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Trump Just Gave Himself the Perfect Excuse to Invade Venezuela - 2025-12-15T21:58:40Z
It sounds like President Donald Trump’s administration is looking for a repeat of America’s disastrous invasion of Iraq—no, seriously.
Trump announced Monday that he planned to sign an order classifying fentanyl as a weapon of mass destruction, practically paving the way for an invasion of Venezuela.
This announcement comes amid mounting tensions with Caracas, following multiple U.S. strikes on boats the Trump administration claims—but won’t prove—are smuggling drugs and the recent seizure of an Venezuelan oil tanker by the U.S. military. Trump himself has repeatedly threatened to take his strikes on alleged drug boats to dry land.
One might hear the echoes of the U.S. government’s lie that Sadam Hussein had stockpiles of weapons of mass destruction as justification for its invasion of Iraq. It seems that history is repeating itself, as there is reason to believe that America’s growing interest in Venezuela is not about drugs at all: It’s actually about oil.
It’s worth noting that the Associated Press reported in November that the boats targeted by U.S. strikes appeared to be carrying cocaine—not the synthetic opioids responsible for thousands of deaths each year.
But just last week, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth described so-called narco-terrorists as the “Al Qaeda of our hemisphere,” responsible for spreading “narcotics so lethal they’re tantamount to chemical weapons.”
In November, The Wall Street Journal reported that a classified legal brief justified the Trump administration’s extrajudicial execution of alleged drug smugglers by referring to fentanyl as a potential chemical weapon.
Christianity Today Editor Slams Trump’s “Disgusting, Immoral Behavior” - 2025-12-15T21:46:34Z
The editor-at-large of Christianity Today magazine on Monday sharply condemned Donald Trump’s deranged post about the murders of Rob Reiner and his wife, Michele.
Russell Moore, formerly the magazine’s editor in chief, called out Trump’s post blaming Reiner for the murders “through his massive, unyielding, and incurable affliction with a mind crippling disease known as TRUMP DERANGEMENT SYNDROME.” Moore called Trump’s comments “vile, disgusting, and immoral behavior.”
“How this vile, disgusting, and immoral behavior has become normalized in the United States is something our descendants will study in school, to the shame of our generation,” Moore’s post read in full.
Though Moore has been a longtime open critic of Trump, he wasn’t alone this time. Even some right-wing supporters of the president took issue with his insensitive post, including commentators Raheem Kassam, Robby Starbuck, and Rod Dreher. Trump’s former lawyer Jenna Ellis also criticized Trump’s comments, writing, “This is NOT the appropriate response” on X.
Moore resigned from the Southern Baptist Convention in 2021, after breaking with other evangelicals on Trump. He has criticized the rise of the Christian right, alarmed at the fact that some evangelicals think of Jesus Christ’s teachings as “liberal” and “weak.” To Moore, Trump’s behavior just shows increasing moral rot, especially from those of his supporters who call themselves Christian.
Jared Kushner Drops His Trump Hotel Plans After Massive Backlash - 2025-12-15T21:35:42Z
Jared Kushner, private equity firm manager and son-in-law to President Trump, has ended his efforts to redevelop a Serbian historical monument into a luxury hotel complex after weeks of protest and controversy.
“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,” a spokesman for Kushner’s private-equity firm, Affinity Partners, said in a statement on Monday.
The land in question is the site of the 78-day NATO bombing of Serbia in 1999. The attack by NATO was part of an effort to end then-President Slobodan Milosevic’s violent ethnic cleansing of Albanians living in Kosovo, which resulted in the death of 13,000 people (mostly ethnic Albanians). NATO bombed bridges, military buildings, and government buildings.
Human Rights Watch estimates that as many as 528 civilians were killed in the bombings, and many Serbians view the ruins as a point of cultural and architectural pride today.
In May, Kushner’s company and the Serbian government signed a deal for a 99-year lease of the land under the bombed-out buildings, promising “revitalization”—meaning a high-rise hotel, office space, and stores. It was set to be a $500 million project, with Kushner’s company building a separate memorial for the bombing elsewhere.
“The economic progress in Serbia over the past decade has been impressive,” Kushner said then. “This development will further elevate Belgrade into the premier international destination it is becoming.”
The decision was met with widespread protest, coupled with indictment of three Serbian government officials—including Minister of Culture Nikola Selaković—for abuse of power and falsifying documents related to Kushner’s redevelopment. Serbians who were against the plans accused their government of shirking public opinion and the law to streamline the effort for Kushner in an effort to curry favor with the Trump administration.
“You call it an investment, we call it high treason,” Serbian Assemblymember Marinika Tepić told Parliament.
Here’s What Bari Weiss’s CBS Focused on Amid Multiple Mass Shootings - 2025-12-15T21:27:18Z
CBS News just wouldn’t stop posting content of Bari Weiss’s weird photo op with Erika Kirk amid a weekend full of high-profile stories of bloodshed around the world.
Kirk, who now leads Turning Point USA, her late husband’s conservative youth organization, appeared on a CBS News Town Hall Saturday moderated by Weiss. Shortly before the town hall was set to air, another story broke: There was an active shooter at Brown University, CBS News posted on X.
Over the course of Saturday evening, CBS News’s X account posted 12 times about its town hall with Kirk, but only posted four updates about the deadly shooting in Rhode Island that killed two students and injured eight others.
By Sunday morning, there was a tab at the top of CBS News’s website providing readers with a quick way to access crucial information about the shooting at Brown University—but right in front of it was another tab leading them to more content from Kirk’s town hall.
That same day, a deadly mass shooting at a Jewish gathering at Bondi Beach in Australia claimed 15 lives. After CBS News posted about Kirk’s interview three times in a row, users on X began to notice that a major news company wasn’t actually, well, covering the news.
While the CBS News account posted on X 12 times about the shooting at Bondi Beach, it also continued to post about Kirk’s town hall six more times: the same number of times it provided updates on the investigation into the shooting at Brown University.
So, over the course of the weekend, CBS News managed to publish a whopping 18 posts about Kirk, 12 posts about the Bondi Beach shooting, and only 10 posts about Brown University.
By Monday morning, yet another major story had broken: the apparent murder of Rob Reiner and his wife. As of 3:30 Monday afternoon, CBS News posted about Reiner’s death 11 times. The network only posted once, however, about President Donald Trump’s heinous reaction, where he claimed that Reiner had caused his own death because his hatred of Trump angered those around him. CBS News’s X account wrote the president had merely “disparage[d] the political views” of the famous director. CBS News has continued to post about the Kirk town hall throughout the day, as well.
In her first memo to CBS News employees when she took over in October, Weiss had proclaimed that she planned to report “on the world as it actually is.” But it seems that her rather boring tendency to gravitate toward right-wing commentators to help us understand our world will always come first.
Trump Doubles Down on Vile Comments About “Deranged” Rob Reiner - 2025-12-15T21:10:02Z
Donald Trump stood firm Monday on his disturbing comments about Rob Reiner hours after the famed Hollywood filmmaker’s murder.
Only a handful of loyal MAGA-ites (such as George Santos) have defended Trump’s claim earlier Monday that Reiner would not have been murdered if he had supported the MAGA movement. Instead, people across the nation have condemned Trump’s remarks, including Republican lawmakers and powerful Christians.
But the public backlash hasn’t bothered Trump one bit. Speaking with reporters in the Oval Office Monday afternoon, Trump emphasized that he was “not a fan of Rob Reiner at all.”
“He was a deranged person as far as Trump is concerned,” Trump said, referring to himself in the third person. “He said, he liked, he knew it was false. In fact it’s the exact opposite, that I was a friend of Russia, controlled by Russia. You know, it was the Russia hoax. He was one of the people behind it.”
Reiner was found stabbed to death in his Los Angeles home Sunday alongside his wife, producer Michele Singer Reiner. Their son, 32-year-old Nick Reiner, was taken into custody on homicide charges early Monday and is being held on $4 million bail.
“I think he hurt himself in career-wise. He became like a deranged person. Trump derangement syndrome,” Trump said. “So I was not a fan of Rob Reiner at all, in any way, shape, or form. I thought he was very bad for our country.”
Q: A number of Republicans have denounced your statement on Rob Reiner. Do you stand by it?
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) December 15, 2025
TRUMP: Well, I wasn't a fan of his at all. He was a deranged person as far as Trump is concerned. pic.twitter.com/HmNJvUXV9w
Reiner’s vast and varied trove of work made him a cinematic legend, with each film standing as a template of its respective genre. Reiner enthralled children and adults alike with The Princess Bride, created the blueprint for romantic comedies with When Harry Met Sally…, and practically invented the mockumentary with This Is Spinal Tap.
He was a longtime critic of the president’s agenda.
Stephen Miller Announces Chilling Hunt for “Fifth Column” - 2025-12-15T20:02:47Z
Stephen Miller made an odious threat on X Monday against “the violent fifth column of domestic terrorists” after the Department of Justice announced it had stopped a bombing plot in California.
“Following the issuance of NSPM-7 vast government resources have been unleashed to find and dismantle the violent fifth column of domestic terrorists clandestinely operating inside the United States,” Miller’s post read.
NSPM-7 refers to a memo issued by the Trump administration titled “Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence” in September that directs federal agencies to focus on domestic extremism. The document defines extremism in terms of common liberal and left-wing beliefs, such as anti-capitalism, as well as vague and subjective positions, for instance “extremism” on race, migration, and gender.
Attorney General Pam Bondi said on X that the DOJ foiled a New Year’s Eve bombing plot against targets in Orange County and Los Angeles. The plot was reportedly hatched by “The Turtle Island Liberation Front—a far-left, pro-Palestine, anti-government, and anti-capitalist group.” The group also planned to attack ICE agents and their vehicles, Bondi said.
This matches up with NSPM-7’s definition of domestic terrorism, and judging from Miller’s post, discovering and foiling the supposed plot is a product of that memo. Miller’s use of “fifth column” refers to a group of people within a country seeking to undermine it from within. It has been used by right-wing groups and governments to attack Muslims and other groups they deem subversive.
In Miller’s hands, the use of such language evokes racism and bigotry, especially considering his known efforts to use his position in the Trump administration to advance his anti-immigrant, xenophobic ideology. That, coupled with Trump and conservatives’ attacks on any dissenting views, suggests that the full force of the government can now be directed at anyone who disagrees with the people in power.
North Carolina Ousts Entire Library Board Over Book With Trans Kid - 2025-12-15T19:45:31Z
North Carolina’s Randolph County chose to dissolve its entire library board rather than allow a book about a trans child to sit on the shelves.
Last week, the county Board of Commissioners voted 3–2 to dismiss every single member of the library board, just weeks after they declined to reshelve or remove a picture book titled Call Me Max, a story about a transgender boy who wants to be called by his chosen name in class.
Tami Fitzgerald, head of North Carolina Values Coalition, a conservative group that focuses on religious freedom and drew media attention to the library board’s decision, argued that the book “teaches children that their parents may be wrong about their gender, and that their gender is actually whatever they feel it is.”
“Planting this lie in a child’s mind at a young age can lead them down a harmful path of social and medical transitioning,” she told The Washington Post.
Kyle Lukoff, a trans man and the book’s author, thinks this is just another attempt from Trump’s GOP to muzzle his community.
“Policies can be helpful, but this is ultimately a question of power,” he said. “If there are people in power who simply believe trans people don’t belong in their communities or the world at large, they will simply twist those policies to try and make it a reality.”
Randolph County went overwhelmingly for President Trump in the last election. This draconian reaction to a book about gender identity is par for the course in the petty culture war his base has been waging.
Swing District Republicans Suddenly Stand Up to Trump Over Rob Reiner - 2025-12-15T19:43:00Z
Republicans in key swing states are peeling away from Donald Trump amid national backlash over his remarks about Rob Reiner’s murder.
Reiner was found stabbed to death in his Los Angeles home Sunday alongside his wife, producer Michele Singer Reiner. Their son, 32-year-old Nick Reiner, was taken into custody on homicide charges early Monday and is being held on $4 million bail.
But Trump chose to make the Hollywood icons’ tragic and untimely deaths all about himself, suggesting Monday that the When Harry Met Sally ... director wouldn’t have been killed if he had supported the MAGA agenda.
Doing so has seemingly come at a cost to critical support ahead of an already contentious midterm election cycle, as at least two conservative figures from swing states condemn the president’s comments.
“A father and mother were murdered at the hands of their troubled son,” wrote Oklahoma Representative Stephanie Bice, responding directly to a screenshot of Trump’s vicious Truth Social post. “We should be lifting the family up in prayer, not making this about politics.”
New York Representative Mike Lawler—who is a part of a coalition of House Republicans fighting party leadership to extend Affordable Care Act premium subsidies—felt similarly.
“This statement is wrong,” Lawler wrote, commenting on the same screenshot. “Regardless of one’s political views, no one should be subjected to violence, let alone at the hands of their own son. It’s a horrible tragedy that should engender sympathy and compassion from everyone in our country, period.”
The president’s remarks, in full, read:
“A very sad thing happened last night in Hollywood. Rob Reiner, a tortured and struggling, but once very talented movie director and comedy star, has passed away, together with his wife, Michele, 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, sometimes referred to as TDS.
“He 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, and with the Golden Age of America upon us, perhaps like never before. May Rob and Michele rest in peace!”
How Kash Patel Wrecked FBI’s Ability to Stop an Espionage Attack - 2025-12-15T18:49:44Z
FBI Director Kash Patel is reportedly crippling the FBI’s counterintelligence capabilities, former bureau agents have told The Bulwark.
On Attorney General Pam Bondi’s first day in office in February, she terminated the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force in order to “free resources to address more pressing priorities, and end risks of further weaponization and abuses of prosecutorial discretion.” She also pared back the bureau’s enforcement of the Foreign Agents Registration Act, curbing investigations into alleged espionage. It’s probably not a coincidence that Patel failed to register under the FARA when he consulted for Qatar.
Under Patel’s leadership, 23 percent of the roughly 13,000 total FBI agents have been reassigned to work on immigration enforcement, which is not historically in the bureau’s purview. According to Democratic Senator Mark Warner, nearly 40 percent of agents in the FBI’s largest field offices have been made to work immigration cases. As a result, agents with expertise on foreign adversaries such as China, Iran, and Russia are now handling immigration cases on a rotating basis, according to former agents who left the bureau.
“It’s a disaster,” Robert Anderson, who ran FBI counterintelligence from 2012 to 2014, told The Bulwark. “I’m rooting for everybody because we’re all Americans, [but] Patel needs to wake up.”
As the FBI’s focus has shifted under Patel’s leadership, the House Intelligence Committee has put forth a bill that would place counterintelligence, including the FBI’s ranks of spy hunters, under the purview of Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard, who has previously been criticized as a “Russian asset.”
Frank Montoya Jr., a retired FBI special agent who also served as director of the Office of the National Counterintelligence Executive, told The Bulwark that putting DNI in charge could be “really dangerous.”
“You could be creating a domestic spy agency with even less transparency to the American public,” he said.
To former FBI agents, that proposal undermines years of work developing a wide range of counterintelligence tactics and networks. “It’s tragic. All our work is being destroyed,” Montoya said.
Even though spy hunting isn’t historically in the DNI’s purview, Gabbard initially seemed anxious to take the reins, claiming the FBI had become too “politicized.” Meanwhile, the bureau pushed back on the intelligence committee’s bill, exposing a power struggle between Patel and Gabbard.
In a statement to The Bulwark, DNI said that Gabbard now “supports the administration’s position, which is in opposition to the legislation.”
As technology becomes more advanced, the threats of foreign adversaries are only growing—and experts are concerned that Patel isn’t doing enough. “Patel is only paying lip service to the Chinese threat,” Montoya said.
Elon Musk’s Grok AI Is Covering Up Trump’s Vile Post on Rob Reiner - 2025-12-15T17:56:39Z
X users are experiencing an entirely different reality from the one that is actually happening.
Grok, Elon Musk’s generative AI program attached to X, is apparently running cover for the president over disturbing comments he made related to the murder of famed Hollywood filmmaker Rob Reiner.
Reiner was found stabbed to death in his Los Angeles home Sunday, alongside his wife, producer Michele Singer Reiner. Their son, 32-year-old Nick Reiner, was taken into custody early Monday and is being held on $4 million bail.
The motive for the gruesome killing is not clear. But in Donald Trump’s mind, the murder is all about him, and The Princess Bride director never would have died if he had shown support for the MAGA agenda.
“A very sad thing happened last night in Hollywood. Rob Reiner, a tortured and struggling, but once very talented movie director and comedy star, has passed away, together with his wife, Michele, 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, sometimes referred to as TDS,” Trump wrote in a chilling post on Truth Social that is still on the site.
“He 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, and with the Golden Age of America upon us, perhaps like never before,” he continued. “May Rob and Michele rest in peace!”
But Grok is either not capable of spotting the current events fiasco or has been programmed to deliberately muffle the president’s remarks. When X users initially probed Grok about the veracity of Trump’s recent post, the chatbot blatantly lied.
“Based on searches of X and Truth Social, no such post exists from @DonaldJTrump,” Grok responded to one user. “The screenshot seems fabricated. Rob Reiner and his wife were tragically killed, but Trump hasn’t commented publicly on it.”
In a separate post, Grok doubled down, informing users that it had “double-checked Trump’s accounts on X and Truth Social” and found that “no posts about Rob Reiner or his wife exist.”
“The screenshot is fabricated,” Grok wrote.
The chatbot eventually changed its mind—though only after Trump’s comments were widely reported by national media outlets.
MAGA Horrified by Trump’s Sick Post Reveling in Rob Reiner’s Death - 2025-12-15T17:33:18Z
Right-wing figures, including many supporters of the president, are condemning Donald Trump’s deranged Truth Social post attacking Rob Reiner following his and his wife’s tragic killing.
Trump claimed that Reiner and his wife’s deaths were “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, sometimes referred to as TDS,” a comment that many conservatives are rightfully calling insensitive and disrespectful.
Some of the president’s supporters replied to his post calling out his insensitive comments and telling him now was not the time to settle a political score.
Right-wing commentators Raheem Kassam, Robby Starbuck, and Rod Dreher—all of whom have supported Trump—were also disappointed in his comments.
Other conservatives who have took a stand against Trump in recent months were equally outraged. Representative Thomas Massie, a libertarian critic of the president, called Trump’s post “inappropriate and disrespectful discourse about a man who was just brutally murdered.”
One of Trump’s biggest supporters turned critics, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, pointed out Rob’s son Nick struggled with drug addiction, calling out Trump for making a “family tragedy” about politics and political enemies.
On Sunday night, Turning Point USA spokesperson Andrew Kolvet posted a video of Reiner’s comments following Charlie Kirk’s murder in September, in which Reiner said his gut reaction was “absolute horror.” Kolvet praised the Hollywood icon for responding “with grace and compassion to Charlie’s assassination.” Not even 12 hours later, Trump showed how much he is lacking in those two qualities.
Dear MAGA — if you are cheering & posting disgusting comments celebrating the tragic death of Rob Reiner, here is a video of his gracious, unifying comments on the murder of Charlie Kirk.
— Morgan J. Freeman (@mjfree) December 15, 2025
PLEASE WATCH: pic.twitter.com/vjwwFTN8O3
White House Furious at Josh Hawley Over Latest Abortion Gambit - 2025-12-15T17:00:57Z
President Trump’s inner circle is reportedly fuming at Republican Senator Josh Hawley for starting a new anti-abortion dark-money group with his wife in an effort to reignite political discourse on the issue—one the GOP expects to lose in the upcoming midterms.
Hawley hopes the group, called the Love Life Initiative, will be a “strong voice advocating for life.” Trump’s team begs to differ.
“Clearly, Senator Hawley and his political team learned nothing from the 2022 elections, when the SCOTUS abortion ruling [that reversed Roe v. Wade] resuscitated the Democrats in the midterms,” an anonymous adviser told Axios. They went on to argue that what they see as positive economic growth should be the theme for the midterms instead. “Picking a fight on an issue like abortion in a midterm is the height of asinine stupidity.”
This rift also comes amid monthslong rumors of Hawley’s potential presidential aspirations in 2028, as he could challenge Vice President JD Vance to rip the GOP away from the MAGA wing post-Trump.
Republican Lawmakers Take the Mask Off Over Bondi Beach Shooting - 2025-12-15T16:54:08Z
MAGA world is calling for a mass deportation of Muslims, following a mass shooting in Australia—ignoring the reality that it was a member of the local Muslim community who intervened and stopped the violence.
At least 15 people were killed Sunday in a horrific attack at Sydney’s Bondi Beach. Two men—a father-son duo—allegedly opened fire on a crowd of Jewish Australians on the first night of Hanukkah. The country’s leadership has declared the incident a terrorist attack.
The suspects have been identified by authorities as 50-year-old Sajid Akram and his son, 24-year-old Naveed Akram. The elder Akram moved to Australia in 1998, while the junior was born in the country.
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said the suspects were “driven” by an antisemitic ideology. He also rejected accusations that recent Muslim immigration into Australia was to blame, noting that the pair had engaged in an “extreme perversion of Islam” while underscoring the actions of the day’s hero—Ahmed Al Ahmed—who ran toward the danger and grappled a gun away from one of the attackers.
But halfway across the world, American politicians were more interested in broadcasting a simpler message—even if it didn’t accurately reflect the events. Across social media, Republicans lawmakers issued similar statements suggesting that Muslims are a threat to peaceful society that must be deported.
“The Religion of Peace strikes again,” posted Representative Randy Fine. “How many Muslim attacks do there have to be until we say enough?”
Senator Tommy Tuberville went a step further, claiming that “Islam is not a religion. It’s a cult.”
“Stop worrying about offending the pearl clutchers,” Tuberville wrote. “We’ve got to SEND THEM HOME NOW or we’ll become the United Caliphate of America.”
Even local politicians hopped on the islamophobic bandwagon. Retweeting a message celebrating the “AUSTRALIAN HERO” (but that did not mention his religion), New York City Councilmember Vickie Paladino claimed that the world was suffering from a “global jihad” that “cannot” be ignored.
“We need to take very seriously the need to begin the expulsion of Muslims from western nations, or at the very least the severe sanction of them within western borders,” Paladino wrote.
New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani—the economic powerhouse’s first Muslim mayor—did not take the same approach. In a lengthy missive, Mamdani recognized the “growing pattern of violence targeted at Jewish people across the world,” and implored New Yorkers to follow in Al Ahmed’s footsteps, urging the city to “confront hatred with the urgency and action it demands.”
MAGA Spreads Dangerous Conspiracy About Brown University Shooter - 2025-12-15T16:13:31Z
MAGA Republicans are already pushing conspiracy theories about the shooting at Brown University over the weekend, claiming that one of the victims was targeted for her conservative beliefs.
Sophomore student Ella Cook was one of the two people killed Saturday when a shooter opened fire during a review session for an economics exam. The gunman has not yet been taken into custody or identified, but the victims have—and apparently that’s all MAGA thought they needed to crack the case.
Some Republicans began to claim that Cook, who served as vice president of the Brown chapter of College Republicans of America, was targeted for her politics. Of course, none of them bothered to mention Mukhammad Aziz Umurzokov, an Uzbek student who was studying neuroscience who was also killed Saturday, or the eight others who were injured.
William Branson Donahue, founder and chairman of the College Republicans, claimed to have been “told” that Cook was “allegedly targeted for her conservative beliefs, hunted, and killed in cold blood.”
“Losing Charlie three months ago rocked our worlds. The entire College Republicans community is weeping this evening learning of the news. This was an attack on our family,” he wrote on X Sunday night.
It seems that Donahue quickly realized the story didn’t quite add up, but rather than remove the original post, he just wrote a second post beneath it.
“This was the report I received that came from students immediately after the news broke. The story is evolving. We are waiting for the official police report and receiving updates from the chapter,” Donahue said.
His follow-up post did not receive nearly as much attention as his initial one. At time of publishing, his conspiracy post had received 833 comments, 3,500 reposts, and 13,000 likes. His tepid attempt to walk it back had just 116 comments, 48 reposts, and 644 likes.
It seems clear Donahue did not wait for the official police report before lighting a flare to his fellow conservatives.
Gabe Guidarini, chairman of the Ohio College Republicans Federation who previously thought a very real video of Vivek Ramaswamy was a deepfake, carried the torch. “They have martyred one of our own,” he wrote on X Sunday night. “Pray for every College Republican leader and member.”
Who are “they?” Why, the left of course.
Chaya Raichik of LibsofTikTok posted on X Sunday that Cook’s death meant it was “open season on Conservatives now.”
And New York City Councilwoman Vicky Paladino wrote Sunday on X that it was “very clear now that the attack at Brown was perpetrated by the leftist activist and targeted Republicans.”
For now, it seems that the only substantive similarity between this shooting and the assassination of Charlie Kirk, besides that they both took place at universities, is just how quickly MAGA has moved to exploit violence for its own political purposes.
MAGA Gets Rude Awakening on Hero at Bondi Beach Shooting - 2025-12-15T15:42:58Z
The far right is claiming that Ahmed Al Ahmed, the bystander who intervened in the deadly, antisemitic mass shooting at a Hanukkah celebration in Bondi Beach, Australia, this weekend was a Christian—and not a Muslim—to justify its Islamophobia.
Australian Mass Shooting
— ThePersistence (@ScottPresler) December 14, 2025
At least 12 are dead & 29 injured after Naveed Akram — a radical Islamic terrorist — opened fire on a Hanukkah celebration.
Don’t let the media whitewash this:
This is terrorism.
This is radical Islam.
Stop allowing migrants from countries that hate… pic.twitter.com/te7TxeruHE
“The media keeps saying the man who disarmed the Muslim terrorist in Australia today is also a Muslim who owns a fruit stand,” far-right commentator Laura Loomer wrote Sunday on X. “Credible reports suggest the man is actually a Lebanese or Coptic Christian. Don’t fall for the propaganda.”
“He is a Christian Maronite! The hero that stopped one of the terrorists in Australia is called Ahmad Al Ahmad. The Anti-Israel mobs celebrated him being a Muslim, as if that made the terror attack less terrible,” a large account called “Hamas Atrocities” wrote. “But he is not a Muslim! He is a Christian Maronite!”
“The hero who disarmed the T*rrorist in Australia is a Christian. NOT a muslim,” said another account.
This was debunked quickly. In reality, Al Ahmed—who tackled and disarmed one of the gunmen in a shocking act of heroism—is a Muslim immigrant from Syria who owns a fruit shop, as confirmed by The Jerusalem Post and Al Ahmed’s family.
“He’s been here since 2006, and he’s an Australian citizen.… My son is a hero. He served with the police and the central security forces,” Al Ahmed’s father told an Australian news broadcast. “His conscience and his soul compelled him to pounce on one of the terrorists and rid him of his weapon.”
The 43-year-old father of two was shot twice after disarming one of the shooters and is currently in the hospital recovering.
Here are Ahmad Al Ahmad, the “Christian Maronite” dad, and Mam talking about their son saving lives at Bondi Beach.
— Abier (@abierkhatib) December 15, 2025
U lying snake.. https://t.co/UrfkOuzuRb pic.twitter.com/A8k5ZmYheK
Mike Johnson’s Health Care Deal Crumbles as Obamacare Deadline Looms - 2025-12-15T15:29:30Z
House GOP moderates are breaking away from their party leader.
At least four Republican representatives—Brian Fitzpatrick, Jen Kiggans, David Valadao, and Mike Lawler—have decided to bypass House Speaker Mike Johnson altogether amid a disagreement on extensions for Affordable Care Act premium subsidies.
There are just 17 days left on the clock before the premium subsidies expire altogether. They assist individuals making upward of 400 percent of the federal poverty level. Without them, health insurance premiums for more than 20 million Americans are expected to double.
But that 17-day deadline is effectively nil. Even if the House manages to pass a package, the Senate isn’t expected to follow suit.
What’s more, Monday is the final day for people to register for ACA open enrollment—something many may be hesitant to do if they’re not sure whether the premiums will expire, sending health care costs skyrocketing.
Last week, Johnson granted Fitzpatrick and Kiggans an opportunity to vote on an amendment to extend the subsidies. But differing opinions over the amendment’s text have effectively crumbled the deal, and the cohort of moderate Republicans are expected to go their own way, Punchbowl News reported Monday.
“Fitzpatrick, Kiggans, and Reps. Mike Lawler (R-N.Y.) and David Valadao (R-Calif.) will go to the House Rules Committee Tuesday to offer their amendment, which would extend the subsidies for two years alongside income caps and anti-fraud reforms,” the digital outlet reported. “They expect it to be rejected. It’s unclear what the moderates will do after that. They’d effectively be free agents.”
Being free could put them in a position to side with Democrats, who have pitched a three-year extension to the Obamacare tax credits. The GOP representatives’ collective signatures would push the liberal party’s discharge petition over the finish line.
Without the subsidies, policy analysts expect a mass exodus from Obamacare plans altogether that could leave roughly four million Americans completely uninsured. The spike in uninsured Americans will spur a nationwide public health problem that has historically made premiums more expensive for the insured as hospitals look to recoup the lost cash.
But have no fear, Republicans have said they’ll focus on health care policy in the coming year—after millions of Americans lose their coverage.
Trump Hits New Low With Twisted Reaction to Stabbing of Rob Reiner - 2025-12-15T15:19:50Z
Donald Trump has responded to the tragic death of director Rob Reiner and his wife, Michele, with an unhinged Truth Social post attacking Reiner for criticizing him in the past.
Trump called Reiner “a tortured and struggling, but once very talented movie director and comedy star,” and made the wildly insensitive claim that the pair died due to Reiner’s “anger he caused others through his massive, unyielding, and incurable affliction with a mind crippling disease known as TRUMP DERANGEMENT SYNDROME, sometimes referred to as TDS.”
Right now, police have not publicly confirmed any details as to the circumstances of the pair’s death, although People magazine reports that their son, Nick, killed them and is being questioned by law enforcement. Nick co-wrote the film Being Charlie with his father, who also directed it, and has spoken extensively about his struggles with drug addiction.
All that is known right now is that Sunday afternoon, the Los Angeles Fire Department was called to provide medical aid to the Reiners’ home and found the couple dead.
Trump has a history of undignified responses to the deaths of people who have criticized him, most notably Senator John McCain. Reiner was very popular in Hollywood and well known for his liberal activism, earning him posthumous tributes from former President Barack Obama, former Vice President Kamala Harris, California Governor Gavin Newsom, and Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass. Even MAGA-supporting actor James Woods offered his “love and respect” to Reiner in a tribute on X.
Trump is receiving a backlash on Truth Social for his remarks, with replies from his fans criticizing his insensitivity.
Following Jimmy Kimmel’s suspension from ABC over his comments on Charlie Kirk in September, Reiner criticized Trump and FCC Chairman Brendan Carr and noted that “there’s only a couple of us that are speaking out in this hard way.” He added, “This may be the last time you ever see me.”
This story has been updated.
Trump Derails His Christmas Speech to Ramble About Snakes - 2025-12-15T15:19:47Z
Guests at the White House Christmas reception fell silent Sunday as President Donald Trump veered way off topic to deliver a cozy holiday tale about … poisonous snakes?
“Tale” is probably giving him too much credit. During his address, 79-year-old Trump turned his attention to Peru, which he said “is known to be a rather rough place in terms of physical creatures crawling around.”
“Twenty-eight thousand people die a year from a snake bite, a certain snake. It’s a viper. It’s said to be the most poisonous snake in the world,” Trump said. “But the venom rarely works, it’s so powerful, the snake. It’s said to be the most poisonous. That, the black mamba, the brown mamba, and the viper from Peru.”
Trump tried to explain that he was telling this “story” because his son Donald Jr. was sitting in the audience, but he didn’t end up telling any story at all.
“And so, he’s being read his rights and his—this is, they thought he was dead three times, three different times, they carried him out, feeding him the anti-venom, and over a period of months he was unconscious for a long time, many weeks, and he made it. I asked him, ‘How ya doing today?’ And he said, ‘Is it perfect?’” the president rambled incoherently.
Suddenly, Trump seemed to notice that he’d lost his audience.
“Look how quiet everybody is,” the president said. “You know, it’s funny when you talk about snakes and things like that, people find it interesting.”
Interesting? No. Deeply concerning? Yes.
Ilhan Omar Reveals Her Son Was Targeted by ICE - 2025-12-15T14:06:47Z
The son of Representative Ilhan Omar was caught up in the Trump administration’s immigration crackdown in Minnesota.
In an interview with local TV station WCCO on Sunday, Omar said that federal agents pulled over her son on Saturday and demanded proof of citizenship.
“Yesterday, after he made a stop at Target, he did get pulled over by [Immigration and Customs Enforcement] agents, and once he was able to produce his passport ID, they did let him go,” Omar said, adding that her son always carries his passport. According to the Somali American congresswoman, it’s not her son’s first brush with ICE: In the past, agents entered a mosque where he and others were praying but left without incident.
After ICE had visited that mosque, she said she “had to remind him just how worried I am, because all of these areas that they are talking about are areas where he could possibly find himself in and they are racially profiling, they are looking for young men who look Somali that they think are undocumented.”
Earlier this month, President Trump launched an immigration crackdown targeting the local Somali American community in the Minneapolis-St. Paul metro area, the largest in the country. The president said he did not “want them in our country,” calling Omar and the rest of the community garbage.
On Friday, Omar sent a letter to Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem and acting ICE Director Todd Lyons accusing the government of “blatant racial profiling” and “an egregious level of unnecessary force” in Minnesota.
“It is clear to me that this surge came in direct response to Trump’s racist comments about Somali people, and about me in particular,” Omar wrote.
Kash Patel Makes Another Major Error on Brown University Shooting - 2025-12-15T13:52:46Z
Kash Patel celebrated too early again.
On Sunday, the FBI director made a lengthy post boasting about the bureau’s efforts to detain a person of interest in the Brown University shooting on Saturday night that killed two and wounded nine.
“Early this morning, FBI Boston’s Safe Streets Task Force … detained a person of interest in a hotel room in Coventry, RI, based off a lead by the @ProvidenceRIPD. We have deployed local and national resources to process and reconstruct the shooting scene—providing HQ and Lab elements on scene,” Patel wrote, attaching pictures. “We set up a digital media intake portal to ingest images and video from the public related to this incident. And the FBI’s victim specialists are fully integrating with our partners to provide resources to victims and survivors of this horrific violence. This FBI will continue an all out 24/7 campaign until justice is fully served.”
Local authorities even confirmed that the person of interest was detained off of a tip obtained by Patel’s FBI.
Q: What exactly was the evidence that led you to this person of interest?
— Acyn (@Acyn) December 15, 2025
A: There was a tip that came in just like we were taking any other tips and that one came in specifically identifying a person of interest, which was this individual. And so we are detectives, just like… pic.twitter.com/XnN1tCFjpJ
The person of interest was released hours after Patel’s announcement.
This blunder from Patel reeks of the same overeagerness that led to this same outcome in the Charlie Kirk shooting.
In September, he drew the ire of the left and right for his premature social media post the day of the shooting, declaring that “the subject for the horrific shooting” was in custody—a claim almost immediately contradicted by local officials. Patel later backtracked, and the manhunt ensued for another 27-plus hours before the suspect, Tyler Robinson, was turned in by a family member.
“I’m grateful that Utah authorities have captured the suspect in the Charlie Kirk assassination, and think it is time for Republicans to assess whether Kash Patel is the right man to run the FBI,” right-wing culture warrior Chris Rufo posted then. “He performed terribly in the last few days, and it’s not clear whether he has the operational expertise to investigate, infiltrate, and disrupt the violent movements—of whatever ideology—that threaten the peace in the United States.”
It’s clear that these questions still apply—and that the FBI director is still more concerned with looking tough and being celebrated than he is with actually being good at his job.
Transcript: Trump Tirades on Econ Go Awry as GOP Panics: “Disaster!” - 2025-12-15T12:00:02Z
The following is a lightly edited transcript of the December 15 episode of the Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.
Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
President Donald Trump can’t seem to decide whether affordability is a hoax or not. He keeps saying concerns about prices are a con job by Democrats. But now he’s tweeting out video of himself talking about how important it is to do something about affordability, which seems to admit that costs are a problem, even on his watch. We think this neatly captures the dilemma that Trump and Republicans find themselves in. And it comes even as Republicans are starting to sound the alarm about the midterms a lot louder than before. In fact, the Republican National Committee chair is admitting that in the midterms, the party faces almost certain defeat. Economist Rob Shapiro has a great new piece at Washington Monthly spelling out the core of the problem, Trump’s policies. So we’re talking to him about all this. Rob, good to have you on, man.
Rob Shapiro: It’s great to be here, Greg.
Sargent: So again and again, Donald Trump has said in the past few months that affordability is a con by Democrats, a scam, a hoax, etc. etc. So it was a bit surprising to see Trump post video of himself on Truth Social at a rally at which he said this.
Donald Trump (voiceover): And I have no higher priority than making America affordable again. That’s what we’re going to do. And again, they caused the high prices and we’re bringing them down. It’s a simple message.
Sargent: So there you have Trump trying to say that the only reason affordability is an issue is because of Democrats, Joe Biden, etc. Now, in fact, Trump inherited an economy that The Economist called the envy of the world.
Rob, that aside, there’s no way to avoid the basic facts of the situation here, right? Which is that Trump now finds himself forced to admit that costs on his watch are a problem. Your thoughts?
Shapiro: Well, you know, there are two realities here. One is the economic reality that people feel they can’t afford the things that they used to be able to afford. And the second is the political reality, which is they blame Trump for it. And they blame Trump for it, I think, because he spent the first six months of his term saying, I’m going to totally redo economic policy, totally redo the economy around the tariffs. And so he seized responsibility for the economy. And of course, the tariffs only raised prices.
So they make the underlying issues worse. And people believed him. He was the master of the economy. Well, they don’t like the results. So he’s got a political reality, which is ultimately based on the underlying economic reality.
Sargent: Well, just in case people need a refresher, CNN put together a few clips of Trump on affordability. Listen to this.
Donald Trump (voiceover): The word affordability is a con job.
They use the word affordability, it’s a Democrat hoax.
Look, affordability’s a hoax.
Sargent: So what’s funny about this is that the political advisors are telling him, “Sir, you really have to stop downplaying costs. This is a meaningful issue for people.” So Trump goes out at a rally and mouths the words that he cares deeply about getting prices down.
But at bottom, he can’t bear to admit this, because it amounts to a confession of fallibility, which is impossible for him. He often says not only that affordability is a Democratic scam, but also that prices are way down compared to last year. Rob, what’s the reality? Can you just lay that out and make it simple for us?
Shapiro: Sure. The reality is that prices continue to rise, and they are continuing to rise at a rate which is a little faster than they were rising last year. Moreover, most economists expect inflation to accelerate because the impact of the tariffs is only now kicking in.
And the reason for that is that businesses knew the tariffs were coming, so they built up their inventories before the tariffs. Well, now they’ve spent down those inventories. So any new inventories they buy—either from abroad or made with inputs from abroad—are going to cost more, and they’ve got to pass it on.
Sargent: Right. So basically, these businesses just stockpiled a bunch of stuff as they were preparing for the tariffs to hit so that they wouldn’t have to pay the tariffs on those goods. Now they’ve kind of shipped all those goods out the door, and now they have to restock, and now they’re going to get hit by the tariffs and then pass the cost of that down to people. How do you simplify the data for us? Like, what’s the simplest way of understanding the numbers?
Because we’ve heard Karoline Leavitt, the White House press secretary, really cooking the numbers in crazy ways. In the simplest terms possible, what does the data say about what’s happened to prices in the last nine months in Trump’s presidency, second term?
Shapiro: In the last nine months—you know, in 2024, at the end of 2024—prices were rising at about 2.8 percent a year, and they had been falling steadily through 2023 and 2024. That is, the rate of increase in prices, the inflation rate, had been slowing steadily.
In 2025, the direction of inflation turned up again instead of easing off. And now prices are rising about 3 to 3.2 percent a year. The price of housing and the price of food and the price of electricity have been rising considerably faster than 3 percent this year. They are rising more [like] four to five percent. So even in the last year, living standards that people expect and are used to have become squeezed.
Sargent: And so it’s not surprising Republicans are clearly in a panic about all this. I’m going to read some quotes from Republican National Committee Chair Joe Gruters that were compiled by The Bulwark: “There’s no sugar-coating it. It’s a pending, looming disaster heading our way.” “We are facing almost certain defeat.” “The chances are, Republicans will go down, and we’ll go down hard.”
Now, Rob that’s the usual effort to lower expectations and so forth. But the truth is that it’s a striking admission coming from the RNC chair. Andrew Egger at The Bulwark talked to GOP operatives who roundly trashed Trump’s message about affordability. And they said it’s precisely because they need to stay loyal to Trump that they’re in such trouble. This is what they told The Bulwark. What do you make of that?
Shapiro: Well, I think that part of it was lowering expectations, and part of it was ringing an alarm bell, that if we don’t figure out how to address this in a credible way to the country, we’re going to get wiped out. And it means that they think that the wave of negative feeling across the country about the economy and Trump’s management of the economy cannot be turned around by spending more money on campaigns, which can make a difference if it’s close.
And if people say, Well, we don’t really know, you know ... yeah, some things are good, some things are bad. That’s not the view of the country. The view of the country is: Almost everything is bad. And, you know, if you’re a president like Trump, who has to be the lead story every day, that’s a way of advertising, It’s all my fault.
Sargent: You wrote in your piece that Trump is uniquely vulnerable here for other reasons as well. First, he campaigned as a populist. And second, his right-wing populist policies are what are playing the big role in making the crisis worse for working people. Can you explain that argument?
Shapiro: Sure. There are really two dimensions of it. One, is the government addresses affordability all the time, by subsidizing certain goods. So we subsidize health care, not only through the kind of tax treatment, but through ACA subsidies and Medicaid. Well, he’s cutting the ACA subsidies and he’s cutting Medicaid. So that means as a direct policy goal, he is making those health care less affordable for probably about 100 million people. We subsidize food, and we subsidize it through the SNAP program for 42 million people.
We also have, in a way, subsidized it through very, very low tariffs on food imported from abroad. Well, the tariffs reversed that. So we are, as a policy matter, making food less affordable, just like we’re making healthcare less affordable. And the third area is energy, where again, he is [slashing] subsidies for wind and solar and other sustainable energies, which those subsidies brought down people’s electricity bills, or held them down. Well, he’s ended those. That’s one of the reasons everybody’s electricity bills have gone up. So he has taken positive, deliberate steps to make healthcare, food, and electricity less affordable, not more affordable.
Sargent: And Rob, I think one of the pleasant surprises of the moment is that people really grasped the tariffs in a way that I didn’t expect. What I expected to happen was something like: Trump comes in, he sort of coasts on the decent economy he inherited from Biden. He talks about tariffs and says, I’m going to protect the country. I’m going to protect workers. And it all codes as good populist policy for people in the sense that he’s using power to protect working people. He’s willing to do that. He’s willing to intervene in the economy to protect them.
I figured that would all code just as good pro-worker policy, no matter what anyone tried to explain. But to my very pleasant surprise, the press has done a remarkably good job at explaining how tariffs actually work. And I think all the data suggests very strongly that people understand what’s happening.
Shapiro: Yes. The truth is that all the polls for the last decade have found that large percentages of the country—like 70 percent—like trade. They think it’s a good thing for the country because they know how many foreign goods they buy. So the underlying distrust of trade, which Trump has out of his really bottomless economic ignorance, is not shared by a majority of Americans.
Sargent: You know, that’s really good to hear because there’s always a presumption on the part of the punditry to say, Trump just has a lock on our arguments. He can’t lose our arguments. Right-wing populist rhetoric is just very pro-worker in a way that is impenetrable for Democrats and liberals to gain traction against. And it turns out that right-wing populist policies are actually unpopular, on immigration, on trade, and even I think on wokeness, on cultural issues as well.
I just find it heartening that Trump is tanking so badly on the right-wing populist policies, on the main pillars of the right-wing populist agenda. That just strikes me as a heartening development. What do you think Rob?
Shapiro: Well, I think it’s very heartening. I think the country was educated by Bill Clinton and Barack Obama about the fact that we live in a global economy and that that’s a good thing, and you can’t go back. So I think it’s very heartening. But, you know, there’s one other dimension of this, and it’s Trump’s underlying anti-populism. And that is what’s happened to people’s earnings is very interesting, because over the last several years, productivity increased 10.2 percent—rose at a very healthy rate.
Sargent: Worker productivity.
Shapiro: We’re absolutely for productivity, because productivity traditionally translates into higher wages. Well, earnings, wages and salaries, have not gone up. It’s not that they didn’t go up 10.4 percent with productivity. It’s that over the last several years, they went up less than 1 percent. And that’s at every level of education. That’s for people with college degrees, people with some college but no degree, high school graduates, people with no high school diploma, and professionals. The people at the top of the education pyramid with graduate degrees or law degrees or medical degrees—their earnings have actually, after inflation, fallen a little.
So the question is: What happened to all the benefits from that productivity? Well, there are two kinds of income. There’s earnings, which you get by working; and then there’s capital income, and that’s interest, dividends, and capital gains. And after inflation, capital income has grown 30 percent. That’s where all the productivity gains went.
And Trump’s policies of making healthcare and food and electricity—all those cuts, making those things less affordable—[were] all done in order to deliver a trillion dollars in tax cuts to the people who own capital. And 88 percent of all capital income goes to the top 10 percent. And 52 percent of all capital income goes to the top 1 percent. So he has made life less affordable in order to make the rich even richer.
Sargent: And Rob, I would just throw in here that that makes it a big double whammy for them politically, because not only are people getting clobbered by the price hikes that are Trump’s fault, people also hate tax cuts for the rich. They understand taxation as well. They understand the Republican Party’s devotion to transferring wealth upward. So how do you see this playing out? Just to sum this up quickly, how do you see it playing out into the midterms? Do you think the crisis continues all the way through and does it cause a Republican loss?
Shapiro: I think that the crisis will get worse in 2026. I think inflation is going to accelerate a bit, and I think unemployment is headed up. You know, the economy is weakening badly, and there is nothing they can do to turn that around between now and next November—in the next 11 months. You know, you can’t turn around an economy that fast. I think prices will rise at 3.5 percent, or so. I think that growth will slow. I think the unemployment rate will increase to 4.6, 4.7, 4.8 percent. And people’s feelings about the economy and their own economic position will worsen. I think that, you know, Trump, he’s getting 31 percent support or 32 or 33 percent support on the economy, on overall approval. He is down to the Republican base. After all, he won 50 percent of the vote, and he’s lost between 15 and 20 percentage points.
Sargent: I will tell you what, Rob, the worse it gets for people, the louder Trump is going to start calling it a hoax and it’s just going to continue spiraling downward. Rob Shapiro, thanks so much for coming on with us, man. Really appreciate it.
Shapiro: Anytime, Greg. Anytime.
Inside Stephen Miller’s Dark Plot to Build a MAGA Terror State - 2025-12-15T11:00:00Z
Stephen Miller’s ancestors first arrived in the United States in 1903. That’s when a man named Wolf Laib Glosser disembarked at Ellis Island after leaving behind his hometown in Antopol, a small town in the part of the czarist Russian empire that is now Belarus. Wolf Laib, who was fleeing a life marked by anti-Jewish pogroms and forced conscription, quickly set about trying to raise more money to bring over relatives.
“Wolf Laib found work in New York City peddling bananas and other fruit on street corners, and began sending small sums of money back to the family,” reads an unpublished book about the family that one of Stephen Miller’s relatives shared with The New Republic. The book—which tells the story of some of Miller’s ancestors’ immigration to the United States and their subsequent thriving here—was written by Miller’s grandmother, Ruth Glosser. Now that Miller has accumulated such extraordinary power over the future of our immigration system, it’s worth turning to this remarkable document, which we’re making available online for the first time.
As the book recounts, Wolf Laib managed to bring over more family members in 1906, including a son, Sam Glosser. Over time, Wolf Laib—Miller’s great-great-grandfather—and his descendants built a successful haberdashery business in Johnstown, Pennsylvania, which evolved into a chain of supermarkets and department stores. Sam Glosser’s American-born son, Izzy, had two American children, David and Miriam Glosser—who were to become the uncle and mother of Stephen Miller.
This story, of course, tracks with that of countless others who arrived in the United States as part of the great migration, mostly from Southern and Eastern Europe, between the 1880s and the 1910s, which numbered as high as 20 million. As the book notes, they were out to “escape economic hardships and religious persecution” to build a “better life for themselves and their children.”
Yet at the time, many Americans didn’t think people like Miller’s ancestors were fit to become a part of the United States. They were targeted by a virulent strain of nativism toward those from Southern and Eastern Europe that was largely about race—it was rooted in the “scientific racism” of the day. But it also involved a somewhat different claim: that the new arrivals suffered from a “social degeneracy” or “social inadequacy”—two typical phrases at the time—which rendered them a threat to the “civilization” the United States was in the process of becoming. In this telling, as prominent sociologist Edward Alsworth Ross declared in a 1914 broadside, these new immigrants were inferior to Americans who descended from the “pioneer breed” who’d given birth to the American nation. The new arrivals, Ross said, had “submerged” that ancestral connection to the “pioneer breed,” setting the nation on a path to the “extinction that surely awaits it.”
“There is little or no similarity between the clear-thinking, self-governing stocks that sired the American people and this stream of irresponsible and broken wreckage that is pouring into the lifeblood of America the social and political diseases of the Old World,” declared one congressman not long after. As historian Gary Gerstle, author of the great book American Crucible, noted in an email to me, many nativists at the time lamented the “civilizational vulnerability” of the United States, believing that “white, Christian, and western European culture” stretching back to “ancient Greece and Rome” represented the “summit of human achievement” and the core of American civilization. This was under dire threat from “groups outside that culture” who were “unassimilable, with Jewish ranks full of Bolsheviks and Italian ranks full of anarchists.”
More than a century later, those diatribes about people like Miller’s ancestors are very similar to claims Miller makes today about the threat to “civilization” supposedly posed by those emigrating from Africa, Latin America, Asia, and elsewhere. To be sure, it is not a new move to bring up Miller’s ancestry in the context of his current nativism, and many aspects of Miller’s worldview are well-known in a scattershot way: his disdain for multiculturalism, his hatred of mass migration, his affinity with white nationalists.
But in a series of tweets, interviews in right-wing media, and statements made elsewhere, Miller has outlined something more comprehensive and sinister—an elaborate worldview that has escaped notice in the mainstream media. It centers immigrants as a threat to “civilization” in terms that echo the rhetoric of those determined to exclude people like his ancestors.
That larger worldview—and its intellectual roots—deserve more scrutiny. Given Miller’s extraordinary power—his near unfettered control over President Donald Trump’s massive ramp-up in immigration enforcement—a deeper understanding of Miller’s views is essential. It demonstrates in a more vivid way the true extremism of his anti-immigrant project—and why it poses a serious threat to the country and its future.
Miller’s Actions: A Meaner, and Whiter, America
In that book about Miller’s ancestors, titled A Precious Legacy, there are wrenching passages about the Immigration Act of 1924. That law, which represented the culmination of all those aforementioned virulent sentiments about Southern and Eastern Europeans, adopted an immigration formula tied to the 1890 distribution of ethnicities in the United States. This guaranteed that most of the 150,000 immigrants allowed entry each year would henceforth come from Northern and Western Europe, imposing tighter limits on those from Southern and Eastern Europe and elsewhere. The law’s primary aim was to slam the breaks on immigration by people like Miller’s ancestors.
Thanks to the 1924 act, the book notes, “the doors to free and open immigration here swung shut.” Fortunately, all of Wolf Laib’s immediate family made it to the United States by 1920, the book says, but many left behind did not fare well. “Those Jews who remained in Antopol were not so lucky,” ruefully recounts the book, which was first discussed in Hatemonger by journalist Jean Guerrero. It adds that most of those who remained in Wolf Laib’s town “were murdered by the Nazis.”
Strikingly, Stephen Miller has spoken positively about the 1924 law. “During the last period in which America was the undisputed global superpower—financially, culturally, militarily—immigration was net negative,” Miller tweeted in August. He’s referring to the period between the 1924 law and the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act, which ended ethnic quotas for immigration created in 1924: In short, Miller is extolling the impacts of the 1924 measure. He was even more direct in 2015 emails to Breitbart obtained by the Southern Poverty Law Center. He repeatedly praised President Calvin Coolidge for signing that law, describing the act rhapsodically as Coolidge’s “heritage” and suggesting the country should act “like Coolidge did”; that is, either dramatically restrict immigration or impose new ethnic quotas on it.
None of this necessarily means Miller is unconcerned about the fate of those who met terrible ends due to their inability to immigrate. But Miller offered those quotes about that century-old law as a device to describe his present-day vision, and, in a very real sense, his true ideological project is to unmake the world the 1965 act created when it ended the ethnic quota system and opened the country to more immigration from all over the world.
Indeed, Miller’s grander aims are best understood as an effort to destroy the entire architecture of immigration and humanitarian resettlement put in place in the post–World War II era. The 1965 law’s end to ethnic quotas guaranteed that, henceforth, immigration slots would be doled out on a race-neutral basis. That and subsequent measures—which created the contemporary refugee and asylum system—drew heavily on the international human rights treaties that the United States and many countries signed on to after the war. Subsequent U.S. law has enshrined the right to seek refuge here and protections against getting sent home to face persecution or grave danger—and a set of values that, theoretically at least, has been to some degree a bipartisan consensus for decades.
Miller is, at bottom, trying to eradicate that set of obligations and values—to undo that larger consensus. To grasp this, you need to look at all the small things Miller is doing, which, taken together, all add up to one very big thing.
Take the administration’s handling of white South Africans. Officials recently announced that they will accept only 7,500 refugees this fiscal year—a dramatic reduction from 125,000 under President Joe Biden—and, critically, it reserved a majority of those slots for white Afrikaners, who are mostly descendants of Dutch and French settlers. This implements Trump’s 2025 executive order decreeing that they must be treated as a persecuted “ethnic minority.” He says they face white “genocide,” which has been roundly debunked by statistics and experts.
Yet the implementation of this has been corrupted, according to two former senior State Department officials who witnessed this firsthand.
Typically, such an announcement designating a group subject to persecution would be backed up by a serious State Department analysis—often from its Bureau of Population, Refugees, and Migration, or PRM—laying out a substantive case detailing this persecution. But after Trump’s executive order hit, PRM was not directed to work up any such analysis, the officials told me. “PRM was not asked for this,” one of the officials said.
Instead, word came down from State Department political appointees declaring that this had to happen simply because the order said so, the officials stated.
“We should have a process that has integrity in determining who among the world’s refugees are most in need of resettlement,” the second source said. “They blew right through that.” Asked for comment, another State Department official insisted that Afrikaner “refugees” meet “statutory requirements.”
Strikingly, the administration is also reportedly mulling proposals to prioritize far-right European political actors, who are supposedly being persecuted for anti-immigrant views, for refugee status. Let’s be clear: It is now apparently U.S. policy to favor whites in the doling out of refugee admissions.
What’s more, the slashing of annual refugee admissions from 125,000 to 7,500 itself represents an enormous retreat on the obligations that members of both parties have long felt toward those seeking refuge here. This comes even as the worldwide refugee population has about doubled in the last decade to over 40 million. Trump and Miller have also moved to end Temporary Protected Status, or TPS, for people here from at least eight countries, totaling over one million. That legal protection provides temporary sojourn to people fleeing some of the most horrific conditions on the planet: armed conflicts, natural and environmental disasters, large-scale civic breakdown. These are not undocumented immigrants. They are here lawfully, have work permits, and are integrating into U.S. communities. That’s all been cruelly wrenched out from under them.
Critically, in moving to end all these things, Miller is feverishly stamping out every single avenue for those fleeing horrific conditions to come here legally that he possibly can. Republican presidents have traditionally set refugee admissions levels much higher than Trump has in both his terms, and TPS was signed into law by a Republican president, George H.W. Bush. In functionally ending all this, Miller is breaking with a consensus that has largely been bipartisan for decades.
Miller may also be restricting legal immigration in a broader, unnoticed sense. At my request, Migration Policy Institute analyst Julia Gelatt looked at data from the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services to determine current processing rates. She found that if you total up most applications for immigrating to the United States—from green cards to family reunification to naturalization to temporary visas and other forms of legal status—the number of denials is going up. Denials rose from around 274,000 during the last three months of Biden’s 2024 term to around 324,000 from April to June of 2025, a hike of about 50,000.
While acceptances are still much higher than denials, those acceptances have been declining, Gelatt found, leading her to conclude that USCIS is “approving fewer applications and denying more.” And as of early December, after an Afghan refugee allegedly shot two West Virginia National Guard members in Washington, Trump suspended all asylum applications and all immigration applications from 19 countries.
Miller’s obsession with sheer numbers—the amounts of various categories of immigrants who are either in the United States or trying to get here—borders on pathological. Take his handling of undocumented immigrants. Miller has repeatedly raged at Immigration and Customs Enforcement officials for arrest numbers he deems too low. Since the summer, arrests have hovered at around 1,000 daily. But he’s demanding 3,000 arrests per day, a pace of about one million people per year. To that end, The New York Times reports, the administration has already shifted thousands of federal law enforcement personnel into deportations, hampering critical efforts to combat serious crimes like child and drug trafficking. What’s more, ICE itself is arresting a lot of undocumented immigrants who are not dangerous criminals, diverting resources away from arresting the latter.
Here’s the thing: Miller’s mission of boosting deportation numbers of necessity requires arresting people who are not criminals or gang members—people who have jobs and have become integrated into U.S. communities—because there’s no other way to get the removals up. But it makes us less safe. Miller plainly places more importance on reducing the totals of people here—or trying to get here—than on removing people who pose any actual danger. He appears to be actively prioritizing shifting the ethnic mix of the country over public safety.
The Intellectual Roots of Miller’s Ethno-Nationalism
“If you import the Third World, you become the Third World,” Stephen Miller declared as the presidential campaign heated up in 2024, in a quote flagged by Media Matters for America. “Elect Joe Biden, and America becomes the Third World.”
This is one of the single most revealing quotes Miller has ever uttered. At the core of Miller’s worldview is the idea that the immigration levels and humanitarian resettlement programs that existed under Biden posed an existential threat to American civilization, whereas those that now exist under Trump will preserve it from ruin and even outright extinction. During a Cabinet meeting in October, Miller gushed to Trump: “This was a country on the verge of dying, and you alone saved it.” This was widely mocked, but Miller meant it quite literally.
Cull through lots of Miller quotes, and a clearer picture of this emerges. “Why would any civilization that actually wants to preserve itself allow for any migration that is negative to the country as a whole?” Miller seethed last spring. He also pointedly asked: “Do you know what happens to a civilization that allows for the large-scale migration of people who hate it?” Miller regularly describes migration as an “invasion” and insists that getting rid of undocumented immigrants would free up emergency rooms, playing on longtime tropes depicting migrants as bearers of disease. During the 2024 campaign, he told a right-wing podcaster that reelecting Biden would represent “the assisted suicide of Western civilization.”
Note that Miller treats it as self-evident that most immigrants to the United States are either “negative to the country” or “hate” it. You see, it’s where these immigrants are coming from that determines whether they pose this existential, civilizational threat. As Miller himself put it: Import the Third World, and you become the Third World.
When I asked Steve Bannon, a longtime Miller ally, which writers most influenced Miller’s view that migration threatens American or Western “civilization,” he texted me some names. The top three were Pat Buchanan, Samuel Huntington, and Oswald Spengler. I was unable to confirm from Miller himself whether he’s read these three authors. However, Miller plainly draws sustenance from a strain of right-wing thought that loosely includes those writers, as well as David Horowitz, who mentored Miller as he came of age politically in a diversifying high school in Santa Monica.
This strain holds roughly that “Western civilization” is something like a static cultural inheritance forever teetering on the edge of plunging into terminal decline. That’s usually due to standard maladies—globalization, mass Third World migration, multiculturalism, and cosmopolitanism, which emphasizes our common humanity across borders—that threaten civilization’s dissolution or obliteration. America’s status as an inheritor of the best of “Western civilization” is perpetually on the brink of annihilation.
Conservative writers, to be sure, have long depicted the West as under siege, but in the hands of Buchanan and others like him, this took a more explicitly ethno-nationalist turn. As John Ganz explains in his excellent book, When the Clock Broke, Buchananism more directly draws inspiration from figures like former Ku Klux Klansman David Duke and white nationalist Sam Francis, and in this sense is a precursor to Trump—and, by extension, Miller.
The similarities between Miller’s language and that of Buchanan—and others writing in a similar vein—are obvious. Buchanan wrote a 2011 book called Suicide of a Superpower. In a companion column, Buchanan declared that “Western civilization” probably won’t “survive the passing of the European peoples whose ancestors created it and their replacement by Third World immigrants.” Buchanan lamented the coming extinction of the “white race” and “European peoples” whose ancestors are credited with creating the “civilization that came out of Jerusalem, Athens, Rome and London.” If the white race passes, civilization disappears with it.
Now compare that with Miller’s twin claims that if you “import the Third World, you become the Third World,” and that electing Biden would represent the “assisted suicide of Western civilization.” The United States is steward and inheritor of this disappearing civilization: Miller recently declared that “our legacy hails back to Athens, to Rome, to Philadelphia, to Monticello,” and is under threat from assorted “enemies” who want to keep us in “darkness.” Among those enemies hell-bent on dragging us back into civilizational darkness are immigrants from the Third World and their globalist allies. In those emails to Breitbart, Miller made this clear. After Pope Francis declared in 2015 that the United States should be more open to immigrants who “travel north”—from Latin America—Miller drew parallels to The Camp of the Saints, the 1973 Jean Raspail novel, beloved by white nationalists, that depicts the West as under siege by teeming masses of Third World immigrants, who are depicted in virulently racist terms.
In Miller’s formulations relative to Buchanan’s, all that’s missing is the word “white.” To be sure, Miller has adamantly denied ties to explicit white nationalists. But even if you accept that claim, Miller’s worldview is still the Buchanan-Francis one, which holds that people from the Third World are fundamentally unfit to partake of the inheritance of Western civilization that is the United States.
“The basic idea is that if you don’t come from a cultural background that comes from a traditional Western perspective—ideally Anglo-Saxon—then you aren’t equipped for and properly formed for freedom,” Laura K. Field, author of Furious Minds, a great new book about the intellectual roots of MAGA, told me. In this worldview, Field continued, without that shared philosophical, cultural, and ancestral foundation, “civilization is impossible.”
For Miller, it all started to go wrong with the 1965 immigration act. Miller has long lamented what this law and its impacts supposedly “did” to the United States. In 2022, Miller declared that the act’s legacy has been to destroy “social cohesion” in the country. “There cannot be social trust,” Miller continued. “There cannot be civic bonding. There cannot be a shared culture, a shared language, a shared education, a shared experience.”
But all of this is wrong. And it’s a terrible basis for U.S. immigration policy.
Miller’s Civilizational Charmed Circle Is Absurd
Let’s return to the fact that Miller’s own ancestors were subjected to similar claims: They, too, were deemed unfit to participate in the inheritance of Western civilization that the United States represented at the beginning of the twentieth century. Obviously history disproved this, as does Miller’s own story. To use Miller’s own frame, this would have to mean that Southern and Eastern Europeans actually did have the cultural genus to carry on the inheritance from Greece and Rome as it was transmitted via (Northern and Western) Europe to Thomas Jefferson’s pen in Monticello and the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, whereas today’s immigrants do not.
Defenders of Miller might insist this assimilation happened because of post-1920s restrictionism, but the argument at the time was that they—a “they” that included his own forebears, remember—could not be assimilated at all because they were fundamentally unfit for it. And those immigrants defied such predictions because the United States turned out to have very powerful mechanisms of assimilation. In countless ways, that great migration positively redefined our “civilization,” which turns out not to be a static thing. Miller has in essence shifted the civilizational goalposts: If Southern and Eastern Europeans didn’t end up threatening U.S. civilization, well, the actual threat lies further afield, in Africa, Latin America, and elsewhere. Miller has simply moved the geographic lines of the civilizational charmed circle, dividing those who are fit to partake in our civilizational inheritance from those who are not.
It’s sometimes argued that the 1965 act, by opening us to global immigration, shifted the country’s demographics far more than predicted. That’s true, but nonetheless, studies have shown that recent waves of immigrants have assimilated just as successfully as previous ones did, and that immigrants embrace American political institutions. Other empirical work has undermined claims that they’re dissolving our social bonds. If you’re worried about declining “social cohesion,” let’s talk about soaring economic inequality, weakening civic virtue, declining worker power, and social tensions cynically stoked and manipulated by right-wing elites—all of which Trump is exacerbating.
Miller Is Wrong About “Social Trust”
“You cannot have migration without consent,” Miller insists. “That is a fundamental principle of having a civilization.” The second that undocumented immigrants settle in our communities, our social contract instantly dissolves, and our civilizational epoxy has come apart.
But immigration—including undocumented migration—spawns new forms of community and solidarity. You know who understands this perfectly well? Joe Rogan does, when he calls it “horrific” to arrest “normal, regular people that have been here for 20 years” in “front of their kids.” So do the residents of a small Missouri town when they rebel against the arrest of a 20-year resident whom they now see as a local “mom.” So do majorities of Americans when they tell pollsters that they don’t support deporting undocumented immigrants who have jobs or have been here for a number of years.
In saying these things, Rogan and all these others are articulating a deeper idea: As time passes and outsiders contribute to—and associate with—local communities, their original illegal entry loses significance, and they develop a claim to belonging. We recognize this because we see them as human, and human life is messy and complicated. Most people understand this intuitively: Communities are dynamic things; their boundaries are not fixed and rigid and unchanging. Polities can decide collectively to grant amnesty to people who didn’t enter perfectly by the book but have since demonstrated good intentions after a democratically determined amount of time has passed. And they are often made stronger by it.
It should go without saying that if immigrants were dissolving our social bonds in any sense that most normal people care about, Miller and his allies would not have to lie constantly about immigrants committing crimes, about immigrants stealing social welfare benefits, and about immigrants adopting alienating social habits like eating people’s pets.
Miller Is Wrong About Cosmopolitanism
Miller has long harbored particular venom for “cosmopolitanism.” He draws heavily on a tradition on the far right that treats cosmopolitanism as a threat to a model of Western civilization constructed upon the building blocks of ancient nations whose volkish identities stretch deep into the mists of the past.
But our understanding of cosmopolitanism is itself partly an inheritance from Miller’s beloved “Western civilization.” It originated with the Stoic philosophers of the ancient world and was developed by the Roman statesman Cicero. It passed via him and others to European philosophers like Immanuel Kant, who elaborated on it further. Its conception of common humanity informed the human rights ideals that emerged after World War II, which the United States signed on to.
In short, there are plenty of resources in our “Western inheritance” that run directly counter to, and are far more admirable than, Miller’s ideology of ethno-nationalist self-preservation. The 1965 immigration act that Miller hates so much—by ending the idea that some ethnicities are more “fit” to be American than others—itself carried forward some of those “Western” inheritances.
Miller Is Wrong to Want Net-Negative Migration
Ultimately, Miller’s goal of net-negative migration is itself a recipe for decline. Miller’s claim that this was responsible for our postwar successes overlooks the role of the U.S. victory in World War II combined with Europe lying in ruins, which helped enable the United States to establish global industrial dominance. It also overlooks the strength of unions in boosting worker power and in building the American middle class, which Trump is trying to destroy.
What’s more, demographers like William H. Frey have gamed out what a scenario of net-negative migration will look like over time, and it’s not pretty. It results in population decline, a dangerously aging workforce, and depleted tax revenues to pay for social insurance for our aging population.
At this point, someone will note that Biden’s policies resulted in an unusually large percentage of foreign-born residents and an out-of-control asylum system that encouraged nativist backlash, leading to Trump. That story is far too simplistic. Indeed, the ferocious public opposition to Trump’s mass deportations suggests that the “nativist backlash” is a mirage: Polls show that Americans are reaffirming their very wide support for immigration as good for the country. Some restrictionist writers have claimed to discern a broad societal backlash to the world the 1965 act made, but it just isn’t materializing.
That aside—even if the politics of the issue are brutal and we liberals haven’t solved that conundrum—the answer is not to throw immigration into reverse. As Jordan Weissmann puts it, “The fact that it is hard does not take away from one fundamental point: There is no real plan for economic stability or for a generous welfare state without more immigration. Full stop. Period.”
Miller’s alternative is a horror. He has set in motion a vicious math problem: His deportation machinery is arresting people faster than they are being removed. To hold them, he’s now looking to build out a network of vast warehouses. We’re going to end up with a massively expanded immigrant carceral state at an enormous cost to all of us, both in taxpayer dollars and in the searing social conflict that Miller’s masked storm troopers have unleashed on the streets of U.S. cities.
We need more immigrants, and there absolutely are ways to limit asylum and end the system’s failures while opening up more channels for orderly legal migration and for those here illegally to get right with the law. Miller’s project is to persuade you that immigration cannot be managed in the national interest. It can, and it’s on us to show how. Because at the end of the day, Miller is trying to restore ethnic engineering to the center of immigration policy. In so doing, he’s denying to millions the blessings that his ancestors and he himself have been so fortunate to enjoy.
On this point, we’re giving the last word to Miller’s cousin on his father’s side, Alisa Kasmer. Over the summer, Kasmer posted a scalding Facebook takedown of Miller that made big news. She refused all subsequent interview requests. But she agreed to talk to me for this piece.
“We’re Jewish—we grew up knowing how hated we were just for existing,” Kasmer told me. “Now he’s trying to take away the exact thing that his own family benefited from: that ability to create a life for themselves, to prosper, to build community, to have successful businesses—to live a rewarding life.” This—not “saving” our “dying” country, as Miller absurdly claims Trump is doing—will be Miller’s ugly legacy.
The Reason Why Glenn Beck Made a Weird AI George Washington - 2025-12-15T11:00:00Z
Glenn Beck wants you to know that the “final chapter” of his career involves interviewing a cartoon George Washington.
Last weekend, Beck dropped a preview of “George AI,” an AI chatbot he’s been building as part of a new platform called The Torch, launching January 5. The whole thing is exactly as weird as it sounds. Beck sits at a table across from a digital rendering of Washington who, for reasons that remain unclear, is wearing a black crewneck T-shirt and appears to have been hitting the gym. Washington sits in front of a podcast microphone like he’s about to drop some takes on Joe Rogan’s show.
Beck asks his AI Washington what he thinks America’s biggest problem is. Washington starts to answer in a formal tone about dangers to the republic, but Beck cuts him off. “Could you just dumb it down a little bit?” The AI explains it has 29 documented points to share. Beck interrupts again: “Just speak in today’s language.”
And so AI George Washington, supposedly drawing from the actual writings of the Founders, delivers a sermon that sounds exactly like ... Glenn Beck. America’s problems are “moral,” not political or economic. We’ve “drifted from the virtues that make liberty possible.” We need “discipline,” “faith,” and “character.” The fix won’t be found in Washington, D.C., but “in every home, every school, every heart.” As Washington says that the country has “grown skeptical of truth,” a sinister-looking image of someone holding a sign that says “Protect Trans Kids” flashes on the screen. Subtle!
Right Wing Watch put it best: “You will be shocked to learn that the AI George Washington created by Glenn Beck sounds exactly like what would happen if Glenn Beck built an AI George Washington to sound exactly like Glenn Beck.”
The whole thing is silly. Beck claims his personal collection of founding documents is the third-largest in the world, behind only those of the Library of Congress and National Archives. He says he’s built a proprietary AI system with an “electric fence” around it that prevents outside information from contaminating the pure wisdom of the Founders. He claims this means George AI won’t “hallucinate” like other chatbots because it’s based entirely on primary sources.
But then he tells it to stop talking like the Founders because it’s “tedious.”
At one point in the full video, Beck claims one of the Founders wrote “at a 70th grade level.” That’s not a typo. Seventieth grade. This is the guy building an AI system to teach Americans “honest history.”
Beck’s also been clear about what’s actually in this supposedly neutral database of founding documents. It’s not just letters and laws. It includes “thousands of sermons from the pulpits” of churches the Founders attended because, as Beck puts it, “almost everything in the Declaration and Bill of Rights came from the pulpits.” This is a specific ideological interpretation of American history baked right into what he’s presenting as objective, document-based AI.
And look, Glenn Beck is a crank. He’s always been a crank. He had his chalkboard connecting random things to George Soros on Fox News. He’s promoted countless conspiracy theories. The Torch is going to have a relatively small audience of Beck superfans (if they still exist), and the main takeaway from the preview is that it’s unintentionally funny.
I’ve been writing about this pattern for most of the year now. The playbook goes like this: Claim existing AI systems are biased against conservatives, build your own, insist yours is the “unbiased” one based on “real” information, and then produce outputs that conveniently align with right-wing politics.
Beck says George AI has an “electric fence” keeping out contamination. Elon Musk says Grok is “anti-woke.” Meta says Llama 4 is correcting a “left-leaning bias.” They all claim to be removing bias when they’re actually just shifting it rightward.
Back in May, Grok started randomly injecting references to “white genocide” in South Africa into completely unrelated conversations. Someone would ask about baseball stats or a cute cat video and get a lecture about white farmers being persecuted. This wasn’t a glitch. AI researcher Matthew Guzdial told 404 Media that xAI was likely “literally just taking whatever prompt people are sending to Grok and adding a bunch of text about ‘white genocide’ in South Africa in front of it.”
That’s crude propaganda, and it got caught because it was so obvious. But the more sophisticated version is what Meta did with Llama 4 or what the Trump administration is trying to do with federal AI contracts. They’re not clumsily inserting conspiracy theories. They’re redefining what counts as “neutral” and “objective” so that conservative viewpoints become the baseline.
The Trump administration’s executive order on AI is literally titled, “Preventing Woke AI in the Federal Government.” It defines “ideological neutrality” in a way that treats acknowledging concepts like systemic racism or unconscious bias as violations of that neutrality. Climate change becomes “radical climate dogma.” Antidiscrimination efforts become “ideological bias.” And companies that want federal contracts have to build AI systems that reflect this worldview.
Then there’s PragerU, which partnered with the Trump White House to create “The Founders Museum,” featuring AI Founding Fathers who literally quote modern conservative talking points. An AI John Adams says, “Facts don’t care about your feelings,” which is Ben Shapiro’s catchphrase. They took the second president of the United States and turned him into a ventriloquist dummy for a guy who wasn’t born for another two centuries.
Beck’s George AI fits right into this pattern. He’s doing what Musk is doing with billions of dollars, just on a smaller budget with worse lip-sync technology. The pitch is identical: Other AI systems are biased; ours is based on REAL documents—it’s OBJECTIVE. And then the output just happens to sound exactly like conservative talk radio.
This matters because AI systems are increasingly how people interact with information. When these tools are deliberately calibrated to reflect a specific political worldview while claiming to be neutral, they don’t just reflect existing beliefs. They shape new ones.
As I wrote back in April about Meta’s shift with Llama, this is what researchers call “computational propaganda” and “personalized persuasion.” It’s not traditional media bias. It’s AI systems that can systematically shape society’s views through interactions that feel personal and objective. OpenAI’s Sam Altman has warned that AI might become capable of “superhuman persuasion” well before it reaches general intelligence. When you combine that persuasive power with deliberate political bias dressed up as neutrality, you’ve got a recipe for something genuinely dangerous.
Beck’s fake Washington telling Americans their problems are “moral” rather than political isn’t going to reshape society on its own. But it’s a proof of concept. It shows how easy it is to build an AI system that validates whatever you already believe, present it as based on “primary sources” and “real documents,” and sell it to an audience primed to distrust other information sources.
The right-wing push to dominate the AI landscape is going to accelerate. We’ve already got Grok pushing conspiracy theories, Meta preemptively shifting its models rightward, the federal government mandating “ideological neutrality” defined by whoever’s in power, and PragerU putting words in the mouths of AI Founding Fathers. Glenn Beck’s buff George Washington in a black T-shirt is almost quaint by comparison.
But they’re all doing the same thing. They’re building machines that tell their audiences what they want to hear while claiming those machines are just telling the truth. And that’s a game where reality itself is what’s at stake.
How Mayor Brandon Scott Curbed Violent Crime in Baltimore - 2025-12-15T11:00:00Z
Brandon Scott knew from a young age that he wanted to be mayor of his hometown. Raised in a rough area of Northwestern Baltimore that hosts the Preakness Stakes—the second leg of the Triple Crown thoroughbred racing series—Scott would see the potential of his neighborhood on display every third Saturday in May. “When you live in a neighborhood where your neighborhood is the center of the sports world for one day, and then every other day you’re not treated as human, it forces you to make decisions at an earlier time,” he said.
Scott recalled the twofold shock of witnessing a shooting before his seventh birthday—both that it had happened right in front of him and that it hardly provoked any kind of reaction from the adults in his life. “No one really cared. We would go back to school like nothing happened,” said Scott, who was in elementary school at the time. “Pestering my parents, my aunts, uncles, grandparents, older cousins, everybody that watched me. Finally, my mom told me one day that if you want things to change you’ve got to do it yourself.”
So the DIY campaign began. In the span of a decade in local politics, Scott went from city councilman to council president to mayor, becoming Baltimore’s youngest mayor at age 36. Scott, vying to run a city long maligned as one of America’s “murder capitals”—and deemed a “deathbed” by President Donald Trump—made a firm vow during his campaign: He would be the mayor to reduce the homicide rate, which was then averaging well above 300 deaths per year, by 15 percent annually over five years.
The 41-year-old Democrat is about to enter his sixth year in office, and while Baltimore hasn’t reached his ambitious benchmark yet, it’s getting very close. With Scott at its helm, Baltimore has achieved what many see as remarkable progress: Homicides began a year-over-year downward slide in 2023, and the city will very likely close out 2025 at a new record low. In November, Baltimore recorded 15 homicides, contributing to a 30 percent year-to-date drop, according to the city’s reporting. That amounted to 127 murders so far for the year, as of last month. That’s still several times higher than the national homicide rate, but the lowest number the city has posted since 1970.
To reach this point, Baltimore has employed a model that showed promise in Oakland, California, and Philadelphia. Baltimore’s Group Violence Reduction Strategy (referred to by the jargony acronym GVRS) employs focused deterrence, using carrots and sticks. The carrot—access to resources, including mentorship and job training. The stick—accountability, namely the vow of arrest and prosecution under a new state’s attorney, Ivan Bates, who is also credited with the violence turnaround. The vast majority of the people involved with the program are not “hardened” criminals, according to Scott. “Most of the violence, in Baltimore and everywhere else, is interpersonal violence. People have conflict, which humans are going to have, but people don’t know how to resolve that conflict,” Scott told The New Republic in his office just before Thanksgiving. Along with systemic factors like redlining, deindustrialization, and a drug trade targeted at Black, brown, and poor neighborhoods, “you understand that you have a recipe, a melting pot that can cause these things to happen.”
Scott’s understanding of what drives—and cures—violent crime is at odds with the conventional wisdom out of Trump’s federal government. When Trump signed an order deploying National Guard troops to Washington, D.C., in August, he called a press conference where he held up mug shots of several alleged criminals, all people of color, whom he said will “never be an asset to society.” That month, the president also threatened to send troops to combat crime in Baltimore, which he called a “hellhole.”
Trump ultimately spared Baltimore the National Guard treatment, instead directing troops into Chicago, Memphis, and Portland. But Charm City’s brief appearance on the president’s shitlist proved to be beneficial to Scott, as it drew attention to the city’s crime reduction under his leadership. In August, The Atlantic called Baltimore a “useful case study” in lasting violence reduction that could apply to D.C. The Trace, an outlet that reports on gun violence, declared in a headline for a profile of Scott: “Brandon Scott Pushed Baltimore Shootings to Historic Lows. Now Comes the Hard Part.”
The “hard part,” the article goes on to say, involves an ideological binary that wants to see Scott’s approach as either too heavy-handed—like the late-twentieth-century drug wars that shaped Scott’s childhood and adolescence—or too soft on those the city sees as likely to commit actual murder. In reality, GVRS doesn’t fall neatly into either box.
“We’ve made investments in GVRS and organizations that help people with reentry. We’ve made historic investments into schools, into rec centers, into workforce development, all of those things,” Scott told me. “And simultaneously, we’re also going to hold people accountable when they don’t comply. We’re going to go out and go after folks that are trafficking guns in the city, dealing drugs in the city. This is not an either-or approach. There is no silver bullet to dealing with gun violence in this country. You have to do all the things well, all the time.”
Scott mounted a mayoral campaign in 2020 amid two health crises—the pandemic, which exacerbated long-standing health care disparities for Black Americans, and an explosion of violence in cities in the wake of George Floyd’s murder in Minneapolis. Baltimore already knew the physical and psychic toll of policy brutality: In 2015, it experienced widespread protests following the death of 25-year-old Freddie Gray in Baltimore Police custody, prompting former Governor Larry Hogan to send in the National Guard.
Gray’s death and its aftermath remained a raw nerve for Baltimore residents in 2020. The city would reach 335 homicides that year, after hitting a high of 348 the prior year. “It’s just simply unacceptable that people are being shot and killed in the streets every single day, and people are fed up with it,” Hogan, a Republican, said at the time. As Democratic Governor Wes Moore, who succeeded Hogan in 2022, told The New Republic: “We saw how this long cycle just continued to exist in a really difficult and complicated manner.”
In 2019, Scott’s predecessor, Catherine Pugh, resigned as mayor amid a scandal that resulted in her guilty plea on federal charges of conspiracy, wire fraud, and tax evasion stemming from fraudulent sales of her self-published children’s book. Scott narrowly defeated Pugh’s replacement in a multiway primary, in which Scott vowed to tackle the root causes of violent crime, neighborhood by neighborhood.
“When I said we were going to reduce homicides by 15 percent from one year to the next, people laughed,” said Scott, who started out at city hall as an unpaid intern for ex-Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake, the last city leader to try a tough-on-crime approach. “Council members that first year and a half were saying that we needed to switch strategy. But we didn’t veer from it because I had that experience of seeing that first you have to build these things. Switching strategy every other year is how we got to where we were.”
GVRS rolled out in Baltimore’s Western District—which encompasses Penn North, a neighborhood known for open-air drug markets and overdosesin January of 2022. Law enforcement, with the help of community stakeholders, pinpointed likely violent offenders, and Scott sent them each a personal letter, laying out the carrot and stick. In the program’s first 18 months, GVRS produced a 25 percent reduction in homicides and shootings and a 33 percent decline in carjackings, according to the University of Pennsylvania’s Crime and Justice Policy Lab. Researchers also determined the program did not result in an increase in arrests or displacement of crime to other areas, an early sign that GVRS was succeeding in actually stopping violence in its tracks.
“In prior years, we tried a similar strategy, but with very poorly planned resources implemented, so that the prior interactions looked more like a law enforcement crackdown rather than a holistic approach to lowering violence,” said Daniel Webster, a researcher at Johns Hopkins University who studies violence in Baltimore. Under GVRS, the city taps existing resources like Safe Streets, which deploys individuals trained as violence interrupters to mediate conflicts. “You actually figure out who the shooters are, and you apply all your means of changing their behavior so that they don’t shoot people.”
Scott told me his support for this model stems directly from growing up in Park Heights at the tail end of the drug wars. It wasn’t easy then, Scott said, but he was surrounded by family who showed him the value of community engagement. As a kid, he hung out at his uncle’s mechanic shop, where people talked politics, or tagged along to fundraisers.
“When you think about even our African American mayors that preceded me—and there haven’t been that many in Baltimore’s history—they were older, which means life is different for you,” Scott said. “I was bearing the brunt of zero-tolerance policing in the war on drugs. I could walk outside my door and, as it happened to me seven times, be sat down in handcuffs simply because I was Black and breathing. It’s different when you’ve ducked the bullets and when, in my case, you’ve had the gun pointed in your face. It’s different when you’ve lived it, right?”
That logic also applies to a president who has taken sharp aim at Baltimore, a majority-Black city, threatening to potentially upend the years of progress on crime with a single order. In September, Scott accused Trump of “dog whistling” and promoting “racist viewpoints” during the height of his National Guard campaign. “I think it is very notable,” Scott said at the time, “that each and every one of the cities called out by the president has a Black mayor, and most of those cities are seeing historic lows in violent crime.”
It’s true that Baltimore is not alone in this crime-reduction turnaround—though other cities have not reached the same generational low in their homicide rates. After spiking in 2020, the national murder rate is down to below pre-pandemic levels. “Part of that is a lot of our systems are back to normal,” said Webster, who noted that cities also benefited from the one-time infusion of federal Covid relief that many used to bolster social services, with a direct impact on reducing crime. In Baltimore, those funds amounted to over $640 million.
Violent crime is just one of the seemingly intractable problems facing Baltimore. In 2025, the city experienced at least three mass overdose events involving powerful opioids. Between June 2024 and May 2025, 640 people died of drug overdoses, Scott said in October—which he noted was a 25 percent year-to-date decline, but a number that still far exceeds the amount of people who die each year in homicides. The Baltimore Banner, an online news upstart, won the Pulitzer Prize in Local Reporting this year for its series on Baltimore’s opioid epidemic, which involved a yearslong battle for city records revealing that 6,000 people died of overdoses over six years.
In October, a critic of Scott’s on the City Council, Mark Conway, entered the Democratic primary for Maryland’s 7th U.S. House district against Scott ally Kweisi Mfume. Conway said he opted to run in part because he’s frustrated with how the city is handling the epidemic. “I agree with the mayor on a lot of things,” Conway told me. “The one thing we haven’t quite given the urgency it needs is the impact of open-air drug markets and addiction on our communities. In the same way that we all came to the table to figure out a comprehensive violence prevention strategy, we need something similar.” (Scott dismissed this criticism as politics and said people picked up in corner sweeps are, “in the grand scheme of drug dealing, Walmart greeters.” He insisted the city employs more sophisticated plans for bringing down drug networks while providing treatment and support for addicts.)
Conway said that living in Baltimore for many “is the tale of two cities,” especially longtime residents. “It’s the vacant buildings, it’s the hopelessness,” he said. “You go into some neighborhoods and they’re beautiful, absolutely gorgeous neighborhoods, places you want to raise your children, places you want to buy your first or second house. And there’s some places that are not that, and they’re stark differences.”
Since 2022, Baltimore has rolled out GVRS in several other neighborhoods, with a plan to take it citywide in Scott’s second term. Though the data is still incoming, Scott claims that of the more than 300 people involved with GVRS so far, 98 percent have not recidivated. “You don’t see numbers like this anywhere,” he said.
Last year, Scott became the first Baltimore mayor since Martin O’Malley in 2004 to win reelection, which some saw as a referendum on Scott’s leadership during the Key Bridge collapse, a disaster that killed six construction workers and closed the Port of Baltimore less than two months from a contested Democratic primary. The win, among other things, has allowed Scott to continue the work of GVRS for four more years.
There are signs too of progress in Scott’s Park Heights. The neighborhood has new market-rate housing, which Scott hopes might woo residents who had previously moved out. Pimlico Race Course is being demolished and redeveloped, so next year’s Preakness will be held in Laurel, Maryland, right outside D.C.—but the plan is for it to eventually return to its traditional locale. “Park Heights has come a long way,” Scott told me. “It still has a long way to go.”
Trump Tirades Over Failing Economy Backfire as GOP Panics: “Disaster!” - 2025-12-15T10:00:00Z
President Donald Trump keeps ranting furiously that “affordability” is a Democratic scam. But suddenly he’s now promoting video of himself talking about how devoted he is—really, truly—to doing something about prices (while angrily blaming Democrats for it). And that admits costs are a problem on his watch. Republicans want him to stabilize his message on affordability, but by lurching wildly back and forth, he’s sabotaging it. And even the very MAGA chair of the Republican National Committee is admitting the GOP faces a “looming disaster” in the midterms. Other MAGA figures are also sounding the alarm. There’s a reason Trump can’t escape this conundrum: His policies actually are making things a lot worse. We talked to economist Rob Shapiro, who has a good piece at Washington Monthly spelling this out. We discuss the true nature of the Tump-GOP conundrum, the deeper reasons Trump is so vulnerable on the economy, and why it’s all likely to get worse right through 2026. Listen to this episode here. A transcript is here.
All Trump Wants for Christmas Is a “Triumphal Arc” - 2025-12-14T22:01:19Z
At a White House Christmas reception on Sunday, President Donald Trump made clear what he wants from Santa this year.
“We’re building an arc, like the Arc de Triomphe,” he said during a rambling speech, after spending 10 minutes talking about golf. “And we’re building it by the Arlington Bridge … opposite the Lincoln Memorial.”
Trump’s “triumphal arc” (yes, “arc”) is the latest construction project on his list, which also includes the 90,000-square-foot, $250 million ballroom he’s tearing down the East Wing of the White House for, and his Rose Garden renovation, in which he paved paradise and put up a parking lot—sorry, a “club.”
“I put Vince in charge of the triumphal arc,” Trump said, referring to his former speechwriter and the current director of the Domestic Policy Council, Vince Haley. “Vince came in one day, and his eyes were teeming. He couldn’t believe how beautiful. He saw it, and he wanted to do that,” the president continued, intelligibly.
“It will be like the one in Paris, but to be honest, maybe it blows it away—it blows it away, in every way,” Trump said.
But the president wasn’t quite finished gushing about his plans. He called Memorial Circle, the site across from Lincoln Memorial right on the border with Virginia, “a circle that’s been waiting to have the arc built on it.” Apparently, Memorial Circle was asking for it.
Trump then asked Vince to show the plans to the National Trust. “I’ve always gotten really along well with the National Trust, so take a look, show it to them, maybe they’ve got some good ideas.” (The National Trust is currently suing the president to block construction of his ballroom.)
While Trump gilds the Oval Office and plans his next vanity project, Americans are struggling to pay for necessities like groceries and doctors’ visits. Trump’s legacy will be one of staggering economic inequality—but at least we’ll have an “arc” to remember him by.
MAGA and Silicon Valley Are Battling for Influence in the White House - 2025-12-14T21:14:48Z
President Donald Trump signed an executive order Thursday intended to stop states from regulating AI—an idea that had received a lot of pushback from members of his base.
The order didn’t emerge out of a vacuum, of course. MAGA Republicans and Silicon Valley leaders have been locked in a battle for influence over the White House on tech policy for some time, The Washington Post reported on Sunday.
Trump’s tech advisers seem to be winning.
Let’s back up a few months: over the summer, the Senate killed a bill that would have imposed a 10-year moratorium on AI laws from states. Then, when a draft version of the just-signed executive order leaked last month, many Republicans, who traditionally support states’ rights, tried to stop the president from going forward with it.
GOP members including Georgia Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene decried the idea, writing on X that “states must retain the right to regulate and make laws on AI and anything else for the benefit of their state. Federalism must be preserved.”
Conservative groups, members of Congress, and governors all reportedly reached out to the White House to raise the alarm about the draft as well.
The Post spoke to more than a dozen people familiar with the administration’s AI policies and White House officials and concluded that this moment was emblematic of a wider struggle between Trump’s base and his tech advisers and industry leaders who used their money and sway to help put him in office.
“It feels like millions of votes across the country just got traded for thousands of [venture capitalist] and tech rich votes in regions Republicans will never win,” one source said.
Compromises were made to the draft to bring Republicans on board, and silence critics, the Post reported, and Trump ended up signing the order this week.
The tension between what Big Tech and the president’s populist supporters want isn’t likely to disappear overnight, though. And as the midterm elections loom, more and more cracks are appearing among Trump’s MAGA base.
Trump’s Support Is Declining Among MAGA Base: Poll - 2025-12-14T20:08:55Z
President Donald Trump’s support is starting to waver, even among his staunchest supporters, a new poll shows.
Don’t get it twisted—Trump’s approval rating among adults has been in the red for months, and is still falling, with now close to 60 percent of Americans saying they disapprove of the president. But according to an NBC News Decision Desk poll that surveyed 20,252 adults online, the two groups that show the largest drop in support for the president since April are Republicans and MAGA Republicans.
For people who identified themselves as Republicans rather than part of MAGA, the percentage who “strongly approve” of the president has dropped to 35 percent, from 38 percent in April.
Among MAGA Republicans, there’s a much higher percentage of people who strongly approve of Trump: 70 percent. But that’s down eight percentage points since April.
Plus, fewer Republicans report being part of MAGA today than did earlier this year. In April, 57 percent of Republicans identified as MAGA, but today the two sides of the party are equally split at 50–50.
These are small shifts, but they belie Trump’s fracturing base of support. From Marjorie Taylor Greene’s split from the president and abrupt resignation to the botched rollout of the Epstein files, to Trump’s tariffs and inability to bring down prices, there are some issues that even die-hard MAGA adherents can’t overlook.
Climate Change Is Coming for Your Favorite Holiday Foods - 2025-12-14T17:51:43Z
Chocolate, vanilla, coffee, cinnamon: The ingredients for your favorite holiday foods are becoming increasingly harder to grow because of climate change.
For example, cocoa beans are grown in West Africa, which has been facing more days of extreme heat and drought, according to a recent report from the Weather Channel. “The crop doesn’t like it,” meteorologist Jennifer Gray explained.
And when cocoa production falls, consumers also feel the heat: Prices for chocolate have shot up over the last year and were four times as high at the end of 2024 as they were in 2022.
Vanilla and cinnamon, key ingredients for holiday baking that are largely grown in Southeast Asia and Indonesia, are also under threat. “Because we rely on just a handful of islands to produce basically our world’s cinnamon, it is extremely vulnerable. These are also places that are facing climate extremes,” Gray said.
And for something like coffee, climate change is drastically shrinking the land where it can grow. Suitable locations could decrease by 50 percent by 2050, according to a 2014 study. Plus, the Trump administration’s on-again-off-again tariffs have shocked the coffee market, one that’s already reeling from landslides and floods in Vietnam.
That festive mocha latte looks like it’ll be getting a lot more expensive. Luckily, we’ll have a lot more heat waves, fires, and floods to deal with to distract us.
Trump Scraps Abolition Coins, Features Himself Instead - 2025-12-14T16:47:16Z
To celebrate America’s 250th birthday, President Donald Trump is commemorating the most important person in the country’s history: himself.
Back in 2021—days after the January 6 riots—Trump signed an act to authorize the creation of new coins to celebrate the country’s 250th anniversary. The act specified that one coin be focused on women’s contribution to U.S. history.
In response, a bipartisan committee came up with some recommendations: a coin featuring Frederick Douglass to represent abolition, one with a “Votes for Women” flag to honor women’s suffrage, and a coin featuring 6-year-old Ruby Bridges, who helped desegregate her school in 1960.
But Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, who has ultimate say, did not follow these recommendations, reported The New York Times.
Instead, the new coins will feature a Pilgrim couple on the Mayflower, George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, and Abraham Lincoln. (The Trump administration, apparently, was not satisfied with the already significant coin representation of three out of four of these historic American men.)
And then, the collection’s pièce de résistance: a Trump dollar coin, featuring the president’s likeness on both sides.
It’s worth pointing out that it is incredibly abnormal—and some would argue, anti-American—to have a sitting president on a coin. Washington refused to have his likeness on a coin while he was president, as it felt too king-like for the leader of the newly free United States, according to the Times. Trump, apparently, has no such qualms.
Dem Senator Slams Trump for Making U.S. More Prone to Gun Violence - 2025-12-14T16:19:48Z
After a deadly shooting at Brown University which left two people dead and injured nine others, people across the country struggled Sunday to make sense of the event and the needless loss of life.
But while Americans tend to agree that mass shootings such as this one are a tragedy, much of the GOP, predictably, continues to engage in magical thinking—by pretending gun violence is not at all connected to being able to easily procure guns.
Democratic Senator Chris Murphy pointed out during an interview on CNN on Sunday that the president himself was making the problem much, much worse.
“Over the last year, President Trump has been engaged in a dizzying campaign to increase violence in this country,” Murphy said. “He is restoring gun rights to felons and people who have lost their ability to buy guns, he eliminated the White House office of gun violence protection, and he has stopped funding mental health grants and community anti–gun violence grants that Republicans and Democrats supported... He’s been engaged in a pretty deliberate campaign to try to make violence more likely in this country, and I think you’re unfortunately going to see the results of that on the streets of America.”
“That’s a pretty big statement. He’s in a campaign to make violence more likely?” the CNN anchor said.
“Of course,” Murphy said. Later, he continued: “The evidence tells you that when you stop funding mental health, you stop funding community anti–gun violence programs, when you give gun rights back to dangerous people, you’re going to have an increase in violence, that is knowable and that is foreseeable.”
Chris Murphy: "This is not shocking, because over the last year, President Trump has been engaged in a dizzying campaign to increase violence in this country. He is restoring gun rights to felons, eliminated the WH office of gun violence prevention, & he's stopped funding mental… pic.twitter.com/OQ9QYyVxHw
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) December 14, 2025
While authorities have reported that a person of interest in the shooting has been detained, details about the deadly attack at Brown University are still emerging. President Trump, for his part, weighed in on the situation Saturday night, saying, “All we can do right now is pray.”
Trump Spread False Information About Brown Shooting. That’s a Problem - 2025-12-14T15:19:23Z
President Donald Trump spread unconfirmed information about an active shooter at Brown University, potentially putting students’ lives in danger as they sheltered in place during the event.
On Saturday evening at around 4 p.m., a man entered a classroom with about 60 students and started shooting. The students were in a final exam review session for their economics class. Two people were killed in the attack, and nine were injured.
On Saturday night, as students barricaded themselves inside dorms and libraries, Trump posted on Truth Social that “the suspect is in custody.”
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) December 13, 2025
But this was not confirmed.
At 5:53 p.m., according to the The Brown Daily Herald, Brown’s student newspaper, the Department of Public Safety sent out an alert saying that the “situation remains ongoing.”
Trump posted at 5:44 p.m., writing that he had been “briefed” on the shooting and that a suspect was in custody.
Then, at 6:03 p.m., he retracted his statement, posting again on Truth Social that the police had reversed their previous statement.
Social media users and students pushed back on Trump’s characterization. One student posted, “I am at brown university they have not confirmed a shooter in custody please do not believe trump and stay inside.”
In a press conference later that night, Providence Mayor Brett Smiley also urged caution: “There is a lot of misinformation that can spread.… If it did not come from an official channel, it is not official.”
As of Sunday morning, the Providence police have a suspect in custody, multiple outlets report.
Inside Chicago’s Neighborhood ICE Resistance - 2025-12-14T11:00:00Z
Lucy says she starts early because ICE starts early. It’s around eight o’clock one Thursday morning in late October, at a coffee shop in Back of the Yards, a neighborhood on Chicago’s Southwest Side. Taped inside the shop’s glass door, a sign warns ICE not to enter without a judicial warrant. (The agents very rarely bother to get one.) More signs surround it: “Hands Off Chicago”; “Migra: Fuera de Chicago”; the phone number to report ICE activity. (These are all over town.) Free whistles sit at the register. Lucy buys a black coffee from the barista and joins me at a table, checking her phone for messages about potential sightings—not just of ICE, but also Customs and Border Protection and other federal agencies, such as the FBI and ATF, tasked with arresting immigrants in neighborhoods like this one. She has dark hair and a few tattoos reaching past her shirtsleeves, and, even at this early hour, her eyeliner is precise. As we wait, we stare out the café window at a nearly empty street, toward a candy-colored mural of clouds over a desert sunset. “There should be a street vendor right there,” Lucy says. There should be more than one. “It shouldn’t be this quiet.”
Volunteers like Lucy, doing ICE or migra watch shifts across the city, tend to work in their own neighborhoods. They are part of a network of rapid-response groups that have sprung up over the last few months to protect immigrant communities from the Trump administration’s brutal, far-reaching “mass deportation” program, led by Department of Homeland Security director Kristi Noem. It would easily take dozens of pages to provide a full accounting of the abductions, arrests, and protests that have taken place in Chicago as of mid-November. The Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights, or ICIRR, posted verified sightings of federal immigration agents nearly every day in September and October. Shortly before I met Lucy, ICIRR identified federal agents in at least nine Chicago neighborhoods and suburbs on a single day: Melrose Park, Oak Park, Cicero, and more, as well as at the Kane County Courthouse and the O’Hare International Airport. At O’Hare, according to reports verified by ICIRR, at least 20 agents shut down exits at rideshare lots, demanded identification from drivers, and detained multiple people. All told, according to the Department for Homeland Security, more than 4,000 people in the city have been taken off the streets by federal agents and held in immigration detention facilities since September, in what the Trump administration calls “Operation Midway Blitz.”
The crackdown is vast, the stakes could hardly be higher, and the response from Chicagoans has been profound and far-reaching. The mayor signed an executive order designating city-owned property as “ICE Free Zones.” A federal judge required some of those overseeing the operation, such as Border Patrol commander Gregory Bovino, to testify under oath, and set schedules for them to update the court on the operation. But neither political nor legal interventions have managed to meaningfully interrupt what’s going on. ICE-free zones, residents report, do not stop ICE. And the slow-moving legal system can’t prevent agents from violating residents’ constitutional rights; indeed, the system largely functions to offer redress after the fact. Even when courts have ordered Immigration and Customs Enforcement or CBP to cease some violent action, such as lobbing tear gas into residential neighborhoods, agents ignored them. The scores of terrifying arrests continued.
The one response that has been genuinely effective has come from community members—ordinary residents who have come together, trained one another, and connected across neighborhoods to form groups like the Southwest Side Rapid Response Team. They have eyes on the street, the trust of their neighbors, and the ability to intervene practically instantaneously, sharing information with the ICE-activity hotline that operates across the state. They can record evidence and pass it along in seconds to rights groups, news media, and social media. Blending protest and direct action, they are offering something concrete to Chicagoans who want to express their opposition to Donald Trump’s war on immigrants. This is true movement-building, a project that may endure after this particular threat to immigrant communities, even after this regime. ICE, CBP, and others have violently retaliated against these groups in part because the agencies correctly understand what many do not: Organized neighbors are mounting an effective defense, and an organized movement is a formidable adversary.
On the far Southwest Side of Chicago, by Lucy’s estimate, hundreds of people have been working together since early September to defend their neighbors, joining thousands across the city. Just outside the parking lot of a nearby Home Depot on Western, a broad street dividing Brighton Park from Back of the Yards, one community group starts its shift at six in the morning: a couple of people with a table, folding chairs, and free coffee. Not far away, ICE uses the parking lot of a strip mall as a temporary base. Enforcement officers gather here, their faces covered in balaclavas, name badges stripped off their uniforms. They idle in their unmarked vehicles, some with the license plates removed. Then they caravan together to pick off people setting up food carts, taking their kids to school, or just out walking alone.
That’s when the notifications will hit Lucy’s phone, as well as hundreds, if not thousands, of other phones, passing messages within neighborhoods. “OK, let’s go to one spot,” Lucy says, grabbing her coffee and picking up a banana for later. She has a report of two suspected ICE vehicles nearby. Now she’ll try to verify the report before it gets shared more widely. If she can, she’ll trail them and report where they’re going, sending word through the network so that others close by can alert the neighborhood with their whistles, follow in their cars, and generally try to make ICE’s work as difficult as possible.
It’s no surprise, then, that these efforts have been cast by Noem and other officials as violent and criminal. Almost all of the people to whom I spoke for this story chose to use pseudonyms, to ensure that they can keep doing community defense work in this environment of new and escalating legal threats. Some are also immigrants or have immigrant family members to protect. People are risking a great deal to defend their neighbors, their students, their co-workers, and their customers, while trying to withstand the chaos caused by armed, masked federal officers operating on Chicago streets with apparent impunity. “What they’re doing is an occupation,” Lucy says. “It’s lawless.” And anybody questioning this reality, she tells me, “is living in their own fantasy land.”
The administration’s attack on Chicago began in early 2025, soon after Trump returned to the White House. Trump dispatched to the city his “border czar” Tom Homan, who belonged to ICE leadership under Barack Obama and was the architect of the family separation policy in Trump’s first term. With him, Homan brought along the television personality Dr. Phil McGraw, who was expected to broadcast the arrests as “exclusive” programming on his own streaming channel (launched when his long-running CBS show was canceled, reportedly for losing advertisers, after McGraw welcomed guests pushing far-right politics and conspiracy theories to his couch). The idea was to hit the streets with geared-up ICE agents and produce COPS-like online content along with terror. But the very public attack backfired: Although it generated news B-roll, it also galvanized Chicago residents, who shared legal resources with their neighbors and whose response may have helped drive down arrests. That’s what Homan seemed to believe. When he was asked about the operation on CNN, Homan complained that Chicagoans pursued by immigration officers were “very well-educated” on their legal rights. “They call it know-your-rights,” Homan said. “I call it how-to-escape-arrest.” It appeared that the agency had backed down on the operation. ICE instead focused on Los Angeles and Washington, D.C., to hone its tactics, giving community organizers in Chicago a few months to prepare.
While many of the rapid-response groups that formed during that period were new, and many people new to community defense work joined, the effort was “not our first rodeo,” as Lucy noted. Chicago is a big city, but the Southwest Side still feels like “an incredibly small town,” she explained, in which many of the community networks now involved in ICE watch already existed. Long before this wave of neighborhood organizing in Back of the Yards, immigrant workers at the Union Stockyards, Chicago’s meatpacking district, organized their own communities. Saul Alinsky’s famed neighborhood-based approach to community organizing took shape here. The European immigrant families are now mostly gone, but the Mexican immigrants who have lived and organized in the neighborhood since the 1920s remain, now joined by multiple new generations, most recently from Venezuela.
Many of the Venezuelan immigrants were forcibly bused to Chicago from Texas by Governor Greg Abbott beginning in 2022. Their arrival increased stress in some communities on the Southwest Side, where work and resources were already strained. But it also tied some communities closer together, with “lots of mutual aid work,” Lucy said. These mutual aid efforts served as a safety net for new immigrants in the city, often before the city offered them resources. Over the years, many were able to establish themselves. “It was honestly very cool,” Lucy remembered, to witness Mexican and Venezuelan food vendors working right next to each other. “It was something that we hadn’t seen.”
These are now some of the immigrants whose neighbors have come out to defend them from ICE. Even those who are at high risk of being detained have joined the rapid-response networks, whether to watch and report possible ICE activity or to visit with neighbors and document what happens after a family member is taken. By the time ICE launched its operation in Chicago in early September, neighborhoods were ready. Homan’s complaints were accurate: They were educated and they were trained. Now, when ICE arrives, “sometimes it’s not even the rapid-response team that starts with the whistles and the honking,” Lucy explained. “It’s the neighbors on the block.”
ICE or migra watch is a practice that grew out of the community defense strategies developed by the Black Panthers in the late 1960s, which inspired cop-watching across the country. It is most visible on the streets, where pairs or teams document law enforcement in their own neighborhoods. Participants used to use handheld video cameras; now their cell phone cameras do the job. But the work extends beyond the moments the officers are recorded. Over time, through direct experience, cop-watch groups come to understand patterns of policing. Some track and request public records of law enforcement activities to learn more. They educate their neighbors about their rights when police stop their cars or come to their doors, and coordinate care and outreach to support neighbors harmed by policing.
During the first Trump administration, immigrant rights groups in Chicago, like Organized Communities Against Deportations, were monitoring ICE and developing deportation defense, said Rey Wences, then a volunteer with OCAD and now the senior director of deportation defense at ICIRR. But it was after working alongside Black-led racial justice groups in the city, such as Black Youth Project 100 and Assata’s Daughters, that migra watch evolved. “We saw the connections,” Wences said, between deportation defense and cop watch, and OCAD asked if it could work with the other groups to build something tailored to watching ICE. The migra watch training ICIRR now leads drew inspiration from all those efforts. In September and October alone, Wences said, ICIRR trained more than 6,700 people. It feels like the organizing has reached “a critical mass,” they said. Indeed, ICIRR was only one of many groups training people up—“like a muscle we all flexed.” As with cop watch, ICE watch is not only a form of protest; it builds and demonstrates a kind of safety net that law enforcement cannot provide—that, in fact, law enforcement actively undermines.
Contrary to the claims of Homan and many others in the Trump administration, federal agents drafted into anti-immigration enforcement operations do not protect residents from crime; they bring violence into communities, targeting not only the people they seek to arrest, but anyone whom they think stands in their way. They have shot tear gas onto residential streets, pepper-sprayed children and bystanders, pepper-balled clergy, and fired “less-lethal” weapons directly at press and protesters alike. In November, U.S. District Judge Sara Ellis issued a preliminary injunction limiting immigration agents’ use of force in Chicago, saying from the bench that their behavior “shocks the conscience.”
The injunction came as a result of a legal challenge filed by demonstrators, religious practitioners, and journalists (including the Chicago News Guild, which is part of the national NewsGuild-CWA, as is The New Republic’s union, the NewsGuild of New York). The challenge argued that federal agents’ use of force violated constitutionally protected protest and religious and news gathering activities. In her ruling, Judge Ellis singled out Border Patrol commander Bovino—who is often the only unmasked and clearly identified federal officer on the scene of ICE abductions and violence against community members—stating that Bovino repeatedly lied under oath about agents’ use of force. Hours later, Bovino was out with a caravan on the Southwest Side, as federal agents fired pepper balls at a moving vehicle in Gage Park and pointed rifles at people in Little Village. The operation, he told the Chicago Tribune, was “going very violent.”
At the Back of the Yards parking lot where ICE and other federal agents had mobilized, community organizers and students at the high school across the street have been pressuring the property owners, Friedman Real Estate, to refuse ICE access to the lot. The volunteers kept showing up, as early as they could, staying as late as they could, to patrol the lot and send the message to ICE agents that they, too, were being watched. They took photos of agents and took down their plates. After their constant patrolling, Lucy said, they saw ICE less frequently at that lot. The empty plaza I had passed that morning was a sign of success.
“I like to say they’re running from us,” Lucy said. “If we’re not already there, we’re coming in like two minutes.”
That morning in late October, driving slowly past family homes on tidy, city-size lawns, we see very few people out. Lucy pauses to let an older person pushing a cart of groceries cross the street. We pass “No Trespassing/Private Property” signs, a warning to ICE, and jack-o’-lanterns on porches. We drive by a patch of yellow marigolds pushing through a chain-link fence, a few clusters of banana-leaf plants. Every few minutes, the car’s sound system broadcasts notifications from Lucy’s phone, a specific ringtone she set just for rapid-response messages coming in. She gets updates on the cars we’re looking for: a boxy, oversize Jeep Wagoneer and an extra-large GMC Yukon truck. Over the weeks, the kinds of cars ICE uses have become very familiar.
Inflatable Halloween decorations wave in some of the front yards we pass. Outside of Gage Park High School, we pause to chat with a crossing guard in a yellow vest. Lucy rolls down the window. “I’m a neighbor in the area,” she explains. “We’re doing ICE watch, so just looking out for ICE vehicles.” New message notifications ding again. “We got reports of a Wagoneer, which, you don’t see too many Wagoneers around here, they’re long and boxy…. I figured I would let you know, just in case.” Before she is done, the crossing guard is already repeating, “Just in case. All right. Thank you,” like this happens all the time. It’s not her first rodeo either.
“Operation Midway Blitz” is not merely an immigration enforcement operation; it is a monthslong offensive meant to break down people’s resistance, a deliberate campaign of political violence and social disruption. Such brutal anti-immigration policing itself is not new, even if it may be newly evident to people in Los Angeles, Washington, and elsewhere, who have not experienced their family and neighbors disappearing. But it is new that ICE and Border Patrol are rolling out daily in caravans; it is new that Border Patrol is unleashing tear gas and firing flash-bang grenades at bystanders. It’s also new that all this is happening at once to a whole city.
ICE has also turned on those residents who dare document and track them across the city. On October 20, reported The TRiiBE, a local independent news site, an attorney named Scott Sakiyama, who had been following immigration agents in his car, was detained by them at gunpoint. Sakiyama had defended a man who had faced federal charges for allegedly assaulting a Border Patrol agent outside the immigrant “processing center” in Broadview, an inner suburb of Chicago. The government had already dropped the prosecution. But when Sakiyama spotted armed, masked immigration agents driving in Oak Park and blew a whistle to alert neighbors, agents stopped him. “Exit your vehicle, or we’re gonna break your window and we’ll drag you out,” one said. This all took place across the street from Abraham Lincoln Elementary School, where one of Sakiyama’s kids is a student. He was loaded into the agents’ vehicle and driven to the Broadview detention facility, where he was merely given a citation and returned to his car. “The federal government is intent on abusing its power to kidnap and violate the rights of our friends and neighbors,” Sakiyama wrote in an Oak Park neighborhood Facebook group, “and now, they say it is a crime to tell your neighbors this is happening.” He encouraged people to attend a rapid-response training and start their own whistle brigade. ICIRR now holds virtual trainings every week; the one I dropped in on in late October was attended by more than a thousand people from dozens of neighborhoods.
As community-based defense projects have ramped up, some local elected officials have supported them. Some, like Alderwoman Jessie Fuentes, have been detained while defending their constituents. Others have ignored their constituents, or, in the case of Democratic Alderman Raymond Lopez, who represents part of Back of the Yards, welcomed Tom Homan and defended Operation Midway Blitz. On a night in late October when Lopez was scheduled to have open office hours, the doors were locked and the lights were off as community members announced a protest there. Jaime Perez said his girlfriend, a tamale vendor, was taken by ICE near 47th Street and Western, and his calls to Lopez for help were ignored. “He wouldn’t come to the phone,” Perez said. As the sun set, Leslie Cortez spoke about the raid she witnessed on 47th Street. “Our community deserves someone who will fight for us,” she said, “not against us.” Before they left, they taped a letter to Lopez’s office door demanding that he resign.
But among even the more sympathetic government leadership, Chicagoans’ political efforts to protect immigrant communities have only gone so far. Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson has referred to the protection afforded by the city’s welcoming ordinance, which is meant to prohibit collaboration between immigration officers and Chicago police, but when ICE and Border Patrol roll through city neighborhoods, the police have been right there. Residents have been told that Chicago police are prohibited from engaging in immigration enforcement (unless ordered to do so by a court), when they can see with their own eyes that Chicago cops are clearing roads for the fleets of sports-utility vehicles and oversize trucks used by ICE and Border Patrol to haul people to Broadview. Illinois Governor JB Pritzker has gained a national reputation as a leader who stands up to Trump and his mass deportation machine, but outside Broadview, where activists, religious leaders, and media gather, the officers firing tear gas and pepper balls at them are Illinois State Police, sent there, according to Pritzker, to “ensure people could safely express their rights.”
Some of the time on migra watch, it can look like nothing is happening. We drive in silence, weaving between Back of the Yards, Gage Park, and Brighton Park, past bakeries and salons and auto body shops, looking twice at any oversize car we see. Suddenly, Lucy asks her phone for directions. “So they are here,” she says. “I’ll keep my distance.” More notifications are going off. Lucy sees what might be an ICE SUV, but as she puts on her blinker and turns to follow, a Chicago Police Department car pulls across her car’s path. Local cops are not supposed to be out here. We hear people honking, leaning on their horns, not that far off.“Is the honking because it’s—” I start to ask, and she says it is, as she grabs a few things in case she needs to hop out and starts dictating a message: “I’m pretty sure I saw that large white SUV, no plates in the front, but as I tried to turn, CPD kind of blocked me.” She gives the intersection where CPD still is. Regardless of the reason the police were there, now she’s lost sight of the SUV. She plays back a video from a few minutes ago on her phone, hoping it shows the direction of the SUV, and the honking fills the car speakers. A few other people saw the SUV as well; Lucy is following their directions now. “It seems like there’s a lot of people out right now,” she says, “which is nice.”
As we drive, we see them, more and more people out on the streets, watching. On a corner at a gas station, a small group of people, some in KN95 masks, stand on the grassy strip at the side of the road, watching. At the Home Depot, Lucy parks and hops out to say “hi” to the people at the table near the parking lot, expecting them to shut down for the morning. A new shift of volunteers, however, has come to stay longer. Another small group is out on a side street lined with houses: four young people in hoodies and puffer coats. They repeat the ICIRR hotline number on a megaphone as they walk. Lucy tells them about what she saw, and they head right back out on foot. “Small town, small town,” Lucy says to me, and we drive off.
We loop around a few more times, checking out a nearby park. We’ve been out for 40 minutes; to me it feels like five. The adrenaline, even at this distance from the action, warps time and attention—every siren might be something. A helicopter looms overhead. When we drive past the crossing guard again, she and Lucy exchange friendly waves.
It can feel like ICE agents are everywhere. That, presumably, is how they want it to feel. At the same time, more and more people who have never engaged in anything like these actions before are purposefully running toward the trouble. As much as their resistance can appear organic and spontaneous—and some of it is—it’s supported by deliberate effort, an infrastructure working to help them expand their tolerance for taking risks.
There’s the know-your-rights trainings, which, like ICE watch trainings, long predate this moment. In the past, however, those were typically offered within a smaller community made up mostly of other organizers. Since Midway Blitz, the groups ramped up because ICE ramped up. They had to scale up know-your-rights trainings to work for mass audiences. They needed to do more than just arm people with information about their rights; now they had to teach “what do you do when an agent is right there,” Lucy said, “right outside your door or right in front of you.” Learning that, she said, enables them to walk out the door and “blow their whistle the minute they identify a car.” Once people know how to defend their own rights, in other words, they don’t stop there—as the last months in Chicago have shown, they turn to defending others.
Intentional or not, this way of spreading rapid-response work ensures that there’s no one point of failure. Multiple groups are employing multiple communication platforms, and generating new methods as they go. New people join them, “just coming up with their own ideas on how to defend Chicago,” as Lucy put it. It turns out that you can’t just gas and detain everyone in the streets. There will be more people tomorrow.
On her phone, Lucy sees that Customs and Border Protection are a few neighborhoods away, in Little Village. A video from the scene plays over the speakers as we drive, birdsong and car sounds and a man calling, “Hey, how you doing!” and what might have been someone else yelling “Fucker!” We can’t join; Lucy’s shift is done, and she has to go to work. By the time I could get there, it will likely have ended. She offers to drop me at the train station. On the platform, I watch a Facebook Live video from the scene, streams of hearts and sad crying emojis floating up over an intersection flooded with Chicago police.
Baltazar Enriquez had been recording ICE for almost an hour by the time I tune in. He was following the federal agents’ caravan at the same time that, a few neighborhoods away, we were driving around Back of the Yards. Witnesses hopped out of their cars, turning their phones toward the agents and yelling, “Shame! Shame! Where’s your warrant? Why are you terrorizing us? Why? Why?” They walked toward the agents, phones up. One woman had a megaphone. The agents kept their faces fully covered with black and camo balaclavas and reflective sports sunglasses. They pointed their long guns at the ground as they paced. “Leave! Leave!” A few agents got back into their white SUV. There was Gregory Bovino, standing next to an agent in a gas mask holding a weapon with a tear gas canister. “Don’t do it! Don’t do it, Bovino.” Overhead, a helicopter buzzed. “ICE go home. ICE go home.” Chicago police formed a line as the feds retreated behind them. The people clustered at an intersection. Someone wore an inflatable pink axolotl costume, Mexican and American flags flew, whistles were distributed. I was still on the train when Baltazar, streaming on Facebook, asked some people to walk with him to another neighborhood to patrol—“Gage Park,” he said, where Lucy and I had just been—and logged off. It was hard to reconcile the violence on the live stream 15 minutes away and the quiet around us. No one was taken from any street we passed. It could feel like nothing happened, except for all the people we saw as we were watching, watching, too.
Trump’s Posts Spur Threats Against Lawmakers on Both Sides of Aisle - 2025-12-13T22:11:52Z
President Donald Trump’s Truth Social rants may be unhinged, but they have serious consequences: His violent rhetoric has spurred threats against nearly two dozen elected officials on both sides of the aisle.
According to a new tally by NBC News, Trump’s posts over the last few weeks have led to threats on a number of Democrats—but even more Republicans, including over a dozen Indiana state lawmakers whom the president was attempting to bully into voting for his gerrymandering scheme.
Democrats who have been threatened include senators Chuck Schumer and Elissa Slotkin, as well as the other five lawmakers whom, along with Slotkin, Trump accused of sedition. On the Republican side, soon-to-be-former Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene has been vocal about the threats she’s received since criticizing the president’s agenda, and over a dozen Indiana state senators have also received threats after being named out by Trump on Truth Social.
Meanwhile, Abigail Jackson, a spokesperson for the White House, said that Trump 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 to NBC.
“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.
Who’s going to tell her that the majority of the people receiving threats were Republicans?
Trump Threatens “Very Serious Retaliation” After Syria Attack - 2025-12-13T22:01:47Z
President Donald Trump raged against ISIS and said the U.S. would retaliate after an attack in Syria on Saturday, possibly laying the groundwork for more American military involvement in another country in the Middle East.
Earlier in the day, a lone gunman shot and killed two U.S. Army soldiers and a civilian interpreter while they were conducting counterterrorism operations in Palmyra, a city in the central part of the country, various outlets reported. The shooter was killed, and three other members of the U.S. military and two Syrians were injured.
U.S. Central Command called the attack the “result of an ambush by a lone ISIS gunman,” though no group has claimed responsibility for the attack as of yet. More details are still emerging, but Trump took to Truth Social to declare there would be a response.
“This was an ISIS attack against the U.S., and Syria, in a very dangerous part of Syria, that is not fully controlled by them. The President of Syria, Ahmed al-Sharaa, is extremely angry and disturbed by this attack,” he wrote. “There will be very serious retaliation.”
What, exactly, that response might look like is unclear. This is reportedly the first case of U.S. deaths in Syria since Bashar Al Assad’s regime fell, and the attack is under investigation.
Defense Secretery Pete Hegseth, who has come under intense pressure and criticism for his role in carrying out questionably legal boat strikes in the Caribbean that have killed more than 80 people, also weighed in.
In a Saturday tweet, Hegseth wrote: “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.”
Though it’s not well publicized, the U.S. military has had an ongoing presence at American bases in different parts of Syria since 2014.
Trump’s DOJ Could Charge Alleged Kirk Killer With Surprising Crime - 2025-12-13T20:33:18Z
President Donald Trump’s Department of Justice is reportedly trying to come up with a way to bring federal charges against Charlie Kirk’s alleged shooter. One solution? Declare Kirk’s murder an anti-Christian hate crime.
Tyler Robinson, the suspect, is already facing state charges for aggravated murder, and may even face the death penalty. But that’s not enough for the Trump administration, which seems to be trying to get the case taken to the federal level, according to a new report from NBC News.
Some prosecutors are pushing back. They say the crime doesn’t really fall under any federal statutes: Murder, generally, is under state jurisdiction, unless the suspect crossed state lines or killed an elected official.
As a result, apparently, the DOJ is exploring the option to charge Robinson with an anti-Christian hate crime, three people who are familiar with the investigation told NBC.
It would be an unusual “hate crime” to prosecute, to say the least: The federal case would have to equate anti-trans views with Christianity, in order for the legal logic to work, according to NBC’s sources.
“They are trying to shove a square peg into a round hole,” one said.
In case anyone is unclear what constitutes a federal hate crime: The Hitler-loving white supremacist who killed Heather Heyer at the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville was charged with a hate crime, as was the white man who gunned down 10 Black people in a supermarket in Buffalo, New York.
Hate crime charges are generally used when someone attacks or discriminates against someone else based on their race, gender, sexuality, or religion.
Robinson, in texts to his trans partner that were released by the FBI, allegedly said that he wanted to kill Kirk because he had “enough of his hatred.” In order to charge Robinson with a hate crime, prosecutors would have to argue that being Christian and being hateful—at least toward trans people—are one and the same.
Thailand Fact-Checks Trump on Bogus Ceasefire Claim - 2025-12-13T19:21:13Z
It’s not the first time, and it won’t be the last—President Donald Trump was a little too eager to claim he had ended an international conflict.
On Friday, the U.S. president said that the countries of Thailand and Cambodia, which have been involved in clashes that have left at least 20 people dead and displaced hundreds of thousands over the past week, had agreed to a truce.
The president wrote on Truth Social that he had a “very good conversation” with the prime ministers of both countries, and they had achieved a breakthrough. “Both Countries are ready for PEACE and continued Trade with the United States of America. It is my Honor to work with Anutin and Hun in resolving what could have evolved into a major War between two otherwise wonderful and prosperous Countries!” Trump wrote.
The ceasefire was supposed to begin yesterday, per Trump’s announcement, and the White House shared the president’s post on Facebook as well.
But on Saturday, Thai Prime Minister Anutin Charnvirakul definitively refuted Trump’s claim, The New York Times reported.
“Thailand will continue to perform military actions until we feel no more harm and threats to our land and people,” he wrote on Facebook. “I want to make it clear.”
Thai Foreign Minister Sihasak Phuangketkeow also said that Trump’s comments didn’t “reflect an accurate understanding of the situation,” per CBS News.
Cambodia’s prime minister has not directly refuted the claim, but made no mention of a new ceasefire agreement.
On Saturday, the violence continued, as Thailand carried out airstrikes along the border between the two countries. The fighting is the latest iteration of a border conflict that’s been simmering for some time.
Meanwhile, Trump continues to repeat the claim that he’s ended a dizzying number of conflicts as part of his endless quest for the Nobel Peace Prize. This time, though, facts intervened.
Chuob Chhouk, a vegetable seller in Cambodia who had been displaced from her home, told the Times, “I want a real ceasefire, not just words.”
ICE Barbie Kristi Noem Spirals Under Intense White House Pressure - 2025-12-13T17:34:59Z
Kristi Noem is scrambling to shift blame to her subordinates for not meeting deportation quotas as the Department of Homeland Security descends into an atmosphere of chaos and finger-pointing, according to a new report.
Noem and her right-hand man (and alleged boyfriend) Corey Lewandowski have been playing the blame game, two DHS officials with direct knowledge of the matter told NBC News, setting up acting ICE Director Todd Lyons and Customs and Border Protection Commissioner Rodney Scott to take the fall.
Scott had been excluded from strategic conversations as well as social gatherings, and that department leaders told him he may soon be out of a job, the sources said. Scott was reportedly even worried that Lewandowski was reading his emails.
He’s not the only one with reason to be afraid: The White House is reportedly growing tired with Noem’s brash leadership, especially her relationship with Lewandowski. DHS officials told The Bulwark in early December that she could be out “really soon.”
As the agency leading President Donald Trump’s hallmark deportation campaign, DHS is under a lot of scrutiny. And despite Noem’s efforts to boost numbers by cruelly grabbing people off the street at random, immigrants or not, she’s way behind where the president wants her to be.
Far from Stephen Miller’s brutal goal of 3,000 deportations per day, ICE is reportedly arresting fewer than 1,000 people each day on average. And contrary to Noem’s and Trump’s promises, they are not just going after the “worst of the worst”: More than a third of the people arrested so far have no criminal history at all.
Trump Admin Is Secretly Giving Names of All Air Travelers to ICE - 2025-12-13T16:05:08Z
The Transportation Security Administration is now sharing passenger data with ICE to enable Trump’s mass deportation campaign.
Before Trump, ICE didn’t get involved with domestic travel—and the TSA didn’t concern itself with immigration matters. But since March, according to a new report by The New York Times, the two agencies have quietly been working together to apprehend people at the airport at the command of the Trump administration.
According to the Times, it’s not clear how many arrests have been made so far. But the paper obtained documents that show the program led to the arrest of 19-year-old Any Lucía López Belloza, who was picked up at Boston Logan Airport when trying to visit her family in Texas for Thanksgiving. Two days later, López was deported to Honduras, where she had not been since she was 7 years old.
According to former ICE officials interviewed by the Times, the program can help the agency meet its high deportation quotas—plus, it allows agents to quickly deport those caught, like López.
“The administration has turned routine travel into a force multiplier for removals, potentially identifying thousands who thought they could evade the law simply by boarding a plane,” said former deputy head of ICE in New York City, Scott Mechkowski.
Since Trump took office in January, many in the U.S. have been living in fear. Trump’s deportation campaign has led to the arrest and detention of immigrants and citizens alike. People have been grabbed by ICE off the street, from their apartments, from their places of work. Now the airport is another place that’s no longer safe.
Tricia McLaughlin, a spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security, expressed no remorse for the position she’s put people in. “The message to those in the country illegally is clear: The only reason you should be flying is to self-deport home,” she said.
“Total Loser”: Sleepless Trump Slams Indiana Republicans - 2025-12-13T15:03:29Z
In the wee hours of Saturday morning, the president laid into Republicans who voted against his gerrymandering campaign in Indiana. Perhaps unable to sleep due to the crushing sting of defeat, Donald Trump took to Truth Social close to 1 a.m. to mock and threaten the state’s legislators.
“Republicans in the Indiana State Senate, who voted against a Majority in the U.S. House of Representatives, should be ashamed of themselves,” Trump wrote. “Headed by a total loser named Rod Bray, every one of these people should be “primaried,” and I will be there to help! Indiana, which I won big, is the only state in the Union to do this!”
On Thursday, Indiana lawmakers voted down Trump’s midcycle redistricting push, choosing to keep election maps the same rather than gerrymander them to Republicans’ advantage. For weeks leading up to the vote, the president had been bullying the Hoosier state’s lawmakers in an attempt to shore up support.
After the vote, Trump turned his fury on state Senate President Pro Tempore Rodric Bray, the main opponent to redistricting. Bray believes the state should instead work on flipping a preexisting district rather than blowing up the whole map—a risky move that would narrow Republicans’ margins in the new districts, and could even result in a loss of seats, he told Politico.
Trump has made it clear that if a Republican is unwilling to follow his agenda to the letter, he’ll put his weight behind a primary challenger. Hours before the vote Thursday, he posted, “Rod Bray and his friends won’t be in Politics for long, and I will do everything within my power to make sure that they will not hurt the Republican Party, and our Country, again.”
Trump’s DOJ Sues Fulton County and Four States to Seize Voter Ballots - 2025-12-12T20:20:43Z
The Justice Department is dredging up the 2020 presidential election conspiracy.
Attorney General Pam Bondi sued Fulton County officials in Georgia Friday to obtain ballots that were cast in the election. The suit demands that Fulton County turn over “all used and void ballots, stubs of all ballots, signature envelopes, and corresponding envelope digital files.”
The suit was filed the same day as the DOJ announced legal action against four more states—Colorado, Hawaii, Massachusetts, and Nevada—in a sweeping national effort to access sensitive voter data. So far this year, the Trump administration has targeted 18 states, most of them Democratic-led.
It’s the first such instance in which the Justice Department has requested physical ballots. A pro-voting group described the initiative to Democracy Docket as a “terrible overstep of power.”
Since Trump first planted the seeds of doubt about the results of the 2020 election, a litany of his allies have continued to tend and water the theory—so much so that within a handful of years, refusing to admit that Trump ever lost to Joe Biden had become a fealty test for MAGA membership.
But there is no doubt—Trump lost that election by a landslide, coming up short by 38 electoral votes. More evidence that Trump did not win includes the fact that he was not inaugurated in 2021, and did not serve a day as president until he succeeded in 2024.
But for anyone still in doubt, know that the theory has been thoroughly debunked by the president’s own appointees. Trump’s last attorney general, Bill Barr, announced in 2022 that despite an intensive, multi-agency investigation, no evidence of widespread fraud had been discovered that supported the president’s wild claims.
But the theory—and Trump’s innumerable cadre of yes-men—persist.
“At this Department of Justice, we will not permit states to jeopardize the integrity and effectiveness of elections by refusing to abide by our federal elections laws,” Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Harmeet Dhillon said in a statement. “If states will not fulfill their duty to protect the integrity of the ballot, we will.”
Republicans Announce Their Next Targets After Indiana Crash and Burn - 2025-12-12T19:17:06Z
Republicans are scrambling for a next move after President Donald Trump’s humiliating failure to bully Indiana lawmakers into bending to the president’s gerrymandering scheme.
On Thursday, Indiana lawmakers rejected the president’s push for midcycle redistricting in the Hoosier State to ensure Republican victory in the 2026 midterms. Indiana Lieutenant Governor Micah Beckwith claimed that the Trump administration had even threatened to withhold federal funding if they refused—but lawmakers wouldn’t budge.
With the midterms fast approaching and the Republican Party’s prospects looking increasingly grim, Trump’s allies have started to discuss where to turn up the heat next.
“Nebraska and Kansas are two top targets,” wrote Tyler Bowyer, chief operating officer of Turning Point Action, the advocacy arm of Charlie Kirk’s organization, in a post on X Friday.
But even he had to admit that Republicans faced some challenges in those states. “Nebraska did not help the President by passing winner-take-all last year. Not a great sign for redistricting. Kansas is controlled by the Koch HQ,” Bowyer wrote.
In Nebraska, the unicameral legislature requires the support of every Republican to advance redistricting, but 83-year-old state Senator Merv Riepe is not buying in. He previously blocked Trump’s 2024 effort to reshape the state’s split Electoral College vote into a winner-takes-all state, and seems similarly uninterested in supporting his gerrymandering this time around.
“I don’t think it’s a necessity for us,” Riepe said in October.
In Kansas, Republicans haven’t seemed all that anxious to get on board the president’s push for redistricting, either. Republicans will need a two-thirds majority to redraw the maps and override an expected veto from Governor Laura Kelly.
Meanwhile, the Heritage Foundation, the far-right think tank behind Project 2025, this week published a report that listed ending ranked-choice voting as a policy priority in 2026. Michigan is currently the only state circulating a ranked-choice ballot petition, meaning that Republicans are likely to target efforts to impose a new voting system there.
Trump’s Own RNC Chair Warns Party Faces “Almost Certain Defeat” - 2025-12-12T19:06:30Z
The chair of the Republican National Committee is issuing a dire warning to Republicans: Anticipate losing next November.
The president’s handpicked RNC leader, Joe Gruters, has been preaching the caucus’s impending doom ahead of the 2026 midterms in a transparent attempt to lower expectations. Gruters joined several right-wing podcasts and Christian television networks to spread the word that the GOP is coming up against a “looming disaster.”
“The chances are Republicans will go down and will go down hard,” Gruters said.
“This is an absolute disaster. No matter what party is in power, they usually get crushed in the midterms,” Gruters told Salem News Channel, a new media entity co-owned by Trump’s son Don Jr.
Republicans have had a trifecta in Washington since Donald Trump returned to office, white-knuckling every branch of the federal government. If history is any indicator, that won’t bode well for the party come next year: In a typical midterm cycle, the presidential party loses grounds via midterms, a phenomenon known as the “presidential penalty.” Those are the basic odds, even before Trump’s devastating tariffs and wildly controversial immigration agenda are taken into account.
But early indicators—such as a healthy dose of special elections in the last year—suggest that the national backlash to Trump’s second-term agenda could be worse for the party than usual. Democrats have seen surprising gains in unexpected areas of the country, including in Tennessee, Georgia, New Jersey, Virginia, and Pennsylvania.
Meanwhile, Republicans seem to be on the verge of panic. Anxious about midterms, the White House has spent months trying to pressure red states to gerrymander their congressional lines to turn a handful of seats in Congress. But so far, the pressure campaign has backfired: On Thursday, Indiana state senators overwhelmingly voted against the effort, citing Trump’s open threats and his crass mouth as their rationale.
Gruters’s comments have similarly raised a stir. The conservative news site, Townhall, blasted The Bulwark for first publishing Gruters’s opinion, claiming that the “story is FAKE” because the publication had edited out Gruters’s words to eliminate his alleged faith in the caucus.* But in doing so, Townhall cut out Gruters’s conclusion: “We are facing almost certain defeat,” he said.
* This piece originally misidentified the owner of Townhall.
Fiasco for Trump as Judge Issues Harsh Rebuke in Ábrego García Case - 2025-12-12T17:35:45Z
Ever since the Trump administration wrongfully deported Kilmar Ábrego García to a torture prison in El Salvador last spring, the president and his anti-immigrant henchman Stephen Miller have plainly understood this saga as a crucial test case for the larger MAGA project. How far could they go in snatching people off the streets and placing them outside of U.S. law entirely? To what degree could they get away with wielding armed state terror against undesirables, with minimal to no constraints?
That’s why the latest turn in the Ábrego García story—in which a federal judge ordered him released from immigration detention in Pennsylvania—is so momentous. It suggests that at least for now, this test isn’t going how Trump and especially Miller evidently hoped.
The top-line news in Judge Paula Xinis’s ruling—the one getting media coverage—is her surprising ruling that no order of removal for Ábrego García exists. She ruled his continued detention unlawful, and he’s now been released, though he still faces separate Justice Department prosecution for allegedly trafficking migrants.
But buried in this ruling is even bigger news. It concludes that Ábrego García’s treatment throughout has violated due process. Again and again, it scorches the Trump administration’s “extraordinary” and “troubling” handling of this whole case, suggesting it’s been utterly lawless and rife with malicious abuses of power.
The ruling neatly encapsulates the madness of the Trump era. It recounts that Ábrego García was removed with scores of others to El Salvador in March, which the administration admitted was an “error,” violating an immigration judge’s 2019 “withholding of removal” ruling barring his deportation to that country, where he was born and raised before fleeing to the United States as a teenager. After the Supreme Court ruled in April that officials must “facilitate” his return, they dragged their feet, bringing him back eight weeks later. During that time in El Salvador he was tortured.
Here’s where one of Trump’s most flagrant abuses of power now arises. Because a “withholding of removal” order does allow deportation to a third country that agrees to take in the subject, Trump officials have been trying to find one to take him.
But this process too has been riddled with venality. Costa Rica has expressed willingness to take in Ábrego García for months, a country that Ábrego García’s lawyers believe would not jail him or return him to El Salvador (where, as we’ve already seen from his experience there, he’d again face torture and imprisonment). But officials have refused to send him to Costa Rica.
Why? They won’t meaningfully say. The ruling details months of tortuous negotiations during which the administration tried to deport him to Uganda, Eswatini, Ghana, and Liberia—places where Ábrego García feared physical harm or removal to El Salvador.
But officials were unable to carry out removal to these places for various reasons; some countries said they didn’t want him. That left Ábrego García in detention for months. And throughout, when prodded by Xinis as to why the government wouldn’t just remove him to Costa Rica, administration lawyers dissembled, stonewalled, and ultimately could not explain the rationale.
This is abominable. By law, immigration detention is not supposed to be about meting out punishment or retribution. It’s supposed to be about facilitating people’s removal. Yet as the ruling details, the administration, by refusing to send Ábrego García to Costa Rica despite having that option, did “not appear to have held him to fulfill that purpose.”
That’s polite legalese for a bombshell: Trump officials held Ábrego García in detention for months for reasons that remain unexplained rather than remove him to a country where he didn’t fear facing grave danger. We all know what happened here: Trump and Miller plainly decided that sending him to a place he sees as acceptable wouldn’t be sufficiently dehumanizing. Trump had to “win” by sending him to the country of Trump’s choice only.
This is deeply sick public conduct. And there’s evidence that Trump and Miller have seen this throughout as a test case for a darker, vaster project. Recall that after officials admitted deporting Ábrego García in error, Miller rushed out to proclaim that there was no mistake at all and that he’d been “sent to the right place.” This wasn’t a good-faith disagreement over what the law said. It was effectively a declaration that the law wouldn’t constrain Trump from sending him to a foreign gulag if he decided to.
Miller has also viciously attacked judges as illegitimate for requiring due process for migrants. Here again this doesn’t reflect genuine legal disagreement; it’s Miller asserting Trump’s authority to inflict state terror without any legal constraints. At one point, Trump even admitted he could bring Ábrego García back at any point and try him lawfully, but refused: He was leaving him in that torture prison abroad because—well, because he could.
Meanwhile, numerous government agencies smeared Ábrego García as a violent gang member, even though they couldn’t produce any evidence of it. Vice President JD Vance stated as fact that Ábrego García was a “high-level gang member” who was not in the country lawfully to begin with—both flat-out lies that look even worse with this ruling. The administration’s real aim has been to create grounds for immigrants to fear that at any point they might face the wrath of arbitrary, unchecked state power and the threat of disappearance beyond the reach of the law.
Here, a caveat: At times officials have followed the law, ultimately bringing Ábrego García back and releasing him this time around under judicial order. But when books are written about this and other travesties, we will likely learn that Miller lost internal battles about how far to push the envelope, with Trump losing interest at key moments or being swayed by other advisers who balked at plunging into full lawlessness. Everything we’ve seen strongly suggests this interpretation, including what was laid bare in Xinis’s extraordinary ruling.
So where does this leave us? In a strange turn, it appears no original order of removal for Ábrego García can be found, perhaps because the “withholding of removal” order is all the original judge filed. So on Thursday night, officials found another immigration judge to issue a new order of removal. As Talking Points Memo’s David Kurtz explains, this was also highly cynical, exploiting these judges’ status as executive branch officials to secure a dubious, preordained outcome. And indeed Xinis also temporarily enjoined Immigration and Customs Enforcement from taking him into custody on that basis Friday morning.
At this point, Ábrego García could end up getting deported to Costa Rica, as he’s requested. Or he could remain free on bail in the U.S. while he faces prosecution for trafficking (and there are ample signs that this too is a malicious prosecution). We don’t know what’s next. It’s all unprecedented.
But here’s what we do know: For now, this saga is showing that certain time-tested legal precedents and norms—habeas corpus, judicial review, professional constraints on lawyers—seem to be acting as a check on tyranny. To the degree that Trump or especially Miller envisioned this as a test—of their ability to spread fear of lawless state terror—the lower courts continue to hold the line. The degree of government persecution inflicted on this day laborer from Maryland remains astounding. But for the time being, what we’re seeing is heartening indeed.
Trump Hit With Massive Lawsuit Over His Tacky Ballroom - 2025-12-12T17:11:08Z
President Donald Trump just got hit with a lawsuit over his enormous $300 million ballroom that would dwarf the White House.
In a 65-page complaint filed Friday, the National Trust for Historic Preservation, a nonprofit organization working to save America’s historic places, argued that Trump did not have the constitutional authority to fast-track construction for a project of this scale, and has violated the Administrative Procedures Act and the National Environmental Policy Act.
The lawsuit also notes that Congress is required to approve any construction on federal land, and the White House is located at the White House and President’s Park, a national park.
In October, Trump fired all six members of the Commission on Fine Arts, which is charged with advising the federal government on the art, design, and architectural development of Washington, seeming to clear the way for him to make any changes he likes to the nation’s monuments. A Trump official said the members would be replaced by those who were “more aligned with President Trump’s ‘America First’ policies,” but two months later, the seats still remain empty.
The legal challenge is just the latest issue to complicate Trump’s plans for a behemoth ballroom. Trump has reportedly had a falling-out with his architect, James McCrery II, who argued that the 90,000-square-foot blueprint would overshadow the 55,000-square-foot White House mansion, violating basic architectural principles.
Trump has repeatedly misled the public about the construction process, claiming that the original structure of the White House wouldn’t be touched—before razing the entire East Wing. He also claimed that the project would only cost $200 million, but that number has since ballooned to $300 million.
The privately funded ballroom has presented a golden opportunity for the country’s wealthiest families and biggest corporations to make good with the Trump administration—and a few defense companies like Lockheed Martin and Palantir have also tossed the president some cash for his vanity project.
Trump has repeatedly turned his attention away from actually governing to the destruction of American landmarks. Trump has redone the Oval Office in the gaudy gold style of Mar-a-Lago, added stupid signs and white marble bathrooms to the White House, paved over the Rose Garden, pitched an “Arc de Trump” monument, and the builder in chief recently declared his intention to “fix” the 100-year-old Reflecting Pool on the National Mall in Washington. Fix what, exactly? Your guess is as good as ours.
Indiana Republican Deletes Post Exposing Trump Gerrymandering Threat - 2025-12-12T16:53:32Z
Unfortunately for Indiana Lieutenant Governor Micah Beckwith, what he posts on the internet stays forever.
Beckwith deleted a Thursday post that confirmed the Trump administration had threatened to pull federal funding from Indiana if state legislators refused to bend to the president’s gerrymandering scheme.
“The Trump admin was VERY clear about this,” Beckwith wrote in the since-deleted post. “They told many lawmakers, cabinet members and the Gov and I that this would happen. The Indiana Senate made it clear to the Trump Admin today that they do not want to be partners with the WH. The WH made it clear to them that they’d oblige.”
He was responding to another post by the Heritage Foundation, which claimed that Trump would withhold national funding from Indiana if it refused to draw new congressional lines, just five years after approving the last batch of maps.
“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,” the official account for the Heritage Foundation wrote.
But Indiana’s Senate did reject the White House’s pressure campaign late Thursday, with 21 Republican senators voting against the scheme. Their rationale for doing so ranged from personal disgust with the president’s language to the personal, violent threats they endured for considering voting against the effort.
Why Beckwith would have felt pressured to delete his post—within hours of making it—is not clear.
Anxious about the 2026 midterms, Trump issued directives to several red states, including Indiana, to redraw their congressional maps in order to bolster Republicans’ razor-thin majority in the House. In Indiana’s case, that unprecedented, long-shot effort would have won the GOP two more seats in the U.S. House.
But so far, bullying lawmakers and barking demands has not been a successful midterm strategy for the Republican leader. Redistricting efforts have crumbled in other red states where Trump issued gerrymandering directives, though not always due to the same ferocious local pushback.
Epstein Photos Spark Questions About Trump—And Missing Bannon Footage - 2025-12-12T16:11:16Z
President Donald Trump, Steve Bannon, and other prominent figures can be spotted in a new collection of photographs from Jeffrey Epstein’s estate released Friday by Democrats on the House Oversight and Reform Committee.
At least three of the photographs showed Trump, who has come under immense scrutiny for his reported ties to Epstein and his efforts to prevent the release of the government’s files on the alleged sex trafficker.
One black-and-white photograph featuring Trump shows the president smiling as he posed with six women wearing leis, whose faces have all been redacted.
Another photograph showed Trump sitting on a plane next to a blonde woman whose face has been redacted.
Another photograph showed Trump listening to a glamorous-looking woman, as Epstein stood, smirking beside him.
Yet another photo showed a pile of Trump-branded condoms.
These photographs, plucked from a trove of 95,000 images and redacted at the discretion of members of the committee, are just the beginning. “Committee Democrats are reviewing the full set of photos and will continue to release photos to the public in the days and weeks ahead,” the release said. Representative Robert Garcia told reporters Friday that some of the photos that were not released were “incredibly disturbing.”
MAGA architect Steve Bannon also made multiple appearances in the photographs released Friday—including one that was particularly disturbing.
One photograph showed Epstein sitting behind a desk, while Bannon sat opposite him talking. On the desk between them sat a framed photograph that appeared to show an at least partially naked woman lying limp on a sofa or bed.
Bannon had reportedly assisted Epstein in navigating the political and legal quagmire that was the last year of his life, conducting a series of interviews with the alleged sex trafficker between 2018 and early 2019, totaling about 15 hours of unreleased footage.
Another photograph showed Epstein and Bannon taking a mirror selfie, and another photograph showed Bannon speaking with director Woody Allen, who has been accused of sexual abuse of a minor.
Former President Bill Clinton appeared to have signed one photograph, which showed him smiling beside Epstein and his co-conspirator Ghislaine Maxwell.
Other prominent figures who appeared in photos were Bill Gates and former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers.
Three of the photographs showed sex toys, including a “jawbreaker gag.”
This story has been updated.
White House Resorts to Desperate Method to Brag About Trump’s Economy - 2025-12-12T15:59:41Z
The White House’s propaganda is getting sketchier.
The official X account for the executive mansion released new figures about the economy Thursday, proclaiming that 91 percent of Americans noticed “gas prices were dropping.” The source of that information, however, was from a White House email survey.
Meanwhile, practically every American has felt the ramifications of Donald Trump’s rattling economic policies. The Drudge Report, the most heavily trafficked conservative news aggregator, topped its site Friday with the headline: “POLL: ‘TIS THE SEASON FOR INFLATION.”
The AP-NORC poll found that large shares of American shoppers are dipping into their savings to afford buying presents this holiday season, with half of polled Americans reporting that it’s harder than usual to afford the things they would typically try to buy.
Roughly the same percentage of U.S.-based shoppers said they were cutting back on nonessentials or big purchases in order to afford their needs, according to the poll.
The findings make sense: An analysis by the Groundwork Collective of popular holiday gifts found that prices skyrocketed by a whopping 26 percent this holiday season.
The disparity between the White House’s messaging and what’s actually happening boils down to the president, who has repeatedly insisted without evidence that there is “no” inflation, that the word “groceries” is an “old fashioned” term, and that the issue of affordability is a “con job” and a “fake narrative” invented by Democrats to trick the public into not supporting him.
“When will I get credit for having created, with No Inflation, perhaps the Greatest Economy in the History of our Country? When will people understand what is happening?” Trump whined Thursday on Truth Social. “When will Polls reflect the Greatness of America at this point in time, and how bad it was just one year ago?”
Inflation has been accelerating since April, when Trump first announced his “liberation day” tariffs. Eight months later, practically everything on the U.S. market is more expensive than it used to be, as companies pass off the cost of the president’s tariffs onto consumers. Food and energy costs are up compared to figures from last year, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Even American-made goods have taken a hit by the tariffs, since more often than not they are created with parts sourced from other areas of the world.
But the commander-in-chief seems to be completely out of touch with that reality. In an interview earlier this week with Politico’s Dasha Burns, Trump remarked that he would rate the current state of the economy “A+++++.”
Trump, 79, Muses About Absolute Power While Covering His Bruised Hand - 2025-12-12T15:09:53Z
President Donald Trump still can’t seem to wrap his head around the fact that the United States is a democracy.
While signing an executive order aimed at preventing states from regulating artificial intelligence, Trump whined that states needed to be “unified” on his approach to AI, in order for the country to win global dominance over China.
“We have to be unified. China is unified because they have one vote, that’s President Xi [Jinping]. He says ‘do it,’ and that’s the end of that. You know, we have a different system,” Trump said. “But we have a system that’s good—but we only have a system that’s good if it’s smart.”
As the president spoke, sitting behind his desk, he covered his right hand, where a massive, mysterious bruise has formed.
Trump: "We have to be unified. China is unified because they have one vote -- that's President Xi. He says 'do it' and that's the end of that. We have a different system." pic.twitter.com/gQo9j5jvvL
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) December 11, 2025
Meanwhile, the folks watching at home weren’t impressed by Trump’s longing for a unitary government and his dismissal of his own country’s so-called “different system.”
“Yes, it’s called DEMOCRACY,” wrote California Governor Gavin Newsom on X.
This isn’t the first time Trump has longed for another form of government. After visiting China earlier this year, the president said he wished his Cabinet secretaries would greet him with stoic compliance (even though their meetings are already a well-documented spectacle of sycophancy).
Sorry, but You Had to Be an Idiot to Believe Trump Could Lower Prices - 2025-12-12T15:07:06Z
“Starting the day I take the oath of office, I will rapidly drive prices down, and we will make America affordable again,” Donald Trump told rallygoers in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, in August 2024. “We’re going to make it affordable again.” He said it over and over and over. “Starting on day one, we will end inflation and make America affordable again. We’ll do that. We’ve got to bring it down,” he told a Wisconsin crowd that October.
Well. Guess what? Prices are up. And they’re not just up, at least in some cases, because of random, impersonal market forces. They’re up because Trump raised them, through his tariffs. But mostly, they’re up because politicians, even presidents, don’t have the power to lower prices quickly and unilaterally.
I thought everyone knew this. I thought everyone was at least sophisticated enough to understand that inflation is kind of complicated and has to do with a number of factors that can’t be easily erased or reversed. I mean, that’s not a particularly advanced political or economic concept. A president can’t just say, “Beef prices, I command thee down!” and beef prices go down. We live in the real world, not some fairy-tale land; there’s no legal limit to the snow here, as there was in Camelot.
And yet—apparently a lot of people did believe him. Well, you know what? I’m not in the habit of calling people idiots. Elected Republicans, yes. A lot of them are idiots, and hypocrites and liars and worse. But regular people—I try to stay away from calling them idiots. They have pressures, they don’t really follow politics, and even in the present case, I understand that a few million voters turned to Trump because Joe Biden seemed to be responsible for inflation (and was, to a certain extent), Kamala Harris didn’t plausibly explain how she’d do things differently, and Trump was the only other entrée on the menu. Those people, I sort of get.
But if you really, truly, deeply believed that Trump would lower prices quickly? I’m sorry. You’re an idiot.
I keep wondering how people could have fallen for this. How could people not know, after living through Trump’s first term, that he’ll say anything—whatever works for him in the moment? Did people really just forget that? Apparently, they did. I have to keep reminding myself: There are a lot of people who pay attention to politics the way I pay attention to gymnastics—for a few weeks every four years. They’ve never understood that Trump is worse—far, far worse—than your average pol in the way he’ll just say whatever sounds good at the time.
Did they think he could fix things because he’s a businessman? You know—a businessman with six bankruptcies? Anyone capable of even a semblance of critical thinking who spent 10 minutes examining Trump’s business career could see that what he mostly did was drive companies into the ground, stiff contractors, fend off lawsuits, and skate through it all because he was a celebrity, which he figured out how to parlay into profit by selling the right to put his name on buildings.
And finally, I suspect a lot of people bought it because a lot of other dishonest people were pushing it. And here, of course, I mean the right-wing propaganda machine—from Fox News to podcasters to the algorithmic narcotics pushers on social media who are rapidly turning half the nation into a bunch of rage-baited nitwits—that helped elect him and that helps keep his poll numbers, anemic as they are, from being even worse.
It’s not as if it was some deeply held secret last year that presidents can’t just lower prices, or that tariffs increase prices. Plenty of people said so and warned that Trump had no answers. But the propagandists drowned the sane voices out.
Imagine that Kamala Harris had said she was going to lower grocery prices immediately, on day one. You know what would have happened? She’d have been laughed off the campaign trail. Mocked relentlessly. And not just by the right wing. By mainstream economic commentators. By liberal pundits. By me.
That’s because we—mainstream commentators, liberal pundits, and the millions of Americans who still do actually read stuff, weigh evidence, connect dots—would have known it was a preposterous and desperate lie. And we’d have said so. She’d have been savaged. She and her people no doubt knew this, which is why she didn’t talk like that.
She did address the issue. She did say she’d bring prices down. But she didn’t say silly things like “from day one,” and she offered some specifics about how she’d try to bring them down. She vowed to go after corporate price-gouging. You’ll recall that she was attacked even for this, on the grounds either that such gouging was allegedly rare or that most states already had laws against it, or it was just more proof she was a not-so-secret Marxist.
Otherwise, her plan to lower prices consisted of the usual dreary, time-consuming, reality-based stuff: expanding the child tax credit to reduce the costs of raising children; expanding the Earned Income Tax Credit, to give more money back to lower-income taxpayers; providing housing tax credits to make homeownership more affordable.
Oh, and one more thing: She proposed extending the enhanced Affordable Care Act subsidies—exactly the hammer that’s about to thwack 20 million Americans over the head because Trump refuses to do this and has ordered the Republicans in Congress to follow suit.
So she put forward some plans. But plans are so ho-hum. Trump, in contrast, promised he’d cut the cost of a new home in half. Half! How? By slashing regulations! What regulations? You know—regulations! The evil, very, very bad ones! Sing along with me, to the tune of “Camelot”: “No regulation ever shall raise prices …”
So he goes back to Pennsylvania, as he did this week, and face-plants at the first MAGA rally of his second presidency by making fun of the whole idea of “affordabili-tee,” even pronouncing the word in such a way as to make light of the idea. Of course he did. He has no idea what to do about all this. So he has to make it sound like a “Democrat” hoax.
Oh—and that “A-plus-plus-plus-plus-plus” he gave himself on the economy in that Politico interview. That’s five pluses. I’ve noticed on cable news a lot of people reducing it to four. Understandable. Four has a more natural rhythm to it, as we know from the world of music. But Trump, of course, had to gild the faux-gold lily and add a fifth. That fifth “plus,” for those attuned to the psychological trip wires that exist in that swampy brain of his, is his secret admission that he knows things aren’t good. Yet he had the gall to lecture his rallygoers: “You’re doing better than you’ve ever done.” Imagine Joe Biden having said that in 2023.
So, to those who voted for TRUMP in the belief that he would “lower prices” on DAY ONE, I ask you: Do you think this man who lives in a Gilded Mansion gets what you’re going through? Do you think he’s EVER been to a supermarket in his life? Do you think he could guess the Price of a Gallon of Milk? A head of his beloved Iceberg Lettuce? I beg of you. PLEASE. WAKE UP!! He is Playing You. Thank you for your attention to this matter!
Marjorie Taylor Greene Plots One Last Surprise for Mike Johnson - 2025-12-12T14:18:01Z
With just six legislative days left before she plans to resign, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene is reportedly working on one last long-shot bid to remove House Speaker Mike Johnson.
The recent MAGA defector has been quietly taking the temperature on a motion to vacate the chair, three sources familiar with her efforts told MS NOW, formerly MSNBC.
In order to remove Johnson, Greene would need the support of eight other Republicans. “Marjorie is approaching members to get to nine who will oust the speaker,” one of the sources told MS NOW. “And if we don’t get to work on codifying Trump’s agenda, anything can happen.”
But Greene, who has spent the last few weeks publicly criticizing Johnson, denied the reporting. The Georgia Republican told MS Now that it was “not true” and that she was “not interested in participating in” their story.
While a bid to unseat Johnson would likely fail, these reports come amid mounting complaints about his leadership.
Last week, Representative Elise Stefanik, who is running for governor of New York, told The Wall Street Journal that Johnson wouldn’t have the votes if there was a roll call vote. “I believe that the majority of Republicans would vote for new leadership,” Stefanik said. “It’s that widespread.” Representative Nancy Mace also shared in Greene’s frustration, and Representative Anna Paulina Luna recently sidestepped the speaker to force a vote on a bill to ban members of Congress from stock trading.
On Tuesday, Greene told CNN that Republican women specifically were starting to lash out at Johnson because “he sidelines us and doesn’t take us seriously.”
Greene has stated that she’ll resign from her seat on January 5, giving her limited time to find support for her measure. She had previously attempted to remove Johnson last May, but that attempt failed after a majority of Democrats stepped in to save the speaker.
How Trump’s Redistricting Plan in Indiana Blew Up in His Face - 2025-12-12T14:17:51Z
After enduring months of bullying by the president to pass his gerrymandering plan, Indiana Republicans overwhelmingly voted to kill the effort on Thursday. Their rationale for doing so, however, was shockingly personal.
Anxious about the 2026 midterms, Trump issued directives to several red states, including Indiana, to redraw their congressional maps in order to bolster Republicans’ razor-thin majority in the House. In Indiana’s case, that unprecedented, longshot effort would win the GOP two more seats in the U.S. House.
There were plenty of reasons to put the kibosh on the initiative. For one, doing so in the middle of the decade would be extraordinary. While political gerrymandering is technically legal, it typically aligns with the release of census data at the beginning of a new decade.
Initial reports speculated that just a handful of Republican state senators would reject the bid to draw new congressional maps. Instead, 21 Republican state senators voted against it—more than half the GOP caucus in Indiana’s upper chamber—citing reasons from personal disgust with the president’s language to the personal, violent threats they endured for considering voting against the effort, according to CNN.
“Hoosiers are a hardy lot, and they don’t like to be threatened. They don’t like to be intimidated. They don’t like to be bullied in any fashion. And I think a lot of them responded with, ‘That isn’t going to work,’” state Senator Sue Glick told CNN. “And it didn’t.”
State Senator Michael Bohacek—a longtime disability advocate whose daughter has Down syndrome—pulled his support for the new maps after Trump called Minnesota Governor Tim Walz “seriously retarded.”
“This is not the first time our president has used these insulting and derogatory references and his choices of words have consequences,” Bohacek said in a statement. “I will be voting NO on redistricting, perhaps he can use the next 10 months to convince voters that his policies and behavior deserve a congressional majority.”
State Senator Greg Walker said he voted no after he felt targeted by several swatting attempts. Voting yes, he told CNN, would have only encouraged the dangerous harassment.
In the end, the White House’s pressure campaign was costing Republicans support in their own districts. State Senator Jean Leising told the network that, after speaking at her grandson’s middle school this past fall, practically every member of his basketball team had fielded text messages about her—”and they were all bad.”
Why Trump May Never Be Popular Again - 2025-12-12T13:38:36Z
You can watch this episode of Right Now With Perry Bacon above or by following this show on YouTube or Substack.
President Trump started the year having won the popular vote for the first time, made significant gains with voters of color and consolidated the support of Republicans on Capitol Hill, on the federal judiciary, and in statehouses. Democrats were divided between a base that wanted a second resistance and a party leadership that was chastened by Trump’s victory and felt the need to try to work with him. Things look much different at the end of 2025. Trump’s poll numbers are dismal. He’s lost ground among the blocs who shifted to him in 2024. Even Republicans on Capitol Hill are increasingly breaking with him. Meanwhile, the Democratic establishment realized the base was right and started more sharply opposing the president, uniting the party. Democratic candidates won resoundingly in November elections across the country. The party has a message, affordability, that emerged from the Democrats’ new star, New York mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani. In the latest edition of Right Now, TNR’s Grace Segers discusses how the parties’ trajectories changed in 2025 and what that means for 2026 and beyond.
Transcript: Why Trump May Never Be Popular Again - 2025-12-12T13:31:12Z
This is a lightly edited transcript of the December 11 edition of Right Now With Perry Bacon. You can watch the video here or by following this show on YouTube or Substack.
Perry Bacon: I’m joined this morning by my great colleague Grace Segers, and we’re going to talk about the year in politics on some level. We’re going to hit a few broad subjects. So, Grace, welcome.
Grace Segers: Thank you very much. Happy to be here.
Bacon: I want to start with kind of the big question—for me, at least—which is that Donald Trump wins a second term a little over a year ago. He wins almost 50 percent of the vote; he wins a plurality for the first time. He makes gains with young voters, Latinos, Asian Americans. He wins basically every swing state. So we have a lot of discussion about politics having changed in America—realignment, et cetera, et cetera.
So now we’re at a point where his approval rating has gone down from about 50 percent in early January to about 40 percent now. So my question for you is: Was that inevitable because he was unpopular? Or maybe because the country is always permanently in a backlash against whoever is president? Or do you think he could have been more popular but governed in the same way he did last time, guaranteeing that he’d be unpopular?
Segers: I think the answer’s probably an annoying answer, because you ask a yes or no question and the answer is both. Because I do think Trump has forgotten what Biden forgot and what every president seems to forget: that people blame the president for what’s happening. They don’t pay attention to the nuances or margins or the rules of congressional politics. They think, Who’s in the White House? Who’s controlling Congress? Trump is in the White House, and yet my prices are still up. I voted for him because my prices were up, so now I’m mad at him. And I think just the... every president forgets that people blame who the president is. So I think part of that is just: This was inevitable. At the same time...
Bacon: Unless prices have dramatically dropped or something that he probably doesn’t have a ton of control over?
Segers: But at the same time, he has made choices like implementing tariffs, which have contributed to an increase in prices. His plan—and the reason that people voted for him—was because they were mad about inflation, and he’s made decisions that have increased inflation. I saw that the Republican Congress passed legislation that will implement dramatic cuts to federal spending, and also Trump slashed the government size. But we’re not going to see the impact of those for, I would say, the next couple of years.
Bacon: So both? You think he made some mistakes and that this was probably—unless something changes—just the inevitable outcome? I mean, are voters perpetually unhappy? Is that what you’re getting at—that they blame the president for things that he or she cannot control?
Segers: I do think that is largely the case. And you see it on both sides of the aisle, but one example that’s coming to me right now is a lot of young progressives were really mad at Biden because their student loans weren’t forgiven to the degree that they wanted. They didn’t care that the Supreme Court is the one that overturned that. And they didn’t care that the Biden administration did forgive a lot of student loans. If it didn’t affect them directly, they thought, He promised this; it’s not happening.
And I think people don’t care about the 60-vote filibuster threshold. They don’t care about what the Supreme Court does when it comes to overturning or upholding a president’s policies. And I know I’m sounding really cynical about voters and about their capacity to appreciate the political nuances, but I am kind of cynical about voters and their capacity to appreciate political nuances.
Bacon: It’s important to note that politicians cannot be critical of voters, but we are not politicians. So let’s zoom in on the Democrats. So at the beginning of the year: Democrats in disarray, what do they do? Party divided, [then at the end] of the year? Huge wins in Virginia and New Jersey. And also the other elections happened last month, and the Democrats did well in Georgia, and they won a lot of races. In the election in Nashville, Democrats do really well. They don’t win, but they do well in Memphis. So was that also inevitable because there’s a backlash to Trump coming, or have Democrats figured out something?
Segers: I think it is a lot easier to be in the minority than it is to be in the majority. I think Republicans especially are very good at being the minority party. But I mean, as Democrats knew the first time around, when Trump gets in office, he’s unpopular. And that’s why you saw such massive gains in 2017 and 2018—because they had this concrete figure doing unpopular policies.
And then again, that’s why you see the reverse when Biden was in office. And I think partially it is just a pendulum swing, but you can’t entirely attribute it to structural factors. I do think that Democrats have gotten better at sort of cohering under a message. And you’ve seen really successful Democrats from as different as Abigail Spanberger to Zohran Mamdani talking about affordability and that being really successful.
I absolutely hate quoting James Carville, but he did go off with, “It’s the economy, stupid.” And so you can’t entirely say, “Well, this is how it goes; the minority will always do better against an unpopular president,” but I do think that is an important factor there.
Bacon: Do we have to say—in all criticism of Chuck Schumer or Hakeem Jeffries throughout the year—that if their goal is to weaken the incumbent president and oppose him, and his numbers have gone down, we have to say they are not as dumb as people on the left say they are?
Segers: They have a thankless task. Every leader who is trying to hold onto their majority or gain the majority has to hold together a lot of disparate moving parts, especially in an increasingly dysfunctional Congress. Thus far this century, the most successful speaker of the House we’ve seen has been Nancy Pelosi, and the most successful Senate majority leader we’ve seen has been Mitch McConnell.
And I think that both of them were really good at not caring at all what people thought of them. And they didn’t care if their own members completely hated them, as long as they voted for them for the majority leader vote. And I think that Schumer and Jeffries are a touch too concerned about what their members say about them. And part of it is just they don’t have the iron grip that McConnell and Pelosi had. But you know, I mean, they don’t have a great job, and you can say that they have made mistakes, because they have.
Bacon: I’m saying that they’re doing a pretty good job—that Trump’s getting more. I’m saying the opposite: I’m asking whether they’re not getting enough credit.
Segers: I wouldn’t go that far either.
Bacon: What about Thune and Mike Johnson? Is the idea that they are under Trump’s thumb, and so we don’t really have much independence? Because it feels like the House Republicans are complaining about Mike Johnson more and more. Now, I can’t tell if that’s a proxy for Trump or if he is not—I don’t follow him as carefully, I’ll be honest. So I’m just curious what you have to say about Mike Johnson and John Thune.
Segers: I do think Mike Johnson has a particularly weak grasp on his conference. And so I think a big part of that is just his members are a lot more recalcitrant than members have been in the past. They want to be on TV; they want to be “Hell no.” And he was part of that, right? When he came to Congress, he was one of those members, and now he is leading them. He’s been weak for years. But you haven’t seen anyone to replace him because no one wants the job. Because it’s a horrible job. Because...
Bacon: He shouldn’t have got the job in this weird way in the first place,
Segers: Yes, exactly. I mean, I was there for 15 rounds of votes. I sat through all of those stupid speaker votes. It was miserable. However long it took—it took a week or whatever—it’s just such an awful process that I don’t think anyone wants to do it. But at the same time, that won’t stop them from complaining about him. And I do think he is historically weak compared to some previous speakers.
Bacon: Or just someone who really had more experience.
Segers: Right. And he very much is doing what Trump wants him to do. Thune, I think, is very well liked in his conference. He always has been. It’s why he became majority leader. He’s been McConnell’s understudy for years. And I think he has a healthy understanding of what makes the Senate unique, and thus far has really kept to Senate procedure.
I don’t actually think he has been tested dramatically yet. I don’t think there really has been something where people have said, Oh, we need to get rid of the filibuster, because for the most part, senators understand: If we get rid of the filibuster, the next time we’re in the minority, we’re kind of screwed. But if in the next election, in ’26, you saw a bunch more firebrand conservatives elected, it’s not out of the realm of possibility. I think he’d be in a lot more trouble.
Bacon: So we had this interesting government shutdown. I’m curious what you made of this. The first point is that the people—and I—we’re talking about politics a lot, but I think the most important point to make is that in terms of policy, a lot of Americans lost, because the system needed to figure out how to not increase their health care premiums, and the government in Washington, which is Republicans right now, did not do anything about that. So people’s premiums have skyrocketed, and that is a horrible thing.
So it was also a political thing, too, though. On some level, I’m curious: on the one hand, the Republicans blocked Obamacare subsidies, which they oppose, I guess, and so in this sense they won that. But in another way, Trump’s polling numbers appear to have gone down in that period. The Democrats—I can’t tell that they lost the policy, but maybe they won the politics. What’s your assessment of what happened, agreeing that the government shutdown did not have the policy results it should have? What was the political impact?
Segers: I always think that a government shutdown—as you say, it’s a policy loser for everybody—but I also have this maybe hot take that it’s a political loser for everybody. As we’ve previously discussed, I do think whoever is the party in control ultimately gets blamed. But the reason that everybody loses on a political front is that people hate Congress.
Bacon: Yes, they have hated Congress for decades. People in both parties are saying this.
Segers: One of the few things Americans of all parties, beliefs, creeds, whatever can agree on is that they hate Congress. They think they’re useless, think they can’t get anything done—and I mean, they can’t.
Essentially, there’s good reason to believe that. And it’s not like Democrats are coming out of this with sky-high polling rates. They’re still polling very poorly, including among Democrats.
And I think that is just why a government shutdown is always going to be a political loser, because you have proved once again that you are literally so dysfunctional you cannot keep the government open. In what other country does that happen? What other democracy? So I think everyone loses from that one.
Bacon: So anything surprise you about this year—just thinking about the year in politics? I mean, I probably did expect Trump to be fairly unpopular because I didn’t expect him to govern much differently. I think the party of the president is always in a big predicament, so that part’s not surprising.
The Democrats don’t have much of a message but are benefiting from Trump being unpopular—or the Democrats have a message but are benefiting from Trump being in the White House. That’s not surprising to me. But I’m curious what you would say first: anything surprising this year?
Segers: It’s going to be a really boring and wonky answer. So I really enjoy tax policy. Okay. And I’ve been sort of on the side covering tax policy, specifically as related to families, for several years now. And the Child Tax Credit in particular has always interested me. As all tax nerds knew, at the end of 2025, the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act—the TCJA—was set to expire. So all of us tax nerds, we were expecting, like, a huge drag-out fight over tax policy. And then it actually ended up being addressed in the reconciliation bill pretty quickly.
The way bigger fight was over Medicaid and SNAP and other poverty policies such as that. And the Child Tax Credit was resolved pretty easily. So that—I think all tax policy people were like, Huh. We really thought that would be a bigger fight than it was. But obviously I could not predict that the specific cuts to SNAP and Medicaid would be implemented.
But I wouldn’t say anything has really surprised me. And that’s down to stuff that I am less familiar with in terms of what I report on. Like, I don’t really report on foreign affairs that often. And so everything that’s been happening in terms of declaring war on Venezuelan drug dealers—that is really, really huge for the country and the world. But it’s hard to say I find it surprising.
Bacon: So two things I would say are, first, how aggressive he was against universities and law firms early on, and how willing they were to fold did surprise me a little bit. And the New York City race—I would’ve bet a lot of money, from January to April, that Cuomo would win until everyone possible jumped in. An American socialist was, in fact, not going to be elected mayor of the capital of capitalism. So that one did surprise me. It became more obvious at some point, but if I’m being honest, that was still a surprise to me.
Segers: You know what did actually surprise me is when Trump met with Zohran Mamdani in the White House. They vibed. Like, they really hit it off. I should not have been surprised because if there’s one thing Trump loves, it’s a hot winner. Zohran Mamdani is a hot winner. And Zohran, I think, has a level of charisma that I was not personally expecting. And seeing him win over someone who is also known for his kind of weird charisma—I thought that was really interesting to see, and not what I was expecting.
Bacon: So you wrote this piece about masculinity and authenticity that I thought was really important a few months ago. Go ahead and explain it from your point of view—what you wrote. I have some follow-up questions, but explain what you were trying to get at in the piece.
Segers: So I think something... let’s actually rewind a little bit. I can’t remember if I addressed this in the piece, but Trump has a very specific brand of masculinity. It’s very macho. Very men have one place, women have another place, and he has defeated female candidates for president. The only time he lost was to a man, right?
And with his choice of Vance, Vance also represents a very ascendant type of masculine consideration: “A true man is the head of a family,” right? And there are traditional gender roles that should be implemented. So on the Republican side, I think you have those various themes. But on the Democratic side, when we talk about authenticity—like, who do you think of as an authentic character? It’s usually a man. It’s usually a white man, and that’s why you’ve seen so many political candidates lately with their plaid and their rugged working-class job.
And the one that comes to me, who has been in a mess for the past couple of months, is Graham Plattner up in Maine. He’s like, “I’m a rough-and-tumble oyster farmer.” And meanwhile, Janet Mills, the governor of Maine, is a technocrat. And Susan Collins... I think it’s very significant that he is trying to beat a woman senator with this kind of persona.
And then whenever you have women trying to show they’re authentic, it’s not usually... they’re wearing yoga pants and talking about how difficult it is to, like, be a mom, ’cause they’re going to get judged in a way that men aren’t going to. So you see women candidates highlight their national security credentials, their military credentials, and just feel like they have to be playing a kind of boys’ game. So that’s a very, like, long-winded sort of overview, but that is the general gist.
Bacon: Let me come back; let me zone in a little bit. Let me say it more harshly or whatever, I guess. But I perceived it as a Graham Plattner [piece] because it was written in September, I think. And that was right when Graham Plattner had launched, but before it turned into what his tattoos are like. I think it was in that period before. So on some level, Plattner was being praised for being authentic, and Spanberger and Mikie Sherrill were being kind of critiqued for being wooden and so on.
And to me, Mikie Sherrill and Spanberger seemed like authentic people who happen to be maybe more polished, more establishment, more military, and I think they seem authentic to themselves. And Graham Plattner, I thought, was sort of on some level a play, a little bit of a character, but playing a character we are looking for. And that was—I’m worried, I guess I read your piece and then maybe my worry is: Does such “authenticity” point you away from Kamala Harris and toward white men cosplaying?
And if you look at Plattner’s actual background, he’s not from a poor family. He’s not really from a working-class family; I think he went to a private prep school. And so I worry the search for...
The Democrats are doing worse with male voters. That is true. They should be, if the goal is to find people that appeal to male voters; that’s an honest way to put it. But saying you need to be “more authentic” is kind of lying about this. But that was my concern: It’s like Abigail Spanberger and Mikie Sherrill seem perfectly authentic and for that matter, Kamala seemed perfectly authentic to me, but they just may not be as appealing to certain voters. Right?
Segers: Right. And I think that is—very, very eloquently—put the point of my article. Clearly you’ve read it more recently than I have; as you know, you write an article and then you’re like, What did that say? But I think all political personas are a performance.
Bacon: That’s true. But Zohran is very good at acting a certain way, right?
Segers: And so I think it’s about what kind of performance politicians believe voters want to see. Right? Which is kind of a tortured way of putting it. But right now, the kind of party strategists—the powers that be—believe that voters want to see rugged white men. And therefore, that’s why you’re seeing this crop of rugged white men candidates. And so then it kind of becomes like a self-fulfilling prophecy, because if you believe voters want to see this, then there will be more of them, and then just the cycle continues.
And I think you’re right that part of it is just that Democrats believe they can win back white men. And they believe that this is the way to do it. And I think there is a level, not of dishonesty when we talk about authenticity but we don’t talk about gender and we don’t talk about race, that means we’re not having the full conversation.
Bacon: And so I’ll finish by moving toward the presidential campaign a little bit—we’re sort of gradually stepping there. How do you put this in that context? Do we see… I don’t think of Gavin Newsom or J.B. Pritzker as being rugged, exactly. So how do you see this playing out going forward? Who appeals to the white guy, which I think is what’s going on here?
Segers: It’s interesting because no one would ever accuse J.B. Pritzker of being a rugged, working-class guy. But he does have something that Trump has, and that is this veneer of success. And Pritzker is crazy wealthy—he comes from an insanely rich family. And I think that is…
Bacon: So, like Trump. He didn’t really earn it. It’s not self-made.
Segers: He’s not self-made. It seems like he says what he means. And I think part of that is just the confidence that comes from being a rich white guy from birth. Like, there’s kind of an insulation there. But it is another form of masculinity—of, like, This is a rich, successful guy. I could be like that, even if it’s like, No, you weren’t born a billionaire.
There’s something aspirational about it that I think still appeals to people. And with Newsom, that brand of masculinity is very, like, California shiny polish. But there is still that sort of aspirational, wealthy element to it. So I guess the big takeaway here is that there are a lot of types of masculinity, and because of the way our society is structured, men always have the advantage. Like, if you have a super-rich woman, she is out of touch, right? You have a super-rich man, it’s like, Ooh, how did he get there? So it’s that kind of thing, I think.
Bacon: I guess Whitmer is not acting like someone who wants to run for president. I don’t think AOC is either. I’m struggling to think of who—not because I think there’s a lack of qualified women in the Democratic Party, but because I don’t feel like any of them are positioning themselves. By contrast, Shapiro and Gavin Newsom are running for president. Andy Beshear is running for president. They’re sort of running really hard right now, I would say.
Is this pervasive sense that we have to win the white guys so deep that the party is informally signaling: if you’re not white-guy-friendly—or really, if you’re not a white guy, [don’t run] in some ways?
Segers: I do think there may be that underlying message. I also think that, for their part, women politicians have seen what happens to women who run. And they’ve seen the way that women candidates are held to a higher level of scrutiny—the way the public just automatically assumes the worst of them. And talk all day about the flawed candidacy of Clinton and Harris and how they should have done X, Y, Z, and how they had all this baggage, and Harris wasn’t running until August and blah, blah, blah.
But when it comes down to it, the first time we saw two major-party nominees that were women, they were run down. I think a lot of women politicians are going to go, Why would I put myself through that? What is the benefit for me when running for president is incredibly hard? It costs a ton of money, and I’m going to be having to fight uphill the entire way.
And then being governor. I think I would never be a politician because it sucks. But if you have to be a politician, being governor is pretty sweet. You are the god-king of your personal fiefdom. And you have this level of power. That’s awesome.
So I never blame members of Congress when they leave to go be a governor. It’s like, yeah, of course you would. But if you’re Gretchen Whitmer, and maybe she doesn’t know what she’s going to do next, that’s when you start thinking about running for president. But, like, if you’ve got a pretty sweet job going on, then why sacrifice that so you can be absolutely battered for six months before losing?
Bacon: Well, that seems true and depressing, but probably true. What do you anticipate for 2026? I anticipate that Trump will get a little more unpopular. There’s probably a floor of 35 percent or so, but I think he’ll get more unpopular.
I think the Democrats will win the House unless the gerrymandering is really changed. The Democrats are big favorites to win the House. North Carolina is the Senate seat they might be very competitive in. I know we always say this, but Roy Cooper actually was the governor. Maine, I don’t know, because I can’t tell if Plattner is going to win the primary.
But I think you’ll see a narrow Senate majority for Democrats. So I think you’re going to see a pretty strong Democratic year, and I think you’re going to see more Republicans on Capitol Hill, governors, and at the state level criticizing Trump. And I think you’re going to see sort of a break from Trump.
Maybe not Bush 2006 levels, but something like this where the party is going to start looking out for itself a little more and Trump a little less. So that’s kind of what I think, but maybe that’s too optimistic. So we’ll see.
Segers: What I’m really interested to see is that we are going to begin to see some of the potential political impact of policy changes. You know, a lot of what passed in the reconciliation law over the summer doesn’t go into effect until after the midterms, and that’s very deliberate.
But we are going to be seeing some immediate impact. So SNAP work requirements are already in. We are seeing the impact if people drop their healthcare because they can’t afford the double or tripled, quadruple ACA marketplace options. What political impact is that going to have? I think that’s going to be a really interesting dynamic going into 2026.
One final thing I’ll say is: If the Supreme Court upholds that Trump can fire members of independent agencies and doesn’t carve out the Fed, and Trump fires Jerome Powell. If that happens, the economy is going to go into free fall. That’s going to be massive. Every single economist that I’ve talked to has told me that is going to be... if that happened, that would be very, very bad.
Bacon: Yeah, I guess I knew that. But I’m glad you sort of reminded me of how important that ruling is going to be.
Segers: I think if I had to guess, I would say the Supreme Court would probably be like, Trump can fire independent agencies—except the Fed; don’t touch the Fed.
That would be my guess. If they are not specific enough on that front, and if his advisers can’t convince him not to fire Jerome Powell, then I think that’ll be a really interesting thing to see.
Bacon: Okay. well thanks for joining me. I’ll end it there.
Segers: Good to see you.
Transcript: Trump Explodes Over Cratering Polls as GOP Losses Worsen - 2025-12-12T11:34:41Z
The following is a lightly edited transcript of the December 12 episode of the Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.
Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
This week, Democrats notched more big wins that show President Trump is really killing his party. A Democrat won the Miami mayoralty for the first time in decades, fueled by a big shift in Hispanic votes away from the GOP. Dems also flipped a Georgia state legislative seat in a district that Trump won by double digits, among other victories. It’s now clear that Trump’s immigration agenda is a big part of this story. A new poll has his approval on the issue in the toilet, and Kristi Noem got badly humiliated at a hearing under tough questioning from Democrats. And in broader terms, Trump knows he’s in political trouble. He unleashed a bizarre self-pitying tirade in which he all but admitted that his polling is bad, which may be a first. William Saletan, a staff writer for The Bulwark, has a great new piece arguing that at its core, Trump’s agenda has now become one of explicit ethnic persecution. We’re going to talk about that and about how badly this is politically backfiring for Trump. Will, great to have you on, man.
William Saletan: Hey, Greg. Thanks for having me.
Sargent: OK, so Democrat Eileen Higgins won the mayoralty in Miami—the first time a Democrat has done this in decades. There was an 18-point shift to Democrats overall and also big shifts among Hispanics. CNN polling analyst Harry Enten talked about Trump’s broader national decline among Latinos and also about what happened in Miami. Listen to this.
Harry Enten (voiceover): Just look at Donald Trump’s not approval among Latinos. In February, it was minus two points. Not too hot to trot, but not that bad either. Look at where it is now. Minus 38 points. That is a shift of 36 points in the wrong direction. The completely wrong direction for Donald Trump, and what the race in Miami illustrates—I was looking at the localities, locality by locality by locality—what you see is these huge shift, these heavily Hispanic neighborhoods of Miami against the Republican nominee from the Donald Trump baseline. And so to me, this is an encapsulation of what we see. We saw it in Arizona’s seventh congressional district, right? That special election earlier this year, again, a heavily Hispanic district.
Sargent: There, Harry talked about how Trump has lost 36 points nationally among Latinos and talked about how, in Miami, heavily Hispanic neighborhoods moved to the Democrats. Will, I can remember that only a year ago, one big takeaway from Trump’s 2024 win was his big inroads with Latinos. And yet now, all of a sudden, one of the big stories at the moment is how fast all that disintegrated. What do you make of that?
Saletan: Yeah, there’s now a lot of numbers to back up the thesis that the shift of ethnic minorities, of Blacks and Latinos in particular, to Donald Trump in 2024 has reversed. In the exit polls, which we have in New Jersey and Virginia from last month, you can just see massive shifts in ... I wrote a piece about this a week or so ago. I’m just looking at the numbers I had there.
Compared to 2024 in Virginia, Blacks and Latinos shifted 13 and 15 points. So 15 points, a little bit under for the two groups, towards the Democrats away from Trump. So that’s in the 2025 gubernatorial election in Virginia versus the 2024 presidential in that same state. In New Jersey, it was twice that. It was a 24-point shift among Latinos, 28-point shift among Blacks—again, away from Trump in the New Jersey governor’s race.
So that, combined with the races that you just talked about, illustrates that this is not isolated. This is now kind of a broad national trend, in which a lot of minorities who thought that Donald Trump was going to be their guy have decided, Eh, maybe not so much. And the Republican candidates down the ballot are paying the price.
Sargent: I think Trump himself knows he’s in political trouble. He unleashed this strange tirade on Truth Social. I’m going to read some of it now:
“We are respected as a nation again. When will I get credit for having created, with no inflation, perhaps the greatest economy in the history of our country? When will polls reflect the greatness of America at this point in time and how bad it was just one year ago?”
Will, all that stuff about inflation and the economy is just complete nonsense, but that aside, note that he admits his polling is very bad. I haven’t seen that before, have you?
Saletan: No, Greg, I’m kind of shocked. This might be the first time that Donald Trump has acknowledged real numbers. I mean, as you point out, like, he’s denying the real numbers about the economy.
I can’t tell you—I watch everything this guy says. I know that’s insane and masochistic. I watch everything he says; I have notes on it. I can’t count the number of times that he has said over the past, since he’s been back in power, that prices are coming down, that he’s bringing prices down, specifically things like groceries.
I mean, you don’t have to look further than the consumer price index and the all-government reports on grocery prices to know that that’s just B.S., right? But he lies about the numbers. And then the problem is Americans, of course, who actually go to grocery stores and buy things are like, Actually, that doesn’t seem to be true. So they think things are getting worse.
And then he has to, like, deal with that polling information, and is he going to admit it or deny it? And he’s denied it. And I’m just kind of shocked at that post because it acknowledges at least the indirect truth of the polls being negative on it.
Sargent: He really does. It’s really surprising. I want to underscore, though, that immigration is a big part of Trump’s unpopularity. I think that’s a difficult thing for a lot of people to get their heads around, but a new Associated Press poll has his approval on this issue down at 39 percent.
That’s supposed to be his strong issue. Much better on border security, but immigration overall, 39 percent. Now let’s listen to Trump at a rally earlier this week.
Donald Trump (voiceover): We had a meeting, and I say why is it we only take people from shithole countries, right? Why can’t we have some people from Norway, Sweden, just a few. Let us have a few. From Denmark, do mind sending us a few people? Send us some nice people, you mind? But we always take people from Somalia, places that are a disaster, right? Filthy, dirty, disgusting, ridden with crime. The only thing they’re good at is going after ships.
Sargent: So during that rant, Trump also said he’s announced a permanent pause on migration from Third World countries. And in addition to all this talk about Somalia you heard there, he’s been saying that people from that country are garbage, and he’s been attacking Representative Ilhan Omar in really the most vile and disgusting ways you can imagine.
Will, in addition to what you wrote—which is that this is just naked ethnic persecution—what we heard there from Trump is also the voice of someone who’s just unshakably certain that this is a winning and popular message, don’t you think?
Saletan: Yeah, of course. He’s looking at a crowd. I mean, picture yourself in Donald Trump’s shoes at a Trump rally. You’re looking out over the podium. What are you seeing? You’re seeing mostly a sea of white people, and you’re seeing a sea of white people cheering you as you slur various ethnic minorities, in particular the Somalis lately, right?
So you live in this bubble where everybody agrees with you, and you generally are in denial of polls, although we just had an exception there. So yeah, you’re gonna think that people are voting your way.
And of course, the 2020 election denial itself is about Donald Trump’s inability to accept that outside his bubble, people voted against him, right? That can’t be true. So he thinks this issue is a winner for him. I gotta underscore, Greg, that I am kind of dismayed that there isn’t more of a backlash against this.
I mean, it was 10 years ago that Donald Trump stood in—I think it was South Carolina—and called for “a ban on all Muslims coming into this country until we can figure out what the hell is going on,” he said. Greg, correct me if I’m wrong: Mike Pence and a bunch of other Republicans at that time said, No, that’s not America. We don’t agree with that.
Sargent: No, that did happen, Will. In fact, I remember very, very vividly that Paul Ryan condemned Donald Trump’s anti-Muslim bigotry at some point. I can’t remember whether it was the campaign or in the presidency, but he absolutely went out there and did that. Republicans, during the first term, or at least during the 2016 campaign and the run-up to that—they absolutely did condemn this kind of stuff, and now they’re 100 percent on board with it.
Saletan: Yeah, it’s shocking to me. I put out an APB looking for any Republican officeholder who had criticized Trump over his categorical slurs against Somalis—American citizens of Somali descent. I want to be clear: It wasn’t even about legal status. It was just, you are from this country originally.
What I got back, Greg, was somebody found a Minnesota state senator—a Republican state senator in Minnesota—and that was it. If anybody else finds anything, let me know. Otherwise, it seems like in 10 years the Republican Party has gone from at least being willing to speak up against a categorical smear and a call for a categorical legal action against Muslims to complete silence or affirmation when the president does this to people of a certain ancestry.
Sargent: Yeah, they’re 100 percent on board with the ethnonationalism. I want to bring up another way this is all backfiring. To go back to Miami for a second, Eileen Higgins directly targeted Trump’s immigration agenda in numerous ways. The Guardian reported that she criticized not just the ICE raids, which are of course the most visible and dramatic, but also Trump’s ending of Temporary Protected Status. And that resonated among Cubans, Venezuelans, Haitians.
Will, again, Trump’s gains with those types of demographics in 2024 were the thing that got everyone theorizing about a realignment. But now you can see Trump’s actual policies just driving those voters away in droves. And I think that’s a positive. By the way, one other thing we should remember that we were told about 2024 is that those working-class, nonwhite voters, including immigrant voters, liked certain aspects of Trump’s strict immigration policies, but you know, it’s turning out not so much, right?
Saletan: Yeah, so I think if you go back to the votes of ethnic minorities in this country—let’s take Latinos. I come from Texas. Now, in Texas, there’s a lot of people with surnames like Gonzales and Rodriguez who will tell you they’re white. Their families have been in this country for generations. So yeah, they count as Latinos, but they feel like they are part of this country, they are legal, and they don’t like people crossing the border without legal authorization. And they think—they thought, a lot of them—Well, that’s who Trump is going after. I’m safe; it’s just these people crossing the border illegally that he’s going after.
What has happened since then? Well, one thing is that ICE has gone around rounding people up—not just people who are here illegally but people who are here legally. People who look like they might be here illegally—i.e., they have the wrong color of skin, they’re speaking the wrong language. So they’re using these cues. And if you are a Latino person in this country, you might look at this and say, Wait a minute, this isn’t what I signed up for.
And the other thing, Greg, is that Trump posted on Truth Social that he was gonna denaturalize people? So that means you’re an American citizen. You were born in another country, you immigrated here, you swore an oath to this country—which, Greg, I never did. I don’t know about you, but, like, I didn’t have to go through a naturalization ceremony. So you’re just born here. So these are people who are American citizens. We told them they were citizens, and Trump is threatening to revoke their status and deport them.
So if you are a Latino in this country, you might look around and say, I thought I was safe, but apparently even being a citizen will not protect me if I am speaking Spanish or if my skin is brown or whatever Trump chooses to go after.
Sargent: Right. And your piece got at that very beautifully. And I want to talk a little bit more about that. I think as you wrote, Trump and Stephen Miller really thought they could test-run this fascism with shock and awe against immigrants and that voters would actually rally to it. If you recall, Stephen Miller was doing all sorts of very ostentatious things for a while there, like lining the White House driveway with mug shots of Latinos and migrants and that sort of thing.
And it was very clear that they thought that they were going to rally a majority of the country behind the type of agenda you’re talking about: the fully ethnonationalist, openly fascist agenda. But, you know, I think at least politically we’re seeing a surprising backlash to that. Acknowledging your point about maybe not quite the backlash we want, especially among Republicans, I do think that we’ve gotten a backlash to the explicit ethnic persecution. What do you think?
Saletan: Well, it’s hard to tell about this latest round. I mean, you can make the case that ... let’s take the Miami election there. And of course the exit polls in Virginia, New Jersey, they break it down by Black, Latino, Asian American. In Miami, they can sort of break it down by neighborhood. So you can see some effect there. In the case of the Somalis, so this is Trump’s new attack. Again, part of what the ethnic demagogue, Trump; part of the strategy he uses is, “Who can I find?” I’m gonna go ahead and draw this analogy. A child predator looks for young people, young women who don’t have families. He looks for someone: “Who can I pick off? Who has no friends? Who has nobody to protect them?”
It’s a predatory mentality. Donald Trump thinks about ethnicity exactly the same way. “Who can I target in this country? What ethnic group can I go after? Or what religious group can I go after? Who is politically weak, who is vulnerable, and who will no one identify with?” And so Latinos are not as juicy a target for that kind of predator as Somalis. The Somalis are generally Black. They are ... you know, in the case of Ilhan Omar, he makes fun of her for wearing a turban, Muslim. You know, he posted—honestly, he reposted on Truth—just a video of Somali Americans standing around listening to music and singing and dancing because he thought that would scare his white audience.
Sargent: Right, that was inherently something to mock and be disgusted by.
Saletan: Yeah, and I want to stress to people that what Donald Trump is doing right now is of the same kind, if not the same degree as—I’m really trying hard not to use the word Nazis right now—but some of these Trump rallies look a lot like Nuremberg and what the crowds cheer for. They cheer for him calling on Ilhan Omar to send her back. Can I just read you three of his lines? Just to be clear on how categorical his words are.
This is over the last couple of weeks. Trump said about Somalia: “If you look at Somalia, they’re taking over Minnesota. We are not taking their people anymore.” OK, that’s... there is nothing there about welfare fraud, about crime. It’s just, “We don’t like this country or anyone from it.” Another one: A reporter told him that Jacob Frey, the mayor of Minneapolis, said he was proud to have a large Somalian community—a Somali community. Trump says, “I wouldn’t be proud.” He said that he’s a fool—about Frey. “I wouldn’t be proud to have the largest Somalian community.” That’s a quote from Donald Trump. “The Somalians, the Somalians should be out of here. They’ve destroyed our country.”
Imagine, Greg, if any politician in this country said that about the Jews, OK? It is absolutely of the same kind. And one more, he said—this was at his rally in Pennsylvania a couple of days ago—about the Somali immigrants in Minnesota: “They ought to get ’em the hell out of here. They don’t work. 91 percent unemployment”—that’s a fake stat—“The people from Somalia, they hate our country.” The people. So this is raw ethnic venom. And Trump is spewing it, and his crowds are endorsing it. I would love to believe, Greg, that there is going to be a backlash in this country to that, but I have not seen it yet.
Sargent: Well, maybe not to that yet, but what I guess I would point to is maybe what looks a little like a split-screen moment, right? On the one hand, I think it’s really true, as you point out, that broadly speaking, a lot of Americans are just not really tuned into the explicit ethnic persecution, the explicitly fascist nature of it. In other words, a lot of Americans probably hear this stuff and mostly say, It’s just Trump being crazy Trump, you know, and they’re not sort of saying to themselves, Holy shit, this is ethnic persecution. This is fascism.
And yet on the other hand, you’re getting these spontaneous community-wide uprisings against the ICE raids, against arrests. People are pulling out their phones. This is kind of a new type of community that’s almost like a new type of solidarity that’s kind of erupting spontaneously in reaction to this kind of thing. And I think that’s pretty surprising in a positive way. Don’t you think?
Saletan: Yeah. I mean, I do think that people are reacting negatively to the ICE tactics. So Greg, earlier you were reading from Trump’s Truth Social post where he talks about, complains about not getting credit for what he’s done on the economy. The other issue where he has complained a lot lately about not getting credit is immigration. He said, “I want to talk about immigration, but my staff won’t let me. They say, ‘Nobody cares about it.’” So the problem for Trump is that he did cut off people coming across the border. And instead of getting credit for that, Americans are like, OK, what’s the next problem? That went away.
So he’s not getting the affirmative credit that he used to get from people who were really pissed off about that issue. But instead, what’s happening is the ICE raids are triggering all the negative reaction. Americans are seeing what it looks like when you send masked people out to pick people off the street in vans and take them away and ship them to foreign torture prisons, right? And this is not what they had in mind.
Sargent: Yes, this is what ethnonationalism looks like, basically. And on that score, we have some comic relief to close on. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem was utterly humiliated by Congressman Seth Magaziner. Listen to this.
Seth Magaziner (voiceover): How many United States military veterans have you deported?
Kristi Noem (voiceover): Sir, we have not deported U.S. citizens or military veterans.
Seth Magaziner (voiceover): I don’t believe you served in the military. I haven’t either. But I think you and I can agree that as Americans, we owe everything to those who have served our country in uniform, particularly those who have served in combat. Do you agree with that?
Kristi Noem (voiceover): Sir, I believe that people that are in the United States that are citizens have legal status here. Those ...
Seth Magaziner (voiceover): Madam Secretary, we are joined on Zoom by a gentleman named Sejun Park. He is a United States Army combat veteran who was shot twice while serving our country in Panama in 1989. Like many veterans, he struggled with PTSD and substance abuse after his service. He was arrested in the 1990s for some minor drug offenses—nothing serious. He never hurt anyone besides himself, and he’s been clean and sober for 14 years. He is a combat veteran, a Purple Heart recipient. He has sacrificed more for this country than most people ever have. Earlier this year, you deported him to Korea, a country he hasn’t lived in since he was seven years old.
Sargent: So I think this exposes the core of the whole thing that we’re talking about: the white nationalist and fascist agenda that you wrote about. It requires mass removals for ethnic engineering purposes. It requires the mass persecution of particular ethnicities and the threats of denaturalization and all that.
But the bottom line is Americans—most Americans—do not want people who are not criminals to be deported, even if they’re here on an undocumented basis, particularly if they’ve been here for years, particularly if they’ve woven themselves into communities, particularly if they’ve had jobs. And I think that’s heartening. And I think that really explains in a big way, or at least partly explains, why Trump is in the toilet in the polls. Your closing thoughts on that?
Saletan: There’s actually three levels to what happened there with Noem. So the first one is Trump said, We’re going to go after the criminals. And so what Magaziner is saying is, What about this guy? He’s not a criminal. Some trivial drug thing from a long time ago ... a veteran.
So secondly, he’s a veteran, and Kristi Noem seems unaware that there exist veterans who do not have legal status in this country but who have done all the things for us that show that they’re not just an ordinary contributor in the community but have gone above and beyond and taken bullets for us.
And then the third thing is, beyond that, you now have the president saying, Never mind you’re not a criminal, never mind if you’re a veteran or if you contribute to the community in other ways, if you have legal status, if you are a citizen of this country, I am threatening to denaturalize you and send you back to the country of your ancestors. And that is so far beyond what anybody, any decent person in America signed up for.
So we have to hope, Greg, that the American population, that the American electorate, is mostly people who do not think that just because you are from a certain country or your ancestors came from a certain country that you should be sent back there.
Sargent: And Will, to your point, I really do hope that we get some sort of real, substantial, sustained outcry in defense of Somalis in particular, because, as you point out, they’re really kind of ripe for victimization. Will Saletan, man, it’s so good to talk to you. Thanks for coming on. You’re always good to talk to.
Saletan: Thanks, Greg.
Something Is Rotten in Chloe Zhao’s Hamnet - 2025-12-12T11:00:00Z
“Time and again,” wrote George Steiner in his 1996 essay “A Preface to the Hebrew Bible,” “I have sought to imagine, albeit indistinctly, Shakespeare remarking at home or to some intimate on whether or not work on Hamlet or Othello had, that day, gone well or poorly.”
Steiner’s thought experiment underlines the tendency we have to see certain artists or historical figures as somehow existing beyond the quotidian, so that the revelation of everyday routines or hobbies takes on a mythic cast: Sylvia Plath keeping bees, or Jack Kerouac playing fantasy sports. In 2020, the Irish author Maggie O’Farrell offered her own variation on this problem, one borne of her own writerly experience. “When you’re sitting at your computer, immersed in the world you’ve created, and have to write: ‘William Shakespeare had his breakfast…’ it’s impossible not to think: I’m an eejit,” she told The Guardian. “Even calling him William seems colossally presumptuous.”
Whatever else you can say of Chloé Zhao’s Hamnet—adapted by the director and O’Farrell from the latter’s award-winning novel of the same name—it is not a tale told by an eejit. Rather, it seeks to imagine, with all of the distinction that its Oscar-winning director and brand-name stars can muster, the process by which William—you can call him Will, played by Paul Mescal—conjured up the world and characters of his most famous play: an endeavor that’s shown going well before it goes poorly. Despite excelling as a husband and father in verdant Stratford, our man feels squeezed by his domestic responsibilities, unable to bear down and scribe while there’s so much sun-dappled frolicking about; he gets himself to a flat in London, while his wife, Agnes (Jessie Buckley), holds down the fort with their three children. In the city, Will has a room of his own, and time enough at last. He pauses, he struggles, he searches inwardly for le mot juste. He gazes out over the water, wondering: To be or not to be?
Sadly, Will isn’t shown eating breakfast, as per O’Farrell, or drowning his sorrows in a bar with Christopher Marlowe as he did in Shakespeare in Love, the upper-middlebrow crowd-pleaser to which Zhao’s exercise in Elizabethan fan fiction plays as a melodramatic companion piece. Shakespeare in Love was a featherweight romantic fantasy, and a skillful one; no less than Harold Bloom conceded its merits as a neatly brocaded time waster. “I mustn’t snipe,” he told Newsweek in 1999 after watching the film on VHS, “because this is a charming movie. It does capture ‘Romeo and Juliet.’ And that I think is the glory of it.”
Charm is not on the docket in Hamnet, although it does have similar aspirations to award-season glory. Coming off the blockbuster debacle of Marvel’s Eternals—a suboptimal follow-up to the gritty, independently produced best picture winner Nomadland—Zhao has returned with serious intentions. Hamnet is a swing for the fences and, as such, determinedly lugubrious from beginning to end: a litany of furrowed brows and primal screams, awash in blood and sweat and other precious bodily fluids.
O’Farrell subtitled her book A Novel of the Plague, and the story is tinged with death at every turn; the premise, which she devised during her time at Cambridge, is that certain key characters and themes in Hamlet were directly inspired by a fugue of grief.
During his sojourn in London, Will learns that his 11-year-old daughter, Judith (played in the film by Olivia Lynes), has contracted the Black Death, and he rushes home to be at her bedside. Upon his arrival, he’s overjoyed to find Judith healthy, and then in the same breath devastated to learn that her twin brother, Hamnet (Jacobi Jupe), had been fatally infected and passed away in the night. The siblings had always liked to playfully trade places around the house, in order to trick their parents; in his final hours, Hamnet held his ailing sister close and told her that he’d die in her stead. To quote the Bard himself: “If you have tears, prepare to shed them now.”
That Shakespeare fathered a child called Hamnet who died before Shakespeare wrote Hamlet is a reliably concrete detail that’s been passed back and forth over the years by scholars and biographers. It’s ultimately little more than a footnote, but O’Farrell deploys it industriously, as a means of collapsing the historical and rhetorical distance between us and an impossibly famous subject, and as a skeleton key unlocking his genius. (The book has sold over two million copies, a total likely to be juiced by fresh copies featuring Mescal’s hangdog-handsome mug.)
Of course, to attempt to reduce a work as complex as Hamlet to a single thesis—or to a sliver of tidy art-imitates-life exposition—is a fool’s errand. (The best writing inspired by Hamlet recognizes this: Tom Stoppard’s superlatively absurd play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, for instance, honors Hamlet’s spaciousness by constructing an entire parallel narrative on its margins.) Still, there is something genuinely elegant in the way Hamnet navigates Hamlet’s labyrinths of self-reflexivity. O’Farrell’s setup effectively echoes Hamlet’s plan, which is to “catch the conscience” of his uncle—to determine whether his uncle is guilty of murdering his father—by making his uncle watch a play about a similar crime; in Hamnet, the task is to search Shakespeare’s own conscience by retracing the creation and performance of Hamlet itself. With a central character so preoccupied by mournful self-incrimination, the play’s existentialist textures of angst and indecision, as well as its morbid inventory of familial betrayal and flawed father figures, carry a potent charge of survivor’s guilt.
“Never take for granted that your children’s hearts beat,” says Will’s mother, Mary (Emily Watson), in a portentous monologue ported over wholesale from the book. What Zhao’s film seeks to dramatize, in as much sound and fury as humanly possible, is what it might feel like for a parent to internalize that lesson, and how those emotions might then be wrangled and channeled in the service of some larger and enduring act of artistic catharsis.
In her first two features, Songs My Brothers Taught Me (2015) and The Rider (2017), Zhao worked primarily with nonprofessional performers (including several residents of a Sioux reservation in South Dakota), cultivating a persuasive (and trendy) sense of hybridity. She repeated—and complicated—that tactic in Nomadland (2020), which dropped no less than Her Majesty Frances McDormand among a carefully curated menagerie of everyday folks in the hope that her performance as a self-styled drifter, chasing a seasonal gig at an Amazon fulfillment center, might duly absorb the salt of the earth.
Hamnet is the director’s first period piece, and while the glancing, magic-hour lyricism of the cinematography (by the excellent Łukasz Żal, who shot The Zone of Interest) connects it to its predecessors, Mescal’s and Buckley’s performances exist in a new register. Instead of trying to penetrate the hardened exteriors of amateur actors—or coaxing an old pro to act natural—Zhao means to steer two thoroughbred thespians through the cinematic equivalent of the Preakness. Buckley’s Agnes is first seen curled up in a muddy hollow—literally tree-hugging—linking her in the film’s meticulously on-the-nose imagery with capital-N Nature; if it’s possible to overact lonely repose, Buckley’s body language fits the bill. It’s not her fault: Hamnet is so determined to establish Agnes as an elemental presence—with quasi-uncanny psychic abilities, a gorgeous pet falcon, and a nasty fairy-tale stepmother to match—that it pushes a technically brilliant actress perilously into the realm of Gaia-ish caricature.
What makes Buckley remarkable in her best roles is her quality of emotional translucence, the way her feelings seem to burn through her skin. Here, though, the temperature has been jacked up so that her gestures and line readings all more or less melt together, while Mescal—after Aftersun, the millennial patron saint of on-screen Sad Dads—tries to compensate with a coolness that, while exquisitely shaded in places, succeeds mainly in making Will a sloe-eyed cipher. Both actors make something of the aftermath of Hamnet’s death, reproducing the stark and telling contrasts of behavior in O’Farrell’s novel, with Buckley inhabiting the omniscient narrator’s observation that “there are many different ways to cry … the sudden outpouring of tears, the deep, racking sobs, the soundless and endless leaking of water from the eyes” and Mescal deftly approximating Will’s reaction upon seeing the body: “the sound that comes out of him is choked and smothered, like that of an animal forced to bear a great weight.”
It’s hard not to be affected by moments like these, or by how Zhao visualizes the dying Hamnet in limbo: wandering a bare stage, wondering aloud where he’s gone, before exiting through a darkened portal. The sheer ferocity of Hamnet’s assault is an achievement of sorts, and yet the boundary between humane empathy and award-baiting shamelessness—a tightrope walked by many great artists, and also plenty of dubious ones—keeps blurring. Part of the problem is that Will and Agnes’s odd-couple, star-crossed courtship and subsequent bucolic family life are presented with such rib-nudging ominousness—the kids arrayed playfully as the witches from Macbeth; the death of the aforementioned family falcon—that things feel heightened (and phony) before the arrival of a paradigm-shifting trauma. Meanwhile, on a formal level, Zhao never stops pummeling us. The use of Max Richter’s luminous composition “On the Nature of Daylight” gives the game away; the piece is such a musical cheat code that pretty much any auteur with a Spotify account has used it, so that when we’re supposed to be gripped by the climactic-performance-within-the-film of Hamlet, we’re remembering money shots from Arrival and The Last of Us instead.
It’s not too much of a spoiler to reveal that Agnes—at this point estranged from her husband, having been heartbroken by his decision to return to work on his opus instead of staying behind to mourn—is front row center at the premiere of Hamlet, or that the film’s structure obliges us to see the play via a kind of dual vision: through our own collective familiarity with what is basically a secular myth—a relocated Greek tragedy with Freud waiting in the wings to analyze it—and through Agnes’s anguished, gradually widening eyes as she comes to understand the true nature of her husband’s achievement, which was to locate and resurrect their son so that he might be bestowed on the world, as a gift.
Whether or not you buy the underlying cause-and-effect psychology, it’s a lovely idea, and so is the staging whereby the company’s boyish, too-too-fragile Hamlet (Noah Jupe) reaches out—beyond the stage directions, and, by extension, from the realm of fiction into the reality it shadows—to commune with one particularly stricken audience member. It’s grand, it’s ambitious, and it works, maybe in spite of itself; though this be corniness, “yet there is method in ’t.”
Nope, Billionaire Tom Steyer Is Not a Bellwether of Climate Politics - 2025-12-12T11:00:00Z
What should we make of billionaire Tom Steyer’s reinvention as a populist candidate for California governor, four years after garnering only 0.72 percent of the popular vote in the 2020 Democratic presidential primary, despite obscene spending from his personal fortune? Is it evidence that he’s a hard man to discourage? (In that race, he dropped almost $24 million on South Carolina alone.) Is it evidence that billionaires get to do a lot of things the rest of us don’t? Or is it evidence that talking about climate change is for losers and Democrats need to abandon it?
Politico seems to think it’s the third one: Steyer running a populist gubernatorial campaign means voters don’t care about global warming.
“The billionaire environmental activist who built his political profile on climate change—and who wrote in his book last year that ‘climate is what matters most right now, and nothing else comes close’—didn’t mention the issue once in the video launching his campaign for California governor,” reporter Noah Baustin wrote recently. “That was no oversight.” Instead, “it reflects a political reality confronting Democrats ahead of the midterms, where onetime climate evangelists are running into an electorate more worried about the climbing cost of electricity bills and home insurance than a warming atmosphere.”
It’s hard to know how to parse a sentence like this. The “climbing cost of electricity bills and home insurance” is, indisputably, a climate issue. Renewable energy is cheaper than fossil fuels, and home insurance is spiking because increasingly frequent and increasingly severe weather events—driven by climate change—are making large swaths of the country expensive or impossible to insure. The fact that voters are struggling to pay for utilities and insurance, therefore, is not evidence that they don’t care about climate change. Instead, it’s evidence that climate change is a kitchen table issue, and politicians are, disadvantageously, failing to embrace the obviously populist message that accompanies robust climate policy. This is a problem with Democratic messaging, not a problem with climate as a topic.
The piece goes on: “Climate concern has fallen in the state over time. In 2018, when Gov. Gavin Newsom was running for office, polling found that 57 percent of likely California voters considered climate change a very serious threat to the economy and quality of life for the state’s future. Now, that figure is 50 percent.”
This may sound persuasive to you. But in fact, it’s a highly selective reading of the PPIC survey data linked above. What the poll actually found is that the proportion of Californians calling climate change a “very serious” threat peaked at 57 percent in 2019, fell slightly in subsequent years, then fell precipitously by 11 points between July 2022 and July 2023, before rising similarly precipitously from July 2024 to July 2025.
Why did it fall so quickly from 2022 to 2023? Sure, maybe people stopped caring about climate change. Or maybe instead, the month after the 2022 poll, Congress passed the Inflation Reduction Act, the most significant climate policy in U.S. history, and people stopped being quite so worried. Why did concern then rise rapidly between July 2024 and July 2025? Well, between those two dates, Trump won the presidential election and proceeded, along with Republicans in Congress, to dismantle anything remotely resembling climate policy. The Inflation Reduction Act fell apart.
I’m not saying this is the only way to read this data. But consider this: The percentage of respondents saying they were somewhat or very worried about members of their household being affected by natural disasters actually went up over the same period. The percentage saying air pollution was “a more serious health threat in lower-income areas” nearby went up. Those saying flooding, heat waves, and wildfires should be considered “a great deal” when siting new affordable housing rose a striking 12 percentage points from 2024 to 2025, and those “very concerned” about rising insurance costs “due to climate risks” rose 14 percentage points.
This is not a portrait of an electorate that doesn’t care about climate change. It’s a portrait of an electorate that may actually be very ready to hear a politician convincingly embrace climate populism—championing affordability and better material conditions for working people, in part by protecting them from the predatory industries driving a cost-of-living crisis while poisoning people.
This is part of a broader problem. Currently, there’s a big push from centrist Democratic institutions to argue that the party should abandon climate issues in order to win elections. The evidence for this is mixed, at best. As TNR’s Liza Featherstone recently pointed out, Democrats’ striking victories last month showed that candidates fusing climate policy with an energy affordability message did very well. Aaron Regunberg went into further detail on why talking about climate change is a smart strategy: “Right now,” he wrote, “neither party has a significant trust advantage on ‘electric utility bills’ (D+1) or ‘the cost of living’ (R+1). But Democrats do have major trust advantages on ‘climate change’ (D+14) and ‘renewable energy development’ (D+6). By articulating how their climate and clean energy agenda can address these bread-and-butter concerns, Democrats can leverage their advantage on climate to win voters’ trust on what will likely be the most significant issues in 2026 and 2028.”
One of the troubles with climate change in political discourse is that some people’s understanding of environmental politics begins and ends with the spotted owl logging battles in the 1990s. This is the sort of attitude that drives the assumption that affordability policy and climate policy are not only distinct but actually opposed. But that’s wildly disconnected from present reality.
Maybe Tom Steyer isn’t the guy to illustrate that! But his political fortunes, either way, don’t say much at all about climate messaging more broadly.
Stat of the Week
3x as many infant deaths
A new study finds that babies of mothers “whose drinking water wells were downstream of PFAS releases” died at almost three times the rate in their first year of life as babies of mothers who did not live downstream of PFAS contamination. Read The Washington Post’s report on the study here.
What I’m Reading
More than 200 environmental groups demand halt to new US datacenters
An open letter calls on Congress to pause all approvals of new data centers until regulation catches up, due to problems such as data centers’ voracious energy consumption, greenhouse gas emissions, and water use. From The Guardian’s report:
The push comes amid a growing revolt against moves by companies such as Meta, Google and Open AI to plow hundreds of billions of dollars into new datacenters, primarily to meet the huge computing demands of AI. At least 16 datacenter projects, worth a combined $64bn, have been blocked or delayed due to local opposition to rising electricity costs. The facilities’ need for huge amounts of water to cool down equipment has also proved controversial, particularly in drier areas where supplies are scarce.
These seemingly parochial concerns have now multiplied to become a potent political force, helping propel Democrats to a series of emphatic recent electoral successes in governor elections in Virginia and New Jersey as well as a stunning upset win in a special public service commission poll in Georgia, with candidates campaigning on lowering power bill costs and curbing datacenters.
Read Oliver Milman’s full report at The Guardian.
This article first appeared in Life in a Warming World, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by deputy editor Heather Souvaine Horn. Sign up here.
Candace Owens, Tucker Carlson, Nick Fuentes: What Could Go Wrong? - 2025-12-12T11:00:00Z
The plot in MAGA-ville is thicker than a holiday fruitcake, but far-right influencers are still stirring in more intrigue.
On Tuesday, the demagogue podcaster Candace Owens, who has some nine million followers across X, YouTube, and Instagram, posted the 2025 equivalent of a Q drop: “Today will be the day that the government can no longer deny it. Charlie Kirk was assassinated and our military was involved.”
This j’accuse moment was inevitable.
For months, Owens, whose forte is antisemitic hatemongering, has claimed that President Trump, a “chronic disappointment,” is sold out to Israel, which is blackmailing him over the Epstein files. Kirk, she alleges, was killed in a Pentagon-Mossad plot because he had privately turned on Israel. As part of this farrago, Owens alleges that Turning Point USA, Charlie Kirk’s right-wing activist organization, played Judas to Kirk’s Christ, was complicit in his murder, and is thoroughly corrupt. The corruption allegation got a boost last month when a former senior TPUSA official was convicted of election fraud.
Coming in for Owens’s particular enmity is Erika Kirk, Charlie’s widow and now TPUSA’s chief executive. Owens, who has called herself Charlie’s best friend and sister, now believes Erika is covering for TPUSA and “this is why” people doubt “women are equipped to lead companies.” Last week, Owens seemed to troll Erika by reminiscing about Charlie’s single days, which led right-wing influencer Scarlett Johnson to call Owens a “cruel Jezebel.” This might sound like Hunting Wives–worthy sniping, except that Trump’s Treasury Department took the time last week to assure Erika Kirk that it would not investigate TPUSA, and TPUSA invited Owens to a much-hyped livestream scheduled for next Monday to discuss her allegations against … the entire world.
Oh, but the Hunting Husbands would like a word. Neo-Nazi Nick Fuentes is beefing with Owens, whom he has called, with unexpected gender fluidity, an “Uncle Tom.” Though Fuentes shares Owens’s hatred of Jews, he believes his Hitlerian views are intellectually superior to Owens’s: “Low-IQ antisemitism has a name, and its name is Candace Owens.” Also on Tuesday, Fuentes told Piers Morgan that “women are very difficult to be around,” and thus he has never had sex. “No, absolutely not,” Fuentes told Morgan. Far-right pepperpot Tucker Carlson recently told Theo Von, another podcasting pepperpot, that, while he’s not saying the FBI killed Charlie Kirk, he is saying the FBI lies, manufactures evidence, and somehow ran January 6 as a political op.
While Trump, as he approaches 80, struggles with late-life cognitive challenges, and seems to have made a permanent home in the mumbletank, younger agitators like Owens, Fuentes, Carlson, and Von are doing more to lay waste to MAGA than any Democrat could have dreamed of.
But if liberals see Owens, in particular, as exposing MAGA’s fault lines, the right seems to turn to her for catharsis. As host of Candace, Spotify’s fourth-biggest news (yes, news) podcast—solidly ahead of The Wall Street Journal, Pod Save America, and Ben Shapiro—she serves as a release valve for the pent-up narrative hysteria that was last seen in the salad days of QAnon, when a woolly demonology fractalized into worldwide madness. The madness, you’ll recall, climaxed with the January 6, 2021, insurrection, after which QAnon’s shadowy leader, “Q” (widely thought to be Ron Watkins, co-owner of hate site 8chan, which hosted child porn, and son of Jim Watkins, who ran other child porn sites), mostly vanished. What were amped crusaders against cannibalistic child molesters to do with their righteous fury?
Kirk’s assassination on September 10 gave them an angle. Fuentes, who considered Kirk his sworn enemy, was at first relieved at the Owens fearmongering, as it (1) was rabidly antisemitic and (2) got the target off his own back. Carlson, by contrast, who has platformed Nick Fuentes and agrees with him on many antisemitic points, said on his own show Wednesday, “I love Candace Owens.” (He further professed love for TPUSA executive Blake Neff, an Ivy grad who once worked for Carlson before he was fired for saying racist things too racist for Fox News.) An important part of world building for these influencers involves populating their conspiracy galaxy with telegenic influencers so they can beef, form alliances, and comment on each other’s beefs and alliances.
It’s been three months since Kirk’s assassination. From day one, it would have stood to reason if Kirk’s supporters had focused their ire on the actual suspect in the murder, a single white male of muddy politics and muddier motives. But no. They seem to have blown right past Tyler Robinson, who to little fanfare made his first in-person court appearance Thursday. Instead, to the fevered mind, someone else, someone much more powerful and exciting than Robinson, must have done it. Go big or go home: It’s the military, the FBI, Trump himself.
The culprit has thus become a hyperobject, a miasma that encompasses everything except the actual suspect. It has implicated whole governments, of course, but also the Macrons of France and Erika Kirk’s jewelry. It’s murder on the Orient Express, then, where the train is the Trump train and its tracks are an infinity, crisscrossing the known galaxy.
Dip into even one of these mind-blowingly popular podcasts by Owens, Fuentes, Von, Carlson, or TPUSA, where Americans now get their news, and you’d have a hard time telling that Fox News is still on the air and Trump is still in the White House. (Fox & Friends, the Fox News showpiece, has about 1.3 million viewers, while each episode of Candace gets more than twice as many downloads: 3.6 million.) Some very insane people have formed an informational junta, spinning far-reaching folklore that will continue to beguile vulnerable minds long after Trump is gone.
For liberals who like democracy and fret about the state of journalism, the good news is that Trump-worshipping MAGA media is on the wane. The bad news is everything else.
John Roberts and the Cynical Cult of Federalist No. 70 - 2025-12-12T11:00:00Z
Last year, the Supreme Court’s conservative majority ruled that the president of the United States had “absolute” criminal immunity for his “official acts,” as well as lesser degrees of immunity for other acts committed while president. This decision in Trump v. United States came under widespread and withering criticism from the dissenting justices and ordinary Americans alike.
“The relationship between the president and the people he serves has shifted irrevocably,” Justice Sonia Sotomayor warned in her dissenting opinion. “In every use of official power, the president is now a king above the law.”
Only a handful of people—other than Trump himself and his lawyers, of course—celebrated the ruling in full on its merits. Among them was Kevin Roberts, the president of the far-right Heritage Foundation and the overseer of Project 2025, the manifesto that essentially became the second Trump administration’s governing blueprint. He argued that the court’s ruling had not defied American political thought but rather echoed it.
“The Supreme Court ruling yesterday on immunity is vital, and it’s vital for a lot of reasons,” Roberts claimed. “But I would go to Federalist No. 70. If people in the audience are looking for something to read over Independence Day weekend, in addition to rereading the Declaration of Independence, read Hamilton’s No. 70 because there, along with some other essays, he talks about the importance of an energetic executive.”
Federalist Number 70 is one of 85 essays written by three of the Framers—Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay—to defend and promote the new Constitution during the ratification debates in 1788. Almost 250 years later, it may be the most important one in terms of today’s political landscape—in large part because its proponents have used and misused it to do so much damage to our constitutional order.
No. 70, which was written by Hamilton and focuses on the nature of the presidency, is perhaps the central text for those who advocate for the “unitary executive” theory. Their choice is somewhat understandable: Hamilton argues forcefully for creating a presidency with one officeholder instead of a “plural executive,” as could have been found in some states and foreign republics at the time.
This basic fact about our constitutional structure—that we have one American president instead of two Roman consuls, five Napoleonic directors, or so on—is unquestioned today. Nobody is arguing for a second or third president. (One is quite enough at the moment.) Unitary executive theory proponents, however, take a skewed view of the text, instead using it to exalt the executive branch as the one true representative of the people’s will, while downplaying legislative authority and legitimacy.
The Supreme Court’s invocation of No. 70 has been increasingly frequent—and increasingly disastrous. In addition to the immunity ruling, the conservative justices have invoked it to justify broad interpretations of executive power and authority. Perhaps the most common adjective drawn from No. 70 is that the Constitution created an “energetic” executive branch that would be capable of vigorously enforcing the nation’s laws. This understanding is one with which Hamilton would likely agree, since he described “energy in the executive” as “a leading character in the definition of good government.”
“It is essential to the protection of the community against foreign attacks,” Hamilton continued; “it is not less essential to the steady administration of the laws; to the protection of property against those irregular and high-handed combinations which sometimes interrupt the ordinary course of justice; to the security of liberty against the enterprises and assaults of ambition, of faction, and of anarchy.”
This was not an abstract problem for Hamilton and his contemporaries. The Framers gathered at the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia to address the defects of the Articles of Confederation, the nation’s first postrevolutionary form of government. Foremost among its many defects were the lack of an executive branch to enforce the Congress of the Confederation’s laws and a federal judiciary to interpret them.
Civil unrest, most notably Shays’s Rebellion in 1786, was the “anarchy” that led Hamilton and other Framers to propose an executive branch that could readily respond to crises and enforce the laws. “A feeble Executive implies a feeble execution of the government,” he wrote. “A feeble execution is but another phrase for a bad execution; and a government ill executed, whatever it may be in theory, must be, in practice, a bad government.”
Hamilton described an “energetic” executive as one that possessed four traits: unity, duration, an “adequate provision for its support,” and “competent powers.” At the same time, he was equally sensitive to fears that a president could be a dictator or a threat to liberty. He explained that “safety in the republican sense” would come from a “due dependence on the people” and a “due responsibility.”
The American presidency, he explained, met these conditions. There would be one president instead of multiple executives. He would serve a four-year term, more than the three years served by the governors of New York, where the Federalist Papers were first published, but far less than the life tenure of a British king. (Hamilton also explained how republican liberty could be secured, but we’ll return to that a little later.)
Unitary executive theorists love to invoke the “energetic” portion to explain why the president should not be encumbered with restraints from Congress or the judiciary. John Yoo, a conservative legal scholar who served in the George W. Bush administration, wrote a 2001 memo arguing for broad presidential war powers after the 9/11 attacks that rejected Congress’s exclusive power to authorize military operations.
“‘Decision, activity, secrecy, and dispatch will generally characterize the proceedings of one man in a much more eminent degree than the proceedings of any greater number,’” he wrote, quoting from No. 70. “The centralization of authority in the president alone is particularly crucial in matters of national defense, war, and foreign policy choices, where a unitary executive can evaluate threats, consider policy choices, and mobilize national resources with a speed and energy that is far superior to any other branch.”
It is worth emphasizing here that No. 70 is not really about the separation of powers, except insofar as it discusses the executive branch’s powers in great detail. Yoo’s quotation of “proceedings of any greater number” might read as if it were referring to Congress, given the context of Yoo’s memo. In reality, Hamilton didn’t have the legislative branch in mind at all. Rather, he was responding to Anti-Federalist concerns about the presidency and public suggestions that a plural executive would work better.
This feat of textual sleight of hand is one thing when done in a White House memo. It is something else entirely when the misapprehended text is subsequently applied by the Supreme Court. In 2020, the Supreme Court struck down the for-cause removal protections that Congress had established for the director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau in Seila Law v. CFPB. Chief Justice John Roberts, writing for the majority, expounded at length upon how the Constitution divided power.
“In addition to being a historical anomaly, the CFPB’s single-director configuration is incompatible with our constitutional structure,” Roberts wrote for the court. “Aside from the sole exception of the presidency, that structure scrupulously avoids concentrating power in the hands of any single individual.” This was relevant because when the court had previously upheld removal protections, they had only applied to multimember boards like the Federal Trade Commission. Here, Hamilton’s concerns about a plural executive are reasonably relevant.
Along the way, however, Chief Justice Roberts laid out what might be his most comprehensive explanation for how he sees the Constitution’s separation of powers. First, he noted that the Framers had divided power in the legislative branch by creating a House of Representatives and a Senate. Then he noted that the executive branch was “a stark departure from all this division,” suggesting that it held some special role in the constitutional order. This special role came at Congress’s expense.
“The Framers viewed the legislative power as a special threat to individual liberty, so they divided that power to ensure that ‘differences of opinion’ and the ‘jarrings of parties’ would ‘promote deliberation and circumspection’ and ‘check excesses in the majority,’” he wrote, quoting at length from No. 70. “By contrast, the Framers thought it necessary to secure the authority of the Executive so that he could carry out his unique responsibilities.”
It may surprise you to discover that this isn’t what Hamilton really meant in Federalist No. 70. Hamilton indeed wrote all the quoted portions in the above excerpt, but he was plainly not describing the “legislative power” as a “special threat to individual liberty.” That anti-parliamentary gloss comes entirely from Chief Justice Roberts.
In No. 70, when discussing the merits of a plural executive versus a single executive, Hamilton discussed human nature at length. “Wherever two or more persons are engaged in a common enterprise or pursuit, there is always danger of difference of opinion,” he wrote. If two or more people hold a public office, there is the risk of “animosity” and “bitter dissensions.”
If these tendencies afflict and divide a nation’s plural executive, Hamilton warned, “they might impede or frustrate the most important measures of the government, in the most critical emergencies of the state.” Worse still, he claimed, such divisions could “split the community into the most violent and irreconcilable factions, adhering differently to the different individuals who composed the magistracy” and lead to civil war.
Upon the principles of a free government, Hamilton continued, these divisions “must necessarily be submitted to in the formation of the legislature,” but he opined that it would be “unnecessary, and therefore unwise, to introduce them into the constitution of the executive.”
This is where his discussion turns to what Chief Justice Roberts (mis)quoted. “It is here too that [divisions] may be most pernicious,” Hamilton wrote. “In the legislature, promptitude of decision is oftener an evil than a benefit. The differences of opinion, and the jarrings of parties in that department of the government, though they may sometimes obstruct salutary plans, yet often promote deliberation and circumspection, and serve to check excesses in the majority.”
In no way does Hamilton use these observations of human nature to claim that the legislative branch is a “special threat to individual liberty,” as Roberts suggests. What may be unavoidable and perhaps sometimes even beneficial for a legislature, Hamilton warned, would only be disastrous for the executive. “No favorable circumstances palliate or atone for the disadvantages of dissension in the executive department,” he wrote, warning that they “constantly counteract” the “vigor and expedition” that he saw necessary to a functional executive branch.
In his Seila Law opinion, Chief Justice Roberts went on to cite No. 70 in piecemeal fashion to explain how the Framers structured the executive branch. “They chose not to bog the Executive down with the ‘habitual feebleness and dilatoriness’ that comes with a ‘diversity of views and opinions,’” Roberts wrote. “Instead, they gave the Executive the ‘decision, activity, secrecy, and dispatch’ that ‘characterise the proceedings of one man.’
“To justify and check that authority—unique in our constitutional structure—the Framers made the president the most democratic and politically accountable official in government,” Roberts claimed. “Only the president (along with the vice president) is elected by the entire nation. And the president’s political accountability is enhanced by the solitary nature of the executive branch, which provides ‘a single object for the jealousy and watchfulness of the people.’”
Roberts is only partially correct here. The president’s political accountability for the executive branch is indisputable, as best summarized by Harry Truman’s “the buck stops here” mantra. But the presidency’s democratic nature is a more recent and debatable trend. Almost half of the states that elected George Washington to his first term in 1788 did so through legislative appointment. Americans then and now vote for presidential electors to cast ballots in the Electoral College, which sometimes chooses the second-place candidate to lead the nation.
Congress, on the other hand, is entirely elected by Americans—the House since 1792 and the Senate since 1914. So crucial is its elective and national nature that Article 1 goes into great detail about when and how the House’s members would be elected. As I’ve noted before, Congress’s actual powers speak clearly about the paramount role that it would play once the Constitution was ratified.
The Roberts court’s habitual disdain for Congress and its reflexive tendency toward hyperpresidentialism led to its decision in Trump v. United States. There it declared, for the first and only time in two and a half centuries, that the president was above the law. Short of rejecting democratic governance altogether, it is hard to imagine a greater heresy against the American constitutional order.
There is, obviously, no “presidential immunity clause” in the Constitution. The conservative justices’ un-originalist efforts to imagine one into it cannot be supported by text or history. Invoking No. 70 was a key portion of Roberts’s case for its functional necessity. The executive branch would be severely weakened, the chief justice wrote, if presidents could face prosecution after leaving office.
“[The Framers] deemed an energetic executive essential to ‘the protection of the community against foreign attacks,’ ‘the steady administration of the laws,’ ‘the protection of property,’ and ‘the security of liberty,’” Roberts wrote in the immunity ruling. “The purpose of a ‘vigorous’ and ‘energetic’ Executive, they thought, was to ensure ‘good government,’ for a ‘feeble executive implies a feeble execution of the government.’”
Federalist No. 70 is also not the only place where the Framers discussed the presidency. In Federalist No. 69, for example, Hamilton sought to rebut both critics and concerned citizens who feared that the Constitution would create a kingly dictator. To distinguish the two, he pointed first to ways in which they can be held accountable.
Hamilton noted that the king of Great Britain is “sacred and inviolable” under the law and that there is “no punishment to which he can be subjected without involving the crisis of a national revolution.” This was likely meant as a reference to the fate of Charles I, who lost the English Civil War in the 1640s and was subsequently tried and executed by Parliament.
American presidents, Hamilton explained, could be deposed without such extraordinary measures. The president “would be liable to be impeached, tried, and, upon conviction of treason, bribery, or other high crimes or misdemeanors, removed from office; and would afterwards be liable to prosecution and punishment in the ordinary course of law.” Sotomayor pointed specifically to this passage in her dissent from the immunity ruling.
Roberts, in his majority opinion, brushed off this evidence—and other indications that the president did not possess some special form of legal immunity—without engaging with it. “Some of [the Sotomayor dissent’s] cherry-picked sources do not even discuss the president in particular,” he claimed, referring to citations of the Constitutional Convention’s debates. On Federalist No. 69 in particular, the chief justice claimed that it did not “indicate whether [the president] may be prosecuted for his official conduct.”
It is worth dwelling on Roberts’s interpretation a little further because it illustrates the magnitude of his—and the court’s—error. Here we have a direct statement from Hamilton that says the president can be held “liable to prosecution and punishment in the ordinary course of law.” This is no mere stray thought or idle observation; he explicitly mentions it in the context of the British king’s own sovereign immunity.
Roberts says this statement carries no weight because it sheds no light on whether the president can be prosecuted for his “official conduct.” This is plainly wrong. Hamilton argued against a plural executive in No. 70 in part because he believed that it would be more difficult to ascribe blame to officials—and thus subsequently hold them accountable—if they abused their powers.
Some historical republics had divided power among multiple high magistrates, most famously pre-imperial Rome. Hamilton disfavored this approach because it “tends to deprive the people of the two greatest securities they can have for the faithful exercise of any delegated power.” One of those securities was the “restraints of public opinion,” which “lose their efficacy” if blame is diffused between multiple people.
The other security was the “opportunity of discovering with facility and clearness the misconduct of the persons they trust, in order either to their removal from office or to their actual punishment in cases which admit of it.” In short, Roberts claimed that criminal immunity was necessary for the unitary executive to operate. Hamilton, however, made clear that one reason for having a single president was to make it easier to prosecute abuses of power—or, as Roberts would refer to them, “official acts.”
Federalist No. 70 will likely continue to be a key force in the Supreme Court’s rulings on behalf of the Trump administration in the years ahead. Its invocation in Seila Law means No. 70 will almost certainly be used by the court to justify overturning Humphrey’s Executor in the Federal Trade Commission dismissal case later this term, for example. Hamiltonian quotes might also be used to justify Trump’s deployment of the National Guard or other extraordinary uses of executive power.
Nonetheless, I can only echo the Heritage Foundation’s call to reread No. 70 whenever the Supreme Court cites it. Americans will be easily able to glean Hamilton’s actual intent: to explain how and why their new presidency could be held accountable to the popular will and constrained by the rule of law. No amount of “cherry-picking,” as the chief justice so aptly put it, can change that.
Trump Rages at Cratering Polls as GOP Losses Reveal Surprise Weakness - 2025-12-12T10:00:00Z
President Trump erupted Thursday in a wild rage on Truth Social in which he appeared to blame pollsters for failing to register his world-historical success. “When will Polls reflect the Greatness of America at this point in time?” he fumed, apparently mindful of the latest news of his cratering poll numbers. Notably, this comes just after Democrats scored big wins in the Miami mayoral race and elsewhere, which analysts see as a sign that the Latino vote is shifting hard away from Trump. Not coincidentally, a new poll has Trump’s approval on immigration plunging below 40 percent. We talked to William Saletan, staff writer at The Bulwark, about his great new piece on Trump’s open agenda of ethnic persecution. We discuss the relationship between Trump’s racism and his unpopularity, what the latest GOP losses show about the collapse of the MAGA coalition, what to make of the GOP’s open embrace of full-bore ethnonationalism, and why it’s (somewhat) heartening that the public is rejecting it so decisively. Listen to this episode here. A transcript is here.
White House Struggles to Defend Trump Idea to Limit Kids’ Presents - 2025-12-11T21:41:59Z
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt lost it Thursday when CNN’s Kaitlan Collins quoted President Trump’s own statements on the economy and Christmas.
“If the economy is as strong as the president has said it is, then why is he telling parents two weeks before Christmas that they should only buy two or three dolls for their children?” Collins asked, referring to Trump’s comments at a rally in Pennsylvania Tuesday, in which the president told a Mount Pocono crowd, “You don’t need 37 dolls for your daughter. Two or three is nice. You don’t need 37 dolls.”
Leavitt tried to deflect, saying that Trump actually meant that he wants products made in America by American small businesses, even if they cost more, because Americans would get a better-quality product and would be supporting their fellow Americans.
“Again, with respect to affordability, every economic metric, Kaitlan, and I wish you would report more on it, does in fact show that the economy is getting better and brighter than where it was under the previous administration,” Leavitt added, specifically pointing to inflation, real wages, and gas prices.
Collins: If the economy is as strong as the president has said it is, why is he telling parents two weeks before Christmas that they should only buy two or three dolls for their children? pic.twitter.com/NEbtTnEY64
— Acyn (@Acyn) December 11, 2025
Collins pressed further, pointing out that grocery prices have been up, but Leavitt kept repeating that inflation was down and that the press didn’t report on the high levels of inflation under President Biden.
“My predecessor stood up at this podium and she said inflation doesn’t exist. She said the border was secure, and people like you just took her at her word, and those were two utter lies. Everything I’m telling you is the truth backed by real factual data, and you just don’t want to report on it because you want to push untrue narratives about the president,” Leavitt said.
Kaitlan Collins pushes Leavitt on her gaslighting about the economy. Leavitt ends by accusing her of wanting to "push untrue narratives about the president" pic.twitter.com/vc6509xbGY
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) December 11, 2025
Leavitt’s replies did nothing to explain why Trump would tell people to settle for less this holiday season. At his Pennsylvania rally, the president was repeating comments he made in the spring to try and explain away the impact his tariffs were having on consumer goods. But back then, as well as this week, his comments only raised more questions about the economic health of the U.S., and no amount of bluster by his staff can shut those questions down.
Trump Wants People to Submit DNA Just to Get a Tourist Visa - 2025-12-11T21:25:17Z
Want to visit the United States? Customs and Border Patrol will make you submit your social media history—and your family history and DNA too.
In an 11-page notice published in the Federal Register on Wednesday, CBP outlined several proposed changes to the Electronic System for Travel Authorization, or ESTA, which screens and approves applicants traveling into the United States through the Visa Waiver Program.
Under the new rules, social media would become a “mandatory data element” for ESTA applications, and all applicants would be required to submit a social media history going back five years. But that’s not all.
The notice also said that it would add several “high value data fields” to the ESTA application, including “biometrics.” Examples listed were face, fingerprint, iris, and even DNA.
The Department of Homeland Security announced in November that it would begin uniformly collecting facial biometrics from all noncitizens upon entry and exit to the United States, removing prior exemptions for some travelers. In the new rules, CBP states that applicants, including third parties applying on an individual’s behalf, would be required to provide a “selfie” of the applicant’s face in addition to their passport photo.
Other “high value data fields” include information about applicants’ family members, their names, phone numbers, and addresses, as well as when and where they were born.
Travelers would also be prompted to submit their personal and business telephone numbers used in the last five years, and email addresses used in the last 10 years.
Kristi Noem Literally Runs Out of House Hearing to Avoid Dem Questions - 2025-12-11T20:20:25Z
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem abruptly ended her time before the House Homeland Security Committee Thursday, angering lawmakers by stepping away from the hot seat to attend a highly anticipated meeting on the future of FEMA.
Except that meeting never happened.
The FEMA hearing was scheduled to take place at 1 p.m. Noem was reportedly informed at 12:26 p.m. that it had been canceled, a DHS spokesperson told The Hill.
Just minutes before receiving that notification, Noem told the committee, “I have to actually leave this hearing early, because the FEMA Review Council is giving their report today on suggestions for changes to FEMA.
“I have to co-chair it, but I will be leaving soon to have to go do that,” she mentioned while responding to a question about FEMA’s distribution of funds.
Noem left shortly afterward, before Democratic Representative Julie Johnson had a chance to grill Noem herself. In response, Johnson made a comment that summed up her caucus’s collective reaction to the ICE captain’s time on Capitol Hill.
“I’m just going to take the position that she was scared of my questions,” Johnson quipped.
But rather than return to the hearing, which continued for a couple more hours, Noem simply … left.
It’s not a good time for Noem to be scurrying away from her responsibilities. In a drastic turn of events, Donald Trump is reportedly considering replacing Noem with outbound Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin, a decision that would make Noem the first person to be pushed out of Trump’s second-term Cabinet.
Three former DHS officials with ties to the current staff said that the changeover could happen “really soon,” giving the term-limited Youngkin a future in Washington.
Trump established the FEMA council by executive order in January, around the same time that he pitched it would be better to do away with FEMA altogether in favor of handing disaster money directly to the states. The council is co-chaired by Noem and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.
Noem Accidentally Admits to Congress That She’s Breaking the Law - 2025-12-11T19:30:30Z
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem didn’t deny that the Trump administration was illegally deporting people with ongoing asylum cases.
Noem spiraled out during a House Homeland Security Committee hearing Thursday, after Representative Dan Goldman pressed her on the government’s efforts to deport lawful asylum-seekers. There have been mounting reports that asylum cases are being routinely dismissed by immigration judges, and the asylum-seekers are then taken into ICE custody for expedited removal.
The New York Democrat asked Noem whether she agreed that asylum was a lawful pathway to citizenship and that immigrants with ongoing asylum applications were legally in the country. Noem agreed asylum was “a lawful pathway.”
“So, if your department then deports anyone with an ongoing asylum application, you are violating the law, correct?” Goldman asked.
Noem immediately became defensive. “Joe Biden left us with a [inaudible] five billion cases backlogged,” she replied, attempting to dodge the question.
“I’m not asking about Joe Biden, I’m asking you a specific question,” Goldman said. “If your department deports anyone with an ongoing asylum application, you are violating the law, correct?”
But Noem continued to speak monotonously throughout the lawmaker’s repeated requests to answer the question, claiming that the Biden administration had “greatly violated” the asylum law.
“Why are you filibustering? Why can’t you answer the question? It’s a simple question,” Goldman asked, but the secretary continued to rant that the “asylum program was broken under the last administration.”
Clearly, Noem had no intention of openly copping to breaking the law—but Goldman said her artless obfuscation did it for her, since yes was the “obvious answer.”
“If you don’t like the asylum system, you change the asylum law. Bring it to us. We’ll work with you. I think it needs to be changed. But you can’t just decide that you’re not gonna follow the law—and asylum is a law—and deport people with ongoing applications. Unfortunately, that is exactly what’s happening,” Goldman said.
ICE attorneys at immigration hearings are increasingly asking immigration judges to dismiss asylum cases, and the Trump administration has instructed judges to grant quick dismissals. At the same time, the Trump administration has purged dozens of immigration judges and sought to recruit so-called “deportation judges” to help ramp up the government’s soft ethnic cleansing.
List of Every Republican Who Voted to Make Obamacare More Expensive - 2025-12-11T19:21:25Z
Health care bills are going to skyrocket next year after the Senate voted down a bill that would have extended subsidies for the Affordable Care Act on Thursday.
The bill needed 60 votes to pass, but only four Republicans broke with their party and voted to extend the subsidies that millions of Americans rely on: Senators Josh Hawley, Lisa Murkowski, Dan Sullivan, and Susan Collins, resulting in a total of just 51 votes in favor. Every single Democrat in the Senate voted to extend the subsidies, while Montana Senator Steve Daines, a Republican, did not vote.
President Trump said last month that he was against extending the subsidies “because the ‘unaffordable care act’ has been a disaster.” But the real disaster is just beginning.
Health care premiums have already gone up in several states, and lower-income states, including Republican-run states like Mississippi, Tennessee, and South Carolina, stand to suffer the most. Many Americans will likely drop their ACA health care plans, meaning that an estimated four million Americans could be without health care coverage.
Here are the 48 Republican senators who voted to end the subsidies and increase premiums:
- Jim Banks (Indiana)
- John Barrasso (Wyoming)
- Marsha Blackburn (Tennessee)
- John Boozman (Arkansas)
- Katie Britt (Alabama)
- Ted Budd (North Carolina)
- Shelley Moore Capito (West Virginia)
- Bill Cassidy (Louisiana)
- John Cornyn (Texas)
- Tom Cotton (Arkansas)
- Kevin Cramer (North Dakota)
- Mike Crapo (Indiana)
- Ted Cruz (Texas)
- John Curtis (Utah)
- Joni Ernst (Iowa)
- Deb Fischer (Nebraska)
- Lindsey Graham (South Carolina)
- Chuck Grassley (Iowa)
- Bill Hagerty (Tennessee)
- John Hoeven (North Dakota)
- Jon Husted (Ohio)
- Cindy Hyde-Smith (Mississippi)
- Ron Johnson (Wisconsin)
- Jim Justice (West Virginia)
- John Kennedy (Louisiana)
- James Lankford (Oklahoma)
- Mike Lee (Utah)
- Cynthia Lummis (Wyoming)
- Roger Marshall (Kansas)
- Mitch McConnell (Kentucky)
- Dave McCormick (Pennsylvania)
- Ashley Moody (Florida)
- Jerry Moran (Kansas)
- Bernie Moreno (Ohio)
- Markwayne Mullin (Oklahoma)
- Rand Paul (Kentucky)
- Pete Ricketts (Nebraska)
- Jim Risch (Idaho)
- Mike Rounds (South Dakota)
- Eric Schmitt (Missouri)
- Rick Scott (Florida)
- Tim Scott (South Carolina)
- Tim Sheehy (Montana)
- John Thune (South Dakota)
- Thom Tillis (North Carolina )
- Tommy Tuberville (Alabama)
- Roger Wicker (Mississippi)
- Todd Young (Indiana)
“Evil n Boring”: SZA Rips White House for Using Her Song in Vile Video - 2025-12-11T18:32:19Z
Yet another musician has joined the choir of voices refuting the White House’s latest string of ICE advertisements.
SZA torched the Trump administration for using her music in a pro-ICE ad, claiming that the blatant intellectual property theft was really just a transparent bid to rage-bait artists into giving the violent campaign more attention.
“White House rage baiting artists for free promo is PEAK DARK … inhumanity +shock and aw tactics,” SZA wrote on X Wednesday. “Evil n Boring.”
The White House published a Christmas-themed montage of ICE arrests Monday set to SZA’s track “Big Boy,” focusing on the song’s reprise “it’s cuffing season”—which, in the context of the song, refers to falling into short-term relationships during the cold winter months. Not ripping people away from their families and forcing them into modern-day concentration camps.
“WE HEARD IT’S CUFFING SZN,” the White House captioned the post alongside a chain emoji. “Bad news for criminal illegal aliens. Great news for America.”
The 36-year-old R&B singer was responding to a kindred comment by her former manager, Terrence “Punch” Henderson, who said that the White House’s efforts to “provoke artist[s] to respond in order to help spread propaganda and political agendas is nasty business.”
But the platinum record-producing duo aren’t alone in their opinion. The White House has also stolen tracks from Olivia Rodrigo and Sabrina Carpenter for similar purposes, earning the ire of the pop music spectrum in the process.
Last week, Carpenter seemingly won her own standoff with ICE after the White House deleted another brutal arrest montage that stole her song “Juno.”
“This video is evil and disgusting,” Carpenter responded to the White House video in a comment that received 1.8 million likes and more than 163 million views—roughly half of the U.S. population. “Do not ever involve me or my music to benefit your inhumane agenda.”
FBI Leader Crumbles During Basic Questions About Threat of “Antifa” - 2025-12-11T17:53:01Z
The FBI’s branch and operations director couldn’t answer basic questions about the Trump administration’s designation of antifa as a terrorist organization at a congressional hearing Thursday.
Michael Glasheen was testifying before the House Committee on Homeland Security, and told Democratic Representative Bennie Thompson that after antifa, a political designation and movement that stands for “anti-fascism,” was designated by President Trump as a domestic terrorist organization, “that’s our primary concern right now.”
Antifa is “the most immediate violent threat we’re facing on the domestic side,” Glasheen said, prompting Thompson to ask, “So where is antifa headquartered?”
Glasheen was tripped up, and tried to say, “What we’re doing right now with the organization—” before Thompson cut him off and firmly asked, “Where in the United States does antifa exist, if it’s a terrorist organization and you’ve identified it as number one?”
“We’re building out the infrastructure right now,” Glasheen replied. This did not satisfy Thompson.
GLASHEEN: Antifa is our primary concern right now. That's the most immediate violent threat we're facing
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) December 11, 2025
BENNIE THOMPSON: Where is antifa headquartered?
GLASHEEN: ... ... ... we are building out the infrastructure right now
THOMPSON: What does that mean? pic.twitter.com/FBzRJ5dCBj
“So what does that mean?” asked Thompson. “You said antifa is a terrorist organization. Tell us as a committee, how did you come to that? Where do they exist? How many members do they have in the United States as of right now?”
Glasheen couldn’t offer anything concrete, saying that the answers to Thompson’s questions are fluid, and that it was “ongoing for us to understand that, the same no different than Al Qaeda and ISIS.”
Thompson pressed further, saying that he merely wanted to know the makeup of antifa, and Glasheen tried to deflect, saying that investigations are active, almost shrugging to say he didn’t know, allowing Thompson to illustrate the point he was trying to make.
“Sir, you wouldn’t come to this committee and say something you can’t prove, I know. I know you wouldn’t do that. But you did,” Thompson concluded.
The truth is that Trump’s targeting of antifa is spurious. Antifa is not anything close to a centralized group but rather a movement or ideology opposing fascism. Trump only designated it as a terrorist organization to go after any left-wing opposition to himself or his far-right allies. Thursday’s hearing made it quite clear that Glasheen, a career FBI official who has worked under multiple presidents, knows all of that. The question is how far the rest of the federal government is willing to take that lie.
Noem Gets Most Awkward Fact-Check of Her Life on Deported Veterans - 2025-12-11T17:18:11Z
Homeland Security Secretary and MAGA hardliner Kristi Noem got a fact-check to her face during her Thursday morning House hearing when Democratic Representative Seth Magaziner brought in a special guest.
“How many United States military veterans have you deported?” Magaziner asked Noem.
“Sir, we have not deported U.S. citizens or military veterans.”
Little did she know there was one staring right at her.
“Madame Secretary, we are joined on Zoom by a gentleman named Sae Joon Park. He is a United States Army combat veteran who was shot twice while serving our country in Panama in 1989,” Magaziner said. “Like many veterans, he struggled with PTSD and substance abuse after his service.... A purple heart recipient, he has sacrificed more for this country than most people ever have. Earlier this year you deported him to Korea, a country he hasn’t lived in since he was seven years old. Will you join me in thanking Mr. Park for his service to our country?”
Noem initially refused to even acknowledge Park, who was staring blankly on an iPad held up near Magaziner.
MAGAZINER: How many veterans have you deported?
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) December 11, 2025
NOEM: We haven't deported veterans
MAGAZINER: We are now joined on Zoom by a combat veteran you deported to Korea pic.twitter.com/oz8Epvf4I4
“Sir, I’m grateful for every single person that has served our country and follows our laws—”
“Can you please tell Mr. Park why you deported him?” Magaziner asked, talking over Noem. “This man took two bullets for our country. You have broad authority, by the way, as secretary, to issue humanitarian parole, to do deferred action. Will you commit to at least looking at Mr. Park’s case to see if you can help him find a pathway back to this country that he sacrificed so much for?”
“I will absolutely look at his case.”
Magaziner also brought in another veteran whose wife had been deported.
Park was forced to self-deport over the summer due to drug possession charges linked to his military PTSD.
“ I can’t believe that this is happening in America,” he told NPR in an interview before he left. “That blows me away, like a country that I fought for.”
Noem Spirals When Asked Who Let in Alleged National Guard Shooter - 2025-12-11T17:00:38Z
The Trump administration is refusing to face the facts that they are the ones responsible for the suspected national guard shooter’s presence in the country.
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem was grilled during a House Homeland Security Committee hearing Thursday on Rahmanullah Lakanwal’s granted asylum, which was approved in April after she took over as head of the agency.
“You blamed [the shooting of the National Guardsmen] solely on Joe Biden. Who approved the asylum for this same person?” pressed Democratic Representative Bennie Thompson after Noem finally stopped cutting him off for long enough to allow him to ask the question in its entirety.
“Mr. Thompson, this individual that came into the country—,” Noem started deflecting, before Thompson pressed again.
“No. I want to know who approved—” Thompson continued.
But Noem cut him off again. “No, no, no, no. I’m not going to let you—”
When Noem refused to stop talking, Thompson called to reclaim his time. Then the chairman of the committee, Representative Andrew Garbarino, got involved, ordering Noem to stop speaking until Thompson could ask his question again.
“Yes or no, who approved the asylum claim?” asked Thompson, but Noem again blamed the Biden administration.
“I don’t want to file perjury charges against you, but I’m of the opinion that the Trump administration—DHS, your DHS—approved the asylum application,” Thompson said.
THOMPSON: You blamed the shooting of Guardsmen solely on Joe Biden. Who approved the asylum for this same person?
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) December 11, 2025
KRISTI NOEM: This individual that came in---
THOMPSON: No. I want to know who approved----
NOEM: *keeps talking over Thompson*
T: I don't want to file perjury… pic.twitter.com/mRX4sqiUcF
It’s been two weeks since the shooting took place. In that time, Noem has repeatedly thwarted attempts to pin her agency for Lakanwal’s asylum, even though that’s actually what happened. Instead, she has nonsensically claimed that the Biden administration’s vetting process for Lakanwal, which began after he entered the U.S. in 2021, had effectively made her powerless to the ultimate decision regarding Lakanwal’s ability to stay in the country.
Prior to the shooting, there were plenty of well-documented reasons to allow Lakanwal into America. He operated as a foreign partner with America’s intelligence services in Afghanistan, and worked with the CIA as a partner in the country for more than a decade before U.S. troops withdrew from the region. Unfortunately, however, Lakanwal struggled with PTSD as a result of the war, his family told CNN.
He allegedly shot two members of West Virginia’s National Guard on the eve of Thanksgiving. U.S. Army Specialist Sarah Beckstrom, 20, died from her injuries. The other victim, U.S. Air Force Staff Sergeant Andrew Wolfe, is “slowly healing,” according to his family.
Judge Rips Trump Lawyers for Lying About Kilmar Abrego Garcia’s Case - 2025-12-11T16:35:55Z
A federal judge slammed Justice Department lawyers Thursday for blatantly lying about their efforts to remove Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the man wrongfully deported to El Salvador last spring—and she ordered the government to release him.
In a 31-page opinion, U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis granted Abrego Garcia’s request to be released from ICE custody. In her ruling, she torched the prosecutors’ efforts to deport Abrego Garcia to Liberia, after they claimed they could not deport him to the country of his choice, Costa Rica.
“This time, when the Court sought information about Liberia and Costa Rica so to fairly assess the validity of Abrego Garcia’s claims, Respondents did not just stonewall. They affirmatively misled the tribunal,” Xinis wrote.
“They announced that Liberia is the only viable removal option because Costa Rica ‘does not wish to receive him,’ … and that Costa Rica will no longer ‘accept the transfer’ of him,” she wrote. “But Costa Rica had never wavered in its commitment to receive Abrego Garcia, just as Abrego Garcia never wavered in his commitment to resettle there.”
Costa Rican officials had previously put in writing that they had no intention to remove Abrego Garcia back to El Salvador once he was in their custody—while Liberia had made no such assurances. Xinis wrote that the government’s continued lies made clear that Abrego Garcia’s lengthy detention was not for the basic purpose of a timely removal to the third country.
Xinis also found that there was never any order for Abrego Garcia’s removal in the first place. “Indeed, Respondents twice sponsored the testimony of ICE officials whose job it is to effectuate removal orders, and who candidly admitted to having never seen one for Abrego Garcia,” she wrote.
Instead, the government argued that the court should take an October 10 “withholding decision” as evidence that an original order existed—but Xinis didn’t buy it. “The October 10 withholding decision is unambiguously not an order of removal,” she wrote.
Continued detention without a removal order violates Abrego Garcia’s rights under the Immigration and Nationality Act, as well as due process.
Fed Chair Warns Trump Admin May Be Seriously Exaggerating Jobs Numbers - 2025-12-11T16:30:52Z
The Trump administration might be exaggerating their employment figures, Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell warned Wednesday.
In a press conference, Powell said that staffers at the Fed think that the government could be overestimating the number of jobs created by 60,000 each month. With published figures stating that the U.S. has added an average of 40,000 jobs each month since April, the true numbers could be closer to a loss of 20,000 jobs a month.
“We think there’s an overstatement in these numbers,” Powell said at the conference, which followed a policy meeting at the central bank.
Much of the issue is how the Department of Labor counts jobs added or subtracted when new businesses are opened or others close shop. The government can’t easily reach out to companies just starting out, or that have gone out of business, so the Bureau of Labor Statistics uses a statistical model to guess. In recent years, BLS numbers have overstated job creation, sometimes by hundreds of thousands of jobs a year, resulting in revisions showing less jobs later.
But the Trump administration has not responded well to bad jobs reports. When payroll processor ADP reported that the economy lost nearly 32,000 jobs in November, Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick scrambled to blame Democrats and deflect blame from President Trump’s tariffs. Trump himself fired the BLS chief over the summer because he was mad about the negative jobs data the agency produced. It’s not outside of the realm of possibility that Trump would put pressure on the agency to fudge better numbers.
Venezuela Accuses Trump of Piracy as He Says We’re Keeping Oil Tanker - 2025-12-11T16:20:45Z
Venezuela has condemned the Trump administration’s Wednesday seizure of an oil tanker, calling it an “act of piracy.”
Attorney General Pam Bondi accused the tanker of illegally sending oil to terrorist groups, justifying the administration’s hostile takeover.
“For multiple years, the oil tanker has been sanctioned by the United States due to its involvement in an illicit oil shipping network supporting foreign terrorist organizations,” she wrote Wednesday on X, along with a video of the seizure. “This seizure, completed off the coast of Venezuela, was conducted safely and securely—and our investigation alongside the Department of Homeland Security to prevent the transport of sanctioned oil continues.”
The Venezuelan Foreign Ministry offered a very different read of the situation.
“The Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela denounces and energetically repudiates what constitutes a brazen robbery and an act of international piracy, publicly announced by the President of the United States … making clear that the policy of aggression against our country responds to a deliberate plan to plunder our energy resources,” they wrote. “Under these circumstances, the true reasons for the prolonged aggression against Venezuela have finally been exposed. It is not migration. It is not drug trafficking. It is not democracy. It is not human rights. It has always been about our natural resources, our oil, our energy, the resources that belong exclusively to the Venezuelan people.”
President Trump seems to have fully embraced the piracy angle.
“What happens to the oil on the ship?” a reporter asked Trump Wednesday afternoon.
“Well we keep it, I guess,” Trump replied, before failing to answer where exactly the oil was originally going.
Reporter: What happens to the oil on the ship?
— Acyn (@Acyn) December 10, 2025
Trump: We keep it I guess pic.twitter.com/F7uQcNUvhN
This is yet another ratcheting up of aggression against the Maduro government—and yet another example of the absolute disregard the Trump administration has for anyone else’s sovereignty but their own.
Barron Trump’s Creepy Ties to Sex Trafficker Andrew Tate Exposed - 2025-12-11T16:13:54Z
Andrew Tate, the self-avowed misogynist and accused sex trafficker with a massive online following, has a powerful ally in the White House: Barron Trump.
The college-aged Trump has been building a steady bromance with the woman-beating influencer since at least 2024, the pair’s mutual friend Justin Waller told The New York Times.
Tate and his brother Tristan are under criminal investigation in several countries related to their web cam business, facing accusations of sex abuse and human trafficking. The pair allegedly trafficked more than 30 women in Romania and Britain. Andrew Tate, who has amassed a following of millions of teenage boys and young men while calling himself the “king of toxic masculinity,” also stands accused of raping and beating a minor in Romania.
But those sordid details weren’t enough to keep the young Trump at bay. Waller, who proudly described himself to the Times as the “third [Tate] brother,” claimed that Barron had grown his relationship with Tate while nudging his father’s social media-based presidential campaigning efforts towards the podcasting manosphere.
As part of that, Waller was invited to a dinner Barron hosted at Mar-a-Lago in the spring of 2024. The two called “each other degenerate names,” discussed Trump’s potential running mates, and mutually agreed to join another guest’s podcast together, reported the Times.
Waller commented to the publication that the teenager was “not a bad ally to have—let’s be frank.”
In the months since, Waller said he’s tried to fill a “big brother” role for Barron (ignoring the fact that the 19-year-old already has two of those), claiming to have offered dating advice and personal connections to the freshman, including Tate himself.
“He and Barron spoke to Andrew over Zoom last year, Mr. Waller said, while the teenager was having a suit fitted by Mr. Waller’s tailor,” reported the Times. “Although they discussed the Romanian case, Barron did not say anything about helping the Tates, Mr. Waller said. They also talked about supporting Mr. Trump’s presidential campaign on their online platforms.”
In the wake of the assassination attempt on Trump’s life, Tate commented to reporters that he was “very close to the Trump family.”
Post-election, the White House assisted Tate, presumably due to his expanding influence over the president’s youngest child. Paul Ingrassia, the Tate brothers’ former lawyer-turned-DHS liaison, intervened in the process of a federal investigation on the Tates’ behalf, claiming that the order to do so had come directly from the White House.
Zohran Mamdani’s First Big Housing Test Is Already Here - 2025-12-11T16:11:15Z
After her husband died in 1996, Brunnie Lebron—now age 71—picked up her two daughters and moved into the third floor of a prewar building near West Harlem, right off St. Nicholas Avenue. The rent-stabilized building always had its problems, she said, but with enough income to pay for her own unit’s repairs, she got along fine. Then, in January 2005, ownership of the building was shuffled from one faceless limited liability corporation to another, and the problems began to snowball.
Lebron’s building was one of many captured in an aggressive buying spree: With the help of a private equity cash infusion, Pinnacle Group—an arm of Joel Wiener’s vast LLC network held under the umbrella of a British Virgin Islands entity—tripled its housing portfolio across New York’s boroughs between May 2004 and May 2006. Many, including Lebron’s, were “distressed” rent-stabilized buildings in Upper Manhattan and the Bronx, Brooklyn, and Queens. In short order, Pinnacle became one of the largest landlords in New York.
Pinnacle’s business strategy hinged on exploiting 1990s-era loopholes and incentives that permitted landlords, under New York state law, to remove apartments from stabilization and convert them into luxury condominiums. To allow this, however, tenants had to move out. So, across Pinnacle properties, roaches multiplied, elevators broke, and old plumbing turned water brown. Rain seeped through crumbling facades, mold bloomed on the walls, and ceilings collapsed, including Lebron’s. When enough tenants fled these uninhabitable conditions, Pinnacle could swoop back in, refurbish the property, and sell its newly minted condos at a profit.
Pinnacle became a notorious gentrifier; in 2017, Wiener became a billionaire. Even when tenants fought back through the years, sometimes even extracting victories in court, the landlord’s holdings were so vast that Pinnacle often appeared too big to fail. That is, until May of this year, when Pinnacle filed for bankruptcy.
Around the same time, Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani was in the midst of what was then seen as a long-shot bid for the New York City’s mayorship. But Mamdani’s bet came in—and the job of cleaning up Pinnacle’s mess will be among the rewards. He won’t be facing it alone: A boisterous tenants’ movement, forged in the Pinnacle properties and fueled by the same spirit that brought Mamdani to power, has already joined the fight.
The mess in question verges on the Augean. The bankruptcy case halted a foreclosure action brought by Flagstar Bank—which is, itself, a product of a reorganizing 2024 bankruptcy—claiming that Pinnacle owes $564 million in mortgage debt. Instead of paying its mortgages, Pinnacle’s money was, according to court documents, funneled to Israeli bondholders who had floated Pinnacle more than $500 million to finance the group’s real estate expansions in the 2010s.
Now 93 buildings and approximately 5,000 rent-stabilized apartments across four boroughs are essentially up for grabs: While Pinnacle solicits offers to refinance, the bankruptcy proceedings have led to an auction where large landlords—including Pinnacle itself—will likely place bids. The deadline to submit bids is this Friday, December 12, but the actual auction will be held on January 8, according to court documents. (After this piece was published, it was announced that the city’s Department of Housing Preservation and Development entered a statement to the court in support of delaying the auction to “ensure the protection of the rights of all parties.”)
Absent from the courtroom drama is a voice for Pinnacle’s thousands of rent-stabilized tenants, who arguably are the most affected by the auction’s results: Will their next landlord be someone like Joel Wiener? Someone worse? While financial entities appraise tenants’ deteriorated homes from on high, the tenants themselves are barred from seeking legal recourse against Pinnacle by the court’s automatic stay on further lawsuits until the case is complete. They may submit letters to the judge detailing their conditions under Pinnacle, but there’s no guaranteeing whether the judge will even allow them. Bankruptcy court, needless to say, is not housing court; their only choice has been to organize a pressure campaign for the city to intervene, and fast.
Tenants have established the Union of Pinnacle Tenants, or UPT, informed by more than a decade of organizing experience via the Crown Heights Tenant Union, influenced, however obliquely, by the unique successes of tenant unions in Los Angeles and Kansas City, and mobilizing at a pace not seen since the height of the pandemic, when everyone intuitively understood the rent crisis demanded a radical response. This is New York’s first portfolio-wide union in recent memory, and surely the first to be built at such dizzying scale: In a matter of months, 40 Pinnacle buildings across three boroughs have formed tenant associations and joined the union to coordinate their demands.
Rent-stabilized tenants were at the heart of Mamdani’s historic campaign for mayor; his promise to freeze their rent was his hallmark policy idea. It’d be too simplistic to say that Pinnacle tenants are rising up today because Mamdani won, but it is, on some level, the same energy he tapped into with his campaign that is now motivating tenants to become their own protagonists.
For weeks, UPT has actively reached out to current and future city officials to grow support for its demands. On November 25, 22 New York representatives, including Councilman Chi Ossé, Assemblymembers Claire Valdez and Julia Salazar, and New York City Comptroller Brad Lander, signed an open letter to the bankruptcy judge to “grant the tenants a say in the auction process.” To date, Mamdani has not signed onto the letter, despite UPT members’ calls for him to do so. Nor did his office respond to The New Republic’s multiple requests for comment. But this hasn’t fazed them. “Old age is a bitch, let me tell you,” Lebron said last time we spoke, “but that doesn’t mean I’m going to give up.”
Pinnacle’s restructuring advisers have blamed three concurrent problems for their insolvency: inflation, interest rates, and, in so many words, tenants. While inflation has undoubtedly increased operating costs, and Pinnacle’s mortgage rates leapt from 3 percent to as much as 10.25 percent, according to court documents, it’s the third item on its list of grievances that the financial press has glommed onto: the 2019 Housing Stability and Tenant Protection Act, or HSTPA, which closed many of the loopholes Pinnacle and others relied on to thrust rent-stabilized units into the speculative market. Tenant groups were the leading force behind the law, and it did, indeed, make life for landlords harder. But only because their business strategy depended on evicting longtime working-class tenants, through increasing property values and soaring rents, which, in turn, permitted further speculation through risky refinancing.
This is what researchers have called “pulling out equity.” In a 2022 report titled “Gambling With Homes, or Investing in Communities,” the Local Initiative Support Corporation, or LISC, outlined how this works. Let’s say a landlord purchases a $1 million building with a $750,000 loan. When the property’s appraised value increases, due partly to the landlord increasing the rent, the study shows that the landlord would more than likely use that new leverage at the bank for an even bigger loan, this time to purchase a $3 million building. The landlord—call them a “housing provider”—is a market genius so long as they continue buying up properties, at the expense of their other buildings, in which they rarely reinvest. But when the rulebook catches up, the market shifts, and—as Julia Duranti-Martinez, senior program officer at LISC, put it—“your assumptions about rent increases don’t hold anymore,” suddenly those loans aren’t such a masterful gambit. Now, they’re just “really bad bets.”
In an emailed statement to The New Republic, a Pinnacle spokesperson said it was “unfortunate that some seek to exploit the already difficult situation facing multi-family housing in New York to advance a political ideology that ignores the rapid rise in maintenance, insurance and other costs which have stressed housing across the city regardless of ownership.” Between 2019 and 2024, Bloomberg—not exactly The Daily Worker—found that “immediately hazardous” housing violations had increased fourfold in Pinnacle buildings, twice the rate of similar rent-stabilized properties. More than that, buildings located in gentrifying neighborhoods saw the “sharpest increases” in housing violations.
Pinnacle’s spokesperson said the Bloomberg report “seems exaggerated” and “doesn’t take into account the across-the-board impacts of documented changes in the law and a post-Covid surge in enforcement.”
Critically, the Pinnacle properties on the auction block are, in fact, profitable. Last year, they generated some $27 million after net operating costs, according to court documents, indicating that the buildings themselves aren’t the central problem. While housing violations have recently increased across the five boroughs, Pinnacle’s long history of neglect has made it a household name among tenant organizers.
In late 2023, Zara Cadoux invited several fellow Crown Heights Tenant Union, or CHTU, members into her home for a meeting of the group’s Palestine solidarity committee. The plan was to discuss how they might connect New York tenants’ struggles to the U.S. financial institutions supporting Israeli occupation. Esteban Girón, one of CHTU’s earliest members and an oral historian of sorts, looked around the living room and said, “Well, you’re sitting in it.”
Cadoux had, months prior, moved into the building, a Pinnacle property since 2006, but CHTU and Pinnacle had met before, going as far back as the group’s 2013 founding. In 2018, 24 Pinnacle buildings in Crown Heights banded together through CHTU to protest poor conditions, but that “fizzled out,” Girón told me, after a schism formed between CHTU and another nonprofit supporting the tenants.
It wasn’t then top of mind that Pinnacle was among the first New York real estate firms to turn to the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange for financing, but soon, CHTU’s Palestine committee discovered at least five of Pinnacle’s major Israeli bondholders also funded construction projects supporting settler occupation in the West Bank and the Golan Heights—meaning, when Pinnacle deferred payments to Flagstar, tenants’ rent was often funneling toward financial entities investing in the Israeli military-industrial complex. (Regarding its Israeli bondholders, Pinnacle declined to comment.)
When Pinnacle residents received notice that their landlord had filed for bankruptcy, “people freaked out,” Cadoux said. “They didn’t know what this meant, if they’d be forced to leave,” which would have played directly into the notorious rent-stabilized converters’ strategy. CHTU saw “a real need to respond as quickly as we could,” but before the group had fully formed a plan to cobble together a borough-to-borough union, tenants beat them to it. In September, at a planned protest over electricity shutoffs at Cadoux’s building, tenants from Lebron’s West Harlem building appeared, asking how they could get involved. “We had been losing steam,” said Vivian Kuo, Lebron’s neighbor and a leader in the building, but “knowing there were other buildings that were organized—more organized than us—gave me more wind for my sails so I could keep going.” Today, she and others in her building are on rent strike.
Tenant activity in the United States tends to ebb and flow with crisis. It’s no accident that CHTU came to life shortly after the 2008 housing bubble, as veterans of Occupy Wall Street sought to flesh out the movement’s idea for neighborhood councils. Other tenant groups, such as Housing Justice for All, partly owe their success to CHTU—Cea Weaver, now part of Zohran Mamdani’s housing transition team, was a founding CHTU member and is now director of HJ4A. But CHTU’s presence was shrinking and required restructuring as it came back to life during the pandemic, when tenants again sought to channel their demands through a grassroots movement.
Since then, forming a citywide tenant union from the bottom up has remained a distant goal among the city’s disparate tenant groups. There are significant challenges ahead, not least because for a group like UPT that ties its identity to a landlord in the middle of restructuring, with no way to know who the landlord will be this time next year, it is difficult to predict the future needs and proclivities of its tenant membership across three boroughs. What happens if they aren’t “Pinnacle tenants” anymore? The goal is to ensure whoever purchases the buildings will have to go through these newly activated tenant associations, but constructing tenant associations at such a rapid pace—“building the airplane while we’re flying it,” as Cadoux said—could also create capacity bottlenecks and burnout from the often thankless work of organizing at the building level.
However, as tenant organizer and New Republic contributor Tracy Rosenthal—who, 10 years ago, slapped $20 on the table to become the “first dues-paying member” of the citywide Los Angeles Tenant Union—contended at a recent Pinnacle tenant assembly, with every “crisis” also comes “opportunity.” The tenant union is at once a response to Pinnacle’s mismanagement and an experiment for what comes next. Tenants are meeting the moment; their organizations will have to work to do so too.
In the 1970s, New York tenants successfully argued that their “sweat equity” entitled them to expropriate the buildings they’d refurbished from the landlords who’d allowed them to fester. More recently, when Signature Bank declared bankruptcy in 2024, the city’s Department of Housing Preservation and Development, or HPD, oversaw a merger (creating Flagstar, the plaintiff in Pinnacle’s case) and partnered with a private financier to place thousands of rent-stabilized homes in a public land bank. UPT is now asking for a similar deal. In an email to The New Republic, Pinnacle warned against the nonprofit housing model, calling it “no panacea” and referred to inflationary operational costs that are today challenging nonprofit owners, adding that Pinnacle “brings decades of experience to their management.” In an emailed statement, Matt Rauschenbach, a spokesperson for HPD, said, “We have shared that we are open to having conversations with the successful bidder about the financing tools we have available to us to help restore, preserve, and protect these homes and keep them affordable for residents.”
But if the speedy rise of UPT signifies anything, it’s that Pinnacle’s residents are ready for a different ownership structure. And they’re not alone. Arielle Hersh, policy director for the Urban Homesteading Assistance Board, said her organization has seen an influx of tenants whose landlords are now going through foreclosure—upward of two buildings per week since January—and are seeking UHAB’s advice for structuring different ownership models for their buildings. Hersch also pointed me to a 2011 Joint Center for Housing of Harvard study, which had warned of the sheer “magnitude” of mortgage loans—more than a quarter of the market at the time—set to “mature sometime after 2020.” “This is a growing issue,” Hersh added. “We’re at the beginning of something that is yet to peak.”
The Pinnacle bankruptcy offers tenants the opportunity to wrest more control over their living conditions; it also offers the incoming Mamdani administration a chance to demonstrate its support for the tenant movement that ushered him into office. Mamdani’s office did not respond to The New Republic’s multiple requests for comment. But when asked, Cadoux wasn’t worried. “My neighbor across the hall is on his transition team,” she said, referring to Manvir Singh, a member of Mamdani’s “kitchen Cabinet.” “So they definitely know about us, and about Pinnacle.”
At a rally outside the Eastern District of New York courthouse one chilly November evening, I saw tenants from Flatbush to Harlem, Midtown to Crown Heights, crowd around a projector broadcasting crowdsourced photos of all manner of indignities: mushrooms growing out of tenants’ ceilings, roaches the size of Medjool dates. To insulate herself as best she could from her landlord, Brunnie Lebron had purchased all of her apartment’s appliances shortly before retiring, but it hadn’t worked. “I want to keep this apartment, for my daughters’ sake, for my sake, and for the rest of the tenants’ sake,” she said. As for Pinnacle, “They can go to hell.”
* This article has been updated.
GOP Uses Budget to Try to Force Pete Hegseth to Release Strike Video - 2025-12-11T15:58:48Z
House Republicans have voted to punish Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth for not releasing footage of the Pentagon’s extrajudicial executions of alleged drug traffickers.
The GOP-led House on Wednesday passed an enormous annual defense policy bill that included a measure to withhold a quarter of Hegseth’s travel budget until the Pentagon turns over unedited footage of its strikes on vessels in the Caribbean.
It’s not clear how much money is in Hegseth’s travel budget, but the bill’s language states that “no more than” 75 percent of that amount will be available until he provides videos to the House and Senate Armed Services Committees.
The Defense Department has come under scrutiny in recent weeks, as it has presented conflicting information about a September incident in which the Pentagon ordered a second strike on the survivors of an initial attack—a war crime that experts say likely violated federal and international law.
The legislation passed the House 312–112, with 197 Republicans supporting the measure. The Senate will likely also approve the National Defense Authorization Act, which will then be sent to President Donald Trump, who has previously voiced his support for the legislation.
The $900 billion budget bill includes measures to repeal sanctions on Syria, provide some military aid to Ukraine, restrict U.S. investment in China, and prevent the Trump administration from significantly reducing the number of troops in Europe. It also includes a controversial provision allowing military contractors to be reimbursed for interest payments.
Even Bush’s Torture Guy Thinks Trump’s Boat Strikes Cross the Line - 2025-12-11T15:15:13Z
Even the Justice Department lawyer who defended the George W. Bush administration’s decisions to waterboard, bind, and sleep-deprive prisoners in the infamous 9/11 “Torture Memos” of 2002 thinks the Trump administration’s drug boat strikes are going too far.
“I don’t think there’s an armed attack” against the United States by the drug cartels, law professor John Yoo, the former Bush DOJ deputy assistant attorney general, told Politico in a Thursday article.
“They’re not attacking us because of our foreign policy and our political system,” Yoo continued. “They’re just selling us something that people in America want. We’re just trying to stop them from selling it. That’s traditionally, to me, crime. It’s something that we could never eradicate or end.”
Yoo’s criticism is significant given the widespread condemnation he received for his own support of unilateral, extrajudicial violence. He’s one of the “Bush Six” who was investigated internationally for war crimes, and his Torture Memo has been described as a “one-sided effort to eliminate any hurdles posed by the torture law,” making his rebuke of Trump’s bombings all the more alarming.
“The only way the strikes have any legal plausibility … is if we’re at war with Venezuela and the drug cartels are something like what we saw in Afghanistan after 2001 with the Taliban and Al Qaeda being so intertwined together that the drug cartels are essentially acting as an auxiliary of the armed forces or intelligence services of Venezuela,” Yoo continued, recalling his own experiences. “For some reason … the administration doesn’t want to say that’s what they’re doing, and they won’t legally justify it.”
It’s a bleak situation when someone who defended human torture and should probably be in some international prison is calling the current administration out for potential war crimes.
“This is the thing I think conservatives should worry about,” Yoo said. “Could a future President AOC say, ‘Oh my gosh, we are at war with the fossil fuel companies. They are inflicting masses of harm on the United States. It might be cumulative, but they’re doing it on purpose.’ … You just make the same exact arguments,” he said.
“That’s the danger you have once you start saying anything that hurts Americans could be an act of war.”
Nevertheless, the Trump administration continues its aggression in the Caribbean Sea, dropping bombs on boats without any kind of due process. On Wednesday, the administration even seized a Venezuelan oil rig.
And while Yoo’s input is worthwhile, it also paints a bleak picture regarding the prospects of anyone involved in the deadly boat strikes actually being held accountable. Yoo has never been tried for his actions and has had a cushy law professor job for years, even as he’s been internationally condemned for his very specific role in “enhanced” interrogation techniques. That doesn’t raise much confidence in the same standards being applied to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and President Trump.
Read the full column here.
Democrats Demand Epstein Files Audit to See if They’ve Been Altered - 2025-12-11T15:12:34Z
Senate Democrats, along with survivors of Jeffrey Epstein’s sex crimes, want an independent review of Epstein case files released by the government to ensure that the records haven’t been tampered with or concealed.
Senators Adam Schiff and Dick Durbin wrote a letter to the Justice Department’s inspector general Thursday asking for a formal review of the files to check for chain of custody issues. Some Epstein survivors, through representatives, are also asking for an independent review to see if any of the documents have been “scrubbed, softened, or quietly removed before the public sees it,” according to CBS News.
“To reassure the American public that any files released have not been tampered with or concealed, the chain of custody forms associated with records and evidence in the Epstein files must be accounted for, analyzed, and released,” wrote Durbin and Schiff, both members of the Senate Judiciary Committee, in their letter.
Last month, Congress and President Trump passed a law requiring all of the Epstein files in government hands to be released by December 19, with as few redactions as possible. Three federal judges have also ruled this month to unseal grand jury records from the criminal investigations into Epstein and his co-conspirator Ghislaine Maxwell.
As several batches of files on Epstein are now due to be released for the first time, the Trump administration’s past actions do not lend much confidence into whether these documents will be released untouched. FBI Director Kash Patel has said that it may not be “lawful” to release certain files, and the bureau has already spent nearly $1 million dollars redacting sensitive information from the files.
Mike Johnson Accuses Reporters of Baiting Him When Asked About Trump - 2025-12-11T14:38:11Z
House Speaker Mike Johnson doesn’t seem to understand why President Donald Trump’s violent racism is his problem.
Trump confirmed Tuesday that he’d used the epithet “shithole countries” eight years ago during a closed-door meeting with senators, though he had initially denied it. While walking through the Capitol Wednesday night, CNN’s Manu Raju asked Johnson if he was OK with the president using that kind of language.
Johnson winced. “Look, I’m baited every day with asking—being made to ask to comment on what the president or other members say,” he replied.
“It’s the president of the United States; don’t you have an opinion on it?” Raju pressed.
“Of course I have an opinion, that’s not the way I speak, and you know that. But the president is expressing his frustration about the extraordinary challenge that is presented to America when you have people coming in, not assimilating, and then taking over the country,” Johnson said.
Recently, the Trump administration has taken aim at the Somali American community in Minnesota with an immigration crackdown, and members of his administration have bent over backward to defend his blatant race baiting. Johnson—who clearly sees himself as part of Trump’s political machine more than a check on the president’s power—seems content to help translate Trump’s frothing at the mouth as good-faith concern for Americans.
Trump Lashes Out at GOP Senator Who Blocked Gerrymandering Scheme - 2025-12-11T14:23:29Z
Donald Trump’s big mouth could cost him more Republican votes in Indiana as he pushes the Hoosier State to redistrict.
Anxious about the 2026 midterms, Trump issued directives to several red states, including Indiana, to redraw their congressional maps in order to bolster Republicans’ razor-thin majority in the House. In Indiana’s case, that unprecedented, long-shot effort would win just two more seats in the U.S. House.
On Thursday, hours before the state Senate is set to vote, Trump issued another nasty missive, attacking more local leaders while threatening to back primary opponents for anyone who votes against his plan. This time, the ire of Trump’s focus was Senate President Pro Tem Rod Bray, who has formed a coalition of allies averse to the measure that very soon could see its death knell.
“Every other State has done Redistricting, willingly, openly, and easily. There was never a question in their mind that contributing to a WIN in the Midterms for the Republicans was a great thing to do for our Party, and for America itself,” Trump wrote in a lengthy Truth Social rant Wednesday night. “Unfortunately, Indiana Senate ‘Leader’ Rod Bray enjoys being the only person in the United States of America who is against Republicans picking up extra seats, in Indiana’s case, two of them.
“He is putting every ounce of his limited strength into asking his soon to be very vulnerable friends to vote with him.
“The people of Indiana don’t want the Party of Sleepy Joe Biden, Kamala, Ilhan Omar, or the rest to succeed in Washington,” the president continued. “Bray doesn’t care. He’s either a bad guy, or a very stupid one!
“Anybody that votes against Redistricting, and the SUCCESS of the Republican Party in D.C., will be, I am sure, met with a MAGA Primary in the Spring,” Trump wrote. “Rod Bray and his friends won’t be in Politics for long, and I will do everything within my power to make sure that they will not hurt the Republican Party, and our Country, again.”
Trump’s fury is unlikely to win him any friends. At least one Republican in the state—a longtime disability advocate—has already sworn off voting in favor of Trump’s new congressional maps, blaming the president’s decision to call Minnesota Governor Tim Walz “seriously retarded.”
Still, the fact that there is a vote on the measure at all could be a sign of twisting attitudes regarding the gerrymandering effort: Indiana’s Senate announced late last month that it would not meet until January, signaling at the time that redistricting would not be on the state’s legislative agenda this year. Now the state could be just hours away from new maps.
The Supreme Court Will Get Another Shot at Church-State Separation - 2025-12-11T11:00:00Z
In May 2025, the Supreme Court handed down a 4–4 split decision in Oklahoma Statewide Charter School Board v. Drummond. That deadlock left intact a ruling from the Oklahoma Supreme Court that denied what would have been the nation’s first publicly funded religious charter school, St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School. In line with recent decisions cutting into the separation of church and state, the court had been expected to rule in favor of the religious school. However, because Amy Coney Barrett recused and one conservative sided with the state, the court left the state decision in place, meaning that states can still exclude religious schools from charter programs.
Because the court did not reach the underlying constitutional questions, the door remains ajar. And as news has emerged that the same legal apparatus that set up and represented St. Isidore is now organizing a Jewish charter school in Oklahoma, many observers see it as an attempt to push the same issue—this time with a majority of conservatives ready to strike down religious public funding bans across the country.
At issue in Drummond were two significant constitutional questions. First: Are privately run charter schools state actors if they are publicly approved and funded? And second: If they are public, does the First Amendment’s free exercise clause prohibit a state from excluding religious schools from its charter school program—or does the establishment clause require it to exclude them?
In 2023, the Statewide Virtual Charter School Board approved St. Isidore as a virtual charter school. However, contrary to state law, the board excluded terms from its standard contract with charter schools requiring any charter school to be “nonsectarian in its programs, admission policies, employment practices, and all other operations.” This exception raised concerns that the school could reserve the right to discriminate in admissions, hiring, or discipline on religious grounds, potentially barring or expelling LGBTQ+ students or staff or denying services to students with disabilities.
As Rachel Laser, president and CEO of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, pointed out in an interview, “The establishment clause provides us the freedom to control our own bodies, freedom to live as LGBTQ+ people, freedom to read and learn, freedom to access health care on equal grounds with others, freedom to access jobs and stores and public accommodations, freedom to access social services, and freedom to receive a good public education.”
Oklahoma Attorney General Gentner Drummond filed a lawsuit requesting a mandamus action to revoke the contract, arguing that by virtue of being publicly funded; open to all; subject to state oversight, testing, and civil rights and disability laws; and revocable by the state, Oklahoma charter schools are functionally public schools. And as Justice Sonia Sotomayor put it at oral argument, “The essence of the establishment clause was we’re not going to pay religious leaders to teach their religion.”
However, the St. Isidore attorneys argued that excluding schools solely because of their religious natures violated the free exercise clause. Drawing on recent U.S. Supreme Court cases like Espinoza v. Montana Department of Revenue and Carson v. Makin, they argued that once a state offers a generally available public benefit, it cannot flatly exclude religious applicants on the basis of religion, and they contended that charter school status was such a public benefit.
The Oklahoma Supreme Court rejected that argument in 2024, and because the U.S. Supreme Court split evenly on the issue, that ruling remains in place.
That brings us to the latest development: a new effort led in part by some of the same board members as St. Isidore and backed by the same legal organization to establish another state-funded, religious charter school, Ben Gamla Jewish Charter School. According to the organization behind it, the school would serve Jewish families who view religious education as “a requirement of the faith.”
Notably, this is not a grassroots push from Oklahoma’s Jewish community. As Rabbi Daniel Kaiman told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, “When I called around to other Jewish leaders in Tulsa and Oklahoma City, none of us knew anything about it.” Rather, this appears to be a deliberate effort to bring a religious charter under legal review in a context where the religious applicant is not Christian but Jewish.
Proponents may be pinning their hopes on the idea that a non-Christian charter will make it harder for opponents to frame the issue strictly in terms of “Christian privilege.” “As a Jew, I am angered that my faith is being misused to advance a Christian nationalist agenda,” said Laser. “This is not what the majority of Jews in Oklahoma want. It is actually counter to what they want.” She pointed out that in lawsuits implicating the separation of church and state across the country, many of the strongest supporters of that separation are clergy members and other people of faith, as a necessity to maintain the integrity of the faith.
If that school’s application under a charter school law succeeds and it makes its way back to the full U.S. Supreme Court, it is likely to have significant legal consequences. The conservatives on the court have been very solicitous of religious freedom arguments at the expense of the separation of church and state—as Justice Sotomayor has put it, allowing the free exercise clause to trump the establishment clause. If the court were to rule in favor of the school, public education funding could be transformed.
States with charter laws might be legally compelled to fund religious charters not as an exception but as a matter of constitutional law. The result would be the institutionalization of sectarian schooling funded by public money across the country under a veneer of neutral school choice. In this, Laser sees a broader effort from organizations on the extreme religious right: “This is part of a larger campaign by Christian nationalists to infuse Christianity into public schools. It’s a two-pronged strategy about indoctrinating a new generation of Americans into Christian nationalist ideology and diverting public dollars to fund that agenda.”
Attempts to drive public funds toward religious education are not unique to Oklahoma. Perhaps anticipating a win for Ben Gamla, Tennessee Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti recently issued an opinion that excluding religious schools from public funding violates the free exercise clause of the U.S. Constitution. Despite a warning from the Colorado Board of Education, a Christian school is attempting to collect public funds through the state’s contract education program. With the wind at their backs, it is very likely that religious conservatives will continue pushing the issue until the Supreme Court gives them their way.
Supporters of the separation of church and state dodged a bullet in Drummond, but it is unlikely that the far-right Supreme Court will set the issue aside forever. And when the justices finally do take up the issue again, the country will confront a decision not only about charter schools but about the character of the public sphere itself. Whether the country will still hold out the promise of a common, secular education—as a safeguard for pluralism rather than a threat to it—will depend on the court’s conservatives.
Laser would remind them of the history that motivated the religious liberty clauses of the First Amendment: “Separation of church and state stops divisions that have been proven to lead to violence and death. The Founders were closer to religious wars and other sectarian conflicts, and they knew that our democracy depends on the separation of church and state.”
A New Report Reveals the Real Reason Democrats Lost in 2024 - 2025-12-11T11:00:00Z
Democrats need to move right to win back voters in 2026 and 2028—that’s the conventional wisdom from a slew of Democratic think tanks and Beltway strategists. To make their case, they’ve released reports and polling trying to prove that voters are more moderate on many social and cultural issues—like trans athletes in school sports and immigration—than the party’s far-left activists. But an exhaustive new report, made available exclusively to The New Republic, makes a convincing counterargument. More importantly, it provides a road map for Democratic candidates that doesn’t require throwing vulnerable members of their coalition under the bus.
The report comes from Way to Win, a left-leaning “strategic donor collaborative and strategy hub” founded after the 2016 election. The report, a compilation and analysis of the surveys and focus groups they’ve done since the 2024 election, looks not just at swing voters but the entire coalition, including those who voted for President Biden in 2020 and then sat out the 2024 election. This presents a fuller picture than analyses that simply conclude the electorate swung right last November. While some Biden 2020 voters did vote for Trump last year, a substantial number stayed home. This changed the composition of the electorate, and made it look more Republican than it really was. Those who sat it out in November are much more politically aligned with Democrats but weren’t motivated to vote for Vice President Kamala Harris and downballot Democrats. Determining what they want from future candidates tells a different story than centrists might hope.
Way to Win pointed to three main problems that cost Democrats last year: Voters were upset not just about rising prices but about longer-term economic trends, and wanted change; Republicans and the far right have a built-in media advantage, thanks to years of investments, which made it harder for Democrats to break through; and movements on the left around issues like Gaza, racial and economic justice, and immigration weren’t aligned with the party.
Fundamental to the report is an important corrective. While many observers have argued that Democrats lost last year because the party had moved too far left, Way to Win makes the case that voters don’t actually apply neatly defined ideological frames when they evaluate candidates’ policies and choose whom to vote for. Their decisions are more complex and filtered through their social, family, and work lives—a conclusion supported by much political science research. “When you go knock on doors, you hear all kinds of stories, but they almost never have to do with detailed policies or ideological framing,” the report says.
This suggests a different path forward from moderating on some issues, like immigration, the environment, or trans rights. While it might be true that the party’s positions are to the left of the majority on some specific issues, there’s no evidence that those are the issues that drove most voters to make their decisions last November. It’s not that these issues don’t matter at all, but they aren’t decisive, and there’s room to persuade voters, as well. “When we actually talk to voters and listen to them, which we did over the course of this year, it’s that the other issues that we highlight in our report are just much bigger factors,” said Jenifer Fernandez Ancona, a co-founder and vice president of Way to Win.
This was especially true of those who skipped voting in 2024. In the important Sunbelt states, these voters were 13 percent of the 2020 coalition, and a majority said they would have voted for Harris if they’d voted in 2024 rather than sitting out. These voters didn’t want Democrats to moderate. They wanted a stronger economic message and wanted Democrats to fight for them. But they often felt like they’d been supporting Democrats for years and hadn’t gotten results.
In fact, moderating on some positions was more likely to reinforce Republican talking points and make Democrats seem weak, according to the report. “If we want to build a bigger coalition, it’s actually going to make it worse if we keep trying to look more like Republicans, or we keep trying to go in this triangulation direction,” Fernandez Ancona said. “It’s not that we’re not saying we need to move more left and be more socialist.… We’re really saying we need to actually go towards strength, which is what we define in the report as basically standing for what you believe in.”
The perception of Democrats as weak was partly shaped by Republican attacks rather than Democratic messages themselves. As an example, voters surveyed by Way to Win said that Harris’s campaign was mostly concerned with trans issues. In reality, it wasn’t a big part of her campaign, Fernandez Ancona said. But trans issues played a starring role in ads from the opposition.
Harris didn’t work to counter that impression—and her actual campaign messages didn’t break through, either. Voters didn’t hear her messages on the economy as much. They also want Democrats in general to talk more about the bigger issues facing the economy, like inequality. “One of the top performing policies or issues that were motivating for the skippers was strengthening enforcement against wealthy tax cheats and making the wealthy pay what they owe,” Fernandez Ancona said. “It’s making the case that the system is not working for a lot of people because of this inequality and this imbalance, and we have to make that more fair.”
Too often, Democratic messages end up reinforcing the story that Republicans are telling, Way to Win says. The report pointed to the losing campaigns of Senators Sherrod Brown in Ohio and Jon Tester in Montana, who touted their support of conservative immigration policies. Instead, Democrats need to tell their own story when it comes to immigration, one that highlights the contributions immigrants make and argues that legal immigration should be easier.
This report is in line with other work from researchers across the left showing that moderation doesn’t necessarily win Democrats more seats. G. Elliott Morris (a former colleague of mine from 538, the now-defunct political analysis site), published a post on his Substack analyzing moderate candidate performance when compared to candidates further to the left. “I estimate that strategic moderation in 2024 could have increased a Democrat’s vote share by 1-1.5 points and their chance of winning by just 10%—not enough to overcome the uncertainty driven by other factors in the election. This is not to say that moderation doesn’t matter, but lots of other factors matter more,” he wrote.
And Anat Shenker-Osorio, a political strategist and messaging consultant, has made the same arguments. She says Democrats need to embrace “magnetism,” which is similar to the “strength” that Way to Win advocates: staking out forceful positions that risk pushing some voters away but are also much more likely to attract voters than simply taking whatever positions the polls suggest.
These arguments are strengthened by the wins of Zohran Mamdani in New York City, Mikie Sherrill in New Jersey, and Abigail Spanberger in Virginia. Those candidates all had ideological differences, but they shared an approach to politics that was combative on behalf of their constituents, one that promised to tackle big issues like affordability and work hard to deliver without ceding ideological ground to Republicans. “They actually went after it head-on by standing up for their values and who they were,” said Fernandez Ancona. “The playbook going forward is, name it, call it out for what it is—because the voters also don’t like this fear and division. We hear that from them a lot. They’re tired of it.”
This could also help motivate the Democratic base, which performs an important function: When grassroots movements and reliable voters align with the party, they help build excitement and spread the word on behalf of candidates. Granted, the havoc and wreckage of the second Trump administration is sufficiently motivating voters to come out for Democrats, as we saw in the November elections and this past Tuesday. That may well remain true in 2026 and 2028. But to win big and, more importantly, hold onto power, the Democrats need to work harder to build a party brand that answers voters’ real concerns and differentiates them from Republicans. That doesn’t mean behaving like a weather vane, turning in whichever direction the political winds blow. It means having the courage and strength to make your own weather.
Mad King Trump’s Latest Peeve: Sans Serif Fonts - 2025-12-11T11:00:00Z
In The Emperor, Ryszard Kapuściński’s classic portrait of autocratic senility, Emperor Haile Selassie orders a great palace to be built in Ethiopia’s Ogaden Desert, keeps a liveried staff there for many years—but visits the site only a single day. In Addis Ababa, one servant waits on Emperor Selassie so that whenever he mounts his throne he can place a pillow under the emperor’s feet (Selassie was very short), and another stands by so that when the emperor’s little dog pisses on a visiting dignitary’s shoe this servant can wipe it off with a satin cloth. The dignitaries are not permitted so much as to flinch.
The point, I guess, is that autumnal patriarchs run out of large abuses of power to initiate (indiscriminate deportations, selling pardons) and turn to petty ones. Two examples of the latter are Trump’s gilding the Oval Office and erecting a 90,000 square-foot White House ballroom that dwarfs the executive mansion. The style of these is literally rococo because MAGA itself has entered its rococo stage. The latest example is Trump’s war on sans serif fonts—that is, typeface lacking traditional small decorative flourishes.
It started with words. When Trump returned to office, he banned from all government communications the words and phrases equality, inequality, climate science, at-risk, socioeconomic, underprivileged, and 193 others. Now Trump is dictating how the letters in the remaining words should appear on a computer screen or page. It’s reported that Secretary of State Marco Rubio on December 9 sent an “action request” to all diplomatic posts ordering them to stop using sans serif type, to “restore decorum and professionalism to the department’s written work.”
If you’re wondering how Rubio could possibly have time for such small matters while Israel makes a sham of its Gaza ceasefire and Trump sells out Ukraine, the answer is that this comes from the top. A source tells me that a Trump administration official outside the State Department recently delivered a similar harangue about sans serif, baffling everyone at the meeting in question. As far back as Inauguration Day, the Trump White House replaced the Decimal sans serif headline font on the Biden White House webpage with the serif-rich Instrument Serif. “I don’t love that the White House uses it,” Instrument Serif’s inventor, Jordan Egstad, recently told Jezebel’s Daniel Han. “Fuck Donald Trump.”
Last month, Trump ordered placed, on a pillar just outside his office and behind the (former) Rose Garden, some gold signage (“The Oval Office”) in flourish-heavy Shelley Script. It looked like an invitation to a Bar Mitzvah. That came down, then went up again. The same font is also visible along the “Presidential Walk of Fame” (the same one where President Joe Biden is depicted, insultingly, as an autopen). It’s all part of Trump’s project to make the White House resemble a 1970s dinner theater.
Before proceeding, let me declare myself. I harbor a mild preference for serifs. The font you see in this article and throughout The New Republic’s website (also its monthly print magazine) has serifs. I like serifs, but I don’t make a big thing of it because, unlike the president of the United States, I have better things to do with my time.
Sans serif fonts gained popularity in the early twentieth century with the rise of mass advertising because sans serif was judged easier to read from a distance. Modernist graphic artists liked sans serif’s stripped-down aesthetic, and in the early days of the World Wide Web, graphic designers decided sans serif was easier to read on a screen. (A sans serif font was the default typeface for Windows Office from 2006 to 2023.) Today, sans serif remains pretty rare in dead-tree books, but online you’re as likely to encounter serifs as not. Older readers typically prefer serifs, whereas millennials, according to New York magazine, can’t abide them. To which I say: Fine, sure, whatever.
The Trump administration opposes sans serif because they think it’s DEI bullshit. In 2023, Rubio’s predecessor, Antony Blinken, in a cable headlined “The Times (New Roman) They Are A Changin’,” switched State Department communications to the sans serif Calibri font. His reason was that it was easier to read for people with dyslexia or other reading disabilities—and, yes, that suggestion came from the State Department’s Office of Diversity and Inclusion, one of many such offices throughout the federal government that Trump ordered eliminated his first day in office.
Rubio’s December 9 cable (“Return to Tradition: Times New Roman’s 14-Point Font Required for All Department Paper”) argued that “switching to Calibri achieved nothing except the degradation of the department’s official correspondence.” Oh, please. The only degradation here is Rubio’s own in pandering to Trump’s pettiest prejudices. Times New Roman, Rubio wrote in his memo, “aligns with the President’s One Voice for America’s Foreign Relations directive.” That executive order was Trump’s warning to the diplomatic corps that if you don’t play ball, he’ll fire your ass. I guess Rubio’s point in citing it was that if you continue to use Calibri, he’ll fire your ass.
The irony, of course, is that when it comes to reading, Trump could use all the DEI assistance he can get. That’s been evident for some time; see, for instance, this hilarious 1987 clip where Trump first says that he hasn’t read Tom Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vanities; then says he “really liked Tom Wolfe’s last book,” which was The Bonfire of the Vanities; then says Wolfe’s “done a beautiful job” with “his current book”; then confirms that he means The Bonfire of the Vanities; then says, “I really can’t hear with this earphone by the way.” In 2016, Tony Schwartz, Trump’s ghostwriter on The Art of the Deal, told The New Yorker’s Jane Mayer, “I seriously doubt that Trump has ever read a book straight through in his adult life.” In 2016, Megyn Kelly asked Trump to name the most recent book he’d read. Trump’s reply: “I read passages, I read areas, I’ll read chapters—I don’t have the time.” People have speculated for years that Trump is dyslexic. The big headlines on his White House website now have serifs, but much of the text does not. Has Trump even noticed?
In initiating a crusade against sans serif type, Trump appears to be telling us: “I’ve never read my briefing books, and I don’t intend to start now. But I like how things look, and serifs look better, and if that creates problems for handicapped people I don’t care.”
A comparison here with Ethiopia’s late emperor is instructive. Selassie “had no schooling,” Kapuściński reports (not an excuse Trump can make). For Selassie, “The custom of relating things by word of mouth” had certain advantages:
If need be, the emperor could say that a given dignitary had told him something quite different from what had really been said, and the latter could not defend himself, having no written proof. Thus the Emperor heard from his subordinates not what they told him, but what he thought should be said.
But petty tyrant though he was, even Selassie didn’t likely give a damn whether the reading matter he didn’t read had serifs or not. Once again, Trump is breaking new ground.
The Self-Delusions of Olivia Nuzzi’s American Canto - 2025-12-11T11:00:00Z
Midway through the journey of her life, Olivia Nuzzi found herself in Malibu, for she had wandered from the straightforward path. In exile from the East Coast, where she had held a plum gig with New York, she awoke on the West, with a plum gig at Vanity Fair, doing hard time as “West Coast editor.” With The Divine Comedy in one hand and The King James Bible in the other—or at least, on display when the Times writer came for the profile—she set out to document her descent. Themes were close at hand. Dante, he wrote about the inferno. Fire, you dig? Well, guess what California’s got? Lousy with it.
The mismatches between reality and reality as described in American Canto began long before the book was released. To recount a fall from grace, it helps to have actually fallen from grace, and on publication day the author was still, somehow, in the upper echelon of her industry. The circumstances that caused her to skip town—to wit: an affair with RFK Jr., then a presidential candidate she had been assigned to profile—would be humiliating to anyone, certainly. But writing as if she was living in hell seems a little unfair to both Malibu and Vanity Fair. Which isn’t the magazine it used to be, but what is, these days? American Canto is a book about personal decline that ends in hitting rock top.
Here the thing gets stranger still, because when the much-celebrated writer got a chance to write at greater length than ever before about the Trump era, the result was an actual fall from grace, with Nuzzi garnering unimpressed reviews and Vanity Fair cutting ties with her (amid a series of revelations from her ex-fiancé Ryan Lizza). This set of events has precipitated altogether too much discourse. There are the claims and counterclaims of the primary participants. There’s second-order discourse about what the whole thing says about some other problem—the influencer-fication of journalism, maybe. Most of that is true enough.
There’s third-order discourse, where people discuss the discussion. “The titanic sexual shaming of a woman, Monica Lewinsky-style,” posted Caitlin Flanagan on X. “No one’s going to be proud of this coverage in 20 years.” It got weirder. “When I look at her I see a little girl, like my daughter,” Lisa Taddeo wrote in Air Mail, adding that “the attempted patriarchal mass murder of this woman’s career” is a “freaksome lynching.”
I’m a little older than Nuzzi. I think good writing—clear thinking—matters. Not much, but a little! This is a minority position, I am learning. If Nuzzi came away from the last decade with useful insight for us, it would not excuse her ethical lapses, but it would be a point in her favor. If she didn’t—if, say, she came face to face with various incarnations of American evil over a decade and not only failed to recognize them as evil but came away with little to tell us—it would tend to sharpen questions about what her defenders are defending, what our industry rewards, and the purpose, if any, of writing in the Trump era.
I have to admit something that surprised me: Parts of this book work. They work conditionally, and not in a way intended by the author, but they work. The sections of American Canto that concern people other than the author herself and RFK Jr. don’t work at all. In this book, other people are always flat and seen through a gauzy screen, and the prose is composed substantially of filler—long portions of transcripts republished whole, republished tweets from accounts like “Bimbopilled,” song lyrics and poetry, historical digressions that go nowhere. On the occasions when Nuzzi lets her mind show, something snaps into place. It’s good for the same reasons the first part is bad.
Before we get there, we have to talk about the Didion thing.
Ordinarily it would be an act of cruelty to compare a writer’s first book to Joan Didion’s work, but Nuzzi summoned the specter of Didion in the build-up to publication. A California book, about fire and entropy and social sickness and the East as seen from the West, a mix of memoir and essays and reportage. The promotional art for American Canto in both Vanity Fair and a glowing Times profile features Nuzzi in her white Mustang, sunglasses, California chic, which inevitably recalls the black-and-white pictures of Didion with her Stingray.
What’s in the text is actually much weirder. The book’s California sections imitate not only Didion’s themes and interests but her specific writerly tics and constructions down to the sentence level. If you happen to buy this book, read it alongside “Quiet Days in Malibu,” the last piece from The White Album. Some of the similarities could be coincidental. Didion’s piece sketches the lifeguards at Zuma Beach, and she clearly likes the way the word looks and sounds, using it over and over. Nuzzi refers back throughout the book to “the little house at Zuma.” Didion loved proper place names, and making lists of them (a tendency Mary McCarthy made much fun of in her review of Didion’s Democracy), and she whips ’em out in “Quiet Days” to draw a parallel between the lifeguards and generals on a front: “All quiet at Leo. Situation normal at Surfrider.” Nuzzi does too, some of the same ones, and for the same reason: “Ball of fire at Point Dume. Clear. Boney Ridge, the San Gabriels, the Topa Topas.”
In American Canto, there’s a certain tick-tock patter that will feel familiar, and also a certain habit of addressing the reader to clear up meanings and definitions. “I mean to tell you as best I can,” starts one paragraph. The next: “I mean to tell you of the canyon.” Two more that way. You may hear a certain resonance in Nuzzi’s description of a childhood home flanked by “hydrangeas and forsythias and tomato plants.” Didion liked playing with negation and repetition, and there it is in the description of RFK’s brain parasite, “the worm that was not a worm.”
Didion loved repetition, loved building long stretches of metronymic prose that break, for effect, in long, sweeping, propulsive sentences. She also loved using the full names of her subjects, rather than last names or pronouns. Here, from the second page of Canto, one of those propulsive sentences:
I knew about beauty pageants because of JonBenét Ramsey, and I was frightened by beauty pageants because of JonBenét Ramsey, because she was the first girl through whom I learned that if you are beautiful you may get killed, and once you are killed you will become the property of the country, and the country will resurrect you so that you can be killed again and again in ecstatic detail on the national altar of television; JonBenét Ramsey said that if you are beautiful you may get killed in service to your country.
If you haven’t caught it, she’s drawing a parallel between herself and her troubles as a beautiful person and Ramsey, and she gives herself permission to draw the connection because of a kind of numerology. “In 1996, the year that Donald Trump acquired the Miss Universe Pageant, I turned three, and JonBenét Ramsey, who was six, was murdered.” Three years later, when she was six, she saw Donald Trump’s car in traffic.
Didion’s techniques have a purpose. Nearly all of her writing had as its target sloppy thinking, self-deception, delusion. Her prose style was the scalpel she used to cleave the real from the unreal. The repetition, the specificity, the remove from her subjects, created a sense of absolute, dispassionate precision. When she’s writing about herself, this precision leavens the anxiety she feels and provides a useful tension. When she’s free to observe other people she’s not emotionally invested in—say, Michael Dukakis or Newt Gingrich—her prose, and her thinking and analysis, is as clear as a mountain spring.
In American Canto, these techniques are exactly the wrong choice—they spotlight what is actually occurring on the page, which is imprecise prose reflecting unclear thinking. This is true from the jump. In the brief introduction, Nuzzi writes that this is not “a book about the president or even about politics.” A few pages later, though, she writes that what “happened between me and the Politician,” which is to say RFK Jr., is in fact the same thing that “happened between the country and the president. I cannot talk about one without the other.”
This sets up the expectation that some meaningful insight into both men is forthcoming. But Nuzzi writes of the Trump era that “events lost context. Words lost meaning.” Sure, but isn’t the point of the writer to separate true from false and discern meaning? The sections about Trump consist too often of long, uninterrupted quotes taken from already published reportage and summaries of events a knowledgeable reader will already know.
Nuzzi has a habit of bending reality to the more cinematic, sentimental version of it. At the beginning, she recalls the trauma she felt from witnessing the day during Donald Trump’s trial when “the boy who missed his mother and could no longer bear to be here doused himself in gasoline and lit a match. When I learned what burning flesh smells like. Strange and sweet.” During a TV appearance later she says she could taste him in her mouth, a horrible thing to imagine. But you may remember that the “boy who missed his mother” was a 37-year-old schizophrenic man who believed information about an imminent fascist takeover was being transmitted to him through classic Simpsons episodes. He was, in a way, a symbol of our time, but not the one that the author wanted to use.
The imprecision in the book’s prose and description of reality is greatly exacerbated by the mystifying decision not to use proper names for figures with whom Nuzzi personally interacted. The reader is supposed to juggle descriptions of the Personality, the President, the Politician, and the Performer, among dozens of others. Not all are so vague, thankfully—there’s the “South African Tech Billionaire” and “the digital everything-company billionaire” and “the War Hero, the senior senator from Arizona”—but others will make the reader confused. When she refers to a businessman, is it the same one as before? I can guess who the “MAGA General” is, but who is the “failed candidate”?
Does it even matter? In a world where words have lost all meaning, what’s the point of words? The sense conveyed by this portion of the book is that the author doesn’t believe they have any—doesn’t believe in much of anything—even though the book is being marketed as an attempt to explain everything.
Meaning is occasionally gestured to, though most often it is left to hang. Nuzzi finds it significant that she was born on January 6. Hey, that’s kinda funny, a reader might think, but for the author this and other conjoined coincidences recall the Ouroboros: “Strange symmetry. Circular. On this humid night, a last gasp as the tail met the jaw. I did not yet grasp this.” She writes that she found her respect for RFK Jr. swell when he dropped a writerly insight about Trump. “I always thought of him as a novel: hundreds of lies that amount to one big truth.” A good line, one that Nuzzi writes filled her with jealousy and longing. But the natural question is: What’s the one big truth? We sail right on by.
There are long sections of this book Nuzzi clearly does care about, and understood in the proper register, they’re strangely compelling. The register in which to absorb American Canto is the one in which you’d read Pale Fire, whose verbose and unreliable narrator, Charles Kinbote, draws us slowly into his deepening, complex madness. Read it this way, and a lot of what might irritate you otherwise will click into place.
This sounds, I’m sure, like an attempt to be cruel. But I mean it earnestly. Nuzzi succeeds in letting us into her mind and communicates how she came to make the mistakes she did, and these portions, at least, are worth reading not because they’re true but because they aren’t. They’re carefully written to obscure as much as they reveal; written defensively. When she first addresses the scandal, she writes in the passive voice that “a monumental fuckup had collided my private life with the public interest.”
But this is a kind of sincerity also. She is admirably frank that she is still primarily motivated by resentments and perceived slights rather than a desire for atonement and forgiveness. “People ask me now about anger. About my lack of it. How? How could I not be enraged?” This is not, of course, the question most people have. She still views Kennedy as a put-upon outsider rather than what he has subsequently revealed himself to be. This is true in both her personal sense of him and her analysis of the man as a political actor—“a collision of conspiracy and error that made it so that he could not win,” she writes, though this was hardly the problem with Kennedy’s bid. She valorized him, and to some extent still does, as a man who made all decisions by thinking through “what would be best for the country. I was sure he could do that, I said, because I trusted him that much.”
The tragedy here, that what Kennedy has done is to wreck American science and health in a way that will take generations to recover, is never addressed. She tangled with a monster and survived, and doesn’t quite seem to have gotten it. The betrayal he carried out, which results in him earning the name the Politician, is to sell out Nuzzi. “I never did think of him, not until much later, and then for reasons that came as a shock, as a politician.” As a journalist, this is a permanently disqualifying lapse of judgment. But it’s good character development.
This gives the book a certain horror-movie undercurrent, as Nuzzi keeps rendering judgments, even from her present position, that the reader suspects are upside-down and missing the key thing. She writes that Kennedy thought it “would be fun” if the two went to Mar-a-Lago at the same time. Nuzzi thinks Trump will clock the affair. She shut her eyes “tightly, as if it might un-reveal the revelation that he did not appreciate how sophisticated an animal he was dealing with,” even though she says a few pages before that Kennedy was perfectly clear-eyed about Trump. “It was not the sort of information the Politician should have wanted the president to have,” she says.
The reader may suspect, in fact, that Kennedy, clearly loving the power imbalance, would have enjoyed seeing her squirm—and would not have minded Trump knowing. It only gets worse from here. Later, she says Kennedy was “not good in a crisis” and “did not know much about how the media worked,” as she explains why his impulse was to lie and slander her when their affair was reported in the press. The discernment that is the essayist’s only valuable skill is gone.
When the thing blows up, Nuzzi is furious at everyone who brought the lapse of judgment to light. The editor who learns the truth—“the man for whom I worked”—was trying to “trap” her. “I had never before lied to him,” Nuzzi says. Then she lies. But of course, she has been lying for a long time now, advocating for the presidential campaign of a person she did not reveal she was intimately involved with. She lambastes those who told the editor as betrayers: She even uses the book to litigate an unrelated grievance with the magazine’s creative director.
From here the madness deepens. “What occurred in private was supposed to be private, and it had not been my choice that it ceased to remain so, nor that a corporate media outfit with a political reputation to uphold had been spooked into participating in what I considered a siege of hyper-domestic terror,” she says. She attempts to make the muddled case that the terror is the result of liberal persecution for her criticism of Joe Biden.
She gets in the white Mustang and drives west, and becomes convinced drones are stalking her. She meditates on how the waiters at D.C. restaurants are most likely spies. The shadows around her grow longer, her alienation deepens. Her connection to reality fractures further and, at the very end, she declares, watching another drone hover over the beach, that “I do not recall what a plane ought to look like in the night sky, whether it should move fast or slow, if it should appear to remain in one place for very long, if it should ever move in circles or up and down,” before declaring that “nobody cares anymore.”
The impulse is to say: Of course you know what a plane does. But maybe not? The last line is another jagged fracturing. The drone is sending a message from God, she writes, and she is unsure whether it is meant to “offer reassurance or to issue a threat.”
In the Times profile that preceded the book, Nuzzi said she wrote American Canto to “complete a thought.” The easy joke: just one? But I, too, feel how hard it is to complete a thought at the moment—to think clearly about anything. Whether it’s the microplastics or the general deadening sense of the world around us or the comforting feel of the phone in my hand, it is a constant struggle. American Canto is the work of a disordered mind in anguish, terribly raw. To the extent that she has put this calamitous state of mind on the page, the prose version of flipping between X and Instagram over and over, alternating between dread and self-delusion, Nuzzi has, in spite of herself, produced an artifact of the age.
The States Leading the Way on Regulating AI - 2025-12-11T11:00:00Z
Artificial intelligence is rushing into our lives at a breakneck pace. And the AI mavens know it: In the merging language of Silicon Valley and Capitol Hill, they like to describe our present state of affairs as a “race.” There are reports that the technology can now execute large-scale cyberattacks, that it can engineer bioweapons. AI chatbots are melting our brains while AI video generators churn out deepfake revenge porn. The GOP’s support for the industry, guided by a friendly President Donald Trump and the considerable influence of the Big Tech money lining the coffers of lawmakers—including, it must be said, some Democrats loath to confront the administration on the matter—has ensured federal regulation is off the table. The first item listed in Trump’s AI Action Plan is a promise to the AI industry that it will be “unencumbered by bureaucratic red tape.”
In response, state legislatures are passing their own regulations, red states included: Texas and West Virginia both passed AI laws in 2025. But the biggest story this year was right here in the industry’s California backyard, where Governor Gavin Newsom signed an AI transparency bill that capped a years-long lobbying battle, immediately becoming a top target in Washington.
California’s new AI law is aimed at preventing “catastrophic risk,” which it defines as “serious injury to more than 50 people” or damages of $1 billion. Colloquially discussed as S.B. 53 but formally titled the Transparency in Frontier Artificial Intelligence Act, the law has already been replicated in New York where, as in California, they’re concerned with an AI model going—let’s say … “semi-sentient”—and “evading the control of its frontier developer or user.” Similar legislation is winding its way through statehouses in Michigan, Massachusetts, and Illinois.
This encroaching regulation has congressional Republicans (and the AI lobby) hell-bent on instituting a federal override on state regulations. In a conversation with The New Republic, state Senator Scott Weiner, the California lawmaker behind Senate Bill 53, called the AI preemption push “a Night of the Living Dead … it keeps coming back.”
Republicans tried to put the preemption in the reconciliation bill in June. They failed. Spectacularly, actually: shot down by a vote of 99–1 in the Senate. Then they tried to slip a 10-year preemption into the NDAA, but that too fell apart—leading an undaunted House Majority Leader Steve Scalise promising to “look for other places” for the language.
This legislative scramble takes place in the foreground of the death of Adam Raine—a 16-year-old who killed himself after a monthslong ChatGPT conversation so disturbing that I’d rather not recount it here. His family is now suing OpenAI. The company says that Raine “misused” their chatbot. They say ChatGPT isn’t designed to do things like congratulate teenagers for attempting suicide. Their legal argument seems to be that ChatGPT evaded the control of its developer.
Stymied on the legislative side, Trump recently drafted an executive order that would cut funding to states with laws like S.B. 53, arguing that regulation hampers progress and that we’re in a “race with our adversaries.” The executive order refers to S.B. 53 as a “burdensome disclosure and reporting law.” Donald Trump obviously didn’t write the order; he probably knows as much about AI as I do about particle accelerators. The more likely author is White House AI czar David Sacks, who has pushed to loosen export controls, thereby allowing America’s advanced AI chips to be sold to China.
Now, it can’t be true that (a) we should sell our advanced AI chips to China, and yet (b) we shouldn’t regulate the industry because we need to beat China in the AI race. The only way you can concoct a logic possible of making both those arguments is if you assume a common motivation: fattening the already bloated bank accounts of tech billionaires like Sacks, Mark Andreessen, and Sam Altman.
Andreessen and Altman both opposed California’s efforts to regulate AI. Altman’s company, OpenAI, even subpoenaed policy wonk Nathan Calvin, requesting “all documents concerning SB 53 or its potential impact on OpenAI.” Calvin is a lawyer at the AI think tank Encode, where he worked on S.B. 53. He told The New Republic that the bill represents “the first time that we’ve seen any jurisdiction in the United States say very clearly, ‘We think that catastrophic risk from the most advanced AI models is worth taking seriously, and we should take affirmative steps to have companies guard against that and have government prepare for that.’”
Now that the law is on the books, OpenAI has asked Governor Newsom to be considered compliant with state requirements because it signed an AI code of conduct in the European Union. Adherence to the EU code is voluntary.
Weiner spent years working on the law that became S.B. 53, first passing a bill known as S.B. 1047, which would have instituted more guardrails on AI companies, requiring third-party audits and a kill switch on AI models. OpenAI lobbied against S.B. 1047. Google lobbied against it. Meta lobbied against it. Andreessen Horowitz lobbied against it. Eight members of the California congressional delegation—Lofgren, Eshoo, Khanna, Cardenas, Correa Barrigan, Bera, and Peters—sent a letter to Gavin Newsom asking him to veto 1047, complaining that the bill was “skewed toward addressing extreme misuse scenarios and hypothetical existential risks while largely ignoring demonstrable AI risks like misinformation, discrimination, nonconsensual deepfakes, environmental impacts and workplace displacement.”
Weiner says the congressional letter was “very odd,” and that it’s the only time in his statehouse tenure that members of Congress have lobbied against one of his bills. He calls their argument a “bad-faith whataboutism.”
Bad faith or not, it worked. Newsom vetoed the law and formed a working group to produce a report that eventually informed S.B. 53. The working group included three people, among them Stanford professor Fei-Fei Li, who herself leads an AI start-up worth $1 billion and backed by, surprise, Andreessen Horowitz.
It’s obviously highly unusual for members of Congress to weigh in on state legislation. You’d have a difficult time figuring out exactly how much money the tech industry has pumped into those campaign coffers. I spent hours trying. But beyond the obvious red flags, there are two problems with the congressional letter on S.B. 1047: First, we probably should be concerned about the “extreme misuse scenarios” of AI—that’s precisely what OpenAI is calling the death of Adam Raine, after all. Secondly, California already has laws prohibiting deceptive AI in elections, nonconsensual deepfakes, and employment discrimination.
All of those laws, of course, would become useless if a federal AI preemption were to be put in place. If the preemption comes through Congress—as Scalise is promising—Weiner says that it “will be litigated,” adding, “Congress’s preemption power is typically tied to enactment of a comprehensive regulatory scheme. And then you can have a fight about what that scheme should be, but the idea that Congress would just ban states from doing this without replacing it with anything else, that’s a legal question.” He seemed even less convinced by Trump’s threats of an executive order, saying, “Trump thinks he’s a king, but he’s not. The president can’t nullify state law by executive order, and it’s a fever dream to suggest otherwise.”
These laws are overwhelmingly popular. They do things like protect the elderly from AI cyberscams. That’s why the Senate vote killing the AI preemption was a staggering 99–1. And these laws represent the most likely avenues for future regulation, if only at the state level.
Nicholas Farnsworth, a lawyer at Orrick who specializes in state-level AI laws, told The New Republic that “we’ll see more and more states adopting the transparency regulations” like the companion chatbot law recently passed in California that requires a disclosure that users are interacting with AI. Farnsworth added that high-risk AI laws like the new one in Colorado “will likely go across the United States.” These deal with high-risk decisions: those in the fields of health care, education, and employment. You can’t, for example, use an AI as the ultimate decision-maker in denying somebody a loan or firing them. Or if you do, you have to give them a chance to appeal for a review with a real live human being.
The Colorado law was also targeted by Trump’s executive order. He complained that the law could “force AI models to embed DEI in their programming.” And while the DEI criticism sounds like vintage Trump, Sacks is also more than fluent in Republican grievance language. He complains constantly about “woke AI,” even fretting that such a thing would be “Orwellian.”
The language of the AI industry is similarly melodramatic, which should come as little surprise since AI is the industry’s latest idée fixe—where every new line of code seems to be about the technology’s self-evident beneficence (and only incidentally about making money). The AI race metaphor is particularly suspicious. Dr. Julia Powles, director of the Institute for Technology, Policy and Law at UCLA called it “an industry narrative.” Nathan Calvin concurred, telling The New Republic that “some of these companies like Meta lobbying most fervently for blocking state AI regulation are not even focused on trying to build the forms of AI that do seem really important to national security. The stuff they’re trying to build is like automated infinite-scroll AI video slop. Do we really need to beat China in the race to addict our kids and citizens in general to as much AI short-form video as we can? Is that the best way to protect our national competitiveness and security?”
It’s worth noting that Calvin, like Weiner and all of the other pro-regulation figures I spoke to, see real promise in artificial intelligence. Calvin said that “AI is here to stay and is really important.” Weiner described himself as a “fan” of AI, adding, “I want AI. I want folks to be able to innovate, to help solve the world’s problems.”
But we’re at a crossroads, all the same. Regulation is coming. Powles noted that “there’s a real sensibility from policymakers that we missed a trick with social media and we don’t want to do that again with AI.” Even the companies seem to be aware that they are in the crosshairs. That’s why the brass at Andreessen Horowitz and OpenAI have a new hundred-million-dollar super PAC and are spending big to fight regulation.
Calvin says that “some of the companies’ approach is to effectively take as much as they can now, grow and embed themselves as fast as they can, and then by the time the public has woken up to what’s happening or is demanding changes, be in a sufficiently entrenched position to prevent any meaningful oversight or changes.” Of course, with a federal moratorium legalizing AI cyberscams on grannies and revenge porn on teens, the public might wake up even quicker than the latest semi-sentient chatbot.
Pete Hegseth’s Own AI Bot Backfires on His Boat Strikes - 2025-12-10T21:44:24Z
Et tu, ChatGPT?
On Tuesday, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth unveiled his department’s new AI chatbot for military personnel, GenAI.mil. Almost immediately, the bot called a “hypothetical” situation where the government orders a strike on a suspected drug-smuggling boat and then double-taps said boat to kill the survivors, “unambiguously illegal.”
A military source who spoke to Straight Arrow News Wednesday pointed reporters to a Reddit thread that featured the alleged interaction with the bot. The source said that military personnel wasted no time in testing the bot’s capabilities.
Hegseth has spent recent weeks ardently defending the legality of a situation just like the one described to the chatbot. Backed by President Donald Trump, Hegseth has ordered at least 22 (likely illegal) airstrikes against numerous boats in international waters under the guise of stopping “narcoterrorism,” which have so far killed at least 87 people. After the very first strike on September 2, he ordered a double-tap attack on an already bombed boat in order to kill two survivors.
The outright killing of shipwrecked survivors has sparked bipartisan outrage, though many Republicans claim to still need more information before they abandon Hegseth. Trump is distancing himself from the situation, saying he’s “not involved.”
At least someone—or something?—in the Trump administration has moral clarity.
ICE Barbie Is Building Her Own Fleet of Deportation Planes - 2025-12-10T20:39:06Z
The Department of Homeland Security just paid nearly $140 million to be in charge of managing its own deportation flights.
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem has signed a multimillion-dollar contract to purchase six Boeing 737 aircrafts from Daedalus Aviation Corporation, whose owners already have ties to massive DHS contracts, The Washington Post reported Wednesday.
Immigration and Customs Enforcement previously chartered planes to carry out deportations. DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin told the Post that owning its own planes would allow ICE to “operate more effectively, including by using more efficient flight patterns.”
Now the agency would be responsible for managing its own fleet of aircraft, flight crews, and all the logistics involved in transporting immigrant detainees around and out of the country. But John Sandweg, former acting ICE director, said that dealing with all of this might be more trouble than it’s worth.
“It’s so much easier to issue a contract to a company that already manages a fleet of airplanes,” Sandweg told the Post. “So this move I’m surprised by because what the administration wants to accomplish, by and large, can be accomplished through charter flights already.”
$140 million is just a small drop in the $170 billion bucket that is DHS’s new four-year budget—but it’s not clear that the decision to run its own deportation airline won’t incur more costs as part of the Trump’s administration’s ongoing efforts to drive up the rate of removals.
The owners of Daedalus Aviation, William Allen Walters III and Taundria Cappel, are also the figures behind Salus Worldwide Solutions Corporation, which won a three-year $915 million air services contract to carry out deportations. That contract is the subject of an ongoing lawsuit, over allegations that it was an “unlawful, rushed, and non-competitive award.”
Guess How Many Republican Seats Democrats Flipped in Recent Elections? - 2025-12-10T20:21:06Z
Now that the 2025 elections are over, we can definitively say: This was a very good year for Democrats.
According to an analysis by Daniel Nichanian for Bolts, Democrats flipped 21 percent of Republican-held state legislative seats—a huge upset and a harbinger of midterm doom for the president’s party.
On the Republican side, candidates managed to flip exactly zero seats: not in New Jersey, where Bolts reports the party had high hopes, and not in newly red Trump-voting districts in New York.
For those hoping for a 2026 blue wave like the one we saw in 2018, get excited: So far, 2025’s election results are looking eerily similar to 2017’s. During the first year of Donald Trump’s first term, Democrats won big in New Jersey and Virginia, as well as in special elections across the country—the same thing that happened this year, with New Jersey Democrats gaining five seats in their assembly, and Virginia Democrats gaining a whopping 13.
And according to Bolts, the overall swing this year is even stronger: 21 percent of GOP-held seats flipped, compared to 2017’s 20 percent.
What’s more, Bolts’ analysis looks at legislative seats, so these winning statistics don’t even take into consideration big victories on the state executive level, such as Governors-elect Abigail Spanberger and Mikie Sherill in Virginia and New Jersey, respectively, or local offices, like just-elected future Miami Mayor Eileen Higgins.
In an even stronger referendum than in 2017, voters made clear that they’re tired of Trump.
Trump Team Extradited Woman Here. Now They Want to Deport Her. - 2025-12-10T19:38:35Z
The feds worked for a year to extradite a Belarusian woman accused of smuggling millions of dollars of U.S. aviation equipment into Russia for its war on Ukraine. But now that she’s finally in the United States, where she can face charges, the Department of Homeland Security is trying to deport her.
The case against the woman, Yana Leonova, could fall apart if she were to be detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, The Washington Post reported Wednesday. She’s facing a 10-count felony indictment for alleged fraud, smuggling, and money laundering. Or, if ICE has its way, she could just, you know, go home.
Judge Zia M. Faruqui called the situation “Kafkaesque” in a hearing Monday, according to the Post. In a written order, he said, “Indeed, it is both preposterous and offensive for the government to bring someone into the United States against their will and then turn around and seek ICE detention because that person is here ‘illegally.’… The government needs to decide what its priorities are: ginning up deportation stats or prosecuting alleged criminals.”
Technically, Leonova was only authorized to remain in the country for two weeks after she arrived in early November. So ICE pounced: DHS told the court that they planned to take Leonova into custody and deport her—if and when she was released from D.C. jail, where she’s been held since she arrived.
The move has confounded lawyers and judges alike. Now prosecutors must ask DHS if Leonova can be given legal authorization to stay in the country while she is tried for her alleged weapons smuggling.
“I haven’t been in this predicament before, your honor,” one prosecutor said to the judge at Monday’s hearing.
“Me, either,” Faruqui responded, according to the Post.
It seems when it comes to locking up actual criminals, as opposed to daycare workers, pregnant citizens, or children, Donald Trump couldn’t care less.
Trump Goes to War With ICC to Shield Himself From Prosecution - 2025-12-10T18:00:47Z
The U.S. government is threatening new sanctions on the International Criminal Court unless it changes its founding document to guarantee that it won’t prosecute President Trump or other administration officials.
Reuters, citing an unnamed White House official, reports that if the court doesn’t listen to American demands, including dropping investigations into war crimes by Israel in Gaza and U.S. troops in Afghanistan, the Trump administration could sanction more ICC officials, as well as the entire court.
Republicans and Democrats alike have long attacked the court over its investigation into Israel’s conduct in Gaza, and those efforts only increased after the court issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, former Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, and Hamas military leader Mohammed Deif last year.
In March 2020, ICC prosecutors opened an investigation in Afghanistan that included possible crimes by the U.S. military. In 2021, the court deprioritized, but never closed, the investigation, and apparently the Trump administration is worried.
“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,” the unnamed White House official told Reuters. “That is unacceptable, and we will not allow it to happen.”
Even under the Biden administration, the U.S. was hostile to the ICC, with Biden calling the arrest warrants for Gallant and Netanyahu “outrageous,” even though Israel has killed at least 69,000 Palestinians in Gaza since 2023. But so far, the ICC has resisted pressure campaigns from the U.S., rejecting American demands last week.
The U.S. has already imposed sanctions against the court’s chief prosecutor, Karim Khan, as well as several of its judges, and, along with Israel, has challenged the court’s jurisdiction on non-member states.
The U.S. is not a signatory or party to the Rome Statute that created the court in 2002, although many of its allies around the world are. Changing the document would require a two-thirds vote from all of the 125 countries that ratified the Rome Statue, which gives the ICC a mandate to prosecute individuals, including sitting heads of state, for crimes committed by them or under their command on the territory of a member state. Trump doesn’t want to be one of them.
Mike Johnson Finally Reveals GOP’s Health Care Plan—and It’s Rough - 2025-12-10T17:44:49Z
House Speaker Mike Johnson just unveiled Republicans’ plan to address spiking health care costs—and it’s a disaster.
As Affordable Care Act tax credits are set to expire in just a few weeks, sending health care costs surging for more than 20 million Americans, Republican leadership presented several bullet points Wednesday on how they plan to lower premiums and give Americans better health options.
Instead of subsidizing premiums for those on Affordable Care Act plans, Republicans proposed introducing Health Savings Accounts, Association Health Plans, and Choice Accounts.
Americans who don’t get insurance through their employer would be given cash directly into an account, which would reportedly be paired with a high-deductible health plan, meaning higher insurance premiums would be replaced by higher out-of-pocket costs.
Currently, Obamacare enrollees never see the funds from their tax credits, which instead are sent directly to insurers. President Donald Trump has suggested that consumers would rather see the money themselves, what little of it there is. Republicans’ plan purports to take the burden of negotiating insurance rates away from health care providers and large companies and place it on individuals, so they can “feel like entrepreneurs,” according to Trump.
Republicans are also considering implementing cost-sharing reductions, programs that can assist low-income Americans in paying high deductibles, that were passed as part of Trump’s behemoth budget bill in July. However, the Congressional Budget Office estimates that funding these reductions will increase the number of people without health insurance by 300,000 through 2034.
Another bullet point was controversial “provider-owned hospitals,” which are directly owned and operated by the doctors. The Federation of American Hospitals published a study earlier this year finding that physician-owned hospitals, which focus on a boutique selection of treatments and services, could be damaging to community hospitals, which typically treat patients using Medicare or Medicaid and therefore operate on razor-thin margins. More provider-owned hospitals could siphon away healthier, better-insured patients.
Another point was to codify the Trump administration’s rules to “fix the ACA,” though it’s not entirely clear what that would entail.
There were some potentially good ideas buried within their list aimed at increasing price transparency. One was to reform pharmacy benefit managers, or PBMs, a class of middlemen who manage the supply chain of prescription drugs. Critics of PBMs have suggested that consolidation among these managers has contributed to decreased transparency and thwarted competitive pricing.
Another idea was “site neutrality,” which means that patients would pay the same prices for the same services regardless of setting—though some critics have warned that would further reduce hospital revenues.
Johnson told Republicans that they wouldn’t implement all 10 of the proposed bullet points and that caucus members should choose two or three to pursue, NOTUS reported.
While discussion was “cordial,” a source told NOTUS, there was “no consensus” at all.
Federal Judge Orders Trump to Get Troops Out of Los Angeles ASAP - 2025-12-10T17:24:08Z
U.S. District Judge Charles Breyer on Wednesday blocked President Trump’s deployment of National Guard troops to California, rejecting the notion that recent protests against Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Border Patrol amounted to rebellion.
“The founders designed our government to be a system of checks and balances. Defendants, however, make clear that the only check they want is a blank one,” Breyer wrote in his 35-page opinion.
This all started this summer, when Trump sent thousands of National Guards troops to Los Angeles in response to protests, against the wishes of Mayor Karen Bass and California Governor Gavin Newsom.
Back in September, Judge Breyer ruled that the Trump administration’s deployment of military troops in Los Angeles was a violation of the Posse Comitatus Act.
“Congress spoke clearly in 1878 when it passed the Posse Comitatus Act, prohibiting the use of the U.S. military to execute domestic law,” Breyer wrote then. “Nearly 140 years later, Defendants—President Trump, Secretary of Defense Hegseth, and the Department of Defense—deployed the National Guard and Marines to Los Angeles, ostensibly to quell a rebellion and ensure that federal immigration law was enforced.”
“There were indeed protests in Los Angeles, and some individuals engaged in violence,” he continued. “Yet there was no rebellion, nor was civilian law enforcement unable to respond to the protests and enforce the law.”
The Trump administration has yet to respond to Breyer’s order. There are about 100 troops still left in Los Angeles.
Trump Threatens to Fire His Treasury Secretary Over … Immigration? - 2025-12-10T16:35:27Z
President Donald Trump threatened to fire Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent—not over interest rates, as he did in November, but over something even less under Bessent’s control: putting people in jail.
As part of a longer rant Tuesday about how much better the country is now than it was under former President Joe Biden, Trump once again turned his ire on Somali immigrants.
“Biden and the radical-left Democrats turned Pennsylvania into a dumping ground for hundreds of thousands of migrants from the most dysfunctional places on earth, like Somalia, and gave them billions and billions of your taxpayer dollars. But we didn’t really give it. It was stolen. And those people should go to jail! Jail!” the president yelled.
“And if they don’t go to jail? Scott Bessent is toast,” Trump said, laughing. “He’s toast.”
Trump: Those people should go to jail! Jail! And if they don't go to jail, Scott Bessent is toast. He's toast. pic.twitter.com/dxaJnPMTsr
— Acyn (@Acyn) December 10, 2025
It should go without saying, but as the treasury secretary, Bessent notably does not have the power to put anyone in jail. The president’s nonsensical speech was like a Mad Libs game of his favorite talking points: Biden, Somalia, jail, Bessent.
Trump was likely referring to the fraud scandal in Minnesota—not Pennsylvania—where over the last five years, social services were defrauded out of more than $1 billion in taxpayer dollars. Federal prosecutors allege that nearly all of the perpetrators came from Minnesota’s Somali community. So far, prosecutors have convicted 59 people. There are about 80,000 Somali Americans in Minnesota.
Though the justice system seems to be handling these crimes just fine without the help of Bessent, he has directed the U.S. Treasury to investigate allegations of fraud. (Though, notably, Bessent is reacting to an unproven report that tax dollars were diverted to support terrorist organizations, which there’s little evidence to support.)
Trump is using the scandal as an excuse not only to attack the entire Somali immigrant community but to continue to chip away at all immigrants’ rights in the U.S. Bessent posted on X in November that, at the direction of the president, the Treasury will work to cut off federal benefits for undocumented immigrants.
Pete Hegseth’s Extreme Plan on Where to Send Boat Survivors Exposed - 2025-12-10T16:34:42Z
The Department of Defense didn’t have a plan to deal with survivors after launching its boat bombing campaign in the waters around Central America.
The New York Times reports that after a mid-October strike in the Caribbean Sea left two survivors in U.S. military custody, Pentagon lawyers asked their legal counterparts at the State Department if the pair could be sent to the infamous Terrorism Confinement Center in El Salvador, where the Trump administration had already sent numerous immigrants on shaky legal grounds.
Alarmed State Department lawyers quickly rejected that idea, and the two survivors ended up being sent to their home countries of Ecuador and Colombia. Later, on October 29, the Pentagon spoke with diplomats in the region regarding survivors from another strike, and decided that any that were rescued had to be sent back to their home countries or to a third county, but definitely not the U.S.
Why? The DOD wanted to avoid having any survivors in the U.S. legal system because Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and other U.S. officials would have to present evidence in court to justify the bombings. The Pentagon has already admitted that it doesn’t know who is on the alleged drug boats it is bombing, which is why it hasn’t tried to prosecute any survivors.
At least some of the people on those boats have been identified as fishermen, and defense officials have not convinced many members of Congress of the legality and justifications for the strikes. Republicans and Democrats alike have criticized them, especially after the revelation that the military bombed survivors of the first boat strike back in September, a possible war crime. Now it seems that Hegseth and the rest of the DOD want to avoid any legal responsibility.
New Poll Reveals Long List of Things Americans Can Barely Afford Now - 2025-12-10T16:16:59Z
As President Trump recoils at the very mention of affordability, bemoaning it as a Democratic scam (still unclear what that means exactly), over half of the country is struggling to pay for basic necessities—and blaming Trump for it.
New polling from Politico and Public First shows that nearly half of respondents find it hard to pay for their groceries, and 55 percent of them hold the Trump administration responsible.
Twenty-seven percent of Americans have skipped a doctor’s appointment or checkup in the last two years because it was too expensive, and 23 percent rejected a prescription for similar reasons. Overall, nearly half of respondents are finding it difficult to afford health care.
Meanwhile, only 36 percent of Trump’s own voters think that the tariffs will work out in the end.
The majority of voters blaming their affordability issues on Trump means that his disinformation campaign—doing everything but taking responsibility for the state of the economy—isn’t working on most people.
Trump went from running on affordability to rejecting the notion entirely. If this polling holds true, that should spell danger for the GOP ahead of the 2026 midterms.
View the full polling here.
How GOP Secretly Helped Convince Jasmine Crockett to Run for Senate - 2025-12-10T16:12:07Z
Republicans are taking credit for Representative Jasmine Crockett’s last-minute decision to run for the United States Senate, as part of their efforts to recruit “very vulnerable Democrats” to run for office, NOTUS reported.
Crockett’s surprise announcement last week reportedly threw the Democrats’ political calculus into flux—but seems to have delighted the Republicans who’d been secretly working to get her in the race.
Crockett has made a name for herself being a particularly outspoken critic of Trump and his cronies, infuriating MAGA and marking her as a controversial figure in her own party.
A source familiar with the process told NOTUS that GOP machinations to prop up Crockett’s run first began in June, when Texas Democrats met to discuss 2026 midterm elections—and the firebrand Democrat wasn’t invited, or included in any initial polls.
In July, the National Republican Senatorial Committee published a poll that found that Crockett was the preferred candidate among Democratic voters. “When we saw the results, we were like, ‘OK, we got to disseminate this far and wide,’” the source told NOTUS.
After the NRSC included Crockett’s name in their poll, other surveys started to include her too. The source told NOTUS that those polls were then aggressively seeded into progressive digital spaces by NRSC allies to “orchestrate the pile on” of promising polling numbers and drive the narrative that support for Crockett was “surging.”
The source dubbed the system of trying to pull in a weaker candidate who would lose to the Republican challenger as an “AstroTurf recruitment process.”
Incumbent Senator John Cornyn, who is running for reelection, dismissed Crockett as “radical, theatrical, and ineffective.”
Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, a close ally of President Donald Trump who is currently leading the Republican primary polls, claimed that “everyone knows” Crockett will “be soundly defeated.” Previous polls had indicated that Paxton would fare far worse against state Representative James Talarico, the other Democratic primary candidate, or Collin Allred, who dropped his bid shortly before Crockett jumped into the race.
Trump Goes on Dark Rant About People From “Filthy” Countries - 2025-12-10T15:18:41Z
Donald Trump’s rally in Pennsylvania Tuesday was supposed to be about affordability. Instead, it devolved into him bashing immigrants and using an epithet that he’s previously denied saying.
In Mount Pocono, Trump related to the crowd a meeting in which he said, “Why is it we only take people from shithole countries? Right? Why can’t we have some people from Norway, Sweden, just a few? Let’s have a few. From Denmark, do you mind sending us a few people? Send us some nice people, do you mind?
“But we always take people from Somalia, places that are a disaster, right? Filthy, dirty, disgusting, ridden with crime. The only thing they’re good at is going after ships,” Trump added.
Trump: I said, why is it we only take people from shit hole countries, right? Why can't we have some people from Norway, Sweden, Denmark… But we always take people from Somalia… places that are a filthy, dirty, disgusting pic.twitter.com/hMeIe1u7Wj
— Acyn (@Acyn) December 10, 2025
Trump was reported to have made the “shithole countries” remark way back in 2018 during his first term to refer to Haiti and unnamed African countries, but he vehemently denied the reports at the time. Back then, he even kicked out a reporter from the Oval Office for asking whether Trump meant he wanted immigrants from European or predominantly white countries.
Now it seems that the mask is off. For years, Trump has criticized immigrants from nonwhite countries, infamously accusing Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, of eating cats and dogs, during his 2024 presidential campaign. But he’s always denied using slurs to describe them until now.
Recently, Trump has described Somali immigrants as “garbage” and launched an immigration crackdown in Minnesota, home to the largest Somali community in the United States. It seems that the president thinks that he can fall back on racism to distract from the fact that the country’s economic problems are his fault.
Democrats Pull Off Two Upset Victories as Voters Send Message to Trump - 2025-12-10T15:11:02Z
More good news for Democrats headed into the midterms: Liberal candidates saw unexpected wins in two Southern states Tuesday night.
Miami residents just elected their first Democratic mayor in almost 30 years. Eileen Higgins, a former Miami-Dade county commissioner, beat Donald Trump–endorsed Republican Emilio González. Higgins won 59 percent of the vote compared to González’s 41 percent.
Both candidates appealed to residents’ economic woes but used different tactics: Higgins emphasized her experience on the County Commission with building infrastructure, streamlining city processes, and building affordable housing. González argued that he would fight overdevelopment and get rid of property taxes. Higgins also loudly criticized Trump’s mass deportation campaign, whereas González pleaded the Fifth, saying he had no control over national policy.
In neighboring Georgia, a special election for a state House seat saw a changed district. Democrat Eric Gisler flipped the previously red seat blue, eking out a win over Republican Mack Guest in a close race.
It’s a major upset: Trump won the district last year by 12 points. Gisler had run for the seat last year and at the time won just 39 percent of the vote. But Tuesday night, he won 51 percent.
Gisler ran on a platform of increasing access to health care, affordable housing, and voting rights. He told the Associated Press that he was grateful for “Democratic enthusiasm” but that he also credited his win to Republicans looking for a change. “A lot of what I would call traditional conservatives held their nose and voted Republican last year on the promise of low prices and whatever else they were selling,” Gisler said. “But they hadn’t received that.”
Trump: Black People Love Me Because They Know a Good Scam - 2025-12-10T15:07:14Z
President Donald Trump is convinced Black people “love” him because “they know a scam better than anybody.”
These peculiar comments came Tuesday night at a rally-style event in Pennsylvania.
“Lemme tell ya. Black people love Trump. I got the biggest vote,” he said, before raising his voice even louder in the microphone. “I got the biggest vote with Black people, they know a scam better than anybody! They know what it is to be scammed.”
Trump: "Let me tell you -- Black people love Trump. I got the biggest vote. I got the biggest vote with Black people. They know a scam better than anybody!" pic.twitter.com/79oF0G6af1
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) December 10, 2025
It’s difficult to parse whether he’s attributing Black people’s knowledge of scams to antiquated racist tropes or making an allusion to the slavery and history of economic discrimination they have endured in America (perhaps the latter is much too generous). Either way, the jury is still very much out on just how much Black people like him.
After Trump made notable gains with the Black vote in 2024, any momentum that he may have had with them since defeating Vice President Kamala Harris last year seem to have evaporated.
“Either the racial realignment never happened, or it already ended. And what I mean by that is, there was a lot of talk after 2024 and the run-up to it about Black voters—particularly Black men and Latino men—and also voters under 30 moving to the right,” The New Republic’s Perry Bacon said on his podcast last month. “That suggests maybe The New York Times and everyone else interviewing every Black man that voted for Trump was a bit of a mistake and an overreaction in the last election.”
Black joblessness—and all joblessness—is up. The shutdown, his anti-DEI crusade, funding cuts to health care, and his antagonistic approach to any federal content that focuses on racism or slavery all bring his proclaimed love for Black people into question. This is a man who just decided to stop offering free national park access on MLK day and Juneteenth, instead making free access on his birthday.
He signed an executive order directing the Interior Department to erase any information that could be misconstrued as a “corrosive ideology,” which of course included anything relating to race relations, LGBTQ rights, and sexism. He also removed a picture of Harriet Tubman from the National Park Service page on the Underground Railroad, and changed the words “enslaved African Americans” to “enslaved workers” while removing a section that discussed Benjamin Franklin being a slave owner.
He’s been sued for racial discrimination in housing, still thinks the Central Park 5 are guilty, and did the whole birtherism thing with the country’s first Black president. This does not seem like someone who has a genuine love and respect for Black people and culture—even if he believes we know a scam.
Trump Suggests It’s “Treasonous” to Talk About His Mental Decline - 2025-12-10T14:29:36Z
President Donald Trump seems to think that having to take more cognitive tests than his predecessors is a good thing.
In a furious, lengthy rant on Truth Social Tuesday night, Trump attempted to defend himself against recent reporting that he has been showing signs of aging and fatigue. He bragged about everything he’s gotten done while in office—including his visits to the doctor’s office.
“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,” Trump wrote. “I do these Tests because I owe it to our Country.”
Trump claimed that in addition to medical examinations, he had taken at least three cognitive exams “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,” he wrote.
It’s not clear why the mere fact of having to sit for multiple cognitive examinations—without releasing results to the public—would exonerate Trump from reports he’s in mental decline.
Trump seemed to specifically take issue with The New York Times, which reported last month that the president’s public schedule shows he has shorter days than he used to, and that his public appearances indicate a dwindling battery life, as he’s taken to sitting or even keeping his eyes closed during press conferences.
“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,’ Trump wrote. “They are true Enemies of the People, and we should do something about it.”
While Trump calling the press the “enemy of the people” is unfortunately not new, his assertion that reporting on his shortcomings and failures is tantamount to sedition is unquestionably totalitarian.
Transcript: Trump in Fury as GOPers Quietly Defy His Plot to Rig 2026 - 2025-12-10T11:46:20Z
The following is a lightly edited transcript of the December 10 episode of the Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.
Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.
President Trump is raging at Indiana Republicans in a last-ditch effort to get them to gerrymander their state as part of his push to rig the 2026 midterm elections. Interestingly, however, some Republicans now fear all this will backfire because Trump is dragging them down so badly that even more seats will be at risk under gerrymandered maps. Congressman Jamie Raskin, a Democrat, sees another kind of opening here for his party. Today he’s introducing a new bill that would require ranked-choice voting in congressional races across the country. So is all the corruption and chaos that Trump and Republicans are unleashing with their gerrymandering ploys creating an opportunity to talk to voters about a different way of doing things? We are talking to Congressman Raskin today about all this. Congressman, thanks so much for coming on with us.
Congressman Jamie Raskin: I am thrilled to be with you today, Greg Sargent. Very excited.
Sargent: So Trump is now pressuring Republicans everywhere to gerrymander their states, but Senate Republicans in Indiana are resisting. Trump raged about this the other day, tweeting: “Why would a real Republican vote against this when the Dems have been doing it for years? If they stupidly say no, vote them out of office! They are not worthy!”
Congressman, what’s your response to the sheer nakedness of Trump’s corrupt pressure on Republicans to gerrymander expressly to hold onto power?
Raskin: Well, that brazenness is invited by the Supreme Court, which now not only tolerates or accepts but celebrates partisan gerrymandering as a legitimate and valid purpose. I love the Indiana Republican state senator who said he would never vote for this after Trump called some people the R-word as a way to denigrate their intelligence, I suppose, or their personality. I think this man is the father of a Down syndrome kid and just said, “I will never go along with this, to teach him a lesson about the language he uses.” And that’s the spirit, man.
Sargent: I hope he means it, don’t you, Congressman?
Raskin: Well, me too. In fact, we’re in a bit of a tangle in Maryland because the Senate president, Bill Ferguson, has said for various reasons that he’s opposed to redistricting to add one seat that would be more competitive for Democrats. One of the reasons he invoked for it was that he said he had spoken to the Republican president of the Indiana Senate, who said he was going to stay out. Well, if he doesn’t stay out, that is going to redouble everybody’s determination to change Bill Ferguson’s mind. I mean, there’s nothing remotely ethical or moral about unilaterally disarming before authoritarians in a game that they’ve created. I mean, they want to essentially declare Congress Republican before a single vote is cast.
Sargent: Well, I want to return to all that in a bit. But first, Congressman, you’re introducing a new bill today to require ranked-choice voting in congressional elections. Ranked-choice voting, of course, allows voters to rank the candidates in order of preference. Can you tell us what your new bill does and why you favor ranked-choice voting?
Raskin: Yeah, I mean, there are 52 jurisdictions across the country that are using ranked-choice voting with great success, including the state of Maine, including the state of Alaska. The central virtue of ranked-choice voting is that it guarantees that the winner of an election actually has majority support. There are something like a dozen candidates now running in this special election to replace Mikie Sherrill, who just won as governor in New Jersey. Somebody could win that with, like, 15 percent of the vote, 18 percent, 20 percent of the vote.
But what ranked-choice voting does is to say, “Rank all of the candidates.” If there are a lot of great candidates and they have similar politics, put them in order, and then you can actually sift through what you think are the critical qualities for someone to have. And then the way it works is that candidates are dropped from the bottom of the ballot. If they lose, their votes are redistributed to their second choice, and then if still nobody has a majority, then you go to the next person and the next person and so on. And it’s a way of accumulating public sentiment.
We saw in the New York City mayoral election another great advantage to ranked-choice voting, which is it promotes positive politics among the candidates. Because now instead of Mamdani and Brad Lander being at each other’s throats and their voters having to accentuate what they hate about the other candidate—now, instead, they look for reasons to build a bridge, and they say, Hey, you know, you like Brad Lander. That’s great. I love him. He’s a great guy. Why don’t you put me second? and vice versa. The candidates start campaigning together. They build coalitions rather than engaging in character assassination.
Sargent: Well, your bill would require ranked-choice voting in congressional and Senate elections, both general and primaries across the country.
Rasking: General and primary both.
Sargent: Can you talk about what the bill does, how that requirement works, what the legal basis for it is?
Raskin: Well, it starts in 2030. So it would be in the 2030 elections; it would require the use of ranked-choice voting in all primary and general elections for the U.S. House of Representatives and for the U.S. Senate. And it also authorizes federal funding to help states implement the change because there are some technical things that need to be done. But it’s proven to be very straightforward and very efficient in all of the jurisdictions that have adopted it. And, you know, as I was saying, people love the fact that the candidates who win have commanded majority support across the electoral jurisdiction and that it promotes this kind of positive, coalitional campaigning rather than divisive, negative campaigning.
It also gets rid of what people oftentimes describe as the spoiler problem. That is, you’ve got one person who is your dream candidate, say, who’s focused on a particular issue that’s really important to you, but you know they can’t really win. Well, this says go ahead and put them first, but then rank second the candidate who you think is viable, who wins, and then that candidate can learn, Oh, you’re really supporting Candidate A because you believe so strongly in that issue; I’m going to take that into account if there’s a significant segment of the electorate motivated by that issue. So it just allows for a far more fine-grained and subtle election.
Sargent: Well, let’s talk about why ranked-choice voting is both a good thing and an antidote to gerrymandering on a real structural level. It essentially makes it a lot harder to dilute the votes of voters of the opposition, correct? How does ranked-choice voting work as as kind of an impediment to gerrymandering?
Raskin: Well, I’ve got two colleagues who I’ve served with in the House who would not have been there except for ranked-choice voting. One is Jared Golden, who comes from a very swing district, the northernmost district in Maine, Maine 2. And when the first-ballot votes were counted, he was slightly behind the Republican, but when they redistributed the independents’ votes, he won overwhelmingly. In other words, he was the overwhelming second choice of people who wanted the independent candidate. So that created a kind of coalition between the Democrats and the independents.
And the same thing happened in Alaska, essentially, with Mary Peltola, who became the first Democrat elected to the U.S. House from Alaska in decades, precisely because an electoral coalition formed between Democrats and more progressive and moderate independents. So we’ve seen how that kind of majoritarian politics is an antidote both to divisive reactionary politics and also an antidote to gerrymandering. The whole point of gerrymandering is to basically render the voters irrelevant so that your vote doesn’t really make any difference because the politicians have chosen the voters before the voters get to speak.
Sargent: And you can’t really gerrymander districts when you have ranked-choice voting, right? Or at least it’s way more challenging, yes?
Raskin: Well, I don’t want to claim, Greg, that ranked-choice voting is a panacea for the problems of gerrymandering. Because the truth is that a sixth grader can now take the map of a state and computer technology and artificial intelligence and turn a 55 percent majority into 100 percent of the congressional seats, or even a 48 percent majority into 100 percent of the congressional seats or 95 percent of the congressional seats. So you can work wonders with gerrymandering if you get to control the district lines and you know who’s in there. It’s true that ranked-choice voting will complicate the picture somewhat in certain districts, but we do have to confront that problem separately. It’s not going to be any kind of knockout punch against the extreme gerrymandering that the Republicans have unleashed in the 2026 elections.
Sargent: Well, it’s now being reported that a number of Republicans fear that the pressure on them to gerrymander will backfire. The worry is that the Trump coalition is disintegrating. So Republicans whose seats are made a little less safe by these gerrymandering schemes—as spreading their voters around a bit more might make them more vulnerable to a blue wave in 2026—those Republicans now fear that outcome. Congressman, everything for these people is about insulating them from the voters and the consequences of their unpopular governing decisions. Doesn’t this really kind of underscore the absurdity of the current system?
Raskin: Yeah, very much so. Well, look, on your first point, let me just say we owe a debt of gratitude to Aftyn Behn in Tennessee and really everybody, including Mikie Sherrill and Abigail Spanberger, who’ve run such strong campaigns because they’ve all put the fear of God into Republican legislators who might otherwise have gone along much more compliantly with these extreme gerrymander plans.
But if you average together all of the electoral victories that Democrats have had in special elections in 2025 or in the gubernatorial elections, we’re up 10, 11, 12 points, depending on where you are in the country, over where we were before. So now if you’re a Republican who’s got an eight-point advantage in your district, you’re saying, Do not touch my district for the purpose of trying to squeeze out more Republican legislators. I need every Republican vote I’ve got. So that is putting the brakes on a lot of this extreme gerrymandering.
But look, the single-member districts ultimately are going to be the problem because it’s very tough to distinguish between what’s redistricting and what’s gerrymandering. The truth is that no matter how you draw the district, it’s going to be favoring somebody.
That’s why what we’re pushing for—now, this is not in my bill; my bill is just the ranked-choice voting part of it—but we do have a more sweeping bill that I’ve worked on with Don Beyer, called the Fair [Representation] Act, which would mandate the creation of multimember districts and the use of ranked-choice voting, you know, as a form of proportional representation. So what that would do is allow Democrats to win in very conservative states—they would at least be able to win some seats—and it would allow Republicans, MAGA Republicans, to win in a very progressive state like Maryland; you’d be able to get something.
But right now we’ve got a system, because of the single-member districts, which basically says if you’ve got 55 percent of the vote, you can draw districts that will lead to 100 percent of the delegation, even if 45 percent of the people are in the other party. And that’s why we get states like Utah, which is all Republican now—we’ll see what happens in this election; maybe we’ll be able to break that up because of some court action—or Massachusetts, which is all Democratic.
One of the other shoes that’s going to drop during this cycle is the Supreme Court’s perhaps completed demolition of the Voting Rights Act. In Shelby County v. Holder in 2013, they got rid of Section 5 of the Fourteenth Amendment—the preclearance requirement—which required covered jurisdictions that had discriminated in the past to submit their plans to the Department of Justice or a federal court in advance. By getting rid of that, there have been hundreds of changes in voting systems and gerrymanderings and all these things going on that have really set back the cause of voting rights.
Now they want to get rid of Section 2 in this Louisiana case, the Callais decision. If they get rid of Section 2, that is an open door to go ahead and dismantle more than a dozen majority–African American and Hispanic districts that are in place right now. Take Mississippi, for example, where there is one majority–African American district, which is occupied by my friend Bennie Thompson. They will just split that district in half. So we’re talking about totally turning the clock back across the South. I mean, this really would be analogous to the end of Reconstruction if they do that, and they are very likely to do it. So we need to be fighting with every means at our disposal, legislatively and politically, to blow the whistle on what’s about to happen so the country understands what’s going on.
Sargent: Well, I want to talk to you about Maryland since you brought it up earlier. Democrats nationally are trying to match the Republican gerrymandering schemes. We’re seeing California creating five new Democratic seats. But as you noted, there’s resistance in your state, Maryland, from the state Senate President Bill Ferguson, who says it would be too legally vulnerable. Now, just to focus on what he said, is there any legitimacy to his argument about the law?
Raskin: Well, let me start with this. If that is all that my friend Bill Ferguson is saying now, that’s good, because before he was also saying it was morally questionable. He was likening it to racial disenfranchisement and racist redistricting, which is, you know, an outrageous misunderstanding of the situation.
If you look at what’s going on with these extreme Republican gerrymanders starting in Texas, they are targeting majority-Black and Hispanic districts. So the people whose districts are hit in the first instance are Vicente Gonzalez, Henry Cuellar, Al Green, Mark Veasey, and Greg Casar. So three Hispanic Americans and two African Americans. And they went to North Carolina—they did it to our African American colleague Don Davis. Then they went to Missouri and they did it to our African American colleague Emanuel Cleaver. Then they want to go to Kansas and do it to one of only two Native American Indians in Congress. So the whole thing, although it certainly has a partisan political agenda, depends on racial and ethnic redistricting and removal of minority members from all of these delegations. That’s number one.
There was no legitimacy to his original critique, which depended on an analogy [on] fighting back against a political racial gerrymander. I really felt that that was a flawed argument. It’s completely legitimate for him to raise the question of whether or not a Republican-dominated state Supreme Court, which we have, would try to overthrow a gerrymander.
Now, let’s be clear. Under federal constitutional analysis that is now not just approved but mandated by the Roberts court, redistricting for political partisan reasons is perfectly legitimate. So he’s saying, Well, what happens if a federal court misapplies the law and says that the state constitution, which says that there shall be no partisan gerrymandering in state elections, also applies to federal elections? A judge has done that before. So it’s not a fanciful concern to raise, but it is legally erroneous.
In fact, the state constitution was amended to ban partisan redistricting in state legislative races and specifically excluded federal races from it. And there was a judge who just conflated the two and just made a basic error. Could it happen again, and might they seize upon that prior case to do it? Sure, it might happen again. But nothing ventured, nothing gained. Maybe it could happen, and then we are back to the 7–1 map we have.
He’s also raised the point, Well, maybe it’s worse than that. Maybe they use it as an opportunity to discredit the current redistricting. That’s extremely unlikely for several reasons. Number one is when you look at what happens when legislative redistricting is struck down, in greater than 95 percent of the cases, it’s just returned to the legislature to do what they want. I don’t know if you can find a case like the one he’s potentially forecasting where they say, Well, you overstretched and now we’re going to dismantle the districts that are in law right now.
The second reason for that is the districts that are in place right now were signed into law by our Republican [former] governor, Governor Hogan. So it seems extremely unlikely that it could lead to some kind of further retrogression. In any event, all of those are tactical considerations that we should be taking into account. But that’s very different from the way that President Ferguson started when he was likening our fighting back to engaging in racial gerrymandering. And I think that’s why his initial remarks caused so much outcry in our state.
Sargent: Well, and also to return to a point you raised earlier, if Indiana does capitulate to Trump and does go forward with their gerrymander, which is of course very possible, that could add a couple more seats to the Republican side. I would think that would increase the pressure for Maryland to act as well.
Raskin: Every seat counts. I mean, we’re down three seats right now. I mean, this is, you know, we’re like in the trenches in World War One and we’re fighting for every district. Nobody’s got the luxury of saying, Well, we’re above this.
And look, here’s the thing that I want to argue very strongly: The Democrats have been fighting to end partisan gerrymandering for more than a decade. If you go back and look at the For the People Act, its very first plank was to get rid of partisan gerrymandering and to create independent redistricting panels in every state in the union. And you know who voted for it? Every Democrat. You know who voted against it? Every Republican. They live on gerrymandering. They swear by gerrymandering. They thrive by gerrymandering. They control a lot more state legislatures than we do. You know why? Because they continue to gerrymander—first, they gerrymander themselves into power at the state level, and then that translates into a gerrymandering advantage at the federal level.
So what we got in North Carolina is a situation where the Democrats win statewide for governor, win statewide for attorney general, but in the U.S. House delegation, there are 10 Republicans and four Democrats. Now, why do they have that extraordinary 5–2 advantage, 10–4 advantage in the U.S. House delegation? It’s because their legislature gerrymandered it that way. And why does the legislature have super-Republican majorities that are able to do that? Because they themselves have been gerrymandered into power decade after decade.
That is the story across the South, Greg. That’s what’s going on. And so we’ve got states that are very close—even Texas, when you go down there, all the Democrats will tell you, This is not a red state. This is a purple state that’s been gerrymandered into oblivion for the Republicans through a combination of prior gerrymanderings and the manipulation of voting through voter suppression devices.
Sargent: Right, it’s layer upon layer upon layer of rigging. Now, just to talk about Ferguson for one more second. If Indiana goes forward, I would think the pressure on Ferguson is going to get extremely intense. Can you talk about what that’s going to look like?
Raskin: To deprive the majority in Maryland of being able to do what majorities are doing all around the country is an essential deprivation of our ability to participate effectively in the national political process. I think he’s raised legitimate points, but I’m convinced that Governor Moore and the people both in the Senate, where I served for a decade, and the people in the House will be able to come to terms with this because the Republicans are doing everything in their power to put the fix in, and we’ve got to counter them wherever we can. And Maryland is one of the handful of states where we can do it.
I know that Governor-elect Spanberger has said that Virginia is going to redistrict to create more competitive districts for Democrats—at least two or three. And again, that’s just writing against prior Republican gerrymanders. So I’d like us to get out of the system entirely, which is why I fought for the For the People Act. It’s why I’m fighting for ranked-choice voting. But in the meantime, we’ve got to use the rules that the Republicans have put in place and not wash our hands of it and say, We’re too clean for that, we’re just going to let them take over Congress.
Sargent: Right. Just to boil this down, if Indiana does capitulate to Trump and act, you fully expect that Maryland will do the same, right?
Raskin: Well, I’m not in Annapolis every day anymore, so I don’t want to make a prediction. I’m not really in the prognostication business. I’m in the mobilization business, but I know I will be fighting very hard among our colleagues to express to our friends in Annapolis what a serious situation this is and that everything is on the line. Medicaid is on the line, Affordable Care Act tax credits are on the line, housing is on the line, voting rights are on the line, and you know, I don’t want to be a broken record, but democracy itself is under threat.
Sargent: Well, the bottom line is, will Republicans be allowed to play by their own rules, or will Democrats join them and play by the same rules that Republicans do, correct?
Raskin: In terms of gerrymandering and redistricting, yeah, I think that’s right. And, you know, they just do not have clean hands in this conversation. We’ve been trying to reform this rotten system. They’re the ones that have guaranteed we’ve not been able to change it. And so now we have to accept the terms that have been written. Does that mean that I would do whatever Republicans do? No. I mean, I would not start disenfranchising likely Republican voters the way that they disenfranchise likely Democratic voters. I just would never do that. People have a right to vote. They are constantly trying to throw people off the rolls. They’re constantly trying to make it more difficult for people to vote. They’re constantly trying to intimidate people at the polls. We would never do that.
But when it comes to the design of the electoral districts, if they are going to try to tilt the playing field to benefit themselves and they control a lot more state legislatures than we do, we have not just a political and a strategic but, I think, an ethical and a moral imperative to fight back the best that we can. And I understand that decision-making under repressive and authoritarian regimes and governments is difficult. And it is difficult to make these decisions, but I am absolutely convinced we’re doing the right thing to fight back however we can, even though we would never start disenfranchising voters and throwing people off the rolls, which is what they are doing right now when you go out to a lot of these states.
Sargent: Well, as you say, democracy itself is on the line. Congressman Raskin, thank you so much for coming on with us today.
Raskin: It is my pleasure, Greg. Thanks so much for having me.
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