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Trump, 79, Accidentally Reads Marco Rubio’s Private Note Out Loud - 2026-01-09T21:23:16Z

Donald Trump humiliated himself Friday when Secretary of State Marco Rubio tried to slyly pass him a note during a meeting with oil executives, and the president immediately read it aloud.

Trump was in the midst of promising “a very nice return” for executives from Chevron, ConocoPhillips, Exxon, Halliburton, Valero, and Marathon—in exchange for a $100 billion investment in rebuilding Venezuela’s energy sector, when he was suddenly sidetracked by a scrap of paper from Rubio.   

“You’re all gonna do very well—Marco just gave me a note. ‘Go back to Chevron, they want to discuss something,’” Trump read, turning to look at Chevron Vice Chairman Mark Nelson. “Go ahead, I’m going back to Chevron, Mark.”

Rubio grimaced uncomfortably, as Trump patted him on the back. “Thank you, Marco,” he said.

“Was there a question, Mr. President?” Nelson asked.

“Yes, go ahead Marco, what are you saying here?” Trump asked, inspecting the note again.

Energy Secretary Chris Wright jumped in. “Mark, if you could update us on operations on the ground, appropriate approvals, what you might be able to achieve in the next 12 to 18 months—give us a little view from the ground,” he said. 

Nelson launched into a description of Chevron’s ground operations. Chevron is the only oil company currently operating in Venezuela, as part of a joint venture with Petróleos de Venezuela. Wright told CNBC Wednesday that the Trump administration was receiving “daily updates” from Chevron and working closely to “allow their model to grow even more.”

Trump’s gaffe was part of a larger trend of cognitive decline, as the aged president has spent the last year in office appearing to fall asleep during meetings and giving incoherent, confused rants.

Katie Miller Loses It at ChatGPT (Yes, Really) for Wildest Reason - 2026-01-09T20:48:10Z

Katie Miller, the wife of Trump adviser Stephen Miller, fumed Friday when ChatGPT didn’t give her the answer she wanted about the ICE shooting in Minneapolis. 

Miller shared a post on X from one right-wing commentator that appeared to show an interaction with ChatGPT, in which a user asked the chatbot “who was responsible” for killing Renee Good. 

“Based on available video and reporting: ICE agents escalated a chaotic stop, gave conflicting commands, and fired as the woman tried to leave,” the chatbot replied. “The responsibility for the shooting lies with the U.S. Immigration Enforcement agent who pulled the trigger.”

That answer wasn’t good enough for Miller, however. “ChatGPT is dangerously woke,” Miller wrote on X. “An AI that wrongly judges an outcome is a threat to the future of nation and world. xAI is the only truth-seeking AI.”

(xAI is Elon Musk’s chatbot that is under fire for making sexualized images of women and children. It has already been used to generate an image of Good’s body in a bikini.)

Surprisingly enough, ChatGPT’s description of the violent shooting was right on the money.

Initial footage of the incident showed Good wave at the agents and urge them to “go around” her vehicle. (Newly obtained video showed that Good wasn’t fully blocking the street, as cars were able to pass her on either side.) ICE agents swarmed her vehicle, pulling on the doors with one officer demanding she “get out of the fucking car!” while another ordered her to leave. 

When Good attempted to drive away from the group of officers, one ICE agent, Jonathan Ross, who was standing near the front of the vehicle, pulled out his service weapon and shot her once through the windshield, and twice through the driver’s side-window. Ross had a history of escalating arrests with violent tactics. Another new video shows that an unidentified agent said, “Fucking bitch,” after Ross fired.

Miller shared another X post calling ChatGPT a “national security threat.”  She then made another post far more despicable than any of her useless toiling over AI, mocking Good’s wife, Becca, and calling her “another sad Liberal angry at the World because daddy didn’t love her enough.” Having seen how her husband talks, is anyone actually surprised?

Trump Picks the Weirdest Moment to Hype Up His New Ballroom - 2026-01-09T20:16:09Z

The president’s myriad disparate interests finally aligned on Friday when he was able to squeeze his recent acquisition of Venezuela’s oil reserves into the same sentence as his White House ballroom project.

“The largest Oil Companies in the World are coming to the White House at 2:30 P.M.,” Donald Trump posted on Truth Social. “Everybody wants to be there.

“It’s too bad that the Ballroom hasn’t completed because, if it were, it would be PACKED,” Trump continued. “We apologize to those Oil Companies that we cannot take today, but Secretary of Energy Chris Wright, and Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum, will see them over the next week. Everyone is in daily contact.

“Today’s meeting will almost exclusively be a discussion on Venezuelan Oil, and our longterm relationship with Venezuela, its Security, and People,” he noted. “A very big factor in this involvement will be the reduction of Oil Prices for the American People. Additionally, and perhaps most importantly of all, will be the stoppage of Drugs and Criminals coming into the United States of America. Thank you for your attention to this matter!”

It wouldn’t be the first time Trump has used the news of the day to talk about his ballroom. He quickly pivoted to his pet project when asked about the assassination of Charlie Kirk, and reportedly keeps leaving his actual duties to survey the construction.

U.S. forces invaded Venezuela early Saturday, bombing its capital, Caracas, as nearly 200 American troops infiltrated the city to capture its 13-year ruler, Nicolás Maduro.

Trump failed to notify Congress before doing so, but didn’t forget to tip off his friends at America’s biggest oil companies, which stand to gain the most from America’s newfound control over Venezuela’s oil supply—the largest in the world.

The invasion followed months of escalating naval attacks by the U.S. and rhetoric between the White House and Venezuela’s leadership, which saw the Trump administration repeatedly pin U.S. fentanyl deaths on Venezuelan drug cartels despite a resounding lack of evidence.

Meanwhile, East Wing ballroom architect Shalom Baranes revealed Thursday that the president’s plans for the White House were bigger than previously understood. In a meeting with members of the National Capital Planning Commission, or NCPC, Baranes announced that the administration intends to build up the West Wing after it finishes its 90,000-square-foot ballroom project in order to add “symmetry” to the executive mansion.

The architect did not offer a timetable for its completion, and did not say if the West Wing’s proposed growth would add to the redevelopment plan’s $400 million price tag.

This would be—at minimum—the second time that Trump has lied about his construction dreams for the White House. Back when the ballroom was first announced in July, Trump pledged that the development would “be near but not touching” the White House East Wing. He then proceeded to completely raze the FDR-era extension in October, plowing forward without prerequisite approval from the NCPC or the express permission of Congress, both of which were conveniently unavailable at the time due to the government shutdown.

Now it seems that no corner of the White House will go untouched by Trump’s white marble dreams.

“F*cking B*tch”: What ICE Agents Did Right After Minnesota Shooting - 2026-01-09T18:54:23Z

A newly released camera perspective of the ICE shooting in Minneapolis has shed additional light on the moments leading up to Renee Nicole Good’s death.

The previously unseen cellphone footage, obtained and published by Allen Analysis Newsroom, depicts a federal agent’s vantage point of the lethal encounter, and captures audio of at least one ICE agent calling Good a “fucking bitch” after they shot and killed her.

The exchange, as captured in the new video, begins with a 360 degree shot of Good’s red Honda Pilot, with the agent walking from the passenger side to the front to the rear of the SUV, presumably documenting the vehicle and its license plates. In doing so, the agent filming captures video of Good’s dog in the backseat, his large, black head hanging out of the open window.

As the agent passes in front of the driver’s side window, Good can be seen and heard telling him: “That’s fine, dude. I’m not mad at you.”

“I’m not mad at you,” she shouts again as he walks behind her car.

The agent’s masked reflection is caught in the glass of the backseat windows as he moves away.

Another woman—presumably Good’s wife, Rebecca Brown Good—is filming the agent while standing next to the rear of the SUV. Her voice can be heard over a long shot of the vehicle’s license plate.

“Show your face,” she said. “It’s OK, we don’t change our plates every morning, so it’ll be the same plate when you come talk to us later. U.S. citizen, former fucking veteran—disabled veteran. You want to come at us? I say you go and get yourself some lunch, big boy.”

Someone can then be heard telling Good to “get out of the fucking car,” when she reverses and then pushes the vehicle forward. As she does so, several shots can be heard. The image loses focus. When the camera stabilizes, Good’s car can be seen careening away.

“Fucking bitch,” an agent said.

In a paltry attempt to defend the agents’ deadly actions, Trump officials have branded Good a domestic terrorist for moving her car, and have suggested that defying the barked orders of masked individuals that evade identification is a crime punishable by death.

Yet other video footage of the incident illustrates that Good did not hit the agent who killed her, identified by the Minnesota Star-Tribune as Jonathan Ross.

Still, within moments of the new video’s release, Vice President JD Vance and White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt breathlessly rushed to mold the clip to their political narrative, excoriating media coverage of Good’s death and claiming that the national outrage is little more than a Democrat-fueled smear campaign.

“The media dishonesty about this officer is an all-time moment in shameless press propaganda,” Vance posted on X Friday.

This story has been updated.

New Details Emerge on ICE Agent Who Shot a Woman in Minnesota - 2026-01-09T17:50:09Z

Jonathan Ross, the ICE agent who shot and killed Renee Good, reportedly had a history of escalating arrests with violent tactics. 

Ross, a 10-year law enforcement veteran, was injured in June during the chaotic attempted arrest of Roberto Carlos Muñoz, an undocumented immigrant from Guatemala with prior convictions for criminal sexual conduct, who drove off during a traffic stop in Bloomington, Minnesota. 

Ross and another agent pulled in front of Muñoz’s vehicle to force him to stop. The two officers exited their vehicle and aimed their firearms at Muñoz, demanding he provide documentation, which he did, according to the affidavit. When the officers demanded that Muñoz roll down his window, he refused. Ross pulled out his taser, which he aimed at Muñoz’s chest, and the officers warned Muñoz that they would break the window if he did not comply.

Ross used a spring-loaded window punch to break the rear driver’s side window, and reached in to try and unlock the driver’s side door. Muñoz put the car in drive and dragged Ross roughly 100 yards, while Ross fired his taser “at least twice,” according to the affidavit. The agent later testified that he fired his taser 10 times.  

Eventually, Ross was shaken loose from the window, falling into the street. “The agent suffered serious lacerations on both arms, which required 33 stitches in total to close,” the affidavit said. 

“I was fearing for my life. I knew I was gonna get drug,” Ross said, according to a transcript of his court testimony from December. “And the fact I couldn’t get my arm out, I didn’t know how long I would be drugged. So I was kind of running with the vehicle.”

The claim that an officer was “fearing for their life” is a common phrase used by officers to justify their use of deadly force—and has become a familiar refrain for ICE agents who claim protesters’ vehicles were “weaponized” against them.  

Vice President JD Vance delivered a full-throated defense of Good’s killing Thursday, while botching some of the details of Ross’s backstory. 

Complaining about a CNN headline that described the incident, Vance said: “What that headline leaves out is the fact that that very ICE officer nearly had his life ended, dragged by a car six months ago, 34 stitches in his leg, so you think maybe he’s a little bit sensitive about somebody ramming him with an automobile?” 

Setting aside the fact that it was Ross’s arm, not his leg, that was injured, Vance’s remarks also absurdly suggest that any officer hurt in the line of duty has a free pass to remain in the field and shoot dead civilians if they get scared. That’s exactly why desk duty exists, right?

It’s hard not to see the parallels between Ross’s interactions with Muñoz and Good. Not in the fact that Ross was in any danger from Good, but that in both cases, he drew his weapon in order to threaten his target when they did not immediately comply with his commands. In one case, that decision was deadly. 

The court documents involving Muñoz’s arrest also contained other information about Ross. He described himself as an Indiana National Guard veteran who served in Iraq from 2004 to 2005 before joining Border Patrol. In 2015, he joined ICE and was assigned to the Enforcement and Removal Operations special response team, where he pursued “higher value targets.”

Trump Has Bonkers Plan to Make Sure White House Matches New East Wing - 2026-01-09T17:31:23Z

The White House ballroom project is about to get even bigger.

East Wing ballroom architect Shalom Baranes revealed new plans for the executive mansion Thursday, showcasing a previously unreported, one-story addition to the West Wing that he claimed would balance out the 90,000-square-foot development.

Screenshot of a tweet

The expansion, which would take place after the ballroom is completed, would “restore a sense of symmetry around the original central pavilion,” according to Baranes.

Responding to questions from members of the National Capital Planning Commission, Baranes said that the potential West Wing project would affect the West Wing colonnade but not the building proper, reported ABC News. The architect did not offer a timetable for its completion, and did not say if the West Wing’s proposed growth would add to the redevelopment plan’s $400 million price tag. (The project was, initially, supposed to cost $200 million before Donald Trump decided to tack on extra construction.)

Baranes also offered more details on the magnitude of Trump’s highly controversial ballroom, projecting that the new building will have 40-foot ceilings, be able to accommodate up to 1,000 seated guests, and would constitute just 22,000 square feet of the 90,000-square-foot development.

Baranes took over the ballroom project after Trump fired the original architect in early December. Despite handpicking James McCrery II to lead the renovation, Trump soon began clashing with McCrery after he disagreed with Trump’s desired size for the new East Wing.

A White House official who aided the presentation, Josh Fisher, said that the administration is also considering changes to Lafayette Square, which is located due north of the White House in the President’s Park.

Will Scharf, a senior White House official on the NCPC, claimed that the myriad changes to the White House were necessary in order to bring it up to snuff with the residences of other world leaders, comparing the symbol of democracy to the sprawling estates of King Charles of England.

But Trump also has his eyes set on spending heaps of taxpayer money on other portions of Washington.

The “Arc de Trump” is expected to be erected near the Arlington Bridge, opposite the Lincoln Memorial. It will be modeled after the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, the historic monument that commemorates those who fought and died for France during the country’s revolution and the Napoleonic Wars—though the president’s arc is, by its namesake, expected to honor just him.

Trump also renovated Jackie Kennedy’s famous Rose Garden, mowing down flowers in order to literally pave paradise. He gutted the Lincoln bathroom, transforming it from Lyndon B. Johnson’s favorite office into a marble-slathered eyesore, and swapped the historic Palm Room’s lush green tones and tall ferns for white paint and framed photos of plants.

Meanwhile, his administration is doing some demolition of its own, reportedly planning to destroy some 13 historic buildings on the grounds of former psychiatric hospital St. Elizabeths in order to expand facilities for the Department of Homeland Security.

Jobs Numbers Hit Record Low as Trump’s Economy Craters - 2026-01-09T16:53:53Z

Donald Trump’s so-called “Golden Age” is seriously screwing American workers, according to the latest jobs report.

The U.S. economy added just 50,000 jobs in December, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, underperforming expectations from Wall Street. December’s meager job offerings capped off total job creation in 2025 at roughly 584,000 total jobs, making it the worst year for hiring since the Covid-19 pandemic that ravaged the American economy. 2025 also saw the weakest annual job growth since 2003. 

Since Trump’s Liberation Day tariffs announcement, job growth has screeched to a halt—and may even be in decline, according to economist Justin Wolfers. 

Heather Long, the chief economist for Navy Federal Credit Union, pointed out that the bulk of hiring last year happened in April, when 158,000 jobs were added to the economy. 

The worst month for job creation was October, when the market lost a staggering 173,000 jobs (revised up in the latest release from 105,000) as federal workers ousted by Elon Musk’s DOGE departed their government roles. November gains were also revised down from 64,000 to just 56,000. 

Meanwhile, the unemployment rate fell slightly to 4.4 percent, after reaching its highest rate in four years. The unemployment rate was overall up from 4 percent in January 2025. 

The first year of Trump’s so-called “Golden Age” has been a rough one. 2025 ended with the number of people employed part-time for economic reasons up by 980,000,  the number of long-term unemployed people up by 397,000, and the number of people not in the workforce but wanting a job up 684,000.

Minneapolis Knows How to Resist This State Violence - 2026-01-09T16:42:59Z

Just over five years after the police murder of George Perry Floyd Jr., Minneapolis is again taking to the streets over an unjustified killing by law enforcement. This time, the victim is Renee Nicole Good, a 37-year-old woman who was shot by ICE agent Jonathan Ross less than a mile from George Floyd Square. This echoing of traumatic recent history has the city on edge, but it is also revealing how the muscle memory of the summer of 2020 has better prepared everyday residents and city leaders to respond.

That memory includes neighborhood communication networks built during the unrest for residents to protect one another and the bravery needed to stand up, protest against injustice, and record the police. While these two flashpoints of violence share some similarities, including the public’s grief and rage, they’re also unfolding in two very different political moments, targeting distinct agencies, and (perhaps) leading to different results.

Over the past year, as Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Border Patrol agents worked their way through Democrat-led cities, Minneapolis residents have been flooding legal observer trainings, handing out 3D-printed ICE whistles, and organizing neighborhood group chats to protect immigrant neighbors. Even staid businesses and schools have seemingly joined the resistance, sending out mass communications on “know your rights” trainings.

Across all of these efforts, there is connective tissue from the unrest of 2020, including demonstrations led by the same groups of clergy leaders and City Council members who supported the initiative to replace the Minneapolis Police Department. In other cases, residents and community leaders who spotlighted the murder of George Floyd are now calling attention to the injustices of ICE. In still others, neighbors are relying on the group chats they had originally created either out of fear that rogue white supremacists were infiltrating their streets or to organize teams to patrol the block and look for fires. Learning from the unrest in 2020, Minneapolis prepared for this fight.

These lessons led witnesses to stream onto the street Wednesday when ICE pulled up in the Central neighborhood of Minneapolis. They blew car horns and whistles, drawing observers out of their homes. Good, driving that morning with her wife, lived in the neighborhood too. This routine everyday resistance was apparent as neighbors began recording on their cellphones and continued to do so even after Good was shot at close range right in front of them.

Across the country, ICE agents have killed three other people in the past five months, and nonfatally shot several more, including a woman in Chicago who, like Good, was caught in an altercation with immigration agents while driving her car. More have died in ICE custody. The killing of Good, however, appears so far to be a potential turning point, another moment of reckoning driven in part by protest in Minneapolis against injustice.

We can also see the impact of movements challenging police violence in the refusal of Minnesota elected officials to accept federal law enforcement’s claims about Good’s death. In the immediate aftermath of the killing, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem described Good as a “violent rioter” and accused her of “an act of domestic terrorism,” while characterizing the shooter’s actions as self-defense. President Trump went one step further, insisting that Good had “run over” an ICE agent who was subsequently hospitalized.

It is easy enough to dismiss these as the latest round of grotesque lies from the administration—lies easily disproven by the widely available video evidence. What is more remarkable is the speed and virulence of local officials’ responses against these statements.

In 2020, local and state officials condemned the actions of Officer Derek Chauvin, but many, including Mayor Jacob Frey, were more cautious in critiquing the police department or policing more broadly. Now, in 2026, local and state officials are directly calling out the authorities. Frey described Noem’s claims as “bullshit,” while Minnesota Governor Tim Walz decried the administration’s “propaganda.”

At a press conference Wednesday night, Mayor Frey, flanked by law enforcement leaders, told ICE forcefully: “Get the fuck out of Minneapolis.” This message has been repeated across the local political spectrum, from Frey’s allies to his opponents, in a surprising repudiation of Minnesota nice. Frey himself repeated it—sans curse word—in a New York Times op-ed on Thursday.

Of course, it’s easier for local and state officials to condemn federal agencies than to condemn their own. And the political logic of Homeland Security raids is quite different from that of local police actions—no mayor in America is likely to tell their police department to “get the fuck out.” But it’s hard to imagine residents’ preparations for ICE patrols, the intensity of politicians’ rebukes, or the public appetite for the call to “abolish ICE” without the muscle-building political struggles in the summer of 2020 and organizers’ continual insistence that law enforcement lies about police violence.

It is precisely this work of organizers and the city’s righteous anger in 2020 that made Minneapolis a target of the Trump administration in 2026, and it flooded the Twin Cities this week with an unprecedented 2,000 ICE and Border Patrol agents to snatch up largely law-abiding immigrants. (As point of reference, the Minneapolis Police Department stands at just over 600 officers.) It was only a matter of time before someone here was killed.

Over the coming weeks, investigators, journalists, and online sleuths will parse the video evidence of Good’s killing frame by frame, making the case that the ICE agent’s behavior did (or did not) constitute murder according to law. With federal agencies leading the investigation, justice will be hard to come by. But just as the criminal conviction against Chauvin was not enough to transform city policing, so too will the fight against ICE terrors need to go well beyond the courts.

The broader truth is clear: There is no reason for ICE to be swarming Minneapolis. There is no crisis on the city streets other than the one created by the Department of Homeland Security. But Noem and Trump wanted this fight. Fortified by the lessons of 2020, Minneapolis stands ready to give it to them.

Mayors Warn You Can’t Trust Trump After Second ICE Shooting in Days - 2026-01-09T16:31:11Z

National trust in federal authority has plummeted in the wake of several ICE shootings, leading at least two mayors to denounce the government.

Two people in Portland, Oregon, were shot by Border Patrol agents during a traffic stop Thursday evening, leading Mayor Keith Wilson to acknowledge that federal agents have made American towns less safe.

Speaking at a press conference late Thursday, Wilson called on the Department of Homeland Security and ICE to quit “all operations in Portland”—but not before he called out the Trump administration for twisting the reality that Americans are experiencing with their own eyes and ears.

“We know what the federal government says happened here. There was a time when we could take them at their word,” Wilson said. “That time is long past.”

Oregon Governor Tina Kotek was in lockstep, claiming at the same press conference that “federal agents at the direction of the Department of Homeland Security are shattering trust.”

“They are destroying day by day what we hold dear,” Kotek said.

The current status of the two shooting victims is not currently known, according to state and city officials in Oregon.

The shooting occurred just one day after an ICE agent killed 37-year-old Renee Nicole Good in Minneapolis shortly after she dropped off her 6-year-old child to school. Her death sparked national fervor, particularly after the Trump administration vehemently defended the agent with an explanation of the incident that did not line up with video footage of the assault.

Penning a New York Times op-ed Thursday, Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey argued that Donald Trump was lying to the country about what had taken place in his city. He cited the escalating violence that ICE agents had enacted against the Minneapolis community in recent months, including incidents in which ICE agents dragged a pregnant woman through the street, sparked chaos at libraries, and hurled chemical agents at high school students on school grounds.

But further still, Frey argued that the president and his officials had undermined public safety by deliberately dividing the public on a federally sponsored killing, caught on tape.

“The actions of the ICE agents deployed to my city are dangerous, and now, even deadly,” Frey wrote. “But that danger has been compounded by the administration’s claim that the victim committed an act of domestic terrorism.”

Video evidence of the incident suggested Good was letting other vehicles pass her on the road before she attempted to get out of the officers’ way, in an attempt to comply with ICE’s orders. However she was momentarily halted when the masked agents approached her window.

As she began to move her vehicle away from the agents, an officer standing in front of her red Honda Pilot sidestepped the car, moving toward the driver’s side before he pulled the trigger multiple times through her open window, video recording illustrates.

The officer then extended his arm and chased after Good as her SUV accelerated down the road, seemingly uncontrolled, before smashing into a utility pole and several parked vehicles.

Somehow, Trump officials have interpreted the clip as an act of aggression, in which they claim that the attacking ICE agent—identified by the Minnesota Star-Tribune as Jonathan Ross—was acting in self-defense. Trump claimed that Good “behaved horribly,” while Vice President JD Vance argued Thursday that Good’s death was effectively her own fault as he believed she had been “brainwashed.”

But after watching “multiple videos from multiple perspectives,” Frey wrote he agreed with eyewitnesses that “it seems clear that Ms. Good, a mother of three, was trying to leave the scene, not attack an agent.”

I Am a Minneapolis Mother and Pastor, and I Know Where I Stand - 2026-01-09T15:11:27Z

In 2026 America, we are being sold a cheap, brutish, ugly, superficial, violent view of the world.

We are told that our world is one in which you #FAFO. One in which failure to obey a man with a gun means certain, justifiable death.

We are told that this world is the only world possible. And sometimes that seems true, as I write to you from Minneapolis, where on Thursday I found myself retracing my steps: driving the less than five miles from my Minneapolis home to a nearby neighborhood in South Minneapolis. Less than six years ago I biked here, wearing my clergy collar, to attend a clergy protest and prayer service after the murder of George Floyd.

Half a mile away from that murder, this week brought another killing by a uniformed officer. This time, they killed a 37-year-old white mother. Then they descended upon the high school next to my church, where students were tear-gassed and two teachers were taken away, school windows broken, teenagers in tears.

We lit candles that night at church. Again, the next day, on Thursday, we donned our clericals and stoles and bowed our heads. How could we? How could we not? Even though my kids are home from school because the Minneapolis School District deemed our streets to be unsafe for children due to ICE. Even though as I write these words, I am late to pick up my son.

We are told that there is not enough for everyone, and so you have to take as much as you can for as long as you can, and if that means cheating other people—well, then you’re the smart one and the other people, the ones who can’t afford their heating bill: They’re suckers.

We are told that our only protection comes in dollar bills and hunks of metal, that our best knowledge and wisdom are housed in cold and costly data centers. That what is most beautiful is most expensive and most altered, by surgeons’ knives or digital filters.

We are told we don’t know any better and that there are evil people trying to take what is rightfully ours and so we have to purge ourselves of them and their blood.

The blood we share.

What have you done? Listen; your brother’s blood is crying out to me from the ground!

Kill or be killed.

More for me.

We cover the sounds of internal screaming with caustic laughter and memes. We use throwaway words meant to distinguish them from us, the real humans.

Domestic terrorists. Antifa. Crazy. Unhinged. Mob. Riot.

They slow down the video and watch her die, frame by frame. It’s not so much what they say they see but what they don’t see, what their eyes shield them from so that the terror inside won’t take over, make them realize the call is coming from inside the house.

They analyze tire tracks and footprints.

Her blood is all over the airbag.

As a mother, I’ve long known that when you bear children, your DNA is irrevocably changed. Your blood is forever mixed with their blood, your genes utterly altered. And so the blood on the airbag is not only hers but theirs, the ones who live on without her; the one who has to go back to elementary school without his mom, her and his blood still running through his veins, though now her fingers are cold as ice.

The murder scene is marked by tire tracks and bullet holes, and also stuffed animals. One looks like a white unicorn, its turquoise mane blowing in the frigid air. There’s a brown bear with sad eyes.

As a mother, I know that these animals had names. Have names.

They moved with mother and child across the Midwest. As she persevered and got her English degree at Old Dominion University in Virginia, much older than her classmates, but with undeniable talent as a writer.

As a poet, she won the 2020 American Academy of Poets Prize for this work, On Learning to Dissect Fetal Pigs, in which she describes donating Bibles to thrift shops and mentions “the piddly brook of my soul.”

As though she knew in America today you have to fight for your soul. Especially as a woman. Especially as a working-class person. Especially as a mother. And yet, even though her soul felt like a “piddly brook,” she claimed it nonetheless. So that no one could say that she was disposable, even though they did, and so that no one could take away her humanity, even though they tried to, right away, and they didn’t let the doctor check her pulse or clear the road for an ambulance.

Finally, beloved, whatever is true, whatever is honorable, whatever is just, whatever is pure, whatever is pleasing, whatever is commendable, if there is any excellence and if there is anything worthy of praise, think about these things.

The Apostle Paul wrote these words to the Church at Philippi, in what is today northern Greece, about 30 years after Jesus was executed, via crucifixion, by a cheap, brutish, ugly, superficial, violent Roman Empire, led by priggish, insecure, authoritarian white men who likened themselves to gods but paid homage to religion when it suited their pursuit of power.

When Paul wrote these words, he was a designated enemy of the state, and though it hadn’t killed him yet, it surely sought his humanity. They called him an agitator and a rioter, a dangerous foreigner who practiced a minority faith. More than once Paul had to prove his citizenship in order to evade Roman pursuit, and still he wrote most of his letters in chains, on house arrest or in prison, until they finally executed him, via beheading, around five years after he wrote those words.

So Paul’s command here is no flowery platitude, nor an excuse to look away from carnage and blood and bullet holes and stuffed animals and orphaned children. Rather, his truth and honor and justice and purity and pleasure and commendation and excellence and praise are reserved for what they rooted in reality, pain, sacrifice, and hard-fought grace.

This is true: Renee Nicole Good did not deserve to die.

This is honorable: The community of Minneapolis gathered that night, the next day, to champion her humanity and hold fast to our commitment to our neighbors.

This is just: That those who kill are violating the Sixth Commandment and are outside the bounds of law and morality, and thus must face investigation and take accountability.

This is pure: That children are born naturally loving every human they meet.

This is pleasing: We have inherited, from the Black Church in America, through all of the injustice it has faced, and all of the lies told about it, a vision of the Beloved Community. We have seen, in fits and starts, in visions and Spirit-filled awakenings, a promised future, and what we see we can believe.

This is commendable: That 24 hours after Renee was killed, clergy from a wide variety of faith backgrounds, hundreds of us, came to stand at the site in Minneapolis and cry out for hope, justice, peace, and love. We embraced one another and held fast to the truth that perfect love casts out fear.

This is excellent: A local elementary school not far from the shooting was home from school Thursday due to safety concerns from ICE’s presence in Minneapolis. That is not excellent. But excellence is the parents at that little elementary school in South Minneapolis, who gathered their kids together and marched around the neighborhood in support of their immigrant neighbors. Because kids know we are better together. Even though these are the same kids who witnessed a school shooting blocks from their home at Annunciation Catholic School less than five months ago. Because we will not let each other bear our pain alone.

This is praiseworthy: Real bravery trumps its cowardly imitator every single time. The pen is mightier than the sword—the biggest assault rifle, the heaviest body armor, rippling muscles to mask crippling insecurity inside. You cannot fake being brave. And so ordinary Americans, mothers, fathers, children, teenagers, immigrants, pastors, put their bodies together and stand as a line against the onslaught of tyranny.

Where do you stand? With them, or with the Lie?

In ICE’s Own Words, It’s “Wartime” in America - 2026-01-09T15:03:35Z

On January 3, four days before the horrific killing of Renee Nicole Good, the Department of Homeland Security put out a press release. The headline bragged: “ICE Announces Historic 120% Manpower Increase, Thanks to Recruitment Campaign That Brought in 12,000 Officers and Agents.”

The statement went on to boast (bolded language in the original): “After receiving more than 220,000 applications to join ICE from patriotic Americans, ICE blew past its original hiring target of 10,000 new officers and agents within a year. In fact, we have more than doubled our officers and agents from 10,000 to 22,000. With these new patriots on the team, we will be able to accomplish what many say was impossible and fulfill President Trump’s promise to make America safe again.”

It appears that Good’s executioner—and it’s hard to think of a more apt word for someone who fires three point-blank shots at the head of an obviously unarmed civilian who is trying to drive away—was not one of these “new patriots.” The incident his defenders have taken to invoking, in which he was dragged by a car and ended up with 33 stitches, reportedly happened last June, before the hiring spree. But even that raises the obvious question: If he was injured, if he was “traumatized” by that event, as Vice President JD Vance said Thursday, what in the world was he doing still out in the field?

An investigation may answer that question (or, since it’s going to be led by Kash Patel’s FBI, maybe it won’t). But our common sense, and what we have learned in the last year about these people, tells us that he was still in the field for the same reason that ICE has hired 12,000 people in six months, recruiting specifically for people with an enthusiasm for guns and the military. The Trump administration wants to force showdowns that lead inevitably to what happened in Minneapolis Wednesday.

Take a look at the recruitment social media post that DHS placed on X last August: “Serve your country! Defend your culture! No undergraduate degree required!”

Let’s break that down. “Serve your country.” OK, nothing objectionable about that. But then we take a very Trumpian-Millerian turn: “Defend your culture.” Who is that aimed at? What set of emotional reactions is that command supposed to fire, and in whom? What “culture,” precisely, is it referring to? And finally, the reassurance that the job is open to practically anyone.

Well, anyone of a certain mindset, that is. On New Year’s Eve, ICE announced that it was initiating a new $100 million recruitment campaign that it referred to as a “wartime recruitment” strategy. The campaign, as The Washington Post put it, will target people “who have attended UFC fights, listened to patriotic podcasts, or shown an interest in guns and tactical gear.”

Any organization that goes from 10,000 to 22,000 in six months has hired some very unqualified people. If that organization is, say, the Candy Stripers, that might not be much of an issue. But if the organization is one that gives its employees badges and masks and riot gear and SIG Sauer P320 semiautomatic pistols (or maybe a Glock 19, to which the agency began transitioning last year), you’ve got a problem.

That’s exactly what Donald Trump, Stephen Miller, Kristi Noem, and Corey Lewandowski (whose exact role at DHS is the focus of many questions) have done. The so-called Big Beautiful Bill passed last July, you might recall, tripled ICE’s budget, from around $10 billion a year to close to $30 billion. All told, as Margy O’Herron of the Brennan Center pointed out last year, the bill “allocates more than $170 billion over four years for border and interior enforcement, with a stated goal of deporting one million immigrants each year. That is more than the yearly budget for all local and state law enforcement agencies combined across the entire United States.” She added that “the largest percentage increase goes to finding, arresting, detaining, and deporting immigrants already living in the U.S., most of whom have not committed a crime and many of whom have had lawful status.”

It’s clear what all this adds up to. There will be more Renee Goods. And they will all be smeared and trashed by Trump and his followers. Vance said Thursday, as have any number of MAGA-ites on social media, that she was driving right at the shooting officer. Proof of this, they say, lies in the fact that first bullet hole went through her windshield.

Yes, it did. But look at where it went through the windshield. It’s all the way over to the right, just a couple of inches from the driver’s-side pillar. If she was driving right at him, wouldn’t that bullet hole be closer to the center of the windshield? The video shows clearly that she was turning the car to the right. But even if there is ambiguity about the first shot, there is no ambiguity whatsoever about the second and third.

Good was executed. And now her reputation and life and values are being killed. Perhaps taking cues from Noem, who accused Good of an act of “domestic terrorism,” Vance referred to the victim as part of a left-wing conspiracy. A reporter asked him to amplify on that, and he couldn’t. He also said Good represented a “lunatic fringe.”

No, Mr. Vice President. Renee Good represents tens of millions of honest, decent, and patriotic Americans. Tens of millions of us who want to live in a humane and compassionate multiracial democracy where citizens, even if they are trying to obstruct a law enforcement action they object to (there is still some question whether Good was doing this), are subjected to the legal process and given their rights and not shot point-blank, where people who aren’t citizens but are otherwise law-abiding don’t have to live in fear, and where the “culture” we “defend” is a culture based not on blood and soil but the rule of law.

The real lunatic fringe in this country is the one that sanctions the execution of a citizen and then spends days smearing her and that imagines itself to be at war with its own people and precipitates these kinds of confrontations in the first place. That fringe is doubling down, and hiring and hiring and hiring. This is going to get much worse.

This article first appeared in Fighting Words, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by editor Michael Tomasky. Sign up here.

Damning New Video Wrecks Trump Team’s Claims on Minnesota ICE Shooting - 2026-01-09T14:44:52Z

A new video shows the minutes leading up to the killing of Renee Good by a federal immigration officer from a new angle—and further casts doubt on the Trump administration’s smears.

The video obtained by CNN Thursday night showed Good’s Honda Pilot arriving at the site of the incident approximately four minutes before the shooting took place. One person appeared to exit Good’s car, before she pulled out into the road perpendicularly. The new footage showed that Good wasn’t fully blocking the street, as cars were able to pass her on either side.

The new video appears to show that ICE arrived suddenly and aggressively, and that Good was not actually blocking their path at all.

Initial footage of the incident, shot from another angle, showed Good wave at the agents and urge them to “go around” her vehicle. Instead, the ICE agents swarmed her vehicle, pulling on the doors and demanding she “get out of the fucking car!” One witness even said that another officer ordered her to leave. When Good attempted to drive away from the group of officers, one officer standing near the front of the vehicle shot her at least three times.

Still, Vice President JD Vance claimed Thursday that Good was a “deranged leftist” that was “part of a broader left-wing network” and “was there to interfere with a legitimate law enforcement operation.”

Members of the Trump administration, including Stephen Miller and Kristi Noem, claimed that Good was some kind of “domestic terrorist.” And President Donald Trump went so far as to claim she’d run over one of the officers, before he actually watched the video, it seems.

But the video evidence—of which there is a lot—does not support these claims at all. When pressed on this shadowy network to which Good supposedly belonged, Vance replied: “Well, it’s one of those things we’re gonna have to figure out.” Apparently, it may take some time to cook up anything to support his outrageous lies.

Trump Casually Reveals He Was Planning a Second Attack in Venezuela - 2026-01-09T14:29:45Z

Venezuela has apparently saved itself from another U.S. invasion by readily handing over political prisoners to the Trump administration.

Donald Trump revealed Friday that there was a preplanned arrangement to attack Venezuela a second time, though he noted that the offensive maneuver had since been called off in light of Venezuela’s capitulation with regard to releasing prisoners.

“Venezuela is releasing large numbers of political prisoners as a sign of ‘Seeking Peace.’ This is a very important and smart gesture,” Trump posted on Truth Social early Friday morning.

“The U.S.A. and Venezuela are working well together, especially as it pertains to rebuilding, in a much bigger, better, and more modern form, their oil and gas infrastructure,” Trump continued. “Because of this cooperation, I have cancelled the previously expected second Wave of Attacks, which looks like it will not be needed, however, all ships will stay in place for safety and security purposes.

“At least 100 Billion Dollars will be invested by BIG OIL, all of whom I will be meeting with today at The White House,” he added.

The move comes just hours after five Senate Republicans joined Democrats to advance the War Powers Resolution, which would force Trump to seek congressional approval before conducting any further military offensives in Venezuela. The Senate will carry out a final vote on the bill next week, after which the measure would need to pass the House and then get signed by Trump.

U.S. forces invaded Venezuela early Saturday, bombing its capital, Caracas, as nearly 200 American troops infiltrated the city to capture its 13-year ruler, Nicolás Maduro.

The narrative surrounding Trump’s attack on Venezuela has been wildly different from America’s other foreign intervention efforts. Whereas the George W. Bush administration insisted that its invasion of Iraq was to quell terrorism and suppress the nation’s nuclear capabilities—a claim that was dubiously received by the American public, considering the country was one of the world’s largest suppliers of oil at the time—Trump has been practically eager to fess to reporters that the primary rationale for his own military incursion against Venezuela was, truly, for oil.

On Tuesday, Trump announced that the U.S. would oversee the sale of some 50 million barrels of sanctioned Venezuelan oil, a sale that could be worth as much as $2.5 billion. The following day, Energy Secretary Chris Wright said that America would continue to oversee and sell Venezuelan oil “indefinitely,” even after the government finishes chewing through the Latin American country’s stockpiled oil reserves.

In an interview with The New York Times published Thursday, Trump claimed that the U.S. will likely run Venezuela for years.

“Only time will tell,” Trump said. “We will rebuild it in a very profitable way.”

Transcript: Can Trump’s Thugs Be Reined In? These Dems Have an Idea. - 2026-01-09T11:34:15Z

The following is a lightly edited transcript of the January 9 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.

MAGA’s response to the awful killing of Renee Good in Minneapolis has truly gone off the rails. Top MAGA figures and Republicans are unrepentant about it in every way. Yet at the same time, powerful new video analyses from news organizations show clearly that the shooting was, at an absolute minimum, unjustified. We think Democrats will now have to fundamentally alter their stance toward ICE and Trump as a result. And we’re talking about this with two Democrats, Representatives Eric Swalwell of California and Dan Goldman of New York, who are introducing a new measure to rein in ICE. We’re going to get into all this. Congressmen, thanks for coming on.

Congressman Eric Swalwell: Of course.

Congressman Dan Goldman: Yeah, thank you for having us, Greg.

Sargent: Well, I want to start with some responses from MAGA figures. There’s JD Vance:

JD Vance (voiceover): Look, there’s a part of me that feels very, very sad for this woman, not just because she lost her life, but because I think she is a victim of left-wing ideology. What young mother shows up and decides they’re going to throw their car in front of ICE officers who are enforcing legitimate law? You’ve got to be a little brainwashed.

Sargent: Vance also said:

JD Vance (voiceover): You have a woman who aimed her car at a law enforcement officer and pressed on the accelerator. Nobody debates that. I can believe that her death is a tragedy while also recognizing that it’s a tragedy of her own making.

Sargent: There’s Randy Fine, who said:

Randy Fine (voiceover): It’s time for Americans to say enough. And if you get in the way of the government repelling a foreign invasion, you’re going to end up just like that lady did yesterday.


Sargent: Congressman Swalwell, you want to respond to all that?

Swalwell: Renee Good was a mom of three kids. And if you looked at her glove compartment, which has been photographed and shared, you don’t see a weapon, you don’t see a knife, you don’t see a gun. You see what we as parents call “stuffies,” stuffed animals. You see a little cup of Cheerios. She’s not a domestic terrorist. She was there to hold to account and bear witness to the atrocities that ICE is committing in our communities. And she should be alive today.

Instead, Donald Trump has sent these mother-murdering thugs into our community. And of course this is what was gonna happen, because it started with putting ICE in the streets and then deporting a six-year-old, Stage 4 cancer victim, U.S. citizen, dragging women by their hair. Those, apparently, were the lucky ones when you look at what happened to Ms. Good.

Sargent: Representatives Swalwell and Goldman will introduce a new bill called the ICE OUT Act, which will end qualified immunity for ICE agents. Congressman Goldman, can you describe what this bill would do and why it’s needed right now?

Goldman: Yeah, basically what the officer is going to say would be that, I personally, subjectively, myself believed that she was driving her car right at me and using her car to try to run me over, and therefore I had to shoot her in self-defense. And because the standard is subjective and it allows for the officer’s own view to carry a lot of weight, it will be very difficult for him to be prosecuted with the current status of qualified immunity.

So what this bill does is only for civil enforcement officers—not criminal enforcement officers who are dealing with real bad guys, not moms driving cars. It would say that it’s an objective test. And if you are acting completely outside of your duties and responsibilities, you don’t have immunity from a civil lawsuit and you don’t have a defense from a criminal charge.

Sargent: OK, I want to break that down a little bit more. So one piece of this is that it removes the protection against lawsuits from victims who allege that their constitutional rights were violated. That’s one piece, yes?

Swalwell: Yes, it’s very hard today with qualified immunity to bring a civil action against somebody who has that immunity.

Sargent: OK, the second piece of this is more complicated. If they thought they were doing what they needed to do to execute federal law, they’re generally protected from prosecution. You guys are trying to remove that and put something in place that’s a lot more clear and doesn’t necessarily turn on what the officer says he or she thought, right?

Swalwell: Yes, we see these guys acting as if they’re invincible, they’re untouchable—that they can drag women by their hair, throw them in vans that are unidentified, and now shoot them three times in the face—and nothing will happen to them. So yes, civilly, this puts them into a place where they can be liable. And criminally, it knocks out a defense that they would otherwise enjoy, which would make a prosecutor think twice as they try and put forward a case that they’d have to prove beyond a reasonable doubt.

Again, it’s just saying, Look, we see what you’re doing. We’re not helpless to stop you. And we’re going to bring account to the acts that you’re committing in our communities.

Sargent: Back to Congressman Goldman, what is the exact standard that this sets up? How does it set up a basic guardrail? What does it say?

Goldman: Well, it would be an objective standard. So it would be what a reasonable person standing in the shoes of that officer would and should have thought. And that’s important because it still does give an officer a real and legitimate argument that, I’m acting in self-defense or that I reasonably believed that I was doing this. But the other thing that I do think is also very important about this is it narrows and identifies what the “duties and responsibilities” defense is.

So ICE agents are not allowed to arrest citizens, and they are not allowed to arrest anyone for criminal violations such as obstruction of justice. Their only authority is to investigate and civilly arrest immigrants for immigration violations.

They should never have been in the situation they were in where they were trying to take a woman out of a car. That was not part of what they should be doing. They could ask her to move if they needed to. It doesn’t look like, from the video, that she was doing anything that was obstructing them. But for them to then be able to just say, I have this blanket defense that I thought she was coming after me and therefore I shot—basically, they should be treated as a civilian would be treated.

Sargent: Let’s talk about this particular case. Congressman Swalwell, would you expect the state of Minnesota to prosecute this ICE agent? And what—what would your bill say and do that would—how would it impact that prosecution exactly?

Swalwell: Well, certainly I would expect any other administration—and by the way, if this individual is not pardoned, a future administration federally could prosecute this individual. But yes, certainly Keith Ellison, the attorney general of Minnesota, or the Hennepin County district attorney would have the ability to do that.

And what I believe we have to do with these guys is, as long as they’re going to continue to run rogue in our communities, we have to max out the law enforcement authorities that our attorneys general and district attorneys across the country have. They only understand one language.

And so if they’re going to commit false imprisonment, kidnapping, battery, assault against the most vulnerable in our communities, you have to charge them with the crime. And the second you start doing that, I promise you these guys are going to think twice.

Sargent: Right, under your bill, it would no longer turn on whether he thought he was acting in good faith compliance with what’s necessary and proper to execute federal law. It would turn on a more independent judgment.

Goldman: That’s right. The one thing to know, though, is it’s still unclear that it could be charged by a state or local prosecutor. Because it’s a federal officer, and generally, even if it were charged in the state, it can be removed to federal court because of the Supremacy Clause.

But what this is also tackling—and I think the messaging here is almost as important, Greg, as anything else, because as you heard from Randy Fine or JD Vance, we’re not expecting to get Republicans to support this—but immediately after this incident, Kristi Noem, Stephen Miller, Donald Trump had already concluded that he did nothing wrong. And so if the FBI is the only investigative agency and you have Kash Patel, who is basically an extension of Donald Trump’s right arm, doing this investigation, we all know it’s going nowhere. It’s not a legitimate investigation.

Kristi Noem had a press conference today where she said, on the one hand, We’re going to go through the policies and procedures to conduct this investigation. Then right after that she said, And we know that those policies and procedures are going to reveal that he acted within his authority. She literally has already made up her mind even though presumably there’s a lot more to the investigation—in talking to witnesses, in talking to the other officers—that you would want to do.

Swalwell: What that does is that tells the next officer in the next environment, in the next case, that you, too, can shoot a mom three times in the face. If they see that they’re going to be so quickly acquitted by the president and Noem, what is there out there to protect the next mom who’s trying to bear witness to what ICE is doing?

Sargent: OK, well, I want to ask about funding for ICE. Obviously, Trump and Stephen Miller have gotten huge infusions of federal money. They’re about to dramatically expand recruitment for ICE. This will get much worse. I’ve got to think this shooting in Minneapolis should make it very hard or even impossible for most Democrats to support the level of funding that ICE is getting. Congressman Swalwell, what do you guys want Dems to do in the upcoming budget debate to rein in ICE funding or dramatically limit it?

Swalwell: I wouldn’t vote to give them a penny under what they’re doing right now. We were promised that the most violent in our community would be targeted. And I can’t speak for Dan, but again, as a former prosecutor, I imagine that we all agree with that: Get violent criminals out of our community.

That’s not what they’re doing. They’re chasing people through the fields and factories where they work. They’re going to churches, they’re going to schools, they’re terrorizing people who are here with all of their documents. And again, they shot a U.S. citizen in the face. They deported a six-year-old with Stage 4 cancer.

So I would not vote to give them a penny with what they’re doing right now. And I’ll let Dan speak for himself as to how he sees it.

Sargent: Congressman Goldman, let me just ask it this way to you. If Democrats take back the House, what should their position on ICE be? I think it’s obvious ICE can’t continue in anything like its current form. What should Dems be for? Is it abolishing it? Is it crushing it? Is it defunding it dramatically and putting major strictures on it so it’s barely recognizable? What should House Democrats in the majority, if they get it, be for?

Goldman: ICE is going to have to be dramatically and overwhelmingly revamped. Whether that means that ICE is eliminated and a new agency is stood up to start from scratch, or it means that the funding is dramatically withdrawn and there are new rules, new procedures, new laws that guide it—I think that’s a debate that’s worth having. But the outcome is more or less the same.

ICE is essentially a military now, and it’s only supposed to be for civil infractions. My district office in downtown Manhattan is across the street from 26 Federal Plaza, which is where the immigration courthouses are and where the immigration detention center—actually, it’s not a detention center, it’s a processing facility that’s been used as a detention center.

And ICE agents, masked ICE agents, are literally pulling people out of court and arresting them. When they are there for their asylum cases. Asylum is a lawful pathway. And even Kristi Noem acknowledged in testimony before our committee, the Homeland Security Committee, that it is illegal to deport someone who is here lawfully; and if you have an active asylum case, you’re here lawfully.

So they are violating the law not just with the excessive force that we see all over the place, but also by deporting so many people who are not criminals. Seventy percent of those arrested in New York by ICE have no criminal record whatsoever. Seventy. And yet we’re told it’s the worst of the worst and it’s criminals and all this. It’s not.

They’re just trying to jack up the quotas to terrorize immigrant communities so that immigrants will self-deport and so that they can keep out as many people who don’t look like Donald Trump and Stephen Miller.

Sargent: Well, I want to give Congressman Swalwell a chance to answer the same question. Abolish ICE, crush ICE—what’s the way to understand it?

Swalwell: I’m not voting to fund this ICE. And so I will support getting rid of their immunity. I will support requiring them to take off the masks and take the identification out. And I want them subjected to every jurisdiction’s law enforcement authorities when they break the law, period. So this ICE is not what anybody asked for, and I’m not going to vote to continue it.

Sargent: OK, let’s just go back to the measure you guys are introducing. I just was hoping to drill down a little more into how it actually works. So just walk us through what the removing of immunity actually does in terms of exposing an ICE agent to some form of prosecution, whether it’s state, federal—what’s the way to get them under the new regime that you would put in place?

Swalwell: Yeah. So Ms. Good’s family would be able to bring a federal ... even if the federal government is not willing to prosecute or if the president were to pardon the person who killed her, her family would be able to go to federal court.

It would not be immediately thrown out under qualified immunity that exists today. And she would be able to make her case. And as Dan said, a more objective standard based on the reasonableness or unreasonableness of the officer’s conduct.

Sargent: That’s a lawsuit—

Swalwell: Yes, civilly. Federally, as you said—I don’t want to mislead people—we can’t do anything to stop the president from pardoning what this officer did. He is still subjected—that’s why I think Dan and I agree that Minnesota authorities should bring a case against this officer, so you’d still be subjected to state law.

This would take away defenses that they would have. And again, when you’re a prosecutor, to really drill down: To charge any individual with a crime, you have to be convinced that you can prove that case beyond a reasonable doubt. Not that you can get an indictment, that even post-indictment that you can prove that case to a jury of that person’s peers beyond a reasonable doubt.

With qualified immunity right now and the defenses offered to people right now, it makes it very hard for prosecutors to cross that Rubicon. This would get rid of that and make it much easier, taking those defenses out on the criminal side.

Sargent: Well, Congressman Goldman, just to boil this down as simply as possible: Your bill, if it were to pass, simply would make this officer and any other rogue officer who did something like this potentially more vulnerable to a state prosecution than he currently is or would be.

Goldman: I don’t think it actually will have a tremendous impact on state prosecution because of the Supremacy Clause. Even if it were charged in the state, they’d remove it to federal court. But what it would do is if the attorney general of Minnesota, for example, were to charge the ICE officer based on the evidence that they collect, it would still be a live case that gets removed to the federal government, the federal court. So there is still a role for the state to play.

The biggest difference—and while this has much more direct impact on civil lawsuits, as we have been talking about, Greg—the civil standard of qualified immunity also has an application in criminal law. Because you would have a defense to the murder by saying, I subjectively ... I personally believed that I was under attack and therefore I had to use force, equal and opposite force. Now that personal, subjective belief would no longer be the standard. The standard would be what a reasonable officer in that situation would think.

And so that is less about what the individual is thinking and more about what someone—a jury, for example—would deem to be objective and reasonable.

Sargent: So under this bill, Keith Ellison could more easily charge this officer with a crime than before? And do you think that should happen?

Goldman: So, yes, it would be easier because there would be a weaker affirmative defense by the ICE agent. And I do think that because we know that the Trump administration has already concluded before any investigation occurred that the victim, Renee Good, was at fault here. And they’re blaming the victim. They’re claiming, even though as you watch the video, after she’s shot in the head, the car still turns because she’s trying to get away, that they’re saying that she was going after him. They’ve already made up their mind.

And sadly and unfortunately, Greg, in this administration—and we cannot normalize this—there’s no independence of the FBI and the DOJ from Donald Trump, the White House, Homeland Security. It is all an apparatus of Donald Trump. So whatever Donald Trump decides is what is going to happen with the FBI. So there’s no hope that the FBI or the Department of Justice will charge this case. They’ve already concluded otherwise.

And so therefore I think that Attorney General Ellison needs to be much more aggressive in considering this because it was not properly investigated and will not be properly investigated by the federal authorities.

Sargent: I think that’s very clear. Just to close this out, Congressman Swalwell, what do you expect to happen in the upcoming budget battles? What stand do you expect Democrats to make here? I cannot see how Democrats vote for ICE funding in anything like its current form now. I guess every House Democrat opposes it? And what happens in the Senate? Is there a consensus position Democrats will reach that would represent an acceptable level in funding or what? What happens?

Swalwell: I am not going to pay masked thugs to shoot moms in the face. Period. So they’re going to have to go somewhere else if they want to find funding for that. I can’t speak for my colleagues, but people are horrified by what they saw.

Goldman: And remember, because of all the Big, Beautiful, Big, Ugly Bill funding, ICE got $45 billion last year. And they’re giving $50,000 hiring bonuses. And they’re not training these agents who are masked and anonymous and are wreaking havoc on our communities with violence and now with murder. We are not going to—I am not going to vote for anything that allows that to continue.

Sargent: Yeah, and simply put, I mean, the Senate is going to have a tough situation. There’s going to be pressure on Senate Democrats to not support anything like this level of funding. Congressman Swalwell, Congressman Goldman, thanks so much for coming on with us today.

Trump’s Foreign Policy Madness Will Haunt Us for Generations - 2026-01-09T11:00:00Z

I think often these days about how past American leaders thought the Civil War was divine punishment for the nation’s sins. In his second inaugural address in 1864, Abraham Lincoln framed the struggle against slavery in biblical terms—not to suggest that he was on a holy mission to abolish it, but that the war itself was the result of providence. “Fondly do we hope—fervently do we pray—that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away,” he told the assembled crowd.

“Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman’s 250 years of unrequited toil shall be sunk,” Lincoln continued, “and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword, as was said 3,000 years ago, so still it must be said: ‘The judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.’”

Ulysses S. Grant, the leading Union general and eventual president, saw the tremendous bloodshed as a balancing of accounts for the Mexican-American War, which helped fuel the westward expansion of slavery. “The Southern rebellion was largely the outgrowth of the Mexican war,” he recounted in his memoirs. “Nations, like individuals, are punished for their transgressions. We got our punishment in the most sanguinary and expensive war of modern times.”

Lincoln had also opposed President James Polk’s contrived effort to annex Texas and conquer roughly half of Mexico in the 1840s. In a private letter to a friend in 1848, he criticized Polk for provoking a war with the Mexican government over Texas and then demanding that Congress support it. Lincoln’s friend had suggested that Polk’s actions were valid because the Constitution allows the president to repel foreign invasions.

That did not apply in this case, Lincoln countered, because Texas was not part of the United States when the fighting began. “Allow the president to invade a neighboring nation, whenever he shall deem it necessary to repel an invasion, and you allow him to do so, whenever he may choose to say he deems it necessary for such purpose—and you allow him to make war at pleasure,” the future president warned.

“Study to see if you can fix any limit to his power in this respect, after you have given him so much as you propose,” Lincoln continued. “If, today, he should choose to say he thinks it necessary to invade Canada, to prevent the British from invading us, how could you stop him? You may say to him, ‘I see no probability of the British invading us,’ but he will say to you, ‘Be silent; I see it, if you don’t.’”

Those words proved to be prophetic. Last week, President Donald Trump sent troops into Venezuela to capture Nicolás Maduro, the president of Venezuela, and bring him to the U.S. to stand trial on various charges. Much of the situation is unclear: Trump initially claimed that the U.S., in some unspecified way, would “take control” of Venezuela. Days later, there are no U.S. troops on the ground, and the Chavismo faction that had been ruling Venezuela, with the exception of Maduro, appears to be intact.

In the immediate aftermath of the raid, Trump showed little interest in the legal or constitutional implications of his actions. “They should say ‘great job,’” he told reporters after one mentioned criticism from congressional Democrats. “They shouldn’t say, ‘Oh gee, maybe it’s not constitutional.’ You know, the same old stuff that we’ve been hearing for years and years and years.”

Nor have he and his subordinates offered much clarity on the situation. Some officials described it as a “law enforcement operation,” citing a 2020 federal grand jury indictment against Maduro. Others suggested that the Trump administration would now try to now control the rest of the New World more aggressively. Trump and his top officials have threatened additional military action in Colombia, Cuba, and Mexico. They have also renewed their demands and threats to acquire Greenland from Denmark, a NATO ally.

Some top GOP officials have taken to sounding like German officials from the late 1930s. “We live in a world, in the real world, Jake, that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power,” Stephen Miller, Trump’s top domestic policy aide, told CNN’s Jake Tapper earlier this week. “These are the iron laws of the world.” Miller also suggested that the U.S. acquisition of Greenland was a foregone conclusion because “nobody is going to fight the United States militarily over the future of Greenland.” Representative Andy Ogles, speaking on the Trump administration’s apparent imperial desires, described the U.S. as the “dominant predator force in the Western Hemisphere.” He appeared to mean that as a compliment.

The American people have signaled no interest in any of these proposed military misadventures. As many as 73 percent of voters oppose the use of military force to seize Greenland, according to one post-Maduro poll. But the views of American voters may not matter, at least in the near term. The U.S. only really has two branches of government right now. Trump sits atop the executive branch, which is little more than a vehicle for his personal whims and desires. Officials like Russ Vought have sabotaged many agencies’ workings to benefit their corporate allies. Other powers and responsibilities have been turned toward darker ends.

The judicial branch also retains much of its vitality despite the Supreme Court’s best efforts to sabotage it. Lower court judges have consistently pushed back against the Trump administration’s lawlessness on immigration enforcement, on federal spending power, and on basic civil rights. Occasionally a majority of the nine justices does something other than undermine their fellow judges, but those days are few and far between.

Congress, on the other hand, functionally no longer exists. It has not been abolished in some dictatorial show of force or authoritarian crackdown. That would be unnecessary. There are still senators and representatives. They occasionally hold votes and hearings on Capitol Hill. They still run for reelection. But they don’t really do much of anything. Oversight is minimal and toothless; lawmaking is centralized, preordained, and infrequent.

Much of the blame for this sorry state lies with the Republican Party and its leaders. The Constitution’s structure anticipates that members of each branch will guard their own powers and prerogatives jealously. It also assumed that lawmakers would be more loyal to their constituents and to the republic than to some passing demagogue. Top GOP lawmakers have gone out of their way to prove these assumptions wrong.

Mike Johnson, the eminently forgettable speaker of the House, insisted in a CNN interview that the Venezuela raid wasn’t a big deal. “This is not a regime change,” he claimed. “This is a demand for change of behavior by a regime.” He and John Thune, the Senate majority leader, insisted that Trump was not obligated to inform Congress under the War Powers Act before launching a military operation to arrest a foreign head of state.

Democrats, too, have struggled to use their platform and (albeit limited) power effectively. “I asked for assurances that they were not planning operations in other countries ... including Colombia and Cuba,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer told reporters on Tuesday, “and I was very, very disappointed in their answer.” Nor have they been able to articulate a compelling argument against Trump’s imperialism. “The White House is laser focused on threatening a military takeover of Greenland,” Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar offered on social media on Wednesday. “Where’s the same focus on lowering costs?”

Congress’s power is immense—if it chooses to wield it. No better evidence could be offered than Trump’s warnings that he will be impeached if Democrats retake at least the House in this year’s midterm elections. “You got to win the midterms, because if we don’t win the midterms, it’s just going to be—I mean, they’ll find a reason to impeach me,” Trump told GOP lawmakers earlier this week at a policy retreat. “I’ll get impeached.”

There is no shortage of reasons to impeach and remove him, but Trump’s military adventurism would be a good place to start. Why does Congress have the power to declare war? Because that power must reside somewhere. It could not reside in the Supreme Court, obviously. Nor could it be entrusted to the president—not even to George Washington, whom the Framers had in mind when they sketched out the office’s powers. Instead it fell to the most representative branch, along with the power of the purse and the approval of military commissions and regulations.

“The provision of the Constitution giving the war-making power to Congress, was dictated, as I understand it, by the following reasons,” Lincoln explained in the 1848 letter. “Kings had always been involved and impoverishing their people in wars, pretending generally, if not always, that the good of the people was the object.”

English history is filled with examples that prove his point. The history of Parliament is, at least in part, a history of medieval kings asking for more money to wage expensive wars and surrendering more power in exchange for it. “This our [Constitutional] Convention understood to be the most oppressive of all kingly oppressions,” Lincoln continued, “and they resolved to so frame the Constitution that no one man should hold the power of bringing this oppression upon us.”

Trumpworld apparently thinks it can solve this ancient dilemma by plundering Venezuela’s oil and transferring it to offshore slush funds, circumventing both the Treasury and the Constitution. Past administrations had the bare decency to pretend they were appealing to a higher interest, like liberty or democracy or human rights. The Trump Doctrine, such as it is, is pure gangsterism, shorn of any moral pretext other than “because I want to and because I can.” It is the domestic abuser’s mentality translated into foreign policy.

The U.S. is powerful enough to get away with this for a little while. But this country is not omnipotent. Much of our strength as a superpower comes from the goodwill of our allies and our neighbors—from our alliances and trade relationships and shared institutions—all of which is now being destroyed or dismantled. Whether by divine reckoning or abstract karma or sheer Newtonian physics, there will one day be an equal and opposite reaction to Trump’s foreign policy adventurism. Only by restoring constitutional government can we hope to limit whatever damage will come.

What a Lobster Heist Tells Us About Government Failure - 2026-01-09T11:00:00Z

On December 12, criminals made off with a $400,000 shipment of lobster meat from a freight hub outside of Boston. It was the latest and most costly in a spate of striking seafood robberies afflicting New England—involving creating a fake trucking load, malware, a deceptively painted truck, and a great deal of intel and advance planning. More Ocean’s Eleven than Goodfellas, despite lobster seeming an almost comical choice for grand larceny.

But while this sensational and slightly perplexing crime has understandably made headlines, and would make a highly bingeable Netflix series, it also exposes a fundamental flaw in how our food system works. Providing American consumers with the bounty of food that lands on our plates on a daily basis is complicated, and freight trucking is an often overlooked ingredient: one that depends on a chaotic, poorly regulated market and the exploitation of its workforce of 3.5 million truck drivers.

Freight industry organizations point to sensational crimes as evidence that law enforcement needs to crack down on cargo theft, and now they’ve supposedly enrolled the increasingly aggressive Immigration and Customs Enforcement in the cause. But the growing vulnerability of American freight shipping to sophisticated and costly heists is less about poor law enforcement and more about waning state regulatory capacity. This under-regulation is what makes our food abundance possible in the first place.


Fresh lobster meat can cost between $40 and $90 per pound—slightly less if it’s still live or hasn’t been shelled—making a shipment of lobster worth vastly more than a comparable shipment of sirloin steak. But unlike the steak, at room temperature, within as little as two hours, lobster meat becomes a toxic bacteria bomb no amount of melted butter will repair. This short shelf life is a boon to thieves. Lobsters, unlike TVs and laptops, don’t have serial numbers (and unlike cows or pigs, they don’t have ear tags); once they’re off the truck and into the pot, they can’t easily be tracked, the evidence of any crime gobbled up or trashed within a few days. Consumers would have no way of knowing if they were eating contraband, and it wouldn’t be hard for savvy crooks to find restaurants, restaurant suppliers, and markets to absorb a truck of hot lobster amid the holiday festivities.

Many articles written in the wake of the lobster heist have emphasized that hijackings of food are a growing problem for the freight industry, as well as for insurers, groceries, restaurants, and ultimately consumers. “Affordability” is an odd word to use here—we’re talking lobster affordability, after all—but hijackings, like other forms of cargo theft, do incur higher overall costs for companies involved, much of which is ultimately passed on to consumers in the form of higher prices. And cargo theft can afflict staple products as much as big-ticket ones. In the midst of surging egg prices this spring, for instance, thieves in Maryland stole a shipment of 280,000 eggs from the nation’s largest egg producer, Cal-Maine.

Freight industry representatives point to potential links to organized crime. The Department of Homeland Security’s ICE launched “Operation Boiling Point” (no, we’re not making that up) in June to combat this epidemic, although it’s not clear that ICE has much firsthand intel about what’s going on. They cite somewhat dubious statistics circulated by freight industry organizations. In calling for more vigilant prosecution of cargo theft and increased law enforcement attention, the American Trucking Association puts the value of stolen cargo in the United States at $35 billion per annum and claims that the number of documented instances increased, year over year by 36 percent between the first quarter of 2024 and the first quarter of 2025.

But these numbers are about as reliable as a lobster stew at a Wyoming all-night diner. After some data scrubbing by criminologist Robert Burns and sociologist Charles Crawford, a search of the FBI’s Unified Crime Report produces about 15,000 total incidents that meet the legal definition of cargo theft, including 3,545 in 2021. Private logistics tracking firms have their own counts that are in the same ballpark. Either way, it’s a tiny percentage of the billions of tons of cargo shipped by truck annually in the U.S. by the over 580,000 registered carriers in three million semi-tractors.

The mismatch between calls for a heavy-handed crackdown and the dearth of good data on the crimes should indicate something is amiss. In fact, no one has a clear idea of what’s going on—not the government, not carriers, not logistics firms. That’s why Burns and Crawford worry that the increased involvement of law enforcement officers, a blunt tool at the best of times, will produce “crime control theater” without eliminating the underlying vulnerabilities that allow sophisticated criminals to jack the seafood platter.

In reality, theft is commonplace in the American food system because of its size, complexity, and under-regulation. The American food system is vast, with well over a million points of sale spread across restuarants, grocers, and convienence stores. To get food from producers to sellers, shipping companies, brokers, and logistics supply firms orchestrate a ballet of freight across a sprawling network of ports, roadways, and warehouses. Much of this is increasingly digitized but poorly overseen.


Police are still investigating what happened with the Massachusetts lobster heist, but it probably went something like this: The bandits used a mixture of low- and high-tech tricks to gain control of a legitimate carrier’s account on a “load board,” the online marketplace where brokers and carriers haggle over proposed freight contracts. Under the guise of that carrier, the thieves lay in wait for an especially succulent load to come across the board, at which point, they bid and leapt into action.

The bandits showed up, as scheduled, at 2 p.m. on December 12. Their truck was painted with the name of the impersonated carrier, and they maintained contact with the other parties using a spoof email address indistinguishable from the real carrier’s address but for a stray hyphen. Their broker, a company in Evansville, Indiana, got wise around 4 p.m., when they noticed the lobster haul’s GPS tracker had been deactivated. By then those lobsters were long gone.

If this all sounds elaborate and surprisingly high-tech for a seafood scam, that’s because America’s freight infrastructure, for lobsters and electronics alike, less resembles an orderly city grid than tangled jungle vines. It’s decentralized, fragmented, and sprawling. Most trucking companies are tiny businesses—90 percent of carriers run fewer than 10 cabs, and a full 10 percent of cabs are owner-operated—and fierce competition in the industry leaves them with tight margins. Smaller carriers often struggle to modernize their equipment, creating technical headaches when they interact with logistics support companies, retailers, and brokers. All parties may be cutting corners and re-brokering loads to make ends meet. “Double-brokering,” where a contracted broker subcontracts a load to a third party without the knowledge or consent of the customer, is technically illegal but all too common. All of this fragmentation makes fraud, such as scammers getting their hands behind the steering wheel of a truck of lobsters, much easier to perpetrate.

The fractured and decentralized nature of American truck shipping is, by design, the product of bad laws, weak regulations, and hollowed-out regulatory agencies. The 1935 Motor Carrier Act, a piece of New Deal legislation, initially imposed strict federal standards on the trucking industry regarding fleet maintenance, labor relations, workplace safety, routes, and fare pricing set by the Interstate Commerce Commission, or ICC. But the Motor Carrier Act of 1980 gutted the ICC’s regulatory powers and eliminated carrier, fare, and route regulations. The ICC itself was shuttered in 1995. In 1999, the Federal Motor Carrier Safety Act reimposed some baseline regulations and created the Department of Transportation’s Federal Motor Carrier Safety Administration, or FMCSA, mostly to improve roadway safety.

Last year, Nebraska’s Republican Senator Deb Fischer and Washington D.C.’s Democratic Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton co-sponsored the Household Goods Shipping Consumer Protection Act to give the FMSCA some additional bite. If passed, it would have required freight carriers to provide the FMSCA with a valid business address to register; they currently don’t even have to. The bill did not get a vote, and, today, it remains farcically easy to register to receive a USDOT number. With that number, fraudsters could present themselves as a normal business and register bids for million-dollar contracts.

The federal government deregulated this industry on the premise that fewer regulations means more carriers and a more competitive freight marketplace, giving everyone the lower shipping costs they crave. That’s mostly worked as intended, especially for food, resulting in reduced shipping costs and quicker delivery.

But this combination of reduced oversight and many more, smaller trucking companies also creates crime opportunities. As trucking logistics has become more technologically sophisticated in the past two decades, it has also created a host of security vulnerabilities. The technological asymmetry between small carriers and larger logistics support companies may also be a problem, with criminals targeting carriers who can’t install the right security update on older systems or who still rely on phone calls to confirm order details.

So whom do affected parties have to turn to? The tiny FMCSA—its 1,000 employees monitor 3.5 million truck drivers in the U.S.—is primarily focused on driver safety, not security, and so refers complaints to the Department of Justice.

Meanwhile, cheap freight also creates more motive for theft in the form of immiserated workers. Freight truck drivers are miserably overworked, horribly underpaid, and have astonishingly high turnover rates. Once a prime example of a stable union job, today fewer than 20 percent of truck drivers are unionized. To meet contracts, they are sometimes expected to drive for unsafe (and illegal) durations of time, putting in 60- to 70-hour workweeks, and they may still wind up getting docked pay for loads delayed by weather or traffic. Happy, well-paid employees might reduce theft, and industries with lower rates of turnover are harder to infiltrate for malicious schemers looking to scoop intel on vulnerable crustaceans.


Increasing regulation of American shipping might marginally increase consumer prices, something few politicians are likely to sign off on at the moment. But the current plan of dedicating more police resources to cargo theft is unlikely to do much. There are, of course, less flashy approaches to preventing cargo theft that politicians and policymakers should consider. Improving the UCR and crime data tracking in general would be worthwhile, as would working with state policymakers to create a systematic nationwide framework for defining and prosecuting double brokering and strategic cargo fraud. Merely ensuring that the Transportation Department’s FMCSA is adequately staffed, resourced, and empowered would be a good start, as would the modest objectives of Fischer and Norton’s stalled Household Goods Shipping Consumer Protection Act.

There’s an important larger message about our food system, here: Slashing regulations, firing federal workers, and wrecking the basic capacities of government officials to do their jobs guarantees the bad government it purports to fix and creates the conditions for the fraud and corruption that tough-talking politicians pretend to abhor. The abundance of our food system is the product of savvy business and novel technology, but also of regulation: of food safety, worker protections, antitrust laws, and a slew of other laws designed to make sure safe food reliably lands on our plates on time and at a fair price. Food system fixes require more of the latter. The solution to lobster heists looks more like guys with clipboards and visors than guys with guns and badges.

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The End Goal of Trump’s Cringey, Nonsensical Videos - 2026-01-09T11:00:00Z

On Saturday at Mar-a-Lago, as he was supposed to be speaking to the White House press corps about the overnight military raid in Venezuela, Donald Trump was busy doing what he loves most: posting on social media. While the reporters waited for him, he published an 84-second video on Truth Social featuring footage of the attack set to Creedence Clearwater Revival’s 1969 hit “Fortunate Son”—the opening guitar lick of which has been a Vietnam War movie cliché for decades.

But “Fortunate Son” is also, as many pointed out on Saturday, an antiwar song that rips on privileged draft dodgers—something Mr. Bone Spurs knows more than a bit about himself. This song choice thus baffled people online, me included. Did Trump even know what the song was about? Was it because he’s a boomer who came of age during the song’s heyday? Was he trolling? Did he even care?

These are the wrong questions—but they’re exactly the questions the Trump administration wants us to be asking. The choice of “Fortunate Son” was no mistake, and it’s just the latest example of how the far right understands and exploits the aesthetics of contradiction, senselessness, and absurdity to shock and numb us.

Trump is singularly obsessed with the spectacle of power. This isn’t new for the far right, of course; fascist Italy and Nazi Germany were obsessed with aesthetics, particularly visuals, in a way that other political ideologies generally aren’t. But Trump, who’s described himself as a “very aesthetic person,” takes it to a new level.

Since returning to the White House, he’s filled it with golden decor that he thinks is fit for a king. No matter that it looks cheesy or tacky or, ironically, cheap to a lot of us. For him and the coterie around him, it’s a projection of power, a glued-up palace presented as a spectacle for the cameras and thus the world.

You could see this singular obsession with the spectacle of power on hyperactive display in the wake of the Venezuela raid. In his comments to Fox and Friends just hours after the attacks, before he even addressed the media at Mar-a-Lago, Trump spoke with awe about watching the violence he’d set in motion.

“I watched it literally like I was watching a television show,” Trump, the would-be auteur of this show, said. “If you would have seen the speed, the violence … it was an amazing thing.” Even photos of Trump and his advisers watching the raids in real time from Mar-a-Lago reveal they were also watching their X feeds on their computers: They wanted to see how their spectacle was being received on their Nazi-friendly, CSAM-filled platform of choice.

So it’s safe to say that the aesthetic choice to set war footage to a known antiwar song is a deliberate decision. But the goal is not to communicate some kind of coherent political message; it doesn’t need to make sense, and in fact it’s better that it not make sense. This is blunt-force aesthetics. You are not meant to think about the lyrics of “Fortunate Son”; you are meant to feel that this is a really cool movie, not unlike ones you’ve seen before. You might even forget for a moment that this isn’t Forrest Gump or Born on the Fourth of July, but real life.

We’ve come to expect such aesthetic absurdity from him. Heck, that wasn’t even his first time using “Fortunate Son” as a soundtrack to military spectacle; it played during his June 2025 military parade in Washington, D.C. Another video from the same genre, which he posted back in June, pairs a montage of stealth bombers raining munitions with Vince and the Valiants’ 1980 song “Bomb Iran,” a parody of the Regents’ chipper 1961 hit “Barbara Ann.”

So it’s no surprise that in his second term, Trump has leaned especially hard into the most absurd content that exists today: AI-generated videos. He has posted videos of Barack Obama being arrested and of Santa Claus in an ICE vest rounding up foreigners, not to mention the infamous one in which he pilots a fighter jet, a golden crown atop his head, and unleashes shit on No Kings protesters. And as with “Fortunate Son,” he has used content without an apparent understanding of its meaning: Almost a year ago, he shared an AI-generated video of “Trump Gaza,” which depicted the Strip as a resort paradise, replete with a golden statue of Trump. The video’s creators later said it was a satire of Trump’s “megalomaniac idea.”

The far right suffers from what one scholar of Theodor Adorno has described, drawing from the German critical theorist’s writings on antisemitism, as “the incapacity to be moved by contradiction.” For the far right, what’s more important is an aesthetics of domination. The Trump administration is flooding our senses without regard for coherence, in the hope we exhaust ourselves trying to make sense of something that’s completely contradictory or willfully absurd. At which point we become numb to it all, which is the ultimate goal.

This aesthetic of domination was on display again in the wake of the ICE shooting in Minneapolis, where an ICE agent shot and killed a protester in her car. Despite all the videos showing that there was no conceivable element of self-defense, the far right on social media—all the way up to DHS Secretary Kristi Noem and Trump himself—tried to tell us otherwise. Even the Bari Weiss–run CBS News ran an article debunking the notion that the agent had been hit by the car and was hospitalized.

You know what it’s like to try to make sense of stuff that just doesn’t makes sense. It confuses you, and can leave you feeling powerless. And if it happens often enough, you can feel yourself giving up. You might even get the urge to withdraw from the world. What, you ask yourself, is the point of anything?

They’ve got you right where they want you.

Mamdani Is Actually a Social Democrat. Here’s Why That Matters. - 2026-01-09T11:00:00Z

In his first address as mayor, Zohran Mamdani declared: “I was elected as a democratic socialist, and I will govern as a democratic socialist. I will not abandon my principles for fear of being deemed radical.”

That bold assertion delighted many of his admirers on the left while confirming the fears of his critics on the right and center. But in terms of what he aims to accomplish and in the context of history, it was not really true. Mamdani does not intend to give wage earners control of their workplaces or to turn private businesses into public property, as Karl Marx advocated (along with other renowned socialists he inspired like Eugene Debs, who was also a small-d democrat, and Vladimir Lenin, who was decidedly not). He does not call, as did the U.K. Labour Party right after World War II, to nationalize major industries and have them run by government employees.

Hizzoner wants instead to make transportation, childcare, and housing more “affordable” for every New Yorker. That makes him not a democratic socialist but a social democrat. What’s the difference?

The latter term has never caught on in the United States, but its adherents have a long and successful history in Europe and in developed nations on other continents. Social democrats seek to create a more egalitarian order within a capitalist market society. They build welfare states that provide health care, family leave, and union protection to their citizens and reject the tyrannical one-party states created by the likes of Lenin, Mao, and Castro. There have been many full or partial social democracies; the most successful ones exist throughout Scandinavia. But democratic socialism, aside from the utopian colonies that existed rather briefly in the nineteenth century in the United States and Great Britain, has always been an unrealized vision.

The good news for Mamdani, and the models for him to follow, come from the last century, when practical socialists governed, for a time, dozens of small and midsize American cities where the gap between the wealthy elite and wage earners had widened alarmingly, much as in New York City today. In St. Mary’s, Ohio, they expanded sewer lines, provided gas and electric service to all neighborhoods for the first time, and made sure working-class children felt welcome in the newly opened high school. In Milwaukee, socialist mayors erected the nation’s first public housing project, won an eight-hour workday for municipal workers, and developed an extensive system of public parks.

Michael Harrington, a founder of the Democratic Socialists of America, to which Mamdani proudly belongs, called on his fellow radicals to develop “the left wing of the possible.” New York’s new mayor follows such mentors as Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in balancing his dream of a humane, “collectivist” order with the need to fight for changes in the only world they will ever know. All three compete in Democratic primaries—the bailiwick of a “capitalist” party—and seek to implement sweeping reforms that revolutionary socialists once denounced as sly tricks to make a rotten system appear fresh and tolerable but that nearly everyone on the contemporary left supports.

In recent polls, about 40 percent of Americans say they have a “positive image” of socialism. A clear majority of people under 30 feel that way. But for most of them, the term evokes what Mamdani and other social democrats who have actually managed to win elections try to achieve: a more secure life in a society that narrows class differences without preventing some individuals from becoming rich as long as they create products or services that ordinary people value. Four decades ago, the great social democratic author Irving Howe described those “socialists” who managed to gain influence in capitalist countries: “They engage themselves with the needs of the moment, struggling for betterment in matters large and small, reforms major and modest: They do not sit and wait for the millennium.”

Mamdani’s eloquent inaugural address struck those same chords. “City Hall,” he promised, “will deliver an agenda of safety, affordability, and abundance, where government looks and lives like the people it represents, never flinches in the fight against corporate greed, and refuses to cower before challenges that others have deemed too complicated.” A full social democracy cannot be built in a single city, even one as large and consequential as New York. But, unlike the yearning for a revolutionary overhaul of an economic order that has endured for centuries, it is a goal that can sustain popular support as the reality gradually draws near.

The collapse of the Soviet Union and its bloc discredited the old definition of socialism that required public ownership of businesses and an army of bureaucrats to run them. But if Mamdani can govern as well as he campaigned, he might spur a new meaning for the s-word grounded in the history of societies more equal and democratic than our own.

Trump Shooting Fiasco Worsens as Dems Find Fresh Line of Attack on ICE - 2026-01-09T10:00:00Z

As the scandal around ICE’s killing of Renee Good in Minneapolis gets worse, two leading Democrats—Representatives Eric Swalwell and Daniel Goldman—are set to introduce a new bill reining in ICE. It would end qualified immunity for civil enforcement officers like ICE agents, making it easier for victims of their abuses to sue them or pursue criminal charges against them in court. All this comes as top MAGA figures and leading Republicans have flatly defended the killing, in some truly ghoulish displays. This, even as powerful new video analyses from The New York Times and The Washington Post show unequivocally that the shooting was at minimum absolutely unjustified. We talked to Swalwell and Goodman about their new proposal, the need for the state of Minnesota to prosecute the shooter, the folly of expecting the FBI to investigate the killing, and the need to functionally end ICE’s existence over the long term. Listen to this episode here. A transcript is here.

We’re All “Domestic Terrorists” Now - 2026-01-08T22:59:06Z

“It was an act of domestic terrorism,” Kristi Noem declared, following Wednesday’s killing of Renee Nicole Good, a 37-year-old mother of three, by an ICE agent in a residential neighborhood of Minneapolis. With a straight face and no evident sense of shame, the head of Homeland Security added, “This goes to show the assaults that our ICE officers and law enforcement are under every single day.” During the same press conference, she assured the public that “anyone who is a citizen of this country or is here legally, has nothing to fear.”

It’s as keen an example of the emperor having no clothes as you’ll find: Though the video of Good’s killing shows no reasonable justification for lethal force, Noem, President Trump, and their MAGA acolytes are telling us that Good was not a victim but another “terrorist” who was somehow a threat to the American people. A year into Trump’s second term, we are used to him and his administration applying that label to migrants and antifa and journalists and even some Democrats. But now, it seems, all of us are potential terrorists, at risk of being gunned down by Trump and Noem’s trigger-happy goons.

The president first experimented with an expansive definition of who qualifies as a domestic terrorist during his first term. In 2017, in an effort that mirrored the COINTELPRO surveillance of civil rights leaders under J. Edgar Hoover, the FBI created a designation of “Black Identity Extremists” that sought to conflate the shootings of police officers with an underground Black revolutionary movement connected to Black Lives Matter. Amid the protests over George Floyd’s murder by police officer Derek Chauvin, Trump lashed out at antifa, tweeting that he would designate the group a domestic terror organization. He made good on that threat this past September, issuing an executive order that declared, “Individuals associated with and acting on behalf of Antifa further coordinate with other organizations and entities for the purpose of spreading, fomenting, and advancing political violence and suppressing lawful political speech.”

Three days later, he issued National Security Presidential Memorandum 7, titled “Countering Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence,” which reads like something out of the White Christian Persecution Fantasy Handbook. It cited violence and threats against right-wing figures, including himself, and claimed, “Common threads animating this violent conduct include anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity; support for the overthrow of the United States Government; extremism on migration, race, and gender; and hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family, religion, and morality.” Of course, it ignored overwhelming evidence that right-wing extremism has historically been responsible for considerably more violence than left-wing extremism. In fact, just a week prior, the Justice Department removed from its website a study that demonstrated exactly that.

For its definition of what constitutes domestic terrorism, the order relied on 18 U.S.C. 2331(5), which states, in part, that domestic terrorism involves activities that “appear to be intended” to “intimidate or coerce a civilian population” or to “influence the policy of a government by intimidation or coercion.” This definition is extraordinarily vague, giving Trump, Noem, and Attorney General Pam Bondi wide latitude to use it as they like. The order seems to indicate that they intend to use it to monitor basic free speech activities, since it declares that terrorist “campaigns” often start with “anonymous chat forums, in-person meetings, social media, and even educational institutions.”

The net was also cast wide for groups or individuals who might be considered “domestic terrorists” by this metric. It includes “organized structures, networks, entities, organizations, funding sources, and predicate actions behind them,” all of which will be subject to investigation. The order charges the National Joint Terrorism Task Force with investigating any person or group deemed responsible, in whole or part, for “radicalizing” people.

Bondi followed up the order with a memo that makes clear she will consider rioting or looting to be domestic terrorism, and as such the DOJ will slap federal charges on people in cases that previously would have been handled locally. Moreover, the memo states that doxing of law enforcement officers will be considered domestic terrorism, as will the “targeting of public officials or other political actors,” without specifying what that targeting includes. Is yelling at a public official or calling them a “fascist” targeting them? We don’t know. What about attempting to drive away from ICE because you were told to, as reportedly happened to Renee Nicole Good?

In the Oval Office before a slew of reporters, Trump stated that the killing in Minnesota was “horrible to watch.” Yet he insisted on showing it to them to prove that Good had tried to “run over” ICE agents, even though the video clearly shows that she did not. This is not the first time that the administration has used this defense for killing someone amid its immigration crackdown. In an incident in September, ICE agents shot and killed Silverio Villegas-Gonzalez, an undocumented immigrant from Mexico, claiming that he had hit an agent with his car and dragged him “a significant distance,” but videos show otherwise. In October, ICE agents became annoyed that Marimar Martinez, an American citizen, was following them and warning people in her Chicago neighborhood that agents were in the area, so they rammed her car and then shot her five times. One of the agents had screamed, “Do something, bitch!” before opening fire. That agent later boasted in texts, “I fired 5 rounds and she had 7 holes. Put that in your book boys.”

Altogether, there have been 14 people shot by ICE under Trump, including nine since September. That figure doesn’t include other people who have died at ICE’s hands or because of the aggressive tactics the administration has been employing, like Jaime Alanis, who fell from a rooftop during a poorly executed ICE raid in July, or the 32 people who have died in ICE custody—the highest number on record—in part due to the inadequate facilities in which they’re placed.

But the administration feels no responsibility toward these people because they’re either “domestic terrorists” or “criminal illegal aliens,” as we’re told. Murdering a civilian is one thing, but murdering a “domestic terrorist” or carting “terrorists” or “gang members” away to CECOT in El Salvador—that’s a different matter. That’s why, whenever its goons gun someone down, the administration’s strategy is the same: Lie about what happened, even when faced with visual evidence that refutes its story, and declare the victim guilty by calling them a terrorist. As the administration sees it, that label justifies whatever violence it commits—even shooting an innocent protester in the face.

Later it could be you or me. But I’m encouraging people to protest nonetheless. I believe in giving ICE a hard time—to make it more difficult for them to abuse people and disrupt communities. That may have been what Good was doing. And if ICE shows up in my neighborhood and starts snatching people off the street, I will be there. I suppose that makes me a terrorist too.

Pastor: ICE Let Me Free Because I’m White and It Wouldn’t Be “Fun” - 2026-01-08T21:17:13Z

A Minneapolis pastor who joined protests Wednesday after an ICE officer fatally shot a woman in her car said that federal agents handcuffed him and threw him in the back of an SUV—before letting him free because he was white and “it wouldn’t be any fun.”

Pastor Kenny Callaghan, who initially shared his story on Facebook, told MS NOW Thursday that as he went to church the previous morning, he noticed protests were happening about a block away, so he grabbed his whistles to join them. As he was protesting, he said that they heard news of the fatal shooting nearby.

“Before I knew it, I saw ICE agents circling a young woman who appeared to be Hispanic, and so I approached her, and we were at that point chanting, ‘We are not afraid, we are not afraid.’”

Callaghan then said he told ICE officers to take him instead of harassing her. An agent then “came, got in my face, pointed a gun at me, and said, ‘Are you afraid now?’” Callaghan recalled.

After he said he still wasn’t afraid, the officer handcuffed him before putting him into the back of an SUV. “They came back three times and they asked me if I was afraid yet, to which I replied, ‘Hell no, I’m not afraid of you, and I’m never going to be afraid of you.’”

Callaghan said that he asked if he was under arrest after officers asked for him to hand over his identification and his cellphone.

“And then they said to me, ‘Well, you’re white, you won’t be any fun anyway. You can get out of the car.’”

ICE hasn’t confirmed the details of this confrontation. However, under the Trump administration, the Department of Homeland Security has been sharing increasingly white nationalist content, and ICE has skipped over proper vetting procedures in an aggressive push to ramp up its numbers.

Callaghan said he was stunned by the interaction, but takes hope in the mass crowd of protesters who are showing up.

“I was grateful to be there and grateful to stand in solidarity with anyone who is marginalized within our society, and will continue to advocate for the rights of my immigrant siblings here in Minneapolis and around the world,” he said.

“I don’t know what happened to me. In my world, I say God empowered me to speak up in that moment.”

Trump Fumes as Five Republicans Vote to Block Him on Venezuela - 2026-01-08T20:37:03Z

President Trump thinks that any Republican who dares to push back on his senseless incursion into Venezuela should “never be elected to office again.”

“Republicans should be ashamed of the Senators that just voted with Democrats in attempting to take away our Powers to fight and defend the United States of America. Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski, Rand Paul, Josh Hawley, and Todd Young should never be elected to office again,” Trump wrote Thursday on Truth Social. “This Vote greatly hampers American Self Defense and National Security, impeding the President’s Authority as Commander in Chief.”

This comes as the Republicans named—along with Senate Democrats—voted 52–47 to advance the War Powers Resolution, which would force Trump to seek Congress’s approval before conducting any further uniliteral military offensives in Venezuela. A final Senate vote on the legislation is expected next week, and it would then need to pass the House and be signed by Trump himself—making it unlikely it will actually become law.

Trump’s poor-tempered response—which may kneecap his own party given that Collins is up for reelection this year—only goes to show why he should not have unfettered ability to engage in war.

“In any event, and despite their ‘stupidity,’ the War Powers Act is Unconstitutional, totally violating Article II of the Constitution, as all Presidents, and their Departments of Justice, have determined before me,” Trump continued, maintaining that Article II gives him the inherent power to go to war. “Nevertheless, a more important Senate Vote will be taking place next week on this very subject.”

Collins, the only senator on the list up for reelection, seemed unfazed.

“The President obviously is unhappy with the vote,” she said, according to Semafor’s Burgess Everett. “I guess this means that he would prefer to have Governor Mills or somebody else.”

Tulsi Gabbard Had No Clue What Trump Was Doing in Venezuela - 2026-01-08T20:34:58Z

Did President Donald Trump actually cut Tulsi Gabbard out of the White House’s preparations to invade Venezuela?

Starting last summer, the White House began excluding Trump’s director of national intelligence from the government’s plans to kidnap Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, The Wall Street Journal reported Thursday. Vice President JD Vance denied the reporting later that day.

A few White House aides even joked that Gabbard’s title as “DNI” stood for “Do Not Invite,” three people told Bloomberg. A White House spokesperson denied that the director was actually a punchline.

In the days preceding the large-scale operation, Gabbard posted from Hawaii, hundreds of miles away from Trump’s makeshift situation room at his Mar-a-Lago estate. “My heart is filled with gratitude, aloha and peace,” she wrote in a post on X, as the president prepared to invade.

Gabbard was reportedly kept in the dark because in the past, she had repeatedly expressed her strong disapproval of American intervention—specifically in Venezuela.

In January 2019, she wrote on X that the United States “needs to stay out of Venezuela.” A few weeks later, she wrote that the U.S. “needs to stop using our military for regime change & stop intervening in Venezuela’s military.”

She voiced her criticism again a few months after that. “Throughout history, every time the US topples a foreign country’s dictator/government, the outcome has been disastrous,” she wrote. “Civil war/military intervention in Venezuela will wreak death & destruction to Venezuelan people, and increase tensions that threaten our national security.”

Days after the Venezuela operation, Gabbard finally posted a brief statement on X.

“President Trump promised the American people he would secure our borders, confront narcoterrorism, dangerous drug cartels, and drug traffickers,” she wrote. “Kudos to our servicemen and women and intelligence operators for their flawless execution of President Trump’s order to deliver on his promise thru Operation Absolute Resolve.”

JD Vance Makes Heinous Claim About Minnesota ICE Shooting Victim - 2026-01-08T19:30:08Z

The Trump administration is sticking with ICE.

Vice President JD Vance on Thursday vehemently defended a federal agent’s decision to kill Renee Nicole Good in Minneapolis, shifting blame to practically every entity beyond the ICE agent that held the gun—including Good herself.

During a hostile White House press conference, Vance claimed that Good had been “brainwashed” by left-wing politics, and argued that the 37-year-old mother was to blame for her own death.

“There’s a part of me that feels very, very sad for this woman. Not just because she lost her life but because I think that she is a victim of left-wing ideology,” Vance said.

“What young mother shows up and decides they are going to throw their car in front of ICE officers that are enforcing legitimate law? You have to be brainwashed to get to that point to where you’re willing—not just to protest, that’s fine—but throw your vehicle in front of law enforcement officers,” he continued, adding that he believed “to get to that point you have to be radicalized in a very, very sad way.”

Yet administration officials—and fans of the president’s violent immigration agenda—seem to be the only ones who interpreted video footage of the attack that way.

Video evidence of the incident suggested Good was letting other vehicles pass her on the road before she pulled out, in an attempt to comply with ICE’s orders, but was momentarily halted when the masked agents approached her window.

As she began to move her vehicle away from the agents, an officer standing in front of the red Honda Pilot sidestepped the car, moving toward her open driver-side window before he pulled the trigger multiple times, video recording illustrates.

The officer then extended his arm and chased after the vehicle, signaling that he was not injured. Her SUV then accelerated down the road, seemingly uncontrolled, before smashing into several parked vehicles.

The Minnesota Star-Tribune reported Thursday that the attacking ICE agent is named Jonathan Ross.

Agents then prevented her petrified neighbors from assisting her, one of whom identified themselves as a physician.

Screenshot of a tweet

Eyewitnesses to the shooting told MPR News that Good posed “no threat” to the agents.

But Vance insisted on excoriating reporters who verbally described the attack the way it was depicted.

“You still believe that she deliberately tried to ram him despite this video?” prompted one incredulous reporter.

“We’re not going to get the chance to ask this woman what was going on,” Vance replied. “But she accelerated in a way where she rammed into the guy.

“Everybody that is repeating the lie that this is some innocent woman who was out for a drive in Minneapolis, when a law enforcement officer shot at her, you should be ashamed of yourselves,” he added.

JD Vance Throws Hissy Fit Over Coverage of Minnesota ICE Shooting - 2026-01-08T19:17:05Z

JD Vance had a complete meltdown Thursday over the media’s coverage of an ICE shooting in Minneapolis that left a U.S. citizen dead.

At a White House press briefing, Vance’s remarks went off the rails while he lectured the press about not writing headlines the way he wants them to.

“‘Outrage After ICE Officer Kills US Citizen in Minneapolis,’” Vance said, reading a headline from CNN. “Well, that’s one way to put it—and that is the way that many people in the corporate media have put this attack in the last 24 hours. And I say attack very, very intentionally.”

“The way that the media, by and large, has reported this story has been an absolute disgrace, and it puts our law enforcement officers at risk every single day,” Vance said, before launching into an outrageous rant about a very neutral headline.

“What that headline leaves out is the fact that that very ICE officer nearly had his life ended, dragged by a car six months ago, 34 stitches in his leg, so you think maybe he’s a little bit sensitive about somebody ramming him with an automobile?” Vance vented.

“What that headline leaves out is that that woman was there to interfere with a legitimate law enforcement operation in the United States of America,” he continued. “What that headline leaves out is that that woman is part of a broader left-wing network to attack, to dox, to assault, and to make it impossible for our ICE officers to do their job.”

Setting aside Vance’s absurd suggestion that any officer hurt in the line of duty has a free pass to shoot dead civilians if they get scared, the vice president left out that there is no actual evidence to support any of his claims.

There is no evidence to suggest that Renee Good was attempting to impede law enforcement, and there is no evidence that she was connected to a “left-wing network” of activists. In fact, Good’s ex-husband told reporters that she was not an activist, but a mom who had just dropped her child off at school.

Footage of the incident showed Good, who was blocking traffic, wave at the agents and urge them to “go around” her vehicle. Instead, the ICE agents swarmed her vehicle, pulling on the doors and demanding she “get out of the fucking car!” One witness even said that another officer ordered her to leave. When Good attempted to drive away from the group of officers, one officer standing in front of the vehicle shot her in the head at least three times.

But even if everything Vance was saying was true—and multiple videos indicate it’s not—that would not mean that Good should be killed. The penalty for not complying with ICE cannot be death.

“If the media wants to tell the truth, they ought to tell the truth,” Vance raged Thursday. It seems that what he really meant was, “If the media wants to tell the truth, they ought to say what I want to hear.”

On Venezuela, Democrats Are Actually Acting Like an Opposition Party - 2026-01-08T19:13:21Z

Ruben Gallego often embodies the worst tendencies of Democrats. In one of his first acts as a U.S. senator, the Arizonan endorsed the Trump-backed Laken Riley Act, which makes it easier for the government to detain undocumented immigrants if they are accused (but not yet convicted) of fairly minor crimes. Having the newly elected Latino from a key swing state back that terrible legislation opened the floodgates for other Democrats to support it and virtually ensured its passage. In his public comments, Gallego constantly suggests fellow Democrats are too liberal and out of touch with regular Americans—doing the Republicans’ work for them.

But over the last week, Gallego has been a voice of moral clarity. The former Marine blasted President Trump’s decision to capture Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro almost immediately after it happened and hasn’t let up, using blunt words like “dumb” and “idiots” when referring to administration officials. And he’s not alone. Center-left Democrats who sometimes diss the party’s left or try to tout their bipartisan credentials, such as Senators Tim Kaine and Mark Kelly and Representative Seth Moulton, are also loudly condemning the administration’s policy in Venezuela and demanding that the administration not invade Greenland or any other nation.

The Democratic Party is unified in opposing Trump’s invasion of Venezuela. That’s a sign of two important and positive developments. The party isn’t as scared as it used to be of being portrayed by Republicans as “soft” on national security. And congressional Democrats, after spending the early part of 2025 being wary of criticizing Trump and voting for many of his Cabinet nominees, are bringing the fighting spirit they showed during the government shutdown into 2026.

You might be thinking that it should be easy and expected for the Democrats to oppose an ill-conceived, unauthorized overthrow of another country’s government by a fascist president. And well, yes, it should be. But the party has repeatedly blundered on foreign policy out of a desperate desire to seem tough and strong. Dozens of Democrats voting for the Iraq War, the overly expansive use of drone strikes by the Obama administration, Obama’s troop surge in Afghanistan, the Biden administration aligning with Israel as it bombed not only Gaza but countries throughout the Middle East in 2024, and the party’s wariness about opposing Trump’s Caribbean basin boat strikes last year were all rooted in part in a desire to not be portrayed as a party of peaceniks. I was worried that Democrats would be unwilling to criticize Trump’s actions and therefore be portrayed as on the side of Maduro, no one’s idea of a hero.

Instead, Democrats have been loud, angry, and combative. They are scolding the administration for lying to them about its plans in Venezuela and invading another country without even briefing Congress. They’re forcing a debate on a War Powers resolution in the Senate—and even brought five Republican senators to their side on Thursday. They are pushing legislation to prevent invasions of Greenland or any other place. House Republicans will almost certainly block anything to rein in Trump. But Democrats are making a clear case to the public, the media, and the countries around the world that most Americans understand that Trump’s moves in Venezuela were radical and crazy even for him. That’s important and valuable.

And it’s great to see that Democrats are remaining combative against Trump—and not just on fairly politically safe issues like health care and food stamps. It’s a huge contrast from last year. It wasn’t just that Gallego and numerous other congressional Democrats backed the Laken Riley provision. Democrats kept pledging to work with Trump. They were voting for many of Trump’s nominees, even though it was obvious they would make terrible decisions. Remember that Secretary of State Marco Rubio, one of the key architects of Maduro’s overthrow and Trump’s imperialist foreign policy, was confirmed 99–0. Even Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren voted for him!

Congressional Democrats finally seem to have gotten over the view that Trump deserves deference and respect because he was elected a second time. It took them far too long, but I’m glad they’re finally there.

But there’s still one problem with the party’s posture. Democrats are trying too hard to tie Trump’s Venezuela moves to domestic policy and the midterm elections. “The White House is laser focused on threatening a military takeover of Greenland. Where’s the same focus on lowering costs?” was the Bluesky post from Minnesota Senator Amy Klobuchar. Similarly, “Never has a President wagged a dog harder than Trump and MAGA now. To distract from Epstein, the explosion of health and homeowners insurance costs, and the tariffs that are decimating small businesses, Trump is plunging this country into a war and using our soldiers as pawns,” Illinois Governor JB Pritzker said on X.

I understand that Democrats view the Jeffrey Epstein scandal and affordability as political weaknesses of the president that will hurt Republicans in November. And perhaps the Venezuela invasion and the administration’s threats about Greenland are part of some brilliant electoral strategy. (I doubt it. Trump and his team just seem obsessed with these ideas, and they actually poll quite badly.) But we are 10 months from the midterms. Democrats can and should spend at least a few days explaining why it’s so horrible that the American president is unilaterally invading countries, without connecting this to Epstein or domestic politics. This is a time for statesmanship and moral clarity, not consultant-approved electoral talking points.

The Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency’s shooting of Renee Good in Minneapolis and the administration’s fervent defense of that killing is another atrocity from this administration. I hope to see Democrats unify against that too, while still keeping focus on Venezuela, Greenland, and the broader problems of Trump’s foreign policy. There has never been a more urgent time for Democrats to be not just the alternative party but the opposition party. And if the party is willing to consistently take on Trump’s radical, undemocratic actions, even when the polls aren’t conclusive, they will actually be that party.

Kash Patel’s FBI Cuts Minnesota Out of ICE Shooting Investigation - 2026-01-08T18:44:27Z

Kash Pate’s FBI is restricting Minnesota investigators from accessing evidence related to ICE’s fatal shooting of Renee Nicole Good on Wednesday in Minneapolis. 

While the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension was originally set to investigate Good’s killing, the FBI’s refusal to cooperate has forced them to withdraw from the process entirely. And that lack of FBI cooperation is likely intended to obstruct what seems grimly apparent: that Good was brutally shot and killed in her own neighborhood for virtually nothing. 

“Without complete access to the evidence, witnesses and information collected, we cannot meet the investigative standards that Minnesota law and the public demands. As a result, the BCA has reluctantly withdrawn from the investigation,” the BCA said. “BCA Force Investigations Unit was designed to ensure consistency, accountability and public confidence, none of which can be achieved without full cooperation and jurisdictional clarity.”  

Minnesota and Minneapolis officials have condemned the decision. “We have learned that the Trump administration has now denied the state that ability to participate in the investigation. And I want to make this as clear as possible to everyone: Minnesota must be part of this investigation,” Minnesota Governor Tim Walz said. 

The FBI will now have full control over the investigation. 

Trump Has a Bonkers New Plan to Win Over Greenland Residents - 2026-01-08T18:42:16Z

The White House is floating a novel scheme in its quest to annex Greenland: outright bribery.

U.S. officials are reportedly mulling over the possibility of paying Greenlanders up to $100,000 each in order to acquire the Arctic outpost, according to four insiders that spoke with Reuters Thursday. White House aides were involved in the discussions, which proposed individual payments between $10,000 to $100,000 per islander.

Roughly 57,000 people reside in Greenland, a self-governing territory within the kingdom of Denmark. Local leaders have repeatedly stated their disinterest in joining the 50 states, going so far as completely reshuffling their Parliament in March to prioritize opposing the U.S. after a landslide election win for the island’s pro-independence movement.

If Greenlanders somehow changed their mind after months of intimidation and militaristic threats by the White House, then the payment plan could cost U.S. taxpayers as much as $5.7 billion.

What exactly the White House stands to gain from controlling Greenland isn’t clear, particularly because myriad existing treaties already give the U.S. unfettered access to Greenland as a military base.

Nonetheless, Donald Trump has been fixated on the idea since at least 2019, when he told reporters that the arrangement could be handled as a “large real estate deal.”

In recent weeks, the president’s threats have escalated in fervor and frequency. In an interview with The Atlantic published Sunday—just a day after he ordered U.S. forces to bomb Venezuela, raid Caracas, and abduct Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro—Trump said: “We do need Greenland, absolutely. We need it for defense.”

Even White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt couldn’t muster a logical explanation for the president’s Greenland obsession during a press conference Wednesday, vaguely suggesting that the acquisition would be beneficial for national security purposes, citing China and Russia. She did not provide any specific details as to how the U.S. would be able to make better use of the island beyond its current treaty arrangement.

Minneapolis Cancels School After Federal Agents Attack Students - 2026-01-08T17:19:21Z

Minneapolis Public Schools have canceled all classes for the rest of the week after a horrifying Border Patrol raid at a local high school, following a fatal ICE shooting of an unarmed woman.

Border Patrol agents pepper-sprayed, tackled, and handcuffed people on the grounds of Minneapolis’s Roosevelt High School on Wednesday—just hours after ICE officers shot and killed Renee Nicole Good.

“The guy, I’m telling him like, ‘Please step off the school grounds,’ and this dude comes up and bumps into me and then tells me that I pushed him, and he’s trying to push me, and he knocked me down,” a school official told MPR News. “They don’t care. They’re just animals … I’ve never seen people behave like this.”

MPR News reports that even high schoolers were caught in the crossfire of the ICE raid, although most gathered in the library for safety.

Roosevelt Principal Christian Ledesma told parents that he “instituted a lockout due to law enforcement presence outside of our school involving a vehicle that stopped near our building” after dismissal, and that teachers and students “witnessed law enforcement engage with people at Roosevelt.”

“I think school property should be off-limits. I think our kids need to feel safe at school,” said Kate Winkel, who lives near the school and witnessed Border Patrol snatch a person into their vehicle. “The federal government doesn’t need to attack schools.”

This comes as federal agents escalate their aggression against Minnesotans protesting Good’s death.

Airline Cuts Ties With ICE Over Deportation Flights - 2026-01-08T16:59:05Z

At least one airline has decided to stop flying for ICE.

Avelo Airlines, the primary commercial air fleet that has carried out the Trump administration’s mass deportation agenda, canceled its contract with the federal government on Tuesday. In an email to employees, CEO Andrew Levy said that Avelo’s arrangement with the government had only offered “short-term benefits” at a cost to the company’s long-term reputation.

“We moved a portion of our fleet into a government program which promised more financial stability but placed us in the center of a political controversy,” Levy wrote in the email, obtained by CNBC. “The program provided short-term benefits but ultimately did not deliver enough consistent and predictable revenue to overcome its operational complexity and costs.”

Protests took place across the country at Avelo’s commercial bases when the company signed on to work with ICE back in May.

In an attempt to salvage its business, Avelo said in its new announcement it would no longer work with the agency and would close its base outside Phoenix on January 27. But significant damage must have already been done to the company’s financials, as it announced it would additionally shutter Avelo bases at North Carolina’s Raleigh-Durham and Wilmington airports, slashing jobs and canceling commercial flights in the process.

“With the closure of the Mesa base, government flying has concluded. For the record, there was never a contract with DHS, ICE or the federal government,” company spokesperson Courtney Goff told NBC Connecticut.

But ICE still has several other companies it can turn to to unceremoniously ship people out of the country, such as CSI Aviation, a charter service that subcontracts flights from GlobalX and Eastern Air Express. The Department of Homeland Security awarded CSI more than $673 million for the 2026 fiscal year.

Did Trump Even Watch Minnesota ICE Shooting Video Before Responding? - 2026-01-08T16:03:18Z

Did President Donald Trump even watch a video of the ICE shooting in Minnesota before he started spreading lies about the victim?

Speaking to a group of New York Times reporters Wednesday, Trump claimed that Renee Good, a driver who was shot and killed by a federal immigration agent, “didn’t try to run him over. She ran him over.” 

To make his point, Trump trotted out a video he’d already shared to Truth Social earlier that day. The video, taken from a distance, was slowed down to isolate the sound of three gunshots, audible above a witness screaming, “No!” 

The video, however, did not appear to show a federal officer being run over or injured in any way. But in his post, Trump had inexplicably claimed that it was “hard to believe [the officer] is alive” after the incident.

The reporters quickly pointed out that Trump’s cherry-picked video didn’t even support his own fictitious claims. 

“Well,” Trump stammered. “I—the way I look at it …” It seems he could not summon an explanation as he watched the footage he’d boosted to millions of people.  

“It’s a terrible scene,” he said at the end of the video. “I think it’s horrible to watch. No, I hate to see it.”

Trump’s reaction “suggests that no one had shown the video to Trump before he posted about the shooting,” Aaron Reichlin-Melchick, a senior fellow at the American Immigration Council, wrote in a post on X Thursday.

The video Trump posted, which went on to be shared by other prominent right-wing figures, did not include footage of moments before the shooting when Good, who was blocking traffic, waved the agents by and urged them to “go around!” 

Instead of pulling around, the ICE agents swarmed her vehicle, pulling on the doors, and demanding she “get out of the fucking car!” One witness even said that another officer ordered her to leave. When she attempted to drive away from the group of officers, the officer standing in front of the vehicle shot her in the head at least three times. 

Trump’s video also did not include footage of ICE agents dismissing a man who identified himself as a physician and asked to check Good’s pulse as she sat motionless in her crashed vehicle. 

Feds Violently Crack Down on Minneapolis Protesters After ICE Shooting - 2026-01-08T15:57:33Z

After an ICE officer shot and killed Renee Nicole Good just yards from her home in Minneapolis on Wednesday, federal agents are now upping their aggression against the Minnesotans protesting her painfully unjust death.

CNN has reported that federal agents are using pepper balls and a “gas-like substance” against protesters outside of the Bishop Henry Whipple Federal Building in Minneapolis. People can be seen on video fleeing from a large cloud of gas as CNN’s Ryan Young said officers “deployed the substance.” One man could be seen on his hands and knees, overcome by the effects of the gas.

President Trump has falsely claimed that Good was trying to hurt the ICE agents on Wednesday. “She behaved horribly,” he said. “And then she ran him over. She didn’t try to run him over. She ran him over.”

But after being shown the video, even he had to admit that it was a “terrible scene.” Nevertheless, federal agents have only cracked down harder on people as they protest the government-supported killing of their neighbor.

Dr. Oz Threatens Medicaid in Minnesota—and Warns It’s Just Beginning - 2026-01-08T15:24:08Z

Federal Medicaid subsidies could be at risk for millions living in Minnesota, thanks to the executive branch’s latest attempt to punish state residents for a fraud scheme that was caught and handled years ago.

Speaking with Fox Business Wednesday, Mehmet Oz—the administrator of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services—claimed that billions of dollars for the public health care system was in jeopardy, in Minnesota and elsewhere.

“Well, sticking to the narrative that it’s cold in Minnesota, this is the tip of the iceberg,” Oz said.

The Department of Health and Human Services paused $185 million in aid to Minnesota after right-wing YouTuber Nick Shirley alleged there was a sprawling fraud scheme taking federal funds from Minnesota-based day care facilities.

As evidence, he visited a slew of day care centers, arguing that closed sites were fraudulently accepting funding. It would later emerge that elements of Shirley’s report were incorrect or inadequately reported: At least two of the centers featured in his video had been closed for several years, Minnesota’s Department of Children, Youth and Families told NewsNation late last month.

More than a dozen schemes have popped up in Minnesota’s safety net programs in recent years, many of them involving members of the state’s Somali population. But they haven’t gone unchecked: More than 90 Minnesotans were charged in federal fraud investigations that began under the Biden administration, at least 60 of which have resulted in convictions.

Yet, apparently incensed by Shirley’s report, the White House ushered a scourge of ICE agents to descend upon the city—though their presence has only caused more problems.

On Wednesday, an ICE agent in Minneapolis shot and killed a 37-year-old woman, Renee Nicole Good, just a few blocks from her home. Video footage of the attack suggested Good was attempting to comply with the masked agents’ orders to drive away, but one member of the deportation agency opted to shoot her several times in the face, instead.

Eyewitnesses to the shooting told MPR News that Good posed “no threat” to the agents.

Donald Trump has already cut off $10 billion in funding for social services such as childcare and aid for poor families in five blue states, including Minnesota.

Trump and JD Vance Say You Can Expect to Die for Disobeying ICE - 2026-01-08T15:12:10Z

Donald Trump and JD Vance want you to know that not abiding federal agents may result in your death.

Less than 24 hours after a federal immigration officer shot and killed 37-year-old Renee Good in Minneapolis, the vice president was already positing that the shooting should be used as a kind of litmus test for political office.

“Every congressional democrat and every democrat who’s running for president should be asked a simple question: Do you think this officer was wrong in defending his life against a deranged leftist who tried to run him over?” Vance wrote in a post on X.

“These people are going to try to arrest our law enforcement for doing their jobs. The least the media could do is ask them about it,” he added.

Trump also attempted to defend Good’s murder by sharing a clip from Fox News’s Hannity, where contributor Nicole Parker argued that deadly force was justified when “a vehicle is coming at you and is being used as a weapon.”

But it’s not clear that Good tried to “run over” an ICE agent at all, or that Good’s vehicle was being used as a weapon.

Vance shared one slow-motion clip of the incident making the rounds on right-wing internet that appeared to show Good driving toward an agent who was standing in front of her car.

This video does not include footage of moments before the shooting when Good, who was blocking traffic, waved the agents by and urged them to “go around!” Instead, the ICE agents swarmed her vehicle, pulling on the doors, and demanding she “get out of the fucking car!” When she attempted to drive away from the group of officers, the officer standing in front of the vehicle shot her in the head at least three times.

Republican Representative Wesley Hunt claimed on NewsNation Wednesday night that Good’s death was “completely avoidable” if only she had followed the instructions of the ICE agents—who descended out of an unmarked vehicle and did not attempt to identify themselves.

“The bottom line is this, when a federal officer gives you instructions you abide by them and then you get to keep your life,” Hunt said. “And it is clear that she tried to use her vehicle as a weapon, mow over an ICE agent, and now she is dead.”

Trump Makes Stunning Confession on How Long U.S. Will Be in Venezuela - 2026-01-08T14:48:29Z

President Trump is planning on having the U.S. control Venezuela for years.

“Only time will tell,” Trump told The New York Times in an interview released on Thursday morning. “We will rebuild it in a very profitable way.... We’re going to be using oil, and we’re going to be taking oil. We’re getting oil prices down, and we’re going to be giving money to Venezuela, which they desperately need.”

This indefinite timeline that Trump is working with only worsens this wanton might = right approach to the most oil-rich, historically left-leaning nations in the world.

The Times attempted to clarify, asking the president for a specific timeline, from three months to a year.

“I would say much longer,” Trump replied.

This comes just days after Trump declared the U.S is in charge of the country—although it appears that the Venezuelan government is still functioning, as it swore in Maduro-supporting Vice President Delcy Rodríguez on Monday.

Even still, the bravado and basic disregard for global sovereignty that has defined this attack, kidnapping, and incoming occupation is likely only the beginning of a long string of problems for Venezuelans, and people across the world—just as Trump promised.

JD Vance Has Chilling Warning About ICE in Wake of Minnesota Shooting - 2026-01-08T14:26:07Z

Hours after an ICE agent shot and killed a legal observer in Minneapolis, the Trump administration announced plans to invest in even more ICE activity.

In a sit-down interview with Fox News Wednesday, Vice President JD Vance revealed that he expects “deportation numbers [to] ramp up” as the agency increases hiring in the coming year.

“I think we’re going to see those deportation numbers ramp up as we get more and more people online, working for ICE, going door to door, and making sure that if you’re an illegal alien, you’ve gotta get out and apply [for citizenship] through the proper channels,” Vance told the network.

Vance’s timing couldn’t be worse, especially considering that the administration’s commitment to Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s growth was already in the works.

Last week, internal documents obtained by The Washington Post revealed that the deportation agency had earmarked $100 million for online advertisements over the next year, hoping to draw gun rights advocates and military enthusiasts into its ranks.

The agency’s so-called “wartime recruitment” strategy involves a nationwide hiring spree that aims to take on as many as 10,000 new officers across the country.

That massive expenditure is practically a drop in the bucket of ICE’s 2026 budget allotment, however. Congress virtually tripled the agency’s budget this summer when it passed Donald Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act, jumping its appropriations from roughly $9.6 billion to $30 billion. (At the same time, the Republican-controlled legislature insisted that it was fiscally necessary to take a hatchet to Medicaid, gutting billions of dollars from the critical public health care program.)

Meanwhile, Minneapolis residents are still reeling from an agent’s decision to shoot dead a 37-year-old woman, Renee Nicole Good, who had been sitting in her car just a few blocks from where she lived.

“That’s so stupid” that she was killed, Donna Ganger—Good’s mother—told the Minnesota Star Tribune. Good leaves behind her 6-year-old son, whose father died in 2023 at the age of 36.

“There’s nobody else in his life,” the child’s paternal grandfather told the Tribune. “I’ll drive. I’ll fly. To come and get my grandchild.”

MAGA Blames Minnesota ICE Shooting on Victim for Unhinged Reason - 2026-01-08T14:18:18Z

Do MAGA Republicans believe that people who list their pronouns in their bio deserve to be shot in the head?

Donald Trump’s army of right-wing shills rushed Wednesday night to defend a federal immigration officer who shot and killed a U.S. citizen—by complaining about the victim’s online presence.

Fox News’s Jesse Watters was careful to cast Renee Good—despite being a white woman and mother—as a political enemy from the opposing side of the culture war.

“The woman who lost her life was a self-proclaimed poet from Colorado—with pronouns in her bio,” Watters said. “A 37-year-old white woman named Renee Good. The Daily Mail says she leaves behind a lesbian partner and a child from a previous marriage. She was a disrupter though she considered herself a legal observer, but there’s no evidence she had a law degree.”

Laura Loomer, the Trump acolyte who pretends to be a reporter, also seemed to struggle to swallow Good’s Instagram profile.

“‘She/her’ Literally every time,” Loomer wrote, including a screenshot of Good’s Instagram profile, beside a picture of someone who was not Good.

Loomer also seemed to have an entirely separate problem with Good. “An aggressive communist carpet muncher who FAFO,” she wrote in a separate post.

Transcript: Trump’s Agents Kill Citizen—Then Damning New Info Emerges - 2026-01-08T13:00:11Z

The following is a lightly edited transcript of the January 8 episode of the Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.

Editor’s note: After we recorded this, The New York Times published a frame-by-frame video analysis of the shooting that further debunks the Trump administration’s version of events.


Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent.

On Wednesday, an ICE agent shot and killed a woman in her vehicle on the streets of Minneapolis. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem immediately accused the woman of committing an act of domestic terrorism. Then President Trump posted a misleading video of the affair and blamed it on the victim in truly vile terms. Officials in Minnesota are flatly disputing the official federal government account of the shooting, calling it a reckless act by out-of-control ICE agents. We think the danger of this moment is hard to overstate. There are now heavily armed government militias roaming the streets of U.S. cities, they’ve been given free rein by Trump and Noem, and they appear unbound and unaccountable. So we’re working through all of this with New Republic contributing editor Felipe De La Hoz, who writes well about the need for ICE accountability. Felipe, good to have you on, man.

Felipe De La Hoz: Nice to be here with you, Greg. Wish it was under better circumstances.

Sargent: It’s pretty fucked. So as of this recording, the authorities haven’t released this woman’s name. The government is saying she weaponized the vehicle against ICE agents and that they killed her in justified self-defense. But videos of the event that are floating around online seem to show that the agent in question fired into the vehicle from the side at close to point-blank range after the vehicle had driven past him. And it was going pretty slowly. Felipe, can you bring us up to date on what we know here?

De La Hoz: Sure. So this was all part of, you know, a surge to Minneapolis—and Minnesota more broadly—that is broadly part of the fascination that the administration currently has with that state and city for a number of reasons, including this story about the welfare fraud that has lit up right-wing media.

And so this was part of that broader operation. And it seems that the woman in question, the person who was shot, was either a legal observer or somehow involved in some of the of the protest movements there and had been responding to a raid that was happening in the community.

There are plenty of interviews so far with eyewitnesses, plus, as you mentioned, videos of the event itself, where it seems like the agents are approaching her vehicle, she kind of backs up a little bit, and then slowly turns—begins to turn, is what it looks like is happening—at which point one agent fires what seemed like three or four shots through the windshield and into the open driver’s side window, at which point the car speeds off, hits another car, and eventually a telephone pole.

Sargent: Yeah, I think one thing that’s not clear from the videos I’ve seen—maybe you’ve seen something to help clarify this—the agent who fired the gun might have been standing in front of the car when it first backed up and started to move. But even if that were the case—and again, I don’t know if it is—we’re still in a situation where the car was really visibly turning down the street, not looking like it was trying to ram a guy. And again, he fired into the driver’s side window at close to point-blank range from the side after the car was clearly posing no danger to him whatsoever. This, at an absolute minimum, looks like extraordinary recklessness, right?

De La Hoz: Indeed. Well, there are a few things that we can establish. The car was going very slowly at the time that the shots were fired. As you mentioned, it does seem like the trajectory of the shots indicates that they were fired mainly from beside the car. There’s one bullet hole through the windshield, but most of the shots seem to have come in through the driver’s side window. It looks like there are two agents who are in the immediate vicinity of the car at the moment of the incident, and it was the one that was closer to the front of the car that fired the shots. But I think from the videos that I’ve seen—and I’m sure you’ve seen—it really does not seem justifiable to say that the car posed an imminent threat to the agents. Certainly not the kind of threat that I think in most law enforcement understandings would necessitate deadly force.

Sargent: Yes, and I want to underscore that in Minnesota, police officials and elected officials are describing the event the way you and I are, and they’re strongly contesting the account being offered by the government. I want to read what Trump said on Truth Social about this: “The woman driving the car was very disorderly, obstructing and resisting, who then violently, willfully, and viciously ran over the ICE officer, who seems to have shot her in self-defense. Based on the attached clip, it is hard to believe he is alive, but is now recovering in the hospital.”

Felipe, it’s hard to see how the videos demonstrate anything like this. He was not run over. The clip that Trump himself posted was only a faraway shot that didn’t show anything of the kind. What’s your reaction to this?

De La Hoz: The administration—Trump, Homeland Security, Kristi Noem, spokeswoman Tricia McLaughlin—could have spun a much more plausible story here than they did. But the thing is this administration treats brazen lying as an assertion of power in itself. And so I think they really can’t help themselves. And it’s very evident from the videos, from the eyewitness accounts that precise details of what they’re describing did not happen. Nobody was run over. It’s very evident in the videos that nobody was actually struck by the car, right?

The agent who was supposedly hospitalized can be seen in videos, not only in the immediate aftermath, but for some time afterward, milling about, walking around, apparently unharmed. And various key components—the speed of the car, whether people were hit—are very easily disproven.

I want to point something out too, by the way, Greg, which is that there was a similar incident in Chicago in October, when ICE agents fired on a woman and similarly claimed that she was battering officers with her car. That woman survived, fortunately. But they brought criminal charges against her and those charges were ultimately dismissed with prejudice in part on the request of the Department of Justice itself, which chose to dismiss the charges. And so I think this is an MO at this point for the federal government to use this as a catchall circumstance to explain their conduct, and these exact kinds of allegations have fallen apart in the past.

Sargent: This October episode you’re talking about, at the very outset, the Department of Homeland Security did the same thing that they did this time, which is they put out a statement blaming the woman, saying she had functionally weaponized the vehicle, was attacking the ICE agents with the vehicle.

And I actually went and looked at the language of that statement from back in October and compared it to the language of Department of Homeland Security’s statement just today about what happened. And it was weirdly, weirdly similar.

It really is almost like cut-and-paste language that they know they’re going to need in situations like this. They prefabricated the language and they just dropped it into this situation really almost before anyone even knew any of the facts.

De La Hoz: Yeah, even giving them the benefit of the doubt, any law enforcement agency, I think, in a shooting conducted by one of its officers, would wait to some extent to clarify the facts before they started making public statements about what exactly happened.

I think you’re right that in this case they had the language more or less ready to go because this has been their justification for use of force over and over again—not only in shootings like this, but in violent arrests, in the use of chemical weapons, munitions against protesters.

It’s always more or less the same language about their officers being at risk, attacked. The use of the phrase “domestic terrorism,” it gets bandied about quite a bit. And so I think they’ve settled on this as the language that they perhaps have adjudged is most likely to get them off the hook when they are using excessive force in this way.

Sargent: It sure looks that way. Now, let’s listen to how Kristi Noem described this particular situation really early on. Listen to this.

Kristi Noem (voiceover): It was an act of domestic terrorism. What happened was our ICE officers were out in enforcement action. They got stuck in the snow because of the adverse weather that is in Minneapolis. They were attempting to push out their vehicle and a woman attacked them and those surrounding them and attempted to run them over and ram them with her vehicle. An officer of ours acted quickly and defensively shot to protect himself and the people around him. And my understanding is, is that she was hit and is deceased.


Sargent: Felipe, this is an absolute horror. We still don’t know who the woman is as of this recording or what she was doing, but for her to rush out, for Noem to rush out and call this domestic terrorism is just absolutely sick public conduct, I think. What’s your thought about it?

De La Hoz: Yeah, I mean, I think that the Department of Homeland Security under Noem has kind of envisioned itself, has conceptualized of itself, not only as a law enforcement department, an agency, but as a kind of propaganda agency to some extent. Which is why Noem herself oftentimes appears at operations in full blowout and glam makeup and an ICE vest. Why there are ICE videographers and photographers often at these raids themselves.

They are in the business of narrative spinning as well as general law enforcement. And I think that this is sort of an extension of that. They feel that they have to get ahead of the narrative quickly, whether or not that narrative is accurate. In fact, I would say that they probably know that it is not, but they are utilizing it again as an exertion of power to be able to say whatever they want regardless of the facts.

Sargent: Well, let’s listen to what Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey said about this.

Mayor Jacob Frey (voiceover): To ICE: Get the fuck out of Minneapolis. We do not want you here. Your stated reason for being in this city is to create some kind of safety, and you are doing exactly the opposite. People are being hurt. Families are being ripped apart. Long-term Minneapolis residents that have contributed so greatly to our city, to our culture, to our economy are being terrorized, and now somebody is dead. That’s on you. And it’s also on you to leave.


Sargent: So Felipe, I find that striking because in one instance after another the story has been that local officials simply don’t want this ICE presence in their cities. And in just about every conceivable way, these ICE invasions of local regions are really making everybody a lot less safe. What do you think of what Frey said there?

De La Hoz: You know, there’s a reason why these—these raids, these operations—have been conducted exclusively in cities and regions that are led by Democrats and that are perceived to be political opponents of the Trump administration.

It’s because the administration itself knows that these are destructive operations, that they are not primarily about public safety. They are an attempt to intimidate and to harm the local populations, right? If this was really about engendering public safety, I would assume that there would be an ICE presence of a similar aggression and size in all sorts of red areas, but there are not.

And so I think that it’s evident that these are not intended to be public safety operations. Primarily, they are intended to carry out Stephen Miller’s broader agenda of ethnic cleansing, of generalized fear.

And I think that the mayor sounds very frustrated because this is an instance where somebody is dead—and I think somebody is dead in a circumstance that, at least as of now, appears to be clearly unjustified. And so I think that this is channeling a certain level of anger that is present in the Democratic base right now. And I think that elected leaders are beginning to see that and embrace it to a greater extent.

Sargent: Well, I want to ask you about that, because it seems to me that in a situation like this—and as in many of the other situations we’ve seen—we could be hearing more from Democrats. Look, this sort of ICE presence, this ramping up of ICE recruitment is all because Trump and Stephen Miller want to deport as many immigrants as possible, especially including nonviolent ones who are now deeply part of American life.

They’re diverting enormous amounts of law enforcement resources away from serious crimes and into this. That puts us in more danger and it creates highly combustible situations that are, as we see here, killing people, including U.S. citizens. And I don’t understand why every single Democrat is not out there shouting this fact about the situation. What do you think?

De La Hoz: I will say I have seen a number of members of Congress who have already commented on the situation today in its immediate aftermath, using words like “murder,” and that I think is totally fair to use at this particular moment in time.

And so I think incidents like this may begin to break that facade of regularity or decorum that has held some of these officials back. But I think it is the combination of the fear that if they show off against the administration they might lose. I wrote something about this a few weeks back. I think that there is a certain calculus that’s being made by some members of Congress, for example, where they retain some level of political power and influence and they’re actually afraid that they might actually lose in a showdown over the rule of law with the administration.

The problem, of course, is that as the power gets sapped away, their ability to eventually fight back begins to decrease. And so I think if you’re going to strike, you have to strike early, make sure that you’re pushing back on this authoritarianism before it consolidates. And I think that’s what we’re beginning to see now. But it’s been a slow lesson to be internalized. I just hope that this is making it clear that there really is no one that is safe.

Sargent: Again, we don’t know the full set of facts. There may be exonerating things for the officer that we don’t know about. We should be fair. I assume there will be body-cam footage potentially. Maybe that’ll show something a little different. But if this does end up showing that this was something close to murder or extraordinary recklessness to the point of extreme dereliction, what should happen? And more broadly, are there prospects for the states and localities to be doing more to rein in what is clearly a rogue, out-of-control militia force at this point?

De La Hoz: Yeah, I mean, from what I understand, there are investigations now being led by the FBI at this moment.... But one would hope, first of all, that the FBI is not so politicized at this time that they would be unable fully to conduct an impartial investigation. I am frankly not very confident about that. The FBI has itself been out with these kinds of immigration operations with agents detailed to these teams. And obviously, Kash Patel is not a particularly reliable leader of the agency.

I wrote relatively recently for The New Republic about the prospect of states prosecuting federal officials who are acting outside the bounds of the law. And I think there’s a sort of a misinterpretation that there’s a kind of blanket immunity for federal officials. But there is not. I mean, there is a Supreme Court precedent dating back over 100 years that states that states cannot prosecute a federal agent for carrying out their duties. However, agents who are acting in excess of their duties, who are using unreasonable force, who are breaking the law, are not as categorically immune from state prosecution.

And so I would like to see at least a conversation had in this instance about local prosecutors, state prosecutors considering state charges in this case, right? Regardless of where the FBI is coming down, there is nothing that prevents it. Of course, there would be litigation about whether this particular agent was acting within the boundaries of his duties as an ICE officer. But it’s entirely plausible, and I think that it would go a long way toward showing that states have an ability to assert their own police powers and maintain peace in their own jurisdiction.

Sargent: Right, I think at an absolute minimum what we need is a clear sign from some of these state leaders that they are looking seriously at the range of options at their disposal along the lines you’re talking about. And it’s at least possible that this is a case that could push that along in a major way. Felipe De La Hoz, thanks for coming on with us, man. Really good to talk to you.

De La Hoz: Thanks, Greg. Hope to talk again, perhaps in brighter circumstances.

Anne Lamott’s Battle Against Writer’s Block - 2026-01-08T11:00:00Z

First published in the spring of 1994, two months before the birth of Amazon and one month after the death of Kurt Cobain, Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott has far outlasted the era of its origin, becoming one of the most influential writing guides of all time. During its 31 years in print, it has sold over a million copies. Its title has taken on a life of its own, referenced in TikToks and pep talks. On Ted Lasso, Ted yells, “Bird by bird!” to encourage struggling football players.

The phrase comes from a childhood memory that Lamott recounts early in the book. Her 10-year-old brother had to write a report on birds and procrastinated until the night before. Near tears, he was “immobilized by the hugeness of the task ahead.” Their father cut through his paralyzing despair by telling him, “Bird by bird, buddy. Just take it bird by bird.” The anecdote is classic Lamott. It conveys “some instructions on writing and life” (the book’s subtitle) in a way that’s quirky, a little bit cheesy, and hard to forget.

I first encountered Bird by Bird when I was a stressed-out teenager looking for someone to teach me how to turn my amorphous literary aspirations into an actual writing career. It helped and (at times) horrified me in a way that still lingers all these years later.

Before Bird by Bird, most of the writing advice I read was about setting standards for smooth, stylish, publishable prose. I gravitated to my grandma’s shelf of old-school how-to-write books: Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style, Robert Graves and Alan Hodge’s The Reader Over Your Shoulder, William Zinsser’s On Writing Well. These books taught me to be persnickety about punctuation, to cultivate a Jiminy Cricket–style internal critic, and/or to strive to write like a Yale man. I also read classic manifestos like George Orwell’s “Politics and the English Language,” with its rousing premise that blurry prose is a political sin, and Mark Twain’s “Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offenses,” which advised me to “avoid slovenliness of form” and “eschew surplusage.”

All these authors write with robust confidence about the importance of direct, efficient, streamlined writing. They abominate vague ideas and messy sentences, seeing them as an insult to readers, or worse. And with the exception of Twain, who has a rollicking time trashing an author he clearly enjoys, their attitude toward writing is as serious and dignified as the prose style they praise.

It’s no wonder that Bird by Bird was a shock to my system. Lamott’s authorial persona is a neurotic mess—anxious, envious, disorganized, and depressed. She keeps joking about suicide. And her dozens of lurid descriptions of the creative process make sitting at a desk and trying to write seem like a cross between a body horror film and an Alcoholics Anonymous bottoming-out story. A sample:

every form of mental illness … surfaces, leaping out of water like trout: the delusions, hypochondria, the grandiosity, the self-loathing, the inability to track one thought to completion, even the hand-washing fixation, the Howard Hughes germ phobias.…

after two sentences you begin to worry about complete financial collapse, what it will be like to live in a car.…

you sit staring at your blank page like a cadaver, feeling your mind congeal, feeling your talent run down your leg and into your sock.

For Lamott, writing is a high-stakes struggle with personal demons. She devotes entire chapters to perfectionism, jealousy, and writer’s block. But she also encourages writers to write no matter what, and to learn to regularly excrete “shitty first drafts”—another phrase that has entered the popular lexicon. (Ever committed to memorable metaphor, Lamott compares a productive writing day to having amoebic dysentery!)

She’s irreverent, but she’s reverent too, in the style of a hippie aunt. There’s a mystical quality to a lot of her advice—so much so that she jokes about seeming too “California” or “Cosmica Rama.” She approvingly cites the Dalai Lama, Rumi, Wendell Berry, Ram Dass, Tibetan nuns, her Presbyterian pastor, and a Catholic priest named Tom. The flip side of writing misery, it turns out, is occasional writing-induced ecstasy produced by committing to daily writing as a devotional practice. At one point she says, “You don’t have to believe in God, but it’s easier if you do.” She turns “Trust the process” into an entire philosophy of life.


Readers of many religious persuasions—or none—have appreciated the spiritual aspects of the book. One commenter on Goodreads describes it as their “new bible.” Another says, “I pull it off the shelf now and then and read whatever page I land on—and always find my way back to my own writing.” When I asked the writer Pooja Makhijani about Bird by Bird, she said, “I love the self-help-y/religious nature of the book, especially because I’m not particularly religious in the conventional sense, but find a sense of comfort and awe from reading and writing. I know what it feels like to be in a flow state while writing, which feels otherworldly in nature; every time I sit down to write, I’m chasing that high.”

Bird by Bird is not that kind of sacred text for me. Still, it has reassured me by taking for granted that psychological barriers are a common part of the writing process and can be overcome. And it has helped me set aside impossible standards long enough to get some writing done.

Anne Lamott didn’t invent rough drafts, of course. Nor did she invent writing instruction as religion-infused self-help. She was writing in a long tradition of books that blend writing advice, life advice, and spirituality, including Brenda Ueland’s If You Want to Write, Natalie Goldberg’s Writing Down the Bones, Annie Dillard’s The Writing Life, and Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way. In recent years, Elizabeth Gilbert’s Big Magic and Suleika Jouad’s The Book of Alchemy have developed the mystical aspects of this genre, while Jami Attenberg’s 1000 Words is a new riff on the down-to-earth, just-do-it, butt-in-chair approach.

What sets Lamott apart from most of these writers is her insistence on writing’s inherent grotesque indignity. Ueland promises to take the pain out of the writing process, Dillard often makes it look glamorous, but Lamott insists it will always be at least somewhat ugly and embarrassing.

She also has a gift for catchy phrases, offbeat metaphors, and practical writing exercises that amounts to a kind of pedagogical genius. When I asked some writers and writing teachers about Bird by Bird, I got a slew of positive responses. Pooja published an essay based on the “School Lunches” prompt. Alex Marzano-Lesnevich frequently uses the “One-Inch Picture Frame” exercise and also imagines “making naysayers really tiny and plopping them into a jar (with air holes).” Similarly, Catherine Osborne still thinks about “Radio KFKD,” the imaginary radio station that plays in your ear all day telling you how much you suck. (You have to learn to turn it down.) Several teachers reported that whenever they assign the “Shitty First Drafts” chapter of Bird by Bird, students say it’s their favorite thing they read all semester.


It’s clear that Bird by Bird holds up as a set of practical aphorisms and discrete chapters, but does it hold up as a book?

Rereading Bird by Bird now, it’s clear that some things haven’t aged well. Lamott’s jokes about how she has to be a writer because otherwise she’d be totally unemployable are grating in an economy where even prolific published writers have to support themselves with nonwriting jobs. Her eye-rolling exasperation with students who ask her how to get published feels mean-spirited too when opportunities are so scarce for newcomers and have come comparatively easily to her; she is a nepo baby who grew up watching her father write and inherited his agent. The least she could do is to try to open the door for writers without those advantages, and to take their ambition seriously.

In addition to her many cultural references that were dated even at the time (Tricia Nixon, Charlie McCarthy, the Gabor sisters), Lamott has an uncomfortably glib way of treating Special Olympics competitors and people with cancer as fonts of wisdom or occasions for her own personal writing epiphanies. Perhaps my least favorite passage in the book is when she watches a documentary about people dying from AIDS and her takeaway is that life’s too short to stay friends with a successful writer she envies: “Finally I felt that my jealousy and I were strangely beautiful, like the men in the AIDS movie, doing the dance of the transformed self, dancing like an old long-legged bird.”

This kind of self-absorption pervades Bird by Bird. It’s why Lamott dismisses her students’ desires for publication while indulging her own. And it’s what causes her to respond to criticisms from an editor by literally showing up at his house and pacing back and forth in his living room explaining how and why he was wrong, a move that she seems to think is gutsy and admirable, but one that could quite possibly end a career. (An editor I know was particularly appalled by this story.)

I love Bird by Bird’s attention to the difficulty of the writing process, but I don’t love how it frames it primarily as a struggle with ego, as opposed to a struggle with words, images, ideas, thought. Writing isn’t hard just because it’s a confrontation with yourself. It’s hard because it’s a skilled craft and a complex art and an undercompensated form of real-world labor. Lamott obviously knows this, but she spends so much time on the other stuff.

Perhaps it’s perverse to say this, but after 20 years as a writing teacher, I’ve come to believe that many writers could stand to be more perfectionist, not less. I’ve observed that for every writer who is stymied by perfectionism, there is a writer who is held back by the lack of it: who is phoning it in (or ChatGPT-ing it in) and doesn’t understand why that’s a problem. And for every writer who is eaten up by jealousy, there is a writer who could be helped by learning to admire and pay attention to other writers more.

Lamott’s instructions were life-giving to me when I was a young perfectionist dealing with writing-related panic attacks. But now, as a middle-aged writer and writing teacher, I’m no longer stuck in the exact same writing psychodramas that I was when I was young. (It turns out I’ve got some new ones that Bird by Bird can’t help me with.) I also don’t want to presume that my students’ struggles are the same as mine or Anne Lamott’s. Still, despite some reservations, I continue to cite Bird by Bird in my teaching, and I appreciate its obsession with process and difficulty more than ever.


In the last chapter, Lamott takes a brief break from offering advice to contemplate the state of the world. “The society to which we belong seems to be dying or is already dead,” she writes. “I don’t mean to sound dramatic, but clearly the dark side is rising.… But the tradition of artists will continue no matter what form the society takes.”

Three decades later, the dark side has risen, and the tradition of artists is threatened in unprecedented ways that were unimaginable in 1994. For the first time in history, the writing process is optional. An essay can be produced with a few simple prompts. And as writing becomes increasingly automated, the inefficient, irreplaceable human practice of writing is arguably becoming ever more precious. In the words of novelist and Bird by Bird fan Jessica Penner: “In a time when AI has invaded every spectrum of life with its glossy EZ-bake tendrils, we need to reinforce that permission to be shitty—because it’s through the shittiness that we make discoveries about ourselves and others.”

These days, “shitty first drafts” produced one bird at a time are more than just a writing exercise. They are an antidote to corporate, algorithm-generated “enshittification.” And although creativity without effort may initially feel like a blessing, I suspect that someday soon, readers will turn to Bird by Bird with nostalgia for the days when trying to write was a struggle demanding everything we had to give.



Trump’s Childcare Funding Freezes Are Going to Hit All Kids Hard - 2026-01-08T11:00:00Z

In recent days, the Trump administration has taken dramatic steps to make federal funds for childcare more difficult to obtain. A lack of clarity around how a slew of new requirements will be implemented has left childcare providers reeling, and raised the specter of facility closures even as childcare costs skyrocket. As providers work to sort through the confusion, experts are warning that no family will be immune from the impact of these policy changes.

The administration has made it more difficult for childcare providers to obtain federal subsidies. In the wake of unverified allegations of fraud in Minnesota day care centers by right-wing influencers, the Department of Health and Human Services said it would freeze childcare funds to all states unless they met additional verification requirements. Days later, HHS announced that it would roll back Biden-era rules governing the Child Care and Development Fund, or CCDF, with the ostensible goal of preventing fraud, now requiring that states base payments to providers on attendance rather than enrollment, no longer mandating that providers be paid ahead of services, and reprioritizing vouchers instead of guaranteed slots for providers. On Tuesday, HHS said that it would specifically freeze $10 billion in childcare funds to five blue states—Minnesota, New York, California, Illinois, and Colorado—including nearly $2.4 billion from the CCDF.

“There is no evidence of clear or widespread fraud in the states that they have chosen now, so there is no way to anticipate who they would choose next. This is not evidence-based or data-based. This looks to be a form of punishment,” said Ruth Friedman, a senior fellow at the Century Foundation, a progressive think tank. “HHS is not following their normal processes for investigating and responding to fraud.”

Although HHS has provided some guidance on the requirements that states will need to meet to receive federal childcare funds, there are still open questions on timelines for providing proof that money is being used to the administration’s liking.

“The fact that everyone has these big questions about something that is so integral to families’ ability to just function day to day, and for communities and businesses to be prosperous, and that this chaos and confusion is reigning is—in and of itself—a big problem in the short and long term,” said Melissa Boteach, chief policy officer for Zero to Three, an advocacy organization focused on early childhood care.

In 2019, around 1.4 million children and 857,700 low-income families nationwide received federally subsidized childcare through the CCDF, according to the most recent data from HHS. States, tribes, and territories can draw down these federal funds under certain guidelines, and then pay providers directly to assist low-income families that may otherwise struggle to afford childcare. States have flexibility in how these funds are used; while the CCDF requires that states also contribute a certain amount of money to childcare, the amount that states contribute varies.

This means that a childcare provider in a state that offers significant childcare assistance, such as New Mexico, may have a bit more flexibility to maintain operations even if federal childcare payments are delayed. But a childcare provider in a state that does not provide funding for childcare outside of what is required by the federal government, such as Oklahoma, may not have the resources to keep its doors open, said Cindy Lehnoff, director of the National Child Care Association.

Lehnoff added that most small providers she knew in higher-income areas had cash flow to maintain operations for three months without federal assistance, but providers that serve lower-income families that don’t benefit from CCDF may only have a cushion to remain open for a month or less.

“Once they close their doors, there’s no coming back from that,” Lehnoff said.

Christina Killion Valdez, the director of a childcare center in Rochester, Minnesota, said in a press briefing that the Minnesota state government had promised support, and that her organization had a cushion of three months for its overall program. But if the freeze continues for several months, her childcare center will be at risk, along with others in the state.

“If the children we serve lose their tuition assistance, it will destabilize our entire budget, like it will for 4,000 other programs. In many areas, there aren’t enough families that can afford childcare to take these spots, and programs will have to cut staff,” said Valdez. “Cutting staff means cutting spots for kids, whether they receive assistance or not. In many cases, it means closing childcare centers altogether. It means a collapse of the childcare system in Minnesota.”

Even for those centers that stay open, if a provider offers care for both low-income families who rely on assistance and households that are able to pay the full cost, losing that funding could result in providers needing to up their prices.

“If you lost all of your subsidized children, that would raise the cost of care to those paying. And we’re already seeing unaffordable childcare in our country,” said Lehnoff.

State agency staff responsible for distributing funds may subsequently have their attention divided by the need to provide evidence of proper spending to the federal government, which could also slow down the distribution process. Experts say there are already guardrails in place to prevent the misuse of federal dollars, so providing an extra layer of verification would increase work for state agencies.

“The staff at state agencies are already overburdened by the work that they’re doing, and adding even this additional small step is going to take additional capacity,” said Stephanie Schmit, director of childcare and early education at the Center for Law and Social Policy. Even if a state meets necessary requirements, the length of time it takes to verify could result in delays in funding being distributed.

The five states specifically singled out by the Trump administration will be the most immediately affected because they will not be able to draw down on funds at all. But the new requirements could also amount to a “de facto freeze” for every other state, said Eliot Haspel, a family policy expert at the think tank Capita. “You’re still asking [for] hoops to jump through before you can get the money you’re otherwise owed,” said Haspel in a press briefing.

Then there is the potential impact on quality of care as a whole, given that a portion of CCDF funds are used to improve childcare programs for all. “There’s a certain percentage of the resources that are allocated to quality activities, and those resources actually impact all children. It’s not just the children who are receiving childcare assistance; it’s all the children in a center whose providers are receiving this additional quality support funded through the resources,” said Schmit.

Because the CCDF funds may be used for paying childcare staff, the freeze in funding could exacerbate workforce shortages for childcare workers. Without those subsidies, staff could lose their jobs or seek employment elsewhere, at a time when wages for childcare providers are frequently insufficient to keep workers afloat.

“When you disrupt an important source of funding in a system that’s already strained to the brink, you’re going to see some providers going out of business. You’re going to see some early educators leaving the field. And that has ripple effects beyond the children who are getting vouchers,” said Boteach.

The funding freeze comes as the Trump administration works to rapidly reshape the social safety net as a whole. Last summer, the Republican-majority Congress approved legislation that made dramatic cuts to Medicaid and the food stamp program, known as SNAP. Although some of these cuts have yet to go into effect, states are already preparing for a loss in funding. The White House also froze funding to several government programs last year and has significantly reduced the workforce for the Administration for Children and Families, which oversees the CCDF. Moreover, the government shutdown in October and November threatened services for low-income households, including SNAP and Head Start. As a result, families that are already vulnerable to cuts to social services will be deeply affected.

“They’re not going to have access to health insurance, they’re not going to have access to food, and now are going to have a challenging time accessing childcare. It’s going to be multiple hits to families who already are in a position where they need support,” said Schmit. “I see this as, on the whole … something that’s really aiming to undermine the needs of families with low incomes in this country.”

Trump Is Making Me Miss the Neocons - 2026-01-08T11:00:00Z

If you doubt neoconservatism is dead, take note of how little attention not only President Donald Trump but even the American press is giving Edmundo González. González won Venezuela’s 2024 presidential election. Now exiled to Spain, he’s ready for his close-up. But if the bookers at CNN and Fox News and MS NOW have been calling, I can find no video evidence. The poor guy is devolving, right before our eyes, into a trivia question.

It’s enough to prompt nostalgia for—God help me—President George W. Bush’s “commitment to the global expansion of democracy,” a central pillar of what became known as the Bush Doctrine. Not that I ever fancied these principles as Dubya or the neocon hawks whispering in his ear applied them, but at least they demonstrated a proper regard for democratic governance.

To jog your memory: The anti-Chavismo Plataforma Unitaria Democrática party, or PUD, chose González after President Nicolás Maduro barred the Nobel Peace Prize laureate María Corina Machado from running for president. There’s no doubt that González won the election—The Washington Post calculated that he got twice as many votes as Maduro—but Maduro, in a maneuver one worries Trump may someday emulate, claimed victory and refused to leave office. The United States, the European Parliament, and various other countries recognized González as the rightful winner. Since the invasion, Machado and French President Emmanuel Macron urged that González be installed as president.

González himself posted a video online Sunday saying, “As the president of Venezuela, I call on the security establishment to enforce the mandate that the people elected on July 28, 2024.” Hardly anybody covered this; I learned about it from reading The Jerusalem Post. (There was also, I later learned, a five-paragraph squib in The Wall Street Journal.) Is that any way to treat Venezuela’s rightful president?

To the limited extent American reporters ask why Maduro’s (and Hugo Chavez’s) Partido Socialista Unido de Venezuela party, or PSUV, remains in power after Trump’s invasion and removal of their standard-bearer, it’s to suggest that Venezuela’s president should be Machado—who, yes, probably would have won the presidency had Maduro let her run. Still, she was not the victor.

The problem is not only an American president who can’t be bothered to justify an oil-motivated invasion by paying lip service to the promotion of democracy, but a press corps that no longer expects democracy to matter in the conduct of American foreign policy. That expectation was killed by the Iraq War, in which, as I noted yesterday, the price of deposing a dictator and establishing some semblance of democracy was 9,000 American lives and $3 trillion. Still, it’s one thing to understand that expanding democracy abroad isn’t worth paying that price (especially when the war is really about oil). It’s quite another to believe democracy is never worth paying any price or bearing any burden, even when these are pretty close to zero, as seems the case in Venezuela.

The Washington Post reported Sunday that Trump vetoed Machado as president because he’s annoyed she accepted a Nobel Peace Prize that he believes he should have won. (On Monday, Machado offered to give him the medal.) But Trump’s lunatic grudge doesn’t apply to González. Apparently, Trump threw his support to Maduro’s vice president, Delcy Rodríguez, because the CIA told him only Rodríguez, Interior Minister Diosdado Cabello, and Defense Minister Vladimir Padrino could maintain order. Never mind that Cabello and Padrino were indicted alongside Maduro for drug offenses (and presumably will continue to commit them as Trump allows them to consolidate power).

How’s this for references: The New York Times calls Cabello “the face of the country’s repression apparatus.” Padrino is Venezuela’s top military official; his parents named him after Vladimir Lenin, according to The Wall Street Journal, and, after an infantry training trip years ago to Fort Benning, Padrino said he’d witnessed “the monster in its entrails.” Did I mention the State Department is still offering a $25 million reward for Cabello’s capture and a $15 million reward for Padrino’s?

We’re a long way from the justification (if you prefer, posturing) that shipped our troops to Iraq. “We need to strengthen our ties to democratic allies and to challenge regimes hostile to our interests and values,” said the 1997 manifesto for the Project for a New American Century, a neoconservative group that guided Dubya’s Iraq strategy. That word “challenge” ended up doing a lot more work than perhaps even the signatories anticipated. But the overall sentiment was hard to argue with. “Lasting peace is gained as justice and democracy advance,” Dubya said in November 2003. “We will raise up an ideal of democracy in every part of the world.” Wouldn’t it be nice to hear an American president say that now?

I don’t want to take this argument too far. As Peter Steinfels pointed out in his classic 1979 book, The Neoconservatives, the neocons’ idealism about promoting democracy abroad accompanied a certain wariness of it at home. Answering Al Smith’s dictum that “the only cure for the evils of democracy is more democracy,” Samuel Huntington wrote in 1976 that “applying that cure at the present time could well be adding fuel to the flames.” As for Bush, Trump’s electoral strategy of disenfranchisement through bogus voter-fraud claims was born in Bush’s White House. The Bush Doctrine that sang the praises of democracy less attractively rejected multilateralism (more Trumpism avant la lettre) and rationalized pre-emptive military attacks.

But Trump doesn’t even pretend to care about democratic values—he flamboyantly abjures them. As TNR’s Michael Tomasky observed earlier this week, Trump is affirmatively against “the idea that America’s military might needs to be tethered to some positive-sum goal that positions the United States as a force that fosters global security and Western democracy.… War is fine, provided it’s just about what everything is, to him, really all about: raw power in the service of plunder and conquest.” Even when Trump takes the legalistic high ground that this intervention was merely a police action to arrest an indicted drug criminal, consider that when President George H.W. Bush claimed the same thing in Panama about Manuel Noriega he made sure that Guillermo Endara, whose ascent to the presidency Noriega had blocked, got sworn in on the day of the invasion. Poppy Bush’s invasion defied domestic and international law just as much as Trump’s, but Panama has been a democracy ever since. Venezuela will remain a dictatorship.

Were neoconservative sermons about advancing democratic ideals abroad inconsistent when applied to foreign nations? Certainly. But at least they acknowledged some need (most famously in Jeane Kirkpatrick’s essay “Dictatorships and Double Standards”) to justify these inconsistencies. For all its many faults, there was an idealistic strain to neoconservatism, and an intellectual rigor that made it somewhat accountable to respectful counterargument. I find myself sorely missing these things now. I bet González does, too.

Netanyahu Is Trying to Drag Trump Into Changing Another Regime: Iran’s - 2026-01-08T11:00:00Z

There are growing signs that Benjamin Netanyahu is deliberately seeking an escalation between Israel and Iran and preparing for another round of war. Iran’s precision-missile testing and missile production are the pretext, and widespread protests taking place in Iranian cities have rekindled Netanyahu’s grand delusions of precipitating regime change in Iran.

More importantly, there are increasing indications that he is trying to manipulate President Trump into joining such an adventure. Trump, infatuated with his abduction of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and believing that he has already effected a regime change in Caracas (even though the Maduro regime is technically still in power, but never mind that), sounds amenable to Netanyahu’s antics, and not for the first time. Netanyahu was critical in persuading Trump to unilaterally withdraw from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, or JCPOA, (the Iran nuclear deal) in May 2018. It’s Obama’s deal, Netanyahu told Trump. You can do much better, he argued, catering to the ultimate dealmaker’s ego. This was based on the false premise and reckless promise that Iran would collapse economically and beg for a new and improved nuclear deal that would also cover long-range ballistic missiles. French President Emmanuel Macron warned Trump to no avail that this was unlikely. Eight years later, it still hasn’t happened.

Then, in June 2025, Netanyahu persuaded Trump to join a risk-free (for the United States) attack on Iran. In exchange, the prime minister said, Israel would end the war in Gaza. A gullible and ill-informed Trump agreed, the U.S. attacked, but the Gaza war did not end until September, and arguably until ever, so far.

Now Netanyahu is at it again, and Trump is as malleable as ever. In their meeting on December 30, 2025, at Mar-a-Lago, Trump threatened Iran with military action with a grinning Netanyahu next to him. Trump upped the ante, declaring that if Iran continues with its missile development and tests, the U.S. will respond. Two days later, on January 1, he said, “If they [Iran] start killing people like they have in the past, I think they’re gonna get hit very hard by the U.S.” He repeated the threat on January 3 after the abduction of Nicolás Maduro, speaking to reporters on Air Force One.

But that wasn’t all. He threatened Venezuela, saying, “If they don’t behave, we’ll do a second strike,” after boasting, “We’re in charge … we’re gonna run it,” a statement contradicted the next day by Secretary of State Marco Rubio. Trump concluded his tour d’horizon of the Western hemisphere by noting that Cuba “is ready to fall” and Colombia should be careful. Intoxicated by his own Kool-Aid concoction, Trump rambled on about how “we need Greenland from a national security situation.”

These Ramboesque statements were interpreted by Netanyahu as signs that Trump is willing to entertain another strike at Iran. Nothing for you to lose, Netanyahu likely told Trump; Iran is the worst actor in the world today, and moving against it would bring no adverse consequences for the U.S. Furthermore, he was probably planting in Trump’s head the idea that a regime change in Iran would be his lasting legacy and contribution to world peace. The Nobel Peace Prize Committee is a bunch of European wusses who would never appreciate what you’ve done for the world. But there’s always the FIFA Peace Prize.

In April and again in October 2024, in the midst of the war in Gaza, Israel and Iran exchanged a kinetic ping-pong of missiles, drones, and interceptions. It was more a display of capabilities than a full-scale war, but that didn’t prevent Netanyahu from spuriously explaining the exchanges in terms of “an existential war fought on seven fronts for the survival of Israel.” Netanyahu, for whom confronting and eventually defeating Iran and “Islamo-fascism” was always the defining principle and raison d’etre of his political career, was intent on escalating and expanding the war in Gaza. He did it in Lebanon, Syria, Yemen, and then directly with Iran.

The rationale underlining a direct clash with Iran had and still has two overarching reasons: political and geopolitical. Politically, for the man responsible for the October 7, 2023, debacle and solely accountable for the unfathomable and tragically cynical policy of paying off Hamas to avoid having to deal with the Palestinian Authority—the worst catastrophe in Israel’s history—prolonging the war in order to distance himself from the calamity made sense. Turning the disaster with Hamas into a strategic triumph over Iran would, in his mind, erase the disgrace of being the prime minister on October 7, who (to this day) refuses to be held accountable.

Geopolitically, particularly after the successful military degrading of Hezbollah and the fall of the Assad regime in Syria in December 2024, Netanyahu began entertaining delusions of remaking the Middle East and transforming Israel’s strategic landscape. Once the war in Gaza failed to reach a decisive end, Netanyahu resolved to attack Iran. But for that, he needed U.S support. By June 2025, he had successfully convinced Trump that using American GBU-57 Massive Ordnance Penetrator bombs, a.k.a. “bunker busters,” which Israel does not have, and Tomahawk cruise missiles would decapitate Iran for good. Both Trump and Netanyahu exaltedly proclaimed that Iran’s nuclear capabilities were “obliterated.” That wasn’t factually true, and Netanyahu knew it, but he concluded that there would be another round.

Then came Venezuela; and now, the opportunity has presented itself again.

Threats and saber-rattling have a built-in, self-fulfilling, escalatory dynamic. Netanyahu knows and embraces that. The hypothetical sequence is clear: First, you get a public commitment from Trump to not rule out a military strike. Then you present “new and alarming intelligence” that Iran is testing precise ballistic missiles and is planning to deflect internal strife onto a war with Israel. Next, you claim that we have actionable intelligence data on the whereabouts of over 400 kg of enriched uranium (60 percent) that went missing after the U.S.-Israeli strikes in June 2025.

Meanwhile, there are reports that Iran is rearming Hezbollah, and in fact, it has done so—with the help of Venezuela. Israel then target-assassinates an Iranian nuclear or rocket scientist, or an Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps senior officer in Beirut or Damascus. Iran retaliates, which provokes an Israeli self-defense reprisal on Iranian missile production sites, taking advantage of Israel’s air-space superiority. An Iranian missile response is then met with a U.S. response.

Is this a feasible scenario? In Netanyahu’s mind, yes. But it remains very unclear if Trump will actually join such an escapade. He has opposition in his own administration to such a policy, with Iran sitting well beyond the Western hemisphere and posing no tangible threat to the U.S. 

Both Trump and Netanyahu have been heralded in the past, even by critics, as being war-averse, cautious, and circumspect when it comes to military action. On major issues, Netanyahu was fundamentally an indecision-maker, always hesitant to employ military means and preferring to kick cans down the road. Trump ceremoniously declared that he was elected to avoid “forever wars” and entanglements.

Now look at the both of them. Intoxicated by the immediate gratifications of ostensibly risk-free military adventures, neither even makes a pro-forma effort to align military means with political objectives, and neither is concerned in the slightest with the consequences. Soon, both may find out that chaos and machtpolitik, like karma, is a bitch.

The Real “Donroe Doctrine”: Spectacular, Made-for-TV Violence - 2026-01-08T11:00:00Z

In the five days since the U.S. kidnapped Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and began to “run” the country—an operation that President Trump said heralded a new “Donroe Doctrine”—Trump and his administration have threatened to attack, invade, or fully colonize four countries: Cuba, Colombia, Mexico, and Greenland. If you extend the timeframe to a week, you could add Iran to the list. If you pull back a full year, it would include Canada, America’s northern neighbor—and arguably closest ally.

Greenland, which is a Danish territory—and therefore protected by the NATO alliance—seems most at risk. Trump has made seizing the resource-rich country in the north Atlantic a priority since the start of his second term. “The United States should have Greenland as part of the United States. There’s no need to even think or talk about this in the context that you’re asking, of a military operation,” White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller told CNN’s Jake Tapper on Monday. “Nobody’s going to fight the United States militarily over the future of Greenland.” The threat seems serious: An official statement from the administration said it wasn’t ruling out “military action” to acquire the island, even though doing so would instantly dissolve NATO and risk war with America’s European allies.

There is some strategic coherence to the administration’s belligerent approach to foreign policy. It suggests a reorientation to American interests in the Western hemisphere, a general pullback from Europe and the NATO alliance, and a return to great power politics—a world dominated by the strategic “interests” of the United States, China, and, to a lesser extent, Russia. But the belligerence itself increasingly seems to be the point, an end in and of itself.

A day after Maduro’s kidnapping, Trump told The Atlantic’s Michael Scherer that he’s ready to do the whole thing again. He claimed that he told the acting Venezuelan leader, Delcy Rodríguez, that “if she doesn’t do what’s right, she is going to pay a very big price, probably bigger than Maduro.” It’s a striking posture from a president who first came to power by denouncing the post-9/11 regime-change wars and who spent most of the past year campaigning for the Nobel Peace Prize. But it’s a revealing one, as well. Trump and his closest allies in the administration believe that they can achieve their goals—to rule their hemisphere, and whatever parts of the world they feel like—via spectacular acts of violence that somehow stop short of full-scale war.

As the reporter Michael Weiss observed shortly after Maduro’s kidnapping, Trump has long thought of American military power as a kind of spectacle. And he has embraced daring one-off attacks since the beginning of his presidency, starting with the decision to drop the “Mother of All Bombs” on Afghanistan early in his first term. The assassination of Maj. Gen. Qassem Soleimani, the commander of Iran’s Quds Force—which Trump ordered exactly six years before Maduro’s kidnapping—marked a transition to riskier and more dramatic acts. Trump appears convinced that he can now commit brazen acts of violence abroad with no political, geopolitical, or military repercussions.

Trump’s increasingly bellicose deployment of the American military and his expressed isolationist “America First” agenda are often depicted as being contradictory or hypocritical, but I think that misses the point. First, as with Trump’s insistence that the U.S. should have “taken the oil” during the Iraq War, his larger theory of American power is that it should be used in short, destructive bursts that achieve (often stupid or pointless) strategic objectives—like taking the oil. Second, his larger theory of international relations is that whatever country has the more powerful military should basically be allowed to do whatever it wants. One of his main criticisms of American foreign policy is that U.S. power is often used on behalf of the interests of other countries—which is significantly different from saying it shouldn’t be used at all.

Trump’s use of the American military has grown bolder, which is partly a reflection of the minimal response it has received from its victims, like Iran and now Venezuela, and partly of the fact that, unlike during much of his first term, he is now surrounded by cronies who have successfully purged what he referred to as the “Deep State” during his first term. But, as I wrote earlier this week, it also points to a growing symbiosis between the Republican Party’s MAGA wing and more interventionist friendly figures, many of whom, like Secretary of State Marco Rubio, predate Trump and his political movement.

Guiding all of it is Trump’s steadfast belief that the United States can engage in destructive and (for him, at least) thrilling military operations that are designed to compel adversaries to do what we want via intimidation, terror, and violence. There is a belief that America’s tactical military superiority can achieve strategic ends in and of itself. But the strategic ends themselves are, in every case, fuzzy and dangerously optimistic—there is no consideration of worst-case scenarios or, for that matter, long-term interests.

In Venezuela, for instance, there seems to be no plan whatsoever. Yes, U.S. special forces conducted a remarkable operation, but it was one that removed the leader of the nation and kept in place everyone else in power. The plan right now appears to be to threaten the current leader and get her to do what Trump wants. If she doesn’t, we’ll do something “worse.” But what then? No one seems to know.

What’s most disturbing—if you discount all of the death and illegality, I suppose—is the larger sense that Trump increasingly understands that there are no consequences for invading and destabilizing other nations. Not only that, he sees them as powerful tools in U.S. foreign policy. Deploying the military is good, in his mind, because it achieves the most important objective of them all, which is reminding the rest of the world that we are strong and they are weak. As Trump grows weaker domestically and as the economy continues to sputter, military adventurism will grow even more attractive.

But it’s also clearly attractive to Trump in and of itself. The president is 79 years old, and when he appeared before reporters on Saturday morning, he was clearly—and understandably—a little sleepy. He had, after all, stayed up late the previous night watching a live feed of the U.S. raid in Caracas. But even before that press conference, Trump had called in to Fox News—and his demeanor was decidedly more upbeat.

“I’ve never seen anything like this,” he gushed to host and longtime ally Maria Bartiromo. “I was able to watch it in real time,” he said. “I watched it, literally, like I was watching a television show. And if you would have seen the speed, the violence.

“It was just amazing,” he continued. “[Maduro] was in a fortress. It had steel doors, it had what they call a safety space where it’s solid steel all around. He didn’t get that space closed, he was trying to get into it, but he got bum-rushed so fast that he didn’t get into that. We were prepared with massive blowtorches to get through the steel, but we didn’t need them.”

To Trump, who is famously a TV addict, this raid was very good TV. And he was the director.

That may be the ultimate driver of last weekend’s events. The president—or, more accurately, his advisers—can claim all they want that the Venezuelan invasion is an expression of something called the Donroe Doctrine. But there is no real coherence to Trump’s foreign policy and no justification for the violence he’s unleashing. What is much clearer is that Trump really likes unleashing that violence. That’s why America might invade Greenland, destroy NATO, abandon Ukraine to Russia, or even spark a regional war in the Middle East by striking Iran. Yes, this would cause chaos and devastation, and quite possibly a lot of death. But to our nitwit-in-chief, it would be a gripping show.

Trump’s ICE Agents Killed a Citizen. Then Damning New Details Emerged. - 2026-01-08T10:00:00Z

On Wednesday, an ICE agent killed a woman in her vehicle on the streets of Minneapolis. She was reportedly a U.S. citizen. But then President Trump and Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem made their own conduct even more damning by blaming the victim and insisting the officer acted out of legitimate self-defense. The video Trump posted didn’t come close to supporting his claims. Other videos strongly suggested the officer wasn’t at all in a life-threatening situation and that lethal force was in no way justified, and Minnesota officials vehemently backed that up. DHS officials then leaked that the agent had violated use-of-force protocol. We talked to New Republic contributing editor Felipe De La Hoz, who writes well about ICE accountability. We discuss the government’s collapsing cover story, how this saga sheds light on ICE’s worsening lawlessness, and what needs to happen to rein in this rogue agency. Listen to this episode here. A transcript is here.

RFK Jr. Conveniently Forgets to Tell Key Group About Vaccine Overhaul - 2026-01-07T21:32:49Z

The health secretary neglected to inform a critical group of individuals when he decided to overhaul the child vaccination schedule: his own staffers at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Vaccine experts at the agency were “blindsided” by Robert F. Kennedy Jr’.s brisk efforts Monday to radically narrow the parameters for which vaccines the government would recommend for children, current and former CDC staff told The Washington Post.

That revamp included stripping recommendations for immunizations against influenza, rotavirus, hepatitis A, and meningococcal diseases that result in meningitis. Instead, those vaccines will only be recommended to children considered at “high risk” of contracting the illness or if a doctor recommends it.

The decision was not informed by emerging scientific evidence and did not undergo a typical review process, but nonetheless went into effect immediately.

“The abrupt replacement of the immunization schedule by one designed for another context and healthcare system has been done with no scientific justification,” Demetre Daskalakis, a former director of the agency’s center on immunization and respiratory diseases, told the Post.

Private and federal health insurance plans have signaled that they would continue to cover the cost of childhood vaccines through 2026, though several major insurers did not elaborate on how they would manage the Health Department’s shifting guidance in subsequent years.

Prior to Kennedy’s meddling, the schedule included 17 immunizations that were universally recommended for all children. The new schedule shrinks that pool to 11 vaccines.

Top officials within the Department of Health and Human Services released a memo regarding the changes Monday, declaring that the switch-up was in no small part due to public mistrust of vaccines and national public health initiatives in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Kennedy, a virulent vaccine skeptic, told the American public before he was confirmed that he would not let his personal feelings about immunizations shape the nation’s public health policy. In an April interview with CBS News, Kennedy reaffirmed that he was “not going to take people’s vaccines away from them.”

But that’s exactly what he’s done.

Since Kennedy took the reins at HHS, he has replaced independent medical experts on the CDC’s vaccine advisory panel with a hodgepodge of vaccine skeptics. He warned against the use of the MMR vaccine during Texas’s historic measles outbreak, recommending that suffering patients instead take vitamins. And he founded his new directive for America’s health policy—the “Make America Healthy Again” report—on studies generated by AI that never existed in the real world.

The 71-year-old has a lot to gain from pushing disinformation about the jab: The more doubt and division that Kennedy sows, the more money he’ll make. Ahead of his appointment, Kennedy disclosed that he made roughly $10 million in 2024 from speaking fees and dividends from his vaccine lawsuits. He’s also made cash from merchandising handled by his nonprofit, Children’s Health Defense, which bungled its response to a 2019 measles outbreak in Samoa so badly that it resulted in the deaths of at least 83 people, the majority of whom were children under the age of 5.

As a reminder: Since their invention, vaccines have proven to be one of the greatest accomplishments of modern medicine. The medical shots are so effective at preventing illness that they have effectively eradicated some of the worst diseases from our collective culture, from rabies to polio and smallpox—a fact that has possibly fooled some into believing that the viruses and their complications aren’t a significant threat to the average, health-conscious individual.

Meanwhile, Kennedy is running DHS with practically zero relevant experience. He has not worked in medicine, public health, or the government—instead, he is guided only by a pocketful of conspiracies that America’s foremost health experts have already thoroughly debunked.

Trump Responds to Minnesota ICE Shooting—and Makes It Way Worse - 2026-01-07T21:11:02Z

President Donald Trump was desperate Wednesday to justify a federal immigration officer shooting a U.S. citizen multiple times—but video footage of the incident showed just how indefensible it really was.

In a post on Truth Social, Trump shared a “horrible” news clip that showed a federal immigration officer shooting a driver who’d blocked traffic on a suburban street in Minneapolis, Minnesota. The video, taken from a distance, was slowed down to isolate the sound of three gunshots, audible above a witness screaming, “No!”

“The woman screaming was, obviously, a professional agitator, and the woman driving the car was very disorderly, obstructing and resisting, who then violently, willfully, and viciously ran over the ICE Officer, who seems to have shot her in self defense,” Trump wrote.

“Based on the attached clip, it is hard to believe he is alive, but is now recovering in the hospital,” he wrote, referring to the officer. The video Trump shared, however, does not appear to show anyone being hit by the victim’s car, and the federal officers are not visible.

Another video taken from a closer angle showed the officer who fired his weapon standing, seemingly completely unharmed as the car initially drove away. A photograph of the officer showed him feet away from the car when he fired. It is not hard to believe that the officer is still alive; it’s not entirely clear that he was ever in danger. The driver, however, a U.S. citizen and apparent legal observer, is reportedly deceased, though the president did not bother to mention it.

“The situation is being studied, in its entirety, but the reason these incidents are happening is because the Radical Left is threatening, assaulting, and targeting our Law Enforcement Officers and ICE Agents on a daily basis,” Trump wrote. “They are just trying to do the job of MAKING AMERICA SAFE. We need to stand by and protect our Law Enforcement Officers from this Radical Left Movement of Violence and Hate!”

Members of the Trump administration have already leapt to declare the shooting as a thwarted attempt at “domestic terrorism.”

ICE Barbie Pushes Unhinged Defense for Minnesota ICE Shooting - 2026-01-07T20:37:11Z

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem had a baffling excuse Wednesday for a federal agent shooting a U.S. citizen protesting an ICE operation in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

Speaking from Brownsville, Texas, Noem claimed that the officer had been responding to “an act of domestic terrorism.”

The secretary claimed that the victim had “attacked” a group of federal officers whose vehicle was stuck in the snow, attempting to “run them over and ram them with her vehicle.” An officer had “defensively shot to protect himself and the people around him” and killed the woman, Noem said.

Witnesses reported seeing something entirely different.

Emily Heller, a Minneapolis resident, claimed that the woman had been blocking traffic with her car as part of the protest earlier Wednesday. When the woman tried to turn her car around, an ICE agent standing in front of her car leaned over the hood and shot her in the face at least three times.

Another resident, Aidan Perzana, told Fox9 that he’d seen three ICE agents attempt to detain the driver. When the vehicle suddenly reversed and then pulled away from the officers, one of the agents shot through the driver’s side window three times.

Minnesota Representative Ilhan Omar indicated that the deceased victim was not only a U.S. citizen, but a legal observer.

A video of the incident appeared to show that the woman’s car did not move toward the ICE officers, but away from them.

Despite these stories, it seems that the Trump administration intends to run with its claim that the victim was a so-called “domestic terrorist.”

White House deputy Chief of Staff Stephen Miller also claimed that the victim had committed a federal crime. “Democrats continue to lend aid and comfort to domestic terrorism,” Miller wrote on X, responding to Minnesota Senator Tina Smith’s plea for ICE to leave Minneapolis following the incident.

Assistant DHS Secretary Tricia McLaughlin, who has spent the last several months spinning blatant lies about immigration officers’ violent interactions with civilians, described the victim as a “violent rioter” who was attempting to kill the federal agents.

“This is the direct consequence of constant attacks and demonization of our officers by sanctuary politicians who fuel and encourage rampant assaults on our law enforcement,” McLaughlin wrote on X.

Karoline Leavitt Flails Trying to Explain Why Trump Needs Greenland - 2026-01-07T19:16:04Z

Even the White House press secretary can’t seem to defend Donald Trump’s incessant warmongering.

Karoline Leavitt couldn’t muster a logical explanation for the president’s escalating fixation on Greenland during a press conference Wednesday, vaguely suggesting that acquiring the Danish-controlled territory would be beneficial for national security purposes.

“I’m curious if you could just spell out for the American public what specifically would the U.S. gain by taking control of Greenland that the U.S. doesn’t already have access to right now?” asked a reporter, highlighting myriad existing treaties that effectively give the United States unfettered access to Greenland as a military base.

“Um—more control over the Arctic region,” Leavitt stuttered. “And ensuring that China and Russia and our adversaries cannot continue their aggression in this very important and strategic region. And there would be many other benefits as well that, again, the president and his national security team are currently talking about.”

In the immediate aftermath of Trump’s bombardment of Venezuela for oil, America’s European allies have weighed whether the U.S. president’s jabs at annexing Greenland—another major international oil resource—actually carried weight. Of particular concern were repeat comments made by the president in which Trump declared he would use “military force” to secure the Arctic island for U.S. interests.

Fears about Trump’s militaristic dreams for Greenland were, in part, rejuvenated by Leavitt herself during the same press briefing, when she refused to rule out the possibility of using U.S. troops to seize the island.

“Past presidents and past leaders have often ruled things out, they’ve often been very open about ruling things in and basically broadcasting their foreign policy strategy to the rest of the world. Not just to our allies but, most egregiously, to our adversaries,” Leavitt said. “That’s not something our president does.

“But I will just say that the president’s first option, always, has been diplomacy,” Leavitt continued, before pointing her finger to the situation in Venezuela. “And look at what happened.”

Witnesses: ICE Just Shot a Woman in the Face Multiple Times - 2026-01-07T18:21:39Z

Federal agents shot a woman in the face multiple times in Minneapolis on Wednesday, according to witness statements reported by MPR News.

Resident Emily Heller told MPR she woke up to loud noise outside of her home, and saw a car blocking traffic as part of a protest against the 2,000 law enforcement officers that have recently descended upon the Twin Cities.

“She was trying to turn around, and the ICE agent was in front of her car, and he pulled out a gun and put it right in—like, his midriff was on her bumper—and he reached across the hood of the car and shot her in the face like three, four times,” said Heller, going on to say that the woman then drove forward for about 100 feet before running into a utility pole. She was seen unresponsive in the vehicle. Her status is unknown at this time. 

“I am aware of a shooting involving an ICE agent at 34th Street & Portland. The presence of federal immigration enforcement agents is causing chaos in our city,” Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey wrote on X shortly after the shooting. “We’re demanding ICE to leave the city immediately. We stand rock solid with our immigrant and refugee communities.” In a press conference held Wednesday afternoon Frey told ICE to “get the fuck out of Minneapolis.” 

DHS Secretary Kristi Noem insisted that the shooting was justified and that the victim was a “domestic terrorist” who endangered officers’ lives. Videos of the incident that have circulated on social media suggest that was not the case—which Frey also noted in his first public remarks about the shooting. 

ICE is indistinguishable from an independent hired militia, and has been for some time. More information about the shooting will come as the situation develops.  

This piece has been updated. 

RFK Jr. Parrots Pete Hegseth, Says America Is Too Fat for War - 2026-01-07T18:10:51Z

It seems like Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr is using his new food pyramid to make sure we don’t have any fat troops in the military when China invades. 

“Seventy-seven percent of military-age Americans are ineligible for military service because of diet-related conditions,” RFK Jr. said during press secretary Karoline Leavitt’s MAHA-themed press briefing on Wednesday afternoon. The health secretary introduced a new “upside-down” food pyramid, in which he prioritized red meat and whole milk.  

 “If a foreign adversary sought to destroy the health of our children, to cripple our economy, to weaken our national security, there would be no better strategy than to addict us to ultra-processed foods.” 

This reeks of the same rhetoric Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has employed in past months, stating at his emergency military meeting in September that “it’s tiring to look out at combat formations, or really any formation, and see fat troops.… It’s a bad look. It is bad, and it’s not who we are.” 

Framing dietary health within the realm of military service and invasion—all while standing in front of a new, upside-down food pyramid—is emblematic of where this administration’s priorities lie.

Trump Team Unveils New Dietary Rules—But No Plan to Lower Food Costs - 2026-01-07T17:46:38Z

The great minds behind “Make America Healthy Again” just unveiled the product of a year’s work: an upside-down food pyramid and the slogan “Eat Real Food.” If only President Donald Trump would help people actually afford it.

During a White House press briefing Wednesday, Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. unveiled new dietary guidelines and a new food pyramid that looked eerily familiar. “It’s upside down, a lot of you will say,” Kennedy conceded to the press. “But it was actually upside down before, and we actually just righted it.”

The “new” diagram is essentially the same pyramid that many are familiar with, but flipped. Now grains occupy the pyramid’s point at the bottom of the image, while “vegetables and fruits” sit at the top, accompanied by “protein, dairy, and healthy fats.”

The original food pyramid was introduced by the U.S. Department of Agriculture in 1991, and was later replaced in 2011 by My Plate, a circle portioned into grains, protein, vegetables, fruits, and dairy. The government has never really pushed consuming “ultra-processed” foods or added sugar—but you wouldn’t know that based on Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins’s remarks.

“Federal incentives have promoted low-quality, highly processed foods and pharmaceutical interventions instead of prevention,” Rollins claimed Wednesday.

“Thankfully, the solution is simple and should be noncontroversial: Eat real food,” she continued. “This is the main message of the new dietary guidelines for Americans 2025 to 2030, which encourage households and schools to prioritize whole, nutrient-dense foods.”

Easier said than done. Despite Trump’s lifeless promises to lower the price of groceries, healthy whole foods still remain out of reach for average Americans.

For example, beef is currently 15 percent more expensive than it was this time last year, and experts say it will only get worse next year, an issue that may take years more to fix. That could prove problematic for the government’s recommendation to eat way more protein. While previous guidelines recommended a daily serving of 13 to 56 grams of protein, the new rules advise that protein consumption should be proportional to body weight. A 150-pound person should apparently eat between 81.6 and 109 grams a day, nearly twice as much as previously recommended.

Additionally, Trump’s disastrous tariffs and environmental factors have also taken turns making imported fruits and vegetables more expensive. A weakening job market, soaring inflation, and the rising costs of childcare and housing haven’t helped Americans at the checkout line, either. But the government wants Americans to “prioritize” oils with “essential fatty acids,” such as often-pricey beef tallow, a favorite among anti-vaxxers.

Rollins revealed that she and her team had been working on adjusting the government’s dietary guidelines “since almost day one.” Clearly, a year well spent.

We May Still Hear Everything Jack Smith Has on Trump - 2026-01-07T16:46:03Z

The American public may still have the opportunity to hear former special counsel Jack Smith’s case against Donald Trump.

Smith developed two cases against Trump: one into the MAGA leader’s alleged retention of classified documents after he left the White House in 2021, and another into Trump’s involvement in the January 6 riots. But both were dismissed after Trump won the 2024 election, on the basis of a long-standing Justice Department policy that prevents the prosecution of a sitting president.

The investigator was invited by Republican Representative Jim Jordan for a closed-door session before Congress last month, giving Smith a platform that top Democrats surprisingly claim was the most advantageous to eventually charge Trump.

“Yeah, well, I left that closed-door deposition of Jack Smith, and I said that Chairman Jordan’s decision to do it behind closed doors was the best decision he ever made in his life, because it was absolutely devastating for Donald Trump and for those who still want to try to pretend as if he wasn’t guilty of these things, he was clearly guilty of these things,” Democratic Representative Jamie Raskin told MS NOW on Tuesday.

Raskin went on to argue that Trump had not evaded his charges because of “any kind of innocence.”

“What’s allowed him to escape, you know, Houdini-like, is the Roberts court and the fact that he’s been able to manipulate the levers of power to keep himself going,” Raskin said. “I mean, if he put, you know, a fraction of that energy into trying to actually do something for the American people, we might be in a different position in America today.

“But the economy, the society are basically in ruins because of the guy,” he continued. “But he has been able to stay afloat, even as it’s overwhelmingly clear that he engaged in an attempt to defraud the United States, disrupt this federal proceeding, and massively violate the voting rights of all Americans by stealing an election. He wasn’t trying to stop election fraud. He was trying to commit election fraud for several months.”

Last week, Raskin told reporters that it would have been “devastating” for Trump if the public heard the extent of Smith’s testimony, which involved “schooling the Judiciary Committee on the professional responsibilities of a prosecutor and the ethical duties of a prosecutor.”

Trump Took a Break From Destabilizing the World to Talk Football - 2026-01-07T16:34:28Z

In the midst of rants about seizing Venezuelan oil and threatening to leave NATO, President Donald Trump gave a shout-out to one of his favorite supporters—recently fired Baltimore Ravens Head Coach John Harbaugh.

Harbaugh, who coached the Ravens for 18 years, was fired after a tumultuous season that ended in heartbreaking fashion—a missed field goal in the last seconds of a game against the rival Pittsburgh Steelers that sent the Ravens home packing, dashing any hopes of making the postseason, much less the Super Bowl.

While some see Harbaugh’s firing as a long time coming, President Trump surprisingly chimed in to defend him.

“HIRE JOHN HARBAUGH, FAST. HE, AND HIS BROTHER, ARE TOTAL WINNERS!!! President DJT,” he wrote in all caps.

While Trump might just be tapped in, it’s worth mentioning that Harbaugh had a friendly visit with the president at the White House this summer—something many fans brought up in jest when discussing what went wrong for the Ravens this season.

Last summer, Harbaugh, his brother Jim—the current head coach of the Los Angeles Chargers—and their mother made a trip to the White House, even as President Trump had described Baltimore as a disgusting, rat- and rodent-infested mess” where “no human being would want to live” back in 2019.

“It was amazing. It was awesome. And I promise you I root for our president,” Harbaugh said. “I want our president to be successful just like I want my quarterback to be successful and I want my team to be successful, and it was an amazing experience.”

If support for Trump is any indication, Jim’s Chargers might be in trouble this weekend against the Patriots.

Trump Suggests Insane New Motive for Invading Greenland - 2026-01-07T16:13:30Z

President Trump spent a large part of his Wednesday morning ranting on Truth Social, with one of those rants concerning how helpless NATO is without him, how he ended eight wars, and how he still deserves the Nobel Peace Prize—even though he swears he doesn’t really care.

“Remember, for all of those big NATO fans, they were at 2% GDP, and most weren’t paying their bills, UNTIL I CAME ALONG. The USA was, foolishly, paying for them! I, respectfully, got them to 5% GDP, AND THEY PAY, immediately,” he wrote. “Everyone said that couldn’t be done, but it could, because, beyond all else, they are all my friends. Without my involvement, Russia would have ALL OF UKRAINE right now.”

While this is par for the course for Trump—he’s been railing against NATO for years—this recent installment comes with Trump’s threatened military annexation of Greenland hanging overhead. That kind of escalation could end NATO as we know it, and our European allies are far from thrilled.

“I believe one should take the American president seriously when he says that he wants Greenland,” Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen said earlier this week. “But I will also make it clear that if the U.S. chooses to attack another NATO country militarily, then everything stops, including NATO and thus the security that has been established since the end of the Second World War.”

Trump could care less about this, as he’s more concerned with what NATO has done for him lately, and vice versa.

“Remember, also, I single-handedly ENDED 8 WARS, and Norway, a NATO Member, foolishly chose not to give me the Noble Peace Prize,” he continued, misspelling “Nobel” while repeating his “ended 8 wars” lie. “But that doesn’t matter! What does matter is that I saved Millions of Lives. RUSSIA AND CHINA HAVE ZERO FEAR OF NATO WITHOUT THE UNITED STATES, AND I DOUBT NATO WOULD BE THERE FOR US IF WE REALLY NEEDED THEM. EVERYONE IS LUCKY THAT I REBUILT OUR MILITARY IN MY FIRST TERM, AND CONTINUE TO DO SO. We will always be there for NATO, even if they won’t be there for us. The only Nation that China and Russia fear and respect is the DJT REBUILT U.S.A.”

Is Trump about to invade a country and destroy NATO all because he didn’t win the “Noble” Peace Prize? It sure seems like it.

Bari Weiss’s CBS Show Hypes up Marco Rubio With Weird AI Photos - 2026-01-07T15:57:32Z

As if there wasn’t enough news Tuesday, Tony Dokoupil spent a full minute of CBS Evening News that night “saluting” Secretary of State Marco Rubio for being the subject of online memes.

“Only in America: the many lives and many jobs of Marco Rubio,” Dokoupil said, closing out the second night of his already unfortunate run at the flagship program with a segment called “Marco Rubio’s ‘Moment.’” Who exactly said the secretary of state was having a “moment”? Dokoupil didn’t bother to say, but it quickly became clear.

“Whatever you think of his politics, you have to admit, it’s an impressive résumé. And now, AI memes have added to that portfolio—” Dokoupil continued, as a slideshow of differently outfitted Rubios glazed the screen.

But it’s not an “impressive résumé”—it’s a disgrace. One must assume that Rubio is not actually simultaneously serving as secretary of state, interim national security adviser, acting archivist at the National Archives and Records Administration, and most recently, “viceroy of Venezuela.” Rather, he is simply holding those titles while allowing organizations such as USAID, of which he is also acting administrator, to suffocate beneath him.

In any case, if your fluff piece about one of the president’s goons is enough to be reposted by the White House, then it’s not journalism—it’s a fancam.

“Marco Rubio, we salute you! You’re the ultimate Florida man,” Dokoupil concluded.

Meanwhile, Dokoupil only gave fewer than 20 seconds to discussing the fifth anniversary of the deadly January 6 riot at the U.S. Capitol, the first anniversary since Donald Trump pardoned more than 1,500 rioters. Dokoupil also dangerously bothsidesed the memorial, saying Trump accused Democrats of not preventing the attack while House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries “accused the president of quote, ‘whitewashing it.’” (Trump went so far as to publish an alternative history timeline on the White House website.)

Dokoupil was tapped by right-wing shill Bari Weiss to revamp the nightly broadcast. So far, his performance in the role is already aligning with Weiss’s journalistic North Star: staying on the Trump administration’s good side, and pulling the national discourse to an invented center that is both unrigorous and uninteresting.

The Jeffrey Epstein Scandal Should Never Stop Shocking Us (and Won’t) - 2026-01-07T15:32:07Z

The relentless pummeling of the internet by the Epstein files is making for a winter of vertigo. Nearly every day we’re reminded anew that the American ruling class is not just greedy and power-hungry but unspeakably depraved.

It’s miserable. And whatever reckless wag-the-dog distraction Attorney General Pam Bondi tries to stage with the coming show trial of the kidnapped leader of Venezuela, the Justice Department is still compelled by law to make the Epstein files public.

So we have a ways to go. In clear violation of the Epstein Files Transparency Act, which gave the Justice Department a December 19 deadline to release all the files, Bondi has published only 400,000 pages. Many references to Trump, her capo, have clearly been scrubbed.

All this slow-walking and redaction suggests just how much the lapdog DOJ is panicking about the old man’s innumerable Epstein ties. On Thursday, Bondi admitted there are some 5.2 million Epstein pages still to come.

Of course there are.

But what does any of this mean for those following along at home, trying to brook (or ignore) the gigabytes of putrid Trump-Epstein material now in the public domain?

Simply put: We’re way, way beyond the what-do-I-tell-my-kids-about-grab-’em-by-the-pussy part of the Trump proceedings. That was a decade ago: a veritable age of innocence. After 10 years of this corrupt felon and adjudicated rapist holding center stage in our politics, everyone knows who Donald Trump really is.

Mind you, there are credible suggestions in the files that Trump sexually abused and harassed teenagers (just as, of course, he abused many women, harassed teens, and was found by jury to have raped E. Jean Carroll). But that’s almost beside the point. He enabled and even attaboyed Epstein’s child rape enterprise, sending young Mar-a-Lago employees to the child rapist’s house to cater to his whims, according to The Wall Street Journal. “Of course he knew about the girls,” Epstein said of Trump, the man he called his closest friend.

So all this is obvious, but the country has developed a weird epistemology when it comes to Trump’s moral rot. Those who don’t like him greet new proof of his disgusting behavior with a kind of studied indifference; we’re close to despair and unshockable. Those who do like him call the proof in the files a Democrat hoax.

We’ve thus become submissive. That might be the saddest part. There’s not going to be a righteous special prosecutor this time, let alone a Twenty-Fifth Amendment play. Robert Mueller and Jack Smith have long since folded their tents. Investigative reporters appear exhausted by Epstein.

With no public defense of our dignity, the American people have been left alone to make what we will of the vile inhumanity being exposed in the files.

The major takeaway should never stop shocking us. America’s corporate elite have spent the last five decades living like feudal lords, convinced they were entitled to exploit the masses and molest women and children with abandon.

Noam Chomsky, one of Epstein’s most left-wing running buddies, inadvertently described the dynamic of his own cohort in 1990: “The cool observers—meaning us smart guys—it’s our task to impose necessary illusions and emotionally potent oversimplifications to keep these poor simpletons on course.”

Plenty of these “smart guys,” including Bill Clinton, Donald Trump, and Jean-Luc Brunel, the late French model scout, exploited women. But the Epstein clique’s exploitation expanded far beyond that. These men had designs on anyone who shopped in malls, studied in universities, voted in elections, had ambitions in the arts—all of us simpletons.

Examples abound in the files, many in unlikely places. If you liked Poetry in America, the PBS special, you were enjoying an Epstein joint that set out to feature his buddy and accused fellow child molester Woody Allen. According to the files, the production included Epstein’s bonding in 2013 with the director, Elisa New (Mrs. Larry Summers), over pedophilic romances, including that of “a man whose whole life is stamped forever by his impression of a young girl.” Epstein’s connection to PBS and poetry after his conviction as a sex offender just five years earlier certainly would have helped launder his reputation.

Above all, the Epstein elite—whether from their perch at Mar-a-Lago or Silicon Valley, Harvard or MIT, the White House or Buckingham Palace, the Lolita Express or Pedophile Island—licensed its members to gouge as many resources out of the simpletons as they pleased. They staked a claim to our bodies, our minds, our loved ones, and a country that was supposed to belong to the people. Trump “loved to fuck the wives of his best friends,” Epstein said in 2017. As Trump himself said about his grabbing habits, “When you’re a star they let you do it.”

But do they? The story of the Epstein circle’s extractive approach to the rest of us is a story not of seduction or consent, but of coercion and force. Epstein specifically licensed a grabby, monopolizing impulse in other men, priding himself on teaching nerds to mog. “He changed my life,” said Martin Nowak, a physicist and especially craven Epstein hanger-on. “Because of his support, I feel I can do anything I want.”

Larry Summers, the former treasury secretary and husband of Elisa New since 1995, turned to Epstein in 2018 for a pep talk on sexually pursuing a mentee. Epstein, in full manosphere style, urged Summers to see the young woman as fated to submit: “She’s doomed to be with you.”

For decades, Victoria’s Secret, overseen by Epstein’s star client and benefactor Les Wexner, conditioned the aesthetic of anyone who so much as visited a mall.

The look of hairless, skinny, undressed figures saturated visual fields, displacing the more mature hourglass forms of Playboy’s heyday. This skinny-child aesthetic happened to comport with Epstein’s perverse eugenics, which further informed the evopsych departments he lavishly underwrote. The exploitation thus hit the poor and privileged alike. While Epstein used the promise of Victoria’s Secret stardom to coerce underclass girls into sex, generations of overclass Ivy League students learned cartoonish ideas about rape being a male prerogative.

You can take all this from victims of the Epstein circle, or you can read the sinister files yourself. Sunlight in this case really does disinfect. But the reckoning will come one way or another. For decades, regular people ceded our time, treasure, and culture to the Epstein class and its systems, which were quite explicitly designed to exploit us.

This article has been updated.

Trump Says He Will Control the Money From the Venezuelan Oil He Stole - 2026-01-07T15:13:53Z

President Trump is overseeing the transfer of between 30 and 50 million barrels of Venezuelan oil into U.S. custody—making his true motives in the region all the more apparent.

Trump stated Wednesday evening on Truth Social that the “interim authorities” of Venezuela—likely referring to Venezuela’s acting leader, Delcy Rodríguez—were gifting him “High Quality, Sanctioned Oil.”

“This Oil will be sold at its Market Price, and that money will be controlled by me, as President of the United States of America, to ensure it is used to benefit the people of Venezuela and the United States!” he continued. “I have asked Energy Secretary Chris Wright to execute this plan, immediately. It will be taken by storage ships, and brought directly to unloading docks in the United States. Thank you for your attention to this matter!”

It seems that the Trump administration extrajudicially killed more than 100 fishermen off the Venezuelan coast, killed 80 people while bombing Caracas, and kidnapped President Nicolás Maduro and his wife in the middle of the night all to have even more control over oil that we’ve historically always gotten from them.

And his promise to “ensure [the oil] is used to benefit the people of Venezuela and the United States” is dubious at best.

This comes as Secretary Wright announced plans to control Venezuelan oil “indefinitely.”

Here’s How Long Trump Plans to Run Venezuela’s Oil Industry - 2026-01-07T15:02:37Z

The U.S. will never stop being involved in Venezuela’s oil production, according to Trump administration officials.

Washington will instead continue to oversee and sell Venezuelan oil “indefinitely,” Energy Secretary Chris Wright said Wednesday morning, even after U.S. officials finish selling off the Latin American country’s stockpiled oil reserves.

“Instead of the oil being blockaded, as it is right now, we’re gonna let the oil flow … to United States refineries and around the world to bring better oil supplies, but have those sales done by the U.S. government,” Wright said while speaking at Goldman Sachs’s Energy, CleanTech & Utilities Conference.

“We’re going to market the crude coming out of Venezuela, first this backed-up stored oil, and then indefinitely, going forward, we will sell the production that comes out of Venezuela into the marketplace,” he noted.

Wright added that the proceeds from the oil sales will go into “accounts controlled by the U.S. government” before supposedly flowing back to benefit the Venezuelan people.

Some of the cash is already on its way to the U.S. Trump announced Tuesday night that Wright would oversee the sale of some 50 million barrels of sanctioned Venezuelan oil, a sale that could be worth as much as $2.5 billion.

U.S. forces invaded Venezuela early Saturday, bombing its capital, Caracas, as nearly 200 American troops infiltrated the city to capture its 13-year ruler, Nicolás Maduro.

Donald Trump failed to notify Congress before the invasion but didn’t forget to tip off his friends at America’s biggest oil companies, which stand to gain the most from America’s newfound control over Venezuela’s oil supply—the largest in the world.

The invasion followed months of naval attacks and escalating rhetoric between the White House and Venezuela’s leadership, which saw the Trump administration repeatedly pin U.S. fentanyl deaths on Venezuelan drug cartels despite a resounding lack of evidence.

Venezuela nationalized its oil supply in 1976 but tightened its grip on the valuable resource during the 2000s under President Hugo Chávez, when the country stripped control and seized assets from several major oil companies, including ExxonMobil.

But a Trump-controlled Venezuela is not likely to be as hostile. Instead, Wright revealed Wednesday that he had already been in discussions with U.S. oil companies about their potential return to the Latin American nation. He emphasized, however, that returning Venezuela to pre-Chávez oil production levels would require “tens of millions of dollars and significant time.”

This story has been updated.

Trump’s Unlawful Attorney Ordered to Explain Why She’s Still There - 2026-01-07T14:28:38Z

A federal judge is demanding to know why Lindsey Halligan still thinks she’s U.S. attorney.

U.S. District Judge David Novak of Richmond—who was appointed by Donald Trump in 2019—filed an order late Tuesday, giving Halligan seven days to explain why she is lying about overseeing the legal matters of the Eastern District of Virginia.

“For these reasons, the Court hereby DIRECTS Ms. Halligan to file, within seven (7) days of the issuance of this Order, a pleading explaining the basis for Ms. Halligan’s identification of herself as the United States Attorney, notwithstanding [U.S. District Judge Cameron McGowan] Currie’s contrary ruling,” Novak wrote, referring to Currie’s November ruling that found that the Justice Department had violated the Constitution by appointing Halligan.

“She shall also set forth the reasons why this Court should not strike Ms. Halligan’s identification of herself as United States Attorney from the indictment in this matter,” Novak continued. “Ms. Halligan shall further explain why her identification does not constitute a false or misleading statement.”

Trump handpicked Halligan—a former White House aide with no prior prosecutorial experience—to replace the last attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia, Erik Siebert. Siebert was forced out when he refused to prosecute former FBI Director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James after he couldn’t find incriminating evidence against the pair.

Halligan was sworn into the powerful position in September. Ignoring protocol, the Trump loyalist moved full steam ahead on prosecutions under the banner of Trump’s approval for months, despite the fact that she was never confirmed by the Senate.

But Currie’s decision didn’t seem to matter one iota to Justice Department officials, who continued to sign Halligan’s name on criminal indictments even after she ruled that Halligan was unlawfully appointed as interim U.S. attorney.

In his own order, Novak suggested that Halligan could face disciplinary consequences for blatantly ignoring the law.

Trump Freaks Out After Pardon Recipient Doesn’t Immediately Grovel - 2026-01-07T14:19:39Z

Donald Trump just can’t seem to wrap his head around why Representative Henry Cuellar isn’t backing off his reelection bid after being pardoned by the president last month.

Writing on Truth Social Tuesday night, Trump unloaded two lengthy screeds targeting the Texas Democrat, whom he’d pardoned from charges of bribery, unlawful foreign influence, and money laundering.

The president gushed about Webb County Judge Tano Tijerina, his pick to win in November, before turning his attention to Cuellar’s “great act of disloyalty” of running again as a Democrat.

“The Democrats wanted to put him ‘away’ for the rest of his life and, likewise, the life of his wife,” Trump wrote. He claimed that if given the chance, he would save Cuellar from “Political Persecution” again, but said the Democrat was “not smart in what he did, not respected by his Party” and was “a person who truly deserves to be beaten badly in the upcoming Election.”

“Henry should not be allowed to serve in Congress again,” the president wrote.

In a second post, Trump revealed exactly why he’d pardoned Cuellar: The embattled Texas Democrat reminded the president of himself.

“Nobody knows Henry Cuellar better than Donald J. Trump,” the president wrote, noting: “He was a weak and incompetent version of me.” He explained that they were in agreement about bolstering border security and had both suffered “Political Weaponization” at the hands of the Democrats.

Trump included a letter from Cuellar’s two daughters Catherine and Christina, who speculated that their father’s disagreements with his party “may have contributed to how this case began.”

“I never assumed he would be running for Office again, and certainly not as a Democrat, who essentially destroyed his life even with the Pardon given,” Trump wrote, adding that “despite doing him by far the greatest favor of his life,” the president now had to challenge his bid for his seat.

The Donroe Doctrine Is a Scam - 2026-01-07T13:32:23Z

It’s been quite a busy few days for U.S. foreign policy. First was President Donald Trump’s brazenly illegal abduction of Venezuela’s head of state. Then Secretary of State Marco Rubio threatened to make good on his longtime dream of retaking Cuba, warning that the Cuban government is “in a lot of trouble.” And on Tuesday, Trump’s senior adviser on fascism (or whatever his title is), Stephen Miller, declared that Greenland belongs to the United States and that Trump could take the territory if he wanted. This “Donroe Doctrine,” as they’ve termed it, is based on a single principle: that, as Miller ranted Tuesday, the United States will henceforth “conduct ourselves as a superpower” by using our military “to secure our interests unapologetically in our hemisphere.”

Here’s the rub: When the Trump administration says “our interests,” they’re not talking about your or my interests, and they’re not talking about the nation’s interests. They’re talking about the interests of corporate elites. The Donroe Doctrine is a racket—nothing more and nothing less—designed to make the U.S. taxpayer underwrite resource imperialism for Trump’s billionaire buddies.

They don’t appear to be trying very hard to hide this reality. Trump has been pretty explicit that the Venezuelan takeover is not about freedom for Venezuelans. Asked whether he would demand the acting Venezuelan president offer amnesty to opposition figures or release political prisoners, Trump responded, “We haven’t gotten to that. Right now, what we want to do is fix up the oil.” The Venezuelan takeover is not about democracy. Asked about plans for “free and fair elections,” he responded, “Well, it depends.… We’re going to have to have big investments by the oil companies.” According to Trump, kidnapping Maduro wasn’t even about regime change. The new acting president of Venezuela, Delcy Rodríguez, was vice president under Maduro, so the regime running Venezuela today is identical minus one person. When Trump was asked, “What do you need from Delcy Rodríguez?” his singular response was: “Total access. We need access to the oil.”

So this gunboat diplomacy is about oil. But it’s not oil for American consumers. The U.S. is already the largest oil producer in the history of the world, and no country on earth exports more oil and refined oil products every day than we do. America’s domestic gasoline sales have essentially been flat for 20 years, so it’s a very safe bet that the U.S. refineries in Texas and Louisiana designed to process Venezuela’s expensive and dirty crude won’t be increasing domestic supplies. Rather, they will most likely convert that high-sulfur oil into finished oil products for export out of the U.S., which does nothing to lower prices at the pump for American consumers.

So who does stand to gain? The same people as usual: Trump’s billionaire buddies. In the case of Venezuela, these are the fossil fuel villains who are already poisoning our air and water and driving the increasingly catastrophic climate disasters that are destroying our homes, raising our property insurance rates, and threatening our future. That includes corporations like ExxonMobil, which has used the controversial investor-state dispute settlement system to claim $15 billion from the Venezuelan government, and ConocoPhillips, which has sought $30 billion via the investor-state dispute settlement system—claims Trump will likely use as a starting point for forced repayments to Big Oil. Both companies’ stocks, as well as Chevron’s, jumped following the Venezuela news on Monday.

It also includes billionaires like Trump megadonor Paul Singer, whose hedge fund Elliott Management last November acquired Citgo, the U.S.-based subsidiary of PVDSA, Venezuela’s state-run oil company. Citgo’s oil refineries stand to make huge profits from Venezuela’s heavy crude oil reserves, according to the executive director of refining and oil products at the Oil Price Information Service, or OPIS, who called this access “a game changer for U.S. Gulf Coast and West Coast refiners in terms of profitability.” Indeed, Trump has already launched that gravy train: On Tuesday, he announced that Venezuela would be “turning over” 30 to 50 million barrels of oil—he appeared to be referring to stock built up during the U.S. blockade—to be sold at “market price” in the U.S. And on Wednesday, Energy Secretary Chris Wright announced that the U.S. would control Venezuela’s oil “indefinitely.” So refineries like those owned by Singer are about to be handed a massive windfall, while Trump—who took to social media to write that “that money will be controlled by me, the President of the United States of America”—gets a new slush fund.

In short, the Venezuela takeover is, like most major endeavors across Trump’s business and political career, a scam. The precise sequence of events leading him to target Venezuela and Maduro is anyone’s guess—and doesn’t really matter in the grand scheme of things. The outcome is the important thing: Trump plans to use your and my tax dollars to guarantee the profits of the fossil fuel billionaires who bankrolled his campaign. Indeed, Trump just Tuesday confirmed that these companies should expect that “they’ll get reimbursed by us”—while, of course, keeping every penny of the returns.

We should expect the same approach to any future illegal land grabs by this administration. Should the Trump team proceed with its unhinged plan to annex Greenland next, the minerals and oil and gas reserves buried there will not be safeguarded for our collective national welfare; they’ll go to Trump’s billionaire friends, to be exploited in the most profitable ways available to them.

That is the real Donroe Doctrine. It’s not about pursuing U.S. interests—it’s about using the power and resources of the U.S. government to pursue the private interests of Trump’s oligarchic cronies. Of course, the former is bad enough. Using one’s military to, as Miller said, “secure our interests unapologetically in our hemisphere” is literally a description of the foreign policy of Mussolini and Hitler. But the Donroe Doctrine lacks even the fig leaf of supposedly doing all this for our shared national security and wealth.

The only good news is that there’s real political vulnerability to this scam. Nobody likes getting ripped off, and voters don’t want their tax dollars to finance the exploitation of other countries for the benefit of wealthy elites.

But Democrats need to actually say this. They need to explain why this rewarmed fascist nonsense is a terrible deal for the American taxpayers who’ll be subsidizing those billionaire profits.

Not everyone has gotten the memo on this point. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, the two most senior Democrats in the country, responded to Trump’s attack on Venezuela first by excoriating Maduro—which only serves to frame his ouster as a positive achievement—and then by complaining about how Trump did not consult Congress prior to taking military action. This is political malpractice. Maduro being a bad actor is irrelevant to this debate for multiple reasons, including that his entire regime is still in place. And nobody cares all that much about dry proceduralism.

It’s looking increasingly unlikely, this week, that Venezuela will be the final target of Trump’s imperial racketeering. So Democrats need to adopt a better message, fast. The Donroe Doctrine is a racket designed to cloak the greed of a small number of billionaires in the mantle of patriotic nationalism so that their profits can be insured by the public. Trump is putting up our treasure—and in the future, perhaps, our blood—to make the richest people in the world even richer, all while he continues to jack up our health insurance rates and cut programs that support working people. It’s evil, it’s toxic, and it’s Democrats’ job to make sure the American people understand that.

Transcript: Senator’s Harsh Takedown of Trump Hits Home: “Bone Spurs!” - 2026-01-07T12:47:22Z

The following is a lightly edited transcript of the January 7 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.

Last year, Senator Mark Kelly and five other Democrats posted a video with a stark message: Military service members and officials are not obliged to carry out illegal orders. This infuriated Donald Trump, and now Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is taking the extraordinary step of bringing disciplinary action against him as a retired Navy man. Mark Kelly offered a striking response to all this in a second video, which is about his own service and about Trump’s lack of it. It’s very powerful stuff. Here’s our question: What if Trump is giving illegal orders to the military? How do we make that part of the discussion? Today we’re working through all this with legal expert Leah Litman, who’s great at puncturing Trump’s lawlessness. Leah, nice to have you on.

Leah Litman: Great to be back.

Sargent: So Pete Hegseth tweeted that these proceedings have begun against Senator Mark Kelly, which are being brought because he’s still subject to military discipline. The procedure could result in his retirement rank getting reduced and a cut to his military pension. Hegseth called Kelly’s warning seditious, which is odd because Kelly was merely stating what the law says about illegal orders. Leah, can you walk us through what Hegseth is doing here and why it’s so wildly inappropriate?

Litman: Yeah, absolutely. So I guess just starting at a high level, it’s no accident that, of course, this administration would think it is illegal to tell people to comply with the law because that’s, at bottom, what Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth is doing.

What he is doing is attempting to leverage the power that the secretary of defense has over not just service members, but also retired service members, to punish Senator Kelly for his speech, for expressing the view that military officers don’t have to and indeed shouldn’t carry out illegal orders.

So under the Uniform Code of Military Justice, the secretary of defense does have power over former service members, but there are real questions about whether Secretary of Defense Hegseth has identified a violation of any law. And second, even if he has, I think Senator Kelly would have very solid First Amendment defenses as well as legislative immunity defenses.

Sargent: Yeah, I think it’s clear that the real reason Trump and Hegseth are in a rage about this is because Kelly is telling people to follow the law.

Litman: Right. Which they don’t want people to do because we have seen so many of their unlawful military escapades. Of course, we are all living through the aftermath of their invasion and capture of a leader of a foreign state.

We have also been living through for the last several months their unlawful summary executions in the Caribbean as well as in the Pacific. So we know they want to order the military to do illegal things. So, of course, they have a problem with people pointing out that military members shouldn’t do that.

Sargent: Yeah, that is very obviously a problem for them. So Mark Kelly did this video, which was a response to this whole thing. I think we should listen to all of it. Here goes.

Mark Kelly (voiceover): I’ve got a question for you. How many generations of Donald Trump’s family have served in the military? Zero. Now for me and my family, service to our country is in my blood. My great grandfather served in the U.S. Navy after immigrating from Ireland. Both of my grandfathers served during World War II. Both of my parents wore uniforms: my dad, in the 82nd Airborne, and both of them as career police officers. And when it was our turn, my brother and I started as volunteer EMTs as teenagers before becoming Navy captains, pilots in the United States Navy, and NASA astronauts. Donald Trump, he deferred the draft five times because he had bone spurs! Look, not everyone has to serve in our military. I get that. But when you’re gonna question my patriotism and lecture me about duty to this country and threaten me with a court-martial, four generations of service to this country earns me the right to speak. Five deferments earns nothing.


Sargent: That’s striking stuff on any number of levels, but one thing that interests me about it is how it sounds like it’s again aimed at members of the military. He’s basically saying in a subtle way here: This commander in chief really doesn’t have your best interests at heart. What do you think of that?

Litman: I mean, I think that is a powerful reminder, because through so much of the first Trump administration and even in the lead-up to and the initial period of the second, we have been told that a major protection against the excesses of the administration would be other members of the federal executive branch who would be willing to adhere to their legal obligations, their constitutional duties, their moral obligations, even if the leaders of the administration wouldn’t do so.

And we did see some examples of that during the first Trump administration, whether it was individuals who were part of the executive branch refusing to go along with Trump’s allegations of voter fraud or whatnot. And I think Senator Kelly is appealing to that same duty, that same obligation, but for a group of people that he was a part of and is a retired service member. And he’s trying to appeal to their sense of duty, loyalty, and obligation that other people have felt and acted on.

Sargent: Yeah, and I think it’s really good to have Democrats talking this way. Don’t you? I mean, it’s really good for Democrats to be getting out there in a very kind of prominent sense and saying, you know, there are actual values and rules and laws that are worth standing up for here. And this guy is just trampling them regularly, including with this attack on Kelly.

Litman: Yes, exactly. I mean, there have been so many calls for Democrats to actually put up a fight and be fighters. And I think Senator Kelly is very much displaying that. And, in part, what people want is these very clear and forceful statements about why the Trump administration is acting illegally and why what they are doing is so dangerous and problematic. And I think that’s very much what Senator Kelly is doing here.

Sargent: I agree one hundred percent. So Hegseth also sent a formal letter of censure to Kelly. He attacked Kelly for making “a sustained pattern of public statements, calling various military operations illegal.” At another point in the letter, Hegseth says Kelly has accused him and others of war crimes. But Leah, is this punishable behavior? Isn’t this just speech? Can you walk us through the guts of the legal issues here?

Litman: I mean, there are no guts. It is very basically just telling someone you are violating the law because of the things you have said and the views you are expressing. As I kind of joked about earlier—only it’s not really a joke—they are saying it is literally illegal to encourage people to follow the law. That is expressing a different view about what the law is or isn’t, what it does or doesn’t say, than the Trump administration’s view, which is basically they can do anything they want and that makes it legal. Senator Kelly is saying, No, that’s not how it works.

And even if Senator Kelly were not a legislator, he would still have First Amendment protections. The government can’t attack people because it doesn’t agree with the views that they are expressing. And then you add to that First Amendment defense the fact that Senator Kelly is a legislator and does enjoy speech and debate protections. And there’s some question about whether the statements he is making are done in his capacity as a legislator. But there is a serious argument that they are.

So I think both of those defenses are very powerful and plausible ones that he has to block any effort to censure him or penalize him that Hegseth is doing. And I just want to add, I’m surprised that Secretary Hegseth has had the time to do all of this, given that he is apparently running or coercing Venezuela at the same time.

Sargent: Yeah, that’s a good point. You’d think he’d be busy with bigger things here. But the biggest thing of all is Donald Trump and how he feels about stuff. I mean, that’s just the bottom line, right? Leah, can you just sort of get at this question: Is there a shred of legitimacy to what Hegseth and Trump are doing here, or is it just entirely illegitimate?

I mean, it seems to me that whatever the answer to that question—and I would love to hear you explain that—it also seems like it’s really about saying to other people: You better not criticize us, you better not call us out for illegal acts, because we’ll bring the weight of the law against you and so forth. What do you think of that?

Litman: Yeah, exactly. So just two quick things. One is, to the extent there is any shred of legitimacy here, it is true that, as I was saying earlier, the Uniform Code of Military Justice has been held by multiple courts to apply to former service members. It is also the case that the Supreme Court has said former service members are held not just to the Uniform Code of Military Justice, but also to all other federal laws.

So in theory, the secretary of defense can attempt to censure or penalize former service members. He can also do so not just for violations of military code, but also federal law. But as ever, the problem is their application of these theories or principles. Because no matter their authority, they can’t use it to violate someone’s First Amendment rights.

And I just think it’s so clear that that’s what they’re doing here. They don’t have a plausible argument to the contrary. And I agree with you that the point of this isn’t necessarily to scare Kelly. He’s going to be fine whether or not they take away his retirement benefits. The point is to scare other people. This is something that judges have written about in their opinions describing the executive orders targeting law firms. The problem wasn’t just the targeted firms.

The problem was everyone else feeling chilled and scared and censoring themselves, preemptively complying, obeying in advance, and avoiding criticizing the administration and doing anything they were concerned the administration wouldn’t like.

Sargent: Well, let’s step back for a second. Can you just explain in a big-picture way why it is that we have this idea out there that members of the military—service members, military officials—are not obliged to follow illegal orders? Where did that come from, and why is it good?

Litman: Where did that come from? I’m not sure I could identify a single source, but every individual who serves in the federal government is still bound by law, still takes an oath to support and uphold the Constitution. So when the Constitution and laws are violated, your oath is to the law, not to the men telling you to violate the law.

That’s what it means for ours to be a system of the rule of law, not a rule of men or one man, or whatever weirdos are running the executive branch. Why is it important? I mean, we have, as we have seen from the most recent series of events and many others, an extremely powerful military. They are very good at exercising force and performing lethal strikes.

And so we want them to exercise their powers responsibly and with care, in compliance with the laws that attempt to constrain their awesome powers. It’s a cliché. I’ll recite it: With great power comes great responsibility. And we want them to take their powers seriously.

Sargent: Yeah, and I think at a very fundamental level, Donald Trump and Pete Hegseth really reject the idea that they are bound, that the power of the military should be bound by rules and laws. I mean, Hegseth has essentially said that, hasn’t he?

Litman: Yeah, I mean, Stephen Miller is running around on the media, making tours saying it’s all about force and strength. Who cares about law?

Donald Trump, after the invasion of Venezuela, said people shouldn’t be saying it’s unconstitutional. They should be saying awesome job. So they have made very clear their views that they don’t care about the law. They don’t think anyone else should care about the law. “Might makes right” is their basic view of things.

Sargent: Right. And I think that gets at the elephant in the room here, which you got at earlier, which is that Trump is giving illegal orders to the military—or very well may be. The bombings of the so-called drug boats in the Caribbean clearly look illegal. Now this attack on Venezuela looks illegal. It’s clearly unconstitutional to do this without Congress. It violates international law.

It’s sort of odd to me that this basic fact is not more central to the discussion—the underlying question of whether it’s reasonable for Mark Kelly to be giving warnings like this or not. It is reasonable because Donald Trump is giving illegal orders.

Litman: Of course. I would hope again that people are willing to say, “Don’t violate the law when someone orders you to do so.” We just think of that as basic decency, right? Basic civic duty, basic responsibility of people who hold political power and political office and actually have a platform to make these claims heard. I can post on Bluesky as much as I want that people should follow the law. But when Senator Kelly and Senator Slotkin make videos, they have a greater platform. And that message is going to be heard by more people. And it carries more force.

So of course we want people kind of reaffirming obligations for the law. And just to back up, those statements actually matter under the law. They matter for international law. In determining whether something violates customary international law, we look to the response that people and states have.

In determining whether the president has certain authority, we look to see whether Congress has stood up and said, No, he doesn’t, and acted against the exercise of the president’s authority. So these statements matter. They matter not just for basic rule of law reasons, but they matter formally under the law as well.

Sargent: I think if I’m hearing you correctly, you’re essentially saying that there’s more to the law than what’s written, than the written black letter code of it. What also matters is what the world perceives about how bound our top officials are by those laws.

Litman: Yes, that’s exactly right.

Sargent: Can you maybe go into that a little more? Because it’s an interesting concept. I think maybe people don’t really realize that there’s this kind of fuzziness to law that you all kind of live every day. You live and breathe this fuzziness every day. And it’s something that’s really being thrust to the forefront now by Donald Trump’s lawbreaking and skirting of the law in all kinds of ways. Can you talk about this gray area?

Litman: So when, for example, international lawyers or international organizations ask, Did this country, did this person violate customary international law?, they have to figure out what obligations under international law are. And those aren’t all just written down on a piece of paper or in a treaty or whatnot. Instead, they are norms that states basically affirmed and reaffirmed. How do they do that? They make statements in support of them. They say, That’s a breach of that norm. And that is something that helps to actually establish what international law is. So that’s one component.

And then even domestically, our law of the separation of powers is based not just on what statutes Congress has written that say the president can do this or the president can’t do this. They are also based on what the cases have called gloss or historical practice or acquiescence. Did Congress sit down and say nothing when the president asserted the authority to run a foreign country?

If they did, then that’s some evidence that the president has that power. Whereas if they instead stood up and spoke out and said, No, you can’t order an invasion of a foreign country, seize a leader, and run the country, that’s evidence that under our constitutional system of separated powers, the president doesn’t have that authority.

Sargent: That is really, really unsettling. I just want to close on an unspoken aspect of this whole battle, which is that it’s kind of about public service. Trump and MAGA, I think, reject the very idea of public service on a fundamental level.

Trump doesn’t see himself as serving the American people in any real sense. He punishes parts of the country for not voting for him in all kinds of ways. In a way, he’s not even serving his own supporters, though he kind of doles out the spoils of governing to his people.

Trump doesn’t think that he’s under any obligation to make sacrifices to serve the public at large and doesn’t feel bound by the laws that the rest of us are bound by. I think that’s what Mark Kelly is getting at with his takedown, in a way. Can you talk about that big picture?

Litman: Yeah, absolutely. So we have seen examples of Donald Trump and his administration threatening to cancel funding in ways that harm Democratic-leaning states. We have seen him attempt to punish states that don’t do what he wants, like releasing an individual from Colorado imprisonment and incarceration when he said, I want the state to actually release that individual who was convicted of a crime. And so we have seen him gleefully punish entire swaths of people that he is nominally in charge of representing.

Like, for him, his obligation doesn’t run to the entire country. His obligation runs to himself, right, and people in his good graces. And that is a very disturbing, I think, autocratic view of what it means to hold power and office. Mark Kelly is instead voicing the view that when you hold power, you represent not just the people who you like and who like you and who voted for you—you represent the public interest and the public at large.

And that’s why service members have an obligation to the law and the public interest, not just to following the commands of one single very terrible, no good, very bad person.

Sargent: And the flip side of that is that they use the law and abuse it horrifically to punish and harm and inflict sadistic damage on those who displease the leader. What do you expect to happen with Mark Kelly? What’s going to happen in the next, I don’t know, six months with this?

Litman: I think this case is going to go nowhere and quickly. I think like any court that gets it is going to say, like, you can’t penalize him for expressing the view that what you’re doing is unlawful and that service members, right, should only follow lawful orders. And I would just be shocked if it came to any other resolution.

Sargent: Well, I sure hope it doesn’t end up chilling people along the way, because a big part of the game here is to make it clear that you will have to expend resources on lawyers and so forth to defend yourself, you know?

Litman: Yep, exactly.

Sargent: Well, folks, if you enjoyed this, make sure to check out Leah Litman’s great book, Lawless, about the Supreme Court. Leah, great to have you on as always.

Litman: Great to be here. Thanks again for having me.

What’s Next for the Normie Anti-Trump Protest Movement? - 2026-01-07T11:00:00Z

When Donald Trump reassumed his presence in the Oval Office, doomsayers and scolds wondered if ordinary liberals would greet his return with anything more than apathy and exhaustion. Having worked so hard to bring the first Trump era to an end, did people have it in them to mount up and do it again? 

Yes, and then some. Hitting the streets under the “Hands Off” and “No Kings” banners, last year’s anti-Trump forces surfaced energy, patriotism, and perhaps more importantly, joy—a simmering movement is now roiling, with millions taking to the public square, and perhaps millions more waiting in the wings.

So what do they do for an encore? And how can this burgeoning movement play a role in fostering the electoral shifts necessary to bring change to Washington, D.C.? To get a sense of this, The New Republic turned to Ezra Levin, a co-founder of Indivisible, the affiliation of progressive organizations that has been a prime mover in last year’s Hands Off and No Kings protests. 

Indivisible was both a response to and inspired by the Tea Party movement. But in 2025, it eclipsed the Tea Party’s most expansive count of public participation, which never topped 500,000. According to the Crowd Counting Consortium, April’s Hands Off brought in around one million protesters. June’s No Kings rallies netted at least two million and maybe as many as 4.8 million. The consortium has yet to count October’s No Kings rallies, but one nonpartisan estimate put it between five and 6.5 million.

The groups behind the No Kings coalition, including Levin at Indivisible, are aiming for the goal articulated by researcher Erica Chenoweth: Authoritarian regimes can be toppled if 3.5 percent of a population engage in nonviolent resistance. Chenoweth’s unambiguous estimate is disputed in some academic circles—but Indivisible is determined to put it to a real-world trial. (This interview has been edited for length and clarity.)


So, is this the year?

It’s probably gonna get worse before it gets better. 

We saw a lot of mobilization under Trump’s first term, but nothing like this. What’s different now? We can say, “Well, he’s worse,” but that is the kind of thing that could dampen turnout.

What we saw in 2017 was “Protest is the new brunch.” I think the opponent is much scarier this time. Trump was limited back then, in a way that he’s not now, because he’s functionally taken over the whole party. And I think especially with No Kings 1, compared to Hands Off, you saw younger and more diverse audiences than you saw in Hands Off. I think that’s largely in response to the attacks on immigrants.

What has this movement learned from progressive movements of the past?

One of the cautionary tales that lives in my mind is Obama. It’s 2008, and Obama’s built an incredible grassroots force; it’s historic. Marshall Ganz was one of the architects of his field program, and he was Cesar Chavez’s organizing director. You had this wondrous thing, new in American politics. It was ready to back up an incoming trifecta Democratic administration, because we had just taken the presidency off, obviously by a landslide, but also had major majorities in the House and the Senate. 

And then, because Obama for America [as an independent force] was a threat to the Democratic Party, it was largely snuffed out. I remember being a bright-eyed, bushy-tailed young volunteer for the Obama campaign, where they did a follow-up call for the volunteers on the campaign saying, and we’re definitely going to need you going into 2009, and then it was crickets. 

We were told to go home or not told anything at all. And what came in, in the absence of any kind of organized infrastructure on the left, was the Tea Party.

Can you go back to how No Kings feels different from the “Protest is the new brunch” sensibility of Trump I?

There was more of a sense of guilt for not having taken Trump seriously to begin with. He won, and then we saw them coming out in droves for the Women’s March and then to found Indivisible groups.

Now a lot of those who got involved in organizing stayed involved. They tried to push to get Kamala Harris over the finish line. And what they saw in 2024 was not that the normal everyday people failed to push back. It was that both the Republican Party, which has fallen off a cliff, and the Democratic Party, which has proven itself corrupt and feckless, fail us. 

And so there’s a sense of anger at the establishment now. Before, there was a sense of loss—it was surprise when he won in 2016. In 2024, it was, “Fuck this. Everybody has failed us. Our leaders, who should be on our side, don’t have what it takes to lead.” We’re coming up to do what has to be done because, clearly, institutions aren’t going to save themselves.

It feels like normal people are angrier at Democrats because this time, they know they did their part but Democrats didn’t.

We saw this with Dianne Feinstein being senile in the Senate, and nobody standing up and saying she should step down. We saw this with Ruth Bader Ginsburg making what I think it was a pretty selfish decision to stay on the court instead of dropping off. We saw this with Joe Biden deciding to run again.

What is the point of a political party? Why does a political party exist? We moved heaven and earth to get Trump out of office, make him the first one-term president in a generation, and not just do that, but deliver a democratic trifecta. We took both Senate seats in Georgia in early 2021, and what did we get out of it? We got Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema writing the legislation that could actually get through.

People thought 2016 was a fluke. Shouldn’t have happened. It was an accident. Maybe Comey was to blame. [Trump] didn’t win a majority or a plurality. They thought, this is a footnote of history that we’re going to correct, and we’re going to correct it through our own actions. And 2024 revealed, oh no, there’s something truly broken here.

I’ve been calling 2025 the year of the normie protester.

I mean, I think the heroes of 2025 are the folks who actually stood up and risked something in order to push [back on] authoritarianism. And that’s not the elites, that’s not the media, that’s not law firms, that’s not universities, by and large. It’s normal everyday people who said, “Fuck this. We’re not going along with it.” Just very stubborn people. I think those are very clearly the heroes of 2025, and in doing so, [they] have started shifting the political system and the broader, broader society, and the direction Trump at the end of 2025 does not look inevitable. He does not look unstoppable. 

He’s probably going to do a lot of damage in 2026, but I think [the everyday protesters] are to be credited with the world that we’re in now versus the world we started out in [at] the beginning of this year. 

Is a protest movement that also targets the opposing party self-defeating?

The Democratic Party is weak. It obviously is. Its approval rating is far lower than Donald Trump’s and lower than the Republican Party’s at a time of the least popular federal policy agenda in modern history. So that’s bad. The question is whether, although they are weak, they are entrenched enough to survive in its current form, and that’s what primary season is for. I truly hope the answer is no, that they are weak and can be reformed and made better and more responsive to their own constituents, and that’s the goal of a primary program. 

If you don’t push them hard, if you don’t keep pressuring them, if you think of it as “we’d all be at brunch now,” you get some pathetic, watered-down version of Build Back Better, instead of an actual policy agenda that reforms the economy and our democracy.

You were inspired by the Tea Party. What have you taken from that movement?

We’re less violent or bigoted and racist than the Tea Party was. But look, they passed out Rules for Radicals to the Tea Partiers to teach them, hey, here’s what community organizing actually is, and here’s how you should do it. 

I also think the Tea Party smartly focused on saying no, beyond everything else. They said no. They didn’t have the House, they didn’t have the Senate, they didn’t have the presidency, but they could yell, “No.” About health care, about Dodd-Frank, about national service, about the stimulus. They could yell, “No.” God knows, it’s pretty attractive: No. 

“No” also papers over a lot. You are not asking for people to agree on an agenda.

Look, the goal is to do good that you can in the moment. We’re not talking about what happens in 2029. Should we have a Democratic House and a presidency? I’m interested in that. I’m a policy nerd. I like talking about Earned Income Tax Credit refundability. We’re not near that right now. We’ve got a fascist in the White House who is systematically trying to attack other sources of power. And the question is, do you allow that to continue, or don’t you? That’s it. That’s the political question of the day. 

Here’s what’s going to happen. We’re going to have a fight over the next year about whether Trumpism, in its current form, should continue or not, and if we’re successful, he will be thoroughly destroyed electorally in the House and in the Senate, and we’ll have Democrats leading both. 

The one mandate that can come to legible demand coming out of No Kings, in terms of policy advocacy is, “Stop this shit.” No more to this unconstitutional legal behavior. Do not reach out and normalize him. Do not work on some immigration bill or tax bill or infrastructure bill [with him]. Let the subpoenas fly. Let the hearings start. Rein in this regime.  

Use the power you have. The purpose of political capital is to spend it.

I mean, LBJ is, despite all his failures, a political hero of mine. He was an out-and-out racist in his interpersonal life, and he also passed the Voting Rights Act and the Civil Rights Act. He was a cheater, he was a coward, he was a bully, and also the most effective political leader since FDR. There was pushback from his advisers that he was going to get political hell from [his reforms]. And he said, What the hell is the presidency for? 

You mention the ugly aspects of LBJ, and I wonder if the tent can get too big?

You need different allies for different timescales. I think it is important for us to have as huge a “Coalition of No” as possible over the course of the next 12 months. And what we know from international fights against authoritarianism that are successful is that building that big-tent coalition of no is critical, because in the absence of that, you lose … you lose. The regime’s strategy is divide and conquer. So if you divide yourself—game over, they’re gonna win.

Are there any other challenges on the horizon?

We need a cultural-level shift where we start thinking of democracy as a participatory sport that we’ve got to engage in. And we should stop thinking of it as, “Well, if we elect the right leader, whoever it is, then they’ll solve it for us.” It just won’t happen. It will not happen. I have long since lost faith in political leadership. I think there are better and worse politicians, and there are better and worse elected officials, but they’re all constrained by the same forces, and if you want to bust through those forces, you need mass involvement. You need mass participation.

What will grow this movement?

Now Trump is looking more ridiculous. He is looking like the wheels are coming off the bus. That doesn’t mean it’s over. There’s money that’s flowing down to ICE. The camps are being constructed. The planes are being purchased. The Proud Boys are being hired. That’s happening now. And as he feels more and more like a cornered animal, he is going to lash out. These are not people who are used to having to face the prospect of real accountability. So when I say I think it’s going to get worse before it gets better, that’s what I mean.

So, back to the central question: Is this the year you get to the magic number? And what do you do with that?

I mean, we are winning, but the more it appears obvious that we are winning, the more police power will be used against us. So I worry about that. And I’m not taking for granted what happens in 2026. I’m currently operating under the assumption that he will try to pull some sort of shenanigans around the elections. If we don’t utterly stop him entirely, they’re gonna try to throw out some kind of results. You don’t win that fight with a one-day protest. You win that fight with real societal disruption, which we currently can’t pull off. We can pull off historic levels of protest. We can pull off multiday strikes.

Are general strikes the goal? 

We’re going to have to get there if you’re going to stop an attempt to steal an election. Everybody showing up on a Saturday is nice. Fifteen million people showing up on a Saturday would be nice. It’s not going to be enough.

The Unexpected Charm of Is This Thing On? - 2026-01-07T11:00:00Z

What is an “art monster”? Jenny Offill popularized the term in her 2014 debut novel, Dept. of Speculation, in which a youthful writer dreams of eschewing domesticity and becoming an “art monster” entirely motivated by her craft. But it is not just dishwashing, parenting, or, as Offill mentions, the licking of stamps that the typically male art monster delegates. Everything, including basic human decency, might be thrown aside in favor of the Work. This is where Claire Dederer picked up in her 2023 book, Monsters: A Fan’s Dilemma. If we concede that the art cannot be separated from the artist—that sometimes callousness is part of the craft, that it leaves traces in the final product—the question remaining is how much monstrousness we can tolerate. As Dederer writes, “A monster, in my mind, was an artist who could not be separated from some dark aspect of his or her biography.” These biographies, in turn, make for horrific journalistic exposés and solid Hollywood entertainment.

Actor turned director Bradley Cooper’s first two films, the 2018 A Star is Born and the 2023 Maestro, look at extraordinary women and the art monsters they love. In the former, singer-songwriter Jackson Maine (Cooper) marries unconventionally beautiful waitress Ally (Lady Gaga) and makes her a star before nearly dragging her down with his alcoholism and all-consuming envy. And the eponymous maestro, Leonard Bernstein (also Cooper), gives his lovely wife (Carey Mulligan) everything except fidelity and a moment’s peace. Charismatic, destructive narcissists, Maine and Bernstein may not be as monstrous as fictional nightmare (and rare female exemplar) Lydia Tár, but they are clingy and distant, self-righteous and messy, and they always hurt the ones they love, as the song goes.

With Cooper’s third directorial feature, Is This Thing On?, he appears poised to continue this streak. Will Arnett plays Alex Novak, a depressed father of two who discovers stand-up comedy in the wake of his impending divorce from his wife, Tess (Laura Dern). Arnett’s two career-defining roles—embittered sitcom star Bojack Horseman and smarmy illusionist Gob Bluth in Arrested Development—prime him to play another art monster, even if his variation on the archetype is more hack than tortured genius.

But Is This Thing On? proves to be a sharp departure from Cooper’s oeuvre and Arnett’s typecasting: Novak, inspired by real-life comic John Bishop, is both gifted and kindhearted. (The film makes a nod to Bishop’s British nationality by making the American Novak an inexplicable Liverpool F.C. fan.) Alex’s comedy career begins after a forced dinner party, when Tess heads home to New Jersey, and Alex, alone in the city, goes for a drink at the Comedy Cellar. Open mic participants don’t have to pay a cover, so, on a pot cookie–sustained whim, he signs up. A depressive “Mrs. Maisel”–esque sequence results: “I think I’m getting a divorce,” he murmurs into the microphone. “What tipped me off is that I’m living in an apartment on my own, and my wife and kids don’t live there. That was probably the biggest clue.”

The club community is exceedingly collegial, sensing, before even he does, that he belongs. “Sad guy, you hanging out?” a woman chirps, and Alex follows. The comics give him advice: Get onstage every night, write it all down, dedicate yourself to your craft. “Hey, love you, young Novak,” one of the Black comics shouts at Alex, who walks off into the night. (That Alex has not one but three underdeveloped Black friends feels like a throwback to a particular kind of ’90s movie about a straight, white wife-guy needing to be convinced of his worth.)

Alex’s value, his inherent goodness, is reiterated fiercely by the people around him, as if the film does not trust the viewer to trust him. In a discussion of his act’s merits, the emcee of the open mic (an underused Amy Sedaris) says, “You’re not naïve, you’re innocent,” while a young comic flirts, “You are good.… I mean, you’re bad at stand-up but … you’re good. You have a good heart.” Later, when his father witnesses an especially angry onstage rant, he intones, wisely, “You’re a decent man, Alex, and you can give yourself the grace to work through all this.”

Alex is not the only well-meaning soul in the mix; his wife is just as sweet and just as lost. Tess is a performer in her own way, her life’s work, volleyball, having taken her to the Olympics years prior. While Alex privately pursues his new passion, Tess debates if and how to return to the work that once defined her, and the two consider, together and separately, if their marriage can be saved. Their diverging ambitions and mutual admiration pull them together and tear them apart, but unlike Marriage Story, a movie with which it has drawn comparisons, there isn’t much in the way of wall-punching. As established, these are nice people.


Too nice? I’ll let Alex and Tess field that one. In one of the couple’s later arguments, Alex insists they should make another try “because we’re doing things that make us happy as individuals now. And if we’re happy, that’s it. Then we make the people we love happy too.” “That’s it? What are you, eight years old?” Tess snaps. “A real relationship is finding somebody you can also be unhappy with.” The film is on her side, but it can’t, rightly or wrongly, shake Alex’s conception of a happy ending. Any road back to each other will require them both to find fulfillment, primarily through the work they do.

In this sense, Is This Thing On? feels less of a piece with Cooper’s directorial turns and more like a spiritual sequel to David O. Russell’s Silver Linings Playbook, in which he starred. Instead of ballroom dancing together, the Novaks pursue their own passions; instead of the cozy, drab suburbs of Philadelphia, Is This Thing On? settles into the cozy, drab suburbs of northern New Jersey, complete with wood-paneled kitchens and batty boomer parents. The grand romantic gesture in Silver Linings Playbook—the letter that reads, “I’m sorry it took so long for me to catch up. I just got stuck”—is where Alex needs to get by the end of Act III. And, finally, as in Russell’s film, it is the actors in Is This Thing On? that overcome the script’s weaknesses and make the world of these characters feel real and close.

The movie’s warm, spacious heart lies with Arnett and Dern, the vulnerable performances they turn in, and the care with which they are filmed. The loving attention the movie pays Alex and Tess, and that they pay one another, comes through in the close-ups: how the red and blue backlights settle into the lines on Arnett’s beleaguered face, how a post-practice Dern hops into the front seat of a car and gives Alex a nervous, lingering smile. Only skilled performers like these two could make the following feel dynamic and not contrived: Tess is on a date with a colleague (Peyton Manning) at the Comedy Cellar when Alex stands up for his first non–open mic set. Not seeing Tess in the audience, he talks about his marriage with comfort and candor.

“I gotta tell you, the whole experience, to be honest, made me miss my wife,” he admits. To hear Arnett’s voice, still recognizably the actor’s own but stripped of his trademark sleaze, is affecting, and Alex’s openness brings forth a dozen conflicting emotions in Tess. Sitting in the back with her date, unmoving and hardly blinking, Dern wordlessly plays fury, hurt, shame, even begrudging amusement. “You know when your partner gets really, really quiet,” Alex says, “and now you gotta guess what’s wrong?” As Tess watches silently, processing what she is hearing, it is the viewer’s turn to guess what she might be thinking. When he follows her out of the club, panicked and defensive, she gives up the game. “It’s hot,” she admits before grabbing his cigarette and taking a drag.

Is This Thing On? belongs to Arnett first, and to scene-stealer Dern second, but the director has included a supporting part for himself, and it’s the closest the movie comes to confronting the art monster of his previous films. Balls (Cooper), Alex’s friend from college, is a struggling actor with a taste for marijuana and saying things like, “I can’t choose when my characters leave me.” He eagerly anticipates his big break, even though he is 30 years into a career that is mostly understudy parts and guest television spots. His wife (Andra Day) is miserable, but Balls is oblivious, or just indifferent, to her feelings: “Living with an artist, guys. Living with an artist,” he offers as a meager apology.

Where Cooper once played the art monster for tragedy, now it is for farce, Balls’s role in the proceedings mostly comic relief. When Alex hangs a framed picture of a young, Olympian Tess on the wall of his single-guy apartment, Balls cannot fathom why he would pick this action shot, because it is shot from behind. “I can’t see her face,” Balls remarks. “You should just turn her around.” It’s not how photography works, Alex is quick to remind him. Wise fool that he is, Balls has given Alex the advice his friend most needs to hear.

Might this be the next chapter for the art monster? To take away his ego and power, hand him a joint, and see what insight he has to offer? If anyone is positioned to figure this out, it has to be Cooper and the troupes he assembles in his work.

This Could Be the Year the Supreme Court Pushes Back on Trump - 2026-01-07T11:00:00Z

There will be no shortage of major legal cases and rulings at the Supreme Court in 2026. The ones we already know about will touch upon topics ranging from tariffs to the structure of federal agencies to Reconstruction-era constitutional amendments. At the core of many of these cases, however, will be one simple question: How much power should Donald Trump have? Up until now, the Roberts court’s rulings have suggested that there aren’t many appreciable limits to Trump’s presidential privilege in his second term. Those boundaries might finally be in sight.

By far the most important Supreme Court case of the year will be Trump v. Barbara. At issue will be the meaning of Fourteenth Amendment’s citizenship clause—and, more specifically, whether the president can unilaterally refuse to recognize birthright citizenship.

The amendment’s drafters wrote the clause in 1869 to overturn Dred Scott v. Sandford, to indisputably confirm the citizenship of formerly enslaved Americans, and to remove future questions of U.S. citizenship from the political sphere. To that end, the constitutional language is sweeping and definitive: “All persons born or naturalized in the United States, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the United States.”

For roughly a century and a half, all three branches of the federal government have interpreted it to apply to anyone born on U.S. soil, except for children of foreign diplomats, who aren’t “subject to the jurisdiction” of the United States because they have diplomatic immunity. Many Native Americans were also previously excluded, but the closing of the frontier and the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924 eliminated that exception.

Trump and his allies want to change that long-settled meaning. The White House issued an executive order last January that instructed federal agencies to refuse to recognize the U.S. citizenship of the future children of certain groups of noncitizens. Lower courts have thus far prevented the order from taking effect.

On an intellectual level, this should be an easy case for the justices. Undocumented immigrants and visa recipients are indisputably “subject to the jurisdiction” of the United States. They can be taxed, arrested, fined, imprisoned, executed, and much more while on U.S. soil. There is also ample precedent supporting birthright citizenship, including Supreme Court rulings like 1897’s Wong Kim Ark v. United States.

To refute this notion, the Trump administration and some of its right-wing allies in legal academia have concocted a novel reading of the clause that instead grounds citizenship in “political allegiance” to the United States. This “scholarship,” which was almost entirely a bespoke creation to justify Trump’s executive order, is flimsy at best and in some cases outright embarrassing. (One of the top revisionist proponents, Kurt Lash, recently published an article where he ran a nineteenth-century congressman’s purported letter through multiple AI chatbots to glean its accuracy and meaning.)

It is hard to trust the Supreme Court to get this case right. The conservative majority’s track record is far from comforting. In 2024 alone, the justices butchered a different clause of the Fourteenth Amendment to allow Trump to run for a second term despite a constitutional bar on officeholding for insurrectionists. A few months later, Roberts and his conservative colleagues invented the concept of “presidential immunity” out of thin air, sparing Trump from a criminal trial before the election and facilitating widespread corruption in his second term.

The past year was not reassuring, either. The high court has bent over backward to facilitate Trump’s illegal purges of the federal civil service, his unlawful deportations and freezes on congressional spending, his dismantling of congressionally authorized federal agencies, and much more. Time and time again, the conservative justices have used the court’s shadow docket to grant Trump new and untrammeled powers, often overriding lower courts without a scintilla of legal reasoning or explanation.

The court’s sloppiness runs so deep that the justices cannot be trusted to get it right even if Trump loses. Some of its worst decisions have been framed as compromises: Roberts’s immunity ruling took pains to reject Trump’s view of the matter, as if he was staking out some sort of median position, while the court also invented a custom exception for the Federal Reserve when it effectively overturned ninety years of precedent in May. The stakes in Barbara are much higher: Any compromise on birthright citizenship could strip U.S. citizenship from millions of Americans, leaving them vulnerable to deportation and destroying their lives.

Trump wants the unilateral power to decide American citizenship—and much more. He is also seeking the limitless authority to fire the heads of multimember agencies like the Federal Trade Commission, the Securities and Exchange Commission, and more in the pending decision in Trump v. Slaughter. Congress created these agencies with the intent of entrusting their immense powers in politically neutral appointees who would act in the public’s best interest. The Supreme Court appears poised to clear the way for Trump to command them at will under the auspices of the unitary executive theory.

There may be limits to the court’s willingness to empower Trump. The justices will hear oral arguments later this month on whether Trump can lawfully dismiss Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook, against whom he and his Justice Department lackeys have brought dubious charges of mortgage fraud. Members of the Fed’s board of governors are legally insulated from dismissal except for cause, and the justices signaled last year that they would preserve the Fed’s independence. (Their 401k’s arguably depend on it.)

And then there are signs that the court might not be willing to grant Trump everything that he wants. In the near future, the court is expected to hand down a ruling that could strike down his claimed ability to impose trillions of dollars in tariffs under a Cold War–era emergency law. Oral arguments were not reassuring for the Trump administration, and the president has occasionally fumed on social media in the recent weeks about the possibility that a cherished cudgel could be stripped from him.

And 2025 closed out with an even more reassuring move from the justices. Two days before Christmas, the court blocked Trump from deploying the National Guard to Chicago to assist in immigration-enforcement operations there. In an unsigned order, the justices concluded that federal law did not allow him to deploy the National Guard under the present circumstances. That drew a strenuous dissent from Justice Samuel Alito, who apparently slept through the last few years of shadow-docket rulings.

“In this case, the Court has unnecessarily and unwisely departed from standard practice,” he wrote. “It raised an argument that respondents waived below, and it now rules in respondents’ favor on that ground. To make matters worse, the Court reaches out and expresses tentative views on other highly important issues on which there is no relevant judicial precedent and on which we have received scant briefing and no oral argument.”

The Illinois ruling is a hopeful sign for those who want the nation’s highest court to aspire to something higher than greasing the wheels for Donald Trump’s half-hearted would-be dictatorship. More importantly, the decision shows that the Supreme Court can contain Trump when it wishes to do so: The president promptly withdrew the National Guard from not only its planned deployment to Chicago but also Portland, Los Angeles, and other cities where he made a performative and un-American show of force. If the court isn’t careful, people might actually expect it to act like a coequal branch of government once again.

Trump’s Vile Attack on Mark Kelly Backfires as Harsh Retort Goes Viral - 2026-01-07T10:00:00Z

Last year, Senator Mark Kelly and five other Democrats posted a video with a stark message: Military service members and officials are not obliged to carry out illegal orders. This infuriated Donald Trump, and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is reprehensibly bringing disciplinary action against him as a retired Navy man. But this is backfiring: Kelly has now offered a striking new response in a second video, and it’s powerful stuff. Kelly speaks emotionally about his family’s commitment to the military and to the country, and absolutely humiliates Trump over his disregard for military service and disdain for free speech. Indeed, the attack on Kelly will likely fail and will keep making Trump look worse; meanwhile, Kelly has been all over the airwaves pushing back. We talked to legal expert Leah Litman, author of the book Lawless, about the Supreme Court. She walks us through the legal ins and outs of this dispute, explains why the case against Kelly represents its own abuse of power, and reflects on how this saga captures Trumpworld’s deeper contempt for public service. Listen to this episode here. A transcript is here.

The January 6 Insurrectionists Take a Victory Lap - 2026-01-07T02:56:16Z

On Tuesday afternoon, exactly five years since January 6, 2021, a few hundred Proud Boys, insurrectionists, and their supporters stood outside the very building they stormed that day, and bowed their heads in prayer.

“We know what you saw us through, Lord. We know that in the darkest hours—as we stood on street corners, as we stood rotting in cells, we know you did not leave us, you did not abandon us,” proclaimed Suzanne Monk, founder of the J6 Pardon Project. “We thank you for the miracle that you put through our hands. We are but vessels to your work, heavenly Father, and we ask that you hear us and you see us, Lord. And you see our cry for this country.… We have lived in faith for five years. We ask you to bless that faith, and bless our nation.”

This moment defined the tenor of the afternoon. The Ashli Babbitt 5 Year Memorial March started at the Ellipse, the park south of the White House, and ended with the placing of flowers and wreaths on the steps of the U.S. Capitol to honor the late insurrectionist, who was shot by Capitol Police as she tried to barge into the Speaker’s Lobby.

The event—organized by Proud Boys leader Enrique Tarrio, who was tried, charged, and pardoned for seditious conspiracy on January 6—wasn’t just a victory lap. It was a spiritual homecoming reunion, a celebration of new life and vindication for J6ers.

“It’s like living a biblical story,” said Jake Lang, a J6er who was pardoned for attacking police officers. “God opened up the lions’ den for Daniel, and he opened up the prison for me.” Lang is running to fill Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s vacated seat in the U.S. Senate, and railed against “Black on white crime” during his speech.

As delusional as it may seem, why shouldn’t the J6ers feel this way? So many of them believed that the 2020 election was stolen. They believe that they were justified for storming the Capitol, and some claim that they were encouraged to do so by law enforcement. They believe that they were wrongly imprisoned, and some claim to have been tortured. And then Trump won the election and saved them. Those hundreds of pardons from President Trump after his 2024 victory—not to mention the administration’s active effort to recast the insurrectionists as political prisoners—only make J6ers feel more absolved. And they let that be known one year out from their pardons.

“We won, man.… They tortured us for years, solitary confinement for years,” said Proud Boy Jon Mellis, who was jailed and later pardoned for assaulting law enforcement. He runs a viral right-wing Instagram account called “patriotwildman.”

“Now I’m living in West Hollywood and dating a Playboy Playmate. Hey, man, my life is pretty good,” Mellis continued. “We’re getting naked models in hot tubs every weekend. So what am I complaining for?” As I left, Mellis told me that the Proud Boys were “the greatest fraternity the world has ever seen.” (Mellis made an appearance later in the rally, grabbing the microphone to yell, “Blow up the fentanyl boats, leave the cocaine alone!!!” to the crowd.)

Samuel Lazar, an insurrectionist who was jailed and pardoned for assaulting an officer, was similarly unapologetic—even as his participation in January 6 resulted in him being estranged from the mother of his two middle school–age children.

“I woke up every morning and said, Why? What am I doing [in prison]? Made no sense. I’m not a criminal,” he told me in a strong New York accent. “I had no regrets because I’m a patriot. I did nothing wrong.… [Today is] gratifying. It’s satisfying. It’s phenomenal. We were vindicated. And all we want now is to make sure that the people who died and lost their lives, the Patriots that lost their lives, are remembered.”

But his life doesn’t seem quite as rosy as Mellis’s.

“It still affects me.… I don’t even see my children anymore,” Lazar continued. “My children felt embarrassed at school because they demonized and defamed us. They were 11 and 13. When I went to prison, I came home two and a half years later … I missed a very important part of their life. So that’s how it affects me. Otherwise, I’m a businessman. I’m a very successful businessman, and it’s a testament.”

Proud Boy Barry Ramey—who was Lazar’s temporary cellmate in the Lewisburg Penitentiary (they’re “brothers for life” now)—was the only person I spoke to who expressed any kind of regret. He was sentenced to five years in prison for pepper-spraying a police officer.

“I tell my story honestly and authentically, and for many reasons. I did assault the police officer that day … the officer, John Riggleman.… I do feel guilty for pepper-spraying. And so if I could take that one action back, I would,” he told me. “But I tell people this: If I’m the bad guy, if I did something wrong, then explain to me what the 1,400 other people did—nothing wrong, nothing violent, and some of them were given more prison time than me.”

While the event was mostly jubilee, a few higher-ups I spoke to expressed a razor-sharp focus on what to do now that so many Proud Boys and insurrectionists were home free. For Ivan Raiklin and Tarrio, the Proud Boys leader, that meant running their guys for office.

“Every single person standing here should … be running for office,” said Raiklin, who rose to prominence for his involvement in election denialism and right-wing organizing. “Every single person that was weaponized by the last 10 to 11 years, by the Department of Justice of both Democrats and Republicans, by the Congress, by the weaponization related to J6 illegal election, the 2020 election heist, the Covid ‘plandemic,’ the January 6 fed selection, all of it—you need to take over your institutions at the local level and start building from the grassroots.”

“I think it’s really important that my guys run for office,” Tarrio told me. “And I’ve been encouraging them to run for office. You know, we’re very active in the local scene in Miami.”

“Would you ever run for office in Florida?” I asked Tarrio.

“Maybe one day. You know, [it would] be cool to see ‘Congressman Tarrio’ walking out of those doors. Hey, I might, I might piss some people off. And it might make some people happy. I know it’ll make the people in my district really happy.”

This event brought together various coalitions of the MAGA movement. There were folks there who were elated by the Trump administration’s kidnapping of Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro (Ramey called it an “antiwar” move), while others wished the United States would just stay out of it. Some called for the destruction of AIPAC and railed against Miriam Adelson, while others made their Zionism known. Some openly expressed their desire for Trump to be president for life, while others saw Rubio or Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth as worthy successors. No one I spoke to felt particularly compelled by JD Vance. Mellis called him “aight.”

What did unite these people was an unflinching belief that their actions five years ago were the right thing to do—and their pardons proved that. One man I spoke to was even carrying his pardon around in a picture frame.

It’s clear that the insurrectionists feel as if they have a mandate. And don’t they? They invaded the U.S. Capitol, went to jail, and came out to a hero’s welcome from the president himself. There’s even an official White House page honoring the “peaceful patriotic protesters” of January 6.

So now, equipped with institutional legitimacy, smugness, and momentum, they’re setting their sights on elected office. We should be prepared for some of them to win.

Wyoming Supreme Court Overturns Country’s First Abortion Pill Ban - 2026-01-06T21:21:19Z

The Wyoming state Supreme Court ruled Tuesday to protect access to abortion—hilariously using a state law originally passed to undermine Obamacare.

The justices ruled 4-1 that two laws banning abortion, including the country’s first ban on abortion pills, violated the state Constitution—specifically an amendment ensuring that “each competent adult shall have the right to make his or her own health care decisions.”

That amendment was originally introduced in 2010 by Republican state Senator Leslie Nutting in order to resist adopting the Affordable Care Act. The bill was backed by Wyoming’s GOP-led legislature before being signed into law in 2011.

Attorneys for the state attempted to argue that abortion was not health care—and failed.

While the justices conceded that the amendment hadn’t been intended to apply to abortion, they determined that it was not their job to “add words” to the state Constitution.

Trump Marks January 6 Anniversary by Completely Rewriting History - 2026-01-06T21:19:56Z

It’s been five years since Donald Trump’s supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol in an attempt to undermine the results of the 2020 presidential election. To celebrate, the White House erected a new website Tuesday detailing the events of the day—though it has published a wildly inventive interpretation of the insurrection.

At the top of the black-and-white site: an enlarged portrait of former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. Below her are smaller, glitching images of several prominent Democrats that led the two impeachment proceedings against Trump during his first term, including Representative Jamie Raskin and Senator Adam Schiff.

The first paragraph on the page makes mention of the sweeping pardon Trump signed during the initial hours of his second term, exonerating some 1,600 January 6 defendants. Below that, a chronological history that would challenge even the most forgiving recollection of the day.

The first slide of the timeline, labelled “Call to Action,” claims that prior to the day, Trump invited “patriotic Americans to Washington, DC on January 6 for a peaceful and historic protest.” It also states that Trump’s call was met by “hundreds of thousands” of his supporters. First fact check: that was not the case. It’s estimated that approximately 53,000 people attended his speech at the Ellipse that day. (Trump has previously claimed that attendance at his “Stop the Steal” rally rivaled Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s 1963 march on Washington, which drew roughly 250,000 attendees.)

The White House’s retelling goes on to purport that, after Trump delivered his speech, the “massive crowd peacefully” marched toward the Capitol building. The site refers to their demeanor as “orderly and spirited,” emphasizing their devotion to the 45th president.

Not mentioned on the website: the repeated lies and violent rhetoric that Trump espoused to hype his supporters up while at the Ellipse, which included Trump encouraging the crowd to “fight like hell” or else they wouldn’t “have a country anymore.” Also not mentioned: when Trump promised to join the march but immediately ditched them instead, hopping into his SUV for a lift to the White House where he chose to watch the bedlam from afar. (Years after the riot, it would become clear that even Trump’s supporters believed the president had incited their violence.)

The website then claims that the violence began after Capitol Police “aggressively fired tear gas, flash bangs, and rubber munitions into crowds of peaceful protesters.” But video evidence and extensive investigations into the proceedings of the day tell the story the other way around: shortly after 1:00 p.m., Trump’s supporters burst through the barriers around the Capitol, running toward the building as Congress voted to certify the election results. They were practically unimpeded by security forces.

Instead, the webpage suggests that Trump’s supporters breezed into the building, practically admitted by Capitol Police who “inexplicably removed barricades, opened Capitol doors, and even waved attendees inside the building,” all while insisting that some portions of the crowd were unfairly targeted by “violent force.”

Trump’s timeline ignores when Capitol Police discovered two bombs on the premises of the Capitol grounds, or when his supporters breached the Capitol by scaling its walls, smashing its windows and busting its doors. It also conveniently forgets that the events placed the Capitol on lockdown, or that the volatile crowd began chanting for the deaths of U.S. lawmakers.

The website claims that, after 2:24 p.m. Trump attempted to engineer a peaceful resolution for the pandemonium. Writing on Twitter, Trump did urge the crowd to “remain peaceful” and “respect the law,” though he did not tell them to exit the Capitol or go home. (Trump wouldn’t do that until 4:17 p.m., well after his supporters broke into Pelosi’s office and ransacked Congress.) But the White House’s retelling leaves out the part where Trump criticized his former number two, Mike Pence, before the vice president—who that morning had told Trump he would not overturn the election results—could exit the building.

“Mike Pence didn’t have the courage to do what should have been done to protect our Country and our Constitution, giving States a chance to certify a corrected set of facts, not the fraudulent or inaccurate ones which they were asked to previously certify. USA demands the truth!” Trump posted at the time.

Pence would eventually find his way out of the building, evading armed crowds chanting for his death.

The next slide on the White House-affiliated website announces that Pelosi repeatedly claimed responsibility for the building’s insufficient security detail. It links out to a video of the former speaker, captured the day of the riot, in which she laments that the National Guard had not been preemptively deployed to protect the legislative chambers from an attack by the president’s supporters.

(An egregious miscommunication between the Pentagon and the commander of the D.C. National Guard would result in the troops’ appallingly delayed deployment to assist the besieged Capitol Police.)

The page then features a smattering of allegations that only make sense through the lens of someone vehemently convinced that the 2020 presidential election was stolen, which mounds of evidence and repeat investigations have proven was not, in fact, the case. The White House accuses Pence of “cowardice and sabotage” for refusing to follow Trump’s orders to defy the votes of the American people, claims that the 2020 election was the effect of “massive mail-in ballot fraud” and “hidden suitcases of ballots.” The site argues that the fallout from the day unfairly “silenced” Trump (on social media), resulted in “mass arrests of patriotic protesters,” and inspired “weaponized prosecutions” against the real estate mogul.

“Despite relentless Deep State efforts to imprison, bankrupt, and assassinate him—all designed to sabotage his political comeback through fabricated indictments, invasive raids, and rigged show trials—President Trump emerges triumphant,” the website concludes in its final panel on Trump’s rewritten history. “Fueled by unbreakable resolve, the fierce loyalty of his courageous family, team, and Patriotic Americans, and God’s unmistakable grace, he delivers a landslide 2024 victory and reclaims the White House in the greatest comeback in American History.”

Transcript: Trump Will Invade Another Country Unless We Stop Him - 2026-01-06T20:20:58Z

This is a lightly edited transcript of the January 5 edition of Right Now With Perry Bacon. You can watch the video here or by following this show on YouTube or Substack.


Perry Bacon: Welcome, everybody.

This is Perry Bacon. And this is The New Republic show Right Now. I’m joined by Leah Greenberg. She’s the co-executive director of Indivisible, which has organized many important rallies and mobilizations against the administration, both from 2017 to 2020 [and] also last year. Leah, great to see you. Welcome.

Leah Greenberg: Great to be here.

Bacon: So I want to talk to you about what happened over the weekend. I’ve talked to some political scientists and scholars, but just like ... why should Americans be concerned that the U.S. government grabbed the leader of a foreign nation without congressional authorization over the weekend?

In layman’s terms, why is this bad? Maduro is not a good person. He lost an election but stayed in power. So why should we be concerned about this?

Greenberg: Look, if the last couple of decades have taught us anything, it is that ill-conceived, aggressive foreign policy interventions into places that we’re fully unprepared to be involved in have enormously horrifying consequences, both for the places that we’re intervening [in] and their people, and for the American people. We have been in multiple decades of these endless wars that are wars of choice that have been activated by American governments with no real sense of what they’re getting into.

And this is perhaps the most ill-conceived, most illegal, most immoral [action] in recent history. This is just an absolutely wild, completely, fundamentally crazy decision to go in and try to execute a gunboat diplomacy-style attack on Venezuela in a period when Americans are crying out for us to address challenges at home. What I would say is that we should all have learned important lessons about what it means to destabilize another country or region without a plan. And also, this is just another demonstration of the fact that Donald Trump does not consider himself constrained by any domestic or foreign law, and will simply put his craziest ideas into action without taking seriously the consequences for anyone.

Bacon: You used the phrase “most illegal.” Explain why, because ...

Greenberg: Let me walk that one back. But it is a wildly illegal series of events. Now, I think that is important. I think that should be part of an ongoing process of investigation and examination of exactly what happened, what decisions were made, who was responsible.

And also, I think that it’s possible sometimes for us as Democrats to go down this rabbit hole where we’re talking about the constitutional authorities. The problem is—it’s a big problem that Congress was not consulted before Donald Trump decided to go to war. It’s also a big problem that this is a crazy, terrible idea. Congress, had they been consulted, should have said no—

Bacon: And I’m guessing these things are tied and that this is so radical and so crazy, if Congress had been asked, it never would’ve happened.

Greenberg: One would certainly hope. If you think about the congressional history here, we got very, very close to a War Powers Resolution on the attacks—on the ongoing series of attacks on fisherman boats. Literally within two votes of the last resolution coming up.

And so what we know is that Congress is quite skeptical of this kind of aggressive foreign policy intervention movement. We’re going to have some coming moments in the next week to test that and to see what kind of overall pushback we can harness as we have War Powers resolutions come up, hopefully. But it’s really clear that you would not get an affirmative go-ahead from this Congress.

Bacon: Talk about what you want Democrats in Congress, and then Democrats in America, to do about this. What should their reaction be—both groups?

Greenberg: Look, fundamentally, we know this administration’s M.O.: They do something awful, they see what kind of blowback they get, and if they’re able to get away with it, then they do more and they escalate. And so I think it’s very important that right now we are collectively outraged, in action, in motion, and creating as much backlash as possible in reaction to what has happened in order to avert future and further escalations and interventions.

We are seeing Trump, as of the last couple of days, rattling his saber at Cuba and at Mexico and at Greenland. It is extraordinarily important that his interpretation and his cronies’ interpretation of what happens here is not: I took this aggressive action, I got away with it. I should try doing that again and again. And that means a combination of popular backlash; that means everyone continuing to mobilize pressure on their own elected representatives, Republicans or Democrats.

I would say the median Democratic member this time has actually been pretty forward-leaning—certainly more forward-leaning than Democratic leadership has been on this. But you have folks who are nobody’s idea of a flaming progressive who are out very clearly [saying] that they think this is a terrible and illegal series of developments. We need to continue to stoke that energy within the Democratic Party. And we also just need to make sure that Republicans are getting some heat on it.

Now, there is the potential for a War Powers Resolution that would come up. These are privileged resolutions, which means that the leadership can’t stop them from coming to the floor within certain parameters. And so there’s an opportunity for a vote on constraining the use of force in both the Senate and the House; the House one [is] likely to come up relatively quickly. And so there’s going to be an opportunity for an actual vote on what is happening here.

Bacon: I’m not an expert on the War Powers Act—so what would the actual vote, policy—what would the policy actually be?

Greenberg: I can’t give you the specifics of each one, but they’re both aimed essentially at preventing—or they would be aimed ostensibly at preventing—further non-defensive military operations and some amount of ongoing effort to constrain the independent action of the executive.

Now, obviously, we’re in uncharted territory in terms of how willing this executive is to simply disregard laws. But we also do see some ongoing evidence that when they are formally constrained, rebuked, etc., they sometimes pull back. Thinking about, for example, a quieter defeat that they had over the last month, which was pulling the National Guard out of blue cities following the Supreme Court’s ruling that that is in fact not [authorized].

Bacon: You said people who are not anyone’s idea of a progressive—I’ll just name Ruben Gallego. There were a lot of members who I don’t think of as very left-wing who said very critical things. You said there’s a gap between the members and the leadership. Explain that a little bit.

I know Jeffries’s statement led with Maduro being a bad person. I think it got decent after that. So talk about the diversity in what the leadership has done and what the members have done, in your view.

Greenberg: Yeah, what I would say is, if you can explain it to me, then that’s great too. I’d welcome it. But you’ve seen notably more caution and hesitation in the framing coming from Minority Leader Jeffries and Schumer than you have coming from a lot of members across the ideological spectrum of the Democratic Party.

I think a lot of moderates, and particularly folks who’ve got combat experience like Senator Gallego, are really clear that getting involved in incredibly ill-conceived, immoral actions leads nowhere good for the people of that country and leads nowhere good for American troops. And so they’re responding with a lot more clarity in this moment.

I think Democratic leadership is in many ways ... often, what we find is that they are cautious. They are not guided by a core set of principles that allow you to simply and clearly react and say, No, absolutely not. Not another Iraq, not on our watch. And it’s our job to generate that pressure to get them there.

Bacon: Last thing—and this is a different subject—you’ve announced that Indivisible is going to have one of the biggest primary campaigns it’s ever had this year.

Talk about what—is this about challenging existing members? Is it about more open primaries? Talk about what you’re thinking about.

Greenberg: Yeah, absolutely. We’re working with our folks around the country on this right now because, fundamentally, Indivisible is a nationwide movement. It is led by folks all over the country on their home turf, and so it is in every congressional district, in every state. We’re in the middle of working directly with folks on where they are going and on primaries, and where we can, as national Indivisible, provide additional support.

And our anticipation is it is going to be a combination of places where we’ve got Indivisible groups who are going in for a candidate in an open primary, or where Indivisible groups are backing a candidate who’s a challenger to an existing Democrat who has not gotten with the program. It’s going to be some combination of those two.

Obviously, there’s way more races than any one organization can coherently support. But we’re going to be coming in behind a bunch of our groups [in] key pivotal places where we think we can really make a difference in the direction of the Democratic Party.

Bacon: So I was looking online at your principles, and one of them is that Senate candidates should commit to not endorsing Schumer for majority leader again. Are there any other civic principles for House or Senate candidates?

Greenberg: Yeah, look, fundamentally we’re looking for fighters. We want to see people who understand this is an emergency, who understand that it requires using all the tools in the toolbox. We’re going to take a different approach to business as usual. That includes being willing to embrace structural reforms, like reforming the Supreme Court. It includes your relationship with money in politics. Not taking money from the funders of fascism, not taking money from crypto or AIPAC.

It includes a host of things, and we’re not trying to be super prescriptive. This is not 40 different questionnaire questions.... I’m a former policy staffer myself, and filling out those questionnaires for the different interest groups was very traumatic because you’re researching things you certainly don’t know enough about to comment on.

And so we’re not trying to get to that level of detail. We want to create an overall flexible set of framing and principles that folks are capable of applying wherever they are, and that gives us some cohesion across the country about what it means to be a Democratic fighter.

Bacon: But it’s also something you’ve been talking about since Trump won. You’ve been saying the divide in the party is not necessarily left or right, or left or center, or progressive versus moderate, although there’s an element of that. It’s more about who’s a fighter—who sees the threat for what it is.

So in some ways—a fighter is a little harder to define than who’s for Medicare for All or who’s for a wealth tax.

Greenberg: That’s right. And look, I think of it as an X and Y spectrum. How far to the center versus the left are you? And then, how much do you think we’re in an emergency or not?

And frankly, there tends to be some alignment between people who are more to the left and more to the “emergency” quadrant, but it’s not everyone and it’s not always. We’ve seen Chris Murphy—who would be nobody’s named progressive champion—emerge this year as a very important leader in the “This Is an Emergency” caucus.

Bacon: I was going to say Van Hollen is actually even more known for being mild-mannered. I don’t know where he is on the center-versus-left—his policy views are fairly normal, but I think he’s been much more engaged in a certain way.

Greenberg: Yeah, you’ve seen some people who got a really clear moral center, who’ve got a willingness to stand up and be counted and who are properly alarmed and horrified by what’s happening, who’ve emerged as leaders who maybe weren’t, who weren’t the center of attention before, like Van Hollen.

Bacon: Last thing: Mayor Mamdani called Trump on Saturday and registered his objections. What did you think about that? That was just—I didn’t—I’m not sure how many members of Congress have access to the president. What did you make of it? I thought it was a good first sign that he’s engaged, though.

Greenberg: That is a fascinating relationship. Obviously not what I think a lot of us were expecting when Mayor Mamdani was elected. We were expecting much more of an aggressive Trump onslaught on New York. Fundamentally, I think this is the kind of blowback that you want Trump to experience from a lot of different spaces and unexpected sources. You know, his mental frames are so simple: Special Forces are cool. Take the oil. That’s great.

To the extent that he experiences this as a poll boost or an easy win, he’s more likely to pursue more of these hits. To the extent that he perceives this as a poll drag—a big problem for him, because suddenly there’s a bunch of extra investigations and votes, and he’s having to answer questions about this for the next two months, and it’s just not something that he wants more of—we’re more likely to be able to constrain the next offensive action.

Bacon: So how we react to these next few days matters and how outraged we all sound really matters.

Greenberg: Yeah, exactly. And I am always obligated to say: Call your members of Congress. There’s active legislation here that they will be called to vote on relatively soon on the War Powers Resolutions. We’ve got to make sure that there’s a resounding rebuke of what Trump has done here.

Bacon: All right, Leah, great to see you. Thanks for joining me.

Here’s Everything Trump Has Done So Far to Try to Take Over Greenland - 2026-01-06T19:45:07Z

The White House triggered international alarm when it ordered U.S. troops to storm Venezuela and capture the country’s leader, Nicolás Maduro. Donald Trump’s blatant violation of international law and order transformed his rhetoric, which was until Saturday blithely dismissed as toothless threats and flat jokes about controlling the world, into a real, immediate danger.

Enter: Greenland. In the immediate aftermath of Trump’s bombardment of Venezuela for oil, European allies weighed whether the U.S. president’s myriad jabs at annexing Greenland—another major international oil resource—had actually carried venom. They have since released public statements in defense of Greenland, potentially pitting the Danish territory against the world’s greatest military force.

To explain how the U.S. got to this point in its relationship with the Arctic island, this New Republic reporter has broken down the more critical details of Trump’s escalating feud with Greenland, its self-governing residents, and the U.S. ally that maintains it as part of its kingdom: Denmark.

August 18, 2019: Trump confirms rumors that he is interested in acquiring Greenland. He tells reporters at the time that the arrangement could be handled as a “large real estate deal.” His comments are little more than a laughless joke to most of the world—but not to those residing on the Arctic island, who receive news of Trump’s interest with searing indignation.

December 22, 2024: Trump’s interest in Greenland resurfaces before he enters office for his second term. He writes on Truth Social that “for purposes of National Security and Freedom throughout the World, the United States of America feels that the ownership and control of Greenland is an absolute necessity.” Greenland’s leadership responds that the semiautonomous territory is “not for sale.”

December 24, 2024: The potential acquisition is lumped into a grander scheme to expand U.S. borders, in which Trump would aim to transform Canada and Greenland into American states.

January 7, 2025: Trump suggests that he would use military force to obtain Greenland, and economic force to squash Canada.

That same day, Donald Trump Jr., Charlie Kirk, and Trump staffer Sergio Gor pay a visit to Greenland as part of a not-so-subtle propaganda tour. The MAGA trio claim that Greenlanders are amenable to a potential takeover. Days later, it emerges that the American envoy had lied and staged Trump-friendly photographs, offering food to homeless people in exchange for pictures of them in MAGA merch.

Aaja Chemnitz, a Greenlandic member of the Danish Parliament, says that Greenlanders do not intend to be a “pawn in Trump’s hot dreams of expanding his empire to include our country.”

January 8, 2025: The House GOP writes that denying Trump’s “big dreams” of eastward expansion would be “un-American.”

February 11, 2025: In an apparent attempt to suck up to the president, Georgia Representative Buddy Carter files a bill pitching that “Greenland shall be known as ‘Red, White, and Blueland,’” authorizing the president to enter into negotiations with the government of Denmark to purchase or otherwise acquire Greenland.

March 12, 2025: Greenland’s parliamentary elections result in a massive win for the pro-independence movement. The center-right Demokraatit Party, which supports a local business-driven approach to gaining independence, wins nearly 30 percent of the vote. The most aggressively pro-independence party, Naleraq, wins 25 percent.

“We don’t want to be Americans. No, we don’t want to be Danes. We want to be Greenlanders. And we want our own independence in the future. And we want to build our own country by ourselves, not with his hope,” Demokraatit Party leader Jens-Friederik Nielsen tells SkyNews on the eve of the election.

March 27, 2025: Trump’s aggression inspires a massive reshuffling of Greenland’s Parliament, with the island’s four political parties forming a coalition government with the primary purpose of opposing American efforts to take control. The reorganization is fronted by Greenland’s center-right Demokraatit Party, making its leader, Jens-Frederik Nielsen, the country’s new prime minister.

That same day, second lady Usha Vance’s trip to much of the Danish territory is spontaneously canceled. The decision follows reports from local media that U.S. representatives were walking door-to-door in Greenland’s capital, Nuuk, inquiring if residents would be interested in a visit from the vice president’s wife.

“They’ve gotten no, no, no, no, no, every single time,” said TV 2 correspondent Jesper Steinmetz.

The story bothered Usha Vance so much that a senior White House official reached out to this TNR reporter to insist that the details of her article were “categorically false,” though the official did not specify which part of the report Vance objected to.

Instead of touring the island as planned, Vance visits a U.S. space base on Greenland alongside her husband, Vice President JD Vance, then–national security adviser Mike Waltz, and Energy Secretary Chris Wright.

April 10, 2025: The New York Times reveals that the White House National Security Council has met “several times” to make Trump’s desires for the Arctic island a reality. One possible plan: a massive P.R. campaign consisting of spending federal dollars on advertising and social media with hopes of persuading Greenland’s 57,000 residents to annex themselves for America.

May 4, 2025: Trump refuses to “rule out” the possibility of using military force against Greenland.

May 7, 2025: Reports emerge that several high-ranking officials under Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard directed the U.S. intelligence community to spy on Greenland’s independence movement over the prior week. The officials also tasked agencies to identify individuals living in Greenland and Denmark who support the Trump administration’s goals for the island, and examine local attitudes regarding potential “American resource extraction.”

August 27, 2025: Denmark’s foreign minister summons a U.S. diplomat to discuss recent incursions in Greenland, including an influence campaign spearheaded by several people with ties to the White House.

One of the Americans reportedly compiled a list of denizens friendly to the U.S., collected the names of people who oppose Trump, and conducted reconnaissance on narratives that could potentially frame Denmark in a bad light for sympathetic American media. The other two Americans were caught cozying up to Greenland politicians, businesspeople, and locals.

December 21, 2025: Trump appoints Jeff Landry, the former Republican governor of Louisiana, as special envoy to Greenland. In an interview with the BBC, Trump affirms his commitment to obtaining the ice island. “We have to have it” for “national protection,” Trump said.

January 3, 2026: Trump’s sudden invasion of Venezuela—and the kidnapping of its leader, Nicolás Maduro—renews concerns regarding Trump’s rhetoric on Greenland. European leaders begin to take the threats seriously.

January 3, 2026: Deputy White House chief of staff Stephen Miller’s wife, Katie Miller, posts a red, white, and blue image of Greenland, captioned: “SOON.”

January 4, 2026: Trump reaffirms his commitment to obtaining Greenland. In an interview with The Atlantic published Sunday, Trump says: “We do need Greenland, absolutely. We need it for defense.”

That evening, Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen rebukes Trump’s rhetoric, saying in a statement that it makes “absolutely no sense to talk about the need for the United States to take over Greenland.

“The U.S. has no right to annex any of the three nations in the Danish kingdom,” Frederiksen says. “I would therefore strongly urge the United States to stop the threats against a historically close ally and against another country and another people, who have very clearly said that they are not for sale.”

January 6, 2026: Seven powerful NATO allies—including France, Germany, and the U.K.—publish a joint statement affirming their support for Greenland’s sovereignty. “Greenland belongs to its people. It is for Denmark and Greenland, and them only, to decide on matters concerning Denmark and Greenland,” they wrote.

Here’s How Many Epstein Files Trump’s DOJ Has Actually Released - 2026-01-06T19:38:37Z

The Department of Justice revealed Monday that it has only released less than 1 percent of the documents related to the investigations into Jeffrey Epstein’s alleged child trafficking.

In a letter sent Monday to Manhattan-based District Judge Paul Engelmayer, Attorney General Pam Bondi and deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche laid bare just how little had been done to comply with the Epstein Files Transparency Act since it was passed in November.

“To date, the Department has now posted to the DOJ Epstein Library webpage approximately 12,285 documents (comprising approximately 125,575 pages) in response to the Act, and there are more than 2 million documents potentially responsive to the Act that are in various phases of review,” the letter stated.

That means that everything that has been released so far—including such tidbits as a government lawyer saying that Trump had traveled on Epstein’s plane “many more times than previously has been reported”—is just the tip of the iceberg.

The letter also stated that initial reviews of a recent batch of more than one million documents received by the DOJ in December revealed that a “meaningful portion” of those documents were “copies of (or largely duplicative of) documents that had already been collected” by the agency.

More than 400 lawyers, including 125 from the Southern District of New York, would continue to review the more than two million documents that remained, the letter stated, for the purpose of de-duplicating them and making efforts to protect victim privacy.

Multiple survivors have criticized the Trump administration’s most recent document dump for failing to redact “numerous victim identities” while also making “abnormal and extreme redactions with no explanation.”

The letter included a lengthy list of ways that the DOJ intended to amend its process for ensuring victim privacy. It claimed that the department would modify the process for responding to survivor’s requests, improve the process of handling duplicative materials, run additional electronic quality control, and “refine” internal guidance for reviewers.

Transcript: Why Trump Overthrowing Venezuela’s Government Was Crazy - 2026-01-06T17:26:22Z

This is a lightly edited transcript of the January 3 edition of Right Now With Perry Bacon. You can watch the video here or by following this show on YouTube or Substack.

Perry Bacon: This is Perry Bacon from The New Republic, and I’m joined by Elizabeth Saunders. She’s a professor at Columbia University who writes a lot about and studies international relations, U.S. foreign policy, and national security. And we’re talking in the wake of—less than 24 hours ago—the U.S. government deposing Maduro.

He’s probably either on a plane or has already landed in the U.S., where he’ll face criminal charges. So we are watching an active regime change and learning the details of it as we speak. So, Professor, welcome.

Elizabeth Saunders: Thank you for having me.

Bacon: So I guess the first question—the obvious question, even right now—is: Why did this happen?

Or even over the last few months—we’ve seen they’ve been building up toward—I was surprised it happened this way, but it seems like the administration has been building up toward this for a while. Trump and Marco Rubio have been talking a lot about [how] the Venezuelan situation must be changed, exaggerating the drug trafficking in a certain way.

So talk—do we know? What’s your sense of why this happened?

Saunders: So I think one of the similarities this has with the Iraq War is that there were a lot of people who supported it for a lot of different reasons. So you had, probably the number one driver of this, just from the reporting I’ve read, was Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who has long been advocating regime change in Venezuela. He connects Venezuela, as he did in the press conference this morning with Trump, to Cuba; sees Venezuela as under the thumb of Cuba. Rubio’s parents fled Cuba when Castro took over. And I think this has been on his wish list for a long time.

You couple that with previous attempts in the first Trump administration by then-national security adviser John Bolton, who’s pretty much never met a regime change operation he didn’t like. There had been some efforts in this area, some covert; I don’t even think we know the whole story yet. So there had been plans. And then Rubio, and then the other piece of reporting that I’ve seen is that Stephen Miller had seized on this as a way of bringing Trump in on the drugs issue. So getting Trump to support this by folding it all into this narrative of narco-terrorism. And so you have Rubio and Miller making common cause. And Hegseth—Pete Hegseth, secretary of defense—likes anything that makes him look tough. And so you have what we call in political science a logroll, where everybody can find their reason and get on board.

And what was really shocking about the press conference—waking up this morning and seeing the news, given all that’s happened, I didn’t actually think it was really going to happen in the end. But then when you saw it, it’s like, “OK, it was a close call.” We were all making bets about whether he would do it or not, but he sent in an aircraft carrier, so it’s not that surprising. But hearing Trump himself talk about “boots on the ground” and “we’re going to run the government of Venezuela,” and “we’re not afraid of boots on the ground”—that was pretty shocking to me, just as an observer of Trump. I’ve never bought into the “Trump is a dove” idea. But he’s been pretty consistent. He likes these pinpoint operations, very risky, but he likes to bomb a target. And this is Pandora’s box. And that was ... it’s very odd to wake up to very surprising and unexpected news and then to be shocked on top of that. But his press conference, I would say, was very shocking.

Bacon: I think we’re going to hear a lot of talk about Venezuelan oil and oil reserves. You didn’t say that, though. I think it’s important—in Iraq, too—we had a lot of discussions about oil, and I was never totally convinced that was George W. Bush’s rationale, even if it seemed the most logical.

Do you see a role for that here? How do you see oil playing out? I’m open to any—I just want to hear your thoughts on that.

Saunders: So yes, there is this sort of persistent idea that the U.S. invades countries for oil. And I think it was really not the case in Iraq—at least not in ... only in the most indirect way. You never know what’s going on in Trump’s mind. But he didn’t mention oil for quite a while. All of this was in motion before he started talking about oil, and then all of a sudden there was the one day where he starts talking about oil. And you think to yourself, “Did somebody brief him on the nationalization of the oil?” Because up until that point, there had been discussions, even, and negotiations, between Trump and Maduro at the beginning of the second Trump administration. And Rubio disrupted that. And so it’s not clear that he would’ve preferred to do this the hard way with military force rather than cutting some deal.

And so maybe when things started—I’m purely speculating—but the fact that it has not really been about oil throughout this whole buildup says to me that it was a late addition to the stew of reasons why Trump might be persuaded to get on board with this. But again, I’m just speculating. It’s also a little bit odd, because it’s not as though Venezuela’s oil ... it doesn’t belong to the U.S. It was nationalized, but that’s a thing that happens. And it was a long time ago. And the oil, the price of oil—there’s too much of it right now for global demand. So it just—I’m not an oil expert or a Latin America expert—but it doesn’t strike me that it’s enough to drive this.

Bacon: Just to clarify, I think the Biden administration’s policy was that Maduro should be pushed out of office in some way—probably not like this—and I assume Harris would have had the same policy, that same goal. [But] this policy, we think, the way this happened last night would not have been done by Biden or Harris.

Saunders: Yeah, people forget that the official law of the land under Bill Clinton in the late years of his administration was to do regime change in Iraq. Congress passed the law; Clinton signed it. So the official policy of the United States was to get Saddam Hussein out of office. And of course, it wasn’t until Bush—and even after 9/11—that Bush decided to undertake that mission. Supporting regime change rhetorically is not the same as doing it, which is one reason why a lot of people were not surprised but saw it as a reasonable guess to think that he would not, in the end—Trump would not, in the end, change the regime by force.

If you oppose a regime and you think it’s illegitimate—and the grounds on which they opposed it are also that Maduro didn’t leave office when he was voted out; he’s not the legitimate president—but those are very different reasons than the ones that we’ve been hearing from the administration. And I don’t see illegal boat strikes in the Caribbean under Biden or—I just have a hard time imagining that’s how they would’ve gone about it.

Bacon: So moving forward—this was not authorized by Congress, and members of Congress are pretty explicitly saying, we asked about this and they told us they were not doing it.

So I know you’re not a lawyer, but what’s your sense? In terms of—we’ve had so many conflicts in which Congress has not voted affirmatively for them—where does this rank? How do you view this in terms of authorized, democratic small-d, authorized by Congress, not authorized, the American public read in, Congress read in, or not?

Saunders: So I’m a little bit cynical on this front. I’m not a lawyer, and I don’t study international law directly, but I follow a lot of lawyers. Quite literally, some of my best friends are lawyers. They all seem to agree, almost universally, that this is illegal under international law.

Bacon: Is it undemocratic in a certain way?

Saunders: That’s more the stuff I study—and I actually, without endorsing in any sense the operation, tend to think we overestimate how much the small-d democratic process is actually involved in decisions about military force.

I think that most of the American public doesn’t pay that much attention unless things go really wrong. And I think you can look at the Iraq War again. It really wasn’t until 2006, the 2006 midterm elections, and there’s some very interesting history around that. The Democrats ran that midterm campaign on Iraq, but didn’t decide to do that until very late in the game in that campaign; they didn’t think it would be a winning issue. Only when things were just dreadful. If you lived through that time, you remember just that day in and day out, terrible violence inside Iraq, deaths of civilians, and then also deaths of U.S. soldiers every day. And I think that’s what it takes to really engage the American electorate on these issues.

And then when it comes to congressional authorization, I absolutely take the point that international law and constitutional law scholars make: that you can’t have a war without Congress declaring it. But we haven’t had declared war since Pearl Harbor, basically.

Bacon: Were Iraq and Afghanistan not declared wars?

Saunders: It wasn’t a declared war, but there was an authorization to use military force. If I’m not mistaken—actually, maybe they finally did get the Iraq one off the books quite recently. But the Afghanistan authorization is still on the books. The Afghanistan War is over; in fact, the 1957 Eisenhower Doctrine, which authorizes force in the Middle East, is still on the books, just for those keeping score. So authorizations to use military force—leave aside declared war—they are political instruments in and of themselves. Presidents ask for them when they think they can get them, when they think it would be beneficial. And they tend to stick around for a long time. And Congress doesn’t like to vote on anything if they can avoid it.

So I wrote a whole book called The Insiders’ Game, which is about how basically elites make decisions about war and peace, and the public sort of looks at what the elites are saying about it, and if there’s not much disagreement, they go along. It wouldn’t surprise me if that happened here. But I do think what happens on the ground in Venezuela is clearly ... I think what was shocking about this morning is there was no prospect that America would be entangled in the aftermath. It could be horrific for Venezuela on the ground—repression, we don’t know what’s happening. But when Trump started saying, “We’re going to run it,” that just raises the specter of a huge range of outcomes from, “Nah, we’re not going to get involved” ... I keep waiting for the reporting, the background walk-back.

Bacon: The walk-back? Yeah, I think it’s probably coming. Yeah, because he’s—let me ask, because in terms of what happened on Friday night—it was unprecedented. On the one hand, there are a lot of precedents of the U.S. doing regime change. On the other hand, I think we were surprised by this, because this is not exactly—there was a long discussion about what would happen in Iraq, and how, and so on. This feels different. So do you think this was weird and unprecedented, or not really?

Saunders: So on the one hand, there’s a really long history of this in Latin America in particular. It goes back to ... as far back as when the U.S. acquired the power to project power into other regions. So late nineteenth century, and we intervened in Cuba, in [the] Dominican Republic, several times. You can’t even count them. There have been so many, and that’s before you even get to the Cold War interventions that are quite notorious. The precedent I think people are pointing to is Panama and Noriega. But ... I don’t have a problem with making these analogies, but I do think that there’s a limit to how much the precedent really matters because we are in a different universe right now.

We are in a universe where Donald Trump has basically no constraints on his presidency. None, compared even to his first administration. So you were looking at this backdrop of the ... tableau down at Mar-a-Lago of Trump with Miller and Rubio, and Hegseth, and the chairman of the joint chiefs, Stan Cain, and somebody else I’m forgetting. There were five of them behind him, and those are not people who put any checks on Trump.

Whereas in the first term, you had Mattis and Kelly and others. His most instinctive whims would be checked. And so I think you can’t really compare the politics of today to the politics in the Cold War when the president really did have to worry about Congress. Even Trump had to worry about his advisers and would take advice, and this is just a permissive environment. It’s not that Trump has changed; it’s that there’s a permissive environment around him where his whims and instincts, or the ones he gloms onto from different advisers, get translated into action with no filter. No process, no consideration.

And what was really dramatic about it was in the run-up. I was waiting, I was listening to the chatter—you know, he was late to give the speech—and they’re saying, “Oh, this has been planned for months and months and months. They’ve done all this planning about what’s going to happen next.” And then he gets up there and says, “We’re going to run Venezuela.” The press did ask him. And they were like, “Really? Who’s going to?” and “Who’s the group?” And he said, “The people ... the five people behind me.” And you do wonder, was that news to them? Like to Rubio and company?

Bacon: I hadn’t thought of it quite that way before. You said elites run foreign policy. You could even argue elites run American policy—particularly foreign policy. I agree. But in this case, it’s going to be different, because based on what I’ve seen so far, this is not going to be a bipartisan agreement.

There’s been some pushback—Schumer, in general, has been more careful, saying you should have gone to Congress first. But in general, this has been pretty widely condemned by Democrats, almost universally, [for] not going to Congress, [for pursuing] regime change. I don’t think you’re going to see the sort of—at least Iraq had initial bipartisan support. This does not look like it’s going to have that.

Saunders: Yes. Although we are in a more polarized time.

Bacon: Yes. That may be why.

Saunders: Yeah. And it used to be that when elites were united, that sent a signal. And when they were divided, that sent a signal. But now elites are divided all the time on partisan lines. So it’s no longer quite so clear what signal the public will take from that. And I should say, my take on this is cynical, but I don’t mean it in the sense that the public doesn’t pay attention and it should pay more attention. Or that elites are somehow this nefarious.... This is how we all make sense of the world.

You asked me on to talk about U.S. foreign policy in Venezuela and the action; if you’d asked me to come on and talk about health care policy, I would’ve said, “You’re crazy. Call my friend who studies health.” We all specialize. And none of us can keep up with ... I’m not a Latin America specialist. I don’t know the intricacies of who’s in and who’s out in Venezuela today.

And so I think we need to think about it more like we hire elites—I mean through elections and then delegating appointment power and all of that—to monitor this stuff. And we trust them, in normal times, to follow the intelligence and get advice and talk to allies. And this is all the stuff Trump doesn’t do. And follow a process and stick to it. And when you see him unleashing stuff like this in real time, possibly unbeknownst to his own advisers ... who knows? I would love to know some of the background reporting on that.

Bacon: They know they were involved in the operation. You’re saying this plan that we’re going to own Venezuela and rebuild it. It seems like—I didn’t have a sense that was true until I heard it, yes.

Saunders: Yes, even when they were at the press conference and they threw it back to the—I think I was watching BBC, or maybe I was toggling between them; CNN maybe—everybody seemed stunned. And Trump is a good politician in many ways, but he stepped on his own message here because now everybody’s talking about “We’re going to run Venezuela.”

Bacon: Not how tough [he] was, [how] he took down the corrupt leader, yes.

Saunders: Not that we should celebrate it as a success, but putting yourself in ... I always like to think about it from the very cynical point of view of the politician. And his job today, in addition to informing people, was to paint this in the best possible light for his administration. That’s what all presidents do. And he got Maduro out of Venezuela, and now all anybody is talking about is that we’re running it.

Bacon: This idea that ... I think Vance said this, like the U.S. filed criminal charges against him, so therefore that’s justification to depose a leader of a foreign nation. Is that something that happens? I don’t know, that’s ... I don’t love that idea, but is that ... is there a precedent for that?

Saunders: I wouldn’t want to ... I don’t want to say yes or no because I’m sure if I say one or the other, I’ll have a friend call me up and say, “You said this wrong.” But it’s one thing to indict somebody in absentia. But to then go in and ... I can’t think of one. Duterte was turned over by the Philippine government to The Hague.

Bacon: That’s a little different. That was an internal coup on some level or something like ...

Saunders: That’s a little different. There have been cases of, like, cartel leaders that I can think of who were extracted. I guess Noriega, but I don’t know. It’s ... even if there is a precedent, I come back to: Is it wise? Just because there’s a precedent doesn’t make it good policy.

Bacon: I’m trying to pin down… It felt very unusual to me, and I’m trying—I’m trying to tease it out. Like I said—I’ve been doing this a long time. Very few things outright surprise me. And I was like, oh, they’re hinting, he wants Maduro to catch the hint, but they’re not going to do this. So this happening so abruptly—I did think, and I guess I should ask you as we’re closing here—I’m not sure you’re allowed to say this, but this feels extreme, and I would say bad. I don’t want the U.S. doing regime change at random, with no international support or no congressional support. This feels—among the many things Trump has done that I don’t agree with—like one of the more outlandish ones. Would you put that in there, for this year, this term at least?

Saunders: I would say of all the things he’s done in his foreign policy—other [than his] general attack on world order and liberal allies, which is very important and very extreme and very big, but also didn’t happen in one day. Even bombing Iran ... Netanyahu had already done a lot of it for him. So by the time he did it, it was not ... I also was on record as saying I didn’t think that would happen either. So take my analysis for what it’s worth. That’s twice I’ve been wrong about him.

I have the same sense, and I do think that there’s a community of international lawyers that’s trying to pin down the nature of what’s illegal about it. And that’s important, the precedents. And there’s this community of Latin America scholars that are very much putting this in the context of all the long, infamous history of U.S. intervention. That’s also correct. But I just keep coming back to: Trump has unchecked power. The last time we did this, it went horribly wrong. And at least Bush ... felt the need to have a justification and all of that. And it’s just even more illustration that there’s no constraints. The fact that the MAGA-friendly press corps pushed him so hard in that press conference, I think, is quite telling. Because it meant that they were surprised and ...

Bacon: Do we know if there was MAGA reporters? Why are you saying that? I didn’t watch …

Saunders: I shouldn’t say that definitively, but my understanding is the pool that goes with him now is handpicked and doesn’t have the usual ... maybe there’s a couple from the networks, but the press pool is very much more MAGA-friendly than it used to be. But they pushed—I couldn’t see who was asking the questions, but they pushed harder than I... they just kept coming back: “Really? Who’s going to be running? What does this mean?” They had the bit between their teeth in a way that they haven’t on a lot of issues.

So I think you have to think of it in the context of today and American politics and the decline of American democracy today and the weakening of guardrails. And also we live in a different international environment now than a lot ... than we did when all the precedents people are citing. Our military is way overstretched, both at ... deployments at home. He makes threats on multiple continents, like, every week. We struck Nigeria over the holidays. Does anyone even remember that?

Bacon: I had you to remind me of that.

Saunders: I try to remind myself of these things because it’s so hard to keep track. And he’s gutted the diplomatic infrastructure—Marco Rubio is complicit in that—and he ended USAID, which would be a very handy thing to have around if you’re trying to do regime change and stabilize a country. We have an extreme border policy, which is ... it’s not clear whether this is going to unleash a new wave of migration. So that’s another sort of unintended consequence. But also, the U.S. ... it used to be the country—for better and often for worse—that underwrote the international order. We violated the rules a lot, but there were rules, and we are now going to learn what it’s like to live in a world without them.

We can’t even reimpose them if we wanted to because of Trump’s gutting of the diplomatic and foreign policy toolkit. And that wasn’t true when we invaded Panama. It may be the right precedent, but the context is ... George H.W. Bush had tremendous foreign policy experience. The Soviet Union was collapsing. Vladimir Putin is not pleased, I would think, about this. So this is just playing with fire in a totally different setting than previous precedents, and I think that, as much as anything, is part of what’s making me also feel like ... OK. Even if there is a precedent, this is still a different level of risk and uncertainty. The range of things that could happen is just enormous.

Bacon: I think I want to end there. The range of things that happen is enormous. I think that we both feel that way.

Saunders: Yeah. I’m not the one you invite to the party to be the cheerful, happy entertainment.

Bacon: This is the kind of thing where it’s hard to be cheerful, but that’s why we’re talking about it on a Saturday because it feels important and scary.

Saunders: Yeah. It is important and it is scary.

Bacon: Professor, thanks for joining me. I appreciate it. Nice to see you.

Saunders: Oh, my pleasure. Thank you for having me.

Bari Weiss’s New CBS Project Debuts—and Is a Total Disaster - 2026-01-06T17:10:13Z

“First day, big problems here.”

That was anchor Tony Dokoupil during his difficult-to-watch debut as the fresh face of CBS Evening News.

During his first foray into evening news Monday, Dokoupil face-planted while transitioning out of a story on Venezuela while Bari Weiss, the right-wing shill tapped to become editor in chief of CBS News, reportedly looked on from the control room.

“To Governor Walz—no. We’re gonna do Mark Kelly,” Dokoupil joked, as graphics of the Arizona senator floated on the screen. “First day—first day, big problems here.”

“Are we going to Kelly here? Or are we gonna go to Jonah Kaplan?” Dokoupil asked producers. There was a long on-air silence, before he finally continued. “We’re doing Mark Kelly, possibly demoted from his retired rank of captain in the Navy.”

While transitioning out of Kelly, Dokoupil made yet another gaffe as he referred to Minnesota as the “Great Lake State,” which it is not. Minnesota is known as the “Land of 10,000 Lakes,” while the “Great Lakes State,” referring to multiple lakes, is Michigan.

Dokoupil, who previously co-hosted CBS’s morning news show, was tapped by Weiss last month to refresh the network’s evening news program previously helmed by news giants such as Walter Cronkite and Dan Rather.

Dokoupil actually promised to be “more accountable” than Cronkite, whatever the hell that means. And yet, his awkward flubs were removed from subsequent streaming and the show’s West Coast broadcast, according to Entertainment Weekly.

The 44-year-old journalist reportedly caught Weiss’s eye after his wildly unprofessional attempt to interview author Ta-Nehisi Coates last year, which Dokoupil turned into a diatribe defending Israel and accusing the author of antisemitism. CBS staffers were reportedly not impressed by Weiss’s uninspired pick of a “mediocre white man.”

Ahead of his debut, Dokoupil previewed his show with a MAGA-coded video posted to social media railing against the “elites” and “legacy media,” complaining about coverage of Hunter Biden’s laptop, Hillary Clinton’s emails, and the president’s fitness for office (not naming names) as examples of journalistic missteps—that were all copy-pasted right-wing talking points.

Dokoupil’s appointment seemingly aligns with Weiss’s journalistic North Star: staying on the Trump administration’s good side, and pulling the national discourse to an invented center that is both unrigorous and uninteresting.

Trump Gives Away His Entire Game on Midterm Elections - 2026-01-06T17:07:25Z

Forget a conservative majority—Donald Trump personally needs Republicans to win big in the coming midterms.

The president tossed aside the significance of his allies’ local elections while speaking at the GOP retreat Tuesday, telling lawmakers that he needs the party to maintain control of the federal government in order to avoid a Democrat-led impeachment effort.

“You gotta win the midterms,” Trump said. “Because if we don’t win the midterms, it’s just going to be—I mean, they’ll find a reason to impeach me. I’ll get impeached.”

Republicans have had a trifecta in Washington since 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 this fall: 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 already 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 influence red states to gerrymander their congressional lines to turn more seats in Congress. So far, that pressure campaign has had mixed results.

The MAGA leader then went on to suggest that Republicans are too nice to impeach Democrats in turn, claiming that they could have impeached “Joe Biden for a hundred different things.” Fact check: Conservative lawmakers tried to impeach Biden several times, though each effort crashed and burned as claims of mounting evidence turned out to be bunk. In one instance, the caucus’s star witness in the Biden-Burisma bribery scandal fessed up to fabricating the story with the Russians.

Trump, meanwhile, has plenty to worry about should he lose sway over the American legislature. Over the last several months, Trump has committed acts of war against Venezuela without congressional approval, forced the National Guard into cities around the country without forward consent of local governors and mayors, signed an executive order to end birthright citizenship, was revealed to be a close confidant and longtime friend of child sex-trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, and routinely attacked the foundational pillars of American democracy by challenging the bounds of the Constitution (to name a small handful of indiscretions).

That should give Democrats plenty of fodder to push Trump out of power—if they can muster the votes.

If they do, plenty of pending charges await the convicted felon—including the dormant consequences of ex–special counsel Jack Smith’s investigation.

Stephen Miller Crashes Out Over American Intervention in Wild Rant - 2026-01-06T16:03:18Z

New Year, same Stephen Miller.

The often-belligerent White House deputy chief of staff delivered a screaming tirade Monday night about “tin-pot dictators” in response to a simple question about the future of Venezuela’s government, following the Trump administration’s capture of President Nicolás Maduro.

For context, Miller has been on a generational run of appearing completely unhinged while giving screaming interviews on television.

CNN’s Jake Tapper pressed Miller on President Donald Trump’s sudden dismissal of Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado as a viable candidate to lead the country. Following Trump’s evaluation that Machado didn’t have the “respect” of her countrymen, there was some concern that he was simply acting out of pettiness because she won the Nobel Peace Prize over him.

“Why does the president think that Machado should not be the next leader; why does he think she’s weak?” Tapper asked.

Miller sputtered out a meaningless answer referencing “all Venezuela experts” who thought that installing Machado would be “absurd and preposterous.”

“So, should there be an election?” Tapper pressed.

It was a simple enough question, but growing gradually louder, Miller ranted about how the “superpower” United States could not allow Venezuela to operate drug trafficking in its own backyard.

“For years, we sent our soldiers to die in deserts in the Middle East to try to build them parliaments, to try to build them democracies, to try to give them more oil, to try to give them more resources. The future of the free world, Jake, depends on America being able to assert ourselves and our interests without apology,” Miller raved, now fully shouting. “This whole period that happened after World War II where the West began apologizing and groveling and begging and engaging in these vast reparation schemes—”

Miller’s framing ignores the plain fact that American intervention in the Middle East and elsewhere was done entirely in the U.S. interest for oil, power, and security, not for charity.

“I don’t even know what you’re talking about now,” Tapper said.

Miller recoiled, accusing Tapper of “doing that smarmy thing,” claiming that his interviewer knew exactly what he was talking about.

“I asked you about if there should be an election!” Tapper pressed again.

Miller continued to rant about ensuring “security and stability” in Venezuela, even though he had just made clear that Venezuelan interests were the furthest thing from his priorities.

“But the woman running Venezuela right now is part of the Maduro regime,” Tapper pushed back. Rather than back Machado, Trump had signaled that he would recognize Maduro’s Vice President Delcy Rodríguez as the face of the country.

“The reason why I was giving you that speech, which I know you didn’t want to hear, is because you’re approaching this from the wrong frame,” Miller raved. “This neoliberal frame that the United States’ job is to go around the world and demanding immediate election be held everywhere, all the time, right away—”

“No, that’s not what I think. But you invaded the country—went into the country and we seized the leader of Venezuela—” Tapper interjected.

“Damn straight we did!” Miller cried. “Because we’re not gonna let—and the point Jake, is we’re not gonna let tin-pot Communist dictators send rapists into our country, send drugs into our country, send weapons into our country, and we’re not going to let a country fall into the hands of our adversaries!”

As a feral Miller continued to rant about Venezuela’s “bright” and “incredible” future, and “one of the greatest foreign policy and military victories” in American history, Tapper gently cut him off and segued into the next segment.

Trump Says He’s Ramping Up Defense Production After Invading Venezuela - 2026-01-06T15:58:18Z

America’s defense industry is about to take a shot of adrenaline straight to the veins, if the president has his way.

Speaking at the GOP retreat at the Kennedy Center Tuesday morning, Donald Trump announced that America “is going to start producing [weapons] much faster” than it has been in recent years.

The declaration followed Trump’s complaints that the U.S. and its allies have to wait “too long” to receive their weapons orders, such as “four years for a plane or five years for a helicopter,” according to the president.

“The problem is we don’t produce them fast enough,” Trump said. “We’re not letting that happen anymore.”

“We’re telling our defense contractors, ‘You’re going to start building faster,’ you know a guy makes—I have a big problem with it,” he said.

Trump then went on to claim that he was the “king” of Boeing, recalling a story in which he claimed that the country’s largest aircraft manufacturer and exporter had named him “salesman of the year.”

“I said, what about salesman of the—in the history of Boeing? I’ve sold more Boeing planes than any man in history, probably over 1,000 planes. I said, that’s the good news, but why should they wait three to four years to get a plane? They should get them immediately,” Trump said.

But Trump’s colorful and bombastic threats about war have not had the same toothless intonation since he ordered U.S. troops to invade Venezuela and kidnap its leader, Nicolás Maduro, on Saturday.

Instead, countries around the world have become alert to America’s newfound hostility with a second-term Trump as its leader. Earlier Tuesday, a coalition of seven NATO allies issued a joint statement, vocalizing their support for Denmark and Greenland against potential U.S. aggression after Trump told reporters the U.S. “needs” the Arctic island for “national defense.”

Nobel Winner Offers to Give Trump Her Prize After He Rejected Her - 2026-01-06T14:22:20Z

Donald Trump might get his Nobel Peace Prize after all.

In a seemingly desperate bid to regain favor with the U.S. president, the 2025 recipient of the prestigious honor—Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado—offered to give her medal to Trump after he announced he would not back her to run the country she’s fought to reclaim.

“Did you at any point offer to give him the Nobel Peace Prize? Did that actually happen? I read that somewhere, I wasn’t sure if it was true,” asked Fox News’s Sean Hannity in a one-on-one interview with Machado late Monday.

“It hasn’t happened yet, but I certainly would love to be able to personally tell him that we—the Venezuelan people … we want to give it to him, share it with him,” Machado said.

She was named the 2025 recipient for her staunch opposition to Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, becoming one of the most outspoken opponents to the authoritarian leader. She spent 11 months in hiding for daring to speak out against him, reportedly fearing for her life.

Machado dedicated her prize to Trump in September after the U.S. president unsuccessfully pined and schemed all year to win the award.

But Trump’s sudden capture of Maduro early Saturday has completely unrooted Venezuelan politics. The U.S. invasion—involving hundreds of American troops who stormed Caracas overnight—was apparently all about oil, according to Trump. Venezuela has the largest oil reserves in the world.

The attack followed months of escalating rhetoric between the White House and Venezuela’s leadership, in which the Trump administration repeatedly pinned U.S. fentanyl deaths on Venezuelan drug cartels, despite a resounding lack of evidence.

Later Saturday, Trump said he would not support Machado in her own bid to lead the country, telling reporters at Mar-a-Lago that “it would be very tough for her to be the leader” as she lacked sufficient “respect” in Venezuela.

He instead signaled that he would recognize Maduro’s Vice President Delcy Rodríguez as the face of the country. Rodríguez had also been recognized by Venezuela’s armed forces as its interim leader. She was sworn in on Monday.

In the same Saturday press conference, Trump warned that Rodríguez would pay “a very high price” if she did not “do what’s right” with regard to helping American companies access Venezuela’s oil reserves.

Trump’s DOJ Quietly Changes Crucial Detail in Charges Against Maduro - 2026-01-06T14:06:49Z

President Donald Trump’s Department of Justice quietly removed references to a fictional drug cartel led by Nicolás Maduro from its newest indictment of the kidnapped Venezuelan president.

The New York Times reported Monday that the new indictment of Maduro and others on charges related to drug trafficking omitted a crucial element of the original charges: the criminal organization that Maduro supposedly ran, Cartel de los Soles.

The original indictment filed against Maduro in March 2020 in the Southern District of New York described the Cartel de los Soles as a “drug trafficking organization comprised of high-ranking officials” that operated between 1999 and 2020.

“Under the leadership of Maduro Moros and others, the Cartel de Los Soles sought not only to enrich its members and enhance their power, but also to ‘flood’ the United States with cocaine,” the indictment said.

But apparently, Cartel de los Soles isn’t a real organization at all. It’s a slang term invented by the Venezuelan media to describe corruption, according to the Times. The supposed cartel’s inclusion in the original indictment would be as if someone tried Trump for leading “Trumpworld” as a criminal organization.

The original indictment mentions the cartel 32 times, while the new one only mentions it twice, this time describing Cartel de los Soles as a “patronage system run by those at the top.”

The fabrication of Cartel de los Soles must be a relatively new revelation for the Trump administration. In November, the U.S. State Department designated Cartel de los Soles as a terrorist organization led by Maduro.

The new indictment adds to the original by including additional charges of “narco-terrorism,” conspiracy to import cocaine, and gun charges, as well as charges against Maduro’s wife for allegedly accepting bribes to broker trafficking meetings.

Transcript: Angry Trump Demands Media Flatter Him as Brutal Poll Lands - 2026-01-06T11:52:35Z

The following is a lightly edited transcript of the January 6 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 runs everything he does through a frame that pits strength against weakness. He just exploded at the media over coverage of his tariffs, claiming media figures are deliberately covering up the fact that his tariffs are making our country strong. Meanwhile, after his operation in Venezuela, he’s threatening at least three other countries. His threat to annex Greenland is spreading real fear in that country. This and his naked threats to take Venezuela’s oil after deposing its leader are meant to position him and our country as strong and dominant. But in every way, the truth is the opposite of what he’s saying. The tariffs, the action in Venezuela, and the threats to disrupt NATO are making us weak. And a new poll finds little support for his invasion, suggesting there’s an opening to undermine his strong-versus-weak frame in the public mind. We’re talking about all this today with international relations professor Nicholas Grossman, who’s one of the best out there at making the case that Trump is broadly weakening our country. Nick, always good to have you on.

Nicholas Grossman: Thanks, Greg. Great to be back.

Sargent: So let’s start here. Trump just erupted on Truth Social, saying his tariffs are taking in hundreds of billions of dollars. He then said:

“The fake news media refuses to talk about it because they hate and disrespect our country and want to interfere with the upcoming tariff decision, one of the most important ever, of the United States Supreme Court. Because of tariffs, our country is financially, and FROM A NATIONAL SECURITY STANDPOINT, FAR STRONGER AND MORE RESPECTED THAN EVER BEFORE.”

Nick, this may seem like a throwaway rant, but I think we need to appreciate how he frames everything as strength versus weakness: He’s strengthening the country, and his enemies—in this case the news media—are weakening it. But the tariffs are clearly weakening the nation in various ways. Your thoughts on all this?

Grossman: Right, the tariffs in particular are weakening the country because, while maybe this is making him stronger personally vis-à-vis the U.S. democratic system, it’s making the United States weaker compared to other countries in the world. So tariffs end up being taxes on Americans, and there’s no particular way that taxing the American people more, taxing American businesses more, is going to make America stronger. But also because it is disrupting trade and disrupting the type of international relationships that have helped the United States become so strong and so wealthy—all to end up getting maybe more personal control for himself, but weaker overall for how the country actually operates with power in the world.

Sargent: I like the way you put that. I’m not sure Trump is capable of distinguishing between his own imagined strength and the strength of the country. What do you think?

Grossman: No, he doesn’t seem to be. He seems to be treating them almost as the same thing—or that, with the tariffs, as if they are opportunities for corruption and they are people effectively paying tribute to him, or at least that’s how he’s presenting it: as if he’s a mob boss who’s getting a little taste of something.

And sure, that makes the mob boss wealthier, I suppose, but it doesn’t make the United States as a whole any stronger because so much of U.S. strength, including economic strength, is based on having steady relationships, on having rule of law, on various companies being able to trust that the United States will be a stable place where they can make long-term investments, where other countries can build up these trade relationships as opposed to going in other directions.

And the U.S. ends up pushing countries more towards ones that are U.S. rivals, like China. A lot of countries don’t want to deal with China—it’s authoritarian, it comes with a lot of strings attached—but at least they know that the Chinese are going to be consistent.

Sargent: Yes, it’s interesting that you put it that way because he is a destabilizing figure. And I think in many ways, the press is sort of conditioned to see disruption as strength because, you know, he’s making his mark. He’s making things happen. But in many ways, these types of things are weakening precisely because they’re destabilizing.

Grossman: Right, and destroying is easy. Maintaining and building is what’s hard. The reason why other presidents haven’t disrupted these relationships before is not because they were incapable of doing so, but because they correctly recognized that it was a bad idea, that it would weaken the U.S. rather than strengthen it. And they weren’t approaching this like a reality TV show character where bluster—just showiness and yelling—is strength. There’s also a lot of strength in the world from things like quiet, from being stoic, from not flying off the handle at just a little poke.

If you can make somebody go nuts just with a little insult, then they are not strong. That’s an example of weakness. The ones who are strong don’t care that you’re insulting them. They don’t take it personally because they know that they’re strong and they know that their actions show that. The way that he’s yelling at the media shows a big insecurity where he wants them to see him as strong, but seems to know at some level that they don’t, that they have good reason not to—otherwise, he wouldn’t have to keep berating them to start acting like they do.

Sargent: Exactly. And so, after Trump ordered the military action against Venezuela and U.S. forces brought its leader, Nicolás Maduro, to the United States, Trump kept up the threats. Listen to this.

Donald Trump (voiceover): We need Greenland from a national security situation. It’s so strategic. Right now, Greenland is covered with Russian and Chinese ships all over the place. We need Greenland from the standpoint of national security. We need Greenland from the standpoint of national security and the European Union needs us to have it.


Sargent: In addition, Stephen Miller’s wife, Katie Miller, tweeted a graphic of Greenland as an American flag with the word “Soon,” implying an American takeover of Greenland. Nick, this too is about creating the illusion of a certain type of strength. He’s depicting the seizing of Greenland as both a strong act in and of itself, but also as something that would strengthen the country. How seriously do you take the actual threat at this point? And is there any way this strengthens us?

Grossman: I think we have to take it pretty seriously. That it was something where when he first said it, even [if] the United States hasn’t taken moves in that direction ... actual physical moves such as military movements would be the important thing to watch out for ... even making that type of threat undermines the solidarity that underpins alliances. Greenland is part of Denmark and Denmark is in NATO. Denmark has been a valuable U.S. ally. They, for example, sent troops to Afghanistan and suffered more casualties per capita in Afghanistan than any other U.S. ally there. So that was only because the U.S. got attacked on 9/11, not Denmark.

And so that undermines the solidarity. And while it is a type of strength, I suppose—like in a Risk game or a video game, or it is definitely the way that the Russian government uses strength ... the U.S. side looks like they’re fantasizing about it in a way similar to how Russia took Crimea from Ukraine in 2014: try to show up, do it quickly, make it relatively bloodless. But it would not make the U.S. stronger; [it would] make the U.S. decently weaker. And because national security is not the sort of thing that can be decided upon immediately—it takes longer-term planning—Denmark and the Europeans are right to take it seriously because they can’t afford the possibility that it’s not.

Sargent: There’s an irony here that I think is worth appreciating. You brought up the fact that Denmark contributed to our post 9/11 actions. Now Trump likes the idea that he’s not reciprocating, that he’s essentially taking what Denmark did and just pocketing it and saying, screw off, we don’t owe you anything at all. He thinks that’s strength because he confuses rapaciousness and thievery with strength in a way. What do you think of that?

Grossman: That’s the sort of thing that works only in a one-time interaction. You know, so I guess as a business person, he goes and he screws over some contractors that he’s working with. And there are so many contractors that there was always another one who would come along and be tempted by whatever offer he was making, and maybe they think they’re different or who knows what. A similar thing happened with banks where he would declare bankruptcy, he would stiff various loans, but then he went internationally, and this was part of how he got a bunch of business ties in Russia: by other banks not really willing to lend to him, but Russian banks would.

So there was always somebody else. With countries, it doesn’t work that way because there is a much more limited number of countries and the interactions between countries keep on going. The world keeps spinning. So, yeah, OK, the U.S. screws over Denmark now and it manages to maybe, let’s say, hypothetically get some land as a result. But the U.S. already has military basing rights on Greenland, has a U.S. military base there, has had [one] there since the 1950s because Denmark is an ally and allows it. And the United States already has a good economic relationship and the ability of American companies to go into Greenland and do things like, for example, develop natural resources because the locals there and the government trust the United States and trust that a long-term relationship will be something worth entering into and that will make benefits for both.

And while the United States is dealing with Denmark in that regard, who is the U.S. really competing against? It’s not a country like Denmark; it is large rival powers like, say, China or possibly Russia, or a smaller country like Iran or North Korea. Those are America’s competitors in the world, and working with Denmark against a country like, say, China, or working with a country like Denmark on a shared problem like terrorism, leaves the United States a lot stronger, more capable of dealing with those problems and of advancing its interests in the world than if it is the U.S. alone picking fights with everybody at once while still trying to compete with other countries like, say, China.

Sargent: This notion of trust among the countries and that being essential to strength is really critical here. The Danish prime minister, Mette Frederiksen, issued a warning about Trump’s threats. She said, “I believe one should take the American president seriously when he says that he wants Greenland.” She added: “If the U.S. chooses to attack another NATO country militarily, then everything stops, including NATO and thus the security that has been established since the end of the Second World War.”

Now, Nick, if you just put aside whether Trump is actually serious about this or not, what you can see here in that response is that Trump’s own threats, which are spreading very real fears in Greenland and Denmark, are a weakening agent by [themselves]. The fact that his threats will make our allies correctly more distrustful of us seems bad for America. I mean, I guess Trump thinks it’s good for our allies to be frightened of us. Can you talk about that?
Grossman: I don’t know if he thinks it is good for allies per se to be frightened, so much as he doesn’t really consider the concept of alliances as a serious issue or a serious benefit. That if he approaches the world as [if] everybody is totally selfish, everybody is always untrustworthy, everybody’s lying all the time and just advancing their agenda all the time, then everything is zero-sum, and then it’s just a question of whether I get one over on you or you get one over on me first.

But as we can see from years, decades, of a successful Western alliance making the West stronger in the Cold War, in the war on terror, and still today—making it stronger as a unit by being able to compete against others—there really [are] a lot of benefits from those sort of alliances. And the United States, by interjecting that lack of trust, by undermining that trust that took so long to cultivate, weakens that. And [it] makes it that then the countries where the United States has been allied with and has been partnered with in ways that really treat problems as joint problems we can solve together as opposed to separate ones—it makes them more competitive with the United States. It gets them to start hedging in different ways.

It reduces the sort of trust that builds stronger alliances and leads to longer decision-making, and then prompts the type of zero-sum competitive thinking that Trump seems to approach everybody with. It gets countries in Europe, for example, or in East Asia or elsewhere, to start thinking things like: “Maybe we need to cozy up to a country like China, not because we like them, but because we need to hedge our bets.” Or: “Maybe we need to stop relying so much on American military equipment because we can’t trust [that] in the future, the United States will be there to help maintain it and help to send replaceable parts.” Or: “Maybe we need to stop sharing so much intelligence.”

And in fact, we saw some of that already as a concrete example. The U.K. cut off sharing intelligence with the United States about the Caribbean and Latin America and South America when the boat-strike campaign began because the United States was violating international law. It was violating basic principles that had underpinned the alliance between the U.S. and the U.K., and they cut off America. And the more and more of that there is, the weaker the United States is as a result.

Sargent: That last example is really important because, in the small minds of Donald Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, the fact that they’re just blowing up people in the Caribbean in defiance of international law is yet another sign of strength. It’s America forging its own way in the world. But here’s a case where we are denying ourselves critical tools and critical information against enemies, which just strikes me as almost the perfect encapsulation of, really, the fallacies at the core of MAGA. What do you think?

Grossman: Yeah, I think that there are kind of two, maybe, broad conceptions you could think of as strength. One is the type of strength that makes other people scared. And another one is the type of strength that makes other people want to follow—that makes other people trust you and want to follow. And the United States became the world’s premier power by a mix of those types of strengths, but especially by cultivating that type of “you can trust us, you want to follow us.” The type of world we’re trying to build is one that you would prefer over the alternatives.

And this is in hard power: U.S. basing rights all over the place, and [as I] mentioned, intelligence sharing, and a lot of military partnerships. And where the U.S. hadn’t fought a war in a hundred years that didn’t have, for example, Australian troops helping out, and a number of other countries allowing flyovers and just other things that they—when it comes to, say, a country like Russia—where they reflexively say no, where they don’t allow it.

And so the type of strength of where everybody’s afraid of you—that is sort of like a reality show with the bluster, or it’s like a playground bully. It’s the type of strength that can destroy but can’t really build, can’t really build anything lasting. It’s Putin’s type of strength also. It’s a type of strength where, yeah, he can hold tight power inside Russia, but he was unable to keep his ally Assad in power in Syria, has been unable to take over Ukraine, unable to develop the Russian economy outside of the oil industry, and [is] falling behind a number of other countries over the last decade or two because they can’t build those relationships and they can’t build that trust that allows countries to really be strong and advance. All they have is that fear and others recognizing: That guy is scary, but no, I don’t want anything to do with him. I won’t work with him. I’m not going to try to build something together.

Sargent: So well said. There’s a new Washington Post poll, by the way, finding that only 40 percent of Americans approve of the decision to capture Maduro by military force versus 42 percent who disapprove, and only 37 percent say this was appropriate without congressional approval, while 63 percent say it wasn’t. And a plurality, 45 percent, oppose the U.S. taking control of Venezuela.

Nick, there was a time when Americans reflexively would see military action through a strong-versus-weak frame, making people very reluctant to criticize it, at least at the outset. I really wonder whether Trump has broken that dynamic, though. He’s such a reckless figure that maybe that old rule doesn’t apply. Is that too optimistic?

Grossman: No, I don’t think so. Those numbers are remarkably low. So if you want to contrast it, for example, with the lead-up to the Iraq War, that was over 60 percent approval and disapproval down in the 30s. You had almost 2-to-1 that was supportive of it. There was widespread support and praise when the United States captured Saddam Hussein. There was largely a positive sentiment in Trump’s first term when the U.S. killed the Iranian general Qassem Soleimani.

And it stands out with such a tactically successful action—that’s separate from the questions of strategy—but as far as military operations go, this was relatively clean and low-cost. You can compare it to something like the Black Hawk Down incident in Somalia, where U.S. forces in the 1990s tried to capture a Somali warlord, failed to capture him, ended up having to try to fight their way out of a mob, killed hundreds of people, and still all the Americans there got killed in the process.

By comparison, Americans often react negatively when Americans get killed abroad or when America has some sort of embarrassing failure tactically. And so to see so many people ... such a close, almost 50-50, slightly negative reaction to this action in Venezuela shows how much Trump’s recklessness has changed the American perspective on this.

We would usually expect to see—yes, some caveats—but overall, a positive impression of something where Maduro, even if removing him will destabilize the situation, was a repressive leader, had violated a lot of human rights, was just overall a bad guy, someone [who had] been under U.S. sanctions for a while. But the reaction from a lot of the American public—and possibly this is reflecting some of the lessons of the Iraq War, too—is showing that merely removing somebody because he is bad does not necessarily make the situation better.

And if the U.S. ends up either having to follow on in Venezuela with more force, with any sort of occupation, or with just removing the head of state and creating destabilization without removing the actual regime and all its underlings ... either way, yes, sure, that got rid of a bad guy, but it is destabilizing the situation, not benefiting it. And overall, [it is] ruining some of those relationships that the United States has, that will then lead to the U.S. being weaker, not stronger, just because this one dictator is no longer there.

Sargent: It seems like, broadly speaking, there’s an opening to challenge Trump’s overall framing of himself as a strong leader on all these fronts. He’s a weak, addled, failing, deteriorating figure, and the kidnapping of a foreign head of state—no matter how flawlessly executed by U.S. forces—doesn’t change that. And I wonder if there’s a way for liberals and Democrats to just go frontally at that and just take the strong-versus-weak frame away from him and take it for themselves and say: “Actual strength looks like X, Y, and Z.” What do you think? Is that possible?

Grossman: I think so. And it comes down to where bullying is not strength. Even in a school context, people maybe think of the bully as kind of scary, but nobody really thinks of the bully as strong. The people that are stronger are the ones that others want to follow—that are stable, that have their shit together, that are making something that others want to join in, where it will actually build something, where it will actually last.

And so I think there’s a great opportunity for Democrats to show that ... stability is strength, that the need to lash out is a sign of weakness. It’s something that desperate people do. It’s something that abusers do. It’s not actually something that strong people do. And when you even think of the archetypes in American culture of something like, I don’t know, John Wayne, for example—it’s the stereotypical strong, silent type, not the Real Housewife who has to scream a lot in order to look like they’re creating drama to stay on the show.

Sargent: Nicholas Grossman, that was all very beautifully said. I hope Democrats are listening. Really good to talk to you as always, man. Thanks for coming on.

Grossman: Same. Thanks, Greg.

The Far Right Is Quietly Building Power Under Trump - 2026-01-06T11:00:00Z

The first year of Donald Trump’s second term in office was marked by the rapid implementation of his far-right program. From ICE to DOGE, from anti-DEI to anti-antifa, and from bombing boats to $400 million bribes, Trump’s regime has turned out even more extreme than feared after he was elected to a second term in November 2024. His words and actions as president have been covered extensively over the past year, as have those of a number of internal advisers and outside confidants, like Stephen Miller and Steve Bannon. However, the grassroots far right, and its influence over the administration, has received far less attention.

One of Trump’s first acts of his second term was to pardon the hundreds of people who were arrested, and in many cases convicted, for their role in the January 6, 2021, riot at the Capitol. Once pardoned, many of these individuals wasted no time in calling for retribution against the FBI and prosecutors and trying to sue the government. Several have been subsequently arrested for crimes including kidnapping and child molestation.

But the most important event for the far right in 2025 was the assassination of Charlie Kirk. Head of the right-wing Turning Point USA, or TPUSA, a political action group focused on young people, Kirk was an anti-trans and racist propagandist known for debating liberals on college campuses. After his death, he was made into a Christian martyr and Trump awarded him the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Many people who made critical comments about him were fired or suspended, the most prominent of whom was late-night host Jimmy Kimmel—although public outcry forced his return.

Trump has also created an environment where far-right terrorists are well positioned to commit attacks, as federal monitoring of far-right groups is being dismantled. Law enforcement training, tracking studies, and prevention programs have all been cut over the past year, along with reviews of the military’s anti-extremism initiatives.

The influence of conspiracy theories on federal officials has also increased dramatically. The most visible are the anti-vax views of Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., but the most outlandish was Trump’s Truth Social post promoting “MedBeds”—which Kelly Weil describes as “a fabled medical instrument that does everything from reversing aging to regrowing missing limbs.”

These conspiracy theories have only been amplified as far-right influencers have been given special access to the administration. In October, the Pentagon banned reporters from its press pool unless they pledged to only publish official statements, which no major outlet agreed to, including right-leaning ones like Fox News. They were replaced by friendly influencers and conspiracy theorists such as Laura Loomer, who also wields unprecedented influence over the president and has directly prompted Trump’s firing of national security officials.

Starting a decade ago, the alt-right created a distinct aesthetic, and these images and slogans have filtered up into the social media of the Department of Homeland Security, Immigration and Customs Enforcement, and Border Patrol. Their accounts now post memes like the neo-Nazi favorite “Moon Man,” antisemitic song lyrics, and slogans referencing white supremacist books.

As longtime digital innovators, white supremacists are taking advantage of new platforms and technologies. Some use AI to help produce propaganda—and even plan terrorist attacks. Elon Musk celebrated Trump’s inauguration with a Nazi salute, his AI Grok has called itself “MechaHitler,” and his online Grokipedia encyclopedia cited white supremacist websites over a hundred times. And neo-Nazis and the 764 child abuse cult are now recruiting on Roblox, an online gaming platform used by millions of children.

The administration has also made efforts to help the European far right, which it is increasingly allied with. Trump is close to Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orbán and Britain’s head of the nativist Reform Party, Nigel Farage, while JD Vance met with the leader of the extremist Alternative for Germany party and called on European parties to remove their “firewalls” against cooperating with the far right. Trump’s new National Security Strategy even celebrates these parties while railing against “civilizational erasure” in the form of immigration from Africa and Muslim-majority countries.

Far-Right Groups

Although remaining strong under Biden, grassroots far-right groups have not exploded in popularity over the past year—likely because the administration is enacting much of their agenda. But this did not stop several groups from having banner years.

Kirk’s murder led to a dramatic rise in the popularity of TPUSA, which proselytizes in schools, trains young right-wing activists, and has 2,000 chapters. The Christian group’s prominence has become so strong that the Texas state government is promoting TPUSA clubs in high schools and TikTok was a sponsor of its December conference.

Ironically, Kirk’s loudest critic on the right, the white supremacist Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes, also received a huge attention boost after Kirk’s death. Fuentes’s Groyper movement works to influence GOP circles from inside, especially by pushing antisemitism, and his fans have been climbing up the career ladder in recent months. Longtime ally Wade Searle is part of the Pentagon press pool, while Fuentes defender Paul Ingrassia is acting general counsel of the General Services Administration.

Fuentes’s appearance on Tucker Carson’s show caused outcry from the right, especially after the Heritage Foundation’s leader, Kevin Roberts, said Fuentes’s antisemitic views were acceptable right-wing positions to express. This led to an intra-movement fight breaking out among conservatives and others on the right over the increasing role of MAGA antisemitism. As it went on, the New York Young Republicans Club hosted antisemites at its annual gala.

The Proud Boys had a quiet year, despite leader Enrique Tarrio’s pardon for his role in J6. While Tarrio was in prison, the organization split between his supporters and opponents, but neither have been very active as there have been no large-scale clashes with antifascists, which were the group’s bread and butter. Tarrio himself was unable to provoke an incident when he showed up at an anti-ICE protest in Portland, Oregon in November.

The fascist Active Clubs, which do martial arts trainings, have continued to expand globally, and there are now 187 chapters in 27 countries. Their potential for violence has drawn the attention of the intelligence services. For example, a Buckingham Palace guard was found to have played a “key role” in an Active Club in England.

But The Base, which promotes terrorism, presents a more immediate danger. They have also been expanding into Europe, leading to numerous arrests there. Leader Rinaldo Nazzaro, now living in Russia, is offering cash bounties to followers who carry out attacks in Ukraine.

Last, the fascist Blood Tribe eschews these other groups’ more sophisticated approach. Its frequent rallies and intimidating visual look—masks, uniforms, and flags—draw significant media attention. But although they have become the most prominent neo-Nazi group in the country, their membership does not match their profile.

Legal Actions

Lawsuits are a frequent tool against the far right. Dominion Voting Systems, falsely accused of rigging the 2020 election, settled for $67 million with Newsmax. The fascist group Patriot Front was ordered to pay $2.75 million for an assault on a Black man during a 2022 march, and there are two lawsuits against the antisemitic Goyim Defense League for a harassment campaign in Nashville.

However, the far right also uses the courts. In addition to the J6 lawsuits, Trump is suing the BBC for $10 billion over an edit of a speech he gave at a rally that preceded the assault on the Capitol, which was broadcast earlier this year. Oath Keepers leader Stewart Rhodes, whose J6 sentence was commuted, said he is preparing to relaunch his militia organization—and meanwhile filed a $25 million defamation suit against USA Today, journalist Will Carless, and his own ex-wife Tasha Adams. Not to be outdone, Jacob Angeli-Chansley, a.k.a. the QAnon Shaman, is suing Trump and others for $40 trillion.

Far-right activists are also arrested constantly. Trump supporter Brian J. Cole Jr. was arrested for planting bombs in D.C. the night before January 6. But many other arrests are related to “nihilist violent extremism,” or NVE, a new FBI category. It refers to an online milieu that mixes Nazi-Satanism, neo-Nazi terrorism, school-shooter fetishists, and the extremist child abuser group 764. Together, they form an amorphous mix-and-match of toxic extremes.

The FBI has opened 350 investigations into 764. Incorporating other NVE currents, its members sextort and threaten minors into producing pornography, engaging in self-harm, and even committing suicide. It has spread globally, and numerous members were arrested in 2025, including leaders “War” and “Trippy”—as well as “White Tiger,” who was arrested for coercing a 13-year-old to kill himself online.

Neo-Nazis involved in terrorist propaganda and actions have been hit hard. Patrick Crusius, who murdered 23 people in the 2019 El Paso Walmart massacre, received 90 life sentences. Maniac Murder Cult’s Michail Chkhikvishvili pleaded guilty to soliciting terrorism. Former Atomwaffen Division leader Brandon Russell was sentenced to 20 years for plotting to attack Baltimore’s power grid. The international Terrorgram Collective was declared a Foreign Terrorist Organization, and one U.S. leader, Dallas Humber, was sentenced to 30 years for soliciting murder. And Terrorgram influenced Nikita Casap, who was arrested for murdering his parents.

Violence

While there were no explicitly white supremacist massacres in 2025, several fit the NVE concept, which mixes politics with school shootings. During the Antioch High School shooting, one person was killed. Although the perpetrator was Black, his manifesto referenced Terrorgram. The perpetrator of the Annunciation Catholic School shooting, where two were killed, painted their guns with the names of both racist murderers and apolitical school shooters. As white supremacist massacres blend seamlessly into apolitical ones and then into school shootings, perhaps the most telling slogan painted on one of the guns was simply: “There is no message.” What starts as politics ends in nihilism.

It’s the same nihilism that underlies Trump’s gratuitous cruelty toward the most marginal members of society, even as his followers proclaim their own victimhood. In 2025, the far-right grassroots was largely eclipsed by the administration’s blitzkrieg—but as its inertia breaks, new possibilities will open. We should be concerned that what runs through them will flank him on the right—especially in the wake of the dismantling of those government apparatuses that kept an eye on far-right terrorism.

The Tim Walz Saga Shows Why Debunking Conspiracy Theories Doesn’t Work - 2026-01-06T11:00:00Z

Minnesota Governor Tim Walz has abandoned his 2026 reelection campaign. In his announcement Monday, Walz pointed to right-wing conspiracy theories about the state’s Somali immigrant community as having played a part in his decision. It has been nine years since Pizzagate, and yet such conspiracy theories have gotten worse—and as they have further eroded many people’s sense of shared political reality, combating them has only become harder.

Late in December, YouTuber Nick Shirley recorded himself going to several childcare centers in Minnesota, an attempt to “prove” that Somali immigrants have been using the centers to steal public money. When Shirley showed up, at least one childcare center did not open its door, one owner said, “because we thought it was ICE.” The resulting video was quickly rebutted and fact-checked: The state’s Department of Children reported the childcare centers he descended upon were “operating as expected.” It didn’t matter. By then, the video had millions of views, and the childcare center “fraud” narrative had become part of the right-wing cable news cycle of anti-immigrant grievance and cruelty. Workers at the childcare facilities Shirley targeted said they had received “hateful” and “threatening” messages. One day care center reported a break-in, and sensitive documents were found missing.

The conspiracy theory was always thin, and never actually implicated Walz. Nevertheless, Walz found himself defending his administration’s actions to stop fraud, and he cited the chaos caused by the video in his announcement abandoning his campaign on Monday. He called Shirley a “conspiracy theorist” and he accused Trump, accurately, of “demonizing our Somali neighbors.” But he was still leaving the race: “I can’t give a political campaign my all,” said Walz. “Every minute I spend defending my own political interests would be a minute I can’t spend defending the people of Minnesota against the criminals who prey on our generosity and the cynics who prey on our differences.”

It’s all too easy to see the parallels to real-world chaos caused by Pizzagate, and the incident nine years ago that signaled to the public how right-wing conspiracy theories had become more serious and dangerous. Then, in 2016, a gunman entered a Washington, D.C. restaurant, convinced by Twitter conspiracy theorists like Jack Posobiec that he could save children who were being trafficked for sex in its basement by a ring they claimed was organized by and for Democrats. The restaurant, Comet Ping Pong, did not have a basement. No one was physically harmed. For most people, news of the gunman’s arrest was their first exposure to such gruesome sex-trafficking conspiracy theories, which to that point were largely the province of marginal media figures feeding them to their growing online audiences.

It has often felt as if Pizzagate never ended. Long after it faded from public attention, Jack Posobiec now has the ear of the president—who, after the Shirley video, suspended childcare funding to the state of Minnesota. The conspiracy theories motivated Trump to take swift action. Trump himself, at the same time as the childcare center videos were circulating, was posting a video on his own social media about the Democratic lawmaker Melissa Hortman, promoting the conspiracy theory that Tim Walz had her assassinated. (The man indicted for Hortman’s murder and currently awaiting trial also targeted other Democrats and abortion providers, and is reportedly a Trump supporter who considered himself to be engaged in spiritual warfare.)

Politics now play out parallel to conspiracy theories, expressing them and promoting them. This has been building for nearly a decade, while attempts to counter them can barely keep up, and don’t seem to stop them. Fact-checking responds to conspiracy theories as if they are isolated incidents that can be corrected, and not common and regular expressions of the political and media ecosystem in which we live.

Over the last decade, each time such conspiracy theories take hold, break containment, and begin to widely circulate, a whole host of anti-misinformation experts, researchers documenting the far right, historians and journalists tracking the rise of Christian nationalism, fact-checkers and defenders of legacy media, and lobby groups for online and child safety attempt to respond. The idea that we can set the truth right is also appealing to those in the media, who, on our better days, believe facts are capable of making change in the world.

It is increasingly common, however, for those who benefit from the rise of conspiracy-theory politics (influencers, content creators, and even elected officials and the mainstream of the Republican Party), to then target those misinformation experts and fact-checkers. In the immediate aftermath of the January 6, 2021, attacks on the Capitol, it briefly looked like Republican members of Congress recognized the threats posed by conspiracy-theory politics: Their own lives were threatened by believers of election conspiracy theories promoted by the outgoing president. But since then, Republicans have mainstreamed the idea that they are under attack not from conspiracy theorists but from content moderators. They have made dismantling infrastructure for combating misinformation and disinformation a major part of their agenda. “Even before Donald Trump returned to the White House, the anti-anti-disinformation movement had chalked up a series of victories with a common set of tactics, combining independent media pressure, congressional scrutiny, and lawsuits that sometimes ran all the way up to the Supreme Court,” writes journalist James Ball in a recent story for The Verge, tracing the battle.

It should be a wake-up call: Misinformation and disinformation have potentially pushed a state governor out of seeking reelection, and appear to be on the cusp of taking away childcare from more than 20,000 children in Minnesota, thanks to the Trump administration halting federal funds over these fictions. Now the administration is reportedly planning to cancel funding for children and other social services to four additional Democrat-led states, premised on the same stories about immigrants stealing. These tales are perfectly suited to Trump’s politics of grievance, defining a set of enemies who are always stealing what’s rightfully the property and province of “real” Americans.

Misinformation and disinformation are how these people attain and build power. It’s why they fight to protect communication and political channels in which to push lies, scapegoating, and propaganda. It’s why you can’t fact-check your way out of a conspiracy theory or disinformation. This was true in 2016, when Trump was a joke. It was true in 2020, when Trump was a loser. It’s true now, with Trump in power again. There is still no coordinated response to misinformation that appears capable of confronting that truth: Lies are powerful. So long as there are people who can benefit from conspiracy theories, there will be people pushing them.

Trump’s Venezuela Invasion Is the Key to Understanding His Second Term - 2026-01-06T11:00:00Z

What are we doing in Venezuela? Given President Trump’s declaration that the United States will now “run” the country for the foreseeable future, the answer should be clear. It isn’t—not even remotely.

In the months leading up to Saturday’s shocking invasion of Caracas to abduct President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, as the U.S. bombed small boats from Venezuela and amassed an armada off its coast, the Trump administration offered one official rationale for its increasing military aggression: to combat drug trafficking, in particular fentanyl, which is responsible for tens of thousands of overdose deaths in America. Venezuela doesn’t produce that drug—it’s mostly manufactured in Mexico, with chemicals from China—and it barely produces any cocaine. But it’s true that Venezuela is a transit hub for cocaine, which is often laced with fentanyl before or after it reaches the United States. This fact, by the administration’s tortured logic, is why Maduro was snatched from his presidential compound and arraigned Monday in New York charges specifically related to cocaine distribution.

But there’s a difference between the administration’s stated rationale and its actual goals, which vary depending on the official. The military buildup was overseen by Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who, as the son of Cuban exiles, is obsessed with removing Cuba’s Communist government and sees Venezuela, one of its few allies and its main source of oil, as a key domino in its downfall. Meanwhile, Stephen Miller, the White House deputy chief of staff and the architect of Trump’s fascist immigration policy, reportedly sees Maduro’s downfall as a key part of his deportation strategy: A pliant Venezuelan government would make it easier to send more Venezuelans currently living in the U.S., regardless of their immigration status, back to their “home” country.

And finally, Trump, after announcing the invasion on Saturday morning, provided a new justification. “The oil business in Venezuela has been a bust, a total bust for a long period of time,” he said. “We’re going to have our very large United States oil companies, the biggest anywhere in the world, go in, spend billions of dollars, fix the badly broken infrastructure, the oil infrastructure, and start making money for the country.” Trump may be the only person who thinks the biggest failure of the U.S. invasion of Iraq was our failure to “take the oil,” but he really does believe it. For him, Venezuela is an opportunity to rectify that mistake—and to do what the U.S. has historically done in Latin America, which is to give U.S. corporations free rein to pillage resources and wealth.

Taken as a whole, a clear picture emerges of an administration driven by alliances of convenience between ideologues who all see U.S. military power as a means to advance their own pet policies. This is Republican foreign policy in a time of MAGA: strategically unwise, yes, but also utterly incoherent because it’s caught between the neoconservatism that ruled the GOP for decades and the Trumpist “America First” foreign policy that is largely created on the fly by the president. And we are just starting to see what kind of damage it can cause.

“We built Venezuela’s oil industry with American talent, drive, and skill, and the socialist regime stole it from us during those previous administrations. And they stole it through force. This constituted one of the largest thefts of American property in the history of our country,” Trump said on Saturday. Given how much of his initial press conference after the invasion focused on Venezuelan oil, it’s understandable that many understood it as a Kinsley gaffe. The U.S. has long been fond of dressing up its imperialistic wars in the just language of democracy and liberation, but here was the president admitting that we were there to steal the oil. Just because Trump bluntly stated it, though, doesn’t mean that it wholly explains the invasion.

The military buildup off the coast of Venezuela did not begin because the administration was out to get the nation’s sizable oil reserves (which will be incredibly difficult to expropriate). It began for ideological reasons. Rubio, an ardent anti-Communist, saw an opportunity to strike a weak regime and quickly found an ally in Miller. But getting the president on board, according to reports, was more difficult. Trump has long painted himself as a kind of isolationist, though his actual approach to foreign policy is one that favors bombastic and often risky military intervention, and even regime change, as long as it doesn’t involve the deployment of American troops for extended periods or the launch of an official “war.”

Over the course of several months, pro-intervention forces in the administration got Trump on board first by convincing him that Venezuela was a massive exporter of illegal drugs, and then by convincing him that its oil actually belonged to the U.S. because the country—notably under Maduro’s predecessor, Hugo Chávez—had nationalized infrastructure that had been built by American companies. Toppling Venezuela has been a priority of the neoconservative right for decades for ideological reasons—the nation has been led by socialists since Chávez was elected in 1999—and related national security ones: Neocons did not like having a socialist nation, particularly one aligned with Russia and (later) China in the Western hemisphere.

As these officials made their case, military action began to take on its own logic. The administration began bombing small Venezuelan boats, which it claimed—without providing evidence—were transporting drugs to the U.S. These strikes may have been aimed at provoking a response from Maduro, or to acclimate Trump to the idea of using military force. Maduro didn’t take the bait, but Trump did. He appears to have been sold on a kind of hybrid Trumpian-neoconservative project to take over Venezuela: The U.S. would bomb Caracas and take out Maduro in a daring, middle-of-the-night raid, but we would leave his government and the nation’s military in place, not deploy American troops (beyond the special forces who snatched Maduro), and, according to Rubio, use sanctions and the threat of further violence to pressure its remaining leaders to acquiesce to our demands.

In short: We have bombed a foreign nation, kidnapped its leader, and essentially taken it over—while leaving most of its government in place. We have done so to weaken Cuba, deport more people, and acquire more oil.

Never mind that we don’t need Venezuela’s oil. Domestic production in the U.S. is so high that crude oil futures are near five-year lows, and oil companies appear to have little interest in reinvesting in Venezuela, given the cost of modernizing its crumbling infrastructure. But the U.S. is going to do everything in its power to take that oil, including apparently running the country, because Trump cares about it. For Rubio and Miller, that may very well be a fair trade. They get to advance their own policy priorities and ideological proclivities, some of which align with the president’s and some of which do not, and the cost is Venezuelan oil (and perhaps also that messy business about occupying a foreign country).

This trade-off explains so much of Republican politics in the Trump era. A xenophobic demagogue with no understanding of policy and little interest in governance took over the GOP. So neocons and nativists alike have learned to Trumpify their policies to achieve their desired goals, while also giving Trump a “win” he can crow about. That is how this administration arrived at the shocking decision to invade a sovereign nation and kidnap its president but apparently has no clue about what to do next.

What are we doing in Venezuela? Perhaps it’s naïve even to ask that question, given all we know about Trump at this point, because it suggests he knows the answer. More likely, he couldn’t care less.

Trump Blurts Out Dark Truth About Venezuela Plan—and About MAGA Voters - 2026-01-06T11:00:00Z

It’s often said that one of Donald Trump’s biggest innovations in American politics is to confess to his corruption right out in the open. Over the years, Trump has frequently confirmed the truth of that diagnosis. But during remarks to reporters on Sunday about his invasion of Venezuela, he gave this a new spin, taking his corruption international in a fresh way.

“We need total access—we need access to the oil and to other things in their country,” Trump said when asked what he’s demanding of acting President Delcy Rodriguez, who has replaced Nicolás Maduro since U.S. forces transported him here. Asked specifically about Venezuela’s oil reserves, Trump said: “We’re gonna run everything.”

This “total access” will go to “very large United States oil companies,” Trump says. While he has insisted this will partly benefit Venezuela, he also says that the country’s oil “wealth” will go to the U.S. as “reimbursement for the damages caused to us by that country.” Trump’s conception of those “damages” is based on the idea that Venezuela “stole” from us when it nationalized its oil industry in 1976—a complicated history but one that doesn’t remotely support his claim. So this now looks very close to outright plunder.

To truly appreciate this, note that most analysis of Trump’s plans for Venezuela has proceeded on two tracks. One of them, as Seva Gunitsky explains, posits that Trump envisions a “tripartite” division of the world, in which the U.S., Russia, and China all bless one another’s domination of their respective regions in a “hegemonic carve-up.” The other sees Trump’s action through the prism of domestic corruption: He’s turning Venezuela over to American oil companies and executives, some of whom bankrolled his reelection.

We need to put those two pieces together. Trump appears to envision something like a “hegemonic carve-up” that also gives regional MAGA-friendly oligarchies a major stake in our “share” of that tripartite division’s spoils. This is already the Putin model: authoritarian rule that enables smash-and-grab oligarchy by those in the regime’s good favor. Trump is making it unusually explicit that in this sphere of influence, Trump-approved oligarchs will be enriched by our regional spoils.

“Baked into Trump’s views on these so-called spheres-of-influence are opportunities to enrich himself, his inner circle, his donors, and his fellow oligarchs,” Casey Michel, a New Republic contributor and author of the forthcoming book United States of Oligarchy, tells me. “Putin envisions a world in which a small group of imperialists loot their portions of the globe as they see fit. Trump has been envious of this model for a long time. He’s implementing it himself in the Western hemisphere.”

To be fair, it’s not obvious that oil companies themselves want in on this scheme. At a minimum, they don’t want to appear open to it: Politico reports that some are “leery” about making such investments, given the logistical challenges of revitalizing the country’s oil industry amid uncertainties about its future.

But what matters here is that Trump himself envisions a future for the region—and for U.S. energy oligarchs—along these lines. When Trump insists the U.S. has a right to “access” all of Venezuela’s oil based on a badly distorted story about our victimization by that country—after the U.S. military invaded it and kidnapped its leader—he’s effectively declaring we have the right to take its resources by force. It all smacks of the schoolyard bully sneering, “What did you say about my mother?” to a hapless smaller kid who actually said nothing, then citing this invented insult as justification for forcibly taking his lunch money.

It’s this international vision that Trump is blurting out when he says that “we need total access” to Venezuela’s oil. You may recall that during the 2024 campaign, Trump told a roomful of oil executives that he would govern nakedly in their financial interests while demanding $1 billion in campaign contributions in an explicit quid pro quo. Trump has now taken this candor further: Whether the oil companies want this or not, he is telling them they have great riches to reap if they buy into his hegemonic-oligarchic schemes. And he’s doing so right out in the open. This isn’t the same as calling this a “war for oil.” It’s more an invitation to oligarchs to join in his conception, such as it is, of the future world order.

By the way, this may be only the beginning of the corruption here. The American Prospect has a great piece reporting on how elite gamblers gamed prediction markets on the invasion, probably with the help of inside information. The aftermath could present more such opportunities.

Beyond all this, Trump’s illegal, unprovoked invasion of Venezuela wrecks the notion that he was ever “antiwar” or “anti-interventionist” in any real sense. As TNR’s Michael Tomasky explains, he’s fine with wars that are about “raw power in service of plunder and conquest.”

We have been told endlessly that many voters who picked Trump were partly frustrated with the foreign military adventurism of bipartisan elites. But that raises a question. Let’s accept for now that many Trump voters are driven by that frustration—that many harbor JD Vance’s stated skepticism that foreign intervention can do good in the world that’s worth our national sacrifice. Will they now decide that Trump’s version of adventurism is a good thing? Now that Trump has laid bare its corrupt, elite-enriching nature, will they go along with a war that’s nakedly about pillage and plunder, either on moral terms or on the grounds that it narrowly benefits the national interest?

Trump seems confident that they will. He told reporters Sunday that his voters are “thrilled” with this action, adding: “They said, ‘This is what we voted for.’”

As it happens, a new Washington Post poll sheds light here. It finds that only 40 percent of Americans approve of the decision to capture Maduro by military force, versus 42 percent who disapprove, and only 37 percent say this was appropriate without congressional approval while 63 percent say it wasn’t. But among those who voted for Trump, 80 percent support the capture and 78 percent are untroubled by the lack of congressional authorization.

So maybe Trump supporters are fine with this sort of military intervention, after all. It’s hard to know if they would support turning all Venezuela’s oil over to U.S. companies; the poll finds only 46 percent of them support the U.S. taking control over that country. But here’s the thing: Trump himself obviously thinks they approve of that too. Listen to the tone of his declaration that this will thrill his voters, and it’s clear he thinks they fully back the rapacious nature of his mission.

That says something grim about Trump’s view of his own supporters. He thinks they are just as corrupt, amoral, indifferent to the fate of those killed by our military, and eager to pillage weaker countries for the spoils of conquest as he is.

Taking Venezuela’s Oil Won’t Come Cheap - 2026-01-06T11:00:00Z

The abduction and rendition of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro is supposed to be about the illicit drug trade, but it’s really about oil. Venezuela is not a major drug supplier to the United States, especially where the administration’s main worry, fentanyl, is concerned. President Donald Trump gave the game away during his January 3 press conference by saying the word “drugs” four times and the word “oil” more than 20 times. “You know, they stole our oil,” Trump said. “We, we built that whole industry there. And they just took it over like we were nothing. And we had a president that decided not to do anything about it.”

Trump didn’t name this do-nothing American president. Actually, Venezuela nationalized its oil industry not once but twice. Both expropriations occurred while Republicans occupied the White House. The first was 50 years ago, on President Gerald Ford’s watch. The second was 19 years ago, on President George W. Bush’s watch.

Neither Republican president did much to fight Venezuela’s nationalizations, in Ford’s case because the energy crisis made it an unpropitious moment, and in Bush’s case because he was already at war with an entirely different petrostate, Iraq. The lesson of that conflict was that, yes, military intervention can open foreign oil spigots, but at an unacceptable price in blood and treasure. At Saturday’s press conference, Trump said, “It won’t cost us anything because the money coming out of the ground is very substantial.” If Trump thinks that’s true, he’s even dumber than I thought.

Before we proceed, let me clarify that the realpolitik discussion to follow is not premised on any notion that America’s  invasion of Venezuela was legal and proper. It was no more in accordance with domestic or international law than President George H.W. Bush’s similar invasion of Panama in 1989 to arrest Manuel Noriega on drug charges. There’s a standing indictment against Maduro for providing diplomatic cover and other assistance to ship cocaine to the United States, much as there was a standing indictment (and subsequent conviction) against Noriega for racketeering and cocaine trafficking. But the only reason Noriega’s prosecution wasn’t thrown out was that the courts refused to consider the constitutionality of the Panama invasion that brought Noriega to the United States. They refused to consider it because if they had considered it they’d have had a very hard time ruling it constitutional. That’s likely to be the case again here, because courts don’t like mucking around in anything related to presidential war powers.

Another parallel with Noriega is what you might call the “good riddance” factor. Like Maduro, Noriega was not the elected president of Panama. Like Maduro, Noriega seized power in defiance of an election. Noriega barred the duly elected Guillermo Endara from taking office as president; Maduro did the same to the duly elected Edmundo González Urrutia (known popularly as Edmundo González).

But that’s where the similarities between Maduro and Noriega break down. To broadcast to the world that the United States was pro-democracy, Poppy Bush arranged for Endara to be sworn in as president on the day of the invasion. Trump, by contrast, is allowing Maduro’s Chavismo vice president, Delcy Rodríguez, to govern the country (despite some impudent back talk), and for multiple members of Maduro’s government named in Maduro’s indictment to remain in power. Trump isn’t even pretending he has the Venezuelan people’s interests at heart. It’s almost as if Trump were trying to advertise he is not pro-democracy. 

The popular opposition leader and Nobel Peace Prize–winner María Corina Machado, whom Maduro barred from participating in the presidential election, is calling for González, currently exiled in Spain, to take power. Given that González ran as a proxy for Machado, who remains in Venezuela, it might make sense for Machado herself to become president. But Trump dismissed that possibility at the press conference, saying, “Oh, I think it would be very tough for her to be the leader if she doesn’t have the support within, or the respect within the country. She’s a very nice woman, but she doesn’t have the respect within the [inaudible].” 

The explanation for Trump’s distaste for Machado, as cited by The Washington Post, is so deranged that it has to be true; nobody would have the nerve to make it up. I’ll quote the Post at length because if I paraphrased it you would doubt me:

Two people close to the White House said the president’s lack of interest in boosting Machado, despite her recent efforts to flatter Trump, stemmed from her decision to accept the Nobel Peace Prize, an award the president has openly coveted.

Although Machado ultimately said she was dedicating the award to Trump, her acceptance of the prize was an “ultimate sin,” said one of the people.

“If she had turned it down and said, ‘I can’t accept it because it’s Donald Trump’s,’ she’d be the president of Venezuela today,” this person said.

Our president, it has been observed, is unwell. Now, back to oil.

“We built that whole industry there,” Trump said at the press conference. Actually, the colonial power present at the creation of Venezuela’s modern oil industry was Great Britain, through its oil multinational Royal Dutch Shell, then the second-largest oil company in the world (after John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil). The precipitating event was what Venezuelans remember as El Reventón—the violent eruption, on December 14, 1922, of a Shell oil well called Los Barrosos II, on Venezuela’s Lake Maracaibo. It was, one chronicler later wrote, “one of the biggest blowouts the world had ever seen. Oil covered the trees, coated the vines and in ever-growing streams flowed through the underbrush like black serpents.” Within a decade, Venezuela’s oil production expanded from one million barrels per year to 137 million, and the country became the world’s largest petroleum exporter.

Even before El Reventón, Venezuela was playing John Bull against Uncle Sam in the granting of oil concessions, and in the decade after the blowout, Standard Oil (now Exxon) and Gulf (now Chevron) gained equal footing to Shell through aggressive State Department diplomacy and endless litigation. None of these three companies owned land in Venezuela; rather, they negotiated oil concessions with the Venezuela government, which was a dictatorship until 1958. The terms of these agreements were frequently changed.

The first nationalization, in 1976, entailed creation of a state-owned oil company, Petróleos de Venezuela, or PDVSA (pronounced “pedda-vaysa”). The expropriation grew out of Venezuela’s leading role in creating the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, or OPEC, in 1960, which prompted many member nations to nationalize their oil industries. Global oil shortages and rampant inflation discouraged the Ford administration from objecting too strenuously to Venezuela’s nationalization. It was a very inopportune moment to rock the boat; memories were still fresh of the 1973 Arab oil embargo. Venezuela didn’t participate, but instead provided the United States with desperately needed oil—though at sufficiently high prices that Venezuela’s oil revenues quadrupled. 

This first nationalization amounted to a more extreme version of Venezuela’s earlier unilateral alterations of oil concessions. Since 1943, Venezuela had claimed 50 percent of all oil profits. Now foreign companies would stop partnering with the Venezuelan government and start partnering with PDVSA. That was enough to drive out Shell, as well as Chevron and Conoco Phillips. But within Venezuela, the nationalization was widely criticized as chucuta, or incomplete, and over time the terms were made less onerous, persuading Chevron and Conoco Phillips to return. 

The second nationalization, in 2007, by President Hugo Chávez, was of a different order. PDVSA now claimed 60 percent, and in some cases more than 80 percent, of all oil profits. That was too much for Exxon and (again) Conoco Phillips, who were already paying higher taxes and royalty fees, so they left. Chevron remained, and now stands to gain the most if Trump truly seizes control of Venezuela’s oil.

But that’s more easily said than done. Oil pretty much is Venezuela’s economy—even in its current diminished state, after two decades of dwindling production under Chávez and Maduro’s Revolución Bolivariana and seven years of on-again, off-again U.S. sanctions against PDVSA, oil accounts for more than 17 percent of Venezuela’s gross domestic product and more than 80 percent of its exports. Indeed, since 2020, Venezuela’s oil production has been on the rise. Barring a full-scale American invasion, not even the Trump-friendly González or Machado regimes (should they come to power) will likely allow Trump to exert control over Venezuela’s oil industry. Among other obstacles, Venezuela is still a member of OPEC.

Which brings us back to Iraq. 

After the U.S. invasion of that country, I found myself asking: “Has the U.S. joined OPEC?” The answer turned out to be yes, sort of, inasmuch as Iraq today remains both an OPEC member and a U.S. client state. This awkward dual identity makes Iraq a somewhat uncooperative OPEC member or, if you prefer, a somewhat uncooperative American proxy. Even with boots on the ground, the United States never dared order Iraq not to participate in the blatantly illegal international oil cartel—because, among other considerations, the American oil companies that came in wouldn’t have stood for it. Don’t expect any better from Venezuela, where we have zero boots on the ground, and where any American oil company that comes in will similarly expect to profit from OPEC’s international price-fixing conspiracy. 

In the end, Iraq did increase its oil production after we deposed Saddam Hussein (though that leveled off after 2016). Today, Iraq is our fourth-biggest supplier of foreign oil, after Canada, Mexico, and Saudi Arabia. But nobody thinks it was worth it—not even, last time I checked, Trump. In 2002, the White House economic adviser Lawrence B. Lindsey lost his job for telling Congress the Iraq War would cost between $100 billion and $200 billion, because President George W. Bush deemed that estimate unacceptably high. In fact, Lindsey’s calculations were unacceptably low. The Defense Department calculated two decades later that the Iraq War cost $728 billion—and with no personal stake in the matter, Nobel laureate Joe Stiglitz and Harvard Kennedy School lecturer Linda Bilmes calculated the cost at more like $3 trillion. You can be a fiscal conservative or you can be a military interventionist, but you really can’t be both.

And, of course, many people died in Iraq. Nearly 9,000 American soldiers and contractors; about 40,000 Iraqi soldiers; nearly 300 journalists (including former New Republic editor Michael Kelly); and approximately 200,000 Iraqi civilians. Plus there were about 32,000 wounded American soldiers. Seizing control of foreign oil, recent history tells us, is a very expensive proposition. I doubt Trump is up to the task, and fervently hope he is not—because in more ways than I can count, we can’t afford it.

Trump Explodes at Media Over Tariff Fiasco as Poll Delivers Harsh News - 2026-01-06T10:00:00Z

President Trump just unleashed a wild rant on Truth Social, accusing media figures of deliberately ignoring good news about his worsening tariff disaster because they “hate and disrespect our country.” He added that the tariffs have made us “FAR STRONGER AND MORE RESPECTED THAN EVER BEFORE.” What caught our eye is how this shows Trump running everything, no matter how trivial, through a “strong” versus “weak” frame. He’s vowing to seize Venezuela’s oil after his invasion; he’s threatening many other countries with military action; and he’s even menacing Greenland, a NATO ally. Yet a new poll finds surprisingly low support for his action against Venezuela on multiple fronts. We talked to international relations expert Nicholas Grossman, who argues that Trump has it all backward: All these blustering fits and threats are a sign of Trump’s personal and political weakness and also are weakening our country’s international standing. We discuss whether that bad poll suggests an opening for Democrats to seize the strong/weak frame from him. Listen to this episode here. A transcript is here.

Trump Will Invade Another Country Unless We Stop Him - 2026-01-05T22:04:02Z

You can watch this episode of Right Now With Perry Bacon above or by following this show on YouTube or Substack.

Democrats in Congress and the broader public must signal their opposition to the Trump administration overthrowing the Venezuelan government or the president will feel emboldened to take other such radical acts, says Leah Greenberg, co-executive director of Indivisible. In the latest edition of Right Now, Greenberg says a major public backlash against Trump is essential to preventing him from taking unilateral action in Greenland, Mexico, or other places he seems obsessed with. Greenberg also discussed Indivisible’s plans to get more involved in Democratic primaries this year. Local Indivisible groups will be looking to endorse candidates who are “fighters” and oppose Democrats, possibly including incumbents, who the group feels aren’t up to taking on Trump.

Woman Arrested on Camera for Protesting Trump’s Invasion of Venezuela - 2026-01-05T21:47:37Z

A woman was arrested live on camera in Grand Rapids, Michigan, while talking to a local newscast about protesting the U.S. government’s sudden takeover of Venezuela.

Jessica Plichta helped Grand Rapids Opponents of War organize the turnout Saturday, which inspired dozens of locals to march through snowy city streets. But in a bizarre turn of events, Plichta’s decision to exercise her First Amendment rights ended when local authorities handcuffed her on the sidewalk while she was live on air.

“We have to apply pressure at all points that we can, this is not just a foreign issue,” Plichta said before she was arrested. “It’s our tax dollars that are also being used to commit these war crimes.”

She was reportedly arrested for obstructing a roadway and failure to obey a lawful command from an officer, according to 13 ON YOUR SIDE.

Plichta had visited Venezuela just three weeks before the Trump administration kidnapped the Latin American nation’s leader, Nicolás Maduro. While there, she attended an international summit, the People’s Assembly for Peace and Sovereignty of Our America, during which she said she saw Maduro “in person.”

“People loved him,” Plichta told the ABC News affiliate before her arrest. “Maduro was elected by the people. He is for the people, and the people want to see his return. Free Maduro.”

U.S. forces invaded Venezuela early Saturday, bombing its capital Caracas as nearly 200 American troops infiltrated the city to capture Maduro. Trump failed to notify Congress before the invasion but didn’t forget to tip off his friends at America’s biggest oil companies, which stand to gain the most from the America’s newfound control over Venezuela’s oil supply—the largest in the world.

The invasion followed months of escalating rhetoric between the White House and Venezuela’s leadership, which saw the Trump administration repeatedly pin U.S. fentanyl deaths on Venezuelan drug cartels despite a resounding lack of evidence.

Trump to Cut Off Funding to Minnesota and Four Other Blue States - 2026-01-05T21:16:44Z

The Trump administration is cutting off $10 billion in funding for social services like childcare and aid for poor families in five deep blue states. 

The New York Post reported Monday that the Department of Health and Human Services will freeze funding for California, Colorado, Illinois, Minnesota, and New York. The freeze will affect $7.35 billion from the Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, or TANF, program, which gives cash assistance to very poor people. The administration is also blocking $2.4 billion in Child Care Development Funding and  another $869 million from the Social Services Block Grant for all five states, citing benefits going to immigrants. 

An official from the Office of Management and Budget later confirmed the news to Axios, though all states don’t appear to have yet been notified.

The move appears to be a reaction to Minnesota’s Somali day-care scandal, which the right has latched onto.  

Regardless of the justification, this is likely just another instance of Trump going out of his way to spite American citizens, many of whom voted for him, living in states that didn’t. 

Lindsey Graham Salivates Over Trump’s Potential Next Targets - 2026-01-05T19:58:59Z

President Trump’s recent imperialistic escalations and threats have neocons like Republican Senator Lindsey Graham practically drooling.

After the “America First” president kidnapped Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, killing about 80 people in airstrikes in the process, he turned his ire to some of neocon America’s longtime targets: Cuba and Iran.

“One of the things that is happening … Cuba is ready to fall,” Trump said inside Air Force One on Sunday, standing snugly in a corner alongside Graham and Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick

“Yes!” Graham interjected, his eyes and smile lighting up as he became visibly excited.

Graham also put his own two cents in.

“You just wait for Cuba. Cuba is a Communist dictatorship that’s killed priests and nuns, they preyed on their own people,” Graham said. “Their days are numbered.”

“Having Trump stand on his plane threatening more regime-change operations, including one of the neocons’ decade-long crown jewel in Cuba, while Lindsey Graham stands next to him twitching in glee and ecstasy—is the perfect illustration of MAGA foreign policy,” journalist Glenn Greenwald chimed.

Graham tripled down later Monday on Fox News.

“Donald Trump will have done something that’s eluded America since the fifties: deal with the Communist dictatorship 90 miles off the coast of Florida. I can’t wait till that day comes. To our Cuban friends in Florida … the liberation of your homeland is close.”

“Trump used to mock @GrahamBlog for being a bloodthirsty neocon warmonger (and stupid!),” podcaster Tommy Vietor wrote on X. “Now he’s adopting Graham’s foreign policy.”

Graham also blew smoke at Iran during his Fox News appearance.

“Unlike Obama, President Trump has not turned his back on the people of Iran. So I pray and hope that 2026 will be the year that we make Iran great again,” he said, donning a black hat with that slogan on it.

Trump Wants Stephen Miller to Have a Terrifying New Role in Venezuela - 2026-01-05T19:53:15Z

The White House’s succession plan for Venezuela could see Stephen Miller deciding the country’s future.

Donald Trump is reportedly “weighing” whether to tap the notoriously anti-immigrant deputy chief of staff to oversee Venezuela in the coming months, according to at least one insider that spoke with The Washington Post.

Miller played a central role in U.S. efforts to oust Venezuela’s leader Nicolás Maduro. That plan came to a head late Friday, when U.S. military forces successfully captured Maduro, hauling him back to Manhattan on narco-terrorism charges.

Maduro’s Vice President Delcy Rodríguez has since been recognized by Venezuela’s armed forces as its interim leader, taking control as acting president in Maduro’s absence. She swore in on Monday.

In the meantime, Trump has seized the country’s oil reserves—the largest in the world—and told reporters he intends to “run” Venezuela.

That decision, in turn, could hand Miller outsize influence regarding the future of the country. Miller might be tasked with the day-to-day, nitty-gritty responsibilities of supervising the regime change under the office of Secretary of State Marco Rubio.

Rubio, a longtime Venezuela hawk, would be the more obvious choice to oversee the regime change—but his schedule is, unfortunately, already backed up. The Trump administration has tapped Rubio to serve not only as secretary of state but also as its national security adviser since Trump’s last pick—Mike Waltz—accidentally admitted journalists into a classified Signal group chat discussing an imminent bombing in Yemen.

Miller would not come without his own policy experience, however. The 40-year-old Californian was an architect of both Project 2025 and the Trump administration’s aggressive immigration policies, pushing on seemingly impossible deportation goals (upward of 3,000 detentions per day), which have forced ICE agents to harass and harangue noncriminal immigrants and U.S. citizens.

Miller was deeply involved in efforts to spark a new war on drugs, fixating on Mexican cartels and Mexico’s alleged drug traffickers. But when that fell through, Miller shifted his gaze to Venezuela, leading the charge on a classified directive in July that would lay the groundwork for months of airstrikes against small watercraft in the Caribbean, inciting new tensions between the U.S. and its supposedly new puppet state.

Trump Could Bring About End of NATO With This Move, Danish PM Warns - 2026-01-05T19:08:35Z

President Donald Trump’s imperialist warpath may be about to destroy NATO. 

Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen warned Monday that Trump was on course to uproot the 77-year-old defense alliance between the United States and its allies in Europe. 

“I believe one should take the American president seriously when he says that he wants Greenland,” Frederiksen said in an interview. “But I will also make it clear that if the U.S. chooses to attack another NATO country militarily, then everything stops, including NATO and thus the security that has been established since the end of the Second World War.”

Frederiksen’s attempt to raise the stakes of a potential invasion comes as the imperialist fanatics in the Trump administration—emboldened by its large-scale military operation over the weekend to oust Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro—have turned their attention back to Trump’s holy grail: Greenland. 

When asked by a reporter Sunday whether he had plans to take action on Greenland, Trump laughed. “We’ll worry about Greenland in two months,” he said. 

“We need Greenland from the standpoint of national security. And Denmark is not going to be able to do it, I’m telling you,” he added.  

Frederiksen released a statement that day urging the United States to “cease its threats against a historically close ally,” saying that it “makes absolutely no sense” for the U.S. to take over Greenland.

To be sure, Trump has rarely ever had anything nice to say about the member states of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, calling them “decaying” nations led by “weak” people. Instead, Trump seems to take his security cues from the Kremlin. His latest effort to carve up the world how he sees fit only further exemplifies how little he cares about keeping U.S. allies.

Bari Weiss Is Dead Wrong—Good Journalism Isn’t About Being Pro-America - 2026-01-05T18:15:33Z

CBS Evening News over the weekend released five “principles” that would guide the program under Tony Dokoupil, who was installed into the anchor role at the show as part of a number of changes by editor in chief Bari Weiss. One of the principles is “We Love America.” It mirrored how Washington Post Opinions section editor Adam O’Neal promised the section would be “unapologetically patriotic” under his leadership after he took the helm last summer.

Weiss is blocking anti-Trump content from being aired; O’Neal is directing an editorial page that now constantly defends the president, including an editorial on Saturday extolling Trump unilaterally overthrowing the Venezuelan government. That rightward shift is exactly what the billionaires (David Ellison and Jeff Bezos) who installed these new execs were aiming for.

But their framing of center-right, pro-Trump journalism as pro-America and patriotic is telling—and alarming. Patriotism and loving America, whether in journalism or politics, does not mean ignoring some of this country’s biggest problems, from racism to income inequality to an authoritarian president. And with Trump acting like a dictator, what we need from journalism and other key institutions in society right now is not celebrating the United States but its exact opposite: questioning how America got to the point where it twice elected a law-flouting madman and how to prevent that from ever happening again.

It’s worth unpacking what CBS and the Post are fighting against. Is there some vein of anti-American journalism out there? Yes, at least according to people who have embraced Weiss’s approach. The period from 2014 to 2024 saw a lot of journalism, including in mainstream outlets like the Post, CBS, and The New York Times, that deeply questioned the status quo in the United States. That coverage was inspired by what was happening politically, particularly the surprising rise of candidates like Trump and Bernie Sanders that reflected Americans’ dissatisfaction with both political parties and movements like Black Lives Matter and #MeToo.

There was a lot of extensive reporting about the massive growth in the wealth of billionaires like Bezos and the widening inequality in power and money of people like him compared to average Americans. Some of this journalism questioned if the superrich truly deserved to have so much more money than everyone else. Meanwhile, the Times’ 1619 Project, the writings of Ta-Nehisi Coates, and other journalism on racial issues argued that the country remained rife with racial injustice and inequality.

These coverage directions irritated many in the center-right and right. Weiss’s other news outlet, The Free Press, is deeply critical of journalism that focuses on racism. Bezos, in explaining his new vision of the Post Opinion section last year, all but stated that being pro-America means being pro-Amazon, pro-billionaire, and pro-Bezos.

“I am of America and for America, and proud to be so,” he wrote. “Our country did not get here by being typical. And a big part of America’s success has been freedom in the economic realm and everywhere else. Freedom is ethical—it minimizes coercion—and practical—it drives creativity, invention, and prosperity,” he wrote in a tweet.

But patriotism and loving America do not require, as Bezos implies, accepting or condoning hyper-capitalism, income equality, racism, and other ills of the United States. There is an alternative patriotism, where one looks at the ideals that America has expressed since the nation’s founding, such as liberty, justice, and freedom, and keeps pushing the nation to try to reach those as fully as possible.

Writer Theodore R. Johnson uses the term “Black patriotism” to refer to Frederick Douglass, Martin Luther King Jr., and other prominent African Americans who were critical of the U.S. policies of their day but deeply committed to the nation itself. People in journalism like 1619 lead author Nikole Hannah-Jones and politicians like Bernie Sanders aren’t tearing down America by pointing at the nation’s flaws and suggesting ways to improve it.

But while I want to emphasize that journalism that is critical of America can still be patriotic, it’s also fine if journalism or individual journalists are not particularly pro-America. O’Neal and Weiss shouldn’t be imposing a patriotism test on the journalists who work for them. Politicians are supposed to appeal to the masses, and that requires being super patriotic. But the role of journalists is to report, investigate, speak clearly and forcefully, and hold the powerful accountable. The driving values of journalists should be accuracy, rigor, creativity, fearlessness, curiosity—not patriotism.

I would have written all that even if Joe Biden or Kamala Harris were president. But with Trump ripping the leaders of the other nations from their homes with no congressional authorization on flimsy legal pretenses and violating core democratic principles hourly, the idea that journalists (or really anyone else) should be celebrating America right now is crazy. All of the worst tendencies of America—racism, sexism, imperialism, cronyism, homophobia, hyper-capitalism, and more—have been concentrated into one administration and, really, one man.

Imagine you were a Native American or Black journalist at CBS or the Post, already aware of all of the other horrible things that have happened to your ancestors in the United States; and now you are required by your boss to celebrate America in the midst of the Trump presidency. You would be doing what all journalists are trained not to: lying.

In fact, some of the best journalism about the United States these days, particularly its foreign policy decisions, comes from The Guardian, Al Jazeera, and other outlets that are not U.S.-based. That’s in part because many U.S.-based outlets, not just the Post and CBS, are somewhat invested in being pro-America, which they interpret as being not too critical of the U.S. government. But this is a time for journalists to be aggressive watchdogs of Trump, his administration, the Republican judges and members of Congress allied with him, and even Democrats who want to duck holding this administration accountable. We need strong journalism in this period—even if it reveals that there are some things fundamentally broken with America that led us to this place.

If you’re reading The New Republic, you’ve probably already figured out that CBS and the Post Opinion section aren’t great places to get honest takes on Trump these days. Even if you’re no longer consuming their content though, it’s important to understand that those outlets and the billionaire class supporting them believe that being patriotic means celebrating America in 2025 and that pointing out our current realities means you are unpatriotic.

But in truth, whether you are a journalist or a regular citizen, true patriotism and loving America demands that you do whatever you can to stop this president. And if Trump being elected twice has robbed you of a sense of pride in America, that’s OK too. That’s how I feel right now.

Trump’s U.N. Ambassador Gives Sick Defense of Venezuela Invasion - 2026-01-05T18:05:52Z

After the United States kidnapped their president and bombed their capital, Ambassador to the U.N. Mike Waltz swears that “there is no war in Venezuela.”

“As Secretary Rubio has said, there is no war against Venezuela or its people. We are not occupying a country. This was a law enforcement operation in furtherance of lawful indictments that have existed for decades. The United States arrested a narco-trafficker who is now going to stand trial in the United States,” Waltz said at an emergency session of the United Nations Security Council on Monday.

If this was just a simple “law enforcement operation,” then why the bombs? Why would the Trump administration consult U.S. oil companies prior to the kidnapping of Maduro? Why would Trump say outright that the U.S. will be running Venezuela?

The indictment Waltz refers to claims that Maduro allowed “cocaine-fueled corruption to flourish for his own benefit, for the benefit of members of his ruling regime, and for the benefit of his family members” and “provided Venezuelan diplomatic passports to drug traffickers and facilitated diplomatic cover for planes used by money launderers to repatriate drug proceeds from Mexico to Venezuela.” Venezuela does not play a major role in trafficking drugs to the United States—and the indictment says nothing about fentanyl, the primary cause of U.S. deaths by overdose.

In his speech, Waltz also emphasized oil, likely the real priority of the Trump administration in this escalation of aggression against Venezuela—not fighting for democracy or stopping drug trafficking.

“You cannot continue to have the largest energy reserves in the world under the control of adversaries of the United States.”

Pete Hegseth Finds New Way to Bully Mark Kelly Over Message to Troops - 2026-01-05T17:00:10Z

Pete Hegseth has finally figured out how to extract his petty payback on Senator Mark Kelly: going after his pension.

The defense secretary announced Monday that he’d initiated a Grade Determination Review following Kelly’s appearance in a video alongside fellow Democratic lawmakers to urge members of the U.S. military and intelligence community not to follow illegal orders.

Hegseth said the so-called Department of War would take “administrative action” against Kelly by reducing his military retirement grade, “resulting in a corresponding reduction in retired pay.”

Kelly slammed the Trump administration’s latest tactic to go after its critics. “Pete Hegseth wants to send the message to every single retired service member that if they say something he or Donald Trump doesn’t like, they will come after them the same way. It’s outrageous and it is wrong,” the Arizona Democrat said in a statement Monday. “There is nothing more un-American than that.”

A Grade Determination Review, or GDR, is the process by which the military assesses misconduct or poor performance to determine military retirement benefits, which are calculated based on the highest grade satisfactorily held.

A GDR typically occurs at the time of retirement and is a review of conduct during service—not after. Reviews are typically triggered by administrative disciplinary actions, poor performance evaluations, and criminal behavior or violations of the Uniform Code of Military Justice. In response to Hegseth’s previous threats to court-martial Kelly, a former astronaut and U.S. naval officer, military experts have argued that Kelly was speaking in his role as a civilian senator and had not violated any law.

Hegseth seemed to think he could get around this by issuing a formal Letter of Censure documenting Kelly’s “reckless misconduct” to be “placed in Captain Kelly’s official and permanent military personnel file.”

Hegseth said he would personally oversee the GDR, which would be completed within 45 days.

“Captain Kelly’s status as a sitting United States Senator does not exempt him from accountability, and further violations could result in further action,” Hegseth wrote, claiming yet again that the Arizona lawmaker had violated the military’s rules and committed conduct that “was seditious in nature.”

Mexican President Slams Trump After He Threatens to Invade Them Next - 2026-01-05T16:04:05Z

Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum has condemned President Trump’s kidnapping of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his threat to take over her country next. 

“We categorically reject intervention in the internal matters of other countries,” Sheinbaum said at her press conference on Monday. “It is necessary to reaffirm that in Mexico the people rule, and that we are a free and sovereign country—cooperation, yes; subordination and intervention, no.” 

Trump has threatened to both bomb and/or invade Mexico multiple times in his first year back in office, and he reiterated those points this weekend.

“The cartels are running Mexico, [Sheinbaum’s] not running Mexico.…  We have to do something,” he said on Fox News. Trump also threatened the sovereignty of Greenland, Cuba, Columbia, and Iran, naming them as potential next targets in his press conference on Saturday. 

Even still, Sheinbaum seems confident that the United States will not escalate. 

“I don’t believe in an invasion; I don’t even think it’s something they’re taking very seriously,” she said. “On several occasions, he has insisted that the U.S. Army be allowed to enter Mexico. We have said no very firmly—first because we defend our sovereignty, and second because it is not necessary.”

Trump Goes on Wild Spree of Threats Against Rest of the World - 2026-01-05T15:44:17Z

It seems that attacking Venezuela was just the beginning for President Donald Trump.

Speaking to reporters on Air Force One Sunday, Trump couldn’t stop musing about ordering more large-scale military strikes on various countries—including some U.S. allies—following America’s military operation to kidnap Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro.

So how many countries are at risk of imminent attack from the power-mad U.S. president? At least five—but probably more. 

Trump began by turning his attention to Venezuela’s neighbor. “Colombia is very sick too. Run by a sick man, who likes making cocaine and selling it to the United States. And he’s not going to be doing it very long, let me tell you,” Trump said.

“What does that mean, ‘He’s not going to do it very long’?” one reporter asked.

“He’s not doing it very long. He has cocaine mills and cocaine factories; he’s not going to be doing it very long,” Trump replied.

“So there will be an operation by the U.S. in Colombia?” the reporter pressed.

“Sounds good to me,” the president replied. 

Trump has steadily increased tensions with Colombia, accusing President Gustavo Petro of being “an illegal drug leader,” targeting boats departing its shores, and cutting all U.S. aid to the country. Petro, for his part, has hit back, comparing Trump to Hitler.

Shortly afterward, Trump also floated a possible strike on Iran when a reporter mentioned the widespread protests there. “We’ll take a look, we’re watching it very closely. If they start killing people like they have in the past, I think they’re going to get hit very hard by the U.S.,” the president said. 

Trump then laughed at a reporter who asked if the president had any plans to take action on Greenland. “We’ll worry about Greenland in two months. We’ll worry about Greenland in 20 days,” he said.

Trump noted that the massive island was “covered in” Russian and Chinese ships. “We need Greenland from the standpoint of national security. And Denmark is not going to be able to do it, I’m telling you,” he said.  

Trump’s efforts to take over Venezuela have reignited right-wing fervor for the United States to claim Greenland, sparking Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen to hit back once again at Trump’s repeated threats to annex the territory. 

Trump then turned his attention to his more immediate targets. “Cuba is ready to fall,” he said, claiming that the country had previously received “all of their income from Venezuela.”

“You have to do something with Mexico,” Trump continued. “Mexico has to get their act together, because they’re pouring through Mexico and we’re gonna have to do something. We’d love Mexico to do it, they’re capable of doing it, but unfortunately the cartels are very strong in Mexico.” 

But Trump wasn’t finished. He even went so far as to threaten a second strike against Venezuela “if they don’t behave,” and said that there could be U.S. troops on the ground depending on what the new administration—“if you want to call them that”—decided to do.

Trump Snubs Top Venezuelan Opposition Leader for the Pettiest Reason - 2026-01-05T14:55:57Z

It seems that Venezuelan opposition leader María Corina Machado dedicated her Nobel Peace Prize to President Trump for nothing.

After Trump’s kidnapping of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his wife, many looked to Machado as the clear option to fill the vacancy, due to both her work promoting democracy in Venezuela and her close relationship with the Trump administration—most evident in her Peace Prize dedication. But over the weekend, Trump stated that the United States would “run” Venezuela and that he had not been in contact with Machado, even claiming that she didn’t have “the respect within the country” to lead.

“She’s a very nice woman, but she doesn’t have the respect,” he told reporters then.

This snubbing is reportedly a result of Machado not outright refusing the award, which Trump also wanted. Two sources close to the White House told The Washington Post that her decision to accept the Nobel Prize, even despite dedicating it to Trump, set the U.S. president off, leading to this current petty grudge.

“If she had turned it down and said, ‘I can’t accept it because it’s Donald Trump’s,’ she’d be the president of Venezuela today,” one said.

Marco Rubio Crashes and Burns Defending Trump’s Plan to Run Venezuela - 2026-01-05T14:40:36Z

Secretary of State Marco Rubio couldn’t provide a single legal rationale for President Donald Trump’s plan to put himself in charge of Venezuela.

Rubio flailed Sunday during an appearance on ABC’s This Week, when host George Stephanopoulos asked him under what legal authority Trump intended to “run” Venezuela.

“Under—well, first of all, what’s gonna happen here is that we have a quarantine on their oil. That means their economy will not be able to move forward until the conditions that are in the national interest of the United States and the interests of Venezuelan people are met. And that’s what we intend to do,” Rubio replied.

He continued to rant that he was “hopeful” this plan would lead to “positive results,” meaning a Venezuela that was not a “narco-trafficking paradise” and had an oil industry “where the wealth goes to the people, not to a handful of corrupt individuals.”

Unfortunately for Rubio, the question hadn’t been, “What are your hopes and dreams?”

“Let me ask the question again,” Stephanopoulos pressed. “What is the legal authority for the United States to be running Venezuela?”

“Well, I explained to you what our goals are and how we’re going to use the leverage to make it happen,” Rubio said. “As far as what our legal authority is on the quarantine are very simple. We have court orders. These are sanctioned boats. And we get orders from courts to go after and seize these sanctions.”

“So, is the United States running Venezuela right now?” Stephanopoulos asked.

“What we are running is the direction that this is gonna move moving forward, and that is we have leverage,” the secretary replied.

Rubio’s mealymouthed answer seemed to suggest that the Trump administration doesn’t plan to produce any legal authority for its reign in Venezuela but instead use sanctions as soft power. However, this explanation completely ignores the fact that the Trump administration just executed a large-scale military operation—without the permission of Congress—to kidnap Nicolás Maduro and is still threatening more strikes on the country.

Shortly after the strike, Trump said he intended for the United States to manage Venezuela “until such time as we can do a safe, proper and judicious transition” of power. Speaking to reporters on Air Force One, Trump confirmed Sunday that the U.S. was currently “in charge” of the South American country.

You Won’t Believe Who Trump Told About Venezuela Attack Ahead of Time - 2026-01-05T13:50:18Z

No, President Donald Trump didn’t tell Congress before launching a large-scale operation to attack Venezuela and kidnap its president—but he did tell someone.

Speaking to the president on Air Force One Sunday, one reporter asked whether Trump had looped in U.S. oil companies to his plans to oust Nicolás Maduro by force.

“Did you speak with them before the operation took place?” the reporter asked.

“Yes,” Trump replied.

“Did you maybe tip them off about what was gonna—?” the reporter continued.

“Before and after. And they want to go in, and they’re gonna do a great job for the people of Venezuela,” the president said. “And they’re gonna represent us well.”

Trump seemed to have no reservations about revealing that his government isn’t a democracy at all—it’s an oligarchy, where companies come first and his constituents don’t matter whatsoever. U.S. oil companies are already cashing in on his brazen constitutional violation.

Shortly after the military operation in Venezuela took place, Trump made clear his intention for oil companies to “go in, spend billions of dollars, fix the badly broken infrastructure, the oil infrastructure, and start making money for the country.” Trump has insisted that “the money coming out of the ground is very substantial,” but it seems that rebuilding the country’s oil industry won’t be cheap or easy.

Not only did Trump not receive authorization from Congress before launching the strike, but Democratic lawmakers now allege that Secretary of State Marco Rubio intentionally misled lawmakers about the administration’s intentions to do so.

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