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.
The FIFA Peace Prize winner is having trouble? Say it ain’t so…
Trump greets Zelenskyy at Mar-a-Lago and says, "I've settled 8 wars and this is the most difficult one. I thought it would be in the middle of the pack." pic.twitter.com/ma9KTq9xp0
Putin got him on the horn just before the meeting. As usual.
Q:Did Putin agree to a ceasefire to allow a referendum?
Trump: Not a ceasefire. He feels that look,you know, they're fighting and to stop. & then if they have to start again, he doesn't want to be in that position. I understand Putin from that standpointpic.twitter.com/k0rFDbsbJv
Trump: "Russia wants to see Ukraine succeed. It sounds a little strange but President Putin was very generous in his feeling toward Ukraine succeeding, including supplying energy, electricity and other things at very low prices." pic.twitter.com/V0GkJnKICs
This was very big of Putin. He could have caused a nuclear meltdown but opted not to. Big points for him:
Reporter: How about Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant?
Trump: Putin is actually working with Ukraine on getting it open. He's been very good in that sense. He wants to see that open, and he hasn't hit it with missiles, hasn’t hit it with anything. pic.twitter.com/Jo6sPnCjpK
He prefers that Americans are killed at home. But we knew that.
Reporter: Nearly a hundred American citizens died in Ukraine on the battlefield. What's your message to their families? Whose loved ones died fighting?
Trump: Well, look, I mean, the message is so obvious. It's what a shame—they died in a foreign country… pic.twitter.com/TJS6js6H38
There’s more but I haven’t the stomach for it today. It’s a waste of time. Trump and the grifters just want to get their business deals in place and the war is getting in the way. How frustrating for them.
I can’t see the way this ends. Trump is the impediment to ending the war and he insists on being right in the middle of it without having the least understanding of the history or the stakes and his henchmen are all stupid and avaricious. I don’t know how that gets fixed.
Stephen Miller: "What would LA look like without illegal aliens? You would be able to see a doctor in the ER right away, no wait time, no problem. You kids would go to a public school that had more money than they know what to do with. Classrooms would be half the size." pic.twitter.com/3SoLs11tOa
Uhm, no. He’s lying. America is going to suffer mightily from the lack of immigrants. (NYT gift link)
Across the United States, someone is missing.
One year into President Trump’s immigration crackdown, construction firms in Louisiana are scrambling to find carpenters. Hospitals in West Virginia have lost out on doctors and nurses who were planning to come from overseas. A neighborhood soccer league in Memphis cannot field enough teams because immigrant children have stopped showing up.
America is closing its doors to the world, sealing the border, squeezing the legal avenues to entry and sending new arrivals and longtime residents to the exits.
The shortages will be felt most acutely in areas that require “hands on” work — the medical field, child care, food, agriculture. But it won’t just be those manual labor jobs. The article says that half of the people who entered since 2018 have college degrees and they are the kind of people who start businesses and fuel the economy. We are impoverishing ourselves on purpose.
The people who are going to feel this most are families who need child care for their kids and help for their elderly parents, of which there are going to be massive numbers as the baby boomers start to hit that very elderly stage. (Keep in mind that Joe Biden isn’t even a baby boomer. The biggest numbers of them are just starting to hit their late 60s and 70s.) Good luck to American families facing that responsibility over the next couple of decades.
I’ve included a gift link to the whole article because it’s long and comprehensive, going into the history of immigration in the U.S. and how previous curbs both hurt and benefited American workers. If Stephen Miller thinks that the great economic success of the post-war in the country was due to not having a lot of immigration he’s even dumber than he seems. The U.S. was the only big advanced nation left standing and we helped rebuild the world — a very lucrative undertaking.
Anyway, it’s not just the horror of the racism and xenophobia or the twisted idea that diversity is a weakness (not to mention the absurd concept of “Heritage Americans.”) It’s the fact that we have not learned on goddamned thing from our past. It’s just so … stupid.
I’m posting this long-ish excerpt of Robert Reich’s newsletter because it reflects some of my thinking as this year has unfolded:
[S]ometimes a nation needs a nightmare before it can fully awaken to long-simmering crises.
Martin Luther King Jr. mobilized the nation against racial injustice by making sure almost everyone in the United States saw its horrors — on the nightly news, watching peaceful Black people getting clubbed and arrested for exercising their rights. Were it not for that painful national exposure to racist brutality, we wouldn’t have gotten the Civil Rights Act or the Voting Rights Act.
Something similar happened in the first years of the 20th century, when muckraking journalists revealed the monopolies, corruption, and public-be-damned arrogance of the robber barons. Were it not for that painful national exposure, we wouldn’t have gotten the reforms of the Progressive Era.
A similar dynamic is playing out as Americans witness the nightmare of Trump’s neofascism: its mindless cruelty, blatant attempts to silence critics, wanton destruction of much of our government, open racism and misogyny.
Trump has revealed himself in ways his first-term handlers wouldn’t allow — as a sociopath who posts AI cartoons showing himself shitting on millions of Americans who marched against him. A malignant narcissist unable to respond to the tragic killings of Rob and Michele Reiner without making it all about himself. A chronic liar who says prices are dropping when everyone knows they’re rising.
As Americans see all this, outrage has been growing. We are beginning to mobilize — not all of us, of course, but the great majority.
Record numbers of us marched on October 18, No Kings Day. Democratic candidates have won just about every recent special election and mayoral and gubernatorial contest and a remarkable number of down-ballot races in bright red states and cities. MAGA is coming apart. Trump’s polls are tanking. We are organizing and mobilizing with a resolve I have not seen in my lifetime.
America had to come to this point. We couldn’t go on as we were, even under Democratic presidents. For 40 years, a narrow economic elite has been siphoning off ever more wealth and power.
I’m old enough to remember when America had the largest and fastest-growing middle class in the world. We adhered to the basic bargain that if someone worked hard and played by the rules, they’d do better than their parents, and their children would do even better.
I remember when CEOs took home 20 times the pay of their workers, not 300 times. When members of Congress acted in the interests of their constituents rather than being bribed by campaign donations to do the bidding of big corporations and the super-wealthy.
I remember when our biggest domestic challenges were civil rights, women’s rights, and gay rights — not the very survival of democracy and the rule of law.
But over the last 40 years, starting with Reagan, America went off the rails. Deregulation, privatization, free trade, wild gambling by Wall Street, union-busting, monopolization, record levels of inequality, stagnant wages for most, staggering wealth for a few, big money taking over our politics. Corporate profits became more important than good jobs and good wages for all. Stock buybacks and the well-being of investors more important than the common good.
Democratic presidents were better than Republican, to be sure, but the underlying rot worsened. It was undermining the foundations of America.
Trump has precipitated a long-overdue reckoning.
That reckoning has revealed the rot.
He goes on to discuss the failure of all the elite institutions which is profound. It’s pretty clear they are all in the tank. But then, what would we expect after 40 years of making profits the highest form of American achievement and turning corruption into a cost of doing business?
It has been coming for a long time. And the hope is that Trump’s crude overreach has exposed it as nothing else could have done, precipitating a crisis. Sometimes that’s what it takes for real change to take place.
Reich concludes by warning us that the “leaders” (his quotation marks) know they may only have one more year to make their killings unrestrained, so it may get even uglier if that’s possible. But the country has been through worse. We’ll get through it.
Context you rarely hear: global stocks are up about 30% over the past year. U.S. stocks? Around 18%. That means American investors underperformed the world by about 12 percentage points, even while headlines called it a “fantastic year.” pic.twitter.com/RyyixGZjsU
18% is very good. But the idea that we’re the “hottest” country in the world, as Trump loves to say, is just wrong. We were. And then he took over and we lost all the momentum coming out of the pandemic. Recall that in October of 2024, the Economist said we were the envy of the world.
Nearly half of Europeans see Donald Trump as “an enemy of Europe”, rather more rate the risk of war with Russia as high and more than two-thirds believe their country would not be able to defend itself in the event of such a war, a survey has found.
The nine-country poll for the Paris-based European affairs debate platform Le Grand Continent also found that nearly three-quarters of respondents wanted their country to stay in the EU, with almost as many saying leaving the union had harmed the UK.
Jean-Yves Dormagen, a political science professor and founder of the polling agency Cluster17, said: “Europe is not only facing growing risks, it is also undergoing a transformation of its historical, geopolitical and political environment. The overall picture [of the survey] portrays a Europe that is anxious, that is deeply aware of its vulnerabilities and that is struggling to project itself positively into the future.”
The polling found that an average of 48% of people across the nine countries see Trump as an outright foe – ranging from highs of 62% in Belgium and 57% in France to lows of 37% in Croatia and 19% in Poland.
This is just sad:
There was a brief moment after the cold war when we thought that maybe the world wasn’t going to be divided up among friends and enemies going forward. That was probably a pipe dream. Humans seem to be wired for that. But the way we’ve gone under Donald Trump’s two terms is just depressing.
I still think our alliances can be repaired. But this second term is making it so much harder. Who can possibly trust a country that would elect this ignorant miscreant twice? It’s going to take a long time to regain it.
.jpg){kind=link}