Greenland
Brexit leader
Daniel Hannan urges Trump voters to hit the exits.
Pollsters have long understood that the act of casting a ballot creates a bond. Once we have voted for a candidate, we feel invested in him. We don’t want to admit to ourselves that we might have made a mistake.
Psychologists have lots of terms for the cognitive glitches that make us think this way: post-decision rationalization, dissonance reduction, commitment escalation, choice-supportive bias. But these phrases don’t do justice to the sheer intensity of what happened in red states in November 2016. Voters who detested Hillary Clinton were emotionally fused to the man who defeated her. Something similar happened eight years later with Kamala Harris, soldering the attachment more firmly.
I understand it. On three successive occasions, the Democrats put up terrible candidates—a curiously self-indulgent thing to do, given how high the stakes were, but that’s another story.
I don’t get a vote, obviously—that was settled at Yorktown—but if I had had one, my candidate in 2016 would have been Gary Johnson, the former governor of New Mexico. Still, let’s be honest: Reason is perhaps the only serious publication where I can mention a Libertarian Party candidate and expect more than the tiniest flicker of recognition. For most Americans in most states, there were only two plausible candidates, and, having chosen one on faute-de-mieux grounds, they began unconsciously to build him up in their minds.
After all, Donald Trump was delivering on a fair chunk of what he promised. He deported illegal immigrants, stopped appointing left-wing activist judges, moved the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem, cut federal regulations, and said what his voters wanted to hear about trans people. True, his tariffs raised prices and made America less competitive. But in the country with the largest gross domestic product in the world, trade is a small proportion of the economy; a spectacularly dumb tariff policy can be offset by moderately sensible policies on taxation, regulation, and energy abundance.
At the same time, Trump was being attacked, often stupidly and dishonestly, by people whom his voters cordially loathed. We are a tribal species, and each such attack pushed them closer to him.
As time passed, the nose pegs came off. Trump was their guy. Sure, he could be brash, bombastic, boorish. But he was more or less delivering on what he had been elected to do. Who cared about his character failings? When you hire a plumber, do you ask whether he is faithful to his wife, or do you just want to get your boiler fixed?
Trump’s character flaws, with all the inevitability of a Greek tragedy, led to the breakdown of January 6, 2021. Everyone knew, his supporters especially, that Trump cannot admit defeat. Whenever something goes against him—a business deal, an awards ceremony, a round of golf—he calls foul and claims victory. Because no one dared check this behavior in him as president, it became more extreme and more destructive.
Will anything turn MAGA against him? I wondered whether, by threatening to annex Greenland, he had found the one issue where his base would not follow him. He was elected as the candidate who would put an end to foreign adventurism, and voters opposed taking Greenland by 71 percent to 4 percent—4 percent being, coincidentally, the “lizardman’s constant,” the estimated proportion of people in any poll who will give insincere or demented replies. Perhaps that is why, as I write, he seems to be backing down from the demand.
The drama, the neediness, the insistence that owning Greenland was “psychologically important for me,” the demented letter to the Norwegian prime minister saying that, because he had not won the Nobel Prize, he might just seize someone else’s territory—will his people continue to back him through all that?
Trump’s refusal to understand that the Norwegian government does not control the Nobel committee is telling. During my time in politics, I came across this tendency again and again when dealing with representatives of tinpot dictatorships. “Why will you not let British Airways fly to our glorious capital?” Well, they’re an independent airline and, if they think the route is profitable, I’m sure they’ll put on a flight. “Lies! Why does your government not act?”
The only two examples I can think of where officials blamed the Norwegian government for the prizes were in 1935, when Hitler went ballistic over the award of the Nobel Peace Prize to Carl von Ossietzky, a German pacifist, and in 2010, when China froze relations with Oslo over its award to the dissident Liu Xiaobo. The idea of attacking a country—let alone a different country—over not getting the prize is without precedent.
There is no point in sugarcoating this. The chief executive is unfit for office. His erratic behavior, his inability to distinguish between his public role and his private interests, his determination to subordinate U.S. foreign policy to his personal wants: These things should bar him.
Congress could put a stop to all this nonsense tomorrow. It could reassert its prerogatives over trade policy and cancel the tariffs. It could begin impeachment proceedings on the grounds that the president is no longer compos mentis. But, filled with cowards and flatterers, it hangs back. And so the checks and balances that the founders put in precisely to contain two-bit Caesarists fail for lack of will.
“A republic—if you can keep it.” Can you, brothers?
Trump budget office orders review of funds to Democratic-controlled states
President Donald Trump said his administration would cut off federal resources to “sanctuary cities” on Feb. 1.
“This is a data-gathering exercise only,” the memo states later. “It does not involve withholding funds and therefore does not violate any court order.”
President Donald Trump declared in a speech last week that as of Feb. 1, the federal government would stop making “any payments to sanctuary cities, or states having sanctuary cities, because they do everything possible to protect criminals at the expense of American citizens.”
The Trump administration has surged immigration enforcement in Minneapolis as prosecutors focus on nonprofits there that have received federal grants. Many of the targeted organizations are affiliated with the city’s large Somali community, and Trump has used the situation to call for a crackdown on both federal benefits fraud and immigration from East Africa.
During a speech Wednesday at the World Economic Forum in the Swiss resort town of Davos, Trump described the investigation’s targets as “Somalian bandits.
“We ar moving forward with taking fraud seriously,” said an OMB spokesperson, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss internal proceedings.
The jurisdictions included in the budget office’s request are: California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Illinois, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Jersey, New York, Oregon, Rhode Island, Vermont, Virginia and Washington state. It also includes the District Columbia wrote in his ruling.
Fact-checking Donald Trump’s Davos speech on Greenland, US economy
“You can say yes, and we will be very appreciative, or you can say no and we will remember,” Trump said in the hourlong Jan. 21 speech.
Hours later, Trump said on Truth Social that he met with Secretary General of NATOMark Rutte and “formed the framework of a future deal with respect to Greenland” and therefore will not impose the tariffs. The post did not provide details.
At an already tense moment for European leaders, amid comments dismissive of NATO, Trump on four occasions referred to “Iceland” as he mused about the reaction to his Greenland push.
Here is a fact-check of his remarks.
“We’ve never gotten anything” from NATO.
That’s wrong. Trump overlooked that NATO invoked Article 5 after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the U.S.
The article’s key text says that “an armed attack against one or more” NATO members is considered an attack on all members and leads to assistance including the use of armed forces. According to historian David Murphy of Ireland’s Maynooth University, Danish troops were among the NATO nations supporting the U.S. effort in Afghanistan. Forty-four Danish troops died in combat, Murphy said — the highest per capita death rate among coalition members. Another eight Danish soldiers died in the U.S. war against Iraq, he said.
Non-NATO members, including Russia, also supported the U.S. after Sept. 11, said Marc Trachtenberg, a UCLA political scientist who studies international relations.
The benefit of NATO for the U.S. during the Cold War was that the Soviets were prevented from “harnessing its vast resources to their war machine” and that was accomplished without West Germany arming itself with nuclear weapons, Trachtenberg said. “What we ‘got’ was a political system both sides could live with — an extraordinary accomplishment.”
“I’ve done more to help NATO than any other president, by far, than any other person.”
Experts said Trump gets some credit for allies agreeing in 2025 to increase their NATO spending. But they also said that Russia President Vladimir Putin’s 2014 and 2022 invasions of Ukraine spurred European defense spending increases.
RELATED: Fact-checking Trump’s text message to Norway’s prime minister about Nobel Peace Prize, NATO
“We gave Greenland back to Denmark.”
This is misleading.
After Germany invaded Denmark, the U.S. assumed responsibility for Greenland’s defense and established a military presence on the island that remains today, albeit in diminished scope. The U.S. never possessed the nation — so it could not have given it back.
Trump was more accurate when he said that during World War II, “We saved Greenland and successfully prevented our enemies from gaining a foothold in our hemisphere.”
“In 2019 Denmark said that they would spend over $200 million to strengthen Greenland’s defenses. But as you know, they spent less than 1% of that amount.”
This is accurate, according to news reports.
In 2019, Denmark pledged to invest around $200 million on military spending in Greenland. At the time, Trump had talked about wanting to buy the territory. However, in 2024, a Danish news outlet reported that Denmark had only spent about 1% of the money.
In 2025, amid renewed threats from Trump to take over Greenland, Reuters reported that Denmark Defense Minister Troels Lund Poulsen said: “We have neglected for many years to make the necessary investments in ships and in aircraft that will help monitor our kingdom, and that is what we are now trying to do something about.”
In October, the Danish government pledged to invest around $4 billion in military spending in Greenland, Reuters reported.
“In 2025, for the first time in 50 years, the United States had reverse migration.”
A Jan. 13 analysis from the Brookings Institute estimated that net migration — how the number of people immigrating to the U.S. compares with the number moving out of the country — was close to zero or negative in 2025, citing Trump’s immigration policies. The analysis also estimated the trend will remain in 2026 while cautioning that “recent reductions in data transparency make the estimates more uncertain.”
The last time the U.S. experienced negative net migration was more than 85 years ago, in the period from 1931 to 1940, during the Great Depression.
“Grocery prices, energy prices, airfares, mortgage rates, rent and car payments are all coming down, and they’re coming down fast.”
The accuracy of this statement is mixed.
Mortgage rates have fallen from just over 7% when he took office to a bit above 6% as of mid-January, and airfare and the price of new and used cars have also experienced price declines.
The picture is more nuanced for grocery and energy prices.
The price of groceries has risen at rates similar to their increase during President Joe Biden’s final year in office. While prices for some specific items — including eggs, bacon, dairy products and bread — have gone down, the prices for many other staples are up, including ground beef, steak, chicken breasts, coffee, fruits and vegetables, and sugar and sweets.
On energy, the cost of electricity is up significantly, almost 7% higher than a year ago. But gasoline prices have seen a notable decline. After spending the first 10 months of 2025 in a holding pattern around $3.10 a gallon, gasoline prices have fallen below $2.80 a gallon nationally since November.
A “major factor in driving up housing costs was the mass invasion of our borders.”
Evidence doesn’t support the connection between immigrants in the country illegally and high housing costs. Instead, experts point to a shortage of millions of homes caused by years of underbuilding. An interest rate surge and increased demand for homes during the pandemic exacerbated the problem.
“China makes almost all of the windmills, and yet, I haven’t been able to find any wind farms in China.”
That’s Pants on Fire!
China has about 44% of the world’s wind farm capacity, ranking No. 1 globally and almost triple what the U.S. has. China is also planning or building more wind farm capacity than any other country.
Describing the dozens of vessels his administration has struck in the Caribbean Sea and Eastern Pacific Ocean since September, Trump said, “We’ve knocked down drugs by water, the oceans, the sea, by 97.2%”
The president has provided no evidence for that figure. A spokesperson for the U.S. Coast Guard told PolitiFact it does not publish monthly drug seizure data. That makes it difficult to know how vessel strikes have affected drug seizure numbers.
In fiscal year 2025, which ended in September, the Coast Guard seized “510,000 pounds of cocaine in the Eastern Pacific Ocean and Caribbean … the largest amount in the Service’s history,” a Nov. 6 Coast Guard press release said.
On Jan. 9, another Coast Guard press release said that in three months starting in August, “Coast Guard crews seized over 100,000 pounds of narcotics.”
It’s important to note that drug seizure data shows only how many drugs don’t make it into the U.S. It’s unclear how many drugs entered the U.S. in the same time period.
— Maria Ramirez Uribe
Trump said Minnesotans protesting are engaged in “fake protests, done by agitators and professional insurrectionists” and said “they’re professional troublemakers.”
He did not cite any evidence. The White House did not immediately provide any.
Trump has used the same term when threatening to invoke the Insurrection Act, an 1807 law that allows the president to deploy military forces to suppress rebellion.
Thousands of Minnesotans have protested federal immigration enforcement’s recent surge, particularly after an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent fatally shot Renee Good. Students at Twin Cities’ high schools held walk outs to protest ICE.
Yohuru Williams, a historian and director of the Racial Justice Initiative at the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, said there is no data to support Trump’s claim.
“Most protestors are residents of the state who are concerned not only about the presence of ICE in the state but also the President’s usurpation of power,” Williams said in an email.
Using messaging apps such as Signal, Minnesotans communicate with each other when they see ICE agents in their neighborhood and then document what they observe by taking notes and filming, for example. Legal observer trainings are so popular that some are filled.
University of Minnesota sociologist Doug Hartmann described the protest events he has attended as peaceful and “not agitated or agitating.”
“Many of those out in the streets are not protesting but observing and trying to protect neighbors and friends,” Hartmann told PolitiFact.
Community volunteers coordinate to bring food and other necessities to immigrant families who are unable to leave their homes.
The New York Times wrote that in Minneapolis and other cities some labor and immigrant rights groups have provided funding and organized downtown rallies against the Trump administration. But much of the anti-ICE organizing has developed through “block clubs, neighborhood group chats, school Facebook groups and Catholic parishes, stretching beyond the typical Democratic voter base,” it reported.
We fact-checked similar claims in 2024 about “outside agitators” during Israel-Gaza protests on college campuses and found that the term has often been attached to large historical movements.
“It was used as sort of a phrase that would link protesters, no matter how peaceful they were, to Communists and other infiltrators who were causing disruption,” said Timothy Zick, William & Mary law professor and author of “Managed Dissent: The Law of Public Protest.”
Zick said the term is used by those seeking to discredit protests by casting doubt on the protesters’ sincerity.
— Amy Sherman
President Donald Trump made his pitch to acquire Greenland to international leaders in Davos, Switzerland, Jan. 21, saying for the first time he did not plan for the U.S. to take the land by force.
Trump, who talked up his tariff-based negotiation strategy, cited Greenland’s strategic position between the U.S., Russia and China as the main reason he wants to acquire the territory.
Retelling United States’ history with Greenland and Denmark, Trump said that during World War II, “We saved Greenland and successfully prevented our enemies from gaining a foothold in our hemisphere.”
This much is accurate: After Germany invaded Denmark, the U.S. assumed responsibility for Greenland’s defense and established a military presence on the island that remains today, albeit in diminished scope.
But Trump overstepped when he said that after World War II, “We gave Greenland back to Denmark.”
“All the United States is asking for is a place called Greenland, where we already had it as a trustee, but respectfully returned it back to Denmark not long ago,” Trump said.
Although the U.S. defended Greenland during World War II, it never possessed the nation — and could not have given it back. Experts have told PolitiFact that Greenland’s status as part of Denmark is not in question, and hasn’t been for more than a century.
Trump said, “We’re drilling more oil and gas now than we ever have, by almost double.”
U.S. oil and natural gas production is up, but not by close to double.
Looking at federal data from January to October, crude oil production is up by about 2.7% between 2025, under Trump, and 2024, the final year of Joe Biden’s presidency. Natural gas production over that period is up by about 3.6%. Figures for November and December 2025 are not available yet.
Oil production has reached an all-time high; natural gas production reached an all-time high in the summer of 2025 before dipping slightly.
— Louis Jacobson
We’re still working on fact-checks from Trump’s speech to the World Economic Forum in Davos.
Speaking about Minnesota, Trump said, “we’re cracking down on more than $19 billion in fraud that was stolen by Somalian bandits.”
Criminal charges filed since 2022 in Minnesota don’t reflect that figure, but investigations are still underway. Dozens of defendants have been charged in schemes of defrauding federal programs designed to feed children and house and serve people with autism spectrum disorder.
Assistant U.S. Attorney Joe Thompson in December announced additional charges, saying providers in 14 “high-risk,” state-run Medicaid programs under state audit had billed $18 billion since 2018, and “half or more” were possibly fraudulent.
The majority of the defendants in the cases are Somali. Most Somalis in Minnesota are U.S. citizens, but the Trump administration has used the fraud as pretext to surge ICE operations in the left-leaning state.
— Amy Sherman
Trump said, “If we were able to cut out 50% of the fraud … we would have a balanced budget without having to talk about even growth.”
This statement is False.
The highest nationwide estimate puts U.S. fraud losses at $521 billion. Even if all of that could be recouped, it would amount to less than a third of the 2025 deficit of $1.775 trillion. Recouping half of that, as Trump said, would amount to less than one-sixth of the 2025 deficit.
— Louis Jacobson
Trump said “in 2025 for the first time in 50 years, the United States had reverse migration.”
A Jan. 13 analysis from The Brookings Institute, estimates that net migration — how the number of people immigrating to the U.S. compares with the number moving out of the country — was close to zero or negative in 2025. The analysis also estimated the trend will remain in 2026 while cautioning that “recent reductions in data transparency make the estimates more uncertain.”
The last time the U.S. experienced negative net migration was more than 85 years ago in the period from 1931 to 1940, during the Great Depression.
— Maria Ramirez Uribe
PolitiFact fact-checks inaccurate statements of people in power. Support the truth today with a donation to our nonprofit newsroom.
Trump said “we’ve never gotten anything” from NATO.
That’s wrong.
According to the Defense Department in 2024, “The only time NATO invoked Article 5 of the Washington Treaty was when terrorists attacked the U.S. on Sept. 11, 2001. NATO personnel fought and died alongside American forces in Afghanistan.”’
Article 5’s key text says that “an armed attack against one or more” NATO members “shall be considered an attack against them all” with NATO members agreeing to assist the parties that have been attacked with “such action as it deems necessary, including the use of armed force.”
PolitiFact found in 2013 that the NATO-led International Security Assistance Force was tasked with preventing Afghanistan “from once again becoming a haven for terrorists, to help provide security, and to contribute to a better future for the Afghan people.”
Six months after President Barack Obama took office, NATO forces in Afghanistan numbered 64,495. As a result of the “surge” supported by Obama, the number of allied troops more than doubled by June 2011, to 132,457.
According to historian David Murphy of Ireland’s Maynooth University, Danish troops were among the NATO nations supporting the U.S. effort in Afghanistan. Danish troops suffered 44 fatal casualties, Murphy said — the highest per capita death rate among coalition members. Another eight Danish soldiers died in Iraq, he said.
— Amy Sherman
Trump said a “major factor in driving up housing costs was the mass invasion of our borders.”
Trump didn’t go as far as Vice President JD Vance, who said in November that housing is expensive “because we flooded the country with 30 million illegal immigrants” and because of a housing shortage. We rated Vance’s statement Mostly False.
Evidence doesn’t support the idea that immigrants in the country illegally are a primary driver of high housing costs.Instead, experts point to a shortage of millions of homes caused by years of underbuilding. An interest rate surge and increased demand for homes during the pandemic exacerbated the problem.
Answering questions about Vance’s statement, a White House spokesperson pointed PolitiFact to multiple studies. Some of the research was outdated and some of the study’s authors told The New York Times their research evaluated immigration’s effects on housing in a given community and they cautioned against using the findings to explain national trends.
— Amy Sherman
Trump said “in 2019 Denmark said that they would spend over $200 million to strengthen Greenland’s defenses. But as you know, they spent less than 1% of that amount.”
In 2019, Denmark pledged to invest around $200 million on military spending in Greenland. At the time, Trump had talked about wanting to buy the territory. However, in 2024, a Danish outlet reported that Denmark had only spent about 1% of the money.
In 2025, amid renewed threats from Trump to take over Greenland, Reuters reported that Denmark Defense Minister Troels Lund Poulsen said: “We have neglected for many years to make the necessary investments in ships and in aircraft that will help monitor our kingdom, and that is what we are now trying to do something about.”
In October, the Danish government pledged to invest around $4 billion in military spending in Greenland, Reuters reported.
— Maria Ramirez Uribe
Trump said, “Now, grocery prices, energy prices, airfares, mortgage rates, rent and car payments are all coming down, and they’re coming down fast.”
Trump is on the safest ground with mortgage rates, which have fallen from just over 7% when he took office to a bit above 6% today. Airfares and the price of new and used cars have also experienced price declines on his watch, significantly for airfares and slightly for cars.
The picture is more mixed for grocery and energy prices.
The price of groceries has risen at rates similar to their increase during President Joe Biden’s final year in office. While prices for some specific items — including eggs, bacon, dairy products and bread — have gone down, the price of many other staples are up, including ground beef, steak, chicken breasts, coffee, fruits and vegetables and sugar and sweets.
On energy, the cost of electricity is up significantly, almost 7% higher than a year ago. But gasoline prices have seen a notable decline. After spending the first 10 months of 2025 in a holding pattern around $3.10 a gallon, gasoline prices have fallen below $2.80 a gallon nationally since November.
— Louis Jacobson
Trump mentioned Iceland several times in Davos, but he appeared to have confused it with its Arctic neighbor, Greenland.
“On Iceland, that I can tell you, our stock market took the first dip yesterday because of Iceland,” Trump said. “So Iceland has already cost us a lot of money, but that dip is peanuts compared to what it’s gone up, and we have an unbelievable future.”
In recent weeks, Trump has been talking about acquiring Greenland, a semi-autonomous part of Denmark, but has said nothing about acquiring Iceland.
Iceland is an independent island nation with nearly 400,000 residents, located east of Greenland.
Traditionally, Icelanders have maintained strong ties to the United States, dating back to World War II, when Iceland’s government invited U.S. troops into the country. In 1949, Iceland became a founding member of NATO, and in 1951, the two countries signed a bilateral defense agreement that still stands.
Its location — between the Arctic and North Atlantic oceans in the Greenland-Iceland-United Kingdom gap, a strategic naval choke point — means that Iceland, despite its lack of a standing military, is geographically important for both North America and Europe.
In 2006, the U.S. gave up its permanent troop presence at the Keflavík Air Base — a 45-minute drive south of the capital of Reykjavík — but U.S. troops still rotate through. Icelandic civilians now handle key NATO tasks such as submarine surveillance and operations at four radar sites on the nation’s periphery. Iceland also makes financial contributions to NATO trust funds and contributes a small number of technical and diplomatic personnel to NATO operations.
Trump’s pick for ambassador to Iceland, former Rep. Billy Long, R-Mo., attracted criticism earlier this month when he was overheard saying Iceland should become a U.S. state after Greenland, and that he would serve as governor.
Long apologized during an interview with Arctic Today. “There was nothing serious about that, I was with some people, who I hadn’t met for three years, and they were kidding about Jeff Landry being governor of Greenland and they started joking about me, and if anyone took offense to it, then I apologize,” Long told the publication. (Trump tapped Landry, Louisiana’s Republican governor, to be the U.S. envoy to Greenland.)
Silja Bára R. Ómarsdóttir, an international affairs professor who now serves as rector, or president, of the University of Iceland, told the Tampa Bay Times in August that newfound attention to Iceland’s security, including concerns over Russia’s invasion of Ukraine for the rest of Europe, is “definitely very noticeable at the political level.” Ómarsdóttir’s polling has found that between 2020 and 2023, the percentage of Icelanders saying that NATO is the best tool for ensuring Iceland’s security rose from about 36% to more than 63%. In the 2023 survey, no other option for maintaining Iceland’s security exceeded 15%.
—Louis Jacobson
Retelling United States’ history with Greenland and Denmark, Trump said that after World War II, “We gave Greenland back to Denmark.”
This is misleading. Experts say Greenland’s status as part of Denmark is rock solid, and has been for more than a century. Because the United States never owned Greenland, it could never have given it back.
Denmark’s colonization of Greenland dates to the 1720s. In 1933, an international court settled a territorial dispute between Denmark and Norway, ruling that as of July 1931, Denmark “possessed a valid title to the sovereignty over all Greenland.”
Trump has a point that in 1940, after Germany invaded Denmark, the U.S. assumed responsibility for Greenland’s defense and established a military presence on the island that remains today, albeit in diminished scope.
After the 1945 approval of the United Nations charter — the organization’s founding document and the foundation of much of international law — Denmark incorporated Greenland through a constitutional amendment and gave it representation in the Danish Parliament in 1953. Denmark told the United Nations that any colonial-type status had ended, and the United Nations General Assembly accepted this change in November 1954. The United States voted to accept the new status.
Since then, Greenland has, incrementally but consistently, moved toward greater autonomy.
Greenlandic political activists successfully pushed for and achieved home rule in 1979, which established its parliament. Today, Greenland is a district within the sovereign state of Denmark, Amann said, with two elected representatives in Denmark’s parliament.
— Louis Jacobson
Trump said the 2020 U.S. presidential election “was a rigged election. Everybody now knows that.”
That’s Pants on Fire. Joe Biden legitimately won the election. Officials in Trump’s first administration said after the 2020 election that it was secure. Trump’s then-Attorney General Bill Barr said he told the president his statements about the election were “bull—-.”
Trump has used falsehoods about the 2020 election to promise to overhaul election laws; those efforts are largely stalled.
— Amy Sherman
Trump said, “China makes almost all of the windmills, and yet, I haven’t been able to find any wind farms in China.”
That’s Pants on Fire!
China has about 44% of the world’s wind farm capacity, ranking No. 1 globally and almost tripling what the U.S. has. China is also planning or building more wind farm capacity than any other country.
— Louis Jacobson and Maria Ramirez Uribe
Trump offered a mix of accurate and inaccurate statements on gasoline prices.
He was accurate to say that “the price of gasoline is now below $2.50 a gallon in many states.” According to the American Automobile Association, 10 states have average gasoline prices below $2.50 today. (He got this talking point wrong less than 24 hours earlier at a White House press briefing.)
But he was incorrect to say that “numerous states are at $1.99.” Even if one assumes that Trump was talking about individual gas stations, only a tiny fraction of gas stations are selling gas that inexpensively. Four states — Colorado, Oklahoma, Texas and Wyoming — had at least seven stations selling gasoline for less than $2 on Jan. 20, according to the gas price app Gas Buddy, and a handful of other states had between one and four stations selling gasoline for under $2.
— Louis Jacobson
Trump’s claim of ending “eight wars” isexaggerated.
Trump had a hand in ceasefires that eased conflicts between Israel and Iran, India and Pakistan, and Armenia and Azerbaijan. These were mostly incremental accords, and some leaders dispute the extent of Trump’s role. Trump made notable progress by securing theIsrael-Hamas ceasefire and hostage agreement, but the deal involves multiple stages.
In other conflicts, peace has not held. Violence continued after a temporary peace deal between theDemocratic Republic of Congo and Rwanda, with hundreds of civilians killed since the deal’s June signing. Cambodia and Thailand, the countries have accused each other ofceasefire violations that have led to violent skirmishes.
A long-running standoff between Egypt and Ethiopia over an Ethiopian dam on the Nile remains unresolved, and it is closer to a diplomatic dispute than a “war.” In the case of Kosovo and Serbia, there is little evidence a potential war was brewing.
— Louis Jacobson
Trump said “we’ve lifted more than 1.2 million people off of food stamps” since he took office in 2025.
That’s accurate, based on available data for most of Trump’s first year. Monthly data for the federal Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program shows about 42.8 million people were enrolled in January 2025, the month Trump took office, and fell to about 41.6 million in September, the most recent month available.
The data shows there were fluctuations during President Joe Biden’s term. About 41.2 million were enrolled in federal fiscal year 2022, the number rose in 2023 and fell to 41.7 million in 2024. But then it rose to 42.4 million in 2025 which spanned a few months of Biden’s presidency through September.
— Amy Sherman
In recent days, Trump has repeatedly said his role in NATO has been history-making.
“I did more for NATO than any other person alive or dead,” he said during a Jan. 20 press conference, days after he relayed a similar message in a textto Norwegian Prime Minister Jonas Gahr Støre.
Trump has influenced NATO, but whether he has done more for the alliance than anyone else in decades is debatable. NATO, formally the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, was created in 1949 to provide collective security against the Soviet Union. The alliance has 32 members, including the United States.
Experts said Trump gets some credit for allies agreeing to increase their NATO spending, but said Russia President Vladimir Putin’s actions also influenced allies’ spending.
Justin Logan, director of defense and foreign policy studies at the libertarian Cato Institute, said Trump “frightened the Europeans” into promising additional spending on NATO by 2035.
A White House official earlier this week pointed us to the 2025 European pledge and said the U.S. spends $1 billion on the alliance, more than other countries.
Since NATO’s founding, the alliance has faced several challenges, said Barry R. Posen, a MIT professor of political science and expert on international relations.
“I do agree, however, that President Trump deserves credit for starting a long delayed and necessary rebalancing of responsibilities in the alliance,” Posen said.
Putin’s 2014 and 2022 invasions of Ukraine spurred European defense spending increases.
Jytte Klausen, a Brandeis University professor of international cooperation, said, “On the other side of the ledger, Trump’s threat to annex Greenland has made the breakup of NATO a near-possibility.”
— Amy Sherman
Key figures in the artificial intelligence industry have assessed the AI race between the U.S. and China differently. In September, Jensen Huang, CEO of chipmaker Nvidia, said China is just “nanoseconds” behind the U.S. In June, White House AI czar David Sacks said Chinese AI models are “three to six months behind.”
U.S. companies have released some of the most powerful large language models, such as OpenAI’s ChatGPT and Google’s Gemini. Until recently, the U.S. restricted China’s access to advanced AI chips, but the government has loosened those restrictions.
But even with the export ban, Chinese companies have released models such as DeepSeek, a much cheaper model that rivals the United States’ frontier large language models. Trump said last year that DeepSeek’s release should be a “wake-up call” for U.S. tech companies.
– Loreben Tuquero
Trump said, “Inflation has been defeated.” But the picture on inflation is more mixed than he acknowledges.
Year-over-year inflation is down from January 2025 — but only slightly, from 3.0% to 2.7%. Today’s inflation rate is higher than it was for most of Trump’s first term, and it’s in the ballpark of where it was for most of Biden’s final year. It’s still higher than the Federal Reserve’s 2% target.
The price of groceries, housing, medical care and clothing are going up, rising year over year by 2% to 3%. Those rates are similar to what they were during President Joe Biden’s final year in office.
Prices of many key grocery staples are up, including ground beef, steak, chicken breasts, coffee, fruits and vegetables and sugar and sweets. Prices for some specific items — including eggs, bacon, dairy products and bread — have gone down.
Electricity costs are up significantly, almost 7% higher than a year ago. Gasoline prices, meanwhile, have seen a notable decline. After spending the first 10 months of 2025 in a holding pattern around $3.10 per gallon, gasoline has fallen below $2.80 a gallon nationally since November.
Wages on Trump’s watch have so far risen somewhat faster than inflation, though less so for those who are on the lower end of the income spectrum.
— Louis Jacobson
Trump said, “We’ve secured commitments for a record breaking $18 trillion” in new investment.
This is False.
The White House website since mid-November has shown a figure of $9.6 trillion, only about half as much as Trump has repeatedly said.
In addition, experts have cautioned PolitiFact that some of the $9.6 trillion in pledges may not come to fruition and that others are unrealistically large compared to the gross domestic product of the countries involved.
— Louis Jacobson
Danish MP Rasmus Jarlov went on the show calmly, even warmly, explaining that Denmark is a close U.S. ally and genuinely wants that relationship to stay strong.
Then the host played a clip of Stephen Miller brushing off Denmark as “a tiny country” that supposedly can’t defend Greenland and therefore shouldn’t control it. That’s when the tone shifted.
Jarlov didn’t hedge or hide behind diplomatic mush. He said Miller’s logic sounded like “the mentality of a rapist” the idea that if someone can’t defend themselves, you’re entitled to take what’s theirs. It was blunt, uncomfortable, and exactly on point. He also reminded viewers that Denmark’s sovereignty over Greenland isn’t some vague tradition; it’s backed by international law and by treaties the United States itself signed.
What made the moment land even harder is that Jarlov wasn’t ranting. He was matter-of-fact. From his perspective and honestly from the perspective of most people who still believe in basic international norms this kind of colonial talk isn’t just offensive, it’s illegal and absurdly outdated. The whole “we’re bigger and stronger, so we get to own your land” mindset belongs in the 1600s, not in modern geopolitics.
And let’s not pretend this came out of nowhere. Trump openly tried to buy Greenland in 2019 and threw a fit when Denmark said no. Now one of his closest advisers is floating the idea that Denmark doesn’t “deserve” Greenland because it’s too small to protect it. That’s not tough-guy realism; it’s empire cosplay.
The part I respected most is that Denmark didn’t grovel and didn’t burn the bridge either. Jarlov was crystal clear: this kind of talk is unacceptable, but Denmark still wants to remain friends with the United States. That’s what a real ally looks like loyal, honest, and unwilling to be bullied into silence.
In the end, the whole exchange felt like a case study in how Trump-era rhetoric poisons alliances. You don’t keep friends by insulting them, questioning their right to their own territory, and joking about taking their land. If someone kept trying to buy your house, mocking you when you said no, and then hinting they might just take it anyway, you wouldn’t call that friendship. You’d call it a threat.
Trump is sounding like Putin.
While there is no official, specific count of “paid for” pardons—as the sale of official acts is illegal—
reports indicate that dozens of individuals granted clemency during the second Trump administration (2025-present) had direct financial or political ties to the president, with many donors having their fines and restitution eliminated.
- Financial Impact: An analysis by a former Justice Department pardon attorney found that Trump-era pardons erased roughly $1.34 billion in fines and restitution owed by individuals and companies convicted of federal crimes.
- Direct Ties: Of the pardons granted in the second term, roughly 1 in 5 (out of a smaller subset of 60) went to individuals with direct financial or political connections to the president.
- Specific Examples:
- Trevor Milton: Nikola founder, convicted of fraud, was pardoned, eliminating a $676.8 million restitution order.
- Paul Walczak: A nursing home executive pardoned after his mother donated $1 million to a fundraiser, wiping out a $4.4 million restitution.
- Jason Galanis: A convicted fraudster pardoned after serving as a witness in a congressional investigation.
- “Pardon Market”: Reports have described a “pardon-for-pay” environment where lobbyists, such as Jack Burkman and Jacob Wohl, were allegedly paid large sums (e.g., $960,000 in one case) to secure pardons.
- Bypassing Official Channels: A vast majority of these pardons did not go through the traditional Department of Justice Office of the Pardon Attorney (OPA).
- Volume: As of July 2025, over 1,500 people had been granted executive clemency, many of whom were associated with the January 6 Capitol attack.
The rollout for President Donald Trump’s new Board of Peace, which has drawn controversy and is facing resistance, does not appear to be going smoothly.
The American president wants national leaders who join to donate at least $1 billion within the first year to become a permanent member. According to reports, Trump would be chairman for life, the organization could be filled with authoritarian leaders, and it is being seen as a possible rival to the United Nations.
Already, French President Emmanuel Macron, who appears to be leading the charge against Trump in Europe, reportedly has declined to join.
“The body was originally conceived as part of the U.S. president’s push to create a new governance framework for the shattered Palestinian enclave in the wake of Israel’s devastating two-year offensive against Hamas,” The Financial Times reported.
“The Board of Peace has had a rough landing,” reported Bloomberg News’ UK political editor Alex Wickham, noting that “it’s been criticized by Israel, questioned by Europe and has Russia’s friends celebrating.”
“World leaders were blindsided and bewildered by Trump’s demand they pay $1 billion for permanent membership, sources say,” Wickham noted. “European allies are working to modify the terms and coordinate a response, sources say. They are trying to persuade Arab leaders to help lobby Trump for changes.”
As chairman, Trump would have the ability to add or remove member nations, veto the board’s decisions and cast tie-breaking votes, and create or dissolve committees.
Critics are blasting Trump’s proposed Board of Peace.
Daily Mail UK columnist Andrew Neil said it will probably be Trump’s “most radical step yet to replace the post-WW2 global order. It will also be quite the dictators’ tea party. Putin, Lukashenko (Belarus tyrant) and the dictator of Kazakhstan have all been asked to join!!”
Fox News’ Jessica Tarlov remarked, “The board of peace stars dictators apparently.”
The Wall Street Journal’s chief foreign-affairs correspondent, Yaroslav Trofimov, observed, “Trump’s ‘Board of Peace’ looks very much like a plan to replace the UN Security Council with an imperial court of vassals in which he is chairman for life, even after leaving the White House, with veto over every decision and the sole right to designate a successor. And a $1 billion fee for aspiring permanent members.”
Former chief White House ethics attorney Richard Painter wrote, “Almost 75,000 people, mostly civilians, have been killed in this war, and now we are auctioning off seats on a Gaza ‘Board of Peace’. For a Middle East peace policy, this is pathetic.”
Archdioceses leaders warn US abdicating ‘moral role’ under Trump
Top clerics in the Roman Catholic church who lead the archdioceses in the United States are rebuking President Donald Trump.
In what the New York Times characterized as a “strongly worded statement,” the top three highest-ranking clerics in the Catholic church wrote Monday that they’re questioning America’s “moral role in confronting evil around the world.”
They said that the U.S. has entered “the most profound and searing debate about the moral foundation for America’s actions in the world since the end of the Cold War.”
The clerics who all signed off on the letter are: Cardinal Blase Cupich, archbishop of Chicago; Cardinal Robert McElroy, archbishop of Washington; Cardinal Joseph Tobin, archbishop of Newark.
Their examples of failed moral leadership include the U.S. invasion of Venezuela, the slash in aid for Ukraine and now the efforts to take control of Greenland.
They’re asking for a “genuinely moral foreign policy” in which “military action must be seen only as a last resort in extreme situations, not a normal instrument of national policy.”
“In our time, the weakness of multilateralism is a particular cause for concern at the international level. A diplomacy that promotes dialogue and seeks consensus among all parties is being replaced by a diplomacy based on force, by either individuals or groups of allies. War is back in vogue and a zeal for war is spreading,” the statement continued.
“The principle established after the Second World War, which prohibited nations from using force to violate the borders of others, has been completely undermined. Peace is no longer sought as a gift and desirable good in itself, or in pursuit of ‘the establishment of the ordered universe willed by God with a more perfect form of justice among men and women.’ Instead, peace is sought through weapons as a condition for asserting one’s own dominion,” it continued.
“The post-World War II consensus of dialogue among nations, the sovereign rights of countries, the refusal to use war to pursue questions of national dominance and national gain — that consensus is shifting away now,” Cardinal McElroy said in an interview.
During a closed-door gathering with Pope Leo XIV, all cardinals from around the world gathered to discuss global affairs.
The three Americans said that they were struck by “a sense of alarm about the way things were going in the world, and some of the actions that were being taken here in the United States,” Cardinal Cupich said in an interview.
The cardinals were also concerned about the dismantling of the U.S. Agency for International Development as part of Trump’s effort to stop funding foreign aid and several federal agencies.
Trump admin doesn’t recorgnize constitutional rights
President Donald Trump’s administration is now allegedly preventing a U.S. citizen and veteran from meeting with their attorney, according to a new report.
ABC News reported Monday that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) is not allowing attorneys representing clients who are being held by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) in the Whipple Building outside of Minneapolis. This apparently includes at least one U.S. citizen who also served in the Iraq War.
According to ABC, an unnamed “prominent local criminal defense attorney” verified that his client was a bystander witnessing an immigration enforcement operation near his home.
“They told me that because my client had not requested me by name, that I could not see him,” the lawyer said. “I’ve been practicing law in Minnesota for almost 20 years, and I have never been denied access to a client.”
Another attorney who withheld their name told ABC that the Whipple Building is unable to accommodate meetings between attorneys and their clients. They accused the Trump administration of denying their client a core Constitutional right that is afforded both citizens and non-citizens alike.
“One ICE agent said if we let you see your clients, we would have to let all the attorneys see their clients, and imagine the chaos,” the attorney told ABC. “And I said to that person, yeah, you do have to let all the attorneys see their clients. You do have to accommodate that. That’s the Constitution. You chose to put them here. I didn’t bring this guy here, you did.”
Under the Sixth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, anyone who is “accused” of a crime not only has the right to a speedy trial by a jury of their peers in the jurisdiction where they were charged, to be able to confront witnesses, have the process for obtaining witnesses in their favor “and to have the Assistance of Counsel for his defence.” Attorney Robert Sicoli told ABC that there is “nothing in the Constitution that talks about accommodating the government.”
“It is a violation of constitutional rights,” said Sicoli, who said he was also prevented from meeting with a client detained by the federal government.
Trump does not recognise International Courts.
- House Vote (Jan 2025): The U.S. House of Representatives passed H.R. 23, the Illegitimate Court Counteraction Act, with a bipartisan vote (243-140).
- Purpose of the Act: To impose sanctions on anyone investigating, arresting, or prosecuting U.S. citizens or nationals from allied countries (like Israel) that haven’t consented to ICC jurisdiction.
- Presidential Sanctions (Feb 2025): President Donald Trump signed an Executive Order imposing financial and visa restrictions on ICC officials involved in the investigation and warrants against Israeli leaders.
- Rationale: The U.S. argues the ICC has no legitimate basis to investigate U.S. or Israeli personnel, setting a dangerous precedent.
- Targeted Officials: Sanctions were imposed on specific ICC judges and prosecutors for authorizing the investigation and warrants related to the Gaza conflict.
- ICC Warrants: The ICC sought warrants in late 2024 for Netanyahu and Gallant, accusing them of war crimes and crimes against humanity in Gaza.
- U.S. Stance: The U.S. does not recognize the ICC’s jurisdiction over its personnel or allies, viewing the court’s actions as illegitimate.
Trump told the New York Times on January 9, 2026, that only “my own morality. My own mind.” restrains him. Not the Constitution, not federal laws and regulations, not treaties we have signed under Republican and Democratic presidents.
He took an oath to obey the Constitution and violated it from Day One.
Stepping forward with an adequate staff, funds that would be raised instantly, the fired generals would bring out retired officers and veterans down the ranking ladder all over the country. Already, Veterans for Peace, with over 100 chapters, is ready for rapid expansion. (See, https://www.veteransforpeace.org/).
Remember this: TRUMP’S DICTATORIAL RAMPAGE IS ONLY GOING TO GET WORSE, MUCH WORSE. Venezuela, Cuba, Panama, Greenland, Nigeria, and Iran are on the growing list for Trump’s endless warmongering. He has openly declared more than once, “Nothing can stop me.” Those words should be sufficient for enough top retired military officers to exert their special legacy of patriotism for the “United States of America and the Republic for which it stands…”
“I’ve kept all my promises and much more,” Trump insisted during a speech this week in Detroit. That is patently false.
With his administration nearing the one-year mark, here’s a look at where some of his most jaw-dropping promises stand:
U.S. defense officials in May accepted a luxury Boeing 747 jet from Qatar for Trump to eventually use as Air Force One, brushing aside ethical and legal questions and even anti-bribery constitutional provisions. The aircraft is being retrofitted in Texas to meet U.S. security and communications standards that are likely to cost about $400 million, the Air Force says. Outside experts estimate costs could approach $1 billion. Despite Trump’s boasts that the work would be done in six months, completion may not actually occur until after he leaves office in January 2029.
After the U.S. military’s removal of Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, Trump renewed his calls to take over the semiautonomous Danish territory, insisting the United States will “have” Greenland “one way or another.” The president also tapped Gov. Jeff Landry, R-La., as the special U.S. envoy to Greenland, with a nod to the 1803 Louisiana Purchase from France that doubled the size of the U.S. Denmark says it is not ceding the world’s largest island and that any invasion could have geopolitical implications given that Denmark is a NATO ally.
Trump has tried to denigrate his predecessor, Joe Biden, by accusing the Democrat of overreliance on the autopen to sign presidential pardons, legislation and other key documents, despite the fact that Trump and other presidents have also used the tool.
The president has said he wants to reopen an “expanded and rebuilt” Alcatraz, the notorious San Francisco Bay prison that has been closed for six-plus decades, to house immigration detainees. William K. Marshall III, the director of the Bureau of Prisons, toured the island in July. His agency announced that engineers and planners were developing design concepts, preliminary budgets and logistical models, it is not feasible, a waste of money William said..
Trump has posted on social media about extending traditional home mortgages repayments from 30 years to 50 years, suggesting that this could ease concerns about housing affordability. Economists say the switch would make it harder to build wealth through home ownership. Nonetheless, the White House has pledged to push the change. Officials have made little headway since, however, and Trump instead has looked to reduce mortgage rates by having the federal government buy $200 billion in mortgage bonds.
Trump has frequently toyed with the idea of a third term, despite the Constitution stating that no one can be elected president “more than twice.” He acknowledged in October, “I would say that if you read it, it’s pretty clear I’m not allowed to run. It’s too bad.” White House chief of staff Susie Wiles also told Vanity Fair that Trump “knows he can’t run again.” Still, Trump mused this month, “I’m not allowed to run? I’m not sure,” and suggested there could be “a constitutional movement” to make that happen.
Despite it being far-fetched, Trump has talked about making America’s northern neighbor the “Great State of Canada” since before his second term started. Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney assured Trump during a subsequent White House visit that his country “won’t be for sale, ever.” Carney suggested in June that Trump had lost interest. Trump has continued to bring up the idea, though, including during a September speech to military personnel in Virginia.
Trump suggested in February that billionaire Elon Musk would be checking out Fort Knox in Kentucky to ensure that U.S. gold reserves were still there. The president even floated the notion of tagging along. Nothing came of that, however, and Musk has left the administration.
The president pledged to ship up to 30,000 of the “worst criminal aliens” to a U.S. Navy lockup in Cuba, and between February and June, about 500 immigrants were held there. But those numbers have since declined and sometimes reached zero. Housing migrants at Guantanamo is more expensive than in traditional detention centers, and doing so has drawn legal challenges.
Trump repeatedly suggested that the U.S. would take over war-torn Gaza and move out the Palestinians living there, and that U.S. developers could turn the area into a “Riviera of the Middle East,” after the war between Israel and Hamas. Gaza’s reconstruction is a key question amid a Trump administration-brokered ceasefire, but Arab nations have rejected the idea of it being a vacation spot. Trump no longer mentions it.
The president says his tariffs (taxes on Americans) could raise enough revenue for most Americans to get $2,000 payments. But he also has pledged to spend that same money on plugging deficits created by tax cuts, reducing the national debt, keeping a key nutrition program for low-income mothers and children funded during last year’s government shutdown, aiding farmers and adding to defense spending for 2027. The U.S. collected about $289 billion in tariff revenue last year, which would be well short of what rebate checks would cost, even without the other promised earmarks. Trump also promised that slashing the size of federal government would give Americans rebate checks, but those never materialized.
Trump has frequently said that steep import tariffs “will be enough to cut all of the income tax,” long suggesting that the U.S. was better off during the Gilded Age, when there was no income tax and federal revenue came largely from tariffs. “If you go back to the 1800s, 1887,” he said Friday, “We had money, so much money, we didn’t know what to do with it.” Lately, however, his administration has more often been promoting how much his tax and spending law might reduce 2026 tax bills for many Americans.
Trump hates the dynamic kickoff, calling it a “demeaning” and “unromantic” affront to football’s “pageantry.” By November, Trump was suggesting the NFL didn’t “have the right to do that to the game” while acknowledging, “I don’t think they’ll change.”
Trump signed an executive order in September aiming to rename the Department of Defense as the Department of War. It will take an act of Congress to make the change lawful.
The board of trustees of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, stocked with Trump loyalists, voted in December to add Trump’s name to Washington’s premier performing arts venue, memorializing the 35th president. The move drew show cancellations and a lawsuit. All of the shows slated for 2026 have been cancelled but one. The Kennedy Center is named by statute and would need Congress’ approval for a legal change.
Trump suggested before his second term that the U.S. might retake control of the Panama Canal because Panama had failed to check Chinese influence over the waterway. His administration then pressured China to have the Hong Kong-based operator of ports at both ends of the canal sell those interests to a U.S. consortium, though that process faced delays. Panama withdrew from China’s Belt and Road investment program in Latin America, and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth visited Panama in April and agreed to bolster security coordination.
The president announced in December that his long-promised “ gold card ” was going on sale. It offers legal status, and an eventual pathway to U.S. citizenship, for individuals paying $1 million and corporations ponying up twice that per foreign-born employee, plus an upfront $15,000 fee to cover screening costs. The program is meant to replace EB-5 visas, which offered permanent U.S. residency in exchange for foreign investors spending a bit more than $1 million on a business that creates at least 10 full-time jobs for American workers.
Since tearing down the East Wing, construction crews have worked into the night, hustling to finish the massive ballroom before Trump’s term ends. The president initially said the structure, set to be bigger than the White House itself, would cost $200 million but he now says $400 million. He has promised that it will be paid for by himself and private donors. The White House has released only a partial list of who is actually contributing and has argued that parts of the project’s plans are “ top secret.”
Following the U.S. operation in Venezuela, Trump accused Colombian President Gustavo Petro of “making cocaine and selling it to the United States” and said U.S intervention in that country “sounds good to me.” After a friendly call with Petro, however, Trump suggested that “the situation of drugs and other disagreements” had been defused. Trump, though, also maintains that Mexico is “run” by drug cartels and says, “You have to do something with Mexico.” He’s warned Iran that if that country starts “killing people like they have in the past” during a recent round of sweeping, anti-government protests, then “they are going to get hit very hard by the United States.” Killings have run into the thousands, but by Friday, Trump appeared to be backing off those threats.
Trump has repeatedly noted Cuba’s weakened position since the U.S. captured Maduro, whose country was a major ally of the communist-run island. Trump has said Cuba “only survives because of Venezuela” and is “ready to fall” without the U.S. intervening. Venezuela’s economic and social chaos and Maduro’s ouster have raised questions about Cuba’s future. But Trump has also suggested Cuba “make a deal, BEFORE IT’S TOO LATE,” without saying what that means. The power was cut at 8 PM due to not having the money for the oil to run the generators befor, it may not even run in the future leading to making Cuba a failed State and people dying.
Trump says he wants a Golden Dome missile defense program — a multilayered, $175 billion system that would put U.S. weapons in space for the first time — to be fully operational by January 2029. Defense officials say more likely all that will be achieved by then is some initial capability for the system. It is envisioned to include ground- and space-based capabilities that can detect and stop missiles at various stages of attack.
Trump said he talked to Rob Manfred before Major League Baseball’s commissioner reinstated Cincinnati Reds slugger Pete Rose in May. Rose died in 2024 but still faced a baseball ban over betting on the game, despite having a record 4,256 career hits. Trump now wants Rose in the Hall of Fame, but that’s up to the Hall’s Classic Baseball Committee, which likely will not meet until at least December 2027.
The fourth installment of the cop buddy-comedy series starring Chris Tucker and Jackie Chan will be coming out after a reported request from Trump. Paramount, which is co-owned by David Ellison, son of Oracle co-founder and Trump megadonor Larry Ellison, is set to distribute the film. Semafor reported that Trump had asked Ellison to help revive the franchise. Warner Bros. released the first three “Rush Hour” films, but eschewed the fourth after earlier sexual misconduct allegations against its director, Brett Ratner. Ratner also made a documentary on first lady Melania Trump.
Trump has intensified his push to wrest sovereignty over Greenland from fellow NATO member Denmark, threatening punitive tariffs on countries which stand in his way and prompting the European Union to weigh hitting back with its own measures.
HOW DID WE GET HERE?
POSSIBLE MEASURES
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HOW DOES THE EU INVOKE THE ACI?
Confirmation requires a qualified majority of EU members – a higher hurdle to clear than that for applying retaliatory tariffs.
President Donald Trump’s Justice Department is launching a criminal probe into Gov. Tim Walz (D-Minn.) and issued subpoenas for both Walz and Minneapolis Mayor Jacob Frey, but no probe into the shooter
The DOJ claimed that Frey and Walz are “impeding federal law enforcement officers’ abilities to do their jobs in the state.”
Walz responded to the allegations on X, saying: “Two days ago it was Elissa Slotkin. Last week it was Jerome Powell. Before that, Mark Kelly. Weaponizing the justice system against your opponents is an authoritarian tactic. The only person not being investigated for the shooting of Renee Good is the federal agent who shot her.”
Reacting to the news, legal experts were both furious and disgusted.
“A confession of weakness by the Regime. This tactic will instantly backfire,” lawyer and writer David Lurie wrote on BlueSky.
“DOJ is out of control. The crime of impeding federal agents requires physical force. Speaking out against the way ICE is being deployed is not a crime,” said former federal prosecutor Barbara McQuade, who now teaches at the University of Michigan School of Law.
“This is a transparent attempt to create a pretext for invoking the Insurrection Act,” said Georgetown University law Professor Steve Vladeck. “One provision applies when a group of people ‘opposes or obstructs the execution of the laws of the United States or impedes the course of justice under those laws.’ And when it’s (allegedly) the state itself…”
“This is like a satanic parody of the best moments of Reconstruction, which saw the DOJ using federal power to break up white supremacist conspiracies against civil rights. Here, white supremacists in the DOJ are using conspiracy law to attack civil rights,” said Constitutional law Associate Professor Evan Bernick, from Northern Illinois University College of Law.
Here is a list that defines fascism from the good people at Keene:
- Powerful, often exclusionary, populist nationalism centered on cult of a redemptive, “infallible” leader who never admits mistakes.
- Political power derived from questioning reality, endorsing myth and rage, and promoting lies.
- Fixation with perceived national decline, humiliation, or victimhood.
- White Replacement “Theory” used to show that democratic ideals of freedom and equality are a threat. Oppose any initiatives or institutions that are racially, ethnically, or religiously harmonious.
- Disdain for human rights while seeking purity and cleansing for those they define as part of the nation.
- Identification of “enemies”/scapegoats as a unifying cause. Imprison and/or murder opposition and minority group leaders.
- Supremacy of the military and embrace of paramilitarism in an uneasy, but effective collaboration with traditional elites. Fascists arm people and justify and glorify violence as “redemptive”.
- Rampant sexism.
- Control of mass media and undermining “truth”.
- Obsession with national security, crime and punishment, and fostering a sense of the nation under attack.
- Religion and government are intertwined.
- Corporate power is protected and labor power is suppressed.
- Disdain for intellectuals and the arts not aligned with the fascist narrative.
- Rampant cronyism and corruption. Loyalty to the leader is paramount and often more important than competence.
- Fraudulent elections and creation of a one-party state.
- Often seeking to expand territory through armed conflict.
Chilling, no?
This defines the fascist Republican Party to a T. It should be sent out far and wide to everybody you know — mostly the ignorants and those in denial — and pinned to your refrigerator with this subject line:
Fascism isn’t coming to America, it is here.
Republicans’ brutal attack on Minnesota is just the latest chilling example of the fascism that washed ashore on Nov. 5, 2024, when tens of millions of disgraceful Americans couldn’t be bothered to vote. Innocent wives are being gunned down in our streets by Trump’s paramilitary group, ICE, which is comprised of lawless, jackboot thugs, many of whom were last seen attacking our Capitol in 2021.
They are no longer “standing back and standing by” as their thuggish leader ordered them to in the lead-up to the 2020 election. They are in our personal business and violently coming for our freedom.
Except now, of course, these lowlifes are wearing the very masks they loathed during the killer pandemic their orange leader lied about during that terrifying chapter of American history.
Armed groups like this are also hallmarks of fascist regimes.
Trump, America’s most notorious insurrectionist, is almost sure to invoke the Insurrection Act to finish off Minnesota, on his way to trying to finish off the rest of us.
This would allow the coward, who is a draft-dodger, to use our armed forces in conjunction with his paramilitary group to carry out law enforcement functions in our cities. They would usurp local law authority, and be used to make arrests, conduct searches, threaten citizenry, and generally kick the stuff out of anybody they deem a threat.
I believe this has been Trump’s goal from Day One of his fascist regime, and have written extensively about it. I typed these words the week following his election in 2024:
NOTHING Trump does with our military will be to protect the citizens of the United States of America.
EVERYTHING Trump does with our military will be to protect himself from the citizens of the United States of America.
As a United States veteran who served to protect us from fascists like Trump, I would have paid anything to be wrong, but here we are.
Now let me lay something else on you that I fear I will also be right about: The use of these troops is only a start, because Trump’s real aim is to prevent any further free and fair elections in America.
He will do everything with the unlimited powers his bought-off Supreme Court has given him to prevent this year’s midterm elections. There is not a single thing I have seen from the lawless, felon Trump that allows me to form any other conclusion.
Fascist Republicans have been getting hammered in election after election since 2024, and know full well they are all but certain to lose control of Congress if Americans are allowed to do the most Democratic thing there is this November: VOTE.
Expect Trump to continue to attack other cities in the coming months using the fascist Minnesota playbook to ‘discourage’ people from showing up at the polls, or by simply declaring a national emergency and stopping the vote altogether.
Just last week, Trump stated that he erred in not seizing voting machines after the 2020 election, and his 7-million vote loss to Joe Biden. That, of course, subsequently lead to his violent insurrection attempt, and the Big Lie that still hangs over America like gray, Moscow smog.
Then there’s this excerpt from an unhinged interview with Reuters published Thursday afternoon:
The president expressed frustration that his Republican Party could lose control of the U.S. House of Representatives or the Senate in this year’s midterm elections, citing historical trends that have seen the party in power lose seats in the second year of a presidency.
“It’s some deep psychological thing, but when you win the presidency, you don’t win the midterms,” Trump said. He boasted that he had accomplished so much that “when you think of it, we shouldn’t even have an election.”
It’s fair to assume Trump will do everything possible to prevent any further elections in America. Will he succeed? Well, a lot of that has to do with us, and how we proceed in the coming days and months.
Our legacy media, with notable exceptions, has proven itself close to worthless in covering and defining the greatest threat to America since the Civil War. Many of the media companies that inhabit this shrinking space still can’t even call Trump a liar, much less a fascist.
And what of the leadership in the Democratic opposition?
Are they up to the task?
Are they up to doing whatever is necessary to stand up for us, and protect us from this fascist threat?
Millions of us have been in the streets the past year. Are our leaders listening to us?
I’ll just ask this question outright: Are Chuck Schumer, Ken Martin and Hakeem Jeffries really the best leaders we have to deal with this threat?
If you have your doubts, now is the time to make your voices heard and demand better, because we will not get a second crack at this. Once we lose our right to vote, and our Democratic freedoms they will most likely be gone for good in our lifetimes.
Now that we know what we are up against, we must do everything we can to stand against it, and demand better.
Live free or die.
THINGS
You know what Americans aren’t talking about very much today after Trump’s threat to detonate the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) this week and his threat this morning to invoke the Insurrection Act in Minnesota?
They aren’t talking a lot about the fact that the Department of Justice has released less than 1% of the Epstein files despite the law, the Epstein Files Transparency Act, Congress passed requiring the release of those files in full no later than December 19. Trump loyalists are trying to shift public anger at Trump over the files back to former president Bill Clinton and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, whom QAnon conspiracy theorists believed were at the heart of a child sex trafficking scheme.
Representative James Comer (R-KY) has threatened to hold former president Clinton in contempt of Congress for refusing to appear for a closed-door deposition about Epstein. But in a scathing four-page public letter to Comer, the Clintons called the subpoenas invalid and noted that Comer had subpoenaed eight people in addition to the Clintons and had then dismissed seven of them without testimony.
They also noted that Comer had done nothing to force the Department of Justice to release all the Epstein files as required by law, including all the material relating to them, as Bill Clinton has publicly called for. They said, “There is no plausible explanation for what you are doing other than partisan politics.”
The Epstein files are the backdrop for everything else, but also getting less attention than they would in any normal era are the fact that an agent for Immigration and Customs Enforcement shot and killed a 37-year-old white mother a little more than a week ago and that President Donald J. Trump, Vice President J.D. Vance, and Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem all defended her killing by calling Renee Good and her wife “domestic terrorists.”
As G. Elliott Morris noted today in Strength in Numbers, more Americans disapprove of that shooting and the way ICE is behaving than approve of them by a margin of about 20 points. There is a gap of about 8 points between Americans who want ICE abolished over those who don’t. Morris writes: “Trump has turned what was nominally a bad issue for him (–6 on immigration and –10 on deportations, per my tracking) into a complete sh*t show in the court of public opinion.” Although immigration had been one of Trump’s strongest positions, now only 20–30% of Americans favor the way ICE is enforcing Trump’s immigration policies.
While Trump and administration officials insist they have had to crack down violently on undocumented immigrants because an organized arm of the Tren de Aragua gang has invaded the United States, Dell Cameron and Ryan Shapiro of Wired reported yesterday that they had obtained hundreds of records showing that U.S. intelligence described Tren de Aragua not as a terrorist threat, but as a source of fragmented, low-level crime. Although Attorney General Pam Bondi insisted that Tren de Aragua “is a highly structured terrorist organization that put down roots in our country during the prior administration,” U.S. officials in 2025 doubted whether the gang even operated in the U.S.
In the wake of Good’s murder, the administration sent more agents to Minnesota in what appears to be an attempt to gin up protests that change the subject from Good’s murder and appear to justify ICE’s violence. Today, Minnesota governor Tim Walz asked Minnesotans to bear witness: “You have an absolute right to peacefully film ICE agents as they conduct these activities…. Help us create a database of the atrocities against Minnesotans, not just to establish a record for posterity, but to bank evidence for future prosecution.”
Last night a federal agent shot and wounded a man in Minneapolis, setting off clashes in the area between agents with tear gas and flash-bang grenades and about 200 protesters who threw snowballs and firecrackers at the agents. What happened between the agent and the victim is unclear: Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs, Mitch Smith, and Hamed Aleaziz of the New York Times reported that a Minneapolis police supervisor told protesters he didn’t know what happened, saying, “It’s not like [the agents are] talking to us.”
This morning, Trump’s social media account posted: “If the corrupt politicians of Minnesota don’t obey the law and stop the professional agitators and insurrectionists from attacking the Patriots of I.C.E., who are only trying to do their job, I will institute the INSURRECTION ACT, which many Presidents have done before me, and quickly put an end to the travesty that is taking place in that once great State. Thank you for you [sic] attention to this matter! President DJT.”
Legal analyst Asha Rangappa points out that invoking the Insurrection Act is not the same as declaring martial law. The Insurrection Act overrides the Posse Comitatus Act to permit troops to enforce federal laws or state laws protecting constitutional rights. It is not clear even then, she writes, that they have authority to enforce state criminal laws. Still, the administration has been defining enforcement of federal laws exceedingly broadly.
Governor Tim Walz has appealed directly to Trump, asking him to “turn the temperature down. Stop this campaign of retribution. This is not who we are,” he wrote on social media. Walz also appealed to Minnesotans not to give the administration an excuse to send in troops. “I know this is scary,” he wrote. “We can—we must—speak out loudly, urgently, but also peacefully. We cannot fan the flames of chaos. That’s what he wants.”
The images coming out of Minnesota have been compared to those of Public Safety Commissioner Bull Connor ordering police officers and firefighters to use fire hoses against the children marching during the civil rights movement in Birmingham, Alabama, or of law enforcement officers beating civil rights marchers in Selma, Alabama. A family with six children in a van caught in the clash last night were hit with tear gas and air bags detonated by a flash-bang grenade. Three of the children, including a six-month-old infant, were taken to a hospital by ambulance for treatment. “My kids were innocent. I was innocent. My husband was innocent. This shouldn’t have happened,” the mother told Kilat Fitzgerald of Fox9 in Minneapolis. “We were just trying to go home.”
The administration has now openly shifted from using federal agents to round up undocumented immigrants to using federal power to suppress political opponents. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters today that Trump’s threat to invoke the Insurrection Act “spoke very loud and clear to Democrats across this country, elected officials who are using their platforms to encourage violence against federal law enforcement officers who are encouraging left-wing agitators to unlawfully obstruct legitimate law enforcement operations.”
Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem told reporters today that federal agents will ask Americans to “validate their identity” by showing proof of citizenship if they are near someone federal agents allege has committed a crime. As CNN’s Kaanity Iyer reported, today, CNN legal analyst Elie Honig explained that it is unconstitutional for an officer to ask someone to show proof of citizenship “without some other basis to make a stop.”
Yesterday, in an interview with Reuters, Trump complained about the common pattern in the U.S. that the party of a president who wins an election then loses seats in the midterms, and suggested he didn’t want to be in that position. “It’s some deep psychological thing, but when you win the presidency, you don’t win the midterms,” Trump said. He went on to say that he had accomplished so much that “when you think of it, we shouldn’t even have an election.”
In that same interview, Trump denied the real conditions in the United States during his presidency. He said polls showing popular opposition to his threat to take Greenland were “fake.” He said he doesn’t care that even Senate Republicans object to the Department of Justice opening a criminal investigation into Federal Reserve chair Jerome Powell in order to force him out and give Trump control of the nation’s financial system. When asked about the affordability crisis in the country, he said again, and falsely, that the economy was the strongest “in history.”
“A lot of times, you can’t convince a voter,” he said. “You have to just do what’s right. And then a lot of the things I did were not really politically popular. They turned out to be when it worked out so well.”
One of the other things Trump’s statements have driven out of the news is the revelation from yesterday that the U.S. has sold $500 million worth of Venezuelan oil and is keeping the money in Qatar rather than in U.S. banks. Trump claims that he has the power to manage that money, and is trying to prevent its capture by the oil companies that have prior claims against Venezuela for property seized when it nationalized the oil fields.
“There is no basis in law for a president to set up an offshore account that he controls so that he can sell assets seized by the American military,” Senator Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) told Shelby Talcott and Eleanor Mueller of Semafor. “That is precisely a move that a corrupt politician would be attracted to.”
The administration is clearly trying to consolidate power, but its actions also reflect the growing strain of Trump’s poor poll numbers, popular anger over ICE, fury over threats against Greenland, Republican pushback over the investigation of Powell, and the December 23, 2025, decision of the Supreme Court suggesting Trump could not use federalized National Guard troops to enforce his power on Democrat-dominated state governments.
That strain is showing in the administration’s raid yesterday of the home of Washington Post reporter Hannah Natanson. The FBI executed a search warrant at Natanson’s home, searching for evidence in a case against a government contractor they say has illegally retained classified documents. But Natanson is a leading journalist covering the federal workforce, a beat that means she has contact with hundreds of federal employees who might give her information about the workings of the administration. The agents seized her phone, two laptops—one personal and one issued by the Washington Post—and a Garmin watch.
The First Amendment to the Constitution, which protects freedom of the press, makes searches of reporter’s homes exceedingly rare. President of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press Bruce D. Brown called the search of Natanson’s home “a tremendous escalation in the administration’s intrusions into the independence of the press.”
The strain also showed in Trump’s fury on Tuesday when a worker at a Ford plant Trump was touring as an attempt to appeal to his weakening base shouted “pedophile protector” at him. Rather than simply ignoring the heckler, as politicians usually do, Trump gave him the middle finger and said, “F*ck you. F*ck you.”
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Why Trump’s pitiful new health care ‘plan’ is even worse than it appears
The White House’s health care gambit isn’t just a sham, it also diverts the process from an actually helpful solution.
Donald Trump has talked about unveiling a health care plan of his own for about a decade, only to consistently miss self-imposed deadlines. The Republican famously assured the public in 2024 that he has “concepts of a plan,” but when it came to doing the hard work of crafting a policy blueprint, the president has never delivered.
After seeing the new proposal billed by the White House as “The Great Healthcare Plan,” it’s fair to say Trump and his team still haven’t delivered. The New York Times reported:
Under pressure to address affordability issues in the country, President Trump on Thursday released his long-awaited health care plan, urging Congress to pass measures that would codify steps his administration has already taken to try to lower drug costs and providing what a White House official called ‘broad direction’ to back health savings accounts.
The plan was short on specific details and left much of the direction for how to finalize it up to Congress. It amounted to a few paragraphs on a webpage.
To characterize the document the White House produced as a health care “plan” is overly generous. The entirety of the proposal — literally, from start to finish — is 386 words. For context, the blog post that you’re reading right now is roughly 650 words, and if your health care blueprint is quite a bit shorter than a blog post, then you don’t actually have a health care plan.
(An accompanying White House “fact sheet” is about 800 words, but a long-awaited presidential health care plan, a decade in the making, shouldn’t be the length of two blog posts, either.)
In a prerecorded video, the president said, “I’m calling on Congress to pass this framework into law without delay, have to do it right now, so that we can get immediate relief to the American people.”
But there is nothing to pass. There is no bill. The plan, for all intents and purposes, does not exist.
Moreover, the White House document is little more than a hodgepodge of conservative ideas, packaged together on a short website. A Washington Post report noted, “The administration released no legislative text nor timeline for related congressional action. … Asked how the proposal would advance in Congress, administration officials said it was a ‘broad architecture’ intended to guide lawmakers on next steps.”
“Broad architecture” is a nice euphemism for “we couldn’t actually come up with anything more than vague goals.”
At the heart of the proposal was a demand for one significant change: The administration wants federal funds that are currently going to insurance companies to go instead to consumers — who in turn would give the money to insurance companies.
Why would that be better than the status quo? I honestly have no idea, and neither the president nor anyone on his team have made any effort to answer questions along those lines.
If one were to stop here, one could simply conclude that Trump, after years of effort, has presented the public with a pitiful outline. But it’s actually worse than that, because of the context in which it was presented.
As much of the public knows, insurance subsidies for Affordable Care Act coverage (known as enhanced premium tax credits, or PTCs) expired on New Year’s Eve, which has imposed drastic price hikes on roughly 24 million Americans. There are, however, ongoing efforts in Congress to restore the benefits, with the House passing a bill last week to revise and extend the subsidies for three years, as the Senate is at least trying to forge a related compromise.
The White House “plan,” however, throws a wrench into those efforts, condemning the ACA as a “scam” and excluding the subsidies from Trump’s “broad architecture.”
Which makes Trump’s gambit not merely a pitiful sham, but also a tactic that pushes the political process away from any solution that might actually help people.
tRump is taking us back to the stone age.
A couple order a door dash dinner.
The delivery person runs into the house pursued by ICE, WHO TRY TO BREAK DOWN THE DOOR.
The police dispatcher advises a woman to “hand over the stranger” . The woman is terrified, beside herself. The besieged couple stands up to the ICE people , denying them entry unless they produce a warrant. They show the ice Thugs the ID OF THE DELIVERY PERSON, proving she is a citizen.
ICE THREATEN…..ICE BULLY. The sheriffs office refuses to send the cops. REFUSES TO SEND THE COPS TO A PERSON ASKING FOR HELP!!! WHAT IF THESE WERE FAKE ICE AGENTS. They refuse to attend !
AND then after almost being forced to hand over the terrified sobbing woman, the home owner snaps and screams at the ice agent in fury, calling them names and telling them to get off her property unless they can produce a warrant signed by a judge. She tells them if they ever come near her again she will sue the Hell out of them.
Guess what, ICE TUCKS TAIL AND LEAVES. This is how you do it !
From YouTube.
“Really American host Steve Harness breaks down a door dash order goes off the rails after ICE shows up and a brave citizen saves a poor woman!”
A respose from one of my readers:
“I am a Veteran, I don’t live off the Government or the State. Do not send me any Garbage!!!” PF
When I responded with I thought Veterans get some things from the government, he responded:
Your thoughts are coming from a different part of your body!!!
Obviously a Yrumper.
Benefits veterans receive:
Health Care
Provided through the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs (VA)
Primary and specialty medical care
Hospital care and surgeries
Mental health care (PTSD, depression, substance use)
Prescription medications (often low-cost)
Hearing aids, glasses, prosthetics
Geriatric care, home health care, hospice
Disability Compensation
Tax-free monthly payments for service-connected injuries or illnesses
Covers physical injuries, chronic illness, hearing loss, PTSD, Agent Orange exposure, etc.
Disability ratings range from 0% to 100%
Pensions (Needs-Based)
For wartime veterans with limited income:
VA Pension (monthly payments)
Aid & Attendance (extra help for those needing assistance with daily activities)
Housebound benefits
Education Benefits
Post-9/11 GI Bill – tuition, housing allowance, books
Montgomery GI Bill
Vocational training & apprenticeships
Transfer of benefits to spouse or children (under some conditions)
Housing & Home Loans
VA-backed home loans with:
No down payment
No private mortgage insurance (PMI)
Competitive interest rates
Grants to adapt homes for disabilities
Temporary housing help for homeless veterans
Employment & Job Training
Veteran hiring preference for federal jobs
Job placement and resume assistance
Vocational Rehabilitation & Employment (VR&E)
Small business loans and entrepreneurship support
Burial & Survivor Benefits
Burial in a national cemetery
Headstone or marker
Burial allowance
Dependency & Indemnity Compensation (DIC) for surviving spouses and dependents
Other Benefits
Life insurance programs (low-cost options)
Legal assistance at some VA facilities
Discounts (travel, retail, parks—varies by state/business)
State-specific benefits (property tax relief, free license plates, tuition waivers)
Nope nothing for him there!
Trump announces sanctuary cities and states will lose all federal funds on Feb. 1
WASHINGTON — President Trump said Tuesday that he’s preparing to halt federal funding to sanctuary cities and states on Feb. 1 — potentially yanking billions in revenue in response to laws barring cooperation with immigration agents.
“Starting February 1, we’re not making any payments to sanctuary cities or states having sanctuary cities because they do everything possible to protect criminals at the expense of American citizens,” Trump said during a speech in Detroit.
The president said the administration is potentially yanking billions in revenue in response to laws barring cooperation with immigration agents.
“It breeds fraud and crime and all of the other problems that come. So we’re not making any payment to anybody that supports sanctuary cities.”
A list published in August by the Justice Department identifies 12 states — including California, Illinois and New York — and five of the nation’s 10 largest cities such as the Big Apple as sanctuary jurisdictions.
“You’ll see. It will be significant,” Trump added later to reporters when asked about the funding cuts.
Top senior prosecutors in D.C. and Minnesota resigned. |
- Breaking: Prosecutors from the U.S. attorney’s office in Minneapolis resigned after the Justice Department’s demands to investigate the widow of Renée Good, who was killed last week by a federal agent.
- More: Five senior prosecutors in the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division also resigned, though the resignations are said not to be connected to the Minnesota investigation.
Trump’s Health Problems Help Make Ankles Great Again
Washington hosted a big medical conference this weekend. Not on cancer. Not on heart disease. On veins. And hovering over the whole thing like a swollen specter were Donald Trump’s cankles.
As vein specialists gathered at the Marriott Marquis a few blocks from the White House, one of the field’s top doctors used the moment to issue some unsolicited lifestyle advice to the president.
Speaking exclusively to The Swamp, Dr. Sanjiv Lakhanpal, founder of the Center for Vein Restoration, suggested that Trump, 79, might want to rethink… well, most things.
First, there are the compression socks, which Trump tried wearing briefly after the White House confirmed his chronic venous insufficiency diagnosis—and then ditched them.
“I didn’t like them,” Trump told the Wall Street Journal in an interview this month. Lakhanpal’s response: patients don’t have to love them, but they improve circulation, reduce swelling and lower the risk of blood clots. In other words, Mr. President: wear the socks. (Try the black ones which have a slimming effect.)
Then there’s Trump’s lifestyle. It’s no secret that the president has a tendency to stay up late, rage-posting about everything from revenge plots to “fake news,” to dead birds, to, well…anything.
But as the Maryland-based doctor warned, “it’s all a vicious cycle” for CVI patients: “If they don’t get a good amount of rest at night, they don’t want to exercise in the morning,” he explained.
To that end, weight loss would also help, Lakhanpal added delicately, acknowledging the president’s penchant for McDonald’s and Diet Coke. That advice landed a day after Trump, who has gone from a claimed 239 pounds in 2018 to a claimed 244 pounds in 2020 and then down to a claimed 224 pounds last April, admitted to the New York Times he “probably” should be on “the fat drug.”
“If you look at his body build, if you look at his lifestyle, if you look at the fact he’s never been a fan of exercise, his (CVI) diagnosis wasn’t surprising,” Lakhanpal said.
But vein specialists who gathered in D.C. this weekend nonetheless thanked the president for his rotund ankles. After all, they’ve done something medicine never quite managed on its own: dragged chronic venous insufficiency into the global spotlight.
Congressman Fine Introduces Greenland Annexation and Statehood Act |
A BILL
To authorize the annexation and subsequent admission to statehood of Greenland, and for other purposes
SECTION 1. SHORT TITLE.
This Act may be cited as the “Greenland Annexation and Statehood Act”
SEC. 2. AUI”HORIZATION FOR THE ANNEXATION OF GREENLAND.
The President is authorized to take such steps as may be necessary, including by seeking to enter into negotiations with the Kingdom of Denmark, to annex or otherwise acquire Greenland as a territory of the United States
Upon completion of such annexation or acquisition, the President may submit to Congress a report consisting of such changes to Federal law as the President may determine necessary to admit the newly acquired territory as a State, in order to expedite congressional approval of such statehood for Greenland after the adoption of a constitution that Congress determines to be republican in form and in conformity with the Constitution of the United States
A federal judge ruled on Monday that the Trump administration’s cancellation of approximately $8 billion in energy grants violated the Constitution by targeting recipients primarily based in Democratic-leaning states.
U.S. District Judge Amit P. Mehta issued a 17-page opinion finding the Department of Energy’s (DOE) grant terminations unlawful under the Fifth Amendment’s equal protection guarantee. The ruling orders the department to restore seven specific grants worth $27.6 million that were part of a broader cancellation affecting more than 200 projects announced by Office of Management and Budget (OMB) Director Russ Vought on October 1, 2025, the first day of the government shutdown.
Newsweek reached out to the White House and OMB via email on Monday for comment.
Why It Matters
Mehta concluded that “all the awardees (but one) were based in states whose majority of citizens casting votes did not support President Donald Trump in the 2024 election.” The ruling establishes constitutional boundaries on executive branch actions that discriminate based on state political affiliation.
According to NOTUS, the DOE’s decision targeted grantees based in blue states while red-state-based groups using federal funding for similar projects largely avoided termination, creating a pattern of disparate treatment across hundreds of projects nationwide.
What To Know
The DOE terminated grants following Vought’s October 1 announcement on X stating that “nearly $8 billion in Green New Scam funding to fuel the Left’s climate agenda is being cancelled.” He listed 16 states—California, Colorado, Connecticut, Delaware, Hawaii, Illinois, Maryland, Massachusetts, Minnesota, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, Vermont, and Washington—none of which voted for Trump in 2024.
The next day, Trump posted on Truth Social that he had met with Vought to “determine which of the many Democrat Agencies, most of which are a political SCAM, he recommends to be cut” during the shutdown.
The termination letters were initially sent without formal DOE letterhead and informed recipients their awards are “not consistent with this Administration’s goals, policies and priorities.” A week later, identical letters were sent on official agency letterhead. The grants supported environmental projects including electric vehicle development, updated building energy codes, and methane emissions reduction.
According to NOTUS, the administration canceled $460 million for Minnesota transmission lines while preserving $700 million for similar Montana projects, and cut Hawaii wildfire resilience funding while maintaining $160 million for Georgia Power’s grid resilience work. Of 17 battery recycling projects, only three were cut—all in blue states—while the remaining 14 in red states or at national labs continued, NOTUS reported. The disparate treatment extended to multi-state programs: for the Grid Resilience and Innovation Partnership program, “only projects in states that voted for Vice President Harris were cancelled on October 2, 2025, while similar projects in states that voted for President Trump were not.”
The city of St. Paul, Minnesota, and environmental groups including Interstate Renewable Energy Council, Plug In America, ElevateEnergy, Southeast Community Organization, and Environmental Defense Fund filed suit. The DOE defended its decision by claiming it advanced Trump administration energy priorities.
However, Mehta found “no plausible rational connection” between the administration’s stated energy goals and selectively canceling blue-state grants. The court emphasized that defendants conceded Plaintiffs’ seven terminated grants are “comparable” to awards to grantees in red states that were not terminated, with the only identifiable difference being “the grant recipient’s state’s political identity.”
The defendants stipulated that “a primary reason for the selection of which DOE grant termination decisions were included in the October 2025 notice tranche was whether the grantee was located in a ‘Blue State.’” The court rejected the DOE’s argument that the Fifth Amendment does not apply to federal funding decisions, stating: “There’s no federal funding exception to the Equal Protection Clause.”
Higher costs for us! Idiocy!
Trump announces 25 percent tariff on countries that trade with Iran
Tehran says it’s ready for “war” or dialogue as Washington weighed its response to mass protests against the government. The tariffs would mean higher prices for American importers of products from dozens of countries, including China, India, Russia, Turkey and Iraq.
Hill Republicans Broke With Trump 5 Times Last Week. What’s Going To Happen This Week?
Just in the last few manic days Trump has launched
- a full out assault on the Fed (see Chairman Powell’s historic video, below).
- He is threatening to invade Greenland,
- bomb Iran,
- struck targets in Syria this weekend, and
- last night declared himself “Acting President of Venezuela.”
- He is now fighting with the oil companies over their reluctance to become part of his Venezuelan oil fantasy;
- threatened the credit card companies with a law that only exists in his mind;
- sanctioned the killing of Americans by his paramilitaries for dissent;
- threatened to veto the resumption of the ACA subsidies if passed by the Senate; and
- with another anemic jobs report on Friday received further confirmation of the failure of his tariffs to deliver for the country, or Republican candidates facing extinction over affordability.
- The lunatic HHS Secretary is returning America to a pre-modern health era, threatening the lives and health of tens of millions of Americans.
- Millions of people took to the streets this weekend, many in terrible weather.
- We are now more than a quarter of the way into the new federal fiscal year without a budget, and the government may run out of money again in 18 days.
Things are getting worse, not better, for Republicans and the country. Trump is
- threatening the fundamental security alliance that has kept us safe and free for 80 years.
- He is threatening the integrity of our financial system which has made us the wealthiest nation in history.
- He has walked away from the UN Charter which has created the basic governing rules for nations for 81 years.
- He snatched a foreign leader from his palace in the middle of the night, without Congressional approval.
- In the last few days he openly threatened both the oil companies, and the big banks, two powerful Republican-aligned industries who will be loudly complaining to Thune and Johnson today.
- Last night he declared himself the “Acting President of Venezuela.”
- He is encouraging his goons to kill Americans on the streets.
- His public performances and social media posts suggest he has completely lost his shit and it is time now for the keys to be taken away.
It’s my guess that part of the manic, desperate behavior we are seeing from Trump in the past few days is due to their tracking polls which show his already terrible poll numbers taking a hit from last week’s ugliness and failure. We are likely to see a lot of independent media polls this week but there have now been three polls released with interviews taken since the killing of Nicole Good and his invasion of Venezuela all with bad news for Trump, and all from sources the White House and Republicans pay attention to:
- CBS/YouGov 41%-59% (-18) – 2 points worse than the current FiftyPlusOne average
- RMG/Napolitan – 47%-51% (-4) – arguably the most pro-Trump pollster found Trump dropping 5 points since their last poll in mid-December.
- TIPP Insights – 40%-51% (-11) – another influential right-wing pollster. 7 point drop since early December, worst showing for Trump in this poll in the past year. Fresh this morning.
And Republicans were already spitting the bit. What happens this week?
How can they defend this?
Or this?
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Or this?
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Or this? (watch and listen):
Will we see more of this?
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We need to be very loud today. Congress needs to hear our roar of disapproval. Those of you with Republican Senators or Reps really need to lean in today. Pick your issue – the Fed, the killing of Americans in their cars, the tariffs, his clear undeniable madness – and just call, email, arrange visits. But we need to be very loud today, and force the GOP to begin to more formally rein in their errant and dangerous leader. Republicans repeatedly broke from Trump last week – on Jan 6th, on the ACA subsidies, on Venezuela and foreign invasions – and we need to keep the momentum going this week.
Now, Let’s Get To Work People!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Tapper HUMILIATES Trump to Kristi Noem’s Face, DROPS F-BOMB
Shooting of Minneapolis mother Renee Good
The “Peace” President is bombing Syria.
Video:
And condidering bombing Iran agaon:
President Trump said Sunday the U.S. military is considering “strong options” on Iran as the country’s regime cracks down on growing nationwide protests. |
Canada’s Arctic Move LOCKS the U.S. Out of a $900B Corridor
Trump screwed us out of the Northwest Passage
Viedo be;oow:
Trump PLEADS CANADA for Nuclear Fuel — One Word Reply “NO”
Now we cannot expand power for AI development. Armed forces bases as well.
See Video:
The right is waging a “war on empathy”
The fatal shooting of Minneapolis mother Renee Good shows just how close they’ve come to winning.
“Among their base, today’s GOP is trying to drum out any natural impulses toward compassion, such that there is no imperative to feel — let alone express — any dismay at the killing of an ideological adversary. If Good wasn’t on Trump’s side, the party line goes, she got what was coming to her,” said Cauterucci. “The rush to defend Ross is more than a political move to justify Trump’s personal militia run amok. It’s another round in the right wing’s mounting war on empathy.”
Influential Christian conservatives have been proclaiming empathy as toxic and sinful, arguing that using caring for others as a means to sway righteous Americans toward liberal causes, such as eradicating racism or feeding the poor. It’s the argument that makes letting 500,000 children die worldwide more palatable, in addition to “Medicaid cuts, SNAP freezes, ICE raids, refugee bans, and forced childbirth.”
She also noted that Tesla and SpaceX CEO (and Trump donor) Elon Musk calls empathy “the fundamental weakness of Western civilization.”
“In this worldview, anyone who poses a danger to those within the inner circles of human worthiness does not warrant much empathy. And it’s easy enough to argue that just about anyone is a threat to one’s family, town, or country, thus exempting them from our responsibilities of care,” said Cauterucci, who named examples such as “a drag queen” or “a liberal judge.” This, she said, could also apply to “someone wearing a Zohran Mamdani T-shirt at the grocery store” or, more recently, “a concerned Minnesotan who stopped to film the agents plucking people out of her community.”
“Once a person is no longer worthy of empathy, they become a justifiable casualty in service to any political aim,” Cauterucci argued. “There is no need to consider proportionality; killing someone for distracting ICE agents is just as defensible as ending a life on a battlefield. From the right’s perspective, Good’s political views made her fair game, so her gruesome, untimely death by the gun of a masked federal agent need not be met with outrage or remorse. Any empathy for her or her family imperils a greater project: cleansing Minneapolis of immigrants.”
From there, Cauterucci said there is a very short distance from “believing someone’s death is unworthy of mourning to believing they deserved to die.” And eventually to “inciting more death.”
“Every falsehood spun by Trump and his acolytes is an attempt to degrade their followers’ capacity for empathy past the point of flinching at an innocent woman’s death,” Cauterucci. “The goal is to diminish the ghastliness of Good’s death, and with it, the value of her life.”
Oil company CEOs mock Trump behind his back as he begs them for help in Venezuela
In addition to questions of safety, companies are wondering why they should invest in hard-to-process heavy Venezuelan crude oil given the nation’s busted infrastructure and uncertain political environment, only to dump more oil on a global market and hurt their bottom line with the resulting cheaper oil prices.
With so many reasons not to invest, Politico reports oil executives may simply string Trump along with big promises while delivering nothing.
“Companies may follow the playbook of promising the White House they are interested in investing in Venezuela just to stay on Trump’s good side but ultimately not following through,” one business lobbyist told Politico. This tactic — called “Everyone Makes Promises And Never Actually Does Anything” — is so common for dealing with the distracted president that it’s got its own acronym.
“My impression is it’s EMPANADA all over again,” an anonymous executive told Politico.
Lead White House ballroom architect says Trump now targeting the West Wing
The Most Contradictory Timeline in History
If you’re confused about what our country stands for at this moment in time, you’re not alone. Our elected leaders say one thing one minute, and then do something totally contradictory the next.
One of the most contradictory areas of U.S. policy this past year has been drug enforcement.
January 20, 2025. Donald Trump signs an Executive Order designating drug cartels terrorist organizations, and declaring that “it is the policy of the United States to ensure the total elimination of [their] presence in the United States.”
January 21, 2025. Trump grants a full pardon to Ross Ulbricht, founder of the Silk Road—an online marketplace that trafficked hundreds of millions of dollars worth of drugs. At least six people died from overdoses, including two teenagers.
March 2025. Trump frees Cesar Humberto Lopez-Larios (aka “El Greñas”), a notorious MS-13 gang leader captured in 2024 after years on the FBI’s Most Wanted List. Lopez-Larios was charged with narco-terrorism and other crimes, but Trump’s DOJ dismissed those charges and returned Lopez-Larios to El Salvador.
March 2025. Trump’s Health Secretary, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., announces that he’s eliminating the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Administration, which is the primary agency responsible for reducing drug overdose deaths and addiction.
April 2025. Trump’s DOJ cuts $88 million in grant funding for substance abuse and addiction treatment.
May 2025. The Trump Administration decides to eliminate the Organized Crime and Drug Enforcement Task Force (known as OCDETF)—a specialized section of the Justice Department that targets major drug traffickers and international cartels. It’s the unit that captured El Chapo, for example. Members of Congress on both sides objected to shutting down OCDETF, but still the unit was fully disbanded by September.
September 2025. Instead of prosecuting suspected drug traffickers through legal channels, Trump starts bombing them. He launches military airstrikes on tiny boats supposedly carrying drugs. We haven’t actually seen any proof of that. But there have been over 30 strikes to date.
October 2025. Trump pardons Changpeng Zhao, the founder of Binance—a cryptocurrency exchange that was used to launder money to international drug trafficking organizations and criminal enterprises.
December 2025. Trump pardons Juan Orlando Hernandez, the corrupt former president of Honduras, who turned his country into a narco-state. Hernandez took millions in bribes from drug traffickers and sent hundreds of tons of cocaine into the US. In 2024, he was convicted by a jury and sentenced to 45 years in prison. Now he’s a free man thanks to Trump’s pardon.
January 2026. Trump sends troops into Venezuela to capture their president, Nicolas Maduro, and try him in the United States on charges of drug trafficking. The charges against Maduro are identical to the ones that Trump pardoned Hernandez for.
So how can we reconcile this totally contradictory timeline? That’s exactly what we should be asking our elected officials. It’s not our job to make it make sense—it’s theirs.
A good review of the ICE shooting.
The woman was trying to leave, the ICE guy was so miffed he shot her from the side window!! He was not in front of her car then! She did not run him over! It was murder.
In the video, Jonathan Ross circles the red SUV being driven by Renee Nicole Good as she tells him, “That’s fine, dude, I’m not mad at you.” She is then shown to turn the wheel of her car and go around him when he screams, “Whoa!” and fires. He never drops the phone, was not run over, and remains filming as he walks toward her car after it drives away and hits the tree.
After the shooting, someone in the video mutters, “f—— b——!”
“The idea that this man feared for his life in that moment is insane. She has a friendly exchange with him 20 seconds before and the car is going 2 miles an hour!” said The Bulwark’s Tim Miller.
“This video shows clearly that he knew it was a middle aged white lady who showed no signs of menace. It also shows that he could clearly see her turning the wheel to the right to leave. He murdered her,” Miller added.
“She smiles at the man who shoots her and says she isn’t mad at him,” MS NOW columnist Philip Bump. “Clearly initiates the effort to leave when the aggressive agents arrive. The question now (not that this was in question) isn’t who’s telling the truth. It’s when DHS had this video and knew that what they were saying was a lie.”
MS NOW columnist Michael A. Cohen noted, “The decisive takeaway from this video is that Good wasn’t focused on the officer in front of her at all. She was looking to the right as he walked past her car. She was clearly trying to leave and didn’t look up until the car was in drive. In fact, she was so intent on getting away that she began to drive as her wife was trying to get into the car.”
Drop State News reporter Ryan Grimm commented on Vice President JD Vance’s post of the video, “You watched this, and that’s your conclusion? He shot her twice through her side window. How was he in danger? I think you’re starting to realize you may have ruined yourself over this.”
Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.) notes that Good was getting two different messages from the officers.
Officer 1: “Get out of the car!” <simultaneously>
Officer 2: “Get out of here!”
Kinzinger comments, “The confusion is not surprising. The shooting officer had his phone out too. This deserves a clear and fair investigation.”
“Sir, I don’t think the video shows what you want us to believe it shows. We have eyes,” Julia Ioffe of Puck News said to Vance. “He doesn’t even drop the phone.”
Republican and Bulwark publisher Sarah Longwell called Vance a “liar.”
“She says, ‘That’s fine dude. I’m not mad at you.’ Then she’s clearly leaving and he shoots her three times in the face and calls her a ‘fucking bitch,’ Then all of you immediately lied about it and called her a domestic terrorist, which is obviously a false smear,” she said.
“Pod Save America” co-host Jon Favreau wrote, “
1. He wasn’t hit by a car, which we believe because we have eyes.
2. I didn’t realize ‘hey dude I’m not mad at you’ is harassment that warrants a death sentence
3. He killed an innocent woman
4. Shooting her in the face did nothing to protect him.
Stepping out of the way did.”
Former MS NOW host Mehdi Hasan, who founded Zeto News, told the VP, “The only real harassment you see in that video is where the officer calls the woman he just murdered a ‘fucking bitch,’ on his own recording, right after he murdered her. And the Trump administration thought this was a clip in their favor?? That the VP should promote? Sheesh.”
Gizmodo reporter Matt Novak posted a zoomed-in version showing Good making the sharp right turn to go around the officer.
He replied to a comment from a legal analyst who said, “the ICE officer calling a woman he just murdered a ‘fucking bitch’ is visceral, but [in my opinion] the most material new information in the latest video is that she very clearly turns the wheel away from the officer right before it happens.”
Novak agreed, “That was my takeaway too. She’s clearly turning the wheel to her right. I’ve slowed the video down here.”
Former law enforcement chief and CNN commentator Charles Ramsey told the network, “It certainly doesn’t seem like a threat at all, and she does seem to be pleasant.”
He went on to say that the video makes it clear to him that it wasn’t “a tense situation.”
January 7, 2026
This morning, a federal agent from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) shot and killed 37-year-old Renee Nicole Good as she was driving away from ICE agents on a residential street in Minneapolis, Minnesota. According to Minneapolis leaders, Good was a legal observer: a volunteer trained to observe police conduct in case of future legal action.
Three videos taken at the scene show a maroon SUV perpendicular on a snowy street. A silver SUV driving up the street stops. Two officers wearing badges that say “police” and body armor get out of the vehicle and walk toward the maroon car.
One of them says, “Get out of the f*cking car,” and the other reaches through the open driver’s side window while trying to open the door. The driver backs up the vehicle, and straightens the wheel as if making a three-point turn. Then she starts slowly to accelerate along the street.
A third officer who has been standing on the side of the road pulls out a gun as the car is turning away. He shoots three times. The maroon car does not hit anyone as it rolls up the street, hitting another vehicle and then a utility pole. The shooter walks briskly away, apparently uninjured.
Seen in slow motion, a video shows the wheels of the maroon vehicle were fully turned away from the shooting officer, who made no effort to jump away, clearly suggesting he did not feel as if he were in danger. His first shot went through the windshield; the next two went through the driver’s side window as the car moved past him. An onlooker shouted “What the f*ck?!”
Video taken by another eyewitness shows ICE agents refusing to allow a self-identified physician to tend to the victim and telling him to back up. Although there is no one tending the clearly visible woman in the car, an agent says: “We have medics on scene. We have our own medics.” When another bystander screams: “Where are they? WHERE ARE THEY?!” an agent tells her, “Relax.” “How can I relax?” she shouts. “You just killed my f*cking neighbor.”
Yesterday the Trump administration deployed federal agents and officers to Minneapolis for what they called the largest federal immigration operation ever carried out, eventually planning to deploy 2,000 agents. The administration has been attacking Minnesota’s Somali community, and Homeland Security Kristi Noem was present at an ICE arrest yesterday, telling a man in handcuffs, who Homeland Security later said was from Ecuador, “You will be held accountable for your crimes.”
Rebecca Santana and Michael Balsamo of the Associated Press reported that Minnesota governor Tim Walz called the deployment “a war that’s being waged against Minnesota.” “You’re seeing that we have a ridiculous surge of apparently 2,000 people not coordinating with us, that are for a show of cameras,” he said.
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) insists that its actions are protecting American citizens from “the worst of the worst” criminal immigrants, so the shooting of a young white woman, the mother of a young child, and how that would look, made it appear eager to smear Good.
It immediately put out a statement {that looked much like what it said after officers shot 30-year-old Chicago teaching assistant Marimar Martinez in October when it claimed she had “ambushed” agents, ramming their vehicle before an agent shot her five times. Footage showed that, in fact, the agents had rammed her car, and after the shooting one had sent a text message bragging: “I fired 5 rounds and she had 7 holes. Put that in your book boys.” }
The Department of Justice dropped the charges it had filed against her, asking a judge to “dismiss the indictment and exonerate” Martinez and her passenger.
Today, DHS posted on social media that “ICE officers in Minneapolis were conducting targeted operations when rioters began blocking ICE officers and one of these violent rioters weaponized her vehicle, attempting to run over our law enforcement officers in an attempt to kill them—an act of domestic terrorism. An ICE officer, fearing for his life, the lives of his fellow law enforcement and the safety of the public, fired defensive shots. He used his training and saved his own life and that of his fellow officers. The alleged perpetrator was hit and is deceased. The ICE officers who were hurt are expected to make full recoveries. This is the direct consequence of constant attacks and demonization of our officers by sanctuary politicians who fuel and encourage rampant assaults on our law enforcement who are facing 1,300% increase in assaults against them and an 8,000% increase in death threats.”
Trump jumped in with his own fact-free post lying that the shooter had been run over: “I have just viewed the clip of the event which took place in Minneapolis, Minnesota. It is a horrible thing to watch. The woman screaming was, obviously, a professional agitator, and the woman driving the car was very disorderly, obstructing and resisting, who then violently, willfully, and viciously ran over the ICE Officer, who seems to have shot at her in self defense. Based on the attached clip, it is hard to believe that he is alive, but is now recovering in the hospital. The situation is being studied, in its entirety, but the reason these incidents are happening is because the Radical Left is threatening, assaulting, and targeting our Law Enforcement Officers and ICE Agents on a daily basis. They are just trying to do the job of MAKING AMERICA SAFE. We need to stand by and protect our Law Enforcement Officers from this Radical Left Movement of Violence and Hate! PRESIDENT DONALD J. TRUMP”
That both DHS and Trump posted false accounts of the shooting even as there are four videos circulating that reveal those accounts to be lies shows they no longer are making any attempt to justify their actions. Instead, they are demanding Americans abandon reality in favor of whatever the administration says. If this works, it would be a demonstration of totalitarian power, the ability to control how people think. Accepting that lie is a loyalty test.
But it is not working.
First of all, Sarah Jeong of The Verge noted that the reason there are so many videos is because “people cared enough to show up where ICE was and record them. It wasn’t just one or two legal observers, and when Good was shot, they didn’t abandon her.”
Second, elected Democrats are pushing back. “I’ve seen the video,” Governor Walz wrote. “Don’t believe this propaganda machine. The state will ensure there is a full, fair, and expeditious investigation to ensure accountability and justice.” To reporters, he said: “We’ve been warning for weeks that the Trump administration’s dangerous, sensationalized operations are a threat to our public safety, that someone was going to get hurt. Just yesterday I said exactly that. What we’re seeing is the consequences of governance designed to generate fear, headlines, and conflict. It’s governing by reality TV and today that recklessness cost someone their life. I’ve reached out to DHS Secretary Kristi Noem and I’m waiting to hear back.”
He told Minnesotans that, like them, he was angry, but “they want a show. We can’t give it to them. We cannot. If you protest and express your First Amendment rights, please do so peacefully as you always do. We can’t give them what they want…. To Americans, I ask you this. Please stand with Minneapolis.”
Walz prepared to call out the Minnesota National Guard if necessary, demonstrating that there would be no need for Trump to invoke the Insurrection Act and send in troops. He reminded Minnesotans that the Minnesota National Guard does not wear masks and that it is theirs, not Trump’s.
Minneapolis mayor Jacob Frey told reporters that the DHS statement was “bullsh*t. This was an agent recklessly using power that resulted in somebody dying, getting killed.” “To the family, I’m so deeply sorry,” Frey said. “There’s nothing that I can say right now that’s going to make you or your relatives, friends of the victim feel any better.” To ICE and other federal agents deployed in Minnesota, he added: “Get the f*ck out of Minneapolis. We do not want you here. Your stated reason for being in this city is to create some kind of safety, and you are doing exactly the opposite. People are being hurt. Families are being ripped apart…and now somebody is dead.”
But something else was also going on today. At the same time the administration was pouring gasoline on the domestic fire ICE had sparked and the international fire it had set with its attacks on Venezuela and threats against Greenland, it was quietly making a number of major financial moves.
The smallest of those moves was that today Trump asked Fulton County, Georgia, for a $6.2 million payout in attorneys’ fees and costs after the criminal charges against him in Georgia were dismissed. Trump had been indicted for trying to overturn the 2020 presidential election in Georgia by pressuring Georgia secretary of state Brad Raffensberger to “find” 11,780 votes to give him a victory in the state of Georgia. In November 2025 a new special prosecutor dropped the charges, citing the difficulty of prosecuting a case against a sitting president. Trump boasted on social media of his victory over an “illegal, unconstitutional, and unAmerican hoax,” and continued to push the lie that Democrats stole the election.
Vicky Ge Huang of the Wall Street Journal reported that the Trump family’s cryptocurrency venture World Liberty Financial today applied for a national banking license from the U.S. Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, part of the Treasury Department. A banking license would integrate the Trump family’s cryptocurrency more fully into mainstream finance.
If the Treasury Department issues the license—a potential outcome that critics say reveals a major conflict of interest for the president—the president and chair of the new company would be Zach Witkoff, whose father is the son of Trump’s envoy to Russia Steve Witkoff, who the Wall Street Journal recently reported had been handpicked for his role by Russian president Vladimir Putin. The younger Witkoff started World Liberty Financial in 2024 with Trump’s sons Don Jr., Eric, and Barron.
Today, Energy Secretary Chris Wright told an audience at a Goldman Sachs energy industry event in Miami, Florida, that the United States will take control of all oil from Venezuela for the foreseeable future. Lisa Desjardins and Nick Schifrin of PBS NewsHour reported this afternoon that Trump administration officials have told lawmakers that they plan to put the money raised from their seizure of Venezuelan oil into bank accounts outside the U.S. Treasury. Desjardins clarified that “[s]ources said they understood these as similar [to] or decidedly ‘off-shore’ accounts.”
Yesterday, Trump announced that, as president of the United States, he would control the money from the sale of Venezuelan oil.
And then, this afternoon, Trump’s social media account first threatened the defense contractor Raytheon, saying that “[e]ither Raytheon steps up, and starts investing in more upfront Investment like Plants and Equipment, or they will no longer be doing business with Department of War.”
Then, the same account posted: “After long and difficult negotiations with Senators, Congressmen, Secretaries, and other Political Representatives, I have determined that, for the Good of our Country, especially in these very troubled and dangerous times, our Military Budget for the year 2027 should not be $1 Trillion Dollars, but rather $1.5 Trillion Dollars. This will allow us to build the ‘Dream Military’ that we have long been entitled to and, more importantly, that will keep us SAFE and SECURE, regardless of foe. If it weren’t for the tremendous numbers being produced by Tariffs from other Countries, many of which, in the past, have ‘ripped off’ the United States at levels never seen before, I would stay at the $1 Trillion Dollar number but, because of Tariffs, and the tremendous income they bring, amounts being generated, that would have been unthinkable in the past (especially just one year ago during the Sleepy Joe Biden Administration, the Worst President in the History of our Country!), we are able to easily hit the $1.5 Trillion Dollar number while, at the same time, producing an unparalleled Military Force, and having the ability to, at the same time, pay down Debt, and likewise, pay a substantial Dividend to moderate income Patriots within our Country!”
Simon Rosenberg of The Hopium Chronicles wrote: “Trump has gone completely mad.”
Trump put up a fake website vidicating himself for Jan 6, lying all the way,
NPR put up this:
https://apps.npr.org/jan-6-archive/
I am sorry; I really am. You have children and a family- you have a mortgage or rent, hobbies, friends, and a life. You won’t like this- it will be controversial. However, I think it is something we all need to hear.
First, let me start with a story
On September 11th, 2001, it was a normal Tuesday like any other, a slow Tuesday even. Then, as the morning went on, planes started changing course and shutting off their transponders. The Hijackers, trying to make announcements to the passengers, accidentally sent out messages to everyone on the frequency, including air traffic control.
Hijackers had overtaken the cockpits of 4 planes using bombs (likely fake) and knives. Their intent was to use them as missiles. At 8:46, the North Tower of the WTC was hit, followed by the South Tower at 9:03.
On United Airlines Flight 93, a similar story played out. However, a delay on the ground and the delay in the actual hijacking led to the cockpit being controlled at 9:28- 30 minutes after the WTC towers had been struck and mere minutes from the attack on the Pentagon.
The 33 passengers were coraled to the back of the plane under the watch of a hijacker, where they began to use the in-flight phones to call their loved ones starting at 9:30. The passengers had been told that they were hotages but they learned quickly from their families over the phone that the hijackers had other plans.
After uncovering the details, the passengers made an incredibly brave decision: they would retake the plane. They waited until the plane was over rural countryside, knowing that they were likely to crash, and began their revolt at 9:57. By 9:59, they had subdued the hijackers and began to try to breach the cockpit.
The hijackers piloting the plane began to make drastic maneuvers to prevent the breach, but it only delayed it. It was clear by 10:01 that they would breach in seconds. The hijackers thus pointed the plane’s nose down to crash. At 10:03, the plane crashed with no survivors, but by taking these heroic actions, hundreds or thousands of lives were saved.
I tell you now, friends, that we are on our own Flight 93. Our nation has been hijacked, and while we may be corralled in the back, we have the real power.
The parable of the “plane” is often used in politics, even by me. We are all on this “plane” together, and wanting the plane to crash because you hate the pilot is illogical. I am not saying that the Trump regime is the same as 9/11 terrorists, nor am I saying that we are facing the same horror that those brave passengers faced. I bring up Flight 93 first to pay homage to some great American heroes and second to expand upon this common parable.
If we are all on this plane together, then make no mistake- it has been hijacked. An unelected South African Billionaire has been given the keys to the castle. Think of how corrupt this is. A US President (and felon) has given an unelected rich donor the right to fire and reform the entire administrative wing of the US Government. Veterans will suffer, the elderly will suffer, and YOU will suffer, thanks to Trump and Musk.
More than that, Musk is using this moment to enrich himself and protect his empire at our expense. As I write this, Musk is attacking (or “downsizing”)…
- The United States Department of Agriculture: Currently investigating Musk’s Neuralink for animal abuse and experimentation
- The Department of Labor: Currenly investigating Musk’s companies for retaliation firing, harassment (the worst kind), and safety violations
- The Consumer Financial Protection Bureau: Currently trying to regulate Musk’s payment system at X
- The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA): A primary competitor of SpaceX
This is by no means a complete list. This is not even the worst part about the Trump Presidency. In a follow-up post, I will dive into that in more detail. It is horrifying and hilarious.
The heroic passengers of Flight 93 had no help, and neither do we. People are exhausted, and resistance to Trump has been minimal. All that anti-Trump 2016 energy is gone. Democrats have stated they have “no leverage” and are just making podcasts. The courts are terrified that Trump will ignore or defy their decisions.
We have to take the plane back and land it ourselves.
Let’s be honest about something else- the founding fathers did not “found” America by asking. Sometimes peace works, and sometimes it does not. Let’s be adults and realize that force is required to enact change. Not violence, mind you, force. Maybe political force, maybe economic force, but force nonetheless.
- I want to press this again. LEGAL and NONVIOLENT action is needed. Violence allows Trump to play the victim, crack down on civil liberties, and portray the opposition as criminal. More importantly, it leads to actual harm.
Trump is bad, but he is a symptom more than a problem. In the US (and Europe), we are facing growing wealth inequality, an unstable economy, international conflicts, and a rapidly changing society. This leads to fear, and Populism thrives on fear. Over 2,000 years ago, the same set of factors led to Populism as it did 92 years ago in Weimar Germany.
We need radical reform. In my plane metaphor, the hijackers have overtaken a malfunctioning plane. First, we must regain control of the plane and arrest its descent into the ground. Then, we can worry about fixing the malfunction.
So what can you do?
Step 1: Be the best you
Cheesy right? The reality is this- you cannot change the world alone; none of us can. It was not 1 person who regained control of Flight 93, it was everyone. This isn’t a money thing; it’s a community thing. Be that trusted person in your community (whatever it is). When your coworker Tom wants to start a Union, he knows you can be trusted and will help. When your neighbor Trisha, a legal migrant, fears her 5-year-old son will be deported, she knows you will help her. To be this person, you must be honest, stable, and the “best” you that you can be. So take care of yourself.
During the Holodomor (a famine/genocide of Ukrainians by Russia), a woman named Kyivan Lidia Balitska found that her neighbors had bloated from starvation. She began to find and smuggle them food at great risk to herself. Of the 9 members of the family, 7 survived thanks to her. This is what being a reliable, brave member of your community looks like.
Step 2: Join something
Go out and join a group. It could be a TV Show fan club that talks politics or a book club. Engage with the community and organize. Find like-minded individuals, people with similar goals and desires.
In a war, the biggest step is mobilization. You have to get the troops into their positions, establish communications, define goals, scout the enemy, make plans, and prepare necessary resources. A good way to lose wars is to be the last to mobilize or to mobilize too late. Famously, the Prussians dominated the French in the Franco-Prussian War despite having fewer men, in part due to mobilization efforts.
The time to mobilize is not after the war has started but before. So, begin this process now. Organize, prepare, and be ready- not for war but for resistance and whatever form that needs to take.
Step 3: Be brave
Be who you are. Tell your friends, tell your family (if wise). Recruit and spread the message. We need allies in every industry, from gas stations to banks. We need unity- we need numbers. This may mean some awkward conversations with friends or coworkers when appropriate. Be who you are.
The more allies we have, the more strength we have. It gives us reach, resources, and power. Spread the message that resistance is alive and well- that we have not surrendered to Trump- and that the fight continues.
Step 4: Ride the tiger
You’re a reliable member of your community, you are a member of a group of like-minded folks, and this group has grown. Now take action- ride the tiger.
So what did you mobilize for? Well, it could be a lot depending on what is to come. Boycotts, protests, attending town halls, writing to politicians demanding they fight, preparing for local and national elections- a whole lot of things.
- I have it on good authority that real letters actually written with intent have far more meaning than basic boilerplate “do X” letters/emails. I know a person who was on the receiving end, and they confirmed that despite getting hundreds or thousands of emails, 3 that were actually written with passion stood out and made an impression.
Kansas Senator Roger Marshall held a Town Hall Saturday where he was shouted down by his own voters, livid over Trump’s actions. This has been happening a lot, and you better believe this forces people into action. Get loud and be honest.
MAGA wants to dominate school boards and local offices- that is a fight we can begin right now. It just takes effort and courage, and we can begin to take back control of our nation.
During WW2, Abdol Hossein Sardari was an Iranian Muslim Diplomat in Paris. When the Germans invaded, he was ordered to return to Tehran. Instead, he spent the war forging passports for Iranian and non-Iranian Jews and even hiding their valuables. It is estimated he saved 3,000 lives.
Ans van Dijk was a Dutch woman (and a Jewish person) who was arrested by the SS in 1943. She agreed to work for the SS in exchange for her release. She proceeded to join the resistance, where she would offer vulnerable Jewish people a hiding place and instead lead them into a trap. She was paid per Jew, and while the circumstances of her life were extraordinary, in total, some 700 Jews died because of her.
Are we Abdol, or are we Ans? Of course, we think we are Abdol but, are we really? Would you risk your life for others? Will you have the bravery to put everything on the line to do what is right or comply and remain safe? Wrestle with this question now.
This is not a partisan issue- this is us, the PEOPLE, retaking control from the oligarchs. It’s not left vs right; it’s right vs wrong. It does not matter how you voted- it matters what you do.
BREAKING: Ex-NATO General stuns MAGA world by calling on Europe to wage war against the United States if Trump seizes Greenland.
The formerly unthinkable is now being said out loud by European allies in reaction to Donald Trump’s illegal kidnapping of a sovereign nation’s president and his obvious designs on taking Greenland from Denmark.
A former top NATO commander, Lt. Gen. Michel Yakovleff of France, has delivered a stunning warning to the world: If Donald Trump moves to seize Greenland, Europe must be ready to fight back—even against the United States.
Yakovleff, who spent decades at NATO’s highest military levels, didn’t mince words. If Trump threatens European sovereignty, he says, Europe must be prepared to defend itself—even if that means a historic rupture with Washington. “If Trump moves on Greenland, Europeans must be ready to fight the U.S.,” he said flatly. This isn’t posture nor bluster. Those are fighting words.
This is what Trump’s America has become: so reckless, so imperial, so hostile to allies that a retired NATO general is openly discussing a “divorce” from the United States and the end of NATO itself.
Yakovleff warned that Trump’s bullying rhetoric and open threats against Greenland— a territory that’s part of Denmark, a NATO ally — are incompatible with any alliance based on mutual defense and respect. If Trump treats allies like conquered territory, Yakovleff argues, Europe must respond by protecting its own sovereignty, even if it means expelling U.S. forces from key bases like Ramstein and Naples.
Let’s examine what this really means: Trump’s behavior is now so destabilizing that serious European leaders are contemplating kicking the U.S. military out of Europe.
This isn’t happening in a vacuum. Yakovleff previously went viral for saying what many world leaders quietly believe: that Trump “works for Putin,” or at minimum advances Vladimir Putin’s interests by undermining NATO, weakening Ukraine, and sowing chaos among democratic allies. Whether through incompetence, ego, or something darker, Trump is doing exactly what the Kremlin wants: breaking the Western alliance from the inside. And now, the consequences are coming into focus.
Yakovleff is clear-eyed about the imbalance of power — Europe doesn’t want war with the U.S. But he’s even clearer about the stakes. If America abandons the rules-based order and starts threatening allies with military force, then NATO, by definition, is already dead.
This is the cost of Trump’s authoritarian fantasy politics: allies preparing for confrontation, alliances collapsing, and America transformed from the leader of the free world into a global threat that even its closest partners must plan to resist.
Trump promised “America First.” What he’s delivering is America Alone—and feared.
Trump Wants To Seize Greenland Because He Doesn’t Understand Trade
Presidents should try to nudge the world toward more trade and less war whenever possible. Trump is doing the opposite.
Imagine for a moment that you have the misfortune to be elected president of some nation. A neighboring nation possesses valuable natural resources that you’d like to have. How to proceed?
You could seize those resources by force. Certainly that’s been a common method across much of human history. Hire some thugs to take what you want. Have them beat up the other guy if he gets in the way. Give your thugs uniforms and an internal hierarchy, and you might fool some people into believing the whole thing is more legitimate. Alternatively, you could offer the other nation some of your own resources in exchange for the ones you want. Things go even more smoothly if you let the people in your country offer their resources in exchange for the stuff in the other country that they want. If you happen to be president of a country with the world’s reserve currency, this deal gets better yet: Instead of offering your own resources, your people can probably just trade money for the things they want, and the other country will be happy to accept. Everyone gets what they want and no one has to fight over it. Unfortunately, President Donald Trump does not seem to understand this on a fundamental level. Again and again, Trump has shown that he views free trade as a suckers game. Why should everyone end up better off when he could win while others lose? The Trump administration’s renewed impulse to seize Greenland—on the heels of a military attack aimed at seizing Venezuelan oil production—is the latest example of this. It’s also perhaps the riskiest, given that Greenland is a part of Denmark (even though it has been semiautonomous since 1979) and Denmark is a member of NATO. In an interview on Monday, Trump adviser Stephen Miller refused to rule out the use of military force to seize the island. “Nobody’s going to fight the United States militarily over the future of Greenland,” Miller said. “We live in a world…that is governed by strength, that is governed by force, that is governed by power.”
This may be a bluff, but we should be clear-eyed about the threat. Miller is talking about a military attack by the United States against Denmark, a longtime ally and fellow member of NATO. Per NATO’s rules, an attack against one member is treated as an attack against all, and as such, all NATO members would be required to respond. That’s unlikely to happen, so the effective result would be the “collapse” of NATO, as Danish Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen put it this week.
Should NATO have been restructured or abolished long ago, once the Soviet Union and its Warsaw Pact were no longer around? Absolutely. Is an attack by one NATO country against another the proper way to go about restructuring the alliance? Good gravy, no. So why is the Trump administration threatening such an insane thing? One possible answer is that Greenland has resources America needs. And, indeed, Greenland does have valuable mineral deposits and might be sitting atop a reserve of natural gas and oil. Gee, if only there were some way to get at them without having to resort to force!
But the most valuable resource Greenland possesses is likely its spot on the map. When the Trump administration talks about Greenland as being vital for national security purposes, that’s because it is adjacent to Russia—use a less traditional map to understand how—and crucial to controlling airspace around the Arctic. (Trump and his allies are also recently spouting off some manifest destiny–esque nonsense about controlling “our” hemisphere, but that’s a less practical consideration.)
Admittedly, land is harder to trade than many other resources. Still, the principle is the same: You can take land by force, or you can offer something you have for something you want. America has spent the past century creating global institutions—like NATO—to discourage the former and encourage the latter, and that’s worked out quite well. It is that cooperative approach that explains why the U.S. has stationed troops and built airbases in Greenland since striking a deal with Denmark in 1951. Everyone wins: America gets a stronger foothold in the Arctic and first alert defense against Russian nukes, and Denmark (a tiny country that’s not a national security threat to anyone) gets protection by being a part of NATO and allies with the United States. There is no good reason—absolutely none—for Trump to blow up that arrangement and seize Greenland by force.
Finally, here’s the most important thing about free trade that Trump fails to grasp: It is voluntary and consensual.
Rolling into Greenland with guns blazing—or making enough threats that Denmark eventually hands the island over to avoid that possibility—is the exact opposite of that. Trump’s centralized, nationalistic view of the world has no room for individuals or their consent. What do the people of Greenland want? What do the people of Denmark want? Heck, most Americans are not very keen on the idea of their government seizing Greenland. It’s not quite accurate to say that no one wants this—some very powerful people unfortunately do—but this would be something that the U.S. government would be doing against the will of most of the individuals involved in the transaction. That should matter—a lot. In fairness, it is encouraging to see that the Trump administration is putting together an offer that will reportedly be presented directly to the semiautonomous government of Greenland. The Economist reports that the deal includes giving Greenland the same status as the Marshall Islands and some other small Pacific islands. The people of Greenland have the right to vote on their own future. If Trump’s deal is accepted, then Denmark (and others) should stand aside. But it certainly seems like that deal would have had a better chance of being accepted without all the bellicosity that has gone along with it. Again, one of the glorious things about free trade is that no one points a gun (or the whole U.S. military’s terrifying arsenal) at you to make a deal happen. Individuals buy and sell things when and how it makes sense for them to do it. Yes, it is impossible to apply that logic to every aspect of international geopolitics, but presidents ought to nudge the world toward more trade and less war whenever possible. Trump is doing the opposite. That is happening, at least in part, because Trump doesn’t understand the value of free trade. Everything happening with Greenland is downstream of that grievous problem.
Trump’s War Is Dumb, Brazen—and Of Course, All About Oil
We are getting a little more brazen the more such wars we conduct. Trump’s assertion that Maduro’s drug trafficking was responsible for the deaths of hundreds of thousands of Americans was laughable. Indeed, there really is no Cartel del los Soles. It is a term of art (like Antifa) that doesn’t describe a real organization but rather a set of loosely associated activities and actors. What is more, Trump did not and does not seek the approval of Congress or the support of allies for his actions. Further, of course, neither Congress nor any coalition of allies would have the power to authorize the U.S. to seize the national assets of a sovereign nation, even if they wanted to.
The last time Trump wanted to seize oil to pay for a war—in that case actions against ISIS—his team blocked it because such actions would be illegal. But this time, his team of kowtowing sycophants are going along with what could easily become one of the largest acts of theft in modern history.
Just like in the case of the second Iraq War, Team Trump clearly has no idea what to do next. The plan, per Trump’s truly weird, meandering press conference (during which he often slurred his words and seemed to have trouble staying awake), seems to be that we’ll figure things out as we go.
Who is in charge of Venezuela now? Trump and his national security team? For how long? Until there’s a transition to a stable future (read: agreed to U.S. control of oil assets). Will the war spread to places like Colombia, Cuba or Mexico? Trump and his team issued threats to all three. (Prior targets Greenland and Panama went unmentioned… for now.) Trump even cringe-flexed that his desire to “dominate” the Western Hemisphere was now being called the “Donroe Doctrine.”
In other words, as bad as America’s past crimes on behalf of the oil lords have been and as badly as they have turned out, we’re at it again.
Axios is reporting that during the course of the day Trump raised the possibility of future interventions in Colombia, Cuba, and Mexico.
Trump The Terrible told us he was now in charge of Venezuela. His words and meaning were very clear:
This afternoon the Venezuelan government, still very much in charge of the country, disputed Trump’s claim.
President Trump said Delcy Rodríguez was sworn in as Venezuela’s interim president and would act as a partner in letting the United States run the country.
“She’s essentially willing to do what we think is necessary to make Venezuela great again,” he said.
Less than two hours later, Ms. Rodríguez — who was Nicolás Maduro’s vice president — delivered a televised address to Venezuela that made clear she viewed the United States as an illegal invader that must be rejected.
“We are determined to be free,” she said. “What is being done to Venezuela is a barbarity.”
Her swift defiance of Mr. Trump made clear that his plans to swoop into the South American nation and run it as his own faced many more hurdles than he suggested in his Saturday news conference declaring victory in Venezuela.
“We had already warned that an aggression was underway under false excuses and false pretenses, and that the masks had fallen off, revealing only one objective: regime change in Venezuela,” she said. “This regime change would also allow for the seizure of our energy, mineral and natural resources. This is the true objective, and the world and the international community must know it.”
Significantly, Ms. Rodríguez delivered her address alongside what she called Venezuela’s National Defense Council, which included the nation’s defense minister, attorney general and the heads of the country’s legislature and judiciary. That unified front directly contradicted Mr. Trump’s claim that the United States would run Venezuela, especially given that White House and Pentagon officials had said that U.S. aircraft and extraction forces had returned to the U.S.S. Iwo Jima.
Venezuela’s defense minister and attorney general also both publicly criticized Mr. Trump and the U.S. military action on Saturday.
In his news conference, Mr. Trump said that Venezuelan leaders must comply with the United States or else. “All political and military figures must realize that what happened to Maduro can happen to them,” he said.
Ms. Rodríguez’s speech also made clear that Mr. Maduro’s supporters — including her — still see him as the nation’s legitimate leader.
She repeatedly said that Mr. Maduro was Venezuela’s “only president” and even the text on Venezuelan state television labeled her as vice president. When she ended, the state broadcaster said that Ms. Rodríguez was the vice president who had just stated that Mr. Maduro was Venezuela’s president.
Did Trump, in another one of his delusions and confabulations, just imagine himself as the new ruler of Venezuela this morning? How does someone get something like this so wrong? And if Trump did invent something of this import, how can he be allowed to keep running the country?
Trump keeps telling us that he’s going to stop endless wars and lower costs. Yet today he’s spending millions of taxpayer dollars to invade Venezuela, capture its President, Nicolás Maduro, and declare that the US will now run Venezuela. What?!
Many of you who are reading this marched and protested against the Iraq war. We saw through George Bush’s lies and knew that war would only make everyone less safe. We were right.
This moment is a test. Trump and his advisors will be looking to see Americans’ reactions to this horror. Any silence will be seen as acceptance. If we don’t loudly push back against more endless war, then the administration will escalate this violence, not just in Venezuela, but across the globe. Panama, Greenland and Canada are on tRump’s wish list.
Maduro is a dictator who oppressed his own people. Yet this operation has nothing to do with the Venezuelan people or Venezuelan freedom. Instead, as Trump himself said, this is an attempt to build power and profit for the Trump administration and the president’s oil industry cronies.
Trump needs to focus on the problems we have here at home—like making sure people can afford groceries or keep their healthcare—instead he’s spending millions pursuing violence overseas.
I know we may feel powerless when it comes to war overseas, but that’s not true. The Iraq war protests fundamentally changed the politics of this country because of the mass outpouring of rage from people like us.
Over the coming days and weeks, many will tell us that this is too complicated and only experts should weigh in. They are wrong. They believe people like us should get shut out while oil executives and war manufacturers prioritize profit over people. Venezuelans should run Venezuela, not Trump.
Trump says Maduro captured, flown out as US military conducts ‘large scale’ strike
by Filip Timotija – 01/03/26 5:21 AM ET
Trump said that United States personnel captured Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro and his wife and were flown out of the country as the U.S. military carried out “large scale” strike inside the nation in the early morning hours on Saturday, an operation that came after a monthslong standoff between the two leaders.
“This operation was done in conjunction with U.S. Law Enforcement,” Trump said in a post on Truth Social, adding that more details will be announced at a press conference at 11 a.m.
Explosions were heard in the early hours in Caracas, the nation’s capital, and some parts of the city reported being without electricity.
The Venezuelan government accused the U.S. military of targeting military and civilian locations in Caracas, along with strikes in the states of Aragua, La Guaira and Miranda.
Maduro, who has been in power since 2013, signed a state of emergency, the country’s communications ministry said in a statement, adding that it urged “all social and political forces” in the country to “activate mobilization plans and repudiate” the attack from the U.S.
The capture of Maduro came just days after the Venezuelan strongman said he was open to conducting negotiations with the U.S. regarding drug trafficking and oil. Maduro and Trump spoke over the phone in November.
Venezuelan Vice President Delcy Rodríguez said that the whereabouts of Maduro and his wife are unknown and demanded proof of life from the Trump administration.
Both the Pentagon and the U.S. Southern Command referred The Hill to the White House when reached for comment. The White House did not respond to a request for comment.
Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah) said he spoke with Secretary of State Marco Rubio, who told him that Maduro was arrested to “stand trial on criminal charges” in the U.S. and that the U.S. strikes in Venezuela were deployed to “protect and defend those executing the arrest warrant.”
“This action likely falls within the president’s inherent authority under Article II of the Constitution to protect U.S. personnel from an actual or imminent attack,” Lee said Saturday morning on social platform X.
Maduro was indicted in March 2020 by the Justice Department on terrorism and drug trafficking charges.
The U.S. attack came after months of tensions, jabs and threats from Trump and U.S. officials toward Maduro, who the U.S. government has accused of being head of a drug cartel and was deemed an “illegitimate leader.”
Since August, the U.S. military has been establishing a massive military presence in the Southcom area, sending warships, at least one submarine, F-35 fighter jets, MQ-9 Reaper drones and spy planes in what the administration argued was a buildup to curb the flow of illicit drugs in the region and protect the U.S.
There are about 15,000 U.S. service members stationed in the Southcom area, a U.S. defense official recently told The Hill.
Trump has repeatedly mused about authorizing land strikes inside Venezuela and told reporters in late December that it would be “smart” for Maduro to leave, but that it is “up to him what he wants to do.”
Since early September, the U.S. has been carrying out lethal strikes against alleged drug-trafficking boats in the Caribbean and eastern Pacific. The U.S. forces have conducted a minimum of 35 strikes and killed at least 115 “narco-terrorists.”
The CIA conducted a drone strike against a Venezuelan port facility recently, where U.S. officials believe the transnational gang Tren de Aragua stores drugs that are sent elsewhere.
A letter from Jeffrey Epstein to Larry Nassar was just released as part of the latest batch of Epstein files released. Written in 2019, it is one of the last letters sent by Epstein before his death. In fact, he appears to be alluding to his own impending demise in the letter.
The text is pretty clear-cut. It is in the handwriting of Jeffrey Epstein. And already in 2023, references to the letter were made. It just wasn’t revealed until now. It reads, in full:
Dear L. N.
As you know by now, I have taken the ‘short route’ home. Good luck! We shared one thing . . . our love & caring for young ladies at the hope they’d reach their full potential.
Our president shares our love of young, nubile girls. When a young beauty walked by he loved to ‘grab snatch,’ whereas we ended up snatching grub in the mess halls of the system.
Life is unfair.
Yours,
J. Epstein
The “short route home”, is this a reference to Epstein’s impending end? I wonder. He does make it very clear that “our president” (this letter was written in 2019, during Trump’s first term) shares their love for “young, nubile girls”.
So yes, he’s implicated. Google Larry Nassar, if by any chance you do not know who Larry Nassar is and what type of “nubile girls” he targetted, for which he has been sentenced for over 300 years in jail. This isn’t subtle anymore.
Trump gives away the game on his motivations for the first vetoes of his second term
The president has threatened to impose “harsh measures” on Colorado unless the state frees a felon he likes. We now know what that means in practice.
After his first term in the White House, Donald Trump had issued fewer vetoes than any American president since Warren Harding, who served only two years in the White House in the early 1920s. In fact, Trump only used his veto pen 10 times before losing his reelection bid in 2020, and in each instance, the vetoes came in the final two years of the Republican’s term, after Democrats had a majority in the U.S. House.
In other words, when the GOP controlled Congress during the first two years of Trump’s first term, he didn’t find it necessary to veto anything. That pattern changed this week when the Republican incumbent issued the first vetoes of his second term, rejecting legislation intended to expand the territory of the Miccosukee Tribe in Florida, as well as a pipeline project intended to bring clean water to southeastern Colorado.
On the former, there’s no great mystery about what happened: The Miccosukee Tribe fought against the administration’s plans for a detention facility in the Florida Everglades — a project better known as “Alligator Alcatraz” — and so Trump wanted to punish the members of the small Native American tribe. Indeed, the president made no real effort to hide his motivations, declaring in an official statement that he didn’t like the fact that the Miccosukee Tribe “actively sought to obstruct” immigration policies that he considered “reasonable.”
But it was that other veto that generated even more attention.
The pipeline project in Colorado, like the measure for the Miccosukee Tribe, cleared Capitol Hill with overwhelming bipartisan support. And if White House officials had any concerns about the effort, they kept those opinions to themselves.
With this in mind, when Trump vetoed the bill, observers were left with a limited number of possible explanations: (1) Maybe the president was punishing Colorado as part of the Tina Peters case; (2) perhaps he was punishing Republican Rep. Lauren Boebert of Colorado over her support for Epstein files transparency; or (3) both.
Trump helped shed light on his reasoning soon afterward. Politico reported:
President Donald Trump told POLITICO on Wednesday that he vetoed a bipartisan bill to fund a Colorado water project because he views it as a waste of taxpayer money, saying residents are leaving the state under Democratic Colorado Gov. Jared Polis.
‘They’re wasting a lot of money and people are leaving the state. They’re leaving the state in droves. Bad governor,’ Trump said in an exclusive phone interview with POLITICO.
Around the same time, the president published an item to his social media platform in which he called Colorado’s Democratic governor a “scumbag,” before concluding, in reference to Polis and other state officials: “I wish them only the worst. May they rot in Hell.”
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In other words, Colorado hasn’t freed a prisoner convicted of a felony whom Trump likes, and so the White House appears to be taking steps to punish the state.
Indeed, the veto of the pipeline bill, known as the Finish the Arkansas Valley Conduit Act, was the latest in a series of anti-Colorado moves from the Republican administration. As The New York Times summarized, “Miffed at Colorado’s votes against him in three successive elections and furious at its refusal to free Tina Peters, a convicted election denier and ardent Trump supporter, Mr. Trump has opened an assault against the Democratic-run state. His administration has cut off transportation money, relocated the military’s Space Command, vowed to dismantle a leading climate and weather research center and rejected disaster relief for rural counties hammered by floods and wildfires.”
On the surface, the circumstances might sound ridiculous: In the United States, presidents aren’t supposed to punish entire states over petty vendettas. And yet, he we are, watching Trump do it anyway.
Indeed, the president isn’t even making much of an effort to hide his thinking on the subject, telling Politico that he considers Colorado’s governor to be “bad,” as if this were a credible explanation.
In August, Trump threatened to impose “harsh measures” on the Rocky Mountain State unless it agreed to release Peters from prison several years before her sentence runs its course. We’re now getting a better sense of what that means in practice.
In a rare moment of courage, Indiana Republican state senator Greg Walker publicly humiliated Donald Trump after being invited to a White House meeting. Unlike many in his party who blindly bow to Trump, Walker reminded the former president of a simple truth: he works for the American people, not the other way around.
In November, Trump’s White House sent a text through Director of Intergovernmental Affairs Alex Meyer: “The President wants to know if you could come to the White House to meet with him on Wednesday afternoon. I left you a voicemail. Can we discuss by phone?” The invitation aimed to secure Walker’s support for MAGA’s controversial gerrymandering plans in Indiana.
Walker refused to play along. His reply was sharp, firm, and unforgettable: “Mr. President is on my payroll but I know he is not requesting a work review; I decline the offer.”
Unlike most GOP lawmakers who fall over themselves to praise Trump, Walker’s response reminded him that he is not a king. He works for taxpayers, and Walker would not bend to political coercion.
Walker also flagged a potential violation of the Hatch Act, which prohibits federal employees from engaging in certain political activities while on the job. He told The Republic: “The underling who reached out to me is trying to influence the election on my dime. He works for me. He works for you. He’s on my payroll, and he’s campaigning on company time. That’s a violation of the Hatch Act.” He added, however, that reporting it seemed pointless in today’s political environment.
He also criticized Trump’s interference in Indiana’s affairs: “How can he have the time and interest to bother with a nobody like me when there’s so many things on his plate that are so much more important for our country? We’ve already done our job. The whole idea came out of Washington to begin with.”
Walker’s principled stance paid off. The Trump administration’s push to manipulate Indiana’s redistricting ultimately failed, proving that when Trump loses, democracy wins.
This incident is a rare but powerful reminder that public officials exist to serve the people, not to act as sycophants for a president’s political agenda.
Rob Dannenberg, former chiefs of operations for the CIA
“Putin looks at Trump and sees a weak guy, vain, with huge ego…. He’s being manipulated in the way that a good case officer like Putin would manipulate this guy. He’s not monogamous, he’s greedy, he’s fascinated by gold — all these are things that, if I were a case officer, I would be leveraging to get this guy to do whatever I want him to do. When that happens to align with Trump’s ambition to get a Nobel Peace Prize, so much the easier, right? You’re pushing on an open door.”
Tilting at windmills: Trump laments death of bald eagle in the US … which was really a falcon in Israel
A pity that Trump, or one of the 18 intelligence agencies reporting to him, did not trace the image back to its source.
Even while on holiday at his Florida resort, Donald Trump has refused to take a break from his unrelenting war on wind energy.
Late Tuesday, the US president posted an image of a dead bird beneath a turbine on social media, accompanied by the lament: “Windmills are killing all of our beautiful Bald Eagles!”
The post was immediately amplified by an official White House account on X with more than a million followers.
Unfortunately for Trump’s effort to sow outrage among American patriots at what he proclaimed to be an image of the national bird laid low, closer inspection reveals the photograph does not show a bald eagle and was not taken in the United States. The image actually shows a falcon that was at a wind farm in Israel eight years ago.
In his rush to post the image on his social media platform, Trump overlooked a pair of visual clues that might have given him pause. The first is that the bird is missing the distinctive markings of a bald eagle. The second is that the turbine blamed for its death appears to have Hebrew writing on it.
A quick survey of Israeli wind farms blamed for bird deaths reveals that the image in question was indeed taken by Hedy Ben Eliahou, an employee of Israel’s Nature and Parks Authority, and was featured in a 2017 report in Haaretz, the Tel Aviv news outlet., and it may not have been the turbine that caused its death,
Jack Smith deposition reveals plans for trial, possible charges against co-conspirators
Former special counsel Jack Smith was still contemplating whether to charge President Trump’s co-conspirators in the Jan. 6, 2021, case when the president won the election, he revealed to the House in a closed-door deposition released Wednesday.
Smith also told investigators he was preparing to rely on a number of Trump allies who agreed to testify against the president that “what they were trying to do was an attempt to overthrow the government and illegal.” He also said the violence of Jan. 6 was “foreseeable” to Trump.
“Our case was built on, frankly, Republicans who put their allegiance to the country before the party,” Smith told the panel’s team over the course of a more than seven-hour interview on Dec. 17.
The Justice Department prohibited Smith from talking about not-yet-public information related to his investigation into Trump’s retention of classified documents at Mar-a-Lago. He was also more broadly prohibited from speaking about aspects of either case against Trump still covered by grand jury secrecy rules.
But the 255-page transcript offers new insights into Smith’s approach to the case, a rare window into the mind of a prosecutor prohibited from making bombshell statements about the case and who has been little heard from since a brief press conference in 2022 announcing he would oversee the investigations.
Smith told investigators that he met with many of Trump’s allies in the case — saying he found a level of cooperation with some of the six co-conspirators they accused of working alongside the president to block the peaceful transfer of power.
“Some of the co-conspirators met with us in proffers and did interviews with us,” Smith said.
“My staff determined that we did have evidence to charge people at a certain point in time. I had not made final determinations about that at the time that President Trump won reelection, meaning that our office was going to be closed down.”
Smith also said, had the Jan. 6 case gone to trial, he planned to bring witness after witness who voted for Trump but saw his efforts as unlawful.
“All witnesses were not going to be political enemies of the president. They were going to be political allies. We had numerous witnesses who would say, ‘I voted for President Trump. I campaigned for President Trump. I wanted him to win,’” Smith said.
Smith said they would have relied on testimony from the former Speaker of the Arizona state House, Rusty Bowers, who also testified before the House select committee that investigated Jan. 6, as well as the prior Speaker of the Michigan House. In both states, Trump and allies pressured delegates to submit false certificates declaring him the winner of the 2020 election.
Smith repeatedly denied any political influence in his case, saying that Trump faced charges due only to his behavior. He also said he did not have any coordination with the office of Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis (D) or Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg (D), who also brought cases against Trump.
“I entirely disagree with any characterization that our work was in any way meant to hamper him in the presidential election. I would never take orders from a political leader to hamper another person in an election. That’s not who I am,” he said.
He ultimately brought charges against Trump under four statutes.
“We wanted to make clear that this was not about trying to interfere with anyone’s First Amendment rights, that this was a fraud. And as you know, under Supreme Court precedent, fraud is not protected by the First Amendment,” he said.
“There is no historical analog for what President Trump did in this case. As we said in the indictment, he was free to say that he thought he won the election. He was even free to say falsely that he won the election. But what he was not free to do was violate federal law and use knowing — knowingly false statements about election fraud to target a lawful government function. That he was not allowed to do. And that differentiates this case from any past history.”
Smith said Trump was able to foresee the violence of Jan. 6.
“Our view of the evidence was that he caused it and that he exploited it and that it was foreseeable to him,” Smith said.
“Our evidence is that he in the weeks leading up to Jan. 6 created a level of distrust. He used that level of distrust to get people to believe fraud claims that weren’t true. He made false statements to state legislatures, to his supporters in all sorts of contexts and was aware in the days leading up to Jan. 6 that his supporters were angry when he invited them and then he directed them to the Capitol.”
Smith declined to answer whether he ever spoke to former Vice President Mike Pence in building his case, with the transcript showing the group agreed to go off the record.
But he said Trump’s social media post on Jan. 6 attacking Pence amid the riot “without question in my mind endangered the life of his own vice president.”
Smith said Trump consistently rejected information from those who said he had no legal pathway to remain in office after losing the election, saying prosecutors could show a “pattern” of Trump sidelining those aides while elevating those with fringe beliefs.
“There was a pattern in our case where any time any information came in that would mean he could no longer be president, he would reject it. And any theory, no matter how far-fetched, no matter how not based in law, that would indicate that he could, he latched on to that,” Smith said.
Smith has made multiple calls to be able to testify publicly, something special counsels are typically permitted to do after filing their final report.
House Judiciary Chair Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) has not ruled that out but has yet to schedule anything.
Meanwhile, House Democrats plan to hold a hearing on the fifth anniversary of the Jan. 6 attack, reconvening its select committee for the event.
While the Mar-a-Lago volume of Smith’s report remains under seal, U.S. District Court Judge Aileen Cannon agreed to release it on Feb. 24, but in doing so she agreed to a timeline suggested by Trump’s legal team that allows for his challenge.
Smith’s attorney, Peter Koski, argued during the deposition that Smith faced great risk by agreeing to speak with the House Judiciary Committee because the attorney has been repeatedly targeted by Trump.
“I feel compelled to make an observation about the risks of participating in this deposition. The most powerful person in the world has said that Mr. Smith should be in jail because of his work as special counsel, not because Jack did anything wrong, but because he had the audacity to follow the facts and the law and apply them to that powerful person,” Koski said.
He went on to mention an interview Trump chief of staff Susie Wiles gave to Vanity Fair where she acknowledged the president’s efforts to use the Justice Department to carry out a retribution campaign against his enemies.
“In the face of those threats, Mr. Smith appears today undaunted, comforted by the knowledge that not only did he do nothing wrong, he conducted his work as special counsel with integrity, impartiality, and an uncompromising commitment to the rule of law.”
Venezuela Detains Americans Amid Growing U.S. Pressure
The number of American citizens held in Venezuela has grown since the start of the U.S. military and economic campaign against President Nicolás Maduro
Some of the detainees face legitimate criminal charges, while the U.S. government is considering designating at least two prisoners as wrongfully detained, according to the official. Those arrested include three Venezuelan-American dual passport holders and two American citizens with no known ties to the country, said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the person was not authorized to speak publicly.
President Nicolás Maduro of Venezuela has long used detained Americans, whether guilty or innocent of serious crimes, as bargaining chips in negotiations with Washington, his greatest adversary.
President Trump has made the release of Americans held overseas a priority in his two presidencies, and sent his envoy, Richard Grenell, to Venezuela to negotiate a prisoner deal days after the start of his second term.
The ensuing period of talks between U.S. and Venezuelan officials resulted in the release of 17 American citizens and permanent residents held in Venezuela.
He embarked on a long trip across Latin America in 2022 following the death of his mother. His father died this year.
“He has been traveling around, figuring out what to do with his life,” said Eva Aridjis Fuentes, a filmmaker who worked with Mr. Luckey-Lange for a documentary about Q Lazzarus. “He has had so much loss.”
Mr. Luckey-Lange wrote in his blog in early December that he was doing research on gold mining in the Amazon region of Guyana, which borders Venezuela. On Dec. 7, he wrote a friend that he was at an unspecified location in Venezuela, and he last spoke to his family the following day. He said he was heading to Caracas, where he was planning to catch a flight on Dec. 12 that would eventually bring him home to New York.
It is unclear if Mr. Luckey-Lange had a visa to enter Venezuela, as the country’s law requires of American citizens.
His aunt and next of kin, Abbie Luckey, said in a phone interview that she has not been contacted by U.S. officials, and is seeking any information about his whereabouts.
Some American citizens who have been released from prison in Venezuela earlier this year have described abusive conditions and lack of due process. Many were not charged with any crimes, and few were convicted.
A Peruvian-American named Renzo Huamanchumo Castillo said he was detained last year after traveling to Venezuela to meet his wife’s family, and charged with terrorism and conspiring to kill Mr. Maduro.
He said the charges made no sense. “We realized afterward, I was just a token,” he added.
Mr. Huamanchumo, 48, said he was frequently beaten and received one liter of muddy water each day while detained in a notorious Venezuelan prison called Rodeo I. “It was the worst thing you can imagine,” he said.
He was freed in a prisoner swap in July.
At least two other people with U.S. ties remain imprisoned in Venezuela, according to their families: Aidel Suarez, a U.S. permanent resident born in Cuba, and Jonathan Torres Duque, a Venezuelan-American.
5 criminal cases that sum up the Trump administration’s corrupt and vindictive 2025
The Trump Justice Department’s handling of prosecutions against Eric Adams and others revealed its priorities.One of the government’s most awesome powers lies in its use of criminal law. How an administration uses that power — or chooses not to — reveals its priorities.
Here are five cases that showed the Trump administration’s crime and punishment priorities this year:
‘For my friends, everything’: The Jan. 6 purge
Setting the tone for his second term, one of President Donald Trump’s first actions was ordering blanket clemency for defendants convicted of charges related to the riot at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, including people who assaulted law enforcement and several who were convicted of seditious conspiracy. Trump also ordered the attorney general to dismiss pending Jan. 6 indictments.
In reaction to Trump’s first days in office, my colleague Steve Benen cited a phrase attributed to an authoritarian leader from another era: “For my friends, everything; for my enemies, the law.”
The quote might have been a guiding principle for Trump and his Department of Justice, which spent much of 2025 working to deliver on the president’s vow to prosecute his political opponents.
Corruption: Eric Adams
Remember him? The outgoing New York City mayor was charged during the Biden administration, in a corruption case that was dismissed after the Trump administration intervened.
Trump’s DOJ requested to only temporarily toss the Democrat’s case, which would have given the government political leverage over Adams if he was uncooperative on immigration enforcement or anything else. The bid was led by former Trump defense lawyer-turned-DOJ enforcer Emil Bove, who’s now a judge himself.
The charade was too much to bear for Republican prosecutors on the case, and they resigned rather than do Bove’s dirty work.
The judge refused, too.
“Everything here smacks of a bargain,” Biden-appointed Judge Dale Ho wrote in April when he dismissed the case permanently.
Injustice: Sidney Reid and Sean Dunn
One of the most remarkable — and embarrassing — developments for the Trump administration this year was a stunning string of cases in which the DOJ failed to obtain indictments. These prosecutorial failures (or grand jury successes) loomed large in cases of alleged assault against officers amid the Trump administration’s immigration enforcement campaign.
Two of the starkest examples come from the nation’s capital, where grand jurors refused to indict Sidney Reid — accused of “forcefully” pushing an FBI agent’s hand against a wall — three separate times, and refused to indict Sean Dunn, who became a folk hero after throwing a sandwich at an immigration agent. Despite failing to secure indictments, prosecutors in both cases plowed forward to trial on misdemeanor charges, which don’t require grand jury approval. But trial juries picked up where grand juries left off, acquitting both defendants.
Reflecting on her experience in an MS NOW column, Reid wrote, “This is our country. We are greater and stronger than this administration.”
Revenge: James Comey and Letitia James
Speaking of grand jury rejections and ill-fated prosecutions, the Trump-backed campaigns against New York Attorney General Letitia James and former FBI Director James Comey have been two of the most blatantly vindictive outings for the administration thus far.
A judge dismissed both indictments on the grounds that the Trump-installed prosecutor who secured them, Lindsey Halligan, was unlawfully appointed. Halligan obtained the indictments over the objection of career prosecutors in the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of Virginia, whose prior head was ousted for refusing to bring the cases.
Since the dismissals, the DOJ has twice failed to reindict James and has separately faced litigation over evidence it wants to use against Comey. Yet the government presses on: The DOJ mounted an appeal of the dismissals, seeking to revive the cases and Halligan’s role.
If the cases return, they’d put Halligan — formerly a personal lawyer to Trump with no prior prosecutorial experience — back in the position of litigating several other pretrial motions to dismiss, including the defendants’ claims that their charges were unconstitutionally vindictive.
So even if the DOJ revives the cases, the prosecution would face an uphill battle making it to trial, where it would need to convince jurors of the defendants’ guilt beyond a reasonable doubt. That’s a much more demanding standard than proving probable cause to a grand jury — which, as we’ve already seen this year, can be a difficult bar for the Trump DOJ to clear.
Desperation: Kilmar Abrego Garcia
Kilmar Abrego Garcia is another administration target who has claimed vindictive prosecution. The government illegally sent him to El Salvador in March, where he was held in the country’s notorious Terrorism Confinement Center, even though he hadn’t been charged with, much less convicted of, any crime. Trump officials resisted his court-ordered return to the U.S. until they finally relented in June, when they had a criminal case waiting for him.
The administration is still trying to deport Abrego, which could make his criminal case moot. But the government is struggling on the deportation front, too. U.S. District Judge Paula Xinis, the Obama-appointed judge who initially ordered his return to the U.S., ordered his release from immigration custody this month because the government lacked a lawful order to remove him. Xinis wrote that while officials “may eventually get it right, they have not as of today.”
During Trump’s first term, he granted pardons or commutations to almost 90 people for drug-related crimes.
Since taking office in January, he has freed 10 more, including pardoning former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernández, who trafficked hundreds of tons of cocaine into the U.S., and Silk Road founder Ross Ulbricht, whose black-market site on the dark web generated hundreds of millions of dollars in sales of illegal goods and services, including drugs.
Trump mocks Kennedy family hours after JFK granddaughter Tatiana Schlossberg dies at age 35
Just hours after it was announced that John F Kennedy’s 35-year-old granddaughter Tatiana Schlossberg died after being diagnosed with leukemia, President Donald Trump posted on Truth Social of MAGA supporters insulting the Kennedys for their response to the president’s move to add his own name to the Kennedy Center.
Trump shared screenshots of MAGA supporters insulting the Kennedys for their response to his recent decision to add his own name to the Kennedy Center
“The Kennedys have plenty of buildings, schools and airports named after them. Adding Trump’s name is entirely appropriate,” a user wrote.
• Tatiana Schlossberg, JFK’s granddaughter, dies of cancer at 35
• Musician faces $1M lawsuit after canceling Kennedy Center Christmas show over renaming
“The Trumps have always been supporters of the arts. The Kennedys are supporters of the Kennedys,” another read.
Trump did not directly mention Tatiana or her death in the Truth Social post.
‘Alarm bells’: New poll is bad for Trump
A new AtlasIntel poll shows 54.4% of likely voters would choose the Democratic ticket and 38.4% would back the Republican ticket if midterms were held today, a 16-point advantage for Democrats.
The poll also finds President Donald Trump’s net approval at minus 20 points, with 39.3% approving and 59.6% disapproving.
Drugmakers raise US prices on 350 medicines despite pressure from Trump
NEW YORK, Dec 31 (Reuters) – Drugmakers plan to raise U.S. prices on at least 350 branded medications including vaccines against COVID, RSV and shingles and blockbuster cancer treatment Ibrance, even as the Trump administration pressures them for cuts, according to data provided exclusively by healthcare research firm 3 Axis Advisors.
The number of price increases for 2026 is up from the same point last year, when drugmakers unveiled plans for raises on more than 250 drugs. The median of this year’s price hikes is around 4% – in line with 2025.
The increases do not reflect any rebates to pharmacy benefit managers and other discounts.
DRUGMAKERS ALSO CUT SOME PRICES
Drugmakers also plan to cut the list prices on around nine drugs. That includes a more than 40% cut for Boehringer Ingelheim’s diabetes drug Jardiance and three related treatments.
Boehringer Ingelheim and Eli Lilly, which sell Jardiance together, did not immediately respond to requests for comment on the reason for the price cuts.
Jardiance is among the 10 drugs for which the U.S. government negotiated a lower price for the Medicare program for people aged 65 and older in 2026. Under those negotiations, Boehringer and Lilly slashed the Jardiance price by two-thirds.
U.S. patients currently pay by far the most for prescription medicines, often nearly three times more than in other developed nations, and Trump has been pressuring drugmakers to lower their prices to what patients pay in similarly wealthy nations.
The increases on 350 medicines come even as Trump has struck deals with 14 drugmakers on prices of some of their medicines for the government’s Medicaid program for low-income Americans and for cash payers. Pfizer, Sanofi, Boehringer Ingelheim, Novartis and GSK are among those companies and also plan to raise prices on some drugs on January 1.
“These deals are being announced as transformative when, in fact, they really just nibble around the margins in terms of what is really driving high prices for prescription drugs in the U.S.,” said Dr. Benjamin Rome, a health policy researcher at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston.
Rome said the companies seem to be maximizing prices while negotiating discounts behind the scenes with health and drug insurers and then setting yet another price for direct-to-consumer cash-pay sales.
An HHS spokesman declined to comment.
KEEPING UP WITH INFLATION
Pfizer announced the most list price hikes, on around 80 different drugs including cancer drug Ibrance, migraine pill Nurtec, and COVID treatment Paxlovid, as well as some administered in hospitals such as morphine and hydromorphone.
Most of Pfizer’s increases are below 10%, except for a 15% hike of COVID vaccine Comirnaty, while some of its relatively inexpensive hospital drugs saw more than four-fold increases.
Pfizer said in a statement it had adjusted the average list price of its innovative medicines and vaccines for 2026 below the overall rate of inflation.
“The modest increase is necessary to support investments that allow us to continue to discover and deliver new medicines as well as address increased costs throughout our business,” the company said.
Larger U.S. drug price increases were once far more common. Drugmakers have scaled them back due to criticism from lawmakers and new government policies, such as penalizing companies that charge Medicare program prices that rise faster than inflation.
European drugmaker GSK plans to increase prices on around 20 drugs and vaccines from 2% to 8.9%. The drugmaker said it is committed to reasonable prices and the hikes are needed to support scientific innovation.
Sanofi and Novartis did not respond to requests for comment.
More price hikes and cuts can be expected in early January, which is historically the biggest month for drugmakers to raise prices.
3 Axis is a consulting firm that works with pharmacist groups, health plans and some pharmaceutical industry-related groups on drug pricing and supply chain issues. It is a related entity to, and shares staff with, drug pricing non-profit 46brooklyn.
The United States military bombed Nigeria on Christmas, reportedly targeting ISIS militants. President Donald Trump claimed the U.S. struck terrorists “who have been targeting and viciously killing, primarily, innocent Christians, at levels not seen for many years, and even Centuries.” Nigeria has been plagued by sectarian violence, but that violence hasn’t primarily targeted Christians — and certainly not at historically unprecedented levels. America’s logic here isn’t clear, but the strikes appear driven more by Trump putting on a show for his evangelical base than trying to reduce violence in Nigeria or even advance U.S. national interests. It’s the first time the U.S. has ever fired missiles into Nigeria, but it’s one of several countries the Trump administration has bombed this year. In 2025, U.S. forces launched more than a thousand strikes against the Houthis in Yemen, more than a hundred in Somalia mostly targeting al-Shabab, dozens against ISIS in Syria, 29 and counting against alleged drug traffickers in the Caribbean and the eastern Pacific, plus some strikes targeting Iran’s nuclear program. All of those efforts killed people and damaged things, but none appear to have achieved anything lasting. Nigeria is a U.S. counterterrorism partner. |
ICE Agents Arrest Man on Christmas Eve—and Then Steal His Groceries
Trump’s immigration agents are doing whatever they want.
Immigrations and Customs Enforcement officers in Yakima, Washington, spent Christmas Eve arresting a man in a Walmart parking lot—even taking his already purchased groceries for themselves.
Four ICE officers in masks and tactical gear can be seen in a video surrounding a man with a car full of food while he loads it into his car. A woman watching the arrest asked ICE if she could take down the phone number of the man’s wife to let her know her husband had been detained. The ICE agents refused.
“No, guess he should’ve complied,” an agent said.
The agents then start to divvy up the man’s groceries, as the bystander tells them they had previously detained and deported her husband. “I fucking hate these motherfuckers,” the woman filming says as they drive off—presumably to the nearby Yakima ICE Detention Center.
Masked men abducting people and looting their groceries is unfortunately par for the course as the first year of President Trump’s mass deportation campaign draws to a close.
Justice Department Says Filming Immigration Raids Is ‘Domestic Terrorism’
A leaked Justice Department memo directs federal prosecutors to press “domestic terrorism” charges against individuals who record immigration operations.
After leaving the Chicago area in November, U.S. Border Patrol Commander Gregory Bovino made an unexpected return on December 16, along with several hundred federal agents and a film crew. Returning to the same aggressive tactics that sparked protests earlier this year, local officials criticized Bovino for using immigration operations as a form of political theater.
In a statement to the Chicago Sun-Times, a spokesperson for Democratic Mayor Brandon Johnson called out agents for allegedly arresting people indiscriminately and without arrest warrants. The mayor’s office also criticized them for filming the raids and “[turning] these operations into a spectacle.”
“This activity is occurring alongside a film crew, which appears to be using these raids to create content at the expense of traumatizing families,” said the spokesperson. “These tactics are destabilizing, wrong, and must be condemned.”
But this is not the first time a federal agency has filmed immigration operations for political theater. In addition to being tasked with carrying out record levels of deportations, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) under President Donald Trump has seemingly been transformed into a propaganda arm to sell the public on the president’s increasingly unpopular immigration policies. Examples include a video posted on X by DHS Secretary Kristi Noem of agents raiding a South Shore apartment building on September 30 and a video posted on the DHS’ official Instagram account depicting various immigration arrests.
As Bovino and the DHS have embraced the power of cinema to document immigration arrests and promote current policies, the Trump administration is also cracking down on individuals who choose to record immigration operations. In a December 4 memo, originally leaked by journalist Ken Klippenstein, the Justice Department encourages federal prosecutors to press “domestic terrorism” charges against people for “doxing” law enforcement officers. While undefined in the memo, “doxing” in this context is understood to mean the publishing of information that identifies law enforcement officers, which the Justice Department insinuates is a threatening activity used to “silence opposing speech, limit political activity, change or direct policy outcomes, and prevent the functioning of a democratic society.”
This definition mirrors previous statements by DHS officials earlier this year, including a statement made by Noem in July: “Violence is anything that threatens [agents] and their safety, so it’s doxing them, it’s videotaping them where they’re at when they’re out on operations.”
However, much of what the Trump administration tries to paint as the unacceptable “doxing” of law enforcement agents is often observers merely recording on-duty officers—an activity firmly protected by the First Amendment when no physical interference or danger is present, and an important tool for holding public officials accountable. By broadly defining domestic terrorism to include something as vague as “doxing,” the Trump administration has rolled out a “nationwide policy of intimidating and threatening people who attempt to observe and record DHS operations,” according to David Bier, the director of immigration studies at the Cato Institute.
Under such a broad definition, even the DHS’ own camera crews and media hired specifically to record and publish details of immigration operations could potentially be prosecuted for domestic terrorism. The only limiting factor in the memo seems to be whether the publisher is considered Trump’s political ally or opponent, i.e., an “Antifa-aligned extremist,” which the December 4 memo defines, in part, as someone with “extreme viewpoints on immigration,” such as “mass migration and open borders.”
But the right to free speech isn’t taken away when someone says or does something that the government disagrees with. Attempting to define who is and isn’t protected by the First Amendment is not only unconstitutional, but also a strategy that could put even Trump’s allies at the mercy of federal prosecutors.
Trump has given many reasons to dislike wind farms, but so far none are backed by agreed-upon facts. Here’s a look at his views:
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(Maybe, but the administration has also weakened habitat protections, ended automatic protections for threatened species and said economic factors should take priority in decisions about endangered species.)
Other rationales
In explaining a range of new policies, the president has pointed to grounds that don’t draw from evidence, or at least not evidence the public can see.
Wind farms: These need to be stopped because of radar “clutter.” See above.
Illegal immigrants: Some have been selected for deportation because the government has said they belong to a gang — without proving it.
Boat strikes: The administration says the nearly 100 boats destroyed off South America were running drugs to the United States. It hasn’t released any evidence for that claim.
National Guard deployments: Trump says protesters in a number of Democratic-led cities have threatened the safety of immigration agents and government facilities. Judges have chastised officials for not providing evidence for these assertions.
Alien Enemies Act: The administration says the presence of Venezuelan gang members in the United States constitutes an “invasion” by a “hybrid criminal state” that allows him to invoke this wartime law, reminds my colleague Mattathias Schwartz, who covers legal affairs. But U.S. intelligence agencies have said Venezuela is not directing gang activity.
Refugees: Trump has shut down most refugee admissions but is letting in white Afrikaners based on a claim of genocide against them that is not backed by evidence, says my colleague Zolan Kanno-Youngs, who covers the White House.
Liberal nonprofits: Vice President JD Vance and others say these groups support political violence — again without providing evidence.
It all adds up to what you might call a governance of assertion. That is: Trust, but don’t verify.
tRump is going after Greenland again.
ICE Data Reveals What Happened to 1,600 People Arrested During Chicago’s Blitz
Most of those arrested were swiftly shuttled to a sprawling array of detention centers in 13 states, many with reports of troubling conditions.
As federal agents descend on Chicago this week for a renewed round of immigration raids, a Marshall Project analysis shows what happened to around 1,600 people arrested in a similar operation this fall. Our reporting reveals how federal agencies moved them through the Trump administration’s expanded network of detention facilities — many rife with complaints of inhumane conditions.
The analysis of recently released Immigration and Customs Enforcement data found that Illinois saw the sharpest increase in ICE arrests of any U.S. state in the first five weeks after the blitz began. And those who were arrested were quickly shuttled to a sprawling array of detention facilities that cut a wide swath down the middle of the country.
When federal agents launched “Operation Midway Blitz” in September, they arrested thousands of people, at times near schools or child care centers, and used chemical agents like tear gas on protesters. In response to the often chaotic and high-profile raids, city residents blew whistles to alert neighbors of approaching agents and organized “magic school buses” to accompany children to school.
The Marshall Project analyzed ICE data that includes arrests and detentions through the middle of October, the most current detailed records publicly available. People who ICE arrested during that time were later detained in 13 states, at county jails, privately run detention centers and a rapidly constructed facility on a military base, the data shows.
“Without that infrastructure, without mass detention, you can’t carry out mass raids or mass deportation,” said Stacy Suh, program director at Detention Watch Network, a coalition of grassroots organizations that seeks to end immigration detention.
The ICE data, obtained by the Deportation Data Project, allowed The Marshall Project to trace individuals as they were transferred between facilities, and in some cases, deported.
President Donald Trump has rapidly ramped up immigration arrests in an attempt to deport 1 million people in his first year back in office. At the same time, a new Department of Homeland Security policy denies detainees the right to bond hearings in immigration court, leading the number of people in detention to reach record-highs.
Examining the records of people who were arrested in the Chicago area, The Marshall Project found that nearly all of them were first held at a facility in Broadview, Illinois, a suburb west of the city. In November, a federal judge issued a temporary restraining order compelling ICE to address conditions there.
The order cites “serious conditions” at the facility, similar to those reported at detention centers across the nation, and requires ICE to provide access to sleeping space, bedding, toiletries, medication, regularly cleaned areas, regular meals, telephone calls and clear information about paperwork the government asks detainees to sign.
The suburban facility, which has been the site of a lot of protests against the immigration raids, was the first stop for many who were arrested off the street as federal agents moved through the region. Dayanne Figueroa, a U.S. citizen who was pulled from her SUV by federal agents in a Chicago neighborhood, was detained at the Broadview facility. Figueroa, who was recovering from kidney surgeries when she was taken to Broadview, told Congress that she “begged for help” but was ignored by agents and “thrown into a filthy jail cell,” until blood in her urine prompted them to get her medical care.
After being booked into ICE custody, more than 380 people arrested in the Chicago area were transported to a recently revived detention facility in the rural town of Baldwin, Michigan. The facility, North Lake Processing Center, tops the list of places where the most people were held in the first weeks of the Operation Midway Blitz raids.
North Lake, which is run by GEO Group, was previously a federal prison until the Biden administration ended Department of Justice contracts with private prison companies. It reopened in June under a new contract with the Department of Homeland Security, becoming the largest immigration detention center in the Midwest.
Nahomi Ramirez, whose father is detained there, said North Lake still looks and feels like the prison it once was.
“It’s concrete walls, it’s barbed wire fences everywhere, like for no one to escape,” Ramirez said. “I haven’t even fully processed that in my brain, to be honest.”
Her father, Fernando Ramirez, a semitruck driver arrested in Indiana, told her he was moved to a freezing-cold, filthy ward with other people who have diabetes. The detainees in the ward were not always fed on time, which caused their blood sugar to crash, Ramirez said, and her father’s allergy to the blankets in his room has left him huddling under his jacket for warmth.
U.S. Rep. Rashida Tlaib of Michigan has reported receiving similar complaints from North Lake detainees about inadequate food, lack of medical care and freezing temperatures, as well as visitation issues, lack of access to legal counsel and suicide attempts. The concerns prompted her to visit the facility.
Since Trump’s second term began, more privately run immigration facilities have opened, or reopened, around the U.S. to keep up with the pace of raids and detentions. Meanwhile, advocates have warned of inhumane conditions for detainees.
Eighteen people, more than half of them children, arrested in the Chicago area were transferred to the Dilley Immigration Processing Center in Texas, run by CoreCivic. President Joe Biden ended the practice of detaining children with their families in 2021, but Trump recently reversed that policy and resumed operations.
Families at Dilley have testified in court filings to troubling conditions, including worms and mold in food and little access to education or recreation for children. They said their children were so distressed that they had hit their own faces and soiled themselves, despite being potty-trained.
In 2021, Illinois banned local jails from supplying detention space to ICE, leaving the agency to rely on neighboring states instead.
At least 300 people from the Chicago raids went through the Clay County Justice Center in Indiana, a jail that has long relied on federal detention contracts to supplement the county budget. After a heated public debate, Clay County opened up a new, 285-bed wing last year to house immigrants. ICE book-ins at the jail nearly tripled in the first half of the year, according to the IndyStar.
As a part of a lawsuit filed in 2022, attorneys for detainees claim the jail wrongfully passed inspection in violation of ICE standards and that ICE’s lack of oversight has allowed the county to misappropriate funds meant for the care and custody of people detained.
Robin Valenzuela, co-founder of Indiana AID, which supports immigrants detained in the state, said even with the expansion, the Clay County facility is overcrowded. People have developed infections from sleeping on floors, she said, and are not being provided with enough hygiene products during menstruation.
The conditions and the indefinitely long stays in detention have led many detainees to sign “voluntary departure” agreements to leave the U.S., she said.
“This whole thing is about deterrence,” Valenzuela said. “So it’s like, how can we make people as miserable as possible in these facilities so that they just say, ‘Screw it, I want to leave.’”
Other counties in Indiana are also cashing in on federal contracts. Immigration detention expanded to four more Indiana county jails this year, according to an analysis from the National Immigrant Justice Center. Data shows Marion County Jail in Indianapolis held at least 42 people arrested in the Chicago raids.
Noelle Smart, principal research associate at the Vera Institute of Justice, said ICE significantly expanded its jail contracts as the agency ramps up enforcement, and that it is increasingly relying on transfers to out-of-state facilities, particularly when it lacks detention space nearby.
Anew Texas detention center, mostly composed of gigantic tents, is an archetype for the kinds of large facilities the Trump administration plans to continue building. More than 50 people arrested around Chicago during the federal enforcement blitz were last held at Camp East Montana before they were deported. The grounds, located on the Fort Bliss military base in El Paso, Texas, began holding immigrants in August, before its construction was finished.
More than 100 Chicago detainees remained there in mid-October. By the end of November, the camp hit an average daily population of over 2,700.
In the few months that it has been operational, the camp has been the subject of reports of abuse and dangerous conditions. In September, The Washington Post reported that an internal ICE inspection report showed it failed to meet at least 60 detention standards.
This month, civil rights groups sent a letter to federal officials detailing abuses based on interviews with dozens of people detained at Fort Bliss. The letter claimed federal officers used threats of violence in an attempt to force detainees to cross the border into Mexico, despite having migrated from Cuba. The letter also details reports of sexual abuse, toilets overflowing into sleeping areas, and detainees being denied access to medication and adequate food.
The family of Victor Miranda, a landscaper from the South Side of Chicago arrested during the blitz, said his medical conditions worsened after his transfer to Fort Bliss. Miranda’s 16-year-old daughter, Ashley, said her father has not had proper meals or been given the breathing equipment he uses to sleep.
“They keep calling them criminals, and they tell them there that the lawyers aren’t going to do anything for them,” said Ashley, translating for her mother, who speaks Spanish. “That you have no chance, you should just give up.”
Miranda is one of hundreds of people detained during the Chicago raids who were allegedly arrested by ICE without warrants.
On Dec. 11, a federal appeals court blocked the collective release of people arrested without warrants in Illinois and other states covered by a consent decree — but said a judge could review individual cases to determine who should be freed. If the Trump administration appeals to the U.S. Supreme Court, that could create more obstacles and delays.
In the meantime, Chicago residents and community organizations are readying themselves for more raids and arrests with the return of the federal blitz.
Erin Tobes, a stay-at-home mother in the Bowmanville neighborhood, launched a mutual aid committee with other mothers that organized rapid response tactics during the first spate of raids. The group continues to support families of people detained and deported by creating GoFundMes, coordinating legal representation and providing staples like diapers and food.
“I’m proud to be able to put that forward and let my kids know that I’m out there working with the community,” Tobes said. “And that they are safe, their friends are safe, and we’re going to do everything we can to help them.”
Early Bets on Trump have failed
A deluge of Donald Trump-related investments made in the aftermath of his victory last November have now ended in disaster more than a year later.
“Sometimes irrational exuberance meets the brick wall of logic,” Art Hogan, chief market strategist at investment management platform B. Riley Wealth, told CNN in summing up the downward trend.
According to the network’s analysis, perhaps the most devastating market turn has been in the value of the president’s very own meme coin, $TRUMP.
The value of the digital asset, launched shortly before the MAGA leader assumed the presidency for the second time in January, initially rocketed up to $9 billion before steadily declining to $1.1 billion, representing a loss of 88 percent.
Investors in First Lady Melania Trump’s coin, MELANIA, will have suffered worse, with the crypto having faceplanted so spectacularly that the coin is now worth just 11 cents. Valued at just under $100 million, it’s down almost 99 percent on its value of $1.6 billion in February.
Trump Media & Technology Group, which owns the president’s favored social media platform, Truth Social, has also apparently lost much of its appeal for traders.
They reportedly flocked to the firm, which has never turned a profit, in the weeks leading up to last year’s election, more than tripling its value to $11 billion.
But today, it’s worth less than $8 billion, representing an 80 percent decline.
Even among investments only tangentially related to Trump and his associates, the markets have reportedly not fared much better.
Investors were apparently hungry for shares in private prison companies in anticipation that the president’s promised anti-immigration crusade would bring a boom in their value.
Stocks in detention facility giant GEO Group, for instance, rocketed up by more than 175 percent in the days before Trump was sworn in. Since that time, however, they’ve lost more than half of that value.
“I’ve given up on private prisons,” Matthew Tuttle, chief investment officer at wealth management group Tuttle Capital Management, told CNN. “A lot of people, myself included, thought ICE would round up people and they would sit in private prisons.”
“I was not expecting sending people to El Salvador and other places,” he added.
Trump attacked director Rob Reiner, who died yesterday. |
- What happened: Trump responded to the death yesterday of Rob Reiner by suggesting Reiner and the Hollywood icon and his wife, Michele Singer Reiner, died because he was anti-Trump.
- Backlash: Trump was criticized by figures across the political spectrum, including Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Georgia), who said the situation was “not about politics or political enemies,” and called for empathy.
- It was Bob Reiner’s son who killed his parents, he had been in and out of care for addictions.
Trump et al are not patriots
In March, Hegseth’s Signal chat published US plans of attack in Yemen, including the exact time and location of the planned attack, which easily could have led to ambush or counter attacks costing American lives.
In June, Trump posted that the US knew where Iran’s enriched uranium was stockpiled, thus he gave Iran advanced warnings to move it before the bombing began, which Iran did.
Both Trump and Hegseth seriously jeopardized national security by releasing US military plans of attack in advance.
Hegseth has now replaced all credible media outlets with MAGA content creators, whom he welcomed to the Pentagon earlier this week for press briefings. These MAGA influencers, despite their lack of reporting or military beat experience, are the “new Pentagon press corps.” They include the My Pillow guy, nutjob Trump whisperer Laura Loomer, and Tim Pool, who was paid to produce videos for a company funded by the Russian government.
Trump is selling us out to our most sinister enemy
Many of us have long suspected or even predicted that Donald Trump would betray America, gut our democracy in favor of a police state, and align us with Russia. You know, the country that the Financial Times reported this week tried to launch multiple terrorist attacks against the United States and Europe over the past year.
We’re now there.
It’s the most under-reported story of the year, perhaps of the century: under Trump, the United States is abandoning advocacy of democracy (shutting down Voice of America, etc), abandoning our democratic allies in Europe, and for the past year has abandoned Ukraine to the tender mercies of the Butcher of Moscow.
At the same time, Trump’s building ties to Middle Eastern dictatorships, adopting Russia’s explicit worldview, trashing civil and human rights at home, and now handing to China our most valuable military-potential technology.
In other words, we’ve been betrayed by Donald Trump and the people around him in ways that would have made Benedict Arnold blush.
A few weeks ago, Trump presented Ukraine with a so-called “peace deal” that was apparently written, in first draft, by Moscow. This week, he told that nation they have “until Christmas” to hand over more than 20 percent of their country to Putin and surrender their own military abilities forever, leaving them vulnerable to Russia’s next attack.
Trump’s brain trust just produced a new National Security Strategy (NSS) for the United States that largely abandons Canada and Europe while embracing a racist, neofascist worldview straight out of Putin’s rhetoric.
As the National Security Desk writes:
“It abandons allies, misidentifies threats, emboldens aggressors, erodes deterrence, and even drives allies to consider nuclear proliferation.”
Alexander Vindman, the former Director of European Affairs for the United States National Security Council (NSC), wrote:
“The prevailing sentiment among European observers was that this document represented not only the closing chapter of decades’ worth of cooperation between the United States and Europe, but also that Washington may soon actively sabotage the political and economic systems of the European Union through the promotion of ‘patriotic parties’ and far-right figures. Amidst an ongoing impasse over a potential peace agreement in Ukraine, representatives of the Russian government claims that the document is ‘consistent with our vision.’”
David Rothkopf, a former senior national security/trade official in the Clinton administration, was equally blunt in an article published by the New Republic:
“Indeed, the document, released by the White House on Thursday, reads as if it were dictated by the Kremlin, much as our recent ‘peace proposal’ for Ukraine turned out to have been. Or, perhaps more accurately, it reads like the product of a collaboration between Vladimir Putin and Stephen Miller, the deputy White House chief of staff for nativist hate.”
Russia expert Olga Lautman called it “Russia’s return on investment for interfering in the 2016 election,” and it sure looks like she’s right. An earlier article by her titled “America’s Foreign Policy Now Aligns With Russia” noted:
“The NSS does not merely ‘shift priorities.’ It flips seventy-five years of American policy on its head and declares political war on Europe’s democratic institutions while elevating the far-right parties in Europe that Russia has been cultivating for more than a decade. Trump’s team packaged this as a vision for a ‘new’ transatlantic relationship, but the core message is unmistakable, and that is to weaken NATO, fracture Europe, isolate Ukraine, and empower nationalist movements that are openly friendly to Moscow, with every paragraph carrying the same cold, transactional, subservient logic that has defined Trump’s relationship with Russia for decades.”
Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman, rarely one to engage in hyperbole, wrote of this document in an article titled “Is This the End of the Free World?”:
“The language is astonishing. Europe, the document warns, faces ‘the stark prospect of civilizational erasure.’ Why? Because ‘it is more than plausible that within a few decades at the latest, certain NATO members will become majority non-European.’ I don’t know why they bothered with the euphemism: ‘non-European’ clearly means ‘nonwhite.’“But there’s hope, the document declares, thanks to ‘the growing influence of patriotic European parties,’ by which it clearly means parties like Germany’s neo-Nazi AfD.”
Meanwhile, Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea are working together to destroy Ukraine, the gateway to Europe, and fielding armies of bots to fill social media and other venues with pro-Trump and anti-democracy rhetoric.
And the world’s richest man and recipient in billions in American government contracts, Elon Musk, the architect of the destruction of America’s soft power via USAID, this week called for the abolition of the European Union itself.
Finally, to the shock of the western world, Trump “cut a deal” to let Nvidia sell some of their most advanced chips to China after our military and intelligence experts have explicitly warned of the danger that this could accelerate that country’s move toward seizing Taiwan and threatening us with World War III.
Add to that Trump’s bellicose and murderous actions against Venezuela that could lead to us engaging in warfare in our own hemisphere, and you have the formula to tie up our military while bringing about the final end of American influence in the larger world, exactly as Putin and Xi want.
NATO chief Mark Rutte yesterday urged the West to prepare for war “like our grandparents endured,” adding:
“Conflict is at our door. Russia has brought war back to Europe. And we must be prepared.”
Trump could use such a war — as has been done before by presidents Wilson and Roosevelt — to gut civil rights in America and imprison the people he sees as his “threats” or political enemies.
And try to call off or steal the elections of 2026.
These developments, combined with the naked brutality of ICE that was revealed by this week’s report from Amnesty International, are shocking. American democracy is being gutted from within, our foreign policy is realigning away from Europe and toward Russia and China, all while dictators and corporate oligarchs openly bribe Trump and members of his family.
Where is our media? Where is the GOP? Democratic politicians are speaking out, as are some commentators, but elected Republicans and the majority of the corporate media are “business as usual.”
This is a five-alarm fire for democracy, both here and around the world.
We are officially in a POLICE STATE
In a bizarre directive that could have been written by the staff of The Onion, or Putin’s secret police, or Evangelical Christians, that is National Security Presidential Memorandum-7 (NSPM-7), Donald Trump ordered the FBI, DOJ, and more than 200 federal Joint Terrorism Task Forces (coordinating FBI with local police forces across the country) to seek out and investigate any person or group who meet it’s “indica” (indicators) of potential domestic terrorism.
They include,
“[A]nti-Americanism, anti-capitalism, anti-Christianity … extremism on migration, extremism on race, extremism on gender, hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on family, hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on religion, and hostility towards those who hold traditional American views on morality.”
- Have you ever spoken ill of our country or its policies, particularly under Trump?
- Trash-talked capitalism on social media?
- Publicly questioned Christianity or professed loyalty to Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, Paganism, or any other non-Christian belief system or religion?
- Embraced the trans or more general queer community?
- Spoken out in defense of single-parenting, gay marriage, or same-sex couples adopting children?
- Said things or carried a sign that might hurt the feelings of masked ICE agents, Trump, or Kristi Noem?
Just imagining that any of these could trigger FBI agents knocking on our doors was so grotesque a notion that when the story first appeared four months ago, it was reported and then largely dismissed by mainstream media within the same day.
Now, in a second bombshell report, Klippenstein has obtained and published a copy of Attorney General Pam Bondi’s Dec. 4 memo ordering the FBI to actually begin Russia-style investigations of people and groups who fit into the categories listed above.
Not only that, Bondi also ordered the FBI to go back as far as five years in their investigations of our social media posts, protest attendance, and other activities to find evidence of our possible adherence to these now-forbidden views.
Just being anti-fascist is, in Bondi’s eyes, apparently now a crime in America. From her memo to the FBI:
“Further, this [anti-fascist] ideology that paints legitimate government authority and traditional, conservative viewpoints as ‘fascist’ connects a recent string of political violence. Carvings on the bullet casings of Charlie Kirk’s assassin’s bullets read, ‘Hey, fascist, catch’ and ‘Bella Ciao’ — an ode to antifascist movements in Italy. … ICE agents are regularly doxed by anti-fascists, and calls to dox ICE agents appear in the same sentence of opinion pieces calling the Trump Administration fascist.”
At the same time, ICE is using a chunk of the massive budget the Big Ugly Bill gave them — larger than the budget of the FBI or any other police agency in America (or, probably, any other police agency in the world outside of China and Russia) — to buy tools they can use to spy on “anti-fascist” people who protest or oppose their actions.
In a report titled “ICE Wants to Go After Dissenters as well as Immigrants,” the Brennan Center for Justice details how the agency has acquired “a smorgasbord of spy technology: social media monitoring systems, cellphone location tracking, facial recognition, remote hacking tools, and more.”
They’ve reportedly acquired devices that spoof cellphone towers, so if you’re near them your phone will connect, thinking it’s talking to your cell carrier. Once the connection is established, ICE and/or DHS can monitor every communication to or from your phone and possibly even download all the content on your phone including emails, pictures, apps, and your browsing history.
They’re tying into nationwide networks of license-plate readers, airport facial recognition systems, and using federal surveillance drones to monitor people they consider enemies of the agency. And they’re carefully combing your social media content for posts, likes, and reposts they consider objectionable. As the Brennan Center noted:
“Homeland Security Investigations recently signed a multimillion dollar contract for a social media monitoring platform called Zignal Labs that claims to ingest and analyze more than 8 billion posts a day. The agency is also paying millions to Penlink for monitoring tools that gather information from multiple sources, including social media platforms, the dark web, and databases of location data.”
ICE is also acquiring Russian-style spy software that can remotely target your phone without your realizing it, infect it with the equivalent of an “ICE virus,” and then have your phone send them everything you do, say, hear, or see on an ongoing basis for months.
The only clue you’ll have will probably be that your battery life seems to have dropped as your phone is pumping out to ICE your data and everything the microphone in it picks up, all without your knowledge or permission.
This Putin-style sort of “search” without a legal warrant is the sort of thing that King George III’s officers did against the colonists (although back then it was reading their mail, spying on them in person, and kicking in their doors) in the 1770s that provoked our nation’s Founders to write in the Fourth Amendment to our Constitution:
“The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.”
It’s also a clear violation of the First Amendment’s protection of our rights to “free speech” and “peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”
When Putin ended democracy in Russia, he defined the people who protested his policies as domestic terrorists and had his secret police go after them in ways that are shockingly similar to what ICE is launching and Bondi is ordering the FBI to do.
It’s chillingly un-American.
How do people find Trump good?
Members of my family are Evangelical Christians; in fact, they’re part of the Quiverfull cult. They love, love, love Donald Trump. They look at him as a second Messiah.
Why?
Because he says he is.
This is really, really hard for non-Evangelicals to wrap their heads around, but for a lot of Evangelicals, what you say is far, far more important than what you do.
Let’s start with this:
You will never, ever, ever shame or persuade an Evangelical by pointing to someone’s behavior and saying “that’s not very Christian, is it?” They’re equipped with a magical defense against that, one phrase in the Bible that’s the perfect counter to any behavior no matter how reprehensible:
“All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.”
Romans 3:23.
Donald Trump cheated a cancer charity? All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God. Donald Trump cleared out a street full of protesters with tear gas? All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.
Donald Trump persecutes and kills immigrants? Well, they like that part, it’s one of the things they voted for. It’s hard to find a more racist bunch than American Evangelicals. The Ku Klux Klan, the White Aryan Resistance, the Aryan Nations, and the various Christian Identity churches all consider themselves Evangelical Christians.
Anyway, that phrase, “all have sinned and fall short of the glory of god,” is like the soldier in that meme standing guard over anything that would shatter their worship of Trump.
Evangelism is authoritarian. Evangelicals are taught never to question people they see as being in legitimate authority, which includes their own leaders. That’s deliberate; Evangelical leaders tend to have sex with children, with the wives of their own flock, and with sex workers, tend to embezzle from their flock, and tend to do all sorts of other reprehensible things…but Evangelicals like my family shrug and say “all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.”
My parents (my father was a deacon) found that the youth pastor was having sex with the children in the church.When they told the pastor and the other deacons, it was my parents that were evicted from the church, not the youth pastor. It was not until it became a police matter that the youth pastor left, he never was punished however, because he was “doing the Lord’s work”.
So “Donald Trump is a bad person who does bad things” will never ever ever work. They know. They don’t care.
So why do they love him?
To understand that, you have to understand something deeply ingrained in American Evangelicals, something non-Evangelicals also have trouble getting their heads around:
Spiritual warfare.
To an Evangelical, spiritual warfare is not a metaphor.
Let me say that again because it’s that important: spiritual warfare is not a metaphor.
They literally believe that the entire earth is currently a battleground, that right now in the room you are sitting in the literal army of God is conducting literal war with the literal army of Satan, that this is a direct war with swords and shields and magical weapons, and the fact you can’t see it doesn’t mean it’s not real.
They believe that Trump is standing beside them protecting them. They believe every doubt (or question about the truth of what they’re taught) comes from a literal demon standing physically right next to them whispering Satan’s words in their ear.
The rules of engagement in this war say that the armies of Satan cannot harm the faithful without their consent, but they can whisper propaganda. Every little twinge of doubt they feel, every little wobble in their faith in their leaders and Donald Trump: “Watch out, Brother, that’s Satan whispering in your ear. If you listen to him, you are lost.”
To understand that, imagine a real, actual war, like say WWII.
Remember this guy?
Winston Churchill was a drunk and a womanizer, but he also led the British to victory.
Evangelicals believe that God can use anyone, anyone, and that person can rise up to be a powerful commander of the armies of God.
Imagine you’re in 1944 Britain and someone tells you, “We should get rid of Churchill because he drinks.”
You’d think he was daft.
Yeah, he drinks, he’s famous for it. Yeah, he has problems with women. So what? Ir’s a war. He’s winning battles.
That’s how Evangelicals feel about Donald Trump.
Is he a womanizer? Yes. Is he a cheat? Yes. Is he problematic? Yes.
All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God.
God can use anyone in His righteous quest and God is using Donald Trump.
Donald Trump is winning battles. He won against the forces of Satan by making abortion illegal. He’s winning against the forces of Satan by making gay men, lesbians, and trans people suffer. He won the battle against DEI. He’s talking about making gay marriage illegal again, the single greatest battle Satan decisively won in recent memory.
You don’t replace your commander in the middle of a war when he’s winning battle after battle because you don’t like the things he does with women.
They don’t have to like him personally to see him as a commander of the armies of God, routing the legions of Hell and their Earthly supporters: the gays, the trans, the liberals, the Muslims, the non-Christians.
A thing my family says: “Sure, I would never invite him to dinner, but so what? He’s doing God’s work.”