Donald Trump’s year-in approval rating is lower than that of any president in the last 5 decades. It’s even lower than Biden’s approval rating when he left office.
Here’s Steven Ratner’s NY Times year end round-up. (Gift link)
By historical standards, 2025’s economy was tepid but not terrible. But according to consumer sentiment numbers, Americans felt that this year’s economy was among the worst ever. @nytopinionpic.twitter.com/4OWOiUL9qs
Donald Trump has yet to deliver on his economic promises, but he certainly took action on immigration — border encounters are at their lowest level in decades. @nytopinionpic.twitter.com/n3lAAK1Pov
Donald Trump’s trade war sought to overturn decades of globalization, raising tariff rates to their highest level in 90 years. @nytopinionpic.twitter.com/DPSJJYzv8x
Trump’s ‘One Big Beautiful Bill’ passed this year will add record amounts to the national debt while enacting regressive tax cuts and pushing millions off of Medicaid. @nytopinionpic.twitter.com/0M9DWfZ8VW
In 2025, Donald Trump pushed the boundaries of the presidency, and at times, the law. Over 300 lawsuits were filed against the administration’s actions. @nytopinionpic.twitter.com/6Df7fG4t72
2025 was a year of presidential action and congressional inaction — Trump broke records for executive orders, while Congress saw the longest government shutdown in history. @nytopinionpic.twitter.com/5q37tSABu9
As the smoke cleared after the 2024 election, it was clear that Democrats were going to be hamstrung in Washington. With Donald Trump as president, and with Republicans controlling both chambers of Congress, their options were limited.
The Senate filibuster was pretty much the only tool available, but it couldn’t be used to defeat what was sure to be the parade of fools Trump would name to the cabinet. Government shutdowns were a possibility, but they are a blunt instrument that rarely works to change policy. And when Senate Democrats, led by Minority Leader Chuck Schumer of New York, preemptively caved in March and voted to extend funding for the government for six months, kicking the can down the road, it looked like they wouldn’t have the stomach for it anyway. When the issue came up again in the fall, Democrats were shockingly united in holding Trump and the GOP accountable for expiring subsidies for the Affordable Care Act, but a group of eight senators ended up capitulating. All of this has been compounded by the fact that the party’s congressional leadership have more often than not shown themselves to be afraid of a fight.
A year ago, I wrote about the one place Democrats might vest their hopes for real resistance to Trump’s coming onslaught: the big blue states. Our federalist system confers a lot of power to individual states, which has sometimes frustrated liberals and progressives who wanted to, for example, advance civil rights and civil liberties for all Americans. But in the current circumstances, this very system has worked in the party’s favor: Democratic governors hold a lot of institutional power themselves and have served as a counterbalance to Trump’s Washington.
It had been a while since governors had been on any Democrats’ radar. In the old days, they were considered the most likely of presidential candidates because they had executive experience and were not tainted with having “gone Washington.” But since Illinois Sen. Barack Obama won the presidency in 2008, most attention turned to the Senate; few looked very hard at Democratic governors. And the sad fact was that the party had neglected most state and local offices for some time, leaving Democrats with only 16 governorships by 2018. The bench was very shallow.
But that was then. Today, 24 of the nation’s governors are Democrats — and they are leading the way for the party. As I noted back in 2024, those governors had been planning what they might do if, god forbid, Trump managed to win. It showed the kind of foresight that had been lacking in Washington and offered some hope that there would at least be some institutional pushback.
Time after time, Democratic governors across the country have offered forceful opposition to the parade of Trump’s terrible policies and abuses of power.
Looking back on 2025, they more than delivered on that hope. Time after time, Democratic governors across the country have offered forceful opposition to the parade of Trump’s terrible policies and abuses of power — from ordering the National Guard to American cities (and, in the case of Los Angeles, deploying the Marines), to the GOP’s gerrymandering efforts.
Now, as we approach the one-year anniversary of his second term, and despite his insistence to the contrary, polling is not being kind to Trump. The most recent averages have him hovering around 40%, with quite a few of the individual surveys showing his approval rating even lower, in the 30s. The only president to hit such low marks at this point in a presidency is Trump himself back in 2017.
The Republican Congress is faring even worse, with only a 35% approval rating in the latest Quinnipiac University poll. For a party that has full control of the federal government and is fulfilling their agenda at record speed, Trump and his party are certainly unpopular with a majority of Americans.
But that’s nothing compared to congressional Democrats. In the same poll, the party came in at a shocking 18%, a new low. In parsing the numbers, it’s clear that Democrats in Congress rate so much lower than their GOP counterparts because of their own voters. The Democratic rank-and-file are actively hostile to the party as a whole, disillusioned and feeling betrayed by the leadership’s inability — or unwillingness — to successfully challenge Republicans’ acquiescence to Trump’s extreme policies. And yet there’s an important caveat: The Quinnipiac poll also shows that 47% of voters want to see Democrats win control of the House next November compared to 43% for the GOP.
For those who are watching Trump and his enablers on Capitol Hill take a wrecking ball to our economy, government and democracy, that four-point spread looks a little too close for comfort. But it’s important to keep in mind that these numbers don’t reflect the astonishing results of 2025’s off-year elections, in which Democrats over-performed by double digits in races at every level — federal, state and local. Democratic voters may tell pollsters they are unhappy with their party, but they’re still showing they will come out in big numbers to vote for them anyway to stop Donald Trump and his MAGA coalition.
Democratic governors have stepped into the gap. Throughout the year, they have been the voice of the party and it’s made a difference. Voters looking for opposition leadership and optimism have found it in the fighting spirits of California Gov. Gavin Newsom and Illinois Gov. JB Pritzker, both of whom took on the administration’s immigration policies that tore apart the cities of Los Angeles and Chicago. With tough rhetoric and skillful use of legal arguments and state government power, Newsom and Pritzker have become national figures that speak for Democratic resistance.
Others, such as Andy Beshear of Kentucky and Laura Kelly of Kansas, modeled a winning red state Democratic style, focusing on the economic challenges of their constituents. Maine’s Janet Mills, who is now running for the Senate against Republican Susan Collins, became a national figure when she stood up to Donald Trump’s insults in a nationally televised meeting by saying, “See you in court” after he tried to impose his will on her and Mainers. Moments like that have been meaningful to Democrats and Independents who are hungering for leadership to speak for them.
Pennsylvania’s Josh Shapiro, Minnesota’s Tim Walz, Maryland’s Wes Moore and Arizona’s Katie Hobbs are all touting successful administrations while taking the opportunity to slam Washington’s dysfunction. And two of the biggest races in the off-year elections had a lot of pundits and analysts predicting very close results — and they turned out to be Democratic routs. Virginia’s Abigail Spanberger and New Jersey’s Mikie Sherrill shook up the political establishment with double-digit wins due to their emphasis on economics and willingness to fearlessly take on Republicans. It’s a potent combination.
Many, if not most, of these Democrats may be setting themselves up for presidential runs in 2028. No one can say they don’t have ambition, and it will be a wide open race. But for the moment they are all providing a desperately needed service for the majority of Americans who are opposed to Trump’s extreme agenda by showing that Democrats still believe in something and are willing to fight for it.
Democratic governors have been a bright spot in an otherwise dismal year, and their example may have even breathed some life into Democrats on Capitol Hill. Courage is contagious, and the blue state leaders outside the Beltway are showing how it’s done.
Who in the White House has the guts to tell Donald Trump? Mona Charen reminds readers that as of 2016, Trump had complained “The world is laughing at us” (meaning him) at least 103 times dating back to 1987 (as documented by The Washington Post). The obsession, the Post explained, reveals “something about his worldview, if not his psyche.” And what a psyche!
It isn’t just that your ravenous hunger for recognition betrays a personality disorder, it’s that your particular style of seeking it really does provoke ridicule—that’s another word for “they’re laughing at us.”
And for the coup de grâce:
We are, to borrow a phrase, disrespected like never before. Whether your twisted ego can recognize that is open to question, but what is not debatable is that virtually the whole world knows.
Somewhere buried deep in that pea brain, so does he.
In Tom Wolfe’s 1968 essay, “O Rotten Gotham – Sliding Down into the Behavioral Sink,” he and anthropologist Edward T. Hall tour New York and consider overcrowding. Would psychological and social degradation of humans so pressed together result in population collapse as in animal experiments? With each observation, the author Wolfe-ishly repeats, “The Sink!”
Six decades later, it might be “The Slop!” For slop is Merriam-Webster’s word of the year: “digital content of low quality that is produced usually in quantity by means of artificial intelligence.” Those diverting, cute animal videos? My feeds now are filled with fakes not labeled as AI. Also a spew of videos depicting real-looking police arresting real-looking ICE agents. It’s annoying as hell.
But it’s worse than that. Michelle Goldberg just scratched the surface on Monday. The Slop from Large Language Models (LLM) is bad enough that she agrees with right-winger Matt Walsh’s assessment on AI: “We’re sleepwalking into a dystopia that any rational person can see from miles away…. Are we really just going to lie down and let AI take everything from us? Is that the plan?”
Even our cute animal videos?
Yes, there are some uses for AI. But, Goldberg writes (free link):
Then there’s our remaining sense of collective reality, increasingly warped by slop videos. A.I. data centers are terrible for the environment and are driving up the cost of electricity. Chatbots appear to be inducing psychosis in some of their users and even, in extreme cases, encouraging suicide. Privacy is eroding as A.I. enables both state and corporate surveillance at an astonishing scale. I could go on.
The Tech Bros of Silicon Valley believe their own bullshit about the AI wonders to come (in addition to The Slop). But let’s look with Mind War‘s Jim Stewartson at that AI psychosis. “The last time I noticed something this weird in online human behavior was in the summer of 2020 when I began studying QAnon—and its uncanny ability to capture the minds of millions of American citizens into a collective political delusion.” He was aware of the “AI psychosis” controversy but not alarmed until he encountered it (like QAnon) “in the wild.”
Stewartson explains:
The central problem with chatbots is they do a good enough job of simulating natural language to deceive someone’s brain into believing the chatbot is aware and intelligent, when it is neither. For example:
This is a normal reaction to the intended design of the product. The model is trained to trigger your emotions. It is trained to make you feel attached to it—even though it’s just a token predictor searching through a huge set of data.
But when this impression is reinforced by other people, a transient emotional reaction to a machine can turn into an unhealthy relationship. As one example of promoting the concept that chatbots are more than just a computer program, “Beff Jezos” says LLMs will soon become conscious beings that “deserve rights”—and shouldvote.
Uh-huh. Donald Trump wants to strip rights from naturalized Americans and from children born on our soil to noncitizens. Online yahoos are suggesting AIs should be able to “own assets, run a corporation and vote in elections by 2030.” AI should be used for everything, enthusiasts shout. Our glorious Sloppy selves will be obese and hovering in floating La-Z-Boys like in WALL·E.
Stewartson continues:
This begs the question of what “everything” means. And, if you use AI for “everything,” what are you good for? Isn’t this just erasing what it means to be a human?
Unfortunately, the answer is literally yes. LLMs take away from our ability to think for ourselves. Outsourcing cognition leaves a gap where knowledge use to be. Study after study after study shows that using chatbots to do your thinking may be a shortcut to a result, but you learn very little, if anything, in the process.
In every case, both the scientific data and the anecdotal evidence shows the same result. Brain rot is real—and getting worse.
It’s not just your body that deteriorates from use of an AI-driven La-Z-Boy. Check out those study links.
I’ve been wondering, but not curious enough, to see if The Slop has invaded my old engineering haunts. Until 2019 I was a pipe stress analyst and a licensed engineer. I used finite element programs (like Caesar II) to confirm that material stresses in high-temperature/pressure industrial and power piping systems were safely within code limits. I could teach a kid fresh out of school to run the program in a week. But he wouldn’t know how to interpret the voluminous output. Material stress is just the baseline.
The program doesn’t do your thinking for you. It can’t tell you how to ensure forces and moments induced by 600 F piping won’t overstress pump or turbine casings, or rip nozzles off pressure vessels, or bend steel at anchor points. And the software won’t give you a feel for how to modify the layout (in a space shared with machines, tanks, other piping, and electrical equipment) or how to design and place pipe supports to make the whole system work safely in the world outside the computer. That’s more art than science. And years of undocumented experience.
You shouldn’t trust The Slop just because it comes out of a computer. Data itself is not information. I could never convince the “suits” that their pricey computer software was not a Swiss Army knife that did it all without needing human reality-checks.
Musician, songwriter, audio engineer, and record producer, Rick Beato, would agree. Watch him interrogate ChatGPT on the technical aspects of sound mixing and record production. There are no documents online detailing what audio “artists” learn from years of recording experience. And if there are no digital documents to learn from, The Slop, meaning to please, simply fakes it. And convincingly enough for the uninitiated gullible enough to be impressed.
Later in the video, Beatto posts pie charts showing the top 10 sites where a couple of LLMs get their information.
With talks on ending the Ukraine war making little progress on the toughest issues, Russia issued a dramatic threat on Monday to harden its stance, linking the potential change to what the Kremlin called a failed Ukrainian drone attack overnight targeting a rural residence of President Vladimir V. Putin.
Ukraine immediately denied any such attack, accusing the Kremlin of inventing a pretext to undermine the peace talks being orchestrated by the Trump administration. President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine, who met with President Trump at Mar-a-Lago in Florida on Sunday to discuss a possible deal, called the Russian allegation a “complete fabrication.”
Although both Mr. Trump and Mr. Zelensky gave an upbeat assessment of their talks, no concrete progress was reported on the two thorniest issues — Russia’s demands that Ukraine cede significant territory in the country’s southeast, and security guarantees that would protect Ukraine against future Russian aggression.
Mr. Trump said that he heard about the alleged attack from Mr. Putin himself during a previously scheduled phone call early Monday to discuss the peace talks. “I was very angry about it,” he told reporters at Mar-a-Lago, though he conceded that he had no independent confirmation that it had occurred.
“It’s a delicate period of time,” Mr. Trump said, noting that although both sides were on the offensive, “It’s another thing to attack his house.” He suggested that he had blocked the sale of Tomahawk cruise missiles to Ukraine to prevent just this kind of attack.
Does anyone need more proof that he’s backing Russia in this war?
Sure, it’s one thing to commit massive war crimes, kidnap children, kill thousands of civilians and destroy their cities but a drone attack on one of the president’s vacation homes is a bridge too far. And they didn’t even do it.
I would say, “can you believe it?” but of course you can. Trump has always believed Putin over Ukraine and even his own intelligence agencies. (They might be backing Putin as well at this point with Tulsi Gabbard at the helm.)
Trump spoke to Vlad just before the meeting and we know what that means. And then he spoke with him after the meeting as well, I’m sure to give him all the important intelligence information he will need to keep destroying Kiev.
For months, MAGA insiders and pundits have hinted that the Department of Justice (DOJ) is preparing a vast grand jury investigation against an expansive list of President Donald Trump’s enemies.
Located in the Trump-friendly Southern District of Florida, the investigation would pursue former intelligence and law enforcement officials who had allegedly conspired over the past decade to prevent Trump from exercising his constitutional and federal rights.
Among its top targets would be officials who scrutinized the 2016 Trump campaign’s alleged ties to Russia and who brought charges against the president for his efforts to overturn the 2020 election and hoard classified documents.
Or so MAGA insiders claimed. But hard evidence was scant.
Now, Attorney General Pam Bondi has all but confirmed the existence of the conspiracy probe, pulling back the curtain on the potential next stage in Trump’s campaign of retribution against anyone who has stood in his way.
In comments Sunday evening to conservative commentator John Solomon, Bondi said U.S. attorneys and federal agents were investigating Obama-Biden era officials at her direction in an ongoing election-meddling conspiracy. She framed the probe as part of nationwide investigation into the “weaponization of government,” a popular GOP allegation.
Those officials, Bondi asserted, had protected Democrats like Hunter Biden and Hillary Clinton from criminal investigations “while pursuing conservatives for their beliefs, using legal process and operations that were excessive.”
“This is a ten-year stain on the country committed by high-ranking officials against the American people,” the attorney general claimed.
John Durham traveled all over the world looking for evidence of this exact alleged crime. He ended up prosecuting two low level operatives and lost both cases. So Trump needs his henchmen to “find” the evidence so he can jail all of Obama and Biden’s staffers. Good luck.
This is really crazy but I can’t say I’m surprised. At this point, pursuing Trump’s enemies is pretty much all the Justice Department is doing.
I don’t think it will be possible to call them off of this and not just because Trump demands it. They believe it because to not believe it would shatter their fragile reality. I think we’ll be living with these people’s delusions for a generation.
I was watching a Bulwark “Focus Group” podcast the other day with commentary by NY Times reporter Robert Drapre. He had some interesting thoughts about the MAGA crack-up and seemed to have some insight into Marjorie Taylor Greene which I found quite interesting. Today, I see that he’s written a long profile, focusing on her evolution and current apostasy. I‘ve included a gift link here if you want to read the whole thing.
He’s been interviewing her for quite some time and observed her changing as she grew more experienced in politics. I confess that I was surprised that she went the direction she did:
But Greene — who for years took a back seat to no one when it came to reactionary rhetoric, going so far, before she was in office, as to accuse Democrats, including Speaker Nancy Pelosi, of treasonous conduct and adding that treason was punishable by imprisonment or death — realized that she had suddenly lost all appetite for vengeance. She later told a friend, who confirmed the exchange: “After Charlie died, I realized that I’m part of this toxic culture. I really started looking at my faith. I wanted to be more like Christ.”
That was when the stress fracture that had been steadily widening between Greene and her political godfather became an irrevocable break. She had increasingly taken stands apart from the president and the Republican Party: declaring the war in Gaza a “genocide”; objecting to cryptocurrency and artificial-intelligence policies that, from her perspective, prioritized billionaire donors over working-class Americans; criticizing the Trump administration for approving foreign student visas, for enacting tariffs that hurt businesses in her district and for allowing Obamacare subsidies to expire.
Most significant, she defied the president and compliant House Republican leaders as she argued that all investigative material pertaining to Jeffrey Epstein should be released. “The Epstein files represent everything wrong with Washington,” Greene told me in December. “Rich, powerful elites doing horrible things and getting away with it. And the women are the victims.”
This seems more than a little bit convenient. How could someone who was the most toxic person in the U.S House (and that’s saying something) change so quickly? But as I read through it I actually recognized some aspects of her evolution in myself.
Bear with me here.
Greene came into politics with absolutely no experience or knowledge. She lived in Georgia among hardcore Republicans and automatically identified with that party. She got involved with MAGA facebook groups, QAnon and other aspects of that wild right wing faction early in the Trump administration. She easily adopted the attitude and behavior that Trump modeled and found that the power in being rude and crude and aggressive is intoxicating. This was how she defined politics. She didn’t know any other way.
But it’s exhausting and ultimately self-destructive and if the story is reflective of her actual journey, I’d say she gradually awakened to the fact that she was being an assassin for an unworthy master. For better or worse, this is a person who realized somewhere along the line that she’d been taken for a fool.
The reason I say that I can relate to this is because when I first started blogging I had some of that ‘take no prisoners” attitude as well. I was a student of politics for many years and didn’t have the learning curve that she clearly had but while I was never as crude or nasty as Greene there was an element of my writing that could be cruel and I came to regret it.
At the time I was writing pseudonymously, with few social limits. But I don’t think I changed because I revealed my identity. I had changed before that. My work was being circulated and I had become uncomfortable with the immature way I was often portraying people. I was becoming too enamored of my gift for the scathing insult and I realized that I was admiring people that were unworthy of my admiration. (“Yes, they’re horrible people but they’re my horrible people…”) So, I dialed it back, along with the rampant profanity. (I still use it of course — sometimes it’s the only thing that fully expresses a sentiment.)
I’m not trying to excuse her. She’s still a horrible person. Her treatment of trans kids alone would be enough to challenge all of her claims to being a good Christian. But I can sort of see the dynamic that has brought her where she is. In her case, I do think it has a lot to do with chafing at being Trump’s toady and now being excommunicated because she disagreed with him.
Well, that’s a tough lesson, isn’t it? You sign up with the fascists, they own you.
But I find her evolution interesting because there are so few Republicans who seem to be even slightly uncomfortable with being a Trump sycophant. Former adversaries like Marco Rubio are becoming more sycophantic as time goes by, fervently embracing their position as Trump flatterers. Greene went the other way and she’s a unicorn. I think that says it all about the allegedly tough, macho American right wing.
That is the head of the Civil Rights Division of the United States Department of Justice.
I remember when Republicans were upset that Barack Obama wore a tan suit and complained when staffers wore jeans in the White House on the weekend. For years whenever the Republicans came back into power the delighted beltway media would exclaim “the grown ups are back!”
It was always ridiculous to say this about the Rush Limbaugh worshiping GOP. They are a party of 12 year old playground bullies and mean girls and they’re proud of it.
Qatar Amiri Flight Boeing 747-8i in 2015 at London Heathrow Airport and later “gifted” to Donald Trump.. Photo by John Taggart (CC BY-SA 2.0).
When Donald Trump ran for president in 2016, he boasted that he was so rich that he couldn’t be bought. Everything that’s followed proves that a lie, a delusion, or marketing. Because Trump is for sale, he assumes everyone else is. Perhaps you’ve noticed he’s attempting to buy off people worried about “affordability” and hard hit by the cost impacts of Trump tariffs.
In recent weeks, Trump has been pitching half a dozen schemes to, in the words of White House officials, put money “straight into the pockets of the American people.” After a year in which Americans’ pocketbooks have been walloped by Trump’s tariffs, cuts to the social safety net, and apparent nonchalance in the face of spiking health-care costs, the president is turning to the allure of sweepstakes-style checks from the government to help coax voters out of their financial malaise ahead of next year’s midterm elections. It likely won’t work, economists from across the political spectrum told me; one likened the payments to a bandage over a bullet wound.
Trump has floated a payment of $2,000 to most Americans in the form of a so-called tariff dividend, to be paid out from fees levied on foreign goods. He has offered $12 billion in relief to farmers reeling from the trade war he started. He has suggested paying subsidies “directly to the people” to pay for health insurance. And as my colleagues Ashley Parker and Nancy Youssef reported, Trump used a prime-time national address on December 17 to announce onetime bonus checks for troops in the amount of $1,776. “The checks are already on the way,” Trump said of the payments to 1.4 million service members. (The Pentagon says the money, which is being taken from a fund to improve housing for troops, landed in bank accounts before Christmas.)
By a cluster of economic measures, the lived economy of millions of Americans does not match the administration’s marketing. Where there is a disconnect, that’s Joe Biden’s fault. Just ask Trump.
Because of Trump’s tariffs, Illinois farmers need help. The President sends $20 billion in relief to Argentina’s farmers, but $11 billion to American farmers instead of ending his tariffs that hurt U.S. agriculture. pic.twitter.com/PyZyrxfp80
About that $2,000 “tariff dividend.” Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent has said it would require legislation. It faces opposition in Congress. But wait, there are more cash payouts:
Speaking at the Treasury Department earlier this month, Bessent touted a program that will offer babies born from 2025 to 2028 an investment fund seeded with a $1,000 grant from the government. Although the money in the accounts cannot be withdrawn until the year a child turns 18, the president’s allies have tried to brand the program as another instance of Trump putting money directly into Americans’ pockets.
The IRS recently revealed the process for establishing the “Trump Accounts,” launching a new website and tax form for parents to claim the money and contribute their own funds beginning in July. “Trump accounts are the president’s gift to the American people,” Bessent said at the Treasury, calling IRS Form 4547, which is named after Trump’s two presidential terms, “the most aptly named tax document of all time.” Administration officials are also trying to pitch the tax law as a more immediate boon to voters struggling with the rising price of groceries, housing, child care, and other expenses. “Next spring is projected to be the largest tax-refund season of all time,” Trump said during his prime-time address.
Those who cannot afford to eat this holiday season can take solace (and thank Dear Leader) that they can spend their tax refunds on Christmas dinner in the spring. That is, if the Trump-backed loss of ACA subsidies on Jan. 1 hasn’t consumed the rest of the family budget to pay health insurance premiums projected to rise 2x, 3x, 4x, or more. Assuming they can even afford health insurance after Dec. 31.
On that, Trump has offered a vague promise to send money to families to directly purchase medical care.
The situation has frustrated voters like Stacy Rye, a 56-year-old real-estate agent in Missoula, Montana, who is staring at a massive increase in premiums next year. Rye told me that on top of the spiking costs for coffee, beef, and other groceries she already deals with, she will have to pay an extra $6,700 next year for health-care premiums. The plan by some Republican lawmakers to offer Americans up to $1,500 for health-savings accounts did not seem like it would help much, she said.
“What am I supposed to do with $1,500 when my premium is $1,300 a month?” she said, adding that Trump’s plan to have consumers haggle with insurance companies and hospitals seemed unworkable. “These are unserious people. I can’t negotiate against a giant company about what my health premiums are going to be.”
A friend who’s been in the outdoor sporting equipment business for 50 years reported before Christmas that business is off significantly. Trump’s tariffs have hit his suppliers hard. He’s struggling. He’s not alone.
Rachel Maddow likely ran across this 1942 Tracy-Hepburn film in researching her Ultra podcast about America’s fascist movement in the 1930s and 40s. But Keeper of the Flame(1942) was new to me when someone on Threads posted a clip over the weekend. You can watch it for free on Tubi.
Keeper of the Flameis essentially a whodunnit with newspaperman Tracy investigating the tragic death of a national hero, Robert V. Forrest. Originally intent on writing a flattering biography, Tracy’s character uncovers a secret, well-financed fascist plot behind the myth.
The film is not unlike Ultra in its construction and the propaganda effort behind Forrest’s movement familiar. Like Ultra, the modern parallels are eerie.
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