Blackouts

These documents are more blacked out than Pete Hegseth on New Years Eve.

– feral streep, on the redactions in the newly released Epstein material

No Sift next week. The next new posts will appear on January 5.

This week’s featured post is “Three days in the life of a pathetic man“.

Ongoing stories

  • Trump’s assault on American democracy. He’s trying to move CNN into the hands of an oligarch ally, and is maneuvering us towards war with Venezuela without consulting Congress.
  • Climate change. Based on the theory that what you don’t know can’t hurt you, the administration is planning to close the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, due to its “climate alarmism”.
  • Gaza and Ukraine. I didn’t run across anything new this week. Probably I was too busy with Christmas stuff.

This week’s developments

This week everybody was still talking about the Epstein files

Friday was the deadline that the Epstein Files Transparency Act had set for the Justice Department to release all of its files about Jeffrey Epstein, with a few minor exceptions, mostly related to protecting the identities of the young women who were Epstein’s victims.

But the EFTA is just a law, one passed overwhelmingly by Congress and signed by President Trump himself. Why should the Justice Department consider itself bound to obey? So of course, DoJ waited until the final day to release anything at all. When it did, the release was not complete, and appeared to be much more heavily redacted than mere victim-protection could account for. (One 119-page document is entirely redacted. One commenter characterized the release as a whole as “more blacked out than Pete Hegseth on New Years Eve”.)

on Friday morning, Todd Blanche, the deputy attorney general, went on Fox News to say that the department wouldn’t actually be releasing all of the files on Friday as required by the law. “I expect that we’re going to release more documents over the next couple of weeks, so today, several hundred thousand, and then over the next couple weeks, I expect several hundred thousand more,” Blanche said on Fox News. “There’s a lot of eyes looking at these and we want to make sure that when we do produce the materials we are producing, that we are protecting every single victim.”

By the time the department eventually did release thousands of pages of materials on Friday evening – not the hundreds of thousands Blanche promised – many of the documents had been heavily or completely redacted. Other than a few pictures, the materials made no mention of Trump, even though attorney general Pam Bondi reportedly told Trump earlier this year his name was in the files.

Some of the pictures released did include former President Bill Clinton, an apparent effort to support Trump’s gaslighting that the Epstein affair was a Democratic scandal, not a Trump scandal. Trump doesn’t seem to grasp that whattaboutism won’t get him out of this jam. “Democrats did it too” or even “Democrats did worse” isn’t a valid excuse. If Democrats are also guilty, expose them too.

The two sponsors of the EFTA, Republican Thomas Massie and Democrat Ro Khanna, both denounced the partial release, which fails to identify anyone who victimized the girls other than Epstein, who is dead, and Ghislaine Maxwell, who is already in prison for sex trafficking (after apparently trafficking the girls to no one, if what has been released is the whole story).

What can Congress do to force DoJ to obey the law? Not much, apparently. It could find Pam Bondi in contempt of Congress, but her own department would then be responsible for prosecuting her, which it would not do. Congress could impeach her, if it had the will to do so (which is doubtful). But Bondi could make the impeachment moot by resigning. Again, whatever Trump is hiding would stay hidden.

The only penalty Trump can be forced to pay is political, which they apparently believe they can mitigate by continuing to dribble out files little by little.

and war with Venezuela

Step-by-step, we are marching into a war with Venezuela. First we blew up their fishing boats, which may or may not have been smuggling cocaine and may or may not have been headed towards the US.

On December 10, the US seized a Venezuelan oil tanker. And then Tuesday, Trump announced an oil blockade of Venezuela. He did it in a Truth Social post that was barely coherent, making references to “the Oil, Land, and other Assets that they previously stole from us”.

It’s tempting to sanewash this by looking for some plausible reference — maybe the nationalization of Venezuela’s oil by Maduro’s predecessor Hugo Chavez. But nations all over the world (Saudi Arabia, for example) have nationalized their oil industries without getting attacked. And why oil previously claimed by an oil company should be “ours” is a bit of a stretch.

But while I think justifications like that should be put to administration spokespeople, I’m not going to assume Trump’s post makes sense at all until some official source explains it.

Here’s something more people should be saying: The recent moves make it clear that the attacks on boats were never about drugs, they were about regime change. And changing the Maduro regime is about getting control of Venezuela’s oil. Without the oil, Maduro could be five times as tyrannical and nobody in the Trump administration would care.

and the Bondi Beach shooting

On December 14, a father and son opened fire on a crowd gathered for a Hannukah celebration at Bondi Beach in Australia. 15 people were killed and 40 injured. The father was killed by police and the son badly wounded. No official statement of motive has surfaced, but antisemitism seems like an obvious guess.

I find two things noteworthy here: First, antisemitism really is rising around the world. I know some people falsely claim that any criticism of the current Israeli government is antisemitism, but you can brush off that canard and still recognize that antisemitism is real.

I’ll repeat what I’ve often said before: You can think whatever you want about Netanyahu or Hamas, but that’s no excuse to bring the war here. American Jews and American Muslims or Arabs are not the problem, and violence against them will not solve anything or prove anything. Ditto for Australians.

Second: Pro-gun people have been crowing about how Australia’s more rigorous gun restrictions didn’t stop this mass shooting. But they’re not thinking this through. The shooters used a bolt-action rifle and a shotgun, rather than semi-automatic weapons, because that’s what they could get their hands on in Australia. Because of that restriction, they only got off 83 shots in something like ten minutes. With American AR-15s, they could have unleashed hundreds of rounds and killed many more people. The 2017 Las Vegas shooter, by himself, fired over a thousand rounds and killed 60.

These kinds of restrictions make a difference, as do limits on the sizes of gun magazines. Shooters are most often stopped when they have to reload. The more bullets they have available without reloading, the longer it will take to stop them.

and Trump’s sad sick week

The Rob Reiner post, the strange plaques Trumpifying past presidents, the self-serving national address, and then the Trump-Kennedy Center. All in three days. The featured post covers these incidents, emphasizing how Trump’s attempts to aggrandize himself just make him smaller.

and Susan Wiles

For some reason nobody has been able to specify, White House Chief of Staff Susan Wiles gave a series of interviews to a Vanity Fair reporter, and high-ranking members of the administration posed for a Vanity Fair photographer.

We learned that Wiles thinks:

  • Trump has an alcoholic’s personality.
  • Vance’s conversion to Trumpism has been “sort of political”
  • OMB head Russell Vought is “a right-wing absolute zealot”.
  • The destruction of the White House’s East Wing is just the beginning. “I think you’ll have to judge it by its totality because you only know a little bit of what he’s planning.”
  • There is no evidence to support Trump’s claims about Bill Clinton and Jeffrey Epstein.
  • The component parts of the Big Beautiful Bill are popular. “That will be a very big deal in the midterms.”
  • Blowing up boats in the Caribbean isn’t about drugs, it’s about pressuring the Maduro government in Venezuela.
  • Trump’s attacks on the high seas don’t needs congressional approval, but an attack on the Venezuelan mainland would.
  • Trump believes Putin wants all of Ukraine, not just the provinces he has claimed so far.
  • If Vance runs in 2028, he’ll be the Republican nominee.
  • Trump hasn’t been asleep in cabinet meetings. He’s just resting his eyes.
  • He insults female reporters because “He’s a counterpuncher. And increasingly, in our society, the punchers are women.”
  • Trump won’t run for a third term.
  • Trump doesn’t wake up thinking about revenge against enemies like James Comey, “But when there’s an opportunity, he will go for it.”

Amazingly, Trump has not denounced her.

and pro-Trump media consolidation

Viktor Orbán’s government in Hungary is often cited as a model for Trump’s authoritarian takeover. A key piece of Orbán’s strategy was to make sure the major media outlets wound up in friendly hands, creating a state media unofficially.

Trump has been doing the same thing, partly by acquisition, partly by coopting the oligarchs who already own media properties. And so:

  • The richest man in the world (Elon Musk) is a Trump ally who owns X/Twitter.
  • The US’s second-richest man (Jeff Bezos) owns The Washington Post, and blocked the Post’s endorsement of Kamala Harris in 2024.
  • The US’s third-richest man (Mark Zuckerberg) owns Meta, which controls Facebook.
  • The fourth-richest (Larry Ellison) controls Skydance, which owns Paramount, which owns CBS. His hand-picked news baron is Bari Weiss. She just spiked a 60 Minutes episode exposing the Trump gulag in El Salvador. Ellison also has wound up controlling the US version of TikTok.

Now Ellison’s empire is bidding against Netflix for Warner/Discovery, which controls CNN, among other notable media properties. Trump is in a position to influence how this goes: He could hint that DoJ would sue to stop a Netflix acquisition as a violation of antitrust laws, but let the Paramount bid go through.

and you also might be interested in …

To no one’s surprise, Republicans in Congress still have no solution to the ObamaCare insurance premiums that are set to skyrocket. The House did pass a bill roughly along the lines I told you about in November: You can lower your premiums by buying the kind of junk insurance that the Affordable Care Act made illegal. You won’t be insured if anything really bad happens to you or your family, but you can tell yourself you have insurance. And even that won’t get through the Senate.

North Carolina’s legislature is one of the most gerrymandered in the country. That’s how a state that has had Democratic governors since 2017 and that Trump carried by a mere 3% in 2024 has substantial and rock-solid Republican majorities in both houses of the legislature: 30-20 in the Senate and 71-49 in the House.

It’s a great frustration to NC Republicans that you can’t gerrymander a statewide office like the governorship. So they’ve done the next best thing: Taken away nearly all the power of the governor and moved it to the legislature.

In essence, they have disempowered their own voters: The voters can control which party gets the governorship, but control of the legislature is baked into the maps.

The Democratic Party is about to go through its usual pattern in the Texas Senate race:

  • A firebrand progressive (Jasmine Crockett, who I love to watch on TV news shows) will excite the base and win the primary.
  • The national party will decide she can’t win and will refuse to put any resources into the race.
  • She’ll lose.
  • The finger-pointing will start: Was the problem that she’s too liberal or that the national party sabotaged her?

I’m not taking a side here, I’m just pointing to the pattern. Until the Party goes all-in on one of these races, we won’t know whose intuition is right.

In his testimony to Congress, FCC Chair Brendan Carr (last seen demanding that ABC fire Jimmy Kimmel) denied that the FCC is an independent agency. Instead, he sees the FCC as an instrument of Trump’s political agenda.

Data from Freedom of the Press Foundation’s Press Freedom Tracker shows that every single investigation or social media tirade Carr has launched against licensees’ speech – be it 60 Minutes’ editing of its Kamala Harris interview, Jimmy Kimmel’s remarks about Charlie Kirk’s death, or Comcast’s accurate reporting that contradicted Trump’s lies about the Kilmar Abrego García’s immigration case – has involved content that upset Trump.

and let’s close with something seasonal

Randy Rainbow’s new parody: It’s beginning to look a lot like f**k this.

December 22, 2025 – 12:41 pm Categories: Weekly summaries | Comments (2)

Three days in the life of a pathetic man

Everything Trump does to aggrandize himself just makes him smaller.

From the time he came down the escalator in 2015, Donald Trump has gloried in his ability to get a rise out of people like me. All our howls of outrage, all the shocked shouts of “He can’t say that!”, have been music to his ears. But lately he’s been losing his touch. Donald J. Trump, once the greatest troll of the social-media era, has jumped the shark. The realization that he is past his sell-by date seems to be driving him ever further off the deep end.

I catch on slowly, so I didn’t notice until his Rob Reiner tweet.

I don’t know if Gen Z even knows who Reiner was, but several of his movies — The Princess Bride comes to mind — became cultural touchstones for my generation. They didn’t often make the critics’ lists of all-time greats, but you could quote them decades later and people would know what you meant.

So Monday, Reiner and his wife were found dead in their home, apparently murdered by their troubled son in the kind of tragedy that touches every parent somewhere deep: What if my kid had inner demons that all my attention, all my love, all the resources I could bring to bear, were helpless to exorcise?

And Trump’s response Tuesday morning was to make this tragic murder all about himself: Reiner died because his Trump Derangement Syndrome made the people around him crazy. The President of the United States went on at some length in that vein.

When I read that post, I was surprised to realize that it didn’t make me angry. No “How can he say that?”. No desire to strike back with some cutting insult.

His tweet wasn’t outrageous. It was pathetic. What a sick, sad little man.

The next two days backed up that assessment. Wednesday we found out about the presidential plaques now lining the colonnade connecting the White House residence to the Oval Office. It’s a newly installed “walk of fame” with plaques for Trump (twice, since he’s both the 45th and 47th president) and his predecessors.

But of course, the plaques for past presidents are not really about them, they’re about him. Andrew Jackson, for example, was “unjustifiably treated unfairly by the Press, but not as viciously and unfairly as President Abraham Lincoln and President Donald J. Trump would, in the future, be.” Ronald Reagan “was a fan of President Donald J. Trump long before President Trump’s Historic run for the White House.”

Joe Biden — who committed the unpardonable sin of kicking Trump’s ass by seven million votes in 2020 — got the nastiest treatment, with the plaque proclaiming him “by far, the worst president in American history”, and representing him not with a portrait, but with a picture of an autopen. The plaque declares that Biden became president “as a result of the most corrupt election ever” and “brought our nation to the brink of destruction”. Barack Obama is characterized as “one of the most divisive political figures in American history” who presided over “a stagnant economy” until his handpicked successor was defeated by Trump. Bill Clinton’s plaque also ends with the defeat of his wife by Trump.

Am I angered? No, I’m embarrassed for my country. Trump probably pictures himself impressing foreign dignitaries by leading them along this walk. In fact, they also will be embarrassed, like your friends are when your senile grandpa starts bragging about things they all know he never did. By casting his plaques in brass, Trump probably imagines them being read decades or even centuries from now. But of course they will vanish the instant he is gone, because they are sad and pathetic. They reflect badly on the White House and whomever its future occupants might be.

Wednesday night, Trump gave a nationally televised address. Typically, presidents demand time from the major networks either when there is something of substance to announce (like a the raid that killed Bin Laden) or some tragedy that calls for a presidential response (like like the Challenger disaster). Prior to Trump, addresses like this were non-partisan: The President was acting as president, speaking to or for all of us, and not as a politician revving up his base.

But that kind of compartmentalization is foreign to Trump’s nature. He demanded national attention Wednesday not because Americans needed to know something, but because his ego was hurting: The economy is doing badly and the American people are increasingly blaming him for it.

His 18-minute address (about the same length as JFK’s Cuban missile crisis speech) contained no news worth mentioning — no major developments, no policy initiatives. (The one apparent announcement turned out to be flim-flam: His $1776 “warrior dividend” to members of our military isn’t new money; it comes out of funds already appropriated for housing allowances.) The self-justification started in his first line: “Good evening America. 11 months ago I inherited a mess, and I’m fixing it.” From there he launched into the kind of self-contradictory excuses you might hear from an 8-year-old: I wasn’t fighting, and besides, he started it.

Everything is wonderful, and the fact that it’s not wonderful is Joe Biden’s fault.

Most presidential addresses call for a fact-check, but that would not do this speech justice. A reverse fact-check would be more appropriate: Try to pick out some statements that are true. It’s a challenge. Sentence after sentence, clause after clause, is a travelogue from a fantasy world where Trump is a world-defining super-president.

What a sick, sad little man.

Thursday, his handpicked board at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts attached his name to this once-iconic institution. It’s now supposed to be known as the Trump-Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. But like the Department of Defense, the Kennedy Center was named in the statute that Congress passed to establish it, so Trump and his board of puppets have no power to rename it. The Washingtonian reports:

While the board’s “change” is basically just another flashy marquee that Trump has hung up in service of his inner real-estate developer, it’s likely to accelerate the tangible decline of the Kennedy Center’s reputation. Ticket sales have nosedived since the president took over in February, which has taken a palpable toll on the performers who work there—including the National Symphony Orchestra’s principal violist, who recently spoke to Washingtonian about his experience serenading half-empty audiences.

Maddening? No, pitiable.

One frequent discussion topic among my friends is how long it will take to undo the damage Trump has done to this country. Some of it, of course, can never be undone. The children who died of hunger or disease after he gutted USAID are beyond the help of future administrations. And we’ll never get back the four wasted years in the battle against climate change (plus a little from his undoing the small progress Biden had made).

I can’t guess how many responsible presidents will have to come and go before our allies trust us again. Or how long the CDC or the Kennedy Center will need to rebuild their reputations. How long before the Presidential Medal of Freedom becomes an honor again? Or until all the demons of bigotry he unleashed can be put back in their bottles? And what about our national sense of decency? Our respect for one another? To rebuild them will require decades of nurturing.

But Trump has never really cared about that kind of thing. He cares about promoting his name and about dictating the names others use. He cares about buildings and decor and gaudy gilding.

And I think he’s starting to realize that all those things will begin vanishing the instant he loses power. No one will ever again talk about the Gulf of America, or the Department of War, or the Trump-Kennedy Center. (JFK’s niece wants to wield a pickaxe to remove Trump’s name herself.) If he leaves before his term is up — this is precisely the situation Section 4 of the 25th Amendment was written for — not even Vance will want anyone to see those ridiculous plaques. The tasteless gilding of the White House will go away, and even his over-priced ballroom will be used for some other purpose and carry some other name.

As soon as he’s gone, the whole country (even most of the people who voted for him) will start pretending he was never there.

I think he’s starting to realize that, and so he’s been turning his Trumpiness up to 11. Every effort to aggrandize himself just makes him shrink faster, but he can’t help himself. It’s like he’s constantly screaming: “You can’t forget me!”

But we will, Donald. We will.

Maybe a small reminder will survive here or there. Perhaps, as in Shelley’s Ozymandias, somewhere the ruins of a statue will survey the wasteland of his legacy.

Look on his works, ye mighty, and despair.

December 22, 2025 – 9:55 am Categories: Articles | Comments (12)

Tagged |

The Monday Morning Teaser

So Friday was the deadline that the Epstein Files Transparency Act set for DoJ to release everything it had on the Jeffrey Epstein case, except for material that would identify his victims. Guess what? It didn’t. None of the files that mention Trump were released, and Deputy AG (and former Trump personal lawyer) Todd Blanche kicked the can a bit further down the road by promising the rest of the files in “a couple of weeks”.

I mean, the EFTA is just a law, and when has the Trump DoJ cared about the law? Expect Blanche’s couple of weeks to become a month or more. And when that excuse runs thin, DoJ can start exploiting apparent loopholes in the EFTA and litigating its interpretations up through the courts. Whatever Trump is hiding can stay hidden for quite a while yet.

But that’s not the main thing I’m writing about this week, because from Tuesday to Thursday we saw a remarkable display of pathos by the President of the United States. His sick sad response to the Rob Reiner murder came on Tuesday. Wednesday we learned about the ridiculous “walk of fame” he has installed on the White House collonade: cast-in-brass plaques about Trump and all his predecessors, interpreting American presidential history through the lens of Trump’s ego. (Ronald Reagan was a fan of Trump. Andrew Jackson was treated unfairly by the press of his day, but not as badly as Trump has been.)

Wednesday night he demanded (and got) free air time from the major networks to make the most trivial national address in American history: Thanks to him, the economy is doing great, and the fact that it’s not doing great is Joe Biden’s fault. Thursday, his puppet board put his name on the Kennedy Center.

Once, this kind of nonsense would have angered me. But now I just feel sad for him, and embarrassed for my country. Every time he tries to aggrandize himself, he gets a little smaller. As soon as he’s gone, we’re all going to forget him as quickly as we can. That realization is driving him to ever more extreme aggrandizement, which shrinks him all the more.

So this week’s featured post calls out the theme: “Three days in the life of a pathetic man”. It should be out shortly.

The Epstein files will be covered in the weekly summary. Also the moves towards war against Venezuela, the Bondi Beach shooting, the Brown/MIT murders, Susan Wiles’ unfortunate Vanity Fair interviews, Bari Weiss’ continuing efforts to turn CBS into Fox News, and a few other things, closing with a new Randy Rainbow song. I’ll try to get it out by noon.

December 22, 2025 – 8:46 am Categories: Morning tease | Comments (1)

Decent World Order

No Sift next week. The next new articles will appear on December 22.

The degree to which America is clearly a country that is open for sale is also really remarkable. But countries that are buying your goodwill by bringing cash to the president, that is a different form of leadership than the kind where we’re guaranteeing their security and trying to have a decent world order for all of us.

– Robert Kagan

This week’s featured post is “A MAGA National Security Strategy“.

Ongoing stories

  • Trump’s assault on American democracy. Thanks to the Supreme Court, Texas will conduct its 2026 congressional elections with a racially gerrymandered map.
  • Climate change. There are interesting and somewhat ironic developments in geothermal power. Details in a short note below.
  • Both Gaza and Ukraine fell off my radar this week.

This week’s developments

This week the focus was on Pete Hegseth

Secretary of War Defense Pete Hegseth is under fire from two directions:

  • Did he really give a “kill everybody” order that led to an attack on two men clinging to the wreckage of their boat? (If we’re not at war, that’s murder. If we are, it’s a war crime.)
  • The DoD inspector general’s report on Signalgate says Hegseth violated military regulations and endangered pilots engaging in an attack, but apparently stops short of finding a crime. The loophole here is that Hegseth himself had the power to declassify the information he released, even if it was irresponsible to do so.

Thursday, members of the House and Senate Armed Services and Intelligence Committees were briefed on the September 2 attack where a boat was sunk and then a second attack killed survivors clinging to the wreckage. All the reactions I’ve seen quoted followed party lines. Democrats like Mark Warner said the video was “very disturbing”, while Republican Tom Cotton said:

I saw two survivors trying to flip a boat loaded with drugs bound for the United States back over so they could stay in the fight, and potentially, given all the context we’ve heard of other narco-terrorist boats in the area coming to their aid to recover the cargo and recover those narco-terrorists

To me, the phrase “stay in the fight” is telling. What fight? Who were the boatmen trying to fight against?

The bottom line here is that eventually the video will come out, and the American people can resolve this argument for themselves. The question is whether people will be able to simply use their eyes, or will they see the scene through a haze of dehumanizing labels like “narco-terrorist”?

As for the legality of the whole boat-sinking campaign, Ron Filipkowski sums it up well:

The US government is summarily executing people on a weekly basis without telling the American people any of their names or presenting any proof of their guilt, for alleged crimes that do not carry the death penalty in the US.

Of course SNL had to get into the act.

and the national strategy

I discuss this at length in the featured post.

An important related article: Overmatched by the NYT editorial board. It discusses how our big complicated and expensive military systems repeatedly fail us in war simulations where we try to defend Taiwan against China.

The basic problem was identified already in James Fallows’ 1981 book National Defense: We need small, simple weapons that are easy to produce in large numbers, but our procurement system favors big, complex weapons that are hard to keep running and hard to replace if they get damaged in battle.

It’s been decades since I read that book, but I think I remember one key example: how Nazi Germany lost the tank war in Russia. Individually, the Russian tanks were no match for the German Tigers and Panthers. But the Russian tanks (and the Shermans imported from America) were easy to make and maintainable by any good street mechanic, while the German tanks were much more complicated and much harder to fix if they broke down.

At some point, which may already have arrived, swarms of hypersonic drones will be able to overwhelm an aircraft carrier like the Gerald Ford, which we just deployed to the Caribbean.

and the Supreme Court

It shouldn’t be surprising when the Court ignores facts, laws, and precedents to give the Republican Party an advantage, but for some reason I still was taken aback when the Court OK’d the Texas congressional map that lower courts had found violated legal guarantees against racial gerrymandering.

I’ll leave the details of the case to Paul Waldman, but the gist is that the district court held extensive hearings about whether the new Texas map was drawn according to race, and found that it was. By precedent, higher courts are supposed to defer to a lower court’s findings of fact unless they spot a clear error. (There’s a reason for that: Higher courts don’t have as much time to devote to assembling and evaluating evidence. The district judge saw and heard the witnesses, while the justices could only read the transcripts.) But the Supreme Court ignored that provision, claimed that the lower court should have given more deference to the State of Texas, and then invoked the Purcell doctrine, that courts should not change maps on the eve of an election.

But of course, as Justice Kagan points out in her dissent, it was the Texas legislature that wanted to change maps, and the legislature that controlled the timing. Letting the old map stand would have disturbed nothing and confused no one.

If Purcell prevents such a ruling, it gives every State the opportunity to hold an unlawful election. The District Court, once again aptly, made the point: Were judicial review so broadly foreclosed, then to implement even a “blatantly unconstitutional map,” the “Legislature need only to pass” it on a schedule like this one. That cannot be the law—except of course that today it is.

This is yet another abuse of the Court’s “shadow docket”, a preliminary finding that applies in this case only and may be reversed eventually. But a temporary finding is all Texas Republicans need to deliver more House seats to Speaker Johnson.

Waldman goes on to argue that Democrats have to start running against the Supreme Court.

Any Democrat who says “Voters don’t really care about this stuff” needs a good smack in the head. The answer to that problem is to make them care. Republicans do this all the time; if they have something they wish was on the agenda, they force it on the agenda, no matter how ridiculous it is or how removed it is from people’s lives. How many Americans cared five years ago about whether some middle school trans kid a hundred miles from where they live wanted to play softball? But they care about it now, because Republicans made them care.

Democrats need to do the same with the Supreme Court — loudly, angrily, personally, relentlessly. If they don’t, the next Democratic president is utterly screwed.

and geothermal power

Normally, you think about geothermal power in places like Iceland or New Zealand — places with volcanoes, where hot lava is close to the surface. But the center of the Earth is 5000 degrees Celsius, so you can find heat just about anywhere if you drill deep enough.

For years that’s been considered impractical, but maybe not much longer. Ironically, the technology to make this work has been developed by the oil and gas industry. Want to drill deep as cheaply as possible? The oil companies know how. Want to get water through rock so you can heat it in the depths? That’s been solved by the fracking companies.

Check out this New Yorker article for more detail.

and you also might be interested in …

The fundamentally anti-Christian nature of the Trump regime is being pointed out in Christmas nativity scenes all over the country. This one is from Dedham, Massachusetts:

The small print below the “ICE WAS HERE” sign says that the Holy Family is safe inside the church’s sanctuary, and gives the number of a hotline to report local ICE activity.

At a time when there is a ridiculous backlog of asylum cases, Trump has been firing immigration judges. The immigration courts that decide such cases are not part of the judicial branch, but belong to the Department of Justice. So DoJ is looking to recruit.

DHS is trying to help by posting DoJ recruitment ads on its Facebook page. The scary thing is what their ads tell you about the kind of people they’re looking for. Here’s one:

The text that goes with it is: “Deliver justice to criminal illegal aliens. Become a deportation judge. Save your country.”

If you’re not up on comic-book-based movies, that’s Judge Dredd. Wikipedia describes him like this:

Judge Dredd is a law enforcement and judicial officer in the dystopian future city of Mega-City One, which covers most of the east coast of North America. He is a “street judge”, empowered to summarily arrest, convict, sentence, and execute criminals.

So if you fantasize about summarily arresting, convicting, sentencing, and executing “criminal illegal aliens”, the Trump regime has just the job for you.

I’m not sure what to make of this theory, but it sounds plausible: James Throt, who claims to be a neuropathologist from the UK, says that the lasting neurological effects of Covid changed our brains, reducing our executive function and making us less empathetic. He claims you can see the change in behavior on dating apps.

Since 2020, apps report the same pattern: shorter messages, less reciprocity, fewer follow-ups, lower meet-up rates & a collapse in sustained conversational ability. This isn’t just “people being tired”. It’s a measurable degradation of attention, initiative & social cognition.

It might also explain why the public so easily falls for the regime’s depersonalization of vulnerable groups like immigrants or the trans community.

Speaking of depersonalizing attacks, Jamelle Bouie looks at Trump’s smearing of all Somali immigrants.

It’s hard to let go of the Trump MRI story, because what he says about it doesn’t add up. There’s no such thing as a “routine” MRI, and it’s hard to believe doctors did one without telling him what they were looking at or for.

Joyce Strong, a nurse, puts clues together and says he probably got a CT-based vascular imaging with contrast. She’s speculating, but her guess is that the testing was motivated by what I’ve been calling Trump’s symptoms of dementia — babbling, falling asleep at meetings, random outbursts, and so on.

and let’s close with something feral

The Washington Post newsroom had to be smiling when it published this: “Drunk raccoon passes out in bathroom after ransacking Va. liquor store“.

A Virginia state-run liquor store was ransacked by a masked bandit on Friday evening, authorities said, leaving a trail of broken spirit bottles strewn across the shop floor.

Apparently this kind of thing happens from time to time. The article also includes a 2016 video from Tennessee of another racoon doing something similar.

December 8, 2025 – 11:52 am Categories: Weekly summaries | Comments (18)

A MAGA National Security Strategy

America used to frame its self-image around freedom and democracy. Now it’s about making money and preserving whiteness.

Back in July, J. D. Vance tried his hand at answering the question “What is an American?” But first he had to say what an American wasn’t, namely, someone who agrees with the principles of the Declaration of Independence.

If you think about it, identifying America just with agreeing with the principles, let’s say, of the Declaration of Independence, that’s a definition that is way over-inclusive and under-inclusive at the same time.

I don’t think many people would argue with the over-inclusive part. As Vance observed, there are probably billions of people who agree with the founding principles of the United States. They may even identify with America the way JFK was identifying with Germany when he said “Ich bin ein Berliner.” But that doesn’t make them Americans in any real sense. Now, if they come here, work, pay taxes, and pledge their allegiance to the government defined in the Constitution, we can start to have a discussion. But until then, hardly anyone would claim they’re Americans.

Where Vance caused controversy, though, was with “underinclusive”. If your ancestors fought in the Civil War, then you “have a hell of a lot more claim over America than the people who say [you] don’t belong”, even if you don’t believe in the founding principles. Vance seemed to be saying that you could be, say, a Nazi. But if your ancestors fought for the fascist empire of its day, the Confederacy, maybe because they wanted to defend and preserve slavery, then you’re one of us.

In short, Vance’s America isn’t fundamentally about freedom or democracy or any other grand principle.

America is not just an idea. We’re a particular place, with a particular people, and a particular set of beliefs and way of life.

This is sometimes described as the “blood and soil” vision of a nation, and it quickly lends itself to what the far right calls “heritage Americans”, who are English-speaking and Christian and (predominantly) White and have a “way of life” that puts men (and not women) at the top of the pyramid. As one author explains:

Non-Christians can be tolerated, as long as they acquiesce to living in an unashamedly Christian America (i.e., submitting to Christian civil law, government support for Christianity, Christian moral, civil, and religious norms and customs, etc.). At the same time, both public and private citizens should be concerned to help the Christian Church flourish in our nation, since a collapse of Christian conversions, church plants, and influence will mark the end of America.

Like so much of Trumpism, this is deniable if you find it embarrassing (as I hope many Trumpists do). Vance didn’t actually spell all that out, and besides, it’s Vance, not Trump. Who takes what J. D. Vance says all that seriously anyway? And since Trump isn’t coherent enough to enunciate such a grand vision, MAGAts don’t have to own up to the full implications of redefining America in blood-and-soil terms.

NSS-USA. Last month, though, the regime put out a document that is harder to deny: National Security Strategy for the United States of America. The text part of it is only 29 pages, but I can’t recommend you read the whole thing, because (like nearly all regime publications) it’s full of praise for how Donald J. Trump rescued America from the pit of despair Joe Biden had left it in. Now is the winter of our discontent made glorious summer by this son of New York, and yadda, yadda, yadda.

But beyond the huckstering, the NSS-USA does have some real content. In particular, it declares an end to the era in which the US tried to be the linchpin of a rules-based global order, and tried (at least some of the time) to promote freedom and democracy. The NSS-USA characterizes this past policy both as “permanent American domination of the entire world” and as “lash[ing] American policy to a network of international institutions, some of which are driven by outright anti-Americanism and many by a transnationalism that explicitly seeks to dissolve individual state sovereignty”.

But we’re done with all that now. Instead, we’re going to control immigration, make money, and launch a “restoration and reinvigoration of American spiritual and cultural health”. And we’re not going to try to export American values like human rights that disrespect “other countries’ differing religions, cultures, and governing systems.” (So if MBS wants to lure an Washington Post journalist into a foreign embassy, kill him, and saw his body into little pieces, that’s just how they do things in Saudi Arabia, and we want to do profitable business with them. As the Emperor Vespasian supposedly said about raising funds by taxing public toilets, “Pecunia non olet“, meaning “Money doesn’t stink”, no matter where it comes from.)

Here’s what that “reinvigoration of American spiritual and cultural health” means:

We want an America that cherishes its past glories and its heroes, and that looks forward to a new golden age. We want a people who are proud, happy, and optimistic that they will leave their country to the next generation better than they found it. We want a gainfully employed citizenry—with no one sitting on the sidelines—who take satisfaction from knowing that their work is essential to the prosperity of our nation and to the well-being of individuals and families. This cannot be accomplished without growing numbers of strong, traditional families that raise healthy children.

That’s why we have to turn our schools into propaganda mills that expunge any real discussion of slavery, genocide against the Native Americans, or the ongoing effects of racism and sexism. The American past must have nothing but “glories”, and we must ignore discouraging trends like climate change, the increasing concentration of wealth, or anything else that might cause our people to expect something other than the Golden Age of Trump. The NSS-USA doesn’t define “strong traditional families” or “healthy children”, but I hear a lot of ominous subtext there.

The document then goes region by region. Some of its goals are the same as previous administrations. We don’t want a hostile power to control the oil of the Middle East, and we want to maintain our access to other critical resources. We want to avoid seeing some rival power dominate the world.

But then it starts to diverge. It defines what is basically an American sphere of influence in the Western hemisphere. We want countries that are “reasonably stable and well-governed enough to prevent and discourage mass migration to the United States”. Beyond that, we don’t care what they do to their people.

The one place where we do want to interfere in other countries’ business is with our allies.

We will oppose elite-driven, anti-democratic restrictions on core liberties in Europe, the Anglosphere, and the rest of the democratic world, especially among our allies.

However, it looks like the regime sees those “elite-driven, anti-democratic restrictions” mainly in our allies’ attempts to suppress right-wing radicalism. It promotes a view of Europe’s future that sounds a lot like proto-fascist parties such as Germany’s AfD (which Vance endorses). Due to immigration and falling native birth rates, Europe faces “civilizational erasure”. But the US wants Europe to “remain European” and to “regain its civilizational self-confidence”.

Europe’s support for Ukraine against Russia (i.e., its “unrealistic expectations for the war”) is due to its “anti-democratic” aspects.

A large European majority wants peace, yet that desire is not translated into policy, in large measure because of those governments’ subversion of democratic processes. This is strategically important to the United States precisely because European states cannot reform themselves if they are trapped in political crisis.

Again, what this “reform” consists of is not spelled out, but I suspect the model is fascist Hungary.

American diplomacy should continue to stand up for genuine democracy, freedom of expression, and unapologetic celebrations of European nations’ individual character and history. America encourages its political allies in Europe to promote this revival of spirit, and the growing influence of patriotic European parties indeed gives cause for great optimism. … We want to work with aligned countries that want to restore their former greatness.

But that’s not where NSS-USA sees Europe heading, so it wants to “cultivat[e] resistance to Europe’s current trajectory within European nations”, I suppose this means supporting blood-and-soil European parties like France’s National Rally.

If Europe refuses to defend its white cultural heritage, though, it sounds like the Trump regime wants to cut them loose.

Over the long term, it is more than plausible that within a few decades at the latest, certain NATO members will become majority non-European. As such, it is an open question whether they will view their place in the world, or their alliance with the United States, in the same way as those who signed the NATO charter

I mean, we signed a treaty with white countries. We can’t be expected to honor it if Whites become a minority.

Other than Europe, where we want political change to preserve a native-European racial mix, we care about other countries only as potential business partners. Nothing in the document suggests that Russia is an enemy, a rival, or a threat to anyone in particular. China is a frenemy, a rival we can do business with. I would really worry if I were Taiwan, because this is how NSS-USA views it:

There is, rightly, much focus on Taiwan, partly because of Taiwan’s dominance of semiconductor production, but mostly because Taiwan provides direct access to the Second Island Chain and splits Northeast and Southeast Asia into two distinct theaters

Taiwan is a fellow democracy and a long-standing ally, but who cares? It produces semiconductors and has a strategic location. China would have to cough up some serious bucks to induce us to turn our backs on that.

The Kagan interview. Robert Kagan is a historian of US foreign policy with whom I have often disagreed. Recently he was interviewed by Bill Kristol, who I also differ with on many things. But despite past differences, I’m fascinated by this interview [video, transcript], which takes a view-from-orbit perspective on American foreign policy. It happened before the NSS-USA came out, but anticipates much of it.

Kagan’s view, basically, is that the American-dominated post-World-War-II world order is a pleasant aberration in history, because for 3/4 of a century other potential great powers like Britain, France, Germany, and Japan have been content to live inside the American orbit. The unspoken contract was that America would take the lead in international affairs, the dollar would be the world’s reserve currency, and so on; and in return, the US would guarantee its allies’ security and wouldn’t use its preeminent position to take advantage of them.

Ordinarily, sovereign nations wouldn’t trust each other to keep a deal like that. (One cautionary historical example is the Delian League, an anti-Persia alliance that got coopted into an Athenian Empire.) But this one has held largely because of the faith all the nations had in shared liberal values like democracy and human rights.

Kagan sees that deal unraveling, largely because Trump doesn’t share liberal values and wants to take advantage.

[T]hat bargain has been exploded. And that’s why we are entering a new era, because if these countries, as is now the case, cannot rely on the American security guarantee, and I think the Trump administration has made it very clear that they can’t, that it’s sort of the intention of the Trump administration to make it clear that they can’t really rely on the United States, on the one hand.

While on the other hand, the United States now is using its superior power to demand, what is in effect, tribute from its allies in the form of these high tariffs. And so the United States is taking advantage of its overwhelming power and abusing it with its own allies. I don’t see how the alliance structure can continue under those circumstances. And now all these countries that have relied on the United States for their security are now going to have to go back to the world that existed before this unusual era in which they can only rely on themselves for security. And that has vast implications for regional geopolitics and global geopolitics that I think, again, Americans have not really begun to contemplate.

(Kagan doesn’t mention this, but from my point of view the contract has been slowly eroding for several years, as the US has used the dollar’s central role to finance enormous budget and trade deficits. In essence, the world sends us goods and we send them dollar-denominated bonds that we could devalue at any time. The Fed could, for example, create enough dollars out of nothing to redeem all the bonds.)

Needing to be able to go it alone, without the US, will probably change the nature of those countries and their governments. Kagan gives the example of Japan, which he says came out of World War I with a largely democratic pro-American government. But in the 1920s, America instituted high tariffs and strong barriers to immigration.

[P]olitics in Japan completely shifts, and then you get the Japan that invades Manchuria in 1931.

For now, our NATO allies may cut deals with Trump and pay his tariffs, while grasping that he no longer guarantees their security against, say, Russia. Short-term, they have little choice. But that’s not a stable situation.

Germany having to re-arm to the point where it can actually meet Soviet power means a completely new Germany again. Now, maybe a heavily armed Germany will still be a liberal Germany, that’s possible. But it’s clear that Germany’s neighbors are going to have the same reaction to that level of German power that they’ve always had in the past. If Japan can’t rely on the United States, it’s going to go become a nuclear weapon state. It’s going to build up its capabilities, and tensions between Japan and China are going to increase exponentially. And if there’s one thing Americans have learned over the past century is that when other great powers get into wars, the United States is immediately implicated in that. That’s the great lesson of World War II. And that’s why we created this liberal world order in the first place.

And again, that’s another thing that I think Americans just are not conscious of. A lot of Americans think we created this liberal order to fight the Soviet Union, which was not true. It was created without regard, even without anticipation that the Soviets were going to be the big problem. It was to prevent a return to effectively a multipolar world.

Trump may think the US can just collect its tribute and live happily ever after. But history has never worked that way before. Picture, for example, a re-militarized Germany led by a xenophobic far-right party like the AfD. What could possibly go wrong?

December 8, 2025 – 10:26 am Categories: Articles | Comments (4)

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The Monday Morning Teaser

This week we got a look at the new National Security Strategy. If you’ve been ignoring all the MAGA rhetoric about “heritage Americans” or blood-and-soil nationalism, the new NSS codifies a lot of these ideas into national policy. Namely, immigration of non-European people is framed as a threat to the “spiritual and cultural health” of the United States, and Europe itself faces “civilizational erasure”. So the US should not only clamp down on immigration itself, but back the “patriotic parties” in Europe that want to preserve European whiteness.

Also, the US no longer stands for any particular principles like democracy or human rights. Instead, we want to do business and make money wherever we can, without disturbing “other countries’ differing religions, cultures, and governing systems.” (Except for Europe, where we want to see right-wing parties take power.) And we no longer envision or support a rules-based international order. Instead, we want to go back to the great-power spheres of influence that worked so well until World War I.

The featured post goes into greater detail about the NSS, and quotes at length from an insightful conversation between (I can’t believe I’m saying this) Robert Kagan and Bill Kristol. It should be out around 10 EST.

The weekly summary then as to cover the increasing hot water around Pete Hegseth, yet another partisan ruling by the Supreme Court, a DoJ ad apparently aimed at recruiting bloodthirsty immigration judges, a neurologist’s theory about subtle Covid-related brain damage that is changing social behavior, and a few other things. I’ll try to get it done around noon.

December 8, 2025 – 8:36 am Categories: Morning tease | Comments (2)

Killing People

I don’t think we’re necessarily going to ask for a declaration of war. I think we’re just gonna kill people that are bringing drugs into our country. We’re going to kill them. They’re going to be, like, dead.

– President Donald Trump
Oct 23 (at 58:50 in the video)

This week’s featured post is “Crime in the Cabinet“.

Ongoing stories

  • Trump’s assault on American democracy. Courts continue to push back against Trump. Trump’s spiteful indictments of James Comey and Letitia James got thrown out.
  • Climate change. COP30 was dispiriting. The fossil fuel industry seems to be winning the information war.
  • Gaza. In spite of the “ceasefire”, the death toll keeps rising. It’s now over 70,000.
  • Ukraine. It looks like Marco Rubio has managed to stop the attempt to force Ukraine to surrender to Putin’s demands.

This week’s developments

This week the Ukraine peace negotiations got more confusing

Initially, we heard that the Trump administration had negotiated a 28-point plan to end the Ukraine/Russia War. Trump’s amateur diplomat Steve Witkoff (a real estate mogul) supposedly had worked it out with Putin’s representative Kirill Dmitriev (who is the head of Russia’s sovereign wealth fund).

Ostensibly, this was “the Trump plan”. But the deal looked suspiciously one-sided, and was essentially a reiteration of Putin’s demands: Ukraine would yield all the territory that Russia claims (including territory it has been unable to conquer), Ukraine would limit the size of its army, NATO would agree not to station peacekeeping troops in Ukraine or let Ukraine join the alliance, and a few more points. Russia would yield essentially nothing, beyond making commitments similar to ones it had already broken by invading Crimea in 2014 and attacking the rest of Ukraine in 2022. Western sanctions against Russia would be dropped, opening up lots of business opportunities for men like Witkoff and Trump, if Putin felt inclined to look on them favorably.

Worse, some odd phrasing in the proposal suggested it had been translated from Russian. In other words, Witkoff had received a Russian plan and passed it off as “the Trump plan”, which Trump seemed content to go along with. Trump gave Ukraine until Thanksgiving to respond to the plan, warning that Ukrainian President Zelenskyy “is going to have to approve it” or face an even worse future for his country.

Two major things have happened since. First, Marco Rubio managed to insinuate himself into the process, pull Ukraine and our NATO allies back in with him, and rewrite the plan in a more balanced way that Putin is likely to reject. In other words, Trump’s Secretary of State for now has managed to scuttle “the Trump plan” to force Ukraine’s surrender.

Second, Bloomberg (behind a paywall) released transcripts of phone calls Witkoff had with Dmitriev and Putin’s top foreign policy advisor Yuri Ushakov. The calls raise serious doubts about Witkoff’s true loyalties. (The Foreign Office blogger Michael Weiss refers to Witkoff as “Dim Philby”, a play on the name of the famous Cold War British traitor Kim Philby. The nickname seems to be catching on.) In the transcripts, Witkoff coaches the Russians in how to pitch their proposal to Trump, as if Witkoff’s job were to manipulate Trump for the Russians, rather than the Russians for Trump.

Slate’s Fred Kaplan summarizes:

Trump is left with two choices: to either fire Witkoff, who is not a formally appointed official anyway, or essentially confirm that he is acting as a Russian tool as well. The fact that Trump has decided to send Witkoff to Moscow for further talks in the coming days suggests the latter.

Three sources tell the story in more detail: Marcy Wheeler, Fred Kaplan, and Michael Weiss.

My two conclusions:

  • The 28-point “Trump plan” is dead, at least for now. Ukraine will not be pressured to surrender for at least another week.
  • We’re going to see more of this kind of behind-the-throne maneuvering, as Trump’s cognitive abilities continue to fade. Strong-willed lieutenants like Witkoff, Rubio, J. D. Vance, Stephen Miller et al will keep trying to manipulate Trump’s increasingly simple thought processes to get their own pet projects through, or just do things and hope the details never rise to the level of Trump’s attention.

and someone killed one of the National Guard troops Trump posted to DC

Two members of the West Virginia National Guard were shot near the White House Wednesday. One, Sarah Beckstrom, has died. The other, Andrew Wolfe, is in critical condition. The two were victims of what appears to have been a planned attack. No motive has been identified.

The alleged gunman, identified as Rahmanullah Lakanwal, 29, came to the US in September 2021 under an Operation Allies Welcome program that gave some Afghans who had worked for the US government entry visas to the US. He was granted asylum in April this year, under the Trump administration, Reuters reported. Lakanwal’s ties to the Central Intelligence Agency, which worked alongside US special forces in Afghanistan, were confirmed by the CIA director, John Ratcliffe, to media outlets. The New York Times reported that the shooting suspect had worked for several US government agencies in Afghanistan, including CIA-backed units in the southern province of Kandahar, a stronghold of the Taliban.

Trump, of course, did what he always does: blamed the Biden administration, took no responsibility for his own administration’s role, and cast collective blame on all asylum seekers.

The Trump administration has halted all asylum decisions following the shooting of two National Guard soldiers in Washington DC, the US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) director has said. Joseph Edlow said the pause would be in place “until we can ensure that every alien is vetted and screened to the maximum degree possible”.

That article is an example of “sanewashing”. It makes Trump’s actions sound like a reasonable, if maybe misguided, response. But you get a different impression if you read what Trump actually posted:

Even as we have progressed technologically, Immigration Policy has eroded those gains and living conditions for many. I will permanently pause migration from all Third World Countries to allow the U.S. system to fully recover, terminate all of the millions of Biden illegal admissions, including those signed by Sleepy Joe Biden’s Autopen, and remove anyone who is not a net asset to the United States, or is incapable of loving our Country, end all Federal benefits and subsidies to noncitizens of our Country, denaturalize migrants who undermine domestic tranquility, and deport any Foreign National who is a public charge, security risk, or non-compatible with Western Civilization. These goals will be pursued with the aim of achieving a major reduction in illegal and disruptive populations, including those admitted through an unauthorized and illegal Autopen approval process. Only REVERSE MIGRATION can fully cure this situation. Other than that, HAPPY THANKSGIVING TO ALL, except those that hate, steal, murder, and destroy everything that America stands for — You won’t be here for long!

So:

  • Trump wants us to believe that immigrants (and not billionaires or Trump’s tariffs) are responsible for the dismal current economy and the long-term hollowing out of America’s middle class.
  • In general, even illegal immigrants are not a “disruptive population”. The vast majority keep their heads down, try not to draw attention to themselves, and work hard for very little money.
  • Trump is promoting the Biden-autopen conspiracy theory, which has no evidence to back it up.
  • Terminating Biden’s “illegal admissions” means getting rid of 1.3 million people who came here entirely legally, through programs like temporary protected status for victims of natural disasters.
  • “Denaturalization” is not a thing, unless your path to citizenship was based on fraud, as Melania’s probably was. Naturalized citizens are like native born citizens; you can’t get rid of them by labeling them “non-compatible with Western Civilization” or making vague claims about “undermining domestic tranquility”.

This is all White supremacist rhetoric otherwise unhinged from reality.

Some background: The US fought a war in Afghanistan for more than 20 years, until President Biden finally faced the reality that we were accomplishing nothing and pulled out in 2021. The pullout was chaotic, which only emphasized the need to get out: Presidents Bush, Obama, and Trump had been telling us for 20 years that we were building a viable government with a viable military, but in fact everything collapsed before we could even get our people out of the country.

In the chaos, everyone who had helped the US military or the CIA was in danger. Operation Allies Welcome was designed to get them out of the country before the Taliban could find and kill them. It was followed by Operation Enduring Welcome. About 200,000 Afghans got at least temporary legal status in the US.

Now one of those 200,000 has done something terrible. So of course we should have left them all to the mercy of the Taliban. And refugees from every other country are also suspect — except Whites escaping South Africa.

and Trump continues to lose in court

Not long after last week’s Sift posted, a federal judge threw out the James Comey and Letitia James indictments because Lindsey Halligan had not been lawfully appointed as US attorney for eastern Virginia. Halligan is a former personal attorney of Trump’s and has no previous experience as a prosecutor. She was appointed after the previous US attorney refused to prosecute the Comey case.

The regime may find another way to prosecute James, but the statute of limitations has run out on what Comey is accused of.

Another court just took out a different Trump prosecutor: An appellate court panel upheld a lower court ruling that Alina Habba was not legally appointed as acting US attorney for New Jersey. Every case she has prosecuted since July 1 is now subject to challenge. The issues here are slightly different than in the Halligan situation, but similarly concerns a scheme to keep a Trump-friendly and unqualified US attorney in office without Senate confirmation, beyond the 120-day period allowed for acting appointments.

and you also might be interested in …

The Epstein files issue hasn’t gone away. The Epstein Transparency Act gives the regime until December 19 to release the files. The clock is ticking.

During the shutdown, Democrats were holding out to get ObamaCare subsidies extended, in an effort to avoid premiums skyrocketing on January 1. Republicans said no, but that they’d deal with the problem after the Democrats caved on the shutdown.

Well, Democrats eventually caved, and guess what? Republicans can’t get a proposal together. Trump briefly seemed to be pushing for a plan to extend the subsidies for two years. But that ran into opposition in the House and vanished.

The basic problem is that a sizeable number of Republicans favor a plan they can’t defend in public: Let poor people die.

Kristi Noem’s contempt of court got covered in the featured post. But that wasn’t even the only Noem scandal this week: $220 million of DHS money has gone to an ad firm with close ties to Noem. The money is for image-building ads starring Noem herself.

Under Noem, DHS bypassed the normal competitive bidding process when awarding the contracts — allocating the majority of the money to a mysterious Delaware LLC that was created days before the deal was finalized. The Strategy Group does not appear on public documents about the deal.

My annual dose of humility: The NYT’s 100 Notable Books list for 2025. This year I’ve read three: 1929, Katabasis, and Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza.

In stark contrast to Trump’s apparent concern with drug smuggling, which has caused him to have the US Navy murder 80 or so Venezuelan fishermen — see the featured post — he said this week that he intends to pardon former Honduran President Juan Orlando Hernandez, who is serving a 45-year sentence in US prison for drug trafficking and related offenses.

Who knows what this is about? Maybe Hernandez paid somebody off. Or maybe Trump is just showing loyalty to a fellow criminal president, or his characteristic sympathy for people at the top of a pyramid, no matter how corrupt the pyramid is.

Similarly mystifying: Trump commuted the sentence of convicted fraudster David Gentile from seven years to 12 days. Gentile ran a Ponzi scheme that defrauded more than 10,000 investors. Does Trump just identify with fraudsters? Or is there something more sinister happening?

The War Defense Department is investigating Senator Mark Kelly for his role in an ad reminding members of the armed forces not to obey unlawful orders, which is just what the Uniform Code of Military Justice says.

President Bone Spurs and Secretary Drunkard don’t seem to understand that any story placing them next to decorated-pilot-and-astronaut Kelly works to his benefit, not theirs.

Meanwhile, South Park has its sites on Hegseth in its Thanksgiving episode. The episode ends on a song that obscenely insults Hegseth, then asks “Pete Hegseth, what you gonna do? Your kids will watch this, and their friends will see it too.”

and let’s close with something fishy

No doubt this question has been keeping you up nights: Can an octopus learn to play the piano? The answer is: kinda/sorta, if you apply huge amounts of time and ingenuity to the project.

December 1, 2025 – 12:14 pm Categories: Weekly summaries | Comments (6)

Crime in the Cabinet

Most administrations come and go
without credible evidence of a crime by a cabinet official.
There were two this week alone.

In January of 2017, as Barack Obama was getting ready to hand the presidency over to Donald Trump after eight years in office, the Heritage Foundation’s Hans von Spakovsky pushed back on the “myth” that Obama had presided over a “scandal-free administration”. Von Spakovsky listed six of what he described as “some of the worst scandals of any president in recent decades”.

One — using the IRS to “target political opponents” — was nothing more than a canard that circulated inside the conservative information bubble. (The IRS was skeptical of the tax-exempt status of new political organizations founded to take advantage of the Supreme Court’s Citizens United ruling. Most of the investigated organizations were conservative, but that was due to the flow of money rather than specific targeting of conservative organizations. In the end, nearly all of them were recognized as tax-exempt. More importantly: No link back to the White House was ever established.)

Others — Benghazi, government personnel records getting hacked, losing track of guns allowed into Mexico as part of a smuggling investigation, veterans dying while waiting for appointments at the VA — were screw-ups not rooted in any nefarious intentions.

Only one — the Hillary Clinton email controversy — involved any credible accusation of a crime. That was investigated by the State Department during the first Trump administration, and the report found “no persuasive evidence of systemic, deliberate mishandling of classified information.” No one was ever charged with a crime, much less convicted.

That’s not unusual. Crime in the cabinet is exceedingly rare. In the history of the United States, no cabinet official was convicted of a crime until 1929, when former Interior Secretary Albert Fall was found guilty of taking bribes in the Teapot Dome scandal. Three Nixon cabinet members and his vice president were convicted of crimes, which is one reason why the Nixon administration is remembered for its corruption.

But the Trump administration has a way of wearing down our standards and making us forget that lawlessness high in the executive branch used to be exceptional. For example, Trump officials violate the Hatch Act (banning government officials from using their offices for political activity) just about every day. Such violations went unpunished in the first Trump administration, so hardly anyone notices any more.

Even so, it was striking to hear two independent credible accusations of crimes by Trump cabinet officials in the same week.

  • DHS Secretary Kristi Noem all but confessed to contempt of court yesterday when she admitted she knew a federal judge had ordered a plane carrying detainees to El Salvador to turn around, but she ordered it to continue.
  • Department of War Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth reportedly gave an order to “kill everybody” in an attack on an alleged drug-smuggling boat in the Caribbean. Two survivors clinging to wreckage were then killed in a second attack. Even if the initial attack were legitimate (which it wasn’t), killing defenseless survivors is a war crime.

The second crime is more serious than the first, so let’s start there.

“Kill everybody”. Since September 2, the Trump regime has launched at least 21 attacks against boats on the high seas that it claimed were smuggling drugs, killing at least 83 people. Friday, that story got even worse, when the Washington Post published a report that Defense Secretary Hegseth had given a “kill everybody” order for the first attack. Two people survived the initial attack and were clinging to the wreckage when a second attack was ordered. It blew the survivors to bits.

If true, that incident is a clear war crime attributed to a specific person, Hegseth.

Horrifying as that is, I think it would be a mistake to lose sight of the larger picture: If we frame this wrong, it might seem as if the air campaign against the boats was fine until helpless survivors were targeted. It wasn’t. Whether Hegseth ever said “Kill everybody” or not, under his command the Department of Defense has committed 83 murders.

No operational consideration justifies the attacks. They are not like the drone attacks that have assassinated terrorist leaders, controversial and morally dubious as those might have been. In those cases, the targets might not have stayed in known locations long enough for a strike team to get there. Or the host country might not have allowed our strike team in. Often, the choice was either to send a drone or let the terrorists go on about their business.

That’s not the case here. These boats were in open seas dominated by our Navy. They could have been seized and could not have gotten away. Whatever drugs they might have been carrying would never have reached American consumers. The crews could have been captured alive, and might have given us valuable information about their suppliers or distributors.

So attacking the boats achieved nothing that couldn’t have been achieved without killing people. Instead, the Trump regime chose to kill 83 people.

Remember: Smuggling drugs is not a capital crime. Even if the alleged smugglers had been captured and given due process, they could not have legally been sentenced to death.

It’s worthwhile to put this in a more familiar context. In Clint Eastwood’s Dirty Harry movies, Harry Callahan is a cop who chafes under the legal restrictions that bind him, and that allow criminals to eventually go free. In the first movie, Harry dares a suspect to go for a gun so that he can legally kill him.

But the second movie, Magnum Force, pits Harry against a death squad of rogue cops who start a campaign of assassinations against the city’s underworld kingpins. The squad expects Harry to join them, but rogue assassinations are too much even for him. “A man’s got to know his limitations,” Harry says.

That’s what we’re seeing now: Trump and Hegseth have turned the US Navy into a rogue assassination squad. They see enough evidence to convince themselves boats are smuggling drugs, show that evidence to no one, and kill the alleged smugglers on their own authority.

Even if you’re as tough on crime as Dirty Harry, you shouldn’t approve. A government has got to know its limitations.

The Trump regime gives two justifications: First, the end justifies the means (which is precisely what Dirty Harry’s rogue cops argued). On October 23rd, Trump made the ridiculous claim that each boat blown up saves the lives of 25,000 Americans. (This is the same kind of math that caused Pam Bondi to claim that drug seizures during Trump’s first 100 days had saved 119-258 million lives.) He postulated that if he told the Congress about the operation (not to seek their authorization, which he says he doesn’t need) “I can’t imagine they’d have any problem with it. … What are they going to do, say ‘We don’t want to stop drugs pouring in’?”

Again, those boats could be stopped without blowing them up or killing anybody.

Second, the regime stretches the definition of “war” to cover this operation. The drug cartels, say Hegseth and Trump, are like ISIS or Al Qaeda. This is typical of the way the regime perverts language, so that reminding soldiers of their legal responsibility not to follow unlawful orders is “sedition”, or individuals deciding to cross our border is an “invasion”.

Smuggling has been part of the American economy since before the Revolution, from British tea to Prohibition whiskey to Colombian cocaine. It has never been considered an act of war. Those 83 people on those fishing boats were not soldiers and were not at war with the United States. They’re murder victims.

But just for a moment, grant the claim that these attacks are part of a war. That’s where the Post’s new revelations come in: Once your enemies are disarmed and helpless, it’s a war crime to kill them. If the report is true, Pete Hegseth and those down the chain who carried out his orders are guilty of war crimes.

It appears, at least for the moment, that Republicans in Congress are not going to cover this up.

Republican Sen. Roger Wicker of Mississippi, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, and its top Democrat, Rhode Island Sen. Jack Reed, said in a joint statement late Friday that the committee “will be conducting vigorous oversight to determine the facts related to these circumstances.”

That was followed Saturday with the chairman of the House Armed Services Committee, Republican Rep. Mike Rogers of Alabama, and the ranking Democratic member, Washington Rep. Adam Smith, issuing a joint statement saying the panel was committed to “providing rigorous oversight of the Department of Defense’s military operations in the Caribbean.”

Hegseth denies giving the order and calls the Post’s report “fake news”.

And before I leave this topic, there is one more dot worth connecting: Military judge advocate generals (JAGs) are supposed to vet these legal issues for the armed forces. But Hegseth purged the JAGs back in February, about a month into his term:

Hegseth told reporters Monday that the removals were necessary because he didn’t want [the JAGs] to pose any “roadblocks to orders that are given by a commander in chief.”

The plan from the beginning was to give illegal orders and remove all obstacles to carrying them out.

Kristi Noem’s contempt of court. Remember back in March, when a judge ordered DHS not to deport a bunch of Venezuelans to the CECOT concentration camp in El Salvador, including turning around planes already in the air? And DHS in fact did not turn those planes around, defying the judge’s order?

The judge, James Boasberg, has kept pursuing the question of who is responsible and whether they should be charged with criminal contempt of court. Tuesday, government lawyers answered the first question: DHS Secretary Kristi Noem made the call, after consulting with Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, Principal Associate Deputy Attorney General (now federal appellate judge) Emil Bove, and DHS acting general counsel Joseph Mazzara.

Dean Blundell cuts through the spin and legalese to draw this conclusion: The regime just threw Noem under the bus. Government lawyers say they’ll be happy to answer any further questions in writing, but that “No live testimony is warranted at this time.” In other words: We’ll answer the questions we want to answer with very carefully crafted spin, and we don’t want to give the court or anybody else the ability to frame their own questions or insist on clear answers.

Blundell summarizes:

  • They’re naming Noem now.
  • They’re trying to keep her off the stand.
  • And they’re trying to keep other insiders and whistleblowers from testifying live

Noem responded yesterday in an interview with ABC’s Jonathan Karl:

KARL: So, I have two questions on that. First of all, is that right? Does the — does the buck effectively stop with you on this? Was this your responsibility? And had you known the judge had ordered those planes to be turned around when that order was issued?

NOEM: Yes, I made that decision. And that decision was under my complete authority and following the law and the Constitution and the leadership of this president, who is dedicated to getting dangerous criminal terrorists and gangs and cartels out of our country. And I’m so grateful that we get the opportunity every day to do that and to make decisions that will keep America safe.

KARL: Did you know about — did you know about the judge’s order when you issued your order for the planes to go (ph)?

NOEM: You know, this is an activist judge. And I understand, you know, we’re still in litigation with this against this activist judge who’s continuously tried to stop us from protecting the American people.

We continue to win. His ridiculous claims are not in good standing with the law or the Constitution. We’ll win this one as well. And we comply with all federal orders that are lawful and binding and we will continue to do that.

But I’m proud of the decision that I’ve made. Proud to work for this president each and every day to keep America safe.

So there you have it: It’s up to the regime, and not the courts, to decide what is “lawful and binding”. She disagreed with the judge, so she ignored his order. If that’s not contempt of court, I don’t know what is.

December 1, 2025 – 10:04 am Categories: Articles | Comments (5)

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The Monday Morning Teaser

It’s easy to get worn down by the lawlessness of the Trump regime. You hear that they’ve ignored some established legal principle and think, “Oh yeah. That’s what they do.”

But this week has been special and deserves your attention. Yesterday, DHS Secretary Kristi Noem admitted on ABC that she authorized the plane that flew detainees to El Salvador after a federal judge had ordered it turned around. Her justification: James Boasberg is an “activist judge”, and Noem will decide for herself whether her orders are “lawful and binding”. This single incident is contempt of court on its own, but it points something far broader and more threatening: The regime refuses to recognize that it can be bound by the courts.

Friday, The Washington Post reported that Defense (not War) Secretary Hegseth ordered the Navy to “kill everybody” in its September 2 attack on an alleged drug-smuggling boat in the open ocean. After the first attack, two survivors were clinging to the wreckage. So a second attack was sent to blow them to bits.

In the featured article “Crime in the Cabinet”, I’ll look at these two incidents and put them in the context of US history: Crimes committed by members of the cabinet are very rare. That we learn of two in one week is completely unique. That should be out around 10 EST or so.

The weekly summary is left to cover the confusing back-and-forth of Ukraine peace proposals; the shooting of two National Guard members near the White House, and Trump’s disproportionate response to halt the processing of all asylum applications; the end of the James Comey and Tish James prosecutions; and a few other things, before closing with a piano-playing octopus. I’ll try to get that out by noon or so.

December 1, 2025 – 8:42 am Categories: Morning tease | Comments (1)

Don’t Believe It

At some point, it becomes difficult, if not impossible, to believe almost anything that Defendants represent.

– US District Judge Sara Ellis,
commenting on ICE and Border Patrol testimony
contradicted by their body camera footage

This week’s featured post is “The Vibecession and the AI Bubble“.

Ongoing stories

  • Trump’s assault on American democracy. A judge found that federal agents in Chicago repeatedly instigated violence against protesters, then lied about it in reports that painted the protesters as violent.
  • Climate change. According to Grist, the COP30 conference in Brazil closed with “no new agreements to wind down fossil fuel use or curb deforestation”.
  • Gaza. Ostensibly there’s a ceasefire, but there are still attacks and people still die. The famine conditions have abated but “the UN’s World Food Programme (WFP) reports that a quarter of households in Gaza are eating just one meal daily”.
  • Ukraine. Representatives of Trump and Putin put together a 28-point peace plan, which Trump has given Zelenskyy until Thursday to accept. It comes at a time of internal Ukrainian weakness, and amounts to a demand for surrender. It’s currently being revised in talks with Ukraine and Europe, who were left out of the original formulation.

This week’s developments

This week Trump did a lot to raise your outrage

Maybe it comes from the sting of his defeat on the Epstein Transparency Act, or from worsening dementia limiting his ability to control himself, but Trump has said and done outrageous things recently at a pace that is unusual even for him. It’s hard to know how to cover them. It would be easy to fill the entire Sift with nothing else, and several hour-long news shows I watched on the rechristened MS NOW did precisely that. But I’m torn.

On the one hand, these incidents only reinforce things you already know:

  • Donald Trump is a disgusting human being.
  • He regularly gets away with outrages that would have ended the career of any previous president, or just about any previous American politician. We’re a long way from the era when Obama could spark outrage by wearing a tan suit or putting his feet up on the Resolute Desk.

Meanwhile, substantive things have been happening in foreign affairs, in the economy, in the courts, and so on. Being drawn into Trump’s Crazytown antics removes us from the world of events that have lasting consequences for our lives and for the future of our nation.

On the other hand, ignoring these persistent outrages makes us complicit in normalizing them. American presidents have never acted like this before, and no one should want this kind of behavior to become acceptable.

So here’s my compromise: I’m going to list the three biggest outrages and link to longer accounts of them, because you should know what happened. But I’m also not going to let them take over and drive out all other news.

  • He threatened six Democratic lawmakers with arrest, trial, and death for making a video repeating the standard Defense Department doctrine that soldiers should refuse to carry out unlawful orders. (No one seems to remember the origin story of the right-wing Oath Keepers after President Obama took office: “More specifically, the group’s members, which number in the thousands, pledge to disobey orders they deem unlawful”. Right-wingers considered that position patriotic in 2009.) Trump has since denied that he was making a death threat, but who knows how his more rabid followers might interpret his statements? If somebody actually does shoot at (rather than just threaten) one or more of the Democrats, it will be a textbook case of stochastic terrorism. Notably, one of the Democrats is Arizona’s Senator Mark Kelly, whose wife Gabby Giffords has already survived a shooting.
  • He called a female White House reporter “piggy”. A week ago Friday, Catherine Lucey from Bloomberg was part of a press gaggle on Air Force One. She asked the kind of hard, direct question reporters are supposed to put to presidents: “if there’s nothing incriminating in the [Epstein] files”, why was he blocking their release? Trump pointed to her in a threatening way (see photo above) and said, “Quiet, quiet piggy.” The White House press secretary later defended this response as “frank and honest“.

This wasn’t an action of Trump himself, but falls into the same outrage category: The Coast Guard briefly considered reclassifying swastikas and nooses as “potentially divisive” rather than hate symbols. Public outcry made them walk that back.

Meanwhile, we still haven’t seen the Epstein files. The Epstein Transparency Act gives the Justice Department 30 days to produce the files. Trump says his DoJ will because there’s nothing to hide, but we’ll see what happens.

The Trump-ordered sham investigations into Epstein’s links to prominent Democrats opens the possibility that DoJ will claim it can’t release information related to an ongoing investigation.

It bears repeating that Trump could have ordered the files released at any time and still could. He didn’t need an act of Congress to force his hand. It’s absurd to claim that you support doing something that you could have done a long time ago and chose not to do.

The best people to deal with absurdity are comedians, so here’s The Daily Show’s take on the situation, where Jordan Klepper applies “Occam’s Giant Fucking Machete“. The whole routine is amusing, but if you’re pressed for time skip ahead to about the 12:30 mark.

and Marjorie Taylor Greene

It’s been interesting these last few months watching MTG become estranged from the Trump regime on issues like Medicaid, ObamaCare subsidies, and the Epstein files. In every case, she has taken the path consistent with Trump’s base and the promises he made them, while Trump has done something else. Just before he flipped back to the release-the-files side (sort of), Trump branded MTG as “Marjorie Traitor Greene”, which MTG claimed (believably) resulted in death threats.

Sadly, like Jeff Flake, Adam Kinzinger, and others before her, MTG decided not to stand and fight. Friday night she released a video announcing that she will resign from Congress on January 5 (coincidentally, just after her pension vests).

Her video is worth watching, mostly because of how well she describes the people she claims to represent. There’s some Christian-right stuff in there about abortion and trans rights, but mostly she’s talking about working-class people who have seen their prospects diminish and who have little hope for their children to have a better life. She’s not wrong about that, and Democrats have to figure out how to speak to and for these people.

Two places in the video stand out for other reasons. Around the 6:30 mark, she has just finished outlining all the ways she has fought for Trump and the Trump agenda in Congress before differing with him on a few issues. But then she says:

Loyalty should be a two-way street, and we should be able to vote our conscience and represent our district’s interests, because our job-title is literally “representative”. … Standing up for American women who were raped at 14 years old, trafficked and used by rich powerful men, should not result in me being called a traitor and threatened by the president of the United States, whom I fought for.

Around 9:15, she compares her relationship with Trump to a broken marriage:

I refuse to be a battered wife, hoping it all goes away and gets better. If I am cast aside by the President and the MAGA political machine and replaced by neo-cons, Big Pharma, Big Tech, military-industrial war complex, foreign leaders, and the elite donor class that can never ever relate to real Americans, then many common Americans have been cast aside and replaced as well.

But there was real news about Ukraine

Thursday, Axios published a leaked draft of a 28-point peace plan worked out by representatives of Trump and Putin, without input from either Ukraine or its European allies. The plan is shockingly one-sided. Ukraine gives in to Russia’s demands: limiting the size of its army, rewriting its constitution to outlaw NATO membership, and even surrendering more territory than Russia has conquered. In exchange it gets only nebulous commitments without clear enforcement mechanisms. Timothy Snyder goes through the proposal point-by-point.

Snyder points to something others have noticed: The plan’s curious phrasing suggests that it was translated from Russian. In other words, Trump’s peace plan was really just Trump’s name attached to Putin’s demands. Much of the plan is in the passive voice, like “Ukraine’s sovereignty will be confirmed.” Exactly who is doing this confirming is never specified. Treaties and other agreements are not written like this.

At first it wasn’t clear whether this was a final product, but Trump quickly got behind it and insisted that Ukraine accept it by Thanksgiving. “He’s going to have to approve it,” Trump said of Zelensky, who is politically weak right now because of a corruption scandal in his administration.

Europe pushed back, and Trump fumed. But today it looks like a second draft will happen after consultation with Europe and Ukraine. Probably Russia will reject this, and we’ll be back to square one.

and the AI bubble

That’s covered in the featured post.

and the regime’s bad week in court

Thursday, US District Judge Sara Ellis ordered ICE and Border Patrol thugs to stop brutalizing the people of Chicago. But an appeals court stayed her order, claiming it was too broad. Then she released 233 very damning pages of her findings. Specifically, federal agents and their leader Greg Bovino repeatedly lied, submitting reports that didn’t match what their body cameras recorded.

After reviewing all the evidence submitted to the Court and listening to the testimony elicited at the preliminary injunction hearing, during depositions, and in other court proceedings, the Court finds Defendants’ evidence simply not credible. … Defendants specifically directed the Court to certain videos and timestamps “to aid the Court in its review of those videos.” Presumably, these portions of the videos would be Defendants’ best evidence to demonstrate that agents acted in line with the Constitution, federal laws, and the agencies’ own policies on use of force when engaging with protesters, the press, and religious practitioners. But a review of them shows the opposite—supporting Plaintiffs’ claims and undermining all of Defendants’ claims that their actions toward protesters, the press, and religious practitioners have been, as Bovino has stated, “more than exemplary.”

Quite the opposite, the videos repeatedly show federal agents as the provocateurs, introducing violence into otherwise peaceful protests:

For example, Defendants directed the Court to two videos of agents outside the Broadview facility the evening of September 19, 2025. In those videos, agents stand behind a fence preparing to leave the facility’s gates and disperse what Defendants described as an unruly mob. The scene appears quiet as the gate opens, revealing a line of protesters standing in the street holding signs. Almost immediately and without warning, agents lob flashbang grenades, tear gas, and pepper balls at the protesters, stating, “fuck yea!”, as they do so, and the crowd scatters. This video disproves Defendants’ contentions that protesters were the ones shooting off fireworks, refusing orders, and acting violently so as to justify the agents’ use of force.

Or this:

Defendants also highlighted an October 3, 2025 video, presumably to show that agents driving the streets faced constant danger from cars ramming them on purpose. But instead of leaving this impression, the video … suggests that the agent drove erratically and brake-checked other motorists in an attempt to force accidents that agents could then use as justifications for deploying force.

After listing other examples and alluding to many others, Ellis conclude:

[A]t some point, it becomes difficult, if not impossible, to believe almost anything that Defendants represent. … Overall, after reviewing all the evidence, the Court finds that Defendants’ widespread misrepresentations call into question everything that Defendants say they are doing in their characterization of what is happening at the Broadview facility or out in the streets of the Chicagoland area during law enforcement activities.

Slate’s Mark Joseph Stern quotes Skye Perryman to respond to the objection that none of this matters because the Supreme Court will knuckle under to Trump anyway:

Listen, this is why we’re doing what we’re doing in the district courts. We are fully aware that somewhere down the line we can lose. But this is the place where the fog of war doesn’t enter the room. What enters the room is people telling the truth and the judge making findings. That is the story we tell, and it’s what we can do to hold the line right now. … [I]t’s frustrating that this order has been stayed. In other words, this changes nothing on the ground. But it is important to have the judge who ordered agents to wear bodycams now make findings in which she says: You just lied. And I think that is the value of all this.

Also Thursday, US District Judge Jia Cobb ruled that Trump’s deployment of the National Guard to DC was probably illegal. Her preliminary injunction gives the government until December 11 to get the troops out of DC.

And the prosecution of James Comey continues to be a comedy of errors. Recall: The career prosecutors found no case worth bringing to a grand jury, so Trump fired the US attorney and brought in Lindsey Halligan, his former personal lawyer. She couldn’t get any other lawyers in her office to accompany her, so she went to the grand jury alone. Having never prosecuted a case before, and trying to move quickly before the statute of limitations ran out, she made a botch of it.

Law-fare’s Benjamin Wittes comments:

It is actually hard to keep up with the pace of developments. Multiple times a day, documents land on this docket that contain new inanities, new abominations in the sight of the law, new factual revelations, new reasons to wonder not whether this case will collapse but only how. At the hearing the other day, Judge Michael Nachmanoff seemed to be struggling with exactly this question, asking an attorney for Comey—in effect—which motion he wants the judge to dismiss the case based on.

US District Judge James Boasberg will hold hearings next week to determine whether contempt charges are justified in the case where administration officials refused to turn around a plane deporting detainees to El Salvador.

and you also might be interested in …

One of the week’s great mysteries is why Trump’s Oval Office meeting with NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani was such a love-fest. In the photo above, Trump is wearing the expression that South Park uses when Trump looks at his lover Satan.

The NYT is staying with the Kash Patel abuse-of-government-perks story. There are two pieces of it: use of his government jet for personal travel (something he criticized previous FBI Director Christopher Wray for), and assigning FBI SWAT agents as a protection team for his country-singer girlfriend.

and let’s close with something to be thankful for

I’ve long thought that the Fox News canard of a “war on Christmas” had it backwards: Christmas is the aggressor and is rapidly advancing against all our other holidays. As soon as Halloween was over, Christmas decorations started appearing, and the deluge of Christmas music can’t be far behind.

If you want to try to hold the Thanksgiving line, though, Country Living has a playlist of Thanksgiving songs you can use.

November 24, 2025 – 12:40 pm Categories: Weekly summaries | Comments (10)