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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 Legal Observer 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—who Minneapolis Representative Ilhan Omar indicated was a legal observer—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 exploiting a mentee at Harvard. 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.

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.

Transcript: Marjorie Taylor Greene Wrecks Trump in Harsh Maduro Tirade - 2026-01-05T12:13:35Z

The following is a lightly edited transcript of the January 5 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.

After American forces captured Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro and brought him to the United States to stand trial here, almost no Republicans spoke out in dissent. Notably, however, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene did speak out. In a series of remarkable tweets, she accused Trump of breaking his promise to avoid military adventurism abroad. Now, the idea that Trump and MAGA are anti-interventionist or anti-war, as we’re constantly told, has long been obvious bullshit, but now we have a MAGA leader stating this very plainly. Strikingly, Greene said straight-out that this is a bid to take Venezuela’s oil. Norm Eisen, the publisher of The Contrarian, has been saying we need to look at Trump’s invasion in similar terms: as an example of international corruption. So we’re talking to Norm about how all this unmasks Trump/MAGA’s true ideology and intentions. Norm, good to have you on, man.

Norm Eisen: Thank you for having me, Greg. Honored to be here.

Sargent: Great to have you on. So as everybody has heard, U.S. staged a major attack on Venezuela, bombing its air defenses and seizing Maduro. The justification is that he’s a narco-terrorist who’s being indicted in the U.S. Now look, Maduro is in many ways an illegitimate leader. He’s a thug. He’s an international pariah. But the bottom line is this wasn’t authorized by Congress. It’s an undeclared and unprovoked war and it violates international law. Norm, how bad is this?

Eisen: Greg, we haven’t seen anything like this in modern American history. It violates the Constitution. It is an invitation to the Putins and Xis of the world to do the same thing in their backyards. It puts our service members potentially at risk. And as Marjorie Taylor Greene shockingly noted, it’s a betrayal of Donald Trump’s commitments to the American people: less foreign adventurism, more helping them at home. He’s doing the opposite.

Sargent: Well, Marjorie Taylor Greene did post the long and remarkable takedown of Trump. You just got into a little of it. I’m going to read some more from it:

“If prosecuting narco-terrorists is a high priority, then why did President Trump pardon the former Honduran president?”

She also said, quote: “By removing Maduro, this is a clear move for control over Venezuelan oil supplies.”

She also said this: “Americans disgusted with our own government’s never-ending military aggression and support of foreign wars is justified because both parties always keep the Washington military machine funded and going. This is what many in MAGA thought they voted to end. Boy, were we wrong.”

Norm, she’s really not wrong about the betrayal of MAGA here, is she?

Eisen: No, she’s not. First of all, she notes that Donald Trump has admitted that he’s doing this to benefit Big Oil. And Greg, she’s hitting a note here where the right and the left actually have some common ground—the genuine right and the left, not Trump’s party, which is all about the greatness of Trump, including supporting his corruption. We should not be invading foreign countries to seize their oil. I mean, the guy is such an unsophisticated dictator. Trump is setting up a payback loop to the big oil companies. He said as much during the campaign. It was reported that he openly said, You should vote for me. You should financially support me. Because, in essence, I’ll make it worth your while if I get into office.

Sargent: Norm, not only did he do that, he did it while he was raising enormous amounts of money from them.

Eisen: And he did it at a fundraising event. And that fundraising has not stopped, Greg, because he’s done political fundraising from the oil companies. But then he’s done quasi-official fundraising for his whims, like the ballroom that he’s going to erect over the destroyed East Wing. That ballroom is like—remember how in the Popeye cartoon, Popeye would have one giant arm, the rest of him scrawny? That ballroom is symbolic; it’s like a corruption tumor on the White House grounds.

So there’s that aspect, the corruption, and there is a commitment that Donald Trump made that he would fight the corruption of the swamp. Instead, he’s just deepening the swamp. So that’s one point. A second point that she notes is Donald Trump promised an end to the forever wars and the entanglements around the world. And instead, he’s just thrust himself into every conflict all over the globe—here, Greg, kidnapping a foreign president, whatever legal claims we may have against him. And nobody supports Maduro, nobody likes Maduro, but you’ve got to deal with Maduro in a legal way.

Part of our gripe with Maduro is that he did not follow the laws, including in running his own country or drug trading. Well, can we break the laws then to go and grab Maduro?

Sargent: I just want to throw this in here, Norm. We recently at The New Republic described what Trump is doing with the presidency as creating a bribe delivery system. And to your point about the fact that fundraising is ongoing, I really do think reporters are going to want to start looking at where Trump is raising the money now in the context of what we’re seeing.

Eisen: That’s right. It’s one of the most outrageous examples of the corruption of government that we’ve seen in American history—probably the most outrageous. And that brings me to the third betrayal that Marjorie Taylor Greene writes about in her long tweet, her social media posting. If you’re primarily focused on grabbing as much cash as you can to stuff into your own pockets and that of your allies so they can pay you back by supporting your political and personal self-aggrandizement, then you’re not focusing on the reason you got elected, which is to help the American people.

And the American people are facing an affordability crisis, a health care crisis. And the two are interrelated. Health care premiums are skyrocketing all over the country because of Donald Trump’s policy failures. Marjorie Greene notes that. And it’s the distraction factor. This is not what they put Donald Trump in office to do. And I think you see that in the extreme unpopularity. Most unpopular president at this point in their tenure of anyone not named Trump—except for the possible exception of his first term, the most unpopular.

Sargent: Well, Norm, I want to try to get at what Trump actually intends with the oil in Venezuela. He’s saying that U.S. oil companies are going to go into Venezuela now and revive the oil industry. You’ll be shocked to hear that we get some of the money. Listen to this.

Donald Trump (voiceover): Well, no, we’re going to have presence in Venezuela as it pertains to oil because we have to have, we were sending our expertise in. So you may need something not very much. But no, we’re to be taking out a tremendous amount of wealth out of the ground and that wealth is going to the people of Venezuela and people from outside of Venezuela that used to be in Venezuela and it goes also to the United States of America in the form of reimbursement for the damages caused us by that country.


Sargent: So it’s a little unclear how real all this is. Some of the oil companies themselves seem to be very reluctant to go in now, but it sure looks like pillage or plunder. What’s your take on Trump’s actual designs here? What do you think he’s going to actually try to do and what will it look like?

Eisen: Well, we know that Chevron is already present there and we know that other oil companies are barred from participating in general because of U.S. sanctions. And Trump promised those oil companies when he was raising money during the campaign that he would release the Biden-era strictures on them. These sanctions were in place in the Biden era. So I think that the initial form of the corruption is going to be allowing oil companies to start profiting again, withdrawing oil, being present in Venezuela.

There’s hostile sentiments being expressed by the Venezuelan government at the moment. What we should look for, though, is whether—even as they continue to make noises, because this is unpopular to say the least with Maduro supporters in Venezuela—Trump may have actually done one of the few things that could give ordinary Venezuelans more sympathy for Maduro by making him into a kidnap victim and by violating international law, violating American law to snatch the guy out of the country. Look for, though, the loosening of those restrictions, American oil companies going back in there.

And then, of course, that sets up this vicious cycle where those same oil companies and/or their executives can start contributing to Trump’s campaign ventures, to his misbegotten vanity projects in government, like the ballroom, like the Kennedy Center. Let’s not forget he’s also raising money as part of this scheme, putting his name on the Kennedy Center. That’ll be the initial level of thaw. You know, the Venezuelan government could continue to make noises about rejecting Trump while allowing the oil companies to come in under this Trump-administration bullying. That’s what I expect, the cutting edge of it.

Sargent: Yes, I think that’s very reasonable to assume it’s going to be really, really ugly. I want to stress something else for a second. It’s good that Marjorie Taylor Greene is calling out Trump for breaking his anti-war promises, but it’s just not true that Trump and MAGA are anti-war or anti-interventionist or anything like that. That whole thought is based on a confused reading of Trump and MAGA’s hatred of multilateralism and international law and institutions. Right here, we see Trump saying almost explicitly that they’re basically using the military abroad to pillage and plunder. I think this just breaks MAGA. You have people like Tucker Carlson who are criticizing Trump adventurism, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Laura Loomer criticizing this latest action. But broadly speaking, what we’re seeing now just wrecks whatever lingering sense there was that MAGA actually stands for anything, right?

Eisen: You do have misbegotten isolationists, America Firsters—that often goes with anti-Semitism. Let’s not get too excited about MTG given some of the anti-Semitic sentiments that she has expressed over the years. That strain of nativist isolationism is really contrary to American interests. It misunderstands our interests. The greatest thing that could have happened for our country—the thing that has powered American wealth, power, and safety since the end of World War II—has been the establishment of international institutions that allow America to prosper and that create peace and prosperity around the world. We’ve helped lift billions out of poverty around the planet by anchoring the economy. It brings investment into our country. It makes the American dollar the currency of choice. It brings prosperity to the American people.

I’m not saying it was perfect. I think you agree with me that we made mistakes in the trade policies of the 1980s, unduly sacrificed the American heartland. There’s things we can do better. But it’s been an extraordinary generation after generation of peace and prosperity for America. When we can avoid adventurism like the Venezuelan adventure—Vietnam was an example of a needless fight that we picked that cost tens of thousands of American lives. Look at Vietnam today, Greg. They want to be a capitalist nation. They want to do business with us. That’s the global system anchored by America that Donald Trump is tearing to pieces.

Sargent: Right, no question. And the fact that we have on a number of occasions not lived up to the promise of this international order, to put it somewhat charitably, doesn’t change your point, I think, at all. Just to close this out, Norm, this is an illegal, unprovoked war. You wear another hat as a legal advocate, and a Democratic House could take over in 2027 if Democrats won the midterms. What are you and your group doing and what could Democrats do going forward about this?

Eisen: Well, at Democracy Defenders Action and our parallel 501(c)(3), Democracy Defenders Fund, we’ve embarked on a series of over 235 legal actions and matters to push back on Donald Trump’s illegality. And Greg, I think it’s very important not to take the illegality of the Venezuelan adventure... it’s unconstitutional. Donald Trump can’t do this without the permission of Congress. It’s an act of war to grab the leader of another country. Not to take that in isolation, but look at the many cases that we have litigated where the courts have said what Donald Trump is doing is illegal. We and others have secured more than 200 court orders to that effect. The Supreme Court just most recently said Donald Trump’s domestic abuse of the military, his National Guard deployments, are illegal. Many, many other examples.

At Democracy Defenders Fund, we’ve started the process of pursuing the law licenses of the lawyers who are telling Trump and his cronies that all of this, including the boat strikes, is legal. It is not. You’re not allowed to kill civilians in international waters; none of the legal predicates that are necessary in order to do that are there. And to the extent that that is the foundation now, and it has been the foundation for going into Venezuela, we’re going to be pursuing the illegality there. So bar proceedings are one example of the kind of legal cases that you can bring. You find places where there’s guardrails and you reinforce those guardrails. And so we’ve done that across the board.

Sargent: Norm, let me ask you, what do you expect if Democrats control the House? I think this is clearly impeachable. There’s going to be a long list of things Trump could be impeached for. But that aside for the moment, what do you expect a Democratic House to do about this kind of thing?

Eisen: The power of the House includes oversight and accountability. I expect that you’ll see a rigorously prioritized list of the biggest scandals, biggest examples of corruption that have harmed the American people, and that the House will investigate those and issue subpoenas, have hearings, and enforce those subpoenas as needed. I do think—having worked on the impeachment of President Trump, the first impeachment, and then covered the second impeachment of President Trump for CNN—I think that you will see impeachment proceedings, maybe against Cabinet members in the first instance, and the investigative powers of the House are at their height.

We’ve got an epidemic of corruption. This invasion to benefit oil companies so they can pay Donald Trump back is an example of that corruption, and it harms the American people, puts our service members in harm’s way. And these are profits that are being grabbed to benefit Trump and continue his corruption. This is not in the interests of Americans. And they hate corruption. They hate it. So expect consequences if the Democrats return to power in Congress.

Sargent: Well, I will say that this invasion of Venezuela and this illegal action does give Democrats a good argument—another good argument—for putting them in charge of the House. I hope they make it. Norm Eisen, terrific to talk to you, man. Thanks so much for coming on.

Eisen: Thank you, Greg. Love being here.

The Perplexing Twist in Jen Percy’s Girls Play Dead - 2026-01-05T11:00:00Z

While interviewing sexual assault survivors for her study Girls Play Dead: Acts of Self-Preservation, Jen Percy began by asking: What did you do immediately after your rape? One woman Percy spoke to prepared chicken soup for her assailant; another “had a bath and watched television with [her] family”; still others comforted or cuddled their violators, fell asleep in the beds where the rapes took place, or pretended, for the sake of their rapists, that the rapists themselves were the proper victims of these events. “I told him I couldn’t wait to do it again,” one confessed. Tidying and accommodating, soothing and self-abnegating—the disquieting scenes of horror’s aftermath.

In the margins of my review copy, I scrawled recollections of my own post-traumatic behavior, likewise bizarre: In the summer of 2012, I waited for my rapist’s footsteps to recede and then stood up, cleaned the blood from my forehead, and staggered down the middle of the street more than a mile until a cab stopped. Just before Valentine’s Day of the following year, I asked my next rapist for a ride home. When he dropped me several blocks from my apartment (I assiduously avoided disclosing my exact address), I thanked him for the lift, closed his car door quietly, and went to bed for three days. Two years later, and in a different city, I walked into a police precinct, not to report the gang rape that had just happened, but to ask if the men turned in the pocketbook they’d stolen from my purse. My driver’s license, it occurred to me, was about to expire; how else would I replace it? A group of policemen laughed at me when I entered. I promptly left.

These weren’t, perhaps, “normal” reactions, but what is normal about being raped—except that it is horrifyingly and statistically commonplace? In the United States, someone is sexually assaulted every 74 seconds; a rape is reported every 4.1 minutes. That some communities and demographics are disproportionately affected by this violence is inarguable, but the notion that rape itself is an exceptional or anomalous injury is a myth. These experiences are, Percy writes, a kind of asphyxiating “accumulation” in the lives of countless girls and women. Rape may come to annihilate the body or fracture the psyche; certainly it disarticulates narrative. Yet the demand on survivors is that we react coherently to violence so shattering it’s often said to be “unspeakable.” To render ourselves credible witnesses, our stories must be lucid; our brokenness must appear in some way familiar.

It’s easy to believe we’ll know how to act in a disaster, that we have an affinity for survival. Survival, however, wears many faces, and there is much we don’t yet comprehend about women’s responses to sexual violence. As Percy points out, the psychological study of rape trauma is a field “no one in America bothered to study” until the early 1970s. Women’s lib and the consciousness-raising groups of that decade brought many of the hitherto private wounds and pleasures of women’s lives into the light, making the case that our experiences could and should be proper objects of inquiry, and we the subjects staging them. Still, progress has been slow and backsliding frequent. Marital rape, for instance, was largely outlawed in the United States by the 1990s, though legal loopholes exist in several states.

To release a rape book in our moment of escalating anti-feminist backlash is a daring act. With its chorus of voices, Percy’s book is distinctively anchored in ­#MeToo—joining together women of disparate circumstance in recognition of shared, systemic subordination. But while some of the most prominent memoirs of the ­#MeToo era—Chanel Miller’s Know My Name, Christine Blasey Ford’s One Way Back, E. Jean Carroll’s Not My Type—gave a loud, clear voice to the victims of high-profile abuses, Percy is attempting to excavate the aftereffects and reactions that remain quietly hidden or catastrophically misconstrued, and to unravel society’s misreadings of them. Girls Play Dead is, by turns, a memoir, a matrilineage, a survey of sex trauma, an analysis of inculcated female docility, and an assemblage of intimate, individual stories of rape’s most discordant and irreconcilable aftershocks.


Girls Play Dead opens meditatively on Percy’s girlhood in rural Oregon, where she spent wilderness hikes “mapping the world” and its attendant flora and fauna with her mother, a naturalist. “We made time to practice surviving,” she remembers, lessons that often took the form of noticing—that the horned lizard “spurted blood from its eyes to scare predators,” that trees could speak to one another through fungal networks, that predators lost interest in prey they believed to be dead, as dead meat harbors disease.

Though there are no grizzlies in Oregon, Percy’s mother trains her to play dead—a widely known survival strategy in the event of an attack. “I hated playing dead,” Percy recalls. “I preferred to fight,” to “compete for wildness.” But her mother insisted on perfecting the practice. Her mother’s own girlhood had been defined by painstakingly feminized domesticity: In a house where her brothers “did nothing and were asked to do nothing,” Percy’s mother cooked dinner each night and was expected to scrub the floors until “the pads of her fingers turned smooth.” For a time, Percy’s grandmother left the family to join a cult led by New Age guru Elizabeth Prophet, who told followers that the apocalypse (likely via annihilation by Russian nukes) would happen in March 1990. Percy’s mother fled toward marriage and work in the logging industry, which nearly killed her.

In the office, the walls “were covered in crotch shots” from porno magazines; in the field, it was “all men, all around.” Percy’s mother was the interloper, the “distraction,” the female impediment in a male-dominated field. While taking regrowth measurements on a precarious scree, she fell but refused to go to the hospital: “She didn’t want her supervisor to get in trouble,” Percy relays. “It was all she thought about.” Like her mother, Percy, too, labored “to keep wounds a secret under my clothes and let them heal in the dark. I learned not to seek help for pain or to give a voice to wounds.”

Survival, for women, rarely manifests as unambiguous victory; often it’s little more than a painful negotiation with circumstance. In later encounters with men, Percy finds herself reacting with disorienting non-reactions: She courteously fields pervy phone calls and, while abroad, stumbles into a brief assignation with an ambiguously cruel Spanish man. At a party, as a stranger crushes her into the carpeted floor, she remembers feeling “light, floating, no longer afraid. I heard the sound of the ocean.” A girl who happens on the scene makes a snide remark to Percy; “It was too difficult to explain, I told her. I shrugged and left.” The trouble of women’s passivity in facing imminent or transpiring violence—and the shame that subsequently affixes itself to this enervation—are the fulcrum of Girls Play Dead, which is preoccupied with the mystifying expanse between anticipated and actual responses.

Percy’s previous book, Demon Camp, was likewise an interrogation of trauma, though her persons of interest there were American combat veterans, who’d returned from Iraq and Afghanistan haunted by what they’d perpetrated and witnessed abroad. “I was interested,” Percy told Bookforum in 2014, “in how traumatic memory can destroy our ability to communicate effectively, how you might need another kind of narrative” when the conventional one fails.

When storytelling breaks down or we are otherwise silenced, how do women’s bodies speak? The middle sequence of Girls Play Dead is divided into a kind of taxonomy of these accounts, sorted by an array of post-traumatic responses: agoraphobia, tonic immobility (freezing in the event), psychosomatic seizures, dissociation and feelings of unreality, and dysregulated models of intimacy, including hypersexuality and love addiction.

These responses are more complex than their labels might suggest: Freezing during a rape may not, for example, always appear as paralysis. An NYU law professor, Erin Murphy, tells Percy of cases where women in moments of duress have removed their clothes themselves, not wanting, say, to ruin an expensive skirt. “I hear it all the time,” Murphy continues, women asking themselves why they’d lifted their hips during a rape in which they were otherwise prostrate. Clinical psychologist Jim Hopper tells Percy it’s statistically uncommon for victims to fight back during an assault, and, as Murphy notes, many juries still can’t “recognize rape unless there was physical resistance.” Verbal dissent, Hopper adds, happens more often, but is still less common than you might think.

In other stories, women recall having sex with men simply because there was a “possibility of violence.” A college freshman told sociologist Jessie Ford that she understood these encounters as “consensualish … consensual but unwanted.” Sex meant to please or appease; uncomfortable sex that seemed able to prevent further harm. Percy suggests that the language we have for sexual violence is too circumscribed and determinative, that we need to develop a more complex vocabulary for the feelings of sexual dysphoria that can arise during “embarrassing, disgusting, painful, or creepy sex.”


The women and girls Percy speaks to are not those who typically surface in a post-Weinstein news cycle: an agoraphobic sex worker, a personal masseuse, a 10-year-old in a refugee camp, a special-ed teacher living in Delaware. Their assailants, meanwhile, are not titans of industry but church acquaintances, family friends, office drones, and landlords. A number of the women have never spoken of or been asked to speak of these histories before. That Percy’s representation of sexual violence is so wide-ranging underscores how pervasive rape is, the way it harms so many—victim-survivors and the countless others we encounter, love, work with, join to or create in friendship and kinship.

Mostly successful is Percy’s decision to let the stories breathe, allowing these women to present themselves as entirely, complicatedly human and living expansive lives. We are not, after all, reducible to or ruined by the violence committed against us. At the same time, the book’s tendency toward broad evaluation is also its occasional undoing. That somatic responses are each separated into discrete categories suggests little overlap between them—not taking into account that, say, a survivor of assault might journey from a period of incapacitating ­antisociality toward one in which they amass frequent and/or novel sexual experiences. Are women who freeze during a rape more likely to suffer seizures in its wake? How does dissociation engineer or reconstruct the routes by which we build physical, sexual, and emotional intimacy with others?

By presenting the women’s stories in fixed groupings, Girls Play Dead leaves little room to explore connections between seemingly oppositional “types,” or to acknowledge that post-traumatic experiences are commonly contradictory, or that they can evolve through a sequence of affects and behaviors. In Percy’s taxonomy, you’re one sort of victim, or else the other.

Percy writes that the agoraphobes she interviewed self-induce pain, pinching skin, for example, or snapping rubber bands against their wrists. A defining feature of the phobia is a confusion of bodily borders, between what is in and what is outside of oneself. For them to remain present in their bodies, “it helped to remind themselves that they had one,” Percy writes. Yet I couldn’t help but hear in these descriptions an echo of Percy’s so-called hypersexuals, who have sex sometimes as a way of seeking punishment (“I thought I deserved to be treated like a piece of trash”), but who also, crucially, have sex in order to rewrite the story of their victimization. Some of the women Percy spoke to told her that post-rape sex concerned establishing that “this time it was my choice” or that now “I’m going to decide who gets to touch me.” Three days after an assault, one woman called a friend and asked to be intimate with him “because [she] didn’t want the only experience [she] had of sex to be rape.”

These brief accounts of women choosing their own paths, however, are overshadowed in Girls Play Dead by exhaustive testimonies of women who have sex we might describe in the manner of “self-harm.” Certainly, both possibilities exist, but the narrative weight that Percy gives to the latter suggests a broad incapacity among rape survivors to make smart sexual decisions, which may even include choosing promiscuity or supposedly problematic sex.


What feels urgent in Percy’s work is her attention to the ways bodies process violence, as well as to the alien, inconsistent nature of many of these responses. Yet Percy is an often distant and disorienting guide through some of the most difficult cases. Her tendency toward disinterested observation and journalistic self-effacement not infrequently registers as evasiveness. Of her approach in Demon Camp, Percy remarked in the Bookforum interview, “I’m a subtle writer when it comes to reflection, and I wish I’d been a little more direct.” At times, this indirectness in Girls Play Dead makes it difficult to see what the stakes are for Percy, or how she’s interpreting the testimonies she collects. The book, in effect, directs the reader toward other sources of authority, citing statistics, police accounts, or psychological professionals over and against some of the women’s own accounts.

This conflict between a removed authorial voice and stories of people in their most intimate and vulnerable moments plays out most perplexingly in the last third of Girls Play Dead. Percy interviews three incarcerated women at the Logan and Decatur Correctional Centers in Illinois: Debraca, Angel, and Laconda, all jailed for having murdered their rapists. Their stories are as relentless as you’d expect, and Percy almost entirely steps away from editorializing in these chapters. She takes these women seriously, and if her reporter’s predilection to disappear from the story at other moments in the book fails to serve her, here her spectral positioning demonstrates a deep respect for the suffering that led Debraca, Angel, and Laconda to actions that derailed the course of their lives and their freedom forever. That these women will spend decades behind bars, separated from their children and other loved ones, for refusing to let their abusers continue defiling them exposes the tragic failure of a world that can’t imagine rehabilitation or repair.

Percy’s interviews lead her, also, to a white woman named Chelsea Godfrey, whose rapist—Dajuan Kirksey, who is Black—was convicted and imprisoned for the rape in 2014. In the course of their conversations in late 2022, according to Percy, Godfrey admitted to having lied on the stand: She tells Percy that, though the rape definitively happened, she’d never said “no” during it. She felt she wouldn’t be believed by the jury. (In a December 16, 2024, opinion denying Kirksey’s request to have his conviction vacated, Virginia Circuit Court Judge Brian H. Turpin found that it was “undisputed” that Godfrey had lied about saying “no” and “stop.”) What follows drastically recalibrates Percy’s role in the book, as she shifts from reportorial observation to intervention. A few months later, Percy approached a prosecutor familiar with Godfrey and the case to disclose what Godfrey confessed to her. The Innocence Project subsequently took on Kirksey’s case and in 2024 sought to overturn Kirksey’s conviction on the grounds that Godfrey had lied. That motion was denied, but Kirksey’s appeal is ongoing. At the time of writing, he is still in prison.

Percy wrestles with what she’s set in motion, ceding that “to report her felt like I was going against everything I had been working toward.” Her husband reminds her that she’s not adjudicating the case, merely relaying what she’s been told. The remainder of the chapter finds Percy reckoning with the institutionalized racism in sex crime litigation, with references to Confederate statues, the way the justice system is stacked against Black men like Kirksey, and statistics about false accusations.

It’s true that Kirksey and countless others, particularly people of color, are abused by the justice system. It’s also possible that Godfrey can have said racist things (and did at the time of her testimony: that she would “never have sex with a Black man,” for example) and still have been raped by the man she claimed to have been raped by. Prejudiced people are not immune to sexual violence, and Godfrey—so far as Percy presents this account—is steadfast in her sense that what she experienced was a rape.

What strikes me about Percy’s inclusion of this story is that the case and her treatment of it work against the book’s major theme. For nearly 300 pages, Percy makes or seems to make the argument that rape victims mostly do not react in expected ways, both during and after assaults. She has foregrounded statistics that reveal the infrequency of verbal and physical expressions of nonconsent during assaults, while the question of physical evidence in rape trials is often profoundly muddied—how many rape kits are left untested every year? In the first half of the book, much is made of tonic immobility—a reaction to rape where a victim is functionally paralyzed and often entirely silent, responses that mirror Godfrey’s account of the event, in which she claims to have been crying and staring at a television screen. Percy even acknowledges that she can understand why a woman in Godfrey’s situation might lie about having said “no” because perhaps “she didn’t think her response to rape was good enough,” and Percy writes that if a friend had confided in her about the same sort of lie, she would have thought “that sounds perfectly normal.” Yet she makes the lie that Godfrey told on the stand the central fact in the chapter, and it is a detail that ushers in the variety of doubts that so often surround rape stories—even though false accusations are vanishingly rare.

While Percy’s husband is right that it was up to the courts to decide what to make of the new evidence Percy found, she gives the reader only a hazy sense of what happened as a result. She describes the subsequent legal maneuverings in confusing and opaque ways; on the emotional fallout, she offers even less. What did all this mean for Godfrey, who believed the case was settled? Or for the man in prison? Who can say? And while Percy highlights Godfrey’s changing story, her reflections on the case omit an important piece of information. She never mentions that Dajuan Kirksey testified at his trial in 2014 that Godfrey did in fact tell him to “stop”; as Judge Turpin noted in his December 2024 opinion, Kirksey told the court that “Ms. Godfrey did tell me to stop and I did stop.”

The episode seems to illustrate, if inadvertently, how easy it is to snap back to typical expectations of rape stories, and how challenging, even for the most informed and well-intentioned observers, to take seriously the possibility that a woman who told a serious lie might also still be telling the truth about her rape. Like Percy, I’m left haunted by the words of a social worker she speaks to at the end of the Godfrey saga: “We think we know these stories because we hear about them in the news.... We don’t know anything.”

Donald Trump Isn’t Antiwar. He’s Anti-West. Learn the Difference. - 2026-01-05T11:00:00Z

Donald Trump’s successful infiltrations into the worlds of both real estate and politics have been constructed on a foundation of cons. One of the more important of these, in both 2016 and 2024, was the strange notion that he was some sort of “antiwar” candidate. You remember: Hillary Clinton was the hawk, the mad bomber; Trump was a man of peace.

This was always propaganda. Yes, with respect to Iraq, it was kind of true. Clinton voted for the war as a senator. (This is the irony of her political career: Back during the lead-up to the Iraq War, the accepted Beltway wisdom was that “yea” was the safe political vote for a Democrat eyeing the presidency to make. And yet, her vote arguably cost her the nomination in 2008 and played some role in costing her the presidency in 2016, when the right really drove home the “Hillary as hawk” narrative.)

But Trump wasn’t nearly the Iraq War critic that he wanted people to believe—he expressed support for the war in the run-up and in its early days, and he only turned against it when it starting going south. Even then, his main criticism was that U.S. forces didn’t max out the possible conquest by taking Iraq’s oil—a fact that’s well worth remembering in this particular news cycle.

Speaking of, here we are, a decade after his first campaign, with Trump having just started his own little unilateral regime-change war. You can choose to call what’s happening in Venezuela a “legal action” or whatever you like, but if someone killed more than 100 American civilians at sea, making accusations about what they were up to without offering proof, and then sent more than 150 aircraft into our airspace and killed 40 of our civilians while arresting and forcefully extraditing our president, I reckon we’d be calling it “war.”

So what’s going on here? Why is the antiwar president making war?

The answer is that Trump is not antiwar. He never has been. That was always a fiction peddled by Trump, his lackeys, and the right-wing media to contrast him with Clinton and Joe Biden to fool the Gullible American community. He is anti-West. Here’s the difference, and why it can look confusing to people who don’t know any better.

When “the West,” led usually by the United States, starts a war, it does so in support of certain stated principles. Now let me quickly point out: Those principles might be wrongly and even tragically applied, and they might be ill conceived. The United States fought the war in Vietnam, for example, in defense of “freedom” (and against communism) and out of the conviction, the “domino theory,” that failing to stop the Reds in Saigon would all but ensure that they’d soon take over across all of South Asia and, before you knew it, would be on our doorstep. (Lyndon Johnson also feared that Congress would impeach him if he didn’t do it.)

This was all crazy talk grounded in a Cold War paranoia whose roots ran nearly as deep in the elite American psyche of the 1950s and 1960s as the belief that we were the world’s defenders of freedom. (See, for example, the tragic figure of James Forrestal, America’s first secretary of defense and a man whose paranoia drove him eventually to suicide.) But my point is, at least there was an attempt to root these decisions in principles; at least there was a foundation for critique and accountability. We didn’t invade Vietnam because we wanted the Lebensraum, or to seize its bauxite. We invaded based on a theory—again, a tragically wrong one—that we were defending “Western” values.

George W. Bush would no doubt say, and did say at the time on many occasions, the same thing about Iraq. I never thought, as many left-wing critics did, that that war was about oil, although the prospect of some easy oil revenues didn’t hurt, from the neocons’ perspective. And I never thought, as Michael Moore argued in Fahrenheit 9/11, that it was about the Carlyle Group. Rather, it was about establishing the United States as the preeminent global power in a unipolar, post–Cold War world; and, in Bush’s mind, I’m sure, it was also about bringing freedom to the people of Iraq—that is, he convinced himself that he was upholding Western values.

What Trump is against is 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. It’s this entire notion of values that Trump is against, not war per se. As my colleague Greg Sargent wrote last summer during an intra-MAGA squabble over how far the Trump administration should go in backing Israel in its aggressive acts toward Iran: “Some confuse Trump’s hostility to the postwar liberal international order with an ‘isolationism’ that eschews foreign military entanglements. But as Nicholas Grossman points out, this doesn’t reflect principled opposition to military action. It reflects Trump’s desire to shred the Western alliance and suck up to authoritarians who similarly hate that alliance, while generally undermining multilateralism and any other international frameworks he might perceive as constraining to the U.S.—and to himself.”

In other words, it’s not war Trump opposes. It’s just war in defense of the Western alliance. 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.

One might argue that this is, in its way, refreshing. After all, if all that hifalutin rhetoric about Western values is so malleable that it can be twisted into justifying catastrophic misadventures like Vietnam and Iraq, maybe it’s better to have someone who rejects such categories utterly.

Well—no. It’s not refreshing. It’s terrifying, for two reasons.

First: The fact that the United States has badly misapplied its values and even lied about them in prosecuting wars does not provide a basis for jettisoning those values. Rather, it provides a basis for defending those values honestly and honorably. We have done this too, from time to time. We, led by that other Clinton, worked with our European partners to stop (eventually) Slobodan Milošević in the Balkans. Under Barack Obama and, yes, Donald Trump, we snuffed out ISIS (but they’ve been staging a comeback lately, and this too is a flashpoint worth watching this year). Joe Biden led what was for a time an inspiring coalition trying to help Ukraine repel Russia. War is never not messy and without unintended consequences, but those are three cases where, for the most part, we did good.

Second: A world in which values don’t exist is a jungle. I’d love to live in a world where values were consistently applied to actions. But we’ll never live in that world. So given the realistic choices, I’d rather live in a world where principles are erroneously and inconsistently applied—and occasionally well applied!—than a world where they don’t even exist. Trump wants the latter world. And, with his pals Putin and Xi, he is quickly making it.

You have only to look at the National Security Strategy published last December. It signals to strongmen and kleptocrats around the world that the United States won’t interfere in their regional affairs—affairs that typically involve the widespread oppression of innocent people. The breakup language therein with respect to Europe couldn’t be clearer. It’s time, says the NSS, to have an “America First” policy, which means whatever Trump decides it means. This year, we’ve learned that “America First” means pardoning a Trump ally who trafficked 500 tons of drugs into the U.S. while sending the U.S. military to kidnap a head of state on the same (though shakier) grounds.

There is little evidence at hand that Trump’s war is going to make sense. It’s not quite about democracy (early signs point to leaving the corrupt Chavismo regime in charge as long as it pays tribute to Trump) or drugs (see above) or the fact that Maduro and his wife carried machine guns (the basis of two of the four counts against them; it’s a weird charge coming from a man who shrugs every time American children are gunned down with the same weapons). It’s about oil, to some extent.

But as the administration’s renewed threats against Greenland and Mexico demonstrate, Trump’s war is mainly about establishing U.S. ownership over our own “near abroad,” to use the phrase Putin invokes to refer to Ukraine and other nearby nations. And it’s a nudge and a wink to Putin and Xi: Don’t mess with me in my near abroad, and I won’t mess with you in yours. That has potentially terrifying consequences for Ukraine, Taiwan, and other nations; and for a larger world order in which national sovereignty is respected.

So, no, Donald Trump was never antiwar—if anything, he is dangerously enamored of his office’s death-dealing capabilities. The question we now face is, exactly how pro-war, on his own despotic terms, is he? In Mexico and Canada and Greenland—and Ukraine and Taiwan and across Latin America—they’re watching closely. Or at least they should be.

Trump Is Reviving a Disastrous, Forgotten Era in U.S. Foreign Policy - 2026-01-05T11:00:00Z

Announcing on Saturday the U.S. military incursion in Venezuela and the capture of its leader, President Donald Trump was characteristically blunt. After rattling off pretextual justifications for the raid—allusions to President Nicolás Maduro’s democratic illegitimacy, his alleged drug-trafficking ties, and the specter of ISIS, Iran, and “narco-terrorism”—Trump got to the point.

“As everyone knows, the oil business in Venezuela has been a bust, a total bust, for a long period of time,” he said. “They were pumping almost nothing by comparison to what they could have been pumping and what could’ve taken place. 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.”

When I was cutting my teeth as a journalist covering the Pentagon during the outbreak of the Iraq War in 2003, this would have been shocking. Back then, the suggestion that President George W. Bush had ordered the invasion and the capture of Saddam Hussein to seize the oil was considered radical; that a president might publicly admit it the stuff of a Dave Chappelle sketch. But as a student of empire, I recognized something deeper in Trump’s words. He isn’t just embarking on a dangerous new adventure in South America, nor even merely adding to the string of U.S.-backed coup attempts in Venezuela. He is turning the clock back to a long-dormant era of U.S. and European imperialism—one that proved disastrous for those in its crosshairs, and ultimately for the entire world.

Though largely forgotten today, in the decades before World War II the United States embarked on a spree of overseas territorial and resource conquests. From 1898 to roughly 1934, the U.S. military invaded, occupied, and in some cases outright colonized no fewer than 14 countries and territories in whole and in part, including Cuba, the Philippines, Puerto Rico, Hawaii, Honduras, Panama, Nicaragua, Mexico, Haiti, and the Dominican Republic. (In 1902, a crisis over Venezuela briefly raised the possibility of war with Britain, but cooler heads prevailed.) Some of those territories, including Puerto Rico and Hawaii, remain U.S. holdings to this day. Others, such as the Philippines and the Panama Canal Zone, were later granted sovereignty or returned to their host nations, though only after the U.S. had taken what it wanted, usually land for military bases.

This was not, however, a uniform process. Different presidents had different approaches to empire building, often in hopes of correcting the costly mistakes of their predecessors. Woodrow Wilson, who was president from 1913 to 1921, saw his role as overseeing civilizing missions, somewhat in the style of the French empire. He paternalistically imparted his vision of morality and self-determination, albeit with U.S. interests paramount and at the barrel of a gun. Before him, William Howard Taft oversaw “dollar diplomacy,” a more British style of informal control through central-bank takeovers and subservience through U.S. loans. His predecessor, Theodore Roosevelt, carried out the most muscular phase of American empire, brutally crushing an insurgency in the Philippines and ginning up a war to cleave the state of Panama from Colombia to build a transoceanic canal. He also declared the “Roosevelt Corollary” to the so-called Monroe Doctrine, inverting the 1823 principle’s toothless opposition to European colonialism into a permission structure for the U.S. to do whatever it wanted in the Americas.

Trump wants to claim Teddy Roosevelt’s mantle. In November’s revision of the National Security Strategy, his aides announced a “‘Trump Corollary’ to the Monroe Doctrine,” to prevent “hostile foreign” ownership of “key assets” and to ensure the “Western Hemisphere remains reasonably stable and well-governed enough to prevent and discourage mass migration to the United States.” (In the press conference, he jokingly referred to it as the “Don-roe Doctrine.”)

But Roosevelt was, by his own reckoning, a “pretty good imperialist,” whose chief foreign policy aim was the growth of the United States into a globe-spanning empire whose reach and landholdings would rival those of the European powers. Trump, on the other hand, has long claimed to disdain forever wars and nation building, and as president has generally sought to keep the world out, not govern it. But now he has announced an open-ended managerial occupation of Venezuela—“until such time as we can do a safe, proper, and judicious transition” to a friendlier government—and seemed to imply that it could be done without “boots on the ground.” Even more fancifully, he stated that the entire operation would pay for itself with “money coming out of the ground”—that is, with the profits generated by handing control over Venezuela’s vast oil fields to ExxonMobil, Chevron, and other U.S.-based energy companies.

In this, he more resembles Teddy Roosevelt’s predecessor, William McKinley. A morally small man, personally indebted to businessmen who rescued him from bankruptcy after he’d made bad loans during an 1893 depression, McKinley stumbled into the 1898 war with Spain that resulted in the conquest of the Philippines, Puerto Rico, Guam, and Cuba’s Guantánamo Bay. (He was pushed in no small part by Teddy Roosevelt, then his assistant secretary of the Navy; reporting suggests Trump was similarly eased into the Venezuela operation by his far more ideological Secretary of State Marco Rubio.) McKinley did so on the promise that, as a pro-war senator said, war with Spain would be a boon to “every branch of industry and domestic commerce” and that he would not have to directly administer Cuba’s nonwhite, Spanish-speaking, Catholic, and Santería-practicing masses.

When he found himself facing a revolt by Filipino nationalists, incensed by the betrayal of U.S. forces who had come in the guise of liberators from Spanish rule, McKinley could only throw more troops and money at the problem, betraying the lack of preparation and foresight. He was assassinated in 1901 by an anarchist outraged in part by American atrocities in the Philippines.

Trump gave a shout-out to McKinley a year ago in his inaugural address, though it is unclear whether he knew anything about him beyond the 1890 tariff he sponsored as a congressman. (For one, he didn’t seem to know that the resulting price increases cost McKinley his seat and the Republicans the majority in the next midterm election, or that the tariff helped trigger the economic crash of 1893.) Trump then transitioned seamlessly into praise for Roosevelt, and announced his intention to “take back” the Panama Canal—which, along with the threatened annexations of Greenland and Canada, and the threat of further regime change wars across the hemisphere, is at the heart of the “Don-roe Doctrine.”

In McKinleyite fashion, Trump seemingly put no thought into what he would do after launching his war of choice in Venezuela. He seems to have no idea who will “run” Venezuela, other than an unspecified “team.” He dismissed the idea of installing opposition leader María Corina Machado, who thanked him after receiving her suspiciously timed Nobel Peace Prize, but offered no alternatives. He claimed Maduro’s vice president, Delcy Rodríguez, was “essentially willing to do what we think is necessary to make Venezuela great again,” only to have her insist, in a pointed speech shortly thereafter, that Maduro remained president and denounce the “unprecedented military aggression” against her country. (“We will never go back to being slaves. We will never again be a colony of any empire, of any kind,” she added.)

The naked extraction and self-dealing at the heart of Trump’s policy harken to other imperial tendencies, as well: Belgian King Leopold II’s personal plunder of the Congo and the rule through corporations of British India or the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia). Trump, or his advisers, may have also taken to heart the Russian argument that the U.S. could be the master of its hemisphere and leave Eastern Europe to Putin. Whatever scheme Trump is following, the potential outcome here is clear. The last era of imperial fights over “spheres of influence,” scramble for resources, and control of the seas and colonies led directly to two world wars and the Great Depression. Now Trump is doing his part to revive that era without any awareness, or care, for the catastrophes that followed.

A Wealth Tax Is Not How You Soak the Rich - 2026-01-05T11:00:00Z

It thrills me to read that Peter Thiel and Larry Page may flee California if the state implements a one-time 5 percent wealth tax on billionaires. On fairness grounds, Thiel and Page have no case. If anything, the 2026 California Billionaire Tax Act is too easy on Golden State oligarchs, because 5 percent is a pretty small bite and because the proposal, devised by the Service Employees International Union and United Healthcare Workers West, exempts up to $10 million in retirement savings. (Rich jerks use Roth IRAs as tax shelters; Thiel sheltered $5 billion in his.)

The purpose of California’s proposed tax, on which the SEIU has only just started to collect signatures to get it onto the ballot this fall, is mostly to plug a $19 billion annual hole in federal Medicaid funding for California left by last year’s budget reconciliation bill. I’d be fine with California extracting that whole $19 billion from Thiel. (He’d still have $6 billion left.) Thiel didn’t donate to Trump in 2024, but he spent $1.5 million to elect Trump in 2016; last year, Thiel gave $852,200 to House Speaker Mike Johnson’s Grow the Majority PAC, which will boost Trump-compliant Republican candidates in this year’s midterms; and the budget bill is expected to invest so much cash in Palantir, the defense contractor of which Thiel is chairman, that Palantir’s stock price shot up 150 percent in 2025.

Reluctantly, though, I must agree with the California Governor Gavin Newsom, a leading contender for the Democrats’ 2028 presidential nomination, that the 2026 California Billionaire Tax Act is not a particularly good idea. This puts both Newsom and myself in distasteful company. In addition to Thiel and Page, Bill Ackman, who doesn’t live in California, opposes the proposed tax, and I expect other billionaire blowhards will line up against it in the coming week, and probably President Donald Trump.

My reason for opposing a broad-based wealth tax is the opposite of Ackman’s. He’s against it because it would be “an expropriation of private property.” I’m against it because I don’t believe much expropriation would result after billionaires got done shifting their assets around to avoid the tax. It’s hard enough just to tax income! Before this country starts messing around with major wealth taxes (which have a miserable track record in other countries), we ought to tax high incomes—not just billionaires—at a much higher rate, and increase capital gains and corporate tax rates as well. All these income-based taxes stand today at what, historically, are appallingly low levels.

If Trump does come out against California’s billionaire tax, he will likely ignore (and perhaps outright deny) that he was once a wealth-tax advocate himself. Nobody ever talks about this, but back in 1999 Trump was even more rabid on this subject than the SEIU; he favored a one-time tax not of 5 percent but of 14.25 percent, not on billionaires but on anyone whose net worth exceeded $10 million, the equivalent of about $20 million today.

Trump, then seeking the 2000 presidential nomination from Ross Perot’s Reform Party ticket, said the tax was necessary to retire the national debt. Roger Stone, who was running Trump’s exploratory campaign committee, told the Los Angeles Times, “Mr. Trump is a graduate of the Wharton School of Finance, and this is something he has been thinking about for some time. The concept of a onetime tax on the super-wealthy is something he feels strongly about, and he has worked with a team of economists to bring it to life.” Trump dropped out in February 2000, and Pat Buchanan won the nomination instead. The Reform Party imploded soon after.

But evidence of Trump’s Bolshie past lives on in his would-be campaign book, The America We Deserve (2000). “The rich will scream,” Trump wrote, and “the pundits and editorial-board writers will warn of dire consequences resulting from my proposal—a stock market crash, a depression, unemployment, and so on. Notice that the people making such objections would have something personal to lose. Many of the doomsayers work for wealthy special interests.” Trump’s ghost writer, Dave Shiflett, later recalled that the Trump he knew at the turn of the twenty-first century was also “a big fan of diversity, inclusiveness and civility.” Trump’s campaign book even flirted with socialized medicine: “My critics will say that … a single-payer agency plan would create a gigantic agency to distribute funds to doctors. I’d point out that by creating one agency we do away with hundreds of smaller ones that are hard to monitor.”

It was, of course, a very long time ago.

The trouble with Trump’s 14.25 percent tax on fortunes north of $20 million, and the trouble with the SEIU’s more modest 5 percent tax on fortunes north of $1 billion, is that these are wealth taxes. A dozen years ago, at a Brookings panel on Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century, I pointed out to the great man that wealth taxes were kind of a hard sell in the United States. “What about property taxes?” Piketty replied. That shut me up, but after further reflection it occurred to me that these are such a touchy subject this side of the Atlantic that when the Great Inflation of the 1970s pushed up property taxes in California, the result was Proposition 13 and a national tax revolt that inspired candidate Ronald Reagan to slash top income-tax rates. Not again, thank you very much.

Politics aside, nearly every OECD country that’s tried to impose a broad-based wealth tax ended up repealing it. When these wealth taxes didn’t chase rich people out, they raised a pittance in revenue; in some instances, they managed to do both at the same time. France, Sweden, Austria, Denmark, Germany, the Netherlands, Finland, Iceland, and Luxembourg all discarded their wealth taxes. (This and the following data come courtesy of the nonprofit Tax Foundation.)

Today only four OECD countries still have wealth taxes: Colombia, Norway, Switzerland, and Spain—and in the latter country, regional governments in Madrid, Andalusia, and Galicia are trying to get rid of it. Excepting Colombia (where the wealth tax rises gradually to a maximum of 5 percent), wealth is never taxed so high as 5 percent. In Switzerland, wealth taxes vary by canton, but the rate is always below 1 percent. In Norway it’s 1.1 percent. In Spain, the maximum rate is 3.5 percent.

In Norway and Spain, wealth taxes bring in revenues equal to 1.5 percent and 0.57 percent, respectively, of total tax revenue. In Switzerland, the haul is a more impressive 4.3 percent, mainly because—supply-side theorists rejoice!—the wealth tax has never been high enough to drive wealthy Swiss out of the country. It may help that Switzerland’s wealth tax is no novelty; it’s been around since the nineteenth century. Even in Switzerland, though, the wealth-tax haul represents only 1.2 percent of gross domestic product.

If the gentle social Democrats of western Europe can’t make a success with a wealth tax, what chance is there that we American brutes can? At best, the campaign to create a billionaire wealth tax in California will put pressure on Washington to finally increase income-based taxes nationally on the wealthy. In that limited sense, I’d be for it. But I don’t think a wealth tax is in itself a good idea.

Marjorie Taylor Greene Wrecks Trump in Epic Maduro Rant as MAGA Breaks - 2026-01-05T10:00:00Z

After American forces captured Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro and brought him to the United States, almost no Republicans spoke out in dissent. But Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene did speak out. In an extended rant, she accused Trump of breaking his promise to avoid military adventurism. She sharply questioned Trump’s commitment to fighting “narco-terrorists.” And she even said straight out that this is a naked bid to take Venezuela’s oil. With other MAGA figures questioning Trump’s interventionism, all this wrecks any sense that Trump’s version of MAGA stands for anything. We talked to Norm Eisen, the publisher of The Contrarian and co-founder of the Democracy Defenders Fund, who has been talking about the invasion as an example of international corruption, just as Greene has. He explains how Greene laid bare MAGA’s corrupt core, why Trump’s illegal invasion is so damaging to international law, and what can be done to try to bring some accountability. Listen to this episode here. A transcript is here.

Trump Has Started Carving Up the World. Now It’s Putin and Xi’s Turn. - 2026-01-04T15:06:42Z

The U.S. invasion of Venezuela late last Friday shocked the world for many reasons. It represents another fundamental departure from the post–World War II order supported by the United States for the last 50 years. It was also an unprovoked, naked act of aggression based on the flimsiest of pretexts. Congress was not consulted, and the executive branch has far exceeded the 60 days allowed by the 1973 War Powers Act to get congressional approval for ongoing military action.

Far worse than these shattered norms are the horrifying possibilities this action raises. President Donald Trump and the GOP have laid bare their desires for hegemony, colonialism, and empire, and the dangerous global consequences of the United States pursuing these cannot be understated. Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro was an unpopular kleptocratic dictator, and this article should not be in any way interpreted as a defense of him; but it is a warning of what this invasion means, and what is to come.

Perhaps the most blatant of all the recent acts is Trump’s own declaration that the U.S. will “take control” of Venezuela “for a while” to seize and exploit the oil resources of the country. He will undoubtedly place a right-wing dictator beholden to him in charge of the country, opening the door to yet another avenue for foreign money flowing to him. Similarly, oil companies will compete with one another for access to the seized assets, meaning more money being laundered to Trump, his family, and other supporters in this spoils-of-war system.

It also sets the U.S. up to occupy a country that, while holding no love for Maduro, likely won’t be happy to exchange a left-wing dictator who bankrupted and impoverished them with a right-wing one who is doing the same. The U.S. has a long history of propping up unpopular despots with embedded troops, which hasn’t gone particularly well since Korea (where there was at least U.S. and U.N. support for the sovereignty of South Korea). Vietnam, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Libya, and Syria have been fruitless fiascos, producing corrupt unstable dictatorships at best (Iraq), or leaving our enemies in charge at worst (Iran, Afghanistan, and Vietnam until the 1990s).

Like so many of Trump’s militaristic foreign policy misadventures, there seems to be no long-term plan or strategy beyond executing lightning strikes in the hope that it produces desired results. While Iran is currently in turmoil, the world does not seem to be safer, more peaceful, or more orderly as a result.

The same is true for Venezuela: Trump does not appear to have a coherent plan for how to take and maintain control. Instead, there seems to be a belief in the administration that Venezuela can either be bullied into surrender or that U.S. troops would be greeted as liberators even as U.S. oil companies seized its national resources. This despite the fact that Maduro’s vice president, Delcy Rodríguez, remains defiant and at large, and the military and security apparatuses of the regime remain largely intact. There are signs that Trump may allow Rodríguez to remain in place, so long as she continues moves to adopt a laissez-faire capitalist system that lets U.S. oil companies exploit Venezuelan resources.

This act has also sent a chilling message to the world that the United States is beginning the process of carving up the world into spheres of influence run by dictatorships (namely the U.S., Russia, and China). Russia was Venezuela’s benefactor and ally but has been strangely quiet. Former U.S. Ambassador to Ukraine Fiona Hill testified to Congress in 2019 that Russia was “signaling very strongly that they wanted to somehow make some very strange swap agreement between Venezuela and Ukraine.” In other words, the U.S. could have Venezuela if we let Russia have Ukraine. This strongly suggests that the price for letting the U.S. go after Venezuela without any protest was, and will be, Ukraine. It also suggests that Taiwan may already be on the table as a bargaining chip with China, in order to secure its acquiescence to further U.S. regional hegemony in the Americas.

America’s 2025 National Security Strategy document has already put NATO and Europe on notice that they are the real enemy to Trump’s ambitions for empire and riches. In this seminal document, Russia was no longer portrayed as an adversary, and China was barely mentioned. Instead, the document focused on distancing the U.S. from NATO and the EU, treating them as adversaries rather than our closest allies. This further supports the notion that the globe is being carved up behind closed doors by nuclear-armed dictators intent on amassing wealth, building buffers to their empires, and securing their own backyards.

Trump has signaled that the global order of the past 80 years means nothing, and the U.S. is back in the business of colonial empire building as if it was a pre–World War I great power. Canada and Greenland should be extremely alarmed by this. Both of these countries have been put on notice since the beginning of the second Trump administration that he intends to annex them, and this overt, over-the-top act of war against Venezuela confirms that there’s nothing stopping him from finding some pretextual casus belli to justify a U.S. annexation of Greenland. Denmark, Canada, and Greenland are all NATO members, and it appears the U.S. is barreling toward a confrontation with that organization.

Members of the EU, NATO, and the countries being threatened here should have their eyes wide open to the implications of what is happening. They are not dealing with someone who can be appeased, any more than Ukraine could have appeased Russia in 2022 by any means other than complete capitulation.

Leaders of democracies around the world need to understand this for what it likely is: the opening salvos of a broader campaign of modern Lebensraum and Anschluss. History teaches that the best time to say no in concrete terms is early, and not after despotic nations are deciding who gets to keep which parts of countries they invaded.

They Say They’re Protesters. The DOJ Says They’re Terrorists. - 2026-01-04T11:00:00Z

In another life, Dario Sanchez taught computer science at a Dallas-area middle school. Now, he stays offline as much as possible, for fear that his court-mandated spyware may perceive some activity—a YouTube thumbnail, a Google search—as “violent,” thus breaking his bond agreement. He’s subject to random alcohol and drug tests, though he doesn’t even drink coffee. He wears long socks to dull the chafe from his ankle monitor.

Sanchez is one of 18 defendants in a vast government case surrounding a July 4 protest outside the Prairieland Detention Center, an Immigration and Customs Enforcement facility in Alvarado, Texas, a small city near Fort Worth. A police officer was shot at the protest. But, like more than a third of the other defendants, Sanchez wasn’t even there. Participants and supporters say that the event was intended as a noise demonstration, and that they lit fireworks to show solidarity with the facility’s 1,000-plus detainees. The indictments have so far claimed that the protesters “provided material support” for terrorism, categorizing the fireworks as “explosives.” Five are charged with multiple counts of attempted murder.

This case is the first of its kind since President Donald Trump, in the wake of Charlie Kirk’s assassination, signed a new national security presidential memorandum, NSPM-7, that instructs federal law enforcement to investigate “anti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, and anti-Christianity,” a staggeringly broad set of “motivations” justifying police action to “disrupt” and “disband” left-wing groups before a crime occurs. After the Alvarado protest, federal officials were unusually quick to circulate mug shots and term the protest a “planned ambush,” levying the defendants’ ties to an anarchist book club and a local chapter of the Socialist Rifle Association, a nonprofit gun club, to claim that they belong to an antifa cell and pull more and more people into the investigation’s dragnet.

To Xavier T. de Janon, the director of mass defense for the National Lawyers Guild, the implications of this case are alarming. If you attend a demonstration that becomes volatile due to an action taken by someone in the crowd—or, for that matter, someone in law enforcement—you could now find yourself on trial for something you had little to do with. Even if you aren’t present, as was the case with Sanchez, you run the risk of facing potentially life-ruining federal charges. If Prairieland sets the precedent, de Janon said, “the state could just accuse you of anything and say you ‘conspired’ to do [it].” The trial, in other words, could shape the future of protest under the second Trump administration—and the future of American civil liberties.


Federal prosecutors describe the July 4 demonstration not as a protest but as a deliberate terroristic “attack” carried out by antifa cell members in “black bloc” clothing: black pants and tops with face coverings and hats used to obscure their identities. Their case hinges on protesters’ use of encrypted messaging apps and the presence of firearms and first aid kits to paint the events as a broad anti-government conspiracy. Court documents and hours of CCTV and body cam footage, part of roughly six terabytes of materials that the prosecution has provided to the defense, reviewed by The New Republic, tell a much murkier story.

At approximately 10:37 p.m., a group of 11 people, faces covered, approached the Prairieland Detention Center from an overgrown tree line to the building’s west. One broke the camera on the guard shack at the property’s entrance and spray-painted “Fuck You Pigs” on it, then headed to the parking lot, where they tagged “ICE Pig” on a white Toyota Prius. At least five followed the razor wire fence north, fanning out and splitting into smaller teams of two to three. One group remained close to the facility entrance, keeping watch.

Before arriving that night, a few protesters had allegedly staked out the facility; indeed, prosecutors have pointed to defendants’ “coordinated” actions, including their use of encrypted messaging apps and nicknames—such as “Champagne,” “Jon ValJon,” and “Not Beating the Little Creature Allegations”—as indicators of a malevolent plot. But using nicknames in a group chat and planning a protest in advance are hardly evidence of violent intent. When Lydia Koza—whose wife, Autumn Hill, is among the 11 protesters—heard Hill’s “Little Creature” moniker in court, she said, “I wasn’t sure whether to laugh or cry.”

Group chat logs in the lead-up to the protest show some back-and-forth about whether it was necessary to bring guns. Benjamin Song, a former Marine reservist and the alleged shooter, argued in favor. They would act as a deterrent in case the confrontation turned hostile. “Cops are not trained or equipped for more than one rifle,” he allegedly wrote, “so it tends to make them back off.” The group arrived at the facility with 11 firearms but left many in their cars, backpacks, or a wagon near the entrance shortly after arriving.

The fireworks at the center of the federal government’s case were small and anti­climactic by Fourth of July standards, especially in Texas: pops of pink, red, and green, reaching just above the trees. A few were lobbed toward the razor wire, bursting on the ground—enough for prosecutors to allege “injury to the property” and “use [of] an explosive to commit a felony.” Evidently, the fireworks weren’t damaging enough to draw an immediate response; at roughly 10:56 p.m., around 15 minutes after protesters began shooting them off, corrections officers called 911.

Screen grabs obtained from the superseding indictment purport to show graffiti and cctv footage of fireworks at the Prairieland Detention Center on July 4, 2025.

Two minutes later, two officers exited the building to confront the protesters. One of the protesters appeared to signal to the others with a flashlight; at least two then fled the parking lot, away from the officers. At around 10:59, Thomas Gross, an Alvarado police lieutenant, pulled up to the scene, engine revving. The protesters scattered. “Hey, stop!” he yelled. “Get on the ground!”

Prosecutors attest that someone yelled “Get to the rifles!” Then, gunfire. The two officers sprinted for cover. “Fuck, I’m hit!” Gross shouted. This is where his body cam footage—less than three minutes—abruptly ends. It’s the most critical moment of the case, and it’s difficult to discern how many shots were fired or by whom.

One of those bullets hit Gross. When Adam Sharp, a fire marshal with the Alvarado police, arrived shortly after, the injured officer walked up to him, indicating which way the protesters escaped. Sharp then cut open Gross’s uniform to better check the wound. The bullet had entered the trapezius, above Gross’s collarbone and followed the trajectory out his upper back. “It grazed you, bud,” Sharp said, before driving him to a nearby Brookshire’s supermarket parking lot, where an emergency helicopter was set to land.

That is what’s clear from records reviewed by The New Republic. But many open questions remain. Federal prosecutors initially claimed that multiple assailants armed with AR-15–style rifles shot 20 to 30 rounds at Gross and the officers. By early August, state filings indicate that only 11 shell casings were found at the scene, suggesting just one shooter, and “leading investigators to believe the initial 20–30 shell casings to be an inaccurate amount of spent rounds.” Finally, in a lengthy preliminary hearing in September, an FBI official told the court that he could not say where the first shots came from.

And then there are the questions of the rifles themselves and the four words that prosecutors pointed to before Gross was shot: “Get to the rifles!” If the group really was planning an ambush, would it have been necessary to “get to the rifles”? When Amber Lowrey, sister of Prairieland protester Savanna Batten, visited Batten’s home after the FBI searched it, she found Batten’s work uniform laid out on the bed, a meal prepped in the microwave, her cat traumatized by the flash grenade. Lowrey remains unconvinced her sister would leave this life she’d made behind: “Any rational person would know that the story the state has spun—that was a suicide mission.”


The ensuing police roundup involved seven offices, including the Texas Game Warden, to supplement Alvarado’s 26-person police department. Nine of the 11 protesters were arrested that night and taken to Johnson County Jail. Eleven firearms—those brought, according to the protesters’ pre-protest chat, with the intention of deterring force—were recovered, many from inside cars or unassembled in backpacks. At least two phones were found in a Faraday bag, which prevents wireless tracking.

Soon, North Texas’s then-acting U.S. Attorney Nancy Larson, an active member of the conservative Federalist Society, learned of the case. Larson had only been on the job since May 29, and her office had been rocked by DOGE cuts and resignations: As much as one-fourth of the office had left, disillusioned by the Trump administration’s politicization of the Department of Justice. 

Shawn Smith, among the office’s remaining highly respected assistant attorneys, was assigned to the Prairieland case, but he had someone looking over his shoulder. Larson had recently given two positions—first assistant to the U.S. Attorney, and Acting Criminal Chief, who oversees all investigations—to Matthew Weybrecht, another assistant attorney, who once argued for the president’s “absolute” authority over the historically independent DOJ. (The North Texas U.S. Attorney’s Office declined to comment for the story.)

Meanwhile, Larson made her case to the cameras. At a July 7 press conference, she labeled the protest “a planned ambush with the intent to kill ICE corrections officers.” Johnson County District Attorney Timothy Good, a Liberty University law school graduate who had recently ousted a 32-year Republican incumbent, also expounded the case to the media. On July 16, he told a local Fox affiliate “there are more people involved” than had already been arrested, adding that police would target everyone who “aided and abetted” the protest. (Larson has since been replaced by Ryan Raybould, formerly a litigation partner at the law firm of Kirkland & Ellis.)

Autumn Hill, Koza’s wife, was the tenth protester arrested, during a July 5 raid on the house she shared with Koza and several roommates, which the FBI has described as a “commune.” On July 7, Daniel Sanchez Estrada, a green card holder and husband to defendant Maricela Rueda, became the eleventh person arrested, for transporting “Antifa materials”: a box containing anarchist art and literature, including Cruel Fiction, a book of sonnets by the poet Wendy Trevino. Prosecutors alleged that he was attempting to conceal evidence against his wife; days after his arrest, ICE’s official Instagram posted a picture of Estrada, saying he was found with “literal insurrectionist propaganda.”

Dario Sanchez’s arrest stemmed from a surprise July 9 visit from a fellow Socialist Rifle Association member, John Thomas, who is accused of “smuggling” Song, his former roommate, out of Alvarado. A distraught Thomas had shown up at Sanchez’s door after his apartment had been raided, his electronics confiscated: He told Sanchez he didn’t know where else to go—he only remembered his address. Sanchez, following their SRA chapter’s security protocols, removed Thomas from group chats in an attempt to prevent messages and identities from leaking.

Six days later, on July 15, Sanchez and his girlfriend, Irina, awoke to an FBI bullhorn ordering him to come out. He was being charged with tampering with evidence for deleting Thomas from SRA group chats. As the couple threw on their clothes, an armored vehicle with a battering ram slammed through their front door. A handheld drone entered, observing the couple as they exited the bedroom. 

Outside, Sanchez and Irina were handcuffed and separated. Casey Brashear, an FBI task force officer, took Sanchez aside and asked about another soon-to-be arrested alleged co-conspirator, though Sanchez said he didn’t recognize her name. This turned out to be Rebecca Morgan, who wasn’t at the protest but allegedly housed Benjamin Song for several days, until that evening, when her home was raided, Song was captured, and she was arrested at work. Brashear offered Sanchez a deal: Let the police impersonate him online, and he could avoid 50 years in prison. “That just told me they were just angling to try and scoop up other people for no good reason,” Sanchez said. After Sanchez told Brashear he wouldn’t talk without a lawyer, he spent around 30 days alone in a segregation cell. In September, he was briefly rearrested at gunpoint after Googling about whether he could convert a model car into a remote-controlled device. His home still bears the scars where the FBI busted in last July.

The later arrests largely stem from defendants’ connection to Benjamin Song and his 11-day-long evasion of police. As of mid-December, seven defendants—four of whom weren’t even at the protest—had accepted plea deals rather than face years in federal prison. 


In early November, I walked to the edge of the sunflower field next to the Prairieland Detention Center, brown and dried by fall, where police had captured several protesters months earlier.

The facility had since installed a new gate and increased the number of guards, said Justin, 34, whose home is mere yards from the gate. Otherwise, it’s been “pretty calm…. Sometimes you hear them hollering back there,” he added, shrugging.

Then Justin’s mother, who has lived in the neighborhood for 20 years, appeared at the door. “You need to go,” she told me. In July, she gave a statement to local news, and since then, she said, she and her family have faced recurring traffic stops “every time we fucking pull out of our driveway.”

“They’re over there watching us all right now,” she said, then slammed her door shut. 

Shortly before I arrived, the police had arrested Janette Goering—accused of participating in Benjamin Song’s escape by providing him a Faraday bag. Song allegedly thanked her for the bag on July 6, but Jesse Spahn, Goering’s husband, said she’d made it at a workshop, a month or two earlier, not directly connected to the protest.

“This could go good or bad, you know, if she cooperates or not,” an officer told Spahn at the raid. Then they ordered Janette, barefoot and in pajamas, into a black SUV. Her bond is set at $5 million.  

Overthrowing the Venezuelan Government Was Radical Even for Trump - 2026-01-04T00:45:02Z

You can watch this episode of Right Now With Perry Bacon above or by following this show on YouTube or Substack.

President Trump’s decision to have U.S forces attack Venezuela and capture president Nicolás Maduro was one of the most radical of his administration, says Elizabeth Saunders, a Columbia University political science professor who specializes in American foreign policy. While the U.S. has deposed leaders abroad before, particularly in Latin America, Saunders argues that Trump’s actions in Venezuela are alarming because the president does not appear to be taking much guidance from Congress, the American public, or even his own advisers. Saunders says she was surprised by the decision to capture Maduro and even more so by Trump declaring that the U.S. would now essentially run Venezuela. Saunders argues that this invasion was driven more by the individual goals and priorities of Trump senior adviser Stephen Miller, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and the president himself than simply a U.S. desire to grab Venezuela’s oil reserves.

Trump Declares U.S. Will Run Venezuela After Regime Change - 2026-01-03T17:13:06Z

After bombing Venezuela and kidnapping President Nicolás Maduro and his wife in the middle of the night, President Trump has declared that he will “run the country” in the meantime.

“We’re going to run the country until such time, as we can do a safe, proper, and judicious transition,” Trump said at a press conference on Saturday. “So we don’t wanna be involved with having somebody else get in, and we have the same situation that we have for the last long period of years. So we are going to run the country.”

Trump also dedicated a significant portion of the presser to discussing the future of U.S. oil companies in Venezuela, which has the largest oil reserves on the planet. “As everyone knows, the oil business in Venezuela has been a bust, a total bust, for a long 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 … and start making money.”

Could you imagine if another country sent a team of special agents to kidnap President Trump and his wife Melania from the White House while they slept? And then went on air the next morning saying they’d plug and play someone else as president?

That someone else could very well be María Corina Machado, Venezuelan opposition leader and Nobel Prize winner who has already displayed her eagerness to serve Trump and the U.S. agenda. For now, Trump hasn’t yet signed off.

Was Someone Insider Trading Right Before Trump’s Attack on Venezuela? - 2026-01-03T16:42:10Z

A suspicious new user on the prediction market Polymarket just made bank on the Trump administration’s military strikes on Venezuela.

The account, which was created on December 27, has only bet on two things: the U.S. invading Venezuela, and its president, Nicolás Maduro, being forced out of leadership by January 31. The user bet $35,000 when the market estimated the probability of intervention in Venezuela at only 6 percent.

Thanks to their very lucky bets, they made over $400,000 in less than a day.

Screenshot of Polymarket account and Venezuela bets

The timing of the account’s bets—and its creation—is certainly suspicious. According to reports, U.S. military officials initially discussed bombing Venezuela on Christmas Day, but reversed course after deciding to pursue airstrikes against ISIS in Nigeria instead. In the days following Christmas, officials held off on the attacks due to the weather.

Trump announced his strikes on Venezuela, and his abduction of Maduro and his wife, early Saturday morning. While he did a good job at keeping the attack from being leaked to the media, it seems someone on his team had no problem leaking the news to Polymarket—and making themselves quite a bit richer in the process.

After Venezuela Attack, Trump Says Something Must Be Done About Mexico - 2026-01-03T16:00:46Z

After the U.S. bombed Venezuela in the middle of the night and abducted its president, Nicolas Maduro, President Donald Trump warned that more attacks could be on the way in the region.

Trump hinted at a future conflict with Mexico in particular in an interview with Fox News Saturday morning.

“Your vice president, JD Vance, said that the message is pretty clear: that drug trafficking must stop. So was this operation a message that you’re sending to Mexico, to Claudia Sheinbaum, the president there?” Fox’s Griff Jenkins asked.

“Well, it wasn’t meant to be, we’re very friendly with her, she’s a good woman,” Trump began. “But the cartels are running Mexico. She’s not running Mexico.”

“We could be politically correct and be nice and say, ‘Oh, yes, she is.’ No, no. She’s very, you know, she’s very frightened of the cartels. They’re running Mexico. And I’ve asked her numerous times, ‘Would you like us to take out the cartels?’ ... Something is gonna have to be done with Mexico.”

Trump also told Fox that a “second wave” of strikes could take place in Venezuela and warned Maduro’s supporters will have a “bad future” if they stay loyal to him.

Trump Admits the Real Reason for His Surprise Attack on Venezuela - 2026-01-03T15:04:59Z

Just hours after President Donald Trump bombed Venezuela and abducted its leader, Nicolás Maduro, he began talking about the Latin American country’s oil industry.

Venezuela has the largest proven oil reserves on the planet, with 303 billion barrels worth of crude, or about a fifth of global reserves, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration. And that fact has clearly been at the top of Trump’s mind.

Appearing in a Fox News interview Saturday morning, Trump was asked what he sees for the “future of Venezuela’s oil industry.”

“Well, I see that we’re going to be very strongly involved in it, that’s all. I mean, what can I say? We have the greatest oil companies in the world, the biggest, the greatest, and we’re going to be very much involved in it.”

This wasn’t the first time that Trump has admitted his war with Venezuela is at least partly motivated by oil. Earlier last month, the U.S. military seized two Venezuelan oil tankers. Asked what would happen to the oil, Trump replied, “we’re going to keep it,” then added: “Maybe we will sell it, maybe we will keep it. Maybe we’ll use it in the Strategic Reserves. We’re keeping the ships also.”

Trump: U.S. Has Abducted Venezuelan Leader After Overnight Bombing - 2026-01-03T14:21:27Z

President Donald Trump announced in the early hours of Saturday that the United States had bombed Venezuela, the most oil-rich country in Latin America, and abducted its president, who is now being flown back to the United States.

“The United States of America has successfully carried out a large scale strike against Venezuela and its leader, President Nicolas Maduro, who has been, along with his wife, captured and flown out of the Country,” he wrote on Truth Social at 4:21 a.m. “This operation was done in conjunction with U.S. Law Enforcement.” He said he will give more details on the attack in a press conference at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida at 11 a.m.

Maduro is expected to be flown to New York, where he will face charges in Manhattan federal court.

“Nicolas Maduro and his wife, Cilia Flores, have been indicted in the Southern District of New York,” Attorney General Pam Bondi announced on X Saturday morning. “Nicolas Maduro has been charged with Narco-Terrorism Conspiracy, Cocaine Importation Conspiracy, Possession of Machineguns and Destructive Devices, and Conspiracy to Possess Machineguns and Destructive Devices against the United States. They will soon face the full wrath of American justice on American soil in American courts.”

Trump did so without the approval of Congress, which is supposed to sign off on all acts of war.

“Secretaries Rubio and Hegseth looked every Senator in the eye a few weeks ago and said this wasn’t about regime change,” Democratic Senator Andy Kim said after the bombing. “I didn’t trust them then and we see now that they blatantly lied to Congress. Trump rejected our Constitutionally required approval process for armed conflict because the Administration knows the American people overwhelmingly reject risks pulling our nation into another war.”

Shortly after the U.S. attack, the Venezuelan government accused Washington of an “extremely serious military aggression.”

“Venezuela rejects, repudiates, and denounces before the international community the extremely serious military aggression perpetrated by the current government of the United States of America against Venezuelan territory and people,” the Venezuelan government said.

Trump Is Bored to Death by the Affordability Crisis - 2026-01-03T11:00:00Z

Not long ago, President Trump seemed simply to be following the Joe Biden playbook on the affordability crisis: Deny Americans’ lived experience. Despite poll after poll, and a mountain of bad economic indicators, he’s called the affordability problem a “hoax” and a “con job” by Democrats, even mocking the concept in a speech in Mount Pocono, Pennsylvania, in early December—just days after yet another poll showed that his own voters were fed up and struggling to pay their bills.

Still, Trump has begun to address the issue a bit more—rhetorically, that is. He’s never fully acknowledged that the affordability problem has continued into his administration, nor how his own policies—from tariffs raising prices on myriad goods to the chaotic interruptions in crucial benefits like food stamps—have contributed to Americans’ economic sufferings. But he has been making more claims about what he’s supposedly doing to bring down the cost of living, a tacit nod to the polling.

He says inflation has “stopped.” He says his policies will cut drug prices by “400, 500, even 600 percent.” He says he has brought down the price of food and gas. He says that electricity costs “will fall dramatically.” He says that wages are up and that manufacturing jobs are flooding back to the United States.

Trouble is, none of that is true.

Inflation has not “stopped.” Grocery prices are up even from the Biden era. His claims about drug prices are not only false but, as CNN points out, “mathematically impossible.”  Wage growth for workers without college degrees slowed, from January to September, and within the same time frame, workers lost 361,000 jobs. From April—the month Trump announced his “liberation day” tariffs—to September, manufacturing in the U.S. fell by 58,000 jobs. On gas, his claims are exaggerated, as are his claims on egg prices. Electricity has spiked by 9 percent during his administration, and while it’s impossible to predict the future, there’s certainly no reason to believe his claim that he’s just about to bring it down.

But an equally big problem is that Americans’ struggles just don’t interest him. That’s why he can’t stay focused on them. That’s why he rolls his eyes when he says the word “affordability.” It’s also why in every recent speech, when he’s not lying about the affordability problem, he’s changing the subject. Trump raises the issue only to pivot to his preferred topics: tariffs (which he said recently was his “favorite word”), immigration, his personal beefs, himself, Ilhan Omar, Somalians in Minnesota, and so on. In his December 17 speech on the economy, he opened with three sentences on the cost of living, and immediately after saying the word “affordability,” he launched a rant about immigrants, as if to wake himself up. Two days later, in a speech in Rocky Mount, North Carolina, he shifted from affordability to his weird obsession with immigrants coming from insane asylums (presumably he is equating those seeking “asylum” with mental patients, a long-standing Trumpian muddle) without even the pretense of a logical transition, just because he couldn’t wait to get there.

Hardship bores Trump. And why wouldn’t it? He’s a rich guy who likes to hang out at Mar-a-Lago with other rich guys. He doesn’t have any answers to the affordability crisis because he doesn’t care—he really should borrow his wife’s infamous jacket—and because some of the easiest and most obvious solutions to the crisis involve rolling back his own policies, not to mention alienating Republican donors. No wonder he’d rather rant about Somalis in Minnesota—or reminisce about the good old days of his attempted assassination.

Trump’s utter disengagement and mendacity on the affordability crisis create a huge opportunity for Democrats, and some have been running with it. On Thursday, democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani was sworn in as the new mayor of New York City. He campaigned on making New York more affordable through universal childcare, free buses, a rent freeze for rent-stabilized buildings, as well as increasing the supply of housing for poor, working-class, and middle-class New Yorkers. He is backed by a grassroots campaign to tax the rich to make all this possible. On January 20, Mikie Sherill, the Democratic governor-elect of New Jersey, will also be sworn in. She too campaigned on lowering costs while also strongly opposing the construction of new data centers, which will increase energy bills, line tech billionaires’ pockets, and only flood the world with more slop.

In a sense, they will face the same challenge that Trump is facing: how to deliver on their campaign promises to address the affordability crisis. The difference is that they have actual policies they plan to advance in their respective legislative bodies. All Trump ever had was his favorite word, and every respected economist knew back in 2024 that astronomical tariffs were certain to accomplish one thing: higher prices on American consumers. But the president is not one to acknowledge his mistakes, let alone learn from them. So it’s a safe bet that he’s not going to suddenly find any solutions to the affordability crisis, not when he can barely bring himself to say those words. 

Steve Bannon Turns on Trump Over His Threat to Iran - 2026-01-02T21:37:10Z

The president is apparently taking foreign policy lessons from one of his political nemeses, Hillary Clinton—at least, that’s what one of his biggest first-term acolytes seems to believe.

Trump’s former chief White House strategist Steve Bannon accused his old boss of rifling through Hillary Clinton’s playbook, during a Friday episode of his War Room podcast. Bannon claimed that the president’s recent threats of violence against Iran were practically identical to State Department operations during the Obama administration.

“Aren’t people teasing right now that Samantha Power and Hillary Clinton must’ve somehow gotten invited to the Mar-a-Lago New Year’s Eve celebration, because the president coming out today saying, ‘We’re locked and loaded’—isn’t that straight from the Samantha Powers and Hillary Clinton playbook?” said Bannon.

Trump warned Iranian officials Friday morning that the United States was ready to defend locals protesting the country’s economic conditions, posting on Truth Social that if Iran “violently kills peaceful protesters, which is their custom, the United States of America will come to their rescue.”

At least three people have been reported dead and 17 injured as Iranian security forces clashed with crowds of protesters in the western province of Lorestan. Still more deaths have been reported in several other cities around the country.

“We are locked and loaded and ready to go,” Trump added.

It was not clear if Trump actually intended to follow through on the warning or had any plans in place to do so, but Iran—which backs forces in Lebanon, Iraq, and Yemen—did not take the specter of confrontation lightly.

Responding to Trump’s comments on X, the head of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, Ali Larijani, wrote that “Trump should know that U.S. interference in this internal matter would mean destabilizing the entire region and destroying America’s interests.

“The American people should know—Trump started this adventurism,” Larijani noted. “They should be mindful of their soldiers’ safety.”

But Trump is no stranger to attacking Iran. In June, the White House joined Israel in striking three of the country’s nuclear facilities. That attack, conducted without the express approval of Congress, damaged facilities in Fordo, Natanz, and Isfahan.

ICE Has a New Recruitment Strategy—and It’s Terrifying - 2026-01-02T19:21:27Z

The powers that be at U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement are planning on a massive recruitment drive in 2026—but the people they’re hoping to attract aren’t your typical feds.

The deportation agency has earmarked $100 million for online advertisements over the next year, hoping to draw gun rights advocates and military enthusiasts into its ranks, according to an internal document obtained by The Washington Post.

The agency’s so-called “wartime recruitment” strategy involves a massive hiring spree that aims to take on as many as 10,000 new officers across the country. To do so, ICE is coordinating a sprawling social media campaign to target people who have “attended UFC fights, listened to patriotic podcasts or shown an interest in guns and tactical gear,” reported the Post.

Some of that cash will be directed toward advertisements on Snapchat and the conservative YouTube dupe Rumble, while other portions of the budget will be dosed out for live marketing via livestreamers and right-wing influencers.

The recruitment blitz will also utilize contemporary software such as geofencing in order to beam ICE advertisements directly to devices in certain areas, such as those near military bases, Nascar races, college campuses, or gun and trade shows, according to the 30-page document.

The plan is a far cry from ICE’s typical recruitment methods, which have historically depended on recruitment from local police offices and sheriff departments to locate experienced talent with potential to grow at the federal level. Former ICE director Sarah Saldaña, who spearheaded the department during Barack Obama’s presidency, warned Newsmax that ICE’s latest recruitment tactics could invite applicants who bring “a certain aggressiveness that may not be necessary in 85 percent” of the job.

It’s unclear just how much of the $100 million allotment ICE has already spent, but the Department of Homeland Security has awarded nearly $40 million to a couple of marketing firms to support the public affairs office, according to federal awards data reviewed by the Post.

Regardless, ICE still has plenty of dough to play around with: 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. (Meanwhile, the legislature also took a hatchet to Medicaid, gutting billions of dollars from the critical public health care program.)

Trump, 79, Goes on Very Weird Spree Posting About Dead Birds - 2026-01-02T19:10:25Z

Just one day after a bombshell Wall Street Journal story on the president’s growing signs of aging, Donald Trump went on a bizarre posting spree about dead birds and wind turbines.

Throughout Friday, Trump posted several different photos on Truth Social of dead birds near turbines.

Truth Social screenshot Donald J. Trump @realDonaldTrump: Killing birds by the millions! (photo of a turbine and lots of birds around it) Jan 02, 2026, 9:15 AM

In one photo captioned “Eagles going down!,” he confused a red kite, a bird of prey, for America’s national bird.

Truth Social screenshot Donald J. Trump @realDonaldTrump Eagles going down! Jan 02, 2026, 9:16 AM (photo of red kite in the grass)

Two days earlier, Trump mixed up a falcon and an eagle in another post complaining about windmills.

Trump’s hatred of wind turbines goes back at least a decade, but the incessant photos of dead birds this week are on another level. Perhaps they can be explained by the Journal’s recent story documenting his rapid physical and mental decline. The story, which Trump is already fuming over, highlighted things like Trump’s requests for shorter and fewer meetings, his belief that a high dosage of aspirin will give him “nice, thin blood,” his difficulty hearing, and how easy is it for him to get cuts on his hand due to his thin skin.

“The White House Doctors have just reported that I am in ‘PERFECT HEALTH,’ and that I ‘ACED’ (Meaning, was correct on 100 percent of the questions asked!), for the third straight time, my Cognitive Examination, something which no other President, or previous Vice President, was willing to take,” Trump wrote Friday morning, before he went on to post about the dead birds.

Elon Musk’s Grok AI Tool Admits It Posted Explicit Photos of Babies - 2026-01-02T17:40:48Z

Elon Musk’s Grok AI chatbot admitted on Friday that it has been posting sexualized images of children on X, blaming “lapses in safeguard” for the content.

“We’ve identified lapses in safeguards and are urgently fixing them—[child sexual abuse material] is illegal and prohibited,” the chatbot posted, adding that “a company could face criminal or civil penalties if it knowingly facilitates or fails to prevent AI-generated CSAM after being alerted.”

Grok estimated that the victims in the explicit content it generated could have been as young as 1 to 2 years old.

In addition to endangering children, the chatbot has also been posting hundreds of sexually explicit photos of women without their consent. French authorities, who are already leading a criminal investigation of X, have said they investigate the sexually explicit deepfakes, as well.

The Department of Defense has begun using Grok, which has in the past also spread conspiracy theories about “white genocide,” posted antisemitic screeds, and called itself “MechaHitler.”

Musk, for his part, doesn’t seem to have much to say on his chatbot’s recent content, instead posting rants about the “end of Western civilization” and the “Somalification of America” as outrage grew.

MAGA Is Losing Its Mind Over 3 Words at Zohran Mamdani’s Inauguration - 2026-01-02T16:29:43Z

Conservatives are already fuming about New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s plans to bring the Big Apple together.

Right-wing commentators blasted Mamdani’s inaugural pledge to bring the “warmth of collectivism” to city residents Thursday, claiming that the mayor’s seemingly garden-variety optimism was tantamount to communism.

“The quiet part is no longer said out loud. New York City embraces communism,” posted Steve Guest, a former staffer for Texas Senator Ted Cruz.

New York Post correspondent Lydia Moynihan snarked that Mamdani’s idea sounded “rather chilling,” while Trump nominee Mark Walker claimed that Mamdani’s comments were “right out of Joseph Stalin’s 1928 play book.”

But communism and collectivism are far from the same thing. Whereas communism is a specific political ideology rooted in Marxism, collectivism is more of a broad principle that elevates the well-being of a society over that of a few individuals. Exactly why MAGA world would be opposed to that isn’t exactly clear—especially since their own leader seems to be just as charmed by Mamdani as New York City is.

The populist politicos were remarkably buddy-buddy during their first encounter in November, despite Trump’s repeated browbeating of the 34-year-old political underdog. Over many moons, Trump accused the local lawmaker of being a “communist” and living in the country “illegally,” threatened Mamdani’s arrest, and even pledged to send the National Guard to New York City if and when Mamdani entered Gracie Mansion.

However, a quick Oval Office encounter at the tail end of November seemed to completely change Trump’s opinion of the democratic socialist, and Trump effusively lauded Mamdani’s stances on crime and affordability. What buttered him up, Trump said at the time, was the fact that Mamdani was “different than your average candidate.”

“I think you really have a chance to make it,” Trump said.

Trump’s confidence in Mamdani has not spread throughout his party. Hours before Mamdani was sworn in at midnight on New Year’s Day, the New York Post reported he would swear in on two family Qurans—the first mayor to use the religious text in the city’s history.

Republican Senator Tommy Tuberville responded by proclaiming, “The enemy is inside the gates.”

Trump Goes Marble Shopping Amid Affordability Crisis - 2026-01-02T15:49:26Z

Donald Trump’s motorcade stopped at a random strip mall in Florida Friday morning so that the president could purchase marble and onyx for his increasingly expensive White House ballroom.

According to White House pool reports, “The motorcade arrived at a shopping center in Lake Worth, Florida at 9:46 AM.... The pool is told that POTUS is shopping at Arc Stone & Tile.” A White House official said that the president “is purchasing lake and onyx, at his own expense, for the White House ballroom.”

It’s perhaps no surprise that Trump wants marble in his White House ballroom. Trump first estimated the ballroom would cost only $200 million, but the president now claims the cost has skyrocketed to double that.

Trump has brought his longtime obsession with marble to his second term, pushing for it to appear just about everywhere. He urged the Federal Reserve building to be renovated with a marble facade, even as the architects wanted glass walls to indicate the agency’s transparency—and has since tried to use the renovation’s high cost as grounds to remove Fed Chair Jerome Powell.

More recently, he redid the bathroom in the White House Lincoln Suite entirely in marble, and he has proposed marble armrests for the Kennedy Center, claiming it would be “unlike anything ever done or seen before!” (Perhaps there’s a reason no one wants marble armrests.)

It remains to be seen whether Trump will indeed pay for the marble himself—or if he’ll add it to the taxpayers’ bill.

Umm, What? Trump Says He Got a Scan That Was “Less Than” an MRI - 2026-01-02T15:47:46Z

A new year, a new lie: The White House is apparently banking that the American public won’t remember what Donald Trump said about his own health just three months ago.

Trump admitted several times on camera to receiving an MRI in October—as did his physician, who released a report in December officially declaring that Trump’s MRI came back “perfectly normal.” Despite that, Trump now claims that he didn’t get an MRI after all, and that the medical assessment instead amounted to a CT scan.

“It wasn’t an MRI,” Trump told The Wall Street Journal in a story published Thursday. “It was less than that. It was a scan.”

The White House has never offered a reason as to why Trump received scans to begin with, but there are some key differences between the two medical assessments. An MRI utilizes magnetic fields to assess tumors, joint injuries, or heart conditions. A CT scan, in comparison, is much faster as it uses X-rays to detect illness and injuries such as cancer, bone fractures, internal bleeding, or lung problems.

The president was remarkably cagey at the time about the scans he received at Walter Reed National Military Medical in early October. At first, he claimed his visit was little more than a “routine yearly checkup,” even though he already received his annual physical just six months prior.

There are also some unexplained discrepancies in the timeline of Trump’s visit to the military hospital. Former White House physician Jeffrey Kuhlman, who served under former President Barack Obama, suggested that Trump could have gotten more work done than was initially revealed, pointing to just how much time he was spending at Walter Reed.

Trump is the oldest person to be elected president. In an interview with The Hill in November, Kuhlman noted that while it wouldn’t be unusual for a 79-year-old to require a second checkup, it was odd that Trump’s supposedly routine tests and reported scans amounted to a four-hour visit at the hospital, according to his schedule.

Trump’s health has been a topic of concern since he was on the campaign trail, when reports circulated that he couldn’t remember the contents of the cognitive exams he claimed to ace. Since then, the president has been spotted with odd discolorations on his hand, routinely appears discombobulated and lethargic during critical meetings with world leaders, and had a drooping expression during 9/11 ceremonies in September that onlookers suggested could be a sign of a stroke.

George Clooney Fires Back After Trump Picks Absurd Feud - 2026-01-02T14:46:10Z

President Donald Trump has rung in 2026 by threatening war on two fronts—and picking a bizarre fight with American actor George Clooney and his wife, Amal.

Trump on New Year’s Eve trashed the actor’s decision to leave the United States and obtain French citizenship with his wife and two children. Calling the couple “two of the worst political prognosticators of all time,” Trump went on a long Truth Social rant attacking their move.

“Good News! George and Amal Clooney, two of the worst political prognosticators of all time, have officially become citizens of France which is, sadly, in the midst of a major crime problem because of their absolutely horrendous handling of immigration, much like we had under Sleepy Joe Biden,” Trump wrote. “Remember when Clooney, after the now infamous debate, dumped Joe during a fundraiser, only to go onto the side of another stellar candidate, Jamala(K!), who is now fighting it out with the worst governor in the Country, including Tim Waltz, Gavin Newscum, for who is going to lead the Democrats to their future defeat. Clooney got more publicity for politics than he did for his very few, and totally mediocre, movies. He wasn’t a movie star at all, he was just an average guy who complained, constantly, about common sense in politics.”

In a statement later Thursday to The Hollywood Reporter, Clooney hit back: “I totally agree with the current president. We have to make America great again. We’ll start in November.”

Trump’s Truth Social rant appears to have been a reaction to Clooney’s Tuesday cover story with Variety magazine, in which the actor expressed alarm over Trump’s America and the way news outlets like CBS have caved to the president’s MAGA agenda.

But if picking an inane fight with a popular American actor wasn’t enough for Trump, he has also spent his initial days of the new year threatening more intervention in two different countries.

In a 3 a.m. post on Friday, Trump threatened to intervene in Iran if the regime injured or killed any protesters, warning that the United States is “locked and loaded and ready to go.”

And Trump’s standoff with Venezuela continues. On New Year’s Eve, the U.S. military announced five more strikes against alleged drug-smuggling boats. According to the Trump administration’s own numbers, this week’s attacks bring the total of publicly known strikes to 35, with at least 115 people killed.

Trump Throws a Fit After WSJ Publishes Story on His Decrepit Health - 2026-01-02T14:32:28Z

A damning new report on Donald Trump’s health has stirred the American public, and even roused the president himself.

Practically nothing irks Trump more than stories about his age and his natural deterioration. But a Wall Street Journal article published Thursday—which includes an interview with Trump—revealed several new details about the president’s routine, depicting a 79-year-old man who has little well-informed consideration for the longevity of his body.

The piece received immediate backlash from Trump, who insisted on Truth Social shortly after its publication that he’s in “perfect health.”

“The White House Doctors have just reported that I am in ‘PERFECT HEALTH,’ and that I ‘ACED’ (Meaning, was correct on 100 percent of the questions asked!), for the third straight time, my Cognitive Examination, something which no other President, or previous Vice President, was willing to take,” Trump posted.

Trump has an oddball history with reportedly “acing” cognitive exams. During the 2024 presidential election, Trump took several—but his recollections of the tests, which sometimes included fabricating questions that the tests’ authors claimed were never on the exams, called into question whether he had actually taken them at all.

“P.S., I strongly believe that anyone running for President, or Vice President, should be mandatorily forced to take a strong, meaningful, and proven Cognitive Examination,” he continued. “Our great Country cannot be run by ‘STUPID’ or INCOMPETENT PEOPLE! President DJT.”

But for all his blather, Trump does not appear to be in pristine condition. According to the Journal report, Trump is taking more aspirin than his doctors recommend, apparently under the belief that “nice, thin blood” is better than “thick blood.”

He also brushed off concerns that the odd discolorations that routinely appear on his hands were anything to be alarmed by, though his explanation for the spots only added more intrigue, as he claimed that they were the results of getting “whacked again by someone.” (CNN’s medical analyst noted that Trump’s outsize aspirin use could actually be behind the bruising, since too much aspirin intake can cause a person to bleed excessively.)

Trump denied the fact that he has repeatedly fallen asleep during critical public appearances—something that practically became a fixture of his first year back in office as he was caught dozing off roughly a dozen times. It’s happened during Cabinet meetings, in the middle of bombastic military parades, while meeting leaders of critical allies, and even during the pope’s funeral.

“Sometimes they’ll take a picture of me blinking, blinking, and they’ll catch me with the blink,” Trump told the Journal.

But a final depiction of the president—from one of his supposed allies, RNC Chair Joe Gruters—really hammered home that the 79-year-old has been anything but delicate with his body, despite ongoing public concerns over his health.

Gruters claimed that he was “shocked” to see the scale at which Trump wolfs down McDonalds, including one instance in which he saw Trump consume “french fries, a McDonald’s Quarter Pounder hamburger, a Big Mac and a Filet-O-Fish” in one sitting.

“Locked and Loaded”: Trump Threatens Iran in 3 a.m. Post - 2026-01-02T13:44:12Z

President Donald Trump threatened to intervene in Iran if the regime hurts protesters, warning the United States is “locked and loaded.”

“If Iran shots and violently kills peaceful protesters, which is their custom, the United States of America will come to their rescue,” Trump wrote on Truth Social at 2:58 a.m. on Friday morning. “We are locked and loaded and ready to go. Thank you for your attention to this matter!”

Iran entered its sixth day of consecutive protests on Friday, as the people are fed up with the regime, soaring inflation, and the collapse of the Iranian rial. At least seven people have been killed so far, according to the AP.

Iranian officials have already responded to Trump’s threats by implying that the protests in recent days have been fomented by the United States—despite the protests’ widespread support—and warning the Trump administration about next steps.

“With the statements by Israeli officials and @realDonaldTrump, what has been going on behind the scenes is now clear,” Ali Larijani, secretary of Iran’s Supreme National Security Council, wrote on X. “Trump should know that U.S. interference in this internal matter would mean destabilizing the entire region and destroying America’s interests. The American people should know—Trump started this adventurism. They should be mindful of their soldiers’ safety.”

Iran’s foreign minister, meanwhile, called Trump’s statement a “flagrant violation” of international law.

It’s impossible to root for anyone in this standoff, other than the people of Iran, but Trump threatening another international conflict—while we also appear to be walking into war with Venezuela—is certainly at least some cause for concern.

This Is the Real SNAP Fraud - 2026-01-02T11:00:00Z

When Republican politicians complain about “food stamp fraud,” they generally mean that some welfare cheat is ripping off the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, by falsely claiming eligibility. Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins, for instance, is fixated on undocumented immigrants accessing the program illegally. “The Democrat Party,” she said in November, “built its entire strategy around protecting illegal aliens. They know if the handouts stop, those illegals will go back home, and Democrats will lose 20+ seats after the next census.” Never mind that undocumented immigrants can’t vote.

MAGA hacks like Rollins seldom acknowledge that a SNAP beneficiary is likelier to be the victim of a crime rather than its perpetrator. So-called targeted benefit fraud is common, costing an estimated $12 billion per year. And Rollins has to know that a thief who steals directly from a SNAP recipient is much likelier to be a hardened criminal than a SNAP recipient who bends or breaks some eligibility rule.

“This is white-collar crime,” Mark Haskin of the Agriculture Department’s special investigations unit told an Atlanta TV news reporter last year. “This is organized crime.” A Romanian transnational mafia gang known as the Dorneanu Organized Crime Group, for instance, allegedly led by one Mihai Dorneanu, stole over $180 million from California welfare funds, leading in February 2025 to 11 arrests by Romanian authorities, five by the Federal Bureau of Investigation, and four by local police. Two members remained at large after they cut their ankle monitors and jumped bail in 2023. One of them was later arrested in Australia.

If some crook hacks your Visa or Mastercard and goes on a shopping spree, Visa or Mastercard will make you whole. Federal law limits to $50 a consumer’s liability for credit card fraud, and the more reputable credit card companies typically won’t hold you liable at all. But if you’re a SNAP recipient and some crook hacks your electronic benefits transfer, or EBT, card, you’re out of luck. No federal statute extends you the slightest protection, and, except California and Maryland, no state will reimburse you out of its own funds. You just go hungry.

Bianca Hunter, a mother of two, had her SNAP EBT card declined last winter at Sam’s Club. When she checked the EBT app on her phone, it showed that somebody in Chicago had purchased $559.49 worth of food, emptying her account. Hunter didn’t live in Chicago; she lived in Overland Park, Kansas. When she sought help at the Kansas Department for Children and Families, she told KCTV in Kansas City, she was advised, “There was nothing they could do about it.”

“So y’all aren’t going to replace my food stamps at all?” she replied. “What am I supposed to do with my two kids; how are we supposed to eat?

“They said we’ll just have to go to food pantries.”


It wasn’t always this way. At the end of 2022, Congress, noting a Covid-era uptick in targeted benefit fraud, authorized the states to reimburse at least some SNAP victims. (SNAP is funded by the federal government and administered by the states.) But the legislation stipulated that, to be reimbursed, your benefits had to have been stolen between October 1, 2022, and September 30, 2024, later extended to December 20, 2024. As the December deadline approached, Congress bowed to the reality that the surge in targeted benefit fraud was still growing and extended the deadline through September 2028. This was in a continuing resolution, or CR, that House Speaker Mike Johnson introduced on December 17, 2024.

Then a tweetstorm by the richest man in the world killed the CR.

“This bill is criminal,” Elon Musk tweeted December 18. Musk also tweeted “Stop the steal of your tax dollars!” and “Ever seen a bigger piece of pork?” and “Any member of the House or Senate who votes for this outrageous spending bill deserves to be voted out in 2 years!” The number of Musk tweets and retweets that day exceeded 100.

Much of Musk’s information, gleaned all or in part from the conservative Twittersphere, was wildly inaccurate. Musk said the CR raised congressional pay by 40 percent; it actually raised congressional pay by 3.8 percent and, technically, wasn’t a raise at all but a cost-of-living adjustment. Musk said the bill gave Washington, D.C., $3 billion to build a new football stadium; it gave D.C. no money at all, but rather transferred control of the site of the former RFK Stadium to D.C. And so on.

In a sane world, Johnson would have ignored Musk’s ignorant cyberkibitzing. Joe Biden was still president, and Musk a mere functionary-in-waiting, designated by President-elect Donald Trump to run some pseudo-government agency (really just a White House office) called the Department of Government Efficiency.

But ours is not a sane world. Trump famously hates to be upstaged, so he quickly followed Musk’s fact-challenged tantrum with his own fact-challenged demand for a fresh CR “WITHOUT DEMOCRAT GIVEAWAYS.” By week’s end, Johnson pushed through the House a substitute that jettisoned the offending provisions, including Congress’s tiny cost-of-living pay adjustment and the D.C. land transfer, which was later passed as a separate bill. Neither Musk nor Trump had singled out the SNAP deadline extension for criticism, but the substitute CR excluded that, too.

Last spring, a bipartisan group of Senate and House members, including Senator John Fetterman, a Democrat from Pennsylvania, and Representative Mike Lawler, Republican of New York, introduced legislation to resume and extend indefinitely reimbursement to SNAP victims of targeted benefit fraud. The bill went nowhere. Instead, Trump’s Big Beautiful budget reconciliation bill cut SNAP spending by imposing work requirements and increasing states’ share of administrative expenses from about 50 percent to about 75 percent. The latter will increase annual state spending from anywhere between $13.9 million in Idaho to $128 million in Wisconsin annually, according to the nonprofit Food Research & Action Center, or FRAC.

In addition, the reconciliation bill for the first time will require states to share with the federal government the cost of the benefits themselves, assigning them a portion of 5 to 15 percent, depending on an individual state’s rate of payment errors (typically overpayments). Under the new law, a state starts losing federal funds if its error rate exceeds 6 percent—as all but eight states did in 2024. A state error rate of 6 to 8 percent will require a 5 percent match; an error rate of 8 to 10 percent will require a 10 percent match; and an error rate over 10 percent will require a 15 percent match. Since 2024’s average state error rate was about 11 percent, most states will end up paying 15 percent. Cost sharing will drain tens of billions annually from state budgets; big ones like Florida and New York will pay more than $1 billion more, and the biggest, California, will pay over $2 billion more, according to FRAC.

Between the federal government’s determination to cut SNAP spending 20 percent over 10 years—the largest reduction in the six decades of the program’s existence—and the massive increase in what states will have to spend on SNAP, there’s little appetite at the federal or state level to resume reimbursing beneficiaries whose benefits get stolen. Instead, interest has shifted toward making the EBT cards that SNAP recipients use to pay for food more secure. But progress here is slow, because that costs money, too.


People call SNAP the “food stamp program” because a predecessor program created during the Great Depression distributed the benefit through post offices in orange-and-blue stamp books. When the modern food stamp program was initiated in 1964, the benefit was a paper coupon distributed by the states. As the program scaled up, opportunities for fraud increased. Most famous was the case of the “welfare queen” about whom Ronald Reagan demagogued endlessly during his 1976 presidential campaign—a woman named Linda Taylor whose life story turned out to be too extravagantly dark and weird to make her an example of anything. The more run-of-the-mill type of food stamp fraud was enabled by the ease with which paper coupons were stolen or counterfeited. Paper coupons were also conspicuous, which created a stigma at the checkout line for SNAP recipients.

Riding to the rescue in the early 1990s was retirement of the “knuckle buster” imprinter, a clumsy manual device used to make a carbon of every credit card purchase, and introduction of the much faster and easier electronic point-of-sale, or POS, device. If a retailer could use this digital marvel to extract credit or cash instantaneously from a bank account, policymakers realized, then surely that retailer could also use it to extract ­preassigned transfer payments from the Treasury. Paper coupons redeemable to buy food were as much of a nuisance as finger-bluing carbon receipts. Why not use POS devices instead? No more fraud, no more stigma, I remember an Agriculture Department official crowing when I wrote about the anticipated shift as a young Wall Street Journal reporter.

Independent owners of corner grocery stores and bodegas were resistant to purchasing new point-of-sale equipment that would accommodate EBTs, so it took a succession of federal laws to effect the changeover, culminating in 1996 with a provision in President Bill Clinton’s welfare reform bill requiring states to deliver SNAP benefits electronically by the start of fiscal year 2003. (Yes, the same bill that fulfilled Clinton’s campaign pledge to “end welfare as we know it” digitized food stamps.)

But criminality abhors a vacuum. The advent of digital commerce prompted international crime rings to exploit the insecure magnetic stripes on credit and debit cards with a technique called “skimming.” Self-serve fuel pumps, automated teller machines, and POS machines were altered to read and transmit keystrokes, enabling criminals to obtain credit and debit card numbers and PINs. Often these devices were as simple as an ultrathin layer of plastic placed atop the keys.

The credit card companies countered by developing more secure chip and “tap-to-pay” features, and by loading credit cards onto cell phones. Adoption of the new technology was initially slow, but demand skyrocketed during the Covid pandemic as customers sought contactless forms of payment, especially at grocery stores, the most difficult type of retail establishment to avoid. The other thing that happened during Covid was that Congress expanded SNAP eligibility and increased the average monthly benefit from about $120 per person to about $230. Ever-adaptive, criminal gangs shifted their target from newly secure credit cards to newly flush SNAP EBTs, which still relied on insecure magnetic stripes.

The obvious solution is to upgrade all EBTs with chips and tap-to-pay. But only one state, California, has done that so far, because it’s expensive; California’s upgrade cost about $75 million. And because those corner grocery stores and bodegas will once again be slow to upgrade their POS devices, California’s new card has a magnetic stripe, too, which still leaves it somewhat vulnerable to fraud. Senators Ron Wyden, a Democrat from Oregon, and Bill Cassidy, a Republican from Louisiana, introduced a bill in 2024 requiring states to make the changeover, but it didn’t have enough stand-alone support, and a hoped-for farm bill to which it might have been amended failed to materialize. Today, with partisan divisions leaving congressional appropriators limping from one short-term CR to another, no farm bill seems likely anytime soon.

In November 2024, then-Agriculture Secretary Thomas Vilsack sent a letter to governors in 50 states announcing that the nonprofit American National Standards Institute had developed technical specifications showing how states could transition to the more secure chip and tap-to-pay technology. That same year, the Agriculture Department directed grocers to an online guide to help them make the changeover and said a proposed regulation would be forthcoming to “establish timeframes for upgrading to secure payment technologies.”

We’re still waiting for that proposed regulation. Vilsack’s successor, Rollins, included SNAP benefit theft among the items targeted in her “National Farm Security Action Plan,” but her main solution was to punish retailers judged insufficiently vigilant. In general, Rollins seems more preoccupied with chasing undocumented immigrants, penalizing states that didn’t suspend full SNAP payments during the government shutdown, and making all SNAP recipients reapply for benefits. Addressing actual SNAP fraud committed by real criminals like the Dorneanu Organized Crime Group is a low priority. “They conflate fraud, and payment error, and abuse,” one Democratic congressional staffer told me. “They just want to talk about things in a general miasma.”

The Right-Wing Justices Know Their Favorite Legal Theory Is Bunk - 2026-01-02T11:00:00Z

The media’s takeaways from the December oral arguments in the Trump Justice Department’s bid to the Supreme Court to invalidate multimember “independent agencies” were unanimous: They were a big win for Trump and for legal conservatives’ decades-long drive to free presidents from congressionally imposed checks on presidential control over executive agencies and personnel. The widely anticipated result would render two dozen commissions and boards that have wielded political authority for decades unconstitutional at a stroke.

To provide a modicum of insulation from political interference, these bodies’ governing statutes prescribe that the president may only remove commissioners or board members for “cause”—usually defined as “inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office.” Such limitations on presidential removal authority run counter to the “unitary executive theory” treasured by the conservative legal movement. On all sides, pundits heard all six conservative justices signaling that they would likely apply that theory to uphold Trump’s unexplained dismissal of Federal Trade Commissioner Rebecca Slaughter, eliminating for-cause removal safeguards and with it, multimember agency independence.

This consensus take is accurate as far as it goes. But beneath the conservative justices’ convergence around that bottom line, the lengthy session exposed reservations, confusion, and differences across the conservative bloc, potentially heralding divergence, uncertainty, proliferating lawsuits, and regulatory gridlock in years ahead—perhaps even this term.

The right-wing justices’ emergent disarray seemed to reflect their awareness of pitfalls lurking in and around their hitherto unquestioned unitary executive gospel—including logical, legal, and most of all, real-world consequences that menace the economy, the nation, and the court itself. With these threats suddenly hoving into view, the conservative justices were flailing to figure out credible strategies to head it off.

Obviously, the gritted-teeth dogmatism of the conservative justices is the engine that has driven this kooky theory forward, despite its evident lack of grounding in constitutional text and history. But liberals also deserve blame. They have stood by while conservative presidential absolutists have framed the debate with labels, shibboleths, and catchphrases that, while misleading or outright false, have tilted the playing field rightward.


Since first hoisted by President Ronald Reagan’s second-term Attorney General Edwin Meese, the unitary executive banner has flown as an originalist imperative, catchily articulated by wordsmith-in-chief Justice Antonin Scalia. Quoting the so-called vesting clause of Article 2 of the Constitution—“The executive Power shall be vested in a President of the United States”—Scalia spun that text to “not mean some of the executive power, but all of the executive power.” Scalia’s chestnut bred an asserted (though not demonstrated) corollary: that to effectively deploy this sweeping authority, presidents must hold an indefeasible power to remove senior executive officials, certainly agency heads, at will, for any reason or no reason.

But in the oral argument testing this claim, the conservative justices seemed to reckon with the fact that recent scholarship had obliterated unitary executive theorists’ claims to an originalist birthright. Here, hammer blows had been struck by both eminent conservative as well as liberal-leaning academics. In the courtroom, the justices’ grudging recognition came across in a variety of ways.

Justice Amy Coney Barrett, perhaps because she repeatedly vaunts her originalist fidelity, tried two countertactics, neither of which seemed to resonate with her conservative colleagues. First, she attempted to trivialize the real-world importance of the several agencies enacted in the 1790s with leadership structures recently shown to lack untrammeled presidential removal authority. Even if this was factually accurate, her contention would have little or no legal probative weight. But Barrett was, indeed, demonstrably wrong on the facts.

In postrevolutionary America, the agencies that Congress saw fit to wall off from presidential at-will removal wielded significant economic and societal power. An example was the Revolutionary War Debt Commission, enacted in 1790, in response to a proposal by Treasury Secretary Alexander Hamilton. He called for an entity to be run by “commissioners, vested with … final authority,” not “with the President … nor Hamilton himself as Secretary of the Treasury,” as noted in Georgetown administrative law expert Victoria Nourse’s friend-of-the-court brief. Hamilton estimated that this Commission was tasked with distributing over $25 million, a “tremendous” sum, according to Nourse, more than $880 million today.

Acknowledging that the War Debt Commission and other similarly independent eighteenth-century entities render the vesting clause a thin reed for presidential absolutist unitary executive theorists, Barrett offered a second alternative approach. She observed to Trump’s lawyer, Solicitor General John Sauer, that constitutional provisions other than the vesting clause could plausibly ground a decision to trim Congress’s power to constrain presidential firing discretion. Then she whisked to her point, “Is there any reason to be specific [about which provision the court relies on] in this case?”

Barrett’s stratagem would have the court bless Trump’s unreasoned dismissal of Slaughter without specifying a reasoned basis for its own decision. Would that ploy pass any relevant smell test? Should six unelected, life-tenured justices wipe out over a century of precedent structuring vast sectors of the economy—without bothering to explain where and how they derive the authority to engineer such an epochal upheaval? Unsurprisingly, no takers spoke up to endorse this approach.

The principal constitutional provision Barrett had in mind as an alternative textual basis for Trump’s purported removal of Slaughter was the so-called “take care” clause. This clause prescribes that the president “shall take care that the Laws be faithfully executed.” Presidential absolutists have often cast that clause as a grant of power paralleling or reinforcing their Scalian gloss on the vesting clause. Without unbounded power to fire all agency heads, they insist, the president will be unable to ensure their faithful execution of the law.

Thus, as Justice Neil Gorsuch grilled Slaughter’s counsel, Amit Agarwal: “You agree, I assume, the president is vested with all the executive power [echoing Scalia’s 1988 proclamation] (emphasis added),” and that “he has a duty to faithfully execute all the laws.” But Gorsuch, reiterating decades-old assertions by presidential absolutists, misstated the text of both clauses. The vesting clause does not actually say “all” the power; Justice Scalia did. His spin is plausible, but that text certainly permits more nuanced interpretations. In a rare slip during an otherwise on-the-mark performance, Agarwal acquiesced in the Scalia-Gorsuch distortion.

Much more telling, the terms of the take care clause do not direct the president to execute the laws, faithfully or otherwise; the clause requires him to “take care that the Laws be faithfully executed”—that is to say by others; namely, his subordinates. Further, this language prescribes a duty, not a grant of power, and one which he is obligated to “take care” to fulfill.

In practical fact, are presidents disabled from performing that good-faith oversight role if they are authorized to fire agency heads for “inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance”? On the contrary, such a mandate could more plausibly be understood to affirmatively ensure that a president could use removal authority to further fidelity to law by agency heads—as distinguished from pushing his own political agenda, which is expressly what this administration argues should be a president’s prerogative.

Moreover, Barrett’s (correct) assertion that more than one constitutional provision pertains to presidential removal authority underscores that the vesting clause cannot be read in isolation but must be contextually interpreted in the light of all such relevant constitutional provisions. (The lifting of discrete words or phrases out of context is a common maneuver by conservatives to twist the meaning of legal texts.) Such other provisions would, necessarily, include Article 1’s foundational grant of power to Congress “To make all Laws which shall be necessary and proper for carrying into Execution the foregoing [enumerated] Powers [specifically assigned to Congress], and all other Powers vested by this Constitution in the Government of the United States, or in any Department or Officer thereof.” (Emphasis mine.) Here lies the textualist/originalist case for absolutist unitary executive theory; rest in peace.

To work around the collapse of this long-standing foundation for presidential absolutism, Barrett’s colleagues on the right took a different tack: They ignored it. They never invoked constitutional text or Framers’ design at all. Instead, they reverted to two strategies. The first was a constitutional policy argument, untethered to constitutional text or original design. This claim was that independent agencies are democratically unaccountable, a failing remediable only by axing removal restrictions and subjecting multimember agencies like the FTC to unlimited control by the elected national chief executive. As Justice Brett Kavanaugh challenged Slaughter’s counsel:

How do you answer the accountability theme.... Independent agencies are not accountable to the people? They’re not elected as Congress and the president are and are exercising massive power over individual liberty and billion-dollar industries?

Reinforcing this “accountability” riff, conservative justices trotted out a second tack—parades of hypothetical horribles, far-fetched in the manner of the fantasies that law professors contrive to bedevil first-year law students. As Kavanaugh, echoing suggestions by Barrett, lectured Slaughter’s counsel:

Your position would allow Congress to ... maybe convert some of the existing executive agencies into independent agencies with no political balance requirement, with a long term, say, 10 or more years.... So you can imagine ... when both houses of Congress and president are controlled by the same party ... so as to thwart future presidents of the opposite party, and ... I don’t think we can just say, oh, that hasn’t happened, so it’ll never happen.

What the “accountability” and parade of horribles gambits both show is that the court’s conservatives, desperate to pull their limping unitary executive theory at-will removal package across the finish line, have leapt from abandoning constitutional text or original meaning to conjuring real-world consequentialist claims that similarly have no connection to on-the-ground reality.

Anyone familiar with the actualities of how nominally “independent” agencies shape and adopt rules and policies, implement, and enforce them—especially those targeting the “billion dollar industries” for which Kavanaugh shed crocodile tears—knows that they are in fact democratically accountable. Their officials are necessarily aware and wary of Congress, where powerful committees and individual members are responsive to interests the agencies regulate, of the federal courts, and of the White House as well. Especially in the current environment, no one who reads newspapers or views newscasts can consider, say, the Federal Trade Commission or the Federal Communications Commission “unaccountable.”

Quite apart from such such agencies’ subservience to the current White House, screeds like Kavanaugh’s, against the “headless fourth branch,” leave out the landmark accountability regime that the post–New Deal Congress enacted. This is the 1946 Administrative Procedure Act, or APA, which gives targets of agency actions statutory rights, enforceable in court—to receive notice; to be heard; to present factual, legal, and policy contentions, before significant agency actions can be undertaken or finalized. To such contentions, agencies must provide “reasonable,” record-based responses or risk getting initiatives scrapped in court.

Those requirements impel agencies to invest years of effort, involving chunks of personnel, revenue, and other resources. Riding on their success, agency leaders, including presidential appointees and presidents themselves, can have significant reputational, ideological, or political stakes. And in terms of democratic accountability, APA-mandated procedures are orders of magnitude more marked by meaningful participation for affected interests, and more transparent to the media and politicians with relevant constituencies and interests, than many secrecy-shrouded backroom maneuvers on Capitol Hill or in the White House—none of which are covered by the APA or equivalent open-government safeguards.


Very unfortunately, despite the empty legal grounding and practical horrors of unitary executive theory, liberal advocates have allowed proponents like Kavanaugh to frame and dominate the public narrative. Their errors and omissions are why liberals have often come up short in the half-century-old war over the courts and the Constitution.

To begin with, liberals have not challenged labels that their conservative adversaries have crafted to frame the debate their way. “Unitary executive theory,” for example, is a mind-numbing, impenetrable abstraction calculated to induce 99 percent of the populace to tune out of the debate altogether. This of course is precisely the impact UET theorists seek.

Liberals should be opening ordinary people’s eyes to the real-world consequences for them of gutting autonomy for, say, the FCC, with its power to grant, deny, condition, or withdraw broadcast licenses, or the FTC, with its power to scotch power-concentrating mergers, rooting out deceptive and abusive marketing schemes, and engineering restitution to victimized consumers.

To do that liberal advocates could begin by replacing the soporific “unitary executive theory” label with one more sharp-edged—perhaps “presidential absolutists” or “politicizers” or “corruption coddlers.” They need to constantly highlight concrete examples of abuses, threatened and actual, and of corruption that could or has already caused attention-getting damage, and spotlight the beneficiaries of agency programs and actions. They could be saying that absolutists are out to “Make America Corrupt Again” or “bring back the swamp.” This should and could be a debate liberals will enjoy having; one that conservatives shall run from.

Too often, liberals counter unitary executive theory with a defense of the need for “impartial experts,“ lauding agency missions in hopelessly abstract terms, such as health or competition or fairness. To be sure, highlighting expertise or critical agency missions is valid and necessary. But taken alone, such frames can reinforce the right’s portrayal of regulatory and other officials as denizens of a remote “administrative state,” distant and undemocratic, performing esoteric duties that don’t speak to the real-world benefits being provided.

Indeed, the very term “independent agency,” which sets the framework for the entire public, political, and constitutional debate, is a misleading misnomer. Presidents have ample means of influencing multimember agencies, notwithstanding that agency leaders can be terminated before their statutorily fixed terms expire (only) for “inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance.” After all, who can, with a straight face, cast that formula as impeding the president’s duty to take care that the laws be faithfully executed?

Anyone who has served in a White House and been involved in efforts to nudge agencies like the FTC or FCC toward a president’s policy priorities—as I was in President Jimmy Carter’s White House—knows that presidents have ample legitimate levers, from the authority to select chairpersons from among commission members; to appoint members on a staggered, fixed-term basis; to formally advocate before or in appropriate circumstances contact agency officials; and even to use the president’s bully pulpit.

The claim made by the absolutists, that these agency heads are “unaccountable,” is ahistorical. In addition to ignoring the accountability to the judicial branch created by the APA, that slander leaves out of account the multidecade reform process that turned notoriously timid agencies, which were often cozy with the industries they were assigned to regulate, into agencies that are qualitatively more conscientious, aggressive, and even innovative instruments of the missions Congress created them to serve.  

That reform process was sparked by Ralph Nader and his legions of young reform-minded lawyers. Their initial target was the very entity that the Trump White House and its acolytes seek to bring to heel by firing Slaughter simply because she was appointed by Trump’s Democrat predecessor. In 1969, “Nader’s Raiders,” as they were dubbed by The Washington Post’s William Greider, famously delivered an 185-page report, which described the FTC as hobbled by “cronyism, institutionalized mediocrity, endemic inaction, delay, and secrecy ... an iceberg of incompetence and mismanagement.”

The report set off a tidal wave of public demand for reform, such that the new Republican president, Richard M. Nixon, requested a follow-up report from the American Bar Association. When the ABA substantiated and even supplemented Nader’s Raiders’ criticisms, Nixon sent a “Special Message on Consumer Protection” to Congress, elaborating his “belief [that] the time has now come for the reactivation and revitalization of the FTC.”

In addition to proposing a raft of statutory enhancements of the FTC’s jurisdiction and authority. Nixon’s message also detailed an internal reform agenda for the agency. He noted, “The chairman-designate of the FTC has assured me that he intends to initiate a new era of vigorous action as soon as he is confirmed by the Senate and takes office.” Nixon “urge[d] the FTC to give serious consideration” to the ABA report and remedies it proposed, and laid out several specific actions for the agency, including “reduc[ing] its unacceptably large backlog of cases” and “more energetic field investigations.”

Moreover, he noted that his Bureau of the Budget (precursor of the current Office of Management and Budget) would assist in diagnosing problems and shaping solutions, and provide or recommend additional funding if necessary. When Jimmy Carter ascended to the White House in 1976, he solidified and intensified Nixon’s “revitalization” effort, by appointing and naming Michael Pertschuk, a Nader ally, as chairman, and appointing an additional new commissioner—Columbia law professor Robert Pitofsky, the author of the ABA’s report.

Precisely because presidents, Congress, and public opinion held the dysfunctional mid-twentieth-century FTC accountable and enabled its “revitalization,” major businesses invested massive resources to reverse that progress. That backlash campaign has now been capped by this bid to the Supreme Court to overturn long-standing precedent, ignore or misconstrue legal text enacted by Congress or embodied in the Constitution—all in order to give an unabashedly corrupt president direct authority to squelch measures inimical to his or his allies’ interests. 

Liberal leaders cannot save invaluable institutional structures their predecessors built, if they fail to galvanize an irresistible fervor for their preservation, as those predecessors did. And with the flaws of unitary executive theory being so apparent to its proponents on the Roberts court, it would be foolish to not pillory this dogma, now that its edifice is buckling.

America Is Still Living in the Backlash to Obama’s Presidency - 2026-01-01T14:20:31Z

You can watch this episode of Right Now With Perry Bacon above or by following this show on YouTube or Substack.

President Trump’s political rise came because of a white backlash against Barack Obama, says Julia Azari, a political scientist at Marquette University. She argues Trump’s circumstances are similar to those of Andrew Johnson and Richard Nixon, two other presidents whose predecessors made major advances for African Americans. (Andrew Johnson succeeded Lincoln; Nixon succeeded Lyndon Johnson.) That’s the argument of her new book, Backlash Presidents. Combating Trumpism, Azari argues, requires recognizing the racial nature of his support. In the cases of Johnson, Nixon, and Trump, American democracy declined in part because of that white backlash, so fighting MAGA will involve fighting anti-Black racism.

Chris Kraus and the Art of the Landlord - 2026-01-01T11:00:00Z

Every so often, a person on the internet discovers that Chris Kraus is a landlord. They post through their shock: How could the iconic anti-establishment author of I Love Dick, the underdog doyenne of American autofiction, collect a check from the very same scrappy have-nots she portrays in her novels?

You might find from social media that Chris Kraus is a landlord, but you could also learn it from any of her books, or from many interviews with her. Her fictional avatar (Chris, Sylvie, Catt) is often a property manager as well as a writer, filmmaker, and/or art critic. Her five novels—I Love Dick, Aliens & Anorexia, Torpor, Summer of Hate, and now The Four Spent the Day Together—play fast and loose with autobiography, critical theory, art criticism, high and low culture, and, frankly, geopolitical circumstances. You could describe them as road novels, and not just because Kraus’s avatar is frequently driving cross-country or cross-continent—she wants to map how we connect, usually across class and gender.

It was 1997’s I Love Dick that eventually brought her mainstream success; one could trace the recent vogue for the unhinged female protagonist to the novel’s raw, thirsty, anxious, angry antiheroine. In I Love Dick, which is about stalking and writing letters to and making feminist art about cultural critic Dick Hebdige (the titular Dick), Chris asks, “If women have failed to make ‘universal’ art because we’re trapped within the ‘personal,’ why not universalize the ‘personal’ and make it the subject of our art?”

Exposing oneself by making art of one’s life, exposing others by barely concealing their identities—Kraus’s novels are also about privacy and ownership. Yes, these are feminist issues, and they are also class issues. She makes art of her life, and she funds her life by owning property. Forget about separating the art from the artist—the question here is separating art from capital. Property management is her day job: “Until the last couple of years, there was no way I could support myself with part-time teaching and writing,” she said in a 2017 interview. And indeed, her latest novel, The Four Spent the Day Together, revolves around real estate and all its effects and affects: apartments, summer homes, commuting, school districts, cities, suburbs, escape, hope, potential, disappointment, despair, and endless repair without redemption.


The importance of having the ability to move is not lost on Catt, the central character in The Four Spent the Day Together. The novel opens in Milford, Connecticut. Catt is five years old, and she and her family are recent transplants from the East Bronx. A “long metal fence” separates the private beach for residents of the affluent side of town from the rest of Milford, namely Wildemere Avenue, where Catt’s family lives. The third-person narration zooms out to survey the neighborhood’s fortunes over time: summer shacks and bungalows that get storm windows when sold to the year-round families who find work on the assembly line in munitions factories in nearby Bridgeport.

The family has moved here for the promise of a better life. The beginning of the novel focuses on Catt’s mother, Emma, who thinks that the Bronx “was an enormous dormitory for immigrant labor built in the late nineteenth century” where “each new wave of workers was a little more desperate.” Alienated from, but not exactly resentful of, her new Puerto Rican neighbors, Emma is relieved to start afresh in a new place. Her focus is Catt’s younger sister, Carla, or rather her sense that something may be different about Carla, who never smiles and constantly wails. While her husband, Jasper, finds challenging books for Catt, Emma takes Carla for doctors’ visits and tests. When Carla is diagnosed with an intellectual disability, Jasper and Emma refuse to believe the limitations the doctor sets for her, just as they refused to accept the limitations of the Bronx.

Mobility is the defining trait of the characters in the novel, the fortune that separates the stuck from the spiraling. But now, in Milford, Emma is lonelier than ever. She collects stamps she can redeem for products at the IGA and is shunned by the other moms when she doesn’t realize she must bring a gift when dropping off Catt at a child’s birthday party. They take out a second mortgage to send Carla to a special-needs program; 18 months later, she starts speaking in whole sentences.

But this is where the narration shifts its focus to Catt, who “couldn’t stand to look at Carla.” She is slighted by the kids in town who call Carla names, and she takes refuge in her father, who lavishes his attention on her (not so much on his wife or other daughter). From here, the narrative mostly sticks to Catt’s lows at school, where she is bullied and shunned. Her teen years are filled with the requisite peeks into sex, drugs, social justice, and hitchhiking. And then Jasper, who has all along been suffering professional disappointment, decides to move the family to Wellington, New Zealand. 


Kraus’s third person provides enough distance between author and protagonist to allow a reader to forget, if they happened to already know, that she, too, was born in the Bronx, moved to Connecticut as a child, and went to high school in Wellington. But once the novel’s second section picks up, we are squarely back in the Chris Kraus autofictional universe. It’s 2012, and Catt dreams of owning a summer house in Balsam, Minnesota, “an old-fashioned cottage, one and a half stories tall, perfectly located,” where she can work on her unfinished novel. She’s already renting a lake house in the area with her partner, Paul Garcia, who completed his master’s in addiction studies nearby.

This section travels back and forth from Minnesota to Los Angeles, Catt and Paul’s primary residence, to Albuquerque, where they own properties. Catt is struggling to make sense of her own place in society. Her old work is getting rediscovered by the Tumblr generation, an online enthusiasm she benefits from but fundamentally mistrusts. Her success seems tenuous to her, since the world she lives in is simultaneously getting fixed up and hollowed out: “the dive bars and hole-in-the-wall galleries where they used to present work to a handful of friends were being replaced by sumptuous, quietly capitalized spaces. There were conferences, seminars, launches, and openings, all of them well-received and then quickly forgotten by larger, more affluent audiences.”

Los Angeles is becoming too expensive, but she doesn’t want to leave behind the house she loves, which the narrator describes as “hidden behind a wrought-iron gate … one of the jewels of the ungentrified, crime-and-gang-ridden neighborhood that Catt loved and Paul hated.” Catt finds romance in living in a predominantly Central American neighborhood; it reminds her of her Bronx childhood. Paul, however, sees the cracks into which he could slip. He had two years of sobriety when he met Catt, and “before that, his life was a mash-up of alcoholic catastrophes.” The way forward, it seems, is real estate: “Recently it had occurred to them both that buying a house two thousand miles from LA in the Northwoods might be the answer.” The implied question: How is it possible for anyone but the wealthy to afford to live in this world?

Kraus doesn’t attempt an answer. Her project, here and in her other novels, is to catalog a range of personal indignities and social injustices and to juxtapose them in the same novel without evaluating who has it worse. What’s curious about her work is how real estate acts as a place of encounter between people having very difficult struggles. The Four Spent the Day Together reevaluates a remark she made in an interview with Sheila Heti in 2013: “buying and fixing, and then renting and managing, was a way of engaging with a population completely outside the culture industry.” Indeed, Paul and Catt met when he applied for a job as a resident manager of some of her apartments in Albuquerque, a town that, the narrator remarks, “as everyone knew, was split sharply between Good and Bad.”

As Catt achieves more recognition for her work as a writer, she objects to the online haters who view her primarily as a property owner. In The Four Spent the Day Together, Catt is, like Kraus, the author of Summer of Hate, I Love Dick (which is similarly turned into a television show), and a biography of Kathy Acker. Catt is also, like Kraus, repeatedly targeted for online and eventual IRL cancellation for various reasons: property ownership; refusing to cancel an event with another writer at a new Boyle Heights arts venue being boycotted by anti-gentrification activists; defending a #MeToo’d professor.

“Catt’s novels had always evolved from her life, but now her life seemed redundant to the grotesque image of her as a landlord,” Kraus rues. Even if Kraus’s novels are invested in dissonance and juxtaposition, Catt, as a character, has a harder time owning her own contradictions than she does owning rental apartments. Catt admits that she “struggled to understand where her critics were coming from. Were they opposed to all rental housing? Should it be run by the state? Did they believe that the buildings maintained themselves?” Catt is sharply attuned to the hypocrisies of others. She describes the Boyle Heights Guardians, a group that calls for a boycott of businesses they deem complicit in the gentrification of the working-class Latine neighborhood, as “comprised largely of ­CalArts students and recent grads” who don’t all even live in Boyle Heights—though how does she know their membership details? She is genuinely surprised that anyone she takes seriously would join up with the group and is hurt when she is met with protesters at a CUNY event.

Catt (and Kraus, as she’s argued elsewhere) is absolutely right, however, that if we’re really going to talk about how artists support themselves, then there’s a long list of trust-fundees and nepo-gallerinos who deserve a stronger side-eye. As for literature, there’s no shortage of beige furniture fiction about who gets the summer home in the divorce. Even edgier books that are buoyed by homeownership aren’t really talked about this way. All Fours, 2024’s feminist bestseller, was also about real estate: It begins with a speculator taking covert pictures of the narrator’s property. Would Miranda July’s perimenopausal revelations have been possible if she and Mike Mills couldn’t afford two homes?


In Kraus’s novels, any one human life matters immensely, but the trick is seeing how much it matters lined up against a rather more dramatic case. The novel’s third and final section is such a hard pivot away from academic and art world gripes as to make them seem meaningless: a retelling of a brutal murder on the fringe of the “meth community” of the Iron Range, northern Minnesota, not far from Catt and Paul’s summer home. Three teenagers shoot and kill a slightly older new acquaintance after spending the day with him (hence the title of the book). The narrator tells the unlucky backstory of each of the four and recounts the circumstances of the day that leads to the murder, the quick apprehension of the suspects, and their trial.

Catt researches the case and tries to get information out of the locals, and the narrative disintegrates into a log of the texts between the murderers during the crime. Though she hopes to write an In Cold Blood–style true-crime novel, full of dark interiority and desperate motivation, she realizes that the crime, committed by people on meth looking for more meth, was ultimately irrational and empty. This is a familiar realization for anyone close to someone in a downward spiral of addiction: The “why” simply does not satisfy. Nevertheless, the novel is driven by an urge to understand: “She thought about the distances between LA and the gray house in Balsam and the lives of these four young people on the Iron Range and decided she would try to bridge them.”

The most compelling parts of the novel pull off acts of bridging. Paul dreads and then quits his job doing mobile mental health triage on Skid Row in L.A., even though Catt “and her friends thought this was an important, even glamorous job. Of course: they did not have to do it.” When Paul starts to drink again to deal with his social phobia, Catt sympathizes with his discomfort around her milieu, because she had once shared it. In previous novels that center around marriage, it was the Kraus character who felt like the alienated spouse, the one no one talked to.

The Four Spent the Day Together also acknowledges the limits of connection. “Her dream of rehabbing the buildings in Albuquerque,” Catt acknowledges, “began not just as a means of supporting herself but as a small social project.” Rehab is a loaded word: For Catt, it’s an innocuous synonym for renovation; for Paul, it’s about recovery. It is agonizing to read Paul’s struggle to find and keep work in addiction services, because he needs help himself, and as those pages add up, they evince a sense of care—someone is noticing, someone is remembering his every misstep, even if, as Paul complains, “Catt was his lifeline, but she was almost always away.”

When there is trouble with the apartments in Albuquerque, the same disconnect emerges. Catt laments at length getting ripped off by the people she pays to manage the properties and the people renting from her. Catt and Paul have been gouged by management companies, so they hire a couple to work for them:

Patrizia was really Patricia, a white working-class wannabe chola, and Sammy, part of a large Gallup Navajo family, had spent numerous years in prison for petty drug-and-alcohol related offenses before getting clean. In a sense, they were Paul and Catt’s lower-class doppelgängers and for this reason, Catt felt compelled to help them: loaning them money, paying for work on Sammy’s old Chevy Blazer, buying them plane tickets so they could connect with long-lost relations.

But Sammy and Patrizia’s friends and family move into the buildings, stop paying rent, and damage the property—so that Patrizia has to ask for money for repairs. Ineptitude or scam? Making a living in real estate isn’t easy: Small-time landlords are constantly hustling, flipping, scheming, and dodging the capital gains tax. The choice is between profit, or human connection. There’s no moment of breakthrough between Catt and her “lower-class doppelgängers.”

Catt doesn’t quite fit, in the neighborhood or in the professional sphere. “She felt estranged from the people she knew in the art world as well, people who’d always been rich or felt underprivileged if their parents were merely professors or lawyers.” The thing about “outsider status” is that the vast majority of people feel that they’re kept out of some inner circle, even those in the center rings. At its best, a Chris Kraus novel understands the futility of knowing that someone has it better or worse than you do. The ghastly details of the true-crime section may seem a far cry from the rest of the novel, though they strike an appropriately jarring note. Though there are no conclusions by the end of the novel, there are confluences. The Iron Ridge story boils down to meth, and in the end, Catt finds Paul “smoking meth and crack” and divorces him. What’s compelling about The Four Spent the Day Together is not a false comparison between haves and have-nots, but the dissonance, the stark juxtapositions, and the inconclusive conclusions that result when you try to make sense of cruelty.  

How the Supreme Court’s Judicial Sanewashing Wrecked the Legal System - 2026-01-01T11:00:00Z

Last fall, in the run-up to the presidential election, a new phrase began to circulate. “Sanewashing” emerged as a term to describe the media’s coverage of Donald Trump, which critics claimed made the rambling, often incoherent statements of the then-wannabe second-term president appear more rational than they actually were. Some argued this was contributing to the “erosion of our shared reality and threaten[ing] informed democracy.”

We’ve now been collectively living in a sanewashed political and legal landscape for nearly a year. For that, we have the Roberts court to thank.

While its popular origins lie primarily in politics, the sanewashing phenomenon is by no means limited to the political sphere. Over the past two decades, the Roberts court has pioneered and perfected the practice. Sanewashing—defined as “attempting to minimize or downplay a person or idea’s radicality to make it more palatable to the general public”—has become a prominent, if entirely underappreciated, feature of the Roberts court.

Relying on judicial sanewashing, the Roberts court has eroded due process protections, political accountability, and civil rights, while simultaneously consolidating power for itself, corporations, gun owners, Christian conservatives, and state officials who owe their political influence to heavily gerrymandered districts. All this has been accomplished while the Roberts court has sought to present itself as a neutral, nonpartisan institution, free from corporate interests and policy preferences and guided solely by constitutional and democratic principles. As the Roberts court has transformed into a conservative policymaking body, it has maintained that it is merely fulfilling its constitutional mandate.

The judicially sanewashed opinions of the Roberts court haven’t been limited solely to sanewashing the law; often, they also involve extensive sanewashing of the facts too. For example, in tandem with whitewashing the anti-racist purpose of the Reconstruction Amendments in Shelby County v. Holder, the Roberts court also recast former Confederate states subject to the Voting Rights Act, or VRA, as aggrieved and mistreated, and in need of legal protection by the court.

According to the sanewashed facts in Shelby County, the VRA was no longer necessary because racially discriminatory voting practices were “rare” and the remaining sections of the statute would be sufficient to protect minority voting rights. In the decade since the court offered those tepid reassurances, states formerly subject to the VRA’s preclearance requirements have passed an avalanche of discriminatory voter suppression laws as the Roberts court has simultaneously sought to further weaken the law. The court is now prepared to strike down the remaining vestiges of the statute it promised would remain in place to ensure voting rights remained protected.

Similarly, when sanewashing the First Amendment to recognize new speech rights by corporations to engage in unlimited political spending in Citizens United, the Roberts court tried to assure a skeptical public that dismantling decades of campaign finance regulations would strengthen the integrity of elections and allow voters to hold officials accountable. Fifteen years later, the ruling has unleashed a torrent of unregulated corporate spending in American politics, enabling super PACs to raise limitless funds from corporations and undisclosed donors to exercise an outsized influence on election results. Between 2010 and 2024, political spending by super PACs grew from $62.6 million to $4.1 billion. Americans are so disgusted with dark money in politics that an overwhelming majority supports a constitutional amendment to overturn Citizens United.

In recent months, the Roberts court has adopted a new sanewashing strategy—the shadow docket. The Supreme Court, traditionally a court of last review, has increasingly decided significant legal questions on its shadow docket, boldly exercising its discretionary review power and circumventing the typical judicial process. The shadow docket, which is quickly becoming one of the Roberts court’s preferred sanewashing forums, has generated a glut of unexplained rulings, decided without the benefit of hearing the full merits of the case and with enormous practical and legal consequences. On the shadow docket, the Roberts court has inserted itself into high-stakes legal challenges against the Trump administration, sanewashing and mischaracterizing lower court rulings preventing the administration’s lawless conduct as “emergencies” to justify intervening on the president’s behalf.

Notably, the shadow docket has been expanded by the Roberts court for the near-exclusive benefit of the Trump administration, and only the Trump administration. On the sanewashed shadow docket scoreboard, the Trump administration has a stellar batting average. Whereas the court granted only four emergency requests from the George W. Bush and Obama administrations over 16 years, it has already granted 23 emergency requests in the first 10 months of the second Trump administration, and has ruled in the administration’s favor in 86 percent of its recent shadow docket decisions.

The shadow docket is by no means the only evidence of the Roberts court’s systemic sanewashing. Stare decisis—a guiding legal principle requiring courts to honor prior judicial decisions involving the same or similar issues to allow for stability under the law—has been all but abandoned by the Roberts court, except where it proves convenient.

Additionally, justiciability doctrines—judicially created standards for determining when federal court involvement is appropriate—are increasingly treated by the Roberts court as discretionary and malleable.

Likewise, the court’s promised fidelity to separation of powers principles and judicial restraint increasingly present as little more than lip service.

As the Roberts court ignores, deconstructs, or nullifies established judicial norms, it tells us that it is doing no such thing. This, in effect, is judicial sanewashing.

The sanewashing techniques employed by the Roberts court to distort the law have been varied, and often used in conjunction with one another. In some instances, as when the court upended a half a century of constitutional protections for abortion rights, the court has defended overruling precedent by describing earlier decisions as “egregiously wrong and on a collision course with the Constitution from the day it was decided,” drawing false comparisons to discredited cases with limited parallels.

Meanwhile, other legal doctrines have fallen by the wayside by being deemed by the Roberts court as “discredited,” “unworkable,” or simply needing to end, even though lower federal courts have been capably applying the legal standard for decades and the invalidated laws had been models of success. It was this sanewashed strategy that allowed the court to eviscerate campaign finance laws and eliminate federal courts’ ability to prevent brazen partisan gerrymandering, ushering in today’s redistricting arms race and dark money mania. This sanewashing approach was also used as a basis to end race-conscious affirmative action in college admissions.

Often, while excoriating earlier decisions and replacing judicial and legislative judgment with its own personal precedent, the Roberts court has engaged in perhaps the most performative sanewashing practice—claiming to be exercising “judicial humility” that predecessor courts supposedly lacked.

There are real public and private costs to judicial sanewashing. In the last year, judicial sanewashing has led to Supreme Court rulings that have empowered the president to act with impunity, sanctioned the deportation of immigrants without due process to conflict zones where they face torture and death, allowed the president to order the wholesale dismantling of independent federal agencies, authorized roving patrols of armed and masked immigration agents to engage in racial profiling (defended by the court as “common sense”), and denied low-income women and transgender youth access to life-saving medical care.

As the Roberts court has sought to sanewash dubious legal theories, whitewash facts and history, and mansplain health care so as to package its decisions as sound and sensible, sanewashing has arguably become the dominant methodology for constitutional and statutory interpretation by the Roberts court. The Roberts court has legitimized anti-democratic legal theories and advanced a biased, ahistorical interpretation of the Constitution through the sanewashing of law and fact, distorting democratic norms while insisting that it is simply following judicial tradition. The extent and magnitude of the effects of judicial sanewashing are now on full display, threatening to corrupt our democratic system and shared sense of reality.

Trump Is Ready to Send Afghan Refugees to Their Death - 2026-01-01T11:00:00Z

Five years ago, they risked their lives to support American troops in Afghanistan. Now refugees across the United States are facing the threat of certain death thanks to ICE.

Some 100,000 Afghans resettled in America, repayment for assisting the U.S. government during a fruitless 20-year war, after Kabul fell to the Taliban in August 2021. Thousands of them have since found a new home in the Dallas-Fort Worth area. But in the wake of the shooting of two National Guard members last month, which was allegedly carried out by one such Afghan refugee, the federal government has placed a dangerous new target on the community.

In the weeks since the shooting, ICE has combed the Dallas-Forth Worth area. Locals say that the agency has been harassing employers and demanding that they turn over employee schedules in an attempt to capture the refugees. Several refugees have already been detained throughout the country, sparking fear among community members that they could be plucked out of their homes and sent back to Afghanistan at any given moment.

“They’re literally going to be sending these people to certain death,” Zeeshan Hafeez, the community outreach director for DFW Refugee Outreach, a local refugee assistance nonprofit, told me. “The Taliban has kept track of them, and they’re going to wait and watch and see who comes back, and they’re going to be sent to certain doom if we allow them to get deported.”

Many of the refugees who came to America worked with the CIA in what were known as Zero Units. The units’ work involved killing or capturing high-profile targets in night raids and assisting U.S. forces with translation services. In doing so, many Afghans willingly risked their lives. But that risk has not gone away since the Taliban took over and the war ostensibly ended: Any Afghan who worked with U.S. forces knows that returning home would be a death sentence.

Rahmanullah Lakanwal, the 29-year-old charged with shooting two National Guard members the day before Thanksgiving, had participated in the Zero Units. The ensuing attention on the controversial CIA program—and, by proxy, the Afghan refugee committee—shifted the Trump administration’s attention in a cataclysmic way, according to community advocates and local leaders in Dallas-Fort Worth.

The day of the shooting, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem took aim at Operation Allies Welcome, the program that facilitated the refugees’ arrival in the U.S., blaming it for admitting “unvetted” immigrants into the country. (Never mind that Lakanwal was granted his refugee status under the current Trump administration.)

Earlier this month, in a brief appearance before the House Homeland Security Committee, Noem offered a dangerous new lens on the embraced allies, lamenting that the program had potentially let in “up to 100,000 people” who she claimed “may be here to do us harm.”

Noem’s words were not empty threats made for the sake of posturing in front of a congressional committee. With ICE putting Dallas-Fort Worth under a microscope, refugees are holing up in their homes. They are avoiding work, food drives, and necessary medications out of fear of running into ICE. People who had once banked on having their families join them from Afghanistan are now warning their relatives not to come to America, despite Afghanistan being under Taliban rule.

“They’re literally intimidating workers and their workplaces and their managers to let go of these folks, and a lot of them are losing their jobs,” said Hafeez, who is also a Democratic candidate for Texas’s 33rd congressional district. “People that have been here for many years are losing their status.”

For a long time, because of the aboveboard deal with the government, members of the Afghan refugee community did not fear the threat of deportation. When Donald Trump turned his gaze toward the Latino community, Afghans did not feel the burn. But all of that has changed since the shooting.

The newfound anxiety has stunned people into silence, regardless of their immigration status. Local leaders were shocked last week when not one refugee showed up at a town hall intended to elevate the issue.

“Our Afghan neighbors are people who served shoulder to shoulder with our troops,” Hafeez told a sparse room. “They have earned their place in our society many times over.”

Aziz K. Budri, a retired executive, moved from Afghanistan to the U.S. more than 50 years ago. He has provided extensive aid to resettle the refugees, helping them land jobs, sign leases, furnish their homes, and generally acclimate to American life. He emphasized that when he first arrived in the U.S. in the late 1960s, he was “treated like a celebrity,” a fact of life that remained true for decades no matter where he lived in the country, from Iowa to Texas.

“American people are really the best people,” Budri said. “I cannot say the same thing, unfortunately, about the government.”

Refugees in the Dallas-Forth Worth area “are afraid,” according to Budri, who regularly fields calls from members of the community. For many of them, the message is loud and clear: The Trump administration will not honor decades of U.S. foreign policy, even with regard to some of its most self-sacrificing allies.

“I really hope the American government does not forget that these people sacrificed their lives, put their lives in danger to help American soldiers, and in some cases even saved their lives,” Budri said.

Trump Whines About Windmills Killing Eagles With Weirdest Photo Ever - 2025-12-31T18:45:23Z

President Donald Trump posted a picture of a dead bird felled by a windmill on Tuesday, yet another example of his aesthetic disdain for wind power.

“Windmills are killing our beautiful Bald Eagles!” he captioned the post.

Screenshot of a Truth Social post

But the bird is not a bald eagle, it’s a falcon. And it isn’t even in America—the image is from a 2017 Israeli news article detailing birds and bats being killed by windmills, as MeidasTouch pointed out on X.

This is another incredibly stupid moment from our president that will likely get lost in the plethora of others. Did anyone review the post at all? It’s so off base that Trump himself might as well have screenshot, cropped, and posted the pictures.

Trump has railed against windmills to justify his preference for coal and natural gas lobbies. He called windmill fields “killing fields” in 2018 and just this summer claimed that windmills in Europe were driving whales “loco.”

Trump’s Next Major Project Shows Where His Real Priorities Are - 2025-12-31T17:56:51Z

Donald Trump’s next Washington vanity project will be going up sooner rather than later.

The president told Politico Wednesday that he expects construction to break ground on his highly teased “Triumphal Arc” (yes, “arc”) within the next two months.

“It hasn’t started yet. It starts sometime in the next two months. It’ll be great. Everyone loves it,” Trump said. “They love the ballroom too. But they love the Triumphal Arc.”

The “Arc de Trump” will be erected near the Arlington Bridge, opposite the Lincoln Memorial, according to the president. 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.

Earlier this month, Trump claimed that early models for his arc were so evocative that his former speechwriter, Vince Haley, cried at their beauty.

“Vince came in one day, and his eyes were teeming. He couldn’t believe how beautiful. He saw it, and he wanted to do that,” the president said at a White House Christmas reception.

The president’s arc campaign is the latest in a string of high-profile projects that he has pitched ahead of the country’s 250th anniversary. He’s already hard at work on a 90,000-square-foot ballroom, the construction of which apparently required the complete demolition of the White House East Wing, despite the fact that Trump pledged months earlier that the project would be “near but not touching” the presidential mansion.

Trump also renovated Jackie Kennedy’s famous Rose Garden, mowing down flowers in order to literally pave paradise; 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.

Trump Insists Ilhan Omar Is Part of Minnesota Fraud in Racist Rant - 2025-12-31T17:25:58Z

The president is thrusting some of the blame for Minnesota’s day care scandal onto Democratic Representative Ilhan Omar.

State officials have come under fire since right-wing YouTuber Nick Shirley reported Friday that empty or abandoned day care facilities were still receiving millions of dollars in taxpayer funds.

The Department of Health and Human Services paused $185 million in aid to the state in light of the video, despite the fact that elements of Shirley’s report were incorrect or inadequately reported. At least two of the centers featured in Shirley’s video had been closed for several years, Minnesota’s Department of Children, Youth and Families told NewsNation.

But the nitty gritty of the situation didn’t matter to Donald Trump, who baselessly asserted on Truth Social Wednesday that Omar was one of the scammers sucking up undue funds.

“Much of the Minnesota Fraud, up to 90 percent, is caused by people that came into our Country, illegally, from Somalia,” Trump posted. “‘Congresswoman’ Omar, an ungrateful loser who only complains and never contributes, is one of the many scammers.”

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. 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.

But Omar, the first Somali American lawmaker and one of the first Muslim women in Congress, doesn’t have any connection to the fraudsters beyond her heritage.

Instead, it was clear that Trump was singularly interested in attacking Omar’s ethnicity, dredging up an old right-wing conspiracy that the lawmaker had married her brother.

“Did she really marry her brother?” Trump asked rhetorically in his post. “Lowlifes like this can only be a liability to our Country’s greatness. Send them back from where they came, Somalia, perhaps the worst, and most corrupt, country on earth. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!!!”

MAGA conservatives have rumbled for years—without evidence—that Omar married her brother to bring him into the U.S. The conspiracy first emerged during her 2016 campaign for the Minnesota state legislature in a since-deleted post on the conservative blog Power Line, where an anonymous source was quoted as saying that Omar’s ex-husband, Ahmed Nur Said Elmi, was related to her by blood.

Omar has vehemently and repeatedly denied the unfounded allegations, which have been disproven by her marriage certificate. At the time, Omar described the insinuation that she had married her brother as “absurd and offensive.”

Trump Uses Veto to Punish Tribe for Blocking Alligator Alcatraz - 2025-12-31T16:58:30Z

President Donald Trump has vetoed a bill that would expand the territory of a small Native American tribe in the Everglades because they didn’t support his “Alligator Alcatraz” plans.

“Despite seeking funding and special treatment from the Federal Government, the Miccosukee Tribe has actively sought to obstruct reasonable immigration policies that the American people decisively voted for when I was elected. My Administration is committed to preventing American taxpayers from funding projects for special interests, especially those that are unaligned with my Administration’s policy of removing violent criminal illegal aliens from the country,” Trump wrote in a message to Congress Tuesday night.

“It is not the Federal Government’s responsibility to pay to fix problems in an area that the Tribe has never been authorized to occupy. For these reasons, I cannot support the Miccosukee Reserved Amendments Act.”

The Miccosukee Tribe was part of a lawsuit along with two environmental groups—Friends of the Everglades and the Center for Biological Diversity—that argued that the Trump administration and Florida state government hadn’t carried out the required environmental review for the construction of the detention center deep in the cherished Southern Florida wetlands.

Now Trump is denying their effort to regain just a portion of the land that was taken from them in the First and Second Seminole Wars of the nineteenth century.

The Miccosukee weren’t the only ones hit with a spiteful veto from a most spiteful president. In Colorado, Trump shot down a massive clean water project that was years in the making because MAGA Representative Lauren Boebert refused to cave to his pressure to stay mum on the Epstein files. She voted for their release, and now 39 communities may have to go back to the drawing board for their clean water.

Border Patrol Chief Admits They’re Arresting U.S. Citizens - 2025-12-31T15:58:29Z

Border Patrol has been arresting U.S. citizens, according to the agency’s leader.

U.S. Border Patrol Chief Gregory Bovino told Fox News Tuesday that his underlings had in fact arrested American citizens, claiming that they had cuffed U.S. nationals for assaulting border patrol agents.

“As far as American citizens, the vast majority of American citizens, especially that the U.S. Border patrol has arrested, many of those citizens assaulted federal officers, assaulted border patrol agents, in the performance of our duties,” Bovino said. “Anyone that assaults a federal officer, you’re gonna go to jail.”

The Homeland Security Department released a memo in November claiming that assaults on DHS agents had risen by 1,150 percent since 2024. They blamed the supposed rise on the rhetoric of sanctuary city politicians, alleging that political opposition to the Trump administration’s immigration agenda—such as condemning ICE and Border Patrol agents as “Nazis” and “slave patrols”—had inspired the unprecedented violence.

“Our law enforcement officers have had Molotov cocktails and rocks thrown at them, been shot at, had cars used as weapons against them, and been physically assaulted,” Homeland Security Assistant Secretary Tricia McLaughlin said in the memo.

Meanwhile, the tactics utilized by ICE agents to arrest and detain the undocumented population have been nothing short of appalling. ICE agents have violently ripped families apart, beaten suspects, and even detained elected officials attempting to visit their facilities or escort immigrants to and from scheduled immigration court dates.

But the agents have also masked their faces and intentionally tried to hide their identities, making the government officials practically indiscernible from violent laypeople as they invade homes, hijack cars, or assault people on the street.

Bovino himself is no stranger to violent behavior. In late November, the Border Patrol chief was slammed by a U.S. district judge after he semantically dodged questions related to his and his agents’ excessive use of force against protesters in Chicago. At the time, Bovino split hairs about how many canisters of tear gas he threw into a crowd as well as other alleged misconduct by officers under his command during “Operation Midway Blitz.”

Lauren Boebert Suggests Trump Vetoed Water Project for Stunning Reason - 2025-12-31T15:42:01Z

Colorado MAGA Representative Lauren Boebert is claiming that President Donald Trump killed a massive clean water project in her district as punishment for her voting to release the Epstein files, even after Trump pressed her not to. 

The Arkansas Valley Conduit was a project decades in the making that was supposed to grant safe drinking water to 39 communities across the region, and received bipartisan support in both chambers of Congress. Trump ended all of that on Tuesday. 

“My Administration is committed to preventing American taxpayers from funding expensive and unreliable policies,” he said in a statement justifying his veto of the bill. “Ending the massive cost of taxpayer handouts and restoring fiscal sanity is vital to economic growth and the fiscal health of the Nation.”

Boebert was incensed. 

“President Trump decided to veto a completely non-controversial, bipartisan bill that passed both the House and Senate unanimously. Why? Because nothing says ‘America First’ like denying clean drinking water to 50,000 people in Southeast Colorado, many of whom enthusiastically voted for him in all three elections,” she wrote in a statement. “I thought the campaign was about lowering costs and cutting red tape. But hey, if this administration wants to make its legacy blocking projects that deliver water to rural Americans; that’s on them.”

“And I sincerely hope this veto has nothing to do with political retaliation for calling out corruption and demanding accountability. Americans deserve leadership that puts people over politics,” she continued. 

Boebert is clearly alluding to Trump’s aforementioned phone call to demand that she remove her name from the petition to release the Epstein files.  

Boebert also argued that the veto would have been reasonable if it targeted more liberal voters in Colorado, but not people in her region who “overwhelmingly voted for Donald Trump in the last three elections.” 

“These are not the people that should be attacked,” she said in a video message. 

The bill’s unanimous passage—and the bipartisan disapproval around its veto—suggest that this fight may not be over. 

Here’s the Sick Reason Trump Banned Epstein From Mar-a-Lago’s Spa - 2025-12-31T14:21:09Z

Three years after Virginia Giuffre left her job as Mar-a-Lago’s pool attendant to “work” for Jeffrey Epstein, another employee at the club spa issued an allegation that hampered the prodigious sex trafficker’s access to Donald Trump’s Palm Beach resort.

Epstein wasn’t actually a member, but Trump told his employees to treat him like one. The financier was a frequent client at the club’s spa, where his appointments were arranged by Ghislaine Maxwell, so much so that he was allowed house calls at his neighboring estate by the spa’s masseuses, according to new reporting by The Wall Street Journal.

That privilege came to a jarring end in 2003, when an 18-year-old beautician returned from one of the house visits complaining that Epstein had attempted to pressure her into sex.

Managers at the club spa then wrote a letter to Trump, urging him to ban Epstein from Mar-a-Lago. The letter was well received, and Trump told the spa management to “kick him out,” according to the Journal.

Prior to his death, pedophilic sex trafficker Epstein described himself as one of Trump’s “closest friends.” The socialites were named and photographed together on several occasions and were caught partying with underaged girls in New Jersey casinos. Epstein was invited to Trump’s wedding to Marla Maples in 1993, and in 2002, Trump told New York Magazine that Epstein was a “terrific guy.”

The same year that the beautician accused Epstein of coercing her, Trump participated in a 50th birthday book for Epstein, penning a letter in which he referred to the disgraced financier as his “pal” and waxed poetic about their shared “secret.”

Trump shocked the country in July when he admitted that he had thrown Epstein out of Mar-a-Lago when he became aware that Epstein was abducting the resort’s underage female employees, and that Trump knew Giuffre—one of Epstein’s most prominent accusers—was one of the “stolen” girls.

But it appears Trump’s “kick him out” directive only referred to the spa, as Epstein wasn’t formally banned from Mar-a-Lago until October 2007, after he reportedly acted inappropriately toward a club member’s daughter. That same month, Epstein’s account was listed as “closed” in Mar-a-Lago’s books.

Even still, a nixed membership did not mean that Epstein was totally absent from the club. Also in October 2007, an article from The New York Post reported that Epstein denied the Mar-a-Lago ban, claiming that he had been invited to an event that year.

Trump Effect Continues: Democrats Land Historic Win in Key Red State - 2025-12-31T14:13:39Z

Democrats have won big in Iowa, as they’ll send Renee Hardman to the state Senate with 71.5 percent of the vote, a whopping 27 points more than Kamala Harris won in the state by last year.

Hardman’s Tuesday night win also prevents Republicans from gaining a supermajority in the chamber. Hardman is the first Black woman elected to the Iowa state Senate.

A Democratic victory that large in a red state mirrors recent historic results elsewhere, and may indicate that voters may be fatigued or are just outright rejecting anything to do with President Donald Trump. Those results include Abigail Spanberger and Mikie Sherrill’s gubernatorial victories in Virginia and New Jersey. But a victory in a small, downballot race such as Hardman’s shows that disapproval of Trump and his administration may be hitting closer to home as the government fails to end endless wars and make the country more affordable.

Earlier this year, Democrats also won big in Erie County, Pennsylvania, which narrowly supported Trump in the 2024 election, and defeated a 36-year Republican incumbent in Virginia’s 66th state House district. Democrats in Georgia managed to win two statewide races for public service commissioner, their first nonfederal statewide wins since 2006.

And even in the deep Southern state of Mississippi, Democrats were able to break the supermajority in the state Senate by flipping three seats after 13 years, taking away Republicans’ ability to override the governor’s veto and easily propose constitutional amendments.

All that is to say that these results should have Trump very worried about how negatively Americans are feeling about his second term, even those who voted for him in 2024. If this holds, it could be a major issue for the GOP come 2026 midterms.

Here’s What “Pro-Family” Trump Did to Families This Year - 2025-12-31T11:00:00Z

Since entering the White House for the second time, President Donald Trump has explicitly cast himself as a “pro-family” president. His administration has frequently adopted the language of the pronatalist movement, promoting ideas and policies intended to encourage Americans to have children.

But many of the ostensibly family-oriented policies proposed by the White House and approved by Congress this year will primarily benefit higher-income households, leaving millions of lower income families in the lurch.

In July, the Republican-led Congress passed a massive legislative package that extended certain tax breaks while dramatically slashing social safety net programs. A provision to increase the amount of the child tax credit, which was set to decrease at the end of the year, has one of the most direct and immediate impacts on families. However, the law set new parameters that will exclude millions of immigrant and low-income children from its benefits.

The maximum amount of the credit is now $2,200 and indexed to inflation beginning in 2026. But the credit begins phasing in for households earning at least $2,500, and, unlike the Covid-era child tax credit that briefly slashed the rate of child poverty in the U.S., is not fully refundable. If the credit is greater than the amount that a family pays in income taxes, they would receive only up to $1,700 as a refund for the 2025 tax year. According to recent research by the Columbia University Center on Poverty and Social Policy, around one in four children under age 17 would be ineligible for the full credit because their parents do not earn enough, representing roughly 19 million children: 17 million previously ineligible beneficiaries who saw no gains from the new law, and 2 million from moderate-income households newly ineligible for the full credit.

“That math just doesn’t really make sense just in general, at any time, but it also especially doesn’t make sense when a lot of the economic indicators we see for families is that they are having a hard time covering the cost of their bills in other areas,” said Megan Curran, the director of policy at the Center on Poverty and Social Policy.

This research also found that a two-parent family with two children would need to earn a minimum of $41,500 in 2025 to be eligible for the full credit; prior to the passage of the law, the analysis found, a family of four would have needed to earn $36,000 to receive the full credit. The federal poverty level for a family of four in 2025 is just over $32,000—meaning that households living at or below the poverty level were already far from earning enough funds to receive the full credit. Moreover, under the new law, adults claiming the credit must have a Social Security number, and all children claimed must have a Social Security number. The Urban Institute estimated that 2 million eligible children would not receive the benefit because their parent does not have a Social Security number.

Another provision included in the Republican tax and spending bill limited to children with a Social Security number are “Trump Accounts.” This new policy, which Trump has touted as a method for encouraging family formation, provides eligible children—those with a Social Security number born between 2025 and 2028 living in zip codes where the median income is under a certain threshold—with a $1,000 federal contribution that tracks to the U.S. stock index and will become available when the child turns 18. Anyone under the age of 18 and with a Social Security number can open a Trump account, but the burden for opening and managing the account rests on families. A donation by the Michael and Susan Dell Foundation will provide donations in Trump accounts for children under the age of ten born before 2024.

But Trump accounts won’t help families in the near term. “It’s something for young adults, for folks leaving the nest, but the fact that families can’t touch it for 18 years means it’s just not going to be helpful for families when they’re actually dealing with the cost of raising children,” said Josh McCabe, the director of social policy at the Niskanen Center, a nonpartisan think tank. “If families are dealing with the affordability crisis right now, Trump accounts don’t do anything to help with that.”

Meanwhile, the legislation also made dramatic changes to the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, and Medicaid. The law tightened SNAP work requirements for parents of children between ages 14 and 17, beginning in November. Similar work requirements for the parents of teenagers will go into effect for Medicaid in 2026.

“The same kids that are not benefiting from the child tax credit in general were actually put in an even worse position,” Curran said. “Those kids are now the same ones at the highest risk of losing their health care and food assistance.”

The loss of SNAP benefits for families with children may in turn have a larger impact on society as a whole. According to research by the Center on Poverty and Social Policy, every $1 lost in benefits for families with children would cost society between $14 and $20. Nearly 40 percent of all SNAP participants are children. The law pushed more of the cost of SNAP onto states, which may result in states further restricting eligibility or cutting benefits.

Although this specific cost-share provision will not go into effect for a few years and will vary on a state-by-state basis, the country got a taste of what a society without SNAP benefits may look like during the 43-day government shutdown, said Elaine Waxman, a senior fellow in the tax and income support division at the Urban Institute. In the month of November, millions of participants received only partial benefits, as the Trump administration maintained it was unable to tap into reserve funds to pay out full SNAP benefits. This resulted in additional burden on the charitable sector, particularly food banks.

“People saw that on the ground in their communities in a really visceral way. But I think this is what could happen if states aren’t able to meet their part of the benefits, because there’s a precedent here now for this idea that we will not pay full benefits,” said Waxman. “Although we can say that the SNAP cost share thing is a little bit down the road, in reality, I think we just got a preview right of what that could be.”

Similarly, although changes to Medicaid were not implemented this year, the looming cuts are already affecting communities. Clinics and hospitals are closing across the country in anticipation of losing their Medicaid reimbursement funds, while hundreds of hospitals nationwide are at risk of closure when the provision goes into effect. Even if a middle-income family would not be directly affected by cuts to Medicaid, if they live in an area where a medical center has closed, they would still feel the impact of the new law.

“In health care, it would be hard to find anything that’s a positive for families,” said Larry Levitt, executive vice president of policy at KFF, a nonpartisan health research organization, referring to the policies enacted by the Trump administration and Congress this year. Medicaid covers more than four in 10 births nationally, and half of all births in rural areas; cuts to the program may thus affect families’ ability to afford having a child in the first place.

Levitt also noted that the pending expiration of enhanced Affordable Care Act subsidies will affect middle-income households, who will face far higher insurance costs in the new year. As such, millions of Americans may opt out of any health coverage rather than paying higher premiums. Although moderate-income children may be able to receive health care through the Children’s Health Insurance Program, which provides coverage for children whose families earn too much to qualify for Medicaid, a parent unable to afford their own health care through the Affordable Care Act marketplace may opt out of coverage for themselves.

Meanwhile, Americans are contending with persistent inflation and worried about affordability, contradicting Trump’s self-declared grade of “A-plus-plus-plus-plus-plus” in handling the economy. A December Politico poll found that 46 percent of all Americans believe the cost of living is worse than they can ever remember, a position held by 37 percent of Trump voters. Consumer sentiment has fallen to one of its lowest levels on record. According to a new survey by the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research, only 31 percent of adults approve of how Trump is handling the economy, the lowest level of his first or second term.

Despite the president’s insistence that the American people are not bearing the brunt of his tariffs, economists are predicting price increases early in the new year. Meanwhile, tariffs are contributing to the rising cost of building materials, making housing even more expensive. As congressional efforts to address affordable housing have stalled, one of the Trump administration’s stated goals—encouraging family formation—may be ever further out of reach for all families, not just low-income ones.

“Tariffs have likely undermined the ability of young families to buy their first home and to start an actual family by having kids,” said McCabe.

Beyond action taken by Congress, Trump’s efforts to dramatically reshape the federal government will have indirect effects on American families. Disruptions to Head Start at the beginning of the year, including the shuttering of regional offices, were exacerbated by the shutdown. In April, the Trump administration eliminated the entire office which sets poverty guidelines, which in turn determines eligibility for social safety net programs. The U.S. Department of Agriculture will also stop collecting data on food insecurity, which has been used by lawmakers to determine administration of federal, state and local nutrition programs.

“If we see a lot of the types of cuts that we expect, or if we see states not be able to handle this cost sharing, then we would expect food insecurity to rise a lot. But if you’re not measuring it right then we’re not going to be able to know whether that’s the case,” said Christopher Wimer, the director of the Columbia Center on Poverty and Social Policy.

Dramatic cuts to the Department of Health and Human Services will also affect American households, said Levitt. Thousands of HHS employees have been laid off, and the Trump administration has pulled funding for key programs and research on topics such as HIV treatment and prevention, family planning, and vaccines.

“Those won’t generally have an immediate effect on families’ healthcare, but they will have elastic effects over time,” said Levitt. “HHS oversees health programs that cover over half the population. So people may not interact with HHS on a daily basis, but the department’s ability to oversee health programs and respond to public health emergencies affects nearly everyone.”

Ultimately, the impact of policy changes this year—from congressional action to administration decisions—may not be apparent in the near future. But families, and by extension American society as a whole, will feel the repercussions deeply in the coming years.

“All of the fundamentals have been changed this year, but we didn’t start to see the actual downstream effects yet because of the mechanisms by which those changes were made,” said Curran. “But basically, probably starting from early 2026 moving forward, is where we’re actually going to see how all of these things impact families in reality in their day to day lives.”

Republicans Have Found Another Insidious Way to Cut SNAP - 2025-12-31T11:00:00Z

The Trump administration is rewarding states for cutting food assistance.

Dr. Mehmet Oz, head of the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, on Monday announced some of the state-by-state disbursement from the Rural Health Transformation Program. Every state will receive between $145 million and $281 million next year—but some are rightly upset about how the money is being awarded.

The $50 billion fund was added to the One Big Beautiful Bill Act late in the process to secure the votes of senators who were concerned about the nearly $140 billion that rural hospitals are projected to lose over the next decade because of Medicaid cuts. The fund was never going to be enough money to cover the gap, but the whole endeavor was made even worse by the fact that Oz, a snake-oil TV doctor, has a lot of discretion about what health policies to push—and which states to prioritize.

This week’s disbursements were used to promote some of the administration’s goals, which include finding creative ways to cut the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, once known as food stamps. The cuts—which will occur under the guise of promoting healthier foods to SNAP recipients—will jeopardize the health and wellbeing of millions of people, threaten small businesses, and undermine one of the last truly robust safety net programs that remains for struggling Americans.

In September, the administration outlined how it would decide to distribute the funds. That included awarding more points to states that implemented some of its “Make America Healthy Again” goals, one of which was blocking SNAP recipients from buying “non-nutritious foods.” In response, states have sought waivers from the USDA to prevent recipients from buying sugary drinks and candy; the agency has approved 12 waivers so far. Just how much these SNAP restrictions counted toward states’ awards isn’t clear because the administration hasn’t been transparent about its decision-making, but it has been crystal clear about its desire to cut SNAP.

On its face, prohibiting SNAP dollars from being spent on soda and candy might seem unobjectionable. Soda and candy are high in sugar and low in nutrition. But implementing these restrictions is burdensome for states and often difficult for grocery stores to follow. Gina Plata-Nino, the SNAP deputy director at the Food Research and Action Center, an anti-hunger policy advocacy organization, pointed to a food industry study showing that the costs of implementing the changes could be $1.6 billion. “And there’s ongoing costs that will happen,” she said. “The large retailers will figure it out. But the smaller retailers, they just can’t afford this. They would just pull out of the program.”

This is already evident when comparing the numbers of retailers who accept SNAP versus the Women, Infant and Children’s nutrition program, which has stricter rules on how the money can be spent. “We have over 266,000 retailers for SNAP, just less than 40,000 for WIC, and that’s because they have to train their staff,” she said.

Many rural Americans rely on these small local grocers. So if their local store stops accepting SNAP, they’ll have to travel farther for food, costing them time and money. They’ll also buy food less frequently and rely on more shelf-stable goods, which tend to be less nutritious than perishables.

Some small stores also rely on SNAP to keep their doors open. “Think about the millions of dollars in a community,” Plata-Nino said. “In some communities, it’s billions of dollars that SNAP brings into your local community. For some retailers, it’s the only thing keeping them afloat.” While stores might not be able to afford implementing the new restrictions, they also might not be able to afford withgoing SNAP entirely—a financial Catch-22.

States, too, will have to spend money to implement these changes. Other SNAP changes made in Trump’s budget bill—like new work requirements, the end of an educational program, eligibility increases, and an increased administrative costs for states—already mean that the program is going to be more difficult and costly for states to run. The bans on “non-nutritious” foods just pile onto the burdens.

All this is all being done to solve a problem that doesn’t exist. Americans overall have unhealthy diets; SNAP participants’ diets aren’t significantly worse. In fact, they tend to have lower health care costs than low-income adults who don’t receive SNAP.

The much bigger problem for low-income Americans is that they’re more likely to suffer from hunger. They already can’t buy enough nutritious food to feed their families, and they face other structural problems like not having the gas to drive to a grocery store with fresh produce or lacking safe places to exercise. That’s as true for low-income urban Americans as it is for rural Americans.

But clearly the Trump administration, and the Republican Party broadly, is more interested in punishing people who need government assistance than in helping them. While the president chows down two Big Macs and two Filet-O-Fish sandwiches, then washes them down with a chocolate milkshake and multiple Diet Cokes, his underlings are effectively deciding what poor Americans can and can’t eat.

“This is about money and privilege,” Plata-Nino said. “It just depends what your income bracket is, whether or not your choices will be policed.”

The New Republic’s Favorite Stories of 2025 - 2025-12-31T11:00:00Z

Real Men Steal Countries: Inside Trump’s Absurd Greenland Obsession

By Christopher Hooks

An underdressed reporter journeys across icy, barren Greenland—and into Trump’s bored, nineteenth-century brain.


Amy Coney Barrett Isn’t What the Conservative Legal Movement Expected

By Matt Ford

The Supreme Court’s second-newest justice is proving herself to be a non-hack—to the increasing consternation of MAGA.


Inside Stephen Miller’s Dark Plot to Build a MAGA Terror State

By Greg Sargent

He is descended from Russian Jews—you know, the kind of people who were once denounced as alien and unassimilable. Today, his project is to unleash government persecution of those he deems alien and unassimilable. How far will Miller’s sadistic designs go?


Firewood Banks Aren’t Inspiring. They’re a Sign of Collapse.

By Sean Carlton

Rural communities are banding together to chop firewood so that people in need can heat their homes. This shouldn’t be necessary.


Inside the Private Equity Scam—and the Livelihoods It Has Destroyed

By Molly Osberg

Financiers have bamboozled the public for years about their expertise in “fixing” companies. Yet they often—and sometimes deliberately—run them into the ground.


Trump’s Military Parade Was a Pathetic Event for a Pathetic President

By Malcolm Ferguson

The turnout wasn’t anything like what he wanted—and not everyone who showed up was even a fan of his.


The Island Where People Go to Cheat Death

By Shayla Love

In a pop-up city off the coast of Honduras, longevity startups are trying to fast-track anti-aging drugs. Is this the future of medical research?


Decades Later, the Truth Behind a Grisly Mass Murder in El Salvador

By George Black

The 1980 execution of four American churchwomen was one of the most shocking human rights crimes of the twentieth century. No one has ever really gotten to the bottom of it—until now.


What’s the Matter with Glenn Greenwald and Matt Taibbi?

By Jacob Bacharach

Tech billionaires and iconoclast journalists suddenly see eye to eye.


How the Billionaires Took Over

By Timothy Noah

Yes, Donald Trump is a threat to democracy. But the far bigger menace is the monstrous growth in wealth concentration over five decades that made a Trump presidency possible—and maybe inevitable. Here’s how we let it happen.


The Right​’s Baseless​ Project to ​Link Trans People​ With Extremism

By Melissa Gira Grant

A campaign for the FBI to adopt a new designation of “transgender ideology–inspired violence and extremism” is less about law enforcement than politics.


Bari Weiss’s Big Secret Is That She’s Boring

By Alex Shephard

The “contrarian” journalist’s new vision for CBS News appears to just mean reinventing Crossfire.


Trump’s Immigration Nightmare: It Is Happening Here

By Radley Balko

With astonishing speed, the administration has toppled the most cherished pillars of a free society. And the experts agree: It’s all going to get much, much worse.


Inside the Hunger Crisis in America’s Last Frontier

By Grace Segers

Alaska’s unique challenges make it difficult to obtain healthy food and adequate medical care. Are the Trump administration and Congress making it worse?


How I Became a Populist

By Alvaro M. Bedoya

My time at the Federal Trade Commission—before Donald Trump fired me—totally changed the way I see our political divide.

Stephen Miller Is The New Republic’s 2025 Scoundrel of the Year - 2025-12-31T11:00:00Z

Is Stephen Miller failing?

True, Miller has amassed unprecedented power for a deputy White House chief of staff. He exerts extraordinary influence over an unusually large swath of the government, from immigration to criminal justice to even the military’s operations on American soil. Much of what defines public life in the Trump era—masked kidnappings on U.S. streets, standoffs between ICE goons and protesters, military patrols in U.S. cities—has been authored by Miller. His ever-present unctuous smirk suggests he’s visibly relishing the violent hatreds all this has unleashed.

Yet now that we’re one year into President Trump’s second term, it’s clear that in important ways, Miller is falling short of his most elaborate authoritarian designs. The deportations are lagging far behind his hopes. He has not persuaded Trump to deploy the dictatorial power he pines to see. And he has unleashed a cultural moment in defense of immigrants that is more powerful than anything he anticipated.

Miller swaggered into Trump’s second term bursting with hubris, but that bubble deflated quickly. Last spring, only a few months into the new term, he was already privately shrieking at top ICE officials over lackluster deportations, angrily demanding the arrests of 3,000 undocumented immigrants per day.

Nine months later, Miller is still two-thirds short of that goal: Arrests are currently averaging around 1,100 daily. Yes, that’s a lot of people, and tragically, large percentages of them are people with no criminal records. A lot of immigrants whose only crime was to illegally enter the country in search of a better life are suffering terribly right now, which surely pleases Miller greatly.

But Miller’s dream of 3,000 daily arrests remains that—a dream. And that’s a very good thing, because the number is essential to a larger goal. Miller hopes to deport one million people a year, and the current rate won’t come close to that. While ICE is still adding personnel, and deportations may increase, many experts expect Trump and Miller to fall far short of their one-million-per-year goal over his entire term.

“It’s clear that they have not achieved the shock-and-awe campaign of mass deportations that they wanted, and they are still running into quite a lot of obstacles,” Aaron Reichlin-Melnick, a senior fellow with the American Immigration Council, told me. After Trump’s term, Reichlin-Melnick continued, “there will still be millions of people here who are undocumented. Miller will not be able to deport even the majority of undocumented immigrants in four years.”


That probably won’t put all that big a dent in the overall undocumented population, which hit around 14 million in 2023, though it’s probably lower now. So one can still hope a future Democratic president and Congress can create a path for longtime non-criminal undocumented residents to get right with the law.

Then there are Miller’s other goals. He has stated plainly that he wants to functionally end due process for migrants entirely. He also appears to envision Trump assuming the authority to simply decree that undocumented immigrants are criminal gang members—or terrorists, or members of a hostile invading army—all by presidential fiat. He wants Trump to assume an unreviewable, quasi-unlimited power to remove people regardless of what any court says.

Miller has done extensive damage to the rule of law, and he and Trump have consigned some migrants to a netherworld beyond the law entirely. But broadly speaking, the courts have continued to function. Trump has not assumed the unchecked authorities Miller wants him to. Miller’s biggest test case for getting Trump to exert such unconstrained powers—that of the wrongfully deported Kilmar Abrego Garcia—has thus far failed.

On another front, Miller has been cagey about whether he wants Trump to invoke the Insurrection Act to ramp up military repression in U.S. cities. He almost certainly does. But as of now, Trump hasn’t done that.

Finally, a glance at this administration’s messaging—the Department of Homeland Security’s X feed has become a white nationalist sewer pit—makes it clear that Miller is trying to pull off a hegemonic shift. Miller hoped the combination of brutal police-state tactics plus relentless state propaganda would shock the American people into embracing—or accepting—a semi-conscious ethnonationalism. Miller wants Americans to see immigrants from the “Third World” as a threat to American wellbeing at an existential, civilizational level.

But that hasn’t happened, either. His tactics have triggered a sustained cultural backlash in defense of the specific migrants in Trump-Miller’s crosshairs and of immigration more broadly as a positive good for the country. Miller has helped drive Trump’s approval on immigration—once a “good” issue for him—into the toilet. The public is rejecting their vision.

Miller is already causing immense human suffering, of course. He has snuffed out many pathways to entry for people fleeing global horrors and has revamped the refugee system to prioritize white people. His project may get a lot farther than many of us can bear.

But it remains possible to envision a different ultimate outcome. In it, Miller’s mass deportations mostly fall short, the government mostly follows court rulings, civil society’s resistance holds, and the public backlash to Miller’s masked storm troopers only grows. A future administration can then channel that popular energy into real reform oriented around immigration as a positive good, realigning our legal, humanitarian and enforcement apparatus with what’s genuinely in the national interest.

And in that scenario, Miller’s true fever dream—for an ethnically reengineered, authoritarian America whose people have sleepwalked into embracing ethnonationalism as the foundation of American identity—will have utterly failed to come to pass.

You Won’t Believe What One of the Boats Trump Struck Was Carrying - 2025-12-30T21:15:33Z

Detritus from one of the Caribbean boat strikes has washed up on the Colombian peninsula, and it’s not what the White House claimed.

The boats apparently wrecked in a November 6 strike arrived on Colombia’s Indigenous-governed Guajira Peninsula two days later with two mangled bodies and torched jerrycans. But at least one of the vessels also carried evidence of the drugs it was smuggling onboard, reported The New York Times: emptied packets of marijuana.

The Trump administration has justified its unfettered air strike campaign on the basis that small watercraft in the Caribbean were funnelling fentanyl into the U.S. To further legitimize the militaristic response—which so far has killed at least 107 people since early September—the president purported that the boats were run by “narcoterrorists” from Venezuela, and designated fentanyl as a “weapon of mass destruction.”

But marijuana, a drug synonymous with the “peace and love” movement of the 1960s, is about as far from a tool of war as you can get. The substance is already legal in the vast majority of the U.S.: 40 states permit its use for medicinal purposes, while 24 states allow residents to get high for any reason whatsoever.

Earlier this month, Trump himself signed an executive order to expedite the process of reclassifying weed from a Schedule I drug—which are considered to have high abuse rates with little to no medical application—to a Schedule III drug under the Controlled Substances Act.

Overall, there seems to be little evidence that the boats have been headed toward the United States. In a classified meeting with U.S. lawmakers two weeks ago, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and State Secretary Marco Rubio revealed that the Trump administration was aware the boats were bound for Europe rather than America. They also disclosed that the administration had no intelligence indicating that fentanyl was coming out of Venezuela, but rather that some of the boats were believed to be carrying cocaine.

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