Month: December 2025

Former US Attorney Joyce Vance has a great piece about the Epstein files that you should read to catch up on the latest. Riddled with redactions and unsurprisingly protective of Trump, the document release on Friday made absolutely no one happy. There was virtually nothing about Trump but they did manage to get a lot of pictures of Bill Clinton out there, most of them out of context and which seem obviously designed to make it appear that he is a pedophile:

Obviously, they were trying to make it look like he was consorting with Michael Jackson and young victims.

But Vance points out something important in all this which should inform the press as the DOJ tries to claim that they have to redact all this stuff because of “ongoing investigations”

Attorney General Pam Bondi told Trump in May that his name showed up in the Epstein Files. That’s unsurprising. The two men’s friendship is public and well known. Nonetheless, Trump campaigned on releasing the files, as though he had nothing to hide. But that changed after Bondi’s revelation. Back in September, CNN reported on the timeline of what followed: “The efforts to downplay Epstein conspiracy theories and previous promises for disclosure really kicked off on May 18, when top FBI officials Kash Patel and Dan Bongino appeared together on Fox News and suddenly said Epstein had indeed died by suicide.” They also point out that, “Elon Musk’s later-deleted claim that Trump wasn’t releasing the Epstein files because he was in them was lodged June 5, after the May briefing,” and “Trump’s recently launched, baseless claims that powerful Democrats ‘made up’ the Epstein files would fit with his tendency to deflect and distract when there’s something he doesn’t want out there.” Suffice it to say, whether it incriminates the president or not, the materials Bondi was referring to remain undisclosed to the public for the most part. On the campaign trail in 2024, when asked about releasing the Epstein Files, Trump responded, “I’d have no problem with it.”

The Epstein Files Transparency Act required the administration to turn over the files, but allowed it to withhold or redact records that could identify victims, including images of child sexual abuse, or documents that are otherwise classified. DOJ routinely declines to release records that could compromise an active federal investigation, and the new law permits that exception as well, although Trump’s social media post/order to Bondi to open a case into Democrats named in the files casts a serious pall over the legitimacy of any claims of that nature.

New York Times reporter Glenn Thrush noted that it took Bondi a mere 217 minutes following Trump’s directive to report that she had opened an investigation into Clinton and other Democrats. But since Trump is not under investigation, records that mention him should be fair game for release. There would be no reason to withhold them. Instead, the Justice Department focused on materials regarding Bill Clinton, who is explicitly part of the investigation Trump demanded that his Attorney General open. Any claim materials are being withheld because of the new investigation are highly suspect.

She is too well-mannered to say that it’s bullshit but it is.

Does this look like it’s protecting survivors? The message says “I have a female for him.”

And get a load of this on Meet the Press today:

Q: “Why was Ghislaine Maxwell moved [to a different prison] just days after you interviewed her?”

Deputy AG Todd Blanche: “That’s a Bureau of Prisons security issue that I will not talk about.”

Q: “Did you have anything to do with it?”

Blanche: “I am responsible for the Bureau of Prisons, so every decision that they make lands on my desk — to the extent it needs to…At the institution she was in, she was suffering numerous, numerous threats.”

So he moved her to a less secure prison? Does that make any sense at all?

Vance quotes a survivor advocate saying:

“The law is clear, the mandate is clear, and the Department of Justice’s failure to comply sends a message that the impunity of powerful individuals who benefited from Epstein’s criminal enterprise is still being prioritized over the pursuit of justice for survivors. To comply with the Epstein Files Transparency Act, the Department of Justice must provide their full reasoning for the redactions. Any meaningful effort toward transparency for survivors demands a far more thorough explanation. We further urge an independent review of redactions to ensure individuals who caused harm and violated the law are not afforded the same protections as those who suffered harm.

How about this?

WELKER: Why was this photo of a desk with a drawer open containing photos of Trump taken down?

BLANCHE: You can see in that photo there are photographs of women. We learned after released it that there were concerns about those women.

WELKER: Are you saying that one or more of those women is a victim of Epstein?

BLANCHE: No, that’s not what I’m saying.

And this:

Pretty gross. I don’t think that redaction was done to protect the girl either.

They are insuring that this thing just keeps going. I guess they figure they can divert attention to Clinton or others but nobody buys that. Epstein and Trump were best buddies and their relationship was based on competing for women (and girls), not money or casual contacts.

This whole thing is an absolute dumpster fire. And the flames are just getting higher.

Happy Hollandaise!

I told you I would document the atrocities…

Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

Happy Hollandaise?

People are pessimistic about everything and for good reason. The economy is just a part of it, and because American discourse is so economically deterministic it’s the way they express their overall negative assessment of our day to day life.

When you ask people how they’re personally doing they mostly say they’re hanging in there with a growing number saying it’s getting much tougher to afford the cost of living. That’s because important items like housing, health care, electricity are all going up and wages have stagnated. And the job market is looking grimmer as well.

But I think there’s a lot more to this. The culture at large just feels sick. People are disturbed by what they’re seeing in their leadership, which now behaves as if it’s on a 6th grade playground (when it isn’t indulging in aberrant, criminal behavior and corruption.) While street crime has gone down significantly we now see images every single day of masked secret police brutalizing people, often women and children, on normal residential streets of America. The president is insane, slapping his name and gold filigree all over everything as if he’s the reincarnation of the King George the Mad King even as we “celebrate” the 250th birthday of the Declaration of Independence. The mainstream media is disintegrating, our social media is a toxic wasteland and rank bigotry is making a major comeback.

America has been through bad times before, and we will probably pull through in the long run. There are still massive reserves of strength, resources, good will and decency. And there’s a fair chance that we’re going through the worst of it right now and will come out the other side sooner rather than later. (By sooner, I mean at the end of this presidential term from hell.)

Gotta keep hope alive.

Happy Hollandaise, everyone.

Thanks again, folks, for your kind generosity. It’s a wonderful affirmation of what we do here and I could not be more grateful.

Former right winger Charlie Sykes wrote in his newsletter today:

You are not alone if your reaction to what’s happening feels something like airsickness, a nausea-inducing conflict between what we know and what we see. The effect is both vertiginous and crazy-making. This isn’t “Trump Derangement Syndrome”. It’s a desperate effort to hang onto reality.¹

I think that describes it well. The daily news seems almost hallucinogenic and you have to constantly ask yourself, “Is this really happening? Am I losing my mind?”

It is really happening. And it’s so outrageous that I honestly wonder how it can get any worse. Are they really going to push this envelope, because if they do we will be going into a darker territory than I think even those of us who always knew it could be bad ever contemplated.

But I’m finding hope in certain places. Obviously, there are the protests and elections which have been huge and decisive. I wrote earlier about James Fallows’ interesting piece about how the non-profit foundations are fighting back. And I think art is finally starting to catch up. In repressive times, it’s often when it flourishes, telling stories and providing images that speak to our reality in ways that reach past the politics and hit a kind of emotional chord that can actually enlighten and change minds.

I started thinking about this when Rob and Michelle Reiner were tragically murdered. The outpouring of grief transcended our divisions (well, except for the monster in the White House) and made people revisit his work, which was nothing if not rooted in all-American values we used to take for granted. It showed that we have something in common, a rare thing these days. (No wonder Trump was so mad.)

Then last night I watched “One Battle After Another”, now streaming on HBO, which I’d seen a few months ago on the big screen. This is the kind of subversive art that truly speaks to our moment, as a surreal take in the mode of Dr. Strangelove. It captures the zeitgeist and the aesthetic of our time in a way I haven’t seen before and I’m hopeful it isn’t the last film or series to capture it.

It’s a dark film but it isn’t depressing and I think it’s because it expresses what Walter Chaw at FCC says in this great review of the film. (Sorry if this is a spoiler for you but I don’t think it is.)

One Battle After Another is a celebration of the power we derive from our diversity, the indomitability of our spirit, and our essential rejection of authoritarianism, which was the driving force behind our revolution against a colonial monarchy and its mad king. It’s not a hagiography for Americans–who can, after all, be messy and violent–but for the idea of a country that used to do things besides try to turn a quick buck. The picture’s ending, like Vineland‘s, is upbeat. Even more upbeat than the book’s, arguably, because it ties a few additional threads and allows for a reunion that’s emotionally resonant. More than upbeat, it’s inspirational: a call to action, an invitation to the dance. Anderson says fighting fascism isn’t civil disobedience, it’s American. There is, in fact, nothing more American, so let’s go.

That’s right. The story of our country is one battle after another.

Let’s go.

If you have the means and the desire to help us keep this one little corner of the resistance going, I’d be most grateful for your support. This next year is going to be a doozy.

Cheers,
digby

Happy Hollandaise!

Brett Stephens calls this bad manners. I call it narcissistic tyranny but the description is correct:

Right now, in every grotesque social media post; in every cabinet meeting devoted, North Korea-like, to adulating him; in every executive-order-signing ceremony intended to make him appear like a Chinese emperor; in every fawning reference to all the peace he’s supposedly brought the world; in every Neronic enlargement of the White House’s East Wing; in every classless dig at his predecessor; in every shady deal his family is striking to enrich itself; in every White House gathering of tech billionaires paying him court (in the literal senses of both “pay” and “court”); in every visiting foreign leader who learns to abase himself to avoid some capricious tariff or other punishment — in all this and more, our standards as a nation are being debased, our manners barbarized.

I wonder if we are ever getting them back — and if so, what will it take. As Trump was unloading on Reiner, James Woods, probably the most outspoken Trump supporter in Hollywood, lovingly remembered Reiner as a “godsend in my life” who saved his acting career when it was at a low point 30 years ago.

“I think Rob Reiner is a great patriot,” Woods said Monday on Fox News. “Do I agree with some of, or many of, his ideas on how that patriotism should be enacted, to celebrate the America that we both love? No. But he doesn’t agree with me either, but he also respects my patriotism.” Woods is right, but how that spirit of mutual respect and good faith can be revived under a man like Trump is a question he and the rest of the president’s supporters might helpfully ask of themselves.

They will not ask themselves that. They voted for what he calls our “petty, hollow, squalid Ogre in Chief and they knew what they were getting. They wanted it. It makes them feel good.

[A]mid all this turmoil, how are all the Donald Trump voters feeling? Has buyer’s remorse set in? Are they starting to wonder whether voting in a convicted felon as president – a man who has declared bankruptcy six times – might not have been the wisest move? Not according to the polls. Rather, the US appears to be a nation of Édith Piafs: they regret rien...

I could cite various academic papers on the politics of resentment; I could surface endless statistics on the subject. But I think the best summation of Trumpism is a quote from a woman called Crystal Minton from back in 2019, which went viral after being included in a New York Times report. Minton lived in a Florida town that had been ravaged by the double whammy of a hurricane and a Trump administration-instigated government shutdown, and was suffering. “I voted for [Trump], and he’s the one who’s doing this,” Minton complained. “I thought he was going to do good things. He’s not hurting the people he needs to be hurting.”

Right now, however, Trump is hurting the sort of people many of his voters seem to be interested in seeing get hurt. He’s an avenging angel, wreaking vengeance on the elite institutions, scapegoats and bogeymen that the Republican party has spent years blaming for the state of the US. He’s cut funding to all the Ivy League universities he’s called “woke” and declared out of touch with American values. He’s gone after transgender people. And he has rounded up immigrants and protesters, just as he promised he would do.

Trump isn’t just doing every vindictive thing he told his supporters he was going to do: he’s trolling his detractors via nasty memes. He’s rubbing salt in their wounds. There has been what Marcus Maloney, a sociology professor at Coventry University in the UK, called a “4Chanification of American politics”. The White House Valentine’s Day post, for example, was a poem: “Roses are red, violets are blue, come here illegally, and we’ll deport you”. Cutesy font appeared above the floating heads of Trump and his border czar, Tom Homan. And a video last month posted by the White House showed a man being deported while Semisonic’s famous lyrics played in the background: “You don’t have to go home, but you can’t stay here.” The cruelty is very much the point.

What are we going to do about that?

I have no idea but we’d better come up with something because that ugly genie is out of the bottle and it’s not going back in with an election of two.

Happy Hollandaise Everyone!

Stephen Miller: "We don't have a Democrat Party anymore…We have a communist party, but it's actually the worst kind of communism imaginable, which is DEI communism. So it's not just 'we're going to redistribute your wealth,' it's 'we're going to import massive number of… pic.twitter.com/M1dvaOqBKp

— Julia 🇺🇸 (@Jules31415) December 20, 2025

Stephen Miller:

“We don’t have a Democrat Party anymore…We have a communist party, but it’s actually the worst kind of communism imaginable, which is DEI communism. So it’s not just ‘we’re going to redistribute your wealth,’ it’s ‘we’re going to import massive number of illiterate refugees and give all your wealth to them.

And we’re going to give their kids the first spot in every college, and we’re going to make sure their kids are the next wave of doctors who are going to butcher you when you’re having a medical emergency’…communism and DEI is LITERALLY a recipe for national death. That is what Democrats are bringing us.”

He’s talking about you. And me. At least half the country.

It would be one thing if he was just another far right kook yammering away at TPUSA. But he’s the Deputy White House Chief of Staff in charge of domestic policy for the U.S Government. And the president he serves is an angry, vengeful,addled old man who nobody can control.

Deep breath…. Three more years.

Oh, and by the way, it isn’t just the Democrats:

And guess where this is heading:

It’s 8 in the morning and I already need a drink.

Happy Hollandaise everyone!

Also, carry plastic bags with you

If you detect mission creep in the White House deportation program enforced by unprofessional, undertrained DHS/ICE agents, you are not imagining things (from Thursday):

As President Donald Trump’s immigration crackdown continues, one community says they’ve felt unfairly targeted. This year, the Navajo Nation said dozens of Native Americans have been questioned or detained by U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents, even though Indigenous people can’t be deported.

You may recognize Native American actress Elaine Miles from her roles in “Northern Exposure,” “The Last of Us,” and “Smoke Signals.” She said ICE agents approached her last month near a bus stop in Redmond, Washington, asking for her ID, and then said it looked fake.

“I kept telling them that it was from a federally recognized tribe in eastern Oregon. It’s a federal ID, and only enrolled members can get those because they kept saying anybody could make them,” Miles said.

Also in November, Leticia Jacobo, an Indigenous woman, was set to be released from an Iowa jail after serving time for a traffic violation. Her aunt, Maria Nunez, said things went downhill when the family tried to pick her up.

“They stated to her that she was to be released at midnight, but was not going to be released because she had an ICE detention hold on her,” Nunez said.

In case you missed the Jacobo story:

BREAKING: ICE agents are questioning and detaining Native Americans.

Leticia Jacobo, an Indigenous woman, was supposed to be released from an Iowa jail after serving time for a traffic violation. Instead, she was stopped at the door.

Jail staff told her she wasn’t being released after all, because ICE had placed a detention hold on her.

She was told she’d be free at midnight. Midnight came and went. Rather than being released, she was treated as if she were undocumented.

She was already dressed in a jumpsuit for deportation.

Leticia is 24 years old. She grew up in Arizona’s Salt River Pima–Maricopa Indian Community. She is Native American. She had her tribal ID with her.

None of that stopped ICE from labeling her an “immigrant.”

Only later did jail staff admit they had made a “mistake,” claiming they confused her with another inmate who had the same last name. After that admission, she was finally released and sent home with her mother.

That explanation should alarm everyone.

This wasn’t a harmless clerical error. It’s the predictable outcome of an enforcement system that increasingly relies on names instead of verified identity.

ICE is not just operating inside jails. Agents are also stopping, questioning, and detaining people during street encounters, often without judicial warrants and with little immediate oversight. In these situations, enforcement frequently depends on name-based database matches, not confirmed identity.

At the same time, federal agencies are sharing large amounts of passenger name data, further expanding the number of ways someone can be flagged, misidentified, or detained.

When enforcement works this way, confusing one person for another isn’t a small mistake, it’s a due process failure. People can be treated as deportable first and sorted out later, if they’re lucky.

And as more of these cases come to light, DHS continues to deny they’re happening at all.

They are lying.

One might guess that DHS Secretary Kristi Noem shot her dog because she misplaced its leash. She could use some for her ICE agents. And a supply of plastic bags to clean up after them.

Happy Hollandaise, everyone.

On the eve of destruction

Late Wednesday evening it seemed a lock that Donald J. Trump’s crazed, prime-time speech would prove fodder for last night’s “Saturday Night Live” cold open. But then beginning Friday morning (and without congressional approval), Trump had workmen add is name atop President Kennedy’s on the John F. Kennedy Memorial Center for the Performing Arts. That evening, his Department of Justice failed to fully release the Epstein files in compliance with the law Trump signed a mere month earlier. Trump complained on Wednesday, as he has for decades, that the world was laughing at us (him). “But they’re not laughing anymore,” he argued. The world had barely recovered from the shock of his Wednesday night rant before Trump gave the world more reason to laugh at us (him).

SNL shifted its focus.

For a man who fears people laughing at him almost more than jail time or losing the media spotlight (or his money), Trump is working overtime at making himself a world-historic laughingstock, and the United States as well.

Reporter Ashley Parker noted during Friday evening’s “Washington Week with The Atlantic” that the “central irony” that “Donald Trump is actually great at willing his own reality.”

Trump cannot convince people that the price of their groceries and rent has gone down. But he is a magician skilled at misdirection whenever he needs to divert public attention from embarrassing news — like his panned speech or the Epstein files non-release. Adding his name to the Kennedy Center accomplished just that. Even SNL’s writers went for it.

“Putin doesn’t name buildings after himself,” said Franklin Foer. “Orban doesn’t name buildings after himself. This is something — you know, the only leaders in the world who do this are in places like Turkmenistan, in Tajikistan. There’s a tin pot dictator quality to what he’s doing and how he’s inflicting his insecurities on the world.”

But moderator Jeffrey Goldberg summed up the Trump presidency as the laughingstock it’s become. The Trump presidency last week took on “a feeling of Boratness to it.”

Somehow, I don’t think MAGA thought they were voting to make their beloved country a character in a cringe comedy.

Happy Hollandaise, everyone.

I rag on the elite institutions in our country all the time because they’ve shown that they are cowards and sellouts. Law firms, universities, corporations etc. have (with some notable exceptions) demonstrated that they have no civic responsibility or even any sophisticated instinct for self-preservation in the face of Trump’s petty and puerile demands. But according to James Fallows there is on sector that is not kow-towing and they are powerful and wealthy in their own right: foundations. He discusses this in the podcast below:

This first podcast is about an under-publicized and perhaps unexpected source of civic strength. These are America’s philanthropic institutions—including the legacies of great wealth accumulated from the Rockefeller or Ford eras onward, which are now applied to challenges in the US and around the world…

Toward the end of making their collective courage less quiet and more contagious, I recently had a podcast discussion with one of the most outspoken of their leaders. This is John Palfrey, now in his seventh year as president of the MacArthur Foundation, based in Chicago.

MacArthur is best known for its “genius” fellowships, but it is active in many other realms, in the US and around the world. Its total assets are just under $10 billion. Before coming to MacArthur, Palfrey had directed the Berkman Center on the Internet and Society at Harvard, been a tenured professor at Harvard Law School, and led Phillips Andover Academy.

This year, Palfrey has been prominent in the philanthropic world for his exhortations that institutions need to “Unite in Advance”—and that they should use their money right now, on an emergency basis, to defend the values that shore up democracy. You can read more about his efforts and messages here, here, here, and here. Those rainy day funds? The rain is pouring down.

Because Palfrey presents his case so clearly, I hope you’ll listen to the full 30-minute podcast discussion, below. His answers are precise, and he clearly extends the lessons from his powerful and privileged sector of American society to the obligations of citizenship for all of us, in emergency times.

As I’ve written many times, the late Jane Goodall had an answer for audiences around the world, especially children, who learned about society’s problems and asked, But what can I do? She would reply: Do what you can. Where you are. When you are able.

John Palfrey closes this discussion on a similar note. In the final two minutes of the recording below, he says that he ends this tumultuous year asking himself, Am I fully doing what is mine to do?

Whatever is in our control, are we doing it, to preserve this American Republic, particularly as we go into our 250th year?

I think there are going to be so many opportunities for every American to stand up and do something that represents the history and the community that we believe in.

And I think only by doing that are we going to be able to restore the fabric of this incredible, incredible American Republic.

It’s really interesting. Give it a listen if you have the chance.

Yep. We’re all in this together. And I think it’s already making and difference and the energy will only grow in the next year.

Happy Hollandaise everyone!