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Notorious Drug Trafficker Personally Thanks MAGA - 2025-12-06T19:17:05Z

Juan Orlando Hernández—narcotrafficker, former Honduran president, and recent recipient of a pardon from President Donald Trump—played a key role in what the Justice Department dubbed “one of the largest and most violent drug-trafficking conspiracies in the world.”

Now, Hernández, who once reportedly told his co-conspirators that they were going to “stuff the drugs up the gringos’ noses,” is heaping gratitude on leading figures in MAGA (a movement purportedly in favor of stopping the influx of drugs into the United States, by any means necessary).

On X Friday, Hernández shared his first message since being released from a U.S. prison, where he was just over a year into a 45-year sentence: an 11-minute Spanish-language speech expressing his “profound gratitude to President Donald Trump,” along with a tweet extolling Trump and other key figures in his orbit.

Hernández specifically thanked Roger Stone and Matt Gaetz, allies of the president who played central roles in the campaign for his pardon. (They characterized Hernández’s prosecution in the sort of grievance-soaked terms Trump could appreciate, as an alleged instance of lawfare by the Biden administration.)

Hernández also extended his gratitude to White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, who has described the former Honduran president as a victim of “Biden over-prosecution,” as well as to Ed Martin, the Justice Department’s MAGA pardon attorney, and Trump’s “pardon czar,” Alice Marie Johnson.

The Internet Schools Trump’s Treasury Department on Economics - 2025-12-06T17:27:26Z

Social media users are skewering the U.S. Treasury Department for bragging about something eminently non-bragworthy.

On Friday, the Treasury Department’s official X account shared a chart reflecting that, in 2025, “U.S. Treasuries are having their best year since 2020.” Claiming that this indicates high investor confidence in President Donald Trump’s agenda, the post continued, “Never bet against @POTUS or America!”

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent chimed in with a celebratory meme of the children’s book character Franklin the Turtle holding a stack of money while wearing a MAGA hat. (The administration also recently used Franklin’s likeness to make light of its reported war crimes in the Caribbean.)

But, as many observers were quick to note, rising bond market returns actually may signal economic uncertainty, as investors anticipating a slowdown or instability seek safety in Treasuries. The high bond returns in 2020, for example, reflected such a “flight to safety” amid the economic turmoil of the pandemic.

Mike Bird, Wall Street editor at The Economist, shared his own Franklin the Turtle meme, in which the character wears a worried expression as he “discovers that rising bond prices can also imply lower future growth expectations”:

The Treasury Department’s post left some observers in disbelief. Adam Kinzinger, political commentator and former Republican U.S. representative, had the following to say: “Wait. Wut? Higher is bad…. Wait…. No way they’re…. Nooooo, what?!?!”

The ridicule spanned the political spectrum. Progressive MS NOW commentator Chris Hayes said he initially thought the tweet was parody. Libertarian Atlantic staff writer Conor Friedersdorf wrote, “Oh my God. They really don’t know.” Tim Chapman of the conservative policy organization Advancing American Freedom said the Treasury Department’s social media team “needs a crash course in Economics 101.”

Never Trump conservative writer Bill Kristol called the post “total economic illiteracy (or gaslighting),” noting, “This is like saying sales of cold medicine are having a great year, aren’t our health policies working great!”

Amanda Fischer, policy director at Better Markets and former chief of staff at the Securities and Exchange Commission, called it a “hall of fame level derp tweet.” And @3YearLetterman, a satirical internet personality known for sharing comically ignorant takes on sports, culture, and politics, posted, “I can’t top this.”

The Alleged Drug Boat Wasn’t Even Heading to the U.S.: Report - 2025-12-06T15:57:42Z

A new, disturbing detail in the “drug boat” controversy that has enveloped Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth over the past week calls the purpose of the entire operation into question.

According to an exclusive report from CNN, the alleged narco-trafficking boat that the U.S. military targeted on September 2 in a “double tap” strike, which killed 11 people, wasn’t even heading to the U.S.

Navy Admiral Frank “Mitch” Bradley, who was in charge of the operation, reported to lawmakers that the boat they struck was actually en route to link up with a larger boat that was heading to Suriname, a country east of Venezuela, two sources with direct knowledge of his remarks said.

Bradley also said that it was still possible that the alleged drug shipment could have eventually ended up in the U.S., the sources told CNN—rather dubious justification for a strike that left several people dead.

President Donald Trump had previously claimed that the strike happened “while the terrorists were at sea in International waters transporting illegal narcotics, heading to the United States.”

The U.S. military targeted the small boat on September 2, purportedly to stop it from transporting illegal drugs to the United States. After the first strike, two survivors were left, clinging to the wreckage, yet the military struck the boat again and again, killing everyone who had been on board. They ultimately struck the boat four times.

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who approved the operation, but sought to shift responsibility to Bradley, has come under intense criticism for authorizing a strike on survivors. Lawmakers and critics on the right and the left have decried the strike as a war crime.

It doesn’t help that the Trump administration’s story keeps changing. As more details emerge, the argument for the deadly boat strike becomes flimsier and flimsier.

“Loser”: Trump Melts Down as Even Fox News Focuses on Affordability - 2025-12-06T15:32:23Z

As the Republican Party flails on the cost-of-living crisis, President Donald Trump kicked off his Saturday morning with an attack on his beloved Fox & Friends for prodding that sensitive subject.

The show on Saturday hosted Peter Schiff, a stockbroker and financial commentator. He’s also a rising critic of Trump—Schiff has taken the president to task for dismissing economic concerns amid mounting inflation, job losses, and affordability issues.

On Truth Social, the president called Schiff a “Trump hating loser” and questioned the integrity of the Fox News program—of which he is, famously, an avid viewer—for having given him a platform. “Either the show made a mistake, or it is heading in a different direction,” Trump wrote, urging its staff to look into “the ‘booker’ who put this jerk on!”

Schiff, Trump wrote, “thinks prices are going up when, in fact, they are coming substantially down.” The claim is a familiar one from the president, who recently referred to “affordability” as a Democratic “hoax,” while recent polls show concerns about his handling of the economy rising to a fever pitch—and even growing among his own voters.

This mounting frustration with the administration, and apparently resultant GOP losses in recent elections, has created anxiety in the party. Some politicians and strategists are calling on Republicans to rethink their approach so as to actually address voters’ material concerns.

Hey, Does Anyone Want to Talk About Donald Trump’s Infirmities? - 2025-12-06T11:00:00Z

In case you missed it, President Donald Trump fell asleep on television this week. There he was, in the middle of a meeting with the members of his Cabinet, completely set adrift on memory bliss as the pool cameras rolled, locked on his dozy face. Before you worry too much, rest assured that this wasn’t a meeting in which matters of national importance were discussed, but rather one of those now-regular occasions in which the president’s underlings gather to see who can offer him the most flamboyant praise. Still, it is rather worrying that not even these regular sessions of compliment bukkake can sustain the president’s waking interest.

Or, at least it should be worrying? I really hate to play the “age card,” folks, but back in my day (2023 and 2024), I distinctly recall that a president with apparent mental infirmities was nigh unto scandalous. Biden’s famous struggles were a national catastrophe that led many journalists to come a-ridin’ atop their high horses to bother their readers about how they got caught flat-footed by the fact that President Joe Biden, nominated at the age of 77, somehow continued to age. Why had no one warned them? (Probably because the same media, back when this all didn’t seem to matter, ritually executed the one guy at the Democratic debates who did.)

For a press so dedicated to sanewashing the Trump administration’s open sewer of corruption, the kid gloves treatment still seems the order of the day. This week, The Atlantic’s Jonathan Lemire published a lengthy exegesis of the “President Trump is increasingly isolated” variety, titled “The Bubble-Wrapped President.” In the piece, Lemire reports that Trump has “dramatically scaled back speeches, public events, and domestic travel compared with the first year of his initial term.” He is described therein as “distracted,” “out of touch,” focused on matters not “high on voters’ minds,” and showing “little willingness to acknowledge” problems gripping the country.   

The piece treats this mostly as some kind of inscrutable mystery, a tale told by the thinking-face emoji. The real story is moving between the lines: The president is fully checked out because he’s old, enfeebled, and his brain is slowly turning into pasta e fagioli. The president moldering in a narcoleptic haze as Marco Rubio yammers away at his side is the same guy who doesn’t seem to remember why he pardoned former Honduran president and celebrated drug trafficker Juan Orlando Hernández, or what part of his body was recently subjected to an MRI. 

There is plenty of room for the discourse to shift, however—and some evidence that it might. The New York Times treats the matter with somewhat less puzzlement than The Atlantic, noting Trump’s advanced age and planting a few red flags about his health; its piece garnered an outraged Truth Social post from Trump after publication. In one of the few articles to actually take on the matter of Trump’s obvious infirmity frontally, The Guardian’s Adam Gabbatt seems exasperated that a president who has obvious trouble “completing a thought” has “largely been saved the same examination” so regularly foisted on Biden.

If The Atlantic limits that examination to a single aside, in which Trump’s lack of acuity is likened to “the same low energy move for which [he] used to mock Joe Biden,” the latter half of the piece does at least present a compelling reason why more attention to a fully noped-out chief executive might be a matter of some alarm: The vacuum Trump is leaving in the White House needs to be filled, and it’s being filled by “enablers” rather than people who might “[moderate] some of his more extreme impulses.” Or, as someone less committed to euphemism euthanasia might put it, it’s being filled by utter ghouls: a Pentagon head who’s in over his head and spiraling out as he commits war crimes, a Health and Human Services secretary who’s bringing Lysenkoism back, an FBI director crashing out because no one brought him a cool jacket to wear—and all the rest hopped up on völkisch nationalism, pulling Black people out of their cars in Minneapolis and warring with Sabrina Carpenter.

In the days leading up to the 2024 presidential election, The New Republic’s Matt Ford tuned in to watch Trump’s campaign event at Madison Square Garden—a gritty reboot of the 1939 German-American Bund rally for fascism—and sounded an alarm about what the next Trump White House was going to look like. “The Madison Square Garden rally,” Ford wrote, “showed how much of Trumpism is about satisfying the basest, crudest, and most hateful impulses in American life—and how much his acolytes can’t wait to wield the federal government to do it.” The issue at hand is no longer one in which we worry there aren’t enough moderating figures in Trump’s life—it’s that all of the monsters Trump brought into his administration now have a free hand to run the country.

Those who served in Biden’s inner circle aren’t going to be remembered fondly, but no matter how enfeebled the president was, the country did not have the same problem we do now. The Biden White House wasn’t packed stem to stern with people dedicated to looting the country, terrorizing children, turning masked goons out onto the streets of American cities, or using the Department of Homeland Security’s social media presence to—as administration sources told Zeteo—“intentionally use popular music from vocally anti-Trump performing artists in order to trigger a negative response from a famous liberal and provide further amplification of neo-Confederate memes.”

Y’all, it really seems like the president sliding sideways into the mud puddle of his few remaining faculties as his frantic acolytes rain down pain and duplicity on everyone is something of a big story. Or at least it used to be. Perhaps one day soon, it will be a matter worthy of attention again. Because the way things are going, I’m expecting him to either fall asleep or wander off during his next State of the Union address.

This article first appeared in Power Mad, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by deputy editor Jason Linkins. Sign up here.

Karoline Leavitt’s Brother Had Grim Custody Fight With ICE-Arrested Ex - 2025-12-05T21:43:54Z

The mother of Karoline Leavitt’s nephew was reportedly engaged in a nasty years-long custody battle with the White House press secretary’s brother before she was detained by Immigration and Customs enforcement last month, WBUR reported Friday.

Bruna Ferreira—a 33-year-old Brazilian immigrant who shares a child with Karoline’s brother Michael Leavitt—was arrested last month in Massachusetts. She is currently detained in Louisiana, hundreds of miles away from New Hampshire, where her 11-year-old son lives with his father.

The Department of Homeland Security alleged that Ferreira had overstayed her visa, which ran out in 1999, and claimed she had a prior arrest for battery. Todd Pomerleau, Ferreira’s lawyer, insisted that she had remained in the country legally and was pursuing citizenship through DACA, and that she had no criminal record. (Melrose police produced a report of an incident from when Ferreira was just 16 years old, where she was summoned to court for assault and battery after an officer said they witnessed her whaling on a girl in a Dunkin Donuts parking lot.)

It seems, however, that Ferreira and her ex-husband had a tumultuous relationship in the years leading up to her arrest.

Ferreira and Leavitt had their son in March 2014, just weeks after she finalized her divorce from her first husband. At first, things seemed amicable, but in April 2015, Leavitt filed a child custody complaint in New Hampshire family court and told police that an “illegal alien from Brazil” had run off with his son and his car.

In the ensuing custody case, Leavitt accused Ferreira of taking the child in the middle of the night, and threatening to take their son to Brazil. Ferreira denied this and alleged Leavitt had threatened to contact ICE in an attempt to have her deported. Although the judge granted Leavitt temporary “sole residential and sole decision-making” responsibilities in 2015, the two continued to squabble for a year until they agreed to split parenting time and Leavitt agreed to pay child support.

In 2020, Ferreira asked for full custody and accused Leavitt of failing to make child support payments, claiming he owed her $70,000. Instead the judge ruled that the child would remain with Leavitt during the school week, and with Ferreira just three weekends a month.

During an incident in June 2022, police officers found that Ferreira’s home appeared to be derelict, and filed a report of suspected child abuse or neglect with the Department of Children and Families.

There has been some speculation that Karoline Leavitt, as the head cheerleader of President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown, was involved in directing immigration authorities to arrest Ferreira, a claim that her brother has previously denied. The two women have reportedly not spoken in years.

Graziela Dos Santos Rodrigues, Ferreira’s sister, told WBUR that there was no bad blood between their families. She said that she’d spoken to Michael Leavitt and his father, who advised that Ferreira’s best option was to self-deport. Still, Dos Santos was adamant about keeping her sister in the United States, and said she’d reached out to Karoline Leavitt but has yet to hear back.

Supreme Court Lets Trump Get Closer to Ending Birthright Citizenship - 2025-12-05T21:10:35Z

The Supreme Court agreed Friday to hear arguments over the legality of Donald Trump’s plan to end birthright citizenship, the 1868 constitutional detail that entitles any person born on U.S. soil to an American passport.

In doing so, the nation’s highest judiciary has set the stage for a decision, expected by the end of June, that could undermine the Fourteenth Amendment. That amendment guarantees citizenship to everyone born or naturalized on U.S. soil.

Trump attempted to end the constitutionally enshrined right mere hours after he was sworn into office in January by signing an executive order stating that children born to immigrants on temporary visas or who are in the country illegally should not be entitled to birthright status. That order was blocked by multiple judges in multiple court circuits over the last year.

In the case the Supreme Court has agreed to hear, which stems from qualms in New Hampshire, the Trump administration argues that language included in the amendment—specifically, “subject to the jurisdiction of”—requires applicable children to not only be present in the country at the time of the birth but also to confer their allegiance to the United States. Exactly how newborn babies would be expected to do so, however, is not clear.

“Long after the Clause’s adoption, the mistaken view that birth on U.S. territory confers citizenship on anyone subject to the regulatory reach of U.S. law became pervasive, with destructive consequences,” Solicitor General D. John Sauer wrote in legal arguments on behalf of the administration.

Sauer added that the intent of Trump’s executive order is to “restore the Clause’s original meaning.”

It’s not the first time this year that the Supreme Court has heard arguments on the topic.

In May, justices on both ideological sides of the court flamed the Trump administration’s efforts to rewrite birthright citizenship through America’s courts, questioning why the government’s attorneys would even bring the case to the judiciary’s doorstep when “every court has ruled against” the administration on birthright citizenship.

At the time, Justice Brett Kavanaugh pressed Sauer into a corner, forcing the solicitor general to admit that the Trump administration doesn’t even know how it would enforce its birthright citizenship order. Sauer managed to appall another Trump appointee—Justice Amy Coney Barrett—by arguing that Trump has the “right” to disregard legal opinions that he doesn’t personally agree with.

How Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear Thinks Democrats Can Win Rural America - 2025-12-05T19:58:56Z

President Donald Trump and Republican governors are colluding to try to rig the 2026 midterm elections in their favor through gerrymandering. They’re helped by the fact that rural voters in large swaths of many states are largely abandoning the Democrats, who already suffer from a rural skew in the Senate and Electoral College. But these Democratic disadvantages don’t have to be destiny. Last week, in a Washington Post op-ed titled, “This slap in the face to rural America is a chance to turn it blue,” Kentucky Governor Andy Beshear argued that Democrats can’t just talk about the challenges facing rural Americans now, but have to deliver on promises on what rural America can be: “Tackling affordability is not enough. To truly lead again, Democrats must be the party of aspiration.… Democrats are good at explaining our “what.” Let’s get good at explaining our ‘why.’” 

This weekend, Beshear is set to be sworn in as the head of the Democratic Governors Association. His elevation comes as no surprise, given that he’s a rarity in national politics: a Democratic leader in an otherwise red state. He won the office in 2019 by just over 5,000 votes, in a state Donald Trump won by 30 percentage points in 2016, and his time as governor has made him even more popular in Kentucky (he handily won reelection in 2023). Whether or not he seeks higher office after his second term ends in 2027, he’ll help shape the party as it seeks to recover voters it lost to Trump.

On Thursday, I asked Beshear about rural America, Democratic messaging, and whether he’s running for president in 2028. This conversation has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Monica Potts: When I saw the headline, I thought you were going to write about farmers. I didn’t see that, and I was pleasantly surprised. What you did write about is the loss of hospitals, where a lot of rural Americans work now. I’m wondering if you feel that that’s something that people misunderstand about rural America. People still tend to think of it as a largely farming area and largely affected by agricultural policy. Do you think that this is something people miss about the new reality of living in rural America?

Andy Beshear: I think people miss that rural America is more complicated, and they might not think that there are more industries, that there need to be more services, and that there are serious implications of policies like the one that the Trump administration has pushed forward. Our fastest growing industry in rural Kentucky is health care. And so the idea that the “big, ugly bill” would gut rural health care means it’s not only reducing options to get health care in rural America, but it’s attacking a foundation of the economy. Every rural hospital we have is the number one payroll in its community and the number two employer behind the public school.

If you remove that business, if you remove those employees who live and spend money in that community, you don’t just close the rural hospital. You may close the local bank, the local coffee shop, the local restaurant, the local insurance company. Not thinking about health care as essential to rural America is not understanding how the economy works.

M.P.: As an example in your piece, you wrote about helping to bring a green paper plant into a rural county in Kentucky. And I read that, and I thought, well, that sounds nice, but we can’t do that everywhere. What are some of the other kinds of ideas about the real investment it would take to help sagging economies in rural counties now?

A.B.: Well, first off, I think we have to be intentional where we can be to locate new jobs in rural Kentucky and in rural America, and I see a greater hunger for it out of the private sector than at any point in my lifetime. We landed the Pratt paper mill, 300-plus new jobs at $40 an hour outside of Henderson, Kentucky, former coal mining town. We put two giant battery plants, two of the biggest in the world, next to a town called Glendale, a very small town in Hardin County, but outside of Elizabethtown. So we’ve created as many rural jobs as we have urban jobs by making sure that we’re putting the opportunity in front of those businesses.

But to make that possible everywhere in rural America, it takes a real investment in infrastructure. It takes making the upfront investment that says to rural Kentucky and rural Americans that we care about you and we want you to be able to compete for those next great jobs. Look at Appalachia, [where] the topography creates big challenges. We are four-laning the Mountain Parkway, which is basically our own interstate-like road to the heart of Appalachia. Why? Because if you want to put a new manufacturing facility, they’re going to want four lanes so that they can ship their products across the United States. It means we also have to invest in water and wastewater, which, you know, there are many parts of rural America that still don’t have clean drinking water, which should be a basic human right, but then you have to have the amount of water necessary to bring in that next opportunity. So in Kentucky, we have programs like what we call our Product Development Initiative, where we put state dollars into improving infrastructure at sites.

M.P.: The plant that you wrote about is an environmentally conscious paper plant. When I see a lot of people talking about Democrats winning back voters, they’re talking about moderating on some issues, including things like the environment, and some cultural issues. I’m wondering if you think that to win voters in rural America, Democrats need to moderate on anything?

A.B.: I think when it comes to jobs, they’re not Democrat or Republican, they’re not left or right. A green job to someone is a job that pays them enough to support their family. I remember that paper plant and the groundbreaking, and we’re in this former coal town, and the owner comes on through a Zoom on a massive screen and says, We’re bringing 350—and then he said the phrase “green jobs”—to Henderson. And everyone stood up and applauded, because they are great jobs where you can support a family. I believe that communities are ready.

And I also believe that sustainability isn’t primarily being driven by government policy. It’s being driven by the demands of the private sector. Every company that comes to Kentucky with their power wants affordability, wants reliability, and then wants sustainability. And so for me, being pragmatic, I’ve got to deliver all three, which means we need greener, more sustainable power production. We need greener jobs, because that’s what the private sector and ultimately consumers are demanding. So no, I don’t think that we have to back away from beliefs about climate change, but I do think within those beliefs, we have to deliver a better life for our people. That means, if you can bring in good, paying green jobs, people of all political ideologies will work in them because it makes life better and easier for their family.

M.P.: One of the things that I thought that President Joe Biden was underappreciated about was that he did make a big effort to bring new plants, especially to red states, and to reform American industrial policy through the Inflation Reduction Act. He did talk a lot about the day-to-day economic concerns that people had. He walked with unions, and he tried to reach out to workers. Why do you feel like that message wasn’t convincing, even when Vice President Kamala Harris took it up in her race in 2024?

A.B.: Well, I think two things. First, as Democrats, we got to get dirt on our boots, and we’ve got to show up in the areas where our policies are creating new jobs, new opportunities, more accessible health care, safer infrastructure, better schools. The signing in the Rose Garden isn’t real anymore. A signing of a bill in Frankfort [Kentucky’s capital] doesn’t directly impact people on that day. So we’ve got to be there at the announcement, at the groundbreaking. And you know, people make fun of it, [but] the most important one is the ribbon cutting. Why? Because the jobs are there, because the future is better for families. We’ve got to make sure that people in rural America see Democrats and see the results of the policies that we’re pushing for.

The second piece, though, is we’ve got to do things faster. The Biden administration passed a lot of good legislation that has spurred a lot of economic development in my state, but the Democrats need to admit that there are times when we are over-regulated, and we’ve created so many rules that some programs that we believe are essential for the American people simply take too long. American people don’t see and feel now the Internet for All program. It’s been three years, and we don’t have a single inch of fiber in the ground. So if you’re a Democrat or a Republican and you believe that the internet is essential, then we should be able to develop a program that gets it out much, much faster.

M.P.: What are some of the regulations that you feel like could be maybe waived or used to speed up the process?

A.B.: What we’ve seen in Kentucky is even a permitting process doesn’t have to be adversarial. If you were talking to the companies and groups that you’re working with, we get most of our factories up and running three to six months faster than most states, and we abide by every environmental and workplace safety rule. What we do is work with and communicate with groups that are doing these projects. They know the expectations. If there are ways to find a solution, move something one direction or another, you impact fewer streams, you invoke fewer rules. In the Internet for All, it wasn’t that they were going to provide the money, set the rules, and then audit us to make sure that we followed them. It was that we had developed every piece of a plan we had to contract and subcontract before we could even submit the plan to potentially be approved. It was set up as a multiyear process before the construction ever started. And again, it was meant to be transformational. But if you want to actually transform in a way that helps people’s everyday lives, you’ve got to be a little bit impatient. You’ve got to understand that people are hurting now and need help now. But if it takes five years to put a program in place, you may have lost an entire generation that needed that help, that needed that assistance, or that deserves that infrastructure.

M.P.: Speaking of losing a generation, I know that in Kentucky there were some really bad river floods a few years ago, and some early decisions made by the Trump administration in a second term may have delayed some of the money going out for recovering from those floods. There are other issues like that going on now, where we’re losing funding for science, for education, for all kinds of things. And I’m wondering how people in the near term kind of survive, or think about the future.

A.B.: Decisions by the Trump administration are making life a lot harder for our American families. Start with tariffs that are raising the price on everything. That young couple in rural or urban America that can’t buy their first house, even though they’re older than their parents were when they could buy it; it’s only become harder for them with tariffs on lumber and upholstery and cabinets, virtually everything that goes into a house has been made more expensive by the tariffs.

Then move to the big, ugly bill that’s going to make it harder to get health care in your own community. Many will lose coverage. People have to drive two hours just to give birth. And what does that mean near the end of a pregnancy? Does it mean staying in a hotel where your husband or spouse is hours away and might not be there?

The Trump administration says it’s going to [change how it assesses] natural disasters, saying large snowstorms might not be included in the future. Well, those have significant costs, and people’s lives are on the line every time that there is a large snowstorm. Look at the amount that’s being shifted in the SNAP program. You know, almost $66 million of new administrative costs in Kentucky, and what that’s going to mean to food availability. All of these policy positions by the Trump administration make life harder for for Americans, but make life a lot harder for rural Americans.

Trump pushed for a tax cut for the wealthiest of Americans, who primarily live in big urban cities, but won’t push for an extension of a tax credit to help people who get health care through the ACA that primarily live in rural America.

M.P.: In some ways, do you think that the actions the Trump administration has taken make the job for Democrats easier in 2026 and 2028 because they can say, “Look what we can offer as a change from this, if you don’t like what he’s done”?

A.B.: I think it puts Democrats in a better position if the Democratic Party remains laser-focused on people’s everyday needs and then provides them the roadmap to a better life. That’s why I talk about simply saying “affordability” isn’t enough. We need to be talking about it a lot. It needs to be talking about the American dream, where it’s not just that you can pay your grocery bill at the end of the month, but you can actually get ahead. The young couple can get that new house. You can take your family on the same vacation you went on as a kid. You believe if you show up and work hard at your job that you can be a little bit better off, and that your kids can be much better off. Yes, I think that’s a compelling message for all of America, and it’s probably more compelling, sadly, because of the pain that Trump is causing and will continue to cause.

M.P.: We’ve avoided talking about agricultural policy a little bit, but it does shape a lot of how rural America is funded. And I’m wondering if there’s anything you think should be revised or reformed in agricultural policy.

A.B.: Well, you look at what the tariff policy is doing to soybean farmers that may lose the Chinese market, the largest market, potentially forever, to Brazil and Argentina, at a time when the U.S. is trying to send billions of dollars to Argentina. These are hard-working farmers that when they’re not growing soybean, they’re growing corn, and Donald Trump’s tariffs and his attacks on the sovereignty of Canada have impacted our bourbon industry, which is a huge purchaser of the corn. You look at the elimination of USAID; you look at the elimination of the Farm-to-Cafeteria programs, and our farmers have been getting hit every way possible, losing multiple markets all at the same time. Now I’m starting to see them speak out. Certainly, our cattle farmers are speaking out, and that’s important because we all care about our families more than we care about any political party, and we need to make sure that simply being a Democrat or Republican isn’t as important as being an American with an economy that can work for all of us.

M.P.: Are you going to run for president?

A.B.: Well, this weekend, I’m going to become head of the Democratic Governors Association. What you’re going to see out of me in 2026 is working to elect Democrats all over the country.

I think you’re going to see us win in rural America. You know, we’ve got a very strong candidate in Iowa, [gubernatorial candidate] Rob Sand; I’m excited to see his campaign. And if we do our work, we’ll change the map for 2028, where Democrats won’t just be battling in five states with zero margin of error. We’ll have an expanded map to where whoever our candidate is can compete in more places and get their message out to more Americans. 

Indiana House Republicans Pass Map Wiping Out All Democratic Seats - 2025-12-05T19:49:51Z

Donald Trump’s attempt to nab more Republican congressional seats and keep his party in control of Congress just got a boost Friday when Indiana’s House of Representatives passed a new legislative map.

The new map, which seeks to give Republicans control of all of the state’s nine congressional seats, passed the state House by a 57–41 vote. The new map will make it harder for the state’s only two Democrats, Representative André Carson and Frank Mrvan, to be reelected. But the map now faces hurdles in the state Senate, despite its being under Republican control, as Republican senators have warned there isn’t enough support.

The fight has turned nasty, with Trump threatening to support primary challengers to these senators, among other attacks on his Truth Social account. As a result, Indiana Republicans have faced violent threats, with at least 11 elected Indiana Republicans being targeted with threats like “swatting,” false police reports meant to cause a violent law enforcement response. One of them, state Senator Greg Goode, hadn’t even made any public comments about redistricting.

The Indiana state Senate won’t meet until January, creating a time crunch to have new maps approved in time for the 2026 midterm elections. If they were to actually pass early in the legislative session, they would likely face legal challenges that could prevent their implementation in time for primary elections.

While the Supreme Court approved Texas’s gerrymandered maps Thursday, there’s no telling if it would do the same for other Republican states, not to mention the fact that other challenges to Texas’s new maps on racial grounds are still possible. Democratic-led states like California and Virginia are also making their own efforts to combat a blatant Republican attempt to subvert the will of the people.

Federal Judge Orders Release of Epstein Grand Jury Documents - 2025-12-05T19:12:01Z

We’re about to get more Epstein documents.

Trump-appointed Judge Rodney Smith of the U.S. District Court of Southern Florida on Friday ordered the release of previously secret grand jury transcripts from 2005 and 2007 investigations into sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. The move was spurred by the passing of Representatives Thomas Massie and Ro Khanna’s Epstein Files Transparency Act.

This comes after weeks of resistance from President Trump that culminated in him switching course and caving to demands to release the files.

“The United States seeks to unseal the grand jury materials in this case and publicly release them, as well as lift any preexisting protective orders that would prevent the Department of Justice from releasing the materials,” Smith’s order reads. “The Act applies to unclassified records, documents, communications, and investigative materials that relate to Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell.”

Other judges from Florida and New York have noted that the grand jury transcripts are unlikely to reveal any new information. The order doesn’t set a deadline for the release of the documents, which will be redacted before being released to the public.

This story has been updated.

Trump’s DHS Uses Spotify Tradition to Try to Joke About Deportations - 2025-12-05T19:02:36Z

The Department of Homeland Security has innovated a cringey new way to spread its blatantly made-up statistics documenting its ethnic cleansing campaign: introducing DHS Wrapped!

In the latest installment of the Trump administration’s weird attempts to appeal to Gen Z, the official DHS X account shared a graphic Thursday channeling Spotify’s Wrapped year-end recaps of its users’ listening habits—but instead of Sabrina Carpenter songs, the DHS version listed the stupidly named immigration operations and some statistics that didn’t quite add up.

“A year full of high stakes operations, deportations, and historic firsts. Here’s what America witnessed in 2025,” the post read.

According to the graphic, the Trump administration had deported more than 586,000 immigrants, while another 1.9 million had self-deported—but those two numbers don’t really make sense.

For the government to have deported 586,000 people, they would have needed to remove about 13,022 people every week since Donald Trump entered office roughly 45 weeks ago. DHS is reportedly removing fewer than 7,500 people every week. That’s still a terrifying number, but nowhere near the level of removals they are claiming.

It’s also unclear how many people have self-deported, and the DHS has given conflicting accounts.

Last month, Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem claimed that 1.6 million people had self-deported. In just a few weeks, that number has ballooned by 300,000. So, in the past month roughly the population of Jersey City just packed their bags and left?

Meanwhile, only 35,000 people have used CBP Home to leave the country, costing roughly $7,500 per self-deportation, The Atlantic reported last week. (The agency previously told The New Republic that “tens of thousands” of undocumented immigrants had used the CBP Home app to relocate to their home countries.)

Trump Warns Europe About “Civilizational Erasure” - 2025-12-05T18:53:15Z

The Trump administration is invoking racist tropes in a policy document, claiming that Europe is facing “civilizational erasure.” 

The White House’s new National Security Strategy, posted Thursday night, called the European Union antidemocratic and seemed to make an openly bigoted jab at the demographics of European NATO states, saying, “Over the long term, it is more than plausible that within a few decades at the latest, certain NATO members will become majority non-European.” 

“As such, it is an open question whether they will view their place in the world, or their alliance with the United States, in the same way as those who signed the NATO charter,” the document states. 

The paper went on to say the U.S. should “help Europe correct its current trajectory,” including by supporting “patriotic” parties. “We want Europe to remain European, to regain its civilizational self-confidence and to abandon its failed focus on regulatory suffocation,” the document reads.

The administration also accused governments of “the subversion of democratic processes” to thwart public opinion to end the war in Ukraine. The document praises Europe’s far-right political parties, saying that “the growing influence of patriotic European parties” gives “cause for great optimism.” 

While sitting European leaders haven’t commented, former leaders have reacted with alarm, comparing the document to rhetoric from Russian President Vladimir Putin and the Russian government. 

“It’s language that one otherwise only finds coming out of some bizarre minds of the Kremlin,” said Carl Bildt, former prime minister of Sweden, on X. He pointed out the only part of the world where the document saw a threat to democracy was Europe. Bildt also described the document as “to the right of the extreme right in Europe” and “JD Vance on steroids.” 

An anonymous European diplomat also mentioned the vice president, saying the document’s “tone was not promising. Even worse than Vance’s speech in February,” referring to Vance’s speech at the Munich Security Conference where he extolled nativism and far-right politics while downplaying the threat from Russia. 

Latvia’s former Prime Minister Krisjanis Karins told Reuters that “the happiest country reading this is Russia,” adding that “Moscow has been trying to break the transatlantic bond for years, and now it seems the greatest disruptor of this bond is the U.S. itself, which is unfortunate.”

Much of the document seems to echo the racist rhetoric coming from other parts of the Trump administration, whether it’s the dog whistles coming out of the Department of Homeland Security or the underpinnings of the administration’s immigration policies. It appears that the White House is more concerned about racial and cultural homogeneity than the real external threats.   

National Parks Now Free on Trump’s Birthday, but Not on Black Holidays - 2025-12-05T18:29:07Z

The Trump administration removed free national park access on Martin Luther King Jr. Day and Juneteenth, while adding it for President Trump’s birthday. 

Now two federal holidays that celebrate Black American history will be ticketed—from around $3 to $30—while Trump’s birthday on June 14 is free entry. 

This change, first reported by SFGATE, is emblematic of the small-scale, antagonistic ways in which Trump wages his MAGA culture war on any federal mention of Black history in America, or any minority group, for that matter. 

The NPS has been a battleground for much of that war. Since taking office for the second time, Trump has ordered the removal of signs and exhibits documenting American slavery, including an iconic 1863 portrait of an ex-slave, often referred to as either Peter or Gordon, and the brutal whipping scars on his “scourged back.” 

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.

This move is spiteful and self-centered, and a perfect opportunity for the president to center himself while punching down on MLK Day and Juneteenth in the name of MAGA.  

FIFA Gives Trump a Dumb Medal So He’ll Stop Talking About Nobel Prize - 2025-12-05T17:34:42Z

The U.S. president on Friday became the inaugural recipient of FIFA’s newly minted peace prize.

The prize was the invention of Gianni Infantino, the boss of the international soccer league, who shocked his own top officials by cooking up the concept after Donald Trump begged, pleaded, and failed to win the Nobel Peace Prize in October.

“This is truly one of the great honors of my life, and beyond awards, Gianni and I were discussing this, we’ve saved millions and millions of lives,” Trump said after the medal—a sculpture of hands holding a soccer ball—had been draped around his neck. “So many different wars that we were able to end.”

But whether a soccer prize will scratch Trump’s itch for global recognition remains to be seen. Trump has coveted the Nobel Peace Prize for years, going so far as to lie about solving nonexistent international conflicts and phoning Norwegian officials this past summer in lame efforts to snag the title (Norway’s government has no influence on decisions made by the committee).

Part of the president’s obsession could stem from the fact that four other U.S. presidents have received the award, perhaps most notably Trump’s political nemesis, former President Barack Obama.

Infantino had publicly lobbied for Trump to win the award. But his failure to launch that process offered Infantino a new opening to flatter the president: inventing an entirely new award to satisfy Trump’s ego.

Trump was announced as the winner during the 2026 FIFA World Cup final draw.

This story has been updated.

RFK Jr.’s Handpicked Advisers Change Hepatitis B Vaccine Guidance - 2025-12-05T17:08:51Z

A federal vaccine advisory panel handpicked by Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. voted Friday to recommend delaying the hepatitis B vaccine for most newborns.

The 8–3 vote by the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices reverses the government’s longtime stance that all babies be vaccinated at birth against the liver infection. Now the panel is recommending the vaccine—which has been credited with preventing thousands of illnesses—be given only to those infants whose mothers test positive or haven’t been tested.

If parents or guardians decide not to get the vaccination at the time of birth, the committee’s vote recommends that the baby should get the dose at two months. One committee member, Dr. Cody Meissner, expressed misgivings, saying, “We are doing harm by changing this wording, and I vote no.”

When asked Thursday by the Associated Press why the committee chose to reexamine this vaccine, committee member Vicky Pebsworth said it was because of “pressure from stakeholder groups wanting the policy to be revisited,” but did not elaborate. A spokesperson for Kennedy did not respond to a question on the subject. Senator Bill Cassidy, a doctor and liver specialist, called the committee “totally discredited” on Thursday.

In 2022, longtime vaccine skeptic Kennedy said the hepatitis B vaccine “was made for prostitutes and for promiscuous gay men.” The virus isn’t just spread through sexual contact, though: Even contact with small amounts of infected blood can put someone at risk.

Now the decision on whether to accept the recommendation goes to the acting head of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Jim O’Neill. But the American Academy of Pediatrics plans to keep promoting the existing CDC guidance for babies to get the first dose of the vaccine at birth, followed by a second at one or two months with the third dose coming between six and 18 months.

At least one state will also continue recommending the hepatitis B vaccine at birth: Governor Maura Healey of Massachusetts said on CNN Thursday that “D.C., the Trump administration, RFK, that panel, they are not doing their jobs. And in the face of that, as governor, I’m going to do mine.”

Trump Judges Rule He Can Fire Whoever He Wants - 2025-12-05T16:41:04Z

An appeals court judge tore into her colleagues’ decision Friday to “pave the way for autocracy” by allowing President Donald Trump to summarily fire the Democratic members of independent federal agencies.

In a 2–1 ruling, Trump-appointed D.C. Circuit Court Judges Gregory Katsas and Justin Walker greenlit the president’s efforts to remove Democratic members of the National Labor Relations Board and Merit Systems Protection Board.

“Congress may not restrict the President’s ability to remove principal officers who wield substantial executive power,” Katsas wrote in the majority opinion. “As explained below, the NLRB and MSPB wield substantial powers that are both executive in nature and different from the powers that Humphrey’s Executor deemed to be merely quasi-legislative or quasi-judicial. So, Congress cannot restrict the President’s ability to remove NLRB or MSPB members.”

Humphrey’s Executor v. United States is a 1935 Supreme Court case that established Congress can pass laws limiting the president’s ability to fire executive officials of independent federal agencies.

In a scathing dissenting opinion, Judge Florence Pan warned that the decision was a disastrous consolidation of executive power behind the president. “Adoption of the government’s maximalist theory of executive power (implicitly or explicitly) threatens to fundamentally change the character of our government,” she wrote.

“Taken to its logical end, the government’s theory will eliminate removal protections for all employees of the Executive Branch and place every hiring decision and agency action under the political direction of the President. But such a radical upending of the constitutional order is not supported by the text or structure of the Constitution and is inconsistent with the intent of the Framers. And while the government claims to uphold the separation of powers, its theory instead concentrates excessive power in the President and thus paves the way to autocracy.”

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 and Rebecca Slaughter, a Democratic commissioner on the Federal Trade Commission.

Mike Johnson Is Struggling to Keep Control of His Party - 2025-12-05T16:31:54Z

Republicans are slowly but steadily peeling away from House Speaker Mike Johnson.

The Louisiana lawmaker is facing mounting scrutiny from his caucus, who are reportedly concerned about his leadership ahead of the 2026 midterm elections.

Democrats’ surprise performance in the Tennessee special election earlier this week put Johnson’s capabilities into laser focus, stressing already fraught tensions between House Republicans and their leader.

“The confluence is weakened political power by Trump, the result from the elections in New Jersey, New York, and Virginia, and people getting anxious about the election,” a senior House GOP lawmaker told NBC News Thursday. “There’s a lot of anxiety and stress about the election, and people looking at their own districts, saying, ‘I thought things were going to be different.’”

The government shutdown only exacerbated the effect, leaving Republicans in vulnerable districts without the support that they thought they could rely on.

“I just think being off for 50 days, there was no continuity. Nobody was here. There was nobody like, ‘Hey, you’re doing great. Keep it up,’” the lawmaker continued. “Everyone being back in their district, there was a loneliness. A lot of members may have felt like we’re on our own.”

Johnson shocked the halls of Congress when he catapulted into the House leadership position in late 2023, replacing former Speaker Kevin McCarthy amid a historically divided caucus. That was possible, in part, because Johnson was a relative unknown with practically zero enemies. But that’s no longer the case.

In recent weeks, Johnson has made enemies out of Representatives Elise Stefanik, Anna Paulina Luna, and Marjorie Taylor Greene on issues ranging from his reluctant release of the Epstein files to his resistance to bipartisan legislation on insider trading.

Speaking with reporters Thursday, Johnson claimed that “friction” and “vigorous debate” were “all part of the process.”

“They’re going to get upset about things. That’s part of the process. It doesn’t deter me in any way. It doesn’t bother me,” he said.

Just nine representatives of the majority party are needed to trigger a vote of no confidence against a House speaker. But for all the malcontent, exactly who could unite the conference to replace Johnson is still not clear.

“I support Mike Johnson and what he’s been doing. I think he’s in line with the president. I think he has the ear of the president,” Representative Troy Nehls, who is retiring when his term ends in January 2027, told NBC. “If it’s not Mike Johnson, well, then who?… Who could get enough votes to even replace him? And quite honestly, it’s probably nobody.”

D.C. Pipe Bombing Suspect Believed Trump’s Biggest Lie - 2025-12-05T16:11:24Z

The man who planted pipe bombs at the Republican and Democratic National Committee headquarters the day before January 6 seems to have been motivated by MAGA election denialism.  

Virginia resident Brian Cole, 30, was taken into custody on Thursday after being charged with placing the bombs on January 5, 2021, the day before Congress was to certify the 2020 presidential election. 

Cole reportedly told FBI investigators that he believed unsubstantiated theories about the 2020 presidential election being stolen from Donald Trump. Sources told CNN he made multiple statements as he spent hours with the FBI.

While the FBI has yet to declare a motive or publicly comment on the report, it’s clear that Trump’s biggest lie played a role in the incident of political violence.

Supreme Court’s Texas Map Ruling Hints at Good News for California - 2025-12-05T16:07:38Z

California Governor Gavin Newsom has reason to be optimistic about congressional redistricting in his state after a Supreme Court ruling.

On Thursday, the court ruled 6-3 that Texas can use a new legislative map that was redrawn to benefit Republicans, with conservative Justice Samuel Alito saying in his concurring opinion that rather than racial gerrymandering, which would be illegal, “the impetus for the adoption of the Texas map (like the map subsequently adopted in California) was partisan advantage pure and simple.”

This seems to suggest that the conservative majority on the high court that approved Texas’s map will also approve California’s, which is being redrawn to give Democrats possibly five more congressional seats. When Attorney General Pam Bondi celebrated the Supreme Court ruling on X Thursday, Newsom’s press office eagerly chimed in, asking if the Justice Department would drop its lawsuit against Newsom and the Golden State.

X screenshot Governor Newsom Press Office @GovPressOffice So you gonna drop your lawsuit against us right, Pam?

The DOJ’s official account didn’t seem to think the ruling applied to Democrats, posting in response, “Not a chance, Gavin—we will stop your DEI districts for 2026.” But that statement may not be how the Supreme Court sees it.

President Trump began the partisan gerrymandering wars earlier this year when he urged Texas to redraw its maps, hoping to avert Republican losses in the 2026 midterms. His efforts to get other Republican-led states on board has not gone as well. Meanwhile, California isn’t the only Democratic-led state replying to Trump: Virginia is now beginning plans to redraw its maps.

Cowardly Pete Hegseth Is This Week’s Proof of the GOP’s Moral Rot - 2025-12-05T15:19:08Z

Pete Hegseth is having one of the worst weeks a Cabinet secretary has had in recent American history. It’s very richly deserved. He’s a bombastic idiot. He’s a liar. And he’s a weasel: Under fire for a second military strike on an alleged drug boat, which killed two survivors of the first strike and was possibly a war crime, he has publicly shifted all responsibility to a uniformed Naval officer who cannot defend himself in public. Finally, I’d add that he has utter contempt for the historic rules of honorable military engagement, but the video that emerged this week of him paying rhetorical homage to those rules back in 2016 when Democrats ran the Pentagon proves that he doesn’t even live according to that benighted “principle” and instead operates on the basis of no principle other than the usual Republican ones—political advantage and power.

He’s a disaster as defense secretary. But here’s a question that must be pondered this week: Didn’t we all know this? Wasn’t there ample reason to suspect that a talk-show host would be in way over his head in running the largest corporation in the U.S. government? Could anyone—anyone—look in the mirror back in January and say to themselves: “Yes, of all the possible nominees in this vast country to run the Department of Defense, Pete Hegseth is the best possible choice”?

Of course we knew this. And yet, he made it through. Why? I see three reasons, all tangled up with one another, because they all describe different aspects of the total moral decay of the Republican Party.

Let’s start with the most obvious reason: Trump wanted him. In other words, no President Trump, no Secretary Hegseth, not in a jillion years. It took an ill-informed demagogue who dodged the draft and thinks soldiers buried in Arlington Cemetery are “suckers” and thinks cable news is the pinnacle of human endeavor to come up with an appointment like this. And this, as we all know, is why Trump chose him: He was a snarling cable host who looked the part and hated DEI. People knew at the time. Exiled Republican Adam Kinzinger posted last November, when Trump nominated Hegseth: “Wow. Trump picking Pete Hegseth is the most hilariously predictably stupid thing.”

But of course, few Republicans were willing to say so, which brings us to reason two: the total abdication of constitutional responsibilities by Trump’s party. Well, not quite total. Three Republicans did vote against Hegseth: Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski, and Mitch McConnell. JD Vance had to hustle up to the Capitol to break the tie.

But what that means is that 47 senators who had to know better (well, Tommy Tuberville excepted) voted for him. Mississippi’s Roger Wicker has been in the news this week because he chairs the Senate Armed Services Committee and is thus deeply involved in the question of how Congress will proceed in probing the second strike on that vessel on September 2. And, as Wicker is not tightly identified with the MAGA movement, I’ve seen him referred to this week as a comparative voice of reason.

Really? Go watch his statement back in January explaining his vote for Hegseth to see what a voice of reason he was then. “Admittedly, this nomination is unconventional,” he allowed. But so was Trump, when he flitted down that escalator. “That may be what makes Mr. Hegseth an excellent choice,” he continued. Hegseth would bring “a new warrior ethos” and “energy” and “fresh ideas.” Those descriptors might in fact be accurate, but not in a good way.

Wicker has been around Washington for three decades. He’s a former Air Force officer. There is zero chance he actually believed those words that he spoke that January day. But he spoke them, and 46 of his colleagues mouthed similarly mendacious platitudes.

Those platitudes received endless repetition on Fox News and the other right-wing propaganda outlets, which brings us to the third reason why it’s possible for such an unqualified hooligan to lead the world’s largest military. The right-wing “media” serves as an enforcer in such situations. GOP senators know very well that if they break with Trump on a big vote, the propaganda mill will target them, and that rich agribusiness magnate back home who’s a MAGA fire-breather will primary them next time, and Trump will endorse him, and goodbye Senate.

These outlets also enforce the acceptance of a certain reality among the rank and file—in which, in the current case, all the talk last winter about Hegseth’s drinking problem and his running that nonprofit into the ground were just deep-state lies. They create for the audience a world that is the direct opposite of reality.

Speaking of which … a poll came out this week—commissioned by the conservative Manhattan Institute, no less—that sought to give America a fuller portrait than we usually get of the beliefs and feelings of today’s GOP. The pollster asked a few questions about conspiracy theories. Find your hat, please, and hold onto it.

One-third, exactly 33 percent, think vaccines cause autism. A little more, 36 percent, think NASA faked the moon landing. Also, 37 percent think the Holocaust was “greatly exaggerated.” Forty-one percent think the September 11 attacks were carried out by actors beyond Al Qaeda and were “likely orchestrated or permitted by the U.S. government.” And 51 percent, as opposed to 40 percent who disagreed, believe the 2020 election was stolen. (Interesting side result, on another question: Fifteen percent of the poll’s respondents admitted to being racist!)

I’m not saying we can trace all this directly to Fox News. As far as I know, even Fox isn’t peddling Faurisson-esque Holocaust denialism. But Fox and the others have certainly promoted a milieu in which their consumers are encouraged to question nearly all statements of fact if liberals seem to believe those facts. From there, the algorithms of social media take over, and we’re off to the parallel-reality races.

It’s no wonder in such a world that a man like Hegseth could rise to his current position, sustained and protected by cowardice and lies. And it’s no wonder that he’s ordering the clearly illegal targeting of vessels and making allegations about them without offering any evidence. This is exactly where the moral rot that has consumed the Republican Party in this century was bound to land us.

Top FBI Official Admits He Made Stuff Up Before Trump Hired Him - 2025-12-05T15:12:30Z

FBI Deputy Director Dan Bongino offered up a baffling excuse Thursday for fueling conspiracy theories about the pipe bombs planted at the Democratic and Republican national headquarters five years ago.

Following the arrest earlier Thursday of a suspect in the attempted bombing, Fox News’s Sean Hannity asked Bongino about his past claims that the government had engaged in a “massive cover-up,” and that the pipe bombs were likely an “inside job.”

“You know, listen, I was paid in the past, Sean, for my opinions. That’s clear,” Bongino said. “And one day I will be back in that space. That’s not what I’m paid for now. I’m paid to be your deputy director, and we base investigations on facts.”

The former talk radio host then launched into yet more conspiracy winding about the so-called “collusion hoax.” So, it seems Bongino’s opinion days aren’t so far behind him after all.

Hannity was referring to comments Bongino initially made on X shortly after the riot on January 6, 2021, but also as recently as this past January—just one month before being tapped to help lead the FBI. Bongino suggested that the agency had identified a suspect but “just doesn’t want to tell us, because it was an inside job.”

Hegseth Lied About Key Detail on Boat Bombing According to Video - 2025-12-05T15:12:14Z

One of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s main arguments for bombing two helpless men in the Caribbean Sea was that they possessed radios that they could have used to call back their alleged cartels. But lawmakers who saw the video said that wasn’t the case.

“There was no radio. There were two individuals clinging to flotsam, that’s what there was,” Democratic Representative Jim Himes told MS NOW. “There wasn’t weaponry of any kind. There wasn’t a radio.... There was no means for them to communicate, other than the fact that the fire and the smoke was fairly well visible for a long distance around. But there was no radio.”

CNN also reported that Admiral Frank M. Bradley—whom Hegseth has named as responsible for the strike—told lawmakers that the men had their boat completely destroyed with no way to even reach a radio. In reality, for nearly an hour, defense officials watched the two men try to overturn the remains of their boat before bombing them a second time.

This directly contradicts what defense officials told The New York Times on Wednesday, adding only more speculation to the legitimacy of this lopsided and unsubstantiated “war” on alleged drug boats.

Only time will tell if Hegseth and the Defense Department actually face any repercussions for their killing in the Caribbean Sea. As of right now, they seem content to keep on bombing.

Trump, 79, Is Freaking Out About Stories That He’s a Tired Old Man - 2025-12-05T15:05:59Z

Hardly anything pisses the president off more than hearing criticism of his mental and physical health.

Donald Trump—the oldest person to ever be elected president—was reportedly irate after he was caught dozing off during a Cabinet meeting earlier this week, fuming over the fact that his drowsy habits earned him some comparisons to his predecessor “Sleepy Joe” Biden.

“He is sensitive to being compared, even if not explicitly, to Sleepy Joe,” a Trump adviser told Zeteo Thursday. “Especially if it’s coming from a reporter he already hates.”

Trump has recently been spotted falling asleep during meetings in the Oval Office and public events. Just one scandal irks him more than reports about his ailing body and mind: the Epstein files.

Screenshot of a tweet

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

The president also received MRI scans at Walter Reed Medical Center in October. Those tests are used by doctors to assess tumors, joint injuries, or heart conditions. Former White House physicians questioned the timeline of Trump’s appointment, pointing out that his four-hour visit to the hospital was far longer than would be required by an MRI test. Nonetheless, Trump said the tests came back “perfect.”

One adviser that spoke with Trump about the renewed focus on his health recalled that Trump complained the press was back on “this bullshit again.”

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt has repeatedly brushed off concerns regarding Trump’s health. In a statement to Zeteo, she insisted that Trump was in “excellent overall health,” and blamed journalists reporting on his aging body for creating an environment of media distrust.

“President Trump’s relentless work ethic, unmatched energy, and historic accessibility stand in sharp contrast to what we saw during the past four years when the failing legacy media intentionally covered up Joe Biden’s serious mental and physical decline from the American people,” Leavitt said. “Pushing these fake and desperate narratives now about President Trump is why Americans’ trust in the media just fell to a new all-time low.”

Kash Patel Used FBI as Uber for His Girlfriend’s Drunk Friend - 2025-12-05T14:16:35Z

FBI Director Kash Patel is in trouble again for allegedly misusing the bureau’s resources.

MS NOW reports that Patel has, at least twice, ordered the FBI security detail protecting his girlfriend Alexis Wilkins to also escort one of her allegedly intoxicated friends home after a night of partying in Nashville, Tennessee. In one of those instances, agents objected to Patel’s order, only for Patel to put his foot down, even calling the head of Wilkins’s detail to yell at him.

FBI spokesperson Ben Williamson did not answer questions from MS NOW, which cites three unnamed sources, but offered a blanket denial.

“This is made up and did not happen,” Williamson said.

Wilkins, a 27-year-old country music performer who lives part-time in Nashville, has her own FBI security detail at Patel’s request, which is composed of members of a local SWAT team. The FBI has reportedly never provided a security detail for a director’s girlfriend, and has historically only provided security for a director’s spouse when they were traveling together with the director’s own detail.

Providing full-time security detail for his girlfriend, and pulling a SWAT team away from their job is questionable use of government resources at best. To then demand that security detail escort his girlfriend’s friend goes even further. Former FBI agents and law enforcement officials told MS NOW that Patel’s alleged actions are completely off-base.

“Not only is the assignment of FBI SWAT personnel to a security detail to protect his girlfriend inappropriate, directing these highly trained professionals to babysit his girlfriend’s friend is outrageous, and demonstrative of Kash Patel’s complete lack of judgment and integrity,” former FBI agent Christopher O’Leary, an MS NOW contributor, said. “FBI agents serve the public and swear an oath to protect and defend the Constitution. This is clearly a long way from that.”

Patel has faced increased criticism in recent days for refusing to get off of a plane to investigate the murder of conservative commentator Charlie Kirk until he was given an FBI raid jacket to wear. He’s also under investigation for using the FBI’s aircraft to fly around the country for personal use. Reportedly, President Trump is upset with Patel and is considering letting him go, although the president denies it.

But this latest news is not going to win Patel any support in the bureau, let alone the Trump administration. Trump officials have reportedly been upset with the director for a while now, and the more negative reports about Patel come out, the louder the calls for him to go will get.

Pete Hegseth Brags About Bombing Another Boat as Outrage Grows - 2025-12-05T14:00:52Z

As the public deliberates on whether he committed a war crime, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is on X bragging about dropping more bombs on alleged “drug boats.”

“Every new attack aimed at Pete Hegseth makes me want another narco drug boat blown up and sent to the bottom of the ocean,” Turning Point USA spokesman Andrew Kolvet posted Thursday afternoon in response to Senator Chuck Schumer calling on Hegseth to resign. 

Hegseth responded eagerly to the bloodthirsty remark.  

“Your wish is our command, Andrew,” Hegseth replied a few hours later. “Just sunk another narco boat.”

X screenshot Pete Hegseth @PeteHegseth Your wish is our command, Andrew. Just sunk another narco boat.

It’s abundantly clear at this point that Hegseth couldn’t care less about the mounting pressures around him. There’s the question of his his complicity regarding the second strike killing two men clinging to the wreckage of their already bombed boat, as well as the Pentagon’s inspector general report that his use of Signal to plan a March strike on the Houthis in Yemen “created a risk to operational security that could have resulted in failed U.S. mission objectives and potential harm to U.S. pilots.” 

And yet the defense secretary would rather keep up with this strongman act, gloating proudly as the weight of the U.S. military unilaterally and violently comes down upon boatmen, often with little evidence they’re trafficking drugs. To him, killing random people in the Caribbean Sea is “owning the libs.” 

“This is the complete moral collapse of America—juvenile man-boys who claim to love God and value human life, but not brown lives,” one user wrote. 

“Secretary of Defense used to be a job occupied by serious and accomplished adult men,” writer Tom Nichols said. 

No, Progressives Don’t Want “Purity.” They Just Want Some Courage. - 2025-12-05T11:00:00Z

Mainstream Democrats use dozens of old catchphrases that suggest they’re out of step. “When they go low, we go high,” for example, sounded fine when Michelle Obama first said it in 2016, but it passed its sell-by date almost the next day. For quite some time, the Democratic Party, which is still closely aligned with banks and billionaires, has needed to go anywhere but high.

But it’s the meme of the “purity test” that should spike real worry that the Democratic Party is missing the moment right now. Party standard-bearers still use the phrase as a slur to trivialize legitimate questions from the left. It’s a petty and defensive move, and it comes across as a refusal to engage with the most obvious and urgent questions facing the party and the country.

A recent case in point involved New Jersey Senator Cory Booker. Booker is a tireless legislator who two weeks ago sponsored a promising bill to provide support for family caregivers, but he has sometimes been criticized for his coziness with Big Tech and Big Pharma. In October, the popular firebrand Jennifer Welch of the podcast I’ve Had It asked Booker why he and other Democrats had turned to “Neville Chamberlain–type appeasement” with President Trump. As just one example, Welch cited Booker’s confirmation of one of Trump’s shadiest ambassadors, Charlie Kushner, Ivanka Trump’s father-in-law; a felon and a billionaire real-estate developer from Booker’s home state of New Jersey.

“What do you have to say about the capitulation that you participated in?”

Booker smiled. He tried to seem unflappable. He then waved away Welch as “holding up a purity test.”

“That’s such bullshit,” Welch shot back. “It’s not a purity test. It’s, Are we in this fight? Are we being beholden to corporations and corporate interests? Or, Are we really the party of the working class?”

Welch was right. “Purity test” is bullshit, and it’s a deflection Democrats must stop using. Challenges to politicians on major issues, including foreign policy, acceptance of corporate money, and failure to keep ICE out of cities—these are not puritanical attacks on their lifestyles. They are credible allegations that the party must acknowledge and address: that Democrats are allies of Republican hawks like Liz Cheney, valets for private equity, and hopeless incrementalists on social justice.

(“Never forget that slavery lasted over 200 years,” said the comedian Christina Brown, playing a generic Democrat, in an extremely popular video sketch. “Because progress takes time.” Another “Democrat” in the sketch, this one played by Prance, added, “We’re going to stand up for Black people. Blackrock. Blackwater mercenaries. Blackstone. Black sites. Black ops.”)

To dismiss the concerns of progressives is to deepen the demoralization that many of them have felt since 2015, when, as they see it, Democrats put Trump in office by keeping Senator Bernie Sanders and his then-insurgent socialism off the ticket.

Right or wrong, the Democrats’ failure to nominate Sanders in 2016 is the origin story of the modern left, and they’re sticking to it. That cursed election is not available for relitigation. So now it’s up to older Democrats, who came up believing that unfettered capitalism was the country’s one true path, to stop trying to censor this generation of liberals, and start learning from them.

And if the Democratic leadership doesn’t want to watch satire on TikTok to understand their own party, they can at least look at the polls. According to Gallup in September, fully 66 percent of Democrats view socialism, by that name, favorably. Bullishness on socialism is up a whopping 16 points since 2010, Obama’s heyday.

At the same time, per the Gallup poll, only 17 percent of Democrats view big business favorably, while—and this is especially surprising—a mere 36 percent of independents do. Anti-monopoly views are clearly no longer the province only of sullen Occupy alumni. Look at those numbers. The vast majority of the gettable electorate can now be spooked by even a hint that the Democratic Party is ignoring the people in favor of rich or ideological donors, corporate interests, Black Rock, Blackstone, and billionaire PACs.

The purity-test dodge seems to have started during the presidential primary of 2019, when Barack Obama told a room of Bay Area donors that Democrats running for president should not be “woke” or engage in “cancel culture.” (Why did that daft formulation waylay so many minds, institutions, and opinion pages?) Nor, Obama said, should Democrats run on positions that could turn off the center and the center-right. What those positions were exactly he didn’t say, but good guesses include taxing the rich and downscaling the police.

“I am always suspicious of purity tests during elections,” he told the Silicon Valley crowd. “Because, you know what, the country is complicated.”

Complicated? Was that 2019-speak for something like “hopping with billionaires who must not be taxed”? If by “complicated” Obama had meant the country was increasingly socialist, he would have come closer to the mark. But in those days “complexity” was all about trying to seduce Republicans and the rich.

A few months after Obama’s fundraising event, Pete Buttigieg, then a candidate for the Democratic presidential nomination, reprised the purity-test dodge on the debate stage. Senator Elizabeth Warren, also a candidate, pressed him on his ties to robber-baron donors, and he responded that this wasn’t fair game. To mention the opulence of his donor parties, he said, was nothing but a “purity test.”

Five years later, sounding out politicians for their connections to billionaires doesn’t seem so persnickety. With their massively successful “Fight Oligarchy” national tour, which has drawn 261,100 attendees so far, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and good old Bernie have skillfully energized the party’s progressive grassroots and quietly reoriented the whole Democratic enterprise. Progressive Democrats no longer just oppose the bottomlessly corrupt billionaire in the White House. They oppose all billionaires, of every party, as they are all bottomlessly corrupt—and have long rigged politics and the economy to consolidate power, exploit workers, pursue white nationalism, and wage war.

If Democrats, when asked, can’t commit to opposing oligarchy, they’re not failing purity tests. They’re hiding a dangerous and right-wing worldview, and Americans deserve to know about it. Socialism may have been sidelined in 2015, and again in 2019, but it’s on all the tickets now.

The Bard of China’s Gig Economy - 2025-12-05T11:00:00Z

They came to Beijing because they had dreams of making a better living, because the fields back home no longer yielded enough to live on, because a cousin had found them a bunk and a lead on a factory job, because they wanted to send money to parents still hoeing the same narrow strips of land, because they were young and restless and wanted to see what the city looked like at night, because they had failed the gaokao and this was the next best route to a future, because they had debts, because they had heard that couriers could make more in a month than they could in a season of farmwork.

By 2015, an estimated 277 million people had left their rural hometowns in China for jobs in cities. China’s internal migrants—also known as the “floating population” (liudong renkou)—build the country’s skyscrapers, guard its gates, sweep its streets, and deliver its parcels. Yet they remain largely excluded from its welfare and residency benefits, a gap reinforced by China’s hukou, or household registration, system. Created in the country’s early central-planning era, hukou still links access to public services to the place where a person is officially registered. Migrants whose hukou is in a rural county can work and rent in Beijing, but without a local hukou they are typically shut out of subsidized housing, public schools, and many forms of health care and social insurance. Confined to the fringes of the urban labor market, many rural migrants live in settlements where rooms are partitioned into windowless cubicles or in so-called “snail households,” portable container units no bigger than a parking space. Working life is defined by long hours, short-term contracts, and the knowledge that a missed delivery or workplace injury could wipe out months of earnings.

Hu Anyan was one of these migrant workers. His memoir, I Deliver Parcels in Beijing, was written from within the churn of the gig economy and was an instant hit in China upon its publication in 2023. It drew more than 50,000 reviews on Douban, one of China’s most popular apps for sharing reading and film recommendations, and even received praise from The People’s Daily, the official paper of the Chinese Communist Party, which hailed it as part of the “fine tradition” of Chinese literature in chronicling “ordinary and meaningful moments” of labor. The book’s positive reception, as the Financial Times recently pointed out, was facilitated by a political moment: Xi Jinping’s “common prosperity” campaign, which included criticism of tech-sector excess. Hu’s memoir was seized on as an example of a work written from the perspective of one inhabiting the di ceng (“bottom rung”) without being read as oppositional to or overly critical of the CCP.

What makes Hu’s book especially striking to an American reader is the way it eludes comparisons to exposés of low-wage work such as Alec MacGillis’s Fulfillment or Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed. If a subtle aim of books like Ehrenreich’s was to reveal the myriad forms of exploitation under capitalism and to transmit a sense of moral indignation, Hu’s book strikes a quieter, almost Daoist, tone. Aggrieved as he may be at being baited or shortchanged by employers, there is no sustained rhetoric of outrage, no appeal to fairer working conditions. Hu’s concern is instead to document, with painstaking precision, the texture of gig work—the small, unremarkable moments in which a day’s labor consumes the body and erodes the self. The book’s latter half especially reads far less like a polemic than a proletarian Pillow Book—a record of fleeting impressions, irritations, and passing thoughts gathered from the edges of exhaustion. Its patient, diaristic attention to the toll of labor in a society where discontent seldom finds public language can be read as a form of quiet resistance.


The boom of the express-delivery industry forms the backdrop of much of Hu’s story. By the 2010s, the sector had become one of the country’s fastest-growing industries, with couriers nationwide moving billions of parcels a year. The job’s low barrier to entry appealed to new arrivals from the countryside, but high attrition was built into the system: 10- to 12-hour days, punishing speed quotas, customer ratings that could dock wages. Few lasted long.

Hu did, at least long enough to make a book out of it—a dispatch from the street level that shines a light on the ways that couriering and assorted forms of gig work yield what Lauren Berlant has called “slow death,” or “the physical wearing out of a population in a way that points to its deterioration as a defining condition of their experience and historical existence.”

Now 46, Hu was born in Guangzhou, the capital of Guangdong Province located near the Pearl River Delta, and cycled through 19 jobs in half a dozen years. Before becoming a courier, he worked for brief periods as a hotel waiter, a popsicle hawker, a fast-food deliveryman, a convenience-store clerk, a security guard, and an apprentice for a comic-book publisher, among a succession of other roles that he recounts in his book. The comic-book gig was uncompensated—it came with only free room and board. One employer at a restaurant allowed him gratis meals, though “the food was always past its shelf life.”

Poor working conditions contributed to an overly deferential attitude and “inferiority complex.” Reflecting on his first few jobs after graduating from secondary school, he writes: “If someone gave a compliment, I reflexively jumped to denial and scrambled to lower myself. I feared that, sooner or later, they would discover I wasn’t all they had made me out to be. I preferred that they thought very little of me, from the start.” Incredibly, when he’s chosen as one of five employees at a clothing store to receive insurance despite being the “worst performer,” Hu declines the offer. His reasoning? “I noticed that this galled some of my colleagues. Knowing I needed to keep working alongside them, I decided the insurance wasn’t worth the potential trouble.” Looking back, he regrets the decision, which he chalks up to a lack of knowledge about individual rights and the idea, instilled in him by his conservative parents, that he should “be kind to others. They failed to mention I also had to stick up for my own interests.”

Not all of Hu’s jobs were in customer-facing roles. In 2017, he worked at a logistics warehouse for D Company, where the pace was grueling and the tasks—moving pallets, breaking down shipments, stacking and restacking parcels—monotonous in the extreme. He averaged only four hours of sleep each day, often leaving his night shifts with his “mind slowing down, my reactions becoming duller, my memory fading.” Many of the precarious positions he held forced Hu to budget rigorously, applying the same logic to time and money. “If a minute was worth 0.5 yuan,” he calculated, “then the cost of urination was 1 yuan—that is, if the toilet was free to use and I only took two minutes. Eating lunch needed twenty minutes—ten minutes of which were spent waiting for the food—and had a time cost of 10 yuan.” To economize, he skipped many lunches and “hardly drank any water in the mornings to reduce the frequency of restroom breaks throughout the day.”

Days off were rare; when they came, Hu would stroll in a park or join a low-cost group tour to a Shanghai suburb. He also indulged in an activity that has no measurable value: reading. Over many months, he paced himself through Robert Musil’s The Man Without Qualities and James Joyce’s Ulysses, and found kindred spirits in Raymond Carver, J.D. Salinger, and Kafka. He absorbed lessons about economy of style from the work of Ernest Hemingway. Citing the author’s “iceberg theory” of writing, Hu notes that “the unwritten part is where the enormity and weight of a story should reside; and the art of story writing is in expressing with as few words and images as possible limitless thought and feeling. This is what I spent my time practicing, whenever I put pen to paper: how to leave empty space and silence, and knowing what not to write.”

But some silences in the book, the reader suspects, are not purely aesthetic. In an interview with the Financial Times, Pu Zhao, a Chinese editor who worked on Hu’s original manuscript, recalled that a scene about a worker’s death by suicide—jumping from his company’s office building—was present in an early draft but absent from the published book. The English edition, translated by Jack Hargreaves, also invites questions about what’s been quietly excised. While Hu has a seemingly photographic memory of the cost of every single dish he has consumed, he professes to not remember details of seemingly greater salience, like the monetary award that came with him being chosen as “employee of the month” at a gas station, the details of a work contract that “violated the current labor laws,” the names of some former colleagues, and the reason he was not completely honest with a work supervisor about quitting one job (to attend night school). Sometimes, he outright contradicts himself, as when he writes, about the book we are reading: “Every choice I made over those years is laid bare—the lead-up, the motive—and I examine my feelings and mental state myself, and give more context about the settings and environments,” only to follow this up with “I can hardly recall the major reason I chose a course of action in some cases, since this all happened so long ago now.” These lacunae hint at their own icebergs, masses of facts submerged from view.

While neither Hu nor his editor has publicly acknowledged working with a censor, it’s worth remembering that in China, editors often serve as proxies for censors. As James Palmer has noted in Foreign Policy, publishing houses don’t have in-house censors, but senior staff will often vet politically sensitive manuscripts. In practice, censorship in the country is a kind of dance between writer and editor—a negotiation over what can be said, and how, without inviting trouble. The results can be mixed. “Chinese books are more poorly edited than in the West, not due to a lack of ability but because the editor’s prime concern is whether the writing will cause problems, not whether it’s good art,” observes Palmer. Writing 10 years ago in The New Yorker about going on a book tour with his Chinese censor, Peter Hessler recalled the “capricious” and “strangely unenthusiastic” editing of his book River Town. At Shanghai Translation, each book manuscript passed through multiple levels of review—editor, supervisor, company head—with editors handling “the vast majority of censorship.” “Rather than promoting an agenda or covering up some specific truth,” Hessler wrote, “an editor tries to avoid catching the eye of a higher authority.”


The book’s longest sustained narrative covers Hu’s parcel-delivery years, beginning in 2018 with S Company. The pre-work gauntlet began with out-of-pocket medical exams and an unpaid trial period—a reminder that the company’s time was valuable but the worker’s was not. Sent from one depot to another to process paperwork for onboarding, Hu was eventually advised to try S Company’s headquarters 20 miles away in Shunyi District, only for H.R. there to discover that a different depot had failed to upload his ID scans. When he finally faced the financial administrator in charge of onboarding—a woman whose smile for colleagues hardened to a mask of contempt when she turned to the waiting recruits—he learned that a manager never even entered his application into the H.R. system. The administrator also claimed he had “failed” his physical due to a blood-test irregularity. A doctor later confirmed that the test result was trivial—likely caused by minor inflammation—and called the company’s rejection “ridiculous.” It would be weeks before he could clear the paperwork hurdles, secure a delivery trike, and begin deliveries.

S Company, the “bellwether of the [delivery] industry,” prided itself on prioritizing “high-quality service” over speed. Hu frequently worked 26 days a month for a daily pay of 270 yuan. Eleven hours a day were spent unloading trucks, sorting parcels, loading his motorbike, and covering his assigned neighborhoods. He describes how customer service could subtly game the system: In slow seasons, they would encourage complaints to pressure drivers to improve; during peak times, “they would do everything in their power to defend us and avoid risking the stability and efficiency of order fulfillment.” One manager—who, like several others in the book, is only identified by an initial, perhaps to avoid retribution—“wanted to beat into us that we owed our every success to the success of the company. We were only cogs in a machine, and could be swapped out at any moment.” At meetings, this taskmaster would even exhort workers to “help customers by taking out their trash.”

Jack Hargreaves’s English translation of I Deliver Parcels in Beijing generally preserves Hu’s pacing—the alternation between compressed bursts of incident and slower, more reflective passages—and carries over much of his clipped directness. What holds the book together is Hu’s sensibility: his blend of self-critique, wry observation, and quiet rage. The irritability is not mere crankiness; it’s the sum of humiliations great and small. In one scene, a fellow driver is ordered to read a letter of self-criticism aloud at multiple depots after a customer complaint. In another, parcels arrive missorted, and drivers must scramble to fix the errors on their own time—or pay out of their own pocket. The absurdity is distilled in a line flicked at Hu by an unsatisfied customer—“The customer is king”—to which Hu defensively replies: “But there should only be one king. I have to serve hundreds every day.”

By 2020, as China and the rest of the world ground to a pandemic-induced halt, Hu was let go from a courier job with Pinjun Express. His severance—two and a half months’ salary plus a returned deposit and final paycheck—totaled roughly 30,000 yuan, enough to tide him over for a while. For nearly a decade now, he has cycled between periods of writing and being gainfully employed. In his profile of the author for the Financial Times, Edward White noted that Hu has frequently been grouped with the yesheng zuojia (“wild writers”)—or self-taught authors from working-class backgrounds who ply their trade outside the official literary establishment—in addition to other literary camps like “pu luo (proletariat), da gong (migrant worker) … and zuo yi (leftist).” For his part, Hu has largely rejected these labels and sees himself as a writer foremost rather than an activist or Marxist. On the government’s endorsement of his work, he has said, “I did not ask for this and, judging from the content of my book, its value to the authorities must be very limited.”

In 2024, Hu followed I Deliver Parcels in Beijing with a more introspective work, Living in Low Places, published by Shanghai-based Insight Media. In the preface to his new work, Hu invokes an idea attributed to the Chinese philosopher Zhuangzi—“All men know the advantage of being useful, but no one knows the advantage of being useless”—to defend reading and writing as ends in themselves. Waking in a rented flat at dawn, reflecting on an old photograph, immersing oneself in The Brothers Karamazov and Anna Karenina, watching ants hunt earthworms: None of these activities promise practical value. Hu has traded a life spent in constant motion for one in which he can be still and gape at the world’s beauties.

The State Where Trump Voters Have Serious Buyer’s Remorse - 2025-12-05T11:00:00Z

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

A surprisingly close U.S. House race in Tennessee this week was the latest illustration that Donald Trump is increasingly unpopular, even in places that he was strong in 2024. Michigan is another place where the president’s support is softening, says Mallory McMorrow, one of the top Democratic candidates in the state’s U.S. Senate primary. (One of her rivals, Abdul El-Sayed, also appeared on Right Now recently.) McMorrow argued that Trump’s unpopularity is tied to his policies, particularly rising health care prices because the administration refused to increase Obamacare subsidies. The 39-year-old, currently a state senator, called for the Democratic Party to embrace younger candidates. She also discussed how her professional background as an industrial designer distinguishes her in a party dominated by attorneys.

A Ray of Hope Amid the Climate Information War - 2025-12-05T11:00:00Z

Climate advocates “worry they are losing the information war,” The New York Times reported this week. Climate disinformation is pervasive, and “only 21 of the nearly 200 countries that signed the Paris Agreement” signed a declaration at this year’s U.N. climate conference about trying to address that. While polls show the public is concerned about climate change, bogus claims about clean energy being unreliable or damaging are “steadily growing, amplified by social media,” and those urging policy responses to the climate crisis are increasingly “labeled ‘alarmists’ who propose radical solutions,” wrote reporters Lisa Friedman and Steven Lee Myers.

This is depressing, maddening stuff. TNR has been covering climate obstructionists’ transition from straightforward “denial” to these more elaborate forms of disinformation since at least 2020, and in recent years the problem has only gotten worse.

But I have a quibble: Climate advocates aren’t losing the information war. They’re losing the money and power war. That’s an important distinction—not least because it requires a different approach, one focused on radically curbing the influence of money in politics. And while losing the money and power war might seem even grimmer than losing the info war, there’s actually a ray of hope in all this.

It’s not just that 65 percent of Americans say they’re at least “somewhat worried” about climate change. Per the latest large-scale survey from the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication, 48 percent say people in the United States are being harmed “right now,” with 46 percent saying “they have personally experienced the effects of global warming.”

If you say you have “personally experienced the effects of global warming,” you are basing that in part on concrete experience—even if you can be influenced in how you interpret that experience. In the Obama years, the percentage of people who said they personally experienced the effects of global warming was in the 20s and 30s, but it has risen steadily since then, and in the 2020s has never dropped below 40 percent.

The experiences of climate change are going to become easier, not harder, to recognize in coming years. Perhaps the fossil fuel industry and its allies are pushing disinformation so wildly right now because they know this is an uphill battle. Arguably, they have already lost it. They cannot possibly win the information war when the information every day becomes more observable with the naked eye—and in people’s finances. Will people easily dismiss climate and affordability policy as “radical” as their homes tank in value, food and insurance costs spiral, and severe weather destroys their homes, finances, and lives? Maybe not.

Where climate obstructionists clearly are winning is the policy arena—the money, the power. The Trump administration is taking a sledgehammer to nearly every climate-friendly policy enacted by the prior administration. Tech titans and big banks are backing off their once-shiny promises to reduce their emissions, and the race to build more data centers for AI is slowing or even reversing the energy transition. Establishment Democrats are backing away from climate policy out of fear of losing elections to Republicans—even though there’s not a ton of evidence that this is a good strategy, and ample evidence for the opposite strategy.

What the climate obstructionists are also in danger of winning is the nihilism war. As Aaron Regunberg and other writers at TNR and elsewhere have pointed out, the fossil fuel industry is, to a certain extent, counting on people’s limited energy and constant discouragement. “Big Oil wants us to succumb to nihilism when it comes to climate change,” Aaron wrote last week. But they’re conspicuously nervous when people refuse to succumb. The moves that companies are now backing away from all emerged after the 2020 election, when people thought Democrats were going to get serious about climate change and media coverage of Greta Thunberg and others seemed to have shifted public opinion. Big companies were scared, and were hoping that flashy pledges could stave off more serious policy.

Fossil fuel interests still have a lot of power and options, of course: They can push for criminalizing protest; they can fund politicians friendly to their interests. They do this regularly, and it may yet prevent action on climate change coming in time to avert utter catastrophe. But when people start to revoke the fossil fuel industry’s so-called social license to operate—by making it socially unacceptable to work for, invest in, or promote planet-destroying polluters, and divesting from these products—that’s the stuff that seems to really unsettle the industry and its political allies. Hence right-wingers going all in on the risible idea that divesting from fossil fuels is a form of discrimination.

Again, the industry can leverage its considerable money on the spin machine (and it helps that it doesn’t seem to care how self-destructive its messaging may be to the wider society). But it’s up against considerable headwinds when it comes to human psychology and what people seem to care about.

Specifically, the industry’s arguments against climate policy have mostly leaned on two items: jobs and affordability. Democrats may have an edge over their more fossil fuel–friendly Republican opponents on energy affordability, and climate policy creates jobs too. More importantly, jobs aren’t the trump card they seem to be. Corny as it may sound, the numbers suggest that love matters more—by a lot. Last year, The New York Times reported on an international poll that found that “protecting the planet for the next generation” was by far the most popular argument for taking climate action—12 times more so than the “promise of creating jobs.”

“At the heart of this is love,” Anthony Leiserowitz, the director of the Yale Project on Climate Change Communication, which conducted the study, told the Times. “People love particular people, places and things. And those people, places and things are being threatened.”

Obstructionists don’t have the advantage on all fronts. As Aaron recently wrote, there’s an easy answer to fossil fuel companies’ hope that you will tune out: “Disappoint them: Don’t give in.”


Stat of the Week
51%

That’s how much homeowner’s insurance rates have increased in the past six years in Washington state. Two residents whose rates more than doubled are now suing Big Oil companies and the American Petroleum Institute, accusing the fossil fuel industry of driving these increases via severe weather events associated with climate change.


What I’m Reading

LA Wildfire Survivors Want to Rebuild All-Electric, but a Utility Is Using Customer Funds to Incentivize Gas Appliances

Today in wild industry spending to prevent the clean energy transition:

After January wildfires destroyed more than 18,000 buildings in Los Angeles, a growing movement of residents who lost their homes want to rebuild all-electric, recognizing that burning gas in household appliances contributes to the climate-driven increase in the destructiveness of wildfires. An attribution study found that climate change made the January fires 35 percent more likely.

But the country’s largest gas utility, SoCalGas, is using funds from its customers to incentivize wildfire survivors to rebuild with fossil gas instead of going electric.

The monopoly gas provider in Southern California is offering thousands of dollars’ worth of rebates to wildfire survivors who rebuild with gas appliances. The rebates are paid for by California utility ratepayers through a California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) energy efficiency program.

Read Hilary Beaumont’s full report at Inside Climate News.

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

The Blacklisted Pentagon Press Is Taking Pete Hegseth to Court - 2025-12-05T11:00:00Z

John Konrad, a former ship captain and current social media personality, became one of the new members of the Pentagon’s reshaped press corps earlier this year. On Wednesday, he updated his Twitter followers about his latest reporting. “[Secretary of Defense Pete] Hegseth answered my questions,” he wrote in a short post. “It’s off the record so no details but I am very pleased with his leadership!”

Konrad is among the flood of right-wing media figures to get access to the Pentagon after Hegseth and his allies ejected legitimate reporters and news outlets from the Department of Defense’s headquarters earlier this year. The Pentagon’s new credential policy imposes a series of arbitrary requirements that sharply limit journalists’ ability to do their jobs.

On Thursday, one of those outlets took Hegseth to court over the restrictions. The New York Times and one of its reporters sued Hegseth and the Department of Defense in federal court to challenge the new press-credential policy, arguing that it violates the First Amendment’s protections for news gathering and reporting.

“Through the Policy, Pentagon officials have dealt to themselves the power to suspend and eventually revoke journalists’ [press badges] for publishing stories that Pentagon leadership may perceive as unfavorable or unflattering, in direct contravention of Supreme Court precedent,” the Times said in its 97-page complaint.

A Pentagon press credential is not required to cover the military per se; the Times and other major news outlets have continued to report on the Pentagon’s actions and policies since October. What it does provide is access to the Pentagon itself—the physical structure, not the metonym—where reporters can take part in briefings, ask questions at press conferences, or even interact with Pentagon officials in the hallways.

Among the new reasons that a reporter could lose their Pentagon press credential is if they receive, publish, or “[solicit]” any “unauthorized” material, even if that material is not formally classified as secret in any way. According to the Times, Pentagon officials have signaled that they will interpret “solicitation” as broadly as possible.

“The Pentagon has made clear that lawful, routine newsgathering techniques—asking questions of government employees and interviewing them for stories—whether on or off Pentagon grounds could, in the Department’s view, ‘constitute a solicitation that could lead to revocation’ of their [credentials],” the Times claimed in its complaint. “But such communications are a core journalistic practice and a public good—the kind of basic source work that led to some of the most important news stories in history, including the Pentagon Papers.”

The result of the policy, which went into effect in mid-October, appears to reflect its intent. Major news organizations have been driven from the Pentagon rather than agree to terms that could compromise their journalistic independence. In their place, the Trump administration has credentialed a wave of pro-MAGA and pro-Trump media outlets and personalities.

Konrad, to his credit, appears to be much more journalistic than some of his newfound colleagues. Other members of the newly credentialed Pentagon press corps include MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell, a fervent Trump booster; the National Pulse’s Raheem Kassan, who has described his publication as “basically an industry mag/site for MAGA world”; former Project Veritas activist and right-wing stunt interviewer James O’Keefe; and so on. Disgraced former Congressman Matt Gaetz was even seen at a recent briefing.

The turnover comes at a fraught moment for the Pentagon and for Hegseth himself. The secretary of defense is under a rare moment of bipartisan scrutiny on Capitol Hill for his role in a series of Caribbean boat strikes. The Pentagon has justified the strikes by claiming they were part of anti-drug operations; critics have described them as illegal without congressional authorization and, in some cases, as potential war crimes.

There is no shortage of questions for reporters to ask. Who exactly ordered the killing of two survivors of a boat strike in the Caribbean in September, and why? Why is it “seditious” for Arizona Senator Mark Kelly and other lawmakers to remind troops to not follow illegal orders when Hegseth made similar assertions in 2016? Why is the Pentagon pursuing policies that will disproportionately drive Black soldiers out of the military?

At the crux of the lawsuit is that the Pentagon is engaging in viewpoint discrimination, which is generally forbidden by the First Amendment. Defense Department officials are not required to give out any press credentials at all, nor must they grant access to the Pentagon building itself. The CIA, for obvious reasons, does not have an on-site press corps at Langley, for example. Once access is granted, however, the Times argued it must comply with the First Amendment.

As is their habit, Trump officials have made the Times’ job fairly easy when it comes to proving intent. “Indeed, Department officials have made clear their viewpoint discriminatory aim in promulgating and implementing the Policy,” the Times explained. “Department officials have publicly derided journalists who declined to sign the Acknowledgment as ‘activists’ and ‘propagandists’ who spread ‘lies … to the American people,’ while praising individuals approved to receive [credentials] under the Policy as free from ‘a biased agenda.’”

The Pentagon’s up-is-down narrative only underscores its goal: to replace an independent and skeptical press corps with a group of supine loyalists who, the administration apparently hopes, will uncritically distribute whatever they are told or face swift revocation of access. This would be a troubling shift for any of the official press corps in D.C., but it is particularly disturbing for the military in a constitutional republic. Fortunately, the First Amendment is made of sterner stuff than that.

Transcript: The State Where Trump Voters Have Serious Buyer’s Remorse - 2025-12-05T11:00:00Z

This is a lightly edited transcript of the December 3 edition of Right Now With Perry Bacon. You can watch the video here or by following this show on YouTube or Substack.


Perry Bacon: This is The New Republic show Right Now. I’m the host, Perry Bacon. I’m honored to be joined this morning by Mallory McMorrow. She’s a state senator from the great state of Michigan. She joined the state Senate in 2019. As you probably know, she’s now running for the U.S. Senate, one of three leading Democrats in what’s going to be an open seat, big race, big swing state. So, welcome. Thanks for coming here.

State Senator Mallory McMorrow: Happy to be here. Hi everybody who’s joining.

Bacon: So I’m going to start off not in Michigan, but in Tennessee, where on Tuesday this week we had this special election for the House in a seat that was very, very pro-Trump. Strong candidate for the Democrats, and she lost by a much, much [smaller margin]—I think it was like seven or eight in a district that was going to be 25 points pro Republican. So the question I’m asking is: Are we in a moment where we can be a little bit happy that whatever we felt like this time in November last year, the country has seen Trump govern and the country is not necessarily that happy about that? Do you see that in Michigan too—signs of some kind of, a little bit of buyer’s remorse, maybe?

McMorrow: Oh, absolutely. Between the elections across the country from a few weeks ago to the results in Tennessee to what we’re feeling on the ground in Michigan, first of all, the answer is: Yes. We are allowed to be happy. Happiness is a form of resistance. But we also can’t throw our arms up before we run through the finish line. I feel like that’s something that we do a little too often. So, people are feeling buyer’s remorse. They’re frustrated; they’re watching what Trump is doing—building a ballroom while he is cutting off SNAP benefits—and they’re recognizing, This is not what I voted for. But they need to see an alternative. So this is the moment to lean in, to run harder. We got a long way to the midterms, but the energy is there to have a really good cycle.

Bacon: How does it play out in Michigan? Like, you saw in Virginia, for example, the federal workers being laid off is obviously a big thing that happens there. It’s a direct result of his agenda. How does that play out in Michigan, where I assume there are federal workers, I’m not denying the obvious, but are there industries or particular groups of people you talk to who are like, I cannot believe this shit, or that kind of thing?

McMorrow: Yeah, I mean, I can tell you the SNAP cutoff was real. We started getting emails to my office, my senate district. I represent northwest Detroit through some of the Oakland County suburbs here. And just a few days before, emails of people saying, He’s not really going to cut this off, is he? He’s not really going to spike these ACA subsidies? When people start to feel it, when they get notices saying, Your benefits are going to get cut off. When people started logging in for open enrollment and seeing their premiums were going up not just 10 or 20 percent—which is a lot—but in some cases, people were sending me screenshots of their premiums 10 times what they were previously. People are really feeling it, and that is the impact on the ground. And then when people see—you’re standing in the grocery line, you see somebody trying to swipe their SNAP card. It’s not going through. They have to go put the groceries back on the shelf. People are pissed off, especially knowing the government is supposed to work for us, not cutting off SNAP benefits so you can give another tax break to billionaires.

Bacon: We’re in this context where everyone’s talking about affordability—even Republicans who were not talking about it six or seven months ago. But I wanted to make sure that it doesn’t become a buzzword. So in a certain sense, I want to hear: When you are campaigning, you’re talking about affordability. What is your, Mallory, what is your affordability agenda?

McMorrow: Yeah, I think that’s a great point. Because you can’t just be talking in buzzwords. You have to make it real. I was at a UA training facility—union hall training facility—talking to apprentices. This is something that I’ve been doing, is going all across the state, not just to meet with union leadership. I’m saying, put me in the room with younger people, people who are just starting out in their careers. And I was talking to this younger guy—early twenties, working hard. He is in the union, he’s doing well, wants to buy a house, and he told me he’d been looking for six months on every house he was trying to buy. He was way too late on putting in an offer. People were coming in with all-cash offers. And he just couldn’t find something. So he told me he was finally excited to buy a house just because a friend of his dad’s happened to have a house, and he knew about it before it was going on the market. So affordability is cost. It’s also access.

When we talk about housing, it’s making sure there’s enough housing supply and that you can afford it, and you’re not competing with people who are parachuting in with all-cash offers. When we’re talking about health care, we’re making sure you can go to see your doctor and you’re not being surprised on the back end with a 10x increase of your insurance premiums or a copay that you didn’t expect. We have Mike Rogers, who’s the likely Republican nominee here, who was caught on a hot mic making fun of the price of coffee going up. He said, Oh, the Democrats are saying coffee’s going up. Who cares? Who cares? In the United States of America, you’re telling me you can’t have a cup of coffee in the morning? I’m sorry, go fuck yourself. Like, that is a real thing that people are feeling.

Bacon: One thing I have been thinking about is, like, we’ve had this age divide in the party. I’ll talk about age—and I usually would not discuss people’s age in a public setting—but I think it’s relevant. You’ve talked about a new generation; you’re 39. That is younger than a lot of—unfortunately, that’s half the age of many of our leading members of Congress. It’s something you don’t see in most other countries. Talk about—I’m reluctant to—some of my favorite members of Congress, Elizabeth Warren’s a great member of Congress in my view, who leads and who seems very competent.  So age is not necessarily—and there are some younger members who I would say are not great—but age is not everything. Age is a number, but I think it’s more than that. Why is it important, and why do you think it’s important to have younger faces for the Democratic Party?

McMorrow: I think for a couple of reasons. Number one, we need our elected officials to be reflective of the people that they represent. And what’s true is that, by and large, Congress is significantly older than the average American. In another one of these apprenticeship meetings, I had an apprentice just expressing so much frustration, and she said, “Everybody there is 80. When is the last time any of them applied for a job? Like, actually filled out a job application, went through the process?” And she said, “When’s the last time any of them even drove their own car?” So that’s not just age, but that is bringing your own lived experience into the role.

I’m a mom of a 4-year-old. A few weeks ago—my husband and I totally screwed up the last day of summer school and the first day of regular school and completely messed up the weeks. So we’re trying to patch together five different babysitters over five different days so we could maintain two full-time jobs and a statewide campaign. That’s something that I’m living that people can see themselves in. And look, you can do that at any age, so long as you stay in touch with your voters and you’re really plugged in to know what people are going through.

Because the reality is, it’s just different for Millennials and Gen Z than it was for our parents’ generation. My dad stayed with his first company for 30 years. The average Millennial and Gen Z is going to have to get a new job every couple of years. We don’t have the same job security. It costs significantly more. The average new home price adjusted for inflation for my parents’ generation was $200,000. Now it’s $450,000. The idea that the average new homebuyer is now over 40 years old is just a very different reality, and voters want to know that you understand that, and that when you go to Washington, you’re going to be bringing their challenges with you to actually make life better for them.

Bacon: So it’s not necessarily that 70-year-olds are not internet-friendly—though that’s sometimes true, as I experience when I do this Substack Live stuff. But your point is that it’s not just a technology [issue], it’s maybe more of a lived experience [issue]: How much financial security do you have? They’re out of touch—is the key here. And any age relates to that, is what we’re getting at in some ways?

McMorrow: I think so. There is a digital piece to it, and there’s a communication piece. As I’m getting all across the state, what is true is that more and more people are getting their news from social media. We’re having this conversation right now on Substack, and you can’t put your head in the sand and pretend that these outlets don’t exist. I was talking to a sitting senator last week, and she mentioned, Look, you can be on a YouTube show that has a million viewers, versus maybe your MSNBC hit—maybe there’s a hundred thousand people. And that’s not to say that that’s not valuable, but it’s a different audience. And you also need to know how to use these tools, how to reach people.

So there’s the communication aspect, the digital aspect, and also the lived experience aspect. And again, it’s just making sure that when you look at our federal officials, on the whole, you have an equal representation of all of the people who are represented so that we can all lean on our lived experience. I can bring my own lived experience as a Millennial and a mom, and learn from the older members and what they’re going through and how we can collectively push forward policy that helps everybody.

Bacon: We just had this health care crisis, and during this health care crisis, do you think the solution is more Obamacare, improved; some kind of Obamacare plus some kind of public option, or Medicare for all? Do you have a distinction between those three things? Which one is preferable to you? Which one is more achievable? I’m just curious how you see that issue.

McMorrow: Yeah. Look, I’ve been now in office for going on eight years, and what I know is that policy work is never done. So I think when we hear Medicare for all, sometimes it comes across as this purity test slogan—as if we wave a magic wand and that it’s all fixed. I was talking with one of the policy advisors who worked with Senator Kennedy on the Affordable Care Act over the last week, and he told me—he’s like, look, if Senator Kennedy were still with us today, he would’ve said the next day: “We keep working on it. It’s not done.” You’re not done when the bill is signed. We now have three states—Colorado, Nevada, and Washington—who have implemented public options, and they have seen cost savings. It is starting to work in those states. You look at a state like Vermont that tried to just shift to a single-payer system in one fell swoop, and 15 years ago, they abandoned it because they just couldn’t make the math and implementation work.

So I’m somebody that supports a public option. Especially as a Millennial, thinking that your health care is going to be tied to your job, I just think, is an outdated notion, especially for people who don’t have the same job security that we used to have. But I also want us to refocus the argument. We talk so much about insurance—How are you going to pay for it?—and we’re missing the fact that all of these arguments are still about: How do you pay for a fundamentally broken system? People don’t have time to build a relationship with your doctor. People don’t trust medical experts anymore because if it takes you six months to get an appointment and then you’re in and out, you don’t have time to ask questions.

There’s a program here in Michigan that I’m really, really proud of. It’s called Rx Kids. It was started by Dr. Mona Hanna, she was the whistleblower of the Flint water crisis, and she’s a pediatrician. She saw the impact of horrible, indefensible government decisions on kids, that’s going to impact them for a lifetime. But she started to think of, how can we improve outcomes for kids? And she created this program called Rx Kids that was piloted in Flint; that’s a cash grant program for new moms. She calls it a cash prescription: $500 upfront, and then a couple hundred bucks every month for, I think, the first two years of a kid’s life. And what she has seen is the outcomes are tremendous. The babies are born at healthier weights. Their brains develop in healthier outcomes. The moms are making it to their doctor’s appointments. They have research now that shows that when you give moms cash, they’re spending it on their babies. They’re buying food, formula, diapers. They’re not missing doctor’s appointments, and they’ve actually seen the birth rate in Flint increase because it turns out when it’s easier to get pregnant, give birth, and have healthier outcomes in the first three years of a baby’s life—when most of the development happens—more people do it and they do it in a healthy way.

So we just passed funding here in our last state budget where we are expanding this program statewide, which is something that I would love to take with me to the federal level. Let’s talk about outcomes. This is a program that the return on investment saves the state so much money over the remedial care that would be required over the lifetime of a child when you can address it upfront. That’s the type of thinking I want to get to. Let’s stop splitting hairs over how we pay for it. Yes, we need to fix our insurance system. We need to make it more affordable for people, but let’s fix the underlying system and focus on outcomes.

Bacon: So this is a campaign. I’m curious about—I feel like in the general election, Michigan is state that’s very competitive, Michigan is a state that the Democrats lost in 2024 and in 2016 as well, and that was a big reason why they lost the election overall.

So talk to me about: When you think of the general election, how will you win? You’re going to campaign, but what are you going to do to bring [in] people who are new voters, who didn’t vote last time, who maybe voted for Trump last time? How do you see yourself appealing to people in a broad way?

McMorrow: You show up and you listen to people. One of the things that we do on my campaign—you can see it on our website, mcmorrowformichigan.com—we’ve got our agenda, but we also have an open call that if you see something missing—we’ve got my agenda and my track record—but if you see something missing, tell me, because the most important thing that your next senator can do is go in with a sense of curiosity.

I came into this from a career in industrial design; my entire career was about identifying problems, coming up with a thousand different solutions, testing them, focus-grouping them, and working together to come up with the best solution. That’s what I want to do as the next senator, and that just requires getting in rooms with people.

Here’s what I know: In this primary, when we started out, I was the dark horse in this race. I’m a state senator. I’ve never run statewide before, like one of my candidates, and I’m not currently a sitting federal official, like one of the other candidates. So I knew I had to build up name recognition. I started out in early polling at around 12 percent. I was trailing in third. I am now in a dead heat for the front-runner position, and that’s because we do more than a dozen events every single week. We’re showing up. We’re doing this brewery tour where it’s open to the public. You can ask whatever you want. We have these back-and-forth conversations. The more people get to know me, the more they learn about our track record in the legislature, where we’ve actually delivered on every single issue that we care about, and they hear about this approach. They like it, they get it, and that’s also a stark contrast to Mike Rogers, who is a multimillionaire who moved back to Michigan from Florida last year just to run for Senate. He’s going to come in and be a rubber stamp for Trump, say he knows everything. And I think being a little more humble and saying, you have experiences that I might not know about. Tell me about your life. What’s going on? What problems do you need to solve? And then I’m going to bring that as my agenda as the next senator from Michigan.

Bacon: Let me follow up with two things. First of all, I like the fact that you didn’t say rural people or Hispanics—you didn’t do that, which I think is good, because I think, not just in terms of race but in general, we tend to categorize people too much. But talk about that a little bit. Your electorate is people who live in Michigan—that’s who you’re trying to reach, of all kinds.

McMorrow: Totally. It’s a state of 10 million people. We’ve got to go talk to everybody, and I think, very candidly to your exact question: The Democrats have micro-targeted ourselves to death. And it felt like over the last few years we’ve sort of tried to stitch together a policy agenda that gives everybody a little something. Like, if you’re a woman, you must care about abortion. If you’re a Latino, you must care about immigration.

People have shared goals and values. People want to buy a house. You want a career that you love that gives you fulfillment, that not only allows you to pay your bills but save up for retirement. You want to go on vacation; you want to start a family. People have hopes and dreams that are the same, whether you’re in Detroit or Grand Rapids or Flint, or the Upper Peninsula, or Macomb County, Hillsdale, wherever you are. The job of the senator is not to try to slice and dice and figure out little bits and pieces for different types of people. But we’re Michiganders. The next senator should represent Michigan.

Bacon: I prepped, but I didn’t recall—I actually didn’t look up—what your profession was. And so when you said industrial designer, I don’t totally know what that means, but I know it’s not lawyer. And so I was excited about—no offense to the attorneys I know, including the one I’m married to—but I was excited about the potential. We probably need a few less lawyers and a few people who’ve done anything else in Congress. But talk about that from your perspective.

McMorrow: Yeah. OK. So, industrial design: Basically every product that you design... interact with is designed by an industrial designer. An industrial designer is sort of that cross between art and engineering. So I went to school for a degree in industrial design. I always wanted to be a car designer. It was my lifelong dream. I actually designed a concept car that we built full-scale at an auto show when I was still in college. I got to give a press conference about it. And in normal times, that would’ve set me up for success. But I graduated in 2008, so I was living in the backseat of my car and couldn’t find a job. But eventually I became a senior designer over global branding and licensing for Hot Wheels at Mattel. There’s a Hot Wheels car that has my name on it, if we can see right at the bottom there. And then I worked in design, media, and advertising, but I think you’re exactly right.

It’s not just diversity in age that we need in our elected officials; it’s also career and background. I’m somebody who, for most of my working life, worked at a company—which is how most people are employed. So I understand what that’s like and can bring that in here. But also my career has always been about storytelling and problem-solving, and that’s very different than, you know, I love lawyers too. Lawyers are great, but lawyers are trained to argue their position. And what if your position is wrong? For design, there’s a willingness to bring everybody together to find the solution—recognizing it might not be yours, it might come from an unexpected place, but that collectively, together, there is a solution out there, and designers are trained to be curious enough to find what that is.

Bacon: Alright, great answer. And Mallory McMorrow, thanks for joining me. This was great. I’ve enjoyed a lot, understood and learned more about industrial engineering—or industrial design. So I’m excited about that. Thanks for joining me. I appreciate it.

McMorrow: Yeah, thanks Perry.

Trump Official Fights for His Life as Fox News Grills Him on Economy - 2025-12-04T21:32:02Z

Director of the National Economic Council Kevin Hassett is fighting for his life trying to put a positive spin on the latest economic data—and even Fox News isn’t having it.

Fox host Martha MacCallum asked Hassett on Thursday about the brutal new layoff numbers from consulting firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas. “Year-to-date job cuts show an increase of 54 percent,” MacCallum asked Hassett. “That seems like a troubling number. What’s your take on it?”

Hassett waffled, claiming that jobs were in flux. “Don’t forget that there’s hires and there’s fires, there’s separations and new jobs, and so net job creation for the year is very positive. But the flow of jobs in and out is a little bit higher, there’s a little bit more turnover. A lot of times that happens because people feel that they’re able to get another job if they leave this job,” Hassett said.

Hassett seems not to realize that the report does not measure the normal ebb and flow of people choosing to leave a job, but job cuts—layoffs. Layoffs this year have surpassed one million for the first time since Covid-19.

MacCallum hit Hassett with another unpleasant truth: that despite Hassett’s and the Trump administration’s attempt to spin the affordability crisis, voters still know who’s to blame. Looking at a Fox News poll, MacCallum noted that 76 percent of respondents see the economy as “only fair” or “poor.”

“And then, when we have ‘Who is responsible for current economic conditions, President Trump or President Biden?’ We have Trump at 62 percent.… What would you say to people who are answering the survey that way, Kevin?”

Hassett defaulted to one of the Republicans’ favorite recent scapegoats: the shutdown. “One of the things that we’ve seen, we’ve studied over the last couple of weeks, is that when there’s a government shutdown … the survey data tend[s] to really tank because everyone is in a terrible mood, because Washington can’t work and the government’s shut down, and they’re worried about how bad it’s going to be,” Hassett said.

Right. If even Fox News isn’t convinced, I’m not sure how Hassett thinks he’ll convince the American people.

France’s Macron Warned Other Leaders About Potential Trump Betrayal - 2025-12-04T20:27:00Z

French President Emmanuel Macron warned Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy and other European leaders on a phone call that Donald Trump could betray Ukraine.

A transcript of the Monday call to strategize how to protect Ukraine was leaked to the German newspaper Der Spiegel and published Thursday. Macron, Zelenskiy, German Chancellor Friedrich Merz, NATO Secretary General Mark Rutte, Finnish President Alexander Stubb, and other European leaders all took part and discussed U.S. negotiation efforts to end the Russia-Ukraine war.

“There is a possibility that the U.S. will betray Ukraine on the issue of territory without clarity on security guarantees,” Macron said, noting that there was “a big danger” for Zelenskiy. German leader Merz also expressed his misgivings, telling Zelenskiy that Trump’s handpicked negotiators, Jared Kushner and Steve Witkoff, “are playing games with both you and us.”

While European leaders have expressed their concerns about America’s Ukraine policies, this transcript is the clearest indication of how they feel about the Trump administration and its efforts. The Finnish president has gotten along well with Trump in public but still said, “We must not leave Ukraine and Volodymyr alone with these guys,” referring to Witkoff and Kushner.

“I agree with Alexander that we need to protect Volodymyr,” added NATO Secretary General Rutte.

Late last month, the Trump administration presented a 28-point peace plan to resolve the conflict that was considered a Russian “wish list” and appeared to be translated from Russian. Under that plan, Ukraine would give up substantial territory, refrain from joining NATO, and limit the size of its military.

After Ukraine weighed in, a new plan was released with a shortened 19 points, to which Russia has not agreed. But it seems that Europeans are worried about Trump deferring to Russia and abandoning Ukraine, and, based on past events, who can blame them?

Trump Accidentally Lets Slip Plan to Rename Kennedy Center - 2025-12-04T19:59:05Z

President Donald Trump “accidentally” let slip on Thursday the next target for Trumpification: the Kennedy Center.

“You have a big event on Friday at the Trump-Kennedy Center—op, excuse me. The Kennedy Center,” Trump said with a laugh.

“Pardon me, such a terrible mistake,” he continued, grinning.

Trump’s “terrible mistake” came during a speech at the U.S. Institute of Peace for the signing of a peace agreement between Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo. Coincidentally, the Institute of Peace is the latest building that the president has stamped his name on, even in the midst of a legal battle over who owns the building.

The president is gearing up for a big weekend, with the storied arts institution hosting the World Cup draw on Saturday and then the annual Kennedy Center Honors on Sunday. Trump may receive a special peace prize from FIFA Saturday, and is hosting Sunday’s ceremony—after personally taking over the job of selecting the Kennedy Center’s honorees, one usually done by a bipartisan council.

Trump has already brought financial ruin to the Kennedy Center, and is angling to bring aesthetic ruin as well. If he has his way, reputational ruin won’t be far behind.

Hegseth Defense Collapses as Dems Reveal Horrific Video Strike Details - 2025-12-04T19:51:32Z

Members of Congress were just permitted to view the video of the second boat-bombing strike that’s consuming Washington in controversy, during a classified briefing with Admiral Frank Bradley, who oversaw the operation. What they saw was deeply unnerving. And it pushes Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s story closer to collapse.

Representative Adam Smith, ranking Democrat on the Armed Services Committee, said in an interview that the video of the second strike—which killed two men who’d been clinging to the wreckage of a boat destroyed in an earlier strike—badly undermines Hegseth’s stance in this scandal.

“This did not reduce my concerns at all—or anyone else’s,” Smith told me. “This is a big, big problem, and we need a full investigation.”

Smith said the video shows two men, sitting without shirts, atop a portion of a capsized boat that was still above water. That portion, Smith said, could barely have fit four people.

“It looks like two classically shipwrecked people,” Smith told me. But in the briefing, lawmakers were told that “it was judged that these two people were capable of returning to the fight,” Smith added. He called it a “highly questionable decision that these two people on that obviously incapacitated vessel were still in any kind of fight.”

Lawmakers pressed Bradley for a “considerable period of time” on the obviously incapacitated nature of the two men, Smith says. And the response was deeply unnerving. “The broader assumption that they were operating off of was that the drugs could still conceivably be on that boat, even though you could not see them,” Smith said, “and it was still conceivable that these two people were going to continue on their mission of transmitting those drugs.”

To be clear on what this means: The underlying claim by Trump and the administration is that all of the more than 80 people killed on these boats are waging war against the United States. They are “narco-terrorists,” in this designation. But this very idea—that these people are engaged in armed conflict with our country—is itself broadly dismissed by most legal experts. They should be subject to police action, these experts say, but not summary military execution, and Trump has effectively granted himself the power to execute civilians in international waters.

Yet here it gets even worse. The laws of war generally prohibit the killing of people who are no longer “in the fight” in any meaningful sense, specifically including the shipwrecked. But these lawmakers were told in the closed-door briefing that the two men were still deemed to be “in the fight” by virtue of the fact that there could have been still-transmittable drugs in the capsized and wrecked boat, Smith says. And that those two men sitting atop the wreckage could have continued with their delivery of them.

“The evidence that I’ve seen absolutely demands a further and continued investigation,” Smith told me. “It strains credibility to say that they were still in the fight.”

This badly undermines the story Hegseth has told. He has said that he did not see the two men before the second strike was ordered, suggesting both that he’d gone off to do other things and that the “fog of war” had prevented a clear viewing of the two men.

Obviously what these lawmakers saw contradicts the latter suggestion: The two men were, in Smith’s telling, very visible, so the “fog of war” line appears to be nonsense. And Hegseth’s implication that the strike was justified due to confusion about the men’s status also appears to be in profound doubt.

Republicans who have seen the video have insisted this was all lawful. Senator Tom Cotton, for instance, said it showed the two survivors attempting to flip a boat “loaded with drugs bound for the United States.” But if Smith’s account of the video is correct, that’s in doubt: The boat looked incapacitated, and the drugs weren’t in fact visible.

The military officials stressed in the briefing that Hegseth never directly ordered them to “kill them all,” meaning all the people on board, something that was implied by Washington Post reporting and that Hegseth denied to Trump. And they confirmed that Hegseth didn’t give the direct order for the second strike, Smith says.

But they did say that Hegseth’s declared mission was to kill all 11 people, Smith notes. “It was, ‘Destroy the drugs, kill all 11 people on board,’” Smith told me. “It is not that inaccurate to say that the rules of engagement from Hegseth were, ‘Kill all 11 people on that boat.’” And so, by all indications, that second strike appears to have been ordered to comply with Hegseth’s command.

Smith did confirm that he’s “somewhat satisfied” by the intelligence he saw that the boat originally did have drugs on it. But again, the idea that any of these people, even if they were trafficking drugs, are “in the fight”—in the sense of waging war against the United States—is already indefensible to begin with.

“They have an unbelievably broad definition of what ‘the fight’ is,” Smith said, and in that context, the order to kill all 11 people on the boat, no matter what, looks even worse: “It’s bad.”

Another Democrat, Representative Jim Himes, seconds this interpretation. “You have two individuals in clear distress without any means of locomotion with a destroyed vessel, who were killed by the United States,” he said.

Importantly, Smith told me that he and others urged military officials to release the video. “I think that video should be public,” Smith said, adding that he also wants to see the much-discussed legal memo supposedly authorizing the strikes released as well. But the military officials said public release isn’t their call. So now the pressure should intensify on Trump and Hegseth to authorize release of both.

There’s also been some discussion of radio communications that the two men may have sent for help. The idea is supposed to be that if they could get assistance, they could get back “in the fight,” meaning they were legit targets. But Smith said the officials confirmed to lawmakers they have no recording of these communications. So this piece of support for the Hegseth-Trump stance may not really exist.

Brian Finucane, a former State Department lawyer, says the entire operation is illegal but that a full investigation could establish more clearly whether this particular strike deliberately targeted the men or just targeted the boat. From what we’re now learning from Smith and others, it clearly seems like the former.

“Based on the descriptions of lawmakers, it does sound as if the men were shipwrecked, and targeting them would be a war crime,” Finucane told me. “It sounds like the men were the target.” He said the stories being told by Hegseth and others are now falling apart: “None of these narratives withstand scrutiny.”

Trump Is Now Denying Visas to People Who Worked in Content Moderation - 2025-12-04T19:38:52Z

The Trump administration may revoke H-1B visa eligibility from people who worked in content moderation, fact-checking, and online safety. Their family members would lose visa status as well. 

A cable, dated Tuesday, obtained by Reuters moves U.S. consular officers to increase vetting for these individuals by looking into their résumés and LinkedIn profile pages. 

“If you uncover evidence an applicant was responsible for, or complicit in, censorship or attempted censorship of protected expression in the United States, you should pursue a finding that the applicant is ineligible,” the cable said. This includes working at “social media or financial services companies involved in the suppression of protected expression.”

“You must thoroughly explore their employment histories to ensure no participation in such activities,” the cable read.

The State Department, however, made it sound more like they were going after liberal cyberbullies more than free speech suppressors.

“We do not support aliens coming to the United States to work as censors muzzling Americans,” a spokesperson said. “In the past, the President himself was the victim of this kind of abuse when social media companies locked his accounts. He does not want other Americans to suffer this way. Allowing foreigners to lead this type of censorship would both insult and injure the American people.”  

It’s hard to believe that the State Department is saying that about Donald Trump, who is infamous for his willingness to publicly verbally abuse people online. The policy, however, is very believable, as it aligns with the larger arc of the administration’s free speech suppression efforts, from disappearing Rümeysa Öztürk for writing an op-ed to requiring universities to vet for pro-Palestinian social media posts before awarding student visas.  

Trump Nearly Has a Stroke Trying to Pronounce Names of African Leaders - 2025-12-04T19:37:11Z

Donald Trump insulted the presidents of two countries right before signing a peace deal when he introduced the duo as “courageous leaders”—but couldn’t follow the flattery up with the correct pronunciation of their names.

The U.S. president couldn’t wrap his mouth around the name of Congolese President Felix Tshisekedi or Rwandan President Paul Kagame as the trio met in Washington Thursday to advance a peace deal that could cap 30 years of violence between the brother nations.

“I want to thank the two courageous leaders—they are courageous leaders, they really are courageous leaders, great people. President Ja-secky-theh-eh, of the Democratic Republic of the Congo,” Trump wheezed.

He then introduced Kagame, whose name he spilled out as “President Keh-goo-may.”

Tshisekedi’s name is pronounced Chi-sek-ed-dee. Kagame’s is pronounced Kah-gah-may.

Trump opted to fully skirt attempting Tshisekedi’s name when his speech required it a second time, instead referring to him as “president of DRC.”

It’s far from the first time that Trump has butchered a foreign name. Last month, he messed up the pronunciation of Kazakhstan, a decades-long U.S. ally, while seated right next to the country’s president.

During a White House dinner with Central Asian leaders, Trump claimed that “Ka-ZACK-a-stan” had joined the Abraham Accords, adding a syllable and stressing the wrong one in the country’s name while announcing supposedly new diplomatic ties between Kazakhstan (which is actually pronounced Kahz-uck-stan) and Israel.

And in 2017, Trump famously remarked on the nonexistent country of “Nambia” during a conference with African leaders.

But don’t be fooled: Trump does have a knack for language—so long as it’s the version he made up. When English proves too difficult for the president, he frequently turns to his own inventive terms, such as “bigly” (an abbreviation of big league), “ana-nomish” (an attempt to pronounce anonymous), and “covfefe,” which still no one has been able to decipher.

Zillow Doesn’t Care If Climate Change Destroys Your New Home - 2025-12-04T19:36:41Z

Will we be safer living inland, away from coastal storms? What about forest fires? Should we have children, and if so, how many? Can we handle old age in a flooding basement, or at the end of a dirt road? What if everywhere we love is dangerous?

When we try to plan our lives rationally, the climate crisis stymies us at every turn. There are already so many other factors to consider—where can we find community and work? Where can we afford to live?—and useful information can be hard to come by. Zillow, the real estate listings platform, just made matters worse. In October, The New York Times recently reported, the company ceased publishing climate risk with its listings. The listings platform had only begun this potentially helpful practice last year, using data from First Street, a risk-modeling firm.

For homeowners, failing to consider climate risks could be catastrophic—in fact, it already is. Almost half the homes in the United States are at serious risk from the climate crisis, whether due to flooding, wildfires, hurricanes, heat, or bad air quality. Adding to the problem, while potential homebuyers struggle to obtain data to guide their decisions, the insurance industry does not suffer from challenges of this kind. Insurers are making rational decisions in their own interests, leaving homeowners with insurmountable costs, or even uninsured. State Farm canceled 72,000 home insurance policies last year, leaving those homeowners unprotected in future disasters. And Hurricane Helene inflicted some $200 billion in damages last year, of which, Grist reported, almost none were covered by insurance. While in some cases insurers are refusing to cover risky homes, in others, they are setting prices so high that millions are going without, or getting cheaper, less comprehensive insurance.

The result of all this, the Senate Budget Committee warned a year ago, will be “a collapse in property values with the potential to trigger a full-scale financial crisis.” Early this year, First Street, the firm that provided climate risk data to Zillow before last month, predicted that over the next three decades, Americans would lose nearly $1.5 trillion in assets due to the damage that climate change would wreak on our homes. For many American homeowners, this is a quick path to financial ruin: Their home is their most valuable asset, with home equity accounting for 45 percent of their net worth. The percentage is much higher for Black and Hispanic homeowners, who tend to have much less wealth overall than white homeowners.

You could end up losing much more than an asset. Far from stereotypically risky locations like Tornado Alley or the Gulf Coast, severe weather events exacerbated by climate change now threaten people’s lives everywhere from Brooklyn basements to the Pacific Palisades.

It’s easy to criticize Zillow for holding back this information. But Zillow isn’t in the business of serving the public interest. It’s a for-profit company that makes money by advertising and other services to the real estate industry, which wants people to buy homes. And climate risk isn’t a topic that encourages that.

Homeowners trying to sell their climate-risky properties understandably aren’t wild about the climate ratings, either. This problem will only grow in the coming years; consider all the baby boomers who retired to coastal Florida or North Carolina’s Outer Banks and will one day leave their heirs struggling to sell their imperiled properties, a demographic time bomb of climate and financial peril.

As the Insurance Fairness Project pointed out in a statement on the Times story about Zillow’s change to its ratings, governments should step in and provide this kind of information to potential homebuyers. We need more, not less, information on how the climate crisis might affect our lives, and private companies like Zillow aren’t best placed to provide that.

The Trump administration isn’t likely to help with this, considering its concerted efforts to defund the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA, and other sources of climate research. The president has also repeatedly insisted that climate change is a “scam” and a hoax.” But state and local governments also have a stake in helping homebuyers make informed decisions; risky home choices will potentially put enormous pressure on rescue services, firefighting, and government relief agencies, adding costs to the inevitably horrific disruptions of the climate crisis, and devastating local economies. They could provide some of this information too.

Of course, that’s not the only solution. Home builders and developers should not build in the most climate-vulnerable places, and regulation to that end would make sense. As Harvard Business School researchers understatedly pointed out this summer, that idea “has not caught on.” But it’s an important component of reducing both individual and society-wide risk, along with designing neighborhoods and homes to be more climate resilient, upgrading sewer systems, and using stronger materials to build, rather than doing everything cheaply for a false sense of affordability.

Of course, addressing the climate crisis at the same time, to help prevent its worst effects, would be even better. But we probably won’t see much effort on that front under this administration, no matter how many Trump voters watch their wealth crumble into the sea.

Trump, 79, Falls Asleep Again During Peace Agreement Signing - 2025-12-04T19:25:50Z

Days after Donald Trump fell asleep during a televised Cabinet meeting, the president on Thursday again dozed off during a ceremony to mark the signing of a peace agreement between Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Trump was visibly closing his eyes as Rwandan President Paul Kagame spoke from the podium at the ceremony inside the U.S. Institute of Peace building, his hands clasped and his head drooping while he sat at a table to the left. Trump continued to doze after Kagame concluded his remarks and DRC President Félix Tshisekedi made his way to the podium, trying in vain to pay attention to each speaker.

Thankfully for the 79-year-old Trump, the two leaders spoke for less than 15 minutes, much shorter than Tuesday’s two-hour Cabinet meeting. One would think he’d be able to last longer at an event with more press, especially international outlets, at a building that he took over with questionable legality and plastered his name on.

Last week, The New York Times reported about Trump’s physical and mental decline, angering the president. But if he keeps falling asleep during public appearances, he really has nothing to argue about, especially considering the untold reasons why he needed an MRI and extra tests at his last doctor’s visit.

Vance Sent 2:30 a.m. Text as Officials Tried to Cover Up Signalgate - 2025-12-04T17:59:26Z

JD Vance hit up his buddies in the Signal chat used to coordinate bombing Yemen with a late-night plea for companionship—hours after the chat’s existence was revealed to the public by Atlantic editor Jeff Goldberg.

“This chat’s kind of dead,” Vance texted at 2:26 a.m. “Anything going on?”

Screenshot of Signalgate messages on March 25

A report from the Pentagon inspector general released Thursday reveals new details about what the chat’s members did in the days and hours after March 24, when Goldberg published that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth had inadvertently texted him classified information about the Trump administration’s war plans.

The vice president’s “u up?”-style message, which we are generously reading as a joke, was sent in the wee hours of the morning of March 25.

Where Vance chose to make light of the possible treason, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent appeared to have another aim: to cover the group’s tracks. According to the screenshot, Bessent shortened the time it would take for messages to disappear from the chat to eight hours. Goldberg reported that the messages had previously been set to disappear after either one or four weeks, already a potential violation of federal law.

Other officials changed their profile names: Secretary of State Marco Rubio changed his screen name from “MAR” to “MR,” CIA Director John Ratfcliffe shortened his name to simply “John,” and deputy chief of staff Sephen Miller, “S M,” changed his name to “SM 76.”

It’s unclear why these obviously identifiable (and already identified) officials would change their names, or attempt to make their messages disappear faster—the photo of the chat from the report was taken on March 27, leaving only a day for fast-deleting messages to be sent and then erased—but they obviously were scrambling.

Hegseth Gave Signalgate Probe Little as Possible—and Still Got Wrecked - 2025-12-04T17:19:51Z

The Office of the Inspector General’s Signalgate report is out, and it does not fully exonerate Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, regardless of his supporters’ claims.

Hegseth overwhelmingly declined to cooperate with the OIG’s report on his early-term scandal, refusing to hand over the personal phone he used to make war plans over Signal and refusing to sit for an interview. Nonetheless, the report found that Hegseth not only violated the DOD’s protocol about using personal devices for sensitive information, he also endangered the lives of American troops in the process.

“We concluded that the Secretary sent sensitive, nonpublic, operational information that he determined did not require classification over the Signal chat on his personal cell phone,” the 84-page report reads.

Hegseth also sent messages on Signal detailing “the quantity and strike times of manned U.S. aircraft over hostile territory” just hours before the strike on the Houthis. “Using a personal cell phone to conduct official business and send nonpublic DoD information through Signal risks potential compromise of sensitive DoD information, which could cause harm to DoD personnel and mission objectives,” the OIG continues.

In his defense, Hegseth claimed in a written statement that his Signal messages contained “non-specific general details which I determined, in my sole discretion, were either not classified, or that I could safely declassify.” And yet one of the messages the IG obtained literally reads, “THIS IS WHEN THE FIRST BOMBS WILL DEFINITELY DROP.” Others include exact timestamps of attacks. That all sounds extremely specific.

“If this information had fallen into the hands of U.S. adversaries, Houthi forces might have been able to counter U.S. forces or reposition personnel and assets to avoid planned U.S. strikes,” the report says. “Even though these events did not ultimately occur, the Secretary’s actions created a risk to operational security that could have resulted in failed U.S. mission objectives and potential harm to U.S. pilots.”

Framing this as a “full exoneration,” of Hegseth, as Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell did Wednesday, is laughable when the phrase “the Secretary did not comply with” followed by a specific DOD protocol is in the report at least eight different times. And yet Hegseth and the administration are acting as if he is being somehow unfairly attacked for planning a bombing over Signal as the head of the Defense Department. This, frankly, should have been an automatic firing.

Read the full report here.

Republican Senators Question Hegseth’s Future as Outrage Grows - 2025-12-04T17:03:29Z

After 83 people have lost their lives in dubiously legal boat strikes in the Caribbean, some prominent Republican senators seem to finally be ready to part ways with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.

Hegseth’s Pentagon was revealed to have levied a second strike against a boat in September in order to kill two survivors of the first attack. The strike, which could be considered a war crime, may be the last straw for Hegseth.

On Thursday, Republican Senator Roger Wicker, chair of the Armed Services Committee, said he had no problem with Hegseth’s conduct regarding the Signal chat where he inadvertently shared classified information about a military operation to a reporter—but stopped short of backing Hegseth completely.

When asked by CNN reporter Manu Raju if he had concerns about Hegseth’s leadership after a watchdog’s report on Signalgate, Wicker said, “We’re continuing to get the facts, but based on this particular allegation, which is now several months old, I think the secretary is in a pretty good position on that.”

“Do you have confidence in him? Would you say that? Could you say if you do?” Raju asked, as Wicker walked away.

Wicker said nothing, and continued down the hall.

Republican Senator Mike Rounds also stopped short of backing the embattled defense secretary, saying that he needs more information to make a call. “We’ll make our decisions based on the facts of the case; we haven’t got the facts yet in front of us in a classified setting,” he told Forbes reporters on Thursday.

Leading members of the House and Senate Armed Services committees heard testimony Thursday from Hegseth’s chosen scapegoat for the second boat strike, Admiral Frank “Mitch” Bradley. At least one lawmaker left that hearing appalled.

Hegseth has claimed that he was not in the room when the double-tap strike was conducted, but that Bradley was following his orders and acted appropriately.

But Thom Tillis, a key Republican senator, told CNN’s Kaitlan Collins Wednesday that Hegseth simply claiming to be out of the room isn’t enough to exonerate him.

“I’ll take at face value right now what Secretary Hegseth said: He said he wasn’t there, he said he was busy doing other things,” Tillis said. “I would assume a part of the record was—what was the other thing that he was doing that was more important than a battle damage assessment over the first strike in the Caribbean?”

Tillis also stood by his claim that whoever was responsible for the second strike should be out of a job. “If someone knowingly launched a second missile at that boat, which led to the deaths of the other two, then they have to be held accountable and they shouldn’t be in whatever role they’re in,” he told Collins.

What We Know About the Suspect in the January 6 Pipe Bombing Case - 2025-12-04T16:51:04Z

Five years after pipe bombs were found near the Democratic National Committee and Republican National Committee headquarters, the FBI has arrested a suspect.

On Thursday morning, Virginia resident Brian Cole was taken into custody by the bureau and charged with placing the bombs on January 5, 2021, the day before Congress was to certify the 2020 presidential election. Some supporters of Donald Trump, who lost to Joe Biden, had other ideas, mounting a riot and insurrection at the Capitol building.

The bombs were placed between 7:30 and 8:30 p.m. the night before the Capitol insurrection but weren’t discovered until 15 hours later. While the bombs did not detonate, they were viable devices that could have seriously injured or killed bystanders. Multiple conspiracy theories about the bombs have proliferated online, including that they were meant to distract law enforcement from responding to the unrest at the Capitol.

Two people familiar with the arrest told MS NOW that Cole has been linked to statements supporting anarchism, but no motive has yet been determined. Solving the pipe bomb case has long been a fixation of FBI Deputy Director Dan Bongino, even before he was appointed to the bureau. As a right-wing commentator and podcaster, Bongino claimed that the FBI was covering up information about the case.

Others on the right, including current FBI Director Kash Patel, have posited that the bombs were an “inside job,” and last month, a right-wing website claimed the suspect was a Capitol Police officer. The arrest may not put those conspiracy theories to bed, as taking five years to solve a rather important case let them proliferate.

The FBI visited over 1,200 residences and businesses, conducted more than 1,000 interviews, combed through 39,000 video files, and examined over 600 tips about the pipe bombs in its long investigation. Maybe now that a suspect has been arrested, the public will have more answers about one of the darkest days in U.S. history.

Top Military Commander Showed Lawmakers Boat Strike Video—and It’s Bad - 2025-12-04T16:25:54Z

Lawmakers were shocked and appalled Thursday after they were shown video footage of the September 2 double tap that killed two survivors of an airstrike in the Caribbean.

Admiral Frank “Mitch” Bradley met behind closed doors with members of the House and Senate in an attempt to defend the Trump administration’s decision to slaughter two individuals who clung to the wreckage of their boat. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff General Dan Caine was also in attendance at the meeting.

Ahead of the meeting, military attorneys claimed that there could be a legitimate explanation for the second strike if Bradley was able to prove the survivors posed a credible threat to U.S. military personnel. But the footage supposedly left no room for doubt that that was not the case.

“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. “You have two individuals [in] clear distress, without any means of locomotion, with a destroyed vessel, [who] were killed by the United States.”

Himes added that, based on his understanding of the Pentagon’s explanation, the survivors were “not in the position to continue their mission in any way.” He noted that Bradley had “confirmed that there had not been a kill them all order, and that there was not an order to grant no quarter,” according to CBS News.

Senator Jack Reed was similarly upset by the classified briefing, telling reporters in a statement that he was “deeply disturbed” by what he saw.

“This briefing confirmed my worst fears about the nature of the Trump Administration’s military activities, and demonstrates exactly why the Senate Armed Services Committee has repeatedly requested—and been denied—fundamental information, documents, and facts about this operation. This must and will be the only beginning of our investigation into this incident,” Reed wrote, adding that the Defense Department must release the “complete, unedited footage” of the airstrike.

Even Republican Senator Rand Paul was incensed by the footage and demanded that it be released. “I think if the public sees images of people clinging to boat debris and being blown up, I think that there is a chance that finally, the public will get interested enough in this to stop this,” he told The Independent reporter Eric Michael Garcia.

He also demanded that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth testify before Congress, and even called out some of his colleagues’ reticence to do anything about the strikes. “I think that Congress, if they had any kind of gumption at all would not be allowed administration to summarily execute people that are suspected of a crime,” he said.

But not everyone that attended the briefing seemed to walk away with the same understanding. Despite the clarified details, Republican Senator Tom Cotton argued that “the first strike, the second strike, and the third and the fourth strike on September 2nd  were entirely lawful and needful,” and that the sequential attacks were “exactly what we’d expect our military commanders to do.”

Since early September, the United States has destroyed at least 20 small boats traversing the Caribbean Sea that Trump administration officials have deemed—without an investigation or interdiction—were smuggling drugs. At least 83 people have been killed in the attacks.

The attacks have been condemned by U.S. lawmakers on both sides of the aisle and foreign human advocates alike, including the U.N. human rights chief, who said in October that the strikes “violate international human rights law.” The needless deaths have also pushed congressional Republicans to consider whether Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth should be stripped of his position altogether.

Donald Trump, however, is still backing Hegseth. The president has so far brushed off the widespread anger at his Defense Department pick, telling inquiring reporters Wednesday that “this is war.”

This story has been updated.

Trump Pardons Sports Executive His Own Justice Department Charged - 2025-12-04T15:52:58Z

President Donald Trump has given a full and unconditional pardon to entertainment executive Tim Leiweke—whom his own Justice Department indicted on charges of “orchestrating a conspiracy to rig the bidding process for an arena at a public university” in Austin.

The pardon is dated Tuesday.

Leiweke was charged in July of this year. “As outlined in the indictment, the Defendant rigged a bidding process to benefit his own company and deprived a public university and taxpayers of the benefits of competitive bidding,” assistant Attorney General Abigail Slater said at the time. Leiweke faced a maximum of 10 years in prison and a $1 million fine. He pleaded not guilty.

In a statement following Trump’s pardon, Leiweke said, “This has been a long and difficult journey for my wife, my daughter, and me. The President has given us a new lease on life with which we will be grateful and good stewards.”

This comes alongside Trump’s pardon for Texas Democrat Henry Cuellar, whom the Biden Justice Department previously charged with allegedly accepting roughly $600,000 in bribes from an oil and gas company owned by Azerbaijan’s government and a bank headquartered in Mexico City.

Cuellar’s and Leiweke’s pardons show that Trump has no qualms about white-collar crime. He may not even see it as a legitimate crime at all. He pardoned Ross Ulbricht, the Silk Road CEO who was serving a life sentence on charges of conspiracy to distribute narcotics and money laundering. He pardoned Las Vegas city councilwoman and state lawmaker Michele Fiore, who was convicted of seven counts relating to wire fraud and using government funds for her own plastic surgery. He pardoned former Culpeper County, Virginia, Sheriff Scott Jenkins, who was convicted of taking more than $75,000 in bribes in exchange for deputy appointments.

These are just a few of the shady business folk Trump has pardoned at whim. Only time will tell just how many more of them get off scot-free before his term is up.

Trump Jr.-Backed Company Cashes In on Massive Pentagon Contract - 2025-12-04T15:40:22Z

A start-up funded by a Donald Trump Jr.-backed venture capital firm has been awarded a $620 million contract from the Pentagon, reports the Financial Times.

Vulcan Elements, a small rare earths start-up, will receive the funds as part of a larger deal from the Defense Department. This $620 million loan is the largest made by the Pentagon’s Office of Strategic Capital.

It’s far from the first time Don Jr. has reaped the benefits of his daddy’s presidency. Vulcan is backed by the 1789 fund, where Trump Jr. sits on the board. Four of the companies in the 1789 fund’s portfolio have been awarded government contracts just this year, to the tune of more than $735 million overall, according to the FT.

According to Trump Jr., he plays a big role in where the fund spends its money: In February, he told the FT that he was “very involved in the strategic decisions regarding where to invest our resources” at 1789.

And just a few months ago, it was reported that the Pentagon awarded a contract to an obscure drone company—where Trump Jr. happened to be an adviser, with a multimillion-dollar stake, since November 2024.

This fund is just one more avenue for the Trump family to make money off the presidency. From newfound crypto billions to global real estate deals made by the Trump Organization, we are far from the days in which presidents had to relinquish their peanut farms.

Johnson Swears In Republican in Record Time After 50-Day Delay for Dem - 2025-12-04T15:27:38Z

House Speaker Mike Johnson swore in Matt Van Epps to Congress Thursday morning, less than two days after Van Epps won a special election for the Tennessee 7th congressional district seat.

The time it took to swear in Van Epps, a Republican, was much shorter than the seven weeks Johnson waited before swearing in Representative Adelita Grijalva, a Democrat. Grijalva won a special election to represent Arizona’s 7th congressional district on September 23 to replace her father, Representative Raúl Grijalva, who passed away in March. She was only sworn in on November 12.

Johnson initially refused to swear in the younger Grijalva for days, and once the government shut down at the beginning of October, claimed that he couldn’t do so until that impasse was resolved. The more likely reason was that Grijalva would have been (and later became) the deciding vote on a petition that would trigger a House vote on the government releasing the Jeffrey Epstein files.

Van Epps’s vote is critical for the narrow House Republican majority, and since Congress and President Trump have now approved the Epstein files, Johnson doesn’t see the need to drag his feet. Van Epps, a former commissioner of the Tennessee Department of General Services and Army helicopter pilot, was endorsed by Trump. However, he defeated his Democratic challenger Aftyn Behn by a much smaller margin of victory than expected, leading national Republicans to worry about the 2026 midterm elections.

This story has been updated.

Top Military Commander Plans Wild Defense of Second Boat Strike - 2025-12-04T15:27:24Z

The two survivors who clung to the wreckage of the Pentagon’s September 2 airstrike on a boat in the Caribbean were still actively trying to advance their drug mission—at least, that’s what Admiral Frank “Mitch” Bradley is expected to tell Congress Thursday.

Bradley plans to spill how he and his advisers determined that the pair of survivors were still aboard the damaged vessel alongside packages of narcotics, supposedly making them legitimate targets for a second attack, according to defense officials that spoke with The Wall Street Journal.

Bradley is meeting lawmakers for a closed-door briefing Thursday as pressure ramps up in Washington to hold someone accountable for the merciless killing. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has faced enormous heat over the last week for the September double tap. But in an apparent effort to save Hegseth and his post from further scrutiny, the White House has redirected blame toward Bradley, who was in charge of the Joint Special Operations Command at the time of the attack.

Since early September, the U.S. has destroyed at least 20 small boats traversing the Caribbean that Trump administration officials deemed—without an investigation or interdiction—were smuggling drugs. At least 83 people have been killed in the attacks.

The September 2 attack was the first such attack. But it is also the only known instance in which survivors were deliberately targeted and killed.

The entire debacle could be swept under the rug if Bradley’s account is deemed accurate. Geoffrey Corn, a former military lawyer who now directs the Center for Military Law and Policy at Texas Tech, told the Journal that if the survivors were genuinely capable of threatening U.S. military personnel after the first strike, then the Defense Department would have a “legitimate explanation for the second strike.”

The attacks have been condemned by U.S. lawmakers on both sides of the aisle and foreign human advocates alike, including the U.N. human rights chief, who said in October that the strikes “violate international human rights law.” The needless deaths have also pushed congressional Republicans to consider whether Hegseth should be stripped of his position altogether.

Donald Trump, however, is still backing Hegseth. The president has so far brushed off the widespread anger at his Defense Department pick, telling inquiring reporters Wednesday that “this is war.”

Now We Know Why Top Navy Admiral Suddenly Resigned Under Hegseth - 2025-12-04T15:07:43Z

Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth pushed out four-star Admiral Alvin Holsey after months of conflict.

The Wall Street Journal reports that, contrary to Hegseth’s announcement in October that Holsey was retiring a year into his tenure, the defense secretary asked Holsey to resign. Tensions between the two began since Donald Trump’s inauguration in January and increased with the administration’s campaign to bomb boats in the waters near Central America, ostensibly to target boats smuggling drugs.

Holsey was concerned about the legality of the strikes, former officials told the Journal, and soon afterward, Hegseth announced the admiral’s retirement. The move to push out a highly decorated Naval officer raises questions about whether military leaders are on board with the boat bombings, and if their concerns are even being heard.

While other military leaders have been pushed out during Trump’s second term, Holsey is the only commander to be dismissed during the current military operation in Central America.

“Having [Holsey] leave at this particular moment, at the height of what the Pentagon considers to be the central action in our hemisphere, is just shocking,” Todd Robinson, who was assistant secretary for international narcotics and law enforcement affairs until January, told the Journal.

Holsey’s background lends itself to the military’s current operation. A former Navy helicopter pilot, the admiral has experience in intercepting drug shipments and had expressed interest in increasing interceptions. In his confirmation hearing in September 2024, Holsey told senators that he wanted a stronger approach to “dismantle the drug cartels.”

“My first deployment to the Southcom area of responsibility was over 33 years ago conducting counterdrug missions,” the admiral said at the time.

Hegseth and Holsey were on good terms at times during the past year, with the admiral preparing military plans after Trump said he wanted to reclaim the Panama Canal. At other times, though, Hegseth thought Holsey was a source of leaks from the DOD. But by the time the boat strikes began in September, the secretary had already lost confidence in the admiral, according to the Journal.

Holsey’s last day is December 12, and he has not spoken publicly about stepping down. But Hegseth is facing increased scrutiny over the legality of the strikes from Congress, including Republicans, and the admiral’s dismissal is going to reflect poorly on Trump and his secretary of defense.

Layoffs Hit Highest Since Covid-19 Even as Trump Brags About Economy - 2025-12-04T15:02:28Z

The U.S. economy has seen 1.1 million layoffs this year—the most since the Covid-19 pandemic—even as President Donald Trump constantly proclaims us to be the “hottest country anywhere in the world.” 

Consulting firm Challenger, Gray & Christmas reported Thursday that there were 71,321 layoffs in November. This brings the year’s total up to 1.17 million, which is a whopping 54 percent higher than last year and the highest layoffs have been since the pandemic hit the economy in 2020. Employers have also seen a 35 percent decrease in hires from last year. 

This negative economic news comes as new Politico polling shows that nearly half the country thinks that the cost of living is the worst they’ve ever seen—and they hold Trump directly responsible for it. 

Trump ran on affordability, on helping working-class Americans left behind by globalization. But as his economy sputters, he continues to attack the very notion, calling affordability a “Democrat scam.” 

If the scale continues to tip in the wrong direction while Americans continue to struggle with higher prices and stagnating wages, it could spell a very rough 2026 midterm for the GOP.  

NY Times Sues Pete Hegseth for Kicking Them Out of the Pentagon - 2025-12-04T14:26:23Z

America’s news media companies are not taking the Pentagon’s new press restrictions laying down.

The New York Times named several key Trump officials in a sweeping lawsuit Thursday, including Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and Pentagon spokesman Sean Parnell. The newspaper argued that the Pentagon’s new rules—which effectively forced out dozens of highly lauded legacy journalists and replaced them with fawning, far-right upstarts—actually “violates the Constitution’s guarantees of due process, freedom of speech and freedom of the press.”

The suit further argued that the punitive policy violated the First Amendment by seeking “to restrict journalists’ ability to do what journalists have always done—ask questions of government employees and gather information to report stories that take the public beyond official pronouncements.”

Under Hegseth’s new rules, credentialed Pentagon reporters were required to pledge that they would not report on anything from the department that had not been approved for official release. The new policy, announced in October, forced journalists to choose between reporting government-sponsored propaganda or having their press credentials revoked.

Dozens of journalists walked away from their desks at the Pentagon as a result, refusing to capitulate to Hegseth’s new standard. In turn, Pentagon officials offered those newly vacated spots to conservative outlets ideologically aligned with the Trump administration, including One America News, The Federalist, and LindellTV, a new outlet formed by Mike Lindell, the My Pillow CEO who practically bankrupted himself by broadcasting conspiracies about the 2020 presidential election.

The Times’ legal complaint seeks a court order to suspend Hegseth’s new rules, as well as a declaration that the initiative “targeting the exercise of First Amendment rights” was illegal.

In a press briefing Wednesday, a senior attorney for the Times said that the paper had discussed a joint lawsuit with other news organizations similarly affected by the policy, but ultimately decided to proceed alone.

Bombshell Report Undercuts Pete Hegseth’s Main Defense for Boat Strike - 2025-12-04T14:07:27Z

The Defense Department’s decision to kill the two survivors of a boat bombing in the Caribbean Sea—which may very well be a war crime—was all part of Secretary Pete Hegseth’s contingency plan, The New York Times reported.

The Hegseth-approved plan involved rescuing any helpless survivors and killing them if they tried to contact a “cartel” member. The Defense Department is alleging that the men killed on September 2 did the latter, initiating the second half of the contingency plan.

The White House has insisted the violence is justified, as the administration accuses the boats of trafficking narcotics to the U.S. from Venezuela and Colombia. Of course, the government has yet to provide evidence that the men they murdered contacted a cartel, or that they were trafficking drugs at all. But this plan once again begs the question: Who was actually responsible here?

Hegseth has made a point to shift the blame for the actual decision to strike the boat a second time—the potential war crime—onto Admiral Frank “Mitch” Bradley.

“I didn’t stick around [after the first strike],” Hegseth told reporters at Donald Trump’s Tuesday Cabinet meeting. “Couple of hours later, I learned that … Admiral Bradley made the correct decision to sink the boat and eliminate the threat.… It was the right call, we have his back.”

Hegseth is trying so hard to distance himself from the attack that he’s claiming he wasn’t even in the room when it happened. Regardless, his version of events made no mention of the report that he approved the contingency plan that Bradley followed.

This saga has drawn the ire of both the left and right.

“This is an act of a war crime. Ordering survivors—who the law requires be rescued—instead to be murdered,” Newsmax host and current Hegseth co-worker Judge Andrew Napolitano said on Tuesday. “There’s absolutely no legal basis for it. Everybody along the line who did it, from the secretary of defense to the admiral to the people who actually pulled the trigger, should be prosecuted for a war crime for killing these two people.”

Bradley is expected to meet with House and Senate Armed Services Committee members on Thursday to clear up exactly what happened.

Transcript: Angry Trump Loses 2026 Plot as GOP Panics: “Flashing Red” - 2025-12-04T12:26:22Z

The following is a lightly edited transcript of the December 4 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.

On Tuesday night, in a special House election in Tennessee, the Republican candidate won by nine points in a district that Donald Trump carried last year by 22 points. That’s a huge swing to the left. Trump is in deep denial about the meaning of these results. He called this a great victory. He’s also been raging wildly that the Democrats’ affordability message is a scam. But his allies aren’t in denial about what happened. They’re out there warning that Republicans are “underperforming” badly, that it’s time to “sound the alarm,” and that there are “flashing red warning” signs for the GOP. Amanda Litman, president of the progressive group Run for Something, has been heavily involved in many state and local elections. She’s going to walk us through all the results, what we can learn from them, and why Republicans are right to panic. Amanda, good to have you on.

Amanda Litman: Thanks for having me, Greg.

Sargent: So the Republican Matt Van Epps beat Aftyn Behn, the Democrat, by 54 percent to 45 percent—again, nine points. But that’s a swing of 13 points in the Democrats’ favor relative to 2024. According to Nate Cohn, Republicans have underperformed Trump by an average of 13 points in many state and federal special elections. That happened again here. Amanda, what’s your overall reaction to these results? What drove that swing?

Litman: People are pissed at Trump. He is not a good president. They do not like him. They do not like his policies around the economy. They do not like what is going on. They’re looking for any possible way to communicate that. And I think this election was a ripe opportunity to do so. But we’ve seen this in basically every election, both the specials and the generals throughout 2025. People are pissed, and they want to show it. Basically, every county where there was the election across Tennessee—it was a very gerrymandered district—it swung further blue by even just a couple points. That’s enough to move the margins—that 13-point swing from 2024.

Sargent: So let’s listen to CNN’s Harry Enten on this.

Harry Enten (voiceover): Republicans should be running for the hills this morning because the blue wave is building, my dear friend, Mr. Berman. What are we talking about here? Well, Van Epps—Matt Van Epps, the Republican candidate—he won it by nine. But this is a district that Donald Trump won by 22 points, 15 points, 17 points. This is a 13-point gain for the Democrats in terms of the margin, and excuse time for Republicans is over because I hear all about these special elections: “Oh, the turnout’s so low. It’s not representative of what happened in the midterm election.” The turnout last night in Tennessee’s 7th district was equal to the turnout in the 2022 midterm election. When a party outperformed in special elections since 2005—five out of five times—they went on to win a majority in the U.S. House of Representatives. What happened last night in Tennessee is a very, very bad omen for Republicans and a very, very good omen for Democrats.


Sargent: So we often hear that special elections aren’t predictive because turnout is very low and only the most engaged voters show up, which creates a distorted picture of what might happen in higher-turnout elections. But here we got turnout that rivals a midterm and Democrats still were able to pull off this huge shift. Why did we see such turnout this time and what does it mean?

Litman: Well, we saw both sides drop millions of dollars in this election, which feels pretty unusual for a special House race this year. I also think Aftyn Behn was a pretty exciting candidate, especially in some of the more urban areas across the district. And while Matt Van Epps is a pretty run-of-the-mill Republican, Trump’s association with him and the Republican Party’s association with him, I think, fires people up who want to send a message to them.

Sargent: Can you talk a little more about what’s driving the turnout in these races?

Litman: Fury about the economy; fury about cost of living. Trump promised to lower costs, to make groceries cheaper, make housing more affordable, and he’s done none of that. People are looking at these Black Friday sales and, you know, buying less goods for more money. They’re buying fewer Christmas presents at higher costs. That shit sucks. And I think that sort of frustration, both in urban and rural parts of Tennessee and across the country—it makes people want to show up and vote and to make their voice heard in whatever way they can.

Sargent: Well, I’m glad you brought up costs because Trump has been pretty in denial about costs. We’ve heard him over and over in recent days rage at Democrats for bringing up affordability. He’s called it a scam. He’s called it a con. He’s called it a hoax.

President Donald Trump (voiceover): But the word affordability is a Democrat scam. They say it and then they go into the next subject and everyone thinks, they have lower prices. No, they have the worst inflation in the history of our country.


Sargent: Trump also said the following about the results in Tennessee as his sycophants applauded.

President Donald Trump (voiceover): Remember we had a great victory last night.

Sargent: Amanda, note the applause there. No one is allowed to contradict him, but we know that he’s wrong about this. This was not a great night for Republicans, was it?

Litman: No, I think it portends a really crappy midterm for them. I played the audio earlier; it seems like they could lose upwards of 40 seats in the House based on the 2024 maps. And remember, we’re not likely to get the 2024 congressional maps in 2026. We’re going to get these new ones that they’ve been drawing across the country as they push forward this mid-decade redistricting. Some of those Trump-plus-20 districts have become Trump-plus-12 or Trump-plus-10. I think they have thoroughly owned themselves going into next year. Now, I also think Trump’s brain is just Jell-O coming out of his ears. He has no idea where he is or what’s happening. That man is so sleepy and so addled and so broken. And it’s a bummer, to put it lightly, that his sycophants can’t seem to stand up to him. Although I expect we will start to see more Republicans, both in Congress and across the country, breaking with him as they realize he is both politically toxic and a lame duck.

Sargent: Well, you got to something I want to bring up, which is Republicans are trying to gerrymander these districts precisely because Trump is ordering them to and they’re not allowed to not do what he tells them to do ever, apparently. But a result like Tuesday’s should put some fear into some of these Republicans, right? If we’re talking about a 13-point shift—and again, that’s been the average; this just ratifies that this average shift is a real thing—then some of these seats, which are supposed to be safe for Republicans but are getting gerrymandered into somewhat less safe Republican seats—those will be more in danger, won’t they?

Litman: That’s absolutely right. To take a bunch of Trump-plus-20 districts and dilute them with formerly Harris-plus-15-type places, you’re going to have to make them a little bit less Republican. And in maybe a normal election they’d still be safe, but with a blue wave like we could see happening next year—and, I hope, good candidates who can really inspire voters to show up and make the case, particularly about affordability—I think they are straight-up screwed.

Sargent: Well, let me ask you about that, because there’s also the resource question. If all of a sudden you take these safe seats and put them in the firing line a little more—OK, maybe Republicans win most of them, like seats that are a little less safe for them. They still win most. But all of a sudden, they’ve got to spend a shitload of money in all these other contests that are supposed to be safe, right? I mean, that’s the thing that I think people are missing about all this: All this gerrymandering that could end up by making all these seats a little bit less safe requires them to sink huge amounts of cash into defending them. Can you talk about that?

Litman: I think that’s going to be a huge problem for them. They’re going to be expanding their battlefield exponentially. Now, the flip is also true for the Democratic side. We’re going to be able to compete in places that we maybe haven’t before. I think that’s why it’s so important that Democrats have been really intentional about building deep benches all across the country. It’s what Run for Something has been doing for most of the last decade, in part because we know that where the competitive races could be will change. They’re going to blow a lot of money. Now, they have a lot of money to blow here, so I want to be mindful of that. They have never hurt for resources in this regard. But they aren’t going to be able to make every election as hyper-nationalized as the ones that we just saw in Tennessee.

Sargent: Well, I should point out that Trump’s own allies are panicking. Representative Elise Stefanik, who’s as MAGA as they come, said that “House Republicans are underperforming for the first time in the Trump era.” GOP strategist Matt Whitlock called this “one of the biggest flashing red light warning signs we’ve seen yet.” Ted Cruz urged Republicans to sound the alarm. Now, it’s not at all true that this is the first time House Republicans have underperformed. They’ve been underperforming all through special elections all year. But still, those are pretty striking signs of panic. And Amanda, what I take from this is these are people who have been around politics a long time—Ted Cruz, Matt Whitlock, Elise Stefanik—and they know what happens in midterms. They know that the mighty Trump and the mighty MAGA aren’t immune to that—what happens in midterms. What do you take from all those quotes?

Litman: I think you’re seeing the Republican Party begin to grapple with the fact that in a year or two, they’re going to have to redefine themselves post-Trump, and it’s going to be a wide-open race for who gets to lead that party forward. He has as much as said he’s not going to be on the ballot in 2028. He constitutionally is not allowed to be on the ballot in 2028. As the party tries to figure out who can hold together the Trump coalition—which I would argue nobody can hold together the Trump coalition—we’ve seen this over and over again. The crazy shit he says might work coming from him and his brand, but it does not work for nearly anyone else. No one has that charisma, whether you like it or not, and decades of life in the public eye to sort of make it stick with folks. They’re going to have to figure their shit out, and it’s going to be messy, it’s going to be expensive, and I’m just excited to eat the popcorn and watch the show.

Sargent: Well, I’ll tell you to watch JD Vance try to imitate Trump’s thuggishness, and it really shows you that he doesn’t really have what it takes to exercise the kind of control that I think is going to be necessary. But I want to ask you a little bit more about what Stefanik and Matt Whitlock are saying. You’ve been around politics a long time. Anyone who has been knows that Republicans—their rule is to always project confidence at all times, no matter what. And so to see them openly panicking in this way is a little surprising, don’t you think?

Litman: I do. I also think it’s been interesting to watch some of the dynamics with Mike Johnson, the speaker of the House—how I believe there was yet another discharge petition that sort of circumvented his leadership and made its way to the House floor. He has no power. He is weak. Trump’s power is getting more and more limited by the week as his approval rating starts to plummet, especially with populations that he thought he had a stronghold on. He’s underwater with young people again, as he should have always been, but as he is once again. I think we are starting to see them really understand they have to begin to preemptively throw folks under the bus and separate themselves, or they’re going to get caught as the wave crashes.

Sargent: Well, we had The Washington Post also reporting that Republicans privately fear that the pool of vulnerable GOP incumbents is larger than they thought. We discussed that earlier. They also fear that Trump’s struggles with independents is a serious problem and even that the conservative base is not energized. Amanda, what did you see? What have you seen out there in the races that you’ve been part of on those fronts, particularly with independents and with the conservative base and the MAGA coalition? Can you get a little granular? What are you seeing with these voter groups?

Litman: Yeah. So Run for Something had about 144 wins in the November election. Forty-three of them were red-to-blue flips across 10 states; 70 percent were municipal races, 23 percent were school boards, 7 percent were state legislative. They were in districts as varied as Clarion County, Pennsylvania, where Trump won 70–30. And I’d say there’s a couple of trends we saw across those places. And these are candidates who had to win over Republicans and independents in order to win. One: affordable housing. Affordable housing, affordable housing, affordable housing. They’re talking about the need to lower the cost of housing. Two: They’re really flipping Republican-coded language on its head. They’re talking about fiscal responsibility and accountability and budgeting taxpayers’ dollars, support for public safety. One candidate really put it well: Prevention, preparation, and compassion, not fear. They’re talking about solutions, not grievances. I think that I found really interesting. And point number three is that 90 percent of our winning candidates in these red-to-blue flips explicitly talked about transparency and about bringing trust back into these institutions—about [how] they understand that people feel like they don’t know what’s happening with their money, with their government, that they really want to. So I think that was a really powerful thing that I hope to see more candidates glomming onto next year. We saw candidates who really loved the place they’re running and honored the place that they were running.

They loved their communities. They didn’t treat them as hellholes to be afraid of or to run from or, like carnage in the streets. No, it was: I love this place, and I want to make it better. We had candidates who really talked about the lived experience they had that was relevant to folks—whether that was renters or having grown up in public housing or being caregivers—like that first-person ability to tell a story that can break through some of the partisan bullshit. We sort of jokingly were like, Better sidewalks are a winning issue. But maybe not exactly that in every community, but it sort of reflects what a winning issue is, which is local. I do think this is a challenge that congressional candidates in 2026 are going to have, which is the only thing they can really credibly promise is oversight and accountability. No, don’t get me wrong; that’s incredibly important. Like holding Trump accountable and providing oversight over his government—really, really necessary. But these local candidates are going to be able to talk about specific things they can do to make places better. Congressional candidates are going to have a tougher time.

So I do think one of our tasks for the Democratic Party writ large is to make sure that the folks who can make the credible arguments, the state and local candidates, have as big of a megaphone as possible. And the final thing I would say about the red-to-blue flips that we had is that they were really listening to voters. They were listening, reflecting, responding—which feels like so fucking obvious to say, but ... man, do a lot of candidates get it wrong. A lot of candidates are listening to consultants, not to voters; listening to focus groups, not the people they’re meeting on the streets. And I think it’s in part because they don’t have a good sense of self and a good sort of set of core values, but the candidates who do are really able to knock it out of the park in long-shot races.

Sargent: So let’s talk about what could go wrong, candidly. Right now we’re seeing this average 13-point swing to the left. It feels pretty good, especially after the Virginia and New Jersey results, which were really pretty solid blowouts. We saw both the candidates in those races erase the Republican advantage with non-college voters, which is really quite an achievement. But we still have almost a year to go. What keeps you up at night? What needs to happen for this to continue all the way through Election Day? And what could go wrong? What do you worry about happening that could prevent that?

Litman: There’s any number of things that keep me up at night. I think that we tend to win in spite of ourselves sometimes as a Democratic Party. I think there’s been a lot of delayed moving of money this year, if I’m being honest. There was some money moving to some of these special elections, but generally speaking, a lot of the year-round organizing, the kind of communications work, the media work, even the candidate recruitment work, like what Run for Something does … money’s been slow. Donors have been sort of in choice paralysis or figuring out what they want to do next. They know that what we did yesterday isn’t going to work anymore, but they don’t know what we need to do tomorrow.

So I think trying to supercharge that work as soon as we can going into 2026, that keeps me up at night. The other thing I would say is that we have no idea where the economy is going to be in a year. I am not an economist. I don’t know, but all the experts seem to say probably not great. So I do think that that is a thing we should be keeping an eye on and how to make sure we can really connect the dots for people that the reason that your Christmas gifts were more expensive, that your housing costs haven’t gone down, it’s on them and on him. It’s on both Trump and the Republican Party and like really being able to tell that story in a way that connects with people.

That’s where I think the state and local candidates will have the advantage. And, you know, we know that Trump is going to try and gaslight people. We learned with Biden, this doesn’t work. You can’t piss on someone’s leg and tell them it’s raining. You can’t send them to the grocery store and tell them No, no, the economy is good. Actually, you have to make sure that you’re really speaking to the way that they’re experiencing their finances. And Trump’s gonna try and undermine that; we’ve got to make sure they understand the truth.

Sargent: Well, just to wrap this up. There’s this sort of shadow debate going on among Democrats over whether they should really focus on affordability or whether they should focus on Trump and attacks on democracy and the slide into authoritarian rule and so forth. I think that whole debate is a bit silly. I don’t really think that candidates have to choose between those things, but you’re on the ground, you’re involved in these races. What do you think is the way for Democrats to thread these needles? Should they talk about Trump, about the ICE raids, about the terrorizing of immigrant communities, about the lawlessness, the law breaking? Where are you on that?

Litman: I think they should talk about what their voters are talking about. They should really be listening to people about what’s on their mind. The thing we’ve heard from a lot of candidates out there knocking doors is like, yeah, they’re pissed at Trump, but really they’re pissed that their groceries are more expensive and their housing costs haven’t gone down. Yeah, they are pissed at Trump, but they’re also pissed that they have to carry whistles with them to scare ICE away from the daycare where it’s trying to kidnap kids. That really does speak to what voters are experiencing. How has this affected their day-to-day life? How has this administration hurt them? It’s not just that it’s lawlessness; it’s the lawlessness in service of what? So really making it personal, keeping it local, and not getting lost in the sauce, as it might be. We have a tendency, I think, to over-intellectualize or try and tell some bigger story. No, shit’s broken. Shit’s bad. We can fix it. We need your help, but we can fix this. Now, I think one of the challenges is that a lot of Democratic candidates maybe don’t have a story for how they want to fix it. They want to go back to the way things were before. That, I think, will not work. You cannot promise a return to the status quo. And that’s the real challenge for Democrats in 2026.

Sargent: OK. So it sounds like talking about ICE in many situations does work.

Litman: So I think it does, if that’s what voters are telling you they care about. I think that’s the thing that I would encourage every candidate that Run for Something works with to do is, like, listen to your neighbors. You know that. You know what’s on their minds. You know what they’re hearing. You know what they’re experiencing. In some places that might be ICE; in many places that might not be. You gotta know what your community needs to hear about, and you gotta reflect it back to them.

Sargent: OK, so this was a House race. You do a lot of state and local races, but you also pay pretty close attention to the House races. What do you think is going to happen in 2026 with the battle for the House?

Litman: Well, I think Democrats are going to be able to take back the House if we run really great candidates, if we rally behind people who win the primary after the primaries are over, if we ensure that races stay localized, and if we ensure that every candidate in every organization has the resources they need to communicate and organize ahead of the November election. But I think it is going to be a great year for Democrats to run for office in all kinds of places, and I would encourage anyone listening to think about it because it’s not too late to get on the ballot for next year.

Sargent: Well, there you have it. People should think about running and I think results like that one this week is really going to get more people off the sidelines and really seriously consider running. Amanda Litman, always great to talk to you. Thanks so much.

Litman: Anytime. Thank you.

Gertrude Stein’s Preparations for the Afterlife - 2025-12-04T11:00:00Z

Gertrude Stein had no doubt that she was a genius. “I have been the creative literary mind of the century,” she once boasted. “Think of the Bible and Homer think of Shakespeare and think of me.” Some years earlier, she informed a baffled magazine editor who had rejected her writing that she was producing “the only important literature that has come out of America since Henry James.” She knew her work was unconventional—repetitive, hermetic, its apparent crudeness belying immense psychological and literary sophistication—but was supremely confident that, in time, it would be recognized as something of enduring cultural value. “For a very long time everybody refuses and then almost without a pause everybody accepts,” she observed in 1926 about the reception of avant-garde art. There was no question in her mind that her own contribution would eventually be accepted: She simply had to wait.

But what do you do while you’re waiting around to become a classic? And how can you help the process along? Francesca Wade’s Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife is an attempt to answer that question. The book is a biography of Stein, but an oddly structured one, in which the subject dies about halfway through. “Biography, like detective fiction, tends to begin with a corpse,” Wade writes (a killer line), “but Stein well knew that a writer’s life does not end at death, if their work has the power to survive them.” Stein, she contends, was unusually concerned with her posthumous reputation: Having accepted that her work wasn’t destined to be appreciated in her lifetime, she put her faith in posterity. “Those who are creating the modern composition authentically are naturally only of importance when they are dead,” Stein once wrote. Accordingly, she spent a good portion of her life making arrangements for her afterlife.

The first half of Wade’s book is a detailed but necessarily compressed account of Stein’s remarkable, if already well-chronicled, existence. In its second half, though, Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife becomes something trickier and more original: a narrative about literary scholarship, and the discomforts it can cause those left behind to tend a legacy. Stein—whose work was a mystery to so many and yet encoded facts about her personal life that would have been unspeakable during her lifetime—turns out to be the perfect case study for such an investigation.


Stein was born in Allegheny, Pennsylvania, in 1874, the child of well-heeled second-generation German Jewish immigrants. When Gertrude was five, the family relocated to Oakland, California, where her father made his fortune investing in the nascent public transportation industry. (The adult Stein’s famous pronouncement on Oakland—“There is no there there”—is one of several Steinisms that has achieved proverbial status.) Gertrude, the youngest of five children, was called “Baby,” a nickname she retained for the rest of her life. She was cosseted and indulged by her parents and siblings, establishing a lifelong pattern of contented dependence on the ministrations of others. “It is better if you are the youngest girl in a family to have a brother two years older,” she wrote of her early bond with her brother Leo, “because that makes everything a pleasure to you, you go everywhere and do everything while he does it all for and with you which is a pleasant way to have everything happen to you.”

Gertrude showed early signs of intellectual distinction—she was a strong student, and spent much of her free time at the public library consuming vast quantities of eighteenth-century literature—and in 1893 she was admitted to the Harvard Annex, soon to be renamed Radcliffe College. There she studied with the famed psychologist William James, who called her his “most brilliant woman student,” and began conducting research on automatic writing that presaged her later literary experiments with documenting consciousness. James encouraged her to attend medical school at Johns Hopkins, which she briefly did, but she soon grew bored and decided to join Leo in Europe, where he was pursuing a career as a painter. By the fall of 1903, Gertrude and Leo were living together in Paris on the rue de Fleurus, where they hosted a glittering salon that attracted avant-garde artists such as Paul Cézanne, Henri Matisse, and Pablo Picasso.

Seeing the astonishing innovations in painting of the time encouraged Stein, who was already writing fiction, to experiment more radically in her own work. Cézanne, she later remembered, “gave me a new feeling about composition … it was not solely the realism of the characters but the realism of the composition which was the important thing.” Her formal breakthrough as a writer came in 1909 with Three Lives, a trio of novellas that adapted Cubist aesthetics to fictional portraiture, making a first, decisive break with literary realism. From there Stein was off and running, moving on to the exhaustive character analysis and intricate repetitions of The Making of Americans—a monumental novel charting the “History of a Family’s Progress” over the course of nearly a thousand pages—and the playful abstractions of Tender Buttons (“A shawl is a hat and hurt and a red balloon and an under coat and a sizer a sizer of talk”). More than a century on, these works are still bracingly strange, written according to an internal logic that is as implacable as it is inscrutable. And yet they are also, as Wade emphasizes, deeply pleasurable, if one gives oneself over to the experience: by turns funny, sexy, touching, and deeply bewildering. “The way to read Stein is to trust her,” Wade assures her reader early on. There’s no other way.

Though Leo scorned her work—while she was writing The Making of Americans, he would pluck pages of the manuscript at random and mock them in front of their mutual friends—Stein soon found other true believers. One of them was the New York heiress Mabel Dodge, who, after reading a draft of The Making of Americans, was “convinced” that it was “the forerunner of a whole epoch of new form & expression.” She poured her energy into drumming up publicity for Stein—“I am working like a dog over you,” she wrote in 1913. Another early acolyte was the novelist Carl Van Vechten, who talked her up in smart literary circles and published one of the first critical articles on her work, “How to Read Gertrude Stein,” in 1914. He often wrote to Stein to tell her of her burgeoning reputation in her home country: “You are as famous in America as any historical character,” he reassured her in 1916.

Stein’s most important early supporter, however, was Alice B. Toklas, who first entered her life in 1907 and quickly became her secretary, muse, lover, and “wife.” (Though the two were not, of course, legally married, Stein consistently used this word to refer to Toklas in private.) A native of San Francisco who, like Stein, had grown up in a well-to-do Jewish family before immigrating to Paris to sample la vie bohème, Toklas was immediately taken with Stein. Recalling their first meeting in her 1963 memoir What Is Remembered, Toklas wrote that “it was Gertrude Stein who held my complete attention, as she did for all the many years I knew her until her death, and all these empty ones since then.” Toklas did everything for Stein—whom she called “Baby,” as her parents and siblings had—from typing up her manuscripts to cooking her meals to organizing her social life. Stein quickly became completely reliant on her; Van Vechten observed that Stein could not “cook an egg, or sew a button, or even place a postage stamp of the correct denomination on an envelope.” Toklas believed completely in Stein’s genius and did everything she could to cultivate and protect it, subsuming her ambitions into her partner’s without remainder. The two became so closely entwined that Stein merged their names in the margin of one of her notebooks: “Gertice. Altrude.”


All of this rich biographical material is covered at a breakneck pace, because Wade’s primary concern, as her subtitle intimates, is not Stein’s life but her afterlife. By the time Stein died of stomach cancer in 1946, her campaign for literary immortality was still unfinished. She had had one unqualified commercial success—The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, a lively memoir, written in a more accessible prose style, which became an improbable bestseller in 1933—but was otherwise a cult figure, infamous for her eccentricity but hardly regarded as “the creative literary mind of the century.” She envied the acclaim that her male modernist peers, such as James Joyce and Ezra Pound, were beginning to receive, even as her own work seemed on the verge of slipping into oblivion. Her published books were little read and much derided; even more frustratingly for the prolific Stein, who regarded everything she wrote as worthy of attention, many of her texts had never been published at all.

It was in the 1930s that Stein began preparing for her posthumous career. Via her friend Thornton Wilder, she learned that librarians at Yale University were beginning to assemble archival collections related to contemporary American literature, and that they were interested in acquiring her papers. Such acquisitions were then highly unusual: Modernism was just beginning to be canonized, and the notion that academic institutions would play a central role in shaping literary history was a relatively novel one. Building an entire archival collection around a still-living author, now a commonplace curatorial practice, was then entirely unheard of.

Stein immediately saw the possibilities. “The idea of an archive fascinated Stein,” Wade writes. With “immortality” in mind, she made the decision to donate her papers to Yale. It meant she no longer had to worry if she could not find a publisher for some of her works during her lifetime:

Through packing her texts into boxes, Stein was able to imagine a reality in which they would be received with pleasure, not derision: recovered, examined, celebrated … This was Stein’s chance to create a paper trail: to project a version of herself into the future.

The latter half of Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife is largely the story of scholars following that paper trail and uncovering various aspects of Stein’s life and work by exploring her vast archive. One secret hiding in plain sight was Stein’s lesbianism. It must have been apparent to most interested observers that Stein and Toklas were more than bosom friends, but the fact was rarely acknowledged explicitly. Anyone who spent time digging in Stein’s archive, however, would quickly come upon evidence of her homosexuality, which she made no effort to conceal. Among the texts she donated to Yale were frankly erotic works like Lifting Belly (which has since become a classic of lesbian love poetry) and “As a Wife Has a Cow: A Love Story.” (“Cow,” Stein scholars soon worked out, was Stein and Toklas’s code word for “orgasm.”) She also sent along private notes to Toklas, using a panoply of whimsical pet names: “darling wife,” “birdie,” “boss,” “little ball,” “little Jew,” “Baby precious,” “Sweet selected sovereign of my soul.” Though Toklas was mortified by the inclusion of these personal documents and insisted that Stein must have donated them to Yale by accident, Wade thinks that “it was just as plausible that Stein wanted future readers to witness the fullness of the relationship, for her archive to anticipate a moment when lesbian sexuality would be more broadly accepted, even offer future lesbian readers a sense of their own history.”

There was more than gossip at stake here. Stein’s sexuality, and the suppression of it, turned out to be crucial to the story of her literary development, as well as to the future of her reputation. One of the first major discoveries in Stein’s archive was an early autobiographical novel called Q.E.D., which told the story of the young Stein’s tormented love affair with a woman named May Bookstaver. The book, written in a much more conventional realist style than her later works, was subsequently reworked into Stein’s story “Melanctha,” the centerpiece of Three Lives, which transposed the characters from white lesbians to a black heterosexual couple. That story had been much praised, including by many black writers and intellectuals, as a nuanced portrait of “Negro psychology,” but before Stein’s death no one had suspected it had any kind of autobiographical basis. Wade speculates that Stein “saw a certain affinity between her own outsider status”—as a lesbian, and a Jew—“and that of the mixed-race Melanctha—that in changing the characters’ races, she had wanted to think through the experience of otherness without being immediately identifiable as the protagonist.”

Whatever the case, when Q.E.D. was published in 1950 under the title Things as They Are, it brought Stein a whole new audience. Edmund Wilson reviewed the book for The New Yorker, calling it “a production of some literary merit and much psychological interest” and proposing that the inordinate difficulty of much of Stein’s mature work might be attributed to “the problem of writing about relationships between women of a kind that the standards of that era would not have allowed her to describe more explicitly.” Wilson’s review, Wade tells us, was “the first time that Stein’s work had been discussed in the context of her sexuality,” and it put her on the path to her eventual reclamation as a queer icon in the 1960s and ’70s. Shortly after the New Yorker review appeared, the small press that had published the novel began receiving orders “from practically every girls’ college in the country,” the publisher Milton Saul reported. “I have an unparalleled mailing list of lesbians by now.”

Q.E.D. had other significant consequences for Stein’s oeuvre. She wrote the novel in 1903, while still in the throes of her youthful infatuation with May Bookstaver. Almost three decades later, in the summer of 1932, she came across the manuscript again. Toklas, who had not previously known of the Bookstaver affair, was gripped by jealousy, resentment, and insecurity. According to Wade, Stein embarked on The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas around this time “as a form of reparation”: Her intention was “to compose a work that would affirm her commitment to Toklas once and for all, uniting their names, publicly, for ever.”

A further bizarre repercussion of Q.E.D., which demonstrates the intensity of Toklas’s feelings, was discovered by the scholar Ulla Dydo in the late 1970s. Examining the handwritten manuscripts of Stein’s long poem Stanzas in Meditation, composed around the time of Q.E.D.’s resurfacing, Dydo noticed that every instance of the word “may” had been struck out and replaced, often with words that made no grammatical or contextual sense: “may be they shall be spared,” for example, became “can they shall be spared.” Toklas, Dydo hypothesized, had been so madly jealous of May Bookstaver that she had forced Stein to eliminate May’s name from the text she was composing, even at the risk of disfiguring its meaning.


Though Wade’s discussion of such scholarly intrigues is deft and will be fascinating to connoisseurs of literary history, it can’t be denied that Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife loses some narrative momentum in its second half. The decision to bifurcate the book into a conventional, if truncated, full-life biography followed by a posthumous reception history is a clever one, but the book inevitably suffers from the absence of Stein as charismatic main character. To some extent, Toklas fills the vacuum, becoming the narrative’s de facto protagonist. In Wade’s telling, she is indeed a compelling, albeit tragic, figure. After Stein’s death, she was utterly bereft. Her friend, the journalist Janet Flanner, called her “the most widowed woman I know.” “Without Baby,” Toklas wrote to another friend in 1948, “there is no direction to anything—it’s just milling around in the dark.”

What purpose Toklas had she found in tending to Stein’s legacy: overseeing the posthumous publication of her unpublished writing, vetting would-be biographers and scholars, and, in Wade’s words, “cementing a narrative in which Stein was a saint, an angel, a genius.” She continued to dwell at the rue Christine, where she and Stein had settled in 1938; when visitors arrived, she would say, “Welcome to Gertrude Stein’s home.” “Some disconcerted visitors compared the apartment to a shrine, or a mausoleum,” Wade writes. “Toklas, distraught and hollow, seemed almost to fade into the furnishings.” “A more enslaved woman would be hard to find,” the writer Max White, who briefly worked with Toklas on her memoirs, reflected. “And when Gertrude was dead, she continued as the slave to a legend.”

But without Toklas, would the legend of Stein have existed at all? Genius takes work, with only a small portion of that work done on the part of the genius herself. Without Toklas—and Mabel Dodge, and Carl Van Vechten, and Thornton Wilder, and dozens of other willing helpmeets—there would be no “Gertrude Stein”: Her achievement was the work of many hands.

Almost 80 years after her death, it seems safe to call Stein’s strategy to secure her posthumous fame a success: She is now a canonical American author, central to the histories of modernism, of queer literature, and of twentieth-century culture writ large. If not quite at the level of Shakespeare or Homer, she is at least as famous as Joyce and Pound. “Stein didn’t believe in an afterlife,” Wade comments. “Her fervent desire for posthumous recognition was her bid for immortality.” Toklas wasn’t so sure: At the age of 80, she converted to Roman Catholicism, largely because she had become fixated on the idea of reuniting with Stein in heaven. Her belief in Stein’s genius was inextricable from her love, just as her life had been inextricable from her devotion. As Toklas put it in a letter to Van Vechten in 1958: “I am nothing but the memory of her.”

Trump’s Crackdown on Afghan Refugees Will Have Dire Consequences - 2025-12-04T11:00:00Z

In the wake of a shooting of two National Guard members last week, the Trump administration has taken dramatic steps to make it more difficult for Afghans to obtain permanent resident status, instilling confusion and fear for refugees seeking entry into the United States, as well as those who’ve already surmounted the legal hurdles and now reside in the U.S.

The suspect in the shooting, Rahmanullah Lakanwal, is a 29-year-old Afghan man who arrived in the U.S. in 2021 through a Biden-era program that helped evacuate and resettle Afghans after U.S. troops withdrew from Afghanistan. The shooting resulted in the death of one National Guard member and the critical injury of another.

In the days that followed, President Donald Trump targeted Afghan immigrants, building upon months of efforts to limit immigration both from Afghanistan and in general. But making it more difficult for Afghans to enter into or stay in the U.S. could have devastating consequences for those in the midst of the application process—including those who’ve specifically fled their home country because their work with the U.S. military has put their lives at risk as the resurgent Taliban cements its control of the country.

“It’s really hard to overstate the tax of living in limbo while you’re waiting on a process that the government has simply stopped, really in an arbitrary manner,” said Laurie Ball Cooper, vice president of U.S. legal programs at the International Refugee Assistance Project. “They’re scapegoating an entire nationality for the tragic acts of one person.”

Since June, Afghans have been subject to a travel ban, with exceptions made for those applying for Special Immigrant Visas and close family members of citizens. But hours after the shooting, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services announced that “processing of all immigration requests relating to Afghan nationals is stopped indefinitely.” As of November 27, the State Department has paused the issuance of all visas, including SIVs for Afghans who aided the U.S. during its two-decade-long war in Afghanistan.

Afghans outside of the U.S. who were in the middle of the interview and vetting process will now see that progress halted, and even those who have had their applications approved will not be issued a visa. This development came the month after Trump dramatically lowered the cap on the number of refugees admitted to the country, prioritizing white Afrikaners from South Africa.

“Afghans who haven’t yet obtained some kind of permanent resident status are facing a closed door, and it’s unclear how long that door will be closed and if it will open again,” said Julia Gelatt, assistant director of the U.S. immigration policy program at the Migration Policy Institute.

Nearly 200,000 Afghans have been resettled in the U.S. since the withdrawal of American troops from Afghanistan in 2021, under the Biden-era Operation Allies Welcome or Enduring Welcome. The majority of these were admitted through a process known as humanitarian parole, which does not offer a pathway to permanent residency. These parolees could apply for asylum or SIVs, but the system for processing these applications was significantly backlogged even before the pause in processing applications.

Not only are Afghans themselves confused about their legal status, the organizations that assist them as they navigate the process of resettling are working off of statements from administration officials without clear direction. “There’s so much uncertainty, and without any operational guidance, we as an organization are also feeling a little bit of a loss on how to educate the community,” said Kristyn Peck, the CEO of the Lutheran Social Services of the National Capital Area, which helps resettle refugees in and around Washington, D.C.

Krish O’Mara Vignarajah, the president and CEO of Global Refuge, a major refugee resettlement agency, noted that the Trump administration had been rolling back protections for Afghans for months. In January, the president signed an executive order suspending the U.S. Refugee Admissions Program, and later terminated agreements with resettlement agencies. Along with instituting the travel ban, the Trump administration also revoked Temporary Protected Status for thousands of Afghans earlier this year, which went into effect in July.

“For Afghan families in particular, there’s deep anxiety. There’s anxiety about their own predicament. There’s anxiety about loved ones still overseas, whose visas are now frozen, and about what it could mean if legal protections here become fragile or reversible,” said Vignarajah. Afghans who aided the U.S. military as interpreters or in other capacities may also feel a sense of “betrayal,” Vignarajah continued; despite their assistance, at risk to their own lives and those of their families, Afghan allies are being prevented from obtaining permanent residency in the United States.

“Refugees and other immigrants from many countries are asking the same painful question: ‘If I followed every rule, passed every check, and built a life here, can it still all be taken away?’” she said. “It’s just an incredibly difficult time for a vulnerable community that’s already had to deal with more than their fair share of demonization.”

There will be cascading effects for migrants from other countries, as well. USCIS will be reexamining green cards for immigrants from the 19 countries subject to the travel ban, and the Department of Homeland Security has announced a reevaluation of asylum cases approved during the Biden administration. On Tuesday, the Trump administration paused all immigration applications from those countries from which travel is restricted.

The Trump administration has contended that Lakanwal, who previously worked with a special paramilitary unit backed by the CIA in Afghanistan, did not receive sufficiently rigorous vetting, blaming the Biden administration for his entry. But reporting has shown that Lakanwal was vetted extensively both before working with the CIA and before arriving in the U.S. in 2021 under Operation Allies Welcome. He was also approved for asylum this year, which involves significant additional scrutiny.

After arriving in the U.S., Lakanwal struggled with mental health issues and with maintaining employment, with reporting by the Associated Press showing community concerns that he was alternating between “periods of dark isolation and reckless travel.”

“Unfortunately, vetting can only tell us what has happened in a person’s past, and it can’t predict what might happen in the future, and it often isn’t able to identify severe mental health issues,” said Gelatt.

Peck said that the purpose of resettlement is “creating conditions for our new neighbors to thrive.” Without access to programs that help refugees adjust to life in the U.S., both through assistance in finding employment and shelter and in helping to address mental health issues, Afghans will struggle to fully integrate into their communities—on top of the stress they now have about their ability to remain in the country.

“The lesson here is to invest in programs that support the health, the well-being, the economic stability of our new neighbors,” said Peck. “The work we do is about creating belonging and welcome, and I am concerned that the divisive and inhumane rhetoric is doing the very opposite of that, and is instead vilifying a whole community.”

Meanwhile, many Afghan refugees will be cut off from services that help keep them afloat. A law passed by Republicans in Congress over the summer revokes SNAP eligibility for certain legal immigrants, including refugees and asylum-seekers, effective in November. Another provision significantly restricts Medicaid, with lawfully present groups of immigrants set to lose access to that program in October 2026.

This may affect a significant percentage of Afghans in the U.S. According to a 2024 report by the Migration Policy Institute, 39 percent of Afghan immigrants were living in poverty, as compared to 14 percent of the overall foreign-born population. Afghan migrants are also less likely than the overall foreign-born population to speak English, which can hinder efforts to obtain a job or find a place to live.

But it’s uncertain how the current political atmosphere could affect the prospects of bipartisan legislation to provide Afghans who assisted the U.S. with a pathway to permanent legal residency. Senator Amy Klobuchar, who introduced the measure—which would also include additional vetting requirements—argued on CNN that the shooting highlights the importance of passing the bill.

“The across-the-board vetting—which involves in-person interviews, gold standard, using biometrics … when you do it with the entire group of people that came over, you can collect more information,” Klobuchar said. “That’s why I hope this will actually be an impetus to pass our bill and put the resources into it that we need to do the vetting across the board.”

The latest actions may face legal challenges, said Ball Cooper, but she argued that opposition from the public would also be necessary to build political pressure on the administration.

“It requires people in American communities standing up and saying, ‘Not in my name can you blame this entire nationality for the act of one person; not in my name and not on on my vote can you go forward and prohibit this entire class of people, based on no individualized determination whatsoever, from entering the United States, even though they stood by us and risked everything for us,’” Ball Cooper said.

Minneapolis Will Prove It’s Better Than Trump’s Sick Somali Smear - 2025-12-04T11:00:00Z

One noontime a few weeks ago, I went to lunch with a colleague from the University of Minnesota. We strolled around the corner from our offices to a mutually favorite spot, the Afro Deli, for a hybrid meal of gyro, samosas, falafel, and chai. This Afro Deli location was part of a local chain that had been founded by an immigrant from Djibouti who won a national award as small-business owner of the year. Half of the lunchtime crowd hailed from the university campus, half from the surrounding neighborhood of Cedar-Riverside, whose eponymous high-rise apartment complex is the epicenter of the Twin Cities’ Somali community of about 65,000.

To hear our president tell it, however, I had put my very life in danger by dining with a friend in an African restaurant in a Somali neighborhood. Though Donald Trump visibly dozed off several times during a Cabinet meeting on December 2, the reliable stimulant of nativism stirred him awake long enough to denounce Minnesota’s Somalis as “garbage.” In a Truth Social posting about two weeks earlier, Trump had declared that “Somali gangs are terrorizing the people of that great State.”

It is hardly surprising that Trump reviled the Somalis: African, Muslim, and dark-skinned, they provide a veritable trifecta for presidential bigotry. And with his feral genius for sniffing out the wedgiest of issues, one might say in the manner of a piggy rooting for truffles, Trump levied his broadside in the aftermath of a genuine scandal, in which a largely Somali nongovernmental organization in Minnesota called Feeding Our Future defrauded the federal government of $250 million meant for providing meals during the pandemic lockdowns.

Of course, Trump neglected to mention that it was a self-described “white lady” born and bred in Minnesota who led the NGO and the scheme. The very day before the president’s rant against Somalis, the big fraud news in Minneapolis concerned the guilty plea in a $200,000 embezzlement case—by another white longtime Minnesotan, who had filched the money while serving as CEO of the regional Chamber of Commerce. And let’s just leave aside, for the moment, the curious spectacle of Trump 2.0—whose family has trafficked in conflict of interest and de facto bribery on an epic scale—purporting to be the moral conscience of the nation.

In the immediate term, the impact of Trump’s attack on the Somalis of Minnesota will include Immigration and Customs Enforcement raids against them and the continuation of previous threats to withdraw Temporary Protected Status from refugees and a reimposition of the so-called “Muslim ban” of Trump’s first term on incoming travelers and visa applicants. But there’s also some very relevant history—both recent and more distant—that is vital to understanding the demagogic game that Trump is playing with the Somalis.

The shorter of those arcs goes all the way back to the final days of Trump’s 2016 campaign. On the Sunday before Election Day, Trump held a rally at Minneapolis’s airport to decry the “disaster” that had befallen the state due to Somali immigration. In this earlier iteration of his truffle-hog mode, candidate Trump seized upon an actual crime—the recent conviction of three Somali men for trying to join ISIS—to try to flip Minnesota red, which continues to be a Republican obsession.

One should never underestimate the potency of racism and nativism as political chemicals, as the rise of MAGA amply demonstrates. Yet the strategy of winning Minnesota for the GOP also revealed a deep misunderstanding of what the state has become, which is far from the white-bread Lake Wobegon stereotype that Garrison Keillor meant as satire but many Americans outside the region took as a peer-reviewed ethnography.

Partly because of the active role that its Lutheran churches have taken in refugee resettlement, the Twin Cities as well as outlying cities like St. Cloud and Rochester have large Somali, Hmong, Vietnamese, Ethiopian, and Liberian communities. In the recent mayoral elections, a Somali American state senator named Omar Fateh ran a strong challenge to the Minneapolis incumbent, Jacob Frey, while neighboring St. Paul elected its first Hmong as mayor, Kaohly Her.

At the more granular levels of daily life, the Somalis one encounters in the Twin Cities are the former teachers or engineers now driving for Uber because their prior credentials are not yet recognized. They are also the twenty-ish children of those drivers, fulfilling the family aspiration for upward mobility by attending the University of Minnesota, Augsburg College, Metropolitan State University. They are the caregivers for homebound elders and nursing-home residents. They are the entrepreneurs who have started up hundreds of businesses and brought their cuisine to that very apex of Minnesota culture, the state fair.

None of these achievements absolve the criminals of Feeding Our Future. But it’s also fair to say that the greatest victims of their massive fraud were the vast majority of law-abiding Somalis. The last thing a despot like Donald Trump needs is a pretext that, for a change, happens to be true.

In that respect, even as Trump surely is ignorant of this longer arc of history, his attacks on Somalis in Minnesota employ a playbook used very successfully nearly a century ago against that period’s alien outsiders: the Jews.

To the delight of local antisemites and the chagrin of their co-religionists, Jewish gangsters such as Kid Cann (Isador Blumenfeld) and his kid brother Yiddy Bloom dominated the bootlegging and gambling rackets in downtown Minneapolis, shifting into illegal after-hour liquor sales when Prohibition was repealed in 1933. To protect their business, Cann and company plowed a share of their profits into bribing the police force. Although he escaped conviction, Cann almost certainly assassinated a muckraking journalist, Walter Liggett, whose articles were exposing the underworld.

The reality of Jewish prominence in organized crime provided the ideal justification for Minneapolis’s encompassing regime of structural antisemitism, which ranged from police brutality to surveillance of Jewish students at the University of Minnesota, to restrictive covenants in housing, to, in the spirit of letting no stone go unturned, a ban on Jewish members of the city’s chapter of the AAA automotive club.

While no single Jew-hating figure of that time wielded the equivalent of Trump’s power on the municipal level, many of them anticipated him and MAGA. There were the Christian nationalist minister William Bell Riley, the right-wing dirty trickster Ray Chase, and the itinerant demagogues Gerald L.K. Smith of the America First political party and William Dudley Pelley of the Nazi-style paramilitary group the Silver Shirts. Though Smith and Pelley operated across the country, they found Minneapolis especially receptive to their toxic message.

The caricature of Jews as crooks coexisted for such bigots with the stereotypes of Jews as both rapacious capitalists and violent revolutionaries. The irreconcilables somehow reconciled in just the way that Trump has pilloried Somalis as both cunning con artists and Islamist terrorists. And then as now, the point of instrumentalizing racial or religious hatred was and is to deny political agency to liberals or progressives or Democrats, whether represented in the person of the Minnesota Governor Elmer Benson in the 1930s or his current successor, Tim Walz.

As mayor of Minneapolis in the mid-1940s, a young Hubert Humphrey and his sophisticated and incorruptible police chief, Ed Ryan, decisively severed the supposed link between Jewish crime and Jewish sedition. Ryan cracked down on the downtown gangsters, while Humphrey pushed through a set of antidiscrimination and civil rights laws that put him on the national political radar.

The Minneapolis of today, led by Mayor Frey and police Chief Brian O’Hara, now has its own moment of reckoning on behalf of its own community of the falsely maligned and cynically persecuted. Their vow this week to refuse cooperation with ICE is a vital sign that the spirits of Humphrey and Ryan are girded for battle against the grandiose threats of Trump.

Angry Trump Unravels Over 2026 Woes as GOP Panic Grows: “Flashing Red” - 2025-12-04T10:00:00Z

Democrats are running in the 2026 midterms on “affordability.” This week, Trump unleashed several angry, wild-eyed rants about their “affordability” message. In one, he raged that it’s a “con job.” In another, he seethed that it’s a “Democrat scam.” He’s angry because these attacks are working, and because he knows it means the GOP’s midterm woes are getting worse. And right on cue, in this week’s special election in a deep-red Tennessee House district that Republicans won, the vote shifted 13 points to the left relative to 2024. That shocked Republicans into a panic: Representative Elise Stefanik openly fretted that Republicans are “underperforming.” Senator Ted Cruz urged Republicans to sound the “alarm.” And a senior GOP strategist called the result a “flashing red light warning.” We talked to Amanda Litman, the president of Run for Something, which is recruiting candidates across the country. She digs into the election outcome to explain why it’s good news, details how Democrats can keep momentum going through 2026, and reflects on what could still go wrong. Listen to this episode here. A transcript is here.

Did Pete Hegseth Even Read the Signalgate Report? - 2025-12-03T22:29:01Z

It seems that Pete Hegseth’s brilliant response to the watchdog report finding that the defense secretary had directly endangered U.S. troops is just to lie and say he didn’t.

Pentagon spokesperson Sean Parnell didn’t even try Wednesday to spin the results of the inspector general’s report on a major scandal earlier this year, when Hegseth sent highly sensitive information in a nonsecure Signal group chat.

“This Inspector General review is a TOTAL exoneration of Secretary Hegseth @PeteHegseth and proves what we knew all along—no classified information was shared. This matter is resolved and the case is closed,” Parnell said in a statement, per Trump acolyte Laura Loomer.

Sources had previously told CNN that Hegseth sent messages detailing materials marked classified at the time. One message from Hegseth—“This is DEFINITELY when the first bombs will drop”—seemed obviously classified. But the war chief has maintained that he had the power to unilaterally declassify information discussed, though no documentation of that actually happening seems to exist.

A classified version of the inspector general’s Signalgate report was sent to Congress on Tuesday night, finding that Hegseth should not have used the app at all. Four sources familiar with the report told CNN that Hegseth had risked compromising sensitive military information and could have potentially endangered troops and mission objectives.

A declassified version of the report is expected to be released to the public Thursday.

Trump Backs Pete Hegseth on Boat Strikes Even as GOP Turns on Him - 2025-12-03T22:05:31Z

Donald Trump is still backing Pete Hegseth, despite growing scrutiny over reports that the defense secretary issued orders to mercilessly kill survivors of a September 2 airstrike on a small boat in the Caribbean.

“If it is found that survivors were actually killed while clinging on to that boat, should Secretary Hegseth, Admiral [Frank M.] Bradley, or others be punished?” asked a reporter at the White House Wednesday.

“I think you’re going to find that this is war, that these people were killing our people by the millions, actually, if you look over a few years. I think last year we lost close to 300,000 people were killed. That’s not mentioning all the families—have you seen what happens with the families?” Trump said.

The White House has insisted the violence is justified, broadly accusing the boats of trafficking narcotics to the U.S. from Venezuela and Colombia while vaguely and inaccurately referring to the death toll caused by fentanyl, a synthetic opioid 50 times stronger than heroin.

Fentanyl overdoses in the U.S. were on the rise for a decade before falling slightly in 2023, when more than 72,000 people died from the synthetic opioid, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

U.S. lawmakers on both sides of the aisle have been more than skeptical of the White House’s theory—particularly since several of the boats were thousands of miles away in international waters, and since the attacks were conducted without prior investigations or interdiction. Pentagon officials reportedly haven’t been concerned with identifying the people on the boats before attacking.

“I think you’re going to find that there’s a very receptive ear to doing exactly what they’re doing taking out those boats,” Trump said. “And very soon we’re going to start doing it on land, too. Because we know every route, we know every house, we know where they manufacture this crap, we’re going to put it all together.”

“So to be clear, you support the decision to kill survivors after—” the reporter pressed, before Trump interjected that he “supports the decision to knock out the boats.”

“Whoever is piloting those boats, they’re guilty of trying to kill people in our country,” Trump added, referring to the alleged drug mules, who would be the lowest and least significant participants on the drug trade totem pole.

Meanwhile, Trump pardoned former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández on Monday, freeing a man who was sentenced to 45 years in prison for playing a central role in what the Biden administration deemed to be “one of the largest and most violent drug-trafficking conspiracies in the world.”

Hernández’s case was initially prosecuted during Trump’s first administration.

Trump Plasters His Own Name on U.S. Institute of Peace Headquarters - 2025-12-03T21:52:44Z

Donald Trump has taken over the United States Institute of Peace building in Washington, D.C., and put his name on it, even as the legal battle over who owns the building is ongoing.

Independent journalist Marisa Kabas posted about the visible signage on the building Wednesday on Bluesky, showing “DONALD J. TRUMP” in block letters tacked to the building. Kabas reports that Trump plans to use the building to host the signing of a peace agreement between Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo on Thursday.

The USIP was created by Congress in the 1980s as a nonprofit organization independent of the federal government. The letters making up Trump’s name seem to have been taken from USIP’s sign inside the building, when the Department of Government Efficiency took over the think tank by force in March.

In May, that takeover was blocked in federal court, with U.S. District Judge Beryl Howell ruling that the firing of the USIP’s leadership and staff, their replacement by DOGE-affiliated staff, and the building’s transfer to the General Services Administration were “effectuated by illegitimately installed leaders who lacked legal authority to take these actions, which must therefore be declared null and void.”

But in June, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia granted the Trump administration a stay of Howell’s ruling pending appeal, ordering that the building be turned over to the GSA and restoring the Trump administration’s preferred leadership.

“The President faces irreparable harm from not being able to fully exercise his executive powers,” the three-judge panel wrote at the time.

“Because the Institute exercises substantial executive power, the Government is likely to succeed on its claim that the Board’s removal protections are unconstitutional,” they wrote, referring to the USIP’s governing board.

“We agree with the Government that ‘[f]acilitating the foreign policy of the United States by brokering peace among warring parties on the international stage is plainly an exercise of executive power under our Constitution,’” the judges added. The appeal is still ongoing, but since then, most of the USIP’s staff have been fired and the institute’s website states that it is under maintenance.

The USIP’s building occupies prime Washington, D.C., real estate between the Potomac River and the National Mall, and is worth approximately $500 million, so it’s no surprise that the Trump administration wanted the building. Now it appears that Trump wanted something else with his name on it where he could be feted and praised, and isn’t willing to wait for the legal case to conclude in his favor.

Jack Smith to Testify on Trump—but GOP Won’t Let It Be Public - 2025-12-03T21:25:11Z

Surprise, surprise: House Republicans don’t want the public to hear what Jack Smith has to say about President Donald Trump—even though the president claims he’d prefer it.

The GOP-led House Judiciary Committee issued a subpoena Wednesday to the former special counsel, demanding he appear for a closed-door interview later this month to discuss his investigations into Trump’s alleged mishandling of classified documents and alleged efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election. Of course, Smith had already offered to tell them everything they wanted to know—if he could have a public hearing.

It seems House Judiciary Committee Chair Jim Jordan wasn’t really interested in that level of transparency—or accountability.

But it’s not clear that Republicans and Trump are on the same page. During a press conference Wednesday, the president was asked whether he would prefer to have Smith testify in a public hearing.

“I think Jack Smith is a sick man, there’s something really wrong with him. I’d rather see him testify publicly ’cause there’s no way he can answer the questions,” Trump said, before veering into a rant about the autopen.

Smith’s legal team had previously requested that their client be given the opportunity to testify publicly to refute the “many mischaracterizations” of his investigations.

The team responded to the subpoena in a statement to CBS News Wednesday: “Nearly six weeks ago Jack offered to voluntarily appear before the House Judiciary committee in an open hearing to answer any questions lawmakers have about his investigation into President Trump’s alleged efforts to unlawfully overturn the election results and retention of classified documents. We are disappointed that offer was rejected, and that the American people will be denied the opportunity to hear directly from Jack on these topics.”

Recently, some Republicans were incensed by a revelation that Smith had requested Senate Republicans’ phone records from the days before and after the deadly January 6 riot, without their knowledge, in order to see who may have been involved in Trump’s alleged efforts to subvert the election. Trump earned himself four felony counts for those alleged efforts, but those charges were dismissed after he was elected to the White House in 2024.

As part of the budget bill passed to fund the government last month, a pretty petty provision was passed allowing senators who had their phone records accessed to sue the Justice Department. Senators would be able to win $500,000 of taxpayer money per violation.

Hakeem Jeffries Seriously Says Trump Deserves Some Credit - 2025-12-03T21:15:54Z

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries is simply not cut out to lead the Democratic Party in any kind of serious opposition against Trump, as he proved once again on Wednesday. 

The insipid congressman twice made a point to praise the president on two particularly controversial decisions—his crackdown on the southern border and his pardon of Texas Democratic Representative Henry Cuellar, whom the Justice Department charged with accepting around $600,000 in bribes from an oil and gas company owned by Azerbaijan’s government and a Mexican bank.

Jeffries was asked about his response to the Cuellar pardoning by CNN’s Wolf Blitzer. 

“Congressman Cuellar is a beloved member of the House of Representatives, loved in his community.... The reality is, this indictment was very thin to begin with, in my view,” Jeffries replied. “The charges were eventually gonna be dismissed.... I think the outcome was exactly the right outcome.” 

While Cuellar was not yet convicted, the charges against him were certainly thick enough for a grand jury to indict him. This could have been an opportunity to denounce Cuellar—a moderate Democrat who is anti-abortion and opposed his party’s agenda in 2024—as a corrupt politician of old. Jeffries could have even tied Cuellar’s corruption charges to how Trump has transformed the presidency to make himself and his family richer. 

Instead, Jeffries is calling a man who the Biden’s Justice Department  charged with bribery, unlawful foreign influence, and money laundering a “beloved” member of Congress, perhaps in an effort to win Cuellar’s vote back to the Democrats if he is to win in 2026.

Later on Wednesday, Jeffries was asked about giving Trump his flowers for the brutal detainment and deportation campaign that he argues has secured the border, and gave a similarly baffling answer.  

“Can you give Trump credit for securing the border?” Jeffries was asked again on CNN. “That was a big issue under the Biden administration when you had record border crossings.” 

“The border is secure, that’s a good thing. It’s happened on his watch. He wants to claim credit for it, of course he’ll get credit for that,” Jeffries replied. “In terms of making sure that we actually deal with the issues that matter, including on immigration … there’s a lot that is left to be desired.” 

Under Trump’s watch, Immigrations and Customs Enforcement, Border Patrol, and other federal agencies have flooded local communities, once again ripping families and neighborhoods apart as they detain immigrants regardless of criminal history. And by the time you read this, he’ll have sent National Guard troops to Minneapolis and New Orleans to continue to do just that. What exactly does Jeffries think is left to be desired? 

“I would not get in a car if Hakeem Jeffries was driving. We can’t continue to let him and those like him ‘lead’ a milquetoast opposition to overt fascism,” one Bluesky user wrote. “Primary appeasers. Elect fighters.”

Trump is as unpopular as he’s ever been, the GOP is reeling with internal strife, and their 2026 chances aren’t looking too good. Americans are still struggling to pay rent, buy food, and support their families, and still Trump claims with his full chest that the very word “affordability” is a hoax. Liberal voters are eager for strong leadership, and this would be the exact time for an all out attack. Instead, Jeffries is practically gift-wrapping the president’s positive sound bites. 

Moments like this are the reason the progressive-led Democratic “fight club” even exists in the first place.  

Mike Johnson Says He’s in Control of GOP as Elise Stefanik Beef Grows - 2025-12-03T21:08:53Z

House Speaker Mike Johnson is convinced he has a grip on his caucus, even as reports circulate that his control is slipping.

The chief House Republican rebuked comments made by Representative Elise Stefanik, who told The Wall Street Journal Tuesday that the speaker would not have enough support among his caucus to win the speakership if the vote took place this week.

Speaking with PBS Newshour correspondent Lisa Desjardins Wednesday, Johnson insisted that Republicans in Congress were “united” behind him.

“I’m not sure how to comment on what Elise is doing or what the rationale behind this is, but you can talk to Republicans in Congress, 99.9 percent are united, we’re working together to keep delivering our agenda,” Johnson told PBS.

“I talked to Elise late last night. We talked through what I thought were a misunderstanding of the facts,” he continued, making mention of the National Defense Authorization Act. Stefanik claimed victory regarding the bill Wednesday morning, announcing that a provision she wrote related to congressional disclosures would be included in the act after a “productive” conversation with Johnson and Donald Trump.

“I told her, you could have just picked up the phone and called me initially and not had to do all this other stuff,” Johnson told PBS.

But Desjardins underscored that plenty of other members of the caucus had expressed their discontent with Johnson’s leadership.

Just nine representatives of the majority party are needed to trigger a vote of no confidence against a House speaker. Those lawmakers could include Stefanik, as well as Representative Anna Paulina Luna, who on Tuesday openly defied Johnson by introducing a discharge petition that would bypass his direction on a bipartisan bill regarding insider trading. It could also include Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, who announced last month her intention to exit office in early January.

Trump Official Forced to Clarify Exactly How Many Somalis Are Garbage - 2025-12-03T20:36:55Z

The Trump administration is taking aim at the Somali American community in Minnesota with an immigration crackdown, punctuated by President Trump on Tuesday calling Representative Ilhan Omar, a Somali American herself, “garbage,” along with the rest of her community.

Since then, Trump’s staff have been defending his racism. Department of Homeland Security spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin was asked by CNN’s John Berman Wednesday exactly how much of the Somali American community in Minnesota, an estimated 40,000 of whom were born in Somalia, could be considered garbage. Her response was a word salad nowhere near a condemnation.

“John, we’re really looking at the data, the analyses here particularly out of Minneapolis, and other parts of the country where we’re seeing Somalia, there’s widespread fraud, particularly marriage fraud when it comes to immigration, we’re looking at criminality here,” McLaughlin said. Berman then repeated his question.

“My question is, all of them? The president says he doesn’t want them here. He called them ‘garbage.’ Do you consider that to be all of the 40,000 people born in Somalia now living in Minnesota?” Berman asked.

“John, this is not about politics, this is about public safety,” McLaughlin replied, referencing last week’s shooting of two National Guard members, allegedly by an Afghan national, in Washington, D.C.

“That’s what the precipice of this was. That’s why we have to get back to base camp and make sure we are prioritizing the American people’s safety,” McLaughlin added, before criticizing the Biden administration for poor vetting processes.

The Somali community in Minnesota, particularly in the Minneapolis-St. Paul metro area, has nothing to do with last week’s shooting. But, it’s clear that McLaughlin is speaking not just for DHS, but for the entire administration by failing to address the president calling an entire ethnic group and community garbage.

Instead, McLaughlin is using the shooting to justify an immigration crackdown on Somalis in Minnesota, 58 percent of whom were born in the U.S., with 87 percent of those born overseas being naturalized U.S. citizens, according to Census data. But she’s only following the president’s racist lead, and he was inspired by a story full of holes originating from right-wing media.

Watchdog Exposes How Hegseth Endangered Troops’ Lives in Signalgate - 2025-12-03T19:19:27Z

A bad week has gotten even worse for Pete Hegseth, as a new watchdog report from the Pentagon inspector general’s office finds that the defense secretary directly endangered U.S. troops when he used the Signal messaging app to discuss sensitive plans to bomb the Houthi rebels in Yemen back in March. 

Sources told CNN that the classified report details Hegseth’s lack of urgency and seriousness in speaking freely on the public messaging app about active U.S. war plans, updates, and even when “the first bombs will drop.” 

It is unclear if any of the information was properly declassified before it was put on Signal—and before The Atlantic editor Jeffrey Goldberg was accidentally added to the chat. As CNN reported, Hegseth claimed he declassified all the info after the messages became public, but no such documentation exists.

A classified version of the inspector general’s report was sent to Congress on Tuesday, with an unclassified version set to drop on Thursday.  

This report comes in the midst of another controversy for Hegseth in which he is currently attempting to shift blame for a boat bombing double strike that killed two survivors—a potential war crime—away from himself and onto Admiral Frank Bradley. 

At Tuesday’s Cabinet meeting, Hegseth claimed that he didn’t know there were survivors after the first strike, adding that the “fog of war” would’ve made it difficult to determine if anyone had survived—a response both the left and right is finding to be insufficient. 

“This week has made it abundantly clear that Pete Hegseth should not be in charge of the most powerful military on Earth,” podcaster Jon Favreau wrote on X. 

Judge Rips Stephen Miller as “Ignorant or Incompetent, or Both” - 2025-12-03T18:54:27Z

A federal judge on Wednesday shredded the Trump administration’s shallow defense for bragging about its rampant, warrantless immigration arrests.

In an 88-page ruling, U.S. Judge Beryl Howell wrote that the Trump administration had illegally lowered the standard for making immigration arrests when it instituted a policy of “arrest now, ask questions later” as part of the federal takeover of Washington, D.C.

Howell documented how the Department of Homeland Security and Trump officials began to insist on using a standard of “reasonable suspicion” to make arrests, and included a laundry list of official comments claiming that the government did not need to demonstrate probable cause. Howell took issue with the government’s attorneys, who claimed the statements had been made by “non-attorneys” who “don’t necessarily understand” legal terms.

“This is a remarkable assertion. On its face, the government’s defense appears to be that the individuals behind these statements are ignorant or incompetent, or both,” Howell wrote.

For example, chief Border Patrol agent Gregory Bovino told the press, “We need reasonable suspicion to make an immigration arrest,” adding, “You notice I did not say probable cause, nor did I say I need a warrant. We need reasonable suspicion of illegal alienage, that’s well grounded within the United States immigration law.”

White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller was also cited in the ruling as saying, “Just go out there” and arrest people at Home Depots or 7-Elevens.

In June, Miller reportedly told a meeting of dozens of immigration officers that he didn’t want ICE to narrow its field to just undocumented immigrants with criminal records. “Stephen Miller wants everybody arrested. ‘Why aren’t you at Home Depot? Why aren’t you at 7-Eleven?’” an official recalled.

Howell barred the government from making warrantless immigration arrests without obtaining probable cause that the person was in the country illegally and a flight risk.

Kash Patel Lets Slip How He’ll Stall Releasing the Epstein Files - 2025-12-03T18:32:54Z

The Trump administration is releasing “as much” of the Epstein files as it can—at least, the components that are “lawful,” according to FBI Director Kash Patel.

Speaking with Fox News Tuesday evening, Patel insinuated that there were some documents related to the investigation of child sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein that can’t be readily released.

“Mr. Director, our viewers also are just—they are chomping at the bit on why it took the Epstein files so long to be released,” said host Laura Ingraham. “Any regrets there? Was that an unforced error, should we have gotten them out earlier? Just get them all out there? Just thought I’d give you a chance to react to that.”

“Yeah, look, this FBI has produced 40,000 pages of documents to Congress. To put that in comparison, [Christopher] Wray put out 13,000 in seven years and [James] Comey put out 3,000,” Patel responded, referring to his two predecessors.

Of course, Wray and Comey were not mandated by a law passed specifically to release the documents. After months of dragging their feet, Republicans in both chambers of Congress passed a bill to release the investigation files related to Epstein and his potential associates. Donald Trump signed the bill on November 19, starting a 30-day timer on the documents’ release.

“We’re committed to transparency. We are putting out as much as we can that is lawful and that is not prohibited by court orders. And those are the things the DOJ is fighting, still, with judges in court to make sure we can reveal everything without breaking the law,” Patel continued.

“That’s what we’re committed to doing. We’re doing it as fast as we can,” Patel added, before abruptly changing the topic.

The House Oversight Committee released more than 20,000 emails last month that it had obtained from Epstein’s estate. The documents included multiple mentions of Trump, such as in a 2011 email, when Epstein expressed he was grateful Trump had stayed quiet about details of Epstein’s life. The “dog that hasn’t barked is Trump,” Epstein wrote, despite detailing how Trump had spent hours at one of Epstein’s properties with a known victim.

Trump Official Panics as Brutal Jobs Report Blames Trump’s Tariffs - 2025-12-03T16:58:00Z

It turns out that Donald Trump’s tariffs aren’t good for private-sector jobs.

A new report from payroll processor ADP found that private employees lost nearly 32,000 jobs in November, far off analyst projections that they would add 10,000 jobs. The data is a sharp decline from October, when businesses overall added 47,000 jobs, according to the ADP’s revised estimate.

“Larger companies are still hiring,” wrote Heather Long, chief economist at Navy Federal Credit Union, on X. “Smaller firms (under 50 workers) are doing the layoffs. It’s been a very tough year for small biz due to tariffs and more selective spending from lower and middle-class consumers.”

Indeed, smaller employers seem to be taking the biggest hit, having lost 120,000 jobs. Medium firms added 51,000 jobs, whereas the largest businesses added 39,000 jobs. To the Trump administration, though, it’s all the fault of the government shutdown and Democrats, as Secretary of Commerce Howard Lutink said on CNBC Wednesday.

“No, no, it’s not tariffs,” Lutnik said, in response to a question from CNBC’s Sara Eisen. “Remember, you had the Democratic shutdown, right, and what do you think happens to small business, the people who do business with the U.S. government, they know they’re not getting paid, so they slow down their projects.

“Remember, as you deport people, that’s gonna suppress private job numbers of small businesses. But they’ll rebalance, and they’ll regrow, so I think this is just a near-term event, and you’ll see as the numbers come through over the next couple of months, you’ll see that all pass,” Lutnick added.

But Lutnick’s only doing damage control. Domestic manufacturing, as measured by the Institute for Supply Management Manufacturing index, fell for the ninth month in a row, showing that the tariffs are hurting an area that Trump boasts they will improve. And private companies, including wholesale retailer Costco, are suing the government to get a refund of the tariffs they’ve paid.

Trump has made erroneous claims that tariffs are paid by other countries, not companies or consumers, and that they are bringing in a windfall in revenue that is diminishing the need for any other taxes. That is demonstrably false. All of this shows that tariffs are not helping but hurting the American economy and American workers.

Pete Hegseth Tells Katie Miller to Her Face That He Hates Her Husband - 2025-12-03T16:38:48Z

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth doesn’t think he’s the most problematic member of Donald Trump’s Cabinet.

Hegseth said Tuesday that he wouldn’t trust deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller to babysit his kids, when asked about it on a podcast hosted by Miller’s wife.

“Who would you trust to babysit your kids?” Katie Miller asked. “This can only be another member of the Cabinet.”

“I mean, not your husband or Marco,” Hegseth said, to laughs. “I would trust the vice president. I mean, I’ve known Sean Duffy for years. I would trust him.”

Hegseth was seated beside his own wife, Jennifer Rauchet, who interjected that Duffy “would just call one of his kids.”

“I would trust Brooke Rollins or Pam. Tulsi’s incredible,” Hegseth added, referring to the agriculture secretary, the U.S. attorney general, and the director of national intelligence.

Hegseth then extended his playful lack of faith, saying that he believed Miller would be most likely to need help in an emergency.

“Who is the most likely to call you after hours in an emergency?” asked Katie Miller.

“Stephen Miller,” Hegseth responded, without missing a beat.

“One hundred percent,” added Rauchet.

“Stephen, you know it’s true. You know it’s true,” poked Hegseth, looking directly at the camera. “There’s others on the list, but he’s on top of the mountaintop.”

“It is true,” Katie Miller relented.

Hegseth, meanwhile, is under fire from practically every element of government for a wide array of scandals that range from reports of alcoholism to Nazi accusations and allegations that he has violated international human rights law in the Caribbean.

Hegseth’s careless, monthslong killing spree against small boats in international waters has claimed the lives of at least 83 people, and has pushed congressional Republicans to consider whether Hegseth should be stripped of his position altogether.

GOP-led panels in the House and Senate dialed up their scrutiny of the Pentagon this week, demanding a full account of a double tap that took place on September 2, mercilessly killing survivors of a U.S. drone strike.

The Republican chairmen of the Senate and House Armed Services committees are both demanding audio and video of the incident. “We’re going to conduct oversight, and we’re going to try to get to the facts,” vowed Senator Roger Wicker Monday.

Hegseth’s 2016 Warning to Military Nukes Trump’s Attack on Democrats - 2025-12-03T16:17:57Z

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is planning to court-martial Democratic Senator and military veteran Mark Kelly for saying—nearly verbatim—the same thing he himself said about soldiers not having to follow “unlawful orders” almost a decade ago. 

On Tuesday, Kelly posted a clip of the defense secretary giving a speech in 2016, when he was still an anchor for Fox News. 

“I do think there have to be consequences for abject war crimes. If you’re doing something that is just completely unlawful and ruthless, then there is a consequence for that. That’s why the military said it won’t follow unlawful orders from their commander-in-chief,” Hegseth said in the video, which was first reported by CNN’s KFile.

Hegseth’s statement is nearly identical to the one Kelly and five other Democratic members of Congress and military and intelligence veterans made in a video last month, in which they stated that “this administration is pitting our uniformed military and intelligence community professionals against American citizens” and that “our laws are clear. You can refuse illegal orders.”

This very measured video led the president to call for the “seditious six” to be hanged, and Hegseth to threaten to court-martial Kelly. 

“The video made by the ‘Seditious Six’ was despicable, reckless, and false. Encouraging our warriors to ignore the orders of their Commanders undermines every aspect of ‘good order and discipline,’” Hegseth wrote on X last month. “Mark Kelly (retired Navy Commander) is still subject to UCMJ—and he knows that. As was announced, the Department is reviewing his statements and actions....  Kelly’s conduct brings discredit upon the armed forces and will be addressed appropriately.” 

The hypocrisy here is obvious. Of course Hegseth has a clip of him agreeing exactly with what Kelly and the other members of Congress expressed because refusing to carry out unlawful orders from the president is a very rational and widely accepted concept. Hegseth’s issue is that the president is his boss, and he wants nothing more than to be the best lackey he can be. 

“I think he’s correct, and it’s exactly what we said,” Kelly told CNN on Tuesday. “But when we said it, Pete Hegseth now … says what we said was false and reckless. And I think it begs the question—what has changed? And it’s pretty obvious. What has changed is we have an unqualified secretary of defense who only cares about sucking up to this president, and loyalty to this president. That’s the difference.” 

Trump’s Excuse for Getting Random MRI Has Major Issues, Doctor Says - 2025-12-03T16:12:49Z

A prominent cardiologist is calling bullshit on President Donald Trump’s MRI story.

Speaking to CNN’s Jake Tapper Tuesday, Dr. Jonathan Reiner, who served as a cardiologist for the late Vice President Dick Cheney, dismissed the White House’s outrageous explanation for the 79-year-old Trump’s repeated visits to the doctor.

A recent memo from Dr. Sean Barbabella, physician to the president, disclosed that Trump had received a chest and abdominal scan as a “preventative” measure for men in his age group.

“There’s no chance that this was just sort of routine preventative care. First of all, it’s not part of routine preventative care,” Reiner explained. “There aren’t patients who come to see me or any of my colleagues who we say, ‘Let’s just scan your whole body!’”

Reiner noted there was a lot of information missing from the doctor’s memo. “The president’s doctor didn’t even disclose what kind of scan. The president said MRI, all that the president’s physician said was advanced imaging. Did he have an MRI? Did he have a CT? Did he have both?” Reiner said.

“And what he didn‘t say is whether the president had a scan of his brain. He didn’t say he didn’t, he just included some data from the chest and abdominal scans. So it’s not plausible or really credible to believe that they just decided to do some preventative screening for a third time this year.”

Trump’s October visit to Walter Reed came six months after his annual physical exam. For days afterward, the White House refused to explain the reason for his second visit. Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt claimed it was his “routine yearly checkup,” but clearly that wasn’t true. Meanwhile, anyone with eyes can see signs that the president has diminishing mental faculties. It appeared that he could barely stay awake throughout a lengthy Cabinet meeting Tuesday, and when he spoke, he was incoherent and confused.

Trump has repeatedly claimed he had no idea why he got an MRI scan or what part of the body the doctors were even looking at. Still, he claimed his results were “absolutely perfect.” Barbabella’s memo detailing Trump’s October visit to Walter Reed said that the president “remains in excellent overall health.”

Trump Pardons Democrat, Showing He Loves All Grifters - 2025-12-03T16:01:11Z

President Donald Trump on Wednesday pardoned Texas Representative Henry Cuellar, a Democrat accused of bribery, unlawful foreign influence, and money laundering.
Writing on Truth Social, Trump claimed that Cuellar had been the victim of a weaponized justice system. “Crooked Joe used the FBI and DOJ to ‘take out’ a member of his own Party after Highly Respected Congressman Henry Cuellar bravely spoke out against Open Borders, and the Biden Border ‘Catastrophe,’” Trump wrote. “Sleepy Joe went after the Congressman, and even the Congressman’s wonderful wife, Imelda, simply for speaking the TRUTH.”
The Department of Justice previously charged Cuellar and his wife Imelda for allegedly accepting roughly $600,000 in bribes from two foreign entities, an oil and gas company owned by Azerbaijan’s government and a bank headquartered in Mexico City.
When Cuellar’s charges were first announced in May 2024, Trump broke with Republicans to defend him.
In his post, Trump included a letter from Cuellar’s two daughters Catherine and Christina, that stressed their father’s record of “strengthening support for Border Patrol and law enforcement and backing the U.S. oil and gas industry.”
“We also believe that our father’s independence and honesty may have contributed to how this case began,” they wrote. “He has never been afraid to speak his mind, especially when it comes to protecting the people of South Texas and securing the border from the policies of the previous administration.”
It looks like Trump was convinced. “Because of these facts, and others, I am hereby announcing my full and unconditional PARDON of beloved Texas Congressman Henry Cuellar, and Imelda. Henry, I don’t know you, but you can sleep well tonight—Your nightmare is finally over!” Trump added.
Despite being scheduled to face bribery charges in April 2026, Cuellar was still favored to win his district, after narrowly defeating progressive challenger Jessica Cisneros in 2022. Cuellar has previously lent his support to numerous GOP bills, including one targeting undocumented immigrants who are merely suspected of a violent crime. He also remains the lone anti-abortion Democrat in Congress.
This story has been updated.

Trump’s Travel Ban Gets More Extreme—Hitting Citizenship Applicants - 2025-12-03T15:12:04Z

The Trump administration is halting immigration applications for people from 19 countries that were already subject to travel bans or restrictions.

Applications linked to those countries, including for green cards and citizenship, will be paused, according to a memo from U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, or USCIS. The countries in question are the same ones subject to travel bans and restrictions thanks to an executive order from President Trump in June.

The order banned citizens of Afghanistan, Myanmar, Chad, the Republic of Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Haiti, Iran, Libya, Somalia, Sudan, and Yemen from traveling to the U.S. It also placed restrictions on travel for citizens of Burundi, Cuba, Laos, Sierra Leone, Togo, Turkmenistan, and Venezuela.

At the time, people from all of those countries who were already legally in the U.S. didn’t face any restrictions. The new measure, however, pauses all immigration and citizenship applications, including green cards, and can only be lifted at the discretion of USCIS’s Director Joseph Edlow, according to the memo. A similar plan was already in the works last month, but it seems last week’s alleged shooting of National Guard troops by an Afghan national spurred it into action.

“In light of identified concerns and the threat to the American people, USCIS has determined that a comprehensive re-review, potential interview, and re-interview of all aliens from high-risk countries of concern who entered the United States on or after January 20, 2021 is necessary,” the USCIS memo said, referencing immigration decisions made during the Biden administration.

The new order is discriminatory and punishes those who have successfully gone through the correct legal process. It amounts to not only punishing every new Afghan immigrant for the alleged actions of one, but also targets people from 18 other countries for seemingly arbitrary reasons. It seems very much like a racist attempt to overhaul U.S. immigration policy.

Lindsey Graham Is Furious at the Pope for the Dumbest Reason - 2025-12-03T15:09:55Z

Senator Lindsey Graham is making an enemy out of the pope.

Pope Leo XIV called out Donald Trump on Tuesday for his aggressive attempts to force Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro out of power. And Graham was having none of it.

The South Carolina lawmaker pushed the pope to stay on the “right side of history” in a lengthy post on social media Tuesday, claiming that a “credible threat” of “military force” is the only way to enact change in Venezuela.

“Without a credible threat of the use of military force, nothing changes in Venezuela. When it comes to Maduro, the time for talking is closing. The time for action to end this reign of terror in Venezuela is upon us,” Graham wrote.

“I would urge the Holy Father to be on the right side of history when it comes to ending Maduro’s reign of terror on the Venezuelan people, the United States and others throughout the region.

“The use of military force to evict Maduro will only be required if Maduro insists on remaining as the illegitimate leader of a narcoterrorist state,” the Baptist continued. “He has stolen elections, collaborates with terrorist groups like Hezbollah, sits atop a notorious drug cartel and has flooded our country with hundreds of thousands of illegal aliens.

“As President Trump said, when it comes to Maduro, we can do it the easy way or the hard way. I would urge the Holy Father to spend his time and energy persuading Maduro to take the easy way out—for all,” Graham wrote.

Since early September, the United States has destroyed at least 20 small boats traversing the Caribbean Sea that Trump administration officials deemed—without an investigation or interdiction—were smuggling drugs. At least 83 people have been killed in the attacks.

The attacks have been condemned by U.S. lawmakers on both sides of the aisle and foreign human advocates alike, including the U.N. human rights chief, who said in October that the strikes “violate international human rights law.”

While chalking the seemingly needless violence up to counter-narco-terrorism efforts, Donald Trump has simultaneously leveraged the aggression to try to shove Maduro out of power, something that he tried and failed to do in 2019.

Pope Leo recommended less violent options that the U.S. could take in the boiling feud. The first American leader of the Catholic Church told reporters Tuesday that it would be “better” to “find another way” to apply pressure, such as hosting a dialogue with Maduro or imposing economic sanctions on the South American nation, “if that is what they want to do in the United States.”

Conservative Media Turns Against Hegseth on Drug Boat Strikes - 2025-12-03T15:00:05Z

Even MAGA media outlet Newsmax is calling Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s September 2 boat bombings a war crime.

“It gives me no pleasure to say what I’m about to say, because I worked with Pete Hegseth for seven or eight years at Fox News,” Judge Andrew Napolitano said on air Tuesday. “This is an act of a war crime. Ordering survivors—who the law requires be rescued—instead to be murdered.”

Napolitano continued.

“There’s absolutely no legal basis for it. Everybody along the line who did it, from the secretary of defense to the admiral to the people who actually pulled the trigger, should be prosecuted for a war crime for killing these two people.”

Newsmax is tailor-made for a far-right audience, is the preferred network of President Trump, and has been virtually unwavering in its support for him. This kind of critique, especially coming from Hegseth’s former co-worker, speaks to just how poorly planned the explanation for this potential war crime was, and how widely panned the decisions have been from both the left and the right.

Rand Paul Drags Hegseth on Boat Strikes: Either Lying or Incompetent - 2025-12-03T14:05:31Z

Republican Senator Rand Paul offered some scathing criticism of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s efforts to push responsibility for the September 2 boat bombings away from himself and President Trump and onto Admiral Frank Bradley.

“In this sense, it looks to me like they’re trying to pin the blame on somebody else and not them,” Paul told reporters Tuesday evening. “There’s a very distinct statement [that] was said on Sunday—Secretary Hegseth said he had no knowledge of this and it did not happen. It was fake news, it didn’t happen. And then the next day from the podium at the White House, they’re saying it did happen.

“So either he was lying to us on Sunday, or he’s incompetent and didn’t know it had happened,” he continued. “Do we think there’s any chance that on Sunday the secretary of the defense did not know there’d been a second strike?”

The growing Republican criticism comes as Hegseth and the Trump administration zero in on their version of events for whether the boat bombing actually happened (it did), and who in particular gave the order for a second strike to kill the two survivors seen clinging to the wreckage after the first bombing. At Tuesday’s Cabinet meeting, Hegseth claimed that he didn’t know there were survivors after the first strike, adding that the “fog of war” would have made it difficult to determine if anyone had survived. He passed responsibility for the decision entirely on to Bradley.

The administration’s explanation for committing what very well may be a war crime has been so botched and sloppy that it made Paul remember he’s a libertarian. And on his question of Hegseth’s incompetence or stupidity, the answer seems to be both.

Republicans Panic After Narrow Victory in Tennessee Election - 2025-12-03T13:43:43Z

Even though a Republican won in Tuesday’s special election in Tennessee, the GOP is worried that their margin of victory was way too close.

Mark Van Epps won Tennessee’s 7th district congressional seat by about nine percentage points over Democrat Aftyn Behn, a big shift from Donald Trump’s 22-point victory in the 2024 presidential election. That swing could mean major losses for the GOP in the 2026 midterm elections.

As one House Republican told Politico, “Tonight is a sign that 2026 is going to be a bitch of an election cycle.”

“Republicans can survive if we play team and the Trump administration officials play smart. Neither is certain,” the anonymous representative said.

Behn made considerable ground in a deep-red district that hasn’t had a Democratic representative in over 40 years, and millions of dollars were spent for Republicans to hold onto what is normally a safe seat. This was not lost on national Republicans, who remember Democrats’ massive victories last month in New Jersey and Virginia.

“I’m glad we won. But the GOP should not ignore the Virginia, New Jersey, and Tennessee elections,” said Representative Don Bacon, a Republican representing a swing district in Nebraska who is retiring next year. “We must reach swing voters. America wants some normalcy.”

The narrow victory came as House Speaker Mike Johnson paid a visit to the state and President Trump addressed a rally via speakerphone. Even then, “it was too close,” a Republican House leadership aide told Politico.

“It was dangerous. We could have lost this district because the people who showed up, many of them are the ones that are motivated by how much they dislike President Trump,” agreed Senator Ted Cruz on Fox News Tuesday night.

“In a year, it’s going to be a turnout election, and the left will show up. Hate is a powerful motivator.”

Transcript: Trump White House Rages at Pop Star Who Nailed MAGA “Evil” - 2025-12-03T11:53:08Z

The following is a lightly edited transcript of the December 3 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 brings a confluence of events that all tell the same story. On a number of fronts, we’re seeing really vividly that sheer, unbridled sadism courses through just about everything President Trump and his administration are doing. The examples are everywhere. Trump just unleashed a vicious, hateful rant about Somali immigrants. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth just tweeted out a deeply sadistic cartoon about his murders in the Caribbean Sea. A prominent MAGA personality just declared that she wants to see the people Trump is bombing suffer and “bleed out.” A pop star denounced the White House for using her song in a truly hateful and disgusting video. Paul Waldman has a good new piece on his Substack, The Cross Section, looking at how this sort of hate and bloodlust undergirds everything coming out of this administration. So we’re talking to him about all this. Paul, good to have you back on.

Paul Waldman: Thank you, Greg.

Sargent: So let’s start with pop star Sabrina Carpenter. This is a good one. The White House posted a video of people getting arrested, pinned to the ground and handcuffed. And it overlaid that footage with Carpenter’s song, which is called [“Juno”]. Paul, that’s a sexually charged song. And so the White House video takes almost a perverted pleasure in this imagery of people suffering. And Carpenter responded with this, “This video is evil and disgusting.” She called it “inhumane” and said she wants no part of it. What do you make of all that?

Waldman: Yeah, I wouldn’t be surprised if that was the reaction that the administration was hoping for. But one of the things that we’ve seen is that on their social media, they really do seem to be highlighting the cruelty of a lot of their policies, especially their immigration policies. And they do it in a couple of different ways, through different formats, using different sorts of genres, and it really is quite a comprehensive strategy.

On the one hand, they want you to kind of luxuriate in the sadism and the suffering of the people in the videos. And a lot of them are sort of like hype videos. They’ve got propulsive music, and they’re cut together with quick cuts. There are a lot of them that use kind of a first-person perspective taken from body cams of the immigration officers who are chasing people down and handcuffing people. It looks very much like a first-person shooter video game, like Call of Duty, or a hundred other video games. So they want you to kind of get excited about it, get your adrenaline pumping. And they also have a lot of content that’s intended to be humorous, where they want you to laugh at those people, to kind of exult in their suffering and the violence that is being perpetrated against them.

So they want you to be kind of pumped up, but also to find it funny. And that really is reflective of a kind of a sadism that’s driving that.

Sargent: A White House spokesperson responded to Sabrina Carpenter with this: “We won’t apologize for deporting dangerous criminal, illegal murderers, rapists, and pedophiles from our country. Anyone who would defend these sick monsters must be stupid, or is it slow?”

Paul, again, the seething hatred and rage is the thing here. This is a White House spokesperson speaking. Clearly, this is all meant to please the audience of one and sate his bloodlust, but there’s actually a through line here, right? We actually saw in this video that the White House put out that they are celebrating the pinning of people to the ground, the suffering of people getting arrested and so forth. It really is the story.

Waldman: Yeah, and the “stupid, or is it slow” is a reference to one of Sabrina Carpenter’s lyrics. And so they try to be very much kind of like tuned in with the cultural space in which they’re operating. But one of the things that’s so different about this administration from administrations before it is that the people who deal with the media or have any kind of public-facing role, they’ve abandoned the kind of propriety that we always saw. There was an incident where a reporter asked a White House spokesperson who had given instructions for some kind of official action, and the reply they got in their email was, “Your mom.” This is the way that the people who are official spokespeople for the United States government are acting.

It’s intentionally juvenile. It’s meant to be abusive toward members of the media. It’s supposed to be as provocative as possible. And I think this is kind of a reflection of the sort of trolling mindset that so many of these people, especially the younger people in the administration, have grown up with. And they brought that into the government. Rather than saying, well, there are certain kinds of ways that you’re just expected to act. And it’s just a matter of kind of taking this job seriously and the role that you have as a representative of the United States government seriously, their attitude is no, we’re just going to be like the worst 4chan troll because we think that’s funny and we think people will respond to it and like it and our base will like it when we’re being abusive to people. And when it comes to people like immigrants—that we’re being literally sadistic to them—that we want people to enjoy their suffering.

Sargent: Well, on another front, let’s listen to what Trump said to reporters during a cabinet meeting on Tuesday. Here he’s talking about Somalis in Minnesota. Listen.

President Trump (voiceover): Somalians ripped off that state for billions of dollars, billions every year, billions of dollars. And they contribute nothing. The welfare is like 88 percent. They contribute nothing. I don’t want them in our country. I’ll be honest with you. Somebody said, that’s not politically correct. I don’t care. I don’t want them in our country. Their country is no good for a reason. Their country stinks. We’re gonna go the wrong way if we keep taking in garbage into our country. Ilhan Omar is garbage. She’s garbage. Her friends are garbage.


Sargent: Right now, it’s being reported that Trump’s stormtroopers are going to start arresting Somalis in Minnesota. So I think with this he’s kind of priming the MAGA masses, ginning up their bloodlust, letting them know that the spectacle of arrests is coming and they should get their popcorn ready. Again, the through line with that White House video where they were celebrating people getting pinned to the ground and handcuffed—the spectacle of suffering is the oxygen that they breathe, basically. What do you think, Paul?

Waldman: Yeah, and it’s not as though this is the first time that Trump has said racist things or tried to gin up hate against some particular ethnic group or national-origin group. But it really does seem like it’s got a harder edge. He says there that he thinks that Somali Americans are basically worthless and that he thinks they shouldn’t belong here. And you’re right that he’s preparing people for a spectacle. And so much of the whole immigration policy is about spectacle. Yes, it’s about something particular and pragmatic—that they do want to actually remove millions of people from the country.

But they also want to do it in a way that’s a big show. And what they want to communicate is their own willingness to commit acts of brutality on behalf of, supposedly, white people. And they don’t use the word white, but that’s who we’re really talking about. So we now have an asylum policy where asylum claims are not being accepted from any oppressed group anywhere in the world except for one: white South Africans. This is really explicitly white supremacist.

The whole immigration raids and this broader policy of going in in a very highly visible way where you don’t just go in and arrest a bunch of people, but you do it with the cameras in tow, and you create highly produced videos out of it, and then you send those out across social media in this kind of triumphant, jokey way to get people excited and to think that, like, This is great. This is the kind of show I want to watch.

Honestly, I’m kind of surprised it took him so long to get around to Somali Americans, which is a group that I’m sure most Americans haven’t really thought of. They’re not the biggest immigrant group in the world. Trump always has hated Ilhan Omar, the congresswoman from Minnesota, for a long time. And he says the most despicable, bigoted things about her in particular. And he did mention her a couple of times in that Cabinet meeting. But now he’s saying that everyone from the community that she comes from—none of them deserve to be here. And we are going to go start rounding people up, and everyone should applaud.

Sargent: Well, I want to add a couple data points to this idea that the immigration raids are part spectacle. One is that they have the Homeland Security secretary, Kristi Noem, actually filmed in front of prisons with a lot of dark people with tattoos in the background. This is deeply sick shit, right? They are almost sexualizing the Homeland Security secretary’s posing in front of people behind bars.

And here’s another one: At the very outset of the administration, when they really started ramping up the mass deportations and they started talking about how they were going to switch to military planes to remove people, they would frog-march the migrants onto these planes in this really showy way and take pictures of it and take video of it. And these people were in manacles, right? They were filming them in manacles and parading them before cameras for MAGA to get thrilled by.

Then on top of that, your point about how when they go into these housing projects in places like Chicago, they have dedicated camera people who are explicitly tasked with capturing the excitement on film of people getting frog-marched out of their homes and into the streets in zip ties and handcuffs. It’s all so disgusting, it’s impossible to get your head around.

Waldman: Yeah. And we do have these kind of competing narratives playing out in social media, because on one hand you have the things that the administration is putting out, which, as you say, show the immigrants who are being arrested as though they are—the phrase that the administration always uses is the “worst of the worst.” And of course, when we actually find out who they are, it turns out none of them have criminal records—or very few of them anyway—but they want to portray them as though every single person that’s being arrested is Hannibal Lecter.

And at the same time, you have on social media just thousands of regular people who are creating their own counternarrative, that shows ICE agents ripping families apart, showing up at schools so they can get the parents when they’re there to pick up their kids, with the crying children as their parents are being taken away, with ordinary people—housekeepers, landscapers—who are being wrestled to the ground and brutalized.

That is an entire counternarrative that is also playing out on social media. And that one is less produced. It’s more candid. It’s faster. There’s an even greater volume of it, because it’s coming from all different kinds of people and not just the official accounts. And we don’t really know yet which one of those is really kind of predominant in people’s minds. But I think that this is a real arena of media contestation and the social media that so many of us are kind of marinating in these days—that despite all of the administration’s efforts, there are a lot of people who are putting up resistance using the same kind of tools and trying to fight back that way.

Sargent: I think you could even argue that they’re losing the war over social media spectacle, because all the polls are showing very clearly that there’s widespread revulsion and rejection of the mass deportations. Trump has completely thrown away whatever advantage he had on the broader immigration issue. Thank you, Stephen Miller, for doing that. He has really wrecked his standing on the issue with all these deportation raids, and so forth. And I think they almost weren’t prepared for it in one critical sense, which is funny, because they pose as very savvy in terms of social media and the cultural stuff—the counternarrative that you’re talking about has been a much larger cultural phenomenon than the story they’re trying to tell. All over the country, ICE is becoming a pariah agency. People are taking out their phones, filming these things. They go wild on social. So what do you make of that? I think it’s fair to say that they’re losing the spectacle wars, no?

Waldman: I think maybe they are. The theory at the heart of what the administration is doing, and what Trump’s entire career is based on, is that we should all be our worst selves, that our darkest impulses should be the ones that reign. We should be the most bigoted, the most corrupt, the most angry and hateful—our truest self is our worst self. And if you look at who is in this administration, it is a collection of the worst people from top to bottom. And the implicit argument is that we should all be that way. And we should cheer when people get brutalized. And we should laugh when we see corruption because everybody is corrupt and everybody is sadistic. And that’s who we ought to be. And the truth is that that’s not who most people want to be.

Sargent: To your point about the open sadism of all this, let’s listen to Megyn Kelly. She’s a big MAGA superstar, formerly of Fox News. Here she’s talking about Trump’s bombings in the Caribbean Sea. Listen.

Megyn Kelly (voiceover): So I really do kind of not only want to see them killed in the water, whether they’re on the boat or in the water, but I’d really like to see them suffer. I would like Trump and Hegseth to make it last a long time. So that they lose a limb and bleed out a little.


Sargent: So on top of that, you’ve got Defense Secretary Hegseth tweeting out this cartoon about killing people in the Caribbean. It’s all a big joke to them, you see. It’s all fun. Between this, the White House response to Sabrina Carpenter, and Trump’s raging about “Somalians,” you’re really seeing a real full-throttle hate moment here, don’t you think? What did you think of the Kelly thing?

Waldman: Yeah, it really does just kind of take away the veil of normalcy and propriety. And I think that most people react against that. You know, one of the things that social media does is it pushes us to kind of engage in that kind of thing. It makes us not just polarized, but also kind of want to indulge in those kinds of thoughts. Again, I think most people like, it’s not that we may never have the thought, but once we do, there’s something that causes us to say, You know what, that’s not who I really want to be. But part of the way you get clicks if you’re Megyn Kelly, and get people to listen to your podcast, is to really kind of get down in the nastiest parts of your own thoughts.

Because there are certainly enough people who do think that way—who have been taught to feel that the people who oppose them, whether it’s their political opponents or people they don’t think should be in the country, are subhuman. And that too is a big part of Trump’s rhetoric. He’s always describing immigrants as “vermin;” it’s the kind of language that’s been used preceding every genocide in human history. But Trump uses that kind of dehumanizing language to say that it’s OK. You don’t have to feel bad. You don’t feel bad when you put out a mousetrap and catch a mouse and it snaps his neck, right? So you don’t have to feel bad when we’re just blowing up like five guys on a boat that, you know, maybe they’re actually bringing drugs or maybe they’re not, but whatever, Pete Hegseth decided he’s going to kill them—and then he’s going to put out a cartoon about it, because it’s all so funny and cool. And they want you not to feel bad about that, but I think that it’s important for us to understand why we should feel bad about some things. And it’s not actually fun. And that’s what they don’t want us to think about.

Sargent: I think maybe the through line here is what you might call the joy of dehumanization. For MAGA, that’s a great, joyous occasion. Anytime that they can dehumanize whoever is the subject of the two-minute “hate of the moment,” it’s time for a party. You had this piece at Public Notice, a Substack as well, where you drew a through line from the goons kidnapping people off the streets, the edgelords crafting the social media strategy, the disgusting lies about immigrants, and then you tied that all to what we’ve been hearing lately about all these mid-level, Republican staffer–types giggling in their Nazi group chats, as you put it. They’re all kind of participants in this broader MAGA project.

Where do you think this is going, Paul? Trump is not going to be on the scene forever, obviously. And there are already signs that the MAGA movement is breaking up. You’ve got JD Vance, who’s positioning himself to inherit it all. And you can kind of see all these strands in what JD Vance is doing. He’s trying to be that same type of hateful, thuggish figure that Trump is being, but he’s just not going to be able to corral all the fury and bloodlust the same way Trump does. Only Trump can really corral it, right? Is there anyone else who can?

Waldman: I really don’t think so. And I don’t want to say there’s going to be a return to normalcy. I think that would be naïve. But one of the things that Trump offered his movement was that if you’re really hardcore MAGA, it’s fun. A nd they want to make it fun. It’s got its own merch. It’s got this kind of excitement. Trump makes a lot of jokes, and there is a kind of a liberatory thrill in not having to feel like you’re constrained by the norms of society anymore. And if you want to just be openly—to let your bigotry have full rein, then you can do that. And it feels exciting to do that. And there was always a kind of element of fun that drew people into Trump’s movement. And that was always a minority of people.

And also, the other thing is that it really does rely on his particular brand of charisma. Like, there’s nothing fun about JD Vance. I don’t think there’s anybody else who kind of captures that spirit in the way Trump does. As much as liberals like you and me might dislike him, he is compelling and he does attract people. And I just don’t see who else can kind of duplicate that. And we’ve seen figures like Ron DeSantis try to offer Trumpism with sort of a different face. And it just never worked because they’re not the same kind of politician, the same kind of character that he is. So it has to be something different. I don’t know what it’s going to be, but it’s got to be something different.

Sargent: Trump really is one of the most charismatic politicians in modern times. He’s up there with Barack Obama, but in his own twisted, crazy way. He’s a deep, really seriously talented politician, and he knows how to talk to all these disgusting impulses in people. Paul Waldman, always great to talk to you, man. Folks, if you like this discussion, make sure to check out his Substack. It’s The Cross Section. Paul, thanks for coming on.

Waldman: Thanks a lot, Greg.

Arrest Mark Zuckerberg for Child Endangerment - 2025-12-03T11:00:00Z

Should Mark Zuckerberg be handcuffed—literally—for the threat his products pose to millions of children? That’s the inescapable question raised by a legal brief filed last month in a civil case against major social media companies.

The litigation, which alleges that social media platforms have been purposefully cultivating addiction among adolescents, has been working its way through the courts since 2022. But the details laid out in this new court filing, and reported recently by Time, contain genuinely horrifying claims about Zuckerberg’s Meta, the parent company of Facebook and Instagram. And they suggest that—in addition to the tort claims being pursued by the families, school districts, and state attorneys general behind this multidistrict litigation—the corporate executives responsible for these harms could and should be criminally prosecuted for child endangerment.

The plaintiffs’ brief alleges that Meta was aware that its platforms were endangering young users, including by exacerbating adolescents’ mental health issues. According to the plaintiffs, Meta frequently detected content related to eating disorders, child sexual abuse, and suicide but refused to remove it. For example, one 2021 internal company survey found that more than 8 percent of respondents aged 13 to 15 had seen someone harm themself or threaten to harm themself on Instagram during the past week. The brief also makes clear that Meta fully understood the addictive nature of its products, with plaintiffs citing a message by one user-experience researcher at the company that Instagram “is a drug” and, “We’re basically pushers.”

Perhaps most relevant to state child endangerment laws, the plaintiffs have alleged that Meta knew that millions of adults were using its platforms to inappropriately contact minors. According to their filing, an internal company audit found that Instagram had recommended 1.4 million potentially inappropriate adults to teenagers in a single day in 2022. The brief also details how Instagram’s policy was to not take action against sexual solicitation until a user had been caught engaging in the “trafficking of humans for sex” a whopping 17 times. As Instagram’s former head of safety and well-being, Vaishnavi Jayakumar, reportedly testified, “You could incur 16 violations for prostitution and sexual solicitation, and upon the seventeenth violation, your account would be suspended.”

The decision to expose adolescents to these threats was, according to the brief, an entirely knowing one. As plaintiffs allege, by 2019 Meta researchers were recommending that Instagram shield its young users from unwanted adult contact by making all teenage accounts private by default. Meta’s policy, legal, and well-being teams all echoed this recommendation, stressing that the policy would “increase teen safety.” But the primary response by Meta’s corporate leadership was to question how this policy would impact its profits. The company directed its growth team to analyze what a default private setting would do to engagement. They found it would have a negative effect—according to one employee quoted in the court filing, limiting “unwanted interactions” would likely cause a “potentially untenable problem with engagement and growth.” As a result, Meta failed to implement this safety recommendation until 2024, allowing billions of nonconsensual interactions between teenagers and adult strangers during the intervening four years. A significant enough number of these encounters were inappropriate, according to plaintiffs, that Meta had an acronym—“IIC,” short for “inappropriate interactions with children”—for them.

If your social media platform is facilitating so many inappropriate interactions between adult strangers and children that you need a shorthand to describe such encounters, then you should be liable for some of the resulting harm. But could that liability extend to the criminal sphere?

It depends, first of all, on the jurisdiction. Every state has some form of law criminalizing conduct that abuses, neglects, or endangers children. While some states limit this crime to parents or guardians, other states outlaw child endangerment more broadly. To take one example, Massachusetts’s child endangerment statute reads: “Whoever wantonly or recklessly engages in conduct that creates a substantial risk of serious bodily injury or sexual abuse to a child or wantonly or recklessly fails to take reasonable steps to alleviate such risk where there is a duty to act shall be punished by imprisonment in the house of correction for not more than 2.5 years.” This seems like an accurate way to characterize Meta’s creation of what one state’s attorney general has described as a “marketplace” allowing “pedophiles, predators, and others engaged in the commerce of sex” to “hunt for, groom, sell, and buy sex with children and sexual images of children at an unprecedented scale.”

While child endangerment laws were not originally written with social media companies in mind—Massachusetts’s law was passed in 2002 as a response to the Catholic sex abuse scandal—that state’s highest court made clear that the statute’s text encompasses any and all reckless conduct that creates a substantial risk of harming a child, noting, “If the Legislature had intended a narrower set of protections, it readily could have drafted the statute to accomplish that more limited objective.” Indeed, the threats allegedly facilitated by Meta are far more severe than many of the hazards—like exposing children to marijuana smoke or leaving them unsupervised in a house—that Massachusetts courts have deemed appropriately dangerous to constitute the crime of child endangerment in the past.

So in at least some jurisdictions it seems quite possible that Meta officials could be criminally prosecuted for the harmful effects they knew their platforms were having on young people. But there would need to be a lot of public utility in such a prosecution to make it worthwhile for a district attorney’s office with limited resources to take on some of the wealthiest Big Tech executives in the world. Should a local prosecutor accept this daunting challenge? I believe the answer to this question is yes, for two important reasons.

First, there is a chance that current civil litigation against social media giants may end up failing. The biggest obstacle these lawsuits face is a 1996 federal law called the Communication Decency Act. Section 230 of this law grants digital communications platforms a broad waiver of civil liability for the user-generated content they host. While plaintiffs are seeking to get around this shield with new litigation strategies—the suits discussed here focus on social media companies’ negligence in the design of their platforms and deception about the known harms of their products, rather than the actual content itself—it’s unclear whether this product-liability theory will succeed in piercing the immunity afforded thus far by Section 230.

But Section 230 only provides for civil immunity for social media companies. It doesn’t say anything about criminal liability. So criminal prosecution for child endangerment may offer a more straightforward—and, if worse comes to worst on the civil side, perhaps the sole—path to accountability for these bad actors.

Second, criminal prosecution could be a highly effective tool for forcing these companies to adopt more pro-social practices. Meta earned over $62 billion in net profits in 2024. Even a massive, multibillion-dollar settlement or civil judgment could potentially be swallowed by the company as the price of doing business. But I can guarantee that Zuckerberg does not want to spend any time in a state prison. Even the credible threat of a multiyear sentence for these corporate executives might be enough to significantly change Meta’s decision-making, in a way that few other remedies could.

Every day, in jurisdictions all across the country, people are prosecuted and incarcerated for committing the crime of child endangerment based on conduct that was far less aware, and resulted in much less harm, than what is being alleged of Meta’s corporate leadership. If the claims against these companies are true, then executives like Zuckerberg have absolutely engaged in reckless conduct that has created a substantial risk of harming young people. In other words, they have committed crimes—and the mere fact that they are wealthy and powerful should not allow them to escape accountability. Local prosecutors have a chance to win justice for teenage victims who have been endangered by these profit-seeking tech titans. Here’s hoping they take the opportunity.

Climate Change Is Killing the Myth of Los Angeles - 2025-12-03T11:00:00Z

I once lived in an apartment in Los Angeles that flooded every time it rained. Not just a polite drip, either. The ceiling sagged and dripped into long wet ribbons, and the wall beside my desk would bleed water like I was playing out Barton Fink in color. I wonder how that space looks now, as Southern California comes out of a long rain event where the hills above Altadena saw nearly nine inches at the site of January’s Eaton fire, between November 14 and November 21. People love to talk about tanned and toned Dallas Raines, the veteran KABC meteorologist who can summon high drama from a passing low-pressure system. Or the obligatory SUV hydroplaning down the 5 Freeway. In L.A., weather banter is its own civic dialect.

We rarely admit how fragile the physical city really is, and how the very places that frame our daily lives—the courtyard where you catch the first blue of morning, the balcony where you watch the hills smolder at golden hour—can start to fail the moment the skies decide to turn. Everything here is built for one type of weather. And most of the time it works. But when it doesn’t, it really doesn’t work.

L.A. has spent over a century advertising its perfect Mediterranean climate. Now increasingly frequent severe weather events are triggering citywide soul-searching about who deserves protection, what neighborhoods get resources, which elected officials are to blame, and whether the promise of this place still holds. Some parts of L.A. County picked up close to a foot of rain in 10 days in February 2023, leaving more than 80,000 Los Angeles Department of Water and Power customers without power, while unhoused residents faced flooded encampments, freezing nights, and packed shelters. Almost exactly a year later, emergency crews pulled a pregnant, unhoused woman from a storm drain above a raging river. The January 2025 fires in the Palisades and Altadena further exposed the gap between the city we imagine and the one we actually live in. What happens when a city built on the mythology of sublime weather has to finally face how to live with a climate that refuses to stay in line?

The Los Angeles myth goes back more than a century: Between the 1880s and the 1920s, the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce mailed millions of pamphlets eastward, selling Midwestern families on a kingdom of eternal spring. Sunkist built a national brand on winter oranges ripening while Chicago froze. Railroads sponsored booster fiction and postcards promising a life where weather was not an obstacle but an asset. In the dead of winter, “[you could] have a small, five-acre citrus farm and do really well and then hop on the streetcar and go to the beach for the day,” said professor Char Miller, a historian and environmental analysis scholar at Pomona College.

Miller has spent decades tracing how this mythology ossified. While the pitch obscured who paid the price—Indigenous communities pushed off their land, Chinese and Japanese residents marginalized or excluded—the promise endured in part because the landscape helped carry it. But for all the valleys, deserts, and coastlines, there were also floods, fires, earthquakes, and landslides: hazards only mentioned in the fine print.

There’s an old line Miller heard during his early days on the West Coast in the 1970s: “California is 90 percent paradise, 10 percent apocalypse.” It was something people once said with a kind of wry affection, the same sensibility baked into disaster films that love to see Los Angeles perpetually destroyed. It was the myth of a place that could always be rebuilt, where catastrophe was fleeting and bounty would always return. But that ratio, Miller says, is shifting, leaning more toward calamity.

It was nearly midnight in New York when my phone lit up. A friend in Los Angeles was calling to ask if I wanted him to move anything out of my apartment, which had just fallen under an evacuation order while I was back East. Earlier that afternoon, on January 8, West Hollywood had been in the mid-70s—bone-dry, humidity in the 20s. The kind of day that feels ominous if you’ve lived here long enough to know what those numbers mean. By nightfall, another fire was creeping toward Runyon Canyon, the hiking trail so quintessentially L.A. it sometimes has a valet.

In the weeks that followed the January fires, the political blame game was relentless. Some went after Mayor Bass, others after Governor Newsom. But the fury felt like a way to avoid the harder truth of a city playing dumb about its own new climate reality.

Even while the January fires were still burning, city and state leaders promised to rebuild immediately, suspending regulations that might have slowed development in the very zones that were incinerated. “What that did was to take off the table any kind of transformation that might have slowed down the very things that that fire consumed, which is rapid growth up into fire zones,” Miller said. A recent CalMatters analysis found that nearly four million people in Southern California are living in such hazardous zones.

Climate scientist Daniel Swain told me that despite all the finger-pointing after the January fires, the forecast wasn’t the problem. Meteorologists had issued “crystal clear warnings” days ahead of time. The real issue, he suggested, is that Los Angeles still treats climate disasters as if they can be willed away, as if better heroics in the moment could out-muscle physics. “We can’t expect to have a firefighting force that can magically overcome hurricane-force winds amid record dry conditions producing a blizzard of embers in the suburbs,” Swain said. “You just can’t fight that in the moment.”

The deeper problem is structural. Southern California is one of the most fire-prone landscapes in the country, and millions now live in or immediately downwind of terrain primed to burn. Many neighborhoods haven’t seen major fire in decades, which feeds the illusion of safety. But growth has pushed suburbs further into the wildland-urban interface just as warming has lengthened fire season, increasing the chances that a Santa Ana wind event arrives when vegetation is crisp and unrecoverably dry. Most years won’t align as catastrophically as January did, Swain noted, but when they do the math is unforgiving.

Work has to happen long before the flames arrive. Swain pointed to neighborhoods where community groups had already tackled vegetation management, replaced vulnerable vents, or cleared brush from wooden fences. Those blocks didn’t just fare slightly better, but some avoided becoming ignition points entirely. Fire resilience, he emphasized, is cumulative; every house that doesn’t burn is one less launching pad for embers to race downwind.

The fixes aren’t always grand or expensive. Sometimes it’s a few hundred dollars for finer mesh vents that stop embers from blowing into attics. Sometimes it’s ripping out head-high brush along a property line. Sometimes it’s insisting that new construction in fire zones meet tougher standards or retrofitting homes that were built for a climate that no longer exists.

Swain sees the January fires as a preview of what strong Santa Ana events will look like going forward. Historically, many of the strongest Santa Ana events came after at least some winter rain. Now that rain is arriving later, meaning more wind events strike when the hills are still crisped from autumn, as was the case in January.

But the problem in Los Angeles isn’t just meteorological: It is political, infrastructural, and deeply cultural. Miller likes to point to other parts of the country that faced similar crossroads and chose differently. After catastrophic floods in 1998, San Antonio bought out homeowners in riparian zones rather than sending them back into danger. Houston did something similar after Hurricane Harvey. These weren’t mass seizures or punitive acts; they were buyouts at market rate, voluntary and forward-looking. “What if,” Miller wondered, “you went to people who were burned out in Altadena and the Palisades and said, ‘We’re going to pay you not to rebuild’?” It’s a planner’s maxim—build up, not out—but in Southern California, the political will rarely matches the topographic reality.

And yet, amid the devastation, there were signs of another kind of civic instinct. In Altadena, neighbors organized mutual aid networks at local businesses like Octavia’s Bookshelf and Bike Oven, and community leaders helped residents navigate insurance, microloans, and temporary housing. New nonprofits sprang up to support people psychologically and financially. Miller is skeptical of rebuilding policy, but he’s quick to note the human creativity that emerged in the fire’s wake—a kind of grassroots adaptation that government hasn’t yet matched.

In May, Miller remembers stepping off a plane at LAX behind someone wearing a leather jacket with two mottos curved across the back: “Never forget” on top, “Rebuild Altadena” on the bottom. “I think the bottom circle erases the top,” Miller said. “If you rebuild, you have already forgotten because you are not paying attention to what happened and why it happened.”

Costco Is Coming for Trump. It Wants Its Money Back. - 2025-12-03T11:00:00Z

President Donald Trump’s legally dubious tariffs have harvested hundreds of billions of dollars from American companies and customers this year, despite the president’s claims that foreign countries are paying them. Now some of those companies want that money back.

Costco, the retail behemoth, filed a lawsuit against the Trump administration on Tuesday to demand a refund of any tariffs that the government collected under the International Economic Emergency Powers Act of 1977, or IEEPA. Trump has used IEEPA tariffs as the primary cudgel for economic policy and trade negotiations, with damaging consequences for Americans.

Costco argued that the tariffs were illegal because Congress never meant to authorize the collection of tariffs under IEEPA. “And there is no better evidence of Congress doing no such thing than the pell-mell manner by which these on-again/off-again IEEPA duties have been threatened, modified, suspended, and re-imposed, with the markets gyrating in response,” Costco complained.

The lawsuit is far from the first legal battle over Trump’s ability to levy “emergency” tariffs without congressional approval. Earlier this fall, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments in Learning Resources v. Trump, where most of the justices expressed doubt that IEEPA could authorize the tariffs in question. A ruling could come within the next few weeks or months.

Nor is Costco the only company that has sought such relief in recent weeks. NPR reported that cosmetics company Revlon, motoring conglomerate Kawasaki, and other brands have pursued similar litigation. Costco’s lawsuit stands out not only because of the size of the company involved but because it illustrates how tariffs actually work—and exposes the Trump administration’s lies about them.

Like those that came before it, Tuesday’s lawsuit argued that the IEEPA tariffs went beyond what Congress had authorized when it enacted the Cold War–era statute. Its sweeping language has been used in times of declared national emergency to freeze foreign assets and seize foreign-owned property. No previous administration, however, has used it as a revenue-raising mechanism before. “The text of IEEPA does not use the word ‘tariff’ or any term of equivalent meaning,” Costco noted in its complaint. “IEEPA was first enacted in 1977 and has been amended several times, but it has never been amended to authorize, or used by any other president to impose, tariffs.”

The Trump administration has claimed in other cases that the law’s authority to “regulate … importations” could be stretched to cover tariffs. It has also insisted that it would refund American importers if the tariffs were held to be illegal. This concession persuaded the Federal Circuit Court of Appeals to not block the tariffs with a preliminary injunction, thereby allowing the government to keep collecting them during litigation.

Costco argued that its new lawsuit was necessary to preserve its ability to recoup the tariffs that it has already paid. “Even if the IEEPA duties and underlying executive orders are held unlawful by the Supreme Court,” the company said in its complaint, “importers that have paid IEEPA duties, including [Costco], are not guaranteed a refund for those unlawfully collected tariffs in the absence of their own judgment and judicial relief.”

The lawsuit’s necessity is also driven by the nature of how tariffs are collected. That responsibility falls to Customs and Border Protection, an agency within the Department of Homeland Security. As its name suggests, CBP was formed in the 2000s by the merger of the U.S. Customs Service, which formerly resided in the Treasury Department, and the U.S. Border Patrol, which was previously housed in the Justice Department. CBP’s highly visible role in immigration enforcement has often obscured its lesser-known role in tariff collection.

In one sense, collecting tariffs superficially resembles the way that most Americans pay their taxes. Ahead of the annual April deadline, Americans report their income, their deductions, and other important details to the IRS, along with any owed payments. The IRS then notifies them if they owe additional taxes or if they are entitled to a tax refund.

For tariffs, the latter part of that process is known as liquidation, and it occurs on a rolling basis. Importers like Costco file a declaration with CBP for imported goods as they arrive and pay an initial duty on them based on the estimated value of the goods, their country of origin, and their classification under the federal tariff schedule. This can be an extraordinarily complicated process at the scale at which large corporations like Costco operate.

Just like the IRS reviewing one’s tax filing, CBP then reviews those valuations to confirm their accuracy. “Once the final amount of duty is determined by CBP, CBP ‘liquidates’ the entry and notifies the importer of record as to whether they owe more money or are entitled to a refund,” Costco explained in its lawsuit. The company noted that this usually takes place within 10 to 12 months.

Once that process is complete, Costco warned, it may be unable to recover the tariffs that it paid. Federal courts “have cautioned that an importer may lack the legal right to recover refunds of duties for entries that have liquidated, even where the underlying legality of a tariff is later found to be unlawful,” Costco claimed. And while CBP can voluntarily extend the liquidation period, the company claimed that the agency denied its request to do so.

This dynamic is in stark contrast to how the Trump administration often describes its tariff policy. In Trumpworld, tariffs are paid by foreign countries that have taken advantage of Americans for decades under free trade policies. In reality, tariffs are paid by American companies and individuals when they import goods into the United States. The Trump administration came close in November to conceding to reality before the Supreme Court justices but couldn’t bring itself to admit it outright.

“Who pays the tariffs?” Chief Justice John Roberts asked Solicitor General D. John Sauer, who argued on the administration’s behalf. “If a tariff is imposed on automobiles, who pays them?” Sauer’s rambling answer did not clearly explain the matter. That prompted Roberts to later state outright in another question that tariffs effectively amounted to the “imposition of taxes on Americans.”

The power to tax, Roberts explained, is a core power of Congress, not the executive branch. His line of questioning signaled that the Trump administration was unlikely to prevail on the legality of its IEEPA tariffs. If Costco and other companies ultimately prevail in their legal war against those tariffs, the full breadth of the Trump’s scam will be made clear to the American public—and his administration may even be forced to make whole the companies he scammed.

The Radical Honesty of Trump’s Racist New Immigration Policy - 2025-12-03T11:00:00Z

In keeping with this administration’s habit of unveiling massive new policies on social media, Department of Homeland Security head Kristi Noem took to X Monday evening to announce that she was “recommending a full travel ban,” barring visitors from “every damn country that’s been flooding our nation” with persons she called “killers, leeches, and entitlement junkies.” These people are “foreign invaders,” Noem said. “WE DON’T WANT THEM. NOT ONE.”

Like many a post on X, it was an astoundingly direct expression of the kind of lofty bullshitting that circulates among white nationalists and neo-Nazis—only now coming out of an official communication channel for a member of the president’s Cabinet and the head of the wealthiest federal agency. “Our forefathers built this nation,” Noem said in the same post, only for immigrants to “slaughter our heroes” and “snatch the benefits owed to AMERICANS.” 

Noem’s post is part of a desperate scramble by the Trump administration, as it attempts to move on from the inconvenient facts around last week’s shooting in the nation’s capital. Last Wednesday, an Afghan immigrant who worked alongside the CIA in the Afghanistan War, and who had been granted asylum in April, allegedly shot two National Guardsmen as they were patrolling the city, killing one and wounding the other. The accused was also shot, and in a virtual court hearing from his hospital bed on Tuesday, he pleaded “not guilty” to one charge of first degree murder.

The National Guard would not have been on the streets in Washington in the first place had the administration not ordered them there as a political stunt in August, claiming they would fight a “crime emergency.” (Trump said nonsensically on Tuesday that, thanks to him and those he deployed, Washington now had “no murders.”) But Trump, Noem, and other strident anti-immigrant administration figures like Stephen Miller have spent the last week using this tragedy to promote anti-immigration sentiment among the public. The day after the shooting, Trump announced that the administration would review all green cards for every immigrant from a “country of concern.” On Friday, it stopped processing all visa applications from Afghanistan, as well as ordering immigration officials to stop approving, denying, or closing open asylum applications from Afghanistan. And on Tuesday, it elaborated on the travel ban Noem had teased, stating it would bar people from at least 30 countries from entering the U.S.

On Sunday, the administration’s narrative began to crumple on Meet the Press. When asked what the federal government knew about the alleged shooter’s motive, Noem said that they “believe he was radicalized since he’s been here in this country.” But having no additional evidence about him, she wandered far afield from his case. “We do know that we will never allow this to continue to happen in our country,” Noem promised. Vaguely, she referred to “individuals who came to our country, that were unvetted by Joe Biden, allowed to run free and loose,” who would be “brought to justice” and “returned” if they “aren’t here for the purposes of being an American.”

If you press even a little on any of these claims by Noem, like a blazer that only holds up on camera, they come apart. This asylee, said Noem, was not yet “radicalized” when he entered the country. Instead, she said Biden was responsible for alleged criminal behavior that followed years later. Noem wanted to represent this case as a failure of the immigration system, but even if it was true that he was not “vetted,” how was the vetting supposed  to have identified “radicalization” that Noem also claims hadn’t happened yet? The host rather mildly raised the fact that as a CIA contractor, the man would have undergone “extensive vetting” at the time of his service to the United States, and then asked Noem why a DHS agency, USCIS, had approved his asylum application in April of this year. “Did you know then that he was moving toward radicalization?” Noem did not answer the question, even when asked again and again. The country has been “infiltrated,” she insisted, going even further into white nationalist rhetoric.

The Trump administration seems to be treating the suspect in last week’s shooting, in other words, as little more than a useful scapegoat in the administration’s ongoing war on immigrants. They’re not being subtle about it. And, true to form, when Trump lackeys fail to gain traction with a particular narrative, or when they falter, they quickly pivot, from one racist trope to another.

The current state of the immigration system was ugly enough already. Trump has barred people from 19 countries, mostly in the Middle East, North Africa, and sub-Saharan Africa, according to a report published in August by the American Immigration Council. Since June, he has reportedly been looking to bar entry to people from 36 additional countries. To resurrect this plan now, perhaps in an attempt to move on from the D.C. shooting story, demonstrates that there are few “distractions” when it comes to this administration: only old, bad ideas come back again.

The bottom line is, Trump’s mass deportation machine has not delivered as promised. While the administration has arrested and detained  immigrants in record numbers (and in what look more like abductions), it hasn’t deported millions as initially pledged. So it is doing all it can to further crash the system. On Monday, the Department of Justice fired eight immigration judges in New York so that it may appoint its own. They join the around 90 other immigration judges the administration has fired this year—out of around 600 judges. “The court has been basically eviscerated,” said one judge who was fired last month. On a single day in November, about 60,000 people were locked up by Immigration and Customs Enforcement or Customs and Border Protection, the most in years. At the same time, immigration courts have granted asylum in about half as many cases as they did last year. Whatever rhetoric is coming out of the administration about asylum, they have already got judges to deny thousands more cases, while installing more of their own judges. DHS is now advertising for new judicial applicants on X with the call to “END THE INVASION.”

On immigration, what may appear as distraction or new ideas are often the same old idea. Certainly the racist rhetoric coming from Noem and others in the administration resembles that of white nationalists. But it also highlights something else we have yet to fully reckon with: the mainstream racist ideas that fueled the anti-immigrant laws of the last century. You could drop Stephen Miller into the Congress of the 1920s and he would fit right in. When Trump is gone, he will not be taking every anti-immigrant narrative with him. Some of them have been here for a very long time. 

Trump Tirades at Media Darken as MAGA Bloodlust on Bombings Boils Over - 2025-12-03T10:00:00Z

Suddenly, on many fronts at once, President Trump and his allies are demonstrating how central sheer sadism is to his agenda—and to how MAGA conducts politics. Trump just unleashed a hateful rant to the media about Somali immigrants to set the stage for a coming campaign to arrest them en masse. Meanwhile, MAGA excitement over the Caribbean Sea bombings is spiking: Pete Hegseth tweeted out a deeply sadistic cartoon celebrating these extrajudicial killings. A prominent MAGA personality just declared her desire to see bombing victims “bleed out.” And MAGA figures are raging at reporters who broke the story of the follow-up strike killing two men in the water. We talked to Paul Waldman, who has a good piece on his Cross Section Substack about all of this. We discuss the centrality of hate and bloodlust to Trump-MAGA politics, how the administration’s social media strategy utilizes sadistic imagery, and why the public backlash to all these depravities is heartening. Listen to this episode here. A transcript is here.

Trump-Backed Republican Wins Special Election—but Just Barely - 2025-12-03T02:28:39Z

Republican Matt Van Epps narrowly beat Democrat Aftyn Behn in a special election Tuesday night to represent Tennessee 7th congressional district.

Van Epps was leading Behn 53.5 percent to 45.5 percent, with 75 percent of votes counted, when NBC News declared Van Epps’s victory.

The district has not had a Democratic representative since 1983, but Van Epps’s win came after polls showed the two neck-and-neck heading into Tuesday. Democrats had hoped to continue their strong electoral fortunes from last month, when they flipped some of the most Republican districts across the country and won the governorships of New Jersey and Virginia.

Behn outperformed Kamala Harris’s 2024 margin in the district, nearly closing the 20-point gap between her and Donald Trump. But the Trump-endorsed Van Epps, a former commissioner of the Tennessee Department of General Services and Army helicopter pilot, ultimately defeated Behn, a Tennessee state representative and former community organizer.

The latest poll from last week showed Van Epps narrowly leading Behn 48 percent to 46 percent, with 2 percent voting elsewhere and 5 percent undecided. Fearful conservatives dropped millions on the race, with right-wing super PACs alone spending $3.3 million against Behn as of last week, a huge expenditure for a normally safe seat in an off year.

The tightness of the race caused alarm among Republicans nationally, with House Speaker Mike Johnson traveling to Tennessee to campaign for Van Epps, even calling President Trump on speakerphone to address a rally.

“We have to win this seat. We’ve gotten you the largest tax cuts in history, and the new bill—the Great Big Beautiful Bill—kicks in, as you know, on January 1. It hasn’t even kicked in yet,” Trump said. “Number one, [Behn] hates Christianity, number two, she hates country music. How the hell can you elect a person like that? … It’s a big vote, and it’s gonna show something. It’s gonna show that the Republican Party is stronger than it’s ever been.”

In the end, Trump’s plea didn’t hurt Van Epps in conservative Tennessee despite the president’s approval rating being underwater. While the GOP has maintained its narrow majority in the House, Van Epps’s close victory will not inspire much confidence for Republicans heading into the 2026 midterm elections.

Trump Accidentally Lets Slip Just How Much He Hates JD Vance - 2025-12-02T22:28:29Z

Sorry, JD Vance—while ridiculing a former vice presidential candidate Tuesday, President Donald Trump seemed to accidentally admit to having an “incompetent” number two.

After barely being able to keep his eyes open during an hours-long Cabinet meeting, Trump appeared to perk up long enough to deliver an incoherent rant about Minnesota Governor Tim Walz.

“I think the man’s a grossly incompetent man,” Trump said, referring to Walz. “I thought that from the day I watched JD destroy him in a debate. I was saying, ‘Who was more incompetent? That man or my man?’ I had a man, and he had a man—they were both incompetent.”

Based solely on the structure of Trump’s statement, the president appeared to assert that “that man” and “his man” were “both incompetent.” But surely Trump would go on to clarify what he meant, right? Wrong.

“I had a man and a woman, I thought she was very incompetent too. But now she’s leading the field and I think she’s leading the field in the nomination,” Trump continued.

If reading loathing in Trump’s confused comment feels like a stretch, just take a look at the president’s glowering face when it was finally Vance’s turn to speak. For most of his Cabinet members, Trump merely kept his eyes shut.

Screenshot of a livestream

Setting Trump’s apparent slight aside, his garbled response is not exactly a promising sign for the commander in chief, who appeared to be struggling to stay awake during the meeting. Trump’s comments were incoherent. Who was “he,” and who was “she”? Was the president even actually conscious while he was speaking?

Earlier in the meeting, Trump joked that “generally speaking,” his Cabinet had many “high IQ” members. “A couple of them I’m a little concerned about,” he said, looking around the table.

Kristi Noem Thanks Trump for Keeping Hurricanes Away (?!) - 2025-12-02T21:05:30Z

Donald Trump’s presidential powers are practically supernatural—at least, according to Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem, who thanked Trump during a Cabinet meeting Tuesday for his apparent ability to ward off hurricanes over the last year.

“Sir, you made it through hurricane season without a hurricane,” Noem said to laughter from the room. “You kept the hurricanes away. We appreciate that.”

While Noem’s comment may have been a joke, the reality is much less funny. Trump has spent months trying to dismantle the Federal Emergency Management Agency, or FEMA, which provides disaster relief for areas severely impacted by natural disasters.

Since he was on the campaign trail, Trump and his allies have spread unfounded conspiracies that the lead emergency response agency had run out of money and that the Biden administration had diverted funds from FEMA to help undocumented immigrants enter the country. (FEMA administrators fervently and repeatedly denied this.) Republicans, at the time, claimed that working with the White House to expedite disaster relief “seemed political” and even conspiratorially suggested that the hurricanes were a government manipulation.

Days after his inauguration, Trump pitched that it would be better to do away with FEMA altogether in favor of handing the money directly to the states, though that plan has not yet come to fruition.

Still, Trump has managed to transform disaster relief into a political issue. In October, the president approved aid for several states that voted for him in the last election, including Alaska, Nebraska, and North Dakota, but denied it to others that did not: Vermont, Illinois, and Maryland.

Meanwhile, FEMA funds have gone to projects that have absolutely nothing to do with disaster relief. In October—days before the longest government shutdown in U.S. history—the Homeland Security Department issued a $608 million FEMA check to Florida to cover costs related to Alligator Alcatraz, the notoriously abusive immigrant detention center that has been roundly torched as a modern-day concentration camp tucked away in the Everglades.

Pete Hegseth Freaks Out When Asked About the Boat Strikes - 2025-12-02T20:56:38Z

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth absolutely lost it Tuesday as he scrambled to shirk responsibility for reportedly murdering the survivors of a September 2 drone strike on an alleged drug trafficking vessel in the Caribbean. 

Sitting beside a drowsy Donald Trump during a lengthy Cabinet meeting, Hegseth claimed that while he had been perfectly happy to take responsibility for the dozen extrajudicial executions of people who the government couldn’t prove were drug traffickers, he wouldn’t dare claim credit for that one Pentagon decision.

Instead, the war chief continued to redirect responsibility for the strike onto Commander Frank “Mitch” Bradley, and even the president himself. 

“I watched that first strike live. As you can imagine at the Department of War we got a lot of things to do, so I didn’t stick around for the hour and two hours, whatever, where all the sensitive site exploitation digitally occurs, so I moved on to my next meeting,” Hegseth said.

“A couple of hours later I learned that that commander had made the—which he had the complete authority to do—and by the way Admiral Bradley made the correct decision to ultimately sink the boat and eliminate the threat.”

Despite his blatant efforts to throw Bradley under the bus, Hegseth insisted Bradley had made “the right call, we have his back.”

Hegseth claimed he was not aware there were survivors after the first strike, adding that the “fog of war” would’ve made it difficult to determine if anyone had survived. He also noted that he’d written about this in his book last year, in which he complained at length about rules and regulations governing warfare in the U.S. military. In fact, two people were reportedly clinging to the side of the burning vessel after that September 2 strike and were killed in the second strike.

Hegseth then railed against the press and claimed that The Washington Post’s report that he’d instructed his underlings to “kill everybody” was “not based in anything, not based in any truth at all.”

But Hegseth wasn’t done covering his own tracks—and even implicated Trump directly.  

“President Trump has empowered commanders, commanders to do what is necessary, which is dark and difficult things in the dead of night on behalf of the American people,” Hegseth ranted. “We support them, and we will stop the poisoning of the American people.”

Pressed on how long there had been between the first and second strike, Hegseth said: “I couldn’t tell you the exact amount of time.”

Trump Trashes Somali Immigrants as He Orders ICE to Target Them - 2025-12-02T20:46:18Z

Donald Trump is openly threatening Minnesota’s Somali American community and making racist attacks against them.

After the president’s Cabinet meeting Tuesday, Trump told reporters that he heard “Somalians ripped off that state for billions of dollars. Billions. Every year, billions of dollars. And they contribute nothing. The welfare’s like 88 percent. They contribute nothing. I don’t want ’em in our country, I’ll be honest with you. Somebody would say, ‘Ooh, that’s not politically correct.’ I don’t care.”

Trump’s racist tirade (and attack on Somali American Congresswoman Ilhan Omar) comes after The New York Times reported that his administration plans to launch an immigration crackdown targeting the Somali community in the Minneapolis-St. Paul metropolitan area, purportedly focusing on undocumented immigrants. About 100 federal officers and agents have been sent to the region from around the country, according to the report.

The state’s Democratic governor, Tim Walz, criticized the plan on X Tuesday, saying, “We welcome support in investigating and prosecuting crime. But pulling a PR stunt and indiscriminately targeting immigrants is not a real solution to a problem.”

Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey expressed support specifically for the Somali community, saying at a press conference Tuesday, “We love you, and we stand with you. That commitment is rock solid.”

“Minneapolis is proud to be home to the largest Somali community in the entire country. They’ve been here for decades in many instances. They’re entrepreneurs and fathers. They benefit both the culture and the economic resilience of our city,” Frey said. “Targeting Somali people means that due process will be violated. Mistakes will be made. And let’s be clear: It means that American citizens will be detained for no other reason than the fact that they look like they are Somali.”

Frey was backed up at the press conference by Minneapolis Police Chief Brian O’Hara, who said the city’s police department would not work with federal agents. He also defended citizens’ right to protest against the Trump administration.

“In moments like this, I know how real the fear is in our community. People are going to want to speak out, protest, and exercise their First Amendment rights. We will absolutely defend people’s right to do just that,” O’Hara said.

How Trump Got Away With an Attempted Coup - 2025-12-02T20:28:07Z

The effort to punish Donald Trump for his attempts to overturn the 2020 election ended last week with a whimper. While most Americans were focusing on Thanksgiving with their families, Trump’s political allies were completing the greatest escape from criminal justice in the nation’s history.

Last Wednesday, a Georgia prosecutor filed a motion to end the final election-interference case against the president, and a judge obliged by promptly dismissing it—thus killing what may have been the final chance that Trump will face a criminal jury for the gravest assault on American democracy since the Civil War. The prosecutor’s timing was no coincidence. Like the dismissal of the federal criminal cases against the president and like his pardons of thousands of January 6 rioters, Trump and his political allies aim to quietly kill the cases against them so the American people will forget the crimes they committed against our country.

Pete Skandalakis, a state official standing in for the disqualified Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis, blended political polemic and practical considerations in his motion rationalizing an end to the case. What he did not do is suggest that the plot perpetrated by Trump and his co-defendants was legal.

Skandalakis wrote that “it is not illegal to question or challenge election results.” But the defendants in the case—who also included Trump’s former lawyer Rudolph Giuliani and his former chief of staff Mark Meadows, as well as three so-called false electors—were not prosecuted for expressing their political opinions, or for seeking to challenge the results of the election through lawful means like lawsuits or recounts. Instead, as Skandalakis later wrote, “the indictment alleges a compelling set of acts which ... would establish a conspiracy ... to overturn the results of the November 2020 Presidential Election in Georgia, and in other states across the country.”

Why, then, did Skandalakis dismiss the case? He gave different answers for different defendants. For the false electors, who were accused of “unlawfully falsely [holding] themselves out as the duly elected and qualified presidential electors from the State of Georgia,” he determined that he could not prove their criminal intent beyond a reasonable doubt. There may be some justice in that, at least for some of the unindicted electors. The key question is whether the electors were co-conspirators or pawns. Some of the false electors in swing states around the country seem to have believed Trump’s aides who told them that their Electoral College votes would be counted only if a court later ruled that Trump had won the election. If that was the plan the indicted Georgia electors believed they were participating in, then Skandalakis was right to dismiss the charges against them.

The central conspiracy in the indictment, and the greatest injustice in its dismissal, was the attempt by Trump and his advisers to pressure Georgia election officials to manipulate the state’s vote totals and force the illegal counting of electoral votes cast for him on January 6, 2021. Skandalakis seems to concede the plot was illegal when he suggests that the appropriate venue for its prosecution was special counsel Jack Smith’s federal case in Washington, D.C., which Smith ended upon Trump’s reelection. Skandalakis then suggests that the inevitable yearslong delay in trying Trump for state crimes after he leaves office in early 2029 renders the prosecution not viable. And, he claims, prosecuting Trump’s advisers without him would be “unproductive” and a “financial burden” on the prosecutor’s office.

This shell game, in which justice is never at hand but only off in some other court or jurisdiction, where prosecuting the most serious crimes ever committed by an American president and his political allies is somehow not worth it, is sadly familiar. Like the dismissal of Smith’s federal charges in D.C.—and in Florida, in the classified documents case—it has nothing to do with guilt or innocence.

That is the tragic conclusion of the criminal cases against Trump. He will evade prison not because he is innocent of the crimes with which he has been charged but because he has improbably succeeded in evading the reach of the law.

The Georgia dismissal is the latest salvo in the profound corruption of the American justice system wrought by Trump and his political allies. This year, the Department of Justice has brought transparently partisan prosecutions and investigations for minor mortgage document errors allegedly committed by Trump’s political opponents, including New York Attorney General Letitia James and Senator Adam Schiff. And in an Orwellian turn, federal prosecutors are now reported to be investigating Willis, the original prosecutor in the Georgia case, for unspecified offenses, after Trump said she is a “criminal” who “should be prosecuted.”

Meanwhile, Trump and his Georgia co-defendants will walk free without ever having to face a jury of their peers for their alleged crimes. Trump has already pardoned his adviser-accomplices, including Giuliani, John Eastman, and Kenneth Chesebro, for any federal crimes they committed as part of his plot. (Full disclosure: I served as the expert witness on constitutional law in the disbarment proceeding against John Eastman, and the Fulton County district sttorney relied on my report on the unlawfulness of the alternate electors scheme in the criminal prosecution of Kenneth Chesebro.) And perhaps most shamefully of all, on the first day of his second term of office, Trump pardoned more than 1,200 people convicted of federal crimes related to the Capitol riot on January 6, including hundreds who assaulted law enforcement officers.

But neither Trump nor the Georgia prosecutor can pardon or dismiss the legal and moral truth. Trump and his accomplices tried to steal the 2020 presidential election. The means through which they attempted to achieve that theft was the manipulation of the legal system, from the submission of false slates of electors to the pressure campaign on Vice President Pence to interfere with the electoral count on January 6. That scheme was unlawful, regardless of whether its perpetrators ever serve a day behind bars.

Trump and his allies who committed crimes in pursuing their plot will probably never face a jury’s judgment. But the truth remains: Trump lost the 2020 election and lied to the American people about it, and then he unlawfully tried to seize power by manipulating the legal system. If American democracy is to survive, we must remember that unvarnished truth so those who would seek to subvert it in the future never hold power again.

Trump Calls Ilhan Omar “Garbage” as His Team Breaks Out in Applause - 2025-12-02T19:56:59Z

President Trump used the last few minutes of his hours-long Cabinet meeting Tuesday to launch a particularly nasty attack on Democratic Representative Ilhan Omar and the entire country of Somalia. 

Trump’s rant was spurred by a leading question about Minnesota governor and former vice presidential candidate Tim Walz’s supposed complicity in allowing massive Social Service System fraud in his home state. Trump completely ignored the question, instead opting to personally attack Walz before shifting to Omar unprompted. 

“When you look at what [Walz has] done with Somalia, which is barely a country … they have no anything, they just run around killing each other,” Trump said. “And when I see somebody like Ilhan Omar—who I don’t know at all—but I always watch her, for years I’ve watched her complain about our Constitution, how she’s being treated badly … hates everybody, hates Jewish people, hates everybody. And I think she’s an incompetent person.” 


As an outspoken Black, progressive, Muslim, African, refugee, and woman in office, Omar is someone whom the president—and the rest of the GOP—can cast their slanderous bigotry toward, much to the delight of the MAGA base.

Trump continued to rant against Omar. 

“She’s a real terrible person … I hear [Somalians] ripped off that state for billions of dollars … I don’t want ’em in our country, I’ll be honest with you. Somebody’ll say ‘Ooh that’s not politically correct.’ I don’t care. I don’t want ’em in our country. Their country’s no good for a reason. Their country stinks, and we don’t want ’em in our country.

“We’re gonna go the wrong way if we keep taking garbage into our country. Ilhan Omar is garbage. Her friends are garbage.… When they come from hell, and they complain, and do nothing but bitch? We don’t want ’em in our country. Let ’em go back to where they came from and fix it.” 

Trump’s Cabinet members started banging on the table, clapping, and cheering as the meeting concluded on that note. 

Trump entered some sort of racist flow state here. He hit all the points that make his base—from the Groypers to the neocons—foam at the mouths: “I’ll never be politically correct,” “This specific group of immigrants is a problem for us,” and “This woman who opposes me is a stupid and awful person.”  

Pope Leo Warns Trump About Next Steps in Venezuela - 2025-12-02T19:41:00Z

Pope Leo has implored Donald Trump not to use military force to force out Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro.

The first American leader of the Catholic Church told reporters Tuesday that it would be “better” to “find another way” to apply pressure, such as hosting a dialogue with Maduro, or imposing economic sanctions on the South American nation, “if that is what they want to do in the United States.”

Since early September, the U.S. has destroyed at least 20 small boats traversing the Caribbean that Trump administration officials deemed—without an investigation or interdiction—to be smuggling drugs. At least 83 people have been killed in the attacks.

The attacks have been condemned by U.S. lawmakers on both sides of the aisle and foreign human advocates alike, including the U.N. human rights chief, who said in October that the strikes “violate international human rights law.”

While chalking the seemingly needless violence up to counter-narcoterrorism efforts, Trump has simultaneously leveraged the aggression to shove Maduro out of power, something that he tried and failed to do in 2019.

The White House confirmed Sunday that the two leaders shared a phone call late last week, during which Trump reportedly issued a stern ultimatum.

“You can save yourself and those closest to you, but you must leave the country now,” Trump told Maduro, according to insiders who spoke with the Miami Herald. That is, “only if he agreed to resign right away.”

Maduro, meanwhile, told thousands of his supporters Monday that he would not capitulate or settle for “a slave’s peace.”

Responding to a reporter Tuesday, Leo suggested that the Trump administration had not been consistent with its policy toward Venezuela.

“On one hand, it seems there was a call between the two presidents.… On the other hand, there is the danger, there is the possibility there will be some activity, some (military) operation.

“The voices that come from the United States, they change with a certain frequency,” the Chicagoan pontiff said.

Elise Stefanik Lashes Out at Mike Johnson, Accuses Him of Lying - 2025-12-02T18:43:16Z

Republican Representative Elise Stefanik is feuding with House Speaker Mike Johnson after legislation she has been pushing for years related to Russia and the 2016 election was left out of the National Defense Authorization Act, a major defense policy bill.

Stefanik’s legislation would require the FBI to notify Congress every time the bureau opens an investigation into a political candidate seeking federal office. On Monday, she complained on X that her years-old provision was being left out of the NDAA and that, as a result, she would be voting “no” on the bill.

“Unless this provision is added back into the bill to prevent illegal political weaponization of the intelligence community in our elections, I am a HARD NO. I have always voted in support of the defense and intelligence authorization bills, but no more,” Stefanik wrote in a long post. “It is a scandalous disgrace that Republicans are allowing themselves to be rolled by the Dems and deep state on this.”

Johnson was not happy, telling Jake Sherman of Punchbowl Tuesday, “All of that is false.”

“I don’t exactly know why Elise won’t just call me. I texted her yesterday. She’s upset one of her provisions is not being made, I think, into the NDAA.… As soon as I heard this yesterday, I was campaigning in Tennessee, and I wrote her and said, ‘What are you talking about? This hasn’t even made it to my level,’” Johnson said.

This seemed to make Stefanik even more upset. She ranted on X: “Just more lies from the Speaker.”

“And in true to form, the Speaker texted me yesterday claiming he ‘knew nothing about it.’ Yeah right. This is his preferred tactic to tell Members when he gets caught torpedoing the Republican agenda,” Stefanik posted, complaining that Johnson was “siding” with Democratic Representative Jamie Raskin.

Losing Stefanik’s vote on the NDAA, a major defense appropriations bill that has to pass every year, could be disastrous for Johnson, considering that Republicans only have a narrow two-vote majority in the House. Stefanik also has the support of fellow House GOP rebel Marjorie Taylor Greene, who posted on X Tuesday, “No surprises here. As usual from the Speaker, promises made promises broken. We all know it,” quoting a post from Stefanik.

Stefanik will not be in Congress much longer, as she has launched her own campaign for governor of New York. In the meantime, she’s not being quiet, and Johnson should be worried that her feelings might spread within the GOP caucus, especially with other House Republicans eyeing the exits.

Trump, 79, Repeatedly Falls Asleep in His Own Cabinet Meeting - 2025-12-02T18:21:51Z

President Trump once again appeared to struggle to stay awake and alert during his own Cabinet meeting.

The president leaned forward, leaned back, twiddled his thumbs, and did everything in between as his eyelids grew heavy in the middle of a Tuesday afternoon Cabinet meeting. As each of his Cabinet members gave him an update on how great everything is going, the president looked more and more exhausted, his eyes fully closed at several points.

This most recent on-camera nap comes just over a week after The New York Times reported on what appears to be a serious drop in Trump’s energy and activity compared to his first term. The president has been pissed about the story ever since.

It’s clear to anyone watching that the president has issues staying up while sitting in long meetings, like many old men do. Trump has dozed off in other meetings, including during a briefing with Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, in May. This all only adds fuel to the narrative that the man who will end his term as the oldest president in U.S. history is not as mentally or physically fit as he claims to be.

Sabrina Carpenter Trashes Trump for Using Her Song in “Evil” Ad - 2025-12-02T18:12:47Z

Sabrina Carpenter slammed the White House Tuesday for using her hit song about “freaky positions” in a racist video about brutal immigration arrests.

The White House posted a video on X Monday using the Gen Z pop star’s song “Juno” over footage of people protesting Trump’s immigration operations. The video then cuts to clips of other people being brutally run down and handcuffed by federal authorities. It’s not clear that any of the people in the video were actually undocumented immigrants—they just weren’t white.

“Have you ever tried this one?” the post read, a lyric from Carpenter’s song. “Bye-bye.”

Carpenter replied the next day: “This video is evil and disgusting. Do not ever involve me or my music to benefit your inhumane agenda.”

But White House didn’t seem to get the message to keep away from Carpenter’s music. White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson responded with a statement that once again referenced the singer’s lyrics: “Here’s a Short n’ Sweet message for Sabrina Carpenter: We won’t apologize for deporting dangerous criminal illegal murderers, rapists, and pedophiles from our country. Anyone who would defend these sick monsters must be stupid, or is it slow?”

If this is the Trump administration’s best attempt to reach out to a younger generation, it doesn’t seem to be going too well.

Earlier this month, Carpenter’s fellow pop star and former Disney Channel actress Olivia Rodrigo hit back at the Department of Homeland Security after it posted an Instagram reel promoting self-deportation, using one of her songs. In a comment, Rodrigo said, “Don’t ever use my songs to promote your racist, hateful propaganda.”

Immigration and Customs Enforcement launched an ad campaign in August to recruit “Gen-Z and early-career professionals” to fill thousands of open roles as so-called “Homeland Defenders.” The Trump administration has desperately worked to boost the number of immigration officers, causing a “shit show” at ICE.

This story has been updated.

Top Republicans Turn Against Hegseth, Demand Video of Boat Strike - 2025-12-02T17:09:11Z

Republican leadership is tiring of Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.

Top conservatives have started to publicly voice their discontent with Trump’s appointed war chief, as reports circulate about a Pentagon decision to mercilessly kill survivors of a drone strike in the Caribbean on September 2.

Republicans have been practically mute as Hegseth’s careless, monthslong killing spree has claimed the lives of at least 83 people. But GOP-led panels in the House and Senate are dialing up their scrutiny of the Pentagon, demanding a full account of the September boat strikes.

The Republican chairmen of the Senate and House Armed Services committees are both demanding audio and video of the incident. “We’re going to conduct oversight, and we’re going to try to get to the facts,” vowed Senator Roger Wicker.

Senator Thom Tillis told CNN that he was still trying to understand whether Hegseth had ordered the second strike that day, killing a couple of survivors that clung to the wreckage left by the initial attack.

“Obviously, if it can be substantiated by facts, it’s a violation of both ethical and possibly legal requirements,” Tillis said. “If it is substantiated, whoever made that order needs to get the hell out of Washington.”

The North Carolina lawmaker was not the only conservative in Washington irate over the events. Senator Lindsey Graham said that he was still working out “the facts” but suggested that the attack could have run afoul of the law.

“It’s a long-held rule that survivors of the ship attack are no longer combatants, and an air crew member in a parachute is no longer a combatant. You’re out of the fight,” Graham told CNN. “I don’t know what the facts are, but that’s general law. We’ll see what the facts are.”

Before he knew that the White House had confirmed the Pentagon struck the boat twice, West Virginia Senator Jim Justice told the network that a second attack seemed “way over the edge.”

“I don’t see how that’s acceptable,” he added.

Ultimately, Hegseth’s long string of scandals appear to be adding up, pushing his potential congressional allies further and further away.

Representative Don Bacon, who serves on the House Committee on Armed Services, told CNN’s Manu Raju that Hegseth should be forced out of government—if he’s deemed responsible for the second strike.

“I felt that way under Signalgate,” Bacon said, referring to an incident in March when Trump administration officials accidentally added The Atlantic’s editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg to a Signal chat regarding sensitive details of a plan to bomb Houthis in Yemen. “He should’ve taken responsibility then, and he didn’t.”

“I’ve seen enough that I don’t think he’s the right leader,” Bacon told Raju.

The White House has repeatedly insisted the violence is justified, broadly accusing the boats of trafficking narcotics to the U.S. from Venezuela and Colombia, though U.S. lawmakers have been more than skeptical—particularly since several of the boats were thousands of miles away in international waters, and since the attacks were conducted without prior investigations or interdiction. Pentagon officials reportedly haven’t been concerned with identifying the people on the boats before attacking.

After National Guard Shooting, Trump Is Ready to Go to a New Extreme - 2025-12-02T16:51:49Z

President Donald Trump is all in on Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem’s plan to exploit the shooting of two National Guard members in order to expand one of the Trump administration’s most racist policies: the travel ban.

Multiple U.S. officials told CBS News Tuesday that Trump’s travel ban would be expanded to roughly 30 countries, up from 19. The Department of Homeland Security also released a statement promising that it would announce a slate of new additions to Trump’s travel ban “soon.”

This announcement comes just days after an Afghan refugee was accused of shooting two guardsmen just blocks away from the White House, spurring the Trump administration to pause asylum case decisions for all nationalities and order a full-scale review of green card cases involving immigrants from the 19 countries currently subject to the travel ban.

Not only is it not clear why the alleged actions of one individual would require all citizens of a country to be barred entry to the U.S., but crucially, Afghanistan is already subject to Trump’s travel ban. Trump’s plot to loop in other countries just shows the lengths the administration will go to further his agenda to smear and exclude immigrants.

It seems the idea for this latest blatantly racist backlash originated with Noem, who wrote on X Monday that she’d recommended Trump impose a “full travel ban on every damn country that’s been flooding our nation with killers, leeches, and entitlement junkies.”

“Our forefathers built this nation on blood, sweat, and the unyielding love of freedom—not for foreign invaders to slaughter our heroes, suck dry our hard-earned tax dollars, or snatch the benefits owed to AMERICANS,” she wrote. “WE DON’T WANT THEM. NOT ONE.”

“EVERY DAMN COUNTRY,” wrote the official DHS X account, sharing Noem’s sentiment.

The Trump administration has also halted all visa and immigration processing for Afghan nationals. The alleged shooter, Rahmanullah Lakanwal, served in a paramilitary unit in Afghanistan led by the CIA and trained by U.S. special operations soldiers. He received his asylum and work authorization in April this year. So, despite Noem’s tantrum, it seems that the Trump administration did at one time want these so-called “foreign invaders.”

Trump’s travel ban currently fully bars entry from Afghanistan, Chad, the Republic of the Congo, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Haiti, Iran, Libya, Myanmar, Somalia, Sudan and Yemen, and partially restricts travel from several other countries, including Burundi, Cuba, Laos, Sierra Leone, Togo, Turkmenistan, and Venezuela.

Hegseth Boasted About Ignoring War Crimes in His Own Book - 2025-12-02T16:48:30Z

Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth told soldiers under his command in Iraq to ignore legal advice on the rules of engagement in war. 

In his book The War on Warriors, published last year, Hegseth wrote about an instance where he rejected a military judge advocate general’s guidance on the rules of engagement, telling troops, “I will not allow that nonsense to filter into your brains.”

Hegseth wrote that the judge advocate general “used the example of an identified enemy holding a rocket-propelled grenade” and asked Hegseth’s platoon, “Do you shoot at him?”

The former Fox News host said his fellow soldiers replied, “Hell, yeah, we light him up,” to which  the JAG said, “Wrong answer, men.” 

“You are not authorized to fire at that man, until that RPG becomes a threat. It must be pointed at you with the intent to fire. That makes it a legal and proper engagement,” the officer said, according to Hegseth, who wrote that his platoon mates “sat in silence, stunned.”

Hegseth wrote that he pulled the platoon aside after the briefing and told them, “I will not allow that nonsense to filter into your brains. Men, if you see an enemy who you believe is a threat, you engage and destroy the threat. That’s a bullshit rule that’s going to get people killed. And I will have your back—just like our commander. We are coming home, the enemy will not.”

The passage, reported on by The Guardian Tuesday, is one of many instances in Hegseth’s book in which he complains about rules and regulations governing warfare in the U.S. military. In another passage, Hegseth gripes, “If our warriors are forced to follow rules arbitrarily and asked to sacrifice more lives so that international tribunals feel better about themselves, aren’t we just better off winning our wars according to our own rules?! Who cares what other countries think.”

Throughout the book, Hegseth repeatedly praises his own commander, Colonel Michael Steele, whom he calls a “certified badass,” and who was later reprimanded for reportedly ordering soldiers in 2006 in Iraq to “kill all military age males” in a raid.

All of this takes on new meaning with news this week regarding Hegseth’s actions in the Caribbean Sea. On September 2, following a strike on boats suspected of smuggling drugs to the U.S., Hegseth reportedly ordered an immediate follow-up strike to kill two survivors. A Washington Post report found that Hegseth made an order to kill everybody on the boats, which the White House denies, instead placing the blame on Admiral Frank “Mitch” Bradley. 

Hegseth’s own words from last year on respecting rules of engagement, as well as international treaties and agreements on war, would seem to suggest that he’d have no problem issuing such an order, which would be a war crime. It would also violate the Defense Department’s own Law of War Manual, which prohibits declaring “no quarter” or conducting operations “on the basis that there shall be no survivors.” Does Hegseth disagree with that as well? 

Pete Hegseth Sends Cryptic Message to Admiral on Drug Boat Strike - 2025-12-02T16:19:47Z

It seems that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and the Trump administration have decided to throw admiral Frank “Mitch” Bradley to the wolves, pinning the order for a second strike on survivors of a boat bombing—which may constitute a war crime—directly on him.

“Let’s make one thing crystal clear: Admiral Mitch Bradley is an American hero, a true professional, and has my 100% support. I stand by him and the combat decisions he has made—on the September 2 mission and all others since,” Hegseth wrote on X Monday evening, making sure to spell out that it was Bradley who made the decisions. “America is fortunate to have such men protecting us. When this @DeptofWar says we have the back of our warriors—we mean it.”

Hegseth’s cryptic message is the latest installment of the fallout from a September 2 boat bombing that killed nine people. There were two survivors left, and The Washington Post reported that they were bombed after Hegseth gave an order to “kill everybody.” Hegseth and the White House have not denied that the potentially criminal order was given but on Monday began to claim that the order came from Bradley, who was the mission’s commander under Hegseth.

Hegseth’s message reads more like him leading Bradley to the gallows than it does a message of support, and the public noticed.

“Let’s be absolutely clear: I stand behind Admiral Bradley, who made this decision and not me,” one user replied to Hegseth, mockingly. “It was the right decision, it was legal, I agree with it 100 times out of 100 and I cannot emphasize enough I had nothing to do with the decision Bradley made on his own, which I support.”

“Hegseth off-loading responsibility while framing it like he’s a Tough Military Dude ‘backing warriors’ or whatever is peak Hegseth: cowardly, scummy, insecure, smarmy, selfish, and soaked in deeply affected rhetoric lifted from 80s action movies,” wrote another. “A total worm.”

Republican House and Senate Armed Services Committee Chairs Mike Rogers and Roger Wicker—along with congressional Democrats—are currently moving to have Bradley in for a classified briefing to hear his side of the story.

Kash Patel Justifies Jacket Meltdown by Saying He Wanted a Kid’s Size - 2025-12-02T15:27:34Z

FBI Director Kash Patel was already trying to make jokes Monday about a humiliating report that he wouldn’t get off a plane to investigate the murder of his friend Charlie Kirk because he didn’t have the right outfit.

Patel has once again become the object of ridicule following a leaked report that he refused to deboard a plane until someone got him a medium-size FBI raid jacket. He ended up taking a female agent’s jacket but then began to complain that that jacket didn’t have the proper patches on it. He refused to disembark until SWAT team members lent him their patches.

Patel tried Monday to clap back at a dig from California Representative Eric Swalwell.

“I don’t mind that FBI Director Kash Patel had to wear a women’s (size medium) jacket to cosplay as someone in charge. I just wish he’d focus on stopping the rampant domestic terrorism happening on his watch,” Swalwell wrote on X.

Patel replied: “I was looking for a Youth Large.... Domestic terrorism arrests are UP 30% this year—impressive, considering I spent zero days dating a Chinese spy named Fang Fang, where should I send your women’s medium for date night?”

It’s unclear how a Youth Large is more “alpha male” than a women’s medium, but OK.

Patel’s rather juvenile reply referred to a 2020 report that Swalwell was among a group of prominent Bay Area Democrats who had been targeted by a suspected Chinese spy named Christine Fang. Swalwell reportedly cut all ties with Fang in 2015 after U.S. intelligence officials alerted him to her alleged connection to China’s Ministry of State Security. Conservatives still make racist jokes about their supposed relationship.

The leaked internal report that contained details about Patel’s temper tantrum also offered a damning assessment of his leadership at the FBI. Two separate sources described Patel as “in over his head.” Another source said that Patel was “not very good” and “may be insecure.”

Pete Hegseth Already Bragged About That Second Strike - 2025-12-02T15:15:59Z

It turns out that Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth knows all about the circumstances of the America’s September 2 strike on boats in the Caribbean Sea. 

A clip of Hegseth talking the next day about the strike to Fox News in September resurfaced online Monday night. In the clip, Hegseth said he watched the bombing happen live. 

“I can tell you that was definitely not artificial intelligence. I watched it live. We knew exactly who was in that boat. We knew exactly what they were doing, and we knew exactly who they represented, and that was Tren de Aragua, a narco-terrorist organization designated by the United States, trying to poison our country with illicit drugs,” Hegseth said. 

Hegseth’s words contradict the Trump administration’s statements after details emerged earlier this week that the U.S. conducted a second strike on September 2 to kill survivors from its initial attack. The administration has attempted to shift blame and responsibility from Hegseth to Commander Frank “Mitch” Bradley. Trump himself claimed Sunday he “wouldn’t have wanted that—not a second strike.” 

If indeed the U.S. government conducted a second strike to kill survivors, that would be a war crime—and that’s assuming we are even at war, which Congress has not declared. Will Republicans in Congress demand accountability for these airstrikes and the many that have followed, all of which are legally questionable?  Or will they instead acquiesce to Trump arbitrarily conducting a war? 

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