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Month: December 2025

Tonight’s A Big Night

Published by digby on December 2, 2025

Tonight’s Tennessee special election is not expected to go to the Democrat. It’s a Trump +22 district. But judging by the Republican panic, they are terrified that the margin is going to be embarrassing enough that the Democratic roll in these elections will be validated again, and in a deep red state. (If the Democrat actually pulls it off it would be an earthquake.) It calls their redistricting scheme into question as well because they have deliberately lowered their margins in a number of districts in order to eliminate Democratic representation. If there really is a blue wave forming that might not work out so well.

As always, Bolts is the place to go to see what we have in store among the states tonight and for the rest of the month:

The 25 Elections to Watch This December

Gramps Napping In His Chair

Published by digby on December 2, 2025

Even a three hour Dear Leader fluffing session couldn’t keep him awake:

Pete Goes Ballistic

Published by digby on December 2, 2025

Trump passed the buck to Hegseth, saying : “As far as the attack is concerned, I still haven’t gotten a lot of information because I rely on Pete. I didn’t know about the second strike. I wasn’t involved in it.”

Pete came out swinging:

Q: So you didn’t see any survivors after that first strike?

HEGSETH: I did not personally see survivors. The thing was on fire. This is called the fog of war. This is what you in the press don’t understand. You sit in your air conditioned offices and plant fake stories in the Washington Post

Hegseth’s avoiding responsibility for the second strike and it’s unclear if Trump is going to stick with him or not. He sat next to him and seemed to support him as he went on and on declaring America’s intention to keep killing and killing “putting them at the bottom of the ocean” because Joe Biden handled them with kid gloves but they are real men with huge swinging egos. And Trump himself said they are going to strike on land because “it’s easier.”

I keep wondering … who’s going to stop them?

That circle jerk cabinet meeting was even worse than usual with Kristi Noem even thanking him for stopping hurricanes this season. I’m not kidding. We are so far down the rabbit hole, friends.

Casual MAGA Chit Chat

Published by digby on December 2, 2025

Sick. Twisted. Bloodthirsty. Freaks.

They have no idea who those people are. We don’t even know that they really are transporting cocaine (that will end up in Europe, not here) and these twisted sociopaths are fantasizing about inflicting mayhem and torture on them. And there’s Mark Halperin nodding along like it’s perfectly normal to sit there while that fascist cretin gets herself all worked up with excitement over inflicting pain and suffering.

And then there’s this lunacy:

That’s just the tip of the iceberg. He posted something like 160 times in rapid succession last night. Seemed to be have a total meltdown.



All The President’s Kingpens

Published by digby on December 2, 2025

Over Thanksgiving weekend, President Donald Trump posted an ominous warning on Truth Social: “To all Airlines, Pilots, Drug Dealers, and Human Traffickers, please consider THE AIRSPACE ABOVE AND SURROUNDING VENEZUELA TO BE CLOSED IN ITS ENTIRETY.” People naturally assumed this might mean that the anticipated direct attack on Venezuela was imminent and braced themselves for the inevitable death and destruction. On Sunday, Trump told the media to not “read anything into it.” That changed again on Monday, when reports emerged that during a phone call he made last week to Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro, Trump advised Maduro he had a week to leave the country.

Meanwhile, the administration’s lethal attacks on alleged drug boats in the Caribbean Sea continue unabated and a new scandal has erupted implicating Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth and others in potential war crimes for allegedly ordering the executions of unarmed survivors of the first attack on Sept. 2. Trump told the media that Hegseth said he never gave the order but that as president, he would not have wanted it â€” suggesting that if proof emerges, Hegseth’s rumored departure from the Pentagon is a near certainty. 

The reason for all this is Trump’s war on what he says are Venezuelan “narco-terrorists” that are attacking the United States under Maduro’s leadership. (The “cartel” he is alleged to be leading is not actually a cartel, but that’s just an inconvenient detail.) During the first Trump administration in 2020, the Justice Department indicted Maduro and 14 others on charges of narco-terrorism, corruption, drug trafficking and other crimes “expressly intending to flood the United States with cocaine in order to undermine the health and wellbeing of our nation.”

Despite that florid language, the indictment against Maduro mostly related to money laundering and corruption. In fact, the cocaine drug trade from Venezuela doesn’t even come to America; it’s directed almost entirely at Europe. (And fentanyl, which the Trump administration is ostensibly targeting with these attacks, is almost exclusively smuggled over land from Mexico.)

Nonetheless, what used to be a metaphorical war on drugs is now a real war, with the U.S. military actually blowing stuff up. Sen. Dave McCormick, R-Penn., compared it to Vietnam on Fox News Sunday, saying “we have a war that’s coming through fentanyl, through opioids, through cocaine. It killed 100,000 Americans last year. That’s twice the number of people that died in eight years of Vietnam — 4,000 Pennsylvanians.” His colleague, Sen. Markwayne Mullin, R-Ok., also evoked Vietnam on CNN with histrionic claims that Venezuela is killing hundreds of thousands of Americans each year. (They might want to rethink that talking point; the Vietnam War didn’t exactly end well.) The message is clear: This country is deadly serious about fighting the drug war. 

How odd then that Donald Trump, the crusading scourge of drug kingpins everywhere, would announce, seemingly out-of-the-blue, that he will pardon Juan Orlando HernĂĄndez, the former president of Honduras, who is currently serving a 45-year sentence in the United States for trafficking more than 500 tons of cocaine into the country. After interfering in yet another Latin American election by promising to shower the country with American largesse if they vote for his chosen right-wing authoritarian leader — or withdrawing all American support if they don’t — Trump dropped the bombshell in the middle of a Truth Social post saying that according to people he greatly respects, HernĂĄndez was treated very harshly and unfairly. The whole case, Trump explained, was nothing but a Joe Biden set-up and that you don’t blame a president just because someone in his country is a drug-runner. 

Trump might have made a phone call to his former personal lawyer, hand-picked deputy attorney general and now federal judge Emil Bove. He was the prosecutor who took down HernĂĄndez’s brother, the former president’s partner-in-crime. Bove stepped down from the Southern District of New York just a month before the Juan Orlando HernĂĄndez indictment was handed down, and he doubtless knew all the details. 

The New York Times reported that the former Honduran president “once boasted that he would ‘stuff the drugs up the gringos’ noses’ [and] accepted a $1 million bribe from El Chapo to allow cocaine shipments to pass through Honduras. A man was killed in prison to protect him.” Among the evidence, there was even a machine gun with HernĂĄndez’s name on it. Contrary to what Trump’s respected friends told him, the prosecution proved HernĂĄndez was a key player in a 20-year scheme to traffic drugs into the United States.

But there were a number of well-paid lobbyists working to get Trump to pardon HernĂĄndez, and one of his most trusted advisers, Roger Stone, recently began boosting the case by talking up what he called “the relatively obscure charter city experiment known as PrĂłspera [that was] founded in 2017 as an experiment in freedom.” Crucially, it was founded in Honduras by an American company and “funded through venture capital from Silicon Valley luminaries like Peter Thiel, Marc Andreessen and Sam Altman.” Stone’s claims that PrĂłspera is a libertarian utopia is not widely held, and Honduras’ current government is hostile to the experiment, which explains why it was so important to persuade Trump to weigh in on the current election. Oh, and there’s also a Bitcoin connection.

Likewise, Bitcoin was involved in Trump’s outrageous pardon of another major drug trafficker: Ross Ulbricht, the owner of Silk Road, a dark web criminal enterprise the president Trump had promised at a crypto conference during the 2024 campaign to free. Uhlbricht was convicted of making more than $200 million, mostly in illegal online sales of cocaine, heroin and fentanyl. But the anti-drug crusading president thought that he, too, had been “treated very unfairly” and deserved a break. (Trump and his entire family are also making billion in the crypto business since he took office so there’s that as well.)

These aren’t the only drug kingpins Trump has pardoned or commuted since he returned to the White House. In fact, the president seems ready to believe that any of them were just victims of deep state persecution as he was, especially if the request comes from celebrities like Kanye West. There are no doubt many people serving excessive sentences for drug crimes in America who are deserving of mercy. But these pardons and commutations from a president who calls for the death penalty for drug dealing are just incoherent. 

In the case of HernĂĄndez, the former Honduran president, it’s actually a bit clearer. Trump told the New York Times, “They gave him 45 years because he was the President of the Country — you could do this to any President.” 

As Will Saletan pointed out at the Bulwark, Trump has made a habit of publicly threatening countries if they don’t let far-right politicians — including Brazil’s Jair Bolsonaro, France’s Marine Le Pen and Israel’s Benjamin Netanyahu â€” off the hook. Donald Trump identifies with them — and he admits it freely. 

So it’s really not much more complicated than this: It’s all about him. It’s always all about him.

Salon

Trump’s K-shaped McOnomy

Published by Tom Sullivan on December 2, 2025

Not-so-happy meals

https://www.brusselstimes.com/1201403/unhappy-meal-gaia-kicks-off-new-campaign-outside-bourse-mcdonalds

Axios reported in late October that despite bead “vibes” about the economy, “Consumers are buying higher-priced drinks, pickup trucks and more — a signal from corporate America that the economy appears to be chugging along just fine.” But who are the consumers out buying higher-priced items and propping up spending?

Best Buy’s CEO Corie Barry told reporters last week that “the top 40% of all U.S. consumers are driving two-thirds of all consumption.“

Axios reports that “… Coca-Cola warned that higher-income consumers might be helping hold the line on spending as lower-income shoppers pull back — a months-long economic trend that could be worsening.”

A Facebook post alerted me to the other side of the story. The Los Angeles Times story from mid-November paints a different story. Here are the leading bullets:

  • McDonald’s prices have risen so high at the iconic fast food chain that traffic from one of its core customer bases, low-income households, has dropped by double digits.
  • The low-income customers at McDonald’s are quickly being replaced by higher-earners, according to company officials.
  • The change demonstrates the pressure facing low-income consumers who are being squeezed by higher housing, clothes and child-care costs.

The Times continues:

McDonald’s executives say the higher costs of restaurant essentials, such as beef and salaries, have pushed food prices up and driven away lower-income customers who are already being squeezed by the rising cost of groceries, clothes, rent and child care.

With prices for everything rising, consumer companies concerned about the pressures on low-income Americans include food, automotive and airline businesses, among others, said analyst Adam Josephson. “The list goes on and on,” he said.

“Happy Meals at McDonald’s are prohibitively expensive for some people, because there’s been so much inflation,” Josephson said.

It’s not just fast food.

A recent earnings report from Delta offers yet another illustration. While Delta’s main cabin revenue fell 5% for the June quarter compared to a year ago, premium ticket sales rose 5%, highlighting the divide between affluent customers and those forced to be more economical.

At hotel chains, luxury brands are holding up better than low budget options. Revenue at brands including Four Seasons, Ritz-Carlton and St. Regis is up 2.9% so far this year, while economy hotels saw a 3.1% decline for the same period, according to industry tracker CoStar.

This is why the “K-shaped” economy is making news. HIgher-income Americans are seeing their incomes and wealth increase while “lower-income households struggling with weaker income gains and steep prices,” the Associated Press reported on Monday:

Growth appears solid, yet hiring is sluggish and the unemployment rate has ticked up. Overall consumer spending is still rising, but Americans are less confident. AI-related data center construction is soaring while factories are laying off workers and home sales are weak. And the stock market still hovers near record highs even as wage growth is slowing.

Donald Trump and Mar-a-Lago billionaires are holding lavish, Great Gatsby-themed costume parties and dining on “beef filet, truffle dauphinoise, pan-seared scallops and a trio of desserts including ‘Trump chocolate cake’” while the peasants seeing “Trump cuts” to their SNAP benefits cannot afford a Happy Meal. That is, when they are not fleeing deportation by masked Trump-Noem-Miller immigration raiders.

The Times adds:

A report released this year by researchers with Joint Center for Housing Studies at Harvard University found that half of all renters, 22.6 million people, were cost-burdened in 2023, meaning they spent more than 30% of their income on housing and utilities, up 3.2 percentage points since 2019 and 9 percentage points since 2001. Twenty-seven percent of renters are severely burdened, spending more than 50% of their income on housing.

As rents have grown, the amount families have left over after paying for housing and utilities has fallen to record lows. In 2023, renters with annual household incomes under $30,000 had a median of just $250 per month in residual income to spend on other needs, an amount that’s fallen 55% since 2001, with the steepest declines since the pandemic, according to the Harvard study.

“This is not an income gap. It is a widening fault line,” posted a social media manager on Facebook:

The McDonald’s warning is not a blip. It is a symptom of a society that has drained its middle class to keep its upper class afloat. It is a sign of a country running on the last reserve tank of its promise. And it is a sign of what happens when generations are told to work harder for less while being blamed for struggling inside a system designed to keep them there.

If the most affordable food in the country is slipping out of reach, the question is no longer whether the economy is in danger. The question is how much longer the center can hold before it gives way entirely.

(h/t LS)

* * * * *

Is this a private fight, or can anyone join?

No King’s One Million Rising movement 
50501 
May Day Strong
Freedom Over Fascism Toolkit
The Resistance Lab
Choose Democracy
Indivisible: A Guide to Democracy on the Brink 
You Have Power
Chop Wood, Carry Water
Thirty lonely but beautiful actions
Attending a Protest Surveillance Self-Defense

Reducing The U.S. To A Laughingstock

Published by Tom Sullivan on December 2, 2025

BREAKING: Trump and Hegseth ‘unserious’

President Donald Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth “are not serious people,” Sen. Mark Kelly, the Arizona Democrat, told “Meet the Press” host Kristen Welker on Sunday. Retired Gen. Barry McCaffrey called Hegseth “an unserious man” on “Morning Joe” on Monday in responding to the meme Hegseth posted, an AI-generated image of Franklin the Turtle, a children’s book character, launching a rocket-propelled grenade against narco-terrorists in boats. (The book’s publisher has condemned Hegseth’s appropriation of Franklin’s name and image.)

This is not really breaking news. Trump is an emotionally stunted man-child, mentally unstable, amoral, deeply insecure, needy, venal, vain and vengeful, pathological liar and con man who has lived his entire life on the edge of the law (and outside it) using his father’s fortune to shield himself, and now the U.S. Supreme Court. All but the last was true before unserious Americans elected Trump president and he delivered that “American carnage” inauguration speech in January 2017 that former President George W. Bush described as “some weird shit.”

With Trump now in serious mental and political decline not one year into a second term, the United States of America looks to the rest of the planet as a deeply unserious country. With his on-again, off-again tariffs, his cabinet-load of cranks, and attempts to sell out Ukraine to Russia, Trump is quadrupling down on unserious.

Daily Beast this morning reports that Trump’s Truth Social account Monday night posted “over 160 times between 7:09 p.m. ET and 11:57 p.m. ET, with most posts shared twice. At one point the president was firing off more than a post a minute.” Many were reposts of others’ content, but Trump included some of his own targeting his usual list of enemies.

What serious world leader does that? What serious CEO does that?

For that matter, what world leader hires a weekend TV host with a drinking problem, a “kill ’em all, let God sort ’em out” ethos, and the immaturity revealed in the image at the top of this post to lead the world’s largest military? Or hires a vaccine crank to run his national health agency? Or men who don’t seem to understand economics to stand before cameras and spew economic inanities on his behalf? Or selects a psychopath as his chief advisor? Or puts a Christian nationalist in charge of dismantling the government he’s charged with leading? Or redecorates the storied Oval Office to look like Liberace’s bedroom?

If one were to conceive a plan for reducing the world’s last superpower and guarantor of world peace to a laughingstock, would it look any different from this Trump administration?

Update: Speaking of unserious.

2nd Update: Edited for clarity “With Trump now in serious mental and political decline….” (h/t DZ)

* * * * *

Is this a private fight, or can anyone join?

No King’s One Million Rising movement 
50501 
May Day Strong
Freedom Over Fascism Toolkit
The Resistance Lab
Choose Democracy
Indivisible: A Guide to Democracy on the Brink 
You Have Power
Chop Wood, Carry Water
Thirty lonely but beautiful actions
Attending a Protest Surveillance Self-Defense

G-Man Cosplay

Published by digby on December 1, 2025

Interesting that this report, via Salon, was leaked to the NY Post. Is Newscorp going rogue?

A damning report from active-duty and retired FBI agents, released on Sunday, said that Director Kash Patel is “in over his head.”

The report from the 24 agents, entitled “A Pulse Check of the First Six Months,” was obtained by the New York Post. It finds that morale is low at the department, described as a “rudderless ship” under Patel. The report found Patel “has neither the breadth of experience nor the bearing an FBI director needs to be successful.”

One source in the report called Patel “very personable and likable,” but blamed him for creating “a culture of mistrust and uncertainty among the ranks.” Another said that leaders at the FBI are “keeping their heads down and are afraid to say anything.”

“They do not want to be terminated from employment,” the source said.

The courage they are showing is so impressive. I feel so safe.

Patel is a clown:

One anecdote from the report claims that when Patel traveled to Utah following the killing of conservative influencer Charlie Kirk, he “refused” to leave his plane without wearing an FBI raid jacket.

FBI agents who “were busy working in the aftermath of the assassination…had to [stop and] ask around to find an FBI raid jacket – a medium-sized one – that would fit FBI Director Kash Patel,” according to the report. When “two velcro patches” were found to be missing from the jacket, two agents removed their own patches and “ran” them over to Patel’s aircraft.

The weirdness of this crew’s obsession with cos-playing never fails to amaze. Normally, the only time you ever see an FBI Director is when he testifies before Congress. That’s it. He doesn’t show up at crimes scenes, very rarely gives a briefing and is simply not a front-facing official. Patel, Hegseth and Noem especially are the most inept buffoons we’ve ever seen in such important powerful jobs and they are everywhere. Of course, you only have to look at their boss to know that the buck stops there.

The Sick Story Everyone’s Whispering About

Published by digby on December 1, 2025

I am quite sure that most of you have not bothered to spend any money following the ongoing Olivia Nuzzi-Ryan Lizza-RFK Jr. saga (neither have I) but if you’re on social media at all you know it’s out there. And it’s almost unfathomably gross. If you do have some curiosity about the whole thing but don’t really understand what’s going on, I recommend this rundown. You won’t be able to get those minutes back but maybe it will at least clear up what the fuss is all about. It’s a stunning indictment of our decadent political and media culture.

I’ll just say this: Bobby Jr’s blow job poem made me want to pour bleach in my eyes. Not because of the blow job itself. But because he forces her to do it, even holding her nose, while calling her “my love.” I think he might be a serial killer.

The Big Bubble

Published by digby on December 1, 2025

Trump literally phoned in a rally today, which Mike Johnson shared on social media. This piece by Jonathan Lemire is the first I’ve seen that really delves into the second term bubble:

[I]t has been many months since Trump hosted a full-on campaign-style rally. He has opted instead to travel abroad, golf at his private clubs, and dine with wealthy friends, business leaders, and major donors. Beyond the rallies, Trump has dramatically scaled back speeches, public events, and domestic travel compared with the first year of his initial term. And that lack of regular voter contact has contributed to a growing fear among Republicans and White House allies: that Trump is too isolated, and has become out of touch with what the public wants from its president.

Every president, of course, deals with being in a bubble, distanced by the demands on his time and the extraordinary security concerns that come with the office. But in his return to the presidency this year, Trump has seldom ventured across the country to anywhere other than his own clubs. He also inhabits something of a news silo, watching far-right cable channels such as One America News Network and Newsmax along with Fox News. Even his social-media consumption has become narrower: Instead of being on the app formerly known as Twitter, where he’d occasionally encounter contrary views, he now posts solely on Truth Social, which he owns and where he is surrounded by sycophants. And his own White House staff, this time largely populated by true believers and yes-men (and a few yes-women), only adds to the echo chamber.

Everyone around Trump, and everything he is seeing on TV and on his phone, is telling him that he’s right. But poll after poll suggests that Americans believe Trump is now getting it wrong and has lost focus on what got him elected.

“People voted for him to lower prices, to bring manufacturing back, to stand up to those taking advantage of them,” a close Trump ally told me on the condition of anonymity so as not to antagonize the president. “They didn’t vote for him to build a damn gilded ballroom. He’s not hearing them.”

He’s not hearing them, perhaps, because he’s not seeing them. I looked at Trump’s travel schedule from the fall of 2017, the first year of his initial term, to compare it with this fall’s, and I was surprised by the drop-off. Back then, he traveled into the country more than a dozen times from September to November to talk with energy workers in North Dakota, rally support in Alabama for a Senate candidate, and explain his agenda directly to his supporters. During that same stretch this year, he barely traveled at all. This fall, he’s ventured beyond the Washington, D.C., metro area; his New Jersey golf club; and Florida, the home of Mar-a-Lago, only five times. Four of those domestic trips were to New York, including three to hang out with rich friends in luxury boxes at sporting events. The other was to attend United Nations meetings, but he stayed only one night, compared with five in 2017. The fifth trip was to Arizona, to attend Charlie Kirk’s memorial service.

Even the one realm where Trump expanded his travel took him away from Americans; this fall, he made three international trips, as opposed to just one eight autumns ago. Some of his most loyal MAGA supporters, such as Laura Loomer and Steven Bannon, urged him to curb the globe-trotting and instead focus on issues at home. Marjorie Taylor Greene said she “would like to see Air Force One parked and staying at home” (she later renounced her support of Trump and announced her resignation from Congress). Trump’s lack of travel across the United States, some allies fear, has knocked his political antenna askew.

In his first term he took a whole “victory tour” of rallies around the country where they had voted for him. It was weird, to say the least. But he always seemed to get sustenance from these events and did calibrate his policies based upon the responses he would get there. He has not done a real “Trump rally” since he was elected this time. You get the sense that even at his smaller, controlled events he’s flagging in energy.

And it’s clear that he’s not well informed by anything much less his base. He famously hates to be briefed and often these days when the media asks questions it’s clear he doesn’t know what they’re talking about. Sometimes he even punts the question to one of his henchmen. I think Lemire is right — he just hears from rich people who have his ear and the trusted circle of sycophantic aides he has around him.

On the other hand, what does he care? He’s 79 years old and he’s living his best life redecorating the White House, pushing the world around, getting revenge on his enemies and making money hand over fist. It’s not like he cares about the country, or even his own family, beyond his primitive belief that what’s good for Donald Trump is good for the USA. He’s just a very powerful, stubborn old man building what he thinks is a legacy and will instead be a monument to failure and destruction.

But he won’t be around long enough to know it. Nixon was 61 when he resigned and he had to live through another 20 years of ignominious infamy. The way Trump’s mind’s going he’ll be in total Lalaland long before he shuffles off his mortal coil anyway.