her position supervising a counterintelligence squad.
There were even greater losses in DHS’ purges.
That’s part of the problem with bullet 3: The NSS’ grand plan to make America’s infrastructure more resilient. Along with gutting those who protect against foreign influence, Noem has gutted those who protect against hacking and natural disasters.
As for bullets 4 and 5? Trump’s trade war has had the opposite effect than he claimed it would, with historic layoffs and struggling manufacturing and small businesses.
Again, Trump did affirmative damage rather than achieving his goals.
Then there’s the question of sovereignty.
For all its yapping about America First, the NSS doesn’t deal with the way that Trump has been trading away America’s advantages to any rich foreigner with millions in cryptocurrency. Just yesterday, for example, Trump approved the sale of one of Nvidia’s most complex chips to China on the same day Houston’s US Attorney rolled out showy prosecutions for Chinese men accused of illegally exporting those very same chips.
“The United States has long emphasized the importance of innovation and is responsible for an incredible amount of cutting-edge technology, such as the advanced computer chips that make modern AI possible,” said Assistant Attorney General for National Security John A. Eisenberg. “This advantage isn’t free but rather the result of our engineers’ and scientists’ hard work and sacrifice. The National Security Division, along with our partners, will vigorously enforce our export-control laws and protect this edge.”
Alan Hao Hsu aka Haochun Hsu, 43, Missouri City, and his company, Hao Global LLC, both pleaded guilty to smuggling and unlawful export activities Oct. 10.
According to now unsealed court documents, between October 2024 and May 2025, Hsu and others knowingly exported and attempted to export at least $160 million worth of export-controlled Nvidia H100 and H200 Tensor Core graphic processing units (GPUs).
Trump already authorized the export of even more complex chips to Saudi Arabia and Abu Dhabi, the same sovereigns backing Paramount’s hostile bid to take over a big chunk of the US entertainment industry (that’s after China’s Tencent was dropped).
And these are just the areas where Trump has most obviously failed his own standards.
He built in a gimme in those standards he actually accomplished by claiming to want nuclear deterrent but then stating, falsely, that the Golden Dome would deliver such a deterrent.
We want the world’s most robust, credible, and modern nuclear deterrent, plus next-generation missile defenses—including a Golden Dome for the American homeland—to protect the American people, American assets overseas, and American allies.
Mark Kelly explained how unrealistic this effort was months ago.
And as for the hope that the rest of the world will use American technology, one of the things Trump wants from the rest of the world?
We want to ensure that U.S. technology and U.S. standards—particularly in AI, biotech, and quantum computing—drive the world forward.
As for those chips Trump cleared for sale, China is limiting their use.
As for American biotech, the rest of the world is instead importing America’s scientists who’ve been defunded as part of Trump’s anti-intellectual purges.
There’s plenty else in this NSS (such as other references to America’s technical superiority) where the boys aspire to have skills they affirmatively destroyed.
As such, the NSS isn’t so much a strategy (a word they scare quote when they define it): it’s a confession that these self-declared competent people are failing to meet their own standards.
The Situation via Lawfare, Why Did the White House Write This National Security Strategy? Benjamin Wittes, Dec. 8, 2025. A very strange document. 
The Situation on Friday recounted my first ride in a driverless car—a ride, it turns out, that coincided with the release by 
the White House of Trump’s National Security Strategy. I’ll let the reader decide whether it was a coincidence or a metaphor, and if the latter, a metaphor for what.
The National Security Strategy is a very strange document—strange in what it includes, strange in what it leaves out, strange in its bombastic personalization of policy to President Trump, strange in displaying a certain meta-quality, and strange in its all-but-overt racism. Needless, perhaps, to say, this does not read like the national security strategies of any prior administration.
The meta-quality gives the racism a weirdly-organized sheen. The document spends the first seven of its 33 pages explaining what a strategy is, why previous American national security strategies have all sucked, what the United States (meaning the Trump administration) wants from the rest of the world, and what means are at its disposal to get what it wants. The document spends time justifying the proposition that it can’t focus on everything and has to prioritize—though it actually does bounce from subject to subject a great deal in a fashion that does not reflect rigorous prioritization.
It’s as though a teacher gave a student a rubric for doing an assignment (writing a national security strategy), and the student went ahead and filled out the rubric like a form and published it as a preface to the paper.
So by the time the document comes around to the United States being on the brink of not surviving as a constitutional republic and Europe facing civilizational collapse, the reader has been well prepared to read, respectively, about “Priorities” and the European theater in the discussion of “The Regions.”
This National Security Strategy reflects any number of remarkable judgments, some of them merely eccentric, some of them far worse than that. Here I want to focus only on two of them—one domestic and the other foreign yet linked conceptually by a frankly racial thread.
The first is this sentence on page 11: “Border security is the primary element of national security.”
Note here that the document is not defining “border security” as an important element of U.S. security or as one of the most significant elements of it. It is defining it as the single primary element of American security.
Lest you misunderstand the document here as talking about protecting the borders of the United States from foreign armies or some other conventional military threat, no, it is talking about immigration. The sentence appears in a section entitled, “The Era of Mass Migration is Over,” a section that is entirely about migration—not conventional military threats. Immediately following the sentence is the statement, “We must protect our country from invasion, not just from unchecked migration but from cross-border threats such as terrorism, drugs, espionage, and human trafficking.”
The primary element of national security? This idea isn’t exactly new. Back in February, in a speech at CPAC, Vice President J.D. Vance declared, “The greatest threat in Europe, and I’d say the greatest threat in the US until about 30 days ago, is that you’ve had the leaders of the west decide that they should send millions and millions of unvetted foreign migrants into their countries."
But it is crazy.
I am willing to entertain the notion that the last several administrations may have underestimated the American people’s desire for a secure border. But to put the issue of border security as the top objective in one’s national security strategy is a kind of a nativist madness that is more about cultural—and let’s be honest, racial—anxiety about immigration than it is about any tangible security threat.
To call border security the primary element of national security, after all, you have to believe that controlling and limiting migration is more important to American security than, say, maintaining a functional and effective nuclear deterrence; having a military capable of protecting American interests at home and abroad, and stopping or deterring Russian and Chinese predations on allies. You have to believe it’s more important than having a coherent approach to protecting American critical infrastructure and cybersecurity and more important than stopping major terrorist operations.
Note that in this paragraph, the security concern is not any worry about activity that might attend uncontrolled migration—the terrorism, drugs, espionage, and human trafficking are almost after-thoughts in the paragraph. The threat is the migration itself. And the stakes? They are total. “A border controlled by the will of the American people as implemented by their government is fundamental to the survival of the United States as a sovereign republic,” the document warns darkly.
The document is, to be fair, consistent on this point. Fourteen pages later, the subject turns to America’s European allies, and this anxiety about migration comes roaring back. Because if the United States needs to control its borders to survive as a sovereign republic, Europe is already facing “the real and more stark prospect of civilizational erasure.” The reason is a combination of governance by the EU and other international bodies, “migration policies that are transforming the continent and creating strife,” “cratering birthrates, and loss of national identities and self-confidence.”
Now back on page 1, in explaining “What Is American Strategy,” the document had scolded “American foreign policy elites” for convincing “themselves that permanent American domination of the entire world was in the best interests of our country.” In fact, the document insists, “the affairs of other countries are our concern only if their activities directly threaten our interests.”
The National Security Strategy’s authors never make clear how exactly European civilizational erasure is directly threatening our interests, except to say that if present trends continue, “it is far from obvious whether certain European countries will have economies and militaries strong enough to remain reliable allies.” The key sentence is the one that follows: “We want Europe to remain European, to regain its civilizational self-confidence, and to abandon its failed focus on regulatory suffocation.”
And by way of accomplishing these objectives, it openly proposes intervening in the domestic politics of European countries. Specifically, it proposes, “Cultivating resistance to Europe’s current trajectory within European nations,” and it states that “We want to work with aligned countries that want to restore their former greatness.”
In a particularly overt endorsement of European far-right populist nationalist parties, it also declares that “American diplomacy should continue to stand up for genuine democracy, freedom of expression, and unapologetic celebrations of European nations’ individual character and history. America encourages its political allies in Europe to promote this revival of spirit, and the growing influence of patriotic European parties indeed gives cause for great optimism.”
Now, I am not one to throw around allegations of racism lightly, but this seems to me a profoundly racist document.
At the domestic level, it elevates migration—not its attendant pathologies but the migration itself—to the singular national security threat the country faces. And at the international level, it sees in Europe, as a result of this migration and the supposed suppression of anti-immigration populism, a total civilizational collapse. It also overtly fingers far-right parties and their ethno-nationalisms as the solution to what ails Europe.
I don’t mean to suggest that there’s no place for debate about the absorptive capacity of countries with respect to immigration, including absorptive capacity on the cultural side. Far from it. Such questions are legitimate, and pro-immigration forces do themselves no favors by delegitimizing such questions.
That said, here the White House is not raising questions. It is making assertions. And the assertions are, well, tendentious at best. It simply is not a defensible position that among the myriad threats facing America, the security of our southern border ranks at the top of the list. Nor is it the case that the great threat to the trans-Atlantic alliance right now is European civilizational collapse. The great threat, rather, is American abandonment of its commitments to Europe, not the other way around. And that threat has exactly zero to do with migration either in Europe or in the United States.
All of which brings me to the question of why it is important to the White House to theorize a national security policy that, in fact, has no theory behind it—that is just a set of instincts and blusters and financial and business interests. Why write a 33-page document that hopelessly intermingles foreign and domestic policy, needlessly inflames tensions with allies, and merely restates for domestic audiences what is obvious to anyone who can read or watch TV or social media: that the border is the singular obsession of the president and the administration?
Short answer: I have no earthly idea.
Global News
In this pool photograph distributed by the Russian state agency Sputnik, Russia’s President Vladimir Putin greets US Special Envoy Steve Witkoff prior to their talks in Moscow on August 6, 2025. (GAVRIIL GRIGOROV/POOL/AFP via Getty Images)
Lev Remembers, Advocacy: Voice from Ukraine family, Lev Parnas, 
right, Dec. 9-10, 2025. In Trump’s own Axios interview, he is finally saying out loud what I’ve been warning you about since the first day I came here.
You can hear it in his own words now – his contempt for Europe, his pressure on Ukraine, his refusal to truly confront Russia. The mask is slipping, and the picture we’ve been drawing together for months is coming into full view
For the last ten months, the media chased him back and forth:
You remember all of that whiplash coverage. Every time, they gave him another benefit of the doubt. Every time, I told you the same thing:
It was a lie. It was distraction. It was theater.
Because this didn’t start last week with an interview. It started when Trump came into office and stopped weapons to Ukraine, then tried to pin the blame on Pete Hegseth and anyone else around him. I told you then: this is just the beginning. Then came the escalation – Trump attacking Zelensky, calling him a dictator, threatening him, questioning his legitimacy, dangling “deals” in exchange for surrender. None of it was random.
All of it was part of a plan. A plan that has names and faces: Kirill Dmitriev, Jared Kushner, Steve Witkoff. The real masterminds behind the “peace plan” nonsense. The same people working the phones and the back rooms. The Alaska encounters, the red-carpet rollouts, the quiet Kremlin trips – it was never about securing honest peace talks. It was always about bringing Russia back onto the center of the world stage and cashing in.
I know this because I was there when the first bricks of this were laid.
I was there in Trump’s first administration when he sent me to Ukraine, when Zelensky was just president-elect, to put pressure on his team. I sat across from Andriy Yermak, Zelensky’s chief of staff. I dealt with the oligarchs. I saw the leverage they were trying to create, the deals they were lining up, the pressure they were testing.
I know these people. I know how they think. I know what they want.
And that’s why I keep telling you: you need to listen to what I’m telling you now.
What you saw in the latest Axios interview isn’t some new Trump. It’s Trump finally speaking openly about the plan that’s been in motion for years. He’s telling you what this has always been about: weakening Europe, cornering Ukraine, and normalizing Russia. He’s not inventing anything new – he’s just taking the mask off.
Remember what I’ve told you again and again. This has always been about regime change.
They tried to get it through elections – pushing for votes on Russia’s timeline, during a live war, using “democracy” as a weapon to destabilize Ukraine from within. They tried it with corruption and threats – pressuring Ukrainian elites, offering deals, dangling money and investigations. And now they’re back to pushing elections again, pretending it’s about giving Ukrainians a “choice” while missiles are still falling.
Why? Because they know they cannot defeat the Ukrainian people by force. Ukrainians will fight until the end. The only way they win is by sabotaging the system from inside, corrupting it, and installing a pro-Trump, pro-Putin government in Kyiv. That has always been the play. It has always been about regime change.
That’s why the so-called “peace plan” looks the way it does: not an off-ramp from war, but a roadmap to a captured Ukraine.
And look at what’s happened since Witkoff and Kushner’s quiet meeting with Putin.
Trump has never once come out and explained that meeting. He’s never told you what was discussed. Reporters aren’t pressing him on it. They’re letting it slide like it’s some side note. But you and I know better, because I’ve already told you what was on that table: it wasn’t peace, it was business.
You’ll notice something else: Kushner and Witkoff aren’t lining up for photo-ops in Kyiv or Brussels. They’re not flying in to stand with Zelensky, shoulder to shoulder, and negotiate like honest brokers. They’re operating from a distance, making calls, sending messages, delivering ultimatums.
Those conversations are not, “How do we defeat Russia?”
They are, “Which territories will you hand over to Russia, that Russia has not and cannot win by force?”
And here’s what my sources across Kyiv and Europe are telling me right now:
There is no deal. Zelensky has not accepted Trump’s terms. Ukraine is not surrendering. Europe is not quietly nodding along. The Ukrainians understand exactly what’s being asked of them, and they are refusing to give away their country at gunpoint and call it peace.
So where does that leave us?
It leaves us at the beginning of what I’ve been warning you about:
All of it is now right out in the open. Trump’s own words are validating what this community has been ahead of for months. The mask is off. The play is clear.
And I’m not telling you this as a pundit sitting in a studio trying to score an angle. I’m telling you this as someone who helped build this machine and is now doing everything in my power to dismantle it in daylight. I am risking a lot – personally, legally, financially – to bring you this information so we can use it to stop authoritarianism, defend Ukraine’s sovereignty, and protect our democracy here at home.
But I can’t do it alone.
I don’t have oligarchs. I don’t have corporate sponsors. I have you.
Meidas Touch Podcast, FURIOUS Zelenskyy CHECKMATES Trump after PLOT UNCOVERED, Ben Meiselas, right, Dec. 9, 2025. MeidasTouch host Ben Meiselas reports on Ukraine President Zelenskyy uncovering Trump’s latest plan to force Ukraine to surrender and Zelenskyy rallying Europe against the United States and Putin.
U.S. Law, Courts, Crime, Justice
Emptywheel, Analysis: The False Claims Todd Blanche, Robert McBride, and Some Lady Impersonating a US Attorney Tell to Justify a Crime, Emptywheel (Marcy Wheeler, right), Dec. 9, 2025. Todd Blanche says that Dan Richman has to just lie back and enjoy the FBI's ongoing unlawful searches of his data while they try to prosecute his friend Jim Comey (shown above).
DOJ — in the persons of Todd Blanche, some lady impersonating a US Attorney, and First AUSA Robert McBride — have responded to Dan Richman’s demand that they stop illegally rifling through his data.
It’s a remarkable filing for two reasons.
First, they cite a bunch of precedents claiming that one cannot use Rule 41 to thwart a prosecution. Best as I can tell, every single one of those precedents pertain to someone trying to withhold his own property to thwart his own prosecution. Michael Deaver trying to stop a Special Prosecutor investigation of himself. Paul Manafort trying to thwart a prosecution of himself. Justin Paul Gladding in a case where he was trying to get his own non-CSAM data back after a conviction. A grand jury case where the subject of the investigation tried to get his files back.
None of these apply here.
Effectively, Todd Blanche, left, is saying Dan Richman, below right, has to lay back and enjoy digital compromise to allow the FBI to prosecute his friend -- and whocares if they’re breaking the law to do so?
But I’m also struck by the lies Blanche and the lady impersonating a US Attorney tell along the way. Consider this passage.
Richman served as a special government employee at the FBI between June 2015 and February 2017.1 Shortly after his departure from the FBI, the Government began investigating whether Richman had disclosed classified information to The New York Times concerning Comey’s decisionmaking process concerning the FBI’s investigation into former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s use of a private email server. See CM/ECF No. 1-1 at 3. The investigation demonstrated, among other things, that Comey had used Richman to provide information to the media concerning his—that is, Comey’s—decisionmaking process concerning the Clinton email investigation and that Richman had served as an anonymous source in doing so.
During the course of the investigation, the Government sought and obtained four search warrants in this district authorizing the Government to search for and seize evidence of violations of 18 U.S.C. §§ 641 and 793 from certain email accounts utilized by Richman, a hard drive containing a forensic image of his personal computer, and his iCloud account.2 See CM/ECF No. 1-1 at 3.
Comey provided relevant testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee shortly before his employment as FBI Director was terminated, and again in September 2020. In May 2017, he testified in response to questioning from Senator Grassley that he had never authorized someone at the FBI to serve as an anonymous source regarding the Clinton email investigation. And in September 2020, he reaffirmed that testimony in response to questioning from Senator Cruz.
1 The government has provided the concise factual summary herein out of an abundance of caution as a result of the Court’s December 6, 2025 temporary restraining order (the “TRO”). See CM/ECF No. 9 at 4. Should the Court have meant the TRO to permit the government to use materials obtained via the relevant search warrants as part of this litigation, the government is prepared to provide a more detailed factual summary if necessary.
2 The investigators sought to obtain evidence of violations of 18 U.S.C. § 641 because it appeared that Richman and Comey were using private email accounts to correspond regarding official government business, i.e., that their correspondence were “record[s]” of the United States. See id.
First, the passage makes a confession, one that Lindsey [Halligan], right, the Insurance Lawyer Impersonating a US Attorney’s Loaner AUSAs never made: the use of May 2017 files involving attorney-client privilege had no basis in the prosecution, because they long post-dated the time Dan Richman left the FBI.
The filing misstates the genesis of Arctic Haze and the focus on Dan Richman. The investigation didn’t start by focusing on Richman. The focus on Richman appears to have started when John Durham discovered his communications while rifling through the image he shared with the Inspector General (a detail that seems quite sensitive, given the redactions).
The claim that the investigation demonstrated that Comey used Richman,
to provide information to the media concerning his—that is, Comey’s—decisionmaking process concerning the Clinton email investigation and that Richman had served as an anonymous source in doing so.
Is not backed by anything in the public record. Richman was not anonymous when doing this in fall 2016, and there’s no evidence that Comey asked Richman to do this in February 2017, where he was also an on-the-record source.
This filing obscures the fact that when Comey told Chuck Grassley he had not leaked anything anonymously, it preceded the time when Richman did share his memos anonymously, and he disclosed that publicly a month later, meaning it could not conceivably have been a lie on May 3, 2017 (before he shared the memo) or after June 8, 2017, in September 2020, because he had already disclosed it.
McBride claims he’s not using the unlawfully accessed materials in this filing, but he did disclose something new: that Richman and Comey were investigated under 18 USC 641 not because Comey shared a memo that the Inspector General would later rule was official FBI material, but because they were conducting official business on personal accounts (which is rich given that Lindsey the Insurance Lawyer masquerading as US Attorney used Signal for official business).
The lies are important for a reason beyond the cynicism: They obscure that if the FBI tried to get a warrant for these very same files, they would never be able to access the files they want.
And so they’re telling Dan Richman to just lay back and enjoy the Fourth Amendment violations.
New York Times, Judge Suggests Prosecutor on Comey and James Cases Should Resign as U.S. Attorney, Devlin Barrett, Dec. 9, 2025. Lindsey Halligan’s indictments against James B. Comey, the former F.B.I. director, and Letitia James, the attorney general of New York, were dismissed last month over Ms. Halligan’s appointment.
A federal judge in Virginia suggested on Tuesday that Lindsey Halligan should resign as U.S. attorney after a ruling declared her appointment unlawful, making her the third jurist to challenge Ms. Halligan’s continued claim to the post.
Ms. Halligan was handpicked by President Trump to oversee the U.S. attorney’s office in the Eastern District of Virginia after career prosecutors there resisted pressure to bring criminal charges against James B. Comey, the former F.B.I. director, and Letitia James, the attorney general of New York.
Once appointed to the job, Ms. Halligan quickly secured indictments of both, but a federal judge dismissed those indictments on procedural grounds in November, ruling that the Trump administration had violated the law for filling vacancies for federal positions.
Still, Ms. Halligan remains listed as the U.S. attorney on court filings, drawing the attention of judges and magistrate judges in recent days.
During the hearing on Tuesday, the judge, Leonie M. Brinkema, pressed a federal prosecutor to explain why Ms. Halligan’s name remained on such filings, despite the court ruling last month. The judge noted that the U.S. attorney in New Jersey, Alina Habba, who was appointed in a similarly unorthodox manner and was similarly found by the courts to be serving unlawfully, had resigned on Monday.
“That’s the proper position, in my view,” Judge Brinkema said. The judge also questioned whether there was any legal guidance issued by the Justice Department to explain why Ms. Halligan was still in the job.
The lawyer representing the government said only that the staff of the Eastern District of Virginia had been told in an email to keep using Ms. Halligan’s name as the U.S. attorney.
Inside the Justice Department, officials have asked the Office of Legal Counsel for guidance because the office provides legal analysis for the administration, according to people familiar with the matter, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe internal deliberations.
The office has advised department officials that Ms. Halligan could stay in spite of a judge’s ruling declaring her appointment invalid because the decision did not require a specific measure to be taken, like her removal, the people said.
New York Times, Supreme Court Is Asked to Take Another Ax to Campaign Finance Limits, Abbie VanSickle and Shane Goldmacher, Abbie VanSickle, Dec. 9, 2025. The case centers on efforts by Republican officials to lift limits on how much money political parties can spend in coordination with candidates.
The Supreme Court on Tuesday will hear a major challenge to the way political campaigns are funded that could sharply reduce one of Democrats’ financial advantages in recent years.
Fifteen years ago, the Supreme Court dramatically remade the campaign finance landscape in Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission, a landmark case in which the justices struck down legal limits on independent political spending by corporations and unions, allowing a flood of new money to enter politics.
The court has been chipping away at campaign finance restrictions ever since. The case the justices will consider on Tuesday involves one of the remaining limits: how much money political parties can spend in coordination with candidates.
The case, National Republican Senatorial Committee v. Federal Election Commission, was brought by national Republican leaders, who argue that the limits violate the First Amendment, restricting their ability to reach and influence voters.
Depending on its scope, such a decision could swing the pendulum of power back toward the official political parties and away from super PACs. It could also allow parties to spend huge sums from big donors directly on candidates, potentially expanding the influence of big money compared with small-dollar contributions. Democrats in recent years have done better than Republicans at winning smaller donations.
In practical terms, a win for the Republicans could have an immediate impact on the midterm elections, shrinking one of the Democratic Party’s major financial advantages: lower costs for political candidates who directly buy broadcast advertising time.
Under federal law, broadcasters must offer political candidates low advertising rates. But they are not required to give super PACs those same low rates. Super PACs often pay double, triple and even four times as much money for the same TV spots as do candidates.
In recent years, Democratic candidates have tended to vastly out-raise Republican candidates, who have been more reliant on the support of super PACs and national party committees, which can accept larger donations. In practice, that means Democratic candidates have been able to take advantage of these lower ad rates more often than Republicans.
A ruling in the case is expected by July. If the court decides to allow unlimited spending by the parties in coordination with the candidates, party committees will suddenly also be guaranteed those cheaper rates — an outcome that campaign finance experts say would probably especially benefit Republicans and potentially save the G.O.P. tens of millions of dollars next fall.
While an individual donor can give only $3,500 to a candidate during an election cycle, a donor can give up to $44,300 to a national party committee’s general fund each year and hundreds of thousands more to specialty accounts. If the Supreme Court lifts limits on party committees to coordinate with candidates, the parties could use the large contributions they raise from wealthy donors to pay for low ad rates.
The ad price disparity is so big that Republicans have been testing various other ways to skirt the existing law while this challenge has been winding its way through the courts.
New York Times, News Analysis: A Key Question for the Supreme Court: What About the Fed? Adam Liptak, Dec. 9, 2025. The president seemed poised for a big Supreme Court win letting him remove officials without cause. But the justices appeared to struggle with how to insulate the Federal Reserve from politics.
Just a few minutes into Monday’s Supreme Court argument over the scope of presidential power to fire leaders of independent agencies, Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh posed a question to the lawyer representing the Trump administration: What about the Federal Reserve?
The case before the court concerns Rebecca Kelly Slaughter, a member of the Federal Trade Commission whom President Trump wants to fire. Though a federal law requires him to provide a reason, he maintains that the Constitution’s separation of powers allows him to remove such officials for any reason or no reason at all.
During the arguments, it was clear that Mr. Trump was heading toward a sweeping victory, one that would allow him to exert complete control over the F.T.C. and many other agencies that Congress had sought to insulate from political interference. There was only one hurdle.
His lawyer, Solicitor General D. John Sauer, had to satisfy the justices that a ruling in his favor would not jeopardize the independence of the Fed, which could spook the markets and endanger the economy.
This required a principled theory, and it was not clear whether Mr. Sauer had one.
“General Sauer, can I ask you about the Federal Reserve?” Justice Kavanaugh asked. “The other side says that your position would undermine the independence of the Federal Reserve and they have concerns about that, and I share those concerns. So, how would you distinguish the Federal Reserve from agencies such as the Federal Trade Commission?”
The Fed will figure in a case to be argued next month involving Lisa D. Cook, a Fed governor whom Mr. Trump has tried to fire.
Mr. Sauer’s answer to Justice Kavanaugh’s question on Monday, which must have been tested and honed as he prepared for the argument, basically cited an earlier statement from the court that was not notable for its clarity.
In May, in an unsigned opinion letting Mr. Trump temporarily remove leaders of the Merit Systems Protection Board and the National Labor Relations Board, the majority had gone out of its way to carve out the Fed, whose status was not, at that time, before the court.
“The Federal Reserve is a uniquely structured, quasi-private entity that follows in the distinct historical tradition of the First and Second Banks of the United States,” the opinion said.
On Monday, Mr. Sauer noted that the sentence contained some important parts of speech. “There’s two adjectives there or an adjective and an adverb,” he said, pointing to “unique” and “distinct.”
Trump Watch
New York Times, News Analysis: Trump Insists Tariffs Will Buoy the Economy. For Now, He’s on Damage Control, David E. Sanger, Dec. 9, 2025 (print ed.). The president rolled out a $12 billion bailout for farmers as he makes the case that his policy is working — or will soon.
On President Trump’s proclaimed “Liberation Day” in April, when he announced the tariffs that have upended global trade, he vowed that “jobs and factories will come roaring back into our country.” The imposition of taxes on imports, the president promised, “will pry open foreign markets and break down foreign trade barriers,” leading to lower prices for Americans.
So far it has not worked out that way, forcing Mr. Trump to move to contain the economic and political damage.
At the White House on Monday, the president announced $12 billion in bailout money for America’s farmers who have been battered in large part by his trade policies.
Tariffs continue to put upward pressure on prices, putting the Trump administration on the defensive over deep public concern about the cost of living. On Tuesday, the president will go to Pennsylvania for the first of what the White House calls a series of speeches addressing the “affordability” problem, which last week he dismissed as “the greatest con job” ever conceived by Democrats.
China, the world’s second-largest economy and the United States’ main economic and technological competitor, released figures on Monday showing that it continues to run a record trade surplus with the rest of the world, even as its overall trade and surplus with the U.S. narrows. That suggests Beijing is quickly learning how to thrive even in a world in which the United States becomes a tougher place to do business.
And there is scant evidence to date of any wholesale return to American towns and cities of the manufacturing jobs lost to decades of automation and globalization.
Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: What’s Keeping Trump Up at Night? Bill Kristol, right, Dec. 9, 2025. We’ve all seen Donald Trump dozing off at cabinet meetings.
One reason may be that he’s not sleeping well at night. At 2:37 a.m. today, the president of the United States was wide awake. How do we know? Because he took to Truth Social to sound the alarm: “The biggest threat in history to United States National Security would be a negative decision on Tariffs by the U.S. Supreme Court. We would be financially defenseless.”
Wow. You can’t blame a guy for being awakened in the middle of the night by “the biggest threat in history to United States National Security.” And you can’t blame him for not being able to go right back to sleep.
Eight minutes later, Trump felt compelled to add this thought: “Because of Tariffs, easily and quickly applied, our National Security has been greatly enhanced, and we have become the financially strongest Country, by far, anywhere in the World. Only dark and sinister forces would want to see that end!!!”
(It happens to be the case that under Trump’s tariff regime, the value of the dollar has fallen by nine percent, which is not what happens when you are “the financially strongest Country, by far, anywhere in the World.” But whatever.)
Is it the prospect of a setback for his beloved tariffs that so disturbs Trump? Or is it the reminder that the Supreme Court isn’t entirely in Trump’s control? That he has not succeeded in entirely killing the rule of law? That this could encourage others to stand up to him?
Was it that thought that made Trump unable to get back to sleep? Did it prompt what one might call a Macbeth moment?
Methought I heard a voice cry ‘Sleep no more! Macbeth does murder sleep’, the innocent sleep, Sleep that knits up the ravell’d sleeve of care, The death of each day’s life, sore labour’s bath, Balm of hurt minds, great nature’s second course, Chief nourisher in life’s feast,—
Or are the sources of Trump’s Macbeth moment deeper still? Are there other things than tariffs and the Supreme Court keeping Trump awake?
Earlier yesterday, a reporter prefaced a question to Trump with this comment: “You said you would have no problem with releasing the full video of that strike on September 2 off the coast of Venezuela.” Trump interrupted her. “I didn’t say that. You said that. I didn’t say that.”
But five days ago, on December 3, Trump said precisely that. In answering a question about releasing the full September 2 video, he remarked, “I don’t know what they have, but whatever they have, we’d certainly release. No problem.”
Could the prospect of the truth coming out about the massacre at sea be keeping him awake? It’s surely not the fact of the killings themselves, about which Trump would only care if he had a functioning human conscience. But could he be worried that this signature policy of his could be politically backfiring?
Or could it be the looming December 19 deadline for the release of the Epstein files that, like Banquo’s ghost, suddenly rises up to disturb our president? Does Trump sense that if he releases the files—or if he fails to release all the files, or tries to tamper with them—the political damage will be even greater than from a Court decision on tariffs, or the release of the boat strike video? Is it a sense of foreboding about matters relating to his old pal Jeffrey that’s been disturbing Trump’s sleep?
We can’t be sure. Trump may not even know just what problem it is that’s keeping him awake. But if he’s disturbed, we should be cheered. If he’s alarmed, we should be heartened.
AROUND THE BULWARK
Quick Hits
GOLDEN AGE WATCH: In recent weeks, Donald Trump has spent a lot of time ordering Americans to disbelieve their lying eyes about the state of the economy. We’re in a “golden age,” he insists, adding that this is “the richest, strongest, and most respected the USA has ever been.” All those polls showing deep-seated economic anxiety, all those concerns about affordability, all those data showing warning signs for employment and prices—one Democratic hoax after another, says our president.
All of which makes Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins’s comments yesterday on Fox Business seem like something of a turning point. “Gas is down. Lumber is down. Eggs are down. . . . Really everything is coming down,” Rollins said.¹ “But listen, we’re not tone-deaf. We know that America, or a lot of Americans at least, are like, ‘Well, we’re still not feeling the relief.’ The relief is coming. . . . It really is a golden age just right around the corner.”
Now, we’re no golden-age experts. But it sure seems like a golden age that was here just moments ago, but is now just around the corner, is getting farther away. On that same note, Trump announced yesterday a $12 billion bailout of U.S. farmers hurt by his trade wars—news that probably came as a surprise to anyone who spent the entirety of his first term in a coma. “We love our farmers,” Trump said, “and as you know, the farmers like me.”
HABBA BOWS OUT: Alina Habba is throwing in the towel. One week after a federal appeals court ruled she was not validly serving as New Jersey’s U.S. attorney, Trump’s former personal lawyer announced yesterday that she would “step down in her role.” This was not technically true, since the court had ruled she had long since ceased to be even an acting U.S. attorney in the first place, but it comes to the same thing: As of yesterday, Alina Habba and the courts agree that she is no longer serving in that role. Even more inaccurate was Habba’s description of how things had come to this: “Judges in my state took advantage of a flawed blue slip tradition and became weapons for the politicized left.” That’s a funny way to say “the Senate decided not to confirm me, leaving the statutory responsibility to pick my interim successor with the judges of my state.”
Here’s something Habba did get right in her statement: “This decision will not weaken the Justice Department and it will not weaken me.”
Certainly it is unlikely to weaken Habba, who throughout this process has played the role of Trump lackey unimpeachably. No doubt the president will find some other important job for which he needs an under-qualified sycophant. It will also come as little loss to the Justice Department, particularly its office in New Jersey, whose line attorneys have been suffering in a kafkaesque “who’s in charge here” limbo throughout the long twilight of Habba’s tenure.
Dec. 8
New York Times, Justices Seem Ready to Give Trump More Power to Fire Independent Government Officials, Ann E. Marimow, Dec. 8, 2025. A ruling in the president’s favor in the case, which deals with his attempt to remove a member of the Federal Trade Commission, would be a major expansion of presidential authority.
The Supreme Court on Monday appeared poised to make it easier for President Trump to fire independent government officials despite laws meant to insulate them from political pressure in what would be a major expansion of presidential power.
Hearing a case dealing with Mr. Trump’s attempt to fire a member of the Federal Trade Commission, the court’s conservative majority seemed ready to overturn or strictly limit a landmark decision from 1935. That precedent said Congress could constrain the president’s authority to remove some executive branch officials.
Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., shown above left, who is almost always in the majority in significant cases, said the F.T.C. that opinion shielded 90 years ago looked nothing like the modern commission. Over time, he said, the commission has come to exercise significantly more executive power, an authority the Constitution generally reserves for the president. He referred to the 1935 precedent as “just a dried husk of whatever people used to think it was.”
Even as they appeared receptive to the Trump administration’s maximalist position, several key justices seemed intent on making sure the court’s eventual decision in this case did not threaten the independence of the Federal Reserve. The justices will hear a separate case dealing with Mr. Trump’s attempt to fire a Fed governor in January.
The court’s three liberal justices warned of the far-reaching consequences for the structure of the modern government if the majority sided with the Trump administration in the Federal Trade Commission matter.
A decision in the president’s favor, they said, would call into question the constitutionality of job protections extended to leaders of more than two dozen other bipartisan commissions and boards. Congress intended to protect these agencies from partisan pressures and charged them with protecting consumers, workers and the environment.
Justice Elena Kagan said such a ruling would “put massive, uncontrolled, unchecked power in the hands of the president.”
Justice Sonia Sotomayor told the administration’s lawyer that “you’re asking us to destroy the structure of government” and to “take away from Congress its ability to protect its idea that a the government is better structured with some agencies that are independent.”
In response, D. John Sauer, the solicitor general, said that “the sky will not fall” if the justices give the president this new power. “In fact, our entire government will move toward accountability to the people,” he said.Editors’ PicksColin Jost Plays Pete Hegseth on ‘S.N.L.’ to Explain ‘Operation Kill Everybody’What Kind of Homeowners’ Insurance Do You Need in a Co-op?What Should I Do About the Bully in My Social Circle?
Since returning to the White House, Mr. Trump has fired government watchdogs, leaders of independent agencies and rank-and-file federal workers, drawing multiple legal challenges.
The Supreme Court has generally allowed the firings to take effect through temporary emergency orders. Monday’s case presents the first opportunity for the court to issue a conclusive ruling on the underlying legal questions of Mr. Trump’s firings.
Next month, the justices will separately consider whether the president has the power to fire Lisa Cook, a Fed governor. The justices have allowed Ms. Cook to remain in her post for now, signaling that the central bank may be uniquely insulated from presidential interference because of its history.
At issue on Monday was Mr. Trump’s firing in March of Rebecca Kelly Slaughter, a Democratic member of the F.T.C., who attended the argument and listened intently from the courtroom. Mr. Trump said he was removing her because she did not align with his agenda, despite a law that says the president can remove commissioners only for “inefficiency, neglect of duty or malfeasance in office.” Ms. Slaughter promptly sued.
Her lawyer, Amit Agarwal of Protect Democracy, told the justices on Monday that presidents of both parties had long accepted that F.T.C. commissioners could not be removed without good cause in part to ensure regulatory stability.
“Folks in power today may not be in power tomorrow, and you want a structure that will be able to withstand the test of time,” Mr. Agarwal said. He added, “Presidents have understood and appreciated the vital interests of the American people can be served by having constraints on the exercise of power.”
Congress intentionally created such bipartisan commissions — made up of experts who could not be fired by the president without cause — to ensure that policy decisions would be made free from politics.
The F.T.C., created in 1914, protects consumers from deceptive practices and monopoly power. It is led by five commissioners who serve staggered seven-year terms; no more than three can be members of the same party.
The F.T.C. has been led by only Republicans since March, after Mr. Trump fired a second Democrat, Alvaro Bedoya. After initially challenging his firing, Mr. Bedoya resigned, citing financial pressures.
A district court judge said in July that Ms. Slaughter’s firing was illegal, and in early September, a divided court panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit reinstated her. The panel pointed to the job protections upheld by the 1935 decision that also involved a fired F.T.C. commissioner.
In that decision, Humphrey’s Executor v. U.S., the Supreme Court unanimously upheld removal restrictions for government officials on multimember boards. The justices in that case said President Franklin D. Roosevelt could not remove a member of the F.T.C. merely because of political differences.
But in the last 15 years, the court has repeatedly narrowed that decision to give the president more control over executive officials.
The court found in 2020 that the structure of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau was unconstitutional because it did not allow the president to fire its single director without cause. The court allowed the job protections to remain for multimember bodies like the F.T.C.
But in its emergency orders issued this year, the conservative majority has let the president temporarily remove leaders of agencies led by such multimember boards, including the National Labor Relations Board, the Merit Systems Protection Board and the Consumer Product Safety Commission.
As a result, Mr. Sauer told the justices that the precedent at issue “stands as an indefensible outlier” and must be overruled. “It continues to tempt Congress to erect at the heart of our government a headless fourth branch insulated from political accountability and democratic control,” he said.
Throughout the lively two-hour argument, the justices appeared divided along ideological lines with questions that underscored their starkly different visions of the president’s powers and the role and history of independent agencies.
Liberal justices pointed to recent historical scholarship showing that Congress has long had the power to devise such agencies and fill them with nonpartisan experts.
“Congress is saying expertise matters,” Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson said. “So having a president come in and fire all the scientists and the doctors and the economists and the Ph.D.s, and replacing them with loyalists and people who don’t know anything, is actually not in the best interest of the citizens of the United States.”
Conservative justices in turn expressed concern about independent agencies exercising vast power over individuals and billion-dollar industries without being accountable to the president, who has authority over the executive branch.
“I think broad delegations to unaccountable independent agencies raise enormous constitutional and real-world problems for individual liberty,” Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh said.
But it was unclear exactly how the court’s eventual decision would affect agencies beyond the F.T.C. Several justices, including Neil M. Gorsuch and Chief Justice Roberts, were critical of the reasoning in the 1935 decision, which dealt specifically with the trade commission. But, the chief justice said, that does not mean that “the other agencies fall with it as well.”
Still, if the administration prevails, Mr. Agarwal said, “everything is on the chopping block” — warning that would include the independence of the Federal Reserve.
Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. pushed back on claims that the Trump administration’s legal arguments would lead to “revolutionary results.” Justice Kavanaugh more than once suggested that the court would carve out an exception to preserve the independence of the Federal Reserve based on the central bank’s history.
There were echoes on Monday of the Supreme Court’s ruling last year in another major case involving Mr. Trump. The conservative majority’s decision in Trump v. United States gave the president immunity from prosecution for his official actions. But the administration relied on it throughout the argument to bolster its expansive view of presidential power.
Justice Clarence Thomas asked the solicitor general whether there were any limits on the president’s authority to fire leaders of multimember commissions even for arbitrary reasons.
New York Times, Trump Administration Live Updates: Habba Resigns as New Jersey’s Top Prosecutor. Staff Reports, Dec. 8, 2025. Where Things Stand
Ms. Habba, a former personal lawyer to Mr. Trump, wrote on social media that she would become a special counsel to Attorney General Pam Bondi. Her tenure had been expected to end in July, but the Justice Department kept her in place through a series of maneuvers that led to immediate legal challenges. Talking Feds Substack, Legal Commentary: Trump’s Alternate-Reality Government, Harry Litman, right, Dec. 8, 2025. They’re describing events from a universe where facts operate under different rules.
Donald Trump is surely the most prolific and brazen liar ever to occupy the White House. From day one of his first term, when he confabulated wildly about the crowd size at his inauguration, he has fabricated nonsense so promiscuously that people—supporters and antagonists—have just come to assume you can’t trust what he says.
But in the last few weeks, Trump and his Administration seem to have broken through the lying speed of light, emerging into a whole new universe of bullshit. From the daily diet of blatant lies, fibs, and fabrications, they’ve taken up occupancy in a stratosphere of crazy, as if arriving through a wormhole from the other side of the universe. They’re now regularly peddling assertions that boggle the mind and leave commentators speechless—provoking a “what planet are you from?” kind of response.
What these claims provoke is less indignation than bewilderment—a sense of “I don’t even know where to begin.” In the last few days, two of the country’s most sure-footed cable hosts basically threw up their hands confronting Administration statements that vaulted over false or even ridiculous to the utterly bizarre.
On CNN, Kaitlan Collins—trying to make sense of yet another sweeping claim about what the Justice Department had or had not “authorized”—responded with exasperation: “None of what they’re saying lines up with the actual record, and I don’t know how else to say it.” (Over the weekend, Collins responded to Trump’s asinine tirade calling her “stupid and nasty” with grace and good humor.)
A day later on MSNBC, Nicolle Wallace offered a similar response as she confronted the latest round of reality-defying explanations from senior officials. “This is just not connected to reality as the rest of us understand it,” she said, before adding, almost incredulously, “I mean… what are we even talking about here?” Her guest Miles Taylor stepped in: “They’re describing events from a universe where facts operate under different rules.”
Consider some of these recent extraterrestrial dispatches that Trump and his senior aides have propounded, each one so unhinged that analysts hardly know where to begin.
• The Halligan Fantasy
The Administration continues to treat Lindsey Halligan, right, as a fully empowered United States Attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, despite a federal judge’s ruling (that the Administration has yet to appeal) that her appointment is invalid. The DOJ is behaving as though the ruling never happened: they continue to sign her name on indictments, even though the court has said such documents are a legal nullity—no different than if they were signed “Mary Poppins.”
• The Illusory Exculpation of Pete Hegseth
Trump now claims Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has been “exculpated” for the deadly September 2 boat strikes. Exculpated by whom? There has been no investigation or formal findings, and only the slightest beginning of a closed-door congressional inquiry. Hegseth has miles to go before he is out of the woods for the stain of the killings on the country, which Senator Adam Schiff on Sunday called “unconstitutional” and “morally repugnant.”
How about: And the first step on that path is the release to the public of the already infamous video of the strike that Hegseth claims he didn’t order but quickly adds that he “would have made the same call myself.”
• The Signalgate “Total Exoneration”
Hegseth’s separate claim—that the acting inspector general’s review of the Signalgate fiasco “totally exonerates” him—holds no water anywhere on the planet.
In fact, the IG found Hegseth endangered U.S. service members by transmitting imminent-strike details over an unsecured Signal chat on his personal phone, including information mirroring SECRET/NOFORN data from a CENTCOM briefing. For his part, Hegseth refused to sit for an interview, submitting only a nonresponsive written statement, the core claim of which was: “I took nonspecific general details which I determined, using my sole discretion, were either not classified, or that I could safely declassify, and created an “unclassified summary” of the USCENTCOM strike details to provide to participants of the Signal chat.”
But the IG found the details weren’t “nonspecific” at all—they tracked classified operational information. And although Hegseth claimed he could declassify the material, the IG explicitly said he could not determine that Hegseth ever exercised that authority. It is, in effect, a defense that says: the disclosure was permissible because I believed I had the power to make it permissible. More to the point, even if he had borrowed and waved Trump’s magic Mar-a-Lago declassifying wand, it would have no bearing on the finding—as inculpatory as you can imagine for a sitting Defense Secretary—that he risked putting service members in danger. Far from exonerating him, the explanation restates the problem.
• The Hepatitis-B Reversal
The Administration’s flirtation with the idea that the hepatitis-B vaccine is “not recommended” in newborns contradicts decades of CDC guidance and a more than 90 percent reduction in childhood hepatitis-B. The reconstituted ACIP panel making this move was hand-selected after RFK Jr. removed the prior members. This is medical policy by wormhole: the consensus stays the same, the data stay the same, but the conclusion suddenly flips. Public health experts predict catastrophic results—particularly for poorer newborns—and a resurgence of child-onset hepatitis B.
• The “Morally Distinguishable” Bomber
The Administration’s touting of the arrest of the January 5 bomber, Brian Cole, above, raises the obvious question: what distinguishes the would-be bomber from the marauders of January 6, whom Trump pardoned on his first day in office? It can’t be the potential for violence: Cole’s bombs didn’t go off, while Trump’s clemency extended to thugs who attacked Capitol officers with stun guns and nerve gas.
Here is the Planet Mongo argument Hegseth offered on Fox News for the distinction—echoed by other Administration officials: “Look, the people who were unfairly targeted have been pardoned. The bomber hasn’t been — and that tells you something.”
Everyone follow that? The difference between the January 6 pardoned marauders and the pipe-bomb suspect is that the pardoned 1000+ were pardoned. That might be a cogent response somewhere, but it isn’t on planet Earth.
And Pam Bondi’s recent answer—or more precisely, her refusal to answer—drove the point home. Asked point-blank how Cole differed from January 6 defendants, she simply ducked the question, pivoting to unrelated talking points. They’re going to need something better as the case proceeds—unless, that is, Trump hews to his otherworldly logic and pardons Cole.
• The Fantasy Economy
On the central promise that likely delivered him a second term—fixing an economy he has instead allowed to wobble and stall—Trump continues to offer the alternate-universe characterization that the economy is “flourishing,” waving away indicators of strain, volatility, and falling household confidence.
• And this just in – the FIFA Peace Prize
Finally, there must be a planet somewhere in which the notoriously corrupt soccer organization FIFA enjoys the moral authority of the Nobel Committee on Earth. Wherever that may be, Trump has proudly received the first-ever peace prize for his “historic leadership.” There is the complication that no committee actually awarded this supposed FIFA Peace Prize. FIFA doesn’t give peace prizes. It doesn’t have a peace-prize committee. It has no mechanism for conferring honors outside the world of soccer. The prize exists entirely because Trump said it did. But such critical logic is so, well, earthbound.
Taken individually, any of these might be chalked up to the familiar Trumpian stew of bluster and improvisation. As an ensemble, they represent something else entirely. This isn’t lying in the usual political sense. It is governing from an alternate reality—one in which legal authority, factual accuracy, and empirical verification are dispensable trifles.
And that is what provokes the shift in reaction among commentators. They are no longer challenging claims as much as expressing bewilderment at the absence of any shared factual universe.
The problem, of course, is that a democracy requires such a universe. Trump has always strained against that baseline, but now he and his Administration increasingly operate in a space where the laws of logic bend and the lines never cross. The rest of us—courts, Congress, journalists, citizens—are left trying to stitch reality back together in a world where the government no longer recognizes it.
The only workable response begins with declining to play by the rules of their distant planet. First, call out the move—not just the mistake. These are not ordinary falsehoods. They are claims wholly untethered from evidence, law, or logic, and the point is to overwhelm, not persuade. Institutions should say plainly when a statement has no factual substrate at all.
Second, refuse to litigate the fabricated premise. Wormhole politics depends on forcing opponents to disprove fantasies—“prove Halligan isn’t authorized,” “prove the survivors weren’t traffickers,” “prove the bomber isn’t morally distinct.” The proper move is to reject the burden-shift and insist that the Administration supply actual evidence before the claim enters serious discourse.
Holding a government to account is work enough without having to chase its claims across the universe to an entirely different planet.
When America stood for freedom: JFK's 'Ich bin ein Berliner' (Photo via CNN)
Paul Krugman via Substack, Political-Economy Commentary: Is This The End of the Free World? Paul Krugman, right, Dec. 8, 2025. Trump wants to MAGAfy Europe, too.
There was a time, not so long ago, when America was the leader of the free world. It was the first among equals within an alliance of nations bound together by shared values — above all a commitment to democracy and civil liberties. From London to Berlin to Tokyo, in the aftermath of genocide and the utter devastation of World War II, America – as Ronald Reagan put it – was the shining city on the hill. We should never forget that Americans played the pivotal roles in the Nuremberg trials, upholding the rule of law in an impartial and transparent manner in the trials of those who had committed unspeakable atrocities and acts of war. “Ich bin ein Berliner,” declared John F. Kennedy in Berlin, as East Germany tried to trap its own people behind the Berlin Wall.
MAGA, however, doesn’t want to be part of that world. In fact, it doesn’t want a world of democracy, civil liberties and the rule of law to exist. The Trump administration has become especially hostile to Europe, precisely because the Europeans are trying to hold on to the values MAGA is trying to destroy at home.
Last week the Trump administration released its updated National Security Strategy for the United States. Much of the document is vague, meandering and self-contradictory. But it becomes clear and focused when it turns to Europe. Quite simply, Trump and those around him hate Europe. And they hate it because it still honors the ideals they’re abandoning in America.
The language is astonishing. Europe, the document warns, faces “the stark prospect of civilizational erasure.” Why? Because “it is more than plausible that within a few decades at the latest, certain NATO members will become majority non-European.” I don’t know why they bothered with the euphemism: “non-European” clearly means “nonwhite.”
But there’s hope, the document declares, thanks to “the growing influence of patriotic European parties,” by which it clearly means parties like Germany’s neo-Nazi AfD.
The political scientist Henry Farrell sums it up this way:
This is, quite straightforwardly, a program for regime change in Europe, aimed at turning it into an illiberal polity. Accomplishing this transformation would involve undermining existing liberal governments in cahoots with Europe’s own far right, and turning Eastern Europe into an ideological wedge against its Western neighbors.
Where is this attack on Europe coming from? Some readers may remember the old slogan from the War on Terror days, “They hate us for our freedom.” Clearly, MAGA hates Europe for its freedom. The people trying to turn America into an authoritarian, white supremacist state, who want us to forsake democratic ideals in favor of Volk, of blood and soil nationalism, want to see Europe go down the same path.
There’s also the role of the tech bros — billionaires who still describe themselves as libertarian but have in practice become hardline authoritarians with enormous sway over the Trump administration. After the European Commission imposed a modest fine on X for failing to obey its rules on transparency, Elon Musk declared that the EU should be abolished and threatened personal retribution against the “EU woke Stasi commissars” responsible for the ruling. And the Trump Administration is acting as the tech bros’ enforcer against Europe, threatening to keep steel tariffs high unless the EU scales back its tech regulations.
Moreover, this is part of a general pattern: the broligarchs hate Europe because the Europeans are trying to impose sensible limits to protect their societies from the well-documented psychological and economic harms that are inflicted by an unrestrained Silicon Valley agenda. For example, the EU is trying to limit the proliferation of digital hate speech as well as the pernicious effects of social media on the young. And more so than the US, it has sought to constrain the monopoly power of the tech titans like Google and Facebook. We should remember that the moderate antitrust and AI regulations adopted by the Biden Administration prompted the tech broligarchy to swing hard behind Trump in the 2024 election.
There are two striking consequences of Trump’s assault on Europe: it weakens the US against what is clearly its only serious geopolitical rival, China, while weakening Europe against the assassin on its doorstep, Russia. As the New York Times points out, this new strategy breaks with Trump’s past rhetoric, which emphasized the dangers posed by China and Russia.
First, turning on our erstwhile allies guarantees that China will best the US in the competition for influence and economic hegemony. The chart below (adjusted for differences in price levels) illustrates this reality: A graph of a graph with text AI-generated content may be incorrect.
As of now, China is clearly the world’s largest single economy. But the group of nations that constituted the “free world” (as we knew it) is a much greater economic power than China. So by treating Europe and Canada as enemies rather than allies, Trump has destroyed any plausible capacity to stand up to China. In effect, Trump has chosen white supremacy over actual national greatness.
Second, that goes for Russia as well. Although Russia is far weaker than China, the US or the EU, the war in Ukraine has shown that an emboldened Russia can wreak long-lasting devastation. By attacking the EU, notably on the same blood and soil grounds that Putin attacked Ukraine — as well as by insulting Zelensky and releasing a “peace plan” that was clearly a Russian wish list — Trump has made it clear that our erstwhile allies cannot rely on us to stand up to Russian aggression. Should we be surprised that some allies have recently begun to refuse intelligence sharing?
Now, it’s important to admit that America often failed to live up to its own ideals in the past. For decades we championed freedom and equality abroad while practicing Jim Crow at home. We were a force for democracy and freedom in Europe, but we often propped up dictators and sometimes engineered the overthrow of democratically elected governments — often at the behest of American business interests — in Latin America, Asia and the Middle East. So in a very real way, the tech broligarchy is trying to use the power of the US government to subjugate the EU the same way the United Fruit Company once used the power of the US government to subjugate Central America.
In truth, Europe is much closer to being Reagan’s shining city on the hill than Trump’s America. Yet it’s important to acknowledge that in the face of economic and immigration challenges, it too is having a hard time preserving its liberal democratic values. Those “patriotic” — i.e., neo-fascist — European parties are indeed on the rise. Yet, on the whole, Europe is dealing with its economic and social strains without giving up on its core values. For example, the recent Dutch elections, while not a decisive victory for the center, did at least push the far right out of government.
And America itself is not yet lost. Many, and I believe most, Americans still believe in our foundational values of freedom and democracy. For the time being power lies in the hands of people who hate those foundational values — and hate Europe because it still clings to those values. But we can still turn this around and claw our way back to being who we should be.
More On U.S. Law, Governance, Politics
New York Times, Obamacare Users Will Be Asked to Pay More for Plans That Cover Less, Reed Abelson, Dec. 8, 2025. People who have health insurance under the Affordable Care Act will face higher deductibles and higher premiums.
Millions of Americans are confronting the highest health insurance costs in years. For those enrolling in Obamacare for next year, the plans will cover a considerably smaller fraction of their medical bills.
More and more people are discovering that their deductibles are rising significantly, worsening fears that they will no longer be able to pay for medical care. That’s on top of higher premiums; they could more than double.
With affordability increasingly out of reach, some people are facing the dire prospect of dropping their insurance altogether, even if they’re still eligible for subsidies. Others may forgo doctors’ visits or trips to the emergency room to avoid the expense.
The contentious debate in Congress over the future of the enhanced subsidies under Obamacare that are set to expire this month has largely focused on the rise in premiums. Most people will still qualify for some federal tax credits in 2026, but many will find that monthly costs are doubling if the generous subsidies are not extended.
The Senate is expected to vote on whether to extend the subsides, although Congress could wait until early next year, even after the subsidies have expired. President Trump has floated supporting some sort of extension, but it is unclear what kind of compromise would muster enough Republican backing to pass.
As medical costs have climbed, health insurance at all levels has become more expensive. Contributing factors cited are higher overall prices for prescription drugs, the cost and the exploding use of obesity drugs, tariffs and increasing labor expenses.
Because many plans under the Affordable Care Act already carry a high deductible, people may not be able to find cheaper policies to significantly reduce costs.
Nearly a third of the 24 million people who signed up for coverage under the A.C.A. last year enrolled in the least expensive kind of plan available to everyone, a so-called Bronze plan.
All Rise News, Legal Commentary: Habba resigns: What’s next for other DQ-d Trump loyalists? Adam Klasfeld, right, Dec. 8, 2025. Ex-federal prosecutor Mimi Rocah and I discuss the Trump's DOJ incoherent responses to Alina Habba, below left, and Lindsey Halligan's disqualifications.
Talk about mixed messages.
On the same day that Alina Habba resigned from the District of New Jersey, the two top officials leading Donald Trump’s Justice Department issued a hostile statement attacking Eastern District of Virginia judges rather than accept a decision that ex-White House aide Lindsey Halligan never lawfully served in the role of U.S. Attorney.
As Rocah noted, Trump cares more about his Eastern District of Virginia cases.
“They’re doing that because I think Trump cares more about these cases against [Letitia] James and [James] Comey than probably anything else having to do with the DOJ,” Rocah noted. “That is like the ultimate revenge for him.”
The Justice Department’s subsequent press release announcing the District of New Jersey’s new top officials leaves the U.S. Attorney position vacant. Habba leaving the U.S. Attorney’s office for a new role as one of Pam Bondi’s advisors abandons the possibility of a Supreme Court battle on this issue.
It remains to be seen whether Trump’s Justice Department will appeal any of the cases against any of the other disqualified top prosecutors — Halligan, Sigal Chattah, and Bill Essayli — further.
For now, Halligan’s disqualification hasn’t been appealed, only ignored by the federal government.
Meidas Touch Network, Trump Sent Another Shady Tariff Rebate, Trump’s fundraising message redirects those who click to a donation page, J.D. Wolf, Dec. 8, 2025. Donald Trump’s political operation sent out another misleading “tariff rebate check” email late Saturday, escalating a fundraising tactic that falsely implies supporters have government checks waiting to be signed.
The message repeats the claim that Trump is preparing to personally sign a “Tariff Check” for the recipient and urges them to verify their name before an 11:59 p.m. deadline. But every “CONFIRM CHECK HERE” button, which appears multiple times throughout the email, redirects to a donation page rather than any official program or verification process.Trump campaign
The email also insists it is “the only tariff rebate email authorized by President Trump,” despite there being no tariff rebate program, no legislation authorizing such checks, and no government mechanism for issuing them.Trump moneyTrump Sends Sketchy Tariff Rebate Check EmailRead More
Trump has even admitted his check idea is stalled pending a Supreme Court ruling on his tariff authority, leaving these messages to misleadingly frame a nonexistent program as imminent while pressuring supporters into making donations under the guise of claiming a financial benefit.
New York Times, Trump Giving Farmers $12 Billion to Blunt Trade War Fallout, Alan Rappeport, Dec. 8, 2025. Federal relief money comes after China boycotted American farm products in retaliation for U.S. tariffs.
President Trump will roll out a $12 billion bailout for struggling farmers on Monday as he looks to shore up the finances of some of his most loyal supporters whose financial fortunes have been hurt by his trade war.
The rescue package, which is expected to be unveiled at a round table at the White House, is an acknowledgment by the administration that Mr. Trump’s trade policies have had negative consequences for the American agriculture sector. Although his plan to raise tariffs were intended to spur domestic production and open export markets, China — the biggest buyer of American crops such as soybeans — retaliated by halting purchases of U.S. farm products this year.
Most of the relief funds will come from the Agriculture Department’s Farmer Bridge Assistance program. According to the White House, the money will go to corn, cotton, sorghum, soybean, rice, cattle, wheat and potato farmers.
The need for the rescue package reflects the limits of Mr. Trump’s trade agenda, which relies on tariffs as leverage to strike new trade deals. American farmers have been warning of the worst crisis since the 1980s as China turned to Brazil, Argentina and other markets for food products.
The White House sought to blame former President Joseph R. Biden Jr. for failing to protect American farmers and manufacturers and said that Mr. Trump was doing what was necessary to make global trade more fair.
“President Trump is helping our agriculture industry by negotiating new trade deals to open new export markets for our farmers and boosting the farm safety net for the first time in a decade,” said Anna Kelly, a White House spokeswoman. “Today’s announcement reflects the president’s commitment to helping our farmers, who will have the support they need to bridge the gap between Biden’s failures and the President’s successful policies taking effect.”
This is not the first time Mr. Trump has had to send money to farmers hurt by his trade policies. During his first term, Mr. Trump funneled more than $20 billion in economic support to farmers after China boycotted U.S. products in response to Mr. Trump’s tariffs.
As part of a trade deal with China reached during Mr. Trump’s first term, Beijing agreed to buy an additional $200 billion of American farm products. However, after relations with the U.S. deteriorated during the pandemic, China failed to meet those purchase commitments. According to the Peterson Institute for International Economics, China bought only about 83 percent of the U.S. farm products that it had committed to purchasing through 2021.
China curbed purchases of U.S. farm products even more significantly this year. But following a trade truce in late October, China agreed to buy 12 million metric tons of soybeans from the United States this year and at least 25 million metric tons of soybeans in each of the next three years. The 25 million metric tons were in line with the 25 to 30 million metric tons that it had purchased in recent years.
Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent said on Sunday that China used American farmers as a “pawn” in trade negotiations and that the relief money would help them with financing and planning for next year.
Meidas Touch Network, MAGA Pushes Racist Cinnabon Worker’s Fundraiser Past $100,000, J.D. Wolf, Dec. 8, 2025.Donors echo Trump’s rhetoric as they boost fired employee.
A GiveSendGo fundraiser for Crystal Wilsey, the Wisconsin Cinnabon employee fired after her racist interaction with a Somali couple went viral, has become a showcase of MAGA-aligned grievance politics and explicit, hateful xenophobia. In the video, Wilsey called one of the customers the n-word.
Wilsey also stated, “I am racist, and I’ll say that to the whole, entire world.” Cinnabon reacted by publically tweeted they had fired the employee over “the disturbing video,” noting that Wolsey’s actions “do not reflect our values or the welcoming experience every guest deserves.”Cinnabon
Donors have poured over $100,000 into the campaign while leaving comments that mirror Trump-era slogans and rhetoric, including “America First,” attacks on DEI, and direct references to Trump’s recent remarks about Somali immigrants.“Stand With Crystal” campaign
Several donors invoked Trump explicitly to justify their hostility, praising the former president for labeling Somalis “garbage” and calling for mass deportations.
Others repeated talking points about “foreign invaders,” framing the fired employee as a victim of multiculturalism and political correctness.
The comment section is also filled with overtly racist language and white-nationalist themes, underscoring how MAGA politics and racist rhetoric often go hand in hand. Incidents of public bigotry can translate into financial reward within the MAGA ecosystem.
Donors described Somalis as “not human,” called for kicking “N’s out” to “ignite the American Golden Age,” a reference to the n-word while utilizing Trump’s rhetoric. Some repeated tribal rhetoric such as “we take care of our own” and “we’re done watching our people get burned” while echoing Trump’s attacks on Somali people.
Meidas Touch Network, Trump Fails to Enshrine Roger Clemens in Hall of Fame, J.D. Wolf, Dec. 8, 2025. A Hall of Fame committee gave Clemens fewer than five votes.
Donald Trump’s public campaign to push Roger Clemens into the Baseball Hall of Fame fell flat this weekend, as the Contemporary Baseball Era Committee gave Clemens fewer than five votes, leaving him far short of the 12 needed for induction. Rose : TrumpTrump Attempts to Pardon Pete Rose Into the Hall of FameRead More
Despite Trump’s three-day barrage of posts urging the “Baseball Commissioner” and MLB to “put Roger Clemens in the Hall… IMMEDIATELY,” the decision rested solely with the 16-member committee of Hall of Famers, executives, and historians.Trump
They rejected Clemens and Trump’s pressure decisively. Clemens has battled against allegations of using performance enhancing drugs.
The outcome is a major setback for Clemens under newly adopted Hall rules: receiving fewer than five votes means he will be ineligible for the next Committee ballot in 2028, with the earliest possible reconsideration pushed to 2031. Trump
Trump framed Clemens as the victim of an Obama-era “witch hunt,” emphasizing his acquittal on perjury charges and suggesting Clemens should “sue the hell out of Major League Baseball” if denied. But his intervention didn’t have his desired effect on the actual process, and we may never know if his posts actually backfired resulting in fewer votes.
The Atlantic Daily, Dan Bongino admits to lying during his pundit days, David A. Graham, Dec. 8, 2025. Before he joined the FBI, Dan Bongino spread bogus claims about the January 6 pipe bomber—and now says he did it just because he was getting paid to do it. That’s particularly pernicious because of his new job, but he’s only the latest right-wing pundit to fess up.
Dan Bongino, the deputy director of the FBI, took an awkward victory lap last week. The bureau notched a major success by announcing the long-awaited arrest of a suspect in the placing of pipe bombs, neither of which exploded, outside the Washington, D.C., headquarters of the Republican and Democratic National Committees on January 5, 2021.
Still, the arrest presented a complication for the Trump administration. The suspect, Brian Cole Jr., reportedly recently told investigators that he was a Donald Trump supporter who believed Trump’s bogus claims of fraud in the 2020 election. But various people in conservative media and politics have insisted for years that the pipe bombs were actually planned or placed by the government in order to make Trump look bad—which was why no one had been apprehended.
One of the most prominent backers of that claim was the podcaster and radio host Dan Bongino. Even the Fox News host Sean Hannity, one of the administration’s most sycophantic pundits, had to point this out during an interview on Thursday night, noting that before joining the FBI, Bongino had called the bombs an “inside job.” Bongino’s answer was astonishing.
“I was paid in the past, Sean, for my opinions, that’s clear, and one day I will be back in that space—but that’s not what I’m paid for now,” he said. “I’m paid to be your deputy director, and we base investigations on facts.”
Some liberal critics have been braying for years that the conservative press is full of hacks who will say anything in order to froth up their audience, regardless of truth. (Rage bait isn’t just the word of this year.) This criticism can feel shamelessly partisan and uncharitable. And yet, here Bongino is, blithely admitting that in his case, the critics are right: He was saying things he didn’t have evidence for and maybe didn’t even believe.
The problem here is not that Bongino is engaging in punditry. When properly done, pundits make arguments—like the one I am making here—based on facts and reasoning. Bongino, by his own account, was doing something else entirely: He was telling his audience that a claim (that the bombing was an inside job) was a fact, when it was not only not true but also not based on any real circumstantial evidence.
This isn’t the first time that Bongino’s prior pundit life has complicated his current role as No. 2 at the FBI. While working as a podcaster, Bongino frequently discussed Jeffrey Epstein and questioned the official narrative about his prosecution and death, which was ruled a suicide. Since joining the FBI, however, he has endorsed many of the Epstein claims he ridiculed.
Nor is this the first time that a major conservative figure has admitted that they’re just making stuff up. In a 2019 lawsuit, a woman who alleged a sexual relationship with Trump sued Fox News for defaming her by accusing her of extorting the president. Fox News’s lawyers argued—and convinced a judge—that the then-host Tucker Carlson couldn’t be held liable, because he was not “stating actual facts” and instead engaging in “exaggeration” and “non-literal commentary.” There are other words for this. Lying is one of them.
What Fox News said in court, moreover, was not what it broadcast on air. During his show, Carlson didn’t simply offer opinions—he insisted that they were not opinions. At one point, he prefaced a riff by telling viewers, “Remember the facts of the story. These are undisputed.” Really, they weren’t even facts.
The revolving door between conservative media and Republican administrations—especially the second Trump administration—might explain why the same behavior also pops up from spokespeople. During the first Trump administration, then–Press Secretary Sarah Sanders claimed that “countless” FBI agents had told the White House that they had lost faith in FBI Director James Comey prior to his firing. This was true only insofar as the agents literally could not be counted: Sanders admitted to Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s team that her statement was “not founded on anything.” In another instance, she dismissed a false claim that she’d made in the briefing room with a self-negating “I’m an honest person.” (She is now the governor of Arkansas.)
No party has a monopoly on lying, but the right has an unusual habit of happily admitting to spreading nonsense. In 2011, Senator Jon Kyl of Arizona, a Republican, said that abortion accounted for “well over 90 percent of what Planned Parenthood does.” Putting a faux-precise number on a false claim is a classic technique for trying to make the claim seem more legitimate, but that kind of statement also attracts scrutiny; Politifact has the real number closer to 12 percent. Kyl’s office explained away his remark by saying that it was “not intended to be a factual statement,” which is perhaps true in a deeper sense than intended: He had no interest in reality or in conveying it accurately to the public.
The right’s worst factual offenders are forced to make these kinds of admissions all the time, which one might think would undermine their credibility among their audiences. But thanks to our siloed media environment, these statements are usually made in places—federal court, mainstream media, left-of-center outlets—where Tucker Carlson and Dan Bongino fans don’t tread. What is unusual about Bongino’s admission last week is that he made it on Fox News, where right-wing viewers could hear it. Then again, he didn’t seem too worried, given that he told Hannity he’d be back in his old role someday. When that day comes, everyone should know how seriously to take whatever he says.
New York Times, Guest Essay: Trump Wants Complete Control. Will the Supreme Court Hand It to Him? Kate Shaw, Dec. 8, 2025. On Monday the Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in Trump v. Slaughter, a case that will decide whether to grant the president, for the first time in American history, the power to fire the heads of virtually all independent agencies at will. This would be a vast transfer of power from Congress to the president.
The Constitution doesn’t explicitly grant the president any such power, and nearly a century ago, the court unanimously rejected an argument that the president possessed it. Today’s Republican-appointed justices appear to be firmly under the sway of an atextual and ahistoric theory — the unitary executive theory — that demands complete presidential control over essentially every government agency and insists that the power to fire agency heads at will is an indispensable part of such control.
Congress has made a range of choices when it comes to creating, structuring and empowering federal agencies; some have been given a degree of independence from the president. Giving a president complete control would have a profound impact on how our government functions and the ability of these agencies to do work that touches the lives of practically every American. It could undermine, in tangible and immediate ways, agencies’ ability to safeguard consumers’ privacy, ensure the rights of workers and unions, minimize the hazards posed by ordinary household products and more.
In his brief in Slaughter, President Trump insists that the Constitution grants him, as part of his core powers, the ability to remove agency leaders at will. (In this case, he is trying to remove Rebecca Slaughter from the Federal Trade Commission.) He further maintains that “the president’s removal power extends to heads of multimember administrative agencies” like the F.T.C.
News Roundups
The Parnas Perspective, Political Commentary, Mike Johnson Braces for 'Mass Exodus' of House Republicans this Month as Dozens set to Retire, Aaron Parnas, Trump caught committing same mortgage fraud he is prosecuting Letitia James for. Trump's Thailand peace deal is effectively over.
A mass exodus of Republicans from the House is expected this month, with as many as 20 members heading for the exits, some possibly earlier than planned, as many conclude they are facing grim odds going into 2026. At the same time, the Thailand - Cambodia peace deal championed by Trump has collapsed, and a new investigation shows that Trump himself engaged in the same mortgage fraud activity he is now pursuing against Letitia James and others.
Before we dive in, TikTok has intensified its crackdown on news content, issuing multiple community guidelines strikes while the White House escalates efforts to target journalists it disapproves of. This is exactly why I am building more of my work here.
Here’s what you missed:
Good news:
Letters from an American, Historical Commentary: December 7, 2025 [U.S. Bombing Of Venezuelan Boats], Heather Cox Richardson, right, Dec. 8, 2025. “I think it’s really important that this video be made public,” Representative Jim Himes (D-CT) said today on Face the Nation. Himes was referring to a video of the September 2 U.S. military strike on a small boat with 11 people on it. In that attack, the first strike broke the boat apart and set it on fire. The strike killed nine people but left two alive, clinging to the remains of the vessel.
“It’s not lost on anyone, of course, that the interpretation of the video, which, you know, six or seven of us had an opportunity to see last week, broke down precisely on party lines. And so this is an instance in which I think the American public needs to judge for itself.”
Himes, left, said he knew how the public would react because it left him profoundly shaken, even though as the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, he has “spent years looking at videos of lethal action taken,” including against terrorists. Himes said he realizes that “there’s a certain amount of sympathy out there for going after drug runners. But,” he added, “I think it’s really important that people see what it looks like when the full force of the United States military is turned on two guys who are clinging to a piece of wood and about to go under, just so that they have sort of a visceral feel for what it is that we’re doing.”
On Friday, Julian E. Barnes and Charlie Savage of the New York Times reported that those who have seen the video reported that the two survivors of the first strike were waving to something overhead before the second strike killed them. The journalists also note that, as there had been no announcement of the administration’s new plan to strike alleged drug traffickers rather than stopping them and turning their operators over to law enforcement, the men had no way of knowing they were under attack.
Some of those who saw the video thought the men were waving to be rescued. Those who support President Donald J. Trump’s argument that the civilians potentially trafficking drugs are enemy combatants—an argument legal analysts widely reject—say the men could have been trying to wave to other alleged drug traffickers to come get them and salvage the cocaine on the boat, although there were no other boats or aircraft in visual range.
Also on Friday, Natasha Bertrand of CNN reported that the boat the U.S. military struck on September 2 was not, in fact, headed for the U.S., a claim from the president that had always seemed doubtful because of how far away from the U.S. the small boats the U.S. has been hitting are. Instead, Admiral Frank “Mitch” Bradley, who was overseeing Special Operations on that day, told Congress that the intelligence he received said the boat was on its way to meet a larger vessel bound for Suriname, a small South American country to the east of Venezuela, to transfer drugs to it. Bradley told the lawmakers that the military could not find the second, larger vessel.
According to U.S. drug enforcement officials, drugs trafficked through Suriname generally are bound for Europe. Bradley also confirmed that after the people on the boat appeared to see American aircraft, they had turned the boat back toward land.
Bill Kristol, right, of The Bulwark wrote: “If the Sep. 2 boat really had ‘narco-terrorists’ on board, questioning the survivors would have been a way to learn about how the organization worked, where more drugs were stashed, etc. But this isn’t a counter-terrorism campaign. It’s a shooting gallery with helpless targets.”
In a speech at the the Reagan National Defense Forum at the Ronald Reagan Presidential Foundation and Institute in California yesterday, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth told attendees: “The war department will not be distracted by democracy building, interventionism, undefined wars, regime change, climate change, woke moralizing and feckless nation building.” He said that Trump has the power to take military action “as he sees fit” to defend the U.S., and defended the strikes on small boats off the coast of Venezuela, including the strikes of September 2.
Democrats and some Republicans are not okay with Hegseth’s assertion of the president’s power to strike the boats without input from Congress. They have been calling for the release of the September 2 video since they saw it on Thursday. Amelia Benavides-Colón of NOTUS reported today that Senator Mark Kelly (D-AZ) told MS NOW he has already talked to the chairs of the Senate Armed Services and Intelligence Committees—he sits on both—about using a subpoena to get the video released.
Representative Adam Smith (D-WA), the top Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee, today told George Stephanopoulos of ABC News: “It seems pretty clear they don’t want to release this video because they don’t want people to see it, because it’s very, very difficult to justify.”
When asked if he would make the footage public, Hegseth told the defense forum: “Whatever we were to decide to release, we’d have to be very responsible about reviewing that right now.”
Coming less than a week after the release of a damning report from the inspector general of the Defense Department about Hegseth’s use of the non-secure messaging app Signal, this rings hollow. After the chair and ranking member of the Senate Armed Services Committee requested an investigation, the acting inspector general, Steven A. Stebbins, reviewed Hegseth’s use of Signal in a March chat revealed by editor in chief of The Atlantic Jeffrey Goldberg, who had been inadvertently included in it.
Stebbins’s report, released to the public on December 2, concluded that Hegseth “sent sensitive, nonpublic, operational information” over Signal on his personal cell phone, against Department of Defense policy. It explained that U.S. Central Command, whose area of responsibility includes the Middle East, Central Asia, and parts of South Asia, sent Hegseth seven emails classified as secret and not releasable to foreign nationals (SECRET/NOFORN) before and during a set of strikes on Houthi militants in Yemen on March 14 and 15. Hegseth transmitted the information in them, including details about targets, weapons packages, aircraft, and strike times, to the people on the Signal chat.
The defense secretary has the authority to declassify information, and Hegseth claimed he had done so. He said he determined the material he shared didn’t have to be classified because “there were no details that would endanger our troops or the mission.” On Wednesday, the day after the report came out, Hegseth relied on his authority to declassify material to claim he had not shared anything inappropriately and that the report had cleared him. “No classified information. Total exoneration,” he wrote on social media. “Thank you for your attention to this IG report.”
But while the inspector general acknowledged that, by virtue of his position, Hegseth had the power to declassify information and thus avoid consequences for sharing such information, he nonetheless concluded that “if this information had fallen into the hands of U.S. adversaries, Houthi forces might have been able to counter U.S. forces or reposition personnel and assets to avoid planned U.S. strikes. Even though these events did not ultimately occur, the Secretary’s actions created a risk to operational security that could have resulted in failed U.S. mission objectives and potential harm to U.S. pilots.”
Hegseth refused to cooperate with the investigation, refusing either to talk to Stebbins or to let the inspector general have access to his phone. For information about the messaging, Stebbins had to rely on The Atlantic’s publication of the messages. The article showed messages the printout offered by the Defense Department didn’t have because Signal had been set to delete them—another breach of policy, which requires that official records be retained.
Representative Smith’s suggestion that the White House and Hegseth don’t want people to see the September 2 video seems more likely than Hegseth’s concern about being “very responsible” about reviewing the video footage.
Although American lawmakers are deeply troubled with strikes that seem illegal and may be war crimes, Russian officials are happy with U.S. foreign policy. They welcomed the National Security Strategy the Trump administration released on Thursday, saying that “[t]he adjustments we’re seeing...are largely consistent with our vision.”
That document announced the U.S. will back away from the global alliances formed in the wake of World War II and called for making sure the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), the organization that has opposed first Soviet and now Russian aggression since 1949, doesn’t continue to expand. The administration’s document calls for a world dominated not by a rules-based international order in which countries must respect each other’s sovereignty, but by a few major powers that control weaker nations in their sphere of influence.
There has been an outcry over the National Security Strategy, with Europeans and other U.S. allies warning that they can no longer trust the U.S. Poland’s prime minister Donald Tusk posted on social media: “Dear American friends, Europe is your closest ally, not your problem. And we have common enemies. At least that’s how it has been in the last 80 years. We need to stick to this, this is the only reasonable strategy of our common security. Unless something has changed.”
But former U.S. ambassador to Russia Michael McFaul posted on social media yesterday: “At a moment in American politics in which Trump has very low approval ratings, Democrats are winning elections, many predict a blue wave in 2026 & a Democratic president in 2028, and a solid majority of Americans support NATO, it would be imprudent to get too fatalistic about the death of Transatlantic relations because of an incoherent National Security Strategy written by a small group in the Trump administration. Play the long game.”
More Global News
New York Times, Europe’s Leaders Vow to Support Ukraine as Talks to End War Falter, Michael D. Shear, Dec. 8, 2025. The destiny of Ukraine “is the destiny of Europe,” the German chancellor said on Monday, as he and other leaders met with President Volodymyr Zelensky in London.
The leaders of Europe’s largest economies vowed on Monday to continue backing Ukraine in its war against Russian aggression, standing in London alongside President Volodymyr Zelensky even as peace talks have languished amid clashing views over how to end the conflict.
Prime Minister Keir Starmer of Britain hosted Mr. Zelensky at 10 Downing Street, along with President Emmanuel Macron of France, below left, and Chancellor Friedrich Merz of Germany, for the closed-door discussion.
In brief remarks before the meeting began, Mr. Zelensky said he was there to discuss “sensitive issues” and stressed 
that it was critical for Europeans and Americans to unite with Ukraine in defending the country against Russia and in negotiating an end to the conflict.
“There are some things we can’t manage without Americans; things which we can’t manage without Europe,” he said. “That’s why we need to make some important decisions.”
After the meeting ended, Mr. Macron’s office issued a statement saying the group had worked on the American peace proposals “with a view to supplementing it with European contributions, in close coordination with Ukraine.”
The statement added that “in parallel, work will be stepped up to provide Ukraine with robust security guarantees and to plan measures for the reconstruction of Ukraine.”
The Europeans repeated their longstanding pledges of robust support for Ukraine, both on and off the battlefield. Mr. Macron stated that Europe and Ukraine have “a lot of cards in our hands,” an apparent reference to President Trump’s statements earlier this year that Mr. Zelensky did not “have the cards” to play in negotiations with Russia on ending the war.Want to stay updated on what’s happening in Russia, Ukraine and the United Kingdom?
Mr. Macron cited “the fact that Ukraine is resisting in this war, and the fact that the Russian economy is starting to suffer.”
Mr. Merz said the current moment “could be a decisive time for all of us,” suggesting that Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was not only devastating for that country, but posed a long-term threat to the security and stability of all of the nations in Europe.
“We all know that the destiny of this country is the destiny of Europe,” he said. “So that’s the reason why we are here trying to figure out what we can do.”
The German chancellor said that he was “skeptical” about some of the provisions in the peace proposal drafted by the United States. But he said, “We have to talk about that. That’s why we are here.”
New York Times, The U.S. Gave Mexico a List of Russian Spies. Mexico Let Them Stay, Maria Abi-Habib, Dec. 8, 2025. Moscow has ramped up covert operations in Mexico, with spies meeting handlers in its bustling capital and seaside resorts, U.S. officials say.
When a U.S. general publicly declared that Mexico was a haven for Russian spies, Mexico’s president at the time dismissed it outright.
“We don’t have information on this,” President Andrés Manuel López Obrador, right, told reporters the next day, in March 2022.
That was not true.
His top aides had repeatedly heard from Washington about the increase in Russia’s covert activities in Mexico, according to nine current and former American and Mexican officials. In fact, Mr. López Obrador had been told about the problem directly, said three of the U.S. officials briefed on the discussions.
The C.I.A. had even compiled a list of more than two dozen Russian spies posing as diplomats, but Mexican officials refused to kick them out of the country, five of the officials said.
The United States did secure a major promise from Mexico in 2023, several of the people said: Under pressure, Mexico agreed to let U.S. officials weigh in on Russians applying for diplomatic credentials, and they have rejected some of them.
But even after a new president took office in Mexico last fall, the Russian spies already in the country were not expelled, according to six current and recently departed officials.
“The Mexican government did help, but they could have done a lot more,” said Juan González, the director for Western Hemisphere affairs on the National Security Council during the Biden administration. “We gave them names of Russian spies who were posing as diplomats at the embassy in Mexico City. These were seasoned spies, who had been on sophisticated operations across Europe.”
Mexico’s proximity to the United States and the cover provided by tourism for spies to operate has allowed Moscow to significantly ramp up espionage activities in the country in recent years, U.S. officials say. Moscow can fly spies and informants from the United States to beach destinations like Cancún, which millions of Americans visit every year — providing a convincing cover that raises few red flags.
Spies and their handlers meet among tourists, sunbathers and surfers, officials say, handing off intelligence gathered in the United States while using Mexico to evade Washington’s sophisticated surveillance systems.
An aerial view of a gypsum pond at a mineral processing plant, with reddish colored earth surrounding it.Sojitz, a Japanese conglomerate, turned to Lynas, an Australian mining company, to build a rare-earth supply chain outside China. Lynas mines in Australia and refines in Malaysia.Credit...Carla Gottgens/Bloomberg
New York Times, How Japan Built a Rare-Earth Supply Chain Without China, River Akira Davis and Kiuko Notoya, Dec. 8, 2025. The 15-year effort by Japan is a model for countries now scrambling to reduce their dependence on Beijing’s critical metals.
The world reacted with alarm this year when Beijing introduced waves of export controls on rare earths, the minerals vital to the manufacturing of everything from cars to advanced electronics. For Japan, the experience felt like déjà vu.
China maintains a near monopoly on the supply of the metals. Japan learned that the hard way in 2010 when China effectively cut it off during a territorial dispute between the countries. Tokyo has since quietly stitched together a supply chain that is considerably less dependent on China. For Japan, that is an important hedge to political risk, as a recent flare-up in tensions between the nations underscores.
As the United States and other nations scramble to secure rare earths outside China and build up their domestic supplies, Japan’s experience provides lessons in how it can be done, according to interviews with current and former government officials, business executives and industry experts in Japan.
“The urgency of the rare-earths situation is just now dawning on the United States and Europe,” said Naoki Kobayashi, an official working in the minerals division of Japan’s trade ministry. “For Japan, this painful lesson came 15 years ago,” he said.
President Trump has said he believes it will take the United States about a year to secure ample rare-earth supplies. But Japan is a case study in how hard it is to pull out of China’s grip — especially its extremely cost competitive rare-earth processing facilities. Experts say such an effort requires both sustained government support and international collaboration
New York Times, China’s Trade Surplus Climbs Past $1 Trillion for First Time, Keith Bradsher, Dec. 8, 2025 (print ed.). President Trump’s tariffs weren’t enough to hold back the global export flood by China, which pushed past last year’s record in just 11 months.
China got the world’s attention last January when it announced that its trade surplus for goods and services had hit almost $1 trillion, an excess of exports to imports that no country had ever reached.
Now China has surged through that milestone in just 11 months this year. China’s customs agency announced on Monday that the country’s accumulated trade surplus reached $1.08 trillion through November.
Tariffs imposed by President Trump on China have caused Chinese exports to the United States to drop by nearly a fifth. But China has throttled back its purchases of American soybeans and other products by almost the same rate, continuing to sell three times as much to the United States as it buys.
China’s $111.68 billion trade surplus in November was its third-largest ever in a single month. The overall surplus through the first 11 months of the year is up 21.7 percent from the same period last year.
China has ramped up considerably its sales to other countries. From cars to solar panels to consumer electronics, a tsunami of Chinese exports is flooding Southeast Asia, Africa, Europe and Latin America. Carmakers and other exporters in traditional manufacturing powerhouses like Germany, Japan and South Korea are losing customers to Chinese rivals. Factories in developing countries like Indonesia and South Africa have had to curtail production or even close as they struggle to match China’s low prices.Want to stay updated on what’s happening in China? Sign up for Your Places: Global Update, and we’ll send our latest coverage to your inbox.
Chinese companies have shifted final assembly of their goods to Southeast Asia, Mexico and Africa, which then ship finished products to the United States. This has allowed them to partly bypass Mr. Trump’s tariffs on goods coming straight from China.
China now sells more than twice as much to the European Union as it buys. China’s trade surplus with the region has widened considerably this year.
One major reason is that China’s currency has been weak over the last several years against many other currencies, particularly the euro. Another is that prices have been falling in China, while they have been rising in the United States and Europe.
The weakness of the Chinese currency, the renminbi, has helped propel its exports. More than a tenth of the Chinese economy now consists of its trade surplus in manufactured goods. Europe has felt the sting sharply.
New York Times, China’s Weak Currency Is Powering Its Exports and Drawing Criticism, Keith Bradsher, Dec. 8, 2025 (print ed.). China’s renminbi is lagging the currencies of key trading partners, making Chinese goods and services cheap and helping to drive exports.
A night at the Waldorf Astoria hotel in the heart of Manhattan starts at about $2,000. A night at the Waldorf Astoria in the heart of Beijing costs about $340.
Hotel rooms are not all that is cheap right now in China. A Big Mac from McDonald’s costs half as much in China as it does in the United States. Made-in-China goods are cheaper, too: A OnePlus 15 smartphone is $999 in the United States and $692 in China. A BYD Seal plug-in hybrid car sells for $15,500 inside China, including computer-assisted driving, and about $50,000 elsewhere.
Large discrepancies between prices inside and outside China point to the biggest distortion in the global economy today: the low value of China’s currency. A combination of low interest rates, slowing economic growth and government policies have kept the country’s currency so weak — undervalued by as much as a third, even some Chinese economists estimate — that prices in China look cheap by international standards.
U.S. Military, Foreign Policy
The Triad via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: Donald Trump and the Power of the Little Lie, Jonathan V. Last, above, Dec. 8, 2025. The war against Venezuela isn’t about drugs. It’s about the destruction of regular order.
It’s such a stupid, obvious little lie.
“Every boat we knock out, we save 25,000 American lives,” Donald Trump said in October.
These American lives were supposedly being saved from fentanyl, which Trump said was being smuggled in the boats the U.S. military was attacking: “And you can see it, the boats get hit, and you see that fentanyl all over the ocean. It’s like floating in bags. It’s all over the place.”Pentagon Press Secretary Kingsley Wilson repeated this claim on December 2: “Every single boat that we strike saves 25,000 American lives.”
This casus belli is a lie at every level. We’re going to examine each part of it so that you understand (a) exactly how and why this charge is a lie and (b) how Trump has used little lies like this to short-circuit American democracy.
First, it is important to understand that Venezuela is not a major producer of any drugs. It is a transit bridge. Why? Because in 2005, Hugo Chávez stopped cooperating with U.S. drug enforcement agencies. It was part of his campaign to consolidate power by demonizing America.
As Venezuela went dark, cartels in Colombia and Peru found that it was easier to smuggle drugs into Venezuela and then out to the wider world than to export directly from the source. Over time, Venezuela went from being a passive bridge to an active participant in the drug trade: Nicolás Maduro and vast swaths of the Venezuelan government and military are believed to operate as their own cartel.
What drugs pass through Venezuela? It’s almost exclusively cocaine. Venezuela shares a 1,378 mile border with Colombia, which produces more than 60 percent of the world’s cocaine. Peru and Bolivia are also in the neighborhood and those three producing countries account for nearly 100 percent of the total global supply of cocaine.
And here’s the key: 90 percent of the cocaine sold in America originates in Colombia and transits to America over land routes through Mexico.
Here’s how it moves, courtesy of the United Nations:
Cocaine moved through Venezuela transits to other Caribbean countries en route, and eventually to Europe. (Cocaine use has risen spectacularly in Europe over the last decade to the point where Europe is a major global consumer. Cocaine is now the second-most popular drug in Europe, behind marijuana.)Here’s a graphic from the U.N.’s 2023 global report on cocaine showing where drugs coming over the Venezuelan bridge go:
The shipwreck survivors whom the U.S. military killed in the war crime case currently under discussion were bound not for the United States but for Suriname, and eventually points east.
So: We’re talking about cocaine, not fentanyl. And the drugs in the boats being blown up are headed to Europe, not America. But what about saving 25,000 lives with each boat strike?How many Americans do you think die of drug overdoses each year? In 2023, the number was 105,007. That’s total.Cocaine overdose deaths have increased since 2015. In 2023, 29,449 Americans died from cocaine use.¹ I suppose if Trump could blow up 1.2 boats worth of cocaine that was heading to America, that number would drop to zero. 🙄
2. Innumeracy
People could only take “we’re saving 25,000 lives with each boat strike” seriously if they were innumerate.
I understand that fentanyl has become the most important subject in the world (after child trafficking) for Republicans. But I suspect most people do not understand that only 72,226 people died from fentanyl overdoses in 2023. Fentanyl deaths had been rising in America since 2013, but went truly out of control during Trump’s first term.
Yes: You’re reading that right. Joe Biden presided over the first decrease in fentanyl deaths since 2013. I’m sure the white working class was super-duper grateful.
Did anyone stop to think about how ludicrous it is to say that one boat’s worth of anything could kill 25,000 people?Just for fun: In order to kill 25,000 people in Dallas, Texas, you’d need to annihilate 6.57 square miles.³ To accomplish that you’d need something like 1,600 tons of conventional ordinance dropped on the area.⁴If a boatload of cocaine could achieve the same results as 1,600 tons of explosives,⁵ then I promise you that China would be paying the cartels to send free cocaine to America instead of building nukes and aircraft carriers.
“Saving 25,000 lives” relies on the kind of innumeracy that led people to believe that, when Trump talked about deporting 20 million people, he would be targeting only criminals, rapists, etc.
There are only 2 million people in American prisons, total. Just how many criminals did you think there were, Cletus?
3. Regular Order
In the legal world, “regular order” is the assumption that if a government lawyer tells a judge something, the judge assumes that the lawyer isn’t willfully lying to him.
The government lawyer might be incorrect. She might be misinformed. She might try to play games, or be cute. But she won’t outright lie.
The presidency used to operate via something like regular order, too. Presidents and their confederates would mislead or conceal. They’d evade or exaggerate. They would take outrageous liberties with anything subject to interpretation.
But they wouldn’t outright lie about discrete, falsifiable facts. When they lied, it was a major scandal—because the American system of government can’t function outside of regular order.
Here are the things we know:• Venezuela is ruled by an authoritarian regime that is enmeshed with the drug trade.• The U.S. military is waging a campaign of attacks on civilian boats in and around Venezuelan waters.• The American government claims that these boats (a) are carrying drugs; (b) some of these drugs are fentanyl; (c) the drugs are bound for America; and (d) each boatload of these drugs kills 25,000 Americans.• At least (b), (c), and (d) are lies: It is exceedingly unlikely that any of these boats would carry fentanyl, or be bound for America. It is impossible that their cargo could kill 25,000 people.• So why should we believe (a)? If the government is lying about everything else, then we should not assume, absent evidence, that these boats are even carrying drugs.• Seriously: Why should we believe anything this administration says without supporting evidence?
That’s not a rhetorical question. To all of the straight-news media reporting on the conflict with Venezuela: What is the rationale for repeating any statement by the Trump administration without alerting your audience that the administration has already lied about the fundamental pretext of these operations and may be lying again?
Trump’s constant stream of little lies short circuits the normal fact-checking functions of the press. No mainstream reporter has the stomach to say, “By the way, this administration lies all the time and we should assume this is a lie too” after every unsupported statement. To be honest, I sort of understand that.
Like I said: The entire system—from judicial review, to congressional oversight, to the fourth estate—is built on the assumption of regular order. I’m not sure that any of it can function if every single statement from the federal government requires a full-length vetting.
Trump’s little lies gave us a choice.
We could become immobilized by a need to litigate every single statement and remark, to qualify and stipulate before every report.
Or we could roll our eyes and pretend that regular order still exists. Sure, in private, everyone admits that nothing in the federal apparatus can be trusted. But publicly, we pantomime as if the foundation of the federal government hasn’t transformed.America chose pretend.I can’t tell if this was an act of cowardice, naivete, or foolishness
The New Republic, Political Commentary: Forbearance: The Simple, Legal Way Trump Could Steal the Midterms, Steve Israel, Dec. 8, 2025. A little-known section of the Constitution may hold the key to overturning Democratic wins in 2026.
Every two years between 2001 and 2015, I’d begin my term in Congress with the official swearing-in ceremony on the House Floor. I’d raise my right hand, proclaim my oath to the Constitution, and take a seat. I’d always assumed that seat was bestowed to me by a majority of voters 
in my Long Island district. Turns out I was wrong: The very Constitution I’d promised to protect and defend has an obscure clause that could have invalidated my election.
That simple language—tucked into Article 1, Section 5—might be a mechanism for Donald Trump and his congressional acolytes to maintain their House majority after the 2026 midterm elections, even if it’s clear the Democrats have flipped the House. It would be craven, but shockingly constitutional. And it would be hard for the courts to reverse.
The possible hijacking of a Democratic majority would rest on these words: “Each House shall be the Judge of the Elections, Returns and Qualifications of its own Members, and a Majority of each shall constitute a Quorum to do Business.” More plainly, voters may believe they are choosing their preferred representative—that once they see their district’s race called on election night, they can sleep peacefully in the knowledge the winner will be sworn in. Ultimately, the final arbiter of those elections is the speaker of the House. And if an election is close—perhaps even beset by accusations of fraud—then the speaker has enough constitutional leeway to override election results.
Believe it or not, we’ve seen it happen before. In 1984, a Democratic-controlled House of Representatives refused to seat newly elected Republican Rick McIntyre from Indiana’s notorious “bloody” 8th congressional district. He’d just beaten incumbent Democrat Frank McCloskey by a mere 34 votes, but questions about the vote counting abounded, leading House Democrats to appoint a three-person commission to investigate further. They ultimately found that McCloskey had held the seat by four votes and seated him instead—reversing the results of the election.
Since then, no House majority has seriously sought to use Article I, Section 5. But as we barrel toward the 2026 midterms with a fully MAGA-filled Congress and a Trump administration intent on bending every institution to his will, Article I, Section 5 is a five-alarm fire waiting to happen.
When the president already says any election he doesn’t like is rigged, what will stop Speaker Mike Johnson, left, from asking his fellow Republicans to accept the fiction of compromised elections in enough close districts to reverse the judgment of actual voters and preserve a Trump rubber-stamp majority?
At the moment, historical trends point toward Democrats flipping the House. Trump has an abysmal approval rating of 36 percent, and the generic ballot favors Democrats by 14 percent. Last Tuesday’s special election for Tennessee’s 7th congressional district gave Republicans the shivers: A progressive Democrat in a district drawn to create a safe seat for the GOP came within single digits of defeating a Republican in a district Trump carried by over 20 points. And state and local elections in November demonstrated deep electoral support for Democrats in ballots across America.
And yet, the midterms are likely to be close. Under ordinary circumstances, Democrats could credibly expect to flip the historical average of 25 seats in these midterms, perhaps even more. But as a result of redistricting, there just aren’t enough competitive seats to produce the wave elections we saw in 2006 (31-seat gain for the Democrats) or 2010 (63-seat gain for the Republicans). Compounding the gerrymandering problem are the forces of residential sorting redistributing the electorate into ideologically homogenous communities and social media algorithms deepening partisanship, thereby culling the number of prized swing voters. The result: Control of the House in 2026 could possibly be decided by single or low double digits.
Picture this: Democrats win the House but narrowly—perhaps by a margin of fewer than 10 seats. When Trump gets on the phone with Speaker Johnson—the man who just refused to seat a new Democratic lawmaker for seven weeks after she won her election—and tells him to declare enough Democratic election victories invalid to grant Republicans a majority, do you think Johnson will turn Trump down? Do you expect him to willingly surrender the gavel because it’s the right thing to do, when Trump and the entire Republican Party threaten his political future?
I’d like to believe that the courts would halt any effort by Trump to enact this congressional coup. After all, the Supreme Court has previously sought to limit Article I, Section 5. In Powell v. McCormack in 1969, the court ruled against the House, as it attempted to leverage this section of the Constitution to refuse a seat to reelected Congressman Adam Clayton Powell Jr., on the grounds of his well-documented corruption scandals. The court made clear that Congress could not decline a seat to a member based on its own interpretation of that member’s qualifications (or misdeeds). But it did not offer a robust check on Congress’s ability to interpret contentious election results. Would this Supreme Court go further than the Warren court? I’m not so sure.
Nonetheless, some legal experts doubt that this plan could really work. I spoke with Jeffrey Toobin, who concluded that “lots of pieces have to fall into place” because “the states run the elections, not the federal government or the Congress, and there have to be enough contested elections to even open this possibility.” He’s right, but what happens if Democrats flip a few close seats in Florida and Texas? If those seats decide who controls the House, we’re betting a lot on Ron DeSantis, Greg Abott, and Mike Johnson bucking Trump in favor of constitutional norms.
And sadly, those norms might not even exist anymore. They were based on a concept essential to a functioning and stable democracy: forbearance, which is described by Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt in their book How Democracies Die as “a collective willingness to avoid actions that respect the letter of the law but violate its spirit.”
Forbearance is the superglue that holds democracy together. It encourages us when we lose elections to offer better candidates and build better campaigns instead of tearing down our political institutions. It’s based on a common acceptance of inconvenient facts, instead of the fueling of political falsehoods. Without forbearance, we’re a set of partisan warriors with souped-up amygdalae locked in an existential battle to defend our own tribal truths. We voraciously swallow these truths without questioning whether they match reality. (For deeper reading on truth in politics, check out Harry Frankfurter’s On Bullshit, Hannah Arendt’s On Lying & Politics, or On Truth by Simon Blackburn.)
Forbearance is Al Gore conceding to George W. Bush in 2000 despite credible evidence that might have encouraged him to continue resisting. Willfulness, on the other hand, is a steadfast adherence to an opinion or course of action in spite of all reason, arguments, and persuasion—the governing style of the entire Trump administration.
Forbearance has steadily eroded in the bases of both parties over the past two decades. But Donald Trump has taken a wrecking ball to it. Once upon a time in America, we accepted electoral outcomes. In 2021, Americans stormed the U.S. Capitol and threatened to hang the people counting and certifying ballots. Trump forgave them, insisting they’re heroes instead of insurrectionists who were motivated to use violence to disrupt the congressional certification of the 2020 election.
That’s why I’m worried that the president and his most rabid supporters have a plan in their back pockets to invalidate the results of the 2026 midterms if Democrats win the House. And while the move may be thoroughly legal, it will be based on a Big (and not so beautiful) Lie that will amount to a constitutional coup d’état.
Next year’s elections will give the country a chance to reassert constitutional checks and balances on the worst impulses of the Trump administration, just as it did in 2018. But even if Democrats win, this fight will not be over. Trump will treat these elections as he’s treated everything else in his second presidency—bulldozing any fact that stands in the way of his power.
It means that Democrats must not only win, they must win big. They must create a cushion that makes it impossible for Republicans to use Article I, Section 5 to retain power. Not five districts but over a dozen. Not by the margin of error, but comfortably. And they must continue to build a nationwide team of election lawyers who will monitor the behavior of state and local election officials and maintain records of truth to withstand the torrential lies of Trump’s MAGA Math, where “two plus two = whatever Trump wants it to be.”
I’d be delighted to look back years later and realize I had been an alarmist. But let’s face it: Alarmism has had a good track record of late. And all around us, Trump is providing a mountain of evidence—from Republicans’ aggressive mid-decade redistricting to the Department of Justice’s politicized deployment of election monitors to Democratic states—that there is no forbearance in this administration. We must prepare accordingly. In 2026, fortitude will be more important than forbearance.
Steve Israel served in the U.S. Congress between 2001–2017, including 4 years as chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee. He’s written three widely praised novels—most recently, The Einstein Conspiracy, a historic thriller.
The Contrarian, Opinion: The second strike isn’t the only problem, Jennifer Rubin, right, Dec. 8, 2025. Extrajudicial killings may lead to another regime-change war.
Whatever ideological differences with Sen. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), pro-democracy forces should acknowledge he hit the nail on the head last week regarding Donald Trump’s illegal and reckless operation in the Caribbean:
The second strike was illegal
Understandably, attention has focused on the United States’ shocking, illegal, and reprehensible action in murdering unarmed civilians whose ship our military had already destroyed. No justification exists for killing shipwrecked civilians:
Video footage of a U.S. military strike on alleged drug smugglers in the Caribbean Sea shows two people attempting to flip their capsized vessel as they were attacked again, multiple lawmakers said … after speaking with the Navy admiral who oversaw the controversial mission.
As Just Security experts explain, simply carrying drugs does not convert those driving the boat into legal targets. “Under international human rights law, which governed the strikes, it is unlawful to knowingly cause the death of individuals, even criminals, in order to destroy criminal assets, like drugs.”
However, throughout last weeks, even more disturbing facts emerged. CNN reported: “The alleged drug traffickers killed by the US military in a strike on September 2 were heading to link up with another, larger vessel that was bound for Suriname.” The boat was not headed to the U.S., so Trump’s attenuated logic that it threatened the homeland collapses.
Moreover, Admiral Frank Bradley, right, admitted to lawmakers that the survivors were “waving at something in the air although it’s unclear whether they might have been surrendering or asking the US aircraft they had spotted for help.” Either way, murdering them in such a situation violates 
every legal and moral precept under which our military operates.
In sum, the murdered survivors had no weapons, no radio, and no intent to head to the U.S. The killings now jeopardize our own service personnel. We should recoil in horror at the prospect that a hostile power would feel emboldened to kill a downed U.S. airman with a radio-equipped raft.
The larger problem is risk of a regime change war
As horrifying the second strike may be, Paul correctly identified a more frightful issue: Trump’s concocted “drug war” appears to be just a pretext to bootstrap extrajudicial killings into grounds for a regime-change war of the very type Trump vowed never to start.
Quite apart from the second strike, the entire operation lacks legal or factual justification. We face no armed combatant. Simply declaring some group of people to be terrorists does not put us into a war footing. Just Security experts detailed:
The United States is not in an armed conflict with any cartel or criminal gang. … Domestic criminal law and international human rights law both prohibit these kinds of lethal strikes outside of armed conflict (such killings are known as murder and extrajudicial killings, respectively). All 21 strikes against suspected drug trafficking boats, killing 83 people to date, have been unlawful.
There is no war and no factual basis for a war. Americans should be skeptical that Trump cares so deeply about fentanyl—which does not come from Venezuela. If he cared about fentanyl addiction, he would have not slashed addiction treatment in Medicaid. Switching the pretext to cocaine does not fly either. No serious anti-cocaine policy would entail pardoning an infamous cocaine smuggler or diverting of thousands of DEA agents to round up Hispanic gardeners and construction workers.
We know how to interdict drugs lawfully and effectively. In a letter to Rand Paul dated Oct. 1, the Coast Guard affirmed that without lethal force it interdicted in the previous month over 200 boats—69 in the Caribbean, 14 of which had no drugs at all. Put differently, lethal force is unnecessary to stop the influx of drugs, puts our military in grave legal jeopardy, and risks murdering persons engaged in absolutely no crime. Deploying our military to commit extrajudicial killings of unarmed drug mules exceeds his powers under the Constitution (which authorizes Congress to declare war) and violates domestic, military, and international law prohibiting murder of civilians, shipwrecked or not.
Trump’s unilateral war of aggression is grievous enough. But a bigger problem looms: Trump has consistently threatened to widen this operation to attack Venezuela directly. We are on the cusp of another unjustified, unauthorized war.
Fortunately, Democratic lawmakers have recognized the gravity of the moment. Thirteen lawmakers signed onto a VoteVets declaration demanding “No Republican Forever Wars!” It insists that America “[e]nd the march toward a costly and unauthorized War of the Americas, and military adventurism worldwide.” It further demands that Trump discontinue “the illegal and unconstitutional strikes in the Caribbean on boats, and all plans for direct military strikes on Venezuela and elsewhere, absent consultation with Congress and a vote to authorize strikes.” And the declaration calls to end military deployments into American cities since “America is not at war with Americans.”
Such anodyne affirmations should be entirely uncontroversial and bipartisan. Since Republican continue to cover for the regime, a vibrant public information campaign to explain the facts and outline the danger of a wider, unauthorized war is essential.
In addition to an investigation, invocation of the War Powers Act, and prohibition on use of funds, Congress must hold Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth accountable for his role in developing an outrageous, illegal operation and in the ensuing heinous Sept. 2 strikes. Furthermore, based purely on the inspector general’s Signalgate findings, Congress should demand his resignation for endangering our troops and dissembling about highly sensitive information released during a military action. If Hegseth does not get fired or resign, articles of impeachment should be introduced.
With Trump’s approval and power draining away, will Republicans finally decide to fulfill their obligations under Art. I? If they instead continue acting like spineless lackeys for an unhinged autocrat, they too will bear responsibility for extrajudicial killings, an illegal and unwanted war, and erosion of our military’s reputation and international alliances.
New York Times, Must the Military Disobey Unlawful Orders? Pam Bondi Has Said Yes, Adam Liptak, Dec. 8, 2025. As a lawyer for a conservative think tank, Ms. Bondi, now the attorney general, filed a Supreme Court brief last year saying service members who followed such orders were committing crimes.
When six Democratic lawmakers issued a video last month telling members of the military that they must refuse unlawful orders, President Trump said they had committed “SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR, punishable by DEATH!”
But Pam Bondi, the attorney general, said the same thing last year in a friend-of-the-court brief in the Supreme Court as a lawyer for the America First Policy Institute, a conservative think tank that represented three former military leaders.
“Military officers are required not to carry out unlawful orders,” she wrote.
She elaborated: “The military would not carry out a patently unlawful order from the president to kill nonmilitary targets. Indeed, service members are required not to do so.”
The brief was filed in support of Mr. Trump, who was asking the Supreme Court to grant him immunity from prosecution on charges of trying to subvert the 2020 election. It was, more specifically, an effort to address a statement by one of Mr. Trump’s private lawyers, D. John Sauer, now the solicitor general, at an appeals court argument in January 2024.
“Could a president who ordered SEAL team 6 to assassinate a political rival, who was not impeached, would he be subject to criminal prosecution?” Judge Florence Y. Pan asked Mr. Sauer.
Mr. Sauer said no. That answer seemed to hurt his case, and Ms. Bondi tried to limit its blast radius in her brief by saying that the hypothetical was unrealistic because military officers would never comply with such an order.
“A president cannot order an elite military unit to kill a political rival, and the members of the military are required not to carry out such an unlawful order,” she wrote. “It would be a crime to do so.”
Mr. Sauer briefly addressed the point in his Supreme Court argument.
The Uniform Code of Military Justice, Mr. Sauer said, “prohibits the military from following a plainfully unlawful act.”
Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. understood the significance of the argument.
“I don’t want to slander SEAL Team 6,” he said, to laughter. “Because they’re — no, seriously, they’re honorable. They’re honorable officers, and they are bound by the Uniform Code of Military Justice not to obey unlawful orders.”
Mr. Trump won his case, obtaining substantial immunity. The six Democratic lawmakers have been denounced, investigated and threatened with death.
The F.B.I. has sought to question the lawmakers, all of whom served in the military or the intelligence service. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has opened an investigation into whether Senator Mark Kelly, Democrat of Arizona, committed a military crime by saying in the video what Ms. Bondi, Mr. Sauer and Justice Alito had said.
Newsweek, Russia Welcomes Donald Trump’s New US National Security Strategy, Peter Aitken, Dec. 7, 2025. Russian Security Council Deputy Chairman Dmitry Medvedev hailed the new National Security Strategy document, published by the Trump administration last week, as having “echoes” of Moscow’s own views.
“The strategy unexpectedly echoes what we have been saying for over a year: security must be shared and sovereignty respected,” Medvedev, a former Russian president and prime minister, wrote on his Max messaging profile. “Now, a window of opportunity for dialogue has been opened.”
The administration remains under scrutiny over President Donald Trump’s working relationship with his Russian counterpart Vladimir Putin as Russia and Ukraine remain in gridlock after months of attempted negotiations to end Russia’s invasion of the Eastern European nation that began in February 2022.
European allies were critical of a proposed peace plan the Trump administration published last month, which would have significantly reduced Ukraine’s armed forces and handed Russia territory it does not currently control. The plan was reportedly crafted with limited input from Ukraine, which deeply upset Kyiv and the wider European community.
Russian Security Council Deputy Chairman Dmitry Medvedev hailed the new National Security Strategy document, published by the Trump administration last week, as having “echoes” of Moscow’s own views.
“The strategy unexpectedly echoes what we have been saying for over a year: security must be shared and sovereignty respected,” Medvedev, a former Russian president and prime minister, wrote on his Max messaging profile. “Now, a window of opportunity for dialogue has been opened.”
Emptywheel, Analysis: The National Security Strategy’s Structure and Presumptions, Emptywheel (Marcy Wheeler, right), Dec. 8, 2025. Last week, the Trump Administration released the National Security Strategy that was dated from the month before.
Trump's National Security Strategy envisions sustaining American power by removing brown people and women from positions of power, sustaining a failed trade war, and dictating what Europe should be.
In an effort to highlight how the Administration — no doubt led by Stephen Miller and his fascist allies — claims to have adopted a utilitarian foreign policy stemming from things called principles and based on wildly imaginary assessment of America’s current strengths, this post will lay out what is in it.
Follow-ups will say more.
Pages 2-3: My fellow Americans
This is a letter from Trump bragging about what he claims his accomplishments since Biden left are. They include:
• Restoring borders (this does not explicitly talk about immigration)• Kicking qualified trans service members and other “DEI” hires out of the military• Making NATO allies pay 5% in defense costs• Getting Congress to pay $1 trillion for a Golden Dome that won’t work• Launching a trade war that has devastated soybean farmers, bankrupted many small businesses, and allowed China to acquire leverage by withholding rare earth products• Attacking Iran’s nuclear facility and claiming the attack did more damage than it did• Forcing Americans to prefer oil and gas over strategically smarter renewable energy• Ending eight wars (he claims)
Among the things this letter does not mention is destroying USAID and America’s soft power, and obviously it treats some of the grave damage Trump has done with his trade war and attacks on science and universities as strengths.
Page 4: Contents
Pages 5-6: Ends over Values
Two pages describing that the US has been doing everything wrong since the Cold War, chasing “platitudes” (also known as values) rather than desired ends.
Pages 7-8: What Should the US Want
These two pages describe a bunch of things it claims the US should, normatively, want.Just half of these are things Trump has actually pursued (and even there, some of Trump’s policies have gone beyond what Trump says is ideal):• ¶3 Secure borders and controlled immigration• ¶5 A lethal military in which everyone is proud of their mission• ¶6 A Golden Dome• ¶10 A reinvigorated American culture (code for white nationalism)
More than half of these are things Trump has affirmatively destroyed:• ¶1 Continued survival of US sovereignty• ¶2 Protect the country from human trafficking, foreign influence, propaganda, and espionage• ¶4 “A resilient national infrastructure that can withstand natural disasters, resist and thwart foreign threat”• ¶7 The most dynamic economy• ¶8 A robust industrial base• ¶9 Unrivaled soft power that “believe[s] in our country’s inherent greatness and decency”)
Page 9: What do “we” want from the rest of the world?• A Trump corollary to the Monroe Doctrine• Halt damage an unnamed China has done while keeping stability in Indo-Pacific and keeping shipping lanes free and supply chains secure• Impose Stephen Miller’s idea of civilizational identity on Europe• “[P]revent an adversarial power from dominating the Middle East, its oil and gas supplies, and the chokepoints through which they pass while avoiding the ‘forever wars’ that bogged us down”• “[E]nsure that U.S. technology and U.S. standards—particularly in AI, biotech, and quantum computing—drive the world forward”
Note, this section parallels the discussion of regions, below, with the exception of laying out how the US will remain the standard-setter in the world by being an asshole and adopting crank conspiracies.
Pages 10-11: What are America’s means to get these ends?
This includes a list of things the US did have when Trump took over (I’ve italicized those which he has squandered, though there are others he is squandering):• A still nimble political system that can course correct;• The world’s single largest and most innovative economy, which both generates wealth we can invest in strategic interests and provides leverage over countries that want access to our markets;• The world’s leading financial system and capital markets, including the dollar’s global reserve currency status;• The world’s most advanced, most innovative, and most profitable technology sector, which undergirds our economy, provides a qualitative edge to our military, and strengthens our global influence;• The world’s most powerful and capable military;• A broad network of alliances, with treaty allies and partners in the world’s most strategically important regions;• An enviable geography with abundant natural resources, no competing powers physically dominant in our Hemisphere, borders at no risk of military invasion, and other great powers separated by vast oceans;• Unmatched “soft power” and cultural influence; and• The courage, willpower, and patriotism of the American people.It also includes a list of things that Trump thinks are good, which I’ve restated to reflect reality:• “Instilling a culture of competence:” They’ve gotten rid of brown people and women who made them insecure• “Unleashing our enormous energy production capacity:” They’ve forced America to stop competing in renewable energy• “Reindustrializing our economy:” They’ve gutted the economy with tariffs• “Returning economic freedom to our citizens:” They’ve exploded the deficit with tax cuts to oligarchs huge tax cuts while cutting the health care that drives the economy• “Investing in emerging technologies and basic science:” They’ve destroyed America’s higher educational advantage and replaced it with state socialism
The strategy
Pages 12-15: Principles [sic]
This starts with a page of shite about Trump’s greatness. Then includes the following bullets:• Focused Definition of the National Interest (Trump will ignore key parts of the world)• Peace Through Strength (white nationalism)• Predisposition to Non-Intervention (with excuses permitted for invasions of choice)• Primacy of Nations (a nice way of saying they’ll gut international organizations)• Sovereignty and Respect (in which the NSS protects projecting “free speech” demands into other sovereign nations)• Balance of Power (China and Russia can extend their power so long as they allow America to do the same)• Pro-American Work (claims utterly inconsistent with Trump’s catering to oligarchs)• Fairness (code for making NATO, Japan, and South Korea pay more)• Competence and Merit (White men should not have to compete with brown people and women, and especially should not have to compete with H1B holders)
Pages 15-19: Priorities•
The Era of Mass Migration Is Over: “Border security is the primary element of national security”• Protection of Core Rights and Liberties: This is defined as “the rights of free speech, freedom of religion and of conscience, and the right to choose and steer our common govern,” but apparently does not include due process or similar rights for Europeans or the Anglosphere• Burden-Sharing and Burden-Shifting: “The United States will stand ready to help— potentially through more favorable treatment on commercial matters, technology sharing, and defense procurement—those counties that willingly take more responsibility for security in their neighborhoods and align their export controls with ours.”• Realignment Through Peace: The President will intervene everywhere and claim to have fostered peace• Economic Security o Balanced Tradeo Securing Access to Critical Supply Chains and Materialo Reindustrializationo Reviving our Defense Industrial Base: We need to build drones in the US cheaplyo Energy Dominance (in oil, gas, coal, and nuclear, explicitly)o Preserving and Growing America’s Financial Sector Dominance
Page 19: The Regions
A half page excusing largely ignoring key swaths of the world, as when you dedicate just a half page to Africa or mention Russia only in a section discussing Europe not as a place but a greatness to be imposed from outside.
Pages 19-23: Western Hemisphere: The Donroe Doctrine• Enlist: Treat a swath of countries as agents insofar as they can help stop the movement of people and drugs• Expand: Eight paragraphs on combatting “foreign influence” not named as Chinese, and three paragraphs imagining this can be driven by corporate investment
Pages 23-29: Asia: Win the Economic Future, Prevent Military Confrontation• Leading from a position of strength: Asia has gotten strong through manufacturing and we will combat that with false platitudes• Economics: the Ultimate Stakes: A claim that Trump’s disastrous trade policy will bring results the opposite of what have happened• Deterring Military Threats: A lot of talk about deterrence, some in passive voice
Pages 29-31: Promoting European Greatness
These are the two pages attracting the most attention, and I will return to it. Note that Europe is not described as a place, like the other regions are. The only mentions of Russia (ten) are in this section, and Russia is defined as not-Europe (and therefore not addressed as a region at all).
Pages 31-33: The Middle East: Shift Burdens, Build Peace. This section claims the Middle East is no longer as important because it is no longer the dominant energy producer, and then explains that major conflicts (including radicalism) are no big deal anymore.
Half of page 33: Africa. Africa will not get aid. It will get investment and Trump claims of peace deals.
Media, Education, High Tech, Culture
New York Times, Paramount Makes Hostile Bid for Warner Bros. Discovery, Benjamin Mullin and Lauren Hirsch, Dec. 8, 2025. The offer to shareholders comes days after Warner Bros. agreed to sell its streaming and studio business to Netflix.
Paramount on Monday mounted a hostile takeover bid for Warner Bros. Discovery, a brazen attempt to secure a Hollywood prize snatched away by Netflix last week.
Netflix announced an $83 billion deal to buy a big part of Warner Bros. Discovery on Friday, in an agreement approved by the boards of both companies. In a news release on Monday, Paramount went around the Warner Bros. Discovery board and straight to shareholders with what itcalled a superior offer.
Paramount said it would pay $30 per share in cash, valuing the company at around $108 billion, including debt. It said it was going to shareholders because the board of Warner Bros. Discovery is “pursuing an inferior proposal” that would lead to “a challenging regulatory approval process.”
Paramount has offered to buy all of Warner Bros. Discovery, including the Warner Bros. movie studio, the HBO Max streaming service and a portfolio of cable channels including CNN. The cable channels are not part of the Netflix deal.
“We believe our offer will create a stronger Hollywood,” David Ellison, the chief executive of Paramount, said in a press release. “It is in the best interests of the creative community, consumers and the movie theater industry.”
Warner Bros. Discovery had no immediate comment.
Paramount’s hostile takeover attempt is the latest in a series of increasingly strident overtures to Warner Bros. Discovery in recent weeks. Just before Netflix announced it had struck a deal, Paramount sent a letter to David Zaslav, the chief executive of Warner Bros. Discovery, alleging that the company ran a “myopic” sale process that “favors a single bidder.”
Warner Bros. Discovery said in a response that it “fully and robustly” complied with its obligations to shareholders. The company ran a weekslong bidding process that also drew interest from Comcast, the cable company that owns NBCUniversal.
A key part of assessment will be whether shareholders expect that regulatory authorities will approve the transaction. The deal between Netflix and Warner Bros. Discovery would include Warner Bros. movie studio and HBO Max, enhancing Netflix’s market power in streaming even more.
At the Kennedy Center Honors on Sunday, President Trump praised Ted Sarandos, Netflix’s co-chief executive, but noted that the company had a “very big market share,” adding that he would be “involved” in the regulatory review.Netflix is expected to argue that regulators should consider its business as part of the much larger entertainment industry that also includes platforms like YouTube and TikTok, as well as tech giants like Amazon and Apple. The social media application Meta successfully made a similar argument defending itself against monopoly charges in a recent case.
If the deal falls through because of a failure to get the necessary approvals, Netflix would pay a $5.8 billion fee to Warner Bros. Discovery, according to documents filed with federal regulators. If it accepts a superior unsolicited bid from Paramount, or any other rivals, it would owe Netflix $2.8 billion, according to the documents.
Netflix’s deal for Warner Bros. Discovery landed like a bomb in Hollywood, setting off fears that the streaming giant would eventually marginalize theatrical releases for one of the few remaining major film studios. Netflix has pledged to continue theatrical releases for movies from Warner Bros. Discovery, a significant development, but many in Hollywood are skeptical of the company’s long-term commitment to theatrical distribution..
New York Times, Jared Kushner, the President’s Son-in-Law, Is Part of Paramount’s Bid for Warner Bros. Discovery, Lauren Hirsch, Dec. 8, 2025. Mr. Kushner’s private equity fund is one of the many groups helping Paramount mount a hostile bid to buy the group, whose holdings include CNN.
Paramount’s hostile bid for Warner Bros. Discovery on Monday included a list of investors lined up to back the offer. Perhaps none stood outmore than Affinity Partners, the private equity firm founded by President Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner, shown above right in a file photo collage with his father-in-law.
Paramount said in the filing that Larry Ellison, the father of the company’s chief executive, David Ellison, alongside the private equity firm RedBird Capital Partners, had committed to backstop the $40 billion in cash needed for the bid. But it has lined up a number of other investors, including Mr. Kushner’s private equity firm, to offload some of that investment.
It was unclear from the filing how much Mr. Kushner’s firm had offered as an investment. Paramount declined to comment.
The inclusion of Affinity Partners adds a new political twist to the fight for Warner Bros. Discovery. The Trump administration will need to approve of any deal. The president has long been critical of CNN, one of the company’s properties. If the Ellisons are able to close an agreement with Affinity’s help, a piece of the parent company would be owned by the Trump family.
It is highly unusual for a president to have a direct say on major corporate deals, which are typically reviewed by independent regulators at a distance from politicians’ input. But on Sunday, Mr. Trump said he would be “involved” in the regulatory review of the Netflix deal.
Mr. Kushner founded the private equity firm after Mr. Trump’s first term and faced scrutiny over its deep reliance on the Saudi sovereign wealth fund known as the Public Investment Fund. The firm, which has roughly $5.4 billion under management, had been known primarily for taking small stakes in companies such as the Shlomo Group, an Israeli car-leasing and financing company, and Dubizzle, a Dubai-based classifieds site.
More recently, though, it has become involved in larger and more high-profile deals. It is investing alongside the P.I.F. and Silver Lake Partners to buy Electronic Arts for roughly $55 billion.
Popular Information, Accountability Journalism: The casino-fication of news, Judd Legum, right, Dec. 8, 2025. New partnerships between the prediction market Kalshi and cable TV networks will transform every news event into a betting opportunity.
Two major news networks, CNN and CNBC, recently announced partnerships with Kalshi, an online predictions market. Kalshi allows the public to place bets on a dizzying variety of news events. There are currently Kalshi markets for the winner of the 2028 presidential election, next month’s unemployment rate, next week’s top TV show on Netflix, whether the announcers will say “Cheesehead” during Sunday’s Green Bay Packers football game, and thousands of other future events.
The CNN deal, which starts immediately, involves the “integration of Kalshi data across CNN programming“ and “a new Kalshi-powered real-time news ticker that will run during segments that feature Kalshi data.” The CNBC deal, which begins in 2026, will “incorporate real-time prediction data into CNBC’s editorial coverage across its TV, digital, and subscription channels.” Kalshi will also create “a CNBC page on its site, featuring CNBC-selected markets.”
The economic terms of the arrangement between Kalshi and the two networks were not disclosed.
Unlike other prediction markets, Kalshi has sought regulatory approval from the U.S. Commodities Futures Trading Commission (CFTC). After winning a lawsuit against the CFTC that allowed it to take bets on the 2024 presidential election, the platform has exploded in popularity. Trading volume is expected to exceed $50 billion in 2025, up from $300 million in 2024.
The new partnerships with CNN and CNBC will not only draw more users to Kalshi but fundamentally change the nature of news. It is no longer just a mechanism to learn about and understand world events. The news is now an opportunity to speculate on future events for financial gain.
“Kalshi is replacing debate, subjectivity, and talk with markets, accuracy, and truth,” Kalshi CEO Tarek Mansour said in a December 2 press release. “We have created a new way of consuming and engaging with information.” CNN and CNBC, two of the most prominent news outlets in the world, are endorsing and legitimizing this model of journalism.
These deals take a style of reporting popularized by election polls — horserace-style coverage that emphasizes who is ahead or behind — and expands it to virtually every topic. The gamified coverage is paired with the promotion of a company, Kalshi, that allows the public to place wagers on the outcome of these events.How the wealthy can manipulate and distort prediction markets — and the news
Treating Kalshi’s betting markets as “news” is based on the Efficient Market Hypothesis, which contends that a liquid market reflects the best information available. According to this theory, while reporters are biased and polling is flawed, betting markets like Kalshi reveal the best approximation of the “truth.”
There are a few problems with this theory. First, while Kalshi is growing rapidly, it is still very small compared to the stock market. $50 billion in annual volume is about $135 million in volume per day. Most of Kalshi’s trades are related to sports events — over 75% according to one recent study — so the markets for current events are even smaller. In contrast, according to the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority (FINRA), there is about $610 billion in daily trading volume for U.S. equities.
Since volumes are exponentially lower, this leaves Kalshi markets much more open to manipulation than the stock market. Now that movement in Kalshi markets will be treated as news on CNN and CNBC, the incentives for market manipulation are even greater.
If a political Candidate A was facing a corruption scandal, for example, a wealthy benefactor could place a large bet predicting that Candidate A would win. It takes no more than a few million dollars, and usually much less, to move a political prediction market substantially. The change in the market will now be treated by CNN and CNBC as “news” and, potentially, evidence that the corruption scandal is not damaging Candidate A’s prospects. The manufactured positive coverage of Candidate A could also crowd out coverage of the corruption scandal itself.
Alternatively, someone could seed a false rumor on social media that Candidate X was dropping out of the race, then place a large bet on the opponent, Candidate Y. When the price for Candidate X to win moves significantly lower, CNN would report that as news, fueling the rumor mill on social media and driving the price of Candidate Y up further. The originator of the false rumor could then sell their position in Candidate Y for a profit before it became clear that the rumor about Candidate X dropping out was false.
Ultimately, the Efficient Market Hypothesis contends that where people spend their money reflects the truth. But in an era of extreme wealth inequality, treating movements in relatively small markets like Kalshi as news is not justifiable. The movements in markets may reflect conventional wisdom, but they could just as easily reflect what wealthy people want others to believe.The insider trading problem
The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has a sophisticated system to prevent, identify, and prosecute insider trading. Some insiders are required to sell their shares only at pre-announced intervals to prevent profiting from non-public information. The SEC benefits from the fact that, at publicly traded companies, the people with access to inside information are relatively limited and well-defined.
There are also sophisticated algorithms that identify suspicious trading from people who may be getting tipped off by insiders.
In addition to automated systems, the SEC offers large whistleblower rewards to individuals who tip the agency off to insider trading. Once insider trading is identified, the agency aggressively prosecutes offenders, seeking civil and criminal penalties, including jail time.
In contrast, the CFTC, which regulates Kalshi, does not prohibit the use of inside information. Most markets regulated by the CFTC are used to mitigate risk. This often involves companies using insider information. A major airline planning an expansion, for example, could purchase jet fuel futures, anticipating that its expansion would drive jet fuel prices higher. By buying jet fuel futures, the company locks in fuel at the current price. This is not only legal but is seen as prudent financial management.
The CFTC does have rules against using inside information to manipulate a market. But purposeful manipulation is very difficult to prove.
Further, since the CFTC does not prohibit insider trading, its resources for identifying and prosecuting bad actors are far more limited than those of the SEC. It has no mechanism or experience monitoring the large and diffuse networks of people who could be using inside information to manipulate any of the thousands of markets on Kalshi.
Kalshi’s rules prohibit trading on “material non-public information” or if you “have the ability to influence the outcome,” but it is unclear what resources Kalshi deploys to enforce these rules.Trivializing the news
The integration of Kalshi into news coverage can trivialize even the most sobering events, framing tragedies as money-making opportunities. For example, Kalshi offered a market allowing people to bet on whether there would be a famine declared in Gaza this year: Since the IPC declared there was a famine in Gaza in August, there are people who used Kalshi to profit from the starvation of other people.A bad bet
The CNN and CNBC deals will promote Kalshi to a new audience that may be unaware that news prediction markets exist. These markets are similar to gambling in that they offer variable rewards, making them addictive. Like gambling, most people also lose money.
Stocks, over the long term, tend to go up in value. So purchasing equities, which is also a kind of “bet,” has a positive expected value.
Prediction markets, however, are zero-sum. For every prediction, there is one outcome, and someone wins, and the person on the other side of the bet loses. Because Kalshi collects a fee, its users are guaranteed, on aggregate, to lose money. One academic study found that, even before fees, Kalshi users lost an average of 20%. This suggests that sophisticated bettors have an advantage over typical users.
Dec. 7
Battleship Row during the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in Hawaii on Dec. 7, 1941, prompting a declaration of war by the United States Congress and the nation's entry into World War II. The large column of water visible in the center is one of the torpedo hits on USS West Virginia. It burnt fiercely and settled into the mud of Pearl Harbor, with 106 fatalities that included three trapped sailors who fought to survive for 16 days.
Letters from an American, Historical Commentary: December 6, 2025 [Pearl Harbor - World War II Lessons For Today], Heather Cox Richardson, right, Dec. 7, 2025. On the sunny Sunday morning of December 7, 1941, Messman Doris "Dorie" Miller had served breakfast aboard the USS West Virginia, stationed in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, and was collecting laundry when the first of nine Japanese torpedoes hit the ship.
In the deadly confusion, Miller reported to an officer, who told him to help move the ship’s mortally wounded captain off the bridge. Unable to move him far, Miller pulled the captain to shelter. Then another officer ordered Miller to pass ammunition to him as he started up one of the two abandoned anti-aircraft guns in front of the conning tower.
Miller, below left, (October 12, 1919 – November 24, 1943) was the first black recipient of the Navy Cross and a nominee for the Medal of Honor.
Miller had not been trained to use the weapons because, as a Black man in the U.S. Navy, he was assigned to serve the white officers. 
But while the officer was distracted, Miller began to fire one of the guns. He fired it until he ran out of ammunition. Then he helped to move injured sailors to safety before he and the other survivors abandoned the West Virginia, which sank to the bottom of Pearl Harbor.
The next day, the United States declared war on Japan. Japan declared war on America, and on December 11, 1941, both Italy and Germany declared war on America. “The powers of the steel pact, Fascist Italy and National Socialist Germany, ever closely linked, participate from today on the side of heroic Japan against the United States of America,” Italian leader Benito Mussolini said. “We shall win.” Of course they would. Mussolini and Germany’s leader, Adolf Hitler, believed the Americans had been corrupted by Jews and Black Americans and could never conquer their own organized military machine.
The steel pact, as Mussolini called it, was the vanguard of his new political ideology. That ideology was called fascism, and he and Hitler thought it would destroy democracy once and for all.
Mussolini had been a socialist as a young man and had grown terribly frustrated at how hard it was to organize people. No matter how hard socialists tried, they seemed unable to convince ordinary people that they must rise up and take over the country’s means of production.
The efficiency of World War I inspired Mussolini. He gave up on socialism and developed a new political theory that rejected the equality that defined democracy. He came to believe that a few leaders must take a nation toward progress by directing the actions of the rest. These menmust organize the people as they had been organized during wartime, ruthlessly suppressing all opposition and directing the economy so that businessmen and politicians worked together. And, logically, that select group of leaders would elevate a single man, who would become an all-powerful dictator. To weld their followers into an efficient machine, they demonized opponents into an “other” that their followers could hate.
Italy adopted fascism, and Mussolini inspired others, notably Germany’s Hitler. Those leaders came to believe that their system was the ideology of the future, and they set out to destroy the messy, inefficient democracy that stood in their way.
America fought World War II to defend democracy from fascism. And while fascism preserved hierarchies in society, democracy called on all men as equals. Of the more than 16 million Americans who served in the war, more than 1.2 million were Black American men and women, 500,000 were Latinos, and more than 550,000 Jews were part of the military. Among the many ethnic groups who fought, Indigenous Americans served at a higher percentage than any other ethnic group—more than a third of able-bodied Indigenous men between the ages of 18 and 50 joined the service—and among those 25,000 soldiers were the men who developed the famous “Code Talk,” based in tribal languages, that codebreakers never cracked.
The American president at the time, Democrat Franklin Delano Roosevelt, hammered home that the war was about the survival of democracy. Fascists insisted that they were moving their country forward fast and efficiently—claiming the trains ran on time, for example, although in reality they didn’t—but FDR constantly noted that the people in Italy and Germany were begging for food and shelter from the soldiers of democratic countries.
The U.S. Navy battleship USS West Virginia (BB-48) off the Puget Sound Naval Shipyard, Washington (USA), 2 July 1944, following reconstruction.
Ultimately, the struggle between fascism and democracy was the question of equality. Were all men really created equal as the Declaration of Independence said, or were some born to lead the rest, whom they held subservient to their will?
Democracy, FDR reminded Americans again and again, was the best possible government. Thanks to armies made up of men and women from all races and ethnicities, the Allies won the war against fascism, and it seemed that democracy would dominate the world forever.
But as the impulse of WWII pushed Americans toward a more just and inclusive society after it, those determined not to share power warned their supporters that including people of color and women as equals in society would threaten their own liberty. Those reactionary leaders rode that fear into control of our government, and gradually they chipped away the laws that protected equality. Now, once again, democracy is under attack by those who believe some people are better than others.
President Donald J. Trump and his cronies have abandoned the principles of democracy and openly embraced the hierarchical society the U.S. fought against in World War II. They have fired women, Black Americans, people of color, and LGBTQ+ Americans from positions in the government and the military and erased them from official histories. They have seized, incarcerated and deported immigrants— or rendered them to third countries to be tortured— and have sent federal agents and federal troops into Democratic-led cities to terrorize the people living there.
They have traded the rule of law for the rule of Trump, weaponizing the Department of Justice against those they perceive as enemies, pardoning loyalists convicted of crimes, and now, executing those they declare are members of drug cartels without evidence, charges, or trials. They have openly rejected the world based on shared values of equality and democracy for which Americans fought in World War II. In its place, they are building a world dominated by a small group of elites close to Trump, who are raking in vast amounts of money from their machinations.
Will we permit the destruction of American democracy on our watch?
When America came under attack before, people like Doris Miller refused to let that happen. For all that American democracy still discriminated against him, it gave him room to stand up for the concept of human equality—and he laid down his life for it. Promoted to cook after the Navy sent him on a publicity tour, Miller was assigned to a new ship, the USS Liscome Bay, which was struck by a Japanese torpedo on November 24, 1943. It sank within minutes, taking two thirds of the crew, including Miller, with it.
We hear a lot these days about how American democracy is doomed and the radical right will win. Maybe. But the beauty of our system is that it gives us people like Doris Miller.
Even better, it makes us people like Doris Miller.
President Trump addresses about 800 U.S. generals and admirals in a political-rally-style speech at Quantico, VA on Sept. 30, 2025, preceded by Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, a former National Guard officer who prefers to call himself "Secretary of War" instead of the congressionally mandated term "Secretary of Defense."
New York Times, News Analysis: Superpower Competition: The Missing Chapter in Trump’s Security Strategy, David E. Sanger, Dec. 7, 2025. President Trump is shifting from discussion of the long-lasting competition among the world’s biggest economies and nuclear powers.
The last time President Trump issued a national security strategy, eight years ago, it heralded a return to superpower competition, describing China and Russia as “revisionist” powers seeking to upend American dominance around the world.
“China and Russia challenge American power, influence and interests, attempting to erode American security and prosperity,” he wrote in a document that reflected the influence of his advisers in his first term. “They are determined to make economies less free and less fair, to grow their militaries, and to control information and data to repress their societies and expand their influence.”
Eight years later, that diagnosis seems truer than ever. The two U.S. rivals have deepened, and occasionally exaggerated, their “partnership without limits.” China’s nuclear force has more than doubled since the 2017 strategy was published; its military runs exercises encircling Taiwan; and its cyber attackers have drilled into American telecommunications, corporate and government infrastructure.
Russia has engaged in a nearly four-year-long war in Ukraine and a shadow war against U.S. allies across Europe.
Yet a reader of Mr. Trump’s 2025 strategy would barely know any of that. While the headlines have focused on how European allies must end mass migration and elect “patriotic” parties or face “civilizational erasure,” what is most striking about the 33-page document is what it ignores.
Russia is mentioned in only four paragraphs, and never in tones of condemnation for its invasion of a neighboring state, leading to a war that has produced more than 1.5 million casualties. Instead, it portrays the United States as something of a neutral negotiator that can diminish tensions between Russia and Europe and “reestablish strategic stability” with Moscow.
And there is virtually no discussion of the daily battle in cyberspace against China’s state-sponsored hackers, after the administration warned last week of another deep penetration of American corporate and government computer networks.
But those are hardly the only direct threats to the United States that seem odd by their omission.
In 2017, Mr. Trump was threatening “fire and fury” against North Korea, which at the time had one to two dozen nuclear weapons. The 2017 strategy notes that the country “seeks the capability to kill millions of Americans with nuclear weapons,” and delves into its chemical, biological and cyber capability. Today, after years of failed diplomacy, North Korea has 60 or more nuclear weapons.
Yet the country is never mentioned in the new strategy. Iran is barely mentioned, and then in contradictory terms. Mr. Trump’s introduction boasts that in June, “we obliterated Iran’s nuclear enrichment capacity.” Then, on the report’s penultimate page, a more careful assessment says that the United States “significantly degraded Iran’s nuclear program.”
“The document is silent on how the administration is going to prevent Iran from reconstituting its degraded program,” Scott D. Sagan, a Stanford University professor who writes extensively on nuclear strategy, noted on Saturday.
No strategy can deal with every threat posed to the United States, of course, and those that try to often read more like a laundry list of challenges. The new report says in its opening paragraphs that it is focused on just a few major national security threats, and that the goal is “to ensure that America remains the world’s strongest, richest, most powerful and most successful country for decades to come.”
“Not every country, region, issue or cause — however worthy — can be the focus of American strategy,” the document says. It then goes on to put the first priority on the Western Hemisphere. Most of that involves updating the Monroe Doctrine — which declared the Americas and their surrounding waters as Washington’s sphere of dominance — with a “Trump corollary.” Not surprisingly, it focuses on limiting migration and drugs.
Still, the move away from discussion of the immediate and long-lasting competition among the world’s two largest economies and three largest nuclear powers is jarring.
There is no discussion of superpower struggle or strategies of containment. The document argues for a quick end to the Ukraine war, on terms that would preserve a Ukrainian state, as a way of achieving that ill-defined “strategic stability” with the United States. And even though more pages of the document are focused on China than on any other nation, it dwells far more on the commercial relations than the strategic competition.
China’s nuclear expansion, which has fixated the Pentagon and strategic planners for years, gets only glancing mention, and there is barely a mention of the remarkably sophisticated, extensive cyber attacks that have burrowed deeply into American telecommunications and utility systems and stayed there, despite years of efforts to oust them.
“The section on Asia is striking,” said Peter D. Feaver, a professor at Duke University who runs its American Grand Strategy program. “When discussing economic competition, China is mentioned explicitly and in granular detail. But when discussing military threats in the Indo-Pacific, the language becomes very vague.”
He added: “Unlike Trump’s first security strategy, China is not identified by name as a country that poses a military threat, which may be the loudest omission in the entire document.”
Yet it is not the only arena in which the competition with China is soft-pedaled, at least in comparison to Mr. Trump’s first strategy and the one that followed from the Biden administration.
“Think about the list of challenges where China presents the greatest threat to the U.S. in the next few decades,” said R. Nicholas Burns, who served as ambassador to China until January and, as a career foreign service officer, ambassador to NATO. “It’s who will emerge most powerful in technology — A.I., quantum computing, biotechnology, cyber. They are linked to the intense military competition we have with China every day throughout the Indo-Pacific.”
They are mentioned only in passing, Mr. Burns noted. “Nor is there mention of the fact that the E.U. and NATO countries have been critical partners with us in sanctioning Beijing for its support for Russia in Ukraine, on Taiwan and on human rights — on our side of the strategic competition,” he added. “In fact, strangely and falsely, there is more condemnation in the report of our European allies than our adversaries China and Russia.”
In fact, Russia is not condemned for its invasion of Ukraine, or the evidence that Mr. Putin was considering the use of tactical nuclear weapons inside the country, most dramatically during a crisis in October 2022.
While the last major nuclear arms control treaty with Russia, New START, expires in two months, there is no discussion of avoiding a renewed, expensive and destabilizing arms race. Instead, the strategy extols missile defenses, “including a Golden Dome for the American homeland,” a project Mr. Trump announced within months of taking office.
But while billions of dollars are being spent on the project already, there is no mention in the strategy of the fact that one of its key elements — placing missile interceptors in space — could prompt a race among the superpowers to place nuclear weapons into orbit as well.
In this pool photograph immediately above distributed by the Russian state agency Sputnik, Russia’s President Vladimir Putin greets US Special Envoy Steve Witkoff prior to their talks in Moscow on August 6, 2025. (GAVRIIL GRIGOROV/POOL/AFP via Getty Images.)
Lev Remembers, Commentary: Trump’s New “National Security Strategy” Is a Surrender Deal to Putin, Lev Parnas, right, former Trump advisor and author of Shadow Diplomacy, below left, Dec. 6-7, 2025. Quietly released blueprint lifts pressure off Russia, pushes a take-it-or-leave-it “peace” on Ukraine, and outlines a far-right world order the media won’t tell you about.
The Trump White House quietly dropped a new “National Security Strategy of the United States of America – November 
2025” on the official site.
No press conference. No prime-time speech. No honest debate. Just a 30+ page blueprint that tells you everything you need to know about where Trump wants to take America – and who he’s really working for.
I’ve read it. I’ve talked to my sources. I know how these people think because I used to be in the room with them.
What I’m about to walk you through is not going to be on cable news tonight.
What This Document Really Says (Not the Spin): On the surface, this “National Security Strategy” is wrapped in patriotic language and buzzwords like “America First,” “peace through strength,” and “protecting sovereignty.”
But if you read past the slogans, here’s what it really lays out:
On paper, it looks like a “serious policy document.” In reality, it’s a roadmap for a far-right world order: strongmen doing deals while democracies are told to sit down, shut up, and “adapt.”
Where Ukraine Fits in: “Negotiated Peace” on Putin’s Terms. Let’s focus on what this means for Ukraine, because that’s where the mask really slips.
Buried in the Europe section, Trump’s strategy says the U.S. goal is to:
It sounds technical. It’s not.
That’s code for a “take it or leave it” deal:
Lock in Russian control over occupied Ukrainian territory.Now line that up with what my sources have been telling you for months:
“Don’t Listen to What They Say. Watch What They Do.” In this document, Trump calls himself the “President of Peace” and wraps everything in “non-interventionism” and “respect for sovereignty.”
At the very same time:
This is why I keep telling you: Don’t listen to what they say. Watch what they do.
And remember: while this glossy strategy is being quietly posted, sanctions are being chipped away and “peace proposals” are being drafted that look a lot like surrender for Ukraine and a reset button for Moscow.
Why This Is a National Security Threat to Us, Not Just Ukraine
This isn’t just about Ukraine’s survival – though that alone would be enough. This “strategy” tells you exactly where Trump wants to drag the United States:
While Trump’s team is writing strategy papers that treat Ukraine like a bargaining chip, Oleksandr is on the ground in Ukraine, where none of these people will ever set foot without a motorcade and cameras.
President Trump (New York Times file photo by Kenny Holston).
Lincoln Square Media, Political Opinion, When Trump Dies What happens next will be ugly and dangerous, Rick Wilson, right, Dec. 7, 2025. Every aging dictator, every long-in-the-tooth autocrat, every once-terrifying strongman eventually feels the cold hand of Death reaching out to tap them on the shoulder and whisper, “It’s time.”
We all understand mortality. It’s the constant of the human condition, the endless winner of billions of lives, even that of the Dear Leaders whose rule seemed eternal.
We don’t spend enough time on how much chaos and blood comes after that tap in the Generallismo’s shoulder, on the inevitable collapse of systems built around a single man entail.
The leader dies, weakens, is defeated politically or militarily, or even loses a step, and the entire structure that pretended to be a unified movement reveals itself as what it really was all along: a feeding frenzy for sycophants who think they were born to inherit the throne. The pressure cooker of autocratic systems rewards fealty, loyalty, public and private obeisance.If you want to understand what is coming for MAGA as Donald Trump ages and declines, you start there.
Not with his tweets, not with daily outrages and excesses, but with the iron law of personality cults: succession is their unsolved problem.Autocrats are very good at seizing power and holding it. They are very bad at leaving it behind without blowing something up on the way out. Political scientists have long argued that personality cult regimes are especially fragile at succession because the leader spends his life eliminating rivals rather than training successors.
Trump is not unique. He is just the latest in an ancient story.
A real personality cult is not just popularity. It is a political system that forces the belief that the Dear Leader has unique, almost mystical qualities, and builds media, ritual, and propaganda around that claim. (Trump loves North Korea for just this reason.) It inflates his importance, demands endless, performative displays of loyalty, and blurs the line between state, party, and person.
We’re lucky these systems contain a fundamental structural flaw.
The more central the person, the more dangerous the question, “What happens after him?” becomes. Any serious discussion of succession looks like treason. Any ambitious lieutenant who looks too capable becomes a threat to be purged. The result is a court full of nervous mediocrities who have no plan for tomorrow and a desperate hunger to survive it.
When the inevitable comes, personality regimes tend to do one of three things:
They fracture into rival factions, each claiming to be the true heirs of the Leader’s mission. This is coming fast, with the Vance/Cruz/Rubio/DeSantis knife fight creeping out of the shadows.
They convert the cult into a dynasty, sliding the crown onto a son, wife, or crony, and pretend nothing has changed. You don’t think the Trumps are giving up all this money, do you?
They are forced into a much larger transition because the institutions are too weak to carry on without a human idol in the center. That’s, frighteningly, the best case.
Now take that template and lay it over Trump and MAGA.
Donald Trump has spent almost a decade turning the Republican Party from a political party into a cult. The party platform literally dissolved into “whatever Trump says.” Candidates run on loyalty to him more than any coherent ideology. The conservative media ecosystem revolves around his moods, his grudges, and his need for constant adoration. If that is not a proto-cult, it is a full-dress rehearsal.
Like every strongman of a certain age, Trump is starting to lose his edge. He is seventy-nine. His public appearances are shorter, more erratic, and laced with obvious signs of fatigue and confusion that his people then try to gaslight away. The White House coverup of his MRI is a case in point: there’s no such thing as a “preventitive MRI” and why would the tallest, healthiest, most virile President ever need one?
He jokes about third terms and being “king” and his court laughs hysterically, then sends staff out to explain that he is only kidding, unless he is not.
Inside MAGA world, everyone knows the calendar. They can read the actuarial tables, just like all of us.
They are not planning for a distant era when some nameless future leader inherits a peaceful, stable movement. They are gaming out a very near future in which Trump is either too weak to dominate or, at some point, simply gone.
The factions are already visible.
You have the zealots who treat Trump as a quasi-religious figure. Their brand is maximum purity. They will not “move past Trump.” They will anoint a successor based on proximity to his most extreme rhetoric and their own ability to channel rage. These are the ones who will insist that anyone who even whispers about “life after Trump” is a traitor. These people will be the core of Don Jr’s 2028 campaign.
You have the courtiers, especially the family, the money men, and figures like JD Vance who surf Trump’s image while also cultivating ties to billionaires, Silicon Valley reactionaries, and the next generation of far-right donors. They will sell themselves as the only people who can keep the base and the money in one tent.
You have the post-Trump aspirants, the ones already talking, sometimes in code, about what comes after MAGA. This is where Marjorie Taylor Greene and Ted Cruz are playing. Watch the nationalist and “America First” micro-brands that now insist they have “moved beyond” MAGA even while courting its audience. They want a purified, more ideologically consistent version, with less chaos and more control, and they are not shy about saying the movement “just needs a leader.”
Everyone smiles toward Mar-a-Lago. Everyone is also counting votes behind closed doors.
When Trump finally fails to answer the bell, either politically or biologically, do not expect a solemn passing of the torch. Expect the Roman script with better lighting and worse hair.
You will see a purity war, as rivals accuse one another of selling out Dear Leader while he was alive. Every corrupt inside deal, every disagreement, every moment of hedging, every attempt to pivot after an electoral loss will be dragged back out and replayed. The badge of honor will be, “I was with him even when it was insane,” which, given his record, is a very high bar.
You will see scapegoating and sacrifice. Some of the people closest to Trump now will be rewritten as secret saboteurs and bad influences. Think of the Gang of Four, repurposed as the reason Mao’s late-period policies failed. MAGA will need its own villainous inner ring to explain away defeats, investigations, and Trump’s own failings.
Those people will be thrown off the lifeboat so others can argue that the movement is pure again. Hell, Susie Wiles is going through this right now, Pete Hegseth is about to, and if Marco’s War in Venezuela goes wrong, he’s next.
You will see first media civil war between Fox and the more feral right-wing outlets. You’ll see a money war between old-line donors and the crypto-and-AI crowd, between state parties that want to win elections and national figures who would rather lose than alter the vision of the Prophet Donald by a single iota.
There will not be one post-Trump right. There will be several competing rights, all claiming the same hat, the same grievance, the same base.
And you will see historical rewrites that would make a Soviet propagandist blush. The winning faction will canonize Trump as a misunderstood genius whom they alone truly understood. The losing factions will insist that they, not the winners, were the faithful guardians of Trumpism. Everyone will swear that whatever they are doing now is exactly what he would have wanted, even if he once screamed at them on Truth Social.
The point is not that MAGA disappears when Trump does.
The point is that the danger takes on different forms. The energy that once ran vertically, from base to Leader, will start to run horizontally, between camps and claimants. That is where movements get creative, and reckless, and violent.
When death comes for Donald Trump, we know there are a few inevitabilities. First, his grave will be the largest public all-gender restroom in history. That’s just science.
Joking aside, the story does not end. It enters the phase history tells us is so often the ugliest: when the courtiers who spent years flattering the king begin, at last, to fight over the crown, and what follows is inevitably ugly, bloody, and more often than not kills off the host nation these parasites bled for so long.
New York Times, Health Policy: Confusion, Anxiety for Parents as Vaccine Guidelines are Upended, Soumya Karlamangla, Dec. 7, 2025. Conflicting recommendations leaves parents with more questions than answers when it comes to vaccines for their newborn children.
Her daughter is only six weeks old, but Eleanor Trenary is already worried that it could be difficult to secure childhood immunizations over the next several years, given shifting vaccine guidance from the federal government. It was something she and her husband fretted about throughout the pregnancy.
“What if we can’t protect our second baby as well as we could our first?” said Ms. Trenary, 35.
For many parents, rapidly changing recommendations around vaccines have added a layer of anxiety in navigating what is typically a stressful time with a new baby at home. New moms said the shifting health advice from the Trump administration has made an already seemingly endless number of decisions feel even more daunting.
On Friday, a federal vaccine committee at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention voted to end a decades-old recommendation that all newborns be immunized at birth against hepatitis B, a highly infectious virus that can cause severe liver damage. Many medical groups and public health experts immediately pushed back, saying that the universal vaccination at birth had helped to eliminate nearly all cases among newborns in the U.S. and that there was no evidence of harm from the shots at any age. The shift is not expected to affect insurance coverage for people who decide on their own to get the shot.
But remaking the childhood vaccine schedule has been a major goal of Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr, right, who fired all 17 members of the vaccine panel in June, replacing them with people who largely share his well-documented skepticism about vaccines. More changes to vaccine policy are likely to follow in the coming months, as the committee goes on to review all childhood immunizations.
New York Times, Hegseth Skirts Questions About Releasing Video of Sept. 2 Boat Attack, Ashley Ahn, Dec. 6, 2025 (print ed.). At an appearance in California, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth was noncommittal about releasing the full video of a U.S. military attack on a boat in the Caribbean.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth on Saturday was noncommittal about releasing the full video of the U.S. military’s Sept. 2 attack on a boat in the Caribbean, after President Trump said he would release whatever footage his administration had.
During an appearance at the Reagan National Defense Forum in Simi Valley, Calif., Mr. Hegseth skirted questions about a public release of the video. Lawmakers have been debating whether a second strike in the Sept. 2 attack, which killed two survivors clinging to the boat’s wreckage, was a war crime.
“We’re reviewing the process, and we’ll see,” Mr. Hegseth said of potentially releasing the video.
He appeared more hesitant to do so than the president, who said on Wednesday that he had “no problem” releasing the footage.
Mr. Hegseth suggested that part of the review process was to make sure “sources and methods” were secure as U.S. military strikes in the Caribbean continued as part of an “ongoing operation.”
On Thursday, key lawmakers viewed footage of the Sept. 2 attack that showed the front portion of the boat overturned but still afloat after the first strike, according to lawmakers and congressional staff members who watched the video or were briefed on it. Two shirtless survivors clung to the hull and tried unsuccessfully to flip it back over.
The laws of armed conflict forbid targeting enemies who have been shipwrecked and are out of the fight. The debate over the second strike intensified after the Washington Post reported in late November that Mr. Hegseth had given the Special Operations commander overseeing the attack a spoken directive to kill everyone.
When asked on Saturday whether he had given such an order, Mr. Hegseth rebuked the newspaper and said its reporting was incorrect.
“It’s just patently ridiculous,” he said. “It’s meant to create a cartoon of me and the decisions we make, and how we make them.”
As for the two survivors of the first strike, he said they “could still be in the fight” and have access to radios to link up with another boat carrying drugs.Editors’ PicksFrom Dreamhouse to Nightmare? The Real Barbie Story Is Dark.5 New and Renewed Hotels in the CaribbeanI Can’t Stop Thinking About a Primate’s Bathrobe. How Can I Find It?
When asked if there was a protocol for dealing with survivors, Mr. Hegseth referred to an Oct. 16 attack by the U.S. military on a semi-submersible vessel suspected of smuggling drugs in the Caribbean. Two men survived and were being returned to their home countries.
More On U.S. Courts, Politics, Law
New York Times, Trump Administration: Judge Stalls Justice Dept. Effort to Seek New Comey Indictment, Alan Feuer, Updated Dec. 7, 2025. The judge’s decision prevented the government until at least next Friday from having access to much of the evidence it used to secure its original indictment against Mr. Comey.
A federal judge on Saturday night threw up a roadblock to the Justice Department’s plans to seek another indictment against James B. Comey, the former F.B.I. director, above, as early as next week.
The decision by Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly of Federal District Court in Washington, right, temporarily blocked the department from using a crucial 
trove of evidence in its efforts to bring new charges against Mr. Comey. But it was unclear whether the ruling would permanently stop prosecutors from trying to re-indict him.
Judge Kollar-Kotelly’s four-page decision barred the government until at least next Friday from having access to much of the evidence it employed to secure its original indictment against Mr. Comey in late September. The move effectively prevents the Trump administration from using the same proof to seek new charges in the coming days.
The initial indictment of Mr. Comey charged him with lying to and obstructing Congress about testimony he gave five years ago denying that he had leaked information to the media concerning sensitive investigations that were conducted when he ran the F.B.I.
The bulk of the evidence came from communications between Mr. Comey and one of his close confidants, Daniel C. Richman, right, a former federal prosecutor who now teaches at Columbia University’s law school.
The Justice Department has claimed that Mr. Richman’s emails and text messages show that Mr.Comey lied about using him as a conduit to convey information to reporters about the sensitive investigations. But in an emergency filing to Judge Kollar-Kotelly on Friday night,Mr. Richman argued that the Justice Department had obtained his files in violation of his constitutional rights, and that it should not be permitted to use them in any new attempt to re-indict Mr. Comey.
Another judge who has worked on Mr. Comey’s case echoed Judge Kollar-Kotelly’s findings last month, ruling that the way the government gained access to Mr. Richman’s messages likely violated the Constitution.
Judge Kollar-Kotelly’s decision granting Mr. Richman’s request was only the latest setback in the prosecution of Mr. Comey, a longtime political foe of President Trump’s. The prosecution has been plagued by a litany of problems almost from the moment that the U.S. attorney’s office in the Eastern District of Virginia first secured an indictment against the former F.B.I. chief in late September.
The case is now technically dead after a separate judicial ruling determined that Mr. Trump’s handpicked choice to run the office, Lindsey Halligan, left, had been put into her job illegally. The same ruling invalidated a second case Ms. Halligan had filed against another one of Mr. Trump’s political opponents, Letitia James, New York’s attorney general.
Emptywheel, Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly Asks DOJ for Signs of Life, Emptywheel (Marcy Wheeler, right), Dec. 7, 2025. Judge Kollar-Kotelly ordered DOJ to stop violating Dan Richman's Fourth Amendment rights. But her order is as interesting for all the squirminess it reveals as the order itself.
Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly granted Dan Richman his request for a Temporary Restraining Order, preventing the government from snooping in his stuff, one that goes through Friday. And while I agree with [news analysts] Gerstein and Cheney (and Bower and Parloff) that it could have the effect of thwarting another indictment of Jim Comey — indeed, it may undercut an attempt to stonewall Richman — I find KK’s order interesting for other reasons.
Partly, it’s the way she’s demanding signs of life from DOJ.
As a reminder, Judge Cameron Currie threw out the indictment against Jim Comey on November 24, the Monday of Thanksgiving week. Two days later, the day before Thanksgiving, Richman, right, cited that dismissal and the expired Statute of Limitations in his bid to get his data back. As far as I know, no one noticed it until Anna Bower pointed to it on Tuesday.
Notably, Richman attached the warrants used to obtain his records as sealed exhibits.
The same day Bower noted it (the day it was assigned), December 2, Judge KK issued an order, half of which dealt with Richman’s sealing request, which she provisionally granted. But she also told him that if he wants to keep the government out of his data, he needs to get a Temporary Restraining Order. Her order emphasized that that request must submit some sign of life from DOJ.
Security camera footage of pipe bomb suspect during the insurrection attacks surrounding the U.S. presidential vote certification by Congress on Jan. 6, 2021 resulting in the launch of the Biden presidency following the 2020 elections ending the Trump presidency for the next four years.
Civil Discourse, Commentary: Charges in the RNC/DNC Bomb Planting Case, Joyce Vance, below left, Dec. 6-7, 2025. Can we trust the FBI and this Justice Department after years of watching Donald Trump denigrate and politicize those previously independent agencies?
That question was brought into sharp focus by the arrest earlier this week of Brian Cole, Jr., below, on charges related to planting a pair of pipe bombs outside the headquarters of the Republican and Democratic National Parties in Washington on the eve of January 6, 2021.
It’s been almost five years. Did they really get their man all of a sudden? As we discussed on Thursday, when the arrest was announced, there is nothing wrong with healthy skepticism in this politicized environment. “Trump’s reckless mishandling of the truth, while sometimes used to inveigle people to fall for his lies, ensures that many people don’t believe anything anymore,” I wrote to you. So, how do we decide whether we can believe in these charges, especially in an environment where the Attorney General spent more time criticizing Joe Biden’s administration from the podium than explaining her case? Or when these charges follow the prosecutions of James Comey and Letitia James that were dismissed by a federal judge?
My suggestion on Thursday was that “the best way I know to assess [the validity of the charges against this defendant] is to look at the charges, any evidence DOJ makes available that was used to substantiate them, and the proceedings that will now unfold in court.”
Currently, Cole is charged in a criminal complaint with transporting an explosive device in interstate commerce and attempting to destroy property using an explosive device. The first charge carries a penalty of not more than 20 years in custody, the second, a mandatory minimum penalty of five years, with the total sentence not to exceed 20 years. The charges are serious and it’s possible that, based on evidence obtained as a result of the search of Cole’s home or statements he made to law enforcement, there could be additional charges when the case is indicted before a grand jury, which will happen sometime this month.
But it’s the affidavit accompanying that complaint that gives us the information we will use to assess the prosecution. The affidavit was made under oath by an FBI agent and contains the typical caveat that agents use: It explains that because the affidavit only has to establish probable cause to justify an arrest, “I have not included each and every fact known to me concerning this investigation…only…the facts that I believe are necessary to establish probable cause.” Those facts alone are substantial. If the government can prove what’s in the affidavit—and there’s no reason to believe they can’t, since the information is easily verifiable and an agent has put their career on the line by swearing to these facts under oath—there is every reason to believe the FBI has identified the person responsible for the crime.
The bombs were planted on the evening of January 5 and found on January 6, shortly before the mob breached the Capitol. The affidavit reflects that both IEDs (improvised explosive devices) consisted of an explosive charge in a container. The devices were operational. Importantly for our purposes, the FBI recovered the components of the disrupted devices and traced them–back to Cole.
After tracking a bank account and six credit cards belonging to Cole, agents discovered that he purchased:
Six 1” x 8” galvanized pipes with markings consistent with the manufacturer of the pipe used in the bombs.
12 black end caps and 2 galvanized ones, that are the same brand of end caps used on the pipe bombs. Each bomb had one black and one galvanized end cap.
Five nine-volt batteries that matched the type used in the devices.
Two white kitchen timers of the type used in the devices.
14-gauge red and black electrical wire, which is the type of wire used in the devices, in the same mixture.
Steel wool, which is what the devices were packed with.
Just one of those items alone might not suffice as proof. All of them, together, constitute compelling circumstantial evidence.
The FBI also obtained the phone Cole used and historical cell site records indicating that he was in the immediate vicinity of the RNC and DNC during the relevant time period on January 5, 2021. There were multiple interactions between Cole’s cellphone and cell towers in the relevant area, establishing his presence at the locations at times when the bombs were planted. This is similar to the type of evidence that let law enforcement place the killer of four students in Moscow, Idaho at the scene of that crime. A vehicle that matched Cole’s was observed driving from Virginia, where Cole lives, into the District of Columbia on the evening of January 5.
The FBI also conducted a height analysis based on video surveillance footage that was recovered after the bombs were found. According to the affidavit, “the height analysis showed that the approximate distance from the ground to the top of the individual’s head, including headwear, was 5 feet 7 inches with an error rate of +/- 1.1 inches.” Cole is 5 feet and 6 inches tall.
What’s compelling about the evidence is the way it works together. Cole’s height alone could be a coincidence. But purchases of bomb components, presence in the area where the bombs were planted at the time they were planted, and physical characteristics all taken together become compelling, proof. Much of the evidence contained in the affidavit is circumstantial, which means that it proves a fact indirectly, like finding a suspect’s fingerprints at the scene of a crime, which permits jurors to infer she was present when the crime was committed. Circumstantial evidence permits jurors to draw an inference that the defendant is guilty, as opposed to direct evidence, such as an eyewitness who can testify to the identity of the person who committed a crime because they saw it happen.
Both kinds of evidence are admissible and equally powerful in court, although sometimes people assume, wrongly, that circumstantial evidence is less powerful. This is how judges in my circuit, the Eleventh, instruct juries on the two types of evidence. Other circuits, including the District of Columbia, where this case will be tried, use similar language:
“You shouldn’t be concerned about whether the evidence is direct or circumstantial. ‘Direct evidence’ is the testimony of a person who asserts that he or she has actual knowledge of a fact, such as an eyewitness. ‘Circumstantial evidence’ is proof of a chain of facts and circumstances that tend to prove or disprove a fact. There’s no legal difference in the weight you may give to either direct or circumstantial evidence.”
In other words, it’s up to jurors to decide if the evidence is credible and if they believe it. Circumstantial evidence is just as valuable a direct evidence, so long as it is compelling, when prosecutors argue to juries that the evidence in a case adds up to proof beyond a reasonable doubt.
Cole is innocent until proven guilty. That said, the evidence the government has put forward, in just this initial filing, strongly suggests that this is a case about the evidence and the facts, not some sort of ulterior motive.
At Cole’s initial appearance in court, the prosecutor told the judge that the suspect spoke with the government for more than four hours, but did not reveal the contents of those discussions. There is reporting that Cole confessed to agents after his arrest. A confession is, of course, a key piece of evidence. A defendant can’t be convicted on the strength of a confession alone; there must be a confession plus corroborating evidence. Here, the government appears to have that.
Cole’s motive is still unclear, but the government isn’t required to prove one. There was reporting that Cole told agents he believed the 2020 election was stolen and expressed views supportive of President Donald Trump. But how that plays into his alleged crimes hasn’t been made public.
Why wasn’t Cole arrested sooner? We don’t know. Attorney General Bondi blamed it on the prior administration and said the case was based on evidence already in investigators’ possession. We’re likely to learn more about that investigation as the prosecution moves forward. The crime occurred during the last month of Trump’s first term in office. Investigation seemed to be a full court press early in the Biden administration, but investigators seemed to hit a brick wall. The FBI ultimately released blurry surveillance photographs of the subject and made requests for assistance from the public. Bombing cases can be difficult and tedious to resolve, like the Unabomber case, where the investigation lasted for 17 years. Sometimes you get a lucky break early in a case, with an investigator recognizing a known bombmaker’s “signature” type of construction. Other cases rely on painstaking review of the evidence, as this one apparently did.
We owe a debt of gratitude to the law enforcement folks who pursued this case. These were live bombs that could have gone off.
But it’s inexcusable that, because of the way the president of the United States has handled himself, law enforcement agents who are doing their jobs are the subject of doubt. And after making an important arrest in a serious case, the leadership of the Justice Department and the FBI stoked political fires when they could have simply thanked the men and women in law enforcement who devoted themselves to the case. People in law enforcement and the public deserve better.
We started our discussion of the arrest of the bomber on Thursday with the philosopher Hannah Arendt. In her last public interview in 1973 she said, “The result of a consistent and total substitution of lies for factual truth is not that the lies will now be accepted as truth, and the truth be defamed as lies, but that the sense by which we take our bearings in the real world—and the category of truth vs. falsehood is among the mental means to this end—is being destroyed.” A post-truth world is a dangerous, intolerable place to live. Arendt’s words are as appropriate for where we find our country today as they were when she wrote them, in a different, but unfortunately illustrative, context.
Thanks for being here with me at Civil Discourse, even on a Saturday night.
We’re in this together,
New York Times, Supreme Court News Analysis: Conservative Project at Supreme Court Meets Trump’s Push to Oust Officials, Ann E. Marimow, Dec. 7, 2025. President Trump has repeatedly ousted leaders of independent agencies despite federal laws meant to shield those regulators from politics.
As a young staff member in the Reagan administration, John G. Roberts Jr. was part of a group of lawyers who pushed for more White House control over independent government agencies.
The “time may be ripe to reconsider the existence of such entities, and take action to bring them back within the executive branch,” the future chief justice of the United States advised the White House counsel in a 1983 memo. Independent agencies, he wrote, were a “Constitutional anomaly.”
Once he ascended to the Supreme Court, Chief Justice Roberts joined other conservatives on the bench in a series of rulings that have chipped away at Congress’s power to constrain the president’s authority to fire independent regulators.
That decadeslong project of the conservative legal movement collides on Monday with President Trump’s desire to oust officials across the government, in defiance of federal laws meant to protect their jobs and shield them from politics.
The result, the Supreme Court’s recent decisions suggest, is that the majority will likely side with Mr. Trump in a move that could significantly shift power from Congress to the president and usher in a dramatic change in the way the federal government is structured.
“This is not a bolt out of the blue,” said Deepak Gupta, a lawyer representing an agency official in a separate case who was also fired by the president.
“There is a tendency to see this as merely part of a recent short-term drama about President Trump, but really a majority of the justices have long been sympathetic to the argument that the Trump administration is making here — and that’s a view that transcends this presidency,” he said.
Monday’s case specifically tests whether President Trump can fire Rebecca Slaughter, a Democratic member of the Federal Trade Commission, simply because he says she does not align with his agenda — despite a law that says the president can only remove commissioners for “inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office.”
The administration is asking the justices to toss a 90-year-old precedent that said the Constitution allowed laws like that one and let Congress put limits on the president’s authority to dismiss some quasi-independent government officials.
The court’s ruling, expected by the end of June, has implications for more than two dozen other agencies that are charged with protecting consumers, workers, the environment and nuclear safety, and have traditionally been insulated from complete presidential control by similar laws.
Since he returned to the White House, Mr. Trump has repeatedly ousted Democratic leaders of independent agencies, including at the National Labor Relations Board, the Merit Systems Protection Board and the Consumer Product Safety Commission, to make way for replacements who share his policy priorities.
A number of the officials have sued. The Supreme Court has generally allowed their firings to take effect but has done so in temporary emergency orders while their lawsuits proceeded through lower courts. In Ms. Slaughter’s case, the court will render a final and lasting judgment on the legality of Mr. Trump’s firings, a major test for the justices to determine how far to expand presidential power.
In January, the Supreme Court will separately consider whether the president has the power to fire Lisa Cook, a Federal Reserve Board governor. In that case, the justices have allowed Ms. Cook to remain in her post for now, signaling that the central bank’s history may mean it can be uniquely insulated from presidential interference.
The Trump administration’s robust view of the executive is being weighed by a conservative Supreme Court majority that has also embraced the so-called unitary executive theory. That is the idea, dating back to the Reagan administration, that the Constitution vests all executive power in the president and that he must be able to control everything the executive branch does.
Some conservatives on the court have been signaling for years that they were eager to overturn the precedent, decided in 1935, that protects independent agencies.
In a 2010 decision, Chief Justice Roberts said the president’s power generally includes “the authority to remove those who assist him in carrying out his duties. Without such power, the president could not be held fully accountable for discharging his own responsibilities.”
Then, in 2020, during Mr. Trump’s first term, the court took a major step toward expanding the president’s power to fire independent officials. In a 5-to-4 decision, the court said the structure of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau was unconstitutional because it did not allow the president to fire the director without cause.
But the majority decision, again written by the chief justice, made a distinction between government agencies run by a single director and those led by multimember commissions that “do not wield substantial executive power.”
In its recent emergency orders, the court, with three justices nominated by Mr. Trump, has telegraphed strongly that it is now poised to give the president more direct control over those agencies as well.
The battle between William E. Humphrey, below left and Franklin D. Roosevelt, right,
has resurfaced in a blockbuster case the Supreme Court will hear on Monday (Photo Harris & Ewing via Library of Congress).
New York Times, For Landmark Test of Executive Power, Echoes of a 1930s Supreme Court Battle, Abbie VanSickle, Dec. 7, 2025. Franklin D. Roosevelt’s efforts to oust a Federal Trade Commission leader offer parallels to the current fight over President Trump’s actions.
A new president with a bold agenda, determined to exert control over government agencies to carry it out. An agency head who refused to quit, rejecting the president’s demand that he resign and insisting Congress had protected his job to keep it independent from politics.
Long before President Trump declared he had the power to fire independent agency leaders, the United States experienced a nearly identical test of presidential power.
The president then was Franklin D. Roosevelt, who wanted to oust a member of the Federal Trade Commission he believed was an obstacle to his sweeping plan to pull the nation out of the Great Depression.
The Supreme Court ruled against Roosevelt, agreeing that Congress could pass laws shielding independent regulators from being fired by the president for no reason — a precedent that has stood for 90 years.
But the battle between Roosevelt and William E. Humphrey, a conservative lawyer who refused to leave his post at the F.T.C., has resurfaced in a blockbuster case the Supreme Court will hear on Monday, as the court decides whether to overturn the nearly century-old Roosevelt-era precedent.ImageRoosevelt in July 1933. He was carried to the White House on his ambitious promise to return the country to prosperity following a stock market crash and economic calamity.Credit...Associated Press
The clash between Roosevelt and Mr. Humphrey, preserved in vivid detail in the archives of the Library of Congress, is more than a historical curiosity. It is a reminder that tests of executive power are nothing new to the United States, nor are presidents who want to assume greater control of the government to execute their agendas.
And as with so many other parts of American law and life, the Trump administration is now testing the limits of what had been thought to be a long-settled debate.
The year was 1933. Americans had just elected Roosevelt, a Democrat carried to the White House on his ambitious promise to return the country to prosperity following a stock market crash and economic calamity. The new president vowed that in his first hundred days in office, he would launch programs aimed at bringing relief to nearly 13 million unemployed people — many in danger of losing farms and homes — and shoring up business and agriculture.Editors’ PicksFrom Dreamhouse to Nightmare? The Real Barbie Story Is Dark.5 New and Renewed Hotels in the CaribbeanI Can’t Stop Thinking About a Primate’s Bathrobe. How Can I Find It?
As he moved swiftly to clear obstacles in his way, his attention landed on Mr. Humphrey.
Mr. Humphrey was first appointed to the F.T.C., an independent agency tasked with enforcing laws aimed at preventing unfair competition, in 1925, and was reappointed by Roosevelt’s predecessor, Herbert Hoover.
A Republican, Mr. Humphrey grew up in a small Indiana town and practiced law northwest of Indianapolis before moving west to Seattle. He won a House seat in Washington State in 1902, and served in Congress for several years before losing a 1916 Senate race.
At the F.T.C., Mr. Humphrey voted to dismiss several agency investigations against big businesses — among them companies that made mattresses, shoes, cash registers and soap — and stridently opposed the president’s proposed New Deal programs.
In July 1933, Roosevelt’s first year in office, Mr. Humphrey wrote him an urgent letter.
“My dear Mr. President,” Mr. Humphrey began. “Information comes to me that you are going to ask my resignation. For what reason I do not know.”
Got a news tip about the courts? If you have information to share about the Supreme Court or other federal courts, please contact us.See how to send a secure message at nytimes.com/tipsBetween July and October of 1933, Roosevelt and Mr. Humphrey had an extended correspondence over Mr. Humphrey's refusal to leave his position at the Federal Trade Commission.Credit...Library of Congress
He asked the president for “a personal interview” to talk things through. After more than 40 years of public service, he wrote, being forced to resign would “greatly injure” his professional life.
Less than a week later, the president confirmed the rumors, writing that he found “it necessary to ask for your resignation.” In language that would preview Mr. Trump’s when he tried to fire quasi-independent officials this year, Roosevelt said that the agency’s work could “be carried out most effectively with personnel of my own selection.”
It was, he explained, “a definite decision.” He ended by congratulating Mr. Humphrey on his “long and active service.”
Mr. Humphrey shot back a few days later that he was “somewhat disturbed and shocked” by the news.
“I have lost all professional and business connections after being out of practice for nine years,” he wrote to the president. “Naturally I should like to consult my friends as to my future actions.”
He did not agree to quit.
Despite Mr. Humphrey’s distress, Roosevelt responded by telegram three days later. He was, he explained, “accepting” Mr. Humphrey’s “resignation.”
Mr. Humphrey retorted that he would not be going anywhere, citing the statute creating the agency, which said that commissioners could be removed only for “inefficiency, neglect of duty or malfeasance in office.”
If he resigned, he said, he would “stand convicted in the public mind.”
The request for him to step down “for purely political reasons” violated the law, Mr. Humphrey wrote. If a president could fire agency leaders, he said, “the independence, the purpose, character and value of all independent commissions will be destroyed.”
The president tried once more to cajole him.
“You will, I know, realize that I do not feel that your mind and my mind go along together on either the policies or the administering of the Federal Trade Commission, and, frankly, I think it is best for the people of this country that I should have a full confidence,” he wrote on Aug. 31.
Mr. Humphrey remained unmoved.
On Oct. 7, Mr. Roosevelt fired him.
But Mr. Humphrey did not go easily. Instead, he launched a campaign to keep his job, writing to his fellow commissioners that he was still a member of the F.T.C., “ready and willing to exercise the powers and functions” of the office. He showed up at the next commissioner meeting. He fired off a letter to his named successor, George C. Matthews, a liberal Republican economist from Wisconsin, to let him know that “there was no vacancy.”
By November, Mr. Humphrey was focused on getting his case to the Supreme Court, according to his correspondence in the archives of the Library of Congress. Mr. Humphrey wrote at the time that it was “unthinkable” to him that Congress would want leaders of independent agencies to be “in a position where their terms of office would be subject to the caprice of the man who happens, by the chance of politics, to occupy the White House.”
As he continued fighting to keep his job, Mr. Humphrey was also battling illness. In January 1934, his doctor wrote to ask him to delay testifying before a Senate committee exploring whether to appoint a new commissioner in his place.
Weeks later, on Valentine’s Day, Mr. Humphrey died at his home in Washington, D.C. He was 71. News stories at the time reported that he had been in poor health but that he had been expected to recover. The cause of death was reported to be a sudden cerebral hemorrhage.
But Mr. Humphrey’s legal fight did not die with him. Instead, a representative of his estate — “Humphrey’s Executor” — pressed forward, arguing that the deceased commissioner had been illegally fired and that his estate was entitled to his back pay.
The Supreme Court heard arguments in the “Humphrey’s Executor” case on May 1, 1935. A unanimous court sided with Mr. Humphrey’s estate later that month, on May 27, a day that became known as “Black Monday” because the court issued a string of decisions striking down key New Deal programs, a sharp blow to the president’s agenda.
The decisions so enraged the president that they set off another landmark test of executive power — Roosevelt’s doomed plan to pack the Supreme Court.
U.S. Governance, Politics
Politico, Pardoned Democrat Henry Cuellar wants GOP to probe his prosecutors, Benjamin Guggenheim, Dec. 5, 2025. The Texas lawmaker said in an interview he'd be willing to cooperate with a House Judiciary "weaponization" probe.
Just-pardoned Democratic Rep. Henry Cuellar is encouraging his Republican colleagues to investigate the prosecutors who charged him and his wife with bribery.
“I really think what they did was wrong,” Cuellar said in an interview Friday, adding that he has spoken to people in the House who are investigating prosecutors under former President Joe Biden. He said he plans to share information with them about his case.
Any such probe would represent a remarkable scrambling of partisan battle lines over the Justice Department. But it would be just the latest such jumble involving Cuellar, right, a self-proclaimed conservative Democrat who was an outlier in his party even before he faced corruption charges — and was suddenly pardoned Wednesday by President Donald Trump.
The investigation Cuellar referred to appears to be an ongoing probe of DOJ “weaponization” led by House Judiciary Chair Jim Jordan (R-Ohio).
Cuellar ran into Jordan shortly after Trump announced the pardon of Cuellar and his wife Wednesday, according to a person granted anonymity to describe the private conversation. Cuellar encouraged Jordan to request records from the Justice Department on his prosecution, and Jordan expressed openness to the idea, the person said.
“Based on what’s there, I definitely feel that there was misconduct by the prosecutors,” Cuellar said Friday. “So we’ll get more in details later on, but I certainly am convinced that this was weaponization.”
Jordan spokesperson Russell Dye declined to comment.
Cuellar and his wife were charged in 2024 with accepting $600,000 in bribes from foreign entities, including an oil and gas company owned by the government of Azerbaijan. Cuellar has said he and his wife were innocent of the charges.
In the Truth Social post announcing the pardon Wednesday, Trump blamed Biden for using “the FBI and DOJ to ‘take out’ a member of his own party” after Cuellar criticized Biden’s immigration policies.
Jordan has spearheaded investigations of Biden-era probes of Trump, leading a select subcommittee on the “Weaponization of the Federal Government.” He has recently ramped up the efforts, most recently subpoenaing former special counsel Jack Smith and accusing Smith’s team of “prosecutorial misconduct and constitutional abuses” in their investigations of Trump.
Cuellar reiterated in the interview that despite his criticism for his own party and his willingness to cooperate with a polarizing GOP probe, he has no plans to switch parties. He filed for reelection as a Democrat soon after he was pardoned Wednesday.
“I was a Democrat, and I’m still a Democrat,” he said.
Cuellar also said in the interview that neither he nor his family members had hired representatives to speak to the White House on his behalf — even as former lawyers and advisers to Trump have reported receiving significant sums to seek pardons on behalf of accused and convicted criminals.
Trump in Wednesday’s Truth Social post included a letter Cuellar’s daughters wrote to the president criticizing the prosecution as politically motivated and pleading for clemency.
Cuellar said he found out about the pardon Wednesday when asked by a reporter about Trump’s announcement.
“My daughters ... saw their mom and dad go through a very difficult time and, on their own, they wrote a letter to the president,” he said. “Apparently the president read it and made a decision.”
U.S. Markets, Money, Economy, Technology
New York Times, How a Cryptocurrency Helps Criminals Launder Money and Evade Sanctions, Aaron Krolik, Dec. 7, 2025. Through layers of intermediaries, stablecoins can be moved, swapped and mixed into pools of other funds in ways that are difficult to trace, experts say.
Smugglers, money launderers and people facing sanctions once relied on diamonds, gold and artwork to store illicit fortunes. The luxury goods could help hide wealth but were cumbersome to move and hard to spend.
Now, criminals have a far more practical alternative: stablecoins, a cryptocurrency tied to the U.S. dollar that exists largely beyond traditional financial oversight.
These digital tokens can be bought with a local currency and moved across borders almost instantly. Or they can be returned to the traditional banking system — including by converting funds into debit cards — often without detection, a New York Times review of corporate filings, online forum messages and blockchain data shows.
A report released in February from Chainalysis, a blockchain analysis firm, estimated that up to $25 billion in illicit transactions involved stablecoins last year. And as more Russian oligarchs, Islamic State leaders and others have begun using the cryptocurrency, the rise of these dollar-linked tokens threatens to undermine one of America’s most potent foreign policy tools: cutting adversaries off from the dollar and the global banking system.
“Bad actors are moving faster than ever before,” said Ari Redbord, a former Treasury official and the head of policy at TRM Labs, a blockchain data company. Sanctions and other economic penalties, he said, lose force when criminals can move millions with a few clicks.
Governments are racing to contain the activity. Late last month, Britain arrested members of a billion-dollar money-laundering network that purchased a bank in Kyrgyzstan in order to help evade sanctions and facilitate payments in support of Russian military efforts. For a fee, Britain’s National Crime Agency said, the launderers would convert money, often generated from the drug trade, firearm sales and human trafficking, to Tether, the most popular stablecoin.
“These ‘cash to crypto’ swaps are an integral part of a global criminal ecosystem,” said Sal Melki, deputy director for economic crime at the National Crime Agency.
For decades, the Treasury Department has relied on banks and credit card companies to root out illicit financial activity, requiring them to spend billions on compliance measures that track and block groups that are subject to government sanctions — or face enormous fines. Since most of the world’s dollar-denominated trade flows through these regulated channels, transacting with those facing sanctions has been extraordinarily difficult.
Stablecoins bypass this system entirely. Through layers of intermediaries, digital dollars can be moved, swapped and mixed into pools of other funds in ways that are more difficult for the authorities to trace, Mr. Redbord said.Editors’ PicksAt Gucci, Demna Brings Back the Tom Ford EraArt Gallery Shows to See in DecemberI Can’t Stop Thinking About a Primate’s Bathrobe. How Can I Find It?A Test of How Easily Money Can Be Converted
To test just how easily crypto can slip between the cracks of banking controls, I found a crypto A.T.M. in Weehawken, N.J., to convert cash into stablecoins.
Soon after I fed two $20 bills into the machine, I received a notification on my phone that crypto had arrived in my digital wallet. A Telegram bot then guided me through the next step: using the stablecoins to generate a Visa payment card number with a balance that I could spend anywhere.
A payment card functions very much like a debit card, though it is not tied to any of my bank accounts. In this case, the card I was issued did not require me to provide an address or identity check of any kind — in effect creating a degree of anonymity for my spending.
My experiment was perfectly legal, despite anti-money-laundering laws in the United States that require banks to scrutinize the identity of an account holder and the source of funds before issuing credit, debit and payment cards.
The Telegram bot that issued my card was run by WantToPay, a company that advertises Visas and Mastercards to Russians who want to shop abroad or make purchases online but are blocked by U.S. sanctions. Because of sanctions tied to the invasion of Ukraine, many American companies cannot process payments from most Russian banks.
In its ads, on WantToPay’s website and on its Telegram channel, the company promises instant issuance without any of the traditional customer checks that banks must perform.
Dec. 6
President Trump (New York Times file photo by Kenny Holston).
New York Times, Trump’s Security Strategy Focuses on Profit, Not Spreading Democracy, Anton Troianovski, Dec. 6, 2025 (print ed.). President Trump’s new National Security Strategy describes a country that is focused on doing business and reducing migration while avoiding passing judgment on authoritarians.
Latin American countries must grant no-bid contracts to U.S. companies. Taiwan’s significance boils down to semiconductors and shipping lanes. Washington’s “hectoring” of the wealthy Gulf monarchies needs to stop.
The world as seen from the White House is a place where America can use its vast powers to make money.
President Trump has shown all year that his second term would make it a priority to squeeze less powerful countries to benefit American companies. But late Thursday, his administration made that profit-driven approach a core element of its official foreign policy, publishing its long-anticipated update to U.S. national security aims around the world.
The document, known as the National Security Strategy, describes a world in which American interests are far narrower than how prior administrations — even in Mr. Trump’s first term — had portrayed them. Gone is the long-familiar picture of the United States as a global force for freedom, replaced by a country that is focused on reducing migration while avoiding passing judgment on authoritarians, instead seeing them as sources of cash.
“We seek good relations and peaceful commercial relations with the nations of the world,” it says, “without imposing on them democratic or other social change that differs widely from their traditions and histories.”
The National Security Strategy of Mr. Trump’s first term, by contrast, cast the world as a contest “between those who favor repressive systems and those who favor free societies.”Sign up for Your Places: Global Update. All the latest news for any part of the world you select. Get it sent to your inbox.
The National Security Strategy has no binding force, and some analysts cautioned against reading too much into it as a guide to future actions given Mr. Trump’s mercurial nature.
But the release of the strategy, which recent presidents have generally updated just once in every term, did carry significance as a snapshot in time. Amid the debates swirling among Republicans over American policy toward the Middle East, Russia, China and elsewhere, the document showed how the administration has appeared to coalesce around a commitment to avoid military entanglements and promote commerce.
In an interview, Dan Caldwell, a former senior adviser to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth who argues in favor of American military restraint, hailed the new strategy as a “true break from the failed bipartisan post-Cold War foreign policy consensus.”Editors’ PicksAnd for the Latest Trick … WallpaperWhy Are Weddings So Expensive?3 Easy Holiday Snacks to Kick Off Any Holiday Party
“For too long, delusion undergirded our foreign policy — delusion about America’s role in the world, delusion about our interests and delusion about what we can achieve through military force,” Mr. Caldwell said. “This is a reality-based document in that regard.”
The document codifies Mr. Trump’s well-established aversion to Europe’s liberal governments and his readiness to overlook human rights abuses, as with his “things happen” remark last month about the murder and dismemberment of a Saudi Washington Post columnist in 2018. Representative Gregory W. Meeks of New York, the top Democrat on the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said it “discards decades of values-based U.S. leadership in favor of a craven, unprincipled worldview.”
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The strategy depicts Europe as facing “civilizational erasure” at the hands of immigrants and its mainstream leaders. It says the United States will cultivate “resistance” to Europe’s mainstream leaders, and asserts that many of their governments “trample on basic principles of democracy to suppress opposition.”
That stance provoked an outcry from European politicians, echoing the shock when Vice President JD Vance castigated German officials in February for trying to blunt the rise of the country’s far-right party. Carl Bildt, a former Swedish prime minister, posted on social media that the National Security Strategy “places itself to the right of the extreme right in Europe.”
Outside Europe, departing from decades of precedent in U.S. foreign policy, the 33-page document does not characterize democracy as a value to be defended. Israel and Taiwan — two democracies whose security the United States has long sought to support — are described in the context of their regions’ economic significance, not their connection to American values.
The Middle East, it says, is “a source and destination of international investment.” The document calls for “dropping America’s misguided experiment with hectoring these nations — especially the Gulf monarchies — into abandoning their traditions and historic forms of government.”
In Latin America, the document says, the United States will “reassert and enforce the Monroe Doctrine to restore American pre-eminence in the Western Hemisphere.” Along the way, American diplomats are to hunt for “major business opportunities in their country, especially major government contracts.”
Letters from an American, Historical Commentary: December 5, 2025 [U.S. Announces Pro-Autocracy Foreign Policies], Heather Cox Richardson, right, Dec. 6, 2025. Late last night, the Trump administration released the 2025 National Security Strategy (NSS) of the United States of America. It did so quietly, although as foreign affairs journalist at Politico Nahal Toosi noted, the release of the NSS is usually accompanied by fanfare, as it shows an administration’s foreign policy priorities and the way it envisions the position of the U.S. in the world.
The Trump administration’s NSS announces a dramatic reworking of the foreign policy the U.S. has embraced since World War II.
After a brief introduction touting what it claims are the administration’s great successes, the document begins by announcing the U.S. will back away from the global engagements that underpin the rules-based international order that the World War II Allies put in place after that war to prevent another world war. The authors of the document claim that the system of institutions like the United Nations, alliances like the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, and free trade between nations that established a series of rules for foreign engagement and a web of shared interests around the globe has been bad for the U.S. because it undermined “the character of our nation.”
Their vision of “our country’s inherent greatness and decency,” requires “the restoration and reinvigoration of American spiritual and cultural health,” “an America that cherishes its past glories and its heroes, and that looks forward to a new golden age,” and “growing numbers of strong, traditional families that raise healthy children.”
Observers referred to the document as National Security Council Report (NSC) 88 and noted that it could have been written in just 14 words. White supremacists use 88 to refer to Adolf Hitler and “fourteen words” to refer to a popular white supremacist slogan.
To achieve their white supremacist country, the document’s authors insist they will not permit “transnational and international organizations [or] foreign powers or entities” to undermine U.S. sovereignty. To that end, they reject immigration as well as “the disastrous ‘climate change’ and ‘Net Zero’ ideologies that have so greatly harmed Europe, threatened the United States, and subsidize our adversaries.”
The document reorients the U.S. away from traditional European allies toward Russia. The authors reject Europe’s current course, suggesting that Europe is in danger of “civilizational erasure” and calling for the U.S. to “help Europe correct its current trajectory” by “restoring Europe’s civilizational self-confidence and Western identity.” Allowing continued migration will render Europe “unrecognizable” within twenty years, the authors say, and they back away from NATO by suggesting that as they become more multicultural, Europe’s societies might have a different relationship to NATO than “those who signed the NATO charter.”
In contrast to their complaints about the liberal democracies in Europe, the document’s authors do not suggest that Russia is a country of concern to the U.S., a dramatic change from past NSS documents. Instead, they complain that “European officials…hold unrealistic expectations” for an end to Russia’s war against Ukraine, and that European governments are suppressing far-right political parties. They bow to Russian demands by calling for “[e]nding the perception, and preventing the reality, of NATO as a perpetually expanding alliance.”
In place of the post–World War II rules-based international order, the Trump administration’s NSS commits the U.S. to a world divided into spheres of interest by dominant countries. It calls for the U.S. to dominate the Western Hemisphere through what it calls “commercial diplomacy,” using “tariffs and reciprocal trade agreements as powerful tools” and discouraging Latin American nations from working with other nations. “The United States must be preeminent in the Western Hemisphere as a condition of our security and prosperity,” it says, “a condition that allows us to assert ourselves confidently where and when we need to in the region.”
The document calls for “closer collaboration between the U.S. Government and the American private sector. All our embassies must be aware of major business opportunities in their country, especially major government contracts. Every U.S. Government official that interacts with these countries should understand that part of their job is to help American companies compete and succeed.”
It went on to make clear that this policy is a plan to help U.S. businesses take over Latin America and, perhaps, Canada. “The U.S. Government will identify strategic acquisition and investment opportunities for American companies in the region and present these opportunities for assessment by every U.S. Government financing program,” it said, “including but not limited to those within the Departments of State, War, and Energy; the Small Business Administration; the International Development Finance Corporation; the Export-Import Bank; and the Millennium Challenge Corporation.” Should countries oppose such U.S. initiatives, it said, “[t]he United States must also resist and reverse measures such as targeted taxation, unfair regulation, and expropriation that disadvantage U.S. businesses.”
The document calls this policy a “Trump Corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine, linking this dramatic reworking to America’s past to make it sound as if it is historical, when it is anything but.
President James Monroe outlined what became known as the Monroe Doctrine in three paragraphs in his annual message to Congress on December 2, 1823. The concept was an attempt for the new American nation to position itself in a changing world.
In the early nineteenth century, Spain’s empire in America was crumbling, and beginning in 1810, Latin American countries began to seize their independence. In just two years from 1821 to 1822, ten nations broke from the Spanish empire. Spain had restricted trade with its American colonies, and the U.S. wanted to trade with these new nations. But Monroe and his advisors worried that the new nations would fall prey to other European colonial powers, severing new trade ties with the U.S. and orienting the new nations back toward Europe.
So in his 1823 annual message, Monroe warned that “the American continents, by the free and independent condition which they have assumed and maintain, are henceforth not to be considered as subjects for future colonization by any European powers.” American republics would not tolerate European monarchies and their system of colonization, he wrote. Americans would “consider any attempt on their part to extend their system to any portion of this hemisphere as dangerous to our peace and safety.” It is “the true policy of the United States to leave the [new Latin American republics] to themselves, in hope that other powers will pursue the same course,” Monroe wrote.
In fact, with very little naval power, there wasn’t much the U.S. could do to enforce this edict until after the Civil War, when the U.S. turned its attention southward. In the late nineteenth century, U.S. corporations joined those from European countries to invest in Latin American countries. By the turn of the century, when it looked as if those countries might default on their debts, European creditors threatened armed intervention to collect.
After British, German, and Italian gunboats blockaded the ports of Venezuela in 1902, and President Theodore Roosevelt sent Marines to the Dominican Republic to manage that nation’s debt, the president announced the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine. On December 6, 1904, he noted with regret that “[t]here is as yet no judicial way of enforcing a right in international law. When one nation wrongs another or wrongs many others, there is no tribunal before which the wrongdoer can be brought.” If countries allowed the wrong, he wrote, they “put a premium upon brutality and aggression.”
“Until some method is devised by which there shall be a degree of international control over offending nations,” he wrote, “powers…with most sense of international obligations and with keenest and most generous appreciation of the difference between right and wrong” must “serve the purposes of international police.” Such a role meant protecting Latin American nations from foreign military intervention; it also meant imposing U.S. force on nations whose “inability or unwillingness to do justice at home and abroad had violated the rights of the United States or had invited foreign aggression to the detriment of the entire body of American nations.”
Couched as a form of protection, the Roosevelt Corollary justified U.S. military intervention in Latin American countries, but it still recognized those nations’ right to independence.
Now Trump has added his own “Trump Corollary” to the Monroe Doctrine, promising not to protect Latin American countries from foreign intrusion but to “reward and encourage the region’s governments, political parties, and movements broadly aligned with our principles and strategy.” In a speech in January, Secretary of State Marco Rubio noted that the administration is “more than willing to use America’s considerable leverage to protect our interests.”
The administration says it will promote “tolerable stability in the region” by turning the U.S. military away from its European commitments and focusing instead on Latin America, where it will abandon the “failed law enforcement-only strategy of the last several decades” and instead use lethal force when necessary to secure the U.S. border and defeat drug cartels. Then, it says, the U.S. will extract resources from the region. “The Western Hemisphere is home to many strategic resources that America should partner with regional allies to develop,” the plan says, “to make neighboring countries as well as our own more prosperous.”
Walking away from the U.S.-led international systems that reinforce the principles of national self-determination and have kept the world relatively safe since World War II, the Trump administration is embracing the old idea of spheres of influence in which less powerful countries are controlled by great powers, a system in place before World War II and favored now by Russia’s president Vladimir Putin, among others.
National security specialist Anne Applebaum wrote: “The new National Security Strategy is a propaganda document, designed to be widely read. It is also a performative suicide. Hard to think of another great power ever abdicating its influence so quickly and so publicly.”
European Council on Foreign Relations senior fellow Ulrike Franke commented: “The transatlantic relationship as we know it is over. Yes, we kinda knew this. But this is now official US White House policy. Not a speech, not a statement. The West as it used to be no longer exists.”
Today, Gram Slattery and Humeyra Pamuk of Reuters reported that Pentagon officials this week told European diplomats in Washington, D.C., that the U.S. wants Europe to take over most of NATO’s defense capabilities by 2027.
U.S. Courts, Law, Crime, Justice
New York Times, Editorial Opinion: The Supreme Court Is Failing at Its Most Important Job, Editorial Board, Dec. 6, 2025. In early November, a conservative Supreme Court justice showed a cleareyed understanding of the threat that President Trump poses to the constitutional order. During an oral argument in a case involving tariffs that Mr. Trump unilaterally imposed by claiming emergency powers, Justice Neil Gorsuch suggested that the move could weaken Congress in an enduring way. “What president’s ever going to give that power back?” he asked.
Justice Gorsuch’s realism in a case involving a signature policy of Mr. Trump’s second term raises the so far elusive prospect that the court may constrain his worst abuses of power. But it’s not clear whether a majority of justices share Justice Gorsuch’s view, since the court has yet to rule in the case. And the comment was noteworthy because it was a rare sign of independence from the conservative wing of the court, highlighting how little the majority has done to rein in a president who has challenged the nation’s laws, norms and balance of powers.
A key test will come on Monday, when the court hears a challenge to Mr. Trump’s power to fire a member of the Federal Trade Commission — an action that flew in the face of a 90-year-old Supreme Court precedent. The court announced on Friday that it would also hear a challenge, likely in the next few months, to Mr. Trump’s attempt to revoke birthright citizenship, which the 14th Amendment explicitly protects.
Many lower courts have responded heroically to Mr. Trump’s ill-founded efforts to centralize power and weaken democracy. Judges on the district courts and courts of appeal have blocked his policies hundreds of times since he retook office in January. The judges stepped in to prevent the president from cutting off spending that Congress appropriated, dismantling departments it created, firing the heads of federal agencies and deporting people without due process.
In many of those instances, however, the Supreme Court later overruled the lower courts, allowing Mr. Trump’s power grabs. It did so almost entirely on its emergency docket, issuing rulings that are preliminary but often last for at least a year or two, with little or no explanation. The justices have wholly denied only one of Mr. Trump’s 32 emergency petitions in his second term (and even then, they effectively reversed themselves later).Sign up for the Opinion Today newsletter Get expert analysis of the news and a guide to the big ideas shaping the world every weekday morning. Get it sent to your inbox.
Still, we continue to hope that the Supreme Court will yet restrain Mr. Trump’s unlawful actions. In addition to Justice Gorsuch, Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Amy Coney Barrett also conveyed some skepticism of Mr. Trump’s power to impose sweeping tariffs during oral argument. And during his first term, the Supreme Court regularly ruled against him. During his second term, however, the six Republican-appointed justices have smoothed the path for Mr. Trump’s dangerous campaign to undermine the Constitution and our system of government.
One explanation is that these justices believe that American presidents in general, and not just Mr. Trump, should be more powerful than they historically have been. Several of the justices, including Samuel Alito and Brett Kavanaugh, have previously promoted an idea known as the unitary executive theory. Taken to its limit, it holds that Congress is powerless to impose any conditions on how the president controls executive branch agencies. There are reasonable arguments about whether the federal government — which often is not effective enough, frustrating liberal as well as conservative goals — would improve if agency heads were more accountable to the president who is in office. But the Supreme Court is flirting with a maximalist version of executive power that facilitates an unaccountable White House — one that, for instance, blows up boats without due process. The court’s approach downplays the primary role that the founders assigned to Congress, making it the subject of Article I of the Constitution.
The justices also seem friendlier to claims of executive power under Mr. Trump than they were under President Joe Biden. They blocked Mr. Biden’s efforts to use his authority to forgive student loans and manage the Covid-19 pandemic. Today, they are enabling a Republican president as he goes much further while relying on weaker rationales.
Just as important, the justices are ignoring the evidence that Mr. Trump is not acting in good faith. In the past, the government has enjoyed what legal scholars call the “presumption of regularity.” Judges assume they can rely on government officials to present facts accurately and give true reasons for their actions — and can defer to those officials at times as a result. The Trump administration does not deserve this presumption. As lower court judges appointed by presidents of both parties have noted, the administration’s actions have been “egregious,” “capricious,” “nonsensical,” “unconscionable,” “baseless,” “cringe-worthy,” “Kafkaesque,” “blatantly unconstitutional” and “a sham.” Judge Karin Immergut, whom Mr. Trump appointed to the U.S. District Court for the District of Oregon, wrote that his professed reasons for deploying the National Guard in Portland were “untethered to the facts.”Editors’ PicksIs There a Better Way to Cut a Cake?The Best Picture Race Has 5 Sure Bets. What About the Other Slots?My Fiancé and I Don’t Drink. How Should We Deal With Booze at Our Wedding?
Yet the Supreme Court remains blithely credulous of the administration. To take one example, Justice Kavanaugh minimized the burden of wrongful stops on legal immigrants by saying they would be briefly questioned and then could “promptly go free.” That is often not the reality of the Trump administration’s immigration roundups. Instead, immigration agents conduct military-style raids that terrify children and hold even citizens in custody for hours or days or even weeks.
The court’s overarching mistake has been to allow Mr. Trump to grab power in dubious ways. Take, for example, the court’s decision in September letting the president withhold $4 billion of foreign aid that Congress had directed to be spent by the end of that month. In a single paragraph of explanation, the majority let the policy stand, citing a president’s authority to conduct foreign policy. That is a far-reaching claim at odds with the country’s long history of respecting Congress’s power of the purse. Mr. Trump’s impoundment of appropriated funds is unconstitutional, full stop.
Other rulings have shown a similar dynamic. The conservative majority has let the president begin to dismantle the Department of Education even though only Congress has the power to abolish an administrative agency. The court gave Mr. Trump a green light to fire members of the National Labor Relations Board and other agencies without cause, contravening the vision of independence Congress had when it created those agencies. In 1911, for example, Senator Francis Newlands of Nevada, who helped create the Federal Trade Commission, said that the new agency should be “independent of executive authority.” The Supreme Court upheld this principle in a 1935 case, Humphrey’s Executor v. United States.
This court may yet enable Mr. Trump to go further. In the case the justices are to hear on Monday, they signaled an openness to overturning the 1935 precedent by asking the parties to prepare for arguments about whether a federal court could prevent anyone’s removal from public office, including lower-level employees with civil service protections. At best, this could bring a return to the patronage system that proved unsuitable to the work of modern government. At worst, it raises a chilling prospect, as our colleague David French has pointed out: Combined with the president’s unfettered pardon power, the authority to fire any government employee could effectively allow a president to run the federal government as a criminal enterprise. He, too, would probably be immune from future accountability, given the court’s misguided 2024 decision shielding presidents from prosecution for most official acts.
What should the Supreme Court do differently? There are still plenty of chances for it to stand up for the American system of checks and balances.
First, the court should show that facts matter. Judges on lower courts, including some appointed by Mr. Trump, have upbraided the Trump administration for its falsehoods and bad faith and begun to treat its arguments with the basic skepticism they have earned. The justices should do the same. They will have an opportunity in several upcoming cases, including on immigration roundups and the Federal Reserve Board. In the Fed case, Mr. Trump has tried to fire Lisa Cook from the board on the basis of an allegation that she committed mortgage fraud. The justices should consider the lack of evidence for that in the record when they hear the case. They should pay attention to what’s really going on here: Mr. Trump’s play to bend the Fed to his will.
Second, the court should recognize that Mr. Trump is taking power that Congress will be hard pressed to take back. At least Justice Gorsuch and the three liberal justices looked ready to do this in the tariffs case. They need a fifth vote. A sixth or seventh would send the president an even stronger signal. It is a shame that neither Justice Alito nor Justice Clarence Thomas seems willing to restrain Mr. Trump in any case of significance.
Third, the court should be faster to block Mr. Trump’s most blatant abuses of power. His order to end birthright citizenship is patently unconstitutional. His use of the Alien Enemies Act, a wartime statute, to deport hundreds of Venezuelans who were subsequently subjected to torture and violence in a notorious prison in El Salvador, was also legally untenable. His administration’s reinterpretation of another immigration law to detain just about anyone seeking protection has been rejected by all but eight of the 225 judges who have ruled in such cases, according to Politico.
Given the largely supine nature of Congress under Republican control, the stability of American democracy depends more than it should on the Supreme Court. So far, it is failing to live up to its constitutional role. But we’re only in the first quarter of this term. There’s a long way to go.
The Parnas Perspective, Political Commentary, Trump Moves Closer to Firing Kristi Noem as ICE Sent Attack Dogs on Migrant, Aaron Parnas, Today was a relatively slow news day on the surface, but there are major developments unfolding inside the Department of Homeland Security that demand your attention.
We learned that President Trump may be preparing to push out DHS Secretary Kristi Noem—an extraordinary move given how central she has been to his mass-deportation agenda. And in Washington state, ICE agents unleashed an attack dog on an undocumented man who was not resisting, leaving him with devastating injuries. An image of those wounds is below, and I want to warn you in advance: it is graphic and deeply disturbing.
This afternoon, I moderated a conversation with Cristina Jiménez, the founder of United We Dream—the largest immigrant youth-led network in the country. At a moment when so many people feel drained or defeated, talking with her was a reminder that hope is not naïve; it is work. And all of you are part of that work. You are helping us reach millions of people—across the political spectrum—with reporting that is accurate, timely, and unafraid.
As the White House escalates its attacks on journalists, independent reporting is not just important—it is essential. I’m committed to pushing back with verified facts and rigorous analysis. But I can only continue this work with the support of readers who believe in journalism that challenges disinformation rather than amplifies it.
Despite overseeing Trump’s flagship mass-deportation agenda with unwavering loyalty, the Bulwark is now reporting that DHS Secretary Kristi 
Noem, left, is increasingly rumored to be on her way out, as senior White House officials grow frustrated with her leadership—especially her reliance on controversial adviser Corey Lewandowski—while former DHS officials say she has recently taken a diminished role in directing department memos; Trump may replace her soon to reset the administration’s immigration effort and refresh public perception, potentially bringing in a prominent GOP figure expected to be newly available.
DHS Secretary Kristi Noem acknowledged in a new court filing that she personally ordered Venezuelan detainees sent to El Salvador despite a federal judge’s directive to return them to the U.S., reviving a major separation-of-powers clash as Judge Boasberg considers contempt proceedings over the Trump administration’s defiance of his order.
After an Afghan asylum recipient shot two National Guard members, immigration hardliners and senior Trump officials are using the incident to push sweeping new restrictions—including expanded travel bans, mandatory in-person asylum interviews, re-vetting or deporting up to 2 million recent arrivals from “countries of concern,” and a full overhaul of adjudications—marking what insiders call an “inflection point” toward far more aggressive screening and mass-deportation policies.
Senator Patty Murray accused ICE of using an “attack dog” to severely injure an unresisting man, Wilmer Toledo-Martinez, after agents allegedly lured him outside under false pretenses, denied him timely medical care, and traumatized his family—an incident emerging amid other reports of violent ICE enforcement actions in the Pacific Northwest. This is an image of the injuries:
NBC reports that Adm. Frank Bradley told Congress the 11 people killed in a Sept. 2 U.S. strike on a suspected drug-smuggling boat were all on an internal military target list authorizing lethal action; he said Defense Secretary Hegseth ordered him to kill the listed individuals and destroy the vessel, leading to multiple strikes—including one that killed two survivors still on the capsized boat—amid growing scrutiny over legality, intelligence gaps, and the lack of evidence supporting the administration’s narco-terrorism claims.
House Democrats are demanding Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth publicly release video of the controversial Sept. 2 boat strikes—citing Trump’s claim he’d “no problem” making it public and alleging Hegseth ordered forces to “kill everybody”—after lawmakers who viewed the footage said the two surviving, unarmed men appeared in clear distress.
Pete Hegseth will not commit to releasing the video:
Trump said that if he can’t outperform Jimmy Kimmel as a host, he shouldn’t be president, noting that no previous president has personally hosted the awards ceremony he’s now leading.
U.S. Deputy Secretary of State Christopher Landau blasted the EU for policies he says harm U.S. security—citing green regulations, tech enforcement (including a €120M fine on X), and migration rules—arguing that Europe cannot rely on NATO while pursuing what he calls “civilizational suicide” through the EU, escalating tensions in transatlantic relations.
A Daily Beast report says FBI communications aide Ben Williamson furiously denounced allegations that Director Kash Patel ordered agents to act as chauffeurs for his girlfriend’s drunk friends—claims multiple sources say reflect a broader pattern of Patel allegedly misusing FBI resources for personal benefit, even as Patel, his girlfriend Alexis Wilkins, and his defenders dismiss the accusations as fabricated.
At a Christmas party honoring Sylvester Stallone, VP JD Vance recounted an Oval Office moment in which Trump derailed a serious meeting with a crude joke about men’s shoe sizes—offering staffers shoes, teasing a politician with size 7 feet, and implying a penis joke—an anecdote Vance used to illustrate the president’s distractibility and penchant for off-color humor.
The Trump administration revised the National Park Service’s 2026 fee-free schedule by removing MLK Day, Juneteenth, and other long-standing access days while adding Trump’s own birthday, Fourth of July weekend, and other “patriotic” dates limited to U.S. residents—changes that come amid broader criticism of politically driven alterations to federal historical and cultural content.
A magnitude-7.0 earthquake struck a remote region near the Alaska–Yukon border, strongly felt in small communities such as Whitehorse and Haines Junction but causing no reported injuries, structural damage, or tsunami threat, with impacts largely limited to items falling from shelves and followed by several minor aftershocks.
California health officials are warning the public after 21 cases of amatoxin poisoning—linked to deadly “death cap” mushrooms—caused one death and severe liver damage in several people, including children, prompting urgent advice to avoid all wild mushroom foraging during the high-risk season.
The IAEA says Chernobyl’s New Safe Confinement structure was severely damaged by a February drone strike and can no longer reliably contain radioactive material, prompting urgent calls for major repairs even though core structural supports remain intact, as the site again becomes a flashpoint amid the ongoing Russia-Ukraine war.
Politico, Trump pardons Texas Democrat Henry Cuellar, Gregory Svirnovskiy, Dec. 6, 2025. Cuellar and his wife were charged in 2024 with accepting $600,000 in bribes from foreign entities.
President Donald Trump pardoned Rep. Henry Cuellar (D-Texas), right, the president announced in a Truth Social post on Wednesday, blaming former President Joe Biden for weaponizing the Justice Department against his opponents.
“Sleepy Joe went after the Congressman, and even the Congressman’s wonderful wife, Imelda, simply for speaking the TRUTH,” Trump wrote. “It is unAmerican and, as I previously stated, the Radical Left Democrats are a complete and total threat to Democracy.”
Cuellar and his wife were charged in 2024 with accepting $600,000 in bribes from foreign entities. The moderate Democrat — who has long been a battleground target for Republicans — was nonetheless reelected to his South Texas seat in November.
Trump’s pardon of Cuellar comes just a day after national Republicans got their top recruit to challenge him in a seat made redder thanks to Texas’ mid-decade redistricting. Webb County Judge Tano Tijerina, a former Democrat who switched parties last year, announced his campaign for the 28th District as a Republican on Tuesday after months of speculation.
Cuellar told a small group of Democrats Wednesday he is not planning to switch parties after Trump pardoned him, according to two people granted anonymity to describe the private calls. He just filed for re-election in South Texas.
His office did not immediately respond to a request for comment on his pardon, but he thanked Trump in a social media post shortly after the president’s announcement. The longtime lawmaker had denied any criminal allegations in a statement following his indictment.
“I want to thank President Trump for his tremendous leadership and for taking the time to look at the facts,” Cuellar wrote on X. “This decision clears the air and lets us move forward for South Texas.”
On Truth Social on Wednesday, Trump accused the Biden administration of targeting Cuellar, even though he is a Democrat, due to the lawmaker’s position on immigration.
The Texan had been a vocal critic of Biden and his immigration policies, telling POLITICO in 2023 that he believed Biden was too influenced by his party’s left flank on immigration.
“They will attack, rob, lie, cheat, destroy, and decimate anyone who dares to oppose their far left Agenda, and Agenda that, if left unchecked, will obliterate our magnificent country,”
Emptywheel, Analysis: Trump's Terrorists, Emptywheel (Marcy Wheeler, right), Dec. 6, 2025. Dan Bongino just learned a remarkable lesson: when you follow the facts rather than chase conspiracy theories, you end up discovering that Trump's terrorists are the ones who threaten the American way of life.
Things could get a bit awkward with two of Trump’s terrorists in the days ahead. Trump has done such a great job of memory-holing his insurrection, and yet it won’t entirely go away.
Start with Taylor Taranto. I’ve written about the mentally ill Navy veteran who trespassed on January 6 — just one of thousands of Trumpsters who invaded the Capitol — but then took up with the DC Jail crowd in the aftermath, growing increasingly unstable until when, after Trump posted Barack Obama’s address on Truth Social, Taranto started stalking Obama, as prosecutors described in a footnote of a motion to gag Trump this way:
[T]he defendant’s public targeting of perceived adversaries has resulted in threats, harassment, or intimidation. The public record is replete with other examples. See, e.g., United States v. Taranto, No. 1:23-cr-229, ECF No. 27 at 4-6 (D.D.C. Sep. 12, 2023) (affirming detention order for Taranto and explaining that, after “‘former President Trump posted what he claimed was the address of Former President Barack Obama’ on Truth Social,” Taranto— who had previously entered the Capitol on January 6, 2021—reposted the address, along with a separate post stating, “‘See you in hell, Podesta’s and Obama’s’” [sic], and then proceeded, heavily armed, to the area the defendant had identified as President Obama’s address, while livestreaming himself talking about “getting a ‘shot’ and an ‘angle,’” adding, “‘See, First Amendment, just say First Amendment, free speech’”) (quoting Taranto, ECF No. 20).
Like everyone else, Taranto was pardoned for his Jan6 trespass and his gun-related crimes were downgraded along with the rest of America’s defense against gun crimes. Trump appointee Carl Nichols sentenced him to time served on October 30, but not before Jeanine Pirro’s office tried to hide the sentencing memo (and prosecutors) who described Taranto’s role in Trump’s insurrection and Trump’s role in inciting Taranto’s stalking.
So he was free to go home to Seattle and attempt to rebuild his life from the chaos that Trump made of it.
Only he didn’t.
In recent days he has been back stalking DC, and specifically Jamie Raskin. The very same prosecutors who attempted to bury Trump’s role in inspiring Taranto’s crimes were stuck asking he be jailed again.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Travis Wolf said Taranto’s return to D.C., his erratic behavior and renewed livestreaming raised serious alarms that he was “on the path” to the same conduct that led to criminal charges against him two years earlier and urged that he be returned to jail.
Wolf described acute mental health concerns, a series of alleged violations of Taranto’s supervised release conditions, and alarming social media posts, including one from the parking lot of the Pentagon. The prosecutor discussed other details of Taranto’s case during a closed court session.
Trump appointee Carl Nichols tried to give Taranto one more chance to go back to Washington and get some help. But he continues to lurk around DC, figuring he still has time before he has to report to Probation in Washington on Wednesday.
The man needs help, and jail is not going to get him what he needs, but until he leaves DC, he remains a real concern.
He’s a reminder of what Trump does to people, driving around DC broadcasting as he goes.
According to the standards DOJ has used with ICE protestors, Trump should have been charged right along with Taranto.
Then there’s the possibility that efforts to prosecute alleged pipe bomber Brian Cole will backfire, at least on those — Pam Bondi, Kash Patel, and Dan Bongino — who crowed about the arrest on Thursday.
Since he was arrested there have been a series of leaks, starting with Ryan Reilly (who literally wrote the book on the January 6 investigation, with all that suggests about his possible sources) followed by Evan Perez (one of the best-sourced journalists at FBI), told the FBI he believed Donald Trump’s bullshit.
The man charged with planting two pipe bombs near the Democratic and Republican party headquarters on the eve of the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol told the FBI he believed conspiracy theories about the 2020 election, according to two people familiar with the matter.
Brian Cole Jr., 30, above, is cooperating with the FBI, NBC News has reported, citing a separate person familiar with the matter. Cole appeared in court Friday, one day after he was charged with leaving pipe bombs outside the Republican National Committee and Democratic National Committee in the hours before Donald Trump supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol. Trump has falsely claimed the 2020 election was “rigged.”
Cole confessed to planting the devices outside the parties’ headquarters in the hours before the Capitol attack, three people familiar with the matter told NBC News. A federal prosecutor said in court on Friday that the suspect spoke with the government for more than four hours, but did not reveal the contents of those discussions.
Pirro has been out trying to disclaim the obvious: that Cole is one of Trump’s terrorists, not the insider threat that people like Dan Bongino and Ed Martin have been claiming since the attack.
Anna Bower tracked Martin’s effort to stoke conspiracy theories about the pipe bomber, including this screen cap.
Kash Patel who has fired people for claiming that Jan6ers were a terrible threat to the country, said that when you do what Cole did, “you attack the very being of our way of life” — and he did so after Pam Bondi hailed his hard work to make the case.
And then Bongino went on Sean Hannity and confessed he was making shit up before.
Hannity, during his interview with his former colleague, gave Bongino an opportunity to criticize prior iterations of the Justice Department and FBI for failing to arrest anyone in the case, and praise his own colleagues for getting the job done. But then he asked Bongino about the FBI deputy director’s own role in promoting conspiracy theories about the bomber during Bongino’s past career as a right-wing commentator.
“You know, I don’t know if you remember this — this is before you became the deputy FBI director,” Hannity said. “You put a post on X right after this happened and you said there’s a massive cover-up because the person that planted those pipe bombs, they don’t want you to know who it is because it’s either a connected anti-Trump insider or an inside job. You said that, you know, long before you were even thought of as deputy FBI director.”
Bongino’s response was astounding. He looked down, as if embarrassed, and replied: “Yeah, that’s why I said to you this investigation’s just begun.” But after hemming and hawing about the confidence he and FBI Director Kash Patel have that they arrested the right person, he got real.
“Listen, I was paid in the past, Sean, for my opinions,” he explained. “That’s clear. And one day, I’ll be back in that space. But that’s not what I’m paid for now. I’m paid to be your deputy director, and we base investigations on facts.”
And when you peruse the possible explanations about why FBI didn’t find Cole before this week (I suspect it’s because FBI had far less evidence against Cole when they arrested him on Thursday than against virtually every other Jan6er; they just got fucking lucky that they got the right guy), they all feed left wing concerns.
Did Steve D’Antuono take steps to distract from Cole back in 2021, as some right wingers are now suggesting? If so, he did that between the time he took insufficient steps to prevent the attack and those times in 2022 when he attempted to kill any investigation of Trump.
Did Chris Wray intentionally stall this investigation? Then what does that say about the rest of the January 6 investigation?
And what if Cole says he qualifies for one or both of the pardons Trump already gave to people, like him, who responded to Trump’s false claims by attacking the Capitol. After all Enrique Tarrio, who was convicted of sedition and adjudged a terrorist at sentencing, was gone from the Capitol a whole day before Cole allegedly placed those bombs, and Tarrio got a full pardon. What is Pardon Attorney Ed Martin going to say to conclude that Cole is somehow different from the hundreds of others, including a good many who brought incendiary devices, who have been running free since January?
It’s still possible Jocelyn Ballantine will manage to bury Cole’s pro-Trump leanings — or at least avoid implicating anyone who worked with Cole to plant the bombs in the precisely perfect place to create a distraction on January 6. Ballantine has played such a role before, and emails that Dan Richman submitted in his bid to get his data back before the FBI can violate his Fourth Amendment rights again suggest she was part of the process that led to that violation in the first place.
But until then, the lesson Dan Bongino just learned could be devastating. When you follow the facts, even the most rabid Trump supporter may discover that Trump’s terrorists are the ones threatening America.
More Global News
New York Times, Battlefield Picture Worsening for Ukraine as Trump Pushes Peace Plan, Cassandra Vinograd, Oleksandr Chubko and Maria Varenikova, Dec. 6, 2025. Russian forces have advanced on several fronts recently. President Vladimir V. Putin signaled after talks with U.S. officials that he was not budging from demands.
It was a clear attempt to project Russian power.
Hours before meeting U.S. officials in Moscow this past week about their plan to end the war, President Vladimir V. Putin claimed that Russia’s forces had seized the strategic Ukrainian city of Pokrovsk after a monthslong fight.
The reality was murkier. Slivers of the city were still contested, according to battlefield maps and the Ukrainian military. But Mr. Putin’s claim, even if premature, reflected a trend shaping his unbending approach to negotiations: Russian forces are on the march.
“The Russians do have the upper hand,” said Emil Kastehelmi, a military analyst with the Finland-based Black Bird Group. Ukraine is not yet at the point where it must capitulate, he said, but it “is looking weak enough that the Russians think that they can impose demands.”
Mr. Putin has ordered the Russian military to prepare for winter combat, signaling after the talks with U.S. officials that he is not budging from his hard-line demands. Mr. Trump’s special envoy, Steve Witkoff, has since held a series of discussions in Miami with Ukraine’s delegation — with another expected to take place on Saturday — that both sides called “constructive.”
As these statements were being released, Russia unleashed more than 650 drones and 51 missiles on towns and cities across Ukraine in an assault that began overnight on Friday and stretched through Saturday morning, Ukrainian officials said.
More On Media, Religion, Culture
New York Times, Angst Turns to Anger in Hollywood as Netflix Hooks Warner Bros., Brooks Barnes and Shawn Hubler, Dec. 6, 2025. Much of the entertainment capital fears that Netflix’s deal will lead to more job losses and theater closings and fewer boundary-pushing movies.
In October, when Warner Bros. Discovery hung a “For Sale” sign on itself, Hollywood was sad. The megaproducer Larry Gordon likened the feeling to a death in the family. In group WhatsApp chats, screenwriters used words like “heartbreaking” and “tragic.”
Now that a sale has been announced, with Netflix striking an $83 billion deal for the Warner Bros. studio and its sibling streaming service, HBO Max, a different emotion is washing through the entertainment capital: Hollywood is mad.
Jane Fonda raged against a deal in a letter to an entertainment trade news publication, calling the end of a stand-alone Warner Bros. “an alarming escalation in a consolidation crisis that threatens the entire entertainment industry, the public it serves and — potentially — the First Amendment itself.”
Michael O’Leary, chief executive of Cinema United, a trade organization that represents 30,000 movie screens in the United States, called the Netflix acquisition “an unprecedented threat” and vowed to fight it. “Theaters will close, communities will suffer, jobs will be lost,” Mr. O’Leary said, noting Netflix’s policy of giving movies only “token” releases in theaters. (Shares in publicly traded theater chains, including AMC Entertainment, IMAX and Cinemark, fell as much as 8 percent on Friday.)
“This merger must be blocked,” the Writers Guild of America, which represents more than 12,000 screenwriters, said in a statement. “The world’s largest streaming company swallowing one of its biggest competitors is what antitrust laws were designed to prevent.” The Teamsters’ motion picture division also demanded that “all levels” of government “reject this deal.”
Netflix insisted on Friday that it would honor the Warner Bros. business model — that it would continue to release movies in theaters for exclusive runs. “It’s not like we have this opposition to movies into theaters,” Ted Sarandos, Netflix’s co-chief executive, said on a conference call with investors.
“Right now, you should count on everything that is planned on going to the theater through Warner Bros.” to “continue to go to theaters,” Mr. Sarandos added.
But many people in Hollywood viewed his comments with extreme skepticism. (“Key words: ‘right now,’” one agent said.) As recently as April, in response to a question at the Time100 Summit about declines at the overall box office, Mr. Sarandos said: “What is the consumer trying to tell us? That they’d like to watch movies at home.” He also called theaters “an outmoded idea” for most people.
The Catholic Herald, The Latin Mass and the shaping of the American Right, Tom Colsy, Dec. 6, 2025. Traditionalists, despite their zeal and growth, remain a remarkably small fraction of the 1.4 billion Catholics worldwide. Yet this strange faction within the Church casts an outsized shadow. This surprisingly disproportionate influence is nowhere better demonstrated than in US politics.
From the likes of William F Buckley to Michael Knowles, from Russell Kirk to Pat Buchanan and Candace Owens, these may not be conservative America’s most recognised names (losing out to the globally iconic figureheads of Donald Trump and Ronald Reagan) but they’re certainly up there.
And make no mistake, the intellectual movements and factions these individuals founded, pioneered or represent have become the driving forces that have been carrying the ideational platforms of presidential elections and administrations for decades.
Despite starkly different personas, each share in common exceedingly rare attributes: traditionalist Catholic Faith and sympathy for (or devotion to) the old Latin Mass.
Statistics today suggest that only around 1-2 per cent of Masses celebrated globally are according to this mystical, ancient, prayerful rite (which once served 98 per cent of the Catholic world). So the fact there exists a curious thread running from the suppressed Mass of St Pius V all the way to people formerly or presently prominent in US politics might first appear to only warrant a raised eyebrow from observers for the sheer fact of its statistical rareness.
But, there is another, more pressingly topical, reason why we should turn our attention to this often unspoken connection: the recent outbreak of civil war on the Right of US politics.
The foremost conservative think tank in Washington DC – The Heritage Foundation – has recently been embroiled in controversy as a result of this very conflict. Its president, Kevin Roberts, sparked outrage last month by publicly defending Tucker Carlson’s decision to interview Nick Fuentes – the foul-mouthed far-right firebrand whose radically anti-Zionist views have long been anathema to mainstream conservatism – against what he called a “venomous coalition” of critics.
Though Roberts – an observant Opus Dei Catholic who has himself made sympathetic overtures on behalf of the Traditional Latin Mass – quickly apologised, claiming ignorance of Fuentes and blaming a now-resigned aide for the script, the backlash included resignations from his “antisemitism task force” as well as a board member resigning, exposing the deepening rift between the old-guard establishment and the surging “America First” insurgents.
What began as a defence of a “close friend” [Carlson] swiftly revealed the deeper fault line now splitting the American Right in two – and, once again, we must observe how the traditionalist Catholic current runs prominently straight through both sides of the divide.
Related to this, is how the American Left-Right divide we know today is, in truth, a comparatively recent invention: the conservative South was Democratic well into the 20th century. By the 1950s, however, a distinct intellectual Right had begun to crystallise – and its first great prophet was Russell Kirk, a convert to Catholicism who attended the Latin Mass daily when he could.
From his rambling Gothic house in rural Michigan, Kirk wrote The Conservative Mind (1953), a book that almost single-handedly gave American conservatism a traditionalist, old-world flavour and a respectable genealogy stretching back to Burke, Aquinas and Aristotle.
At the height of his influence he advised presidents, shaped the 1964 presidential campaign of Republican candidate Barry Goldwater – and warned ceaselessly against the “behemoth state” and the deracinating acids of modernity.
Iconically archaic, Kirk would be found dressed in his three-piece tweed suit, sitting at the desk of his nostalgically-built home “Piety Hill” where he frequently hosted the homeless – a living rebuke to the suburban industrial optimism of Eisenhower’s America.
William F Buckley Jr – no convert, rather an Irish-German American who was educated in English Catholic independent schools – took a different path. From the Manhattan office that doubled as the headquarters of National Review (the influential magazine he founded which would be regularly read by sitting presidents), he forged what became known as “fusionism”: a grand alliance of traditionalists, libertarians and anti-communist ex-Trotskyists prepared to fight the Cold War by almost any means.
Buckley’s fusionism would come to dominate the thinking of the Thatcher and Reagan administrations. He continued attending the Latin Mass throughout his life, even arranging for a private Tridentine rite said weekly in a chapel near his Stamford home by a sympathetic priest.
Both Kirk and Buckley grieved the liturgical upheaval. Kirk lamented the replacement of Latin by “awkward English” and the “tampering with the traditional liturgy”, warning that such changes inflicted “strife and change” upon the Church. He was a founding member of Una Voce America, a branch of the lay traditional Catholic advocacy organisation now led by English academic Joseph Shaw, who is also chair of the Latin Mass Society.
Buckley, more diplomatically, simply continued to attend the Tridentine Mass privately, though he hosted traditionalist critics on Firing Line – his prime-time high-brow TV discussion show – and published anguished symposia in National Review on the “loss of the sacred”.
Yet the political conclusions of these two men diverged sharply. Kirk’s was a parochial, sacramental conservatism of little platoons and permanent things. Buckley’s – shaped by his years in the CIA and his friendships with the neoconservative ex-leftists – became a compromise and consensus model. He criticised multiculturalism as a “religion”, but the alliances he forged and ideas he put forth nevertheless built an inclusive, fighting faith meant to steer the American empire, global finance and perpetual war against the Evil One abroad.
Kirk’s lineage runs forward to Pat Buchanan. He was another daily Mass-goer and defiant devotee of the old rite whose 1992 presidential campaign voiced themes more conservative-minded – trade protection, immigration restriction, hostility to forever wars and “Zionist” funding) – than the Buckleyite era; a baton which would eventually be taken over by the “America First” movement.
Buchanan’s traditionalism was unapologetic: he defended the Latin Mass in print, and warned that a conservatism that forgot Christendom would perish. Though he was viciously attacked – in a pre-Internet age, he was effectively frozen out of the mainstream – his movement can be considered a prefiguration of the Carlson-Fuentes axis today.
Buckley’s heirs, by contrast, are the colour-blind, market-worshipping, fiercely Zionist conservatives of so-called “Conservative Inc.” (the label an accusation of its leaders’ compromised, establishment connections).
This faction – the opposite side of the conflict to Fuentes, Owens and Carlson’s loosely and tenuously united “America First” coalition – is broadly unconcerned about demographic change and presents itself as unwaveringly committed to particularly secular and liberal interpretations of America’s founding philosophy and principles.
Its leaders are behind the National Review of today: the Daily Wire (led by Ben Shapiro) and constitute much of The Heritage Foundation’s leadership class.
For decades the Buckley dispensation reigned supreme: Kirk, Buchanan and their successors were excommunicated as “paleocons” or worse. Yet the wind has shifted with startling speed. Nick Fuentes’s America First Political Action Conference drew thousands in 2024; his nightly livestream routinely exceeds 100,000 concurrent viewers – numbers that dwarf the legacy conservative outlets on the same platforms. On Instagram his offensive and brazen tirades are a sensation with youth tired of overcorrect speech.
Meanwhile, Tucker Carlson – who while not Catholic is a Christian – commands the largest audience of any political commentator in America and advances many of the arguments made by America First Christian nationalists like Fuentes.
Candace Owens – baptised and confirmed in 2024, and a regular at the Latin Mass – has seen her YouTube channel surge past 5.5 million subscribers while she denounces “Frankism” and the “pornographic” nature of liberal modernity.
Even those who try to straddle the divide feel the gravitational pull. Michael Knowles – another traditional Latin Mass Catholic who has appeared in the Mass of the Ages films advocating its place in the Church – is one of the most influential political commentators in America. He can boast 2.5 million subscribers on YouTube and over 1.26 billion cumulative views there.
Working for Shapiro’s Daily Wire, Knowles is conspicuously mute on the debates that serve today as the primary proxy conflict territory between the two American conservative factions: Zionism and interventionism. But he quite radically quotes Aquinas and Louis IX on the state’s duty to suppress public blasphemy and has called for pornography to be banned outright (a heinous affront to civil liberties for Buckley-era liberal conservatives). He is, in effect, the highest-profile post-liberal voice inside the old citadel.
So there you have it, the American Right has been shaped – divided, energised and very nearly conquered – by a thin scarlet thread of traditionalist Catholicism. The Mass attended by scarcely one per cent of the Church’s children has, again and again, supplied the intellectual energy for conservatism’s most consequential rebellions and counter-rebellions.
As a result, one thing is quite clear: the kingmakers still wear mantillas – or, at the very least, remember what a mantilla is for.
New York Times, Olivia Nuzzi and Vanity Fair Will Part Ways, Jessica Testa, Dec. 5, 2025, Condé Nast, the magazine’s parent company, said her contract would expire at the end of the year.
Vanity Fair will be parting ways with Olivia Nuzzi, the magazine’s short-lived West Coast editor, in an effort to extricate itself from a storm of controversy over her past romantic relationship with Robert F. Kennedy Jr., the health secretary.
“Vanity Fair and Olivia Nuzzi have mutually agreed, in the best interest of the magazine, to let her contract expire at the end of the year,” Condé Nast, the publisher of Vanity Fair, and Ms. Nuzzi said in a joint statement on Friday.
The status of Ms. Nuzzi’s contract had been the subject of speculation for weeks after the publication was “taken by surprise” by alarming new claims from Ms. Nuzzi’s former fiancé, the journalist Ryan Lizza, that her involvement with Mr. Kennedy’s presidential campaign was deeper than she had disclosed. Mr. Lizza also accused her of having another relationship with a reporting subject.
In a separate statement, Ms. Nuzzi said, “I love Vanity Fair, and this decision was made out of respect for the staff and faith in the future of the publication.”
The personal relationship between Ms. Nuzzi and Mr. Kennedy has been known since September 2024. Ms. Nuzzi was the Washington correspondent for New York magazine at the time and had written a profile of Mr. Kennedy while he campaigned for president.
A month later, New York magazine fired Ms. Nuzzi, although it said a law firm it had hired to conduct an investigation had found “no inaccuracies nor evidence of bias” in her 2024 campaign coverage.
Ms. Nuzzi then went into a self-described “exile” in Malibu, Calif., publicly re-emerging only when Vanity Fair hired her in September — part of a wave of splashy appointments made by the magazine’s new global head of editorial content, Mark Guiducci.
In November, on the same day Vanity Fair published an excerpt from Ms. Nuzzi’s new memoir, “American Canto,” Mr. Lizza began publishing a still ongoing series on Substack about what he had learned about the affair.
“Part 1” was free, though subsequent updates have required readers to pay Mr. Lizza $9.99 per month or $79.99 per year. On Wednesday, he published what he described as a “strategy memo” written by Ms. Nuzzi “to Bobby” during his campaign. Mr. Lizza has not yet disclosed how he came to possess the memo.Ms. Nuzzi has called his weeks of posts “obsessive and violating fan fiction-slash-revenge porn.”
New York Times, Elon Musk’s X Hit With $140 Million Fine in Europe, Adam Satariano and Kate Conger, Dec. 6, 2025 (print ed.). The case over online transparency has become a point of contention between the European Union and the Trump administration.
The European Union fined X, the social media company owned by Elon Musk, above, $140 million on Friday for violating one of the bloc’s major laws targeting the technology industry. The case has been seen as a test of European officials’ willingness to aggressively regulate tech companies at the risk of antagonizing the Trump administration.
X is the first company to be fined under the European Union’s Digital Services Act, a sweeping law intended to force large internet companies to protect their platforms against manipulation and illicit content. The Trump administration has criticized the policy as an attack on free speech and American tech firms.
Regulators in Brussels said the penalty against X was not about free speech but about the company’s lack of controls to prevent the platform from being abused. That included X’s “deceptive design” that allowed users to mislead others about their identities, opaque advertising practices and refusal to provide independent researchers with access to public data.
“Deceiving users with blue check marks, obscuring information on ads and shutting out researchers have no place online in the E.U.,” said Henna Virkkunen, the executive vice president for tech sovereignty, security and democracy for the European Commission, the bloc’s executive arm, in a statement. “We are holding X responsible for undermining users’ rights and evading accountability.”
X did not respond to requests for comment. Mr. Musk can appeal the ruling, which could set up a prolonged legal battle.
The fine of 120 million euros is smaller than others issued in recent years by E.U. regulators against large tech companies and modest relative to Mr. Musk’s overall wealth of more than $450 billion. A European Commission spokesman said the amount was proportionate to X’s violations.
The penalty landed at a delicate moment for the European Union’s relationship with the United States on issues like the war in Ukraine. Earlier on Friday, the White House published an annual national security strategy, warning that Europe risked “civilizational erasure” for policies seen as undermining liberty, sovereignty and free speech.
Several Trump administration officials posted on X in defense of Mr. Musk’s platform. Marco Rubio, the U.S. secretary of state, said the penalty was an attack on “the American people by foreign governments.” Brendan Carr, the chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, criticized Europe for “suffocating regulations.”
“The E.U. should be supporting free speech not attacking American companies over garbage,” Vice President JD Vance said ahead of the announcement on Thursday.Editors’ PicksWhat Should I Do About the Bully in My Social Circle?My Father Had an Affair While My Mother Was Dying. Should I Tell My Siblings?5 New and Renewed Hotels in the Caribbean,
Mr. Musk responded to Mr. Vance: “Much appreciated.”
The X penalty had been expected to be announced earlier this year, but it was delayed during trade negotiations between the European Union and United States.
The fine may not be the last that X faces in Brussels. A second, more far-reaching investigation is underway into the company’s hands-off approach to policing content.
The European Union is also debating dialing back some regulation of the tech industry to encourage economic growth and advancements in areas like artificial intelligence. But officials have said they remain committed to enforcing laws like the Digital Services Act.
The digital law was passed in 2022 to create more oversight of social media, which many European officials blame for exacerbating political divisions and disinformation. The inquiry into X, which started in 2023, was one of the first major announced cases.
In addition to Mr. Musk’s ties to the Trump administration, he has widening influence in Europe. One of his companies, Starlink, provides key satellite communication technology to Ukrainian troops fighting Russia. Mr. Musk has also become involved in European politics, backing far-right groups like the Alternative for Germany party and the British anti-immigration activist Tommy Robinson.
Dec. 5
U.S. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, right, U.S. Sen. Mark Kelly, center, and President Trump (File photos).
Letters from an American, Historical Commentary: December 4, 2025 [U.S. Boat Attacks Scandal, Hearing], Heather Cox Richardson, right, Dec. 5, 2025. “What I saw in that room was one of the most troubling things I’ve seen in my time in public service,” Representative Jim Himes (D-CT), the top Democrat on the House Intelligence committee, said. “You have two individuals in clear distress without any means of locomotion, with a destroyed vessel,... killed by the United States.”
Himes, left, was talking about a video of a U.S. strike against two survivors of a first strike in the Caribbean on a small boat allegedly carrying cocaine to the U.S. Today Admiral Frank “Mitch” Bradley, the Special Operations commander who ordered the strike, and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Dan Caine briefed members of Congress in a closed-door session on the events of that day.
The U.S. attacked the boat on September 2, in an unannounced operation against what it claims are drug runners, meaning the men on the boat had no way of knowing they were targets. After the strike, the administration announced it had begun strikes against what it insists are drug boats manned by gang members.
The administration says President Donald Trump has “determined” that the U.S. is in a formal armed conflict with drug cartels and that those in the boats are formally “combatants,” but it has not reinforced those claims with the legal authority they need. After informing Congress of the strikes on September 4 to ensure Congress was “fully informed, consistent with the War Powers Resolution,” Trump has since ignored that resolution, which requires congressional approval for hostile actions to continue longer than 60 days, a deadline that passed in early November.
As Charlie Savage explained today in the New York Times, legal experts say this operation is not lawful. Civilians engaged in trade—even illicit trade—are not enemy combatants. For that matter, the public, so far, has seen no hard evidence but only heard the administration’s claim that the boats are engaged in drug trafficking.
Katie Bo Lillis, Natasha Bertrand, and Haley Britzky of CNN explained that the initial strike of September 2 killed nine of the eleven people on the boat immediately. It set the vessel on fire and split it in half, capsizing it and leaving two survivors clinging to the wreckage. For the next 41 minutes, U.S. officers watched as the men struggled to right what was left of the boat. Then, rather than rescuing the two men, Admiral Bradley ordered a second strike that killed them, now saying he intended to destroy the vessel, which the administration claims was a military target.
Shelby Holliday and Alexander Ward of the Wall Street Journal reported last night that Bradley would tell Congress that the men appeared to be communicating by radio with other “enemy” vessels in the area and thus were still combatants, an argument defense officials have been making for weeks now.
But Bradley, right, did not say that today. Instead, he admitted the men were in no position to communicate with other vessels. He told congressional lawmakers that he ordered the strike because the vessel appeared to be afloat thanks to packages of cocaine and that the survivors could have floated to safety and continued to traffic the drugs.
A source told the CNN reporters that Bradley’s rationale was “f*cking insane.”
Even if the U.S. is at war with drug traffickers—a dubious argument—it is a war crime to kill individuals who are “outside of combat,” no longer posing an imminent threat. It’s hard to imagine that two unarmed, shipwrecked men trying to right the remains of a capsized boat in the ocean hundreds of miles from the U.S. posed a threat.
While some Republicans—notably Senator Tom Cotton of Arkansas— are defending the strike, Senator Rand Paul (R-KY) said: “There is a difference between being accused of being a bad guy and being a bad guy. It is called the presumption of innocence. It is called due process. It is called, basically, justice that our country was founded upon.”
Paul, left, told MS NOW columnist Eric Michael Garcia he wanted Hegseth to testify before Congress under oath, saying that “Congress, if they had any kind of gumption at all, would not be allow[ing the] administration to summarily execute people that are suspected of a crime.” He said he wanted the full video of the strikes released: “[I]f the public sees images of people clinging to boat debris and being blown up, I think that there is a chance that finally, the public will get interested enough in this to stop this.”
Senator Jack Reed (D-RI), right, the top-ranking Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee, said: “I am deeply disturbed by what I saw this morning. 
The Department of Defense has no choice but to release the complete, unedited footage of the September 2nd strike, as the President has agreed to do. This briefing confirmed my worst fears about the nature of the Trump Administration’s military activities, and demonstrates exactly why the Senate Armed Services Committee has repeatedly requested—and been denied—fundamental information, documents, and facts about this operation. This must and will be [only the] beginning of our investigation into this incident.”
As of this morning, the U.S. had carried out more than 20 strikes on the small boats the president says are run by “narco-terrorists,” killing at least 87 people.
This evening, Andrew Kolvet of Turning Point USA posted on social media: “Every new attack aimed at Pete Hegseth makes me want another narco drug boat blown up and sent to the bottom of the ocean.”
Hegseth quoted Kolvet and commented: “Your wish is our command, Andrew. Just sunk another narco boat.”
U.S. Southern Command confirmed the strike against a small boat in the eastern Pacific, saying that “[i]ntelligence confirmed that the vessel was carrying illicit narcotics and transiting along a known narco-trafficking route…. Four male narco-terrorists aboard the vessel were killed.”
New York Times, News Analysis: The Furor Over Trump’s Boat Attacks and a Particular Follow-Up Strike, Explained, Charlie Savage, Dec. 5, 2025 (print ed.). Bipartisan congressional oversight is underway, but for now is focusing on narrow details about one missile instead of broader legal issues.
The House and Senate Armed Services Committees are scrutinizing a Sept. 2 attack by the U.S. military on a speedboat in the Caribbean Sea that the Trump administration has claimed was smuggling drugs — and especially whether a decision to fire a second missile at the vessel, which killed two survivors of the first blast, was a war crime.
The oversight effort is dissecting the specific orders of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and the Special Operations commander overseeing the attack, Adm. Frank M. Bradley, right. The admiral and Gen. Dan Caine, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, are scheduled to go to Capitol Hill on Thursday to answer questions about the strike.
A broad range of legal experts argue that the killings have been murders.
The Trump administration insists that its lethal campaign, including the second strike on Sept. 2, is lawful.
Here is a closer look.What is the boat attacks operation?
President Trump has ordered the military to kill people on boats in international waters who are suspected of smuggling narcotics on behalf of drug cartels. Since Sept. 2, the administration has announced 21 such attacks in the Caribbean Sea and the eastern Pacific Ocean that have killed 83 people.
This is a change from the longstanding U.S. approach of having the Coast Guard intercept such vessels and, if suspicions prove accurate, seize illicit cargos and arrest the people on board. The legality of the new policy has been widely disputed.
The Contrarian, Opinion: Undaunted Veteran Stands Up to MAGA Bullies, Jennifer Rubin, right, Dec. 5, 2025. Senator Mark Kelly is a national treasure.
Since he posted a video along with five fellow Democrats with military or intelligence experience advising U.S. military personnel to reject illegal orders, Sen. Mark Kelly (D-Ariz.) has been on fire. He has roundly skewered Donald Trump for threatening to execute him; reminded lawmakers and the public that the U.S. is bound by domestic and international laws; lambasted Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth as manifestly unqualified; demanded a full inquiry into the military’s Sept. 2 strikes, which allegedly murdered shipwrecked survivors posing no threat to Americans; and explained the finding of the Defense Department Inspector General investigating Signalgate.
The “don’t follow illegal orders” video, which Kelly later said he was motivated to participate in due to Trump’s repeated statements that he expected the military to carry out illegal orders, was exceptionally prescient:@senslotkinSen. Elissa Slotkin on Instagram: "We want to speak directly to…
Trump and his MAGA minions freaked out, calling Kelly and his colleagues “seditious” and suggesting the appropriate punishment was “DEATH!” Trump and his horrifically incompetent defense secretary (whom Kelly compared to a “12-year old playing Army”) settled on a bogus investigation, which should go nowhere—given that the lawmakers were simply stating black letter law.
Kelly, a retired Navy captain and astronaut, swiftly responded to the death threat issued to him and his colleagues with a statement: “If this is meant to intimidate me and other members of Congress from doing our jobs and holding this administration accountable, it won’t work.” He added:
I have given too much to this country to be silenced by bullies who care more about their own power than protecting the Constitution.
He went on to make clear on Rachel Maddow’s show that he would not shy away from holding Trump accountable for his actions:
Last Sunday, Kelly hammered Trump again. “We have a president who doesn’t understand the Constitution, who installed an unqualified Secretary of Defense. I cannot think of a Secretary of Defense in the history of our country that is less qualified than Pete Hegseth. He should not be in this position,” Kelly declared on State of the Union. “He should have been fired after Signalgate.” He reiterated, “These guys don’t scare me. They’re not serious people. I mean, the President of the United States and the Secretary of Defense. Neither of them.”
On Meet the Press, he was equally defiant:
Pete Hegseth says that I should be court-martialed. I mean, how ridiculous is this? We say, ‘follow the law,’ and this is their response? These are not serious people. And, Kristen, this is meant to just intimidate us. We’re sticking up for the Constitution here, and the rule of law, and they’re saying these folks should be executed for doing that.
On Monday, Kelly delivered a blistering critique of Trump, providing a primer for Americans on the law and the futility of Trump’s bullying:
Throughout his entire career—in business, reality TV, and politics—Donald Trump has had one and only one play: bully his opponents into silence. He did it as a failed casino owner who bankrupted his properties and screwed over his contractors. He did it as a reality TV host known for firing people. And he has done it as a President who tries every day to intimidate people, with no regard for the rights or well-being of the American people.
I’ll say this for him: while he’s never seemed to do much else right, for most of Donald Trump’s career, bullying people has worked out for him. But not now. Because I won’t let it. The American people won’t let it. President Trump is trying to silence me—threatening to kill me— for saying what is true. He’s sent his Secretary of Defense after me. And it’s not going to work.”
In response to the news of the so-called second strike, Kelly declared that Hegseth was the one who needed to answer questions under oath.
As a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, he will be among those conducting the oversight investigation. On Monday, he said that “folks in the military need to understand… the Law of the Sea, the Geneva Conventions, what the law says.” If there were survivors “clinging to a damaged vessel” a strike would be “over a line,” he observed.
On Tuesday, Kelly offered up even more damning information: the Pentagon lawyer who briefed Congress months ago on the Sept. 2 incident did not say anything about a second strike. “He didn’t share all the information with us,” Kelly said on Morning Joe. He added, “We asked a bunch of questions. They seemed to me to be sort of evasive. Their legal analysis about this entire operation has a bunch of holes in it.” That lack of candor is consistent with the regime’s release of a video of the strike that omitted the second strike and Hegseth’s changing narrative as to whether he witnessed the strikes.
After Trump pardoned the former Honduran president previously sentenced to 45 years for his role in smuggling more than 400 tons of cocaine into the country, Kelly slapped down Trump on social media. He asked the obvious question: “If Trump wants to stop drug traffickers, why did he just pardon the guy convicted in one of the biggest narco cases in U.S. history?”
On the following day, Wednesday, Kelly, right, told the Wall Street Journal that the Pentagon’s IG who investigated Signalgate found Hegseth “should not be using his cellphone and putting … this kind of information on an unclassified system.” Contrary to Hegseth’s patently absurd argument that the material was not sensitive, the data could have put our service people at risk:
The watchdog report states that Hegseth declined to sit for an interview with the inspector general, instead sending a written statement, according to a person with knowledge of the document. In that statement, Hegseth, left, claimed that he intentionally declassified information that wouldn’t pose a threat to servicemembers or the mission, the person said.
However, the report found that the operational details he shared on Signal would have posed a risk to troops and the mission if it had been intercepted, according to the person and another person briefed on the report.
Signalgate seems to sum up Hegseth’s character flaws—his cowardice (refusing to sit for an interview), his recklessness (having used an ins
No one has been more fearless, impassioned, and authoritative on the abject incompetence and lawlessness of the regime’s use of the military than Senator Mark Kelly.
Undaunted, unapologetic, and unafraid in the face of Trump’s insults and threats, Kelly continues to inform his fellow Americans about the expectations we set for and expect from our military. His experience makes him an authoritative figure to explain just how badly Trump has stained the reputation of our military. We are all grateful for his service, and grateful that Kelly will be part of the committee investigating this entire atrocious escapade.
Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: Chaos Is Coming, Bill Kristol, Andrew Egger and Jim Swift, Dec. 5, 2025. America helped keep the (relative) peace for 80 years. Not anymore. Happy Friday.
Quick Hits
THE DOUBLE-TAP POST-OP: There are many crazy things about the double-tap boat strike that has plunged the Pentagon into still-deeper controversy over its campaign against Caribbean drug runners. But the craziest may be that it’s all on camera. Yesterday, members of Congress got to view the classified footage, and—this may shock you—Republicans and Democrats came away with very different interpretations of what it showed.
Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.), right, who chairs the Senate Intelligence Committee, said the video showed an attack that had been “righteous” and 
“highly lawful.” The survivors of the first strike, he said, had been trying to flip a boat “loaded with drugs bound for the United States,” which made them still-legal targets.
But Rep. Adam Smith (D-Wash.), the ranking Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee, had a starkly different view. The survivors who were sitting atop the capsized boat when the military launched its second strike looked like “two classically shipwrecked people,” he told the New Republic yesterday. It was, he said, a “highly questionable decision that these two people on that obviously incapacitated vessel were still in any kind of fight.”
Earlier this week, President Trump told reporters that “we’d certainly release” the now-classified footage. He did not specify when. But we know President Trump is good to his word.
U.S. Crime, Courts, Justice
New York Times, Trump Administration Updates: Grand Jury Declines to Reindict James, Staff Reports, Dec. 5, 2025. Where things stand:
Emptywheel, Analysis: What's Not Being Said about the Alleged Pipe Bomber, Emptywheel (Marcy Wheeler, right), Dec. 4, 2025. The arrest affidavit for Brian Cole, above, now accused of laying the pipe bombs discovered on January 6, includes only purchase records and location information. There's not a single data point between the time Trump announced the January 6 rally on December 19 and Cole's presence on Capitol Hill on January 5, 2021.
Security camera footage of pipe bomb suspect during the insurrection attacks surrounding the U.S. presidential vote certification by Congress on Jan. 6, 2021 resulting in the launch of the Biden presidency following the 2020 elections ending the Trump presidency for the next four years.
New York Times, Suspect Arrested in Inquiry Into Pipe Bombs in D.C. Ahead of Jan. 6 Riot, Alan Feuer, Glenn Thrush and Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs, Dec. 5, 2025 (print ed.). The suspect was described as a 30-year-old man from Prince William County, Va. His arrest could ultimately provide an answer to one of the mysteries arising from the Jan. 6. attack.
Federal agents arrested a Virginia man on Thursday on charges that he planted two pipe bombs on Capitol Hill the night before Jan. 6, 2021, a breakthrough that came after years of false leads and rampant conspiracy theories — some promoted by the same F.B.I. leaders who took credit for cracking the case.
The man, Brian Cole Jr., 30, has been charged with transporting explosive materials across state lines and with the attempted destruction of buildings with explosives, according to court papers filed in Federal District Court in Washington. He was expected to appear there in front of a judge on Friday.
The arrest of Mr. Cole, taken into custody on Thursday morning at the home he shared with his parents in suburban Woodbridge, provided potential closure for an enduring and politically charged mystery: Who planted bombs outside the national headquarters of the Republican and Democratic parties on the eve of congressional certification of Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s 2020 victory?
Neither device exploded. But their discovery around 1 p.m. on Jan. 6 added to the fear and confusion on a day when a pro-Trump mob stormed the Capitol, and fueled conspiracy theories among Trump surrogates — the now-deputy F.B.I. director among them — that it was an inside job intended to discredit the right.
U.S. Courts, Elections, Democracy
New York Times, Supreme Court Clears the Way for Republican-Friendly Texas Voting Maps, Abbie VanSickle, Dec. 5, 2025 (print ed.). Texas officials had asked the court to allow the state to use the new maps in the midterm elections, part of a push by President Trump to gain a partisan advantage.
The Supreme Court cleared the way on Thursday for Texas lawmakers to use newly redrawn congressional maps favoring Republicans in the 2026 midterm elections.
The decision overturns, at least for now, a lower-court ruling that the new maps were likely an unconstitutional racial gerrymander. That decision had blocked lawmakers from using the maps in the midterms.
The Supreme Court’s order comes days before a Dec. 8 deadline for candidates to file to run for office in Texas. It marks a victory for Texas Republicans and for President Trump, who has pushed Republican-led states to revise their congressional maps to try to secure G.O.P. victories in the midterms.
The ruling also adds to the growing list of successes for the Trump administration before the justices, particularly on their emergency docket of cases heard without oral arguments, where the court’s orders are intended to be merely interim. Critics refer to it as the “shadow docket” and note the temporary decisions can have broad consequences.
In a five-paragraph order, the majority wrote that Texas was “likely to succeed on the merits of its claim” that a lower court had wrongly blocked the new maps. The trial court, the majority wrote, had “improperly inserted itself into an active primary campaign, causing much confusion and upsetting the delicate federal-state balance in elections.”
The court’s order did not include a vote count, which is typical for rulings on such emergency applications. Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. wrote a concurrence, adding that he joined the majority’s decision to allow the Texas maps. Two other conservatives, Justices Clarence Thomas and Neil M. Gorsuch, joined him.
In a 17-page dissent, Justice Elena Kagan, joined by the court’s two other liberals, argued that the majority had wrongly overturned a careful, 160-page lower court ruling, “based on its perusal, over a holiday weekend, of a cold paper record.”
“We are a higher court than the district court, but we are not a better one when it comes to making such a fact-based decision,” she wrote.
Justice Kagan wrote that the Supreme Court’s order “disserves the millions of Texans whom the district court found were assigned to their new districts based on their race,” adding that “because this court’s precedents and our Constitution demand better, I respectfully dissent.”
The ruling outlines the state of play while litigation over the map continues through the lower courts — including potentially returning to the Supreme Court for further consideration. But given the deadline, the order means the map will be used for the key 2026 vote.
New York Times, Remapping Florida Could Be Huge for Republicans. But Some Aren’t in a Rush, Patricia Mazzei and Nick Corasaniti, Dec. 5, 2025 (print ed.).Redistricting talks in Florida got off to a slow start on Thursday, as state lawmakers grapple with political and legal questions amid internal power struggles.
Florida could yield a major payoff for Republicans as President Trump pushes states to redraw congressional districts in time for the 2026 midterms. A new map could include as many as five new red, or reddish, districts, helping Republicans keep control of the House.
Yet some of the state’s Republican leaders appear in no rush to get started, as they weigh political and unique legal questions amid internal power struggles.
A House redistricting committee met for the first time in Tallahassee, Fla., on Thursday, with members saying they were ready to get to work. But a month before the annual lawmaking session begins, neither Gov. Ron DeSantis nor legislators have proposed any maps. The State Senate has not even started studying the issue.
State Representative Mike Redondo, a Miami Republican and the House committee chairman, said that if the chamber does propose a new map, it will be by the end of the regular session in March. Any later would be “irresponsible,” he said.
More On U.S. Foreign Policy, National Security, Global Affairs
Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: The New World Disorder, William Kristol, right, Dec. 5, 2025. Bob Kagan is a leading commentator on and historian of American foreign policy. In a conversation I had with him earlier this week, he argues that Trump’s second term could well prove a decisive break from the last eight decades of American foreign policy. It’s likely, he argues, to bring about a new world disorder very different from what we’ve experienced in our lifetimes.
Kagan’s bracing account of where we are and where we might be heading is very much worth your attention, and I provide some very lightly edited excerpts here. You can (and should!) watch or listen to it, or read the transcript.
Kagan on whether we’re entering a new period of history:
Normally, wearing my historian hat, I’m reluctant to say things have changed radically, because there’s usually tremendous continuity. And that’s particularly been true of American foreign policy since the end of the Second World War. It’s not that there haven’t been huge debates about American foreign policy, but mostly American policy, with a new administration, regardless of the rhetoric they’ve run on, is about 10 percent one way or 10 percent the other way in terms of our foreign policy.
But now I think we’re at a moment of a real break and a real discontinuity—and the beginning of a return to, I think the best way to put it is, “normal” international relations. Normal international relations are a very dangerous situation. We sort of take for granted the degree of peace that we’ve enjoyed over the past eight decades, the degree of prosperity, etc. And we sort of think that’s the norm. The norm is actually a lot more like what the world looked like before 1945. Certainly, the previous hundred years were one of constant great-power warfare. And I don’t think people are really quite ready for that, for the world that we’re now moving into.
On the consequences for the geopolitical order when the United States is an unreliable ally:
Trump has put us back in the position that we were in the ‘20s and ‘30s. We could help a country if we decide to help them. We don’t have to help them if we don’t decide to help them. This year we’re aligned with these guys; this year we’re aligned with that guy.
But it’s the permanence and reliability of the [post-1945] system that has been such a great force for peace.
For instance, the fact that the British could not necessarily be relied upon to come to France’s defense in 1914 had a huge impact on German calculations. If the Kaiser had known for sure that the British were going to come in on the side of the French, he would not have gone to war.
This whole notion that we are trapped into wars by the commitments we make to our allies—I think the opposite of that is true. We have not had to fight for any treaty ally. It is the reliability of the commitment that is the source of stability. And right now, we are absolutely anything but reliable.
On threats we face in Europe and Asia:
It’s hard to really get in the heads of both Putin and Xi Jinping. But I would say it would be logical for them to believe that they can’t count on the United States being Trumpy forever, that certainly the history of the United States is one where eventually we come back, and then we go to war and we defeat you.
In which case, I would say the urgency of getting done what you need to get done if you’re Putin is more than people think. I think there’s a lot of assumptions that whatever happens in Ukraine, he’s going to need years to deal with it. By the way, exactly the same arguments that were made about Japan in the 1930s—“It’ll take a while. We’ll have years to be ready for the next thing.”
It is clear that Putin’s building up a military that is not only about Ukraine, but also about Europe. And what some people are calling “phase zero operations” in Europe, which are really extensive, need to be understood as probes of European defense capabilities. And so if we have three years of Trump, I wonder whether Putin in particular—but maybe also Xi—thinks this is the time to make the move before the Americans have recovered their understanding of what needs to be done.
On Trump’s rejection of liberal principles:
One of the aspects of the turning point today is precisely that Trump, I think, is the first post–World War II president who does not share those basic liberal values. He doesn’t share them in terms of American domestic politics. And in foreign policy, his movement is also hostile to liberalism. They support all kinds of anti-liberal movements and governments around the world. And so that essential sort of ideological binding [of a commitment to liberalism broadly understood], which I think was kind of an essential glue to the whole system—that is gone.
All the presidents since World War II have shared that liberal outlook. So even Barack Obama, who I think was not happy with the American grand strategy—at the end of the day, he was unwilling to basically turn against the entire order in the same way. And that’s what’s different about Trump. He is willing to turn against the order.
Not a lot of happy talk in my conversation with Kagan, but important talk. Do watch, listen to, or read the transcript of the whole thing.
Emptywheel, Analysis: SignalGate: "This Chat's Kinda Dead," Emptywheel (Marcy Wheeler, right), Dec. 4, 2025. JD Vance's response to the silence that followed Jeffrey Goldberg's withdrawl from the Houthi Signal chat back in March was to ask where all the cool kids had gone.
DOD IG has released the unclassified version of the report confirming what was clear months ago: Whiskey Pete Hegseth has no business leading DOD.He was wildly uncooperative with the investigation, refusing to be interviewed, refusing to let DOD inspect his phone, refusing to turn over other threads.But Whiskey Pete may not look quite as stupid as JD Vance.You see, Whiskey Pete turned over the Signal chat that was left on his phone after all the autodeleting these scofflaws had been doing. Most of the thread was gone. But there was a single text that post-dated Jeffrey Goldberg’s departure from the list, something the Deputy General Counsel used to suggest the Atlantic thread might not be reliable (a claim DOD IG refused to put in the body of the report because, some people still refuse bullshit).After Jeff Goldberg left the group, JD Vance said, “This chat’s kind of dead. Anything going on?” One after another participant on the thread changed their ID, perhaps in hopes … I don’t know what they fuck they were thinking.
These are dumb people.
No one more so, though, than JD.
Emptywheel, Analysis: The Hacking Hole Where John Bolton Should Be, Emptywheel (Marcy Wheeler, right), Dec. 4, 2025. The progression of Iranian efforts to hack and assassinate various Trump One officials looks different when you put all the timelines together.
Unless DOJ disguised him, the hack of John Bolton described in his indictment didn’t show up in the Iranian hack-and-leak indictment. It should have. After listing the 2022 attempt to assassinate Bolton (where he is described as “a former US National Security Advisor,” the indictment lists a slew of people that Iran IRGC attempted to hack (starting in 2020) and (starting in 2021) nine people it succeeded in hacking before it hacked Roger Stone and four other Trump flunkies.
Bolton should have, could have, been included along with those nine people.As the (nifty color-coded) timeline below makes clear, Bolton told the FBI about the hack of him, on July 6, 2021, just as the Iranian hackers were setting up infrastructure to hack a set of people that include those, like Bolton, who played a role in the Qasem Soleimani assassination and Trump’s hardline first term approach with Iran.
To be sure, there are potentially good reasons why Bolton is not in there. There’s a sealed notice of related case in the Bolton docket (at docket entry 6), which could reflect charges against the people who hacked him, charges that might have been filed shortly after he alerted the FBI about the hack. Prosecutors could have left Bolton out to obscure that he told the FBI about the hack (and that therefore the FBI had been working backwards from that ever since, which is consistent with the timeline).
Prosecutors could have left Bolton out because the criminal investigation into him remained open.
All plausible reasons to leave him out.
But when you put the hack and assassination targeting of Bolton on the same timeline as the hack-and-leak targeting first fellow Iran hawks and then the Trump campaign, as well as the second alleged assassination attempt by Asif Merchant, all presumed to be IRGC, it raises further questions.
First, one reason I was interested in Merchant’s disclosure yesterday that he was under surveillance from the moment he arrived in the US in April 2024 is because it suggests US spies were already well aware of the efforts to retaliate for the Soleimani killing.
Indeed, the timeline explains how the FBI was magically able to get CHSes in both the Shahram Poursafi and the Asif Merchant attempt to hire hit squads to target Bolton and others: the FBI identified those people via those intercepts and flipped them early on in the plot.
It does raise questions about whether the FBI also knew of the hack-and-leak targeting Bolton in advance. The FBI would have been tracking the IRGC closely after their 2020 effort to attack Democrats under the guise of the Proud Boys (an earlier plot that makes the targeting of Proud Boy ally Roger Stone more interesting).
There is some separation between these two plots. While Poursafi eventually had access to non-public intelligence targeting Bolton, he didn’t even know Bolton’s home address at first, which he would have known if he had the emails stolen from Bolton available to him. But the hack-and-leak indictment, at least, lists as one of the goals of the hacking campaign, “to advance the IRGC’s malign activities, including ongoing efforts to avenge the death of Qasem Soleimani,” and the first hack included, of someone at State who led the Abraham Accords, implies that’s how they used, “travel, lodging and other information” from someone who was “a senior U.S. Department of State official at the time of Qasem Soleimani’s death and therefore of interest to the IRGC.” Near the tail end of the Poursafi complaint, so just weeks before the hack of that victim, Poursafi turned to another target.
More On U.S. Governance, Politics
President Trump (New York Times file photo by Kenny Holston).
New York Times, U.S. DOT Picks Air Traffic Contractor, Staff Reports, Dec. 5, 2025 (print ed.). The Department of Transportation and Federal Aviation Administration have announced that they selected Peraton, a national security and technology company, to oversee the Trump administration’s efforts to upgrade the U.S. air traffic control system.
Peraton will manage the initial rollout of $12.5 billion in infrastructure, technology and safety upgrades that Congress approved earlier this year; the administration is seeking another $20 billion in appropriations to finance the rest of the planned overhaul.
In other news:
After a day of scrutiny over the U.S. military’s boat strikes, U.S. Southern Command on Thursday evening announced that the military had killed four more people in a 22nd strike today, in the Eastern Pacific. In a social media post with an accompanying video, Southern Command said that the strike was carried out at the direction of Hegseth.
President Trump said earlier this evening that he had met the family of Staff Sgt. Andrew Wolfe, of the West Virginia Air National Guard, who was shot last week near the White House. Trump said that Wolfe, who is still in the hospital, was “hopefully getting better” and shared a photo on social media of himself with Wolfe’s parents and brother in the Oval Office. U.S. Army Specialist Sarah Beckstrom, who was also shot in the attack, died last week from her injuries.
Trump switches architects for his White House ballroom project. President Trump has hired a new architecture firm to oversee the design of his new ballroom, the White House said on Thursday, a move that comes after he had multiple disagreements with his original designer.
The president chose Shalom Baranes Associates, a Washington, D.C.-based firm that has designed other government buildings, to oversee the next phase of the project, a White House spokesman, Davis R. Ingle, said in a statement. He added that the firm would join “a team of experts to carry out President Trump’s vision on building what will be the greatest addition to the White House since the Oval Office.”
“Shalom is an accomplished architect whose work has shaped the architectural identity of our nation’s capital for decades, and his experience will be a great asset to the completion of this project,” Mr. Ingle said, referring to the firm’s founding principal, Shalom Baranes.
The selection comes after Mr. Trump had clashed with the original designer, McCrery Architects, as the president has insisted on increasing the size and scope of the ballroom on a short timeline.
James McCrery, who runs McCrery Architects, which is known for its work building Catholic churches, had personally presented the president with plans of a design that would be in keeping with the rest of the White House. But their visions diverged as Mr. Trump’s ambitions for the project grew.
Mr. Trump tore down the East Wing in October after pledging that the White House would not be touched, and is seeking to build a ballroom more than four times as large as the 20,000-square-foot one at his Mar-a-Lago club in Florida that inspired it.
And Mr. Trump’s insistence that the ballroom be completed before his term ends in 2029 has resulted in sloppy plans. The various plans released so far, including a rushed model made by a contractor, have included windows that collide into each other and a staircase to nowhere.
A White House official insisted that McCrery Architects was not being replaced, and that Mr. McCrery, who had pulled back from day-to-day involvement in the project in recent weeks, would serve as a “valuable consultant.”
e selection of the firm was a curious one for Mr. Trump. Shalom Baranes has been designing government buildings for several decades, and boasts awards for its commitment to historic preservation.
Earlier this year, Mr. Baranes was among several architects interviewed for an article in the Washington Business Journal about preserving the Brutalist architectural style of several of the capital’s federal buildings — and that Mr. Trump has expressed his dislike for.
“Advocating for the demolition of major structures on the basis of stylistic preferences strikes me as callously irresponsible,” Mr. Baranes said in the business journal article.
Mr. Baranes also donated to several Democratic campaigns, according to Federal Election Commission filings, including some of Mr. Trump’s most frequent political targets — Representative Nancy Pelosi, and former Presidents Joseph R. Biden Jr. and Barack Obama.
Tim Walz calls Trump’s tirade against Somalis in Minnesota ‘vile.’ Gov. Tim Walz of Minnesota on Thursday called President Trump’s recent tirades against Somalis in the state “vile,” warning that xenophobic rhetoric could lead to bloodshed. “This creates danger,” Mr. Walz, a Democrat, told reporters during a news conference. “We know how these things go, they start with taunts, they turn to violence.”
The governor made the remarks as his administration announced a new fiscal analysis suggesting that Minnesota will grapple with a nearly $3 billion state budget deficit in the 2028-2029 cycle. That forecast raised new questions about a fraud scandal targeting state social services programs.
In recent days, Mr. Trump has lashed out at Somali Americans, referring to them as “garbage” and saying, “we don’t want them in our country.” The president’s outburst followed news reports about the fraud scandal in Minnesota targeting safety net programs designed to feed vulnerable children, help people at risk of homelessness and provide therapy to children with autism. The vast majority of the 86 people federal prosecutors have charged in the fraud schemes are of Somali ancestry. Most are American citizens. So far, 59 people have been convicted in the cases.
Mr. Walz and budget experts in his administration said on Thursday that they had no way of determining precisely how hundreds of millions of dollars stolen in the fraud schemes had affected the projected budget shortfall. But the governor said an audit of 14 government programs would likely give state officials a clearer sense of the scope of the problem.
“We’ve acknowledged that this is serious, it needs to stop, it’s stopping, people are continuing to go to prison,” said Mr. Walz, who is running for a third term as governor next year.
Minnesota Republicans, who have not won a statewide race since 2006, have seized on the issue as they aim to win the governor’s office in 2026. But some struggled on Thursday to keep attention on the fraud scandal as they were asked about the president’s insults against tens of thousands of Somalis who live in Minnesota.
“If this had been taken care of early on, we wouldn’t be having this conversation at this time,” said Lisa Demuth, the speaker of the Minnesota House, who is among the Republicans running for governor.
Asked whether she agreed with the president’s assertion that Minnesota would be better off without Somalis, Ms. Demuth told reporters: “There is not an entire community that is bad, and there is not an entire community that is good.”
Minnesotans of Somali descent have said President Trump’s comments have left them feeling scared and hurt. The Trump administration this week deployed about 100 federal agents from to Minnesota with a mandate to detain Somalis who are subject to deportation.
On Thursday afternoon, U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement said that federal agents had detained “some of the worst of the worst criminal illegal aliens” during the operation in Minnesota, dubbed Operation Metro Surge, since Monday. The ICE statement included the names and photos of five men from Somalia, six from Mexico and one from El Salvador.
The Trump administration cuts the length of work permits for asylum seekers and refugees.Some migrants will now have to renew their work permits every 18 months instead of every five years.Credit...Damian Dovarganes/Associated Press
The Trump administration said it would reduce how long work permits are valid for refugees and asylum seekers, intensifying a sweeping crackdown on legal immigration after an Afghan national was charged with the shooting of two National Guard members in Washington.
The federal government will now require some migrants to renew their work permits every 18 months instead of every five years, according to a statement from U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services on Thursday. The agency said the change would help it screen and vet migrants more often, allowing it to identify people with “potentially harmful intent so they can be processed for removal.”
More On U.S. Media, Technology, Culture
Dec. 5
New York Times, New York Times Sues Pentagon Over First Amendment Rights, Erik Wemple, Washington, Dec. 5, 2025 (print ed.).The lawsuit said the Defense Department’s new set of rules for journalists “violates the Constitution’s guarantees of due process, freedom of speech and freedom of the press.”
Pentagon in a lawsuit on Thursday of infringing on the constitutional rights of journalists by imposing a set of new restrictions on reporting about the military.
In the suit, filed in the U.S. District Court in Washington, The Times argued that the Defense Department’s new policy violated the First Amendment and “seeks to restrict journalists’ ability to do what journalists have always done — ask questions of government employees and gather information to report stories that take the public beyond official pronouncements.”
The rules, which went into effect in October, are a stark departure from the previous ones, in both length and scope. They require reporters to sign a 21-page form that sets restrictions on journalistic activities, including requests for story tips and inquiries to Pentagon sources. Reporters who don’t comply could lose their press passes, and the Pentagon has accorded itself “unbridled discretion” to enforce the policy as it sees fit, according to the lawsuit.
The suit said that “reporting any information not approved by department officials” could lead to punishment, “regardless of whether such news gathering occurs on or off Pentagon grounds, and regardless of whether the information at issue is classified or unclassified.”
The complaint sought a court order halting enforcement of the rules and a declaration that the provisions “targeting the exercise of First Amendment rights” were unlawful. The Times has retained Theodore J. Boutrous, a First Amendment lawyer who has argued major media access cases in federal court. Julian E. Barnes, a Pentagon reporter for The Times, is listed as a plaintiff alongside the company.
The Pentagon did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
The new rules are the latest step in a monthslong effort by Pete Hegseth, the defense secretary, to curtail the access and privileges of the Pentagon press corps.
Mr. Hegseth arrived at the Pentagon in January after a bruising confirmation process that surfaced allegations of excessive drinking and sexual assault, which he said were untrue. Early in his tenure, Mr. Hegseth proposed evicting from the Pentagon a veteran reporter at NBC News who had contributed to some of the coverage.
The department later stripped several national news outlets of their workspaces in the Pentagon, offering them mostly to conservative outlets. Mr. Hegseth has also added limits on where reporters can roam in the complex.
A draft of the new restrictions first emerged in September, and was revised after pushback from lawyers representing news organizations. The final rules were released on Oct. 6, and more than a week later, dozens of credentialed journalists — including six from The Times — surrendered their badges instead of signing the document. The departing outlets have continued reporting on the military despite the access limits.
Many major news organizations released statements in October condemning the Pentagon policy as an incursion on the First Amendment. “The policy is without precedent and threatens core journalistic protections,” said a statement from ABC News, CBS News, CNN, Fox News Media and NBC News.
New York Times, Netflix to Buy Warner Bros. in $83 Billion Deal to Create a Streaming Giant, Brooks Barnes, Lauren Hirsch and Nicole Sperling, Dec. 5, 2025. The deal to acquire the Hollywood giant’s television and film studios as well as HBO Max will bulk up the world’s biggest paid streaming service.
Netflix announced plans on Friday to acquire Warner Bros. Discovery’s studio and streaming business, in a deal that will send shock waves through Hollywood and the broader media landscape.
The cash-and-stock deal values the business at $82.7 billion, including debt. The acquisition is expected to close after Warner Bros. Discovery carves out its cable unit, which the companies expected be completed by the third quarter of 2026. That means there will be a separate public company controlling channels like CNN, TNT and Discovery.
Netflix is already the world’s largest paid streaming service, with more than 300 million subscribers. Bulking up with Warner Bros. Discovery assets would create a colossus with greater leverage over theater owners and entertainment-industry unions. It could force smaller companies to merge as they scramble to compete.
The acquisition would also complete the conquest of Hollywood by tech insurgents. Instead of acquiring studios, tech companies have mostly grown under their own steam in Hollywood. In 2022, Amazon closed its $8.5 billion acquisition of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, home to James Bond and Rocky franchises.
U.S. Inflation, Economy, Jobs, Markets
Paul Krugman via Substack, Political-Economy Commentary: MAGA’s Affordability Crisis Will Get Worse, Paul Krugman, right, Dec. 5, 2025. And Trump’s numbers will continue to slide.
Long ago, probably in a long-forgotten hotel room, I watched a 1974 movie called The Internecine Project — now available, as you’ll see if you follow the hyperlink, on YouTube. In truth, it’s a pretty bad movie. But what made it memorable was the unusual nature of the villain, played by James Coburn: An evil, murderous chair of the President’s Council of Economic Advisers. Yes, you read that correctly – an evil, murderous chair of the CEA.
In the opening scene, Coburn is on a talk show, being quizzed about the high rate of inflation. He responds that people shouldn’t be upset about rising prices, because their incomes are rising even faster. Presumably the scriptwriters intended this to show how smarmy and cynical he is.
And that’s why Donald Trump won the 2024 election. No, Democrats didn’t lose because they use big words, or advocate for open borders, or talk too much about trans rights. None of those things actually happened to any significant degree, regardless of what Trump or the self-defeating wing of the Democratic Party says. They lost because Americans were angry about higher prices and not mollified by the fact that most people’s wages had risen more than overall consumer prices. In this coming Sunday’s primer, I’ll talk more about the underlying economics of the affordability issue, and in the following primer I’ll talk about specific strategies for Democrats to adopt to address it.
But what I want to focus on today is the politics of affordability. As current polls show, swing voters are increasingly blaming Trump, rather than Biden, for the cost of living. And the public’s ire is likely to get worse for the Republicans as time goes on.
In the summer of 2024, as Trump was lagging in the polls behind Kamala Harris, he began to repeatedly and explicitly promise not simply to reduce inflation but to deliver large declines in consumer prices: “Starting the day I take the oath of office, I will rapidly drive prices down.” Although economists warned that there was no way he could deliver on those promises, enough voters believed him to swing the election.
Now that Trump has in fact utterly failed to deliver, those voters — especially those Black and Latino voters who believed him — have swung back to the Democrats with a vengeance: A graph with red line and black text AI-generated content may be incorrect.
Trump is handling this reversal with his usual style and grace: in the past few days he has repeatedly called affordability a “hoax” and a “con job.” According to Axios, he’s planning a nationwide retribution tour to convince voters that things are going great and that they’re wrong to be so down on the economy. Democratic strategists must be rubbing their hands with glee.
And if you are one of those Republicans reconsidering your future career options, know that things are going to get worse. A lot worse.
Lately I’ve been revisiting the work of the political scientist Suzanne Mettler. Mettler asked why so many people who are dependent on government social programs vote for conservatives who want to slash those programs. She focused in particular on Kentucky, where 28 percent of the population is covered by Medicaid, yet which gave Trump a more than 30 point margin last year.
My quick summary of Mettler’s analysis emphasizes two points. First, many people who benefit from government social programs don’t actually think of them as social programs. This is true not only for implicit aid like the tax exemptions for mortgage interest payments and employer-provided health insurance, but also for explicit aid programs like Medicare and Social Security. What Mettler documented is that many people who depend on government benefits don’t consider them “benefits” but rather something they’ve earned. Medicare Recipients Against Handouts - The New York Times
Second, Mettler documented that recipients of means-tested government benefits such as Medicaid and food stamps are relatively poor, less educated, and often fail to vote.
I will add a third point: Most Americans aren’t close followers of policy debates. Telling them how an election promise is likely to affect their future benefits simply doesn’t register for most people. Instead, there has be a clear demonstration of the policy change before it is made real to them. Take the example of Obamacare, which was famously unpopular before it went into effect. But once people experienced the benefits of Obamacare it went on to garner very strong public support. Furthermore, most people don’t mobilize in support of popular programs until it’s very obvious that they’re under imminent threat. Trump’s anti-Obamacare rhetoric during the 2016 campaign didn’t appear to hurt him, but his actual attempt to kill the program in 2017 helped Democrats win big in the 2018 midterms.
Which brings us to the health care earthquake that’s soon to hit — an earthquake that, based on my read of Mettler, is going to inflict significant political damage on the Republicans.
For those who haven’t been keeping up: The Affordable Care Act requires that health insurance companies offer the same policies to everyone, with no discrimination based on pre-existing conditions. It also provides significant subsidies to help people pay insurance premiums — specifically, limiting the amount families have to pay out of pocket as a percentage of their income — with the subsidies on a sliding scale based on income. These subsidies have an important secondary benefit: They encourage even healthy people to buy insurance, which improves the risk pool and therefore holds overall premiums down.
Mandatory disclaimer for liberals: Yes, it would be much simpler just to have single-payer healthcare, paid for with progressive taxes. But that wasn’t politically possible when Obamacare was created, and it still isn’t. Obamacare was more or less the best we could get.
As originally drafted, however, Obamacare was underpowered and underfinanced. Insurance was still hard for many Americans to afford, even with the subsidies. And there was an upper income limit for the subsidies: you still received substantial support as long as your income was less than four times the poverty line, but as soon as you crossed that line all support was cut off. This is the kind of “notch” everyone who studies tax and benefit policy is adamant that you want to avoid.
So in 2021 the Biden administration enhanced the subsidies. Out of pocket payments were reduced for everyone. And the “notch” was eliminated: maximum premium payments as a percentage of income were capped no matter how high one’s income was, although this limit wasn’t relevant for the truly affluent.
But the legislation providing these enhanced subsidies expires at the end of this month. And Republicans in Congress are adamantly opposed to maintaining them. Even Trump has pleaded with his party to agree to a temporary extension, but seems to be getting nowhere. Visceral GOP dislike for anything that helps ordinary Americans may be partly to blame. Moreover, bolstering the ACA would be an implicit admission by the Republicans that they have been wrong all along about health care.
So let’s think about the politics of what’s about to happen: Millions of Americans are about to see a sudden rise in health care costs — not a hypothetical future rise, but a sudden jump on January 1.
And who will be hit worst? Here are Charles Gaba’s estimates for Florida: A graph of a financial report AI-generated content may be incorrect.
Almost all ACA enrollees will be paying more. However, the really huge premium increases will fall on older Floridians who are relatively well off — that is, those with incomes above the maximum allowable to receive subsidies. According to Gaba, these people are likely to see their insurance bills rising by more than $2500 a month — more than $30,000 a year! And these people, unlike many Medicaid or food stamp beneficiaries, have a high propensity to vote.
This ACA premium shock will hit as other forces are exacerbating the sense of crisis over affordability. Businesses are starting to fully pass onto consumers the cost of Trump’s tariffs. Electricity prices are soaring as data centers inflict the cost of their enormous power demands on consumers. In addition, Trump’s deportation policies are increasing the cost of food.
Trump may believe that affordability is a con job, but it isn’t. It’s going to hit him and his allies hard. And it couldn’t happen to a more deserving group of people.
Global News
New York Times, Zelensky’s Government Sabotaged Oversight, Allowing Corruption to Fester, Constant Méheut and Kim Barker, Dec. 5, 2025. Ukrainian leaders blame independent advisers for failing to prevent graft. A Times investigation found that President Volodymyr Zelensky’s own administration removed guardrails.
When Russian troops invaded Ukraine, Kyiv’s Western allies faced a dilemma: how to spend billions supporting a government fighting Russia without watching the money vanish into the pockets of corrupt managers and government officials.
The stakes were high because Ukraine’s vital wartime industries — power distribution, weapons purchases and nuclear energy — were controlled by state-owned companies that have long served as piggy banks for the country’s elite.
To protect their money, the United States and European nations insisted on oversight. They required Ukraine to allow groups of outside experts, known as supervisory boards, to monitor spending, appoint executives and prevent corruption.
Over the past four years, a New York Times investigation found, the Ukrainian government systematically sabotaged that oversight, allowing graft to flourish.
President Volodymyr Zelensky’s administration has stacked boards with loyalists, left seats empty or stalled them from being set up at all. Leaders in Kyiv even rewrote company charters to limit oversight, keeping the government in control and allowing hundreds of millions of dollars to be spent without outsiders poking around.
Supervisory boards serve an essential oversight function, allowing independent experts, typically from other countries, to scrutinize major decisions inside Ukrainian state-owned companies.
Dec. 4
Senior military leaders look on as Defense Secretary Pete Hegseths warms up the crowd before remarks by President Trump at Marine Corps Base Quantico on September 30, 2025 in Quantico, Virginia.
New York Times, Trump Administration: U.S. Military’s Boat Strikes Planning Takes On New Significance, Helene Cooper, Julian E. Barnes, Charlie Savage and Eric Schmitt, Updated Dec. 4, 2025. The details could raise questions about who was responsible for a follow-up strike on Sept. 2 — the commander who ordered it or the defense secretary.
Before the Trump administration began attacking people suspected of smuggling drugs at sea, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth approved contingency plans for what to do if an initial strike left survivors, according to multiple U.S. officials.
The military would attempt to rescue survivors who appeared to be helpless, shipwrecked and out of what the administration considered a fight. But it would try again to kill them if they took what the United States deemed to be a hostile action, like communicating with suspected cartel members, the officials said.
After the smoke cleared from a first strike on Sept. 2, there were two survivors, and one of them radioed for help, the U.S. officials said. Adm. Frank M. Bradley, who commanded the operation, ordered a follow-up strike and both were killed.
The military’s contingency plans have taken on new significance as Admiral Bradley and Gen. Dan Caine, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, are set to go to Capitol Hill on Thursday to answer questions about the attack amid an uproar over the killing of the survivors.
The men plan to present a vigorous defense, officials said, of what they will assert was a lawful follow-up strike on the survivors. That moment is just a small part of Mr. Trump’s legally disputed campaign of killing people suspected of smuggling drugs at sea as if they were combatants in a war, but it is now the focus of intense congressional scrutiny.
The details of the contingency planning could raise more questions about who was responsible for the second strike — the commander who ordered it or the defense secretary who approved the overall operation. Many critics, including some lawmakers, have said the follow-up attack could be a war crime.
Defenders of both Mr. Hegseth and Admiral Bradley said that once lawmakers learn more about the planning scenarios and the circumstances of the second strike, they will be exonerated.
President Trump on Wednesday offered his support for both men. The Pentagon did not respond to request for comment on the military’s planning.
On orders from Mr. Trump and Mr. Hegseth, the U.S. military has attacked 21 boats in the Caribbean Sea and eastern Pacific Ocean, killing 83 people, as part of a legally disputed policy of summarily executing people suspected of smuggling drugs as if they were combatants on a battlefield.
A photograph released by the F.B.I. shows a person placing pipe bombs at the Republican National Committee headquarters in Washington the night before Jan. 6, 2021.Credit...EPA, via Shutterstock
New York Times, Trump Administration Live Updates: Suspect Arrested in Jan. 6 Pipe Bomb Investigation, Officials Say, Alan Feuer and Glenn Thrush and Staff Reports, Dec. 4, 2025.
A suspect has been charged with planting pipe bombs near the Capitol before the Jan. 6 riot. An individual in a gray hoodie, face mask, and dark gloves.
Federal agents on Thursday arrested a suspect in Virginia on charges of having planted two pipe bombs near the Capitol the night before Jan. 6, 2021, after nearly five years of false leads and frustrated investigation, according to people familiar with the matter.
The suspect’s identity remained unclear for the moment, but the arrest could ultimately provide an answer to one of the most enduring mysteries arising from Jan. 6.: Who planted the bombs on Capitol Hill outside the national headquarters of both the Republican and Democratic parties on the night before a congressional ceremony certifying that Joseph R. Biden Jr. had won the 2020 election?
While neither device exploded, their discovery on Jan. 6 added to the fear and confusion on a day when a pro-Trump mob stormed the Capitol, delaying the certification of Mr. Biden’s victory.
“This is a testament to the painstaking efforts of the career agents and prosecutors who have worked on this case for years,” said Gregory Rosen, a former prosecutor in the U.S. attorney’s office in Washington who once led the sprawling investigation into Jan. 6. “While we don’t know all the facts yet, we should be proud that the F.B.I. has continued to investigate thoroughly.”
The bureau has redoubled its efforts several times in recent years to find the pipe bomber, circulating various video clips of the suspect wearing a mask, a gray hooded sweatshirt, dark pants and Nike Air Max Speed Turf sneakers. Agents also obtained a trove of location data from cellphones and digital advertising services, tried to find people who bought devices similar to those used in the making of the bombs and issued subpoenas to 18 vendors that sold the type of sneakers the suspect was wearing.
Conspiracy theories have often filled the void left by the lack of an arrest, many of them centered on the belief that the pipe bombs were put in place as part of an inside job by deep-state law enforcement and intelligence officials intended to discredit President Trump and his supporters. Just weeks ago, The Blaze, a far-right news outlet founded by Glenn Beck, published an article claiming that the bomber was a former law enforcement official identified by a computer analysis of the way the person walked.
Dan Bongino, the deputy director of the F.B.I., pushed back hard against the Blaze report, saying the bureau’s investigation was continuing. Mr. Bongino has identified the pipe bomb investigation as one of the F.B.I.’s top priorities. But agents had not taken anyone into custody in connection with the inquiry until Thursday morning.
It remained unclear what precise charges the suspect would eventually face in court. The break in the case was not based on new information but came after agents bore down yet again on their investigative files and discovered a new lead, according to one person familiar with the matter.
U.S. Public Health Policies
New York Times, Inside Kennedy’s Methodical Quest to Shake Up America’s Vaccine System, Sheryl Gay Stolberg and Christina Jewett, Dec. 4, 2025. The health secretary has walled himself off from government scientists and empowered fellow activists to pursue his vaccine agenda.
Throughout his two-decade crusade against vaccines, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. viewed the federal government’s Vaccine Safety Datalink as a kind of holy grail. With millions of confidential patient records, the database, he believed, held the potential to prove whether vaccines cause autism.
After he became President Trump’s health secretary, Mr. Kennedy demanded access to the data, and assigned an old ally to examine it. But the scientists who managed it were standing in his way, worried that the data could be used improperly. Frustrated, Mr. Kennedy sent Hannah Anderson, one of his top advisers, to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in Atlanta.
“She said, ‘I can’t leave town until you figure out how we’re going to do this,’” recalled Dr. Daniel Jernigan, who oversaw the database and has since left the C.D.C. In the end, Ms. Anderson got the data.
Mr. Kennedy took over the Department of Health and Human Services in February after assuring skeptical senators weighing his confirmation that, despite 20 years of hostility toward the country’s long-established vaccine system, he would do nothing that “makes it difficult or discourages people from taking vaccines.” He sought to present a more unifying agenda, vowing to target ultraprocessed foods and minimize toxic exposures as part of a broader mission to “reverse the chronic disease epidemic and put the nation back on the road to good health.”
But an examination of Mr. Kennedy’s tenure atop the nation’s massive health agency shows how, in ways not previously known, he has methodically laid the groundwork to overhaul American vaccine policy, following a blueprint he laid out in books, speeches and podcast appearances during his years as the leader of a movement attacking the system he now oversees. He has walled himself off from the government scientists and other civil servants he distrusts while elevating longtime allies to help carry out his vaccine agenda.
Mr. Kennedy has denied misleading senators about his intentions. He said in an interview that it should be no surprise that he brought in people he can trust, including parents who believe their children were injured by vaccines.
“I don’t want to perpetuate a system that everybody knows is broken,” he said, adding, “I need people in there who are highly motivated to challenge the inertia, challenge the orthodoxies, because the biggest threat to the system is inertia, because it will just continue this terrible sick care system where everyone is sicker. You need to disrupt it.”
Mr. Kennedy’s efforts will be on full display Thursday and Friday when those advisers — handpicked by the health secretary after he fired the old group — meet to reconsider the suite of vaccines given to young children.
Unraveling the vaccine schedule would mark a radical and, experts say, dangerous shift. Public health officials warn that if Mr. Kennedy succeeds, measles and other infectious diseases will come roaring back, jeopardizing the health of all American children. Six medical organizations have taken Mr. Kennedy to court, accusing him of “a clear pattern of hostility toward established scientific processes” that has resulted in chaos throughout the health care system.
The federal government does not mandate vaccination; that is up to states. But the C.D.C.’s recommendations provide a guide to state lawmakers and parents, and help dictate which vaccines insurance companies will cover. As secretary, Mr. Kennedy controls billions of dollars in vaccine funding for low-income children. He has already threatened to withhold money from states that do not allow parents to opt out of vaccine requirements.
His ultimate power is the bully pulpit. He can shake confidence in vaccination, or reinforce it.
New York Times, Will All Newborns Still Receive Hepatitis B Shots? A Committee’s Vote Will Tell, Apoorva Mandavilli, Dec. 4, 2025. The federal vaccine panel appointed by Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is likely to decide on Thursday that the shots should be delayed for infants whose mothers test negative for the virus.
A federal vaccine committee is expected to vote on a significant change to the nation’s vaccine policy on Thursday, deciding whether to end a decades-long recommendation to immunize all babies at birth against hepatitis B, a highly contagious virus that can damage the liver.
The committee, whose members were appointed by Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., is most likely to end the practice, and to delay vaccination for most babies until they are older, Dr. Kirk Milhoan, the panel’s newly appointed chair, said in an interview. But, he added, the panel was likely to continue to recommend the immunization of newborn children of women known to be infected with the virus, and perhaps also the infants of women who were not screened for infection.
The committee, called the Advisory Committee for Immunization Practices, will meet again on Friday to debate broader changes to the timing of vaccines given to children, as well as the composition of the shots. They will also address whether aluminum salts, which are added to vaccines to increase the immune response, should be removed from vaccines, Dr. Milhoan said.
Although the committee members will not vote on Friday on the issues they discuss, some public health experts see the debate as a likely prelude to sweeping changes in the childhood vaccine schedule. Aluminum salts are present in dozens of vaccines, for example, and their removal would require the development of entirely new shots.
The members of the panel were handpicked by Mr. Kennedy, right, who has long campaigned against many childhood vaccines, and some panelists share his skepticism of vaccines in general. Nearly all of the new members have spoken out against Covid vaccines.
Officials at the Health Department gave the committee the task of evaluating whether hepatitis B shots for infants whose mothers tested negative for hepatitis could be delayed, Dr. Milhoan said, adding, “That’s what we’ve been asked to do.”
New York Times, Former F.D.A. Commissioners Sound Alarm on Plan to Change Vaccine Policy, Rylee Kirk, Dec. 4, 2025 (print ed.). Twelve former commissioners, in a New England Journal of Medicine article, said they were “deeply concerned” by a leaked memo from the agency’s vaccine regulator.
In an article published Wednesday in The New England Journal of Medicine, 12 former Food and Drug Administration commissioners sharply criticized anticipated changes to vaccine policy that were detailed in a leaked memo from an agency official.
“We are deeply concerned by sweeping new F.D.A. assertions about vaccine safety and proposals that would undermine a regulatory model designed to ensure that vaccines are safe, effective and available when the public needs them most,” the former commissioners wrote.
The former commissioners, including four from the first Trump administration, were responding to a memo written by Dr. Vinay Prasad, the director of the F.D.A.’s vaccine division. He sent it to agency staff members on Friday, outlining findings from a review of reports concerning 10 childhood deaths and attributing them to myocarditis, or inflammation of the heart muscle, after receiving a Covid-19 shot.
The memo was obtained by The New York Times and not publicly released. It did not provide details such as the ages of the children, whether they had any health problems or how the agency had determined the vaccine-death link. Nor did it disclose the makers of the vaccines involved.
In the memo, Dr. Prasad proposed radically transforming how vaccines are regulated and approved, though it was unclear whether the White House had been advised of the memo’s contents. The proposals could be challenged by lawmakers and drug companies.
Among the changes Dr. Prasad outlined for oversight and approval were requirements that vaccine studies include all subgroups, such as pregnant women. He said the annual practice of updating flu vaccines to match a circulating strain would be re-examined. Companies also would need to do larger studies before promoting vaccines as safe to administer together, such as the flu and Covid-19 vaccines, according to the memo.
The Department of Health and Human Services, which oversees the F.D.A., did not immediately respond to a request for comment. Dr. Prasad also did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
New York Times, Poll Suggests G.O.P. Will Face More Blame if Obamacare Subsidies Go Away, Reed Abelson, Dec. 4, 2025. About half of people covered under the Affordable Care Act say that if their health costs spike, it will have a “major impact” on how they vote in the 2026 midterm elections, a survey found.
Some voters may punish congressional Republicans in next year’s midterm elections if expanded Obamacare insurance subsidies are allowed to expire at the end of this month, a new poll released Thursday suggests.
Without the extension of larger subsidies, which lower the cost of health insurance under the Affordable Care Act for millions of Americans, many people will see their health expenses rise by about $1,000 next year. Among those facing a spike, most said they would blame President Trump or Republicans in Congress, according to the poll, which was conducted by KFF, a nonprofit health policy research group.
About half of people covered by Obamacare plans who are registered to vote said such an increase would have a “major impact” on how or whether they vote in the 2026 midterms, according to the survey.
The Senate is expected to vote next week on whether to extend the subsidies, but it is unclear whether there is enough Republican support for continuing them. President Trump was considering throwing his support behind an extension, a White House official said recently, but has made no public announcement.
Without the additional subsidies, which were first extended during the Covid pandemic, many people will see their annual premiums more than double next year to $1,900 from an average of around $890. Most people will still be eligible for some subsidies.
Concerns about health care affordability cross party lines. Many people are already struggling with the cost of monthly insurance premiums and high out-of-pocket medical costs, and are worried about their ability to pay more for their health care next year. Roughly six in 10 people surveyed said they could not afford an increase of $300 a year in insurance without it significantly affecting their finances.
The Contrarian, Opinion: Republicans are ‘Nowhere on Healthcare,’ Jennifer Rubin, right, Political disaster looms for MAGA.
MAGA Republicans may have ended the shutdown standoff by luring eight feckless Senate Democrats to reopen the government without addressing the MAGA-induced healthcare crisis, but Republicans are still well on their way to losing the healthcare issue, and in turn setting themselves up for a sweeping defeat in the midterms. With healthcare affordability front and center in last month’s elections, Republicans got trounced.
The latest reason for GOP panic? Democrat Aftyn Behn came within single digits in the TN-7, a district that Donald Trump won by 22 points just one year ago. Aftyn Behn responds graciously to chants of “We’re Not Done”You already can hear the central pitch for Democrats in 2026. “Republicans have not put forth a single credible proposal to address the affordability crisis. Instead, life in America is more expensive,” House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries wrote in a Dear Colleague letter to his fellow House Democrats this week. “The reckless Trump tariffs have increased costs on hardworking American taxpayers by thousands of dollars per year.” He pointed out that, in contrast to Republicans, Democrats “have introduced a discharge petition that will trigger an up-or-down vote on a three-year extension of the Affordable Care Act tax credits.” With the paper thin Republican majority, Democrats only need a few defections to get the measure to the floor.
Meanwhile in the Senate, the promised floor vote on extension of the Affordable Care Act credits is scheduled for next week. While Democrats will ready their own extension plan, Republicans have a whole lot of nothing. “Senate Majority Leader John Thune and two other people familiar with internal conference discussions didn’t rule out a vote on a GOP health care plan next week but would not commit to that timing,” Politico reports.
We should not be surprised by the utter disarray on the Republican side. MAGA Republicans have never given up hope of repealing or at least hobbling the ACA. When the White House suggested it would roll out its own capitulation plan to extend the ACA credits, Republicans on the Hill threw a fit. That leaves Republicans facing a Democratic plan with no alternative of their own.
Minority Leader Sen. Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) aptly summed up the situation in a floor speech on Tuesday.
Republicans, meanwhile, are a total mess when it comes to healthcare. Republicans don’t know what to do. One day, Trump floats a so-called “healthcare plan.” The next day, Speaker Johnson, right, forces him to shoot it down. Some Republicans say they want to dismantle the ACA, probably a majority of them in the House and a large number in the Senate want to just dismantle it altogether. Other Republicans seem to be more focused on eradicating reproductive care in every state than helping people afford healthcare. The bottom line is that Republicans are in total disarray on healthcare.
A rump group of faux moderate Senators facing the wrath of voters (e.g., Sen. Susan Collins of Maine) who lacked the wherewithal to stop the big, ugly bill (which omitted the ACA credit extension), have mumbled about a bipartisan solution but plainly lack votes to save themselves. Meanwhile, MAGA Republicans’ big idea is health spending accounts (which allow people to put money aside tax free for healthcare costs but could not possibly pay for decent coverage)—although it is more a concept of a plan than a concrete proposal. As Schumer pointed out, even Republicans admit that they are “nowhere on healthcare.”
Republicans are in a politically untenable position. KFF in November reported that “public support remains high for extending the enhanced ACA tax credits set to expire at the end of the year, with three quarters (74%) of the public in favor of extending them.” That includes 76 percent of independent voters and 50 percent of Republicans. Moreover: “When asked which party they trust to do a better job on the future of the ACA, larger share of voters say that they trust the Democratic Party (43%) than the Republican Party (32%).” That bodes poorly for Republicans in the midterms, which Democrats are intent are making a referendum on affordability in general and healthcare specifically.
A glance at some key 2026 Senate races shows just how heavily Democrats will lean into the issue of healthcare affordability. Former governor and Senate Democratic candidate in North Carolina Roy Cooper has been stressing the issue, as he did at a healthcare roundtable this fall. “Insurance companies are raising their premiums on top of federal subsidies not being renewed by Congress in this Big Beautiful Bill,” he told the audience. “And we’re going to see probably close to 900,000 people are going to find their premiums increasing hundreds of dollars a month, some of them thousands of dollars a month.”
It is much the same story in Ohio, where former senator Sherrod Brown is slamming the Republican appointed to fill J.D. Vance’s seat. “Hundreds of thousands in Ohio are going to see their premiums double or triple, all because people like Jon Husted wanted tax cuts for billionaires,” Brown said at a typical campaign stop in Columbus last month.
That message will reverberate in every Senate and House race in 2026. Democrats will be able to remind voters that they had put forth a plan to stop ACA premiums from skyrocketing and also opposed devastating Medicaid cuts. Unless political reality dawns on Republicans, they will have no cogent response. And that has all the makings of a political disaster for a party that has vowed for nearly twenty years to get rid of the ACA without a viable alternative.
U.S. Public Safety, Crime, Courts, Justice
Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: The Four Horsemen of the Trumpist Apocalypse, William Kristol, right, Dec. 4, 2025. The Departments of Defense, Justice, and Homeland Security, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation are important agencies of the United States government.
They’re currently being directed by individuals who were confirmed by the Senate despite being manifestly unqualified by either experience or character for those positions of serious responsibility. None of these individuals has, over the past year, shown any sign of growing into the job. None has shown any inclination to try to do so. None is acting a whit more responsibly today than one could have anticipated the day they assumed office.
Quite the contrary.
But this isn’t a failure on their part. They were meant to serve Donald Trump as authoritarian apparatchiks reshaping the power ministries of his government. They’re doing what they were appointed to do.
This week’s provided reminders of what that means. The following incidents aren’t the most important examples of what’s happening at those key agencies. But they’re perhaps a useful reminder of what authoritarian Trumpism in power really means.
Trumpism means lying.
At Tuesday’s cabinet meeting, Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem said to her boss, the president, “You told me to look into Minnesota and their fraud on visas and their programs—50 percent of them are fraudulent, which means that that wacko Governor Walz either is an idiot or he did it on purpose.”
As the CBS affiliate in Minnesota reported, “Noem did not provide evidence” in response to a request for data. No immigration expert thinks this figure is remotely plausible. Indeed, as CBS reported, in September U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services conducted an operation in Minneapolis-Saint Paul looking at 1,000 cases of potential immigration fraud. “Those investigations yielded 42 referrals to U.S. Customs and Immigration Enforcement and just four for arrest, which is roughly 0.5% of those cases.”
As for Noem’s accusation that Gov. Tim Walz was responsible for the alleged fraudulent visas, the governor’s office pointed out that states don’t handle immigration cases.
Trumpism means covering up.
Yesterday, five members of Congress from both parties and chambers, worried that Attorney General Pam Bondi is planning to avoid complying with the Epstein Files Transparency Act passed by Congress on Nov. 19 that requires the Justice Department to release the Epstein files within 30 days, wrote a letter to Bondi asking for a briefing and update by the end of this week on that legally mandated release.
We’ll see if they get that briefing by tomorrow. We’ll see if they get those files two weeks from now. We’ll see if the Epstein coverup ends. I was in touch with one of those lawmakers yesterday. That person is doubtful we’ll see all the files we should see.
Trumpism means politicizing.
Meanwhile, Bloomberg reported yesterday that FBI Director Kash Patel “is pressuring the bureau’s career domestic terrorism agents to open a seditious conspiracy investigation into six Democratic lawmakers who pointed out that military officers are not supposed not obey illegal orders.” As Bloomberg puts it, this “would escalate the administration’s use of law enforcement to probe the president’s critics.”
Career leaders at the bureau’s Washington field office have so far resisted this effort, citing “a lack of legal and factual basis to initiate a criminal case against the senators and House members.” Patel said in late November that the decision to investigate would be up to career FBI agents and analysts. But the prior head of the Washington office, Steven Jensen, was fired in August, apparently in retaliation for insufficient loyalty to Trump. We’ll see if the professionals can succeed in resisting yet another step in the all-out politicization of law enforcement.
Trumpism means unquestioningly following orders.
Yesterday, the Wall Street Journalreported that the admiral in charge of Southern Command, Alvin Holsey, whose sudden resignation after less than a year in command was announced two months ago, was in fact fired by Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth. Shortly after his confirmation, Hegseth met with Holsey on a secure video conference and, according to notes from a participant in the call, told the admiral, “You’re either on the team or you’re not. When you get an order, you move out fast and don’t ask questions.”
Halsey apparently insisted on asking questions about military orders that might be unwise or illegal. Holsey’s departure ceremony after 37 years of military service will be next week.
And all of this is not to mention the big story of the week, Hegseth’s orders, reported by the New York Times, to bomb alleged drug boats in the Caribbean, “summarily executing people suspected of smuggling drugs as if they were combatants on a battlefield”—[a use of force that does not meet the standard of being a military conflict and is unauthorized by Congress.
These are mere hints and indications of what is happening at these four crucial agencies. They’re just glimpses of the larger Trumpist reshaping of our government, which is being effectuated by these obedient apparatchiks. They (or equally obedient replacements) will continue to carry forward this authoritarian agenda for the next three years.
And if you believe that these four Trumpists–Noem, Bondi, Patel, or Hegseth—or, for that matter, Trump himself—are committed at the end of these four years to allowing free and fair elections, and to a peaceful transfer to power to an opposition party that could investigate their tenure in government . . . I have some Trump meme coins to sell you.
Andrew Wolfe, above left, and Sarah Beckstrom are the West Virginia National Guard members who were shot and critically wounded on Nov. 26, 2025, while deployed in Washington, DC.
New York Times, A Volunteer’s Dire Warnings About the National Guard Shooting Suspect, Edward Wong, Kurt Streeter, Safiullah Padshah, Fahim Abed, Thomas Gibbons-Neff and Jack Healy, Dec. 4, 2025. More than a year before the Trump administration granted asylum to the Afghan immigrant, the volunteer’s emails raised concerns that he was unraveling.
The emailed plea was urgent and direct: “Rahmanullah needs help.”
The warning came nearly two years before Rahmanullah Lakanwal, left, would be named as a suspect in the gunning down of two National Guard troops near the White House on the eve of Thanksgiving. It was enshrined in writing by a volunteer helping to give Mr. Lakanwal a fresh start in America who had become convinced he was unraveling.
He had tried to make a go of life in the coastal city of Bellingham, Wash., after he and his family were evacuated from Afghanistan by the U.S. military in August 2021. In Afghanistan, he had fought in a C.I.A.-trained paramilitary unit. In the United States, he did temporary jobs, took his five sons to a local mosque and hosted visitors for tea in an apartment decorated in traditional Afghan style, with floor pillows and red rugs.
But by early 2023, he started to show signs of depression and erratic behavior, according to accounts from a volunteer in northwest Washington who worked with his family.
In the months after, he sequestered himself inside his darkened bedroom, refused to answer his phone, and even failed to bathe or dress his sons when his wife left to take short breaks from him. He dropped out of the English classes he was supposed to take, did not seek work and stopped paying rent. His family received an eviction notice.
“Rahmanullah has not been functional as a person, father and provider since March of last year,” the volunteer wrote in a January 2024 email for a friend to send to a nonprofit group working with immigrants. “His behavior has changed greatly.”ImageA man wearing an F.B.I. jacket standing near a lectern looking at photos that are on display.
Occasionally, Mr. Lakanwal did emerge from “dark isolation,” only to disappear onto the open road, taking seemingly aimless drives hundreds of miles away to Chicago and Phoenix and Indianapolis in “reckless travel,” the volunteer wrote. He posted photos from the car on Instagram.
Last week, Mr. Lakanwal went on one last road trip, the authorities say, driving cross-country to Washington, D.C., where he is accused of shooting two West Virginia Guard members, one fatally. Mr. Lakanwal, 29, has pleaded not guilty to the charges.
Investigators are still trying to understand why Mr. Lakanwal spiraled downward — whether he was haunted by his involvement with a violent Afghan paramilitary group, as a childhood friend told The New York Times, or if he was succumbing to the isolation, poverty and untreated mental traumas that trail many Afghans from their war-ravaged homeland, or something else entirely.
Prosecutors called the shootings a betrayal by a man who had benefited from America’s generosity.
Regardless of motivation, the attack has had global reverberations, as America’s failed wars violently returned just steps from the White House.
The shootings unnerved Afghan immigrant communities from Washington, D.C., to Washington State, and prompted President Trump to order a sweeping new immigration crackdown against Afghans and many others from around the world.Want to stay updated on what’s happening in Afghanistan and Washington State? Sign up for Your Places: Global Update, and we’ll send our latest coverage to your inbox.
This account of Mr. Lakanwal’s troubled life in Afghanistan and the United States is based on interviews with the volunteer who knew him, friends in his homeland, former comrades, residents of Bellingham and workers from refugee resettlement groups, as well as emails from the volunteer obtained by The Times. Most people interviewed agreed to talk only on the condition of anonymity because of safety concerns.
The volunteer said in an interview that Mr. Lakanwal was a singular case and worried her in a way no other Afghan refugee did.Editors’ PicksA 20-Minute Workout to Build Strength for Everyday TasksThe 14 Best Cookbooks of 2025Pantone’s 2026 Color of the Year Is ‘Cloud Dancer’
In Mr. Lakwanal’s adoptive hometown, Bellingham, a liberal city of 97,000 near the Canadian border, church groups and volunteers who once embraced the wave of new Afghan arrivals have taken down web pages detailing their efforts and deleted online fund-raising sites as anger over the attack has intensified.
Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: The Only Democrats Trump Likes..., Bill Kristol, Andrew Egger and Jim Swift, Dec. 4, 2025. Frustration with House Speaker Mike Johnson was apparently one of the factors that drove Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene to announce her resignation from Congress late last month.
Now, Rep. Nancy Mace is considering doing the same. And Johnson is openly feuding with Rep. Elise Stefanik. Wtf we love Mike Johnson now? Happy Thursday.
Former U.S. senator Bob Menendez speaks to press after his sentencing in bribery conviction in New York, United States on January 29, 2025. Former US Senator Bob Menendez was sentenced to 11 years in federal prison on bribery, extortion and corruption charges (Photo by Mostafa Bassim/Anadolu via Getty Images)
Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: What About Bob? Andrew Egger, Dec. 4, 2025. Donald Trump, as a rule, hates Democrats. They’re radical left anti-American communists and domestic terrorists, after all. But every once in a while, Trump bumps into a Democrat that turns out to be a kindred spirit, someone he can really relate to.
Typically, they’re the ones who have been accused—and occasionally convicted—of corruption crimes.
Yesterday brought the latest such unexpected breakthrough of human feeling. In a Truth Social post Wednesday morning, Trump announced he would pardon “Highly Respected Congressman” Henry Cuellar of Texas, whom he said had been targeted by the Biden administration because he “bravely spoke out against Open Borders, and the Biden Border ‘Catastrophe.’”
Trump politely declined to mention the actual reason Cuellar was under federal indictment: because he allegedly had taken hundreds of thousands of dollars in bribes from the government of Azerbaijan and a Mexico-based bank in exchange for promises to work to shift U.S. policy in a direction favorable to those entities. Cuellar, the indictment alleged, took pains to hide those payments from scrutiny—squirreling them away in accounts connected to shell companies under his wife Imelda Cuellar’s name.¹
Semafor’s Dave Weigel wrote last year of Trump’s “giant soft spot for indicted Democrats,” which during his first term included pardons or commutations for former Detroit Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick and former Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich. Republicanshave had a good batting average landing Trump pardons for corruption charges too: Just ask former Reps. Duncan Hunter, Chris Collins, and George Santos.
But this year, Trump’s pardon habit has gone from an occasional indulgence to a full-blown lifestyle. Even as he fantasizes in public about police roughing up “criminals” and looks for pretexts to throw his political enemies in prison, the president’s blanket sympathy for anybody else accused of white collar criminality is reaching astonishing heights. He’s issuing pardons to congressmen without bothering to tip off the speaker of the House first. He’s even undoing indictments that his own Justice Department is issuing: Last night, as we were finishing up this newsletter, Trump pardoned a real estate developer who was facing charges of corruptly rigging an arena-building bidding process at the University of Texas to favor his own company. The president is on an epic binge.
Trump has issued pardons and clemency to January 6 rioters, to disgraced ex-congressman, and to anyone who seems willing to stuff the coffers of one of his political committees or family crypto businesses. His impulse to issue get-out-of-jail free cards has extended to global leaders: He’s actively encouraged Israel’s president to pardon its Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, and taken a hostile diplomatic and economic posture toward Brazil over its jailing of former President Jair Bolsonaro. Most recently, as we wrote this week, he pardoned Juan Orlando Hernández, former president of Honduras, who was facing 45 years in U.S. federal prison over drug and corruption charges.
Ultimately, this impulse to give clemency to bad people—something that every other president at least had the shame to wait to do until their last day in office—is rooted in what Weigel called Trump’s monomyth: “that the justice system he’s tangled with throughout his business and political careers is crooked, picking favorites and treating its enemies unfairly.” Trump has remarkably few core beliefs, but this conviction is one, and one he holds deeply enough that corruption charges seem to improve his feelings about a politician rather than the opposite. If the system’s coming after them, they must be doing something right!
Which makes you wonder: How much longer is Trump going to make former senator and accused gold-bar aficionado Bob Menendez twist in the wind?
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These days, Menendez is starting to stand out as the one prominent former member of Congress jailed on corruption charges who hasn’t been lucky enough to retrieve a Trump pardon. Menendez’s case, after all, mirrors Cuellar’s in striking ways: Both netted hundreds of thousands of dollars from entities connected to foreign governments—Egypt and Qatar, in Menendez’s case—in exchange for promises to steer U.S. policy in those governments’ favor. (Menendez was in a particularly useful perch from which to do so, as he formerly chaired the powerful Senate Foreign Relations Committee.) Like Cuellar, Menendez’s wife, Nadine, was sentenced alongside him; both are currently serving multi-year sentences in federal prison.
And it’s not like Menendez hasn’t been trying to land a pardon of his own. Scroll back through his most recent posts on X² to find Menendez working overtime to catch Trump’s eye, tagging the president repeatedly and casting his prosecution as a “witch hunt” launched by their mutual enemies like Attorney General Merrick Garland and the U.S. attorney’s office of the Southern District of New York.
“President Trump is right,” he wrote back in January. “This process is political and has been corrupted to the core. I hope President Trump cleans up the cesspool and restores integrity to the system.”
Maybe Trump still hasn’t forgotten Menendez’s staunch opposition to him during his first term, including his votes to convict Trump in both of his impeachment trials. Maybe he just doesn’t have a good MAGA-pleasing policy excuse for pardoning Menendez like he does with Cuellar.
Or, hey—maybe he’s just warming up to the crown jewel pardon. Bob Menendez better start working that prison phone.
AROUND THE BULWARK
A Bubble-Wrapped Trump… On the Flagship Pod, JONATHAN LEMIRE joins TIM MILLER to discuss Trump’s retreat from the campaign trail, warning signs inside the White House, and why Democrats are seeing a sudden opening.
The ‘Fog of War’ Is No Excuse… Mistakes are one thing; failures of moral judgment are another, argues MARK HERTLING.
Mike Johnson’s Speakership Is Hanging by Dental Floss… Live from Bulwark HQ, SARAH LONGWELL, JVL, and TIM MILLER get through a chaotic week in Trump’s Washington on The Next Level.
Dems to America: Touch Grass… Skepticism about AI and Big Tech is on the rise among party leaders and thinkers, reports LAUREN EGAN in The Opposition.
The Three Dumbest Republican Self-Owns on Health Care… JILL LAWRENCE documents how the party hurts itself, its voters, and the country.
Quick Hits
YOU CAN’T DO THAT, PETE: Remember Signalgate? Pete Hegseth and Co.’s accidental and hilarious inclusion of the Atlantic’s Jeffrey Goldberg on a war-planning group chat has since been buried under about a thousand other White House and Defense Department scandals. But the wheels of accountability turn slow: The Pentagon only just wrapped its internal review of the failures that allowed for that remarkable breach. Reporting from multiple outlets suggests the Defense Department inspector general found that Hegseth had violated Pentagon regulations by sharing highly sensitive information about an ongoing mission with the “Houthi PC Small Group” group chat. (Who could have guessed!)
But because Hegseth, as the secretary, has the authority to declassify Pentagon information—and because Hegseth claims, implausibly but with no proof to the contrary, that he intended to declassify that information as he shared it—the report also suggests his ill-advised use of Signal may not have broken any criminal laws. The whole unclassified report is expected to be released today—so you can give it a read and decide for yourself.
MORE ECONOMIC STORM CLOUDS: Payroll-processing company ADP’s latest jobs report is out, and the numbers aren’t good. Private-sector employment fell by 32,000 jobs in November, ADP reported—the third decline in four months, with losses concentrated among America’s small businesses. If it’s accurate, it’s a cause for real economic alarm.
But is it accurate? This is the problem we’re all dealing with these days, both in the media and in the economy at large, as our own Catherine Rampell has noted. In the absence of the usual government jobs data—the collection of which ground to an extended halt during the government shutdown, and the reliability of which has been called into question by Trump’s political meddling at the Bureau of Labor Statistics—we’ve been deprived of a normal picture of the economy. In its place, we have been forced to piece together a mosaic from bits and pieces of private-sector data. These all have their uses, but they tend to be more limited and less reliable than the gold-standard BLS data we’ve had at our fingertips for the last century.
It’s difficult, in this moment, for well-meaning and knowledgeable people trying to read the economic tea leaves. But that pales in comparison to the difficulty of just being a person out there encountering economic news ambiently—where the confusing and incomplete data picture is swept utterly aside by various max-decibel economic-messaging machines, like the White House’s. Trump never tires of bragging about how America has entered its “golden age,” that the country is “HOT” again under his leadership, that this is “the richest, strongest, and most respected the USA has ever been.” Meanwhile, he has denounced the word “affordability” as “a Democrat scam.”
GETTING AROUND TO HEALTHCARE COSTS: It’s very, very, very, very, very late in the game, but Senate Republicans are suddenly sounding a bipartisan note when it comes to renewing or revising Obamacare subsidies that are now just weeks from expiring. At a hearing of the Health, Education, Labor and Pensions Committee yesterday, both Republicans and Democrats expressed hope they might still be able to swerve away from the year-end fiscal cliff. But they still seem miles apart on what exactly a solution might look like. Politico reports:
“If we don’t do something on this issue, if Congress does not take action, this will be a crisis for 24 million Americans and counting,” said Sen. Josh Hawley (R-Mo.).
But Hawley’s move Wednesday to make his own pitch for a far-reaching change to the country’s health policies—he offered a bill to allow people to deduct up to $25,000 in medical expenses—showed how GOP lawmakers aren’t willing to go with the simplest solution, a temporary extension of the subsidies Democrats prefer.
Read the whole thing, and you start to get the sense there’s nearly as many Republican plans as there are committee Republicans. A vote to renew the subsidies in their current form will take place in the Senate next week—but if that vote fails, as is pretty much guaranteed, the next step remains unclear.
More News Roundups, Commentary
Letters from an American, Historical Commentary: December 3, 2025 [U.S. Political Trends], Heather Cox Richardson, right, Dec. 4, 2025. Republican Matt Van Epps won yesterday’s special election in Tennessee’s seventh congressional district, but Republicans aren’t celebrating triumphantly. Van Epps beat out Democrat Aftyn Behn by about 9 points in a district Donald Trump and Republican senator Marsha Blackburn each won in 2024 by 22 points. Yesterday’s vote shows a 13-point shift toward the Democrats in about a year.
Aaron Pellish and Meredith Lee Hill of Politico reported the comment of a House Republican after officials called the election: “Tonight is a sign that 2026 is going to be a b*tch of an election cycle. Republicans can survive if we play team and the Trump administration officials play smart. Neither is certain.”
As G. Elliott Morris of Strength in Numbers noted, “[t]he fact that a rural Tennessee district ended up just a high-single-digits win for Republicans should be a five-alarm fire for the party ahead of the 2026 midterms.” Morris explains that congressional special elections have swung 17 points on average toward the Democrats, while special elections for seats in state legislatures have swung toward the Democrats by about 11 points. Morris combines these results with turnout differences in special, midterm, and presidential elections, to estimate that—as of right now—the 2026 midterms can be expected to see a swing of 7 to 8 points toward the Democrats. These numbers would give Democrats control of the House of Representatives and put the Senate into play as well.
It is safe to assume, Morris says, “that something big has shifted in the national environment.” He adds that the Republican Party “will likely find itself defending an unusually wide array of seats next year, even in districts previously thought to be immune to national swings.”
Democrats and many Republicans think that shift has come about in large part over the issue of affordability, the rising costs of food, housing, energy, gasoline, and healthcare that are squeezing most Americans. Trump insisted yesterday that “affordability” doesn’t mean anything to anybody,” but most Americans would disagree. According to Morris of Strength in Numbers, the word “affordability” appears to mean not just the pressure of higher prices, but also frustration at economic stagnation, the unfair way in which the economic system operates, the idea of being stuck and unable to rise, the current illusiveness of the American dream.
After the voters rejected Republican candidates in the early November elections, Republicans vowed they would address affordability issues. Trump initially moved in that direction but now is rejecting the idea that his economic policies have caused hardship, although news dropped today from Automatic Data Processing (ADP), a private human resources management company, that the U.S. lost about 32,000 jobs last month. The losses were primarily in small businesses, which are often considered a bellwether for the rest of the economy.
The secretary of commerce, billionaire Howard Lutnick, admitted to CNBC that Trump’s policies have caused disruption, but promised they would start to build the economy in 2026. “Remember,” he said, “as you deport people, that’s going to suppress private job numbers of small businesses. But they’ll rebalance and they’ll regrow. So I think this is just a near-term event and you’ll see as the numbers come through over the next couple of months, you’ll see that all pass, and next year the numbers are going to be fantastic.”
On the table more immediately are the rising costs of health insurance premiums. The Republicans’ budget reconciliation bill of July extended tax cuts for the wealthy and for corporations but neglected to extend the premium tax credits that supported the purchase of healthcare insurance on the Affordable Care Act insurance markets. The loss of those credits will throw at least two million people off healthcare insurance while driving up healthcare costs for millions more. This will undermine the Affordable Care Act, a goal many Republicans have held since the measure became law about fifteen years ago. But in September, close to 80% of Americans wanted the credits extended; as the issue became politicized, some Republicans withdrew their support so the number dropped to about 75%.
In October, Senate Democrats refused to agree to vote in favor of a continuing resolution to fund the government unless the Republicans extended that premium tax credit, but after weeks of party members calling attention to the issue, seven Democrats and one Independent voted in November to end the shutdown in exchange for a Senate vote on a measure to extend the tax credits.
That bill is now coming due, trapping Republicans between their ideology, which calls for slashing all government programs, and voters, who overwhelmingly want the credits extended.
Trump said he was going to produce a healthcare plan that would extend the premium tax credit for two years, along with new restrictions on who could use the credits, by last Monday but postponed the announcement after Republican lawmakers demanded the extension include a nationwide abortion ban. The White House has not indicated when a new plan might appear. On Air Force One, Trump told reporters he doesn’t actually want to extend the tax credits. “I’d rather not extend them at all,” he said. “It may be, some kind of an extension may be necessary to get something else done, because the Unaffordable Care Act has been a disaster.”
Kaia Hubbard of CBS News notes that any plan Senate Democrats come up with will need the support of 13 Republicans to pass the 60-vote Senate filibuster threshold. So far, though, Republican senators seem inclined not to extend the credits as they currently exist, but to try to force through a partisan measure that Democrats will not support. Republican senators are proposing different options, but say there is no point in figuring out their own position until Trump tells them what he is willing to sign.
In the House, Republicans in safe districts don’t want to extend the credits, saying that an end to support for the system will make it easier to kill the law they insist is a disaster. According to Alice Miranda Ollstein and Robert King of Politico, some Republican strategists think that voters won’t care about healthcare costs by the time of the midterm elections, especially if Republican policies bring down the costs of housing, energy, food, and gas. They think voters will be angrier at support for the Affordable Care Act than at higher healthcare costs.
Vulnerable Republicans disagree. They are calling for a temporary extension of the credits to help lower costs again before the midterms.
Meanwhile, House Democrats have announced they have 214 signatures on a discharge petition to force a vote on extending the tax credits and invited Republicans to join them to bring the measure to the floor. Today, Democratic caucus chair Pete Aguilar (D-CA) told reporters: “Republicans have said that they want an extension, that they support the Affordable Care Act tax credits. We’re giving them an opportunity to do that. That’s what this discharge petition is about. As Leader [Hakeem] Jeffries has said for months, Democrats will go anywhere and have any discussion with our Republican colleagues about addressing the Affordable Care Act tax credits or the affordability crisis. If Republicans want to have a conversation about solutions, we’re all ears.”
The declining fortunes of MAGA Republicans are widening the rifts in the party. Annie Karni of the New York Times reported today on House Republicans’ anger at Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA), who has defended the priorities of President Donald J. Trump at the expense of the interests of Republican lawmakers. Johnson’s letting Trump call the shots means the House has accomplished very little apart from passing the budget reconciliation bill Republicans call the One Big Beautiful Bill Act, a law the American people appear to hate.
Although Republicans hold the majority in the House, Johnson has kept the members subservient to Trump’s demands. He kept them out of session for almost eight weeks during the government shutdown, for example, to try to jam the Senate into either accepting the House version of a continuing resolution to fund the government or ending the filibuster to enable Trump to force through his unpopular policies. Now, angry that they will have to run in 2026 with little to show for their House majority, House members are talking to the media about their frustration with Johnson.
The Republicans have other concerns as well. Today House Judiciary Committee chair Jim Jordan (R-OH) subpoenaed former special counsel Jack Smith to testify in private, rejecting Smith’s offer to testify in public. Smith wanted to testify in public to prevent committee members from leaking his comments selectively to the press, spinning them to mislead Trump loyalists. But public testimony could expose some of the evidence Smith gathered about President Trump’s participation in the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol and retention of classified documents.
In a statement, Representative Jamie Raskin (D-MD), the top-ranking Democrat on the Judiciary Committee, asked: “What are our colleagues so afraid of, that they won’t let the American people hear directly from the Special Counsel?... The American people deserve to hear the full unvarnished truth about Special Counsel Smith’s years-long effort to investigate and prosecute the crimes committed by Donald Trump and his co-conspirators.”
Also today, Senators Ben Ray Luján (D-NM), Jeffrey Merkley (D-OR), and Lisa Murkowski (R-AK), along with Representatives Ro Khanna (D-CA) and Thomas Massie (R-KY), wrote a letter to Attorney General Pam Bondi asking for a briefing no later than Friday on what she has claimed is “new” material in the Epstein files that she said on November 14 had caused her to initiate investigations into connections between Jeffrey Epstein and former president Bill Clinton, former treasury secretary Larry Summers, and investor Reid Hoffman. On July 7, an FBI memo said there was no new evidence to open new investigations “against uncharged third parties.”
Now the bipartisan lead sponsors of the Epstein Files Transparency Act from both chambers of Congress are calling out what looks to be Bondi’s attempt to shield Trump, first by saying that there was no information in the files that would warrant an investigation of “uncharged third parties” and then by opening such investigations on Democrats to muddy the waters and possibly claim that she could not release the files because of ongoing investigations.
The lawmakers noted they “are particularly focused on understanding the contents of any new evidence, information or procedural hurdles that could interfere with the Department’s ability [to] meet [the] statutory deadline” of December 19, and expressed their interest in making sure “the law is fully implemented.”
More On U.S. Politics, Governance
New York Times, What Tennessee Revealed About the G.O.P.’s Trump Trap in the Midterms, Shane Goldmacher, Dec. 3, 2025. Republican candidates face the problem that President Trump alone gets out the vote that they need. And he alone gets out the vote that Democrats need, too.
President Trump and Republicans got a win on Tuesday night — and it set off alarm bells for the party.
Just like every other congressional contest held this year, the Tennessee special election for the House tilted sharply in the Democratic Party’s direction compared with the 2024 election. The Trump-backed Republican candidate, Matt Van Epps, won by nine percentage points in a ruby-red seat that Mr. Trump had romped through a year earlier by 22 points.
That 13-point swing to the left — if it continues into 2026 — threatens to be an undertow strong enough to subsume a range of Republicans in less lopsidedly red seats and deliver Democrats a comfortable House majority next year.
Republican candidates, as they have been for much of the last decade, are caught between Mr. Trump’s singular popularity with the Republican base and his distinct, and dipping, unpopularity with swing voters.
He alone gets out the vote that Republicans need. And he alone gets out the vote that Democrats need, too.
“The left will show up,” Senator Ted Cruz, Republican of Texas, warned of Democratic voters in next year’s elections as he spoke on Fox News on Tuesday night. “Hate is a powerful motivator. They hate President Trump.”
Republicans are still trying to figure out what their big motivator will be. For now, strategists say the default is likely to be a blitz of negative advertising trying to disqualify all types of Democratic nominees. Tennessee offered a preview with a kitchen-sink-style advertising assault on Aftyn Behn, the Democratic candidate, over her positions on taxes, transgender issues and immigration.
“The MAGA death star landed on our heads,” said Ian Russell, a Democratic strategist who made ads for Ms. Behn and has worked on numerous House races.
U.S. Economy, Inflation, Markets, Jobs
Paul Krugman via Substack, Political-Economy Commentary: Eggs, Lies and Gasoline, Paul Krugman, right, Dec. 4, 2025. The unbearable lightweightness of being Kevin Hassett.
Last Sunday Kevin Hassett, left — chair of the National Economic Council, effectively the Trump administration’s chief 
economist — was interviewed by Nancy Cordes for CBS’s Face the Nation. Most observers expect Hassett to be appointed as the next chair of the Federal Reserve. Prediction markets give him a virtual lock: A graph of blue orange and red lines AI-generated content may be incorrect.
So CBS was probably hoping that he would say something newsworthy. He didn’t.
But he did, in just a few sentences, make it clear that he is absolutely unqualified — intellectually and morally — to be Fed chair. And the fact that nobody took notice, that his ignorance and mendacity were accepted as par for the course, demonstrated just how far our standards for public service have been degraded.
Here’s the exchange that caught my eye:
NANCY CORDES: What’s your advice to holiday shoppers who don’t want to spend more this year than they did last year, or can’t afford to spend more?
HASSETT: Right. Well, as you know, it depends on what you’re looking at. Like egg prices are down. Gasoline prices drop below $2 a gallon in a lot of places, mortgage rates are down—
NANCY CORDES: --you mean below- gas prices on average are still at $3 a gallon.
HASSETT: Yeah that’s right for a few states they got below two.
Given the timidity of legacy media these days, Trump officials need to be really out there to get fact-checked in real time. But Cordes was right: average national gas prices are around $3 a gallon. And contra Hassett, there are no states in which gas prices are below $2, or even close: A map of the united states AI-generated content may be incorrect.
Was Hassett lying, or just unaware of basic facts? Neither is what you want to see in a man who may soon be overseeing monetary policy.
Furthermore, if you’re trying to assess economic policy, it’s hard to come up with worse indicators than the prices of eggs and gasoline. Egg prices fluctuate wildly, not in response to policy changes, but because of the coming and going of bird flu. Gasoline prices mainly reflect the global price of crude oil, a price on which U.S. policy has at most a marginal influence.
So what are we to make of Hassett boasting about prices he should be ignoring if he becomes Fed chair?
Look, I’m not naïve. I understand that when you work for the president — any president — you’re expected to make the best case you honestly can for his policies. But “honestly” is the key word. Sycophancy toward a president who refuses to acknowledge reality, who insists that affordability is a “con job,” crosses that line.
It’s especially important that public officials not tarnish their reputations if they’re going to be moving on to jobs that are supposed to be apolitical — jobs like chairing the Federal Reserve.
The truth is that if Hassett becomes Fed chair, he’s likely to face some very hard choices. How will the Fed deal with the conundrum of weak labor markets combined with stubbornly elevated inflation? How will it respond to soaring electricity prices? If AI is a bubble, what will the Fed do when it bursts? If geopolitical conflict erupts, disrupting supply chains, how will the Fed react?
And the next Fed chair won’t just have to deal with these hard choices. He’ll have to build consensus among his colleagues. For crucial decisions about interest rates aren’t made by the chair, they’re made by committee.
To lead the Fed, then, requires both good judgment and gravitas. For the past two decades we’ve been blessed with chairs who possessed both. Ben Bernanke and Janet Yellen were both highly regarded researchers who were able to combine intellectual excellence with strong management skills and a firm grasp on real-world concerns. Jerome Powell came from the world of investment banking — and is a lifelong Republican — but has earned widespread respect for his open-mindedness and willingness to learn from experts.
Hassett has none of these strengths. I won’t bore you with a review of his research career, from Dow 36,000 to his “cubic model” that predicted very few deaths from Covid, except to say that few would describe it with the words “highly regarded.”
My guess is that few economists will be willing to say this openly, but basically everyone understands that Hassett is an ideological DEI hire. That is, his career has depended not on getting things right but on displaying unswerving loyalty to conservative causes — and, latterly, on saying whatever Donald Trump wants to hear.
Some observers are consoling themselves with the thought that since interest rate decisions are made by committee, Hassett can’t do too much harm. But we expect more from Fed chairs than for them to be mostly harmless. We expect and need them to be effective leaders.
That’s not what we’re going to get.
Judd at Popular Information, Accountability Journalism: UPDATE: Trump Jr.-backed startup receives $620 million Pentagon loan, Rebecca Crosby and Noel Sims, Dec. 4, 2025. In October, Popular Information reported that the Pentagon awarded a contract to Unusual Machines, an obscure drone company that President Trump’s son, Donald Trump Jr., joined as an advisor in November 2024, despite having no notable experience with drones or military contracting.
The contract was for the manufacturing of 3,500 drone motors, and the Army also “indicated it planned to order an additional 20,000 components” from Unusual Machines next year. Trump Jr. was given 200,000 shares of the company’s stock in 2024, which are now worth millions.
Now, another small startup funded by 1789 Capital, a venture capital firm where Trump Jr. is a partner, will receive a $620 million loan from the Defense Department, the Financial Times reported. Vulcan Elements, which currently has around 30 employees, produces rare-earth magnets, which can be used in “drones, radar systems and other military applications.” The contract was awarded just three months after 1789 invested in Vulcan.
The loan is part of a larger $1.4 billion deal announced last month that also involves another company, ReElement Technologies. It also includes $50 million from the Commerce Department and $550 million from private investors. In exchange, the “Department of Commerce will receive $50 million of equity in Vulcan Elements.” The Department of Defense will receive warrants for Vulcan Elements — an option to buy a stake in the future — according to a press release.
Both Vulcan CEO John Maslin and Unusual Machines CEO Allan Evans said that Trump Jr. played no role in securing the government contracts. According to the Financial Times, “[a]t least four of 1789’s portfolio companies have won contracts from the Trump administration this year, amounting to more than $735 million.”
Trump Jr. “helped screen candidates for top jobs at the Pentagon on behalf of his father after the election.” In September, Trump Jr. said on his podcast that he looked for candidates who wanted to spend more on drones, alleging that the military is “better served with a drone that costs… a tiny fraction of that of a plane.” During the nomination process, Trump Jr. was also an outspoken defender of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who later issued several directives that enabled the Pentagon to increase spending on drones.Trump family crypto scheme runs into trouble
As Trump has boosted the crypto industry from the White House by softening regulations and creating a national crypto reserve, he and his sons have raked in cash from their own crypto firm, World Liberty Financial.
In August, World Liberty Financial sold $750 million of $WLFI, the firm’s cryptocurrency, to a small tech company called Alt5 Sigma. Alt5 Sigma bought the stockpile of $WLFI to tie the value of its stock to the value of the cryptocurrency. This move mimicked a firm called Strategy, which created a Bitcoin reserve that initially sent its stock price soaring. The tactic has since fallen out of favor and Strategy’s stock has lost about 50% of its value in the last six months.
When Alt5 Sigma created its $WLFI stockpile, the Trump family netted about $500 million in cash and received an equity stake in the company. According to the World Liberty Financial website, DT Marks DEFI LLC receives 75% of the proceeds from $WLFI. At the start of 2025, 70% of this LLC was owned by President Trump and the rest was divided among family members. The family sold an unknown amount of the company earlier this year.
At the time of the deal, Trump Jr., was made a non-voting observer of Alt5 Sigma’s board. His brother, Eric, is currently listed as a “Strategic Advisor and Observer.” Zach Witkoff, World Liberty Financial CEO and son of Trump’s Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff, is the board’s chair.
Three months after the deal with World Liberty Financial, the company finds itself in chaos.
On November 19, Nasdaq notified the company that it is out of compliance with listing requirements after the company failed to file a quarterly report with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC). Failure to resolve the issue could result in the stock being delisted from the exchange.
The company removed its acting CEO last month after firing his predecessor in October. In May, a subsidiary of the company was found liable for money laundering in Rwanda.
Alt5 Sigma blamed the delayed report on its accountant, who the company claims resigned on November 21. However, the accountant has said he notified the company before June 30 that he would resign after the filing of an August quarterly report. Public companies are required to notify the SEC of their accountant’s departure within four days.
Adding to Alt5 Sigma’s troubles, cryptocurrency prices have tumbled in recent weeks, causing the stock prices of firms with crypto reserves to fall as well. Alt5 Sigma shares have gone down in value by 75% since it created its $WLFI reserve. Although the Trumps’ stake in Alt5 Sigma has lost value, they have still made hundreds of millions of dollars from the company’s $WLFI purchase.
More On Trump Administration
Lincoln Square Media, There’s No Such Thing as a Preventative MRI — but There’s Definitely Such a Thing as Political Bullshit, Kristoffer Ealy, right, Dec. 4, 2025. Since 2005, I’ve had at least one MRI every single year of my adult life. I know MRIs the way other people know Spotify playlists or the McDonald’s menu.
I’ve heard a lot of nonsense in politics over the years, but every once in a while a phrase pops out of someone’s mouth that is so cosmically stupid, so profoundly unserious, and so deeply disrespectful to actual lived experience that it reaches a new stratosphere of bullshit.
Donald Trump’s recent claim that he got a “preventative MRI” is one of those phrases. It’s the kind of thing that sounds like it came from a man who wandered into a hospital, misheard two nurses talking, and sprinted out yelling, “See? I’m healthier than everyone!” MRIs are not preventative. MRIs are not routine. MRIs are not something you put on your 2025 vision board next to “read more books” and “drink more water.” MRIs are diagnostic instruments designed to tell you whether something in your body is about to change your life. So when I hear the president toss out “preventative MRI” as if it’s a seasonal flu shot or a Groupon, I don’t just roll my eyes. I get offended on behalf of every single person who’s ever had to lie in that tube wondering whether their life is about to split into “before” and “after.”
Let me establish something up front: I am not a medical doctor. I don’t treat patients. I don’t prescribe medications. I don’t diagnose anything outside of the shit-show that is American political behavior. But technically — I mean, if we’re splitting hairs — I am a doctor. I’m the kind of doctor who assigns APA papers, teaches constitutional law at 9 a.m., and lives off energy drinks and the occasional caffeine pill like a man who has made several poor life choices in a row. Anyone who clowned Jesse Spano for melting down over caffeine pills has clearly never taken one as an adult with grading to finish—every time I swallow one, I question my entire existence. Elizabeth Berkley, you are owed an Emmy in my opinion. But I digress. I’m the kind of doctor parents brag about until someone starts coughing. I can’t tell you whether your blood pressure is high, but I can absolutely tell you why your senator is. And while I’m not a medical professional, I am absolutely fluent in political bullshit. Trump saying he got a “preventative MRI” is bullshit at the doctoral level. If bullshit were an Olympic sport, Trump would be the Simone Biles of dishonesty—flipping, twisting, sticking the landing every time, and somehow convincing almost half the country gravity doesn’t apply to him.
But here’s why this particular lie hits differently for me: since 2005, I’ve had at least one MRI every single year of my adult life, sometimes two, sometimes more. I know MRIs the way other people know Spotify playlists or the McDonald’s menu. I’ve had MRIs of my brain, my spine, my legs — if a body part can legally fit inside that tube, I’ve had it scanned. And not once, not a single time in twenty years, has a doctor ever said, “We’re doing this to prevent something.” It’s always: “We need to check something.” Or: “We’re not sure what’s going on.” Or: “We have to make sure this hasn’t gotten worse.” If you want to say “preventative MRI,” fine — let’s all pretend we live in a world where vocabulary has no rules and people invent terms like they’re building IKEA furniture without instructions. Let’s just say it for shits and giggles. But even in that imaginary world, the only thing an MRI “prevents” is your disease silently cooking up new ways to ruin your week.Subscribed
My history with MRIs goes all the way back to 2003 when I was in Army ROTC at the University of Tennessee. When I first joined, I was out of shape. But ROTC instructors don’t care — they will whip you into shape whether you like it or not. Within months, I could do pushups, pull-ups, squats, swim laps — stuff I never thought I’d be good at. The only thing I could never get right was running. Some mornings I could run six miles with the other cadets like it was nothing. Other mornings I couldn’t get past the first mile before my legs suddenly said, “Nah, we’re clocking out.” After one particular run, I cramped so hard I could barely walk. I wasn’t sick enough to go to the hospital, but they sent me to one of the medical officers. The next day my instructor pulled me aside and said, “Ealy, you got a lot of heart, but this is just not something you can do right now.” And let me tell you, nothing will humble a 22-year-old faster than hearing, “Your spirit is willing, but your body is staging a quiet rebellion.”
I was heartbroken. ROTC was supposed to be my path forward after multiple semesters of slacking off. Without it, I had no plan. So I left Tennessee, moved to Virginia to stay with my uncle, and drifted around the DMV for a while trying to figure out life. Eventually I moved back to Los Angeles to live with my cousin Cherrae in 2005. By then, I had lost the depression weight I’d packed on and looked like a young, healthy 24-year-old man with nothing particularly wrong with me. Except there was something wrong. Whenever Cherrae and I would leave a restaurant or walk to the car, there were random moments when my legs would just … stop. Go numb. Lock up. And I still didn’t get it checked out, because I was young enough to assume nothing bad could ever be happening to me.
Then one night at 3 a.m., I got a fever so intense I couldn’t move my body at all. I called my mom, panicked. She said, “Call 911 right now.” At Huntington Hospital in Pasadena, they ran tests, checked reflexes, did all the things. The next morning, the neurologist — the late great Mihiko Nelsen — told me I needed an MRI. I had no idea what an MRI really was. I thought it was some fancy X-ray. I didn’t know that tube was about to become a recurring character in the next twenty years of my life, like a clingy ex who refuses to stop showing up at your house uninvited.
Let me pause here to explain something about MRIs: there is nothing routine about them. They are loud, claustrophobic, and uncomfortably intimate. You lie on a narrow table, slide into a tube that looks like something NASA abandoned in the ’80s, and for the next 30 to 60 minutes you listen to sounds that can only be described as a robot having a nervous breakdown. Some people panic inside. Some people need to be sedated. Some people pee themselves — yes, that happens. The tech always tells you, “Just relax,” which is hilarious advice when you’re stuck inside a magnet thinking about every medical mystery in the universe. I have never met a single person who enjoys getting an MRI. Not one. People only get MRIs because a doctor thinks something might be seriously wrong.
And in my case, something was. After that first MRI in 2005, they diagnosed me with multiple sclerosis. Not a death sentence, but definitely a life sentence. You hear those words and immediately know your old definition of “normal” is about to be discontinued.
But I was young and stubborn, and I refused to let MS define me. I moved to L.A., took acting classes, dated, partied — did all the things a 24-year-old is supposed to do. Over the years since my diagnosis I had four girlfriends: two were kind of serious, one was very serious, and the fourth became my wife. The funny thing about dating with MS is that sometimes the MRI scared women more than the disease. A disease can be abstract. But an MRI? That sounds like you’re being inspected for alien abduction. And because they were women — especially Black women — they did what Black women do better than the FBI: they Googled everything. They’d come back like, “Kristoffer … why are you going in that machine every year? Are you gonna die?” And I’d be like, “Nah, the machine isn’t the problem. It’s the thing the machine is looking for.”
In 2010, someone I was with — someone whose opinion carried more weight with me than I admitted at the time — told me point-blank that I needed to stop pretending this wasn’t serious. It wasn’t just a casual comment; it was one of those moments where someone who cares about you more than you realize holds up a mirror you weren’t ready to look into. I brushed her off at first, but then I talked to my grandmother. She told me, “Whatever happens to you, your partner has to carry that weight, too.” And that landed with a different kind of force. So I finally started taking my neurologist’s advice seriously. I exercised. Ate better. Took my meds. Did everything by the book. My MRIs stayed consistent. Life stabilized. I finished a master’s degree, got into USC Annenberg, built a career. And for a long time, I was able to live as someone who could hide what was wrong with me — until it reached a point where hiding it wasn’t an option anymore.
Dec. 3
Presidents—they’re just like the rest of us. Yesterday on Dec. 2, 2025, Donald Trump had a deeply human experience: repeatedly dozing off throughout a meeting after burning the candle at both ends on an epic all-night social media binge, as reported by The Bulwark and shown above.
"Unfortunately," The Bulwark commented, "that meeting was a televised cabinet gathering, and the content Trump snoozed through was a mountain of praise from his cabinet members of what a good job he’s doing saving America. It all made for some pretty funny viewing—and some headlines that the White House doesn’t love."
New York Times, After Decades in Combat, a SEAL Suddenly Comes Under Scrutiny, Helene Cooper and John Ismay, Dec. 3, 2025 (print ed.). Adm. Frank M. Bradley will soon face questions from lawmakers, as Republicans and Democrats express concerns about a Sept. 2 attack on a boat in the Caribbean.
During his career, Adm. Frank Mitchell Bradley, right, a stoic and cerebral SEAL known as Mitch to his peers, has ordered and carried out military strikes against targets in Afghanistan, Yemen and other war zones.
Over the decades, he drew little attention outside the smoke and mirrors world of military Special Operations. But now he is facing his biggest professional challenge in public.
After years of following orders with clear rules of engagement and with congressional authority, targeting jihadists in rural and urban settings, Admiral Bradley was put in command of a legally murky attack on Sept. 2 targeting a boat in the Caribbean that the Trump administration says was smuggling drugs.
And in ordering a second strike that killed two survivors who were clinging to the burning wreckage of the boat — something his superiors say they did not specifically order him to do — Admiral Bradley now finds himself in potential legal jeopardy.
On Thursday, he will head to Capitol Hill for closed-door sessions with lawmakers, as Republicans and Democrats express concerns about the Trump administration’s campaign.
At the time of the Sept. 2 attack, Admiral Bradley was beginning the last month of his tour as head of the Joint Special Operations Command, which conducts some of the military’s most secret missions, and preparing to assume the command of U.S. Special Operations Command, a job he took in October.
But now he has become a public example of the potential legal peril that the American military faces as it carries out the orders of President Trump and his defense secretary.
The president said that he “wouldn’t have wanted” a second strike on the boat survivors, and that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth told him he did not order one.
Mr. Hegseth had previously said that he watched the operation live on video. But on Tuesday, Mr. Hegseth said he “didn’t stick around” to see the second strike.
At the White House on Monday, Karoline Leavitt, right, the press secretary, read a statement that said Mr. Hegseth had authorized Admiral Bradley “to conduct these kinetic strikes” and that the admiral had “worked well within his authority and the law” to make sure the boat was destroyed.
The public comments of the president, Mr. Hegseth and Ms. Leavitt all leave Admiral Bradley exposed.
“For the top two civilians in the Pentagon and the White House to effectively wash their hands of it and claim no responsibility, while simultaneously saying that they stand by the decision, goes against any kind of ideas of responsible command,” said Carrie A. Lee, the former chair of the department of national security and strategy at the Army War College.
“Trying to walk this middle line where you are saying, ‘Well, I agree with his decisions, but if they violated the law, then we’re going to leave him swinging,” added Ms. Lee, who is now a senior fellow at the German Marshall Fund.
The problem Admiral Bradley now faces was almost inevitable, Pentagon officials said, as the military tries to apply the rules of engagement it used in battling Al Qaeda and the Islamic State in Mr. Trump’s battle against “narco-terrorists.”
Convicted sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell with her co-trafficker and co-rapist of underage girls and sometime boyfriend Jeffrey Epstein (Getty images).
New York Times, Ghislaine Maxwell Says She Will Ask a Court to Free Her From Prison, Benjamin Weiser, Dec. 3, 2025. In a court filing, a lawyer for the onetime companion of the disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein said she would seek to be released from her minimum-security federal lockup.
Ghislaine Maxwell, the longtime companion of Jeffrey Epstein who is serving a 20-year prison sentence for sex trafficking, plans to ask a court to release her, according to a letter filed on Wednesday in Manhattan federal court.
The letter, submitted by her lawyer, offers no details about what grounds Ms. Maxwell will cite in her filing, known as a habeas petition. But the letter indicated that she would file the request shortly, and that it would be done without a lawyer representing her.
Ms. Maxwell’s lawyer, David Oscar Markus, declined to comment on Wednesday when asked about the letter.
Ms. Maxwell has already been moved from a federal prison in Florida to a minimum-security camp in Texas. The move occurred about a week after she was interviewed over two days about the Epstein case by Todd Blanche, the Justice Department’s second-in-command and one of President Trump’s former lawyers.
Mr. Blanche met with Ms. Maxwell amid a firestorm of criticism from Trump supporters who called for the administration to release all federal files related to Mr. Epstein.
Mr. Markus’s letter suggests that Ms. Maxwell, in her habeas petition, will challenge her December 2021 conviction, which came after a monthlong trial in Federal District Court in Manhattan. The jury found her guilty of sex trafficking conspiracy, sex trafficking of a minor and other counts.
The Epstein matter has become a consistent headache for the Trump administration. The president and Mr. Epstein knew each other socially, and Mr. Trump has alluded to Mr. Epstein’s involvement with young women.
But many of Mr. Trump’s most fervent supporters came to believe that as president, he would open all investigative files on the case, divulging secrets about a cabal of powerful men. Indeed, several top aides to Mr. Trump led the president’s followers to believe that the papers would be quickly made public. But the Justice Department in July released a letter saying there would be no further disclosures, sparking fury.
The letter from Ms. Maxwell’s lawyer came about two months after top officials at the Justice Department informed Mr. Trump that he himself was mentioned in the files. A person’s name appearing in the documents is not necessarily an indication of wrongdoing.Editors’ PicksThese 7 Cookies Will Be the Life of Every PartyWhy Are My Hands and Feet So Cold?Inside the Museum-Style Home of Michael Ovitz, an A-List Collector
In his letter on Wednesday, Mr. Markus told the judge overseeing Ms. Maxwell’s case that his client took no position on a recent request by Attorney General Pam Bondi that the court release sealed materials related to the grand jury investigation of Ms. Maxwell.
At the same time, Mr. Markus wrote, releasing the materials from Ms. Maxwell’s case, “which contain untested and unproven allegations, would create undue prejudice so severe that it would foreclose the possibility of a fair retrial should Ms. Maxwell’s habeas petition succeed.”
Although the judge, Paul A. Engelmayer, previously denied a request by the Justice Department to release those documents, Ms. Bondi made her latest motion under the Epstein Files Transparency Act, which was signed by Mr. Trump last month.
Ms. Bondi has made a similar motion seeking release of grand jury materials involving Mr. Epstein to Judge Richard M. Berman, who oversaw the Epstein case in Manhattan federal court. In 2019, Mr. Epstein was found hanged in his jail cell — a death ruled a suicide — as he was awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges.
Lawyers for Mr. Epstein’s estate on Wednesday told Judge Berman that they took no position on the release of the grand jury materials, as long as there were “appropriate redactions of victim-related and other personal identifying information.”
More On U.S. Governance, Politics
Meidas Touch Network, Commentary: Democrat Aftyn Behn Overperforms in Deep-Red Tennessee In Another Warning Sign for Trump, Troy Matthews, Dec. 3, 2025. Democrats continue to beat expectations as voters show out to shut down the Trump agenda. o
Democrat Aftyn Behn, above right, significantly overperformed in deep-red Tennessee Tuesday night in a race that should have been a blowout win for MAGA. Republican Matt Van Epps, above left, won the special election for Tennessee's 7th congressional district by 53.9 percent to Behn’s 45.1 percent, a 9-point victory in a district Trump won in 2024 by 22 points.
Early voting results had Behn ahead as polls closed, creating unexpected optimism for Democrats eyeing the race all over the country. A Behn win would have been catastrophic for House Speaker Mike Johnson who is holding on to a hemorrhaging GOP majority by his finger tips after the resignation of Marjorie Taylor Greene, and with other expected departures in the coming months.
Though the Election Day vote tally solidified the win for the Trump-loyalist Van Epps, Behn came closest to winning the district than any Democrat has in years, once again forcing Republicans to expend cash – more than $3 million – on what should have been a safe race.
Van Epps also needed the campaign support of Trump and Johnson who made appearances at his rallies in the final weeks before Election Day as polls tightened.
"Although tonight is not the final result we wanted, it is the beginning of something so powerful," Behn told a crowd of supporters after conceding the race. "This isn’t the end of our story. It’s not even close. Because what we built here in this district is a grassroots movement, is part of something bigger that is happening across the south."
Democrats have now won or overperformed in 220 of 248 special elections since November of 2024; nearly 90%, in a stark warning for Trump and MAGA Republicans heading into the 2026 midterms.
“What happened tonight in Tennessee makes it clear: Democrats are on offense and Republicans are on the ropes," DNC Chair Ken Martin said in a statement. "Aftyn Behn’s overperformance in this Trump +22 district is historic and a flashing warning sign for Republicans heading into the midterms."
"The fact that Republicans spent millions to protect this Trump +22 district and still lost so much ground should have the GOP shaking in their boots," Martin continued.
Meidas Touch Network, Commentary: Trump Warns of ‘Other Scams’ While Offering Non-Existent Tariff Checks, J.D. Wolf, Dec. 3, 2025. Trump continues to dangle money in campaign cash grabs
Donald Trump continues to fundraise off of promised tariff rebate checks that don’t exist. He has warned supporters that the checks are in legal peril pending a Supreme Court ruling and even though, he continues to dangle the cash in exchange for donationsTrump campaign
In his recent fundraising email from Never Surrender, Inc., Trump claims it is “the only tariff rebate email authorized by President Trump,” apologizes if recipients “fell for other scams,” and then asks: “Would you accept a TARIFF rebate check signed by Trump?”Trump campaign
The message is paired with an image of Trump holding cash and demands a response “before end-of-month deadline.”Trump campaign
Trump has repeatedly teased “tariff checks” in rallies and social posts, but no policy exists. There is no statutory authority for such payments, and no legislation passed by Congress.
New York Times, His Deadline for a Peace Deal Blown, Trump Faces Choices on Russia-Ukraine Talks, David E. Sanger and Anton Troianovski, Dec. 3, 2025. The president wanted Moscow and Kyiv to come to terms by Thanksgiving. Negotiations are now stalled, leaving the White House to decide if an agreement is possible anytime soon.
Just two weeks ago, President Trump set a Thanksgiving deadline for Ukraine to agree to a peace treaty with Russia, putting on the table a proposal with elements that could have been drafted by the Kremlin.
Now, it seems clear he will have to wait — maybe weeks, maybe past the fourth anniversary of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in late February.
A Ukrainian delegation is expected to meet on Thursday with Mr. Trump’s negotiators, keeping alive hope for some progress. But PresidentVladimir V. Putin signaled yet again this week that he was not budging from his hard-line demands, leaving Mr. Trump’s envoys with no breakthrough to show for their five-hour meeting with the Russian leader in Moscow on Tuesday.
That leaves Mr. Trump with a difficult but familiar set of choices. Does he pressure Ukraine to make even more concessions — as he attempted two weeks ago — even if that means endangering the country’s sovereignty? Does he eventually walk away, as he has suggested at some moments that he might, even if that admits failure in an effort to end a war that he had promised to solve in 24 hours?
Or does he reverse course and restore wide-ranging American military aid to Ukraine, after declaring that Europe, not the United States, would have to bear the financial burden of arming the country?
“It does take two to tango,” Mr. Trump told reporters on Wednesday, acknowledging the difficulty of getting Russia and Ukraine to a deal.
“I don’t know what the Kremlin is doing,” Mr. Trump said when asked for an update on Tuesday’s meeting, which included his envoy, Steve Witkoff, and his son-in-law, Jared Kushner. “I can tell you that they had a reasonably good meeting with President Putin. We’re going to find out.”
It was a very different tone than the one he used at his August meeting with Mr. Putin in Anchorage, Alaska, where he confidently predicted that the leaders of Russia and Ukraine would sit down together and hammer out an understanding, with Mr. Trump as their mediator and guide.
All year, Mr. Trump has set deadlines and claimed that a peace deal might be nigh, only to be frustrated by a Russian president who has stuck, unwaveringly, to his far-reaching goals for Ukrainian territory and sovereignty.Editors’ PicksAdding Vintage Touches to an 1800s VictorianInside the Museum-Style Home of Michael Ovitz, an A-List CollectorSolve the December Bonus Puzzle
But while many observers expected Mr. Trump to eventually lose interest in trying to stop the war, he has only redoubled his efforts in recent weeks, apparently convinced that Ukraine’s grinding battlefield setbacks and the mounting costs to Moscow of a sustained conflict would drive both sides toward a deal.Want to stay updated on what’s happening in Russia and Ukraine? Sign
New York Times, Republican Anger Erupts at Johnson as Party Frets About Future, Annie Karni, Dec. 3, 2025. A small group of G.O.P. women have been among the most vocal in raising what their colleagues say is a broader frustration with the speaker.
Representative Elise Stefanik of New York called Speaker Mike Johnson, right, a habitual liar.
Representative Nancy Mace of South Carolina has told people she is so frustrated with the Louisiana Republican and sick of the way he has run the House — particularly how women are treated there — that she is planning to huddle with Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia next week to discuss following her lead and retiring early from Congress.
Representative Anna Paulina Luna of Florida has gone around Mr. Johnson in a bid to force a vote he has declined to schedule on a bill to ban members of Congress from stock trading.
Less than a year out from midterm elections in which Republicans’ vanishingly small majority is at stake, Mr. Johnson’s grasp on his gavel appears weaker than ever, as members from all corners of his conference openly complain about his leadership. Some predict that he may not last as the speaker for the rest of this term.
Republican women, in particular, have been publicly challenging Mr. Johnson and taking issue with his priorities and his style.
Their dissatisfaction is indicative of a broader splintering of a restive group of G.O.P. lawmakers who are perpetually unhappy with their leaders, but appear to be reaching a breaking point with the current man at the top.
“Rarely have things been completely harmonious in the conference, but it does seem like there is an unusually high level of discontent,” said Representative Kevin Kiley, a California Republican who has been at odds with Mr. Johnson over the redistricting battles that will likely put him out of a job next year.
He added: “The overriding issue is the House has not been at the forefront of driving policymaking, or the agenda in Washington. That is naturally going to be frustrating to members who ran for Congress to make an impact on issues they care about.”ImageRepresentative Elise Stefanik at the Capitol this summer. Credit...Kenny Holston/The New York Times
The rifts have opened as Republicans preparing to face voters in next year’s elections are increasingly worried that they have squandered a year in which their party had total control of government.
Many G.O.P. lawmakers are unhappy with the passive role the speaker has played in the redistricting arms race that has spread across the country and upended districts they know how to win. Even more are angry at his decision to send the House home for nearly eight weeks before and during the government shutdown, limiting what they have been able to accomplish. Members in competitive districts are desperate for a vote on extending expiring Affordable Care Act subsidies, which Mr. Johnson is resisting.
Ms. Stefanik told The Wall Street Journal in an interview that Mr. Johnson would not have the support to remain speaker if a vote were held tomorrow, adding that disaffection with him among Republicans was “that widespread.”
Ms. Stefanik declined to speak on the record for this article.
Mr. Johnson declined to comment, as well. But a senior Republican congressional aide, who spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of prolonging an intraparty feud, said that after Mr. Johnson had provided Ms. Stefanik with office space and a budget for what the aide described as “a fake job and a fake title,” he would have expected her to be more gracious.
(After President Trump asked Ms. Stefanik earlier this year to withdraw as his nominee to serve as ambassador to the United Nations, Mr. Johnson created a new post for her called “chairwoman of House Republican Leadership,” although their relationship had collapsed.)
New York Times, U.S. Military’s Boat Strikes Planning Takes On New Significance, Helene Cooper, Julian E. Barnes, Charlie Savage and Eric Schmitt, Dec. 3, 2025. The details could raise questions about who was responsible for a follow-up strike on Sept. 2 — the commander who ordered it or the defense secretary.
Before the Trump administration began attacking people suspected of smuggling drugs at sea, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth approved contingency plans for what to do if an initial strike left survivors, according to multiple U.S. officials.
The military would attempt to rescue survivors who appeared to be helpless, shipwrecked and out of what the administration considered a fight. But it would try again to kill them if they took what the United States deemed to be a hostile action, like communicating with suspected cartel members, the officials said.
After the smoke cleared from a first strike on Sept. 2, there were two survivors, and one of them radioed for help, the U.S. officials said. Adm. Frank M. Bradley, who commanded the operation, ordered a follow-up strike and both were killed.
The military’s contingency plans have taken on new significance as Admiral Bradley and Gen. Dan Caine, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, are set to go to Capitol Hill on Thursday to answer questions about the attack amid an uproar over the killing of the survivors.
The men plan to present a vigorous defense, officials said, of what they will assert was a lawful follow-up strike on the survivors. That moment is just a small part of Mr. Trump’s legally disputed campaign of killing people suspected of smuggling drugs at sea as if they were combatants in a war, but it is now the focus of intense congressional scrutiny.
The details of the contingency planning could raise more questions about who was responsible for the second strike — the commander who ordered it or the defense secretary who approved the overall operation. Many critics, including some lawmakers, have said the follow-up attack could be a war crime.
Defenders of both Mr. Hegseth and Admiral Bradley said that once lawmakers learn more about the planning scenarios and the circumstances of the second strike, they will be exonerated.
President Trump on Wednesday offered his support for both men. The Pentagon did not respond to request for comment on the military’s planning.
On orders from Mr. Trump and Mr. Hegseth, the U.S. military has attacked 21 boats in the Caribbean Sea and eastern Pacific Ocean, killing 83 people, as part of a legally disputed policy of summarily executing people suspected of smuggling drugs as if they were combatants on a battlefield.
The alleged radio communications by the initial survivors — including any recordings of intercepts the U.S. may have — may not be the only messages that lawmakers seek to scrutinize as contemporaneous evidence of what happened.
Several U.S. officials told The New York Times that military officials had used a written texting system known as “Strike Bridge” to communicate, both during planning scenarios ahead of the attack and during the operation itself. The written messages, they said, included communications between Admiral Bradley and the SEAL Team 6 operators directing the drone.
Meidas Touch Network, Commentary: Sabrina Carpenter Called Out Trump’s ‘Inhumane Agenda,’ J.D. Wolf, Dec. 2, 2025. White House paired sexual position lyrics with images of pinned migrants in ICE hype video.
The Trump White House’s ICE hype video not only used Sabrina Carpenter’s song “Juno” without permission, but misrepresented its meaning. The clip looped the lyric “have you like this one,” a line that in the actual song is sexual in context: “Wanna try out some freaky positions? Have you ever tried this one?”Sabrina Carpenter
Pairing that lyric with footage of federal deportation agents tackling and restraining people made the video even more jarring, especially as it was packaged with a cheerful “Bye-bye 👋😍” message from the official White House account.Trump Stained GlassTrump Promotes Worship Song Calling Himself “The Chosen One”Read More
The hit recording artist quickly condemned the post, calling the video “evil and disgusting” and demanding that her music never again be used to support Trump’s “inhumane agenda.”
Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: The Cover-Up Begins to Unravel, William Kristol, right, Dec. 3, 2025. I’ll begin with some bad news on this cold and wintry-ish morning in Washington, D.C.: Lying sometimes works.
I wish this weren’t the case. It would be nice if lying were always to fail. But, as we’ve all been reminded over the past decade, a determined and shameless liar can do pretty well for himself. A peddler of simple but psychologically attractive lies can fool many of the people much of the time. And even when some of his lies are definitively exposed as falsehoods, a confident deceiver can stick to his guns, plunge ahead, and get a surprising number of people to continue to believe them—or at least to tolerate them.
That’s not good. As James Madison explains in Federalist No. 55, republican government “in a higher degree than any other form” presupposes the existence of “qualities in human nature which justify a certain portion of esteem and confidence.”
Well, if one of the vital qualities for republican government is a deep attachment to truth-telling and a reliable revulsion at dissembling, then we are in some trouble.
On the other hand, there’s good news: If lies often succeed, cover-ups frequently don’t. Lying can be pretty simple and easy. Cover-ups tend to be complicated and difficult. They require forethought and discipline on the part of their organizers. They often require enlisting the active cooperation—or at least the passive acquiescence—of lots of other people who were involved in the action being covered up. And so, they often fail.
Partial cover-ups—what Nixon aide John Ehrlichman called modified limited hangouts—are particularly difficult to pull off.
We’ve seen that with the Epstein scandal. The Trump administration would surely have been better off if they could have stuck to their original line that there was nothing more to see there and that they wouldn’t be releasing any material. But once they were forced down the slippery slope of providing some information, that’s when the trouble started.
We’re likely to see the same dynamic with the current war-crimes coverup. Trump and Hegseth might have been able to hold the line by insisting on an alleged necessity of secrecy for military decision-making when it came to striking an alleged drug-running boat in the Caribbean twice. They could have accompanied this stonewall with demagogic attacks on their critics, who supposedly want to weaken our military and coddle drug dealers.
But now that they’re trying to explain and rationalize what they did, they’re probably on a path to failure.
At yesterday’s cabinet meeting, Pete Hegseth couldn’t resist boasting that he had taken personal charge of the decision to blow up the alleged drug boat on September 2, explaining that he wanted to be “the one to make that call.”
Hegseth went on to explain that he’d watched the first strike live. But, he said, he’s a busy guy, so he “didn’t stick around” for an extra hour or two to see “all the sensitive sight exploitation.” Only later that day, he claims, did he learn that “the commander had made the . . . decision to ultimately sink the boat and eliminate the threat.”
Perhaps. But of course Hegseth would presumably still have been reachable after he left the room, by secure phone—or on Signal!—to discuss that second decision. Indeed, one would think the commander would have taken a minute to call or text him if were still what the military calls the “target management authority” for the engagement. Unless, of course, the commander felt no need to get back in contact with Hegseth because Hegseth had given an unequivocal order ahead of time to “kill everyone” on board.
Either way, the second strike is Hegseth’s responsibility. It’s a responsibility Hegseth obviously hadn’t wanted to publicize, as he never mentioned the second strike over the next months when discussing the operation, including when he boasted about it and showed video of the first strike only on Fox & Friends the next day.
But by discussing the sequence of events, Hegseth has made it much harder for the administration to resist demands from Congress for documents and records and sworn testimony from everyone invited. He’s already lifted the veil of secrecy.
So if the bad news is that lying can work, the good news is that cover-ups can unravel. Believers in our republican government and defenders of the honor of our military should be determined to unravel this one.
New York Times, Trump Returns to Gasoline as Fuel of Choice for Cars, Gutting Biden’s Climate Policy, Lisa Friedman, Maxine Joselow and Jack Ewing, Dec. 3, 2025. The president said he would weaken Biden-era mileage standards, which were designed to increase electric-vehicle sales, calling them a “scam.”
President Trump on Wednesday threw the weight of the federal government behind vehicles that burn gasoline rather than electric cars, gutting one of the country’s most significant efforts to address climate change and thrusting the automobile industry into greater uncertainty.
Flanked by executives from major automakers in the Oval Office, Mr. Trump said the Transportation Department would significantly weaken fuel efficiency requirements for tens of millions of new cars and light trucks. The administration claimed the changes would save Americans $109 billion over five years and shave $1,000 off the average cost of a new car.
The Biden administration’s stricter efficiency standards were designed to get more Americans to go electric. But Mr. Trump said they “forced automakers to build cars using expensive technologies that drove up costs, drove up prices, and made the car much worse. This is a green new scam, and people were paying too much for a car that didn’t work as well.”
For the past half-century, the efficiency standards have compelled automakers to increase the distance their vehicles can travel on a gallon of gas, reducing fuel consumption and leading to innovations like electric and hybrid cars.
The announcement on Wednesday was the second part of a one-two punch against policies promoting electric cars, a central pillar of President Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s strategy for fighting climate change.
Transportation is the largest source of greenhouse gases in the United States, and Mr. Biden had adopted a carrot-and-stick approach to reducing these emissions. He offered tax credits to encourage motorists to buy electric cars while requiring that automakers meet stringent fuel efficiency standards to pressure them to sell more nonpolluting models.
Mr. Trump and the Republican-controlled Congress got rid of the tax credits earlier this year. They also eliminated fines for automakers who violate the fuel efficiency standards. And now the standards themselves will be watered down.
Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: MAGA Media Gets Its Moment, Andrew Egger, Dec. 3, 2025. Yesterday, Defense Department Press Secretary Kingsley Wilson took to the Pentagon briefing room for her first on-camera press briefing of the year. It’s a time of high controversy for the Defense Department, with Secretary Pete Hegseth under pressure about his involvement in a double-tap strike on an alleged drug-trafficking boat off the coast of Venezuela. So reporters made sure to hold Wilson’s feet to the fire with a barrage of probing questions. . . .
Ha! Just kidding! Wilson wasn’t speaking to the once-independent DoD press. She was addressing the motley crew of right-wing influencers and Trump-media reporters who were willing to sign on to the quasi-loyalty pledge hatched by Hegseth earlier this year.
That new-look Potemkin Pentagon press corps had come to D.C. this week for a ludicrous meet-and-greet event, where the Defense Department is letting them go through the motions of being real honest-to-God reporters—working out of the Pentagon press pen, wearing little PRESS badges, sitting in the briefing room—in exchange for them blasting out content about what a swell job Hegseth & Co. are doing and how the mean ol’ establishment media won’t give them any credit.
The Bulwark isn’t part of the Pentagon press pool. But we aren’t anyone’s lickspittles, either. If that sounds like your cup of tea, join our community.Subscribed
The result was yesterday’s “briefing,” where a rookie spokesperson for the world’s most powerful military made a towering procession of outrageous and ridiculous claims. Among them: that the Washington Post had fabricated its story that broke the news of the double-tap strike, that congressional Democrats who released a video reminding soldiers they had a duty not to follow unlawful orders had committed sedition, and that “every single boat that we strike saves 25,000 American lives.” Each of these claims received zero pushback from the folks asking the questions in the room.
That’s not to say there weren’t some good questions. While the questioners were content to give Wilson a pass on her smears of Democrats and the media, many struck a skeptical posture toward other elements of the White House’s foreign policy.
There was the strange spectacle of former Rep. Matt Gaetz—you could tell it was him by the “Representative Matt Gaetz” quarter-zip he was wearing—asking probing questions about the implications of Trump declaring Nicolás Maduro’s government in Venezuela a “narco-terrorist” regime: Is it the policy of the United States that everyone serving in Venezuela’s government or military is “definitionally” a narco-terrorist? A few minutes later, Laura Loomer had a sharp question of her own, asking Wilson to explain why the Defense Department was pushing ahead with closer military ties with Qatar at the exact same moment that the White House is preparing to designate the Muslim Brotherhood a foreign Islamic terrorist organization.
Wilson’s canned responses shed little light on either question. But they were a reminder that parts of MAGA have been anything but enthused about parts of Trump’s approach to his use of the military abroad. The odd irony of the current Pentagon press strategy may be that it’s the one part of Trump’s government that has taken pains to exclude all but the most MAGA-ish voices from its press pool, but it’s also the one part of Trump’s government these days that MAGA voices are finding their own reasons to criticize.
And those reasons keep growing. Trump, emboldened by the public’s collective shrug at his strikes on Venezuelan boats, suggested at a cabinet meeting yesterday that his campaign against Maduro and the drug trade may venture onto Venezuelan land soon enough. “We’re going to start doing those strikes on land, too,” he said. “You know, the land is much easier.”
Back at the Pentagon, Wilson was asked what the Defense Department’s posture was on congressional calls for regime change in Venezuela. She was again tight-lipped: “The Department of War stands behind the president 100 percent, and we will execute on the orders our commander-in-chief gives us, and we’re proud to do so,” she said. “And again any decision that is going to be made about certain military actions in the Western Hemisphere region will be the president’s alone.”
The Pentagon may have constructed the press corps of its dreams. But that doesn’t mean it’s getting good press.
AROUND THE BULWARK
Quick Hits
‘LET THEM GO BACK TO WHERE THEY CAME FROM’: It’s not exactly new news that Donald Trump, who famously launched his 2016 presidential campaign with a rant about Mexican migrants bringing drugs, crime, and rape to America, likes to traffic in racist tropes. Still, he outdid himself at yesterday’s cabinet meeting with a rant against Somali Americans that was so grotesque that even normally staid publications didn’t bother putting gloss on it. Here’s the New York Times:
President Trump unleashed a xenophobic tirade against Somali immigrants on Tuesday, calling them “garbage” he does not want in the United States in an outburst that captured the raw nativism that has animated his approach to immigration.
Even for Mr. Trump—who has a long history of insulting Black people, particularly those from African countries—his outburst was shocking in its unapologetic bigotry.
Take a moment to sip your coffee if you need to. Then keep reading:
“When they come from hell and they complain and do nothing but bitch, we don’t want them in our country. Let them go back to where they came from and fix it,” Mr. Trump added as Vice President JD Vance banged the table in encouragement.
He said Somalia “stinks and we don’t want them in our country.” He described Representative Ilhan Omar, Democrat of Minnesota, who came to the United States from Somalia as a refugee and became a citizen 25 years ago, as “garbage.”
“We could go one way or the other, and we’re going to go the wrong way if we keep taking in garbage into our country,” Mr. Trump said. “She’s garbage. Her friends are garbage. These aren’t people who work. These aren’t people who say, ‘Let’s go, come on, let’s make this place great.’”
Of course, it’s not just rhetoric. Trump last week singled out Somalis for revocation of Temporary Protected Status—a form of legal authorization for migrants fleeing armed conflict abroad—and is going after them this week in targeted ICE operations in Rep. Omar’s Minneapolis district.
STEFANIK UNCHAINED: House Speaker Mike Johnson has been having enough trouble keeping rank-and-file members of his tiny GOP majority in line this year. But this week, he found himself in the midst of his strangest intra-conference battle yet—after a onetime member of his own House leadership team decided to pick a very public fight with him.
Rep. Elise Stefanik, who is retiring from Congress to run for governor of New York, has been threatening to withhold her vote on next year’s National Defense Authorization Act unless it includes her provision requiring law enforcement to notify Congress before opening an investigation into candidates seeking federal office. And she’s been lashing out at the speaker, saying that the provision’s lack of inclusion in the current version of the bill is evidence that Johnson is “siding with Jamie Raskin against Trump Republicans to block this provision to protect the deep state.”
Asked about Stefanik’s accusations Tuesday, Johnson reacted with bemused irritation. “I don’t exactly know why Elise won’t just call me,” he said, telling reporters he’d texted her saying: “What are you talking about? This hasn’t even made it to my level.” Stefanik clapped back quickly. “Just more lies from the Speaker,” she fumed.
It’s hard to know how much Stefanik’s heart is in this fight—she’s a political chameleon who first built a brand as a new-look GOP moderate before making a hard and shameless pivot to Trump cheerleadery during his first term. But if anything, that makes the dustup more uncomfortable for Johnson. If Stefanik sees picking a fight with him as a good way to rev up the base, that’s a likely sign he’s starting to lose the trust of the MAGA faithful.
More On Law, Justice, Crime
Emptywheel, Analysis: Four Shots at an Unarmed Boat in Uncontested Waters, (Marcy Wheeler, right), Dec. 3, 2025. It took the most powerful military in the history of the world four strikes to destroy an unarmed boat in uncontested waters.
Twenty-eight paragraphs into the story that first focused attention on the murder Pete Hegseth ordered back in September (though as it notes, Nick Turse first revealed the second shot just days after the attack) is this revelation: it took four strikes to kill first the people then destroy any debris from the targeted boats.
The boat in the first strike was hit a total of four times, twice to kill the crew and twice more to sink it, four people familiar with the operation said.
It took the most powerful military in the history of the world four shots the get the job done.
One.
Two.
Three.
Four.
That fact lies at the core of a whole bunch of other senselessness about Trump’s feckless rule. There’s Trump’s release of Juan Orlando Hernández, a proven high-level threat, even as forces that normally prevent turbulence in the Middle East gather off of Venezuela’s oil fields. There’s the many ways, starting with the destruction of USAID and definitely including Trump’s trade war, that has added to global instability. There’s the cost involved in drone-striking small boats. There’s the neutering of legal advisors who might have saved Admiral Frank Bradley from being underbussed by the guy who promoted him. There’s the pretend press corps filled with nutballs and cranks that ensures that Whiskey Pete will never be challenged with actual knowledge.
But at root, you’ve got Pete Hegseth, right, sitting atop that most powerful military boom boom boom boom, treating it like a children’s game.
And he doesn’t realize that on this, his first attempt, and twice more after that, the most powerful military in the history of the world could not take out an unarmed boat in uncontested waters with one shot.
Donald Trump thinks murderboats make him look strong (though the video he released of this one hid that it took four shots to get the job done).
Pete Hegseth thinks murderboats make him look strong.
But holy hell, can we talk about how feckless the reality is?
Update: This timeline of the conflicting things Trump and his minions have said about the September 2 strike is useful.
Emptywheel, Analysis: The Kafka Story Inside Trump’s Godfather Trilogy, (Marcy Wheeler, right), Dec. 3, 2025. Eleven days after Maurene Comey sued DOJ for wrongful termination, OLC decided that the Merit Systems Protection Board -- and not Article III Courts -- should decide whether Trump has the authority to override civil service protections.
I’ve written several times (one, two, three) about the possibility that Maurene Comey’s wrongful termination lawsuit might provide transparency on DOJ’s larger weaponization against people like her father.
But (aside from vindication for Ms. Comey), I always conceived it in terms of the specific disclosures it might bring. Because she claims she was fired because of Trump’s gripes about her father, if the lawsuit survives motion to dismiss, Ms. Comey might well get more details of how Trump installed his Insurance Lawyer just in time to try to prosecute her father. (Indeed, Judge Jesse Furman, who presides over this case, suggested in an order he might grant Ms. Comey discovery before the motion to dismiss.)
A filing submitted in advance of a hearing scheduled for tomorrow reveals it may be more than that.
As part of a discussion in defense of suing now, before Merit Systems Protection Board adjudicates her case, Ms. Comey revealed a lot of what has been going on at MSPB, which normally would review Civil Service violations like her firing.
It starts by arguing that MSPB cannot adjudicate novel legal issues, such as whether the President can unilaterally ignore the Civil Service Reform Act.
[T]he MSPB lacks expertise to adjudicate this novel dispute: whether, as the government will likely argue, Article II of the Constitution overrides a federal employee’s rights under the Civil Service Reform Act (“CSRA”) and the Bill of Rights. See, e.g., Jackler v. DOJ, MSPB DA-0752-25-0330-I-1, DOJ submission, available at: https://washingtonlitigationgroup.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/09/Jackler-Motion.pdf. Because this case raises foundational constitutional questions with respect to the separation of powers, the MSPB is not the appropriate forum for this dispute. See Axon Enterprise Inc. v. Federal Trade Commission, 598 U.S. 175, 195-96 (2023) (district court retains jurisdiction over “collateral” claims “outside the [agency’s] sphere of expertise”); Thunder Basin Coal Co. v. Reich, 510 U.S. 200, 212, 214-215 (1994) (claims not of type Congress intended to be reviewed within statutory structure if “wholly collateral” to statute’s review provisions and “agency expertise” not “brought to bear on the statutory questions presented”) (cleaned up).
Then, it notes that all the legal precedents requiring people with termination complaints to first go through MSPB process are predicated on the MSPB being independent of the President.
Second, the Supreme Court decisions that outline the MSPB’s jurisdiction presumed an MSPB that functioned independently of the President, which is no longer true. The “CSRA’s adjudicatory scheme was predicated on the existence of a functioning and independent MSPB,” See Nat’l Ass’n of Immigr. Judges v. Owen, 139 F.4th 293, 304 (4th Cir. 2025) (rejecting channeling to MSPB because “Congress enacted the CSRA on the bedrock principle that the members of the MSPB and the Special Counsel would be protected from removal on political grounds, providing them independence from the President”). However, the President has pronounced that independent agencies must follow his interpretation of the law. See Exec. Order 14215 (Feb. 18, 2025) §§ 1, 2(b), 5, 7 (directing that the President and the Attorney General “shall provide authoritative interpretations of law for the executive branch,” and their “opinions on questions of law are controlling on all employees”—including on “so-called independent agencies”; “No employee of the executive branch… may advance an interpretation of the law… that contravenes the President or the Attorney General’s opinion on a matter of law”).2 Further, the President terminated the sole Democratic member of the MSPB Board and insists he has the unlimited right to do so,
Then, it noted that in the days after Ms. Comey wrote this in her complaint (Ms. Comey is represented by Margaret Donovan, who is handling several other Article II and other politicized firings) …
As of September 1, 2025, 891 PFRs are pending.47 Finally, on information and belief, in recent cases, the Government itself has argued before the MSPB that the CSRA is unconstitutional because it violates the President’s alleged Article II prerogatives, and that the MSPB has no jurisdiction over a challenge to an Article II removal. The MSPB, for its part, has previously ruled that it does not have the authority to adjudicate the constitutionality of statutes. 48 On information and belief, the MSPB is currently treating agencies’ Article II-based challenges to its authority consistent with this precedent, which is to say, it is declining to rule on the issue.
… The Office of Legal Counsel all of a sudden decided that the MSPB, and not Article III courts, should decide constitutional matters.
Indeed, the MSPB itself has repeatedly concluded that it lacks authority to adjudicate such sweeping constitutional questions, see Malone v. DOJ, 14 M.S.P.R. 403, 406 (1983), and until two months ago, so did the government, as discussed below, see Dkt. 1 ¶ 84.
[snip]
[A]nd the Department of Justice recently and suddenly reversed its position and now insists that the MSPB must review constitutional issues, compare Department of Justice, Office of Legal Counsel, Slip Opinion, 49 Op. O.L.C. __ (Sept. 26, 2025), to, e.g., Dkt. 1 ¶ 84 (alleging that the government argued, before September 15, 2025, that MSPB has no jurisdiction over a challenge to an Article II removal). The OLC’s reversal came immediately after an MSPB administrative judge declined to rule on the constitutionality of Article II removals; that issue is now on appeal to the very Board that the President has ordered must adhere to his interpretation of law. This is a thorough evisceration of the MSPB’s independence. As a matter of due process and constitutional principle, the President’s decision to remove a career civil servant without cause, in violation of Congress’s explicit prohibition, cannot fairly be adjudicated by an agency that is subservient to that same President.
Then it reveals that MSPB has been dismissing cases, like hers, challenging her firing on Article II authority until it decides whether the President’s Article II authority can override civil service protections, which is where Kafka gets invoked.
Third, any MSPB proceeding would be futile. On November 25, 2025, an MSPB administrative judge notified Ms. Comey that the MSPB intends to dismiss her appeal without prejudice, while awaiting a ruling from the Board (now beholden to the President) about whether the President’s Article II power overrides the CSRA. Today, the government consented to that dismissal. To the best of our knowledge, Ms. Comey is not alone. Since November 17, 2025, MSPB administrative judges have dismissed without prejudice multiple MSPB appeals of “Article II” firings, and the government has acquiesced in each case. See, e.g., Law360, “Ex-US Trustee Director’s Firing Appeal Tossed, For Now,” November 21, 2025 (citing Tara Twomey v. DOJ, MSPB DC-0752-25-1950-I-1). This procedure is Kafkaesque: the Executive Branch maintains it can fire Ms. Comey without the due process afforded by the CSRA, yet insists that she submit adjudication of that question to the body created by the CSRA, all while advocating for the premature termination of the CSRA process. Meanwhile, the Executive Branch contends it can dictate the outcome of her appeal (should it eventually proceed) by controlling the “authoritative interpretations of the law” and removing any decisionmaker who dares to disagree. This scheme has been transformed into a dead end that provides no due process. See Carr v. Saul, 593 U.S. 83, 93 (2021) (“It makes little sense to require litigants to present claims to adjudicators who are powerless to grant the relief requested.”). It is not what Congress intended. See Axon Enterprise, 598 U.S. at 191 (plaintiffs need not submit to administrative process where they would face “an illegitmate proceeding, led by an illegitmate decisionmaker,” because “being subjected to such an illegitmate proceeding causes legal injury” that “cannot be undone”); Thunder Basin, 510 U.S. at 212 (Congress did not intend to preclude district court jurisdiction where statutory scheme “forecloses all meaningful judicial review”). [my emphasis]
Thus far, Ms. Comey has not mentioned that John Sarcone, the only one willing to defend against this lawsuit, is playacting at being US Attorney just like Lindsey Halligan is or was.
Just to add to the abuse of power going on here.
It all sounds like the kind of case that could be headed for SCOTUS.
For now, Ms. Comey has more modest goals, like figuring out whether the President personally fired her, or whether some flunky (or former Defense Attorney) at DOJ did it for him.
First, initial discovery can be narrowly tailored, if necessary, to critical questions relating to the circumstances of Ms. Comey’s termination, including who made the decision and on what basis.
[snip]
For example, if the President terminated Ms. Comey, then the question before the Court is whether the President’s Article II powers supersede Congress’s Article I powers and the Bill of Rights. On the other hand, if, as the White House claims (Dkt. 1 ¶ 51), someone within the Department of Justice terminated Ms. Comey, then the Court must decide the additional question of the extent to which the President can delegate his alleged Article II power to supersede Article I.
Of course, even that detail may intertwine with her father’s potentially ongoing persecution.
U.S. Tariffs, Markets, Inflation, Economy
New York Times, Ahead of Tariff Ruling, Businesses Race to Secure Refunds, Tony Romm and Ana Swanson, Dec. 3, 2025. The Supreme Court has not yet ruled on the legality of President Trump’s sweeping tariffs, but some companies aren’t waiting to try to secure a speedy and substantial payout.
From the buy-in-bulk retailer Costco to the canned-tuna company Bumble Bee Foods, some U.S. businesses are racing to get in line for tariff refunds, anticipating that the Supreme Court will soon rule against President Trump and force him to return billions of dollars collected on imports.
A growing roster of companies in recent weeks has hired lawyers, filed lawsuits or submitted official claims to the U.S. government, all in an early bid to secure a quick payout in the event that the centerpiece of Mr. Trump’s global trade war is struck down.
For the moment, the fate of the money collected from his sweeping tariffs rests in the hands of the Supreme Court justices. At oral arguments last month, they seemed skeptical of the president’s vast assertions of power to tax imports at a whim, stoking suspicions that they could deliver a defining blow to Mr. Trump’s economic strategy.
A ruling against the president could also force the Trump administration to pay back a substantial portion of the roughly $200 billion it has collected in duties since the start of the year. While the Supreme Court offered little indication as to whether it would order such refunds, some businesses have started the legal legwork to obtain them anyway, aiming to beat the rush and recover their full tariff costs.
The latest lawsuit arrived on Friday, as lawyers for Costco asked a federal trade court to invalidate the president’s tariffs and “ensure that its right to a complete refund is not jeopardized” as the justices deliberate.
The retailer did not indicate how much it had paid in tariffs since Mr. Trump ratcheted up duties beginning this spring. But Costco’s lawsuit reflected the reality that the financial burden of tariffs often falls hardest on American importers, not foreigners, as the White House has insisted. Through August, companies had absorbed about half of the cost of tariffs, while passing on more than one-third to consumers, according to Goldman Sachs.
Similar lawsuits have been filed recently by cosmetics companies, including Revlon Consumer Products; Valeo North America, an automotive supplier; Interstate Batteries, which makes car batteries; Kawasaki, which manufactures motorcycles; and Bumble Bee Foods, according to court filings. Each of the companies, along with Costco, is represented by the law firm Crowell & Moring, which declined to comment. Bumble Bee and Costco did not respond to requests for comment.
Other firms, particularly small businesses, have opted for alternative routes. They have filed formal appeals with Customs and Border Protection, in what may presage a flood of similar claims. And some companies have sought to sell the rights to any future tariff refunds to a stable of eager investment firms, giving up the prospect of a big payday later for a more certain, yet far smaller, payment now.
New York Times, Fed Pick Puts Pressure on Bessent to Deliver for Trump, Alan Rappeport and Colby Smith, Dec. 3, 2025. Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, who is leading the search for the next Federal Reserve chair, could face President Trump’s wrath if the person chosen does not quickly lower interest rates.
In an August post on Truth Social, President Trump lashed out at his first-term Treasury secretary, Steven Mnuchin, for advising him to select Jerome H. Powell, right, as chair of the Federal Reserve in 2017.
Mr. Trump, who had spent months fuming that Mr. Powell was not cutting interest rates quickly enough, wrote: “Steve ‘Manouychin’ really gave me a ‘beauty’ when he pushed this loser. The damage he has done by always being Too Late is incalculable.”
The sharp criticism of one of Mr. Trump’s most loyal first-term cabinet members came as the president’s current Treasury secretary, Scott Bessent, was preparing to find a successor for Mr. Powell, whose term as chair expires next year.
The stakes for the next Fed chair will be high. Mr. Trump has made no secret that he expects his pick to swiftly cut rates. But the selection is also putting Mr. Bessent in an unusually uncomfortable spot, with Mr. Trump making clear that his Treasury secretary’s fortunes are tightly tied to what the Fed does next.
At a speech in Washington last month, Mr. Trump joked that he was disappointed that Mr. Bessent was failing to sway Mr. Powell on interest rates.
“The only thing Scott is blowing it on is the Fed,” the president said during remarks at a Saudi investment forum. “If you don’t get it fixed fast, I’m going to fire your ass.”
Mr. Trump is expected to announce his pick to be the next Fed chair soon. At a cabinet meeting on Tuesday, he said it could come “early next year.”
Although the final decision will be Mr. Trump’s to make, the pressure is now on Mr. Bessent to steer through a candidate who will be the monetary policy dove that Mr. Trump desires.
Mr. Bessent, who is speaking at the New York Times DealBook conference on Wednesday, has curried favor with Mr. Trump by calming markets in the face of global trade fights and bashing liberal policies. The president has lavished praise on Mr. Bessent, even saying he would like to see his Treasury secretary lead the Fed. But if Mr. Trump’s Fed pick struggles to push through much lower interest rates or proves to be less than compliant with the White House’s wishes than expected, Mr. Bessent could bear the blame.
New York Times, Trump Calls Affordability a ‘Con Job’ as His Edge on the Economy Slips, Erica L. Green, Dec. 3, 2025 (print ed.). President Trump is growing frustrated as Americans struggle with higher prices and pessimism over the state of the economy.
President Trump on Tuesday downplayed the cost-of-living pains being felt by Americans, declaring that affordability “doesn’t mean anything to anybody” as his political edge on the economy continues to dissipate.
In remarks during a cabinet meeting, Mr. Trump railed against Democrats who have championed the issue, which helped the party secure several off-year election victories last month and is likely to be a defining topic in the midterms next year.
After ticking off what he claimed were trillions of dollars of investments and other economic accomplishments, Mr. Trump called the issue of affordability a “fake narrative” and “con job” created by Democrats to dupe the public.
“They just say the word,” he said. “It doesn’t mean anything to anybody. They just say it — affordability. I inherited the worst inflation in history. There was no affordability. Nobody could afford anything.”
The comments marked something of a turnabout for Mr. Trump, who just last weekend appeared to acknowledge the salience of the issue, calling himself the “affordability president” and promoting his efforts to bring down prices.
After Democrats won decisive victories in state and local elections last month, in part powered by a focus on prices, the Trump administration has been rolling out new affordability policies and recasting its economic messaging to match.
Mr. Trump even promoted the issue less than two weeks ago during a remarkably chummy Oval Office meeting with Zohran Mamdani, the democratic socialist elected as the mayor of New York.
New York Times, Those Sky-High Bitcoin Prices That Everyone Said Were Here to Stay? They Left, David Yaffe-Bellany and Kailyn Rhone, Dec. 3, 2025. Bitcoin has plunged more than 30 percent and Ether is down around 40 percent in recent months, as gains from President Trump’s pro-crypto policies evaporated.
A year ago, the price of Bitcoin hit a landmark of $100,000, sparking wild celebrations in the cryptocurrency world. With a pro-crypto president set to take office, industry boosters predicted that Bitcoin would surge as high as $250,000 by the end of 2025.
Those rosy projections have not panned out.
Over the last two months, Bitcoin has plunged to a low of $82,000 in late November from $126,000, a nearly 35 percent drop that erased virtually all its gains this year. (Bitcoin rebounded this week, reaching $93,000 on Wednesday.) The prices of other leading cryptocurrencies have also plummeted, with Ether down nearly 40 percent since August.
Dec. 2
Semafor, Republicans question strikes, drug pardon, Burgess Everett and Shelby Talcott, Dec. 2. 2025. President Donald Trump is facing fresh 
GOP skepticism of both his administration’s double-tap strike on suspected narco-traffickers and his pardon of former Honduran president — and convicted drug trafficker — Juan Orlando Hernández.
Sen. Jim Justice, R-W.Va., said it’s “not acceptable” to hit survivors in the water, and Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., questioned Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s competence after an initial denial of details about the strike: “Was he incompetent enough not to know that it happened? Or was he lying?” Paul said.
Sen. Bill Cassidy, R-La., said he couldn’t sit idly by while Hernández received leniency: “I’m a doctor, I have worked in a hospital for the uninsured. I have seen people die of cocaine that this guy may have helped bring in.” The Trump administration is defending itself on both fronts as Congress probes the strikes.
Among the images President Trump released in the days before the 2025 Thanksgiving holiday portraying himself as a America's supreme ruler was the above via his Truth Social Network, portraying himself as King, with three Senate Democrats, Sens. Charles Schumer, left, Elizabeth Warren and Adam Schiff, kneeling at his feet, , seemingly awaiting the punishment he has long threatened against them.
Letters from an American, Historical Commentary: December 1, 2025 [Trump's Mental State], Heather Cox Richardson, right, Dec. 2. 2025. President Donald J. Trump’s behavior over the holiday weekend has increased concern about his mental acuity.
A rant on his social media account at midnight on Thanksgiving itself threatened to strip citizenship from naturalized immigrants, called Minnesota governor Tim Walz a profoundly offensive slur, and ended: “HAPPY THANKSGIVING TO ALL, except those that hate, steal, murder, and destroy everything that America stands for—You won’t be here for long!”
On NBC’s Meet the Press yesterday, Walz responded by calling for Trump to release the results of an MRI he told reporters he underwent in October, later saying: “I have no idea what they analyze, but whatever they analyze, they analyzed it well and they said that I had as good a result as they’ve ever seen.” Although Trump told reporters the MRI was part of his routine physical, medical experts say such tests are not routine.
Walz said to Kristen Welker: “Here we got a guy on Thanksgiving, where we spent time with our families, we ate, we played Yahtzee, we cheered for football or whatever. This guy is apparently in a room, ranting about everything else. This is not normal behavior. It is not healthy. And presidents throughout time have released a couple things. They’ve released their tax returns—not Donald Trump—and they’ve released their medical records—not Donald Trump. And look, the MRI is one thing, but I think what’s most concerning about this is, as your viewers out there are listening, has anyone in the history of the world ever had an MRI assigned to them and have no idea what it was for, as he says? So look, it’s clear the President’s fading physically. I think the mental capacity, again, ranting, you know, crazily at midnight on Thanksgiving about everything else. There’s reasons for us to be concerned. This is a guy that randomly says the airspace over Venezuela’s closed. He’s ruminating on if you could win a nuclear war. Look, this is a serious position. It’s the most powerful position in the world, and we have someone at midnight throwing around slurs that demonize our children, at the same time he’s not solving any of the problems. So I’m deeply concerned that he is incapable of doing the job.”
Last night, on Air Force One, Trump responded oddly to a reporter’s question about Walz’s call for Trump to release the MRI results: “[I]f they want to release it, it’s okay with me to release it,” Trump said. “It’s perfect. It’s like my phone call where I got impeached. It’s absolutely perfect…. [I]f you want to have it released, I’ll release it.” When a reporter asked “What part of your body was the MRI looking at?” Trump answered: “I have no idea. It was just an MRI. What part of the body? It wasn’t the brain because I took a cognitive test and I aced it. I got a perfect mark, which you would be incapable of doing,” he said, pointing at the female reporter. He then pointed at another female reporter and said: “You, too.”
Today White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt, right, released a memo from the president’s physician, Sean P. Barbabella, saying that “advanced imaging” was performed on the president as a preventative measure. The memo said this imaging “was performed because men in his age group benefit from a thorough evaluation of cardiovascular and abdominal health.” It said Trump’s cardiovascular and abdominal imaging is “perfectly normal.”
Conspicuously absent from the memo was any reference to the president’s brain.
In the press conference, Leavitt also addressed Friday’s Washington Post story by Alex Horton and Ellen Nakashima claiming that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth ordered Special Operations commander Admiral Frank “Mitch” Bradley to “kill everyone” in a small boat off the coast of Venezuela on September 2. After a first strike left two survivors clinging to burning wreckage, Bradley ordered a second strike that killed the survivors.
This so-called double tap has been widely condemned as unlawful and a war crime, although Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth yesterday appeared to make fun of those concerns. He posted an AI-faked cover of a children’s book featuring Franklin the Turtle with the title “Franklin Targets Narco Terrorists.” It showed the fake Franklin in a military vest and helmet at the open door of a helicopter, firing what appears to be a rocket launcher at a burning small boat with a person and bundles in it while two other boats with armed men and bundles converge nearby. Above the image, the post read: “For your Christmas wish list…”
Hegseth might think targeting survivors is funny, but he’s about the only one who does. A strike on survivors who pose no threat is outside the bounds even of the administration’s own assertion that it can kill civilians it claims are “narco terrorists” who threaten the United States. That assertion itself has met significant disagreement from legal experts. But as Talking Points Memo’s David Kurtz wrote today, the September 2 double tap that killed the two men “would be a violation of the laws of war even under the administration’s own self-justifying description of its campaign as an armed conflict with ‘narcoterrorists.’”
The development is so alarming that there has been bipartisan outcry among lawmakers. Democrats have spoken out forcefully, while the Republican chairs of the House and Senate Armed Services committees, Representative Mike Rogers (R-MI) and Senator Roger Wicker (R-MS), have also publicly vowed to conduct oversight not just of the September 2 strike but of the entire operation. Representative Mike Turner (R-OH) explained: “There are very serious concerns in Congress about the attacks on the so-called drug boats down in the Caribbean and the Pacific, and the legal justification that’s been provided. But this is completely outside of anything that’s been discussed with Congress, and there is an ongoing investigation.”
Senator Angus King (I-ME), a lawyer who sits on both the Senate Intelligence Committee and the Senate Armed Services Committee, told CNN’s Kate Bolduan that “the law is clear. If the facts are as have been alleged, that there was a second strike specifically to kill the survivors in the water, that’s a stone cold war crime. It’s also murder. So the real question is who gave which orders, when were they given, and that’s what we’re going to get to the bottom of in the Congress…. It’s really a factual question. The law is totally clear.”
Today, Leavitt told reporters the administration believes the strike was lawful because it “was conducted in self defense to protect Americans and vital United States interests.” This justification would permit the president, or those acting in his name, to be judge, jury, and executioner without regard to the law.
But Leavitt was careful to distance both the president and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth from the order. When asked by a reporter, “Does the administration deny that that second strike happened, or did it happen and the administration denies that Secretary Hegseth gave the order?” she said: “The latter is true.” She attributed the orders of September 2 to Admiral Bradley, appearing to be setting him up for underbussing.
This evening, Hegseth pushed Bradley under, posting: “Admiral Mitch Bradley is an American hero, a true professional, and has my 100% support. I stand by him and the combat decisions he has made—on the September 2 mission and all others since.” Commentator Brandon Friedman promptly posted: “Hegseth is very transparently blaming a Navy admiral for his own decision. Let this be a lesson for every other military officer: The Trump administration will issue unlawful orders, then blame you for following them.”
Hegseth’s Franklin post to dismiss what is shaping up to look like a war crime is an excellent illustration of this administration’s focus on their fantasy of what strength looks like. In The Atlantic today, national security scholar Tom Nichols called out Hegseth, the secretary of defense of the United States of America, for acting like “a sneering, spoiled punk who has been caught doing wrong and is now daring the local fuzz to take him in and risk the anger of his rich dad—a role fulfilled by Donald Trump, in this case.”
Senator Mark Kelly (D-AZ), whom the administration recently threatened to court martial and execute for recording a video to remind service members they must not follow an illegal order, called Hegseth “unqualified” for his job. “He runs around on a stage talking about lethality and warrior ethos and killing people.” But, Kelly said, “the most competent, capable military this planet has ever seen” needs direction about “mission and accountability and the rule of law and training,” as well as being “equipped to do really hard jobs.”
“[I]nstead,” Kelly said, “he runs around on a stage like he’s a 12-year-old playing army. And it is ridiculous, it is embarrassing, and I can’t imagine what our allies think of looking at that guy in this job, one of the most important jobs in our country…. He is in the national command authority for nuclear weapons. And last night, he’s putting out on the internet turtles with rocket-propelled grenades…. This is the secretary of defense. This is not a serious person. He should have been fired after Signalgate. And then every single day after that.”
Hegseth is not the only Trump appointee unqualified for their job. Today a federal appeals court upheld a lower court ruling that Alina Habba, whom Trump placed in the position of acting U.S. attorney for the District of New Jersey, was appointed unlawfully. Trump appointed her to a 120-day acting appointment, after which the district court judges control the spot until the Senate confirms a new U.S. attorney. The judges rejected Habba, who has no experience as a prosecutor, and instead selected Desiree Leigh Grace, an experienced prosecutor, to lead the office. Attorney General Pam Bondi then fired Grace and maneuvered Habba back into control of the office.
“It is apparent that the current administration has been frustrated by some of the legal and political barriers to getting its appointees in place,” wrote Judge D. Michael Fisher in the opinion. But the judges say Trump cannot just get his way by ignoring the law.
Last week a federal judge found that Trump’s appointment of Lindsey Halligan to the post of U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia was illegal and threw out the cases she had brought against former FBI director James Comey and New York attorney general Letitia James. Erica Orden of Politico noted today that federal judges have also found illegal Trump’s appointments of U.S. attorneys for the Central District of California and the District of Nevada.
New York Times, Vaccine Committee May Make Significant Changes to Childhood Schedule, Apoorva Mandavilli, Dec. 2, 2025. Comments by President Trump, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and some panelists suggest the committee is likely to delay hepatitis B shots and discuss revising the use of other vaccines.
Advisers to Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., right, appear poised to make consequential changes to the childhood vaccination schedule, delaying a shot that is routinely administered to newborns and discussing big changes to when or how other childhood immunizations are given.
Decisions by the group are not legally binding, but they have profound implications for whether private insurance and government assistance programs are required to cover the vaccines.
Depending on what the committee does, the changes could also further erode Americans’ confidence in immunizations. Although a majority of Americans still say they are confident about vaccines’ effectiveness, multiple surveys show the percentage has dropped sharply over the last few years.
Members of the group, called the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, were handpicked by Mr. Kennedy, who has long campaigned against many childhood vaccines. They are scheduled to meet on Thursday and Friday.
The specific proposals the members will vote on are still unknown. The agenda is thin on details, listing neither specific speakers nor times, merely mentioning “votes” on the first day of the two-day meeting. But public comments by some panelists, as well as by President Trump and Mr. Kennedy, hint at some possible outcomes.
The committee is likely to decide that a vaccine to prevent hepatitis B — a highly contagious disease that can severely damage the liver — should no longer be administered routinely at birth and perhaps should not be offered to children at all.
The committee members may also question the safety of ingredients like aluminum salts that are present in many childhood vaccines. And they are likely to discuss whether vaccines for different diseases should be offered as separate shots rather than in the combination products currently used.
The meeting comes on the heels of unsupported claims made by Dr. Vinay Prasad, the Food and Drug Administration’s top vaccine regulator, that Covid shots have killed “no fewer than 10” children. The internal memo did not provide any details or data. The memo went on to question the safety of administering multiple vaccines at the same time.
On Monday, the Department of Health and Human Services named Dr. Kirk Milhoan, a pediatric cardiologist and a current member of the committee, as its chair. During the coronavirus pandemic, Dr. Milhoan raised concerns about myocarditis caused by Covid vaccines and urged the Biden administration to withdraw the shots from the market. Martin Kulldorff, the outgoing chair of the committee, will take on a new role as a chief science officer at the Health Department. The changes may require the department to add new members to the committee.
Mr. Kennedy has frequently said that children are given too many vaccines and too many at the same time, which, he contends, overloads the immune system and leads to conditions like autism.
Dozens of studies have looked for a possible link between vaccines and autism and have not found one. And children now receive more shots because scientists have developed effective vaccines for more of the diseases that harmed and killed people decades ago, said Dr. Bruce Gellin, who led the U.S. National Vaccine Program Office from 2002 to 2017.
New York Times,The U.S. Is Funding Fewer Grants in Every Area of Science and Medicine, Aatish Bhatia, Amy Fan, Jonah Smith and Irena Hwang, Dec. 2, 2025 (print ed.). A quiet policy change means the government is making fewer bets on long-term science.
In the past decade, the National Institutes of Health awarded top scientists $9 billion in competitive grants each year, to find cures for diseases and improve public health.
This year, something unusual happened…
Starting in January, the Trump administration stalled that funding. By summer, funding lagged by over $2 billion, or 41 percent below average.
But in a surprising turn, the N.I.H. began to spend at a breakneck pace and narrow this gap. There was a catch, however: That money went to fewer grants.
Which means less research was funded in areas such as aging, diabetes, strokes, cancer and mental health.
To spend its budget, the N.I.H. made an unusual number of large lump-sum payments for many years of research, instead of its usual policy of paying for research one year at a time.
As a result of this quiet policy shift, the average payment for competitive grants swelled from $472,000 in the first half of the fiscal year to over $830,000 in the last two months.
While this might sound like a boon for researchers, it’s actually a fundamental shift in how grants are funded — one that means more competition for funding, and less money and less time to do the research. In the past, the N.I.H. typically awarded grants in five annual installments.
Researchers could request two more years to spend this money, at no cost.
Under the new system, the N.I.H. pays up front for four years of work.
In this pool photograph distributed by the Russian state agency Sputnik, Russia’s President Vladimir Putin greets US Special Envoy Steve Witkoff prior to their talks in Moscow on August 6, 2025. (GAVRIIL GRIGOROV/POOL/AFP via Getty Images.)
New York Times, Putin to Meet With Witkoff and Kushner as U.S. Pushes for Ukraine Deal, Ivan Nechepurenko and Paul Sonne, Dec. 2, 2025. In Moscow, Steve Witkoff, President Trump’s special envoy, and Jared Kushner, Mr. Trump’s son-in-law, are expected to present President Vladimir V. Putin with a revised proposal to end the war.
President Vladimir V. Putin of Russia is set to host Steve Witkoff, President Trump’s special envoy, and Jared Kushner, right, Mr. Trump’s son-in-law, in Moscow on Tuesday, as the United States pushes for an end to the war in Ukraine.
Mr. Witkoff is expected to present Mr. Putin with a U.S.-backed peace proposal that was revised by American officials after recent negotiations with Ukrainian diplomats. The initial version of the plan that emerged last month was seen by Ukraine and its European allies as echoing the maximalist demands Russia has made since its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.
Mr. Witkoff’s visit to Moscow, his sixth since January, is to take place two days after American and Ukrainian delegations met in Miami to discuss the details of the potential peace plan, parts of which Ukraine has sought to soften. Both sides called those talks constructive but said more work was needed, without detailing the unresolved issues.
Dmitri S. Peskov, the Kremlin spokesman, told journalists on Tuesday that Mr. Witkoff and Mr. Kushner would participate in the talks for the American side, noting that the negotiations would go on “as long as necessary.” The meeting was expected to take place early evening Tuesday, Moscow time. Mr. Kushner does not have a formal role in the Trump administration, but played a role in brokering the cease-fire in Gaza.
President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine, seeking support from European allies, met in Paris on Monday with President Emmanuel Macron of France. Mr. Zelensky is to travel to Ireland for meetings on Tuesday.
More On U.S. Military Killings, Alleged War Crimes
Senior military leaders look on as Defense Secretary Pete Hegseths warms up the crowd before remarks by President Trump at Marine Corps Base Quantico on September 30, 2025 in Quantico, Virginia.
Popular Information, Accountability Journalism: Department of War Crimes, Rebecca Crosby and and Noel Sims, Since September 2, the Department of Defense (DOD) has used drones to kill more than 80 people traveling by boat in the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific. The government claims strikes targeted “terrorists” trafficking drugs into the United States.
According to a New York Times report, the military does not know the names of all the people it has killed. Instead, the military carries out a strike on a boat if it “knows that someone on the boats has a connection to a drug cartel, and it has some level of confidence that drugs are on the vessels.” No evidence has been presented to the public and Colombia’s government says that at least one of the strikes killed an innocent fisherman.
Even if every person killed by the drone strikes was in fact a drug trafficker, it is unclear what authority the DOD has to kill them. The Department of Justice (DOJ) has argued that cartels are trafficking drugs to finance a “non-international armed conflict” against the U.S., giving the executive branch the authority under Article II of the Constitution to kill the drug traffickers without Congress signing off on a declaration of war. Lawmakers and legal experts have raised doubts that smuggling drugs into the U.S. constitutes initiating an “armed conflict.”
Recently, new information has surfaced with the strongest evidence yet that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth committed a war crime in ordering at least one of the strikes.
Last week, the Washington Post reported that Hegseth gave a verbal order to leave no survivors in the first strike of the DOD’s campaign against drug smuggling boats, which took place in the Caribbean on September 2. Several minutes after striking the boat for the first time, the Special Operations commander overseeing the attack ordered a second strike to kill two men hanging on to the burning remains of the boat in order to comply with Hegseth’s order, according to the Post.
That narrative describes a likely violation of the Geneva Conventions, which states, “Persons taking no active part in the hostilities, including members of armed forces who have laid down their arms and those placed ‘hors de combat’ by sickness, wounds, detention, or any other cause, shall in all circumstances be treated humanely,” with specific protections against “violence to life and person, in particular murder of all kinds.”
Two people, whose exact identities and potential roles in drug trafficking are unknown, clinging to wreckage in the middle of the ocean would certainly be ‘hors de combat’ — individuals who cannot fight back — which would make killing them a war crime. This would also be a violation of the 1996 War Crimes Act, which incorporates the Geneva Conventions into U.S. law.
Both Democrats and Republicans have raised serious concerns about Hegseth’s order in the wake of the Washington Post report. Sen. Tim Kaine (D-VA) said on CBS, “This rises to the level of a war crime if it’s true.” Rep. Mike Turner (R-OH) said, “Obviously if that occurred, that would be very serious, and I agree that that would be an illegal act.” The House and Senate armed services committees have announced that they are looking into the order.
On Monday, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt defended the second strike during the September 2 operation, saying everything was within the military’s legal authority. Leavitt provided no details to substantiate this claim.
That Hegseth would give such an order that could potentially constitute a war crime should come as no surprise. Hegseth has a long history of expressing contempt for the Geneva Conventions and the legal rules of engagement.Hegseth suggested abiding by international law was like “fighting with one hand behind our back”
In his 2024 book The War on Warriors, Hegseth questioned whether the U.S. military should abide by the Geneva Conventions. Hegsethargued that following the Geneva Conventions was like “fighting with one hand behind our back.”
Should we follow the Geneva Conventions? What if we treated the enemy the way they treated us? Would that not be an incentive for the other side to reconsider their barbarism? Hey, Al Qaeda: If you surrender, we might spare your life. If you do not, we will rip your arms off and feed them to hogs.
Makes me wonder, in 2024—if you want to win—how can anyone write universal rules about killing other people in open conflict? Especially against enemies who fight like savages, disregarding human life in every single instance. Maybe, instead, we are just fighting with one hand behind our back—and the enemy knows it.
Hegseth went on to suggest that the U.S. military should just follow “our own rules” and disregard “international tribunals:”
If our warriors are forced to follow rules arbitrarily and asked to sacrifice more lives so that international tribunals feel better about themselves, aren’t we just better off winning our wars according to our own rules?! Who cares what other countries think. The question we have to ask ourselves is, if we are forced to fight, are we going to fight to win? Or will we fight to make leftists feel good—which means not wining [sic] and fighting forever.
During confirmation hearing, Hegseth avoided questions about following Geneva Conventions
During Hegseth’s confirmation hearing, Senator Angus King (I-ME) asked Hegseth about whether he believed in abiding by the Geneva Conventions. Hegseth avoided directly answering.
Senator, as I’ve… stated multiple times, the Geneva Conventions are what we base ours… What an America first national security policy is not going to do is hand its prerogatives over to international bodies that make decisions about how our men and women make decisions on the battlefield. America first understands we send Americans for a clear mission and a clear objective, we equip them properly for that objective—and we give them everything they need and then we stand behind them with the rules of engagement that allow them to fight decisively to defeat America’s enemies which is why we sit quietly and peacefully in this conference room.
“We follow rules, but we don’t need burdensome rules of engagement that make it impossible for us to win these wars,” Hegseth said.
Hegseth also told Senator Jack Reed (D-RI) during his confirmation hearing that he had “thought very deeply about the balance between legality and lethality, ensuring that the men and women on the frontlines have the opportunity to destroy with and close the enemy, and that lawyers aren’t the ones getting in the way,” ABC News reported.Hegseth told military leaders to set aside “stupid rules of engagement”
In a September speech, Hegseth told a group of senior military leaders to ignore “stupid rules of engagement,” which he called “overbearing.” Rules of engagement are legal guidelines for the use of force.
We unleash overwhelming and punishing violence on the enemy. We also don’t fight with stupid rules of engagement. We untie the hands of our warfighters to intimidate, demoralize, hunt and kill the enemies of our country. No more politically correct and overbearing rules of engagement, just common sense, maximum lethality and authority for warfighters.
Hegseth called for “maximum lethality”
In September, Trump signed an executive order changing the name of the DOD to the Department of War. At the signing, Hegseth said that the department would focus on “maximum lethality, not tepid legality.”
This name change is not just about renaming. It’s about restoring. Words matter. It’s restoring as you’ve guided us to, Mr. President, restoring the warrior ethos, restoring victory and clarity as an end state, restoring intentionality to the use of force… We’re going to go on offense, not just on defense. Maximum lethality, not tepid legality. Violent effect, not politically correct. We’re going to raise up warriors, not just defenders.
Hegseth lobbied Trump to pardon men accused of war crimes
Hegseth lobbied Trump in his first term to pardon men who had either been convicted or were facing charges “related to alleged war crimes committed in Iraq and Afghanistan.” Trump eventually pardoned both Army Lieutenant Clint Lorance and Army Major Mathew Golsteyn, and “reversed a demotion” of Navy SEAL Edward Gallagher.
“These are men who went into the most dangerous places on earth with a job to defend us and made tough calls on a moment’s notice,” Hegseth said in May 2019. Hegseth argued that they were “not war criminals, they’re warriors.”
In June 2024, Hegseth defended his position on a podcast, CNN reported.
Donald Trump pardoned a bunch of guys I advocated for in his last couple years in office. They killed the right guys in the wrong way, according to somebody. I’m done with that. We need to fight total war against our enemies when we do. And yeah, you don’t kill civilians on purpose, but you kill bad guys. All of ’em, you stack bodies, and when it’s over, then you let the dust settle and you figure out who’s ahead.
In a November 2024 podcast interview, Hegseth defended ignoring rules of engagement. Hegseth spoke about being briefed about rules of engagement by a military lawyer in Baghdad in 2005, the Associated Press reported. Hegseth said that after the briefing he told his platoon, “Guys we’re not doing that.”
Hegseth argued that “the New York Times, and the left, and Democrats… all they do is take one incident and yell ‘war criminal.’”
U.S. Sen. Mark Kelly, Democrat of Arizona, shown at left before his Senate career as a medal-winning Naval combat pilot and officer, and U.S. Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth, known as a hard-drinking Fox News talk show host before his appointment to office as one of the most powerful Trump cabinet members
Emptywheel, Analysis: On Eve of Illegal Venezuelan Invasion, Pete Hegsesth Utterly Destroys His Ability to Lead It, Emptywheel (Marcy Wheeler, right), Dec. 2, 2025. Pete Hegseth has squandered what shreds of credibility he had in recent weeks.
I think the trajectory of the last few weeks has been lost in the serial disclosures, so I want to summarize them here.Mark Kelly and five other Democrats made a video reminding service members they can refuse illegal orders
On November 18, Elise Slotkin released a video in which she and five other former military or intelligence officers — Mark Kelly, Chris DeLuzio, Maggie Goodlander, Chrissy Houlahan, and Jason Crow — reminding that they can refuse illegal orders.
One of the tactics Republicans chose to use in response was to demand that the members of Congress describe what illegal orders had been given.
An even stupider tactic was to move to prosecute the six, in Kelly’s case (because his retirement makes him susceptible to such a thing), threatening to withdrawn him from retirement to courtmartial him.
Trump and Pete Hegseth chose to give Kelly, a genuine hero, likely presidential candidate, and far more of a man than either of them, a bigger platform and fundraising draw.WaPo publishes the first double tap story
The video from the six Democrats was likely focused on orders to target Americans, not Venezuelans (or Colombians or Trinis, all of whom have been targeted in the murderboat strikes); it specifically describes that the Trump Administration is pitting the military and intelligence community against American citizens.
But then WaPo described Pete Hegseth — verbally — giving the quintessential illegal order.
The longer the U.S. surveillance aircraft followed the boat, the more confident intelligence analysts watching from command centers became that the 11 people on board were ferrying drugs.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth gave a spoken directive, according to two people with direct knowledge of the operation. “The order was to kill everybody,” one of them said.
A missile screamed off the Trinidad coast, striking the vessel and igniting a blaze from bow to stern. For minutes, commanders watched the boat burning on a live drone feed. As the smoke cleared, they got a jolt: Two survivors were clinging to the smoldering wreck.
The Special Operations commander overseeing the Sept. 2 attack — the opening salvo in the Trump administration’s war on suspected drug traffickers in the Western Hemisphere — ordered a second strike to comply with Hegseth’s instructions, two people familiar with the matter said. The two men were blown apart in the water.
The initial response to this was the same tactic that has gotten Trump where he is: to attack the press, claiming it was fake.
Trump promises to pardon Juan Orlando Hernández, destroying pretext for war
Meanwhile, Trump totally undercut the premise behind over a year of targeting Venezuela.
There were always problems with Trump’s pretense for the murderboats and planned Venezuelan invasion, which is that Venezuela’s government leads a cartel of narcotraffickers that amounts to an invasion of the United States.
At first, Stephen Miller’s bullshit about Venezuela was rooted in false claims about Tren de Aragua. Perhaps because the Intelligence Community publicly debunked those claims (but not before Miller relied on his bullshit to send 200 mostly-innocent men to a concentration camp, where they were tortured), Miller moved onto a new predicate. Nicolás Maduro wasn’t in charge of Tren de Aragua, Miller decided; he was in charge of Cartel de los Soles.
Tren de Aragua at least exists, albeit not in anywhere near the numbers of slumlord residents as Miller has claimed. It’s not at all clear CdlS does. Plus, if it does exist, it traffics in cocaine, not fentanyl, the claimed invading drug that justifies treating drug trafficking as war (almost no right wing Senators understand this problem, which would be hilarious if it weren’t about to become the new Yellowcake).
But then Trump promised to pardon former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández, above, who actually did what Trump claims Maduro is doing, who was convicted of it, who was sentenced to decades in prison.
You cannot credibly claim to give a fuck about drug trafficking when you’re freeing major traffickers. I mean, Trump doesn’t care, but the men and women risk their lives and their liberty have to attend to the likelihood they’ll be left holding the bag for Trump’s crimes.White House concedes the double tap but defends Hegseth
Then, as Congress — led by Senate Armed Services Committee Chair Roger Wicker — begins to investigate the operation, demanding the full video of the strike and testimony from those involved, and as legal experts made it clear that this was not just a war crime, but murder, the White House changed tack. Trump knew nothing, wouldn’t have wanted it to happen, but in fact it did happen but Pete Hegseth didn’t give the order.
While NYT was publishing a story laundering Hegseth’s claims (that he did not specifically order the murder), WaPo was back with quotes from service members recognizing that Hegseth had begun underbussing his subordinates, especially Admiral Frank Bradley.
“This is ‘protect Pete’ bulls—,” one military official, who, like others, spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal conversations, told The Post.
Leavitt’s statement “left it up to interpretation” who was responsible for the second strike that killed the two survivors, a separate military official said, imploring the White House to provide clarity on the issue.
One official said of Leavitt’s statement, “It’s throwing us, the service members, under the bus.” Another person said some of Hegseth’s top civilian staff appeared deeply alarmed about the revelations and were contemplating whether to leave the administration.
Hegseth, writing on social media Monday night, said he stands by the admiral “and the combat decisions he has made — on the September 2 mission and all others since.” His statement is likely to deepen the sense of furor among military officials who suspect Hegseth is attempting to insulate himself from any legal recourse and leave Bradley — whom the secretary called “an American hero, a true professional” — to account for the fallout alone.
Whiskey Pete even posted a tweet claiming to have Bradley’s back while emphasizing that Bradley made the decision.
CIA’s disavowal of Rahmanullah Lakanwal
This comes amid several reports that Rahmanullah Lakanwal, the accused killer of two National Guard members last week, had done terrible things for the CIA, but then was abandoned by John Ratcliffe’s CIA before declining into bouts of depression in advance of the attack.
The struggles to start over, leave the war behind, and find work were ever present. Lakanwal was fired from his job at a laundromat because he lacked a work authorization card despite being approved for asylum and authorized to work by the Trump administration, according to his former unit mate, who fought alongside him for more than a decade.
[snip]
About a month ago, Lakanwal told his unit mate that his inability to work due to missing immigration paperwork meant his family couldn’t afford rent or food. He resorted to borrowing money from friends and former unit members, and during the conversation, he broke down in tears from frustration and desperation, his unit mate said.
“Every time, like looking [for] somebody [to] help for documents, somebody [to] help for pay the rent, he’s not going to work,” the Afghan unit mate said.
His unit mate said Lakanwal sought help in June from a CIA program designed to aid Zero Unit veterans with immigration issues. Rolling Stone reviewed a screenshot of the group chat in June where Zero Unit veterans shared information with a CIA representative about ongoing issues. Lakanwal posted messages asking for help. His last post went unanswered and was deleted by the chat’s administrator.
None of this excuses the killing. It just makes clear that Lakanwal is one of thousands of men damaged by America’s war on terror who needs — in this case, needed — help before something terrible happens. Nigel Edge, the former Marine sniper who shot up a club from his boat in Cape Fear in September, is another one.Mark Kelly models leadership
Meanwhile, precisely because Trump and Hegseth chose to attack Kelly, he was able to stage a press conference for little other reason than to attack Trump and Hegseth’s leadership failures.
That included addressing the double tap, in which he mostly deferred to investigations, but still upheld the import of international law.
We don’t know how all this will end.
What we do know is that, in advance of a likely demand that service members do something patently illegal, Pete Hegseth has made it clear he’ll sacrifice everyone to save himself.
U.S. Law, Justice, Crime
Former FBI Director James Comey and 2016 Democratic Presidential Nominee Hillary Clinton (File Photos)
Emptywheel, Analysis: Dan Richman Wants His Data Back, (Marcy Wheeler, right), Dec. 2, 2025. There are a number of articles (Reuters, Politico) describing discussions about reindicting Jim Comey and Letitia James.
Neither addresses the issue I lay out here — namely, that the ultimate goal of the Comey prosecution, at least, is to support the Grand Conspiracy in Florida, perhaps by obtaining at least probable cause that Comey lied to cover up the import of (Grand Conspiracy nutballs claim to believe) the “Clinton Plan” CIOL and Comey’s decision to release a memo documenting Trump’s corruption.
More importantly, neither addresses a new wrinkle: That Dan Richman wants his data back. (Anna Bower first noted the suit.)
Last Wednesday, Richman, right, moved under Rule 41(g) to get his property, in the form of an image of his computer made by the Inspector General, as well as emails and additional content obtained derivative to that.
While there are redacted bits describing the original imaging by DOJ IG of the computer and the overcollection at that stage (as well as the warrants themselves, which would have been unsealed by now if the indictment hadn’t been dismissed), it relies heavily on and largely tracks William Fitzpatrick’s ruling effectively cataloging the many Fourth Amendment violations involved in the searches of Richman’s data, which Richman points to in order to claim that Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly need not consider the normal balancing considerations.
While the government may argue that it needs the Hard Drive to obtain evidence to prosecute Mr. Comey, the Comey case has now been dismissed and any charges related to the underlying conduct are time-barred. [citation omitted] (noting that had Mr. Comey not been indicted, the statute of limitations would have expired on September 30, 2025).
Even if the case were to somehow proceed, the government should be barred from using evidence from the Hard Drive. The materials from the Hard Drive that the government presented to the grand jury in the Comey case were only identified by the government because it (1) exceeded the scope of the Warrants and seized non-responsive data, (2) illegally retained materials it should have destroyed or returned, and (3) searched the illegally seized and retained data without a warrant.
As Comey was preparing to move to suppress this content, the Loaner AUSAs claimed that he had no Fourth Amendment interest in Richman’s data. That was contestable for at least a subset of the data. But Richman clearly has a Fourth Amendment interest in it.
If this effort by Richman is successful, in particular his request for “a temporary restraining order enjoining the government from using or relying on in any way the improperly seized materials until such time as the Court can further consider the merits of his claims,” all the data would become inaccessible, both for any reindictment of the false statements indictment or for the Grand Conspiracy conspiracy.
Oh sure, the FBI could attempt to obtain new warrants — or subpoena Richman for the same material. But much of their use of this data (Exhibits 8, 9, and 10 post-dated Richman’s departure from the FBI, and Exhibits 3 through 7 involved sourcing for which Richman was public) did not fit basic criteria arising from the imagined crimes, Richman leaking information while still at FBI. Of what the Loaner AUSAs presented to the grand jury, they’d be stuck with the “Clinton CIOL” that the jury no-billed.
Exhibit 1: DOJ IG Investigation into Comey’s Memos Exhibit 2: Comey letter reopening investigation Exhibit 3: January 2, 2015: Letter stating that Richman would not comment on matters he “work[s] on for the Bureau”[1st Columbia email] Exhibit 4: October 29, 2016: Text saying, “The country can’t seem to handle your finding stuff” [2nd Columbia email] Exhibit 5: October 30, 2016: Richman offering to write an op-ed for NYT [2nd Columbia email] Exhibit 6: November 1-2, 2016: Comey suggests perhaps Richman can make Mike Schmidt smarter [2nd Columbia email] Exhibit 7: November 2, 2016: Richman noting story about Hillary [2nd Columbia email] Exhibit 8: April 23, 2017: Email to Richman thanking him [Columbia email] Exhibit 9: February 11, 2017: Richman recruiting Chuck Rosenberg for article [1st Columbia email] Exhibit 10: May 2017: Texts between Schmidt and Richman [Dan Richman’s phone] Exhibit 11: DOJ IG Investigation into Comey’s Memos Exhibit 12: July, 27, 2025: 18 USC 2071 Opening memo Exhibit 13: September 26, 2016: Notes on Russian investigation briefing Exhibit 14: Transcript of Lindsey Graham question about the CIOL
And to get the files they really want — Exhibit 10 — the FBI would undoubtedly rely on the tainted searches Richman invokes here to justify demanding the return of his data. Plus, there’s a chunk of data DOJ unlawfully seized that went through 2019; if DOJ found anything enticing in there, it too would become inaccessible.
Kash Patel’s FBI fucked up pretty badly in the way they searched Richman’s data for dirt on Jim Comey. The dismissal of the indictment might have otherwise shielded them from consequences. But at the very least this effort may thwart their ongoing witch hunt targeting Comey.
New York Times, Supreme Court to Hear Dispute Over Anti-Abortion Center Donor Records, Abbie VanSickle, Dec. 2, 2025. The legal fight involves an attempt by New Jersey’s Attorney General to subpoena crisis pregnancy center records.
In November 2023, New Jersey’s Attorney General sent a subpoena to a group of anti-abortion nonprofit centers demanding the names of their donors.
State investigators said they were entitled to the donor lists as part of an continuing investigation into whether the group had misrepresented itself to donors and the public.
The organization, First Choice Women’s Resource Centers, a collection of five centers that offer free prenatal care, sued, arguing the subpoena violated its First Amendment freedoms of speech and association.
The Supreme Court will hear arguments on Tuesday in the dispute, which arose the year after justices overturned the constitutional right to abortion.
That 2022 ruling in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization led states throughout the country to examine access to abortion and put a spotlight on the centers, which abortion rights advocates have argued mislead women seeking abortions. The clinics often look similar to medical facilities for pregnant women, featuring signs offering ultrasounds and literature describing pregnancy tests, but abortion rights advocates say they actually exist to dissuade women from ending their pregnancies.
The issue before the justices is a narrow procedural question about whether First Choice brought the case to federal court at the right time in the process, what is known as being “ripe” in legal jargon, or whether the case must first go through state court. If the clinics win, it could clear the way for them to continue their First Amendment challenge in the federal courts. If they lose, they would most likely be unable to continue their federal case, at least until after further action in state court.
The case has led to some unusual alliances, including one between the anti-abortion centers and the American Civil Liberties Union, which filed a brief supporting their claims, arguing that such subpoenas for donor lists could have a chilling effect on free speech rights and asserting that state attorneys general across the political spectrum have used similar tactics, citing subpoenas issued by the Florida attorney general related to restaurants that have hosted drag shows.
The case started off as an investigation by the New Jersey attorney general into whether the centers had misled donors and potential clients into believing they would provide “certain reproductive health care services,” particularly abortion referrals.
The agency and the state’s Division of Consumer Affairs subpoenaed First Choice, seeking, among other information, a list of the group’s donors. Under state law, First Choice was not required to comply with the subpoena until after it was approved by a state court. If the organization had refused, as a next step, the state court could hold the group in contempt.
But before those steps played out, First Choice sued New Jersey in federal court, arguing the subpoena violated the First Amendment by chilling the group's speech and harming its relationship with donors.
U.S. Media, Education, Culture
Paul Krugman via Substack, Political-Economy Commentary: State of the Stack, One Year In, Paul Krugman, right, Dec. 2. 2025. I guess I’m not retired yet. Enough About The Dollar. Let's Talk About Me!
Taking a break today while waiting for various shoes to drop. As it happens, however, almost a year has passed since I took this newsletter out of hibernation, with a post about why DOGE would fail. So I thought some readers might want an update on how the venture is going and be interested in a glance behind the scenes.
First, yes, I’m finding an audience. Here’s the total number of subscribers over time: A graph showing a line AI-generated content may be incorrect.
I’d like to add a few hundred thousand to that total. I keep running into devoted readers of my NYT column who still aren’t aware that this newsletter exists. Please spread the word! It’s almost every day, and free except for the Sunday primers, which involve an immense amount of work to produce.
Substack also maintains bestseller lists based on paid subscriptions. Here’s the top 10 for U.S. politics, which isn’t exactly what I write about, but close enough: A screenshot of a phone AI-generated content may be incorrect.
Except for the admirable and inimitable Heather Cox Richardson, every Substack above me is a group effort. So I think we’re doing pretty well.
I say “we” because Robin Wells, my wife, is very much a part of this project. So let me tell you how this newsletter is produced.
First, both of us are more or less constantly doing background research. This involves flagging and saving news reports, articles, working papers and so on that look as if they might come in useful. It also involves downloading data that might be relevant at some point. There’s a running joke among data-oriented commentators: “Do you even FRED, bro?” I do. I also Eurostat, OECD, IMF, World Bank and, lately, Haver Analytics.
Every morning I get up, make coffee, and feed the cat. Then Robin and I have our coffee and discuss what the next post should be about. Next, I try to get exercise in — running in the park when weather permits, stationary bike when it doesn’t. Then time to start writing, generally producing whatever charts I think the piece needs along the way.
I’m a fast writer, but the process of drafting a post involves a lot of time staring into space and thinking, so a first draft can take most of a working day. Then Robin edits, often suggesting that I put in things I should have included and take out material best left for another day. I then edit her edit, and it often takes several passes before we think it’s good enough.
Finally, I upload the post into Substack and schedule it for publication the next morning, always allowing for the possibility of last-minute updates and changes.
The Sunday primers are a sort of extra-strength version of this process. I reserve Saturdays for video interviews conducted earlier in the week, so writing each primer is a two-day marathon beginning Friday morning, which often involves having to do a lot of additional research. Also, my initial plan usually turns out to be too much for one post, which is why so many of the primers end up being series.
We don’t have anyone else working for us, except for some technical help when I do video interviews/podcasts.
PS: There’s currently a YouTube channel that looks as if it features me speaking. It’s not me, it’s AI, and we’re trying to get it shut down.
I never envisaged this Substack as a full-time job. It was supposed to be just a way to keep my voice out there post-NYT. But as it turns out, both Robin and I are working longer hours than we ever did in the past.
And the truth is that it’s great. I just hope that readers find what we’re doing useful in these scary times.
Dec. 1
In this pool photograph distributed by the Russian state agency Sputnik, Russia’s President Vladimir Putin greets US Special Envoy Steve Witkoff prior to their talks in Moscow on August 6, 2025. (GAVRIIL GRIGOROV/POOL/AFP via Getty Images)
Popular Information, Accountability Journalism: Top Trump negotiator retains partnership with Ukraine-sanctioned billionaire, Judd Legum, right, Dec. 1, 2025. Steve Witkoff coached a top Putin aide on managing Trump and created a peace plan that mirrored Russian demands.
Steve Witkoff, a fellow real estate developer and frequent golf partner of President Trump, was appointed by Trump as special envoy for peace missions, tasked with negotiating a peace deal between Russia and Ukraine. Witkoff, a billionaire with no previous diplomatic experience, is in charge of mediating an extraordinarily complex international conflict, a role that requires him to be trusted by both Russia and Ukraine as an honest broker.
An investigation by Popular Information reveals that, while serving in this role, Witkoff has maintained an active financial partnership with Len Blavatnik, below right, a billionaire sanctioned by Ukraine over his ties to Russia. Witkoff and Blavatnik are co-developing a massive residential real estate project in New York City. The relationship raises additional 
questions about the nature of Witkoff’s role.
A transcript of an October 14 phone call leaked last week to Bloomberg News revealed that Witkoff has been coaching his Russian counterpart, Yuri Ushakov, below left, and advising him on how to undermine an upcoming call between Trump and Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy.
Witkoff advised Ushakov, the top foreign policy advisor of Russian President Vladimir Putin, that Putin should call Trump quickly, before a scheduled meeting with Zelenskyy. During the call, Witkoff recommended Putin “congratulate the president” on the cease-fire between Israel and Hamas, and praise Trump as “a man of peace.” That phone call took place on October 16 and appeared to have the desired impact. In a “tense“ meeting with Zelenskyy the following day, 
Trump rejected Ukrainian requests for Tomahawk missiles.
Further, in the leaked October 14 call, Witkoff appears to suggest that he partner with Russia to create the “Trump plan” to end the war in Ukraine. “We put a 20-point Trump plan together [for Gaza] that was 20 points for peace and I’m thinking maybe we do the same thing with you,” Witkoff said. “Maybe [Putin] says to President Trump: you know, Steve and Yuri discussed a very similar 20-point plan to peace and that could be something that we think might move the needle a little bit.”
On October 20, the United States produced a 28-point “Trump plan” which required Ukraine to cede significant territory to Russia, permanently abandon aspirations to join NATO, and limit the size of its army. It was less a peace plan than a laundry list of Russian demands. Indeed, Reuters reported that the Trump proposal, created by Witkoff, was based on “a Russian-authored paper submitted to the Trump administration in October.” (Witkoff’s proposal has since been pared back in an effort to attract Ukrainian support.)
All of which raises the question: Why does Witkoff appear to have so heavily favored Russia during the negotiations? The answer may be buried in Witkoff’s 33-page financial disclosure form, quietly posted to the White House website in September.
The document, known as form 278e, reveals that Witkoff has ongoing financial interests that link him to Russian oligarchs and others hostile to Ukrainian interests.
In 2021, Witkoff partnered with billionaire Len Blavatnik to take over the project now known as One High Line, a massive luxury condo development in New York City’s Chelsea neighborhood. In 2024, Witkoff and Blavatnik refinanced the development for $1.15 billion.
Blavatnik, born in Soviet Ukraine, is a naturalized U.S. and UK citizen. He made his initial fortune investing in Russia alongside sanctioned Russian oligarch Victor Vekselberg. left, Among other ventures, Blavatnik and Veksberg acquired 40% of Tyumen Oil Company (TNK) for $800 
million in 1997 and, in 2003, merged it with the Russian assets of BP. In 2013, Blavatnik and Veksberg sold their stake in the company, netting Blavatnik around $7 billion. Veksberg reportedly has “close ties“ to Putin.
Based on his connections to the Putin regime, Blavatnik was sanctioned by Ukraine in December 2023 for at least 10 years. Blavatnik claims to have divested from Russia following the invasion of Ukraine, selling a valuable stake in an aluminum business he owned with Veksberg.
Nevertheless, British politicians have faced criticism for accepting donations from Blavatnik in light of the Ukrainian sanctions. He also established the Blavatnik Fund for Innovation at Yale, which has become controversial. “As many of us have begun to learn more about Kremlin-associated oligarchs, we’re deeply uncomfortable with being affiliated with these awards,” Aaron Ring, a recipient of the award, told Yale News in 2022.
As Witkoff serves as Trump’s top negotiator to end the war in Ukraine, Blavatnik remains Witkoff’s most important business partner. The 278e form reveals that Witkoff has maintained his ownership stake in 76 Eleventh Avenue Property Owner LLC, part of his “residential real estate” holding in New York City, and a subsidiary of WG 76 11th LLC. The value of the parent LLC is listed at $50 million or more, the highest valuation category.
76 Eleventh Avenue Property Owner LLC is the entity selling the condos at One High Line, according to a public document posted by the development.
Witkoff is also partnered with Blavatnik on Ocean Terrace, an ultra-luxury condo development in Miami. Witkoff’s form lists Ocean Terrace Owners LLC and related entities. While the project is still under construction, there have been hundreds of millions in pre-sales.What is missing from Witkoff’s federal disclosure
One of the primary purposes of the federal disclosure form is to ensure that the filer is in compliance with the conflict of interest provisions of federal law. All forms must be reviewed by a federal ethics official within 60 days of filing. The federal official then signs the form, certifying that “on the basis of information contained in this report, I conclude that the filer is in compliance with applicable laws and regulations.”
But while Witkoff signed his form on August 13, the version posted to the White House website remains unsigned. This is not an oversight. On November 17, Senators Chris Murphy (D-CT), right, and Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) sent a letter to the White House Counsel and the Office of Government ethics noting that “no agency ethics official signed the form… even though the 60-day deadline for an ethics official to review his form passed in October 2025.” The Senators say the form “appears to have inaccurate or incomplete information.”
One issue is that Witkoff’s form does not provide full transparency about what financial assets Witkoff currently owns.
The form does reveal that Witkoff “sold an interest in his eponymous real estate management company for $120 million“ as “part of divestiture planning.” But he continues to own a portion of the Witkoff Group valued at more than $50 million, according to the same form. So he has not actually divested from the company.
Further, a partial stake in the Witkoff Group, a private real estate company, is an illiquid asset. So who did Witkoff sell his stake to? Witkoff has not disclosed the buyer. It could be a family member, such as his son Alex Witkoff, who is currently running the company. Such a sale would do little to assuage concerns about conflict.Diplomacy or kleptocracy?
In addition to his current partnership with Blavatnik, Witkoff is ideally positioned to financially benefit from a peace deal if it includes unfreezingRussian assets. Witkoff appears to be focused on maximizing investment opportunities.
In an unusual move, Witkoff hammered out the peace plan not with a Russian foreign affairs official but with Kirill Dmitriev, left, the head of Russia’ssovereign wealth fund (RDIF). In 2022, Dmitriev was sanctioned by the United States and banned from the country for his role at the RDIF, which the Treasury Department described as “a slush fund for President Vladimir Putin and… emblematic of Russia’s broader kleptocracy.”
Despite the sanctions, Witkoff requested Secretary of Treasury Scott Bessent, below, allow Dmitriev to travel to DC in April. Bessent reportedly “had questions about the unique request, but ultimately signed off.” Since then, Witkoff and Dmitriev have met multiple times in person, in Moscow and elsewhere, and chatted frequently on the phone. Last month Witkoff and Dmitriev met in Miami to finalize the “Trump plan.”
The 28-point plan specifically contemplates using Russian assets to facilitate American investment. Section 13 contemplates the “lifting of sanctions” and “a long-term economic cooperation agreement for mutual development in the areas of energy, natural resources, infrastructure, artificial intelligence, data centers, rare earth metal extraction projects in the Arctic, and other mutually beneficial corporate opportunities.”
Also present at the October meeting was Jared Kushner, right, Trump’s son-in-law. Kushner operates a private equity firm, Affinity Partners, that is financed almost exclusively by investments from foreign sovereign wealth funds.
Senior military leaders look on at Marine Corps Base Quantico on September 30, 2025 in Quantico, Virginia.
The Contrarian, Opinion: War Crime...or Murder? Jennifer Rubin, right, Dec. 1, 2025. Killing shipwreck survivors is patently illegal and morally abhorrent.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who makes up in false bravado what he lacks in judgment and expertise, appears to have committed an inexcusable, unjustified violation of black-letter international and domestic law, according to a stunning Washington Post story released last Friday. The incident occurred during our Sept. 2 Caribbean military operation against suspected drug traffickers:
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth gave a spoken directive, according to two people with direct knowledge of the operation. “The order was to kill everybody,” one of them said.
After the attack, two survivors clung to the “smoldering wreck.” Then, in an action that should shock the conscience, forces murdered the two survivors. “The Special Operations commander overseeing the Sept. 2 attack—the opening salvo in the Trump administration’s war on suspected drug traffickers in the Western Hemisphere—ordered a second strike to comply with Hegseth’s instructions, two people familiar with the matter said,” The Post reported. “The two men were blown apart in the water.”
The Trump regime claims the report is false, but the evidence has not been specifically debunked. No explanation has been given as to why the video was edited to omit this part of the attack.
Putting aside for the moment the legitimacy of the underlying order to shoot these boats out of the water (which, frankly, is hard to justify based on a false theory and made-up facts), it is impossible to imagine any Pentagon lawyer blessing this action. The concept of hors de combat—literally, out of combat—is a fundamental aspect of the law of war that prevents harming those disabled from combat.
If we are at war, this is a shocking violation of the law of war and specifically the Department of Defense Law of War Manual (updated in July 2023). Per the latter, those shipwrecked (or “those in distress at sea or stranded on the coast who are also helpless”) are protected under the Geneva Convention, and in turn, U.S. law. Not only must shipwrecked individuals “not be knowingly attacked, fired upon, or unnecessarily interfered with,” but our military must “without delay, take all possible measures to search for and collect the wounded, sick, and shipwrecked at sea, to protect them against pillage and ill-treatment, to ensure their adequate care, and to search for the dead and prevent their being despoiled.”
Conservative lawyer Jack Goldsmith, right, reiterates, “ The DOD Manual is clear because the law here is clear: “Persons who have been incapacitated by . . . shipwreck are in a helpless state, and it would be dishonorable and inhumane to make them the object of attack.” Todd Huntley, a former Special Operations military lawyer cited in The Post report, agrees that even if the U.S. were at war an order to kill all the survivors “would in essence be an order to show no quarter, which would be a war crime.”
Others take the view that these alleged drug traffickers are not in “armed conflict” against the U.S., no matter how Trump spins it. Military law expert Eugene Fidell shared with me:
It is a war crime to kill someone who is hors de combat. If, as the administration has suggested, the strikes are part of an armed conflict, we have a national duty to investigate and prosecute. If, on the other hand (as I believe), we are not in an armed conflict with drug traffickers, then we are dealing with a lawless law-enforcement operation, and the killings would fit the definition of murder. Killing survivors at sea, rather than rescuing them, is particularly reprehensible.
Without congressional authorization or a plausible justification that we are engaged in armed conflict with Venezuela, those involved are in an especially precarious position, as Brian Finucane, who served for a decade in the Office of the Legal Adviser at the U.S. Department of State where he advised the U.S. government on the use of military force, tells me. “Notwithstanding the administration’s supposed legal justification for its killing spree at sea, as a legal matter there does not appear to be an actual armed conflict,” he says. Since “without a war there’s no war crimes,” he concludes that “these premeditated killings implicate US domestic criminal laws—including murder on the high seas, conspiracy to commit murder outside the United States, and murder as an offense under the Uniform Code of Military Justice.”
Just Security’s Ryan Goodman points to “precedent dating back to World War II trial of Germans for that very act, which lawyers know well.” The Peleus World War II War Crimes Trial concerned a group of 12 survivors of a Greek Steamer whose vessel was sunk. The Nazi naval officer in command ordered grenades and machine guns to be used to sink the vessel and kill those stranded. At the war crimes trial, five German officers were convicted of war crimes for firing at the survivors. If the facts are as reported, is Hegseth’s order any different? (At least there was no doubt Germany was at war.)
In a statement of the former JAGs Working Group, the former military lawyers analyzed, in detail, relevant international and domestic law, concluding that “both the giving and the execution of these orders, if true, to constitute war crimes, murder, or both.” In stark terms, they declare:
We call upon Congress to investigate and the American people to oppose any use of the U.S. military that involves the intentional targeting of anyone—enemy combatants, non-combatants, or civilians—rendered hors de combat (“out of the fight”) as a result of their wounds or the destruction of the ship or aircraft carrying them.
We also advise our fellow citizens that orders like those described above are the kinds of “patently illegal orders” all military members have a duty to disobey.
Since orders to kill survivors of an attack at sea are “patently illegal,” anyone who issues or follows such orders can and should be prosecuted for war crimes, murder, or both.
Other military law experts agree. “The military justice system has to address these issues,” Fidell states. “If it doesn’t because of pressure from above, then that system itself will be collateral damage.” He adds: “Secretary Hegseth may not think that’s important, but anyone who cares about the proper administration of justice will disagree.”
Even Senate and House Republicans seem to comprehend the gravity of the situation. Departing from their normal spinelessness, they joined Democrats on both the Senate Armed Services Committee and the House Armed Services Committee in bipartisan statements vowing to investigate. Democrats—and any decent Republican—should use every tool available to insist on a thorough and independent investigation, reiterate zero tolerance for war crimes and murder, and pledge to hold everyone responsible to the full extent of the law.
No wonder Trump and his minions freaked out over Democratic congressmen and senators’ video advising military personnel not to follow illegal orders. It’s not Sen. Mark Kelly (D-Ariz.) who should be investigated, but those threatening retribution for raising the red flag.
More On U.S. Governance, Politics
Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: Sex Crimes. State Crimes. War Crimes, Bill Kristol, Andrew Egger and Jim Swift, Dec. 1, 2025. We’re detecting a pattern with this administration.
You really just can’t take breaks around here, huh? While we were all busy digesting dinner Thanksgiving night, Donald Trump was tapping away at his phone doing a little supervillain brainstorming on Truth Social.
The president promised to “permanently pause migration from all Third World Countries,” “remove anyone who is not a net asset to the United States or is incapable of loving our country, and “end all federal benefits and subsidies” to noncitizens living in America.
On Friday, Trump went further, posting that “any document signed by Sleepy Joe Biden with the Autopen, which was approximately 92% of them, is hereby terminated.”
Now this week we get to find out how much of this the president intends to actually pursue as policy. 2025! Happy Monday.
Among the images President Trump released in the days before the 2025 Thanksgiving holiday portraying himself as a America's supreme ruler was the above via his Truth Social Network, portraying himself as King, with three Senate Democrats, Sens. Charles Schumer, left, Elizabeth Warren and Adam Schiff, kneeling at his feet, , seemingly awaiting the punishment he has long threatened against them.
Paul Krugman Commentary via Substack, Trump: Pro-crypto or Pro-crime? Paul Krugman, right, Dec. 1, 2025. Or are they the same thing?
On one side, the Trump administration is sinking small boats that it claims, without evidence, are smuggling drugs — and according to the Washington Post, Pete Hegseth, the self-styled Secretary of War, has personally ordered at least one follow-up strike to kill the survivors. A working group of former JAGs, that is, members of the military’s legal branch, issued a statement declaring that it
"unanimously considers both the giving and the execution of these orders, if true, to constitute war crimes, murder, or both."
On the other side, Donald Trump has declared his intention to grant “a Full and Complete Pardon” to Juan Orlando Hernández, a former president of Honduras who has been convicted of conspiring to import cocaine into the United States. In fact, Hernandez was part of a cartel, including his brother, that smuggled hundreds of tons of cocaine into this country.
At first glance, the juxtaposition seems bizarre – Trump is either murdering or committing war crimes against people who are at worst small-time drug smugglers, and may be innocent fishermen, while pardoning a drug lord who was responsible for thousands of American deaths while savaging his own country, Honduras. But there is a pattern to this murderous madness, once one connects the dots between Trump’s mob-boss persona and the billionaire crypto/tech broligarchy.
First, understand that Trump’s vendetta against purported penny-ante drug smugglers is all about dominance display, an exhibition of his ability to order violence. The real object may be to set the stage for invadingVenezuela.
Second, while Trump is clearly willing to inflict gratuitous suffering on the little people, he positively revels in his association with big-time criminals, whether it’s Putin; or Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman, who had a critical journalist dismembered with a bone saw; or Ross Ulbricht, creator of Silk Road, an underground e-marketplace known for drug trafficking, whom Trump pardoned immediately after assuming office; or Larry Hoover, a Chicago crime boss, who was sentenced to several lifetimes in prison for leading the Gangster Disciples, also pardoned by Trump. Yes, Trump really and truly cares about crime in Chicago.
Still, why would Trump, whose poll numbers are cratering, generate even more negative headlines by pardoning Hernández, who was duly convicted of conspiring to send more than 400 tons (!) of cocaine to America?
The answer is the influence of the crypto/tech broligarchy. In fact, many of Trump’s pardons of the most egregious criminals are closely linked to their influence.
A case in point is Ulbricht, whose Silk Road was an early example of what is still the main non-speculative use of Bitcoin: facilitating criminal activity. Ross Ulbricht was a darling of the tech-libertarian crowd, which includes Peter Thiel, arguably the godfather of Silicon Valley and whose financial backing was critical to JD Vance’s senate win. Trump first promised to pardon Ulbricht in 2024, as part of a pitch to win the votes of libertarians: Speaking at the Libertarian Party convention in 2024, President Donald Trump promised to free Ross Ulbricht, a former tech entrepreneur who created a dark web site called Silk Road that was used by drug traffickers.
Trump at the Libertarian Party national conference in 2024, where he promised to pardon Ulbricht A close-up of a sign AI-generated content may be incorrect.
Whatever libertarians were in the past, they are now an extremist party, opposed to laws against drug smuggling, money laundering, any type of prudential government regulation, and – in the case of Thiel – opposed to democracy itself. It should not go unnoticed that Trump saluted a party that proclaims “Become Ungovernable” as its guiding principle, written with the anarchy a-symbol.
Next, Trump’s pardon of Changpeng Zhao, aka CZ, the former CEO of the cryptocurrency exchange Binance, fits the same pattern. CZ pled guilty to charges of violating U.S. laws against money-laundering and was fined $50 million, in addition to a fine of $4.3 billion against Binance. Under CZ, Binance was a major channel of worldwide money laundering. As one report put it, prosecutors charged that Binance
intentionally and purposefully ignored the transfer of money from countries and areas that are subject to sanctions -- including Syria, Iran, Cuba, Russia-occupied Crimea and the Donbas region in Ukraine. There was also trading that involved the criminal dark-web market Hydra.
And the story continues. Last week
The families of 300 U.S. citizens hurt or killed in the Oct. 7 attack on Israel sued Binance, claiming the cryptocurrency exchange aided Hamas and other terrorist groups by transferring more than $1 billion among accounts they controlled.
However, in the world of radical libertarians, of the crypto/tech broligarchy, CZ’s crimes weren’t real crimes because crypto is designed to “free” us from the pernicious oversight of government. Yes, Trump really cares about stopping terrorism.
Finally, why pardon Hernández? What’s the connection to the crypto/tech broligarchy? It’s called Próspera.
Próspera is a for-profit city being built off Honduras’s coast. Its charter largely exempts the island from Honduran law. Instead, the city is run by a governing structure that for the most part gives control to a corporation, Honduras Próspera Inc., which is in turn funded by a familiar list of Silicon Valley billionaires including Thiel, Sam Altman and Marc Andreesen.
So while the city is being marketed as a libertarian paradise, it’s best seen as an autonomous oligarchy, government of, by and for billionaires. And you won’t be surprised to learn that within Próspera, Bitcoin is legal tender.
The 2013 Honduran law that made the creation of Próspera possible was initially ruled unconstitutional by the Honduran Supreme Court. But that ruling was reversed after Juan Orlando Hernández’s predecessor, Porfirio Lobo Sosa, managed to dismiss 4 of the court’s justices. Like Hernández, Sosa was a right-winger, who became president after a populist president, Manuel Zelaya, was overthrown by a military coup. Under both Hernández and Sosa, chaos reigned – corruption, criminal gangs, and drugs overran the country. The current president, Zelaya’s wife, has tried to claw back some sovereignty over Próspera, which has struck back with a mammoth lawsuit that could bankrupt the country.
Yesterday Honduras held an election in which Trump backed Nasry Asfura, a member of the same right-wing party as Hernández. Early results show the governing left-wing party well behind, but Asfura in a virtual tie with another right-wing candidate.
In any case, the point is that while Trump threatens and fulminates against Maduro in Venezuela, he is openly backing the Honduran political party that has allowed massive drug smuggling into the U.S. Why? The only logical answer is because of the influence of the crypto/tech broligarchy and their interests in Próspera.
So the announced pardon of Hernández for drug smuggling isn’t really a departure from the pardons of Binance’s Changpeng Zhao for money laundering or Silk Road’s Ross Ulbricht for facilitating illicit drug sales. In each case what’s being upheld is the principle that lawlessness in the pursuit of tech billionaires’ interests is no vice. In fact, it’s to be encouraged.
And Trump, whose only principles appear to be self-enrichment and vindictiveness, is happy to go along.
Letters from an American, Historical Commentary: November 2, 2025 [Russian "Peace" for Ukraine], Heather Cox Richardson, right, Dec. 1, 2025. On Friday evening, the Wall Street Journal published an article about the Trump administration’s negotiations with Russia over Ukraine that illuminated the administration’s approach to the world at home, as well as overseas.
Authors Drew Hinshaw, Benoit Faucon, Rebecca Ballhaus, Thomas Grove, and Joe Parkinson explained that the administration’s plan for peace was a Russian-led blueprint for joint U.S.-Russia economic cooperation that would funnel contracts for rebuilding Ukraine, extracting the valuable minerals in the Arctic, and even space exploration to a few favored U.S. and Russian businessmen.
Many of those business leaders have close ties to the White House.
“Russia has so many vast resources, vast expanses of land,” Trump envoy Steve Witkoff, left, told the journalists. “If we do all that, and everybody’s prospering and they’re all a part of it, and there’s upside for everybody, that’s going to naturally be abulwark against future conflicts there. Because everybody’s thriving.”
On ABC’s This Week this morning, Representative Don Bacon (R-NE), who sits on the House Armed Services Committee, said to host Jonathan Karl: “Putin’s the invader, he’s the dictator, he’s murdered all his opponents. But I just don’t see that moral clarity coming from the White House. We saw that Wall Street Journal article yesterday that many people around the president are hoping to make billions of dollars—these are all billionaires in their own right—from…Russia, if they get a favorable agreement with Ukraine. That alarms me tremendously. I want to see America being the leader of the free world, standing up for what’s right, not for who can make a buck…. I don’t want to see a foreign policy based on greed. I want to see it based on doing the right thing.”
There is far more at stake here than morality, although that is clearly on the table.
The Trump administration is replacing American democracy with a kleptocracy, a system of corruption in which a network of ruling elites use the institutions of government to steal public assets for their own private gain. It permits virtually unlimited theft while the head of state provides cover for his cronies through pardons and the uneven application of the law.
It is the system Russia’s president Vladimir Putin exploits in Russia, and President Donald J. Trump is working to establish it in the United States of America.
In the New York Times today, Cecilia Kang, Tripp Mickle, Ryan Mac, David Yaffe-Bellany, and Theodore Schleifer explored the story of David 
Sacks, right, an early technology entrepreneur with Peter Thiel and Elon Musk who now advises the White House on AI and cryptocurrency policy while investing in the companies that benefit from those policies. Sacks has brought Silicon Valley leaders, including the chief executive of Nvidia, into contact with White House officials. Shortly after, the government got rid of restrictions on Nvidia’s chip sales to foreign countries, a change that could net Nvidia as much as $200 billion.
Tom Burgis of The Guardian explained today how the Trump family is using its position in the federal government to advance its personal interests and enrich itself. Trump’s sons Don Jr. and Eric have thrown themselves into cryptocurrency, broken ground on new golf courses, and rushed through permissions for new buildings in foreign countries at the same time U.S. government policies over tariffs, cryptocurrency, and pardons, for example, seem to advance those interests.
“The Trumps’ most natural allies,” Burgis wrote, “first in business, now also in politics—have long been the rulers of the Gulf’s petro-monarchies, who see no distinction between their states’ interests and their families’.”
When New York Times reporters Ken Bensinger and David Fahrenthold published an article about Trump disclosing the donors who funded his transition to his second term a full year after promising to do so, they noted that the 46 individuals on the released list included billionaires and others who were later appointed to office. White House spokesperson Danielle Alvarez said: “President Trump greatly appreciates his supporters and donors; however, unlike politicians of the past, he is not bought by anyone and does what’s in the best interest of the country. Any suggestion otherwise is simply false.”
As wealth and power flow through the executive branch, Trump is overriding the rule of law that is designed to protect the rest of us from self-
dealing by unscrupulous individuals. On Wednesday he commuted the sentence of private equity executive David Gentile, left, convicted in August 2024 of defrauding 10,000 investors in a $1.6 billion scheme that included securities and wire fraud. According to Kenneth P. Vogel of the New York Times, prosecutors said the victims were small business owners, teachers, nurses, farmers, and veterans: “hardworking, everyday people.” “I lost my whole life savings,” one victim wrote about his losses. “I am living from check to check.”
A judge sentenced Gentile to seven years in prison. He reported to authorities on November 14, was incarcerated, and was released less than two weeks later after Trump commuted his sentence.
There is a growing sense that an elite group of wealthy people is running the world without accountability to the law, and that the Trump administration is protecting and even advancing the people in that group. That sense is key to popular anger at the administration’s refusal to release the FBI files about its investigation into sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
The documents from the Epstein estate released by the House Oversight Committee on November 12 showed a chummy friendship between Epstein and political, academic, and economic leaders eager to retain access to Epstein’s money, information, and connections even after he pleaded guilty to procuring a minor for prostitution.
MAGA voters backed Trump in the belief that he would hold such people to account, but it is now clear he is protecting them instead. Indeed, as Mona Charon of The Bulwark noted today, Trump’s ally Steve Bannon, whom Charon describes as “Trump’s consigliere, strategist, propagandist, and former senior counselor at the White House,” was on such friendly terms with Epstein that it was to him Epstein turned to scrub his public image after his initial guilty plea.
The realization that Trump is bolstering and protecting an entitled elite rather than defending everyday Americans victimized by them has dovetailed with this administration’s undermining of the economy, firing of civil servants, attacks on public health, and destruction of the nation’s social safety net to create angry references to “the Epstein class.”
Representative Ro Khanna (D-CA) explained to NPR’s Scott Detrow earlier this month: “[T]he Epstein class is a group of people with extreme wealth who have donated to politicians and been part of a system where they think the rules don’t apply to them, and they have created a system that has shafted a lot of forgotten Americans. That’s why Donald Trump ran and was central to his campaign. And many people, like Marjorie Taylor Greene and others, believe he’s become part of the swamp that he said he would drain. He’s forgotten the forgotten Americans he said he would stand up for.”
Unlike the robber barons of the late nineteenth century, today’s power elite is, as Anand Giridharadas of The Ink wrote on November 23 in the New York Times, a borderless network of people connected not to nations or their fellow citizens but to each other. They exchange nonpublic information and capital to enable the members of that group to control events, disregarding the effects of their decisions on those outside their network.
Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo suggested Friday that the deep unpopularity of AI comes in part from the fact that it has become a symbol “of a society in which all the big decisions get made by the tech lords, for their own benefit and for a future society that doesn’t really seem to have a place for most of the rest of us.”
Popular anger at this “Epstein class” is sparking a political realignment. Democratic leaders have been hammering on how Republican policies benefit the wealthy at the same time that Trump’s tariffs send household costs upward and the Republicans’ budget reconciliation bill of July—the one Republicans call the “One Big Beautiful Bill Act”—slashes the social safety net and drives up the cost of health care premiums. The extraordinary demand for energy caused by the massive data centers AI requires has sent energy costs skyrocketing.
In November, voters turned away from the Republicans and toward the Democrats, expressing concerns about the economy and “affordability.” Chris Stein of The Guardian explained today how 33-year-old John McAuliff flipped a Republican seat in the Virginia House of Delegates in those elections. McAuliff attracted Republican voters by going door to door, talking with voters about data centers and the infrastructure they require and noting voters’ own rising electricity costs.
McAuliff told Stein that the rising prices are “essentially an artificial tax on everyday Virginians to benefit Amazon, Google, some of the companies with the biggest market [capitalizations] in human history. Which is not to say they don’t provide benefits to those communities, but we need to do a much, much better job of extracting those benefits, because the companies can afford them.”
Voters’ anger at the administration’s support for the Epstein class is now so palpable it has inspired some MAGA leaders to try to cast themselves as populist leaders standing against the wealthy who control the government, a stand that puts them at odds with the White House. “I’ve always represented the common American man and woman as a member of the House of Representatives which is why I’ve always been despised in Washington DC and never fit in,” Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) began her resignation letter.
In 1932, in a similar time of political realignment, New York governor Franklin Delano Roosevelt attracted voters across the political spectrum when he promised “a new deal for the American people,” with “more equitable opportunity to share in the distribution of national wealth.” “Let us…constitute ourselves prophets of a new order of competence and of courage,” he told the delegates to the Democratic National Convention when he accepted its nomination for president. “This is more than a political campaign; it is a call to arms. Give me your help, not to win votes alone, but to win in this crusade to restore America to its own people.”
Emptywheel, Analysis: David Sacks and the Entire American Tech Stack Win! Emptywheel (Marcy Wheeler, right), Dec. 1, 2025. David Sacks and all his tech bro friends are in a tizzy at Elon Musk's bubble of trolls because the NYT said they're just serving each other. Something funny is happening over at Xitter.
Yesterday, NYT published a 3,000-word profile of David Sacks describing how his installment as the White House AI and crypto czar has led to a number of decisions that may not benefit the US, such as sharing AI technology with UAE in seeming exchange for personal gain for others, including Trump. The profile quotes Sacks’ own spokesperson explaining that poor David Sacks just “wants the entire American tech stack to win.”
It also quotes Steve Bannon, which might hint at where the article came from, warning of the “road to perdition”!
Steve Bannon, a former adviser to Mr. Trump and a critic of Silicon Valley billionaires, said Mr. Sacks was a quintessential example of ethical conflicts in an administration where “the tech bros are out of control.”
“They are leading the White House down the road to perdition with this ascendant technocratic oligarchy,” he said.
In general, the article is a bit of a squish. As one critical example, it doesn’t mention Sacks’ role in fueling a run on Silicon Valley Bank only to whine and whine and whine until Sleepy Joe Biden bailed out the billionaires, the most significant lesson to explain Sacks’ installation.
The closing paragraphs nod to the significance of all this: that at a time when both crypto and AI need a bailout — a vastly bigger bailout than SVB needed — David Sacks is there to ensure that gets prioritized over real America.
In the keynote speech, Mr. Trump described Mr. Sacks as “great” before signing executive orders to speed the building of data centers and exports of A.I systems.
Then he handed Mr. Sacks the presidential pen.
The tech bros need a bailout and Sacks is there to deliver it to them.
But NYT doesn’t lay out the stakes. If this was a Bannon-attempted hit job, it missed its mark.
Or so I thought until I watched the Xitter response to Sacks’ whiny 1,500-word complaint about how he lawyered the article, to which he attached a much longer letter from defamation lawyers.
INSIDE NYT’S HOAX FACTORY Five months ago, five New York Times reporters were dispatched to create a story about my supposed conflicts of interest working as the White House AI & Crypto Czar. Through a series of “fact checks” they revealed their accusations, which we debunked in detail. (Not surprisingly the published article included only bits and pieces of our responses.) Their accusations ranged from a fabricated dinner with a leading tech CEO, to nonexistent promises of access to the President, to baseless claims of influencing defense contracts. Every time we would prove an accusation false, NYT pivoted to the next allegation. This is why the story has dragged on for five months. Today they evidently just threw up their hands and published this nothing burger. Anyone who reads the story carefully can see that they strung together a bunch of anecdotes that don’t support the headline. And of course, that was the whole point. At no point in their constant goalpost-shifting was NYT willing to update the premise of their story to accept that I have no conflicts of interest to uncover. As it became clear that NYT wasn’t interested in writing a fair story, I hired the law firm Clare Locke, which specializes in defamation law. I’m attaching Clare Locke’s letter to NYT so readers have full context on our interactions with NYT’s reporters over the past several months. Once you read the letter, it becomes very clear how NYT willfully mischaracterized or ignored the facts to support their bogus narrative.
In response, every one of the loathesome crypto and AI bros whose installation Sacks served piped up to describe what a hero poor beleaguered David Sacks is.
Mark Andreessen who of course hosts or hosted a private chat of tech bros talking up other tech bros, may have kicked it off with his claim that Sacks was performing some kind of noble citizenship, which Daddy then picked up.
Marc Benioff seconded Gavin Baker’s tautology even while treating AI bros as “builders.”
David Marcus described tech bros’ efforts to collapse dollar hegemony in glowing terms while scoffing at “incompetent technocrats.”
Zach Witkoff — the man facilitating corrupt foreign investment in precisely these technologies — hailed Sacks’ role in “helping advance the ball forward on AI and Crypto.”
Martin Shkreli, who misspelled Sacks’ name, nevertheless insisted this is the kind of guy Americans want selling away American power.
And they all tagged Sacks and he RTed them (well, except for Shkreli) and all these billionaire tech bros were performing a circle jerk for the benefit of the foreign trolls their host has installed, as if that performance itself could affirm the value of all this tech brobery to real Americans.
None of this exposes the real underlying problem here, the degree to which the American economy has been hollowed out so these bro boys can attempt to divorce themselves from the physical reality of real people entirely.
But it performs it.
U.S. Courts, Law, Crime, Justice
Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: Trump’s Gang of Criminals, William Kristol, right, Dec. 1, 2025. “Remove justice, and what are kingdoms but gangs of criminals on a large scale?”
Augustine made this suggestion 1,600 years ago, in The City of God. Today, in the country of Trump, we’re getting a convincing demonstration of Augustine’s proposition. Justice has been removed and a gang of criminals are in charge.
They’re certainly acting on a large scale. Their expertise ranges from ordering war crimes to covering up sex crimes to engaging in all manner of financial criminality. They’re a diverse bunch, from tough guys outfitted in combat gear and masks rampaging through the streets of our cities, to smooth operators in tuxedoes who mingle with ease at state dinners. Their ranks encompass experienced criminals and newbies. They commit novel crimes and cover up old ones. Allies who had the misfortune to be caught—or were too bumbling to succeed—get pardons from the boss.
It’s all a veritable festival of law-scorning; an amazing smorgasbord of law-breaking. And it turns out that if a president aggressively shuns any concern for justice and is willing to demonstrate utter contempt for the law—if he then disables the Department of Justice and the judge advocates general and almost all other internal checks and mechanisms of accountability—his gang can get away with a heck of a lot. They don’t even have to shoot particularly straight.
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And so we have an administration that embraces and pursues criminality greedily and shamelessly. They’re so far unpunished, and there doesn’t seem to be much expectation that they will be punished.
Over Thanksgiving break, the Washington Post reported that Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth ordered a second firing on a suspected drug-running boat near Venezuela to ensure that the survivors clinging to the wreckage were killed.
Almost every serious person agrees with Andrew McCarthy of National Review and Fox News that, even without the second firing on the survivors, the three months of military strikes on the boats in the Caribbean are either “a war crime under federal law” or more likely simply “lawless.”
But, McCarthy stresses, even “if we stipulate arguendo that the administration has a colorable claim that our forces are in an armed conflict with non-state actors . . . the laws of war do not permit the killing of combatants who have been rendered hors de combat (out of the fighting)—including by shipwreck.”
In fact, every serious person knows that the second strike that reportedly took place to kill those two survivors of the original September 2 attack was illegal. Indeed, in its discussion of the duty to refuse illegal orders, the Department of Defense’s current law of war manual offers (in section 18.3.2.1) this instance of “Clearly Illegal Orders to Commit Law of War Violations:” “For example, orders to fire upon the shipwrecked would be clearly illegal.”
Even President Trump gave a hint that he understood the problem when said last night that he would not have fired on the survivors. But he also said he didn’t know what happened and seemed pretty uninterested in finding out. And his secretary of defense hasn’t actually denied issuing that order. On Sunday evening, he put out a tweet with an AI-generated children’s book cover leaving the clear impression he’d do it again (see below).
Based on what we’ve seen over the past year, there will be no internal investigation or consequences. McCarthy himself emphasizes that “this is a very serious matter”—but seems to accept that nothing is going to happen because even were efforts made, “President Trump is undoubtedly going to pardon any administration officials in potential legal jeopardy.”
He’s probably correct. But are we simply stuck in this situation? Do we have no recourse? We have an utterly lawless administration both at home and abroad. Do we just have to live with it for at least three more years? And then hope the criminal gang permits free and fair elections?
Yes, the courts can do some things. But they have to wait for cases to come to them, and ultimately they have a limited ability to force the administration to change course.
There is one body in our system of government that could provide a recourse, that could make a difference: Congress. It may seem wishful to say—once again—that the rule of law depends on a Congress willing to assert its rightful authority and to hold the executive accountable. It may seem wishful to implore—once again—Republican members of Congress to put country and Constitution over party and political convenience. But could the wish finally be father to the thought?
It was somewhat heartening to see the Republican chairmen of the Senate and House Armed Services Committees join the Democratic ranking members in expressing alarm at the reports of the killing of the survivors. They said they were going to look into what happened. We’ll see how far they’re really willing to go.
And we’ll see if, perhaps, as they explore accountability in that one arena, they’ll dip their toes into the many others. We’ll see if anyone is willing to act against the mind-boggling and pervasive grift of Trump and cronies, and their subordination of foreign and domestic policies to their own personal financial interests. We’ll see if they push back against the rampant use of the pardon power in return for what are effectively bribes. We’ll see if they’re willing to treat this White House for what it truly is: a hot bed of corruption; a grift operation wrapped in the emblems of the state.
Not to try to stop the reckless criminality of this administration is to collude in it. It is to accept the collapse of our experiment in republican self-government into rule by a lawless gang.
New York Times, Appeals Court Says Alina Habba Is Unlawful U.S. Attorney, Jonah E. Bromwich and Tracey Tully, Dec. 1, 2025. The judges wrote that the Trump Administration appeared to have become frustrated by legal and political barriers that have prevented its preferred U.S. attorneys from leading federal prosecutors’ offices.
A federal appeals court said on Monday that Alina Habba had been serving unlawfully as the U.S. attorney in New Jersey, dealing a blow to the Trump administration and most likely setting up a showdown at the Supreme Court.
Ms. Habba is one of a number of U.S. attorneys whom the Trump administration has sought to keep in power through a series of unusual maneuvers even though she was neither confirmed by the Senate nor appointed by district trial court judges — the two traditional pathways.
In its ruling, the three-judge panel, based in Philadelphia, affirmed an earlier ruling by a Federal District Court judge. The court said that the government’s tactics had violated the law as written and concluded that, overall, the Trump administration appeared to have become frustrated by legal and political barriers to placing its favored U.S. attorneys in charge.
The maneuvers undertaken to keep Ms. Habba in charge exemplified the difficulties the administration had faced, the judges wrote. And yet, they said, “the citizens of New Jersey and the loyal employees in the U.S. attorney’s office deserve some clarity and stability.”
It was not immediately clear how the ruling would affect legal proceedings in the New Jersey federal courts or whether Ms. Habba will continue to lead the office in the near future. The courts had already been operating in a kind of limbo, given her uncertain status. Certain types of criminal cases were slowed, and some grand jury proceedings were halted.
Emptywheel, Analysis: Alina Habba: A Parking Garage Lawyer with $1 Million in Sanction Penalties, Emptywheel (Marcy Wheeler, right), Dec. 1, 2025. Sometimes a Parking Garage Lawyer is just a Parking Garage Lawyer. Sometimes a Parking Garage Lawyer is a Parking Garage Lawyer with $1 million in penalties for frivolous lawyering.
In the first appellate court decision on Donald Trump’s persistent effort to put Insurance Lawyers, Election Deniers, and other sundry actors play-acting as US Attorneys, the Third Circuit has unanimously ruled that Alina Habba really is nothing more than a Parking Garage lawyer.
Habba is not the Acting U.S. Attorney for the District of New Jersey by virtue of her appointment as First Assistant U.S. Attorney because only the first assistant in place at the time the vacancy arises automatically assumes the functions and duties of the office under the FVRA. Additionally, because Habba was nominated for the vacant U.S. Attorney position, the FVRA’s nomination bar prevents her from assuming the role of Acting U.S. Attorney. Finally, the Attorney General’s delegation of all the powers of a U.S. Attorney to Habba is prohibited by the FVRA’s exclusivity provision. Therefore, we will affirm the District Court’s disqualification order.
This ruling, if applied elsewhere, would cause problems for Lindsey the Insurance Lawyer, Sigal the Election Denying Laywer, and Bill the Claremont Nut, as well — including Essayli, whom a judge ruled could act as First AUSA.
Abbe Lowell, who represents Letitia James in EDVA, argued this case before the court.
The Third Circuit ruling comes even as the Eleventh Circuit ruled that Alina the Parking Garage lawyer is not only just a Parking Garage lawyer, but a frivolous one at that, sustaining the $1 million in fees on her and her liege Donald Trump.
New York Times, Fight Over 2020 Election in Georgia Persists as Midterms Approach, Danny Hakim and Richard Fausset, Dec. 1, 2025. The Justice Department is trying to access ballots cast in 2020, while several officials who were involved in the fight over the election outcome are seeking higher office.
The election interference case against President Trump in Georgia was dismissed last week, but the ghosts of the 2020 election are still looming over the state as next year’s midterms approach.
Mr. Trump’s Justice Department has been investigating Fani T. Willis, above left, the district attorney in Atlanta who brought criminal charges against him. Though the full contours of the investigation are unclear, The New York Times has learned that several dozen subpoenas have already been issued, according to a copy of one of them and interviews with veterans of the U.S. attorney’s office for the Northern District of Georgia.
Federal prosecutors are separately trying to obtain copies of tens of thousands of ballots that were cast in Georgia in 2020. And races for governor and other statewide offices feature candidates who actively helped or resisted the president’s efforts to cling to power after he lost in 2020.
The dismissal last week of the election interference case against Mr. Trump came at the request of a state prosecutor who had taken it over. Ms. Willis was removed from the case amid revelations that she had been romantically involved with the lawyer she hired to run the Trump prosecution.
Mr. Trump had pressured Republican officials in Georgia to help reverse his 2020 loss there. In one phone call, he tried to persuade the state’s then-speaker of the House to call a special session of the legislature to overturn his loss. In another, Mr. Trump pushed Georgia’s secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, to help overturn the state’s election results, citing debunked claims of election fraud.
Some of Mr. Trump’s co-defendants in the case were accused of lying to Georgia lawmakers, creating a slate of fake pro-Trump electors and illegally accessing voter equipment and data. Four of the defendants pleaded guilty in the months after the August 2023 indictment.
Following the dismissal of the case, Mr. Trump called it an “illegal, unconstitutional, and unAmerican hoax,” adding that “we have to hold responsible those who attempted to destroy our Legal System.”
To that end, the president has reconfigured the Justice Department to pursue retribution against a number of his perceived enemies. The Times previously reported that federal investigators were scrutinizing a trip that Ms. Willis took to the Bahamas last year, during which she attended management training sessions.
Daily Mail, Kash Patel humiliated as explosive 115-page dossier reveals what FBI agents really think... and his tantrum after being issued a women's raid jacket, Brittany Chain, Dec. 1, 2025. A scathing 115-page report into the state of the FBI under Kash Patel has exposed turmoil and friction as agents turn on him and even Trump administration allies admit he is out of his depth.
The bombshell report, written by an alliance of active-duty and retired agents who railed against former president Joe Biden's DEI policies, described the FBI as 'a rudderless ship' and 'all f**ked up' under Patel.
Barely six months into the job, Patel has already been mired in controversy over his use of a government jet to visit his country singer girlfriend, Alexis Wilkins, and his astonishing decision to assign a SWAT team to protect her.
The damaging new dossier, obtained by the New York Post's Miranda Devine, detailed an embarrassing tantrum Patel allegedly threw after the assassination of conservative commentator Charlie Kirk.
Patel reportedly flew into Provo, Utah, on September 11, the day after the killing, and refused to 'disembark from the plane without an FBI raid jacket.'
He did not have his own and was so concerned about the optics that he pulled Salt Lake City FBI field agents from the investigation and ordered them to find him medium-sized outerwear.
They eventually tracked down one he could wear but it belonged to a female agent.
Patel was reportedly fuming when he received the jacket and erupted when he noticed 'two areas on the upper sleeves did not have Velcro patches attached', and still refused to step off the plane.Kash Patel allegedly refused to get off his private plane without an FBI raid jacket after Charlie Kirk's assassination
Kash Patel allegedly refused to get off his private plane without an FBI raid jacket after Charlie Kirk's assassinationThe damning review of his first six months in the job comes as he faces mounting criticism over his use of a government jet to travel to his country singer girlfriend, Alexis Wilkins, and assigning a SWAT team to protect her
The damning review of his first six months in the job comes as he faces mounting criticism over his use of a government jet to travel to his country singer girlfriend, Alexis Wilkins, and assigning a SWAT team to protect herRead MorePete Hegseth mocks war crime allegation with inflammatory cartoon as cold-blooded order sparks investigationarticle image
Ultimately, 'members of an FBI SWAT Team took patches off their uniforms and ran those patches over' to stop Patel's outburst.
Only then did he disembark the plane, the report claims.
The alliance revealed sources who contributed to the report and openly support Trump described Patel as 'not very good' and noted he 'may be insecure.'
Patel, a MAGA loyalist who once said he would shut down the FBI building on day one and accused the bureau of being part of the 'Deep State,' was appointed after a 51-49 vote and blistering battle between Democrats and Republicans.
His appointment was just one in a series of controversial Trump nominees to make it through confirmation along party lines as Republicans had enough senators to confirm them without bipartisan support.TRENDINGTrump's MRI scan results released by White House19.2k viewing nowNotorious dine-and-dasher sparks all out WAR at ritzy apartment block15k viewing nowDoctor and wife executed in the garage of their $1.3m home3.6k viewing now
Patel took over from Christopher Wray, who Trump also nominated during his first term before turning on him.
The FBI boss started his career as a public defender. He later worked as a prosecutor in the Justice Department before serving as a senior aide to the House Intelligence Committee under then-chairman, Congressman Devin Nunes.
He also worked as a staffer to the National Security Council during Trump's first term, in the office of the Director of National Intelligence and as chief of staff to the acting defense secretary.
The FBI insiders appeared to support concerns that he 'lacks the requisite experience' or 'measured self-confidence' to thrive in a role as demanding and high-pressure as FBI director.
They cited Patel's eagerness to address the public in the immediate aftermath of Kirk's assassination, which led him to incorrectly announce that investigators had someone in custody when they did not.
Later, he 'did a disservice to the FBI by breaking with Bureau tradition and norms by taking credit for the good work by other agencies,' one agent revealed.
Patel seemed to imply that the outcome of the investigation would not have been possible without his direct involvement.
Both he and his deputy, Dan Bongino, faced scathing criticism in the report for their 'unfortunate obsession with social media.'According to the White House, Patel enjoys Trump's full support
According to the White House, Patel enjoys Trump's full supportHis deputy, Dan Bongino, faced further embarrassment in the report, described as 'something of a clown' who multiple agents said never should have been considered for the deputy role
His deputy, Dan Bongino, faced further embarrassment in the report, described as 'something of a clown' who multiple agents said never should have been considered for the deputy role
One source advised the duo to 'stop talking, stop posing, and just be professional,' while another contributor said both men are 'spending too much time on social media and public relations' and 'are too often concerned with building their own personal resumes.'
Many agents said they often heard news about internal operations via Patel and Bongino's X and social media platforms, rather than through the appropriate chains of command.
Bongino faced further embarrassment in the report, described as 'something of a clown' who multiple agents said never should have been considered for the deputy role.
It should have instead gone to a 'career FBI Special Agent' who would have offered more experience and knowledge alongside Patel's relative inexperience.
One source recalled Bongino telling agents 'the truth is for chumps' during a visit to a field office, which left staff 'shocked, offended and appalled.'
Despite the scathing nature of the report, the authors noted it 'was never intended to be a hit piece in any way, shape or form.
'But the anecdotal reporting from FBI personnel skewed 80/20 negative,' they added.
The report did celebrate the fact that the FBI under Patel is making 'case work and threats the priority' in a noted shift away from the Biden-era DEI policies and politicization of the agency.
Emptywheel, Analysis: “The Truth Is for Chumps:” Prepare for the Hunger Games, Emptywheel (Marcy Wheeler, right), Dec. 1, 2025. In the next few weeks we should expect Kash Patel to exhibit a Hunger Games-like frenzy as he attempts to keep his job.
As you read the 100 page report about what a shitshow the FBI is under Kash Patel, keep the following in mind.
First, this report is an attack on Kash from the right, complaining among other things, that he hasn’t eradicated “Trump Derangement Syndrome” from the FBI and that Fox doesn’t play in FBI break rooms, while applauding him for eliminating DEI.
It was shared first with Miranda Devine, whose skillset is hit jobs, not government analysis.
It was shared as a Sribd.
It was sent to Chuck Grassley and Jim Jordan, but not their counterparts Dick Durbin and Jamie Raskin.
Yes, the report’s most damning anecdote describes that Kash delayed a presser in theTyler Robinson case until he could get a ladies’ sized jacket with the particular SWAG he wanted. Yes, it describes multiple sources quoting Dan Bongino saying, “the truth is for chumps.”
There’s even the very serious and persistent concern that the FBI has neglected its counterintelligence and counterterrorism mission (the report doesn’t mention rampant public corruption).
Perhaps the most telling detail, though, is there’s no mention of Andrew Bailey, ostensibly co-Deputy with Dan Bongino.
You see, in just two weeks, Bailey will be eligible to run the FBI or even DOJ without undergoing confirmation. And so you should expect that sometime after that, someone will be replaced.
Kash has long been the leading candidate to be replaced. But there’s likely to be a bit of a Hunger Games competition in the weeks ahead as various contestants attempt to keep their high-flying planes.
New York Times, Despite Supreme Court Wins, Elite D.O.J. Unit Has Seen Mass Turnover, Abbie VanSickle and Ann E. Marimow, Dec. 1, 2025. Even with an exodus of lawyers, the Office of the Solicitor General has had remarkable success. But fiery rhetoric and close White House ties have raised concerns
On a spring evening earlier this year, more than a hundred lawyers and guests filled the Justice Department’s Great Hall to mark the end of an era.
The invitation-only event celebrated the retirement of Edwin S. Kneedler, who over a 46-year career in the Office of the Solicitor General, had argued 160 cases on behalf of the government before the Supreme Court — a modern record.
Standing in front of statues depicting the “Spirit of Justice” and the “Majesty of Law,” speakers praised the traditionally fierce independence of the solicitor general’s office, the elite unit inside the Justice Department that represents the federal government before the justices. But some in the crowd grew uneasy, as the event’s theme served as a striking contrast to a shift underway since President Trump took office in January.
Led by Mr. Trump’s former personal lawyer, D. John Sauer, the solicitor general’s office has appeared to be an unusually functional corner of a Justice Department that has been rocked by mass departures and internal chaos. The office has racked up a record of wins on emergency applications filed to the Supreme Court that even liberal critics describe as impressive.
But behind the scenes, people familiar with the office say it’s been affected by the politicization spreading through the rest of the department.
By Mr. Kneedler’s farewell on May 29, several other lawyers had also departed, adding to a number that would swell to nine, or more than half of the office’s frontline attorneys, by late November. It’s unusually high turnover, even for the first year of a new administration after a White House change of party. And new hires at the traditionally bipartisan office have leaned more Republican than in the past.
White House lawyers, who have typically had a carefully circumscribed relationship with the office, have also become more involved in its work since Mr. Trump began his second term, sending frequent emails and offering detailed edits of high-profile court filings, people familiar with the interventions said.
For the first time in modern memory, the office’s merits briefs, the legal filings it makes before the justices hear a case, begin with an “introduction,” a section often filled with unusually charged language, including direct quotes from Mr. Trump.
This account of how Mr. Trump is changing even one of the most staid, tradition-bound corners of the U.S. government is drawn from interviews with more than a dozen people familiar with the office, many of whom spoke on the condition of anonymity because of the sensitivity of internal discussions within the office.
Talking Feds Podcast, Halligan, Bondi, and Other Turkeys, Harry Litman, right, Dec. 1, 2025. For his latest periodic deep dive on the Department of Justice, Harry talks to DOJ veterans Paul Fishman and Amy Jeffress as well as reporter Anna Bower to assess an institution that looks to be coming apart at the seams.
The panel digs into the political and legal flashpoints facing the Department, including its response to the embarrassing dismissals of the prosecutions against James Comey and Letitia James, the revival of possible contempt sanctions against the department, and the prospect that Pam Bondi may act as Trump’s firewall for the Epstein files.
Mentioned in this episode:
Morning Shots via The Bulwark, Political Opinion: Yet Another Ridiculous Pardon, Andrew Egger, Dec. 1, 2025. Now, look. Sure, Donald Trump may be committing a few war crimes here and there as he indiscriminately blows up boats off the coast of Venezuela.
But you guys aren’t getting the big picture! Trump has to blow those boats up, because anyone who would scheme to bring illegal drugs into our great country is a narcoterrorist, and the punishment for narcoterrorism is death. If you’re upset about that, well, you plainly aren’t as mad about America’s drug crisis as Trump is.
This is the argument that Trump’s and Hegseth’s MAGA defenders have gotten used to making in recent months. But on Friday, Trump blew it all up like one of those boats in the Caribbean with an unexpected Truth Social proclamation: He would soon be pardoning Juan Orlando Hernández, the former president of Honduras currently serving a 45-year prison sentence in the United States for allowing hundreds of thousands of pounds of cocaine to be trafficked through his country during his tenure.
During Hernández’s trial, prosecutors showed evidence he had taken enormous bribes from drug kingpins like El Chapo to allow them to use Honduras as a staging ground for cocaine smuggled from further south. They also showed that he had used drug money to manipulate the vote in national elections and even had a co-conspirator killed in prison to cover his tracks. A New York jury convicted Hernández on three counts of drug trafficking and weapons conspiracy. Trump, however, had a different take: Hernández had been, “according to many people that I greatly respect, treated very harshly and unfairly.”¹
To say this pardon is out of step with Trump’s typical approach to drug-crime issues would be an understatement. To make the two line up, you’d have to hypothesize that Trump is springing Hernández from federal prison just to have the military shoot down the plane carrying him home.
But sometimes a politician has to set aside a lesser priority for the sake of a greater one. And while Trump might care quite a bit about cracking down on the drug trade, that doesn’t hold a candle to the agenda item that has quickly become one of the most consistent of his second term: the desire to aid right-wing world leaders accused of criminal behavior.
Trump has attempted to browbeat Israel into abandoning the corruption prosecution of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, threatening to withhold further U.S. funds to Israel over the matter. When he slapped enormous tariffs on Brazil earlier this year, Trump cited that country’s prosecution of its former president, Jair Bolsonaro, over his clumsy attempts to steal a presidential election. He has called France’s embezzlement charges against right-wing leader Marine Le Pen a “witch hunt” and speculated that a special prosecutor investigating a coup attempt by former South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol might have been like “deranged Jack Smith.”
Trump plainly sees himself in all these leaders. But the Hernández pardon is particularly remarkable for its overturning of a conviction by an American court. Trump doesn’t appear to have even bothered to look up any of the details of the trial—people he trusts say it was a witch hunt, so a witch hunt it is.
AROUND THE BULWARK
Quick Hits
given enormous latitude to shape the White House’s policy on AI and cryptocurrency—all while continuing to run his own Silicon Valley investing firm raking in huge sums in these very fields. The New York Times reports on a summer White House AI summit hosted by Sacks’s All-In podcast and Sacks’s many other remarkable conflicts of interest:More Global News
Drop Site Daily News Roundup, Honduras election shock; Mass casualty flooding and fires in Asia; Netanyahu demands a pardon, Staff and wire reports, Dec. 1, 2025.
Israel kills two Palestinian children in a drone strike on Khan Younis. Trump is rewarded for his heavy intervention in Honduras’s election as his 
preferred candidate is leading a close race, with the left-wing party of the incumbent president trailing badly.
Palestinian American teenager Mohammed Zaher Ibrahim is released from detention. Trump mandates closure of Venezuela airspace and cancels repatriation flights. A coup in Guinea-Bissau.
Fires kill 150 in Hong Kong. Floods kill over 1,000 in Southeast Asia. Rains continue to imperil the people of the Gaza Strip. Israeli forces withdraw from Tubas, ending an intense operation in the West Bank city. Attacks continue near Hebron and Bethlehem Netanyahu asks for a pardon. Far-right cabinet members push for more guns for West Bank settlers and promote a Border Police officer who killed surrendering Palestinians.
U.S. halts visas and asylum for Afghans. The U.S. Navy is accused of covering up plutonium leaks.
Drop Site publishes a dispatch on guerilla fighters in West Papua. The Pope heads to Lebanon and continues the Vatican’s push for Palestinian statehood.
Russian-Ukrainian negotiations continue as a lead Ukrainian negotiator departs, due to his role in a growing corruption scandal within the country. Israel kills 13 in Syria. A French investigation finds that Sudan’s Army used chlorine gas as a weapon of war last year against the RSF. Turkish and Kurdish negotiators reach an impasse. Iran seizes another tanker.
New York Times, Honduras Votes in Presidential Election, 1Annie Correal and Jeff Ernst, Updated Dec. 1, 2025. Hondurans cast their ballots in Sunday’s presidential elections. The race was tense even before President Trump got involved, endorsing one of the right-wing candidates.
Election authorities in Honduras said Monday morning that the conservative former mayor endorsed by President Trump and a sportscaster rival were virtually tied in a presidential election that many predicted would be volatile even before Mr. Trump weighed in on the race.
The preliminary and partial results showed that Mr. Trump’s pick, Nasry Asfura, and the sportscaster, Salvador Nasralla, were in the lead, with ballots from nearly 56 percent of polling places counted. The candidate for the left-wing party in power, Rixi Moncada, was trailing far behind, the early results showed, with around half the votes cast for each of the right-wing candidates.
Voters went to the poll just days after Mr. Trump endorsed Mr. Asfura and announced he would pardon an unpopular ex-president from Mr. Asfura’s National Party who was convicted on drug-trafficking charges in U.S. federal court last year.
Mr. Asfura had 40 percent of the vote, versus 39.8 percent for Mr. Nasralla, according to the preliminary and partial results. The gap between the two candidates was roughly 4,000 votes.
A member of Mr. Asfura’s campaign said it would wait until all votes were counted and electoral authorities announced the final results to declare victory. But at party headquarters in Tegucigalpa, the capital, Mr. Asfura’s supporters were already celebrating late Sunday, with some jumping up and down and others in tears.
Mr. Nasralla said the lead was so small that it amounted to a “technical tie.” His party insisted that when votes came in from the industrial north of the country, thought to heavily favor their candidate, he would be the winner. At a hotel in the capital, Mr. Nasralla took the stage and danced before a jubilant crowd.
“I have no doubt I’m going to win,” he said.
New York Times, Netanyahu Asks Israel’s President to Pardon Him in Corruption Cases, Isabel Kershner, Dec. 1, 2025 (print ed.). Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu made the contentious appeal weeks after President Trump had made the same request to the Israeli president.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel, right, asked its president on Sunday to pardon him in his long-running corruption trial, a request that
the president called “extraordinary” and that critics said would run counter to the rule of law.
Mr. Netanyahu’s unusual pre-emptive appeal to President Isaac Herzog, while his trial is still underway, came about two weeks after President Trump sent a letter to Mr. Herzog urging him to pardon the Israeli prime minister.
A statement by the Israeli president’s office said the request would have “significant implications,” and that he would “responsibly and sincerely consider” it after seeking expert opinions.
Mr. Netanyahu said he believed that canceling his trial would help heal the divisions in Israeli society. But the immediate effect of the request appeared to amplify the rifts that have intensified over two years of war and his long battle with the judiciary.
Mr. Netanyahu was indicted in 2019 on charges of bribery, fraud and breach of trust in connection with three separate, but interlocking cases, and he has been on trial for five years. He has denied any wrongdoing in the cases, which center on accusations that he arranged favors for tycoons in exchange for gifts and sympathetic media coverage for himself and his family.
Soon after his request to the president was made public, Mr. Netanyahu explained his reasoning in a video statement. He said that he would have preferred to prove his innocence in court, but that the national interest demanded otherwise.
Citing Israel’s “security and political reality,” he called the requirement that he appear in court to testify three times a week “an impossible demand,” and he referred to Mr. Trump’s equally extraordinary interventions on his behalf as justification for seeking a pardon.Want to stay updated on what’s happening in Israel? Sign up for Your Places: Global Update, and we’ll send our latest coverage to your inbox.
“President Trump called for an immediate end to the trial so that I may join him in further advancing vital and shared interests of Israel and the United States,” Mr. Netanyahu said.
Israeli legal experts said such a request by a sitting Israeli prime minister was without precedent and subverted the principle of equality before the law, a cornerstone of Israeli democracy.
“The general rule is that the president pardons those who have been convicted,” said Prof. Suzie Navot, an expert in constitutional law and vice president of research at the Israel Democracy Institute, a nonpartisan research group.
Climate, Energy
New York Times, Many Fighting Climate Change Worry They Are Losing the Information War, Lisa Friedman and Steven Lee Myers, Dec.1, 2025 (print ed.). Shifting politics, intensive lobbying and surging disinformation online have undermined international efforts to respond to the threat.
When nearly 200 nations signed the 2015 Paris agreement, acknowledging the threat of rising global temperatures and vowing action, many hoped that the era of climate denial was finally over.
Ten years later it has roared back, arguably stronger than ever.
As delegates wrapped the annual United Nations climate talks last Saturday, those who have campaigned to reduce the use of fossil fuels expressed growing alarm that forces arrayed against them are gaining ground in the information war.
The oil, gas and coal industries continue to downplay the scientific consensus that the burning of fossil fuels is dangerously heating the planet. It’s a strategy that has been echoed by oil-rich countries such as Russia, Saudi Arabia and — under the Trump administration — the United States.
President Trump mocks global warming as a hoax, cheered on by a chorus of influencers online who regularly promote disinformation on social media platforms that once tried to curtail it. While such views have long been dismissed as conspiracy theories, their influence on the global policy debates has clearly grown.
The final statement of the U.N. talks, which were held in Belém, Brazil, did not even use the words “fossil fuels.”
“We thought that good ideas would get people to act,” J. Timmons Roberts, a researcher at Brown University and executive director of its Climate Social Science Network, lamented in a briefing on the eve of the talks.
“In fact there’s been a quite systematic campaign that’s been sophisticated and extremely well funded,” he said. “They have succeeded at undermining climate action globally.”
This year’s climate summit took place against a backdrop of increased drilling and mining — in Brazil, the host government recently granted a license to the state oil company to explore new sources of oil near the mouth of the Amazon River.
Associated Press via Politico, Electricity prices jump after Trump rejects disaster aid for Michigan utilities, Thomas Frank, Dec.1, 2025. The president denied the state’s request for federal aid to rebuild power lines after a fierce ice storm last March, a move that could force thousands of rural electricity customers to pay the entire tab.
A recent decision by President Donald Trump to deny disaster aid to two electric utilities in rural northern Michigan could cost residents tens of millions of dollars.
The Oct. 22 denial is a striking example of how Trump’s cuts to disaster aid — and his vow for deeper reductions next year — threaten to shift billions of dollars in costs from federal taxpayers to households struggling to rebuild. In this case, it would hit a working-class region that voted overwhelmingly for the president last year, helping him win the crucial swing state.
Those households could now face thousands of dollars apiece in rate hikes to make up for the costs of rebuilding their communities’ electric grids after a three-day ice storm in March, utility officials and lawmakers warned.
The denial came after the Trump administration documented $90 million in damage to utility infrastructure, according to records obtained by POLITICO’s E&E News. The amount is nearly five times the federal threshold to qualify for disaster aid. But in its October denial letter, the Federal Emergency Management Agency told Democratic Gov. Gretchen Whitmer that assistance to the utilities “is not warranted.”
“It could be tens of millions of dollars left on the backs of the members,” said Allan Berg, the CEO of Presque Isle Electric & Gas, known as PIE&G, in northeastern Michigan.
The other utility, Great Lakes Energy in northwestern Michigan, said on its website that “all storm-related costs not reimbursed by state or federal disaster aid will be paid for by the cooperative’s entire membership.”
Both utilities are nonprofit electric cooperatives, which serve rural areas and are owned by customers — unlike the for-profit, investor-owned utilities that electrify most of the United States. They collectively serve 160,000 households and businesses in this heavily wooded region.
The funding denial “could make the co-op actually go broke if something isn’t done to make them whole again,” said Pete Rose, a retired PIE&G foreman, of his former employer.
Whitmer warned Trump in August that ratepayers face surcharges and rate hikes “equivalent to at least $4,500 per household” without federal aid. Her office did not respond to a question on whether she supports a state legislative proposal that would have Michigan aid businesses such as the power companies directly.President Donald Trump waves to reporters from the South Lawn of the White House on Saturday.
President Donald Trump has said that FEMA will be giving states less disaster aid in the future. | Jose Luis Magana/AP
When asked for comment about the federal denial, White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson provided a statement saying Trump handles disaster requests “with great care and consideration, ensuring American tax dollars are used appropriately.”
The decision came as Trump awaits an internal report from an expert group exploring ways to overhaul FEMA. Trump created the group after assailing the agency as slow and wasteful. He voiced support at the time for dismantling the agency or constraining it. Both moves would force states to pay more for rebuilding efforts after disasters.
Trump has already paused two FEMA grant programs that allocated billions of dollars a year for resilience projects to address weather-related hazards.
At the end of the 2025 fiscal year, FEMA pushed $15 billion in scheduled disaster payments to fiscal 2026, which began Oct. 1.
Since April, Trump has denied at least nine gubernatorial disaster requests despite FEMA documenting damage that met the federal threshold for disbursing aid, according to an E&E News analysis of federal and state records. E&E News reported Nov. 18 that Trump had denied more than $125 million in disaster aid for Chicago residents whose homes were damaged by storms and flooding this summer.
The White House Office of Management and Budget “is being extremely critical of everything,” said a former FEMA official who was granted anonymity to avoid retribution. “Before, they would take a cursory look at everything. Now, as a practice they’re scrutinizing every single thing.”
FEMA said in a statement that the denial of requests in states other than Michigan, including Republican strongholds of Arkansas, Nebraska and Oklahoma, “was based on policy not politics.”
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Andrew Kreig
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The Justice Integrity Project (JIP) researches official misconduct
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This 2016 photo shows Judge Hannah Dugan in Milwaukee. (Lee Matz/Milwaukee Independent via AP)