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Trump’s DOJ Sues Fulton County and Four States to Seize Voter Ballots - 2025-12-12T20:20:43Z

The Justice Department is dredging up the 2020 presidential election conspiracy.

Attorney General Pam Bondi sued Fulton County officials in Georgia Friday to obtain ballots that were cast in the election. The suit demands that Fulton County turn over “all used and void ballots, stubs of all ballots, signature envelopes, and corresponding envelope digital files.”

The suit was filed the same day as the DOJ announced legal action against four more states—Colorado, Hawaii, Massachusetts, and Nevada—in a sweeping national effort to access sensitive voter data. So far this year, the Trump administration has targeted 18 states, most of them Democratic-led.

It’s the first such instance in which the Justice Department has requested physical ballots. A pro-voting group described the initiative to Democracy Docket as a “terrible overstep of power.”

Since Trump first planted the seeds of doubt about the results of the 2020 election, a litany of his allies have continued to tend and water the theory—so much so that within a handful of years, refusing to admit that Trump ever lost to Joe Biden had become a fealty test for MAGA membership.

But there is no doubt—Trump lost that election by a landslide, coming up short by 38 electoral votes. More evidence that Trump did not win includes the fact that he was not inaugurated in 2021, and did not serve a day as president until he succeeded in 2024.

But for anyone still in doubt, know that the theory has been thoroughly debunked by the president’s own appointees. Trump’s last attorney general, Bill Barr, announced in 2022 that despite an intensive, multi-agency investigation, no evidence of widespread fraud had been discovered that supported the president’s wild claims.

But the theory—and Trump’s innumerable cadre of yes-men—persist.

“At this Department of Justice, we will not permit states to jeopardize the integrity and effectiveness of elections by refusing to abide by our federal elections laws,” Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights Harmeet Dhillon said in a statement. “If states will not fulfill their duty to protect the integrity of the ballot, we will.”

Republicans Announce Their Next Targets After Indiana Crash and Burn - 2025-12-12T19:17:06Z

Republicans are scrambling for a next move after President Donald Trump’s humiliating failure to bully Indiana lawmakers into bending to the president’s gerrymandering scheme.

On Thursday, Indiana lawmakers rejected the president’s push for midcycle redistricting in the Hoosier State to ensure Republican victory in the 2026 midterms. Indiana Lieutenant Governor Micah Beckwith claimed that the Trump administration had even threatened to withhold federal funding if they refused—but lawmakers wouldn’t budge.

With the midterms fast approaching and the Republican Party’s prospects looking increasingly grim, Trump’s allies have started to discuss where to turn up the heat next.

“Nebraska and Kansas are two top targets,” wrote Tyler Bowyer, chief operating officer of Turning Point Action, the advocacy arm of Charlie Kirk’s organization, in a post on X Friday.

But even he had to admit that Republicans faced some challenges in those states. “Nebraska did not help the President by passing winner-take-all last year. Not a great sign for redistricting. Kansas is controlled by the Koch HQ,” Bowyer wrote.

In Nebraska, the unicameral legislature requires the support of every Republican to advance redistricting, but 83-year-old state Senator Merv Riepe is not buying in. He previously blocked Trump’s 2024 effort to reshape the state’s split Electoral College vote into a winner-takes-all state, and seems similarly uninterested in supporting his gerrymandering this time around.

“I don’t think it’s a necessity for us,” Riepe said in October.

In Kansas, Republicans haven’t seemed all that anxious to get on board the president’s push for redistricting, either. Republicans will need a two-thirds majority to redraw the maps and override an expected veto from Governor Laura Kelly.

Meanwhile, the Heritage Foundation, the far-right think tank behind Project 2025, this week published a report that listed ending ranked-choice voting as a policy priority in 2026. Michigan is currently the only state circulating a ranked-choice ballot petition, meaning that Republicans are likely to target efforts to impose a new voting system there.

Trump’s Own RNC Chair Warns Party Faces “Almost Certain Defeat” - 2025-12-12T19:06:30Z

The chair of the Republican National Committee is issuing a dire warning to Republicans: Anticipate losing next November.

The president’s handpicked RNC leader, Joe Gruters, has been preaching the caucus’s impending doom ahead of the 2026 midterms in a transparent attempt to lower expectations. Gruters joined several right-wing podcasts and Christian television networks to spread the word that the GOP is coming up against a “looming disaster.”

“The chances are Republicans will go down and will go down hard,” Gruters said.

“This is an absolute disaster. No matter what party is in power, they usually get crushed in the midterms,” Gruters told Salem News Channel, a new media entity co-owned by Trump’s son Don Jr.

Republicans have had a trifecta in Washington since Donald Trump returned to office, white-knuckling every branch of the federal government. If history is any indicator, that won’t bode well for the party come next year: In a typical midterm cycle, the presidential party loses grounds via midterms, a phenomenon known as the “presidential penalty.” Those are the basic odds, even before Trump’s devastating tariffs and wildly controversial immigration agenda are taken into account.

But early indicators—such as a healthy dose of special elections in the last year—suggest that the national backlash to Trump’s second-term agenda could be worse for the party than usual. Democrats have seen surprising gains in unexpected areas of the country, including in Tennessee, Georgia, New Jersey, Virginia, and Pennsylvania.

Meanwhile, Republicans seem to be on the verge of panic. Anxious about midterms, the White House has spent months trying to pressure red states to gerrymander their congressional lines to turn a handful of seats in Congress. But so far, the pressure campaign has backfired: On Thursday, Indiana state senators overwhelmingly voted against the effort, citing Trump’s open threats and his crass mouth as their rationale.

Gruters’s comments have similarly raised a stir. The Heritage Foundation’s news site, Townhall, blasted The Bulwark for first publishing Gruters’s opinion, claiming that the “story is FAKE” because the publication had edited out Gruters’s words to eliminate his alleged faith in the caucus. But in doing so, Townhall cut out Gruters’s conclusion: “We are facing almost certain defeat,” he said.

Fiasco for Trump as Judge Issues Harsh Rebuke in Ábrego García Case - 2025-12-12T17:35:45Z

Ever since the Trump administration wrongfully deported Kilmar Ábrego García to a torture prison in El Salvador last spring, the president and his anti-immigrant henchman Stephen Miller have plainly understood this saga as a crucial test case for the larger MAGA project. How far could they go in snatching people off the streets and placing them outside of U.S. law entirely? To what degree could they get away with wielding armed state terror against undesirables, with minimal to no constraints?

That’s why the latest turn in the Ábrego García story—in which a federal judge ordered him released from immigration detention in Pennsylvania—is so momentous. It suggests that at least for now, this test isn’t going how Trump and especially Miller evidently hoped.

The top-line news in Judge Paula Xinis’s ruling—the one getting media coverage—is her surprising ruling that no order of removal for Ábrego García exists. She ruled his continued detention unlawful, and he’s now been released, though he still faces separate Justice Department prosecution for allegedly trafficking migrants.

But buried in this ruling is even bigger news. It concludes that Ábrego García’s treatment throughout has violated due process. Again and again, it scorches the Trump administration’s “extraordinary” and “troubling” handling of this whole case, suggesting it’s been utterly lawless and rife with malicious abuses of power.

The ruling neatly encapsulates the madness of the Trump era. It recounts that Ábrego García was removed with scores of others to El Salvador in March, which the administration admitted was an “error,” violating an immigration judge’s 2019 “withholding of removal” ruling barring his deportation to that country, where he was born and raised before fleeing to the United States as a teenager. After the Supreme Court ruled in April that officials must “facilitate” his return, they dragged their feet, bringing him back eight weeks later. During that time in El Salvador he was tortured.

Here’s where one of Trump’s most flagrant abuses of power now arises. Because a “withholding of removal” order does allow deportation to a third country that agrees to take in the subject, Trump officials have been trying to find one to take him.

But this process too has been riddled with venality. Costa Rica has expressed willingness to take in Ábrego García for months, a country that Ábrego García’s lawyers believe would not jail him or return him to El Salvador (where, as we’ve already seen from his experience there, he’d again face torture and imprisonment). But officials have refused to send him to Costa Rica.

Why? They won’t meaningfully say. The ruling details months of tortuous negotiations during which the administration tried to deport him to Uganda, Eswatini, Ghana, and Liberia—places where Ábrego García feared physical harm or removal to El Salvador.

But officials were unable to carry out removal to these places for various reasons; some countries said they didn’t want him. That left Ábrego García in detention for months. And throughout, when prodded by Xinis as to why the government wouldn’t just remove him to Costa Rica, administration lawyers dissembled, stonewalled, and ultimately could not explain the rationale.

This is abominable. By law, immigration detention is not supposed to be about meting out punishment or retribution. It’s supposed to be about facilitating people’s removal. Yet as the ruling details, the administration, by refusing to send Ábrego García to Costa Rica despite having that option, did “not appear to have held him to fulfill that purpose.”

That’s polite legalese for a bombshell: Trump officials held Ábrego García in detention for months for reasons that remain unexplained rather than remove him to a country where he didn’t fear facing grave danger. We all know what happened here: Trump and Miller plainly decided that sending him to a place he sees as acceptable wouldn’t be sufficiently dehumanizing. Trump had to “win” by sending him to the country of Trump’s choice only.

This is deeply sick public conduct. And there’s evidence that Trump and Miller have seen this throughout as a test case for a darker, vaster project. Recall that after officials admitted deporting Ábrego García in error, Miller rushed out to proclaim that there was no mistake at all and that he’d been “sent to the right place.” This wasn’t a good-faith disagreement over what the law said. It was effectively a declaration that the law wouldn’t constrain Trump from sending him to a foreign gulag if he decided to.

Miller has also viciously attacked judges as illegitimate for requiring due process for migrants. Here again this doesn’t reflect genuine legal disagreement; it’s Miller asserting Trump’s authority to inflict state terror without any legal constraints. At one point, Trump even admitted he could bring Ábrego García back at any point and try him lawfully, but refused: He was leaving him in that torture prison abroad because—well, because he could.

Meanwhile, numerous government agencies smeared Ábrego García as a violent gang member, even though they couldn’t produce any evidence of it. Vice President JD Vance stated as fact that Ábrego García was a “high-level gang member” who was not in the country lawfully to begin with—both flat-out lies that look even worse with this ruling. The administration’s real aim has been to create grounds for immigrants to fear that at any point they might face the wrath of arbitrary, unchecked state power and the threat of disappearance beyond the reach of the law.

Here, a caveat: At times officials have followed the law, ultimately bringing Ábrego García back and releasing him this time around under judicial order. But when books are written about this and other travesties, we will likely learn that Miller lost internal battles about how far to push the envelope, with Trump losing interest at key moments or being swayed by other advisers who balked at plunging into full lawlessness. Everything we’ve seen strongly suggests this interpretation, including what was laid bare in Xinis’s extraordinary ruling.

So where does this leave us? In a strange turn, it appears no original order of removal for Ábrego García can be found, perhaps because the “withholding of removal” order is all the original judge filed. So on Thursday night, officials found another immigration judge to issue a new order of removal. As Talking Points Memo’s David Kurtz explains, this was also highly cynical, exploiting these judges’ status as executive branch officials to secure a dubious, preordained outcome. And indeed Xinis also temporarily enjoined Immigration and Customs Enforcement from taking him into custody on that basis Friday morning.

At this point, Ábrego García could end up getting deported to Costa Rica, as he’s requested. Or he could remain free on bail in the U.S. while he faces prosecution for trafficking (and there are ample signs that this too is a malicious prosecution). We don’t know what’s next. It’s all unprecedented.

But here’s what we do know: For now, this saga is showing that certain time-tested legal precedents and norms—habeas corpus, judicial review, professional constraints on lawyers—seem to be acting as a check on tyranny. To the degree that Trump or especially Miller envisioned this as a test—of their ability to spread fear of lawless state terror—the lower courts continue to hold the line. The degree of government persecution inflicted on this day laborer from Maryland remains astounding. But for the time being, what we’re seeing is heartening indeed.

Trump Hit With Massive Lawsuit Over His Tacky Ballroom - 2025-12-12T17:11:08Z

President Donald Trump just got hit with a lawsuit over his enormous $300 million ballroom that would dwarf the White House.

In a 65-page complaint filed Friday, the National Trust for Historic Preservation, a nonprofit organization working to save America’s historic places, argued that Trump did not have the constitutional authority to fast-track construction for a project of this scale, and has violated the Administrative Procedures Act and the National Environmental Policy Act.

The lawsuit also notes that Congress is required to approve any construction on federal land, and the White House is located at the White House and President’s Park, a national park.

In October, Trump fired all six members of the Commission on Fine Arts, which is charged with advising the federal government on the art, design, and architectural development of Washington, seeming to clear the way for him to make any changes he likes to the nation’s monuments. A Trump official said the members would be replaced by those who were “more aligned with President Trump’s ‘America First’ policies,” but two months later, the seats still remain empty.

The legal challenge is just the latest issue to complicate Trump’s plans for a behemoth ballroom. Trump has reportedly had a falling-out with his architect, James McCrery II, who argued that the 90,000-square-foot blueprint would overshadow the 55,000-square-foot White House mansion, violating basic architectural principles.

Trump has repeatedly misled the public about the construction process, claiming that the original structure of the White House wouldn’t be touched—before razing the entire East Wing. He also claimed that the project would only cost $200 million, but that number has since ballooned to $300 million.

The privately funded ballroom has presented a golden opportunity for the country’s wealthiest families and biggest corporations to make good with the Trump administration—and a few defense companies like Lockheed Martin and Palantir have also tossed the president some cash for his vanity project.

Trump has repeatedly turned his attention away from actually governing to the destruction of American landmarks. Trump has redone the Oval Office in the gaudy gold style of Mar-a-Lago, added stupid signs and white marble bathrooms to the White House, paved over the Rose Garden, pitched an “Arc de Trump” monument, and the builder in chief recently declared his intention to “fix” the 100-year-old Reflecting Pool on the National Mall in Washington. Fix what, exactly? Your guess is as good as ours.

Indiana Republican Deletes Post Exposing Trump Gerrymandering Threat - 2025-12-12T16:53:32Z

Unfortunately for Indiana Lieutenant Governor Micah Beckwith, what he posts on the internet stays forever.

Beckwith deleted a Thursday post that confirmed the Trump administration had threatened to pull federal funding from Indiana if state legislators refused to bend to the president’s gerrymandering scheme.

“The Trump admin was VERY clear about this,” Beckwith wrote in the since-deleted post. “They told many lawmakers, cabinet members and the Gov and I that this would happen. The Indiana Senate made it clear to the Trump Admin today that they do not want to be partners with the WH. The WH made it clear to them that they’d oblige.”

He was responding to another post by the Heritage Foundation, which claimed that Trump would withhold national funding from Indiana if it refused to draw new congressional lines, just five years after approving the last batch of maps.

“Roads will not be paved. Guard bases will close. Major projects will stop. These are the stakes and every NO vote will be to blame,” the official account for the Heritage Foundation wrote.

But Indiana’s Senate did reject the White House’s pressure campaign late Thursday, with 21 Republican senators voting against the scheme. Their rationale for doing so ranged from personal disgust with the president’s language to the personal, violent threats they endured for considering voting against the effort.

Why Beckwith would have felt pressured to delete his post—within hours of making it—is not clear.

Anxious about the 2026 midterms, Trump issued directives to several red states, including Indiana, to redraw their congressional maps in order to bolster Republicans’ razor-thin majority in the House. In Indiana’s case, that unprecedented, long-shot effort would have won the GOP two more seats in the U.S. House.

But so far, bullying lawmakers and barking demands has not been a successful midterm strategy for the Republican leader. Redistricting efforts have crumbled in other red states where Trump issued gerrymandering directives, though not always due to the same ferocious local pushback.

Epstein Photos Spark Questions About Trump—And Missing Bannon Footage - 2025-12-12T16:11:16Z

President Donald Trump, Steve Bannon, and other prominent figures can be spotted in a new collection of photographs from Jeffrey Epstein’s estate released Friday by Democrats on the House Oversight and Reform Committee.

At least three of the photographs showed Trump, who has come under immense scrutiny for his reported ties to Epstein and his efforts to prevent the release of the government’s files on the alleged sex trafficker.

One black-and-white photograph featuring Trump shows the president smiling as he posed with six women wearing leis, whose faces have all been redacted.

Another photograph showed Trump sitting on a plane next to a blonde woman whose face has been redacted.

Another photograph showed Trump listening to a glamorous-looking woman, as Epstein stood, smirking beside him.

Yet another photo showed a pile of Trump-branded condoms.

These photographs, plucked from a trove of 95,000 images and redacted at the discretion of members of the committee, are just the beginning. “Committee Democrats are reviewing the full set of photos and will continue to release photos to the public in the days and weeks ahead,” the release said. Representative Robert Garcia told reporters Friday that some of the photos that were not released were “incredibly disturbing.”

MAGA architect Steve Bannon also made multiple appearances in the photographs released Friday—including one that was particularly disturbing.

One photograph showed Epstein sitting behind a desk, while Bannon sat opposite him talking. On the desk between them sat a framed photograph that appeared to show an at least partially naked woman lying limp on a sofa or bed.

Bannon had reportedly assisted Epstein in navigating the political and legal quagmire that was the last year of his life, conducting a series of interviews with the alleged sex trafficker between 2018 and early 2019, totaling about 15 hours of unreleased footage.

Another photograph showed Epstein and Bannon taking a mirror selfie, and another photograph showed Bannon speaking with director Woody Allen, who has been accused of sexual abuse of a minor.

Former President Bill Clinton appeared to have signed one photograph, which showed him smiling beside Epstein and his co-conspirator Ghislaine Maxwell.

Other prominent figures who appeared in photos were Bill Gates and former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers.

Three of the photographs showed sex toys, including a “jawbreaker gag.”

This story has been updated.

White House Resorts to Desperate Method to Brag About Trump’s Economy - 2025-12-12T15:59:41Z

The White House’s propaganda is getting sketchier.

The official X account for the executive mansion released new figures about the economy Thursday, proclaiming that 91 percent of Americans noticed “gas prices were dropping.” The source of that information, however, was from a White House email survey.

Meanwhile, practically every American has felt the ramifications of Donald Trump’s rattling economic policies. The Drudge Report, the most heavily trafficked conservative news aggregator, topped its site Friday with the headline: “POLL: ‘TIS THE SEASON FOR INFLATION.”

The AP-NORC poll found that large shares of American shoppers are dipping into their savings to afford buying presents this holiday season, with half of polled Americans reporting that it’s harder than usual to afford the things they would typically try to buy.

Roughly the same percentage of U.S.-based shoppers said they were cutting back on nonessentials or big purchases in order to afford their needs, according to the poll.

The findings make sense: An analysis by the Groundwork Collective of popular holiday gifts found that prices skyrocketed by a whopping 26 percent this holiday season.

The disparity between the White House’s messaging and what’s actually happening boils down to the president, who has repeatedly insisted without evidence that there is “no” inflation, that the word “groceries” is an “old fashioned” term, and that the issue of affordability is a “con job” and a “fake narrative” invented by Democrats to trick the public into not supporting him.

“When will I get credit for having created, with No Inflation, perhaps the Greatest Economy in the History of our Country? When will people understand what is happening?” Trump whined Thursday on Truth Social. “When will Polls reflect the Greatness of America at this point in time, and how bad it was just one year ago?”

Inflation has been accelerating since April, when Trump first announced his “liberation day” tariffs. Eight months later, practically everything on the U.S. market is more expensive than it used to be, as companies pass off the cost of the president’s tariffs onto consumers. Food and energy costs are up compared to figures from last year, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Even American-made goods have taken a hit by the tariffs, since more often than not they are created with parts sourced from other areas of the world.

But the commander-in-chief seems to be completely out of touch with that reality. In an interview earlier this week with Politico’s Dasha Burns, Trump remarked that he would rate the current state of the economy “A+++++.”

Trump, 79, Muses About Absolute Power While Covering His Bruised Hand - 2025-12-12T15:09:53Z

President Donald Trump still can’t seem to wrap his head around the fact that the United States is a democracy. 

While signing an executive order aimed at preventing states from regulating artificial intelligence, Trump whined that states needed to be “unified” on his approach to AI, in order for the country to win global dominance over China. 

“We have to be unified. China is unified because they have one vote, that’s President Xi [Jinping]. He says ‘do it,’ and that’s the end of that. You know, we have a different system,” Trump said. “But we have a system that’s good—but we only have a system that’s good if it’s smart.”

As the president spoke, sitting behind his desk, he covered his right hand, where a massive, mysterious bruise has formed. 

Trump: "We have to be unified. China is unified because they have one vote -- that's President Xi. He says 'do it' and that's the end of that. We have a different system." pic.twitter.com/gQo9j5jvvL

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) December 11, 2025

Meanwhile, the folks watching at home weren’t impressed by Trump’s longing for a unitary government and his dismissal of his own country’s so-called “different system.”  

“Yes, it’s called DEMOCRACY,” wrote California Governor Gavin Newsom on X. 

This isn’t the first time Trump has longed for another form of government. After visiting China earlier this year, the president said he wished his Cabinet secretaries would greet him with stoic compliance (even though their meetings are already a well-documented spectacle of sycophancy).

Sorry, but You Had to Be an Idiot to Believe Trump Could Lower Prices - 2025-12-12T15:07:06Z

“Starting the day I take the oath of office, I will rapidly drive prices down, and we will make America affordable again,” Donald Trump told rallygoers in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, in August 2024. “We’re going to make it affordable again.” He said it over and over and over. “Starting on day one, we will end inflation and make America affordable again. We’ll do that. We’ve got to bring it down,” he told a Wisconsin crowd that October.

Well. Guess what? Prices are up. And they’re not just up, at least in some cases, because of random, impersonal market forces. They’re up because Trump raised them, through his tariffs. But mostly, they’re up because politicians, even presidents, don’t have the power to lower prices quickly and unilaterally.

I thought everyone knew this. I thought everyone was at least sophisticated enough to understand that inflation is kind of complicated and has to do with a number of factors that can’t be easily erased or reversed. I mean, that’s not a particularly advanced political or economic concept. A president can’t just say, “Beef prices, I command thee down!” and beef prices go down. We live in the real world, not some fairy-tale land; there’s no legal limit to the snow here, as there was in Camelot.

And yet—apparently a lot of people did believe him. Well, you know what? I’m not in the habit of calling people idiots. Elected Republicans, yes. A lot of them are idiots, and hypocrites and liars and worse. But regular people—I try to stay away from calling them idiots. They have pressures, they don’t really follow politics, and even in the present case, I understand that a few million voters turned to Trump because Joe Biden seemed to be responsible for inflation (and was, to a certain extent), Kamala Harris didn’t plausibly explain how she’d do things differently, and Trump was the only other entrée on the menu. Those people, I sort of get.

But if you really, truly, deeply believed that Trump would lower prices quickly? I’m sorry. You’re an idiot.

I keep wondering how people could have fallen for this. How could people not know, after living through Trump’s first term, that he’ll say anything—whatever works for him in the moment? Did people really just forget that? Apparently, they did. I have to keep reminding myself: There are a lot of people who pay attention to politics the way I pay attention to gymnastics—for a few weeks every four years. They’ve never understood that Trump is worse—far, far worse—than your average pol in the way he’ll just say whatever sounds good at the time.

Did they think he could fix things because he’s a businessman? You know—a businessman with six bankruptcies? Anyone capable of even a semblance of critical thinking who spent 10 minutes examining Trump’s business career could see that what he mostly did was drive companies into the ground, stiff contractors, fend off lawsuits, and skate through it all because he was a celebrity, which he figured out how to parlay into profit by selling the right to put his name on buildings.

And finally, I suspect a lot of people bought it because a lot of other dishonest people were pushing it. And here, of course, I mean the right-wing propaganda machine—from Fox News to podcasters to the algorithmic narcotics pushers on social media who are rapidly turning half the nation into a bunch of rage-baited nitwits—that helped elect him and that helps keep his poll numbers, anemic as they are, from being even worse.

It’s not as if it was some deeply held secret last year that presidents can’t just lower prices, or that tariffs increase prices. Plenty of people said so and warned that Trump had no answers. But the propagandists drowned the sane voices out.

Imagine that Kamala Harris had said she was going to lower grocery prices immediately, on day one. You know what would have happened? She’d have been laughed off the campaign trail. Mocked relentlessly. And not just by the right wing. By mainstream economic commentators. By liberal pundits. By me.

That’s because we—mainstream commentators, liberal pundits, and the millions of Americans who still do actually read stuff, weigh evidence, connect dots—would have known it was a preposterous and desperate lie. And we’d have said so. She’d have been savaged. She and her people no doubt knew this, which is why she didn’t talk like that.

She did address the issue. She did say she’d bring prices down. But she didn’t say silly things like “from day one,” and she offered some specifics about how she’d try to bring them down. She vowed to go after corporate price-gouging. You’ll recall that she was attacked even for this, on the grounds either that such gouging was allegedly rare or that most states already had laws against it, or it was just more proof she was a not-so-secret Marxist.

Otherwise, her plan to lower prices consisted of the usual dreary, time-consuming, reality-based stuff: expanding the child tax credit to reduce the costs of raising children; expanding the Earned Income Tax Credit, to give more money back to lower-income taxpayers; providing housing tax credits to make homeownership more affordable.

Oh, and one more thing: She proposed extending the enhanced Affordable Care Act subsidies—exactly the hammer that’s about to thwack 20 million Americans over the head because Trump refuses to do this and has ordered the Republicans in Congress to follow suit.

So she put forward some plans. But plans are so ho-hum. Trump, in contrast, promised he’d cut the cost of a new home in half. Half! How? By slashing regulations! What regulations? You know—regulations! The evil, very, very bad ones! Sing along with me, to the tune of “Camelot”: “No regulation ever shall raise prices …”

So he goes back to Pennsylvania, as he did this week, and face-plants at the first MAGA rally of his second presidency by making fun of the whole idea of “affordabili-tee,” even pronouncing the word in such a way as to make light of the idea. Of course he did. He has no idea what to do about all this. So he has to make it sound like a “Democrat” hoax.

Oh—and that “A-plus-plus-plus-plus-plus” he gave himself on the economy in that Politico interview. That’s five pluses. I’ve noticed on cable news a lot of people reducing it to four. Understandable. Four has a more natural rhythm to it, as we know from the world of music. But Trump, of course, had to gild the faux-gold lily and add a fifth. That fifth “plus,” for those attuned to the psychological trip wires that exist in that swampy brain of his, is his secret admission that he knows things aren’t good. Yet he had the gall to lecture his rallygoers: “You’re doing better than you’ve ever done.” Imagine Joe Biden having said that in 2023.

So, to those who voted for TRUMP in the belief that he would “lower prices” on DAY ONE, I ask you: Do you think this man who lives in a Gilded Mansion gets what you’re going through? Do you think he’s EVER been to a supermarket in his life? Do you think he could guess the Price of a Gallon of Milk? A head of his beloved Iceberg Lettuce? I beg of you. PLEASE. WAKE UP!! He is Playing You. Thank you for your attention to this matter!

Marjorie Taylor Greene Plots One Last Surprise for Mike Johnson - 2025-12-12T14:18:01Z

With just six legislative days left before she plans to resign, Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene is reportedly working on one last long-shot bid to remove House Speaker Mike Johnson.

The recent MAGA defector has been quietly taking the temperature on a motion to vacate the chair, three sources familiar with her efforts told MS NOW, formerly MSNBC. 

In order to remove Johnson, Greene would need the support of eight other Republicans. “Marjorie is approaching members to get to nine who will oust the speaker,” one of the sources told MS NOW. “And if we don’t get to work on codifying Trump’s agenda, anything can happen.”

But Greene, who has spent the last few weeks publicly criticizing Johnson, denied the reporting. The Georgia Republican told MS Now that it was “not true” and that she was “not interested in participating in” their story. 

While a bid to unseat Johnson would likely fail, these reports come amid mounting complaints about his leadership.   

Last week, Representative Elise Stefanik, who is running for governor of New York, told The Wall Street Journal that Johnson wouldn’t have the votes if there was a roll call vote. “I believe that the majority of Republicans would vote for new leadership,” Stefanik said. “It’s that widespread.” Representative Nancy Mace also shared in Greene’s frustration, and Representative Anna Paulina Luna recently sidestepped the speaker to force a vote on a bill to ban members of Congress from stock trading.

On Tuesday, Greene told CNN that Republican women specifically were starting to lash out at Johnson because “he sidelines us and doesn’t take us seriously.”

Greene has stated that she’ll resign from her seat on January 5, giving her limited time to find support for her measure. She had previously attempted to remove Johnson last May, but that attempt failed after a majority of Democrats stepped in to save the speaker. 

How Trump’s Redistricting Plan in Indiana Blew Up in His Face - 2025-12-12T14:17:51Z

After enduring months of bullying by the president to pass his gerrymandering plan, Indiana Republicans overwhelmingly voted to kill the effort on Thursday. Their rationale for doing so, however, was shockingly personal.

Anxious about the 2026 midterms, Trump issued directives to several red states, including Indiana, to redraw their congressional maps in order to bolster Republicans’ razor-thin majority in the House. In Indiana’s case, that unprecedented, longshot effort would win the GOP two more seats in the U.S. House.

There were plenty of reasons to put the kibosh on the initiative. For one, doing so in the middle of the decade would be extraordinary. While political gerrymandering is technically legal, it typically aligns with the release of census data at the beginning of a new decade.

Initial reports speculated that just a handful of Republican state senators would reject the bid to draw new congressional maps. Instead, 21 Republican state senators voted against it—more than half the GOP caucus in Indiana’s upper chamber—citing reasons from personal disgust with the president’s language to the personal, violent threats they endured for considering voting against the effort, according to CNN.

“Hoosiers are a hardy lot, and they don’t like to be threatened. They don’t like to be intimidated. They don’t like to be bullied in any fashion. And I think a lot of them responded with, ‘That isn’t going to work,’” state Senator Sue Glick told CNN. “And it didn’t.”

State Senator Michael Bohacek—a longtime disability advocate whose daughter has Down syndrome—pulled his support for the new maps after Trump called Minnesota Governor Tim Walz “seriously retarded.”

“This is not the first time our president has used these insulting and derogatory references and his choices of words have consequences,” Bohacek said in a statement. “I will be voting NO on redistricting, perhaps he can use the next 10 months to convince voters that his policies and behavior deserve a congressional majority.”

State Senator Greg Walker said he voted no after he felt targeted by several swatting attempts. Voting yes, he told CNN, would have only encouraged the dangerous harassment.

In the end, the White House’s pressure campaign was costing Republicans support in their own districts. State Senator Jean Leising told the network that, after speaking at her grandson’s middle school this past fall, practically every member of his basketball team had fielded text messages about her—”and they were all bad.”

Why Trump May Never Be Popular Again - 2025-12-12T13:38:36Z

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

President Trump started the year having won the popular vote for the first time, made significant gains with voters of color and consolidated the support of Republicans on Capitol Hill, on the federal judiciary, and in statehouses. Democrats were divided  between a base that wanted a second resistance and a party leadership that was chastened by Trump’s victory and felt the need to try to work with him. Things look much different at the end of 2025. Trump’s poll numbers are dismal. He’s lost ground among the blocs who shifted to him in 2024. Even Republicans on Capitol Hill are increasingly breaking with him. Meanwhile, the Democratic establishment realized the base was right and started more sharply opposing the president, uniting the party. Democratic candidates won resoundingly in November elections across the country. The party has a message, affordability, that emerged from the Democrats’ new star, New York mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani. In the latest edition of Right Now, TNR’s Grace Segers discusses how the parties’ trajectories changed in 2025 and what that means for 2026 and beyond.

Transcript: Why Trump May Never Be Popular Again - 2025-12-12T13:31:12Z

This is a lightly edited transcript of the December 11 edition of Right Now With Perry Bacon. You can watch the video here or by following this show on YouTube or Substack.

Perry Bacon: I’m joined this morning by my great colleague Grace Segers, and we’re going to talk about the year in politics on some level. We’re going to hit a few broad subjects. So, Grace, welcome.

Grace Segers: Thank you very much. Happy to be here.

Bacon: I want to start with kind of the big question—for me, at least—which is that Donald Trump wins a second term a little over a year ago. He wins almost 50 percent of the vote; he wins a plurality for the first time. He makes gains with young voters, Latinos, Asian Americans. He wins basically every swing state. So we have a lot of discussion about politics having changed in America—realignment, et cetera, et cetera.

So now we’re at a point where his approval rating has gone down from about 50 percent in early January to about 40 percent now. So my question for you is: Was that inevitable because he was unpopular? Or maybe because the country is always permanently in a backlash against whoever is president? Or do you think he could have been more popular but governed in the same way he did last time, guaranteeing that he’d be unpopular?

Segers: I think the answer’s probably an annoying answer, because you ask a yes or no question and the answer is both. Because I do think Trump has forgotten what Biden forgot and what every president seems to forget: that people blame the president for what’s happening. They don’t pay attention to the nuances or margins or the rules of congressional politics. They think, Who’s in the White House? Who’s controlling Congress? Trump is in the White House, and yet my prices are still up. I voted for him because my prices were up, so now I’m mad at him. And I think just the... every president forgets that people blame who the president is. So I think part of that is just: This was inevitable. At the same time...

Bacon: Unless prices have dramatically dropped or something that he probably doesn’t have a ton of control over?

Segers: But at the same time, he has made choices like implementing tariffs, which have contributed to an increase in prices. His plan—and the reason that people voted for him—was because they were mad about inflation, and he’s made decisions that have increased inflation. I saw that the Republican Congress passed legislation that will implement dramatic cuts to federal spending, and also Trump slashed the government size. But we’re not going to see the impact of those for, I would say, the next couple of years.

Bacon: So both? You think he made some mistakes and that this was probably—unless something changes—just the inevitable outcome? I mean, are voters perpetually unhappy? Is that what you’re getting at—that they blame the president for things that he or she cannot control?

Segers: I do think that is largely the case. And you see it on both sides of the aisle, but one example that’s coming to me right now is a lot of young progressives were really mad at Biden because their student loans weren’t forgiven to the degree that they wanted. They didn’t care that the Supreme Court is the one that overturned that. And they didn’t care that the Biden administration did forgive a lot of student loans. If it didn’t affect them directly, they thought, He promised this; it’s not happening.

And I think people don’t care about the 60-vote filibuster threshold. They don’t care about what the Supreme Court does when it comes to overturning or upholding a president’s policies. And I know I’m sounding really cynical about voters and about their capacity to appreciate the political nuances, but I am kind of cynical about voters and their capacity to appreciate political nuances.

Bacon: It’s important to note that politicians cannot be critical of voters, but we are not politicians. So let’s zoom in on the Democrats. So at the beginning of the year: Democrats in disarray, what do they do? Party divided, [then at the end] of the year? Huge wins in Virginia and New Jersey. And also the other elections happened last month, and the Democrats did well in Georgia, and they won a lot of races. In the election in Nashville, Democrats do really well. They don’t win, but they do well in Memphis. So was that also inevitable because there’s a backlash to Trump coming, or have Democrats figured out something?

Segers: I think it is a lot easier to be in the minority than it is to be in the majority. I think Republicans especially are very good at being the minority party. But I mean, as Democrats knew the first time around, when Trump gets in office, he’s unpopular. And that’s why you saw such massive gains in 2017 and 2018—because they had this concrete figure doing unpopular policies.

And then again, that’s why you see the reverse when Biden was in office. And I think partially it is just a pendulum swing, but you can’t entirely attribute it to structural factors. I do think that Democrats have gotten better at sort of cohering under a message. And you’ve seen really successful Democrats from as different as Abigail Spanberger to Zohran Mamdani talking about affordability and that being really successful.

I absolutely hate quoting James Carville, but he did go off with, “It’s the economy, stupid.” And so you can’t entirely say, “Well, this is how it goes; the minority will always do better against an unpopular president,” but I do think that is an important factor there.

Bacon: Do we have to say—in all criticism of Chuck Schumer or Hakeem Jeffries throughout the year—that if their goal is to weaken the incumbent president and oppose him, and his numbers have gone down, we have to say they are not as dumb as people on the left say they are?

Segers: They have a thankless task. Every leader who is trying to hold onto their majority or gain the majority has to hold together a lot of disparate moving parts, especially in an increasingly dysfunctional Congress. Thus far this century, the most successful speaker of the House we’ve seen has been Nancy Pelosi, and the most successful Senate majority leader we’ve seen has been Mitch McConnell.

And I think that both of them were really good at not caring at all what people thought of them. And they didn’t care if their own members completely hated them, as long as they voted for them for the majority leader vote. And I think that Schumer and Jeffries are a touch too concerned about what their members say about them. And part of it is just they don’t have the iron grip that McConnell and Pelosi had. But you know, I mean, they don’t have a great job, and you can say that they have made mistakes, because they have.

Bacon: I’m saying that they’re doing a pretty good job—that Trump’s getting more. I’m saying the opposite: I’m asking whether they’re not getting enough credit.

Segers: I wouldn’t go that far either.

Bacon: What about Thune and Mike Johnson? Is the idea that they are under Trump’s thumb, and so we don’t really have much independence? Because it feels like the House Republicans are complaining about Mike Johnson more and more. Now, I can’t tell if that’s a proxy for Trump or if he is not—I don’t follow him as carefully, I’ll be honest. So I’m just curious what you have to say about Mike Johnson and John Thune.

Segers: I do think Mike Johnson has a particularly weak grasp on his conference. And so I think a big part of that is just his members are a lot more recalcitrant than members have been in the past. They want to be on TV; they want to be “Hell no.” And he was part of that, right? When he came to Congress, he was one of those members, and now he is leading them. He’s been weak for years. But you haven’t seen anyone to replace him because no one wants the job. Because it’s a horrible job. Because...

Bacon: He shouldn’t have got the job in this weird way in the first place,

Segers: Yes, exactly. I mean, I was there for 15 rounds of votes. I sat through all of those stupid speaker votes. It was miserable. However long it took—it took a week or whatever—it’s just such an awful process that I don’t think anyone wants to do it. But at the same time, that won’t stop them from complaining about him. And I do think he is historically weak compared to some previous speakers.

Bacon: Or just someone who really had more experience.

Segers: Right. And he very much is doing what Trump wants him to do. Thune, I think, is very well liked in his conference. He always has been. It’s why he became majority leader. He’s been McConnell’s understudy for years. And I think he has a healthy understanding of what makes the Senate unique, and thus far has really kept to Senate procedure.

I don’t actually think he has been tested dramatically yet. I don’t think there really has been something where people have said, Oh, we need to get rid of the filibuster, because for the most part, senators understand: If we get rid of the filibuster, the next time we’re in the minority, we’re kind of screwed. But if in the next election, in ’26, you saw a bunch more firebrand conservatives elected, it’s not out of the realm of possibility. I think he’d be in a lot more trouble.

Bacon: So we had this interesting government shutdown. I’m curious what you made of this. The first point is that the people—and I—we’re talking about politics a lot, but I think the most important point to make is that in terms of policy, a lot of Americans lost, because the system needed to figure out how to not increase their health care premiums, and the government in Washington, which is Republicans right now, did not do anything about that. So people’s premiums have skyrocketed, and that is a horrible thing.

So it was also a political thing, too, though. On some level, I’m curious: on the one hand, the Republicans blocked Obamacare subsidies, which they oppose, I guess, and so in this sense they won that. But in another way, Trump’s polling numbers appear to have gone down in that period. The Democrats—I can’t tell that they lost the policy, but maybe they won the politics. What’s your assessment of what happened, agreeing that the government shutdown did not have the policy results it should have? What was the political impact?

Segers: I always think that a government shutdown—as you say, it’s a policy loser for everybody—but I also have this maybe hot take that it’s a political loser for everybody. As we’ve previously discussed, I do think whoever is the party in control ultimately gets blamed. But the reason that everybody loses on a political front is that people hate Congress.

Bacon: Yes, they have hated Congress for decades. People in both parties are saying this.

Segers: One of the few things Americans of all parties, beliefs, creeds, whatever can agree on is that they hate Congress. They think they’re useless, think they can’t get anything done—and I mean, they can’t.

Essentially, there’s good reason to believe that. And it’s not like Democrats are coming out of this with sky-high polling rates. They’re still polling very poorly, including among Democrats.

And I think that is just why a government shutdown is always going to be a political loser, because you have proved once again that you are literally so dysfunctional you cannot keep the government open. In what other country does that happen? What other democracy? So I think everyone loses from that one.

Bacon: So anything surprise you about this year—just thinking about the year in politics? I mean, I probably did expect Trump to be fairly unpopular because I didn’t expect him to govern much differently. I think the party of the president is always in a big predicament, so that part’s not surprising.

The Democrats don’t have much of a message but are benefiting from Trump being unpopular—or the Democrats have a message but are benefiting from Trump being in the White House. That’s not surprising to me. But I’m curious what you would say first: anything surprising this year?

Segers: It’s going to be a really boring and wonky answer. So I really enjoy tax policy. Okay. And I’ve been sort of on the side covering tax policy, specifically as related to families, for several years now. And the Child Tax Credit in particular has always interested me. As all tax nerds knew, at the end of 2025, the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act—the TCJA—was set to expire. So all of us tax nerds, we were expecting, like, a huge drag-out fight over tax policy. And then it actually ended up being addressed in the reconciliation bill pretty quickly.

The way bigger fight was over Medicaid and SNAP and other poverty policies such as that. And the Child Tax Credit was resolved pretty easily. So that—I think all tax policy people were like, Huh. We really thought that would be a bigger fight than it was. But obviously I could not predict that the specific cuts to SNAP and Medicaid would be implemented.

But I wouldn’t say anything has really surprised me. And that’s down to stuff that I am less familiar with in terms of what I report on. Like, I don’t really report on foreign affairs that often. And so everything that’s been happening in terms of declaring war on Venezuelan drug dealers—that is really, really huge for the country and the world. But it’s hard to say I find it surprising.

Bacon: So two things I would say are, first, how aggressive he was against universities and law firms early on, and how willing they were to fold did surprise me a little bit. And the New York City race—I would’ve bet a lot of money, from January to April, that Cuomo would win until everyone possible jumped in. An American socialist was, in fact, not going to be elected mayor of the capital of capitalism. So that one did surprise me. It became more obvious at some point, but if I’m being honest, that was still a surprise to me.

Segers: You know what did actually surprise me is when Trump met with Zohran Mamdani in the White House. They vibed. Like, they really hit it off. I should not have been surprised because if there’s one thing Trump loves, it’s a hot winner. Zohran Mamdani is a hot winner. And Zohran, I think, has a level of charisma that I was not personally expecting. And seeing him win over someone who is also known for his kind of weird charisma—I thought that was really interesting to see, and not what I was expecting.

Bacon: So you wrote this piece about masculinity and authenticity that I thought was really important a few months ago. Go ahead and explain it from your point of view—what you wrote. I have some follow-up questions, but explain what you were trying to get at in the piece.

Segers: So I think something... let’s actually rewind a little bit. I can’t remember if I addressed this in the piece, but Trump has a very specific brand of masculinity. It’s very macho. Very men have one place, women have another place, and he has defeated female candidates for president. The only time he lost was to a man, right?

And with his choice of Vance, Vance also represents a very ascendant type of masculine consideration: “A true man is the head of a family,” right? And there are traditional gender roles that should be implemented. So on the Republican side, I think you have those various themes. But on the Democratic side, when we talk about authenticity—like, who do you think of as an authentic character? It’s usually a man. It’s usually a white man, and that’s why you’ve seen so many political candidates lately with their plaid and their rugged working-class job.

And the one that comes to me, who has been in a mess for the past couple of months, is Graham Plattner up in Maine. He’s like, “I’m a rough-and-tumble oyster farmer.” And meanwhile, Janet Mills, the governor of Maine, is a technocrat. And Susan Collins... I think it’s very significant that he is trying to beat a woman senator with this kind of persona.

And then whenever you have women trying to show they’re authentic, it’s not usually... they’re wearing yoga pants and talking about how difficult it is to, like, be a mom, ’cause they’re going to get judged in a way that men aren’t going to. So you see women candidates highlight their national security credentials, their military credentials, and just feel like they have to be playing a kind of boys’ game. So that’s a very, like, long-winded sort of overview, but that is the general gist.

Bacon: Let me come back; let me zone in a little bit. Let me say it more harshly or whatever, I guess. But I perceived it as a Graham Plattner [piece] because it was written in September, I think. And that was right when Graham Plattner had launched, but before it turned into what his tattoos are like. I think it was in that period before. So on some level, Plattner was being praised for being authentic, and Spanberger and Mikie Sherrill were being kind of critiqued for being wooden and so on.

And to me, Mikie Sherrill and Spanberger seemed like authentic people who happen to be maybe more polished, more establishment, more military, and I think they seem authentic to themselves. And Graham Plattner, I thought, was sort of on some level a play, a little bit of a character, but playing a character we are looking for. And that was—I’m worried, I guess I read your piece and then maybe my worry is: Does such “authenticity” point you away from Kamala Harris and toward white men cosplaying?

And if you look at Plattner’s actual background, he’s not from a poor family. He’s not really from a working-class family; I think he went to a private prep school. And so I worry the search for...

The Democrats are doing worse with male voters. That is true. They should be, if the goal is to find people that appeal to male voters; that’s an honest way to put it. But saying you need to be “more authentic” is kind of lying about this. But that was my concern: It’s like Abigail Spanberger and Mikie Sherrill seem perfectly authentic and for that matter, Kamala seemed perfectly authentic to me, but they just may not be as appealing to certain voters. Right?

Segers: Right. And I think that is—very, very eloquently—put the point of my article. Clearly you’ve read it more recently than I have; as you know, you write an article and then you’re like, What did that say? But I think all political personas are a performance.

Bacon: That’s true. But Zohran is very good at acting a certain way, right?

Segers: And so I think it’s about what kind of performance politicians believe voters want to see. Right? Which is kind of a tortured way of putting it. But right now, the kind of party strategists—the powers that be—believe that voters want to see rugged white men. And therefore, that’s why you’re seeing this crop of rugged white men candidates. And so then it kind of becomes like a self-fulfilling prophecy, because if you believe voters want to see this, then there will be more of them, and then just the cycle continues.

And I think you’re right that part of it is just that Democrats believe they can win back white men. And they believe that this is the way to do it. And I think there is a level, not of dishonesty when we talk about authenticity but we don’t talk about gender and we don’t talk about race, that means we’re not having the full conversation.

Bacon: And so I’ll finish by moving toward the presidential campaign a little bit—we’re sort of gradually stepping there. How do you put this in that context? Do we see… I don’t think of Gavin Newsom or J.B. Pritzker as being rugged, exactly. So how do you see this playing out going forward? Who appeals to the white guy, which I think is what’s going on here?

Segers: It’s interesting because no one would ever accuse J.B. Pritzker of being a rugged, working-class guy. But he does have something that Trump has, and that is this veneer of success. And Pritzker is crazy wealthy—he comes from an insanely rich family. And I think that is…

Bacon: So, like Trump. He didn’t really earn it. It’s not self-made.

Segers: He’s not self-made. It seems like he says what he means. And I think part of that is just the confidence that comes from being a rich white guy from birth. Like, there’s kind of an insulation there. But it is another form of masculinity—of, like, This is a rich, successful guy. I could be like that, even if it’s like, No, you weren’t born a billionaire.

There’s something aspirational about it that I think still appeals to people. And with Newsom, that brand of masculinity is very, like, California shiny polish. But there is still that sort of aspirational, wealthy element to it. So I guess the big takeaway here is that there are a lot of types of masculinity, and because of the way our society is structured, men always have the advantage. Like, if you have a super-rich woman, she is out of touch, right? You have a super-rich man, it’s like, Ooh, how did he get there? So it’s that kind of thing, I think.

Bacon: I guess Whitmer is not acting like someone who wants to run for president. I don’t think AOC is either. I’m struggling to think of who—not because I think there’s a lack of qualified women in the Democratic Party, but because I don’t feel like any of them are positioning themselves. By contrast, Shapiro and Gavin Newsom are running for president. Andy Beshear is running for president. They’re sort of running really hard right now, I would say.

Is this pervasive sense that we have to win the white guys so deep that the party is informally signaling: if you’re not white-guy-friendly—or really, if you’re not a white guy, [don’t run] in some ways?

Segers: I do think there may be that underlying message. I also think that, for their part, women politicians have seen what happens to women who run. And they’ve seen the way that women candidates are held to a higher level of scrutiny—the way the public just automatically assumes the worst of them. And talk all day about the flawed candidacy of Clinton and Harris and how they should have done X, Y, Z, and how they had all this baggage, and Harris wasn’t running until August and blah, blah, blah.

But when it comes down to it, the first time we saw two major-party nominees that were women, they were run down. I think a lot of women politicians are going to go, Why would I put myself through that? What is the benefit for me when running for president is incredibly hard? It costs a ton of money, and I’m going to be having to fight uphill the entire way.

And then being governor. I think I would never be a politician because it sucks. But if you have to be a politician, being governor is pretty sweet. You are the god-king of your personal fiefdom. And you have this level of power. That’s awesome.

So I never blame members of Congress when they leave to go be a governor. It’s like, yeah, of course you would. But if you’re Gretchen Whitmer, and maybe she doesn’t know what she’s going to do next, that’s when you start thinking about running for president. But, like, if you’ve got a pretty sweet job going on, then why sacrifice that so you can be absolutely battered for six months before losing?

Bacon: Well, that seems true and depressing, but probably true. What do you anticipate for 2026? I anticipate that Trump will get a little more unpopular. There’s probably a floor of 35 percent or so, but I think he’ll get more unpopular.

I think the Democrats will win the House unless the gerrymandering is really changed. The Democrats are big favorites to win the House. North Carolina is the Senate seat they might be very competitive in. I know we always say this, but Roy Cooper actually was the governor. Maine, I don’t know, because I can’t tell if Plattner is going to win the primary.

But I think you’ll see a narrow Senate majority for Democrats. So I think you’re going to see a pretty strong Democratic year, and I think you’re going to see more Republicans on Capitol Hill, governors, and at the state level criticizing Trump. And I think you’re going to see sort of a break from Trump.

Maybe not Bush 2006 levels, but something like this where the party is going to start looking out for itself a little more and Trump a little less. So that’s kind of what I think, but maybe that’s too optimistic. So we’ll see.

Segers: What I’m really interested to see is that we are going to begin to see some of the potential political impact of policy changes. You know, a lot of what passed in the reconciliation law over the summer doesn’t go into effect until after the midterms, and that’s very deliberate.

But we are going to be seeing some immediate impact. So SNAP work requirements are already in. We are seeing the impact if people drop their healthcare because they can’t afford the double or tripled, quadruple ACA marketplace options. What political impact is that going to have? I think that’s going to be a really interesting dynamic going into 2026.

One final thing I’ll say is: If the Supreme Court upholds that Trump can fire members of independent agencies and doesn’t carve out the Fed, and Trump fires Jerome Powell. If that happens, the economy is going to go into free fall. That’s going to be massive. Every single economist that I’ve talked to has told me that is going to be... if that happened, that would be very, very bad.

Bacon: Yeah, I guess I knew that. But I’m glad you sort of reminded me of how important that ruling is going to be.

Segers: I think if I had to guess, I would say the Supreme Court would probably be like, Trump can fire independent agencies—except the Fed; don’t touch the Fed.

That would be my guess. If they are not specific enough on that front, and if his advisers can’t convince him not to fire Jerome Powell, then I think that’ll be a really interesting thing to see.

Bacon: Okay. well thanks for joining me. I’ll end it there.

Segers: Good to see you.

Transcript: Trump Explodes Over Cratering Polls as GOP Losses Worsen - 2025-12-12T11:34:41Z

The following is a lightly edited transcript of the December 12 episode of the Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.

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

This week, Democrats notched more big wins that show President Trump is really killing his party. A Democrat won the Miami mayoralty for the first time in decades, fueled by a big shift in Hispanic votes away from the GOP. Dems also flipped a Georgia state legislative seat in a district that Trump won by double digits, among other victories. It’s now clear that Trump’s immigration agenda is a big part of this story. A new poll has his approval on the issue in the toilet, and Kristi Noem got badly humiliated at a hearing under tough questioning from Democrats. And in broader terms, Trump knows he’s in political trouble. He unleashed a bizarre self-pitying tirade in which he all but admitted that his polling is bad, which may be a first. William Saletan, a staff writer for The Bulwark, has a great new piece arguing that at its core, Trump’s agenda has now become one of explicit ethnic persecution. We’re going to talk about that and about how badly this is politically backfiring for Trump. Will, great to have you on, man.

William Saletan: Hey, Greg. Thanks for having me.

Sargent: OK, so Democrat Eileen Higgins won the mayoralty in Miami—the first time a Democrat has done this in decades. There was an 18-point shift to Democrats overall and also big shifts among Hispanics. CNN polling analyst Harry Enten talked about Trump’s broader national decline among Latinos and also about what happened in Miami. Listen to this.

Harry Enten (voiceover): Just look at Donald Trump’s not approval among Latinos. In February, it was minus two points. Not too hot to trot, but not that bad either. Look at where it is now. Minus 38 points. That is a shift of 36 points in the wrong direction. The completely wrong direction for Donald Trump, and what the race in Miami illustrates—I was looking at the localities, locality by locality by locality—what you see is these huge shift, these heavily Hispanic neighborhoods of Miami against the Republican nominee from the Donald Trump baseline. And so to me, this is an encapsulation of what we see. We saw it in Arizona’s seventh congressional district, right? That special election earlier this year, again, a heavily Hispanic district.

Sargent: There, Harry talked about how Trump has lost 36 points nationally among Latinos and talked about how, in Miami, heavily Hispanic neighborhoods moved to the Democrats. Will, I can remember that only a year ago, one big takeaway from Trump’s 2024 win was his big inroads with Latinos. And yet now, all of a sudden, one of the big stories at the moment is how fast all that disintegrated. What do you make of that?

Saletan: Yeah, there’s now a lot of numbers to back up the thesis that the shift of ethnic minorities, of Blacks and Latinos in particular, to Donald Trump in 2024 has reversed. In the exit polls, which we have in New Jersey and Virginia from last month, you can just see massive shifts in ... I wrote a piece about this a week or so ago. I’m just looking at the numbers I had there.

Compared to 2024 in Virginia, Blacks and Latinos shifted 13 and 15 points. So 15 points, a little bit under for the two groups, towards the Democrats away from Trump. So that’s in the 2025 gubernatorial election in Virginia versus the 2024 presidential in that same state. In New Jersey, it was twice that. It was a 24-point shift among Latinos, 28-point shift among Blacks—again, away from Trump in the New Jersey governor’s race.

So that, combined with the races that you just talked about, illustrates that this is not isolated. This is now kind of a broad national trend, in which a lot of minorities who thought that Donald Trump was going to be their guy have decided, Eh, maybe not so much. And the Republican candidates down the ballot are paying the price.

Sargent: I think Trump himself knows he’s in political trouble. He unleashed this strange tirade on Truth Social. I’m going to read some of it now:

“We are respected as a nation again. When will I get credit for having created, with no inflation, perhaps the greatest economy in the history of our country? When will polls reflect the greatness of America at this point in time and how bad it was just one year ago?”

Will, all that stuff about inflation and the economy is just complete nonsense, but that aside, note that he admits his polling is very bad. I haven’t seen that before, have you?

Saletan: No, Greg, I’m kind of shocked. This might be the first time that Donald Trump has acknowledged real numbers. I mean, as you point out, like, he’s denying the real numbers about the economy.

I can’t tell you—I watch everything this guy says. I know that’s insane and masochistic. I watch everything he says; I have notes on it. I can’t count the number of times that he has said over the past, since he’s been back in power, that prices are coming down, that he’s bringing prices down, specifically things like groceries.

I mean, you don’t have to look further than the consumer price index and the all-government reports on grocery prices to know that that’s just B.S., right? But he lies about the numbers. And then the problem is Americans, of course, who actually go to grocery stores and buy things are like, Actually, that doesn’t seem to be true. So they think things are getting worse.

And then he has to, like, deal with that polling information, and is he going to admit it or deny it? And he’s denied it. And I’m just kind of shocked at that post because it acknowledges at least the indirect truth of the polls being negative on it.

Sargent: He really does. It’s really surprising. I want to underscore, though, that immigration is a big part of Trump’s unpopularity. I think that’s a difficult thing for a lot of people to get their heads around, but a new Associated Press poll has his approval on this issue down at 39 percent.

That’s supposed to be his strong issue. Much better on border security, but immigration overall, 39 percent. Now let’s listen to Trump at a rally earlier this week.

Donald Trump (voiceover): We had a meeting, and I say why is it we only take people from shithole countries, right? Why can’t we have some people from Norway, Sweden, just a few. Let us have a few. From Denmark, do mind sending us a few people? Send us some nice people, you mind? But we always take people from Somalia, places that are a disaster, right? Filthy, dirty, disgusting, ridden with crime. The only thing they’re good at is going after ships.

Sargent: So during that rant, Trump also said he’s announced a permanent pause on migration from Third World countries. And in addition to all this talk about Somalia you heard there, he’s been saying that people from that country are garbage, and he’s been attacking Representative Ilhan Omar in really the most vile and disgusting ways you can imagine.

Will, in addition to what you wrote—which is that this is just naked ethnic persecution—what we heard there from Trump is also the voice of someone who’s just unshakably certain that this is a winning and popular message, don’t you think?

Saletan: Yeah, of course. He’s looking at a crowd. I mean, picture yourself in Donald Trump’s shoes at a Trump rally. You’re looking out over the podium. What are you seeing? You’re seeing mostly a sea of white people, and you’re seeing a sea of white people cheering you as you slur various ethnic minorities, in particular the Somalis lately, right?

So you live in this bubble where everybody agrees with you, and you generally are in denial of polls, although we just had an exception there. So yeah, you’re gonna think that people are voting your way.

And of course, the 2020 election denial itself is about Donald Trump’s inability to accept that outside his bubble, people voted against him, right? That can’t be true. So he thinks this issue is a winner for him. I gotta underscore, Greg, that I am kind of dismayed that there isn’t more of a backlash against this.

I mean, it was 10 years ago that Donald Trump stood in—I think it was South Carolina—and called for “a ban on all Muslims coming into this country until we can figure out what the hell is going on,” he said. Greg, correct me if I’m wrong: Mike Pence and a bunch of other Republicans at that time said, No, that’s not America. We don’t agree with that.

Sargent: No, that did happen, Will. In fact, I remember very, very vividly that Paul Ryan condemned Donald Trump’s anti-Muslim bigotry at some point. I can’t remember whether it was the campaign or in the presidency, but he absolutely went out there and did that. Republicans, during the first term, or at least during the 2016 campaign and the run-up to that—they absolutely did condemn this kind of stuff, and now they’re 100 percent on board with it.

Saletan: Yeah, it’s shocking to me. I put out an APB looking for any Republican officeholder who had criticized Trump over his categorical slurs against Somalis—American citizens of Somali descent. I want to be clear: It wasn’t even about legal status. It was just, you are from this country originally.

What I got back, Greg, was somebody found a Minnesota state senator—a Republican state senator in Minnesota—and that was it. If anybody else finds anything, let me know. Otherwise, it seems like in 10 years the Republican Party has gone from at least being willing to speak up against a categorical smear and a call for a categorical legal action against Muslims to complete silence or affirmation when the president does this to people of a certain ancestry.

Sargent: Yeah, they’re 100 percent on board with the ethnonationalism. I want to bring up another way this is all backfiring. To go back to Miami for a second, Eileen Higgins directly targeted Trump’s immigration agenda in numerous ways. The Guardian reported that she criticized not just the ICE raids, which are of course the most visible and dramatic, but also Trump’s ending of Temporary Protected Status. And that resonated among Cubans, Venezuelans, Haitians.

Will, again, Trump’s gains with those types of demographics in 2024 were the thing that got everyone theorizing about a realignment. But now you can see Trump’s actual policies just driving those voters away in droves. And I think that’s a positive. By the way, one other thing we should remember that we were told about 2024 is that those working-class, nonwhite voters, including immigrant voters, liked certain aspects of Trump’s strict immigration policies, but you know, it’s turning out not so much, right?

Saletan: Yeah, so I think if you go back to the votes of ethnic minorities in this country—let’s take Latinos. I come from Texas. Now, in Texas, there’s a lot of people with surnames like Gonzales and Rodriguez who will tell you they’re white. Their families have been in this country for generations. So yeah, they count as Latinos, but they feel like they are part of this country, they are legal, and they don’t like people crossing the border without legal authorization. And they think—they thought, a lot of them—Well, that’s who Trump is going after. I’m safe; it’s just these people crossing the border illegally that he’s going after.

What has happened since then? Well, one thing is that ICE has gone around rounding people up—not just people who are here illegally but people who are here legally. People who look like they might be here illegally—i.e., they have the wrong color of skin, they’re speaking the wrong language. So they’re using these cues. And if you are a Latino person in this country, you might look at this and say, Wait a minute, this isn’t what I signed up for.

And the other thing, Greg, is that Trump posted on Truth Social that he was gonna denaturalize people? So that means you’re an American citizen. You were born in another country, you immigrated here, you swore an oath to this country—which, Greg, I never did. I don’t know about you, but, like, I didn’t have to go through a naturalization ceremony. So you’re just born here. So these are people who are American citizens. We told them they were citizens, and Trump is threatening to revoke their status and deport them.

So if you are a Latino in this country, you might look around and say, I thought I was safe, but apparently even being a citizen will not protect me if I am speaking Spanish or if my skin is brown or whatever Trump chooses to go after.

Sargent: Right. And your piece got at that very beautifully. And I want to talk a little bit more about that. I think as you wrote, Trump and Stephen Miller really thought they could test-run this fascism with shock and awe against immigrants and that voters would actually rally to it. If you recall, Stephen Miller was doing all sorts of very ostentatious things for a while there, like lining the White House driveway with mug shots of Latinos and migrants and that sort of thing.

And it was very clear that they thought that they were going to rally a majority of the country behind the type of agenda you’re talking about: the fully ethnonationalist, openly fascist agenda. But, you know, I think at least politically we’re seeing a surprising backlash to that. Acknowledging your point about maybe not quite the backlash we want, especially among Republicans, I do think that we’ve gotten a backlash to the explicit ethnic persecution. What do you think?

Saletan: Well, it’s hard to tell about this latest round. I mean, you can make the case that ... let’s take the Miami election there. And of course the exit polls in Virginia, New Jersey, they break it down by Black, Latino, Asian American. In Miami, they can sort of break it down by neighborhood. So you can see some effect there. In the case of the Somalis, so this is Trump’s new attack. Again, part of what the ethnic demagogue, Trump; part of the strategy he uses is, “Who can I find?” I’m gonna go ahead and draw this analogy. A child predator looks for young people, young women who don’t have families. He looks for someone: “Who can I pick off? Who has no friends? Who has nobody to protect them?”

It’s a predatory mentality. Donald Trump thinks about ethnicity exactly the same way. “Who can I target in this country? What ethnic group can I go after? Or what religious group can I go after? Who is politically weak, who is vulnerable, and who will no one identify with?” And so Latinos are not as juicy a target for that kind of predator as Somalis. The Somalis are generally Black. They are ... you know, in the case of Ilhan Omar, he makes fun of her for wearing a turban, Muslim. You know, he posted—honestly, he reposted on Truth—just a video of Somali Americans standing around listening to music and singing and dancing because he thought that would scare his white audience.

Sargent: Right, that was inherently something to mock and be disgusted by.

Saletan: Yeah, and I want to stress to people that what Donald Trump is doing right now is of the same kind, if not the same degree as—I’m really trying hard not to use the word Nazis right now—but some of these Trump rallies look a lot like Nuremberg and what the crowds cheer for. They cheer for him calling on Ilhan Omar to send her back. Can I just read you three of his lines? Just to be clear on how categorical his words are.

This is over the last couple of weeks. Trump said about Somalia: “If you look at Somalia, they’re taking over Minnesota. We are not taking their people anymore.” OK, that’s... there is nothing there about welfare fraud, about crime. It’s just, “We don’t like this country or anyone from it.” Another one: A reporter told him that Jacob Frey, the mayor of Minneapolis, said he was proud to have a large Somalian community—a Somali community. Trump says, “I wouldn’t be proud.” He said that he’s a fool—about Frey. “I wouldn’t be proud to have the largest Somalian community.” That’s a quote from Donald Trump. “The Somalians, the Somalians should be out of here. They’ve destroyed our country.”

Imagine, Greg, if any politician in this country said that about the Jews, OK? It is absolutely of the same kind. And one more, he said—this was at his rally in Pennsylvania a couple of days ago—about the Somali immigrants in Minnesota: “They ought to get ’em the hell out of here. They don’t work. 91 percent unemployment”—that’s a fake stat—“The people from Somalia, they hate our country.” The people. So this is raw ethnic venom. And Trump is spewing it, and his crowds are endorsing it. I would love to believe, Greg, that there is going to be a backlash in this country to that, but I have not seen it yet.

Sargent: Well, maybe not to that yet, but what I guess I would point to is maybe what looks a little like a split-screen moment, right? On the one hand, I think it’s really true, as you point out, that broadly speaking, a lot of Americans are just not really tuned into the explicit ethnic persecution, the explicitly fascist nature of it. In other words, a lot of Americans probably hear this stuff and mostly say, It’s just Trump being crazy Trump, you know, and they’re not sort of saying to themselves, Holy shit, this is ethnic persecution. This is fascism.

And yet on the other hand, you’re getting these spontaneous community-wide uprisings against the ICE raids, against arrests. People are pulling out their phones. This is kind of a new type of community that’s almost like a new type of solidarity that’s kind of erupting spontaneously in reaction to this kind of thing. And I think that’s pretty surprising in a positive way. Don’t you think?

Saletan: Yeah. I mean, I do think that people are reacting negatively to the ICE tactics. So Greg, earlier you were reading from Trump’s Truth Social post where he talks about, complains about not getting credit for what he’s done on the economy. The other issue where he has complained a lot lately about not getting credit is immigration. He said, “I want to talk about immigration, but my staff won’t let me. They say, ‘Nobody cares about it.’” So the problem for Trump is that he did cut off people coming across the border. And instead of getting credit for that, Americans are like, OK, what’s the next problem? That went away.

So he’s not getting the affirmative credit that he used to get from people who were really pissed off about that issue. But instead, what’s happening is the ICE raids are triggering all the negative reaction. Americans are seeing what it looks like when you send masked people out to pick people off the street in vans and take them away and ship them to foreign torture prisons, right? And this is not what they had in mind.

Sargent: Yes, this is what ethnonationalism looks like, basically. And on that score, we have some comic relief to close on. Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem was utterly humiliated by Congressman Seth Magaziner. Listen to this.

Seth Magaziner (voiceover): How many United States military veterans have you deported?

Kristi Noem (voiceover): Sir, we have not deported U.S. citizens or military veterans.

Seth Magaziner (voiceover): I don’t believe you served in the military. I haven’t either. But I think you and I can agree that as Americans, we owe everything to those who have served our country in uniform, particularly those who have served in combat. Do you agree with that?

Kristi Noem (voiceover): Sir, I believe that people that are in the United States that are citizens have legal status here. Those ...

Seth Magaziner (voiceover): Madam Secretary, we are joined on Zoom by a gentleman named Sejun Park. He is a United States Army combat veteran who was shot twice while serving our country in Panama in 1989. Like many veterans, he struggled with PTSD and substance abuse after his service. He was arrested in the 1990s for some minor drug offenses—nothing serious. He never hurt anyone besides himself, and he’s been clean and sober for 14 years. He is a combat veteran, a Purple Heart recipient. He has sacrificed more for this country than most people ever have. Earlier this year, you deported him to Korea, a country he hasn’t lived in since he was seven years old.

Sargent: So I think this exposes the core of the whole thing that we’re talking about: the white nationalist and fascist agenda that you wrote about. It requires mass removals for ethnic engineering purposes. It requires the mass persecution of particular ethnicities and the threats of denaturalization and all that.

But the bottom line is Americans—most Americans—do not want people who are not criminals to be deported, even if they’re here on an undocumented basis, particularly if they’ve been here for years, particularly if they’ve woven themselves into communities, particularly if they’ve had jobs. And I think that’s heartening. And I think that really explains in a big way, or at least partly explains, why Trump is in the toilet in the polls. Your closing thoughts on that?

Saletan: There’s actually three levels to what happened there with Noem. So the first one is Trump said, We’re going to go after the criminals. And so what Magaziner is saying is, What about this guy? He’s not a criminal. Some trivial drug thing from a long time ago ... a veteran.

So secondly, he’s a veteran, and Kristi Noem seems unaware that there exist veterans who do not have legal status in this country but who have done all the things for us that show that they’re not just an ordinary contributor in the community but have gone above and beyond and taken bullets for us.

And then the third thing is, beyond that, you now have the president saying, Never mind you’re not a criminal, never mind if you’re a veteran or if you contribute to the community in other ways, if you have legal status, if you are a citizen of this country, I am threatening to denaturalize you and send you back to the country of your ancestors. And that is so far beyond what anybody, any decent person in America signed up for.

So we have to hope, Greg, that the American population, that the American electorate, is mostly people who do not think that just because you are from a certain country or your ancestors came from a certain country that you should be sent back there.

Sargent: And Will, to your point, I really do hope that we get some sort of real, substantial, sustained outcry in defense of Somalis in particular, because, as you point out, they’re really kind of ripe for victimization. Will Saletan, man, it’s so good to talk to you. Thanks for coming on. You’re always good to talk to.

Saletan: Thanks, Greg.

Something Is Rotten in Chloe Zhao’s Hamnet - 2025-12-12T11:00:00Z

“Time and again,” wrote George Steiner in his 1996 essay “A Preface to the Hebrew Bible,” “I have sought to imagine, albeit indistinctly, Shakespeare remarking at home or to some intimate on whether or not work on Hamlet or Othello had, that day, gone well or poorly.”

Steiner’s thought experiment underlines the tendency we have to see certain artists or historical figures as somehow existing beyond the quotidian, so that the revelation of everyday routines or hobbies takes on a mythic cast: Sylvia Plath keeping bees, or Jack Kerouac playing fantasy sports. In 2020, the Irish author Maggie O’Farrell offered her own variation on this problem, one borne of her own writerly experience. “When you’re sitting at your computer, immersed in the world you’ve created, and have to write: ‘William Shakespeare had his breakfast…’ it’s impossible not to think: I’m an eejit,” she told The Guardian. “Even calling him William seems colossally presumptuous.”

Whatever else you can say of Chloé Zhao’s Hamnet—adapted by the director and O’Farrell from the latter’s award-winning novel of the same name—it is not a tale told by an eejit. Rather, it seeks to imagine, with all of the distinction that its Oscar-winning director and brand-name stars can muster, the process by which William—you can call him Will, played by Paul Mescal—conjured up the world and characters of his most famous play: an endeavor that’s shown going well before it goes poorly. Despite excelling as a husband and father in verdant Stratford, our man feels squeezed by his domestic responsibilities, unable to bear down and scribe while there’s so much sun-dappled frolicking about; he gets himself to a flat in London, while his wife, Agnes (Jessie Buckley), holds down the fort with their three children. In the city, Will has a room of his own, and time enough at last. He pauses, he struggles, he searches inwardly for le mot juste. He gazes out over the water, wondering: To be or not to be?

Sadly, Will isn’t shown eating breakfast, as per O’Farrell, or drowning his sorrows in a bar with Christopher Marlowe as he did in Shakespeare in Love, the upper-middlebrow crowd-pleaser to which Zhao’s exercise in Elizabethan fan fiction plays as a melodramatic companion piece. Shakespeare in Love was a featherweight romantic fantasy, and a skillful one; no less than Harold Bloom conceded its merits as a neatly brocaded time waster. “I mustn’t snipe,” he told Newsweek in 1999 after watching the film on VHS, “because this is a charming movie. It does capture ‘Romeo and Juliet.’ And that I think is the glory of it.”

Charm is not on the docket in Hamnet, although it does have similar aspirations to award-season glory. Coming off the blockbuster debacle of Marvel’s Eternals—a suboptimal follow-up to the gritty, independently produced best picture winner Nomadland—Zhao has returned with serious intentions. Hamnet is a swing for the fences and, as such, determinedly lugubrious from beginning to end: a litany of furrowed brows and primal screams, awash in blood and sweat and other precious bodily fluids.

O’Farrell subtitled her book A Novel of the Plague, and the story is tinged with death at every turn; the premise, which she devised during her time at Cambridge, is that certain key characters and themes in Hamlet were directly inspired by a fugue of grief.

During his sojourn in London, Will learns that his 11-year-old daughter, Judith (played in the film by Olivia Lynes), has contracted the Black Death, and he rushes home to be at her bedside. Upon his arrival, he’s overjoyed to find Judith healthy, and then in the same breath devastated to learn that her twin brother, Hamnet (Jacobi Jupe), had been fatally infected and passed away in the night. The siblings had always liked to playfully trade places around the house, in order to trick their parents; in his final hours, Hamnet held his ailing sister close and told her that he’d die in her stead. To quote the Bard himself: “If you have tears, prepare to shed them now.”

That Shakespeare fathered a child called Hamnet who died before Shakespeare wrote Hamlet is a reliably concrete detail that’s been passed back and forth over the years by scholars and biographers. It’s ultimately little more than a footnote, but O’Farrell deploys it industriously, as a means of collapsing the historical and rhetorical distance between us and an impossibly famous subject, and as a skeleton key unlocking his genius. (The book has sold over two million copies, a total likely to be juiced by fresh copies featuring Mescal’s hangdog-handsome mug.)

Of course, to attempt to reduce a work as complex as Hamlet to a single thesis—or to a sliver of tidy art-imitates-life exposition—is a fool’s errand. (The best writing inspired by Hamlet recognizes this: Tom Stoppard’s superlatively absurd play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, for instance, honors Hamlet’s spaciousness by constructing an entire parallel narrative on its margins.) Still, there is something genuinely elegant in the way Hamnet navigates Hamlet’s labyrinths of self-reflexivity. O’Farrell’s setup effectively echoes Hamlet’s plan, which is to “catch the conscience” of his uncle—to determine whether his uncle is guilty of murdering his father—by making his uncle watch a play about a similar crime; in Hamnet, the task is to search Shakespeare’s own conscience by retracing the creation and performance of Hamlet itself. With a central character so preoccupied by mournful self-incrimination, the play’s existentialist textures of angst and indecision, as well as its morbid inventory of familial betrayal and flawed father figures, carry a potent charge of survivor’s guilt.

“Never take for granted that your children’s hearts beat,” says Will’s mother, Mary (Emily Watson), in a portentous monologue ported over wholesale from the book. What Zhao’s film seeks to dramatize, in as much sound and fury as humanly possible, is what it might feel like for a parent to internalize that lesson, and how those emotions might then be wrangled and channeled in the service of some larger and enduring act of artistic catharsis.

In her first two features, Songs My Brothers Taught Me (2015) and The Rider (2017), Zhao worked primarily with nonprofessional performers (including several residents of a Sioux reservation in South Dakota), cultivating a persuasive (and trendy) sense of hybridity. She repeated—and complicated—that tactic in Nomadland (2020), which dropped no less than Her Majesty Frances McDormand among a carefully curated menagerie of everyday folks in the hope that her performance as a self-styled drifter, chasing a seasonal gig at an Amazon fulfillment center, might duly absorb the salt of the earth.

Hamnet is the director’s first period piece, and while the glancing, magic-hour lyricism of the cinematography (by the excellent Łukasz Żal, who shot The Zone of Interest) connects it to its predecessors, Mescal’s and Buckley’s performances exist in a new register. Instead of trying to penetrate the hardened exteriors of amateur actors—or coaxing an old pro to act natural—Zhao means to steer two thoroughbred thespians through the cinematic equivalent of the Preakness. Buckley’s Agnes is first seen curled up in a muddy hollow—literally tree-hugging—linking her in the film’s meticulously on-the-nose imagery with capital-N Nature; if it’s possible to overact lonely repose, Buckley’s body language fits the bill. It’s not her fault: Hamnet is so determined to establish Agnes as an elemental presence—with quasi-uncanny psychic abilities, a gorgeous pet falcon, and a nasty fairy-tale stepmother to match—that it pushes a technically brilliant actress perilously into the realm of Gaia-ish caricature.

What makes Buckley remarkable in her best roles is her quality of emotional translucence, the way her feelings seem to burn through her skin. Here, though, the temperature has been jacked up so that her gestures and line readings all more or less melt together, while Mescal—after Aftersun, the millennial patron saint of on-screen Sad Dads—tries to compensate with a coolness that, while exquisitely shaded in places, succeeds mainly in making Will a sloe-eyed cipher. Both actors make something of the aftermath of Hamnet’s death, reproducing the stark and telling contrasts of behavior in O’Farrell’s novel, with Buckley inhabiting the omniscient narrator’s observation that “there are many different ways to cry … the sudden outpouring of tears, the deep, racking sobs, the soundless and endless leaking of water from the eyes” and Mescal deftly approximating Will’s reaction upon seeing the body: “the sound that comes out of him is choked and smothered, like that of an animal forced to bear a great weight.”

It’s hard not to be affected by moments like these, or by how Zhao visualizes the dying Hamnet in limbo: wandering a bare stage, wondering aloud where he’s gone, before exiting through a darkened portal. The sheer ferocity of Hamnet’s assault is an achievement of sorts, and yet the boundary between humane empathy and award-baiting shamelessness—a tightrope walked by many great artists, and also plenty of dubious ones—keeps blurring. Part of the problem is that Will and Agnes’s odd-couple, star-crossed courtship and subsequent bucolic family life are presented with such rib-nudging ominousness—the kids arrayed playfully as the witches from Macbeth; the death of the aforementioned family falcon—that things feel heightened (and phony) before the arrival of a paradigm-shifting trauma. Meanwhile, on a formal level, Zhao never stops pummeling us. The use of Max Richter’s luminous composition “On the Nature of Daylight” gives the game away; the piece is such a musical cheat code that pretty much any auteur with a Spotify account has used it, so that when we’re supposed to be gripped by the climactic-performance-within-the-film of Hamlet, we’re remembering money shots from Arrival and The Last of Us instead.

It’s not too much of a spoiler to reveal that Agnes—at this point estranged from her husband, having been heartbroken by his decision to return to work on his opus instead of staying behind to mourn—is front row center at the premiere of Hamlet, or that the film’s structure obliges us to see the play via a kind of dual vision: through our own collective familiarity with what is basically a secular myth—a relocated Greek tragedy with Freud waiting in the wings to analyze it—and through Agnes’s anguished, gradually widening eyes as she comes to understand the true nature of her husband’s achievement, which was to locate and resurrect their son so that he might be bestowed on the world, as a gift.

Whether or not you buy the underlying cause-and-effect psychology, it’s a lovely idea, and so is the staging whereby the company’s boyish, too-too-fragile Hamlet (Noah Jupe) reaches out—beyond the stage directions, and, by extension, from the realm of fiction into the reality it shadows—to commune with one particularly stricken audience member. It’s grand, it’s ambitious, and it works, maybe in spite of itself; though this be corniness, “yet there is method in ’t.”

Nope, Billionaire Tom Steyer Is Not a Bellwether of Climate Politics - 2025-12-12T11:00:00Z

What should we make of billionaire Tom Steyer’s reinvention as a populist candidate for California governor, four years after garnering only 0.72 percent of the popular vote in the 2020 Democratic presidential primary, despite obscene spending from his personal fortune? Is it evidence that he’s a hard man to discourage? (In that race, he dropped almost $24 million on South Carolina alone.) Is it evidence that billionaires get to do a lot of things the rest of us don’t? Or is it evidence that talking about climate change is for losers and Democrats need to abandon it?

Politico seems to think it’s the third one: Steyer running a populist gubernatorial campaign means voters don’t care about global warming.

“The billionaire environmental activist who built his political profile on climate change—and who wrote in his book last year that ‘climate is what matters most right now, and nothing else comes close’—didn’t mention the issue once in the video launching his campaign for California governor,” reporter Noah Baustin wrote recently. “That was no oversight.” Instead, “it reflects a political reality confronting Democrats ahead of the midterms, where onetime climate evangelists are running into an electorate more worried about the climbing cost of electricity bills and home insurance than a warming atmosphere.”

It’s hard to know how to parse a sentence like this. The “climbing cost of electricity bills and home insurance” is, indisputably, a climate issue. Renewable energy is cheaper than fossil fuels, and home insurance is spiking because increasingly frequent and increasingly severe weather events—driven by climate change—are making large swaths of the country expensive or impossible to insure. The fact that voters are struggling to pay for utilities and insurance, therefore, is not evidence that they don’t care about climate change. Instead, it’s evidence that climate change is a kitchen table issue, and politicians are, disadvantageously, failing to embrace the obviously populist message that accompanies robust climate policy. This is a problem with Democratic messaging, not a problem with climate as a topic.

The piece goes on: “Climate concern has fallen in the state over time. In 2018, when Gov. Gavin Newsom was running for office, polling found that 57 percent of likely California voters considered climate change a very serious threat to the economy and quality of life for the state’s future. Now, that figure is 50 percent.”

This may sound persuasive to you. But in fact, it’s a highly selective reading of the PPIC survey data linked above. What the poll actually found is that the proportion of Californians calling climate change a “very serious” threat peaked at 57 percent in 2019, fell slightly in subsequent years, then fell precipitously by 11 points between July 2022 and July 2023, before rising similarly precipitously from July 2024 to July 2025.

Why did it fall so quickly from 2022 to 2023? Sure, maybe people stopped caring about climate change. Or maybe instead, the month after the 2022 poll, Congress passed the Inflation Reduction Act, the most significant climate policy in U.S. history, and people stopped being quite so worried. Why did concern then rise rapidly between July 2024 and July 2025? Well, between those two dates, Trump won the presidential election and proceeded, along with Republicans in Congress, to dismantle anything remotely resembling climate policy. The Inflation Reduction Act fell apart.

I’m not saying this is the only way to read this data. But consider this: The percentage of respondents saying they were somewhat or very worried about members of their household being affected by natural disasters actually went up over the same period. The percentage saying air pollution was “a more serious health threat in lower-income areas” nearby went up. Those saying flooding, heat waves, and wildfires should be considered “a great deal” when siting new affordable housing rose a striking 12 percentage points from 2024 to 2025, and those “very concerned” about rising insurance costs “due to climate risks” rose 14 percentage points.

This is not a portrait of an electorate that doesn’t care about climate change. It’s a portrait of an electorate that may actually be very ready to hear a politician convincingly embrace climate populism—championing affordability and better material conditions for working people, in part by protecting them from the predatory industries driving a cost-of-living crisis while poisoning people.

This is part of a broader problem. Currently, there’s a big push from centrist Democratic institutions to argue that the party should abandon climate issues in order to win elections. The evidence for this is mixed, at best. As TNR’s Liza Featherstone recently pointed out, Democrats’ striking victories last month showed that candidates fusing climate policy with an energy affordability message did very well. Aaron Regunberg went into further detail on why talking about climate change is a smart strategy: “Right now,” he wrote, “neither party has a significant trust advantage on ‘electric utility bills’ (D+1) or ‘the cost of living’ (R+1). But Democrats do have major trust advantages on ‘climate change’ (D+14) and ‘renewable energy development’ (D+6). By articulating how their climate and clean energy agenda can address these bread-and-butter concerns, Democrats can leverage their advantage on climate to win voters’ trust on what will likely be the most significant issues in 2026 and 2028.”

One of the troubles with climate change in political discourse is that some people’s understanding of environmental politics begins and ends with the spotted owl logging battles in the 1990s. This is the sort of attitude that drives the assumption that affordability policy and climate policy are not only distinct but actually opposed. But that’s wildly disconnected from present reality.

Maybe Tom Steyer isn’t the guy to illustrate that! But his political fortunes, either way, don’t say much at all about climate messaging more broadly.

Stat of the Week
3x as many infant deaths

A new study finds that babies of mothers “whose drinking water wells were downstream of PFAS releases” died at almost three times the rate in their first year of life as babies of mothers who did not live downstream of PFAS contamination. Read The Washington Post’s report on the study here.

What I’m Reading

More than 200 environmental groups demand halt to new US datacenters

An open letter calls on Congress to pause all approvals of new data centers until regulation catches up, due to problems such as data centers’ voracious energy consumption, greenhouse gas emissions, and water use. From The Guardian’s report:

The push comes amid a growing revolt against moves by companies such as Meta, Google and Open AI to plow hundreds of billions of dollars into new datacenters, primarily to meet the huge computing demands of AI. At least 16 datacenter projects, worth a combined $64bn, have been blocked or delayed due to local opposition to rising electricity costs. The facilities’ need for huge amounts of water to cool down equipment has also proved controversial, particularly in drier areas where supplies are scarce.

These seemingly parochial concerns have now multiplied to become a potent political force, helping propel Democrats to a series of emphatic recent electoral successes in governor elections in Virginia and New Jersey as well as a stunning upset win in a special public service commission poll in Georgia, with candidates campaigning on lowering power bill costs and curbing datacenters.

Read Oliver Milman’s full report at The Guardian.

This article first appeared in Life in a Warming World, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by deputy editor Heather Souvaine Horn. Sign up here.

Candace Owens, Tucker Carlson, Nick Fuentes: What Could Go Wrong? - 2025-12-12T11:00:00Z

The plot in MAGA-ville is thicker than a holiday fruitcake, but far-right influencers are still stirring in more intrigue.

On Tuesday, the demagogue podcaster Candace Owens, who has some nine million followers across X, YouTube, and Instagram, posted the 2025 equivalent of a Q drop: “Today will be the day that the government can no longer deny it. Charlie Kirk was assassinated and our military was involved.”

This j’accuse moment was inevitable.

For months, Owens, whose forte is antisemitic hatemongering, has claimed that President Trump, a “chronic disappointment,” is sold out to Israel, which is blackmailing him over the Epstein files. Kirk, she alleges, was killed in a Pentagon-Mossad plot because he had privately turned on Israel. As part of this farrago, Owens alleges that Turning Point USA, Charlie Kirk’s right-wing activist organization, played Judas to Kirk’s Christ, was complicit in his murder, and is thoroughly corrupt. The corruption allegation got a boost last month when a former senior TPUSA official was convicted of election fraud.

Coming in for Owens’s particular enmity is Erika Kirk, Charlie’s widow and now TPUSA’s chief executive. Owens, who has called herself Charlie’s best friend and sister, now believes Erika is covering for TPUSA and “this is why” people doubt “women are equipped to lead companies.” Last week, Owens seemed to troll Erika by reminiscing about Charlie’s single days, which led right-wing influencer Scarlett Johnson to call Owens a “cruel Jezebel.” This might sound like Hunting Wives–worthy sniping, except that Trump’s Treasury Department took the time last week to assure Erika Kirk that it would not investigate TPUSA, and TPUSA invited Owens to a much-hyped livestream scheduled for next Monday to discuss her allegations against … the entire world.

Oh, but the Hunting Husbands would like a word. Neo-Nazi Nick Fuentes is beefing with Owens, whom he has called, with unexpected gender fluidity, an “Uncle Tom.” Though Fuentes shares Owens’s hatred of Jews, he believes his Hitlerian views are intellectually superior to Owens’s: “Low-IQ antisemitism has a name, and its name is Candace Owens.” Also on Tuesday, Fuentes told Piers Morgan that “women are very difficult to be around,” and thus he has never had sex. “No, absolutely not,” Fuentes told Morgan. Far-right pepperpot Tucker Carlson recently told Theo Von, another podcasting pepperpot, that, while he’s not saying the FBI killed Charlie Kirk, he is saying the FBI lies, manufactures evidence, and somehow ran January 6 as a political op.

While Trump, as he approaches 80, struggles with late-life cognitive challenges, and seems to have made a permanent home in the mumbletank, younger agitators like Owens, Fuentes, Carlson, and Von are doing more to lay waste to MAGA than any Democrat could have dreamed of.

But if liberals see Owens, in particular, as exposing MAGA’s fault lines, the right seems to turn to her for catharsis. As host of Candace, Spotify’s fourth-biggest news (yes, news) podcast—solidly ahead of The Wall Street Journal, Pod Save America, and Ben Shapiro—she serves as a release valve for the pent-up narrative hysteria that was last seen in the salad days of QAnon, when a woolly demonology fractalized into worldwide madness. The madness, you’ll recall, climaxed with the January 6, 2021, insurrection, after which QAnon’s shadowy leader, “Q” (widely thought to be Ron Watkins, co-owner of hate site 8chan, which hosted child porn, and son of Jim Watkins, who ran other child porn sites), mostly vanished. What were amped crusaders against cannibalistic child molesters to do with their righteous fury?

Kirk’s assassination on September 10 gave them an angle. Fuentes, who considered Kirk his sworn enemy, was at first relieved at the Owens fearmongering, as it (1) was rabidly antisemitic and (2) got the target off his own back. Carlson, by contrast, who has platformed Nick Fuentes and agrees with him on many antisemitic points, said on his own show Wednesday, “I love Candace Owens.” (He further professed love for TPUSA executive Blake Neff, an Ivy grad who once worked for Carlson before he was fired for saying racist things too racist for Fox News.) An important part of world building for these influencers involves populating their conspiracy galaxy with telegenic influencers so they can beef, form alliances, and comment on each other’s beefs and alliances.

It’s been three months since Kirk’s assassination. From day one, it would have stood to reason if Kirk’s supporters had focused their ire on the actual suspect in the murder, a single white male of muddy politics and muddier motives. But no. They seem to have blown right past Tyler Robinson, who to little fanfare made his first in-person court appearance Thursday. Instead, to the fevered mind, someone else, someone much more powerful and exciting than Robinson, must have done it. Go big or go home: It’s the military, the FBI, Trump himself.

The culprit has thus become a hyperobject, a miasma that encompasses everything except the actual suspect. It has implicated whole governments, of course, but also the Macrons of France and Erika Kirk’s jewelry. It’s murder on the Orient Express, then, where the train is the Trump train and its tracks are an infinity, crisscrossing the known galaxy.

Dip into even one of these mind-blowingly popular podcasts by Owens, Fuentes, Von, Carlson, or TPUSA, where Americans now get their news, and you’d have a hard time telling that Fox News is still on the air and Trump is still in the White House. (Fox & Friends, the Fox News showpiece, has about 1.3 million viewers, while each episode of Candace gets more than twice as many downloads: 3.6 million.) Some very insane people have formed an informational junta, spinning far-reaching folklore that will continue to beguile vulnerable minds long after Trump is gone.

For liberals who like democracy and fret about the state of journalism, the good news is that Trump-worshipping MAGA media is on the wane. The bad news is everything else.

John Roberts and the Cynical Cult of Federalist No. 70 - 2025-12-12T11:00:00Z

Last year, the Supreme Court’s conservative majority ruled that the president of the United States had “absolute” criminal immunity for his “official acts,” as well as lesser degrees of immunity for other acts committed while president. This decision in Trump v. United States came under widespread and withering criticism from the dissenting justices and ordinary Americans alike.

“The relationship between the president and the people he serves has shifted irrevocably,” Justice Sonia Sotomayor warned in her dissenting opinion. “In every use of official power, the president is now a king above the law.”

Only a handful of people—other than Trump himself and his lawyers, of course—celebrated the ruling in full on its merits. Among them was Kevin Roberts, the president of the far-right Heritage Foundation and the overseer of Project 2025, the manifesto that essentially became the second Trump administration’s governing blueprint. He argued that the court’s ruling had not defied American political thought but rather echoed it.

“The Supreme Court ruling yesterday on immunity is vital, and it’s vital for a lot of reasons,” Roberts claimed. “But I would go to Federalist No. 70. If people in the audience are looking for something to read over Independence Day weekend, in addition to rereading the Declaration of Independence, read Hamilton’s No. 70 because there, along with some other essays, he talks about the importance of an energetic executive.”

Federalist Number 70 is one of 85 essays written by three of the Framers—Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay—to defend and promote the new Constitution during the ratification debates in 1788. Almost 250 years later, it may be the most important one in terms of today’s political landscape—in large part because its proponents have used and misused it to do so much damage to our constitutional order.

No. 70, which was written by Hamilton and focuses on the nature of the presidency, is perhaps the central text for those who advocate for the “unitary executive” theory. Their choice is somewhat understandable: Hamilton argues forcefully for creating a presidency with one officeholder instead of a “plural executive,” as could have been found in some states and foreign republics at the time.

This basic fact about our constitutional structure—that we have one American president instead of two Roman consuls, five Napoleonic directors, or so on—is unquestioned today. Nobody is arguing for a second or third president. (One is quite enough at the moment.) Unitary executive theory proponents, however, take a skewed view of the text, instead using it to exalt the executive branch as the one true representative of the people’s will, while downplaying legislative authority and legitimacy.

The Supreme Court’s invocation of No. 70 has been increasingly frequent—and increasingly disastrous. In addition to the immunity ruling, the conservative justices have invoked it to justify broad interpretations of executive power and authority. Perhaps the most common adjective drawn from No. 70 is that the Constitution created an “energetic” executive branch that would be capable of vigorously enforcing the nation’s laws. This understanding is one with which Hamilton would likely agree, since he described “energy in the executive” as “a leading character in the definition of good government.”

“It is essential to the protection of the community against foreign attacks,” Hamilton continued; “it is not less essential to the steady administration of the laws; to the protection of property against those irregular and high-handed combinations which sometimes interrupt the ordinary course of justice; to the security of liberty against the enterprises and assaults of ambition, of faction, and of anarchy.”

This was not an abstract problem for Hamilton and his contemporaries. The Framers gathered at the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia to address the defects of the Articles of Confederation, the nation’s first postrevolutionary form of government. Foremost among its many defects were the lack of an executive branch to enforce the Congress of the Confederation’s laws and a federal judiciary to interpret them.

Civil unrest, most notably Shays’s Rebellion in 1786, was the “anarchy” that led Hamilton and other Framers to propose an executive branch that could readily respond to crises and enforce the laws. “A feeble Executive implies a feeble execution of the government,” he wrote. “A feeble execution is but another phrase for a bad execution; and a government ill executed, whatever it may be in theory, must be, in practice, a bad government.”

Hamilton described an “energetic” executive as one that possessed four traits: unity, duration, an “adequate provision for its support,” and “competent powers.” At the same time, he was equally sensitive to fears that a president could be a dictator or a threat to liberty. He explained that “safety in the republican sense” would come from a “due dependence on the people” and a “due responsibility.”

The American presidency, he explained, met these conditions. There would be one president instead of multiple executives. He would serve a four-year term, more than the three years served by the governors of New York, where the Federalist Papers were first published, but far less than the life tenure of a British king. (Hamilton also explained how republican liberty could be secured, but we’ll return to that a little later.)

Unitary executive theorists love to invoke the “energetic” portion to explain why the president should not be encumbered with restraints from Congress or the judiciary. John Yoo, a conservative legal scholar who served in the George W. Bush administration, wrote a 2001 memo arguing for broad presidential war powers after the 9/11 attacks that rejected Congress’s exclusive power to authorize military operations.

“‘Decision, activity, secrecy, and dispatch will generally characterize the proceedings of one man in a much more eminent degree than the proceedings of any greater number,’” he wrote, quoting from No. 70. “The centralization of authority in the president alone is particularly crucial in matters of national defense, war, and foreign policy choices, where a unitary executive can evaluate threats, consider policy choices, and mobilize national resources with a speed and energy that is far superior to any other branch.”

It is worth emphasizing here that No. 70 is not really about the separation of powers, except insofar as it discusses the executive branch’s powers in great detail. Yoo’s quotation of “proceedings of any greater number” might read as if it were referring to Congress, given the context of Yoo’s memo. In reality, Hamilton didn’t have the legislative branch in mind at all. Rather, he was responding to Anti-Federalist concerns about the presidency and public suggestions that a plural executive would work better.

This feat of textual sleight of hand is one thing when done in a White House memo. It is something else entirely when the misapprehended text is subsequently applied by the Supreme Court. In 2020, the Supreme Court struck down the for-cause removal protections that Congress had established for the director of the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau in Seila Law v. CFPB. Chief Justice John Roberts, writing for the majority, expounded at length upon how the Constitution divided power.

“In addition to being a historical anomaly, the CFPB’s single-director configuration is incompatible with our constitutional structure,” Roberts wrote for the court. “Aside from the sole exception of the presidency, that structure scrupulously avoids concentrating power in the hands of any single individual.” This was relevant because when the court had previously upheld removal protections, they had only applied to multimember boards like the Federal Trade Commission. Here, Hamilton’s concerns about a plural executive are reasonably relevant.

Along the way, however, Chief Justice Roberts laid out what might be his most comprehensive explanation for how he sees the Constitution’s separation of powers. First, he noted that the Framers had divided power in the legislative branch by creating a House of Representatives and a Senate. Then he noted that the executive branch was “a stark departure from all this division,” suggesting that it held some special role in the constitutional order. This special role came at Congress’s expense.

“The Framers viewed the legislative power as a special threat to individual liberty, so they divided that power to ensure that ‘differences of opinion’ and the ‘jarrings of parties’ would ‘promote deliberation and circumspection’ and ‘check excesses in the majority,’” he wrote, quoting at length from No. 70. “By contrast, the Framers thought it necessary to secure the authority of the Executive so that he could carry out his unique responsibilities.”

It may surprise you to discover that this isn’t what Hamilton really meant in Federalist No. 70. Hamilton indeed wrote all the quoted portions in the above excerpt, but he was plainly not describing the “legislative power” as a “special threat to individual liberty.” That anti-parliamentary gloss comes entirely from Chief Justice Roberts.

In No. 70, when discussing the merits of a plural executive versus a single executive, Hamilton discussed human nature at length. “Wherever two or more persons are engaged in a common enterprise or pursuit, there is always danger of difference of opinion,” he wrote. If two or more people hold a public office, there is the risk of “animosity” and “bitter dissensions.”

If these tendencies afflict and divide a nation’s plural executive, Hamilton warned, “they might impede or frustrate the most important measures of the government, in the most critical emergencies of the state.” Worse still, he claimed, such divisions could “split the community into the most violent and irreconcilable factions, adhering differently to the different individuals who composed the magistracy” and lead to civil war.

Upon the principles of a free government, Hamilton continued, these divisions “must necessarily be submitted to in the formation of the legislature,” but he opined that it would be “unnecessary, and therefore unwise, to introduce them into the constitution of the executive.”

This is where his discussion turns to what Chief Justice Roberts (mis)quoted. “It is here too that [divisions] may be most pernicious,” Hamilton wrote. “In the legislature, promptitude of decision is oftener an evil than a benefit. The differences of opinion, and the jarrings of parties in that department of the government, though they may sometimes obstruct salutary plans, yet often promote deliberation and circumspection, and serve to check excesses in the majority.”

In no way does Hamilton use these observations of human nature to claim that the legislative branch is a “special threat to individual liberty,” as Roberts suggests. What may be unavoidable and perhaps sometimes even beneficial for a legislature, Hamilton warned, would only be disastrous for the executive. “No favorable circumstances palliate or atone for the disadvantages of dissension in the executive department,” he wrote, warning that they “constantly counteract” the “vigor and expedition” that he saw necessary to a functional executive branch.

In his Seila Law opinion, Chief Justice Roberts went on to cite No. 70 in piecemeal fashion to explain how the Framers structured the executive branch. “They chose not to bog the Executive down with the ‘habitual feebleness and dilatoriness’ that comes with a ‘diversity of views and opinions,’” Roberts wrote. “Instead, they gave the Executive the ‘decision, activity, secrecy, and dispatch’ that ‘characterise the proceedings of one man.’

“To justify and check that authority—unique in our constitutional structure—the Framers made the president the most democratic and politically accountable official in government,” Roberts claimed. “Only the president (along with the vice president) is elected by the entire nation. And the president’s political accountability is enhanced by the solitary nature of the executive branch, which provides ‘a single object for the jealousy and watchfulness of the people.’”

Roberts is only partially correct here. The president’s political accountability for the executive branch is indisputable, as best summarized by Harry Truman’s “the buck stops here” mantra. But the presidency’s democratic nature is a more recent and debatable trend. Almost half of the states that elected George Washington to his first term in 1788 did so through legislative appointment. Americans then and now vote for presidential electors to cast ballots in the Electoral College, which sometimes chooses the second-place candidate to lead the nation.

Congress, on the other hand, is entirely elected by Americans—the House since 1792 and the Senate since 1914. So crucial is its elective and national nature that Article 1 goes into great detail about when and how the House’s members would be elected. As I’ve noted before, Congress’s actual powers speak clearly about the paramount role that it would play once the Constitution was ratified.

The Roberts court’s habitual disdain for Congress and its reflexive tendency toward hyperpresidentialism led to its decision in Trump v. United States. There it declared, for the first and only time in two and a half centuries, that the president was above the law. Short of rejecting democratic governance altogether, it is hard to imagine a greater heresy against the American constitutional order.

There is, obviously, no “presidential immunity clause” in the Constitution. The conservative justices’ un-originalist efforts to imagine one into it cannot be supported by text or history. Invoking No. 70 was a key portion of Roberts’s case for its functional necessity. The executive branch would be severely weakened, the chief justice wrote, if presidents could face prosecution after leaving office.

“[The Framers] deemed an energetic executive essential to ‘the protection of the community against foreign attacks,’ ‘the steady administration of the laws,’ ‘the protection of property,’ and ‘the security of liberty,’” Roberts wrote in the immunity ruling. “The purpose of a ‘vigorous’ and ‘energetic’ Executive, they thought, was to ensure ‘good government,’ for a ‘feeble executive implies a feeble execution of the government.’”

Federalist No. 70 is also not the only place where the Framers discussed the presidency. In Federalist No. 69, for example, Hamilton sought to rebut both critics and concerned citizens who feared that the Constitution would create a kingly dictator. To distinguish the two, he pointed first to ways in which they can be held accountable.

Hamilton noted that the king of Great Britain is “sacred and inviolable” under the law and that there is “no punishment to which he can be subjected without involving the crisis of a national revolution.” This was likely meant as a reference to the fate of Charles I, who lost the English Civil War in the 1640s and was subsequently tried and executed by Parliament.

American presidents, Hamilton explained, could be deposed without such extraordinary measures. The president “would be liable to be impeached, tried, and, upon conviction of treason, bribery, or other high crimes or misdemeanors, removed from office; and would afterwards be liable to prosecution and punishment in the ordinary course of law.” Sotomayor pointed specifically to this passage in her dissent from the immunity ruling.

Roberts, in his majority opinion, brushed off this evidence—and other indications that the president did not possess some special form of legal immunity—without engaging with it. “Some of [the Sotomayor dissent’s] cherry-picked sources do not even discuss the president in particular,” he claimed, referring to citations of the Constitutional Convention’s debates. On Federalist No. 69 in particular, the chief justice claimed that it did not “indicate whether [the president] may be prosecuted for his official conduct.”

It is worth dwelling on Roberts’s interpretation a little further because it illustrates the magnitude of his—and the court’s—error. Here we have a direct statement from Hamilton that says the president can be held “liable to prosecution and punishment in the ordinary course of law.” This is no mere stray thought or idle observation; he explicitly mentions it in the context of the British king’s own sovereign immunity.

Roberts says this statement carries no weight because it sheds no light on whether the president can be prosecuted for his “official conduct.” This is plainly wrong. Hamilton argued against a plural executive in No. 70 in part because he believed that it would be more difficult to ascribe blame to officials—and thus subsequently hold them accountable—if they abused their powers.

Some historical republics had divided power among multiple high magistrates, most famously pre-imperial Rome. Hamilton disfavored this approach because it “tends to deprive the people of the two greatest securities they can have for the faithful exercise of any delegated power.” One of those securities was the “restraints of public opinion,” which “lose their efficacy” if blame is diffused between multiple people.

The other security was the “opportunity of discovering with facility and clearness the misconduct of the persons they trust, in order either to their removal from office or to their actual punishment in cases which admit of it.” In short, Roberts claimed that criminal immunity was necessary for the unitary executive to operate. Hamilton, however, made clear that one reason for having a single president was to make it easier to prosecute abuses of power—or, as Roberts would refer to them, “official acts.”

Federalist No. 70 will likely continue to be a key force in the Supreme Court’s rulings on behalf of the Trump administration in the years ahead. Its invocation in Seila Law means No. 70 will almost certainly be used by the court to justify overturning Humphrey’s Executor in the Federal Trade Commission dismissal case later this term, for example. Hamiltonian quotes might also be used to justify Trump’s deployment of the National Guard or other extraordinary uses of executive power.

Nonetheless, I can only echo the Heritage Foundation’s call to reread No. 70 whenever the Supreme Court cites it. Americans will be easily able to glean Hamilton’s actual intent: to explain how and why their new presidency could be held accountable to the popular will and constrained by the rule of law. No amount of “cherry-picking,” as the chief justice so aptly put it, can change that.

Trump Rages at Cratering Polls as GOP Losses Reveal Surprise Weakness - 2025-12-12T10:00:00Z

President Trump erupted Thursday in a wild rage on Truth Social in which he appeared to blame pollsters for failing to register his world-historical success. “When will Polls reflect the Greatness of America at this point in time?” he fumed, apparently mindful of the latest news of his cratering poll numbers. Notably, this comes just after Democrats scored big wins in the Miami mayoral race and elsewhere, which analysts see as a sign that the Latino vote is shifting hard away from Trump. Not coincidentally, a new poll has Trump’s approval on immigration plunging below 40 percent. We talked to William Saletan, staff writer at The Bulwark, about his great new piece on Trump’s open agenda of ethnic persecution. We discuss the relationship between Trump’s racism and his unpopularity, what the latest GOP losses show about the collapse of the MAGA coalition, what to make of the GOP’s open embrace of full-bore ethnonationalism, and why it’s (somewhat) heartening that the public is rejecting it so decisively. Listen to this episode here. A transcript is here.

White House Struggles to Defend Trump Idea to Limit Kids’ Presents - 2025-12-11T21:41:59Z

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt lost it Thursday when CNN’s Kaitlan Collins quoted President Trump’s own statements on the economy and Christmas.

“If the economy is as strong as the president has said it is, then why is he telling parents two weeks before Christmas that they should only buy two or three dolls for their children?” Collins asked, referring to Trump’s comments at a rally in Pennsylvania Tuesday, in which the president told a Mount Pocono crowd, “You don’t need 37 dolls for your daughter. Two or three is nice. You don’t need 37 dolls.”

Leavitt tried to deflect, saying that Trump actually meant that he wants products made in America by American small businesses, even if they cost more, because Americans would get a better-quality product and would be supporting their fellow Americans.

“Again, with respect to affordability, every economic metric, Kaitlan, and I wish you would report more on it, does in fact show that the economy is getting better and brighter than where it was under the previous administration,” Leavitt added, specifically pointing to inflation, real wages, and gas prices.

Collins: If the economy is as strong as the president has said it is, why is he telling parents two weeks before Christmas that they should only buy two or three dolls for their children? pic.twitter.com/NEbtTnEY64

— Acyn (@Acyn) December 11, 2025

Collins pressed further, pointing out that grocery prices have been up, but Leavitt kept repeating that inflation was down and that the press didn’t report on the high levels of inflation under President Biden.

“My predecessor stood up at this podium and she said inflation doesn’t exist. She said the border was secure, and people like you just took her at her word, and those were two utter lies. Everything I’m telling you is the truth backed by real factual data, and you just don’t want to report on it because you want to push untrue narratives about the president,” Leavitt said.

Kaitlan Collins pushes Leavitt on her gaslighting about the economy. Leavitt ends by accusing her of wanting to "push untrue narratives about the president" pic.twitter.com/vc6509xbGY

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) December 11, 2025

Leavitt’s replies did nothing to explain why Trump would tell people to settle for less this holiday season. At his Pennsylvania rally, the president was repeating comments he made in the spring to try and explain away the impact his tariffs were having on consumer goods. But back then, as well as this week, his comments only raised more questions about the economic health of the U.S., and no amount of bluster by his staff can shut those questions down.

Trump Wants People to Submit DNA Just to Get a Tourist Visa - 2025-12-11T21:25:17Z

Want to visit the United States? Customs and Border Patrol will make you submit your social media history—and your family history and DNA too.

In an 11-page notice published in the Federal Register on Wednesday, CBP outlined several proposed changes to the Electronic System for Travel Authorization, or ESTA, which screens and approves applicants traveling into the United States through the Visa Waiver Program.

Under the new rules, social media would become a “mandatory data element” for ESTA applications, and all applicants would be required to submit a social media history going back five years. But that’s not all.

The notice also said that it would add several “high value data fields” to the ESTA application, including “biometrics.” Examples listed were face, fingerprint, iris, and even DNA.

The Department of Homeland Security announced in November that it would begin uniformly collecting facial biometrics from all noncitizens upon entry and exit to the United States, removing prior exemptions for some travelers. In the new rules, CBP states that applicants, including third parties applying on an individual’s behalf, would be required to provide a “selfie” of the applicant’s face in addition to their passport photo.

Other “high value data fields” include information about applicants’ family members, their names, phone numbers, and addresses, as well as when and where they were born.

Travelers would also be prompted to submit their personal and business telephone numbers used in the last five years, and email addresses used in the last 10 years.

Kristi Noem Literally Runs Out of House Hearing to Avoid Dem Questions - 2025-12-11T20:20:25Z

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem abruptly ended her time before the House Homeland Security Committee Thursday, angering lawmakers by stepping away from the hot seat to attend a highly anticipated meeting on the future of FEMA.

Except that meeting never happened.

The FEMA hearing was scheduled to take place at 1 p.m. Noem was reportedly informed at 12:26 p.m. that it had been canceled, a DHS spokesperson told The Hill.

Just minutes before receiving that notification, Noem told the committee, “I have to actually leave this hearing early, because the FEMA Review Council is giving their report today on suggestions for changes to FEMA.

“I have to co-chair it, but I will be leaving soon to have to go do that,” she mentioned while responding to a question about FEMA’s distribution of funds.

Noem left shortly afterward, before Democratic Representative Julie Johnson had a chance to grill Noem herself. In response, Johnson made a comment that summed up her caucus’s collective reaction to the ICE captain’s time on Capitol Hill.

“I’m just going to take the position that she was scared of my questions,” Johnson quipped.

But rather than return to the hearing, which continued for a couple more hours, Noem simply … left.

It’s not a good time for Noem to be scurrying away from her responsibilities. In a drastic turn of events, Donald Trump is reportedly considering replacing Noem with outbound Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin, a decision that would make Noem the first person to be pushed out of Trump’s second-term Cabinet.

Three former DHS officials with ties to the current staff said that the changeover could happen “really soon,” giving the term-limited Youngkin a future in Washington.

Trump established the FEMA council by executive order in January, around the same time that he pitched it would be better to do away with FEMA altogether in favor of handing disaster money directly to the states. The council is co-chaired by Noem and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.

Noem Accidentally Admits to Congress That She’s Breaking the Law - 2025-12-11T19:30:30Z

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem didn’t deny that the Trump administration was illegally deporting people with ongoing asylum cases.

Noem spiraled out during a House Homeland Security Committee hearing Thursday, after Representative Dan Goldman pressed her on the government’s efforts to deport lawful asylum-seekers. There have been mounting reports that asylum cases are being routinely dismissed by immigration judges, and the asylum-seekers are then taken into ICE custody for expedited removal.

The New York Democrat asked Noem whether she agreed that asylum was a lawful pathway to citizenship and that immigrants with ongoing asylum applications were legally in the country. Noem agreed asylum was “a lawful pathway.”

“So, if your department then deports anyone with an ongoing asylum application, you are violating the law, correct?” Goldman asked.

Noem immediately became defensive. “Joe Biden left us with a [inaudible] five billion cases backlogged,” she replied, attempting to dodge the question.

“I’m not asking about Joe Biden, I’m asking you a specific question,” Goldman said. “If your department deports anyone with an ongoing asylum application, you are violating the law, correct?”

But Noem continued to speak monotonously throughout the lawmaker’s repeated requests to answer the question, claiming that the Biden administration had “greatly violated” the asylum law.

“Why are you filibustering? Why can’t you answer the question? It’s a simple question,” Goldman asked, but the secretary continued to rant that the “asylum program was broken under the last administration.”

Clearly, Noem had no intention of openly copping to breaking the law—but Goldman said her artless obfuscation did it for her, since yes was the “obvious answer.”

“If you don’t like the asylum system, you change the asylum law. Bring it to us. We’ll work with you. I think it needs to be changed. But you can’t just decide that you’re not gonna follow the law—and asylum is a law—and deport people with ongoing applications. Unfortunately, that is exactly what’s happening,” Goldman said.

ICE attorneys at immigration hearings are increasingly asking immigration judges to dismiss asylum cases, and the Trump administration has instructed judges to grant quick dismissals. At the same time, the Trump administration has purged dozens of immigration judges and sought to recruit so-called “deportation judges” to help ramp up the government’s soft ethnic cleansing.

List of Every Republican Who Voted to Make Obamacare More Expensive - 2025-12-11T19:21:25Z

Health care bills are going to skyrocket next year after the Senate voted down a bill that would have extended subsidies for the Affordable Care Act on Thursday.

The bill needed 60 votes to pass, but only four Republicans broke with their party and voted to extend the subsidies that millions of Americans rely on: Senators Josh Hawley, Lisa Murkowski, Dan Sullivan, and Susan Collins, resulting in a total of just 51 votes in favor. Every single Democrat in the Senate voted to extend the subsidies, while Montana Senator Steve Daines, a Republican, did not vote.

President Trump said last month that he was against extending the subsidies “because the ‘unaffordable care act’ has been a disaster.” But the real disaster is just beginning.

Health care premiums have already gone up in several states, and lower-income states, including Republican-run states like Mississippi, Tennessee, and South Carolina, stand to suffer the most. Many Americans will likely drop their ACA health care plans, meaning that an estimated four million Americans could be without health care coverage.

Here are the 48 Republican senators who voted to end the subsidies and increase premiums:

1. Jim Banks (Indiana)
2. John Barrasso (Wyoming)
3. Marsha Blackburn (Tennessee)
4. John Boozman (Arkansas)
5. Katie Britt (Alabama)
6. Ted Budd (North Carolina)
7. Shelley Moore Capito (West Virginia)
8. Bill Cassidy (Louisiana)
9. John Cornyn (Texas)
10. Tom Cotton (Arkansas)
11. Kevin Cramer (North Dakota)
12. Mike Crapo (Indiana)
13. Ted Cruz (Texas)
14. John Curtis (Utah)
15. Joni Ernst (Iowa)
16. Deb Fischer (Nebraska)
17. Lindsey Graham (South Carolina)
18. Chuck Grassley (Iowa)
19. Bill Hagerty (Tennessee)
20. John Hoeven (North Dakota)
21. Jon Husted (Ohio)
22. Cindy Hyde-Smith (Mississippi)
23. Ron Johnson (Wisconsin)
24. Jim Justice (West Virginia)
25. John Kennedy (Louisiana)
26. James Lankford (Oklahoma)
27. Mike Lee (Utah)
28. Cynthia Lummis (Wyoming)
29. Roger Marshall (Kansas)
30. Mitch McConnell (Kentucky)
31. Dave McCormick (Pennsylvania)
32. Ashley Moody (Florida)
33. Jerry Moran (Kansas)
34. Bernie Moreno (Ohio)
35. Markwayne Mullin (Oklahoma)
36. Rand Paul (Kentucky)
37. Pete Ricketts (Nebraska)
38. Jim Risch (Idaho)
39. Mike Rounds (South Dakota)
40. Eric Schmitt (Missouri)
41. Rick Scott (Florida)
42. Tim Scott (South Carolina)
43. Tim Sheehy (Montana)
44. John Thune (South Dakota)
45. Thom Tillis (North Carolina )
46. Tommy Tuberville (Alabama)
47. Roger Wicker (Mississippi)
48. Todd Young (Indiana)

“Evil n Boring”: SZA Rips White House for Using Her Song in Vile Video - 2025-12-11T18:32:19Z

Yet another musician has joined the choir of voices refuting the White House’s latest string of ICE advertisements.

SZA torched the Trump administration for using her music in a pro-ICE ad, claiming that the blatant intellectual property theft was really just a transparent bid to rage-bait artists into giving the violent campaign more attention.

“White House rage baiting artists for free promo is PEAK DARK … inhumanity +shock and aw tactics,” SZA wrote on X Wednesday. “Evil n Boring.”

The White House published a Christmas-themed montage of ICE arrests Monday set to SZA’s track “Big Boy,” focusing on the song’s reprise “it’s cuffing season”—which, in the context of the song, refers to falling into short-term relationships during the cold winter months. Not ripping people away from their families and forcing them into modern-day concentration camps.

“WE HEARD IT’S CUFFING SZN,” the White House captioned the post alongside a chain emoji. “Bad news for criminal illegal aliens. Great news for America.”

The 36-year-old R&B singer was responding to a kindred comment by her former manager, Terrence “Punch” Henderson, who said that the White House’s efforts to “provoke artist[s] to respond in order to help spread propaganda and political agendas is nasty business.”

But the platinum record-producing duo aren’t alone in their opinion. The White House has also stolen tracks from Olivia Rodrigo and Sabrina Carpenter for similar purposes, earning the ire of the pop music spectrum in the process.

Last week, Carpenter seemingly won her own standoff with ICE after the White House deleted another brutal arrest montage that stole her song “Juno.”

“This video is evil and disgusting,” Carpenter responded to the White House video in a comment that received 1.8 million likes and more than 163 million views—roughly half of the U.S. population. “Do not ever involve me or my music to benefit your inhumane agenda.”

FBI Leader Crumbles During Basic Questions About Threat of “Antifa” - 2025-12-11T17:53:01Z

The FBI’s branch and operations director couldn’t answer basic questions about the Trump administration’s designation of antifa as a terrorist organization at a congressional hearing Thursday.

Michael Glasheen was testifying before the House Committee on Homeland Security, and told Democratic Representative Bennie Thompson that after antifa, a political designation and movement that stands for “anti-fascism,” was designated by President Trump as a domestic terrorist organization, “that’s our primary concern right now.”

Antifa is “the most immediate violent threat we’re facing on the domestic side,” Glasheen said, prompting Thompson to ask, “So where is antifa headquartered?”

Glasheen was tripped up, and tried to say, “What we’re doing right now with the organization—” before Thompson cut him off and firmly asked, “Where in the United States does antifa exist, if it’s a terrorist organization and you’ve identified it as number one?”

“We’re building out the infrastructure right now,” Glasheen replied. This did not satisfy Thompson.

GLASHEEN: Antifa is our primary concern right now. That's the most immediate violent threat we're facing

BENNIE THOMPSON: Where is antifa headquartered?

GLASHEEN: ... ... ... we are building out the infrastructure right now

THOMPSON: What does that mean? pic.twitter.com/FBzRJ5dCBj

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) December 11, 2025

“So what does that mean?” asked Thompson. “You said antifa is a terrorist organization. Tell us as a committee, how did you come to that? Where do they exist? How many members do they have in the United States as of right now?”

Glasheen couldn’t offer anything concrete, saying that the answers to Thompson’s questions are fluid, and that it was “ongoing for us to understand that, the same no different than Al Qaeda and ISIS.”

Thompson pressed further, saying that he merely wanted to know the makeup of antifa, and Glasheen tried to deflect, saying that investigations are active, almost shrugging to say he didn’t know, allowing Thompson to illustrate the point he was trying to make.

“Sir, you wouldn’t come to this committee and say something you can’t prove, I know. I know you wouldn’t do that. But you did,” Thompson concluded.

The truth is that Trump’s targeting of antifa is spurious. Antifa is not anything close to a centralized group but rather a movement or ideology opposing fascism. Trump only designated it as a terrorist organization to go after any left-wing opposition to himself or his far-right allies. Thursday’s hearing made it quite clear that Glasheen, a career FBI official who has worked under multiple presidents, knows all of that. The question is how far the rest of the federal government is willing to take that lie.

Noem Gets Most Awkward Fact-Check of Her Life on Deported Veterans - 2025-12-11T17:18:11Z

Homeland Security Secretary and MAGA hardliner Kristi Noem got a fact-check to her face during her Thursday morning House hearing when Democratic Representative Seth Magaziner brought in a special guest.

“How many United States military veterans have you deported?” Magaziner asked Noem. 

“Sir, we have not deported U.S. citizens or military veterans.”  

Little did she know there was one staring right at her.

“Madame Secretary, we are joined on Zoom by a gentleman named Sae Joon Park. He is a United States Army combat veteran who was shot twice while serving our country in Panama in 1989,” Magaziner said. “Like many veterans, he struggled with PTSD and substance abuse after his service.... A purple heart recipient, he has sacrificed more for this country than most people ever have. Earlier this year you deported him to Korea, a country he hasn’t lived in since he was seven years old. Will you join me in thanking Mr. Park for his service to our country?” 

Noem initially refused to even acknowledge Park, who was staring blankly on an iPad held up near Magaziner. 

MAGAZINER: How many veterans have you deported?

NOEM: We haven't deported veterans

MAGAZINER: We are now joined on Zoom by a combat veteran you deported to Korea pic.twitter.com/oz8Epvf4I4

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) December 11, 2025

“Sir, I’m grateful for every single person that has served our country and follows our laws—”

“Can you please tell Mr. Park why you deported him?” Magaziner asked, talking over Noem. “This man took two bullets for our country. You have broad authority, by the way, as secretary, to issue humanitarian parole, to do deferred action. Will you commit to at least looking at Mr. Park’s case to see if you can help him find a pathway back to this country that he sacrificed so much for?” 

“I will absolutely look at his case.” 

Magaziner also brought in another veteran whose wife had been deported. 

Park was forced to self-deport over the summer due to drug possession charges linked to his military PTSD. 

“ I can’t believe that this is happening in America,” he told NPR in an interview before he left. “That blows me away, like a country that I fought for.”

Noem Spirals When Asked Who Let in Alleged National Guard Shooter - 2025-12-11T17:00:38Z

The Trump administration is refusing to face the facts that they are the ones responsible for the suspected national guard shooter’s presence in the country.

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem was grilled during a House Homeland Security Committee hearing Thursday on Rahmanullah Lakanwal’s granted asylum, which was approved in April after she took over as head of the agency.

“You blamed [the shooting of the National Guardsmen] solely on Joe Biden. Who approved the asylum for this same person?” pressed Democratic Representative Bennie Thompson after Noem finally stopped cutting him off for long enough to allow him to ask the question in its entirety.

“Mr. Thompson, this individual that came into the country—,” Noem started deflecting, before Thompson pressed again.

“No. I want to know who approved—” Thompson continued.

But Noem cut him off again. “No, no, no, no. I’m not going to let you—”

When Noem refused to stop talking, Thompson called to reclaim his time. Then the chairman of the committee, Representative Andrew Garbarino, got involved, ordering Noem to stop speaking until Thompson could ask his question again.

“Yes or no, who approved the asylum claim?” asked Thompson, but Noem again blamed the Biden administration.

“I don’t want to file perjury charges against you, but I’m of the opinion that the Trump administration—DHS, your DHS—approved the asylum application,” Thompson said.

THOMPSON: You blamed the shooting of Guardsmen solely on Joe Biden. Who approved the asylum for this same person?

KRISTI NOEM: This individual that came in---

THOMPSON: No. I want to know who approved----

NOEM: *keeps talking over Thompson*

T: I don't want to file perjury… pic.twitter.com/mRX4sqiUcF

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) December 11, 2025

It’s been two weeks since the shooting took place. In that time, Noem has repeatedly thwarted attempts to pin her agency for Lakanwal’s asylum, even though that’s actually what happened. Instead, she has nonsensically claimed that the Biden administration’s vetting process for Lakanwal, which began after he entered the U.S. in 2021, had effectively made her powerless to the ultimate decision regarding Lakanwal’s ability to stay in the country.

Prior to the shooting, there were plenty of well-documented reasons to allow Lakanwal into America. He operated as a foreign partner with America’s intelligence services in Afghanistan, and worked with the CIA as a partner in the country for more than a decade before U.S. troops withdrew from the region. Unfortunately, however, Lakanwal struggled with PTSD as a result of the war, his family told CNN.

He allegedly shot two members of West Virginia’s National Guard on the eve of Thanksgiving. U.S. Army Specialist Sarah Beckstrom, 20, died from her injuries. The other victim, U.S. Air Force Staff Sergeant Andrew Wolfe, is “slowly healing,” according to his family.

Judge Rips Trump Lawyers for Lying About Kilmar Abrego Garcia’s Case - 2025-12-11T16:35:55Z

A federal judge slammed Justice Department lawyers Thursday for blatantly lying about their efforts to remove Kilmar Abrego Garcia, the man wrongfully deported to El Salvador last spring—and she ordered the government to release him.

In a 31-page opinion, U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis granted Abrego Garcia’s request to be released from ICE custody. In her ruling, she torched the prosecutors’ efforts to deport Abrego Garcia to Liberia, after they claimed they could not deport him to the country of his choice, Costa Rica.

“This time, when the Court sought information about Liberia and Costa Rica so to fairly assess the validity of Abrego Garcia’s claims, Respondents did not just stonewall. They affirmatively misled the tribunal,” Xinis wrote.

“They announced that Liberia is the only viable removal option because Costa Rica ‘does not wish to receive him,’ … and that Costa Rica will no longer ‘accept the transfer’ of him,” she wrote. “But Costa Rica had never wavered in its commitment to receive Abrego Garcia, just as Abrego Garcia never wavered in his commitment to resettle there.”

Costa Rican officials had previously put in writing that they had no intention to remove Abrego Garcia back to El Salvador once he was in their custody—while Liberia had made no such assurances. Xinis wrote that the government’s continued lies made clear that Abrego Garcia’s lengthy detention was not for the basic purpose of a timely removal to the third country.

Xinis also found that there was never any order for Abrego Garcia’s removal in the first place. “Indeed, Respondents twice sponsored the testimony of ICE officials whose job it is to effectuate removal orders, and who candidly admitted to having never seen one for Abrego Garcia,” she wrote.

Instead, the government argued that the court should take an October 10 “withholding decision” as evidence that an original order existed—but Xinis didn’t buy it. “The October 10 withholding decision is unambiguously not an order of removal,” she wrote.

Continued detention without a removal order violates Abrego Garcia’s rights under the Immigration and Nationality Act, as well as due process.

Fed Chair Warns Trump Admin May Be Seriously Exaggerating Jobs Numbers - 2025-12-11T16:30:52Z

The Trump administration might be exaggerating their employment figures, Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell warned Wednesday.

In a press conference, Powell said that staffers at the Fed think that the government could be overestimating the number of jobs created by 60,000 each month. With published figures stating that the U.S. has added an average of 40,000 jobs each month since April, the true numbers could be closer to a loss of 20,000 jobs a month.

“We think there’s an overstatement in these numbers,” Powell said at the conference, which followed a policy meeting at the central bank.

Much of the issue is how the Department of Labor counts jobs added or subtracted when new businesses are opened or others close shop. The government can’t easily reach out to companies just starting out, or that have gone out of business, so the Bureau of Labor Statistics uses a statistical model to guess. In recent years, BLS numbers have overstated job creation, sometimes by hundreds of thousands of jobs a year, resulting in revisions showing less jobs later.

But the Trump administration has not responded well to bad jobs reports. When payroll processor ADP reported that the economy lost nearly 32,000 jobs in November, Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutnick scrambled to blame Democrats and deflect blame from President Trump’s tariffs. Trump himself fired the BLS chief over the summer because he was mad about the negative jobs data the agency produced. It’s not outside of the realm of possibility that Trump would put pressure on the agency to fudge better numbers.

Venezuela Accuses Trump of Piracy as He Says We’re Keeping Oil Tanker - 2025-12-11T16:20:45Z

Venezuela has condemned the Trump administration’s Wednesday seizure of an oil tanker, calling it an “act of piracy.”

Attorney General Pam Bondi accused the tanker of illegally sending oil to terrorist groups, justifying the administration’s hostile takeover.

“For multiple years, the oil tanker has been sanctioned by the United States due to its involvement in an illicit oil shipping network supporting foreign terrorist organizations,” she wrote Wednesday on X, along with a video of the seizure. “This seizure, completed off the coast of Venezuela, was conducted safely and securely—and our investigation alongside the Department of Homeland Security to prevent the transport of sanctioned oil continues.”

The Venezuelan Foreign Ministry offered a very different read of the situation.

“The Bolivarian Republic of Venezuela denounces and energetically repudiates what constitutes a brazen robbery and an act of international piracy, publicly announced by the President of the United States … making clear that the policy of aggression against our country responds to a deliberate plan to plunder our energy resources,” they wrote. “Under these circumstances, the true reasons for the prolonged aggression against Venezuela have finally been exposed. It is not migration. It is not drug trafficking. It is not democracy. It is not human rights. It has always been about our natural resources, our oil, our energy, the resources that belong exclusively to the Venezuelan people.”

President Trump seems to have fully embraced the piracy angle.

“What happens to the oil on the ship?” a reporter asked Trump Wednesday afternoon.

“Well we keep it, I guess,” Trump replied, before failing to answer where exactly the oil was originally going.

Reporter: What happens to the oil on the ship?

Trump: We keep it I guess pic.twitter.com/F7uQcNUvhN

— Acyn (@Acyn) December 10, 2025

This is yet another ratcheting up of aggression against the Maduro government—and yet another example of the absolute disregard the Trump administration has for anyone else’s sovereignty but their own.

Barron Trump’s Creepy Ties to Sex Trafficker Andrew Tate Exposed - 2025-12-11T16:13:54Z

Andrew Tate, the self-avowed misogynist and accused sex trafficker with a massive online following, has a powerful ally in the White House: Barron Trump.

The college-aged Trump has been building a steady bromance with the woman-beating influencer since at least 2024, the pair’s mutual friend Justin Waller told The New York Times.

Tate and his brother Tristan are under criminal investigation in several countries related to their web cam business, facing accusations of sex abuse and human trafficking. The pair allegedly trafficked more than 30 women in Romania and Britain. Andrew Tate, who has amassed a following of millions of teenage boys and young men while calling himself the “king of toxic masculinity,” also stands accused of raping and beating a minor in Romania.

But those sordid details weren’t enough to keep the young Trump at bay. Waller, who proudly described himself to the Times as the “third [Tate] brother,” claimed that Barron had grown his relationship with Tate while nudging his father’s social media-based presidential campaigning efforts towards the podcasting manosphere.

As part of that, Waller was invited to a dinner Barron hosted at Mar-a-Lago in the spring of 2024. The two called “each other degenerate names,” discussed Trump’s potential running mates, and mutually agreed to join another guest’s podcast together, reported the Times.

Waller commented to the publication that the teenager was “not a bad ally to have—let’s be frank.”

In the months since, Waller said he’s tried to fill a “big brother” role for Barron (ignoring the fact that the 19-year-old already has two of those), claiming to have offered dating advice and personal connections to the freshman, including Tate himself.

“He and Barron spoke to Andrew over Zoom last year, Mr. Waller said, while the teenager was having a suit fitted by Mr. Waller’s tailor,” reported the Times. “Although they discussed the Romanian case, Barron did not say anything about helping the Tates, Mr. Waller said. They also talked about supporting Mr. Trump’s presidential campaign on their online platforms.”

In the wake of the assassination attempt on Trump’s life, Tate commented to reporters that he was “very close to the Trump family.”

Post-election, the White House assisted Tate, presumably due to his expanding influence over the president’s youngest child. Paul Ingrassia, the Tate brothers’ former lawyer-turned-DHS liaison, intervened in the process of a federal investigation on the Tates’ behalf, claiming that the order to do so had come directly from the White House.

Zohran Mamdani’s First Big Housing Test Is Already Here - 2025-12-11T16:11:15Z

After her husband died in 1996, Brunnie Lebron—now age 71—picked up her two daughters and moved into the third floor of a prewar building near West Harlem, right off St. Nicholas Avenue. The rent-stabilized building always had its problems, she said, but with enough income to pay for her own unit’s repairs, she got along fine. Then, in January 2005, ownership of the building was shuffled from one faceless limited liability corporation to another, and the problems began to snowball.

Lebron’s building was one of many captured in an aggressive buying spree: With the help of a private equity cash infusion, Pinnacle Group—an arm of Joel Wiener’s vast LLC network held under the umbrella of a British Virgin Islands entity—tripled its housing portfolio across New York’s boroughs between May 2004 and May 2006. Many, including Lebron’s, were “distressed” rent-stabilized buildings in Upper Manhattan and the Bronx, Brooklyn, and Queens. In short order, Pinnacle became one of the largest landlords in New York.

Pinnacle’s business strategy hinged on exploiting 1990s-era loopholes and incentives that permitted landlords, under New York state law, to remove apartments from stabilization and convert them into luxury condominiums. To allow this, however, tenants had to move out. So, across Pinnacle properties, roaches multiplied, elevators broke, and old plumbing turned water brown. Rain seeped through crumbling facades, mold bloomed on the walls, and ceilings collapsed, including Lebron’s. When enough tenants fled these uninhabitable conditions, Pinnacle could swoop back in, refurbish the property, and sell its newly minted condos at a profit.

Pinnacle became a notorious gentrifier; in 2017, Wiener became a billionaire. Even when tenants fought back through the years, sometimes even extracting victories in court, the landlord’s holdings were so vast that Pinnacle often appeared too big to fail. That is, until May of this year, when Pinnacle filed for bankruptcy.

Around the same time, Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani was in the midst of what was then seen as a long-shot bid for the New York City’s mayorship. But Mamdani’s bet came in—and the job of cleaning up Pinnacle’s mess will be among the rewards. He won’t be facing it alone: A boisterous tenants’ movement, forged in the Pinnacle properties and fueled by the same spirit that brought Mamdani to power, has already joined the fight.

The mess in question verges on the Augean. The bankruptcy case halted a foreclosure action brought by Flagstar Bank—which is, itself, a product of a reorganizing 2024 bankruptcy—claiming that Pinnacle owes $564 million in mortgage debt. Instead of paying its mortgages, Pinnacle’s money was, according to court documents, funneled to Israeli bondholders who had floated Pinnacle more than $500 million to finance the group’s real estate expansions in the 2010s.

Now 93 buildings and approximately 5,000 rent-stabilized apartments across four boroughs are essentially up for grabs: While Pinnacle solicits offers to refinance, the bankruptcy proceedings have led to an auction where large landlords—including Pinnacle itself—will likely place bids. The deadline to submit bids is this Friday, December 12, but the actual auction will be held on January 8, according to court documents. (After this piece was published, it was announced that the city’s Department of Housing Preservation and Development entered a statement to the court in support of delaying the auction to “ensure the protection of the rights of all parties.”)

Absent from the courtroom drama is a voice for Pinnacle’s thousands of rent-stabilized tenants, who arguably are the most affected by the auction’s results: Will their next landlord be someone like Joel Wiener? Someone worse? While financial entities appraise tenants’ deteriorated homes from on high, the tenants themselves are barred from seeking legal recourse against Pinnacle by the court’s automatic stay on further lawsuits until the case is complete. They may submit letters to the judge detailing their conditions under Pinnacle, but there’s no guaranteeing whether the judge will even allow them. Bankruptcy court, needless to say, is not housing court; their only choice has been to organize a pressure campaign for the city to intervene, and fast.

Tenants have established the Union of Pinnacle Tenants, or UPT, informed by more than a decade of organizing experience via the Crown Heights Tenant Union, influenced, however obliquely, by the unique successes of tenant unions in Los Angeles and Kansas City, and mobilizing at a pace not seen since the height of the pandemic, when everyone intuitively understood the rent crisis demanded a radical response. This is New York’s first portfolio-wide union in recent memory, and surely the first to be built at such dizzying scale: In a matter of months, 40 Pinnacle buildings across three boroughs have formed tenant associations and joined the union to coordinate their demands.

Rent-stabilized tenants were at the heart of Mamdani’s historic campaign for mayor; his promise to freeze their rent was his hallmark policy idea. It’d be too simplistic to say that Pinnacle tenants are rising up today because Mamdani won, but it is, on some level, the same energy he tapped into with his campaign that is now motivating tenants to become their own protagonists.

For weeks, UPT has actively reached out to current and future city officials to grow support for its demands. On November 25, 22 New York representatives, including Councilman Chi Ossé, Assemblymembers Claire Valdez and Julia Salazar, and New York City Comptroller Brad Lander, signed an open letter to the bankruptcy judge to “grant the tenants a say in the auction process.” To date, Mamdani has not signed onto the letter, despite UPT members’ calls for him to do so. Nor did his office respond to The New Republic’s multiple requests for comment. But this hasn’t fazed them. “Old age is a bitch, let me tell you,” Lebron said last time we spoke, “but that doesn’t mean I’m going to give up.”

Pinnacle’s restructuring advisers have blamed three concurrent problems for their insolvency: inflation, interest rates, and, in so many words, tenants. While inflation has undoubtedly increased operating costs, and Pinnacle’s mortgage rates leapt from 3 percent to as much as 10.25 percent, according to court documents, it’s the third item on its list of grievances that the financial press has glommed onto: the 2019 Housing Stability and Tenant Protection Act, or HSTPA, which closed many of the loopholes Pinnacle and others relied on to thrust rent-stabilized units into the speculative market. Tenant groups were the leading force behind the law, and it did, indeed, make life for landlords harder. But only because their business strategy depended on evicting longtime working-class tenants, through increasing property values and soaring rents, which, in turn, permitted further speculation through risky refinancing.

This is what researchers have called “pulling out equity.” In a 2022 report titled “Gambling With Homes, or Investing in Communities,” the Local Initiative Support Corporation, or LISC, outlined how this works. Let’s say a landlord purchases a $1 million building with a $750,000 loan. When the property’s appraised value increases, due partly to the landlord increasing the rent, the study shows that the landlord would more than likely use that new leverage at the bank for an even bigger loan, this time to purchase a $3 million building. The landlord—call them a “housing provider”—is a market genius so long as they continue buying up properties, at the expense of their other buildings, in which they rarely reinvest. But when the rulebook catches up, the market shifts, and—as Julia Duranti-Martinez, senior program officer at LISC, put it—“your assumptions about rent increases don’t hold anymore,” suddenly those loans aren’t such a masterful gambit. Now, they’re just “really bad bets.”

In an emailed statement to The New Republic, a Pinnacle spokesperson said it was “unfortunate that some seek to exploit the already difficult situation facing multi-family housing in New York to advance a political ideology that ignores the rapid rise in maintenance, insurance and other costs which have stressed housing across the city regardless of ownership.” Between 2019 and 2024, Bloomberg—not exactly The Daily Worker—found that “immediately hazardous” housing violations had increased fourfold in Pinnacle buildings, twice the rate of similar rent-stabilized properties. More than that, buildings located in gentrifying neighborhoods saw the “sharpest increases” in housing violations.

Pinnacle’s spokesperson said the Bloomberg report “seems exaggerated” and “doesn’t take into account the across-the-board impacts of documented changes in the law and a post-Covid surge in enforcement.”

Critically, the Pinnacle properties on the auction block are, in fact, profitable. Last year, they generated some $27 million after net operating costs, according to court documents, indicating that the buildings themselves aren’t the central problem. While housing violations have recently increased across the five boroughs, Pinnacle’s long history of neglect has made it a household name among tenant organizers.

In late 2023, Zara Cadoux invited several fellow Crown Heights Tenant Union, or CHTU, members into her home for a meeting of the group’s Palestine solidarity committee. The plan was to discuss how they might connect New York tenants’ struggles to the U.S. financial institutions supporting Israeli occupation. Esteban Girón, one of CHTU’s earliest members and an oral historian of sorts, looked around the living room and said, “Well, you’re sitting in it.”

Cadoux had, months prior, moved into the building, a Pinnacle property since 2006, but CHTU and Pinnacle had met before, going as far back as the group’s 2013 founding. In 2018, 24 Pinnacle buildings in Crown Heights banded together through CHTU to protest poor conditions, but that “fizzled out,” Girón told me, after a schism formed between CHTU and another nonprofit supporting the tenants.

It wasn’t then top of mind that Pinnacle was among the first New York real estate firms to turn to the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange for financing, but soon, CHTU’s Palestine committee discovered at least five of Pinnacle’s major Israeli bondholders also funded construction projects supporting settler occupation in the West Bank and the Golan Heights—meaning, when Pinnacle deferred payments to Flagstar, tenants’ rent was often funneling toward financial entities investing in the Israeli military-industrial complex. (Regarding its Israeli bondholders, Pinnacle declined to comment.)

When Pinnacle residents received notice that their landlord had filed for bankruptcy, “people freaked out,” Cadoux said. “They didn’t know what this meant, if they’d be forced to leave,” which would have played directly into the notorious rent-stabilized converters’ strategy. CHTU saw “a real need to respond as quickly as we could,” but before the group had fully formed a plan to cobble together a borough-to-borough union, tenants beat them to it. In September, at a planned protest over electricity shutoffs at Cadoux’s building, tenants from Lebron’s West Harlem building appeared, asking how they could get involved. “We had been losing steam,” said Vivian Kuo, Lebron’s neighbor and a leader in the building, but “knowing there were other buildings that were organized—more organized than us—gave me more wind for my sails so I could keep going.” Today, she and others in her building are on rent strike.

Tenant activity in the United States tends to ebb and flow with crisis. It’s no accident that CHTU came to life shortly after the 2008 housing bubble, as veterans of Occupy Wall Street sought to flesh out the movement’s idea for neighborhood councils. Other tenant groups, such as Housing Justice for All, partly owe their success to CHTU—Cea Weaver, now part of Zohran Mamdani’s housing transition team, was a founding CHTU member and is now director of HJ4A. But CHTU’s presence was shrinking and required restructuring as it came back to life during the pandemic, when tenants again sought to channel their demands through a grassroots movement.

Since then, forming a citywide tenant union from the bottom up has remained a distant goal among the city’s disparate tenant groups. There are significant challenges ahead, not least because for a group like UPT that ties its identity to a landlord in the middle of restructuring, with no way to know who the landlord will be this time next year, it is difficult to predict the future needs and proclivities of its tenant membership across three boroughs. What happens if they aren’t “Pinnacle tenants” anymore? The goal is to ensure whoever purchases the buildings will have to go through these newly activated tenant associations, but constructing tenant associations at such a rapid pace—“building the airplane while we’re flying it,” as Cadoux said—could also create capacity bottlenecks and burnout from the often thankless work of organizing at the building level.

However, as tenant organizer and New Republic contributor Tracy Rosenthal—who, 10 years ago, slapped $20 on the table to become the “first dues-paying member” of the citywide Los Angeles Tenant Union—contended at a recent Pinnacle tenant assembly, with every “crisis” also comes “opportunity.” The tenant union is at once a response to Pinnacle’s mismanagement and an experiment for what comes next. Tenants are meeting the moment; their organizations will have to work to do so too.

In the 1970s, New York tenants successfully argued that their “sweat equity” entitled them to expropriate the buildings they’d refurbished from the landlords who’d allowed them to fester. More recently, when Signature Bank declared bankruptcy in 2024, the city’s Department of Housing Preservation and Development, or HPD, oversaw a merger (creating Flagstar, the plaintiff in Pinnacle’s case) and partnered with a private financier to place thousands of rent-stabilized homes in a public land bank. UPT is now asking for a similar deal. In an email to The New Republic, Pinnacle warned against the nonprofit housing model, calling it “no panacea” and referred to inflationary operational costs that are today challenging nonprofit owners, adding that Pinnacle “brings decades of experience to their management.” In an emailed statement, Matt Rauschenbach, a spokesperson for HPD, said, “We have shared that we are open to having conversations with the successful bidder about the financing tools we have available to us to help restore, preserve, and protect these homes and keep them affordable for residents.”

But if the speedy rise of UPT signifies anything, it’s that Pinnacle’s residents are ready for a different ownership structure. And they’re not alone. Arielle Hersh, policy director for the Urban Homesteading Assistance Board, said her organization has seen an influx of tenants whose landlords are now going through foreclosure—upward of two buildings per week since January—and are seeking UHAB’s advice for structuring different ownership models for their buildings. Hersch also pointed me to a 2011 Joint Center for Housing of Harvard study, which had warned of the sheer “magnitude” of mortgage loans—more than a quarter of the market at the time—set to “mature sometime after 2020.” “This is a growing issue,” Hersh added. “We’re at the beginning of something that is yet to peak.”

The Pinnacle bankruptcy offers tenants the opportunity to wrest more control over their living conditions; it also offers the incoming Mamdani administration a chance to demonstrate its support for the tenant movement that ushered him into office. Mamdani’s office did not respond to The New Republic’s multiple requests for comment. But when asked, Cadoux wasn’t worried. “My neighbor across the hall is on his transition team,” she said, referring to Manvir Singh, a member of Mamdani’s “kitchen Cabinet.” “So they definitely know about us, and about Pinnacle.”

At a rally outside the Eastern District of New York courthouse one chilly November evening, I saw tenants from Flatbush to Harlem, Midtown to Crown Heights, crowd around a projector broadcasting crowdsourced photos of all manner of indignities: mushrooms growing out of tenants’ ceilings, roaches the size of Medjool dates. To insulate herself as best she could from her landlord, Brunnie Lebron had purchased all of her apartment’s appliances shortly before retiring, but it hadn’t worked. “I want to keep this apartment, for my daughters’ sake, for my sake, and for the rest of the tenants’ sake,” she said. As for Pinnacle, “They can go to hell.”

* This article has been updated.

GOP Uses Budget to Try to Force Pete Hegseth to Release Strike Video - 2025-12-11T15:58:48Z

House Republicans have voted to punish Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth for not releasing footage of the Pentagon’s extrajudicial executions of alleged drug traffickers.

The GOP-led House on Wednesday passed an enormous annual defense policy bill that included a measure to withhold a quarter of Hegseth’s travel budget until the Pentagon turns over unedited footage of its strikes on vessels in the Caribbean.

It’s not clear how much money is in Hegseth’s travel budget, but the bill’s language states that “no more than” 75 percent of that amount will be available until he provides videos to the House and Senate Armed Services Committees.

The Defense Department has come under scrutiny in recent weeks, as it has presented conflicting information about a September incident in which the Pentagon ordered a second strike on the survivors of an initial attack—a war crime that experts say likely violated federal and international law.

The legislation passed the House 312–112, with 197 Republicans supporting the measure. The Senate will likely also approve the National Defense Authorization Act, which will then be sent to President Donald Trump, who has previously voiced his support for the legislation.

The $900 billion budget bill includes measures to repeal sanctions on Syria, provide some military aid to Ukraine, restrict U.S. investment in China, and prevent the Trump administration from significantly reducing the number of troops in Europe. It also includes a controversial provision allowing military contractors to be reimbursed for interest payments.

Even Bush’s Torture Guy Thinks Trump’s Boat Strikes Cross the Line - 2025-12-11T15:15:13Z

Even the Justice Department lawyer who defended the George W. Bush administration’s decisions to waterboard, bind, and sleep-deprive prisoners in the infamous 9/11 “Torture Memos” of 2002 thinks the Trump administration’s drug boat strikes are going too far.

“I don’t think there’s an armed attack” against the United States by the drug cartels, law professor John Yoo, the former Bush DOJ deputy assistant attorney general, told Politico in a Thursday article.

“They’re not attacking us because of our foreign policy and our political system,” Yoo continued. “They’re just selling us something that people in America want. We’re just trying to stop them from selling it. That’s traditionally, to me, crime. It’s something that we could never eradicate or end.”

Yoo’s criticism is significant given the widespread condemnation he received for his own support of unilateral, extrajudicial violence. He’s one of the “Bush Six” who was investigated internationally for war crimes, and his Torture Memo has been described as a “one-sided effort to eliminate any hurdles posed by the torture law,” making his rebuke of Trump’s bombings all the more alarming.

“The only way the strikes have any legal plausibility … is if we’re at war with Venezuela and the drug cartels are something like what we saw in Afghanistan after 2001 with the Taliban and Al Qaeda being so intertwined together that the drug cartels are essentially acting as an auxiliary of the armed forces or intelligence services of Venezuela,” Yoo continued, recalling his own experiences. “For some reason … the administration doesn’t want to say that’s what they’re doing, and they won’t legally justify it.”

It’s a bleak situation when someone who defended human torture and should probably be in some international prison is calling the current administration out for potential war crimes.

“This is the thing I think conservatives should worry about,” Yoo said. “Could a future President AOC say, ‘Oh my gosh, we are at war with the fossil fuel companies. They are inflicting masses of harm on the United States. It might be cumulative, but they’re doing it on purpose.’ … You just make the same exact arguments,” he said.

“That’s the danger you have once you start saying anything that hurts Americans could be an act of war.”

Nevertheless, the Trump administration continues its aggression in the Caribbean Sea, dropping bombs on boats without any kind of due process. On Wednesday, the administration even seized a Venezuelan oil rig.

And while Yoo’s input is worthwhile, it also paints a bleak picture regarding the prospects of anyone involved in the deadly boat strikes actually being held accountable. Yoo has never been tried for his actions and has had a cushy law professor job for years, even as he’s been internationally condemned for his very specific role in “enhanced” interrogation techniques. That doesn’t raise much confidence in the same standards being applied to Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and President Trump.

Read the full column here.

Democrats Demand Epstein Files Audit to See if They’ve Been Altered - 2025-12-11T15:12:34Z

Senate Democrats, along with survivors of Jeffrey Epstein’s sex crimes, want an independent review of Epstein case files released by the government to ensure that the records haven’t been tampered with or concealed.

Senators Adam Schiff and Dick Durbin wrote a letter to the Justice Department’s inspector general Thursday asking for a formal review of the files to check for chain of custody issues. Some Epstein survivors, through representatives, are also asking for an independent review to see if any of the documents have been “scrubbed, softened, or quietly removed before the public sees it,” according to CBS News.

“To reassure the American public that any files released have not been tampered with or concealed, the chain of custody forms associated with records and evidence in the Epstein files must be accounted for, analyzed, and released,” wrote Durbin and Schiff, both members of the Senate Judiciary Committee, in their letter.

Last month, Congress and President Trump passed a law requiring all of the Epstein files in government hands to be released by December 19, with as few redactions as possible. Three federal judges have also ruled this month to unseal grand jury records from the criminal investigations into Epstein and his co-conspirator Ghislaine Maxwell.

As several batches of files on Epstein are now due to be released for the first time, the Trump administration’s past actions do not lend much confidence into whether these documents will be released untouched. FBI Director Kash Patel has said that it may not be “lawful” to release certain files, and the bureau has already spent nearly $1 million dollars redacting sensitive information from the files.

Mike Johnson Accuses Reporters of Baiting Him When Asked About Trump - 2025-12-11T14:38:11Z

House Speaker Mike Johnson doesn’t seem to understand why President Donald Trump’s violent racism is his problem.

Trump confirmed Tuesday that he’d used the epithet “shithole countries” eight years ago during a closed-door meeting with senators, though he had initially denied it. While walking through the Capitol Wednesday night, CNN’s Manu Raju asked Johnson if he was OK with the president using that kind of language.

Johnson winced. “Look, I’m baited every day with asking—being made to ask to comment on what the president or other members say,” he replied.

“It’s the president of the United States; don’t you have an opinion on it?” Raju pressed.

“Of course I have an opinion, that’s not the way I speak, and you know that. But the president is expressing his frustration about the extraordinary challenge that is presented to America when you have people coming in, not assimilating, and then taking over the country,” Johnson said.

Recently, the Trump administration has taken aim at the Somali American community in Minnesota with an immigration crackdown, and members of his administration have bent over backward to defend his blatant race baiting. Johnson—who clearly sees himself as part of Trump’s political machine more than a check on the president’s power—seems content to help translate Trump’s frothing at the mouth as good-faith concern for Americans.

Trump Lashes Out at GOP Senator Who Blocked Gerrymandering Scheme - 2025-12-11T14:23:29Z

Donald Trump’s big mouth could cost him more Republican votes in Indiana as he pushes the Hoosier State to redistrict.

Anxious about the 2026 midterms, Trump issued directives to several red states, including Indiana, to redraw their congressional maps in order to bolster Republicans’ razor-thin majority in the House. In Indiana’s case, that unprecedented, long-shot effort would win just two more seats in the U.S. House.

On Thursday, hours before the state Senate is set to vote, Trump issued another nasty missive, attacking more local leaders while threatening to back primary opponents for anyone who votes against his plan. This time, the ire of Trump’s focus was Senate President Pro Tem Rod Bray, who has formed a coalition of allies averse to the measure that very soon could see its death knell.

“Every other State has done Redistricting, willingly, openly, and easily. There was never a question in their mind that contributing to a WIN in the Midterms for the Republicans was a great thing to do for our Party, and for America itself,” Trump wrote in a lengthy Truth Social rant Wednesday night. “Unfortunately, Indiana Senate ‘Leader’ Rod Bray enjoys being the only person in the United States of America who is against Republicans picking up extra seats, in Indiana’s case, two of them.

“He is putting every ounce of his limited strength into asking his soon to be very vulnerable friends to vote with him.

“The people of Indiana don’t want the Party of Sleepy Joe Biden, Kamala, Ilhan Omar, or the rest to succeed in Washington,” the president continued. “Bray doesn’t care. He’s either a bad guy, or a very stupid one!

“Anybody that votes against Redistricting, and the SUCCESS of the Republican Party in D.C., will be, I am sure, met with a MAGA Primary in the Spring,” Trump wrote. “Rod Bray and his friends won’t be in Politics for long, and I will do everything within my power to make sure that they will not hurt the Republican Party, and our Country, again.”

Trump’s fury is unlikely to win him any friends. At least one Republican in the state—a longtime disability advocate—has already sworn off voting in favor of Trump’s new congressional maps, blaming the president’s decision to call Minnesota Governor Tim Walz “seriously retarded.”

Still, the fact that there is a vote on the measure at all could be a sign of twisting attitudes regarding the gerrymandering effort: Indiana’s Senate announced late last month that it would not meet until January, signaling at the time that redistricting would not be on the state’s legislative agenda this year. Now the state could be just hours away from new maps.

The Supreme Court Will Get Another Shot at Church-State Separation - 2025-12-11T11:00:00Z

In May 2025, the Supreme Court handed down a 4–4 split decision in Oklahoma Statewide Charter School Board v. Drummond. That deadlock left intact a ruling from the Oklahoma Supreme Court that denied what would have been the nation’s first publicly funded religious charter school, St. Isidore of Seville Catholic Virtual School. In line with recent decisions cutting into the separation of church and state, the court had been expected to rule in favor of the religious school. However, because Amy Coney Barrett recused and one conservative sided with the state, the court left the state decision in place, meaning that states can still exclude religious schools from charter programs.

Because the court did not reach the underlying constitutional questions, the door remains ajar. And as news has emerged that the same legal apparatus that set up and represented St. Isidore is now organizing a Jewish charter school in Oklahoma, many observers see it as an attempt to push the same issue—this time with a majority of conservatives ready to strike down religious public funding bans across the country.

At issue in Drummond were two significant constitutional questions. First: Are privately run charter schools state actors if they are publicly approved and funded? And second: If they are public, does the First Amendment’s free exercise clause prohibit a state from excluding religious schools from its charter school program—or does the establishment clause require it to exclude them?

In 2023, the Statewide Virtual Charter School Board approved St. Isidore as a virtual charter school. However, contrary to state law, the board excluded terms from its standard contract with charter schools requiring any charter school to be “nonsectarian in its programs, admission policies, employment practices, and all other operations.” This exception raised concerns that the school could reserve the right to discriminate in admissions, hiring, or discipline on religious grounds, potentially barring or expelling LGBTQ+ students or staff or denying services to students with disabilities.

As Rachel Laser, president and CEO of Americans United for Separation of Church and State, pointed out in an interview, “The establishment clause provides us the freedom to control our own bodies, freedom to live as LGBTQ+ people, freedom to read and learn, freedom to access health care on equal grounds with others, freedom to access jobs and stores and public accommodations, freedom to access social services, and freedom to receive a good public education.”

Oklahoma Attorney General Gentner Drummond filed a lawsuit requesting a mandamus action to revoke the contract, arguing that by virtue of being publicly funded; open to all; subject to state oversight, testing, and civil rights and disability laws; and revocable by the state, Oklahoma charter schools are functionally public schools. And as Justice Sonia Sotomayor put it at oral argument, “The essence of the establishment clause was we’re not going to pay religious leaders to teach their religion.”

However, the St. Isidore attorneys argued that excluding schools solely because of their religious natures violated the free exercise clause. Drawing on recent U.S. Supreme Court cases like Espinoza v. Montana Department of Revenue and Carson v. Makin, they argued that once a state offers a generally available public benefit, it cannot flatly exclude religious applicants on the basis of religion, and they contended that charter school status was such a public benefit.

The Oklahoma Supreme Court rejected that argument in 2024, and because the U.S. Supreme Court split evenly on the issue, that ruling remains in place.

That brings us to the latest development: a new effort led in part by some of the same board members as St. Isidore and backed by the same legal organization to establish another state-funded, religious charter school, Ben Gamla Jewish Charter School. According to the organization behind it, the school would serve Jewish families who view religious education as “a requirement of the faith.”

Notably, this is not a grassroots push from Oklahoma’s Jewish community. As Rabbi Daniel Kaiman told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, “When I called around to other Jewish leaders in Tulsa and Oklahoma City, none of us knew anything about it.” Rather, this appears to be a deliberate effort to bring a religious charter under legal review in a context where the religious applicant is not Christian but Jewish.

Proponents may be pinning their hopes on the idea that a non-Christian charter will make it harder for opponents to frame the issue strictly in terms of “Christian privilege.” “As a Jew, I am angered that my faith is being misused to advance a Christian nationalist agenda,” said Laser. “This is not what the majority of Jews in Oklahoma want. It is actually counter to what they want.” She pointed out that in lawsuits implicating the separation of church and state across the country, many of the strongest supporters of that separation are clergy members and other people of faith, as a necessity to maintain the integrity of the faith.

If that school’s application under a charter school law succeeds and it makes its way back to the full U.S. Supreme Court, it is likely to have significant legal consequences. The conservatives on the court have been very solicitous of religious freedom arguments at the expense of the separation of church and state—as Justice Sotomayor has put it, allowing the free exercise clause to trump the establishment clause. If the court were to rule in favor of the school, public education funding could be transformed.

States with charter laws might be legally compelled to fund religious charters not as an exception but as a matter of constitutional law. The result would be the institutionalization of sectarian schooling funded by public money across the country under a veneer of neutral school choice. In this, Laser sees a broader effort from organizations on the extreme religious right: “This is part of a larger campaign by Christian nationalists to infuse Christianity into public schools. It’s a two-pronged strategy about indoctrinating a new generation of Americans into Christian nationalist ideology and diverting public dollars to fund that agenda.”

Attempts to drive public funds toward religious education are not unique to Oklahoma. Perhaps anticipating a win for Ben Gamla, Tennessee Attorney General Jonathan Skrmetti recently issued an opinion that excluding religious schools from public funding violates the free exercise clause of the U.S. Constitution. Despite a warning from the Colorado Board of Education, a Christian school is attempting to collect public funds through the state’s contract education program. With the wind at their backs, it is very likely that religious conservatives will continue pushing the issue until the Supreme Court gives them their way.

Supporters of the separation of church and state dodged a bullet in Drummond, but it is unlikely that the far-right Supreme Court will set the issue aside forever. And when the justices finally do take up the issue again, the country will confront a decision not only about charter schools but about the character of the public sphere itself. Whether the country will still hold out the promise of a common, secular education—as a safeguard for pluralism rather than a threat to it—will depend on the court’s conservatives.

Laser would remind them of the history that motivated the religious liberty clauses of the First Amendment: “Separation of church and state stops divisions that have been proven to lead to violence and death. The Founders were closer to religious wars and other sectarian conflicts, and they knew that our democracy depends on the separation of church and state.”

A New Report Reveals the Real Reason Democrats Lost in 2024 - 2025-12-11T11:00:00Z

Democrats need to move right to win back voters in 2026 and 2028—that’s the conventional wisdom from a slew of Democratic think tanks and Beltway strategists. To make their case, they’ve released reports and polling trying to prove that voters are more moderate on many social and cultural issues—like trans athletes in school sports and immigration—than the party’s far-left activists. But an exhaustive new report, made available exclusively to The New Republic, makes a convincing counterargument. More importantly, it provides a road map for Democratic candidates that doesn’t require throwing vulnerable members of their coalition under the bus.

The report comes from Way to Win, a left-leaning “strategic donor collaborative and strategy hub” founded after the 2016 election. The report, a compilation and analysis of the surveys and focus groups they’ve done since the 2024 election, looks not just at swing voters but the entire coalition, including those who voted for President Biden in 2020 and then sat out the 2024 election. This presents a fuller picture than analyses that simply conclude the electorate swung right last November. While some Biden 2020 voters did vote for Trump last year, a substantial number stayed home. This changed the composition of the electorate, and made it look more Republican than it really was. Those who sat it out in November are much more politically aligned with Democrats but weren’t motivated to vote for Vice President Kamala Harris and downballot Democrats. Determining what they want from future candidates tells a different story than centrists might hope.

Way to Win pointed to three main problems that cost Democrats last year: Voters were upset not just about rising prices but about longer-term economic trends, and wanted change; Republicans and the far right have a built-in media advantage, thanks to years of investments, which made it harder for Democrats to break through; and movements on the left around issues like Gaza, racial and economic justice, and immigration weren’t aligned with the party.

Fundamental to the report is an important corrective. While many observers have argued that Democrats lost last year because the party had moved too far left, Way to Win makes the case that voters don’t actually apply neatly defined ideological frames when they evaluate candidates’ policies and choose whom to vote for. Their decisions are more complex and filtered through their social, family, and work lives—a conclusion supported by much political science research. “When you go knock on doors, you hear all kinds of stories, but they almost never have to do with detailed policies or ideological framing,” the report says.

This suggests a different path forward from moderating on some issues, like immigration, the environment, or trans rights. While it might be true that the party’s positions are to the left of the majority on some specific issues, there’s no evidence that those are the issues that drove most voters to make their decisions last November. It’s not that these issues don’t matter at all, but they aren’t decisive, and there’s room to persuade voters, as well. “When we actually talk to voters and listen to them, which we did over the course of this year, it’s that the other issues that we highlight in our report are just much bigger factors,” said Jenifer Fernandez Ancona, a co-founder and vice president of Way to Win.

This was especially true of those who skipped voting in 2024. In the important Sunbelt states, these voters were 13 percent of the 2020 coalition, and a majority said they would have voted for Harris if they’d voted in 2024 rather than sitting out. These voters didn’t want Democrats to moderate. They wanted a stronger economic message and wanted Democrats to fight for them. But they often felt like they’d been supporting Democrats for years and hadn’t gotten results.

In fact, moderating on some positions was more likely to reinforce Republican talking points and make Democrats seem weak, according to the report. “If we want to build a bigger coalition, it’s actually going to make it worse if we keep trying to look more like Republicans, or we keep trying to go in this triangulation direction,” Fernandez Ancona said. “It’s not that we’re not saying we need to move more left and be more socialist.… We’re really saying we need to actually go towards strength, which is what we define in the report as basically standing for what you believe in.”

The perception of Democrats as weak was partly shaped by Republican attacks rather than Democratic messages themselves. As an example, voters surveyed by Way to Win said that Harris’s campaign was mostly concerned with trans issues. In reality, it wasn’t a big part of her campaign, Fernandez Ancona said. But trans issues played a starring role in ads from the opposition.

Harris didn’t work to counter that impression—and her actual campaign messages didn’t break through, either. Voters didn’t hear her messages on the economy as much. They also want Democrats in general to talk more about the bigger issues facing the economy, like inequality. “One of the top performing policies or issues that were motivating for the skippers was strengthening enforcement against wealthy tax cheats and making the wealthy pay what they owe,” Fernandez Ancona said. “It’s making the case that the system is not working for a lot of people because of this inequality and this imbalance, and we have to make that more fair.”

Too often, Democratic messages end up reinforcing the story that Republicans are telling, Way to Win says. The report pointed to the losing campaigns of Senators Sherrod Brown in Ohio and Jon Tester in Montana, who touted their support of conservative immigration policies. Instead, Democrats need to tell their own story when it comes to immigration, one that highlights the contributions immigrants make and argues that legal immigration should be easier.

This report is in line with other work from researchers across the left showing that moderation doesn’t necessarily win Democrats more seats. G. Elliott Morris (a former colleague of mine from 538, the now-defunct political analysis site), published a post on his Substack analyzing moderate candidate performance when compared to candidates further to the left. “I estimate that strategic moderation in 2024 could have increased a Democrat’s vote share by 1-1.5 points and their chance of winning by just 10%—not enough to overcome the uncertainty driven by other factors in the election. This is not to say that moderation doesn’t matter, but lots of other factors matter more,” he wrote.

And Anat Shenker-Osorio, a political strategist and messaging consultant, has made the same arguments. She says Democrats need to embrace “magnetism,” which is similar to the “strength” that Way to Win advocates: staking out forceful positions that risk pushing some voters away but are also much more likely to attract voters than simply taking whatever positions the polls suggest.

These arguments are strengthened by the wins of Zohran Mamdani in New York City, Mikie Sherrill in New Jersey, and Abigail Spanberger in Virginia. Those candidates all had ideological differences, but they shared an approach to politics that was combative on behalf of their constituents, one that promised to tackle big issues like affordability and work hard to deliver without ceding ideological ground to Republicans. “They actually went after it head-on by standing up for their values and who they were,” said Fernandez Ancona. “The playbook going forward is, name it, call it out for what it is—because the voters also don’t like this fear and division. We hear that from them a lot. They’re tired of it.”

This could also help motivate the Democratic base, which performs an important function: When grassroots movements and reliable voters align with the party, they help build excitement and spread the word on behalf of candidates. Granted, the havoc and wreckage of the second Trump administration is sufficiently motivating voters to come out for Democrats, as we saw in the November elections and this past Tuesday. That may well remain true in 2026 and 2028. But to win big and, more importantly, hold onto power, the Democrats need to work harder to build a party brand that answers voters’ real concerns and differentiates them from Republicans. That doesn’t mean behaving like a weather vane, turning in whichever direction the political winds blow. It means having the courage and strength to make your own weather.

Mad King Trump’s Latest Peeve: Sans Serif Fonts - 2025-12-11T11:00:00Z

In The Emperor, Ryszard Kapuściński’s classic portrait of autocratic senility, Emperor Haile Selassie orders a great palace to be built in Ethiopia’s Ogaden Desert, keeps a liveried staff there for many years—but visits the site only a single day. In Addis Ababa, one servant waits on Emperor Selassie so that whenever he mounts his throne he can place a pillow under the emperor’s feet (Selassie was very short), and another stands by so that when the emperor’s little dog pisses on a visiting dignitary’s shoe this servant can wipe it off with a satin cloth. The dignitaries are not permitted so much as to flinch.

The point, I guess, is that autumnal patriarchs run out of large abuses of power to initiate (indiscriminate deportations, selling pardons) and turn to petty ones. Two examples of the latter are Trump’s gilding the Oval Office and erecting a 90,000 square-foot White House ballroom that dwarfs the executive mansion. The style of these is literally rococo because MAGA itself has entered its rococo stage. The latest example is Trump’s war on sans serif fonts—that is, typeface lacking traditional small decorative flourishes.

It started with words. When Trump returned to office, he banned from all government communications the words and phrases equality, inequality, climate science, at-risk, socioeconomic, underprivileged, and 193 others. Now Trump is dictating how the letters in the remaining words should appear on a computer screen or page. It’s reported that Secretary of State Marco Rubio on December 9 sent an “action request” to all diplomatic posts ordering them to stop using sans serif type, to “restore decorum and professionalism to the department’s written work.”

If you’re wondering how Rubio could possibly have time for such small matters while Israel makes a sham of its Gaza ceasefire and Trump sells out Ukraine, the answer is that this comes from the top. A source tells me that a Trump administration official outside the State Department recently delivered a similar harangue about sans serif, baffling everyone at the meeting in question. As far back as Inauguration Day, the Trump White House replaced the Decimal sans serif headline font on the Biden White House webpage with the serif-rich Instrument Serif. “I don’t love that the White House uses it,” Instrument Serif’s inventor, Jordan Egstad, recently told Jezebel’s Daniel Han. “Fuck Donald Trump.”

Last month, Trump ordered placed, on a pillar just outside his office and behind the (former) Rose Garden, some gold signage (“The Oval Office”) in flourish-heavy Shelley Script. It looked like an invitation to a Bar Mitzvah. That came down, then went up again. The same font is also visible along the “Presidential Walk of Fame” (the same one where President Joe Biden is depicted, insultingly, as an autopen). It’s all part of Trump’s project to make the White House resemble a 1970s dinner theater.

Before proceeding, let me declare myself. I harbor a mild preference for serifs. The font you see in this article and throughout The New Republic’s website (also its monthly print magazine) has serifs. I like serifs, but I don’t make a big thing of it because, unlike the president of the United States, I have better things to do with my time.

Sans serif fonts gained popularity in the early twentieth century with the rise of mass advertising because sans serif was judged easier to read from a distance. Modernist graphic artists liked sans serif’s stripped-down aesthetic, and in the early days of the World Wide Web, graphic designers decided sans serif was easier to read on a screen. (A sans serif font was the default typeface for Windows Office from 2006 to 2023.) Today, sans serif remains pretty rare in dead-tree books, but online you’re as likely to encounter serifs as not. Older readers typically prefer serifs, whereas millennials, according to New York magazine, can’t abide them. To which I say: Fine, sure, whatever.

The Trump administration opposes sans serif because they think it’s DEI bullshit. In 2023, Rubio’s predecessor, Antony Blinken, in a cable headlined “The Times (New Roman) They Are A Changin’,” switched State Department communications to the sans serif Calibri font. His reason was that it was easier to read for people with dyslexia or other reading disabilities—and, yes, that suggestion came from the State Department’s Office of Diversity and Inclusion, one of many such offices throughout the federal government that Trump ordered eliminated his first day in office.

Rubio’s December 9 cable (“Return to Tradition: Times New Roman’s 14-Point Font Required for All Department Paper”) argued that “switching to Calibri achieved nothing except the degradation of the department’s official correspondence.” Oh, please. The only degradation here is Rubio’s own in pandering to Trump’s pettiest prejudices. Times New Roman, Rubio wrote in his memo, “aligns with the President’s One Voice for America’s Foreign Relations directive.” That executive order was Trump’s warning to the diplomatic corps that if you don’t play ball, he’ll fire your ass. I guess Rubio’s point in citing it was that if you continue to use Calibri, he’ll fire your ass.

The irony, of course, is that when it comes to reading, Trump could use all the DEI assistance he can get. That’s been evident for some time; see, for instance, this hilarious 1987 clip where Trump first says that he hasn’t read Tom Wolfe’s The Bonfire of the Vanities; then says he “really liked Tom Wolfe’s last book,” which was The Bonfire of the Vanities; then says Wolfe’s “done a beautiful job” with “his current book”; then confirms that he means The Bonfire of the Vanities; then says, “I really can’t hear with this earphone by the way.” In 2016, Tony Schwartz, Trump’s ghostwriter on The Art of the Deal, told The New Yorker’s Jane Mayer, “I seriously doubt that Trump has ever read a book straight through in his adult life.” In 2016, Megyn Kelly asked Trump to name the most recent book he’d read. Trump’s reply: “I read passages, I read areas, I’ll read chapters—I don’t have the time.” People have speculated for years that Trump is dyslexic. The big headlines on his White House website now have serifs, but much of the text does not. Has Trump even noticed?

In initiating a crusade against sans serif type, Trump appears to be telling us: “I’ve never read my briefing books, and I don’t intend to start now. But I like how things look, and serifs look better, and if that creates problems for handicapped people I don’t care.”

A comparison here with Ethiopia’s late emperor is instructive. Selassie “had no schooling,” Kapuściński reports (not an excuse Trump can make). For Selassie, “The custom of relating things by word of mouth” had certain advantages:

If need be, the emperor could say that a given dignitary had told him something quite different from what had really been said, and the latter could not defend himself, having no written proof. Thus the Emperor heard from his subordinates not what they told him, but what he thought should be said.

But petty tyrant though he was, even Selassie didn’t likely give a damn whether the reading matter he didn’t read had serifs or not. Once again, Trump is breaking new ground.

The Self-Delusions of Olivia Nuzzi’s American Canto - 2025-12-11T11:00:00Z

Midway through the journey of her life, Olivia Nuzzi found herself in Malibu, for she had wandered from the straightforward path. In exile from the East Coast, where she had held a plum gig with New York, she awoke on the West, with a plum gig at Vanity Fair, doing hard time as “West Coast editor.” With The Divine Comedy in one hand and The King James Bible in the other—or at least, on display when the Times writer came for the profile—she set out to document her descent. Themes were close at hand. Dante, he wrote about the inferno. Fire, you dig? Well, guess what California’s got? Lousy with it.

The mismatches between reality and reality as described in American Canto began long before the book was released. To recount a fall from grace, it helps to have actually fallen from grace, and on publication day the author was still, somehow, in the upper echelon of her industry. The circumstances that caused her to skip town—to wit: an affair with RFK Jr., then a presidential candidate she had been assigned to profile—would be humiliating to anyone, certainly. But writing as if she was living in hell seems a little unfair to both Malibu and Vanity Fair. Which isn’t the magazine it used to be, but what is, these days? American Canto is a book about personal decline that ends in hitting rock top.

Here the thing gets stranger still, because when the much-celebrated writer got a chance to write at greater length than ever before about the Trump era, the result was an actual fall from grace, with Nuzzi garnering unimpressed reviews and Vanity Fair cutting ties with her (amid a series of revelations from her ex-fiancé Ryan Lizza). This set of events has precipitated altogether too much discourse. There are the claims and counterclaims of the primary participants. There’s second-order discourse about what the whole thing says about some other problem—the influencer-fication of journalism, maybe. Most of that is true enough.

There’s third-order discourse, where people discuss the discussion. “The titanic sexual shaming of a woman, Monica Lewinsky-style,” posted Caitlin Flanagan on X. “No one’s going to be proud of this coverage in 20 years.” It got weirder. “When I look at her I see a little girl, like my daughter,” Lisa Taddeo wrote in Air Mail, adding that “the attempted patriarchal mass murder of this woman’s career” is a “freaksome lynching.”

I’m a little older than Nuzzi. I think good writing—clear thinking—matters. Not much, but a little! This is a minority position, I am learning. If Nuzzi came away from the last decade with useful insight for us, it would not excuse her ethical lapses, but it would be a point in her favor. If she didn’t—if, say, she came face to face with various incarnations of American evil over a decade and not only failed to recognize them as evil but came away with little to tell us—it would tend to sharpen questions about what her defenders are defending, what our industry rewards, and the purpose, if any, of writing in the Trump era.

I have to admit something that surprised me: Parts of this book work. They work conditionally, and not in a way intended by the author, but they work. The sections of American Canto that concern people other than the author herself and RFK Jr. don’t work at all. In this book, other people are always flat and seen through a gauzy screen, and the prose is composed substantially of filler—long portions of transcripts republished whole, republished tweets from accounts like “Bimbopilled,” song lyrics and poetry, historical digressions that go nowhere. On the occasions when Nuzzi lets her mind show, something snaps into place. It’s good for the same reasons the first part is bad.

Before we get there, we have to talk about the Didion thing.

Ordinarily it would be an act of cruelty to compare a writer’s first book to Joan Didion’s work, but Nuzzi summoned the specter of Didion in the build-up to publication. A California book, about fire and entropy and social sickness and the East as seen from the West, a mix of memoir and essays and reportage. The promotional art for American Canto in both Vanity Fair and a glowing Times profile features Nuzzi in her white Mustang, sunglasses, California chic, which inevitably recalls the black-and-white pictures of Didion with her Stingray.

What’s in the text is actually much weirder. The book’s California sections imitate not only Didion’s themes and interests but her specific writerly tics and constructions down to the sentence level. If you happen to buy this book, read it alongside “Quiet Days in Malibu,” the last piece from The White Album. Some of the similarities could be coincidental. Didion’s piece sketches the lifeguards at Zuma Beach, and she clearly likes the way the word looks and sounds, using it over and over. Nuzzi refers back throughout the book to “the little house at Zuma.” Didion loved proper place names, and making lists of them (a tendency Mary McCarthy made much fun of in her review of Didion’s Democracy), and she whips ’em out in “Quiet Days” to draw a parallel between the lifeguards and generals on a front: “All quiet at Leo. Situation normal at Surfrider.” Nuzzi does too, some of the same ones, and for the same reason: “Ball of fire at Point Dume. Clear. Boney Ridge, the San Gabriels, the Topa Topas.”

In American Canto, there’s a certain tick-tock patter that will feel familiar, and also a certain habit of addressing the reader to clear up meanings and definitions. “I mean to tell you as best I can,” starts one paragraph. The next: “I mean to tell you of the canyon.” Two more that way. You may hear a certain resonance in Nuzzi’s description of a childhood home flanked by “hydrangeas and forsythias and tomato plants.” Didion liked playing with negation and repetition, and there it is in the description of RFK’s brain parasite, “the worm that was not a worm.”

Didion loved repetition, loved building long stretches of metronymic prose that break, for effect, in long, sweeping, propulsive sentences. She also loved using the full names of her subjects, rather than last names or pronouns. Here, from the second page of Canto, one of those propulsive sentences:

I knew about beauty pageants because of JonBenét Ramsey, and I was frightened by beauty pageants because of JonBenét Ramsey, because she was the first girl through whom I learned that if you are beautiful you may get killed, and once you are killed you will become the property of the country, and the country will resurrect you so that you can be killed again and again in ecstatic detail on the national altar of television; JonBenét Ramsey said that if you are beautiful you may get killed in service to your country.

If you haven’t caught it, she’s drawing a parallel between herself and her troubles as a beautiful person and Ramsey, and she gives herself permission to draw the connection because of a kind of numerology. “In 1996, the year that Donald Trump acquired the Miss Universe Pageant, I turned three, and JonBenét Ramsey, who was six, was murdered.” Three years later, when she was six, she saw Donald Trump’s car in traffic.

Didion’s techniques have a purpose. Nearly all of her writing had as its target sloppy thinking, self-deception, delusion. Her prose style was the scalpel she used to cleave the real from the unreal. The repetition, the specificity, the remove from her subjects, created a sense of absolute, dispassionate precision. When she’s writing about herself, this precision leavens the anxiety she feels and provides a useful tension. When she’s free to observe other people she’s not emotionally invested in—say, Michael Dukakis or Newt Gingrich—her prose, and her thinking and analysis, is as clear as a mountain spring.

In American Canto, these techniques are exactly the wrong choice—they spotlight what is actually occurring on the page, which is imprecise prose reflecting unclear thinking. This is true from the jump. In the brief introduction, Nuzzi writes that this is not “a book about the president or even about politics.” A few pages later, though, she writes that what “happened between me and the Politician,” which is to say RFK Jr., is in fact the same thing that “happened between the country and the president. I cannot talk about one without the other.”

This sets up the expectation that some meaningful insight into both men is forthcoming. But Nuzzi writes of the Trump era that “events lost context. Words lost meaning.” Sure, but isn’t the point of the writer to separate true from false and discern meaning? The sections about Trump consist too often of long, uninterrupted quotes taken from already published reportage and summaries of events a knowledgeable reader will already know.

Nuzzi has a habit of bending reality to the more cinematic, sentimental version of it. At the beginning, she recalls the trauma she felt from witnessing the day during Donald Trump’s trial when “the boy who missed his mother and could no longer bear to be here doused himself in gasoline and lit a match. When I learned what burning flesh smells like. Strange and sweet.” During a TV appearance later she says she could taste him in her mouth, a horrible thing to imagine. But you may remember that the “boy who missed his mother” was a 37-year-old schizophrenic man who believed information about an imminent fascist takeover was being transmitted to him through classic Simpsons episodes. He was, in a way, a symbol of our time, but not the one that the author wanted to use.

The imprecision in the book’s prose and description of reality is greatly exacerbated by the mystifying decision not to use proper names for figures with whom Nuzzi personally interacted. The reader is supposed to juggle descriptions of the Personality, the President, the Politician, and the Performer, among dozens of others. Not all are so vague, thankfully—there’s the “South African Tech Billionaire” and “the digital everything-company billionaire” and “the War Hero, the senior senator from Arizona”—but others will make the reader confused. When she refers to a businessman, is it the same one as before? I can guess who the “MAGA General” is, but who is the “failed candidate”?

Does it even matter? In a world where words have lost all meaning, what’s the point of words? The sense conveyed by this portion of the book is that the author doesn’t believe they have any—doesn’t believe in much of anything—even though the book is being marketed as an attempt to explain everything.

Meaning is occasionally gestured to, though most often it is left to hang. Nuzzi finds it significant that she was born on January 6. Hey, that’s kinda funny, a reader might think, but for the author this and other conjoined coincidences recall the Ouroboros: “Strange symmetry. Circular. On this humid night, a last gasp as the tail met the jaw. I did not yet grasp this.” She writes that she found her respect for RFK Jr. swell when he dropped a writerly insight about Trump. “I always thought of him as a novel: hundreds of lies that amount to one big truth.” A good line, one that Nuzzi writes filled her with jealousy and longing. But the natural question is: What’s the one big truth? We sail right on by.

There are long sections of this book Nuzzi clearly does care about, and understood in the proper register, they’re strangely compelling. The register in which to absorb American Canto is the one in which you’d read Pale Fire, whose verbose and unreliable narrator, Charles Kinbote, draws us slowly into his deepening, complex madness. Read it this way, and a lot of what might irritate you otherwise will click into place.

This sounds, I’m sure, like an attempt to be cruel. But I mean it earnestly. Nuzzi succeeds in letting us into her mind and communicates how she came to make the mistakes she did, and these portions, at least, are worth reading not because they’re true but because they aren’t. They’re carefully written to obscure as much as they reveal; written defensively. When she first addresses the scandal, she writes in the passive voice that “a monumental fuckup had collided my private life with the public interest.”

But this is a kind of sincerity also. She is admirably frank that she is still primarily motivated by resentments and perceived slights rather than a desire for atonement and forgiveness. “People ask me now about anger. About my lack of it. How? How could I not be enraged?” This is not, of course, the question most people have. She still views Kennedy as a put-upon outsider rather than what he has subsequently revealed himself to be. This is true in both her personal sense of him and her analysis of the man as a political actor—“a collision of conspiracy and error that made it so that he could not win,” she writes, though this was hardly the problem with Kennedy’s bid. She valorized him, and to some extent still does, as a man who made all decisions by thinking through “what would be best for the country. I was sure he could do that, I said, because I trusted him that much.”

The tragedy here, that what Kennedy has done is to wreck American science and health in a way that will take generations to recover, is never addressed. She tangled with a monster and survived, and doesn’t quite seem to have gotten it. The betrayal he carried out, which results in him earning the name the Politician, is to sell out Nuzzi. “I never did think of him, not until much later, and then for reasons that came as a shock, as a politician.” As a journalist, this is a permanently disqualifying lapse of judgment. But it’s good character development.

This gives the book a certain horror-movie undercurrent, as Nuzzi keeps rendering judgments, even from her present position, that the reader suspects are upside-down and missing the key thing. She writes that Kennedy thought it “would be fun” if the two went to Mar-a-Lago at the same time. Nuzzi thinks Trump will clock the affair. She shut her eyes “tightly, as if it might un-reveal the revelation that he did not appreciate how sophisticated an animal he was dealing with,” even though she says a few pages before that Kennedy was perfectly clear-eyed about Trump. “It was not the sort of information the Politician should have wanted the president to have,” she says.

The reader may suspect, in fact, that Kennedy, clearly loving the power imbalance, would have enjoyed seeing her squirm—and would not have minded Trump knowing. It only gets worse from here. Later, she says Kennedy was “not good in a crisis” and “did not know much about how the media worked,” as she explains why his impulse was to lie and slander her when their affair was reported in the press. The discernment that is the essayist’s only valuable skill is gone.

When the thing blows up, Nuzzi is furious at everyone who brought the lapse of judgment to light. The editor who learns the truth—“the man for whom I worked”—was trying to “trap” her. “I had never before lied to him,” Nuzzi says. Then she lies. But of course, she has been lying for a long time now, advocating for the presidential campaign of a person she did not reveal she was intimately involved with. She lambastes those who told the editor as betrayers: She even uses the book to litigate an unrelated grievance with the magazine’s creative director.

From here the madness deepens. “What occurred in private was supposed to be private, and it had not been my choice that it ceased to remain so, nor that a corporate media outfit with a political reputation to uphold had been spooked into participating in what I considered a siege of hyper-domestic terror,” she says. She attempts to make the muddled case that the terror is the result of liberal persecution for her criticism of Joe Biden.

She gets in the white Mustang and drives west, and becomes convinced drones are stalking her. She meditates on how the waiters at D.C. restaurants are most likely spies. The shadows around her grow longer, her alienation deepens. Her connection to reality fractures further and, at the very end, she declares, watching another drone hover over the beach, that “I do not recall what a plane ought to look like in the night sky, whether it should move fast or slow, if it should appear to remain in one place for very long, if it should ever move in circles or up and down,” before declaring that “nobody cares anymore.”

The impulse is to say: Of course you know what a plane does. But maybe not? The last line is another jagged fracturing. The drone is sending a message from God, she writes, and she is unsure whether it is meant to “offer reassurance or to issue a threat.”

In the Times profile that preceded the book, Nuzzi said she wrote American Canto to “complete a thought.” The easy joke: just one? But I, too, feel how hard it is to complete a thought at the moment—to think clearly about anything. Whether it’s the microplastics or the general deadening sense of the world around us or the comforting feel of the phone in my hand, it is a constant struggle. American Canto is the work of a disordered mind in anguish, terribly raw. To the extent that she has put this calamitous state of mind on the page, the prose version of flipping between X and Instagram over and over, alternating between dread and self-delusion, Nuzzi has, in spite of herself, produced an artifact of the age.

The States Leading the Way on Regulating AI - 2025-12-11T11:00:00Z

Artificial intelligence is rushing into our lives at a breakneck pace. And the AI mavens know it: In the merging language of Silicon Valley and Capitol Hill, they like to describe our present state of affairs as a “race.” There are reports that the technology can now execute large-scale cyberattacks, that it can engineer bioweapons. AI chatbots are melting our brains while AI video generators churn out deepfake revenge porn. The GOP’s support for the industry, guided by a friendly President Donald Trump and the considerable influence of the Big Tech money lining the coffers of lawmakers—including, it must be said, some Democrats loath to confront the administration on the matter—has ensured federal regulation is off the table. The first item listed in Trump’s AI Action Plan is a promise to the AI industry that it will be “unencumbered by bureaucratic red tape.”

In response, state legislatures are passing their own regulations, red states included: Texas and West Virginia both passed AI laws in 2025. But the biggest story this year was right here in the industry’s California backyard, where Governor Gavin Newsom signed an AI transparency bill that capped a years-long lobbying battle, immediately becoming a top target in Washington.

California’s new AI law is aimed at preventing “catastrophic risk,” which it defines as “serious injury to more than 50 people” or damages of $1 billion. Colloquially discussed as S.B. 53 but formally titled the Transparency in Frontier Artificial Intelligence Act, the law has already been replicated in New York where, as in California, they’re concerned with an AI model going—let’s say … “semi-sentient”—and “evading the control of its frontier developer or user.” Similar legislation is winding its way through statehouses in Michigan, Massachusetts, and Illinois.

This encroaching regulation has congressional Republicans (and the AI lobby) hell-bent on instituting a federal override on state regulations. In a conversation with The New Republic, state Senator Scott Weiner, the California lawmaker behind Senate Bill 53, called the AI preemption push “a Night of the Living Dead … it keeps coming back.”

Republicans tried to put the preemption in the reconciliation bill in June. They failed. Spectacularly, actually: shot down by a vote of 99–1 in the Senate. Then they tried to slip a 10-year preemption into the NDAA, but that too fell apart—leading an undaunted House Majority Leader Steve Scalise promising to “look for other places” for the language.

This legislative scramble takes place in the foreground of the death of Adam Raine—a 16-year-old who killed himself after a monthslong ChatGPT conversation so disturbing that I’d rather not recount it here. His family is now suing OpenAI. The company says that Raine “misused” their chatbot. They say ChatGPT isn’t designed to do things like congratulate teenagers for attempting suicide. Their legal argument seems to be that ChatGPT evaded the control of its developer.

Stymied on the legislative side, Trump recently drafted an executive order that would cut funding to states with laws like S.B. 53, arguing that regulation hampers progress and that we’re in a “race with our adversaries.” The executive order refers to S.B. 53 as a “burdensome disclosure and reporting law.” Donald Trump obviously didn’t write the order; he probably knows as much about AI as I do about particle accelerators. The more likely author is White House AI czar David Sacks, who has pushed to loosen export controls, thereby allowing America’s advanced AI chips to be sold to China.

Now, it can’t be true that (a) we should sell our advanced AI chips to China, and yet (b) we shouldn’t regulate the industry because we need to beat China in the AI race. The only way you can concoct a logic possible of making both those arguments is if you assume a common motivation: fattening the already bloated bank accounts of tech billionaires like Sacks, Mark Andreessen, and Sam Altman.

Andreessen and Altman both opposed California’s efforts to regulate AI. Altman’s company, OpenAI, even subpoenaed policy wonk Nathan Calvin, requesting “all documents concerning SB 53 or its potential impact on OpenAI.” Calvin is a lawyer at the AI think tank Encode, where he worked on S.B. 53. He told The New Republic that the bill represents “the first time that we’ve seen any jurisdiction in the United States say very clearly, ‘We think that catastrophic risk from the most advanced AI models is worth taking seriously, and we should take affirmative steps to have companies guard against that and have government prepare for that.’”

Now that the law is on the books, OpenAI has asked Governor Newsom to be considered‭ compliant with state requirements because it signed an AI code of conduct in the European Union. Adherence to the EU code is voluntary.

Weiner spent years working on the law that became S.B. 53, first passing a bill known as S.B. 1047, which would have instituted more guardrails on AI companies, requiring third-party audits and a kill switch on AI models. OpenAI lobbied against S.B. 1047. Google lobbied against it. Meta lobbied against it. Andreessen Horowitz lobbied against it. Eight members of the California congressional delegation—Lofgren, Eshoo, Khanna, Cardenas, Correa Barrigan, Bera, and Peters—sent a letter to Gavin Newsom asking him to veto 1047, complaining that the bill was “skewed toward addressing extreme misuse scenarios and hypothetical existential risks while largely ignoring demonstrable AI risks like misinformation, discrimination, nonconsensual deepfakes, environmental impacts and workplace displacement.”

Weiner says the congressional letter was “very odd,” and that it’s the only time in his statehouse tenure that members of Congress have lobbied against one of his bills. He calls their argument a “bad-faith whataboutism.”

Bad faith or not, it worked. Newsom vetoed the law and formed a working group to produce a report that eventually informed S.B. 53. The working group included three people, among them Stanford professor Fei-Fei Li, who herself leads an AI start-up worth $1 billion and backed by, surprise, Andreessen Horowitz.

It’s obviously highly unusual for members of Congress to weigh in on state legislation. You’d have a difficult time figuring out exactly how much money the tech industry has pumped into those campaign coffers. I spent hours trying. But beyond the obvious red flags, there are two problems with the congressional letter on S.B. 1047: First, we probably should be concerned about the “extreme misuse scenarios” of AI—that’s precisely what OpenAI is calling the death of Adam Raine, after all. Secondly, California already has laws prohibiting deceptive AI in elections, nonconsensual deepfakes, and employment discrimination.

All of those laws, of course, would become useless if a federal AI preemption were to be put in place. If the preemption comes through Congress—as Scalise is promising—Weiner says that it “will be litigated,” adding, “Congress’s preemption power is typically tied to enactment of a comprehensive regulatory scheme. And then you can have a fight about what that scheme should be, but the idea that Congress would just ban states from doing this without replacing it with anything else, that’s a legal question.” He seemed even less convinced by Trump’s threats of an executive order, saying, “Trump thinks he’s a king, but he’s not. The president can’t nullify state law by executive order, and it’s a fever dream to suggest otherwise.”

These laws are overwhelmingly popular. They do things like protect the elderly from AI cyberscams. That’s why the Senate vote killing the AI preemption was a staggering 99–1. And these laws represent the most likely avenues for future regulation, if only at the state level.

Nicholas Farnsworth, a lawyer at Orrick who specializes in state-level AI laws, told The New Republic that “we’ll see more and more states adopting the transparency regulations” like the companion chatbot law recently passed in California that requires a disclosure that users are interacting with AI. Farnsworth added that high-risk AI laws like the new one in Colorado “will likely go across the United States.” These deal with high-risk decisions: those in the fields of health care, education, and employment. You can’t, for example, use an AI as the ultimate decision-maker in denying somebody a loan or firing them. Or if you do, you have to give them a chance to appeal for a review with a real live human being.

The Colorado law was also targeted by Trump’s executive order. He complained that the law could “force AI models to embed DEI in their programming.” And while the DEI criticism sounds like vintage Trump, Sacks is also more than fluent in Republican grievance language. He complains constantly about “woke AI,” even fretting that such a thing would be “Orwellian.”

The language of the AI industry is similarly melodramatic, which should come as little surprise since AI is the industry’s latest idée fixe—where every new line of code seems to be about the technology’s self-evident beneficence (and only incidentally about making money). The AI race metaphor is particularly suspicious. Dr. Julia Powles, director of the Institute for Technology, Policy and Law at UCLA called it “an industry narrative.” Nathan Calvin concurred, telling The New Republic that “some of these companies like Meta lobbying most fervently for blocking state AI regulation are not even focused on trying to build the forms of AI that do seem really important to national security. The stuff they’re trying to build is like automated infinite-scroll AI video slop. Do we really need to beat China in the race to addict our kids and citizens in general to as much AI short-form video as we can? Is that the best way to protect our national competitiveness and security?”

It’s worth noting that Calvin, like Weiner and all of the other pro-regulation figures I spoke to, see real promise in artificial intelligence. Calvin said that “AI is here to stay and is really important.” Weiner described himself as a “fan” of AI, adding, “I want AI. I want folks to be able to innovate, to help solve the world’s problems.”

But we’re at a crossroads, all the same. Regulation is coming. Powles noted that “there’s a real sensibility from policymakers that we missed a trick with social media and we don’t want to do that again with AI.” Even the companies seem to be aware that they are in the crosshairs. That’s why the brass at Andreessen Horowitz and OpenAI have a new hundred-million-dollar super PAC and are spending big to fight regulation.

Calvin says that “some of the companies’ approach is to effectively take as much as they can now, grow and embed themselves as fast as they can, and then by the time the public has woken up to what’s happening or is demanding changes, be in a sufficiently entrenched position to prevent any meaningful oversight or changes.” Of course, with a federal moratorium legalizing AI cyberscams on grannies and revenge porn on teens, the public might wake up even quicker than the latest semi-sentient chatbot.

Pete Hegseth’s Own AI Bot Backfires on His Boat Strikes - 2025-12-10T21:44:24Z

Et tu, ChatGPT?

On Tuesday, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth unveiled his department’s new AI chatbot for military personnel, GenAI.mil. Almost immediately, the bot called a “hypothetical” situation where the government orders a strike on a suspected drug-smuggling boat and then double-taps said boat to kill the survivors, “unambiguously illegal.”

A military source who spoke to Straight Arrow News Wednesday pointed reporters to a Reddit thread that featured the alleged interaction with the bot. The source said that military personnel wasted no time in testing the bot’s capabilities.

Hegseth has spent recent weeks ardently defending the legality of a situation just like the one described to the chatbot. Backed by President Donald Trump, Hegseth has ordered at least 22 (likely illegal) airstrikes against numerous boats in international waters under the guise of stopping “narcoterrorism,” which have so far killed at least 87 people. After the very first strike on September 2, he ordered a double-tap attack on an already bombed boat in order to kill two survivors.

The outright killing of shipwrecked survivors has sparked bipartisan outrage, though many Republicans claim to still need more information before they abandon Hegseth. Trump is distancing himself from the situation, saying he’s “not involved.”

At least someone—or something?—in the Trump administration has moral clarity.

ICE Barbie Is Building Her Own Fleet of Deportation Planes - 2025-12-10T20:39:06Z

The Department of Homeland Security just paid nearly $140 million to be in charge of managing its own deportation flights. 

Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem has signed a multimillion-dollar contract to purchase six Boeing 737 aircrafts from Daedalus Aviation Corporation, whose owners already have ties to massive DHS contracts, The Washington Post reported Wednesday. 

Immigration and Customs Enforcement previously chartered planes to carry out deportations. DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin told the Post that owning its own planes would allow ICE to “operate more effectively, including by using more efficient flight patterns.” 

Now the agency would be responsible for managing its own fleet of aircraft, flight crews, and all the logistics involved in transporting immigrant detainees around and out of the country. But John Sandweg, former acting ICE director, said that dealing with all of this might be more trouble than it’s worth.  

“It’s so much easier to issue a contract to a company that already manages a fleet of airplanes,” Sandweg told the Post. “So this move I’m surprised by because what the administration wants to accomplish, by and large, can be accomplished through charter flights already.”

$140 million is just a small drop in the $170 billion bucket that is DHS’s new four-year budget—but it’s not clear that the decision to run its own deportation airline won’t incur more costs as part of the Trump’s administration’s ongoing efforts to drive up the rate of removals.

The owners of Daedalus Aviation, William Allen Walters III and Taundria Cappel, are also the figures behind Salus Worldwide Solutions Corporation, which won a three-year $915 million air services contract to carry out deportations. That contract is the subject of an ongoing lawsuit, over allegations that it was an “unlawful, rushed, and non-competitive award.”

Guess How Many Republican Seats Democrats Flipped in Recent Elections? - 2025-12-10T20:21:06Z

Now that the 2025 elections are over, we can definitively say: This was a very good year for Democrats.

According to an analysis by Daniel Nichanian for Bolts, Democrats flipped 21 percent of Republican-held state legislative seats—a huge upset and a harbinger of midterm doom for the president’s party.

On the Republican side, candidates managed to flip exactly zero seats: not in New Jersey, where Bolts reports the party had high hopes, and not in newly red Trump-voting districts in New York.

For those hoping for a 2026 blue wave like the one we saw in 2018, get excited: So far, 2025’s election results are looking eerily similar to 2017’s. During the first year of Donald Trump’s first term, Democrats won big in New Jersey and Virginia, as well as in special elections across the country—the same thing that happened this year, with New Jersey Democrats gaining five seats in their assembly, and Virginia Democrats gaining a whopping 13.

And according to Bolts, the overall swing this year is even stronger: 21 percent of GOP-held seats flipped, compared to 2017’s 20 percent.

What’s more, Bolts’ analysis looks at legislative seats, so these winning statistics don’t even take into consideration big victories on the state executive level, such as Governors-elect Abigail Spanberger and Mikie Sherill in Virginia and New Jersey, respectively, or local offices, like just-elected future Miami Mayor Eileen Higgins.

In an even stronger referendum than in 2017, voters made clear that they’re tired of Trump.

Trump Team Extradited Woman Here. Now They Want to Deport Her. - 2025-12-10T19:38:35Z

The feds worked for a year to extradite a Belarusian woman accused of smuggling millions of dollars of U.S. aviation equipment into Russia for its war on Ukraine. But now that she’s finally in the United States, where she can face charges, the Department of Homeland Security is trying to deport her. 

The case against the woman, Yana Leonova, could fall apart if she were to be detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement, The Washington Post reported Wednesday. She’s facing a 10-count felony indictment for alleged fraud, smuggling, and money laundering. Or, if ICE has its way, she could just, you know, go home. 

Judge Zia M. Faruqui called the situation “Kafkaesque” in a hearing Monday, according to the Post. In a written order, he said, “Indeed, it is both preposterous and offensive for the government to bring someone into the United States against their will and then turn around and seek ICE detention because that person is here ‘illegally.’… The government needs to decide what its priorities are: ginning up deportation stats or prosecuting alleged criminals.”

Technically, Leonova was only authorized to remain in the country for two weeks after she arrived in early November. So ICE pounced: DHS told the court that they planned to take Leonova into custody and deport her—if and when she was released from D.C. jail, where she’s been held since she arrived. 

The move has confounded lawyers and judges alike. Now prosecutors must ask DHS if Leonova can be given legal authorization to stay in the country while she is tried for her alleged weapons smuggling. 

“I haven’t been in this predicament before, your honor,” one prosecutor said to the judge at Monday’s hearing.

“Me, either,” Faruqui responded, according to the Post.

It seems when it comes to locking up actual criminals, as opposed to daycare workers, pregnant citizens, or children, Donald Trump couldn’t care less.  

Trump Goes to War With ICC to Shield Himself From Prosecution - 2025-12-10T18:00:47Z

The U.S. government is threatening new sanctions on the International Criminal Court unless it changes its founding document to guarantee that it won’t prosecute President Trump or other administration officials. 

Reuters, citing an unnamed White House official, reports that if the court doesn’t listen to American demands, including dropping investigations into war crimes by Israel in Gaza and U.S. troops in Afghanistan, the Trump administration could sanction more ICC officials, as well as the entire court. 

Republicans and Democrats alike have long attacked the court over its investigation into Israel’s conduct in Gaza, and those efforts only increased after the court issued arrest warrants for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, former Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant, and Hamas military leader Mohammed Deif last year. 

In March 2020, ICC prosecutors opened an investigation in Afghanistan that included possible crimes by the U.S. military. In 2021, the court deprioritized, but never closed, the investigation, and apparently the Trump administration is worried. 

“There is growing concern ... that in 2029 the ICC will turn its attention to the president, to the vice president, to the secretary of war and others, and pursue prosecutions against them,” the unnamed White House official told Reuters. “That is unacceptable, and we will not allow it to happen.”

Even under the Biden administration, the U.S. was hostile to the ICC, with Biden calling the arrest warrants for Gallant and Netanyahu “outrageous,” even though Israel has killed at least 69,000 Palestinians in Gaza since 2023.  But so far, the ICC has resisted pressure campaigns from the U.S., rejecting American demands last week. 

The U.S. has already imposed sanctions against the court’s chief prosecutor, Karim Khan, as well as several of its judges, and, along with Israel, has challenged the court’s jurisdiction on non-member states. 

The U.S. is not a signatory or party to the Rome Statute that created the court in 2002, although many of its allies around the world are. Changing the document would require a two-thirds vote from all of the 125 countries that ratified the Rome Statue, which gives the ICC a mandate to prosecute individuals, including sitting heads of state, for crimes committed by them or under their command on the territory of a member state. Trump doesn’t want to be one of them. 

Mike Johnson Finally Reveals GOP’s Health Care Plan—and It’s Rough - 2025-12-10T17:44:49Z

House Speaker Mike Johnson just unveiled Republicans’ plan to address spiking health care costs—and it’s a disaster. 

As Affordable Care Act tax credits are set to expire in just a few weeks, sending health care costs surging for more than 20 million Americans, Republican leadership presented several bullet points Wednesday on how they plan to lower premiums and give Americans better health options. 

Instead of subsidizing premiums for those on Affordable Care Act plans, Republicans proposed introducing Health Savings Accounts, Association Health Plans, and Choice Accounts. 

Americans who don’t get insurance through their employer would be given cash directly into an account, which would reportedly be paired with a high-deductible health plan, meaning higher insurance premiums would be replaced by higher out-of-pocket costs. 

Currently, Obamacare enrollees never see the funds from their tax credits, which instead are sent directly to insurers. President Donald Trump has suggested that consumers would rather see the money themselves, what little of it there is. Republicans’ plan purports to take the burden of negotiating insurance rates away from health care providers and large companies and place it on individuals, so they can “feel like entrepreneurs,” according to Trump.

Republicans are also considering implementing cost-sharing reductions, programs that can assist low-income Americans in paying high deductibles, that were passed as part of Trump’s behemoth budget bill in July. However, the Congressional Budget Office estimates that funding these reductions will increase the number of people without health insurance by 300,000 through 2034.

Another bullet point was controversial “provider-owned hospitals,” which are directly owned and operated by the doctors. The Federation of American Hospitals published a study earlier this year finding that physician-owned hospitals, which focus on a boutique selection of treatments and services, could be damaging to community hospitals, which typically treat patients using Medicare or Medicaid and therefore operate on razor-thin margins. More provider-owned hospitals could siphon away healthier, better-insured patients.

Another point was to codify the Trump administration’s rules to “fix the ACA,” though it’s not entirely clear what that would entail.  

There were some potentially good ideas buried within their list aimed at increasing price transparency. One was to reform pharmacy benefit managers, or PBMs, a class of middlemen who manage the supply chain of prescription drugs. Critics of PBMs have suggested that consolidation among these managers has contributed to decreased transparency and thwarted competitive pricing. 

Another idea was “site neutrality,” which means that patients would pay the same prices for the same services regardless of setting—though some critics have warned that would further reduce hospital revenues. 

Johnson told Republicans that they wouldn’t implement all 10 of the proposed bullet points and that caucus members should choose two or three to pursue, NOTUS reported.

While discussion was “cordial,” a source told NOTUS, there was “no consensus” at all.

Federal Judge Orders Trump to Get Troops Out of Los Angeles ASAP - 2025-12-10T17:24:08Z

U.S. District Judge Charles Breyer on Wednesday blocked President Trump’s deployment of National Guard troops to California, rejecting the notion that recent protests against Immigration and Customs Enforcement and Border Patrol amounted to rebellion.

“The founders designed our government to be a system of checks and balances. Defendants, however, make clear that the only check they want is a blank one,” Breyer wrote in his 35-page opinion.

This all started this summer, when Trump sent thousands of National Guards troops to Los Angeles in response to protests, against the wishes of Mayor Karen Bass and California Governor Gavin Newsom.

Back in September, Judge Breyer ruled that the Trump administration’s deployment of military troops in Los Angeles was a violation of the Posse Comitatus Act.

“Congress spoke clearly in 1878 when it passed the Posse Comitatus Act, prohibiting the use of the U.S. military to execute domestic law,” Breyer wrote then. “Nearly 140 years later, Defendants—President Trump, Secretary of Defense Hegseth, and the Department of Defense—deployed the National Guard and Marines to Los Angeles, ostensibly to quell a rebellion and ensure that federal immigration law was enforced.”

“There were indeed protests in Los Angeles, and some individuals engaged in violence,” he continued. “Yet there was no rebellion, nor was civilian law enforcement unable to respond to the protests and enforce the law.”

The Trump administration has yet to respond to Breyer’s order. There are about 100 troops still left in Los Angeles.

Trump Threatens to Fire His Treasury Secretary Over … Immigration? - 2025-12-10T16:35:27Z

President Donald Trump threatened to fire Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent—not over interest rates, as he did in November, but over something even less under Bessent’s control: putting people in jail.

As part of a longer rant Tuesday about how much better the country is now than it was under former President Joe Biden, Trump once again turned his ire on Somali immigrants.

“Biden and the radical-left Democrats turned Pennsylvania into a dumping ground for hundreds of thousands of migrants from the most dysfunctional places on earth, like Somalia, and gave them billions and billions of your taxpayer dollars. But we didn’t really give it. It was stolen. And those people should go to jail! Jail!” the president yelled.

“And if they don’t go to jail? Scott Bessent is toast,” Trump said, laughing. “He’s toast.”

Trump: Those people should go to jail! Jail! And if they don't go to jail, Scott Bessent is toast. He's toast. pic.twitter.com/dxaJnPMTsr

— Acyn (@Acyn) December 10, 2025

It should go without saying, but as the treasury secretary, Bessent notably does not have the power to put anyone in jail. The president’s nonsensical speech was like a Mad Libs game of his favorite talking points: Biden, Somalia, jail, Bessent.

Trump was likely referring to the fraud scandal in Minnesota—not Pennsylvania—where over the last five years, social services were defrauded out of more than $1 billion in taxpayer dollars. Federal prosecutors allege that nearly all of the perpetrators came from Minnesota’s Somali community. So far, prosecutors have convicted 59 people. There are about 80,000 Somali Americans in Minnesota.

Though the justice system seems to be handling these crimes just fine without the help of Bessent, he has directed the U.S. Treasury to investigate allegations of fraud. (Though, notably, Bessent is reacting to an unproven report that tax dollars were diverted to support terrorist organizations, which there’s little evidence to support.)

Trump is using the scandal as an excuse not only to attack the entire Somali immigrant community but to continue to chip away at all immigrants’ rights in the U.S. Bessent posted on X in November that, at the direction of the president, the Treasury will work to cut off federal benefits for undocumented immigrants.

Pete Hegseth’s Extreme Plan on Where to Send Boat Survivors Exposed - 2025-12-10T16:34:42Z

The Department of Defense didn’t have a plan to deal with survivors after launching its boat bombing campaign in the waters around Central America.

The New York Times reports that after a mid-October strike in the Caribbean Sea left two survivors in U.S. military custody, Pentagon lawyers asked their legal counterparts at the State Department if the pair could be sent to the infamous Terrorism Confinement Center in El Salvador, where the Trump administration had already sent numerous immigrants on shaky legal grounds.

Alarmed State Department lawyers quickly rejected that idea, and the two survivors ended up being sent to their home countries of Ecuador and Colombia. Later, on October 29, the Pentagon spoke with diplomats in the region regarding survivors from another strike, and decided that any that were rescued had to be sent back to their home countries or to a third county, but definitely not the U.S.

Why? The DOD wanted to avoid having any survivors in the U.S. legal system because Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth and other U.S. officials would have to present evidence in court to justify the bombings. The Pentagon has already admitted that it doesn’t know who is on the alleged drug boats it is bombing, which is why it hasn’t tried to prosecute any survivors.

At least some of the people on those boats have been identified as fishermen, and defense officials have not convinced many members of Congress of the legality and justifications for the strikes. Republicans and Democrats alike have criticized them, especially after the revelation that the military bombed survivors of the first boat strike back in September, a possible war crime. Now it seems that Hegseth and the rest of the DOD want to avoid any legal responsibility.

New Poll Reveals Long List of Things Americans Can Barely Afford Now - 2025-12-10T16:16:59Z

As President Trump recoils at the very mention of affordability, bemoaning it as a Democratic scam (still unclear what that means exactly), over half of the country is struggling to pay for basic necessities—and blaming Trump for it. 

New polling from Politico and Public First shows that nearly half of respondents find it hard to pay for their groceries, and 55 percent of them hold the Trump administration responsible. 

Twenty-seven percent of Americans have skipped a doctor’s appointment or checkup in the last two years because it was too expensive, and 23 percent rejected a prescription for similar reasons. Overall, nearly half of respondents are finding it difficult to afford health care. 

Meanwhile, only 36 percent of Trump’s own voters think that the tariffs will work out in the end. 

The majority of voters blaming their affordability issues on Trump means that his disinformation campaign—doing everything but taking responsibility for the state of the economy—isn’t working on most people. 

Trump went from running on affordability to rejecting the notion entirely. If this polling holds true, that should spell danger for the GOP ahead of the 2026 midterms. 

View the full polling here.  

How GOP Secretly Helped Convince Jasmine Crockett to Run for Senate - 2025-12-10T16:12:07Z

Republicans are taking credit for Representative Jasmine Crockett’s last-minute decision to run for the United States Senate, as part of their efforts to recruit “very vulnerable Democrats” to run for office, NOTUS reported. 

Crockett’s surprise announcement last week reportedly threw the Democrats’ political calculus into flux—but seems to have delighted the Republicans who’d been secretly working to get her in the race.

Crockett has made a name for herself being a particularly outspoken critic of Trump and his cronies, infuriating MAGA and marking her as a controversial figure in her own party.

A source familiar with the process told NOTUS that GOP machinations to prop up Crockett’s run first began in June, when Texas Democrats met to discuss 2026 midterm elections—and the firebrand Democrat wasn’t invited, or included in any initial polls.  

In July, the National Republican Senatorial Committee published a poll that found that Crockett was the preferred candidate among Democratic voters. “When we saw the results, we were like, ‘OK, we got to disseminate this far and wide,’” the source told NOTUS.

After the NRSC included Crockett’s name in their poll, other surveys started to include her too. The source told NOTUS that those polls were then aggressively seeded into progressive digital spaces by NRSC allies to “orchestrate the pile on” of promising polling numbers and drive the narrative that support for Crockett was “surging.”

The source dubbed the system of trying to pull in a weaker candidate who would lose to the Republican challenger as an “AstroTurf recruitment process.” 

Incumbent Senator John Cornyn, who is running for reelection, dismissed Crockett as “radical, theatrical, and ineffective.” 

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, a close ally of President Donald Trump who is currently leading the Republican primary polls, claimed that “everyone knows” Crockett will “be soundly defeated.” Previous polls had indicated that Paxton would fare far worse against state Representative James Talarico, the other Democratic primary candidate, or Collin Allred, who dropped his bid shortly before Crockett jumped into the race. 

Trump Goes on Dark Rant About People From “Filthy” Countries - 2025-12-10T15:18:41Z

Donald Trump’s rally in Pennsylvania Tuesday was supposed to be about affordability. Instead, it devolved into him bashing immigrants and using an epithet that he’s previously denied saying.

In Mount Pocono, Trump related to the crowd a meeting in which he said, “Why is it we only take people from shithole countries? Right? Why can’t we have some people from Norway, Sweden, just a few? Let’s have a few. From Denmark, do you mind sending us a few people? Send us some nice people, do you mind?

“But we always take people from Somalia, places that are a disaster, right? Filthy, dirty, disgusting, ridden with crime. The only thing they’re good at is going after ships,” Trump added.

Trump: I said, why is it we only take people from shit hole countries, right? Why can't we have some people from Norway, Sweden, Denmark… But we always take people from Somalia… places that are a filthy, dirty, disgusting pic.twitter.com/hMeIe1u7Wj

— Acyn (@Acyn) December 10, 2025

Trump was reported to have made the “shithole countries” remark way back in 2018 during his first term to refer to Haiti and unnamed African countries, but he vehemently denied the reports at the time. Back then, he even kicked out a reporter from the Oval Office for asking whether Trump meant he wanted immigrants from European or predominantly white countries.

Now it seems that the mask is off. For years, Trump has criticized immigrants from nonwhite countries, infamously accusing Haitian immigrants in Springfield, Ohio, of eating cats and dogs, during his 2024 presidential campaign. But he’s always denied using slurs to describe them until now.

Recently, Trump has described Somali immigrants as “garbage” and launched an immigration crackdown in Minnesota, home to the largest Somali community in the United States. It seems that the president thinks that he can fall back on racism to distract from the fact that the country’s economic problems are his fault.

Democrats Pull Off Two Upset Victories as Voters Send Message to Trump - 2025-12-10T15:11:02Z

More good news for Democrats headed into the midterms: Liberal candidates saw unexpected wins in two Southern states Tuesday night.

Miami residents just elected their first Democratic mayor in almost 30 years. Eileen Higgins, a former Miami-Dade county commissioner, beat Donald Trump–endorsed Republican Emilio González. Higgins won 59 percent of the vote compared to González’s 41 percent.

Both candidates appealed to residents’ economic woes but used different tactics: Higgins emphasized her experience on the County Commission with building infrastructure, streamlining city processes, and building affordable housing. González argued that he would fight overdevelopment and get rid of property taxes. Higgins also loudly criticized Trump’s mass deportation campaign, whereas González pleaded the Fifth, saying he had no control over national policy.

In neighboring Georgia, a special election for a state House seat saw a changed district. Democrat Eric Gisler flipped the previously red seat blue, eking out a win over Republican Mack Guest in a close race.

It’s a major upset: Trump won the district last year by 12 points. Gisler had run for the seat last year and at the time won just 39 percent of the vote. But Tuesday night, he won 51 percent.

Gisler ran on a platform of increasing access to health care, affordable housing, and voting rights. He told the Associated Press that he was grateful for “Democratic enthusiasm” but that he also credited his win to Republicans looking for a change. “A lot of what I would call traditional conservatives held their nose and voted Republican last year on the promise of low prices and whatever else they were selling,” Gisler said. “But they hadn’t received that.”

Trump: Black People Love Me Because They Know a Good Scam - 2025-12-10T15:07:14Z

President Donald Trump is convinced Black people “love” him because “they know a scam better than anybody.”

These peculiar comments came Tuesday night at a rally-style event in Pennsylvania.

“Lemme tell ya. Black people love Trump. I got the biggest vote,” he said, before raising his voice even louder in the microphone. “I got the biggest vote with Black people, they know a scam better than anybody! They know what it is to be scammed.”

Trump: "Let me tell you -- Black people love Trump. I got the biggest vote. I got the biggest vote with Black people. They know a scam better than anybody!" pic.twitter.com/79oF0G6af1

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) December 10, 2025

It’s difficult to parse whether he’s attributing Black people’s knowledge of scams to antiquated racist tropes or making an allusion to the slavery and history of economic discrimination they have endured in America (perhaps the latter is much too generous). Either way, the jury is still very much out on just how much Black people like him.

After Trump made notable gains with the Black vote in 2024, any momentum that he may have had with them since defeating Vice President Kamala Harris last year seem to have evaporated.

“Either the racial realignment never happened, or it already ended. And what I mean by that is, there was a lot of talk after 2024 and the run-up to it about Black voters—particularly Black men and Latino men—and also voters under 30 moving to the right,” The New Republic’s Perry Bacon said on his podcast last month. “That suggests maybe The New York Times and everyone else interviewing every Black man that voted for Trump was a bit of a mistake and an overreaction in the last election.”

Black joblessness—and all joblessness—is up. The shutdown, his anti-DEI crusade, funding cuts to health care, and his antagonistic approach to any federal content that focuses on racism or slavery all bring his proclaimed love for Black people into question. This is a man who just decided to stop offering free national park access on MLK day and Juneteenth, instead making free access on his birthday.

He signed an executive order directing the Interior Department to erase any information that could be misconstrued as a “corrosive ideology,” which of course included anything relating to race relations, LGBTQ rights, and sexism. He also removed a picture of Harriet Tubman from the National Park Service page on the Underground Railroad, and changed the words “enslaved African Americans” to “enslaved workers” while removing a section that discussed Benjamin Franklin being a slave owner.

He’s been sued for racial discrimination in housing, still thinks the Central Park 5 are guilty, and did the whole birtherism thing with the country’s first Black president. This does not seem like someone who has a genuine love and respect for Black people and culture—even if he believes we know a scam.

Trump Suggests It’s “Treasonous” to Talk About His Mental Decline - 2025-12-10T14:29:36Z

President Donald Trump seems to think that having to take more cognitive tests than his predecessors is a good thing.

In a furious, lengthy rant on Truth Social Tuesday night, Trump attempted to defend himself against recent reporting that he has been showing signs of aging and fatigue. He bragged about everything he’s gotten done while in office—including his visits to the doctor’s office.

“I go out of my way to do long, thorough, and very boring Medical Examinations at the Great Walter Reed National Military Medical Center, seen and supervised by top doctors, all of whom have given me PERFECT Marks—Some have even said they have never seen such Strong Results,” Trump wrote. “I do these Tests because I owe it to our Country.”

Trump claimed that in addition to medical examinations, he had taken at least three cognitive exams “and I ACED all three of them in front of large numbers of doctors and experts, most of whom I do not know.”

“I have been told that few people have been able to ‘ace’ this Examination and, in fact, most do very poorly, which is why many other Presidents have decided not to take it at all,” he wrote. 

It’s not clear why the mere fact of having to sit for multiple cognitive examinations—without releasing results to the public—would exonerate Trump from reports he’s in mental decline.

Trump seemed to specifically take issue with The New York Times, which reported last month that the president’s public schedule shows he has shorter days than he used to, and that his public appearances indicate a dwindling battery life, as he’s taken to sitting or even keeping his eyes closed during press conferences.

“After all of the work I have done with Medical Exams, Cognitive Exams, and everything else, I actually believe it’s seditious, perhaps even treasonous, for The New York Times, and others, to consistently do FAKE reports in order to libel and demean  ‘THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES,’ Trump wrote. “They are true Enemies of the People, and we should do something about it.”

While Trump calling the press the “enemy of the people” is unfortunately not new, his assertion that reporting on his shortcomings and failures is tantamount to sedition is unquestionably totalitarian.

Transcript: Trump in Fury as GOPers Quietly Defy His Plot to Rig 2026 - 2025-12-10T11:46:20Z

The following is a lightly edited transcript of the December 10 episode of the Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.

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

President Trump is raging at Indiana Republicans in a last-ditch effort to get them to gerrymander their state as part of his push to rig the 2026 midterm elections. Interestingly, however, some Republicans now fear all this will backfire because Trump is dragging them down so badly that even more seats will be at risk under gerrymandered maps. Congressman Jamie Raskin, a Democrat, sees another kind of opening here for his party. Today he’s introducing a new bill that would require ranked-choice voting in congressional races across the country. So is all the corruption and chaos that Trump and Republicans are unleashing with their gerrymandering ploys creating an opportunity to talk to voters about a different way of doing things? We are talking to Congressman Raskin today about all this. Congressman, thanks so much for coming on with us.

Congressman Jamie Raskin: I am thrilled to be with you today, Greg Sargent. Very excited.

Sargent: So Trump is now pressuring Republicans everywhere to gerrymander their states, but Senate Republicans in Indiana are resisting. Trump raged about this the other day, tweeting: “Why would a real Republican vote against this when the Dems have been doing it for years? If they stupidly say no, vote them out of office! They are not worthy!”

Congressman, what’s your response to the sheer nakedness of Trump’s corrupt pressure on Republicans to gerrymander expressly to hold onto power?

Raskin: Well, that brazenness is invited by the Supreme Court, which now not only tolerates or accepts but celebrates partisan gerrymandering as a legitimate and valid purpose. I love the Indiana Republican state senator who said he would never vote for this after Trump called some people the R-word as a way to denigrate their intelligence, I suppose, or their personality. I think this man is the father of a Down syndrome kid and just said, “I will never go along with this, to teach him a lesson about the language he uses.” And that’s the spirit, man.

Sargent: I hope he means it, don’t you, Congressman?

Raskin: Well, me too. In fact, we’re in a bit of a tangle in Maryland because the Senate president, Bill Ferguson, has said for various reasons that he’s opposed to redistricting to add one seat that would be more competitive for Democrats. One of the reasons he invoked for it was that he said he had spoken to the Republican president of the Indiana Senate, who said he was going to stay out. Well, if he doesn’t stay out, that is going to redouble everybody’s determination to change Bill Ferguson’s mind. I mean, there’s nothing remotely ethical or moral about unilaterally disarming before authoritarians in a game that they’ve created. I mean, they want to essentially declare Congress Republican before a single vote is cast.

Sargent: Well, I want to return to all that in a bit. But first, Congressman, you’re introducing a new bill today to require ranked-choice voting in congressional elections. Ranked-choice voting, of course, allows voters to rank the candidates in order of preference. Can you tell us what your new bill does and why you favor ranked-choice voting?

Raskin: Yeah, I mean, there are 52 jurisdictions across the country that are using ranked-choice voting with great success, including the state of Maine, including the state of Alaska. The central virtue of ranked-choice voting is that it guarantees that the winner of an election actually has majority support. There are something like a dozen candidates now running in this special election to replace Mikie Sherrill, who just won as governor in New Jersey. Somebody could win that with, like, 15 percent of the vote, 18 percent, 20 percent of the vote.

But what ranked-choice voting does is to say, “Rank all of the candidates.” If there are a lot of great candidates and they have similar politics, put them in order, and then you can actually sift through what you think are the critical qualities for someone to have. And then the way it works is that candidates are dropped from the bottom of the ballot. If they lose, their votes are redistributed to their second choice, and then if still nobody has a majority, then you go to the next person and the next person and so on. And it’s a way of accumulating public sentiment.

We saw in the New York City mayoral election another great advantage to ranked-choice voting, which is it promotes positive politics among the candidates. Because now instead of Mamdani and Brad Lander being at each other’s throats and their voters having to accentuate what they hate about the other candidate—now, instead, they look for reasons to build a bridge, and they say, Hey, you know, you like Brad Lander. That’s great. I love him. He’s a great guy. Why don’t you put me second? and vice versa. The candidates start campaigning together. They build coalitions rather than engaging in character assassination.

Sargent: Well, your bill would require ranked-choice voting in congressional and Senate elections, both general and primaries across the country.

Rasking: General and primary both.

Sargent: Can you talk about what the bill does, how that requirement works, what the legal basis for it is?

Raskin: Well, it starts in 2030. So it would be in the 2030 elections; it would require the use of ranked-choice voting in all primary and general elections for the U.S. House of Representatives and for the U.S. Senate. And it also authorizes federal funding to help states implement the change because there are some technical things that need to be done. But it’s proven to be very straightforward and very efficient in all of the jurisdictions that have adopted it. And, you know, as I was saying, people love the fact that the candidates who win have commanded majority support across the electoral jurisdiction and that it promotes this kind of positive, coalitional campaigning rather than divisive, negative campaigning.

It also gets rid of what people oftentimes describe as the spoiler problem. That is, you’ve got one person who is your dream candidate, say, who’s focused on a particular issue that’s really important to you, but you know they can’t really win. Well, this says go ahead and put them first, but then rank second the candidate who you think is viable, who wins, and then that candidate can learn, Oh, you’re really supporting Candidate A because you believe so strongly in that issue; I’m going to take that into account if there’s a significant segment of the electorate motivated by that issue. So it just allows for a far more fine-grained and subtle election.

Sargent: Well, let’s talk about why ranked-choice voting is both a good thing and an antidote to gerrymandering on a real structural level. It essentially makes it a lot harder to dilute the votes of voters of the opposition, correct? How does ranked-choice voting work as as kind of an impediment to gerrymandering?

Raskin: Well, I’ve got two colleagues who I’ve served with in the House who would not have been there except for ranked-choice voting. One is Jared Golden, who comes from a very swing district, the northernmost district in Maine, Maine 2. And when the first-ballot votes were counted, he was slightly behind the Republican, but when they redistributed the independents’ votes, he won overwhelmingly. In other words, he was the overwhelming second choice of people who wanted the independent candidate. So that created a kind of coalition between the Democrats and the independents.

And the same thing happened in Alaska, essentially, with Mary Peltola, who became the first Democrat elected to the U.S. House from Alaska in decades, precisely because an electoral coalition formed between Democrats and more progressive and moderate independents. So we’ve seen how that kind of majoritarian politics is an antidote both to divisive reactionary politics and also an antidote to gerrymandering. The whole point of gerrymandering is to basically render the voters irrelevant so that your vote doesn’t really make any difference because the politicians have chosen the voters before the voters get to speak.

Sargent: And you can’t really gerrymander districts when you have ranked-choice voting, right? Or at least it’s way more challenging, yes?

Raskin: Well, I don’t want to claim, Greg, that ranked-choice voting is a panacea for the problems of gerrymandering. Because the truth is that a sixth grader can now take the map of a state and computer technology and artificial intelligence and turn a 55 percent majority into 100 percent of the congressional seats, or even a 48 percent majority into 100 percent of the congressional seats or 95 percent of the congressional seats. So you can work wonders with gerrymandering if you get to control the district lines and you know who’s in there. It’s true that ranked-choice voting will complicate the picture somewhat in certain districts, but we do have to confront that problem separately. It’s not going to be any kind of knockout punch against the extreme gerrymandering that the Republicans have unleashed in the 2026 elections.

Sargent: Well, it’s now being reported that a number of Republicans fear that the pressure on them to gerrymander will backfire. The worry is that the Trump coalition is disintegrating. So Republicans whose seats are made a little less safe by these gerrymandering schemes—as spreading their voters around a bit more might make them more vulnerable to a blue wave in 2026—those Republicans now fear that outcome. Congressman, everything for these people is about insulating them from the voters and the consequences of their unpopular governing decisions. Doesn’t this really kind of underscore the absurdity of the current system?

Raskin: Yeah, very much so. Well, look, on your first point, let me just say we owe a debt of gratitude to Aftyn Behn in Tennessee and really everybody, including Mikie Sherrill and Abigail Spanberger, who’ve run such strong campaigns because they’ve all put the fear of God into Republican legislators who might otherwise have gone along much more compliantly with these extreme gerrymander plans.

But if you average together all of the electoral victories that Democrats have had in special elections in 2025 or in the gubernatorial elections, we’re up 10, 11, 12 points, depending on where you are in the country, over where we were before. So now if you’re a Republican who’s got an eight-point advantage in your district, you’re saying, Do not touch my district for the purpose of trying to squeeze out more Republican legislators. I need every Republican vote I’ve got. So that is putting the brakes on a lot of this extreme gerrymandering.

But look, the single-member districts ultimately are going to be the problem because it’s very tough to distinguish between what’s redistricting and what’s gerrymandering. The truth is that no matter how you draw the district, it’s going to be favoring somebody.

That’s why what we’re pushing for—now, this is not in my bill; my bill is just the ranked-choice voting part of it—but we do have a more sweeping bill that I’ve worked on with Don Beyer, called the Fair [Representation] Act, which would mandate the creation of multimember districts and the use of ranked-choice voting, you know, as a form of proportional representation. So what that would do is allow Democrats to win in very conservative states—they would at least be able to win some seats—and it would allow Republicans, MAGA Republicans, to win in a very progressive state like Maryland; you’d be able to get something.

But right now we’ve got a system, because of the single-member districts, which basically says if you’ve got 55 percent of the vote, you can draw districts that will lead to 100 percent of the delegation, even if 45 percent of the people are in the other party. And that’s why we get states like Utah, which is all Republican now—we’ll see what happens in this election; maybe we’ll be able to break that up because of some court action—or Massachusetts, which is all Democratic.

One of the other shoes that’s going to drop during this cycle is the Supreme Court’s perhaps completed demolition of the Voting Rights Act. In Shelby County v. Holder in 2013, they got rid of Section 5 of the Fourteenth Amendment—the preclearance requirement—which required covered jurisdictions that had discriminated in the past to submit their plans to the Department of Justice or a federal court in advance. By getting rid of that, there have been hundreds of changes in voting systems and gerrymanderings and all these things going on that have really set back the cause of voting rights.

Now they want to get rid of Section 2 in this Louisiana case, the Callais decision. If they get rid of Section 2, that is an open door to go ahead and dismantle more than a dozen majority–African American and Hispanic districts that are in place right now. Take Mississippi, for example, where there is one majority–African American district, which is occupied by my friend Bennie Thompson. They will just split that district in half. So we’re talking about totally turning the clock back across the South. I mean, this really would be analogous to the end of Reconstruction if they do that, and they are very likely to do it. So we need to be fighting with every means at our disposal, legislatively and politically, to blow the whistle on what’s about to happen so the country understands what’s going on.

Sargent: Well, I want to talk to you about Maryland since you brought it up earlier. Democrats nationally are trying to match the Republican gerrymandering schemes. We’re seeing California creating five new Democratic seats. But as you noted, there’s resistance in your state, Maryland, from the state Senate President Bill Ferguson, who says it would be too legally vulnerable. Now, just to focus on what he said, is there any legitimacy to his argument about the law?

Raskin: Well, let me start with this. If that is all that my friend Bill Ferguson is saying now, that’s good, because before he was also saying it was morally questionable. He was likening it to racial disenfranchisement and racist redistricting, which is, you know, an outrageous misunderstanding of the situation.

If you look at what’s going on with these extreme Republican gerrymanders starting in Texas, they are targeting majority-Black and Hispanic districts. So the people whose districts are hit in the first instance are Vicente Gonzalez, Henry Cuellar, Al Green, Mark Veasey, and Greg Casar. So three Hispanic Americans and two African Americans. And they went to North Carolina—they did it to our African American colleague Don Davis. Then they went to Missouri and they did it to our African American colleague Emanuel Cleaver. Then they want to go to Kansas and do it to one of only two Native American Indians in Congress. So the whole thing, although it certainly has a partisan political agenda, depends on racial and ethnic redistricting and removal of minority members from all of these delegations. That’s number one.

There was no legitimacy to his original critique, which depended on an analogy [on] fighting back against a political racial gerrymander. I really felt that that was a flawed argument. It’s completely legitimate for him to raise the question of whether or not a Republican-dominated state Supreme Court, which we have, would try to overthrow a gerrymander.

Now, let’s be clear. Under federal constitutional analysis that is now not just approved but mandated by the Roberts court, redistricting for political partisan reasons is perfectly legitimate. So he’s saying, Well, what happens if a federal court misapplies the law and says that the state constitution, which says that there shall be no partisan gerrymandering in state elections, also applies to federal elections? A judge has done that before. So it’s not a fanciful concern to raise, but it is legally erroneous.

In fact, the state constitution was amended to ban partisan redistricting in state legislative races and specifically excluded federal races from it. And there was a judge who just conflated the two and just made a basic error. Could it happen again, and might they seize upon that prior case to do it? Sure, it might happen again. But nothing ventured, nothing gained. Maybe it could happen, and then we are back to the 7–1 map we have.

He’s also raised the point, Well, maybe it’s worse than that. Maybe they use it as an opportunity to discredit the current redistricting. That’s extremely unlikely for several reasons. Number one is when you look at what happens when legislative redistricting is struck down, in greater than 95 percent of the cases, it’s just returned to the legislature to do what they want. I don’t know if you can find a case like the one he’s potentially forecasting where they say, Well, you overstretched and now we’re going to dismantle the districts that are in law right now.

The second reason for that is the districts that are in place right now were signed into law by our Republican [former] governor, Governor Hogan. So it seems extremely unlikely that it could lead to some kind of further retrogression. In any event, all of those are tactical considerations that we should be taking into account. But that’s very different from the way that President Ferguson started when he was likening our fighting back to engaging in racial gerrymandering. And I think that’s why his initial remarks caused so much outcry in our state.

Sargent: Well, and also to return to a point you raised earlier, if Indiana does capitulate to Trump and does go forward with their gerrymander, which is of course very possible, that could add a couple more seats to the Republican side. I would think that would increase the pressure for Maryland to act as well.

Raskin: Every seat counts. I mean, we’re down three seats right now. I mean, this is, you know, we’re like in the trenches in World War One and we’re fighting for every district. Nobody’s got the luxury of saying, Well, we’re above this.

And look, here’s the thing that I want to argue very strongly: The Democrats have been fighting to end partisan gerrymandering for more than a decade. If you go back and look at the For the People Act, its very first plank was to get rid of partisan gerrymandering and to create independent redistricting panels in every state in the union. And you know who voted for it? Every Democrat. You know who voted against it? Every Republican. They live on gerrymandering. They swear by gerrymandering. They thrive by gerrymandering. They control a lot more state legislatures than we do. You know why? Because they continue to gerrymander—first, they gerrymander themselves into power at the state level, and then that translates into a gerrymandering advantage at the federal level.

So what we got in North Carolina is a situation where the Democrats win statewide for governor, win statewide for attorney general, but in the U.S. House delegation, there are 10 Republicans and four Democrats. Now, why do they have that extraordinary 5–2 advantage, 10–4 advantage in the U.S. House delegation? It’s because their legislature gerrymandered it that way. And why does the legislature have super-Republican majorities that are able to do that? Because they themselves have been gerrymandered into power decade after decade.

That is the story across the South, Greg. That’s what’s going on. And so we’ve got states that are very close—even Texas, when you go down there, all the Democrats will tell you, This is not a red state. This is a purple state that’s been gerrymandered into oblivion for the Republicans through a combination of prior gerrymanderings and the manipulation of voting through voter suppression devices.

Sargent: Right, it’s layer upon layer upon layer of rigging. Now, just to talk about Ferguson for one more second. If Indiana goes forward, I would think the pressure on Ferguson is going to get extremely intense. Can you talk about what that’s going to look like?

Raskin: To deprive the majority in Maryland of being able to do what majorities are doing all around the country is an essential deprivation of our ability to participate effectively in the national political process. I think he’s raised legitimate points, but I’m convinced that Governor Moore and the people both in the Senate, where I served for a decade, and the people in the House will be able to come to terms with this because the Republicans are doing everything in their power to put the fix in, and we’ve got to counter them wherever we can. And Maryland is one of the handful of states where we can do it.

I know that Governor-elect Spanberger has said that Virginia is going to redistrict to create more competitive districts for Democrats—at least two or three. And again, that’s just writing against prior Republican gerrymanders. So I’d like us to get out of the system entirely, which is why I fought for the For the People Act. It’s why I’m fighting for ranked-choice voting. But in the meantime, we’ve got to use the rules that the Republicans have put in place and not wash our hands of it and say, We’re too clean for that, we’re just going to let them take over Congress.

Sargent: Right. Just to boil this down, if Indiana does capitulate to Trump and act, you fully expect that Maryland will do the same, right?

Raskin: Well, I’m not in Annapolis every day anymore, so I don’t want to make a prediction. I’m not really in the prognostication business. I’m in the mobilization business, but I know I will be fighting very hard among our colleagues to express to our friends in Annapolis what a serious situation this is and that everything is on the line. Medicaid is on the line, Affordable Care Act tax credits are on the line, housing is on the line, voting rights are on the line, and you know, I don’t want to be a broken record, but democracy itself is under threat.

Sargent: Well, the bottom line is, will Republicans be allowed to play by their own rules, or will Democrats join them and play by the same rules that Republicans do, correct?

Raskin: In terms of gerrymandering and redistricting, yeah, I think that’s right. And, you know, they just do not have clean hands in this conversation. We’ve been trying to reform this rotten system. They’re the ones that have guaranteed we’ve not been able to change it. And so now we have to accept the terms that have been written. Does that mean that I would do whatever Republicans do? No. I mean, I would not start disenfranchising likely Republican voters the way that they disenfranchise likely Democratic voters. I just would never do that. People have a right to vote. They are constantly trying to throw people off the rolls. They’re constantly trying to make it more difficult for people to vote. They’re constantly trying to intimidate people at the polls. We would never do that.

But when it comes to the design of the electoral districts, if they are going to try to tilt the playing field to benefit themselves and they control a lot more state legislatures than we do, we have not just a political and a strategic but, I think, an ethical and a moral imperative to fight back the best that we can. And I understand that decision-making under repressive and authoritarian regimes and governments is difficult. And it is difficult to make these decisions, but I am absolutely convinced we’re doing the right thing to fight back however we can, even though we would never start disenfranchising voters and throwing people off the rolls, which is what they are doing right now when you go out to a lot of these states.

Sargent: Well, as you say, democracy itself is on the line. Congressman Raskin, thank you so much for coming on with us today.

Raskin: It is my pleasure, Greg. Thanks so much for having me.

The Racist Worldview Behind the New Vaccine Recommendations - 2025-12-10T11:00:00Z

When René Najera emigrated to the United States from Mexico at age 10, he had to prove he was fully up to date on all of his vaccines. He got every single childhood vaccine again, since his original records were lost. Last week, Najera watched U.S. vaccine advisers blame immigrants for disease outbreaks at their high-profile meeting to discuss the childhood vaccination schedule. It was frustrating for more than one reason: Najera is now a historian of vaccines and a professor of public health. He knows immigrants to the United States are, on the whole, a highly vaccinated population—and he knows how often they are used as scapegoats anyway.

At the meeting of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, or ACIP, on Thursday and Friday, presenters blamed Asian immigrants for hepatitis B cases and advisers asked whether measles outbreaks were seeded by foreign visitors. This narrative has long been promoted by people opposing childhood vaccination in the United States. Now this antivax trope is openly broached at the highest levels of U.S. vaccine policymaking, highlighting how the Make America Healthy Again movement, spearheaded by Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and the Make America Great Again movement, spearheaded by President Trump, join seamlessly to blame immigrants for America’s ills.

There are other scapegoats too. Anti-vaxxers claim hepatitis B, for instance, is a disease of drug users, queer people, and sex workers, even though most people don’t know how they acquire the virus. The message is increasingly clear: In Donald Trump’s and RFK Jr.’s America, illness comes from—and is experienced by—other, lesser people.

Having high-level officials endorse this misinformation endangers people of color, as we saw when anti–Asian American hate crimes rose following rumors about Covid as a Chinese bioweapon or hoax. It endangers everyone else too, if it causes health officials to implement the wrong policies—for example, if they were to institute travel bans rather than a vaccination campaign for a disease already circulating domestically. “Scapegoating basically puts blinders on our ability to actually identify how to solve the problem,” Richard Pan, a pediatrician and senior lecturer in public health at U.C. Davis, told me. “You’re not actually getting to exactly what’s causing the problem—and then how do we solve it?” And this misinformation endangers people another way: Blaming immigrants leads nonimmigrants to believe they’re not at risk, which makes them less likely to protect themselves or to seek out testing when they become sick—harming themselves while infecting others.

Scapegoating outsiders for disease outbreaks goes back centuries. And it’s not just a narrative, but a worldview. “It’s a very long-standing trope, whether it’s immigrants or other groups, that disease comes from outside,” Pan pointed out. “If you see someone who’s sick, you run from them or expel them from your community because they might make other people sick.” Frequently, this comes with moral and religious implications. “Being sick often means that you did something wrong, or you’ve been cursed, or you’ve committed sin, and that’s why God is punishing you,” Pan said. There’s an idea that sick people “did something wrong, or they’re the wrong people, or they’re dirty people, or they ate or did the wrong things; they weren’t healthy.” By extension, in this worldview, health is a barometer of goodness; people who get sick are inherently lesser, weaker, deserving their illness in some way, while people who have the good luck (and financial resources) to stay healthy are simply built different. After all, RFK Jr. doesn’t believe in germ theory; he believes diseases are caused by poor hygiene and sanitation. If you keep yourself clean and pure, the logic goes, you have nothing to worry about.

Kennedy isn’t the only Trump health official to take this “personal responsibility” theory of disease prevention to unscientific and insulting extremes. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services administrator Mehmet Oz said over the summer that impoverished and elderly Americans need to do their part to stay healthy and eat better. He reiterated the message in a recent email to employees: “You don’t have to try every cookie on the holiday table.” National Institutes of Health director Jay Bhattacharya outlined a brief plan last month to prepare for the next pandemic: “Whether simply by stopping smoking, controlling hypertension or diabetes, or getting up and walking more, anything that makes the population healthier will prepare us better for the next pandemic,” he wrote. Sure, it’s always better to be healthy, but it’s hard to see how walking more could have significantly disrupted a virus that sickened, disabled, and killed millions.

When tragedy strikes, people try to make sense of it through the stories they tell themselves. But with something senseless like a disease outbreak, often there is no narrative; we learn how an outbreak began months or years after the fact, if we ever find out at all. “People look for reasons, and often we in public health are unable to provide them the full reason why,” Najera, director of public health at the College of Physicians of Philadelphia, told me. In the absence of answers, people create their own, he said. “They want a scapegoat.”

Blaming other people, especially groups that have already been marginalized and mocked, “makes it easier to say that ‘I don’t need to do anything about disease. If we only got rid of those other people, the disease would go away,’” Pan said. People also feel a false sense of safety when they believe that other, more culpable people are to blame, instead of acknowledging the randomness of tragedy. “It makes people feel safe if they don’t belong to the minoritized group,” Najera said. For instance, with misinformation about hepatitis B vaccines, people tell themselves, “If I’m not Asian, and if I’m not a traveler, then I should be safe. And why should I get vaccinated?”

Immigration came up again and again at the ACIP meeting, with presenters and advisers blaming, with glaringly incomplete data, both authorized and unauthorized immigrants for surges in hepatitis B and even potentially measles.

“The elephant in the room that I’ll mention is immigration,” said Evelyn Griffin, an ACIP adviser and “functional medicine” obstetrician and gynecologist. “We have had years of illegal immigration, undocumented people coming from higher-endemicity countries.” Griffin herself is an immigrant; her parents moved from Poland to Canada, and then she moved to the United States. She decried the lack of testing for hepatitis B without mentioning that vaccination is a requirement for immigration or that many unauthorized people first enter the country with paperwork. Undocumented people also tend to come from countries with very high vaccine acceptance. “Especially in Latin America, they’re very adamant about vaccinating children,” Najera said. “They have vaccination campaigns at every corner. You see the nurses with the coolers, giving the vaccines. You see the people going home to home, checking for vaccination records.”

The risk hepatitis B presents to American children has been overstated, argued Cynthia Nevison, a climate researcher who has sought to link vaccines to autism and is now a contractor with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. At the meeting, she presented a paper, from a quarter-century ago, showing that half of cases in the 1980s where parents transmitted hepatitis B to children occurred among Asian immigrant populations. Nevison concluded that horizontal transmission—from people of the same generation, rather than from parent to child—“can occur among certain high-risk immigrant communities.”

The presentation ignored the context of immigration following the Vietnam War, the Korean War, and World War Two, Najera said—when “a lot of immigration happened from that part of the world, and hepatitis B was very prevalent in those places.” Those were trends from nearly 50 years ago, before the vaccine was offered to every child at birth in the U.S.—a policy that meant recorded cases among children dropped from 20,000 to about 20 a year.

Anti-vaxxers see hepatitis B as a disease of vice, only occurring among drug users and the sexually promiscuous, but some 50 to 70 percent of the two million people living with hepatitis B in the U.S. have no idea where they got it. Unlike HIV, which is only transmitted by close contact with certain bodily fluids, hepatitis B is infectious for up to a week on surfaces. That means you might get sick from nail clippers shared with a family member, or sports equipment. There are major issues with detecting it through testing, as well. The hepatitis B test has a high false-negative rate, which means about one in 20 people who have hep B may test negative. The test is usually given in the first trimester of pregnancy, but people can acquire hep B later in pregnancy, and half a million pregnant people in the U.S. aren’t tested for hep B at all.

Even so, Robert Malone, vice chair of ACIP and a major source of vaccine misinformation, used “economically disadvantaged Asian immigrant populations” as an example of “high-risk communities.” At one point, he mistook a physician’s question about grandparents visiting infants to mean immigrants were causing higher rates of infection among older Americans. He also made a confusing reference to the possible role of travel in the current U.S. measles outbreak. “I have some information about the history of the original West Texas outbreak, but that’s anecdotal and secondhand,” Malone said, without offering further details. Cody Meissner, an adviser and professor of pediatrics at the Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth College, asked a presenter how much of the rise in measles cases could be attributed to immigrants bringing the virus with them.

“That one is personal to me,” Najera said, pointing to evidence that the U.S. outbreak spread to Mexico, not the other way around. A current outbreak now in Chihuahua, Mexico, is thought to have been caused by an unvaccinated school-age child who traveled to Seminole, Texas—the heart of the ballooning U.S. crisis earlier this year, where two unvaccinated children died—and then to Mexico. Since then, 15 children in Chihuahua have died from measles. “They went to the state that I’m originally from, Chihuahua,” Najera said. “A lot of children there in the native Mexican, Native American community, they’ve been hit very, very hard.”

“When people talk about, ‘Well, it’s immigrants’—no, it’s actually Americans who aren’t taking precautions,” Pan said. Most reported cases of measles in the U.S. happen when an unvaccinated American travels to places where measles is more common and brings the disease back—and, if they belong to unvaccinated or under-vaccinated communities, it sparks an outbreak. The same is true of the occasional polio case detected in the United States.

Contrary to the moralistic view of disease, we don’t always know who is going to get sick, or who is sick already and doesn’t know it yet. “That’s why we recommend everybody get vaccinated,” Najera said. “Once we eliminate and then eventually eradicate the disease, then we can stop vaccinating, but not until then.” Believing that you’re not at risk because you’re living your life the right way offers a false sense of security, Najera said, and “you’re hurting children who are going to be under-protected when those diseases do arrive—and they will arrive.” Children who survive whooping cough at a young age have a higher risk of lung disease later on. One in 1,000 children who survive measles will later develop an encephalitis, or brain swelling, that is 100 percent fatal.

Americans are primed to believe in rugged individualism. “We tend to frame health decisions as individualistic—you’re healthy because of choices you made, not because of your environment. But we know the research all shows the opposite,” Pan said. We all drink the same water and breathe the same air. “We’re all exposed to the same stuff, and we’re all in it together.”

We’re all in it together—but the decisions some of us make can have ripple effects for everyone, and not everyone is able to protect themselves equally. Adults make these choices, Najera said. But “in the end, it is the children who suffer the consequences.”

My Dual Citizenship Is None of Bernie Moreno’s Business - 2025-12-10T11:00:00Z

On November 26, after I’d spent hundreds of dollars obtaining certified documents and a considerable amount of time agonizing over the status of my application, FedEx delivered the piece of paper I had spent three years waiting for: confirmation of my acquisition of German citizenship by descent. But less than a week later, I learned that some Midwestern car salesman turned senator wants to take that away from me and millions of other Americans.

On December 1, Republican Senator Bernie Moreno of Ohio announced new legislation, the Exclusive Citizenship Act of 2025, which would ban dual citizenship, a move that followed months of agitation against dual citizenship by far-right podcasters. Under the bill, Americans who acquire the nationality of other countries would “be deemed to have relinquished United States citizenship,” while those who already had it would have a year to renounce it or else lose U.S. citizenship. “Existing law allows certain United States Citizens to maintain foreign citizenship, which may create conflicts of interest and divided loyalties,” the bill states, and “it is in the national interest of the United States to ensure that United States citizenship is held exclusively.”

Here in a place called “reality,” my dual citizenship in no way threatens America’s national interests and is actually none of Moreno’s business. Ditto for the multiple citizenships of children born to American parents on foreign soil, descendants of immigrants from various countries, and Black Americans connecting with their heritage through citizenship-by-descent programs from certain African nations. That I can belt out a rendition of “Das Lied der Deutschen” that’s just as sappy as “The Star-Spangled Banner” does not aid or comfort America’s enemies. The fact that I am one among many everyday Americans with multiple citizenships has as much to do with Moreno as what we eat for breakfast or the colors of our curtains.

But the fact that a sitting U.S. senator saw fit to introduce such a bill in the first place speaks to an ugly strain in American society of blood-and-soil nationalism, xenophobic paranoia, and the puritanical delusion that other people’s private lives are somehow detrimental to the rest of society.

For all the busybodied handwringing over the supposed threat posed by dual citizens like little old me, one hardly needs multiple citizenships to work against the interests of the United States. One of the far-right agitators for a dual-citizenship ban, Benny Johnson, allegedly helped spread Russian disinformation (he claims he was duped into it), while many Americans with no obvious additional nationalities have spied for China. By contrast, I have harshly criticized people who spread pro-Kremlin propaganda and Russian colonial narratives, and despite fond memories of my three years in China, I loathe the tyrannical regime that rules it and would never spy on its behalf. So maybe John and Jane Q. Public dual citizens are not the people Moreno should be worried about.

At any rate, legal scholars have said the bill is unconstitutional and unlikely to pass, and it appears deeply unpopular even among Moreno’s constituents. While trusting precedent in the hands of today’s Supreme Court may be unwise, in two landmark decisions—1967’s Afroyim v. Rusk and 1980’s Vance v. Terrazas—the court has ruled that Americans can have multiple nationalities and can’t be deprived of U.S. citizenship without their consent. Nevertheless, the nationalist sentiments that led to Moreno’s bill, however irrational, still have currency among some Americans, even liberals, which demands scrutiny.

Though Moreno’s justifications may seem superficially principled, they are based on purely hypothetical abstractions rooted in fearmongering and cornball sentimentalism rather than the real lives of real people.

Particularly when applied to Jews, “divided loyalties” is also a longtime antisemitic trope that hints at the dark undertones never far beneath the surface of opposition to dual citizenship. Moreno confirmed to NBC’s Sahil Kapur that his bill would apply to U.S.-Israeli dual citizens. It should come as no surprise that far-right antisemites like Nick Fuentes and Tucker Carlson are among those who have joined the call for this ban. Those on the right and left inveighing against dual citizenship have disproportionately directed their ire at real or imagined Israeli Americans based on the incorrect assumption that American Jews—particularly those in elected office—have Israeli nationality.

In reality, Jews are not automatically born with Israeli citizenship and can only obtain it under the Law of Return by physically going to Israel, which can be cumbersome and expensive, may entail military service, and often involves emigration. Only a small minority of American Jews have actually gone through the process: There are no clear data, but estimates by outlets like The Jerusalem Post suggest that the number of American Jews who have obtained Israeli citizenship is in the low six digits, while the total number of Jewish people in the U.S. is as high as 7.5 million.

Moreno’s bill would also adversely affect figures within and close to the Trump administration like Turkish American Mehmet Oz, South African Canadian American Elon Musk, and Trump’s Slovenian American wife and youngest son, as well as many GOP voters and donors. Consider too the irony of native-born Americans—who would presumably include Revolutionary War descendants, people with Native American heritage, and descendants of enslaved Black people whose ancestors obtained citizenship via the Fourteenth Amendment—losing U.S. citizenship at the whims of a Colombian immigrant.

Americans inclined to support Moreno’s bill should also ask themselves if they’re comfortable with the kind of company our country would find itself in if it passed.

The vast majority of countries in the Americas and the West allow dual citizenship in some form, and while some may restrict who can have it, hardly any ban it entirely. Japan’s ban makes it an outlier, but it rarely enforces the rule, especially for those born with multiple nationalities. The global trend has been toward liberalization, with democratic nations like South Korea and Ukraine, and even some nondemocratic ones like Vietnam and the United Arab Emirates, loosening their laws in recent years.

So which countries ban dual citizenship completely? China, Singapore, Tajikistan, Ethiopia, Brunei, Myanmar, and all Gulf Cooperation Council member states except the UAE, to name a few.

Notice a pattern? Most democratic nations allow dual citizenship. Most of the countries that ban it to enforce narrow-minded visions of “national loyalty” are under authoritarian regimes, sort of like the one the MAGA right is trying to establish here.

Summarily stripping people of citizenship, as Moreno’s bill would do, is likewise an authoritarian move. In 1967, the Greek military junta revoked the citizenship of actress Melina Mercouri for criticizing the regime. In 1905, the Kingdom of Bavaria stripped Donald Trump’s grandfather of citizenship and deported him for emigrating illegally.

Wanting to ban dual citizenship on the premise that it creates divided loyalty springs from the same type of puritanical paranoia behind far-right efforts to ban same-sex marriage on the premise that it supposedly harms the institution of marriage as a whole. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve found myself in arguments with right-wingers who wax philosophical about the dangers of allowing two men or two women to marry but can’t name one demonstrable harm that it causes. Moreno and his far-right propagandist inspirers operate under the same modus operandi: They subordinate the empirical to the imaginary. It’s just another version of the “ick” factor dressed up as logic.

What you have are people instinctively disconcerted at anything unfamiliar to them—whether that’s marriage between two people of the same sex or someone having the citizenship of multiple countries—and who concoct political arguments and legislation to put a veneer of reason on their panicked emotional state. Moreno’s bill is, at heart, classic vibes-based policymaking.

Such a vibes-based policy would cause very real harm to millions of Americans and to the U.S. itself. To understand how, it’s helpful to have some knowledge of how nationality laws work.

There are two main principles that form the basis of nationality laws worldwide: jus soli, or law of the soil, and jus sanguinis, or law of the blood. Derived from English common law and prevalent in most countries in the Americas, including the U.S., jus soli is what Americans often call “birthright citizenship” and means that one acquires a country’s citizenship through birth on its sovereign soil. Jus sanguinis comes from the Napoleonic Code and is the basis of nationality laws in most of Europe, the Middle East, and Asia. It confers citizenship at birth via one or both parents, often irrespective of birthplace.

The nationality laws of most jus soli countries, including the U.S., have elements of jus sanguinis, such as granting citizenship to children of citizens born abroad. At the same time, jus sanguinis countries’ laws often result in children born in jus soli countries acquiring dual citizenship at birth. And many jus sanguinis countries—particularly in Europe—consider certain descendants of emigrants to be citizens, meaning that many Americans may unknowingly already have European citizenship or at least the eligibility for it.

What would Moreno’s bill mean for them? Or for those who use dual citizenship to study, work, retire, or invest in other countries? Or who have spouses and children with a mix of nationalities?

Millions of Americans in these situations would quickly find their lives upended under Moreno’s proposal, and for no good reason.

Many more dual citizens will happily throw their American passports in the trash, if forced to choose, to avoid the hassles that come from being citizens of the only major country that imposes taxes based on citizenship rather than residency in the country. Others prefer living abroad as other countries offer better quality of life, better upward mobility, and saner politics. There’s a reason “the new American dream is to leave America.” All those Americans taking their money and talents elsewhere would greatly damage the American economy.

Reforming the U.S. tax code so that only people who actually live and earn an income in the United States have to file with the IRS—which Trump, in a rare broken-clock moment, has even proposed—would bring our laws up to speed with those of pretty much every other country except the East African dictatorship of Eritrea and encourage more dual citizens abroad to keep U.S. citizenship. Moreno’s proposal would be a massive step backward and would make U.S. citizenship far less attractive.

But then again, policies that prioritize nationalist sentimentalism and ideological dogma over practical reality tend to cause economic damage. That has been quite visible in the U.K. in the aftermath of Brexit, one of whose chief backers, far-right politician Nigel Farage, also wants to ban Britons from having dual citizenship.

The U.K. and U.S. both are experiencing declining living standards and quality of life for the average person, hence many citizens of both countries looking to emigrate. Acquiring dual citizenship—which, to be sure, is an enormous privilege that most people don’t enjoy and which often draws envy and resentment, particularly with the current American political climate—makes emigration easier. Banning dual citizenship makes it easier to bring emigration to a halt. Whether encumbering people from leaving is either Moreno’s or Farage’s goal is unclear, but it would certainly be an effect.

What is clear is that countries that are on the up and up, self-assured, and optimistic about the future don’t usually need to coerce citizens to stay by resorting to petty, nationalistic stunts like laws to ban dual citizenship, which accomplish nothing but massaging fragile egos.

What Does It Mean to Be in an “Affordability Crisis”? - 2025-12-10T11:00:00Z

Here’s the view of the economy reflected in the funhouse-mirror politics of the Trump administration. There is no affordability crisis. But if there is an affordability crisis, it’s President Joe Biden’s fault. President Donald Trump is solving it; alternatively, he has already solved it. But also: What affordability crisis? People have it better than they’ve ever had it before.

Forget what he said as a candidate, or even what he said when he introduced his tariffs in March, when he seemed to acknowledge that families might have to buy two dolls for their children instead of 30 this Christmas season—now upon us, by the way—because of his tariffs, which will eventually make the economy great. Also, why are farmers getting a reported $12 billion bailout if there’s no crisis? Never mind, look over there at immigration!

That torrent of doublespeak only continued this week, when Trump traveled to Pennsylvania on Tuesday to give a speech about inflation and mocked “affordability.” It also came during an interview with Politico’s Dasha Burns, in which Trump graded his economy “A-plus-plus-plus-plus-plus.”

Americans have been worried about inflation, the increasing cost of living, and the economy in general since the Covid-19 pandemic began. During the Biden administration, the economic concerns were confusing for many economists and other observers because so many metrics indicated that the economy was good and getting better, not just for the very rich but for many low and middle incomes as well. In fact, as a candidate, Trump ran on addressing affordability issues, everything from gas to groceries to mortgage rates, and accused the Biden administration of tinkering with economic numbers to make conditions look better than they were. But now, just as Democrats are running on—and winning elections on—fixing the affordability crisis, he says there isn’t one.

What does it mean to be in an “affordability crisis”? Prices always go up, and whether families can afford what they need or want has a lot to do with their incomes. So how do we assess whether the United States, writ large, really is in an affordability crisis? It turns out that we can measure not just how people feel about the economy but all of the ways that goods are getting too expensive for working Americans. Economists are looking for more detailed ways to show affordability problems than would be hinted at by some of the broader indicators economists normally rely on. Those everyday indicators show that American families are stretched and stressed.

It’s not just vibes driving Americans to feel gloom about the economy, but their real struggles to pay their bills and build toward a more secure future. A full year into Trump’s second term, fewer voters are buying his accusations that it’s somehow still Biden’s fault.

Regular polling from YouGov shows that more Americans than ever say their incomes aren’t stretching to meet their expenses, and nearly half of those who make less than $50,000 a year are worried about paying for basic necessities. Increasingly, they’re blaming rising prices not just on government spending—which voters usually think is the cause of their economic woes—but on large corporations trying to maximize profits, as well as Trump’s tariffs, which economists do believe are driving escalating costs right now.

Naturally, there are two components to whether families can afford their lives: the cost of goods, and how much they make. During the pandemic, family incomes were actually on the rise, and toward the end of Biden’s term they were rising from the bottom faster than inflation.

Bharat Ramamurti, former deputy director of the White House National Economic Council, said part of the problem was that most of the increased income families were bringing in was getting eaten up by inflation. “Imagine if you get a $10,000 raise but then you spend $9,500 out of your new $10,000 just paying for the same stuff you were buying before,” he said. “That’d be really frustrating, because you’re like, OK, finally, I can go on a vacation, or I could save a little bit more or whatever.” Instead, the increases went to rent or utility bills or groceries, and people saw that as the government’s fault.

Ramamurti has looked at housing, where affordability has decreased over time. But he said an even more important indicator is the rate of home sales, which has gone way down over the past year. In a normal market, families would buy houses and move as they saw new opportunities or their families grew. But they’re not doing that now, largely because still-high interest rates are locking people into the much lower rates they were able to get if they were lucky enough to buy during the boom in 2020 or 2021. The decreased sales means families are reluctant to take on new mortgages, even if they’re ready to move.

On a historical scale, interest rates are not that bad, but they are still higher than most adults trying to buy homes today remember them being. But there are other indicators showing why families might feel stretched. The Century Foundation showed that utility bills are up 32 percent since 2022. What’s worse, an increasing number of families headed into winter with past-due balances, meaning they were at risk of having their power shut off during the coldest months.

The Century Foundation’s Angela Hanks also pointed to another indicator that worries her: More and more families are taking on debt, especially as buy now, pay later services like Klarna and Affirm become more widely available. And they’re not taking on debt to pay for bigger, luxury items. “A lot of families are using it because they need to pay [for] their groceries, and [paying on] installment like that is a sign of people struggling.… People’s lives are just more financialized in all kinds of different ways that lead to more precarity, more debt,” she said.

Debt is an underexplored component of how families are feeling, because if we’re not paying attention to the hundreds of dollars a family might have to pay just to meet their minimum credit card or loan payments every month, we’re missing a huge chunk of how hard it is for them to budget right now.

But the two biggest factors coming into play that are hitting families especially hard heading into the new year are the costs of childcare and health care, said Ashley Burnside, a senior policy analyst at the Center for Law and Social Policy, or CLASP. “We can’t talk about affordability in this moment without naming the huge health care costs that families are now facing because of the expiration of the premium tax credits,” she said.

She continued: “That unfortunately means a lot of families are either going to be paying much, much higher premiums than they had before, or choosing to be uninsured. And that then means if there is a health emergency and a family does not have thousands of dollars in savings, they have to end up in urgent care or delay and need a doctor’s appointment, which could lead to a financial spiral for families.… It’s not just low-income families that are feeling that, it is also middle-income families, and even what some people may call higher-income families, because we all need health insurance. So I do think there’s that reckoning happening in our nation right now too.”

These escalating expenses all come atop the well-documented price increases of basic household needs, such as groceries and gas. Here, families at the bottom of the income ladder are suffering the most. For low-income families, food makes up almost a third of their budget, so the rising costs of groceries impacts them deeply. They are not just making hard choices about where to save, but may go hungrier, especially as benefits such as food assistance come under attack.

Lorena Roque, associate director for labor policy at CLASP, said she sees data showing that a lot of families are taking on two or more jobs just to make ends meet. But even that might no longer provide a full picture of who is struggling because the administration has been hostile to the kinds of data-gathering efforts that would give us a fuller picture of the economy, like the rates of Black and Latino unemployment.

That also might explain why Trump is pushing back on the idea that there is an affordability crisis, and why he keeps insisting that the economy is great and that he is also going to make it better. “They’re purposely trying to kill the integrity of very objective agencies like the [Bureau of Labor Statistics],” she said. “It’s like an attack on the truth. It’s an attack on data and how people are feeling.… I think they’re trying to hide the truth.”

All of this also shows an opening for Democrats to hit Trump with the same attacks he used against Biden last year, and across the country, Democratic candidates are doing precisely that. Trump has countered that the claims of Democrats are a hoax. But families do need real relief, and they’re unlikely to get it from an administration that continues to deny how its policies may be affecting them—even as they can see it for themselves.

For Once, the Supreme Court May Not Give Republicans What They Want - 2025-12-10T11:00:00Z

The Supreme Court appeared uncertain about whether it would strike down a major campaign finance restriction during oral arguments on Tuesday, with some of the court’s conservative members questioning a right-wing push to do so.

The case, National Republican Senatorial Committee v. Federal Election Commission, revolves around a legal challenge to Congress’s ban on “coordinated party expenditures.” Federal election law currently forbids political parties from coordinating their election spending with federal candidates for office.

A group of challengers, including the GOP’s Senate campaign finance arm and Vice President JD Vance, argued that the ban violates their First Amendment rights to political speech through campaign spending. “The coordinated party spending limits are at war with this Court’s recent First Amendment cases,” Noel Francisco, who argued on behalf of the plaintiffs, told the court.

One big question in the case is whether procedural hurdles should prevent the court from deciding the case. “Well, Mr. Francisco, the RNC is not here,” Justice Clarence Thomas told him in his first question of the day. “I think you would have to explain why the groups, the Republican groups here, fit the bill of a national party.” The law does not necessarily apply to the National Republican Senatorial Committee, or NRSC, which is not structured as a formal political party.

While the Federal Election Commission is the named defendant in the case, the GOP-controlled commission is also not defending the law’s constitutionality, raising questions about whether there is an actual dispute for the justices to resolve. As a result, the lower courts allowed Democratic lawyers to intervene in the case and the Supreme Court appointed an uninvolved lawyer to defend the law as well.

Sarah Harris, the Justice Department lawyer who argued for the commission, contended that the case wasn’t moot by distinguishing between the government’s belief that a law is unconstitutional and a formal decision to not enforce the law. “For mootness, the other side would need to establish that there is no possible credible threat of enforcement either way,” she told the justices. “I really don’t think they can do that.”

Vance, who was a candidate for the U.S. Senate when the lawsuit began, is also not currently an active candidate for political office. While vice presidents often run for president after their running mate’s term ends, Vance has refused to say whether he would do so. Roman Martinez, the court’s appointed lawyer, also noted that there is no real likelihood that the FEC would pursue him for violating the law.

“No one thinks President Trump is going to enforce this law and target his own vice president,” he told the justices during his opening remarks.

In addition to Thomas, whose questions suggested concerns about the court’s own jurisdiction over the matter, Chief Justice John Roberts signaled that he might not accept the challengers’ interpretation of the law in question. He asked Francisco to explain the difference between “coordinated expenditures” and actual contributions, describing it as a “legal fiction.”

“I don’t know in substance what the difference is,” Roberts added. His questioning suggested that “coordinated expenditures” would effectively count, in his eyes, as normal campaign contributions. That would bypass other regulations on contributions, most notably the annual and quarterly limits on them.

To prevail, the NRSC and its allies have to persuade the justices to remove a prohibition on coordinated expenditures that has existed since the post-Watergate reforms to campaign finance laws. The Supreme Court previously upheld the ban in question in a 2001 case, but Francisco argued that the court’s rulings since then have called that decision into question.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor strenuously disputed Francisco’s assertions that the ban did not fall under the court-recognized justification for campaign finance restrictions, which is to prevent the appearance or reality of quid pro quo corruption. She pointed to the original scandal that led Congress to enact it in the 1970s.

“The dairy industry channeled millions of dollars to President Nixon through the Republican Party and its committees,” Sotomayor explained. “The industry landed a hundred-million-dollar subsidy from President Nixon in return. Was there a quid pro quo? There certainly was an appearance of quid pro quo. That’s what started the entire campaign finance reform legislation. The threat hasn’t diminished.”

Francisco responded by claiming that there was no example of coordinated party spending ever being used in quid pro quo corruption, to which Sotomayor quickly pushed back. “Because it hasn’t happened,” she interjected. “We’ve been prohibiting it since Buckley.” (Buckley v. Valeo was the 1976 case that upheld the post-Watergate reforms.)

The law’s challengers also tried to argue that other measures, such as disclosure requirements and individual contribution limits, would serve the anti-corruption interest even without the coordinated expenditure ban. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson was not persuaded. She noted that the court had struck down other campaign finance restrictions on the premise that limits like the one in question on Tuesday would remain intact.

“How can your argument be today that these limits can fall and it will be OK because the other limits exist, if you can’t make a representation that we’re still going to have those other limits?” she asked.

It was notable that the court’s deregulatory drive had relatively few defenders on the bench on Tuesday. While none of the conservatives expressed regret about their past rulings, only Justice Samuel Alito seemed interested in lauding them. At one point, he described the court’s infamous decision in Citizens United as “much maligned [and] I think unfairly maligned.”

But key voices on the court remained curiously quiet. Justice Kavanaugh’s questions expressed some concern that the “overall architecture of our jurisprudence” may have “weakened or disadvantaged political parties as compared to outside groups,” but did not clearly signal what conclusions that might lead him to. Justice Neil Gorsuch asked no questions, while Justice Amy Coney Barrett asked only one that shed little light on her overall thinking.

Since the mid-2000s, the Roberts court’s conservative majority has worked in case after case to weaken the once-bipartisan legal infrastructure around campaign finance reforms. It is unlikely that the court will reverse course so suddenly. But Tuesday’s oral arguments suggested that there might not be a great appetite to go much further—a state of affairs that the court’s liberal justices may have hinted at.

“Your answer’s suggesting to me that every time we interfere with the congressional design we make matters worse,” Sotomayor told Francisco. “You’re telling us that Citizens United and McCutcheon [v. FEC] ended up, yes, in amplifying the voice of corporations but diminishing another voice, that of the party. Now you want to … tinker some more and try to raise the voice of one party.

“Our tinkering,” Sotomayor concluded, “causes more harm than it does good.” A ruling in the case is expected by the end of the court’s current term in late June. By then, we will find out how many other members of the court agree with her assessment.

Can the “Sistine Chapel of the New Deal” Be Saved From Trump? - 2025-12-10T11:00:00Z

The Trump White House’s desire that government-funded art “remove divisive or partisan narratives,” to quote a letter sent last August to Smithsonian secretary Lonnie G. Bunch III, is nothing new. At the dawn of the Cold War, that same fatuous sentiment was directed against Ben Shahn’s New Deal frescoes The Meaning of Social Security, the most visually arresting of many murals and sculptures decorating the Wilbur J. Cohen Federal Building in Washington, D.C. Gray Brechin, an architectural historian and founder of the nonprofit Living New Deal, described the Cohen to me as “a kind of Sistine Chapel of the New Deal.” It and all the art inside could soon be rubble.

The Cohen lies two blocks west of the United States Capitol and across Independence Avenue from the National Mall. Its principal tenant is Voice of America, which President Donald Trump has been trying to liquidate. A couple of months ago, I broke the story that the Trump administration was racing to sell the Cohen with no regard for the art inside (part one; part two). I now see that I was insufficiently alarmist.

A December 8 story by Bloomberg’s Suzanna Monyak reported that, according to a former official of the General Services Administration, the agency in charge of federal real estate, Trump is already bypassing legally required GSA procedures and soliciting bids to demolish the Cohen, along with three other federal buildings in Washington—the Marcel Breuer–designed Housing and Urban Development headquarters; the building housing the Treasury Department’s Bureau of the Fiscal Service, built in 1919; and the GSA’s own Regional Office Building, which, like the Cohen, is a New Deal–era building housing social-realist murals, in this instance by Howard Weston (though these are on oil and removable). Once the four buildings are demolished, the land will be sold to developers. It won’t likely fetch a high price, because these buildings are all in Washington’s southwest quadrant, where the vacancy rate is above 15 percent. (Anything north of 10 percent is bad.)

The threat to the Cohen is the most urgent because The Meaning of Social Security is probably the most significant work of New Deal public art in Washington. Last week, I finally got to see it up close. Its colors remain astonishingly vibrant eight decades on. (Everybody, I’m told, has that reaction.) Small wonder that, on completion, Shahn called this “the best work I’ve done.” I also saw Philip Guston’s lovely mural Reconstruction and Well-Being of the Family, in the Cohen’s auditorium—a triptych whose panels open up and slide away ingeniously to make way for a movie screen—plus two handsome Seymour Fogel murals, Security of the People and Wealth of the Nation, that stand sentry in what was once the Cohen’s entranceway on Independence Avenue. (Today you enter from the other side, on C Street.)

In the event of demolition, removing the Guston would be a cinch; removing the Fogels more difficult; and removing the Shahn extremely difficult and costly, and perhaps impossible. Painfully aware of this, the GSA recently discussed with Olin Conservation Inc., a private contractor that for decades has done preservation work on the Shahn frescoes, preparation of “feasibility studies for potential removal of some of the art work,” David Olin, the company’s senior conservator, told me. One salient question is whether either of the walls on which the Shahn frescoes are painted is load-bearing. (To my untrained eye, one of them might be.) The GSA press office told me it was not yet able to answer this question, and Olin told me that he also didn’t know.

When I wrote my earlier pieces, the Trump administration had designated the Cohen for “accelerated disposition” (i.e., sale) in 2025. I subsequently learned that—barring Trump flouting several laws and/or bulldozing the Cohen—the timeline was more like two years. That gives preservationists more time to act. Much progress has been made already. A campaign is underway to save the Cohen, led by Mary Okin, assistant director of Living New Deal. An online petition has collected nearly 2,000 signatures; various art and architecture publications and a couple of podcasts have weighed in; and Heather Cox Richardson, The Guardian, and National Public Radio have reported on this threat to New Deal art and architecture.

But now it appears the Trump White House doesn’t want to give preservationists time to mobilize. Its plan to bulldoze the Cohen is described in a court filing in a lawsuit against Trump’s harebrained plans to whitewash the Eisenhower Executive Office Building. In the filing, Mydelle Wright, former D.C.-area director of the Office of Planning and Design Quality for the Public Buildings Service, which is part of GSA, said that on December 5 she was told (presumably by former GSA colleagues) that “the White House, acting on its own and not through GSA, has solicited bids and/or is finalizing a bid package (the last step prior to solicitation) to analyze and recommend for demolition [the] four historic buildings in D.C.” Wright continued:

Key GSA personnel have only just learned of the White House’s activities.… For the first time of which I’m aware, a president is personally involved in facilitating end-runs around the [GSA]’s obligations to the buildings that are our national heritage, and who in the agency is going to tell him “no”?

This is of course outrageous, but from Trump’s point of view it makes a certain amount of sense because the more you learn about efforts to sell the Cohen, the clearer it becomes that doing so will be very difficult if the federal government follows various legally required procedures, as the GSA currently shows every intention of doing. The same is likely true, though to a lesser extent, of the other three federal buildings Trump wants gone.

Trump’s first commissioner of the Public Buildings Service was a MAGA loyalist named Michael Peters. Peters came in pledging to unload 50 percent of the federal government’s real estate portfolio. But the White House concluded Peters was all bluster (“too many unforced errors,” an industry source told the Federal News Service), and he left GSA in July. Peters’s acting replacement, Andrew Heller, is a civil servant who’s served in multiple administrations, and he’s playing it by the book. That likely displeases White House budget director and “Project 2025” architect Russell Vought, who exercises a large and growing influence over Trump’s domestic policies. Vought posted a memo on December 8 recommitting the administration to offloading “unnecessary leases and buildings.”

The ultimate wild card is Trump. Thus far, we don’t know that Trump himself has demonstrated any interest in this demolition, but we do know he has an ungovernable passion for bulldozers. When I posted my previous two articles on the Cohen, the White House still had an East Wing. Now it’s gone. A lawsuit brought by a Virginia couple after the demolition began argued persuasively that Trump was violating, among other statutes, the National Capital Planning Act of 1952 and the National Historic Preservation Act of 1966. But the plaintiffs withdrew their complaint five days later, presumably because the demolition was completed before the court took any action (except to notify them that they’d neglected to pay a filing fee and furnish a required cover sheet).

A May 2025 report by the federal government’s Public Buildings Reform Board recommended the Cohen’s sale “within the timeframes established under” the 2016 Federal Assets Sale Transfer Act, or FASTA, and Vought immediately approved that. But despite the name, FASTA isn’t that fast. It requires three rounds of review by the Public Buildings Reform Board, and the Cohen has been through only two; the third is due next year.

Also, as I’ve noted previously, the Cohen is on the National Register of Historic Places and therefore requires GSA to engage in consultation over any potential “adverse effects,” of which the loss or damage of the New Deal art would seem pretty significant. A series of court decisions, including a district court ruling from last March, has established that even if a building containing New Deal art is sold, the art remains the property of the public.

I’ve explained previously at some length why no buyer of the Cohen building would likely wish to renovate the building; any real estate value lies in the location of the land on which it sits. In brief: The Cohen has never been renovated going all the way back to 1940, and renovating it now would cost (according to a GSA analysis from earlier this year that has not been made public) about $1 billion. The government can afford to perform such a renovation (and that unreleased GSA report offered sound suggestions to refurbish the Cohen that remain by far the best option). But not many private real estate developers would be willing to spend $1 billion on a renovation. (For a more modest example of private investors rehabbing a New Deal building about one-third the Cohen’s size and making its art available to the public, see my October report on some fine Shahn murals at the former Bronx Post Office.)

Ergo: Privatizing the Cohen is virtually synonymous with demolition, if not before the Cohen is sold, then after. If the federal government performs the demolition itself, the Cohen will sell more quickly.

But again: That would be illegal. We haven’t even discussed the preservation laws of local government. Contrary to popular belief, Washington, D.C., possesses one! Rebecca Miller, executive director of the D.C. Preservation League, told me by email that the Cohen is separately landmarked by the District of Columbia government and therefore protected by the DC Historic Landmark and Historic District Protection Act of 1978. So even though the National Historic Preservation Act ultimately allows demolition of a building on its register once it passes into private hands, D.C. law poses a much more serious obstacle. Demolition, Miller explained, “could only take place … by going through D.C.’s rigorous Mayor’s Agent process, where the new owner of the building would need to prove that the public benefit of a project outweighs the preservation loss. The process is lengthy, and very few buildings are razed under the law.”

The Cohen sale is a bit unusual because Congress authorized it last January; usually it’s the executive branch that makes such decisions, consulting Congress along the way. That may, I’m sorry to report, give the Trump administration some legal leeway to skip a few steps, though certainly not all of them. All the more reason to consider that the crucial laws to protect the Cohen will be the local ones.

Congress enacted the Cohen’s sale through a provision tucked last January into a water resources bill by Senator Joni Ernst, Republican of Iowa, and signed by an unwary President Joe Biden days before he left office. Ernst was so eager to demonstrate loyalty to Trump after declining to endorse him before the 2024 Iowa caucuses that she didn’t wait for Trump to assume office to found a DOGE Caucus, and she’s pushed to sell off multiple federal buildings. Still, I can’t tell you why Ernst started with the Cohen, because her staff has been ducking my emails and phone calls for months. I finally sent two of her press contacts the following five questions:

1) Why did Senator Ernst choose, specifically, the Wilbur J. Cohen federal building to sell off in last January’s water resources bill?

2) Did Senator Ernst, or any of her staff, visit the Cohen building before introducing her amendment to sell off the Cohen to the water resources bill?

3) Is Senator Ernst aware that there is New Deal art in the building, including frescoes by celebrated artists such as Ben Shahn and Philip Guston? Does she have any notions about what to do with it?

4) Does Senator Ernst know any prospective buyers for the Cohen building, and what their plans might be for the building?

I’ve yet to receive a reply.

I’m especially eager to get an answer to (2) because, as I’ve already noted, the Cohen is all of two blocks from the Capitol. If Ernst or an Ernst staffer ever ambled over to the Cohen, I can’t find anybody at GSA who remembers it. I asked Olin, who probably knows more about the present condition of The Meaning of Social Security than anyone, whether he heard from Ernst or her staff.* He said no.

The language in Ernst’s amendment to the water resources bill gave the GSA two years to sell the building after it’s vacated. I presumed it would be vacated by now, but it isn’t entirely, and even Trump wouldn’t likely demolish a building with civil servants still working inside it. A small number of Voice of America employees remain there, along with some employees from the Health and Human Services’ Office of Inspector General. So (assuming it’s still relevant), GSA’s two-year clock has not yet started ticking.

But I promised to tell you about the last time The Meaning of Social Security was at serious risk—due not to indifference, as today, but to the very Trumpy-sounding complaint that it’s insufficiently upbeat.

“Critics Want Art to Be Appropriate” announced a Washington Post headline in June 1947. In a letter to the Public Buildings Administration (a division of the Treasury Department that had commissioned this and other New Deal artworks), tenants in what today we call the Cohen building complained that Shahn’s frescoes depicted people who “look pathetic” and “are in poor circumstances.”

The strangest part of this story is who these tenants were: employees of the Federal Security Agency, an early precursor to the Health and Human Services Department. Like emergency-room doctors unnerved by the sight of blood, pioneering architects of America’s welfare state took offense at The Meaning of Social Security and wanted it removed. Politics likely played some role. This was the same year President Harry Truman established his notorious loyalty oaths for federal employees; Depression-era leftism was very much out of favor.

The complaining Federal Security Agency employees didn’t want all the Shahn murals removed; they just wanted half. Shahn likely modeled The Meaning of Social Security on Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s two fourteenth-century frescoes, The Allegory of Good and Bad Government in Siena’s Palazzo Pubblico. Along a 70-foot corridor, Shahn’s update depicted on one wall life without Social Security (a destitute-looking child on crutches; unemployed men sitting idly by a railroad track) and on the opposite wall, life with Social Security (men building a house; men driving rivets into girders, and yes, the working class in New Deal painting is mostly male). The Federal Security Agency workers didn’t object to the happy side. But the unhappy side, and most especially that child on crutches, really bugged them.

The controversy drew in Duncan Phillips, founder of Washington’s Phillips Collection. A week after the Post story ran, Phillips wrote in alarm to Museum of Modern Art curator James Thrall Soby, who was then preparing a major MOMA retrospective of Shahn’s work. “I am shocked to hear for the first time that Ben Shahn’s murals in the [Cohen building] are in danger of being covered over or destroyed,” Phillips wrote. “I will write a letter of protest since I agree with you that Shahn is one of our most distinguished artists and his murals among the best executed under the Treasury project.” After much to-ing and fro-ing, a compromise was struck, in which the unhappy side of The Meaning of Social Security was covered with a heavy curtain that remained in place through the 1970s. (I’m indebted for most of these details to Laura Katzman, professor of art history at James Madison University, who wrote a 1995 brochure for GSA’s rededication of The Meaning of Social Security.)

Now Trump is scheming to blow the whole building to smithereens, along with three others. Preservationists may have to secure a court injunction to stop it. Remember the East Wing! Save the Cohen! And if you have a moment, please sign this petition.

* This article originally misidentified Joni Ernst.

Trump Erupts in Fury as GOPers Humiliatingly Defy His Plot to Rig 2026 - 2025-12-10T10:00:00Z

In today’s episode, we talk to Representative Jamie Raskin about President Trump’s corrupt scheme to gerrymander the 2026 midterms—and about Raskin’s new ranked-choice voting plan. Trump’s rage is growing as Indiana Republicans resist his pressure to gerrymander their state, and he exploded in a wild weekend rant, threatening primaries against Republicans who “stupidly say no.” Yet for now, state Senate Republicans appear dug in. Meanwhile, other Republicans are now arguing that his overall gerrymandering scheme is backfiring. Why? Because Trump is hurting Republicans so badly that those whose seats are made somewhat less safe by redrawn maps might now be at risk. Raskin sees an opening to offer another way: Today he’s introducing a new bill that would require ranked-choice voting in congressional races across the country. He tells us about the proposal, discusses how Trump’s gerrymandering chaos reveals ranked choice as a better alternative, and urges Democrats to fight GOP tactics with hardball of their own. Listen to this episode here. A transcript is here.

Sotomayor Rips Lawyer Who Claims Elon Musk’s DOGE Job Wasn’t Shady - 2025-12-09T20:45:44Z

Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor torched a lawyer Tuesday for suggesting that Elon Musk didn’t buy his way into the White House.

While hearing oral arguments in a case on campaign finance law, Sotomayor warned that if the Supreme Court removed the limits on coordinated expenditures, then there would be “no control” over how much one donor could give to a presidential campaign—opening the door for blatant corruption.

“So, with all respect your honor, I don’t have a problem with the various statistics you just cited in the absence of any evidence or any suggestion it was tied to quid pro quo corruption,” replied Noel Francisco, the attorney for the National Republican Senatorial Committee.

“You mean to suggest that the fact that one major donor to the current president—the most major donor to the current president—got a very lucrative job immediately upon election from the new administration does not give the appearance of quid pro quo?” Sotomayor pressed. She was clearly referring to Elon Musk, who was appointed as head of the Department of Government Efficiency after donating a whopping $288 million to Trump’s 2024 presidential campaign.

Prior to bringing up Musk, Sotomayor also cited Hillary Clinton’s 2016 joint victory fund with the DNC, “which allowed a single donor to give up to $356,000” just to show it wasn’t a solely Trumpian problem.

Francisco tried to dismiss Sotomayor, saying that Musk’s meager salary was not “an effective quid pro quo bribery, which may be why nobody has even remotely suggested that.”

Actually, a lot of people have suggested that—and it has nothing to do with his salary as a special government employee. It’s no secret that Musk used his time as DOGE czar working to dismantle the very agencies that regulate his companies, clearing the way for the richest man in the world to amass even more money.

Musk also used his proximity to Donald Trump to boost his many businesses in foreign countries. In some cases, the administration even pressured foreign governments into approving his products. Not to mention that Musk was the biggest individual winner when Trump announced a 90-day pause on tariffs, sending Tesla stock shooting up 23 percent.

Just because their plan didn’t work perfectly—and Musk ended up losing twice as much as he cut in government spending—doesn’t mean it wasn’t still corrupt.

Governor Pritzker Makes It Easier for People to Sue ICE - 2025-12-09T20:03:08Z

Illinois Governor JB Pritzker is taking aim at the Trump administration’s violent and excessive immigration actions.

On Tuesday, Pritzker signed a bill that makes it easier for Illinois residents to sue federal immigration agents for up to $10,000 if they believe their rights have been violated, and also restricts those agents from enforcement outside courthouses. The bill also requires hospitals to safeguard patient access, and prohibits schools from disclosing the immigration status of students, employees, and contractors unless required by law.

Democratic lawmakers passed the bill in October in the midst of Operation Midway Blitz, the Trump administration’s attempt to crack down on illegal immigration in the Chicago area. The initiative was met with protests and a violent crackdown from federal agents including ICE and Border Patrol.

“Residents should be able to go to court, take their kid to day care and have access to the university they attend without fear they will be kidnapped off the street,” said state Representative Lilian Jiménez, who represents parts of Chicago, in a statement at the time.

Pritzker has sharply criticized President Trump and his federal actions in Illinois. Last month, he called out Border Patrol agents for mocking a neighborhood they had tear-gassed while staging a photo op in front of the Chicago art installation The Bean.

“Making fun of our neighborhoods and communities is disgusting,” Pritzker posted online at the time. “Greg Bovino and his masked agents are not here to make Chicago safer. As children are tear gassed and U.S. citizens detained, they are posing for photo ops and producing reality TV moments.”

Pritzker again called out the Trump administration after signing the bill on Tuesday.

“After what our communities have experienced, we understood that our response needed to be deep and comprehensive to counter the Trump administration’s depravity,” Pritzker said.

DOJ Tries New Way to Free MAGA Conspiracy Theorist Trump Can’t Pardon - 2025-12-09T19:26:05Z

Assistant Attorney General Harmeet Dhillon and the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division are pretending to care about prisoners’ human rights in an apparent effort to get conspiracy theorist, former state official, and convicted 2020 election fraudster Tina Peters out of a Colorado jail.

“Under my direction, @CivilRights has opened an investigation into the entire Colorado prison system following multiple reports of unconstitutional and legally insufficient carceral conditions. Prisoners have civil rights,” Dhillon wrote Tuesday afternoon.

Dhillion’s letter is addressed to Colorado Governor Jared Polis, and accuses the Colorado prison system of “failing to provide adequate medical care and safe sanitary physical conditions of confinement,” and will determine if the state violates prisoners’ rights by “housing biological males in units designated for females.”

On Monday, a federal judge refused to release Peters, who is Trump’s only 2020 ally still behind bars. Trump can’t just pardon her like he’s done with virtually everyone else who’s committed felonies in his name, since she is being held on state charges, not federal—so instead, the administration has to use this “prisoners’ rights” loophole.

Those on both the left and the right acknowledged that Dhillon’s move is part of a larger plan to free the woman who committed seven felonies in Colorado for Trump.

“PLEASE focus on @realtinapeters,” one supporter wrote. “She is a victim of the system.”

“They’re going to get Tina out?” said another, attaching prayer hand emojis.

“New Trump pressure on Colorado to release election conspiracy theorist Tina Peters—who Trump can’t pardon because she’s imprisoned on state charges,” The Bulwark’s Will Sommer chimed in.

Right-wingers have been doing the “Free Tina” thing for some time now. Peters is currently serving nine years in jail for granting unauthorized access to Colorado voting machines and being charged with three counts of attempting to influence a public servant, two counts of conspiracy to commit attempting to influence a public servant, first-degree official misconduct, violation of duty, failing to comply with the secretary of state, obstruction, contempt of court, criminal impersonation, and identity theft.

The right, of course, views Peters as a political prisoner rather than someone who blatantly tried to use her power to swing the 2020 election in Trump’s favor. Her lawyers and MAGA-sphere supporters have alleged that her health is declining and that she was temporarily placed in solitary confinement last month.

“FREE TINA PETERS, a brave and innocent Patriot who has been tortured by Crooked Colorado politicians, including the big Mail-In Ballot supporting the governor of the State,” Trump posted on Truth Social back in August. “Let Tina Peters out of jail, RIGHT NOW. She did nothing wrong, except catching the Democrats cheat in the Election. She is an old woman, and very sick. If she is not released, I am going to take harsh measures!!!”

Trump called to free Peters last week too.

“The SLEAZEBAG Governor of Colorado, Jared Polis, refuses to allow an elderly woman, Tina Peters, who was unfairly convicted of what the Democrats do, cheating on Elections, out of jail! She was convicted for trying to stop Democrats from stealing Colorado Votes in the Election,” he wrote. “She was preserving Election Records, which she was obligated to do under Federal Law.”

Prisoners’ rights probably are being violated in Colorado, as they are in most prisons in this country. But it’s obvious that the Trump administration is more concerned with gaming the system than it is with prison conditions of any kind.

Trump Is Ending a Crucial Program for Student Loan Holders - 2025-12-09T19:10:12Z

The Trump administration has moved to strip millions of student debt holders from the Saving on a Valuable Education, or SAVE, repayment plan.

The White House proposed a joint settlement with Missouri Tuesday that will force borrowers onto other repayment plans.

“As part of the proposed joint settlement agreement, the Department will not enroll any new borrowers in the illegal SAVE Plan, deny any pending applications, and move all SAVE borrowers into legal repayment plans,” the Education Department announced in a statement.

“If the agreement is approved by the court, it will mark the definitive end of the Biden Administration’s illegal student loan bailout agenda, putting it to rest once and for all, and end the limbo that more than 7 million borrowers currently face when it comes to not being able to make payments on their federal loans.”

The Joe Biden–era income-driven loan option has been blocked since February, when the Eighth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals determined that the former president had overstepped his office’s authority when he invented the repayment alternative.

A coalition of Republican-led states argued in the lawsuit that Biden had intentionally attempted to craft the student loan relief scheme after an ultraconservative Supreme Court ruled 6–3 to shoot down his formal federal student loan forgiveness plan. That would have erased as much as $20,000 per borrower for 43 million Americans.

Since the court ruling, more than 7.6 million Americans have been placed in SAVE forbearance, the Education Department determined in July, offsetting their payments until 2028.

More than 42 million Americans—or one in six adults—currently have student loans. Their collective debt amounts to more than $1.6 trillion, according to the Congressional Research Service.

Trump Aides Desperately Want Him to Stop Blaming Biden All the Time - 2025-12-09T18:03:44Z

Donald Trump is blaming his predecessor, Joe Biden, too much, and his aides are trying to get him to stop.

Trump’s economic policies have caused food prices to go up and increased affordability issues, but the president remains in deep denial, calling affordability a Democratic hoax and “scam.” The president has chosen to respond to any bad news about the economy by complaining about a president who hasn’t been in office for almost a year, and his staff worries that this will backfire on the American people.

“Joe Biden is no longer a threat to them because he’s out of office, he’s never going to be in office again,” one adviser told CNN. “You’ve got to feel their pain. You’ve got to talk about it every day.”

But is the president willing to admit that costs have gone up for most Americans? In an interview with Politico Monday, Trump said if he were grading the economy, he would give it an “A-plus-plus-plus-plus-plus.”

POLITICO: I wonder what grade you'd give the economy

TRUMP: A+

POLITICO: A+?

TRUMP: A+++++ pic.twitter.com/hfqExeJ11a

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) December 9, 2025

If that were true, why did the president announce a $12 billion bailout for farmers on Monday? Trump told those farmers that it’s because “we inherited a total mess from the Biden administration.” But the public isn’t buying explanations like that. In a poll late last month, 49 percent of respondents said the president has done more to increase prices, while only 24 percent said he’s done more to lower prices. Trump is even losing Republican allies in Congress on the economy.

To try and fix the public perception, Trump is going to be making trips around the country, beginning with a Pennsylvania swing district on Tuesday. It may not be enough, especially in the likely event that Trump finds another excuse to blame Biden on the trip. That won’t convince working people, who can see prices shooting up with their own eyes.

Pete Hegseth’s New AI Defense Tool Rollout Immediately Derails - 2025-12-09T17:15:22Z

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s rollout Tuesday of the U.S. military’s new AI platform just fell flat on its face.

“The future of American warfare is here, and it’s spelled A-I,” Hegseth said in a video on X, announcing GenAi.Mil, the new “American-made” AI platform that will allow military members to “conduct deep research, format documents, and even analyze video or imagery at unprecedented speed”—and all without using their brains.

Unfortunately for Hegseth, his post presented a slight problem.

The name GenAi.Mil automatically produced a link to an empty website. So X users thinking they were about to get a sneak peak at the military’s new chatbot were greeted by a message reading: “Upstream connect error or disconnect/reset before headers. reset reason: connection termination.” Predictably, the platform can’t actually be accessed from external networks, but the wonky rollout triggered eyerolls across the internet.

One popular post on R/Army, the Reddit forum dedicated to military matters, suggested that service members had all received surprise invitations to use the new platform on their work computers. But having never heard about it before receiving the invite, the user deemed that it looked “really suspicious.”

“Is it real and safe,” the user asked.

The invite features a logo and short link, but no indication of what the invitation is actually for. “Victory belongs to those who embrace real innovation not antiquated systems of a bygone era. It’s time to deliver efficient, decisive results for the warfighter,” the e-vite reads. “I want YOU to use AI.”

The platform will house Google Cloud’s Gemini for Government, using a retrieval-augmented generation to connect the large language model chatbot to Google Search “to ensure outputs are reliable and dramatically [reduce] the risk of AI hallucinations.”

The Trump administration has been eager to embrace the AI industry, and in July, it awarded Google a massive $200 million contract to support AI solutions at the DOD.

MTG Says She Feels “Sorry” for Trump as Feud Escalates - 2025-12-09T17:03:05Z

After being President Trump and MAGA’s most boisterous supporter, Georgia Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene was on CNN Tuesday morning telling Wolf Blitzer how “sorry” she feels for the president. A lot can change in a year. 

“President Trump posted yesterday that you are … ‘not America First or MAGA’  and your ‘new views are those of a very dumb person’; that’s the president of the United States speaking about you,” Wolf Blitzter said to Greene. “What’s your response to these latest attacks?”

“Well actually Wolf, I feel very sorry for President Trump, I genuinely do,” Greene responded. “It has to be a hard place for someone that is constantly so hateful, and puts so much vitriol, name-calling, and really tells lies about people in order to try to get his way, or win some kind of fight. And I think that’s exactly what’s wrong in America today.… I personally think that that’s poor leadership from a president, it’s a very bad demeanor. And Americans are very tired of it.” 

While Greene’s comments are frustrating on some level given her own contributions to the hate and vitriol she decries, they also further reaffirm a Republican Party that is wavering ideologically, with the party pulling between the MAGA, America-first crowd and the more traditional neocons as a future without Trump looms. 

Marjorie Taylor Greene on CNN: "I feel very sorry for President Trump. I genuinely do. It has to be a hard place for someone that is constantly so hateful and puts so much vitriol, name calling, and really tells lies about people in order to try to get his way." pic.twitter.com/YxjyEEiyPz

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) December 9, 2025

“It’s easy for me to say a prayer for him and forgive him. But the part that I have had a very hard time with is the fact that he called me a traitor, and because of his words, that brought serious threats against myself and my family,” Greene continued. 

Marjorie Taylor Greene: "It's easy for me to say a prayer for him and forgive him. But the part that I have had a very hard time with is the fact that he called me a traitor, and because of his words, that brought serious threats against myself and my family." pic.twitter.com/92pwrUoGqK

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) December 9, 2025

This all comes as Greene and potentially more than 20 other Republicans plan to resign or retire ahead of the 2026 midterms. 

Trump Rants About His 2020 Election Conspiracy at Strangest Time - 2025-12-09T16:46:03Z

Donald Trump apparently can’t speak about Kyiv without making the Russia-Ukraine war all about himself.

When asked by Politico’s Dasha Burns Monday night if he believed Ukraine had lost its war with Russia, Trump said that the Eastern European nation had lost a lot of “very good land,” chuckling that he “wouldn’t say” Ukraine’s actions had amounted to “a victory.”

But then Trump chose to turn the spotlight back on himself, resurrecting his 2020 presidential election conspiracy while discussing the foreign country’s diplomatic options.

“You know, think of it, if our election wasn’t rigged ... there was a rigged election. Now everyone knows it. It’s gonna come out over the next couple of months too, loud and clear ’cause we have all the information and everything,” Trump said.

“But if the election wasn’t rigged and stolen, uh, you wouldn’t even be talking about Ukraine right now,” he added.

The Trump administration unveiled a 28-point peace plan last month that catered to some of Russia’s most outrageous demands, such as requiring Ukraine to swear off NATO membership and to hand Moscow Crimea and the eastern Donbas region. Those two details alone have reversed long-standing U.S. policy with regard to the area.

In the weeks since, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy has drafted his own peace plan, refusing to relinquish his country’s territory.

Elsewhere in the interview, Trump claimed that Europe would “drop” if the continent’s leaders continued to support Ukraine, and that his son Donald Trump Jr. “wasn’t exactly wrong” to suggest that the president would “walk away” from supporting the war-sieged nation himself.

“But you know, at some point, size will win, generally,” Trump said, referring to Russia’s advantages. “And this is a massive size, uh—you—when you take a look at the numbers, I mean, the numbers are just crazy.”

There is some evidence that the White House’s peace plan may have come directly from the Kremlin: Several sentences in the document were passively formatted with clunky English phrases that make more sense when translated into Russian. It was speculated that the awkward sentences could have been the influence of Kirill Dmitriev, Russian President Vladimir Putin’s envoy, who worked on the project alongside Trump’s special envoy, Steve Witkoff.

Trump has touted himself for months as a great peacemaker, pushing a narrative that he has—so far—solved at least eight foreign conflicts. Practically all of his war-solving braggadocio is demonstrably untrue, to the extent that several of the examples he often lists were never even at war. But despite repeated efforts, he has not made any meaningful headway on the Russia-Ukraine war.

More than 13,300 civilians have been killed and 31,700 injured in Ukraine since Russia invaded in February 2022, according to a United Nations report from June.

“Don’t Be Dramatic”: Trump Shuts Down Concerns About Rising Costs - 2025-12-09T16:43:20Z

Donald Trump took offense at an innocuous question while discussing his health care plans during an interview with Politico’s Dasha Burns Monday, snapping when Burns segued into families’ rising costs for the holidays.

“So right now, people are buying their holiday presents, they’re planning for—” Burns began in a cheery tone, before Trump cut her off.

“Look, don’t be dramatic,” Trump said abruptly, as if Burns had insulted him. Burns continued on her point, saying, “They’re planning their budgets for next year, Mr. President.”

Trump to holiday shoppers concerned about high prices:

"Look, don't be dramatic." pic.twitter.com/m5yFf6yQXE

— FactPost (@factpostnews) December 9, 2025

Trump continued on, trying to make the point that he wants “to give the money to the people to buy their own health care” and that Democrats are responsible for any increases in health care premiums for next year “because they’re corrupt people because they’re totally owned and bought by the insurance companies.”

It’s clear that Trump was offended at the question, and he’s in denial about the fact that health care premiums are going to shoot up next year thanks to the expiration of Affordable Care Act subsidies. It was the major issue in Congress’s budget negotiations for months, even leading to the record-long government shutdown.

Even though Republicans promised to hold a vote on extending the subsidies, Trump’s plan seems to be to just let them end, which would likely leave millions of Americans without health coverage. The president continues to spout the delusional idea that Democrats could simply agree to lower health care costs on their own, and Republicans in Congress don’t seem to care.

Trump Accidentally Sabotages Case for Bombings in New Interview Fiasco - 2025-12-09T16:35:42Z

In case you needed further proof that President Trump’s case for his boat bombings is a steaming pile of horse-bleep, he just helpfully provided reams of additional evidence in a new interview with Politico. In so doing, Trump also handed Democrats a new weapon to hound Republicans mercilessly if they fail to exercise oversight over these ongoing crimes—oversight that must go all the way to the top.

Remarkably, in this interview, Trump revealed that his pardon of Honduran ex-President Juan Orlando Hernandez for his drug-trafficking conviction—in a U.S. court—is almost comically ill predicated. This came when Politico’s Dasha Burns pointed out that Hernandez’s pardon casts doubt on Trump’s commitment to combating drug trafficking—the stated grounds for his boat bombings.

Trump then responded:

Well, I don’t know him. And I know very little about him other than people said it was like, uh, an Obama-Biden type setup, where he was set up … there are many people fighting for Honduras, very good people that I know. And they think he was treated horribly, and they asked me to do it, and I said I’ll do it.

This is monumentally deranged stuff. Note that Trump admits he knows next to nothing about Hernandez’s case, even though prosecutors won a conviction after alleging that he helped bring more than 500 tons of cocaine into the United States. Trump pardoned him with zero serious reflection on the impact he had on drug use in our country. This is by Trump’s own admission.

Then, after Burns asked Trump if this sends “the wrong message to drug dealers,” Trump segued into claiming Hernandez was the victim of “weaponized” government, just as Trump himself was. Combine this with Trump’s confession that he granted this pardon because people “asked me to do it,” and the takeaway is inescapable. He did it as a favor, probably corruptly, or out of his narcissistic association of Hernandez with himself, or a combination of both: His narcissism subjects him to easy manipulation by corrupt actors.

Trump has ordered the killings of over 80 people in the Caribbean Sea on the grounds that they are bringing drugs into the United States. His administration hasn’t presented serious evidence of this, and indeed, tons of evidence contradicts it in various ways. Yet Trump has designated these alleged drug traffickers as “narco-terrorists” and claims constitutional authority to kill them as combatants in a war. Most legal experts dismiss this as nonsense, noting that he’s claiming the authority to summarily execute civilians who are not in fact waging war against the U.S.

For Trump to then blithely admit to pardoning someone who trafficked in infinitely more drugs than any of these people he’s illegally killing—while not bothering to familiarize himself at all with that man’s crimes against our country—should conclusively demolish the idea that any of this is about drugs coming into our homeland.

It gets worse. Under questioning, Trump justified his campaign by claiming the bombing of each boat saves 25,000 American lives, which is a brain-dead lie in numerous ways. Trump also told Politico, “We’re gonna hit ’em on land very soon, too,” seemingly saying straight out that a ground invasion of some sort in Venezuela is coming.

And then, after Burns noted that very little if any fentanyl comes to the U.S. via Venezuela or via boats off its coast, this exchange happened:

Burns: So would you consider doing something similar with Mexico and Colombia that are even more responsible for fentanyl trafficking into the U.S.?

Trump: Yeah, I would. Sure. I would.

Note that it’s now taken as a given—as an unremarkable and baked-in fact about our politics—that Trump is mulling a ground invasion of Venezuela and a dramatic expansion in his bombing campaign with no congressional authorization. What emerges from this interview is that Trump is pulling all of this—the substantive case for these bombings, the legal justification for them, the rationale for mulling a massive military escalation in the Western hemisphere—out of his rear end.

It’s fortuitous that this comes amid new signs that Republicans might—might—be open to more oversight over these bombings. That GOP concern comes amid continuing controversy over the news that two men were killed in a follow-up strike on September 2 as they clung to a boat destroyed in an initial strike, which violates the laws of war.

We just learned, for instance, that lawmakers have inserted a provision into the annual defense bill that withholds one-fourth of Hegseth’s travel budget to force some oversight. The provision would require the Pentagon to release the written order for the strikes and unedited video of them to the Senate and House Armed Services committees.

That’s a step forward. Representative Adam Smith, the ranking Armed Services Democrat, tells me via text that the Pentagon has not released those written orders to the committee despite demands for it. That confirms other reports to this effect, and it’s important, because seeing them would allow lawmakers to assess precisely what Hegseth ordered, leading to that second strike. That could reveal Hegseth to be even more culpable. Such a public release would also make video of the second strike—and perhaps all the others—available to a wider pool of lawmakers.

What’s more, Smith confirms to me that this insertion into the defense bill proceeded with the “quiet acquiesce” of Republicans. While we mustn’t forget that this entire bombing campaign is illegal, the peculiarly heinous nature of the second strike might be prying open the door to more oversight later.

What this new interview really confirms is that this oversight absolutely must go all the way to the very top, as national security law expert Tess Bridgeman explains on The New Republic’s podcast. We know that at least one military lawyer internally objected to the bombings, that the admiral previously overseeing them abruptly resigned amid concerns about them, and that the legal memo fake-justifying them—which hasn’t been released—appears to be a deeply unserious document.

So what has Trump been advised internally about the legal and substantive basis for these strikes? What have his underlings told him? What deliberations took place over Trump’s decision to pardon the ex-president of Honduras? Has Trump discussed pardoning Hegseth or any others involved in these illegal killings?

Trump’s disastrous admissions in this interview reveal again that he is profoundly, catastrophically unfit to be making any of these decisions. By even the most minimal standard of public service, this should induce more Republicans to get to the bottom of all of it. Democrats should use these new revelations to hound them relentlessly if they refuse, as they surely will.

Trump Confirms Democrats’ Story on Horrific Boat Strike Video - 2025-12-09T16:15:51Z

Not even Trump can bring himself to defend his Defense Department’s second strike on two men in the Caribbean Sea.

“Have you watched the video?” Politico’s Dasha Burns asked Trump in a Monday interview.

“I watch everything, yeah.… I see a lot of things,” Trump replied.

“And do you believe that that second strike was necessary?”

“Well it looked like they were trying to turn back over the boat,” Trump said, contradicting Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s story.” “But I’m not involved in that, that’s up to them.”

Last week, the Defense Department alleged that the two men could have attempted to radio back to their cartel to continue their drug-trafficking mission. Lawmakers were informed in closed-door briefings that “it was judged that these two people were capable of returning to the fight.” But here, Trump echoes the Democrats’ story that the video shows the exact opposite.

POLITICO: Do you believe the second strike was necessary?

TRUMP: Uhhhh. Well it looked like they were trying to turn back over the boat. But I don't get involved in that. That's up to them. pic.twitter.com/afTFdEI9qZ

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) December 9, 2025

“What I saw in that room was one of the most troubling things I’ve seen in my time in public service,” Representative Jim Himes, the top Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, told CNN last week. “You have two individuals [in] clear distress, without any means of locomotion, with a destroyed vessel, [who] were killed by the United States.”

The fallout from this potential war crime has been an exercise in finger-pointing. First, Hegseth claimed the entire story was fabricated, then he made a point to blame the order for the second strike on Admiral Frank Bradley, who was heading the attack. Now Trump—who is above them both—implies that he doesn’t just disagree with the decision but that his Defense Department is lying about why they even struck twice at all.

Maybe Trump sees the writing on the wall and is just trying to absolve himself of any guilt before this goes any further. Or maybe he really is tired of Hegseth and his strike first, think later decision-making style. Either way, this saga seems far from over.

Trump Personally Intervenes to Block Release of January 6 Documents - 2025-12-09T15:54:09Z

The Department of Justice has confirmed that President Donald Trump blocked the release of more than 4,100 documents related to the deadly riot on January 6.

In a court filing Monday night, lawyers for the DOJ revealed that Trump had stepped in to prevent the release of some material requested as part of a lawsuit brought by police officers injured by violent rioters at the U.S. Capitol. The materials were originally subpoenaed from the National Archives and Records Administration in February.

The filing included the December 1 memo signed by Trump, which claimed the subpoena had requested an “extremely broad set of materials” and blocked the release of 4,152 documents.

“I have determined that the following records are subject to a constitutionally based claim of executive privilege. This privilege helps respect the separation of powers enshrined in the United States Constitution and the need for the President of the United States to receive candid and confidential advice in decision making,” the memo stated.

Trump’s memo asserted that claiming executive privilege did not waive other privileges, such as that for presidential communications, deliberative process, and attorney-client.

White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson released a statement last week confirming that Trump had asserted executive privilege in response to “overly broad” discovery requests in this case, Politico reported at the time.

With this action, Trump is directly blocking a case alleging that he helped to fuel the riot. In a 2022 ruling, U.S. District Court Judge Amit Mehta, who is overseeing the current case, found that there were indications Trump may have been aware that some of his supporters were armed and had discouraged security checks.

We’re About to Get More Info on Investigation into Ghislaine Maxwell - 2025-12-09T15:30:23Z

A federal judge opened the floodgates Tuesday, allowing the Justice Department to publicly release investigative materials related to a sex trafficking case brought against Ghislaine Maxwell, the longtime associate and girlfriend of child sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein.

The decision, made by Manhattan-based federal Judge Paul A. Engelmayer, could release hundreds or even thousands of previously unseen documents, reported the Associated Press. They will be released to the public in a searchable format in the next 10 days, as required by the recently passed Epstein Files Transparency Act.

The DOJ argued that the release was what Congress intended after the legislature passed the law last month. The latest document release will “encompass 18 categories of investigative materials” collected in the sex trafficking probe, including “search warrants, financial records, survivor interview notes, electronic device data and material from earlier Epstein investigations in Florida,” according to the AP.

Engelmayer is now the second judge to allow the DOJ to release previously secret Epstein documents, after a judge in Florida approved the release of transcripts from an abandoned federal grand jury investigation into the New York financier roughly two decades ago.

Maxwell was sentenced in 2022 to 20 years in jail for playing an active role in Epstein’s crimes, identifying and grooming vulnerable young women while normalizing their abuse at the hands of her millionaire boyfriend. Maxwell’s attorneys have pressed the White House for a pardon for several months now, and the British ex-socialite signaled in a court filing last week that she would ask a court to free her from her captivity.

In a statement issued prior to Engelmayer’s ruling, Maxwell’s attorneys claimed that the release of the documents “would create undue prejudice so severe that it would foreclose the possibility of a fair retrial.”

Engelmayer made headlines in August when he denied the president’s request to release grand jury transcripts related to Maxwell, claiming that the administration’s renewed focus on those specific documents was little more than a ruse to shake public frustration over lagging progress on the Epstein files. At the time, Engelmayer claimed that the content of the grand jury transcripts were already publicly available elsewhere and wouldn’t reveal anything new.

“NATO Calls Me Daddy”: Trump Trashes Europe as He Brags About Himself - 2025-12-09T15:16:48Z

Donald Trump trashed America’s European allies in an interview with Politico published Tuesday, calling them “decaying” nations led by “weak” people.

“I think they’re weak,” Trump said of European politicians. “But I also think that they want to be so politically correct,” adding, “I think they don’t know what to do. Europe doesn’t know what to do.”

“NATO calls me ‘Daddy,’” Trump said when asked about European elections. “I have a lot to say about it.”

The president claimed that he had a new draft of a peace plan that some Ukrainian officials received favorably, but that President Volodymyr Zelenskiy had not read it yet. Meanwhile, Zelenskiy met with the leaders of the United Kingdom, France, and Germany Monday and stressed that Ukraine would not give up territory in any peace deal.

Trump said that regarding Ukraine, European leaders “talk, but they don’t produce, and the war just keeps going on and on.” He also made a jab at Zelenskiy, urging new elections in Ukraine.

“They haven’t had an election in a long time,” Trump said. “You know, they talk about a democracy, but it gets to a point where it’s not a democracy anymore.”

The president denigrated cities like Paris and London for being overrun with immigrants from the Middle East and Africa, saying that unless European states tightened their borders, they “will not be viable countries any longer.”

Trump singled out London Mayor Sadiq Khan, who is of Pakistani descent, as a “disaster,” making the racist insinuation that he was “elected because so many people have come in. They vote for him now.”

Trump’s words are not going to inspire confidence from Europe, especially with Ukraine-Russia peace talks going so abysmally. European leaders are already worried that Trump will kowtow to Russian demands, and the White House’s new National Security Strategy, released last week, was seen as almost a carbon copy of rhetoric coming from Russia.

Despite Europe’s backlash to the security policy document, which praised far-right political movements, Trump said in the interview that he would be willing to endorse far-right politicians like Hungary’s Viktor Orbán.

“I’d endorse,” he continued. “I’ve endorsed people, but I’ve endorsed people that a lot of Europeans don’t like.”

That security document was more concerned with bringing Europe to heel than any consideration of any external security threats to Europe or the U.S., instead projecting the Trump administration’s own racism and white nationalism onto European states. But those views are not likely to earn the president or his policies any goodwill across the Atlantic.

David Ellison Made Trump a Big Promise on CNN in Warner Bros. Convo - 2025-12-09T14:59:12Z

In a recent visit to the White House, Paramount CEO David Ellison promised President Trump that he would completely rehaul CNN if the president allowed them to purchase Warner Bros. Discovery instead of Netflix, as reported by The Wall Street Journal. 

Ellison’s father, billionaire founder of Oracle, also privately called Trump after the deal with Netflix was announced last week to express his concerns.

The president has yet to publicly side with anyone, but it seems clear where his loyalties lie. He’s already expressed his desire to be involved in the decision, saying over the weekend that Netflix already has “a very big market share. And when they have Warner Bros. you know that share goes up a lot, so I don’t know, that’s going to be for some economists to tell, and also I’ll be involved in that decision too.” 

Trump and Larry Ellison already met last month to discuss firing CNN hosts Erin Burnett and Brianna Keilar (both of whom Trump has issues with) and putting CBS’s 60 Minutes on CNN if Ellison were to acquire Warner. 

Both Larry and David are vocal Trump supporters with a right-wing media empire to go with it, having already acquired CBS and Bari Weiss’s anti-woke publication The Free Press, and having brought TikTok under U.S. ownership to push pro-Israel views. 

If Paramount acquires Warner instead of Netflix and the Ellisons fulfill their promise to Trump,  we could see Trump blatantly using them to shape the entire mainstream media landscape—from CNN to TikTok—in his own image. 

MAGA Influencer Calls Other Right-Wingers “F*cking Evil” as Feud Grows - 2025-12-09T14:25:47Z

MAGA world is on the fritz.

Far-right influencer Tim Pool dialed up his critique of his fellow conservative influencers during a livestream Monday, claiming he was “fucking done” with the political caucus while branding its own as “scumbags” and “psychopaths.”

Pool, who rose to prominence during the Occupy Wall Street Movement, ignited when the topic of his podcast veered toward Charlie Kirk and Turning Point USA, which he claimed was being destroyed by conspiracy theories.

“The organization that helped get Donald Trump elected ... is being gutted by fucking psychopaths telling people to pull their donations,” Pool said. “Their leader and founder is murdered, and prominent pieces of human trash are trying to destroy it. It’s fucking evil.”

He took specific aim at influencer Candace Owens, whom he called a “degenerate cunt” for communicating to CNN last month that she didn’t believe Kirk was killed by the man charged with the crime, 22-year-old Utah native Tyler Robinson.

“I first and foremost do not believe Tyler Robinson killed Charlie Kirk.… Whether he was involved, I think the answer was yes,” Owens, an old friend of Kirk’s, told the network in November.

Since then, Owens has shared social media posts insinuating that Turning Point is no longer aligned with Kirk’s vision, citing an alleged redirection from America’s colleges to faith-based organizations.

Pool went on to slam conservatives who had reached out to him, thanking him for excoriating Owens while failing to take a stand themselves.

“She is burning everything down and she’s gloating and smiling while she does it,” Pool ranted. “Don’t fucking DM me like I did something for you, as you cower, as you fucking cower, scared that she’ll put you on her thumbnail and claim you benefited from Charlie Kirk’s assassination, which she’s doing to me right now. I’m fucking done with these people.”

Owens, in turn, appeared to stand by her right-wing ally, writing to her 7.5 million social media followers that she “wouldn’t turn” Pool’s violent reaction into “a cheap internet moment.”

“He is genuinely not well right now,” Owens posted on X late Monday night. “There is just so clearly something personal going on in his life. It’s hard to run a business and he’s under pressure. Pray he comes through it.”

Trump Kicks Off Brand New Trade War With One of Our Biggest Partners - 2025-12-09T14:22:15Z

President Donald Trump once again threatened to increase tariffs on one of America’s biggest trading partners, Mexico.

Hours after his roundtable meeting Monday to announce a $12 billion aid package for farmers hurt by his own policies, Trump took to Truth Social to claim that Mexico was under-delivering on its water obligations to the United States.

“Mexico continues to violate our comprehensive Water Treaty, and this violation is seriously hurting our BEAUTIFUL TEXAS CROPS AND LIVESTOCK,” the president wrote.

Trump was referring to the Utilization of Waters of the Colorado and Tijuana Rivers and of the Rio Grande Treaty, which requires that the United States receive an average of at least 350,000 acre-feet of water from Rio Grande tributaries each year. In cases of “extraordinary drought,” a term not actually defined in the treaty, Mexico is permitted five years to make up the difference—but has repeatedly failed to do so.

“Mexico still owes the U.S over 800,000 acre-feet of water for failing to comply with our Treaty over the past five years. The U.S needs Mexico to release 200,000 acre-feet of water before December 31st, and the rest must come soon after,” Trump wrote, and threatened to levy an additional 5 percent tariff on Mexico, which would raise the tariff rate to 30 percent.

In April, Trump alleged that Mexico had withheld 1.3 million acre-feet of water and threatened unspecified tariffs and even sanctions. Shortly after, the State Department announced that it had struck a deal with Mexico to increase water deliveries. The International Boundary and Water Commission observed an uptick in water deliveries from Mexico to the United States compared to the previous two years.

Raising tariffs on the America’s largest trading partner would undoubtedly continue to raise prices for consumers.

Transcript: Hegseth Case on Strike Collapsing as Damning New Leaks Hit - 2025-12-09T11:59:17Z

The following is a lightly edited transcript of the December 9 episode of the Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.

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

Pete Hegseth’s defense of the killing of two men clinging to an incapacitated boat is falling apart on multiple fronts. Lawmakers who saw a video of this killing have shared damning details about what they witnessed, and were now learning that the boat very well might not have been bound for the United States to begin with. All this comes as some Republicans appear to be quietly moving away from defending Hegseth on this. And there are increasing signs that this video may actually end up getting released, which would almost certainly wreck Hegseth’s story even further. We’re working through exactly where we are right now with Tess Bridgeman, co-editor-in-chief of the Just Security website and former national security lawyer on the Obama administration, who’s been doing sharp commentary on all this. Tess, good to have you on.

Tess Bridgeman: Thanks so much for having me.

Sargent: So before we get into the specifics of this latest bombing, let’s remind everybody of this: The United States has killed over 80 people that Trump has designated narcoterrorists, bombing these small boats in the Caribbean Sea on the grounds that by smuggling drugs, the people in them are waging war on the United States. Tess, can you just briefly recap why that’s so depraved, and why it’s almost certainly illegal?

Bridgeman: The thing to keep in mind, zooming out, is that The United States is quite simply not at war. There is no armed conflict going on between the United States and any criminal gang or cartel operating in the Western Hemisphere. Transporting drugs is not an act of war. It’s not a hostile act, and it can’t get you into an armed conflict. So whichever way you go about it, whether you look at the administration’s claim that transporting drugs that end up harming or killing some Americans constitutes an armed attack—that doesn’t hold water.

When you look at the idea that the people on these boats are somehow combatants engaged in hostilities themselves, that also is an absurd reading of the law that no serious expert would countenance. So whichever way you slice it—and they’ve tried to do it a couple of different ways—there’s simply no authority for the United States to be targeting these vessels or the people on them. And that means the law that does apply is domestic criminal law and international human rights law, making these killings murder and extrajudicial killings or summary executions, respectively.

Sargent: And they’re killing people who are civilians. Basically what experts have said is, OK, even if these people are doing bad things by smuggling drugs and doing things that could hurt the United States and hurt Americans, this should be subject to police action and the administration by turning this into a war, sort of reimagining it as a war, is essentially giving President Trump the authority to execute civilians, right?

Bridgeman: That’s right. And I’ve said repeatedly that I think the big story here is exactly what you just said, Greg: that there, is underlying this entire campaign, a notion that the president can—outside of the law, outside of armed conflict—can simply say, I’m designating these people terrorists, which is just a label, it doesn’t bring any authority with it to use force. Just labeling these people terrorists and asking the military to then kill them on that basis. That has never been done before in the history of the United States.

That is the clean break from the past that should be terrifying and chilling to us all. The idea that the president can misuse the military in this way, and has thus far gotten away with it, until Congress recently started applying some much-needed pressure—that is something that we should be focused on as the big story. Of course, there are lots of other wrinkles that we can get into, but asking the military to use force outside of the law and the military carrying that campaign out is the bottom line of what’s going on here.

Sargent: Absolutely. So in this particular case, we’re now talking about, on September 2, an initial strike demolished a boat carrying 11 people. Then the live feed showed military officials that two men were alive, clinging to the wrecked boat. They were then killed in a second strike. Generally, it contradicts the laws of war to kill people who are not in the fight, specifically those who are shipwrecked. Tess, again, understanding that the entire campaign is illegal, can you explain why this latest wrinkle is even worse and might be a war crime?

Bridgeman: Yeah, absolutely. So again, important to start with the premise, as you just said, that the laws of war don’t even apply here. So these aren’t war crimes on their face. They are murder. That applies to the first nine people who were killed on that first September 2 strike. And it applies to the two survivors who were killed in the subsequent strike.

But the big new revelation here is that even operating within this paradigm that the administration has manufactured—this idea that we are in a war based on the fake facts that they have marshaled to try to make it so—it is a textbook example of an unlawful order to order that shipwrecked people be fired on. And it is such a textbook example that it is, in fact, what the Department of Defense’s Law of War Manual uses as their example of a clearly illegal order.

So once it was clear—and it should have been clear as soon as the smoke cleared and you could see two individuals clinging to the wreckage of their burned-out vessel at sea, defenseless—it’s what the term of art in the law of armed conflict context is, hors de combat, which essentially means defenseless. It should have been obvious to anyone seeing that video or who was informed of it in real time that the two survivors clinging to the wreckage of their burned-out vessel were simply defenseless, or hors de combat, as it’s considered in the law of armed conflict, which means they posed no threat. And in fact, there was a duty, if feasible, to rescue them.

That’s something that Admiral “Mitch” Bradley, who was overseeing this operation in his capacity as the JSOC commander, should have known. It’s something his military lawyer should have known and that, quite frankly, should have been clear up and down the chain of command. It’s a 101 example that you might get taught in an ops law class. It’s just something that you do not do.

Sargent: We’re now getting new details about how bad this actually is and how clear-cut it is. Lawmakers viewed the video of the second strike last week, and The New York Times reports that, according to people who saw it, the two men appeared to be waving at something, which indicated to these lawmakers that they were attempting to surrender or beckoning for a rescue.

Now, Tess, some Republicans have offered this ludicrous explanation that these two men could have tried to contact other cartel members or could have continued to deliver drugs. But Representative Adam Smith told me last week that no recording of any radio traffic exists, and no drugs were visible in the video. All that aside, if these men were waving, doesn’t that further underscore the idea that they were not in any sense in the fight?

Bridgeman: Absolutely. And again, that’s what should have been crystal clear to anyone who was involved here. First and foremost, though, there was no fight for them to be surrendering from. And that’s why this really horrific set of events clarifies the mind about the broader campaign.

What exactly is it that Admiral Bradley, his lawyer, and those in the chain of command were looking for on that day? Were they looking for them to put down their weapons? Because there’s no allegation they had any to begin with. Were they looking at them to wave a flag of truce or surrender? Well, someone, even if they were trafficking drugs, someone trafficking drugs doesn’t have such a flag.

It’s absurd to think about the scenario through a law of war lens when you’re not at war, but even if you were operating in that paradigm, it is just blatantly obvious that you cannot strike these two survivors. And I think that’s something that congressional oversight will continue to get to the bottom of and will shed light on the broader campaign.

Sargent: Well, it gets even worse. I want to play something that Pete Hegseth said on Saturday. The context here is that Hegseth is recounting that he watched the first strike on the boat, the one that incapacitated it. Listen to this.

Pete Hegseth (voiceover): Later on, couple hours later, I was told, hey, there had to be a re-attack because there were a couple folks that could still be in the fight, access to radios. There was a link up point of another potential boat. Drugs were still there. They were actively interacting with them. Had to take that read. I said, roger, sounds good. From what I understood then and what I understand now, I fully support that strike.

Sargent: So let’s note what Hegseth actually admitted here. He said that two men, “could still be in the fight.” I think that’s absolutely damning. He didn’t even know that they were in the fight. Tess, doesn’t that undermine their case further?

Bridgeman: Well, the thing to keep in mind here is that there’s absolutely nothing, no set of facts, right, that you could look at that would make these individuals “in the fight,” right? The fact of radioing for help, for rescue—that certainly doesn’t make a shipwrecked survivor of an attack on their boat “in the fight,” right? The idea that there might have been cocaine in the water—which, by the way, is contradicted by others who saw the video—that certainly wouldn’t make these survivors “in the fight” if there were still packages of cocaine bobbing around in the water. So there’s nothing that they could have been looking for,  given there’s not even an allegation that these individuals were armed in the first place, that could have made it lawful to presume they were still in the fight based on what was being seen on that feed.

Sargent: Well, now there’s the CNN report that Admiral Bradley, who oversaw the operation, told lawmakers in a briefing that this boat was linking up to another vessel headed for Suriname, a small country east of Venezuela. Then, amazingly, the admiral said that the larger vessel could still possibly have gone on to the United States. Tess, again, it’s these same words: “could,” “maybe,” “possibly.” They had no solid evidence of any kind that these men were still in any fight or that the drugs were still on the boat or that the drugs were headed for the U.S. Now, again, putting aside the fact that the entire thing is illegal, this specific case is in total collapse now, no?

Bridgeman: It is, and again, within the paradigm that the law of armed conflict somehow magically applies to this purported criminal activity, what we’re looking at here might be a kind of legal theory that essentially holds that things being sold to finance a war effort are themselves targetable. And that’s known as war-sustaining objects.

That’s a controversial theory on its own, even within the law of armed conflict. But something that’s really important to note is that people transporting war-sustaining objects are not considered fighters. They’re not even considered to be civilians directly participating in hostilities. They are just civilians, full stop.

And that means even if there were drugs that were targetable as war-sustaining objects—which, again, is not the world we’re in because we’re not at war, but even if that were the case—the individuals themselves would not be targetable. And so the fact that they went back and blew up two more people after they had destroyed the boat with the drugs on it, it’s just unconscionable if that’s indeed the theory they were operating under.

Then extend that to the fact that they were simply looking at transporting drugs to another vessel, likely in Suriname, that then was most likely going to Europe. It’s very difficult how you wrap your head around the idea that these could represent hostile acts, or somehow represent attacks against the United States. So whether you’re looking at it through the war-sustaining objects lens, or the idea that this is somehow actually hostilities or actually combat, neither of those is plausible.

Sargent: Well, there are signs that Republicans are quietly starting to move away from Hegseth. Senator Jim Justice says he’s “not comfortable” with the second strike. Representative Don Bacon strongly criticized Hegseth over another scandal involving sensitive information shared by text with a reporter, saying Hegseth’s recent decisions have “ruined his credibility.”

Now we’re learning that lawmakers have quietly inserted a provision into the annual defense bill that withholds one-fourth of Hegseth’s travel budget until unedited video of the strikes—meaning, I guess, all of them, but certainly meaning the one we’re talking about—is released to the House and Senate Armed Services committees. Tess, that would not happen without the quiet acquiescence of Republicans, correct?

Bridgeman: Correct. And that’s what’s been missing, to date, is some Republican support for basic oversight. And this is really basic oversight. It’s: Can the Armed Services committees view the video that their leadership was already permitted to see in unedited versions?

That should just be the beginning. There need to be subpoenas for witnesses, for documents, all up and down the chain of command. I think it’s appropriate that Hegseth is in the hot seat. And this is something that’s going to be less palatable on the Republican side of the aisle. So I don’t think we’re going to see it in the near term, but we need to remember that this whole campaign also goes all the way up to the president. He is who ordered this all, starting reportedly in the summer, before we started seeing strikes in September. So if starting with Hegseth and starting with the September 2 second strike helps clarify the mind about the illegality of this entire campaign, I think that’s a great place for oversight to start.

If, on the other hand, it sort of shrouds the basic illegality of this entire killing spree, we may have a bigger problem on our hands. So I hope this is the beginning of true bipartisan oversight that gets to the bottom, not just of the September 2 strike, which was so manifestly unlawful that it boggles the mind how anyone in the chain of command could have countenanced it, but hopefully also the broader campaign as a whole that’s killed, I think, 87 people to date.

Sargent: Yes. And I think you do need something as jarring as this second strike killing two very visibly helpless people to kind of pry open the door a little bit, even a crack, to getting Republicans on board with some kind of oversight. So let’s look ahead. Are we going to get a full accounting of this? Remember, Democrats may take back the House, so we could see one then. And critically, is anyone going to be held accountable in any sense at the end of the day?

Bridgeman: That’s the question. I think we’ll see this play out in different ways over the short, medium, and long term. I think in the short term, we may get some version of accountability for that second September 2 strike, just through what Congress is now showing signs that it’s willing to look at, which is: Within the parameters even that the executive branch has set out, could this even be lawful?

As we were just discussing, I think that would miss the bigger picture and the need for accountability, especially up to the top, for this entire campaign. And if that doesn’t happen, it normalizes the notion that the president can misuse the military by ordering them to use force outside of the law. And that’s why the oversight cannot stop with just that second strike on September 2. It has to go further.

I’m under no illusions that the Trump administration is going to start prosecuting people, let alone Secretary of Defense Hegseth, for these crimes, because they are crimes at the end of the day—not war crimes, just regular crimes under U.S. federal law. I do think what we might start seeing over time, though, especially if congressional investigations get more facts brought to light, is we could see more cases brought in international tribunals.

We could see countries that have statutes on the books that let them prosecute particularly serious types of crimes where universal jurisdiction is an avenue. That could mean, for example, Hegseth has to be careful where he travels when he’s no longer in office. And I would hope that in the future, we see a U.S. executive branch that sees fit to hold its own to account. I think that’s what was missing in the post-torture years. And that’s what we need to see now, if we ever want to turn the page on the idea that the most powerful people in our government can never be held to account, no matter what they do. It should have been the case with torture. It has to be the case for murder.

Sargent: And I want to underscore for people that if you want oversight and accountability, you’re going to have to elect a Democratic House. That’s the only way we’re going to get the extensive oversight you’re talking about. Tess Bridgman, thank you so much for coming on. That is really harrowing stuff, though, I will say.

Bridgeman: It is. I wish we were talking about a different topic, but thanks for breaking it down and it was good to be on.

Some Indiana Republicans Are Balking at Trump’s Gerrymandering Scheme - 2025-12-09T11:00:00Z

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

With President Trump’s deep unpopularity and the traditional backlash against the president’s party, Republicans seem destined to lose the House. So last summer, Trump started insisting that state-level Republicans further gerrymander their states’ congressional districts to protect the GOP House majority as much as possible. This was a huge break with precedent, since congressional districts are normally drawn every 10 years. Most states just redrew their districts in 2021. Texas, under huge pressure from Trump, made the first move. Now Missouri, North Carolina, and Ohio are among the Republican states that have redrawn districts in ways that would hurt Democrats. To fight back, Democratic leaders in California and Virginia are now poised to redraw their maps. It seemed for a while that Indiana would not redraw its lines. The state’s legislature is overwhelmingly Republican, but at first many in the GOP balked. But under intense pressure from Trump, Indiana House Republicans last week adopted a map that would likely result in nine Republican U.S. House seats and zero for Democrats, compared to the state’s current 7–2 mix. Andrea Huntley, the assistant minority leader of Indiana Senate Democrats, says there is still a chance that enough Republicans in her chamber balk that the redistricting doesn’t pass. But it would require a big bloc of Republicans to break with Trump, since 40 of the chamber’s 50 members are Republicans.

Transcript: Indiana Republicans Could Block Trump’s Gerrymandering - 2025-12-09T11:00:00Z

This is a lightly edited transcript of the December 8 edition of Right Now With Perry Bacon. You can watch the video here or by following this show on YouTube or Substack.

Perry Bacon: I’m Perry Bacon. I’m the host of The New Republic show Right Now. I’m joined by Andrea Hunley. She’s a state senator in the great state of Indiana. I’m in Louisville, so very close by to us. Great football team, in case you have not heard—really doing well there, great season there. But we’re here to talk about maybe less positive news, at least from my point of view, which is that Indiana is one of the states that President Trump has mandated that the legislature gerrymander and redistrict.

Indiana currently has two of its nine members of the House who are Democrats. It’s a Republican state, but two of nine is significant compared to what they’re trying to push for, which is they’re trying to redraw the maps so that all nine members would be Republicans. And last week, the Indiana House passed a proposal that would change the districts and draw the maps. It’s now being sent to the Senate. Andrea is in the Senate, so we’re going to talk about the Senate process. There are, unfortunately, only 10 of the 50 members are Democrats in the Senate in Indiana, so you’ll need some Republicans to join this cause.

But there are some Republicans in the Indiana state Senate who are weary of Trump and weary of redrawing the map. So let’s talk about this a little bit. Welcome. Thanks for coming.

State Senator Andrea Hunley: Thank you so much for having me. I’m so excited to be here, and I hate to start with a correction, but Perry, I’ve got to give you one right off the top, which is that Indiana is not a Republican state.

We really are much more purple than people give us credit for. And in fact, in 2008, we went for Obama, but about 54 percent Republicans voted in our last election for the governor. And so that shows you that we really are a much more split and independent state than folks give us credit for.

Bacon: So I remember a few weeks ago in November, it seemed like this redistricting idea might have died—I know Pete Buttigieg was down there, it seemed like there was a victory, he was the secretary of state in Indiana for a while. What happened? How did this get back on the radar screen?

Hunley: Yes, it got back on the radar because we’ve gotten a lot of pressure from D.C. insiders who’ve been calling, who’ve been inviting folks out to the White House, and who’ve been putting a lot of pressure and, quite frankly, threatening Indiana to ensure that we heard this legislation.

And so last week it was heard in the House. And these gerrymandered, rigged maps passed out of the House, and now it’s up to us in the Senate to hold the line and really speak up for all Hoosiers—because, and that’s what we call ourselves here in Indiana, Hoosiers—because here in Indiana, folks, whether they’re Republican or Democrat or independent, they do not want these maps.

They do not want to bend a knee to D.C. insiders. They want us to stand up for what we believe in here in Indiana, which is that we run our state—those of us here in the state legislature and Hoosiers.

Bacon: Explain the map a little bit. So the map would be, so there’s the, there’s two Democrats in Indiana, one is in the Indianapolis area, and is one in the Gary area?

Is it the other one? Is it out generally?

Hunley: Correct. One is in Northwest Indiana, and then one is right here in the heart of Indianapolis—and the heart of my Senate district. So my state Senate district overlaps with the congressional district that has just been completely torn apart.

So I want you to imagine if I walk out of the door of our statehouse: I am in one district, and the moment that I cross the street, I would be in a completely new district. They have just taken apart Black neighborhoods and made sure that they are just gerrymandered in a way that you would go all the way from here in Indianapolis all the way down to the border of the state of Indiana and Kentucky.

And it’s really wild that we would have these districts that span two hours and that span urban core with rural Indiana, and that really is just diluting representation for everyone. But that’s the goal. I mean, and so that’s the goal that they want to achieve.

They’ve been unapologetic about it. If you listened to a session last week, then you would’ve heard the author of the bill say over and over again, Yeah, we’re doing this for political reasons. They’re not hiding it at all.

Bacon: Explain to people why it’s bad when a district is split up this way or when it’s two hours apart. I know why the Republicans are doing it, and I get why the Democrats on some level have to gerrymander. But explain why gerrymandering is bad if you’re an individual citizen in the United States.

Hunley: Well, so for one, we really want to keep like communities together, and the maps that we passed here in Indiana during our last redistricting, which we do once every 10 years, the maps that we passed last time actually got an A for keeping compact communities together.

So you want whole cities together, whole counties together, whole townships together. Well, this map here is splitting that apart so that we’ve got neighborhoods that are split apart, that we’ve got voting precincts that are split apart, we’ve got whole cities that are divided up. Indianapolis isn’t the only one. There are several other cities that are being just split apart. But we want to make sure that there’s holistic representation.

And if you are in—we’re a big agriculture state, 72 of our 92 counties are rural. So if you’re in a rural county, you want to make sure that your needs are being met, that folks are fighting hard for the farm bill, that they’re fighting hard for agriculture, that they’re fighting hard for the environment and water.

Here in Indianapolis, we have different needs, right? We’re the sixteenth-largest city in the entire country. We are a sports capital. We are a tourism capital. And so we have different needs than our folks in farmland. And if you’ve got folks with competing interests and competing needs, trying to fight for limited resources, it makes it really hard for anybody to have the representation that they need.

Bacon: For someone in your job—if you’re a member of Congress and your district is two hours apart and is very diverse in terms of farming and Indy 500 at the same time—it’s hard to do your job of representing people if the area is large and the needs are so diverse, right?

Hunley: Absolutely. I was talking to a gentleman from Fulton County, Indiana. And that is a small town. It’s got one main street, and they would be in the same district as Gary, Indiana, which is a large metropolis area—I mean, essentially like a suburb of Chicago, but on the Indiana side. And the gentleman from Fulton County said, “We’ll never see our congressional representative. We will never see our congressperson. They’ll never come here because they’re going to be too busy.” And that’s what this is about.

It’s about making sure that every Hoosier—I mean, right now, we’re in a place where you can pick up the phone and call your congressperson. You can stop into their office and talk to them. You can invite them to your cookout or to your town parade, right? That’s the type of relationship that we have with our elected officials. And it just won’t be that way if we have these rigged maps.

But the maps really are just a distraction from the real issue, which is the fact that what they’re looking for is power in Washington, D.C.—that’s it. They just want to take power and transfer it from the states out to the federal government, and that’s what we’re fighting against. We are fighting to make sure that we keep local control over our own state.

Bacon: So the numbers, to me, look dire. There’s a lot more Republicans than Democrats in the state Senate, but that may not capture everything. Talk about the Republicans in the state Senate, because it seems like there’s a bloc of them who are not excited about this.

Hunley: Absolutely. And this really is bipartisan opposition. And I think that that’s what’s really clear. I mean, from our leader, the president of the Senate, all the way down to those of us Democrats, there is bipartisan opposition, and we’ve been hearing it from our whole communities across the state, and so I think that that’s the piece that we’re focused on, is making sure that people represent their district.

And what’s been really powerful during this fight has been the coalitions that have been built. People from across the state have been coming to the statehouse to make their voices heard. They’ve been calling and emailing and writing letters to make sure that their voices are the ones that are at the forefront of the conversation. Today, we will have our first hearing on the Senate side, and committee, and folks have been here starting since 7:30 this morning to sign up; the committee hearing’s not until 1:30 p.m. So they’ve been here, ready to go, ready to sign up to make sure that they’ll have their voices heard.

Bacon: Has there been any polling on this? I assume it’s not popular, but I was curious. I haven’t looked it up yet.

Hunley: It is not popular at all. And once people have been educated on the impact of the redistricting and the negative impact of it, we’re at about 78 to 80 percent of Hoosiers who disagree completely. And that was the phone calls that were being made to independents and to Republicans. And so that shows you how high that is.

Bacon: So what is the process next? You’re having a hearing today—so how soon are you likely to vote? I guess the goal is to maybe delay a vote permanently, but how does the process go? Where is it going to go from here?

Hunley: I think our big goal is really to decisively defeat this nonsense. I mean, we want to vote and we want to just let people know once and for all—and by people, I mean Trump—let folks know that we’re not playing this way. So our vote will be—it’s looking like Thursday—would be our final vote on this. We’ll go into Friday if we need to, and continue on into Saturday if we must. But we’re hoping that we will be able to have a final vote on this on Thursday.

Bacon: It sounds like you need like 15 Republican votes. Are you anywhere close to that now? What’s your sense of the numbers?

Hunley: I am cautiously optimistic, but it’s going to take all of us to continue the pressure to continue calling, to continue showing up at the statehouse, and to continue supporting those who are in opposition. I mean, it’s been nasty the past couple of weeks here—nasty. Not just on Twitter with the internet thumb thugs, but people actually making threats toward our members of the legislature, threatening them, threatening their families. It’s been really ugly, and we want that to end. And so a vote, a final vote, we’re hoping can just be the end of that conversation.

Bacon: Now, your colleagues on the Republican side—because I’ve seen that Trump is tweeting or Truth Social–ing, whatever he uses these days—he’s threatening them pretty explicitly. Are they flustered by that? How do they feel? Not physically threatened, but he is definitely suggesting, implying, You vote against this, there’ll be a primary, we will take you down. How do they feel about that?

Hunley: Annoyed. I mean, I’m annoyed on their behalf because we are a sovereign state. We are not meant to follow what D.C. politicians are saying. We are the ones who are representing Hoosiers, who are voting for them who represent our districts. And so there is no reason why folks out in D.C. should have any influence over our elections. The other thing this week is that we’re in regular session right now, so these maps are absolutely a distraction.

But they’re a distraction from the real work. I mean, our utility bills are outrageous right now. Obviously, medical debt is high for folks across the country. That’s true here in Indiana. We have a childcare crisis and we also have a housing shortage. And so these are the issues that we’re continuing to be focused on.

And in fact, this week, two of our Democrat-led bills are being heard in committee to address this affordability issue. We’ve got one on housing, and then we also have one on medical debt. And actually, we’ve got another one that is on our thirteenth check for our retirees. And so we’re still doing the work of representing our constituents and trying to avoid this culture-war nonsense.

Bacon: It’s just because I’m curious now: What are the housing and medical debt bills? I guess I had assumed Indiana was Republican—except, per your correction, it’s more purple. What can you pass on housing and medical debt in a state like Indiana that has a lot of Republicans in government, even if maybe not among the voters?

Hunley: Yeah. So we’re looking at, on the medical debt piece, making sure that those pieces of medical debt are not going to hit your credit scores at all. And so that’s really big for us and making sure that then people are getting that relief, and that it’s not going to impact liens on people’s homes. So that’s a big challenge there.

And then on the utilities side, we’re also looking at no tax on utility bills. And so we’ve got several things that our caucus—we are 10, but we are mighty—and we work very hard to make sure that we’re representing folks, not just in our district, but across the entire state. And so we’ve got lots of bills in those areas.

Bacon: Let me finish with: What should the rest of us who are not in Indiana, but who are on your side, do here? It’s probably not helpful if I get people who live in D.C. to call Indiana legislators—that’s probably not helpful, and in fact that’s what you’re opposing, as you say.

But even regular people in D.C. or in New York or what have you—what can they do? What do you hope people nationally, people who don’t live in Indiana, do about this issue?

Hunley: Well, we hope that they don’t ignore Indiana anymore. I mean, to see that we really do carry quite a bit of power. We’re here in the Midwest, but we need investment. And so in civic education, to help people—we have one of the lowest voter turnouts in the entire country. And so I think that that’s a place that people can help: help educate Hoosiers, help get people out to the polls when it’s time to vote. And that’s a nonpartisan issue, right? Making sure that people understand what’s going on.

And then the other piece is I’m a deep person of faith, and we just need prayer for folks who are nervous and who are afraid because, while some of these threats have just been words, others have not been. And really, it should never be that way. When we’re talking about politics, we’re talking about government, we’re talking about representing people—

Bacon: For people who don’t follow, there’s been threats about people burning their house. What have the threats been specifically about the redistricting? I know what you’re talking about, but for people nationally, explain.

Hunley: Yes. So there have been bomb threats to people’s homes. There have been swatting attempts where then the police showed up and busted down a legislator’s door, where their children were inside. And that was a false attempt…

Bacon: Targeting Republican legislators who are sort of not sure they’re going to vote for this mainly. Right?

Hunley: Absolutely. But they’ve also targeted some Democrats as well—the head of our state party as well as a Democrat city councilor. And so this really has just been folks being targeted for speaking up and for speaking out. And so I would say that the other help that we need is for people to condemn those types of actions, because we cannot live in a country where people who’ve been elected are living in fear just for doing their jobs and for speaking up for their constituents.

Bacon: Andrea Hunley, thank you for joining me. Good luck this week. Thanks to everyone that tuned in. Thank you. Have a great week.

Hunley: Thank you. Bye.

The Supreme Court Is Set to Pick Financial Predators Over the People - 2025-12-09T11:00:00Z

Justice Brett Kavanaugh used an interesting choice of phrase when describing the constitutional issues in Trump v. Slaughter, the vividly named case on the president’s ability to remove certain federal officials that Congress stipulated could only be fired for cause.

“How do you answer the accountability theme, which I think is the theme of the other side, is that independent agencies are not accountable to the people?” Kavanaugh asked Amit Agarwal, who argued on behalf of FTC Commissioner Rebecca Slaughter. “They’re not elected, as Congress and the president are, and are exercising massive power over individual liberty and billion-dollar industries, whether it’s the FCC or the FTC or whatever it might be.”

We’ll get to the merits of Kavanaugh’s point later. What really jumped out at me was how he phrased it. The court’s conservative justices speak often about protecting “liberty” or “individual liberty” when referring to the president’s removal power and Congress’s constrains on it. In their view, it is essential for individual liberty that the president is able to fire any top-level federal official for any reason, or even for none at all.

Kavanaugh articulated something a little different on Monday by adding “billion-dollar industries” there. As the oral arguments made clear, the Supreme Court is about to bless an unholy union between presidential corruption and corporate power under the premise that it is actually upholding constitutional principles.

The namesake of Monday’s case, Rebecca Slaughter, is a commissioner on the Federal Trade Commission. She does not appear to be a threat to anyone’s individual liberty. Ironically, Slaughter was originally nominated to serve on the FTC by Trump himself. The Senate confirmed her in 2018 to fill a vacancy by one of the commission’s Democratic seats, and then-President Joe Biden successfully renominated Slaughter to a full seven-year term in 2023.

Trump ordered her removal in March, along with another Democratic FTC appointee, without cause, only two years into her second term. In response, Slaughter filed a federal lawsuit to challenge the legality of her dismissal. She argued that the Trump administration had violated the for-cause removal protections enacted by Congress for FTC commissioners when the agency was founded over a century ago.

Precedent is on Slaughter’s side. In the 1935 case Humphrey’s Executor v. United States, the Supreme Court upheld the for-cause removal protections for FTC commissioners. The justices acknowledged that presidents could generally remove top federal officials at will, but argued that this power was more limited in the FTC context because agencies like it also exercised “quasi-legislative” and “quasi-judicial” powers.

Congress has relied on that decision to structure much of the federal government over the past century. Under the Constitution, Congress has the power to regulate interstate commerce. To exercise these powers, lawmakers created a host of federal agencies over the years to enact regulations and enforce federal law. Some of these agencies, like the FDA and the EPA, are directly under the president’s control because he can fire the officials who lead them.

Other agencies are structured to be more independent. The Federal Trade Commission, the agency at issue in this case, enforces federal antitrust law and some consumer protection laws, with a mandate to prevent fraudulent, anticompetitive, and deceptive business practices. To ensure that the FTC operated in the interests of good government, Congress placed it under the direction of a board of Senate-confirmed commissioners and insulated them from unjustified removal by the president.

This has generally been a good thing for the American people. Agencies like the FTC, the Securities and Exchange Commission, the National Labor Relations Board, and so on have existed for roughly a century now—a century when Americans enjoyed unprecedented growth in prosperity, quality of life, and individual liberty. This is not to say that these agencies were responsible for twentieth-century America’s success, of course. But they certainly didn’t seem to prevent or inhibit it.

The conservative legal movement—and, more importantly, the six justices it installed on the Supreme Court—takes a much different view. They favor the “unitary executive theory,” whereby presidents should be able to wield absolute control over every aspect of the executive branch. Then-Judge Brett Kavanaugh wrote in an opinion in PHH Corp v. CFPB in 2018, while serving on the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, where he aptly summarized the conservative view.

“The independent agencies collectively constitute, in effect, a headless fourth branch of the U.S. government,” Kavanaugh wrote. “They hold enormous power over the economic and social life of the United States. Because of their massive power and the absence of presidential supervision and direction, independent agencies pose a significant threat to individual liberty and to the constitutional system of separation of powers and checks and balances.”

Let us get the obvious point out of the way: It is virtually certain that Slaughter will lose. I do not like to predict outcomes of Supreme Court cases in advance, but it would be misleading to suggest anything else here. Set aside for a moment the conservative justices’ writings over the years denouncing Humphrey’s Executor, or the course of Monday’s oral arguments, or even the general ideological vibes of the justices themselves.

We know Humphrey’s Executor is almost certainly doomed because the Supreme Court already effectively overturned it via the shadow docket. In case after case, the justices blithely overruled the lower courts to allow Trump to fire protected federal officials without cause. The conservative justices’ unsigned orders indicated that, in their view, it would be worse to allow a dismissed federal official to stay on the job than it would be for the president to obey black-letter federal law and century-old Supreme Court precedent pending appeal.

Slaughter herself remained in office by order of the lower courts for most of this year until the Supreme Court allowed her to be temporarily removed during litigation in September. The sole exception to this practice was Lisa Cook, a member of the Federal Reserve Board of Governors whom Trump tried to remove in August. The Supreme Court allowed her to keep her job pending a ruling in her case, which is set for oral argument in January.

Monday’s oral arguments only confirmed what was already obvious. None of the court’s six conservatives seemed interested in saving Humphrey’s Executor, or even in considering a narrower ruling in Trump’s favor that focused on changes to the FTC’s powers since 1935. Chief Justice John Roberts even echoed Solicitor General D. John Sauer’s phrasing by opining that Humphrey’s Executor is “just a dried husk” at this point, which is not what justices typically say when they approve of something.

The only question now is how much damage the Supreme Court will do along the way. These agencies—the FTC, the SEC, the NLRB, and so on—received immense power from Congress when they were established, under the theory that it would be exercised independently of the president’s control. So too did other agencies and boards that might be swept up by the court’s ruling.

Some of the court’s liberal justices raised concerns that non–Article 3 courts like the U.S. Tax Court could be compromised, for example, as could other laws that insulate the overwhelming majority of federal workers from arbitrary dismissal. “You’re putting at risk the civil service,” Justice Sonia Sotomayor told Sauer. “I don’t see how your logic could be limited.” Sauer could only reply that the Justice Department wasn’t challenging those restrictions “in this case.”

Justice Samuel Alito jumped in at one point to throw Sauer a life preserver of sorts. What if the Supreme Court simply suggested in its ruling in this case that it did not necessarily apply to those other situations? “What would you propose that we say so as to reserve a decision on those agencies that may not come before us in the near future or perhaps at any time in the future?” he asked Sauer.

That drew an incredulous response from Justice Elena Kagan in a later exchange. “Logic has consequences,” she explained to her colleagues. “Once you use a particular kind of argument to justify one thing, you can’t turn your back on that kind of argument if it also justifies another thing in the exact same way. And so, you know, putting a footnote in an opinion saying we don’t decide X, Y, and Z because it’s not before us doesn’t do much good if the entire logic of the opinion drives you there.”

Slaughter’s lawyers struggled to present an argument that would be persuasive to the justices, in part because it was a likely doomed mission from the start and in part because they struggled to articulate the underlying principles of the status quo. Only at times did they manage to defend Congress’s prerogatives from a predatory executive branch.

“It is absolutely implausible to say for the entirety of American history, presidents of the United States have been complicit in giving up a vital executive power that is, according to [the government], indispensable to their constitutional duty,” Agarwal noted. Instead, he explained, “the better answer by far is to say that presidents have understood and appreciated that vital interests of the American people can be served by having constraints on the exercise of power,” which he described as a “really important part of our political tradition.”

That tradition, of course, is now in dire jeopardy. If and when Trump prevails at some point next year, the court’s ruling will mark the greatest expansion of presidential power since the New Deal. And the Supreme Court will be handing over that power not just to any president, but to one who has almost exclusively used his existing authority for a wide range of corrupt and self-serving purposes.

This does not appear to have deterred the justices. If anything, it may have encouraged them. Sauer expressed concern at one point about the “real-world consequences” of agencies “exercising enormous governmental authority with a great deal of control over individuals and small and large businesses and so forth,” if they “ultimately do not answer to the president.” It should be the president, Sauer argued, who gets to wield the FTC’s power over mergers and antitrust, or the SEC’s control over financial regulations, or the NLRB’s power to resolve labor-management disputes.

That will be an enormous boon to the companies that have cozied up to Trump, whether by donating millions of dollars to his campaign or by doing his bidding on conservative culture-war projects, or by funding an illegal White House ballroom, or so on. It will also be helpful to any business that thrives in a weaker regulatory environment by grifting Americans outright, or by exploiting the nonenforcement of labor laws, consumer protection laws, and securities laws. Scammers and predators and white-collar criminals of all varieties shall inevitably rejoice when this decision is handed down.

All of that would be dangerous for Americans’ lives, liberties, and pursuits of happiness, one would think. Perhaps that is why Congress structured these agencies to keep their distance from more easily corruptible officials in the executive and legislative branches. Unfortunately, Kavanaugh and his colleagues have a different conception of “liberty” in mind: one where “billion-dollar industries” are at liberty to conspire with a corrupt president to exploit and abuse the rest of us. As a result, Trump v. Slaughter is poised to be a landmark step on this country’s turn away from democratic governance and good government in favor of oligarchy and despotism.

The Surprisingly Convincing Case Against Cars - 2025-12-09T11:00:00Z

In 2017, the urban planner Bruce Appleyard asked 9- and 10-year-olds from two Bay Area suburbs to draw maps of their neighborhoods. The first group lived in a community with heavy traffic and little bike infrastructure. They created maps lacking in detail and dominated by red and orange, colors that Appleyard asked the children to use to indicate zones of danger or dislike. The second group, from a community with light traffic where children could safely walk or bike to school, drew very different maps. These maps were full of details like houses, trees, and play spots. They featured lots of green and blue, the colors used to indicate positive associations. They had more labeled destinations. After the first suburb added new pedestrian infrastructure, Appleyard compared maps drawn by children before and after the upgrades. The new maps more closely resembled the second group’s: They reflected the day-to-day experience of the neighborhood.

Appleyard’s study revealed the hidden psychic cost of car dependency. Its methodology followed the cognitive mapping approach associated with the MIT planner Kevin Lynch, whose work emphasized the legibility of urban environments. In the 1960s, figures like Lynch, the journalist William H. Whyte, and the writer Jane Jacobs drew attention to the negative effects of the car. They critiqued the highways that ripped through U.S. cities in the name of urban renewal, calling instead for intimate, walkable neighborhoods. This romantic urbanist tradition influenced generations of city officials and planners whose touchstone remains The Power Broker, Robert Caro’s epic biography of New York City’s midcentury planning czar, Robert Moses. Caro placed the blame for the city’s planning failures at the feet of Moses and his six-lane Cross Bronx Expressway (Moses was recently played off-Broadway by the actor Ralph Fiennes, famous for his role as archvillain Lord Voldemort in the Harry Potter franchise). But can the fight against cars win support beyond a technocratic elite?

Sarah Goodyear, Doug Gordon, and Aaron Naparstek, authors of Life After Cars: Freeing Ourselves from the Tyranny of the Automobile, certainly think so. Goodyear and Gordon host the podcast The War on Cars and Naperstek is a former co-host. They are winningly self-aware about the optics of a trio of podcast hosts from Park Slope, Brooklyn, lecturing middle America on the evils of personal car ownership. Accordingly, Life After Cars seeks to appeal to a wide swathe of readers, from public transit nerds to the congenitally bike lane–averse. The authors marshal a compelling blend of history, statistics, and anecdote in support of a quietly radical argument: that mass car ownership, far from natural and inevitable, is a historical blip that can and should be reversed. They are quick to make some exceptions: emergency workers, residents of rural areas, and people with mobility disabilities, among others, have good reasons for driving. Their lives would be easier if everyone else got off the road.  

The authors begin their chronicle of car culture’s ills in 1899, when a man named Henry Bliss stepped into the path of an oncoming taxi, becoming the first victim of a car crash in the United States. The advent of mass automobility in the 1920s generated fierce backlash from citizens outraged by the number of people being killed by cars. Just as cities were on the brink of regulating the automotive menace, however, the auto industry stepped in. Industry allies persuaded voters to reject proposed speed ordinances that would have significantly reduced the chance of dying from being hit by a car. Local governments reinforced the message that wayward pedestrians, not cars, bore the blame for collisions. In the postwar period, the Eisenhower administration subsidized the construction of the U.S. Interstate Highway System, creating endless suburban developments that took car ownership as a given. 

As a result, the authors argue, we have accepted the massive costs of car dependency rather than questioning a way of life centered around personal vehicles. Some of these costs are obvious. Cars kill 40,000 people a year on American roads, a toll so ingrained that other risks—the chance of being a victim of gun violence or an opioid overdose—are assessed relative to your chances of being killed in a car crash (one in 95 over a lifetime). Some are borne by animals, not people. Advocates have successfully campaigned for wildlife crossings, concrete corridors that help animals safely navigate deadly highways. But there is no feel-good solution for the toxic chemicals that leach from tires into bodies of water, poisoning fish and disrupting fragile ecosystems. Equally insidious is the hollowing out of social space as people retreat into cars that resemble armored vehicles, shuttling in isolation between home, work, and soccer practice.

That last destination is significant. As Appleyard’s 2017 study underlined, car dependency prevents children (as well as anyone else who can’t drive, from seniors to disabled people) from autonomously navigating their environments. Among the many revealing anecdotes in Life After Cars is the artist Sean Kenney’s tale of moving from the U.S. to the Netherlands. Arriving in Amsterdam, Kenney is surprised when their landlord apologizes for only handing over three sets of keys for his family of four—Kenney, his wife, their 9-year-old, and their 6-year-old. “A key for the 6-year-old?” he asks in disbelief. The landlord is equally bewildered. Of course a 6-year-old would be exploring the neighborhood independently and letting themselves in and out of the family home.

The authors anticipate the response that inevitably follows charming tales like this one: The U.S. isn’t Amsterdam. They counter by showing that Amsterdam wasn’t Amsterdam until the 1970s, when new policies favoring cycling pushed cars out of Dutch city centers. In 1975, the Netherlands’ traffic fatality rate was 20 percent higher than that of the U.S.; it is now 60 percent lower than the U.S. rate. This rebuttal isn’t entirely convincing. Amsterdam, like many European cities, is centuries old and was built to be navigated on foot, or, later, by horse-drawn conveyance or trams. Its dense, narrow streets naturally favor bikes and pedestrians.

There are plenty of examples of this kind of compact urban development in the United States, from colonial-era cities like Philadelphia to streetcar suburbs like Shaker Heights, Ohio. But we also have a lot of twentieth-century planning based around cars, as the authors note: sprawling Sun Belt cities like Houston and Phoenix; low-density suburbs strung out along freeways; nightmarish street-road hybrids, or “stroads,” lined with parking lots. Adding infrastructure like sidewalks and bike lanes, rezoning for density, and investing in transit represent a start. Yet the stubborn legacy of car-centric growth means that not all U.S. communities will be able to emulate Ghent, Belgium, Paris, or Emeryville, California, the cities the authors single out for their pedestrian- and bike-friendly upgrades in the face of concerted opposition. 

If we’re stuck with car-centric built environments, at least for now, what about electric cars? The authors concede that electric cars are undoubtedly a better option than their gas-powered counterparts—they’re quieter, don’t produce tailpipe exhaust, and, assuming the gradual decarbonizing of the electricity grid, have the potential to be zero-emission. But they kill just as many people in collisions as gas-powered cars, take up space in cities, and fail to solve the social problems that cars have caused. Life After Cars urges a more radical reexamining of the design of our cities and our lives. The authors acknowledge the extent to which the promise of the automobile—mobility, freedom, power—is intertwined with the American dream. Decentering the car means rethinking the good life.

In January of this year, New York City’s congestion pricing plan finally went into effect. The rollout of congestion pricing, which requires drivers to pay a fee to enter Manhattan below 60th Street, hit plenty of bumps along the way. Governor Kathy Hochul of New York initially shelved the plan in June 2024, just weeks before its planned launch. She cited the cost to working-class New Yorkers—even though only 4 percent of outer-borough residents commute into Manhattan by car, and more than two-thirds of this number have moderate or higher incomes. Local lawmakers came out in opposition, describing the plan as a shadow tax on hardworking commuters—even though drivers are already heavily subsidized through free on-street parking. Behind the rhetoric is a set of facts that points to congestion pricing’s success: lower rates of traffic congestion and air pollution; quieter streets and fewer crashes.

The frenzy around congestion pricing reflects what Goodyear, Gordon, and Naparstek call “bikelash”—an irrational aversion to anything that threatens to topple the car from its sacred place in American life. Knee-jerk defenses of cars can be found across the political spectrum. In April 2024, the City Council of Cambridge, Massachusetts voted 5–4 to delay the completion of the city’s 25-mile protected bike lane plan by 18 months. Cambridge is one of the most bike-friendly cities in America; walking to work through the city’s Inman Square neighborhood last year, I passed streams of bike commuters whizzing down Hampshire Street. Yet the city’s commitment to cyclists has triggered bikelash, with a vocal constituency claiming that bike lanes hurt small businesses and pose a risk to pedestrians. A far bigger risk to pedestrians is, unsurprisingly, cars. Moreover, as the authors point out, when cyclists break the law—by riding on sidewalks, for instance, where they can endanger pedestrians—their behavior is typically motivated by safety concerns stemming from poor infrastructure, rather than the urge to go faster.

Listen to any city resident complain about cyclists, and delivery workers on e-bikes inevitably come up. (I have advocated for e-bikes through my involvement with the E-Mobility Project). Missing from Life After Cars’s analysis are the ways in which rising demand for last-mile delivery is exacerbating the pressure on roads. Gig workers face intense pressure to complete deliveries while navigating heavy traffic and limited bike infrastructure. At the same time, last-mile deliveries on vehicles generate 30 percent of all greenhouse gas emissions in cities and 40 percent of fine particle pollution. Trucks take up more physical room on roads than cars; they are heavier and wear down roads more quickly. Tackling car culture also means reckoning with the ripple effects of next-day delivery. 

Of course, most people don’t drive delivery vehicles. Most people drive cars. Life After Cars concludes by listing steps readers can take to reduce car dependency in their communities. These range from tactics like setting up flowerpots to create a visual barrier between bike lanes and traffic to learning to see cars by walking through an area where people usually drive. There is hope, they argue, even for places that don’t resemble Amsterdam or Copenhagen. Life After Cars shows us how different, how enriching, a car-free world could be. Until then, we can only echo the theorist Marshall Berman, surveying the shattered landscape of the South Bronx in 1982. Looking out at acres of blight, Berman reflected on both the devastation caused by the Cross-Bronx Expressway and the extent to which the area’s old residents had hastened its decline by moving to the suburbs. “We fight back the tears, and step on the gas.”

Firewood Banks Aren’t Inspiring. They’re a Sign of Collapse. - 2025-12-09T11:00:00Z

Rural America knows the truth long before the rest of the country feels it. Nothing collapses all at once. It just stops working in small places first while everyone else calls it local hardship. That’s why wood banks—like a food bank but for fuel—are important. They’re the clearest sign that basic systems in this country have already failed.

A wood bank is exactly what it sounds like. People in rural and Indigenous areas still heavily rely on wood heat as the primary fuel source for their homes. Volunteers cut and split firewood, stack it somewhere public, and give it away for free to those who can’t afford it. No paperwork. No means tests. No government forms. Just a pile of hardwood that shows up because someone else’s house would be cold without it.

Most articles about wood banks wrap them in the same tired language. Community spirit. Rural generosity. Neighbors helping neighbors. It’s the kind of coverage you get when journalists focus on the people stacking the wood instead of the conditions that made it necessary. They never mention the underlying reality. Wood banks exist because without them, people would freeze. It’s the same everywhere: Local news crews film volunteers splitting logs while pretending it’s heartwarming, reporting on senior citizens splitting 150 cords a year for neighbors in need as if the story is about kindness instead of the failure that created the need in the first place.

Wood banks now operate in hundreds of towns across the country, some run by churches, some by fire departments, and some by volunteers who buy or haul low-grade timber when families have no other heat source. Demand has grown fast enough that the Agriculture Department has issued multiple rounds of grants to help communities process more wood because so many households can’t afford the heat they used to rely on. Almost one in four households couldn’t pay their energy bills in 2024, according to census data. The federally funded Low Income Home Energy Assistance Program, which offers grants to help people pay their bills, routinely runs out of money in some locations partway through the season. And this year, funds have been delayed due to the government shutdown.

You don’t start a wood bank in a country with functioning institutions. You start one when heating assistance programs can’t keep up, when the grid flickers every time the wind shifts, when propane and heating oil costs swing so hard that families can’t budget more than a week out. You start a wood bank when seniors stop turning on their heat because they’re scared of the bill. You also start one when the country pretends energy insecurity doesn’t exist because acknowledging it would mean admitting that entire regions were left behind on purpose. Federal data shows that families are using less fuel than they did five years ago but spending more for it. Heating oil and propane have seen some of the steepest price swings, especially in rural states, and those increases hit households that already live on tight margins.

That’s collapse. Not the cinematic kind. Not the dramatic scenes everyone imagines when they talk about a country falling apart. Collapse is boring. It’s ordinary. It looks like people standing next to a log splitter on a Saturday morning because the safety net dissolved and no one replaced it. Collapse isn’t a single moment. It’s what happens when the systems people rely on keep existing on paper but stop functioning in practice. Heating programs remain funded but reach only a fraction of eligible households. The grid stays interconnected, but the outages keep stacking up and repairs keep getting delayed. Fuel is available, but the costs vary so widely that families can’t budget for it or afford it. These are small failures that accumulate until ordinary people are left to solve problems that institutions were supposed to solve.

Rural families don’t get to pretend. They know exactly what it means when the power goes out for the third time in a month and the utility company shrugs because the profit isn’t there to fix it. And they’ve lived long enough inside these systems to know that plenty of companies don’t fix it when the profit is there, either. They also know what it means when everything gets privatized except the consequences. This winter, federal grid monitors warned that large parts of the country face elevated outage risks because demand is climbing faster than utilities can keep up. The spread of data centers has pushed peak winter load sharply higher, and storms are hitting harder and more often. Rural households feel those failures long before any report is written.

Wood is the last fallback because it’s the only thing that hasn’t been captured by markets or politics. It’s honest. It’s physical. It keeps you warm whether the rest of the country works or not. And that’s exactly why wood banks reveal so much. When a society is functioning, wood isn’t the fallback and families aren’t relying on volunteers with chainsaws. Firewood is now doing the work that was supposed to be guaranteed. That shift is why wood banks have multiplied in places like Maine, where leaders report record demand and new laws now support their expansion because so many families have no other reliable heat.

People like to say rural communities are resilient. What they mean is rural communities absorb the damage so others don’t have to think about it. The volunteers running wood banks aren’t performing resilience. They’re plugging holes in a sinking ship and doing the work the state stopped doing. They are the thin line between a cold snap and another obituary.

The danger is how invisible it all is. You can drive through a town and never notice that the shed behind the church isn’t storing holiday decorations but several cords of oak that’ll decide whether someone wakes up warm tomorrow. You won’t see the short text messages that go out when temperatures drop, or the pride swallowed by the person who finally calls asking for help. No one will ever see the quiet math families do when the fuel bill comes in and something else has to suffer.

Collapse doesn’t announce itself. It piles up. It accumulates in places people don’t look. And right now it’s sitting in stacks behind rural churches and volunteer fire departments. It’s measured in cords, not policy briefs. Every log is evidence of a system that stopped working.

Hegseth Defense Collapsing as Fresh Leaks on Strikes Grow More Damning - 2025-12-09T10:00:00Z

Pete Hegseth’s defense of the killing of two men clinging to an incapacitated boat is falling apart on multiple fronts. Lawmakers who saw video of this horror are letting it be known that the two men were waving before their execution, suggesting they were either surrendering or beckoning for rescue. And other leaks confirm that the boat very well might not have been bound for the United States to begin with. Meanwhile, some Republicans are abandoning Hegseth or acquiescing to legislative language that denies him funding until video is made more widely available to lawmakers, suggesting his position is weakening. We talked to Tess Bridgeman, co-editor in chief of the Just Security website and former national security lawyer in the Obama administration. She explains why Hegseth’s position is untenable, why the entire bombing campaign is illegal, why it’s critical that oversight pin down President Trump’s role, and what the prospects are for true accountability later. Listen to this episode here. A transcript is here.

Two Inept Male Trump Officials Talk About Nursing Babies - 2025-12-08T22:08:11Z

For some strange reason, two members of President Trump’s Cabinet, both men, spoke about the benefits of breastfeeding at Reagan National Airport in Arlington, Virginia, Monday afternoon.

Secretary of Transportation Sean Duffy and Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. were at the airport to announce new family and health-centric travel initiatives. Kennedy began by waxing poetic about the “mother’s breast.”

“All of the ingenuity of corporate America, all the resources, all the resourcefulness, has not produced an infant formula that is superior in nutrition and all the qualities that we want to the infant formula that God made, which is the infant formula in a mother’s breast,” Kennedy said, adding that the Department of Health and Human Services was encouraging mothers to breastfeed as much as possible.

RFK Jr: "All of the ingenuity of corporate America has not produced an infant formula that is superior in nutrition and all the qualities that we want to the infant formula that God made, which is the infant formula in a mother's breast." pic.twitter.com/bwVFBeMguk

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) December 8, 2025

If hearing those words in Kennedy’s voice wasn’t bizarre enough, Duffy then spoke about his wife’s complaints about a lack of facilities for nursing mothers at airports, and, referring to the presence of Kennedy, himself, and infamous pseudoscience health influencer Paul Saladino, pointed out the obvious: “It’s maybe a little odd for three guys to talk about nursing and options for nursing.”

Duffy: "It's maybe a little odd for three guys to talk about nursing and options for nursing, but ... pic.twitter.com/BfpaY0IQFT

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) December 8, 2025

Duffy then introduced the one woman and mother at the event: conservative content creator Isabel Brown, who was there to speak about the lack of nursing facilities at airports. By that point, though, Kennedy and Duffy had spoken at length about breastfeeding before Brown even said a word. Thankfully, Saladino, known for pushing pseudoscience like a carnivore diet and feeding raw milk to infants, didn’t broach the topic in his remarks.

In Trump’s first term, the U.S. government had the opposite stance on breastfeeding, lobbying against a UN resolution’s language calling on governments to “protect, promote and support breast-feeding.” While moving away from this stance is a positive step, having Kennedy and Duffy speak about the topic doesn’t inspire much confidence, especially considering the pseudoscience Kennedy continues to traffic in.

Trump Pulls a Sudden 180 on Releasing Boat Strike Video - 2025-12-08T21:35:11Z

Five days after he promised the American public that they would be able to see drone footage from the September 2 airstrike in the Caribbean, Donald Trump has decided to walk it all back.

The president scolded a reporter during a White House roundtable Monday, berating her for quoting comments he made less than a week prior, in which he stated that any video of the merciless double tap would be released.

“Mr. President, you said you would have no problem with releasing the full video of that strike on September 2 off the coast of Venezuela,” a reporter asked. “Secretary [Pete] Hegseth has—”

“I didn’t say that,” Trump interjected. “You said that. I didn’t say that. This is ABC fake news.”

“You said you would have no problem releasing the full vid—well, OK,” the reporter flustered.

Unfortunately for Trump, it’s not so easy to rewrite history when it exists in recent memory on tape, video, and in print. On December 3, Trump told reporters in the Oval Office that “whatever” footage the government had in its possession of the attack, it would “certainly release.”

That, however, was apparently no longer the case come Monday.

“Whatever Hegseth wants to do is OK with me,” Trump said.

“He now says it’s under review. Are you ordering the secretary to release that full video?” the reporter pressed.

“Whatever he decides is OK with me,” Trump repeated. “So every boat we knock out of the water, every boat, we save 25,000 American lives. That was a boat loaded up with drugs.”

Since early September, the U.S. has conducted at least 22 strikes on small boats traversing the Caribbean that Trump administration officials have deemed—without an investigation or interdiction—were smuggling drugs. At least 86 people have been killed in the attacks. The White House has defended the violence, chalking it up to allegedly necessary efforts to thwart the pipeline of fentanyl into the country.

“Are you committed to releasing the full video?” the ABC News reporter asked for clarification—a move that seemingly really got under the president’s skin.

“Didn’t I just tell you that?” Trump said.

“You said it was up to Secretary Hegseth,” she responded.

“You are the most obnoxious reporter in the whole place. Let me just tell you, you are an obnoxious—actually, a terrible reporter, and it’s always the same with you,” Trump said.

It could be that Trump’s sudden reluctance to release the footage is because the tapes make his administration look cruel, callous, and careless. Lawmakers that were briefed on the September 2 double tap left the meeting appalled by the country’s actions, relaying to members of the media that they were “deeply disturbed” by footage of the killings.

Trump Asks Random Farmer Which Countries to Tariff Next - 2025-12-08T21:30:05Z

President Donald Trump revealed Monday just how clueless he is about his own tariff policies, and appeared to improvise new rice tariffs on the fly after speaking with one rice farmer.

During a roundtable to unveil a $12 billion bailout package for American farmers, Meryl Kennedy, CEO of Louisiana-based Kennedy Rice Mill, told Trump that she believed other countries were “dumping” rice into the United States.

“Which countries?” Trump asked.

“India, Thailand, even China into Puerto Rico. Puerto Rico used to be one of the largest markets for rice, we haven’t shipped rice into Puerto Rico for years,” Kennedy said, adding that the president needed to “double down” on his tariffs.

“You want more?” Trump asked incredulously, and Kennedy replied that other countries were “cheating” by subsidizing their rice production.

Trump seemed to have no idea whether other countries were “dumping” rice, and asked Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent if India had a tariff exemption for rice.

“No sir, we’re still working on their trade deal,” Bessent replied. As of August, India is facing steep 50 percent tariffs on all exports, with exceptions for certain agricultural products, such as tea, coffee, and spices—not rice. In October, exports from India to the United States rose for the first time in months as trade negotiations were underway.

As Kennedy tried to explain how India might be illegally subsidizing its rice production, Trump interrupted her. “Give me the countries, if you could? Go ahead. India, who else? Mark it down, Scott,” the president said.

Kennedy repeated the “main culprits” of India, Thailand, and China, adding, “But there’s others too, and we can get you a full list.” Trump promised he’d “take care” of the problem quickly.

U.S. rice production is small compared to that of other grains, such as soybeans or corn. Across the six states that produce rice, there are only an estimated 5,500 farmers for that crop. In 2025, rice production in the U.S. reportedly suffered from adverse weather, while rice production in South American countries surged.

During the same roundtable, Trump also floated placing “very severe” tariffs on fertilizer imported from Canada—the largest supplier to the United States—which could boost domestic production but risks further hurting farmers.

Trump Loses His Mind When Asked About Flood of Retiring Republicans - 2025-12-08T20:59:45Z

President Trump on Monday lashed out at a reporter who asked about impending GOP House resignations.

“There’s at least 20 House Republicans who have either said they’re going to retire or not run again—”

“And Democrats, and Democrats also. And Democrats also,” Trump chimed in. “Why don’t you mention them? How many Democrats have retired? How many Democrats?”

“Well that’s what I was gonna ask—”

“Well, why don’t you tell me the number of Democrats too?”

“Well, are you concerned about the narrow margins?”

“No, I’m not concerned, I think we’re gonna do well,” Trump said, talking over the reporter. “We’re gonna have the greatest economy.... We’re gonna have the greatest economy in history. How many Democrats are retiring? How come you only know the Republicans and not the Democrats?”

“Because I came prepared to ask you a question—”

“No no, you’re unprepared. Because you should know the Democrats. You’re totally unprepared.”

Reporter: There are at least 20 house Republicans who said they will retire or not run again.

Trump: Democrats also. Why didn't you mention them? How many Democrats are going to retire? Why don’t tell me the number of Democrats? How come you only know the Republicans? You’re… pic.twitter.com/G8tMfvkClV

— Acyn (@Acyn) December 8, 2025

This weekend, Puck News reported that 20 House Republicans will announce their retirement in the coming weeks, in addition to the 23 who’ve already said they’re leaving Congress.

The reporter at the roundtable Monday, who was from Newsday, was likely asking President Trump a question about the Republican resignations because he is the Republican president. But the question—coming in the wake of months of reporting on internal rifts within the GOP—clearly struck a nerve with President Trump.

Very Stable Genius Trump Says Turning on a Lawn Mower Is Hard - 2025-12-08T20:46:08Z

Donald Trump’s latest attempt to appeal to American farmers involves imagining that he’s ever operated a piece of farm equipment.

The country’s agriculture industry is in the toilet—largely thanks to the president’s volatile tariff plan, which has destabilized relationships with some of the industry’s biggest foreign markets. In the middle of announcing a $12 billion bailout package to offset the damage he caused to America’s farmers on Monday, Trump claimed that lawn mowers (of all things) had become so difficult to operate that you’d need to be a certified genius in order to turn on the ignition.

“Farming equipment has gotten too expensive, and a lot of the reason is because they put these environmental excesses on the equipment which don’t do a damn thing except make it complicated, make it impractical,” Trump said. “In many cases, you need about 185 IQ to turn on a lawn mower now.”

Trump: In many cases, you need about 185 IQ to turn on a lawnmower. pic.twitter.com/F9iIapMrIt

— Acyn (@Acyn) December 8, 2025

This is coming from the same very down-to-earth billionaire real estate mogul who claimed in 2017 that he didn’t want a “poor person” in his presidential Cabinet, and earlier this year threw a Great Gatsby-themed party at Mar-a-Lago during the longest government shutdown in U.S. history, as well as paved over the White House’s rose garden and repeated that he believes the term groceries is “an old-fashioned word.”

“We have a term, groceries,” Trump told the leaders of the United Arab Emirates in May. “It’s an old term, but it means basically what you’re buying, food, it’s a pretty accurate term but it’s an old-fashioned sound but groceries are down.”

Trump’s tariffs have devastated the American farming industry from both ends, hurting both supply and demand by raising costs on equipment and fertilizer while nixing key international markets such as China.

When the bailout was initially pitched in September, Trump said he intended to use the country’s supposedly surplus tariff money to subsidize American soybean farmers, though his concept of how much cash could be infused to America’s food producers was not coherent. Speaking with reporters, Trump mixed up “billions” and “millions,” apparently confused on the specifics of what government funds could amount to actual aid. Meanwhile, the Trump administration moved forward with a plan to send $40 billion in aid to Argentina.

Indiana Statehouse Rocked by Protests as Republicans Try to Rig Maps - 2025-12-08T20:40:56Z

Protesters packed the Indiana Statehouse Monday to fight against Republican plans to redraw the state’s congressional maps to give their party an extra advantage and eliminate the state’s two Democratic congressional seats.

President Trump has pushed for the redistricting, which passed Indiana’s House of Representatives last week. Republicans in the state Senate have warned that there aren’t enough votes for new maps to pass, which Trump has met with insults and threats.

Monday is the last day for public testimony on the bills, and the past week has been full of dueling pro- and anti-redistricting rallies. Loud chants of “Stop the steal” filled the statehouse as lawmakers in the Senate Committee on Elections began their session Monday afternoon, with many protesters bringing homemade signs.

People already starting to chant now.

Last week, anti- redistricting organizers held a rally earlier in the day and saw numbers dwindle once lawmakers gaveled in. Not the case this week. Protesters organized around when lawmakers are scheduled to meet today. pic.twitter.com/tVaGLSx3Yt

— Cate Charron (@catecharron) December 8, 2025

Similar to other anti-redistricting and anti-Trump protests, lots of homemade signs: pic.twitter.com/kbmSlakXwz

— Cate Charron (@catecharron) December 8, 2025

When public testimony began, pro-redistricting speakers were booed and heckled. One person yelled that Republicans were stacking the deck with redistricting supporters, which may be true considering those who signed up to testify on the bill stated their position on the form. Committee chairs often group speakers by position, according to the Indianapolis Star’s Cate Charron.

CNN’s Eric Bradner said that Monday’s anti-redistricting rally was much larger than the pro-redistricting rallies at the Statehouse, including one last week organized by Turning Point USA. The reason for that, CNN reports, is that there isn’t much enthusiasm among Indiana Republicans, with much of the pro-redistricting pressure coming from national groups such as TPUSA and the Club for Growth.

Trump likely sees redistricting as the only way to protect his presidency from a hostile Democratic Congress, and is threatening to support primary challengers to Republican senators who oppose redistricting and calling them names on his Truth Social account. At least 11 elected Indiana Republicans have faced swatting threats, including state Senator Greg Goode, who hadn’t even made any public comments about redistricting.

But in spite of the pressure campaign, Indiana Republicans are not coming out in droves to support the idea.

“It’s ridiculous to bring the whole thing up to begin with, but it’s what the president wants,” Debbie Myers, a Republican small-business owner in Martinsville, Indiana, told CNN about redistricting. “It’s wrong, and it’s a waste of money and a waste of these people’s time, and I don’t think it should have happened.”

Alina Habba Resigns as Trump Loses Yet Another Totally Inept Nominee - 2025-12-08T19:20:51Z

President Trump’s former lawyer and interim U.S. attorney for New Jersey Alina Habba is stepping down from her role in the wake of a 3–0 appeals court ruling that found she was “unlawfully” serving in the position.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit  agreed with a lower court’s ruling that Habba was given the U.S. attorney position through a “novel series of legal and personnel moves” and was not legally able to take the job. 

“While I was focused on delivering real results, judges in my state took advantage of a flawed blue slip tradition and became weapons for the politicized left.... They joined New Jersey senators, who care more about fighting President Trump than the well being of residents which they serve,” Habba wrote in her resignation letter, posted on X. “As a result of the Third Circuit’s ruling, and to protect the stability and integrity of the office which I love, I have decided to step down in my role as the U.S. Attorney for the District of New Jersey. But do not mistake compliance for surrender. This decision will not weaken the Justice Department and it will not weaken me.”

Habba was originally meant to leave her interim position over the summer, as New Jersey federal judges refused to extend her 120-day appointment as U.S. attorney. But the Trump administration fired Desiree Grace, the U.S. attorney first assistant and Habba’s planned successor, prior to the end of Habba’s appointment, purposefully leaving the role unfilled. It then made Habba first assistant, allowing her to take the role of acting U.S. attorney without a Senate confirmation—which she may have likely failed. 

“My fight will now stretch across the country. As we wait for further review of the court’s ruling, I will continue to serve the Department of Justice as the Senior Advisor to the Attorney General for U.S. Attorneys,” Habba’s statement concluded. “Make no mistake, you can take the girl out of New Jersey, but you cannot take New Jersey out of the girl.”

Supreme Court Sounds Ready to Give Trump a Terrifying New Power - 2025-12-08T18:56:26Z

It’s not looking so good for former Federal Trade Commissioner Rebecca Slaughter—or any Democratic appointees at federal agencies.

While hearing arguments Monday in a case challenging Slaughter’s removal earlier this year, the Supreme Court’s conservative majority seemed primed to overturn Humphrey’s Executor v. United States, a 1935 case that established Congress can pass laws limiting the president’s ability to fire executive officials of independent federal agencies.

The court’s six conservative justices voiced concerns that agencies wielding executive power weren’t really accountable to the executive, Bloomberg Law reported. “Tomorrow we could have the Labor Commission, the Education Commission, the Environmental Commission, rather than Departments of Interior and so forth,” warned Justice Neil Gorsuch.

The court’s liberal justices weren’t convinced. Justice Elena Kagan said allowing Slaughter’s removal would place “massive, uncontrolled, unchecked power in the hands of the president.”

Only Justice Brett Kavanaugh voiced “concerns” about handing over the Federal Reserve, which is meant to set monetary policy without political interference.

The Supreme Court previously approved Donald Trump’s emergency request to remove Slaughter, despite the rulings of two lower courts and a law stating that presidents may only legally remove FTC commissioners for “inefficiency, neglect of duty, or malfeasance in office.” At the time, Kagan torched her colleagues for empowering Trump to remove “any member he wishes, for any reason or no reason at all.”

“And he may thereby extinguish the agencies’ bipartisanship and independence,” Kagan wrote in her opinion. Slaughter was the only Democrat left on the FTC board.

Breaking with precedent on Humphrey will allow Trump to continue his unfettered firing campaign against Democratic appointees, but it would also grant the president unprecedented control over agencies that regulate the economy, the stock market, as well as federal campaign finance and communication rules.

The Supreme Court previously allowed Trump to oust Gwynne Wilcox at the National Labor Relations Board and Cathy Harris at the Merit Systems Protection Board—whose terms weren’t due to expire until 2029—as well as three Democratic appointees on the Consumer Product Safety Commission.

Pam Bondi Made the Same Statement Trump Claims Is Sedition - 2025-12-08T18:22:16Z

President Trump has been quite upset over six Democratic legislators telling members of the military that they have to refuse illegal orders, calling the lawmakers seditious and saying their statements are “punishable by DEATH.”

But as it turns out, Attorney General Pam Bondi has said the same thing.

Last year, as a lawyer for the America First Policy Institute, a conservative think tank, Bondi filed a brief with the Supreme Court writing, “Military officers are required not to carry out unlawful orders.”

“The military would not carry out a patently unlawful order from the president to kill nonmilitary targets. Indeed, service members are required not to do so,” Bondi wrote in the brief, filed to support Trump in his effort to convince the Supreme Court to grant him immunity from prosecution on charges of trying to overturn the 2020 election.

Bondi was in fact trying to cover for one of Trump’s lawyers in January 2024, who was asked by Judge Florence Y. Pan in federal appeals court, “Could a president who ordered SEAL Team 6 to assassinate a political rival, who was not impeached, would he be subject to criminal prosecution?”

D. John Sauer, who is now Trump’s solicitor general, said no, seeming to hurt his case. Bondi’s friend-of-the-court-brief was meant to cover for Sauer by arguing that Pan’s hypothetical question wasn’t realistic because military officers would disobey such an order.

“A president cannot order an elite military unit to kill a political rival, and the members of the military are required not to carry out such an unlawful order,” Bondi wrote in her brief. “It would be a crime to do so.”

When the case reached the Supreme Court, conservative Justice Samuel Alito agreed.

“I don’t want to slander SEAL Team 6,” Alito said to laughter in the courtroom. “Because they’re—no, seriously, they’re honorable. They’re honorable officers, and they are bound by the Uniform Code of Military Justice not to obey unlawful orders.”

While the president won his immunity case, the six Democrats have been targeted by Trump’s supporters with violent threats and unrelenting attacks from the White House. And Bondi is not the only administration official who has affirmed that the military should disobey illegal orders—Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth is on video saying the same thing in 2016. But to this administration, Trump can’t break the law, only the people who disobey him do.

Republican Rep. Questions His Own Party—and Trump—in Brutal Interview - 2025-12-08T17:47:23Z

GOP Representative Brian Fitzpatrick sat down with CNN’s Manu Raju on Sunday and directly criticized the recent policy decisions of President Trump and the Republican Party in general, further emphasizing the various internal rifts on the right.

The Pennsylvania representative first came for what he sees as his party’s steerless criticism of the Affordable Care Act.

“On health care, you’ve been pushing very hard to deal with these expiring subsidies under the Affordable Care Act, pushing your own plan for this,” Raju said to Fitzpatrick. “But you’re encountering a lot of resistance from within your own party.... What do you say to them?”

“If you don’t have a better plan, then get on board with ours. But doing nothing is not an option,” the representative replied. “I’ve heard so many people in the Republican conference rail against the Affordable Care Act, rail on Obamacare, rail on the premium tax credits.... If you wanna criticize something that’s OK, as long as you have a better alternative. They have never offered a better alternative.”

GOP Rep. Brian Fitzpatrick says Rs need more focus on affordability.
On Trump calling it a D scam: “I don't believe that to be true at all..It's real.”
On GOP railing on ACA: “They have never offered a better alternative”
On Ukraine, says Trump has been “too deferential” to Putin pic.twitter.com/KboOhZIMNQ

— Manu Raju (@mkraju) December 8, 2025

Fitzpatrick also stressed the affordability issue.

“Everybody’s gotta have an answer to rising costs across the board, whether it be health care or anything. This is what people voted on,” he said. “This is what led to Donald Trump’s election in ’24, I believe it’s what led to Mamdani’s election in ’25. I think affordability is the issue, that’s what trumps everything else.”

“The president himself called affordability a Democratic scam,” Raju replied.

“I don’t believe that to be true. At all.”

“Do you find those comments problematic?”

“I don’t know what he was intending, I’ve heard him say the opposite of that, that he wants to focus on affordability,” Fitzpatrick said. “I don’t know where he’s going with that.... I can just tell you from my standpoint, affordability is the most important issue. Issue number one.”

Fitzpatrick reserved some of his harshest criticism for how Trump has handled Russia’s war on Ukraine, as the president has pushed what many have referred to as a 28-point pro-Putin peace plan.

“I have not liked the way either this or the prior administration has handled this.... We need a lot more moral clarity out of the administration,” he said. “Vladimir Putin invaded a peace-loving democracy. Volodymyr Zelenskiy is a legitimately elected president, Vladimir Putin is an unelected dictator. Russia invaded Ukraine, Russia has kidnapped close to 20,000 Ukrainian children. It is genocide, it is war crimes, and we have to call that out for what it is.”

“Has Trump been too deferential to Putin?”

“I believe so.”

This interview comes as narratives of GOP disharmony are peaking, sparked by MAGA Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene’s criticism of Trump’s disdain for anything but his own agenda, and her subsequent resignation announcement.

“I think emotions are really high… A lot of our colleagues are frustrated that their legislation has not been brought to the floor.… It’s a lack of priorities.”

While other Republicans recently criticizing Trump plan on retiring, Fitzpatrick has confirmed his intention to run for reelection in 2026.