Gingrich: To watch president trump give a 19-minute disciplined speech that covered that many facts was worthy of Ronald Reagan. pic.twitter.com/OgxErMYl7l
It’s true that Ronald Reagan knew how to read a lot of words on a teleprompter. But he didn’t feel the need to speak it at 5X normal speed.
Gingrich: If he can win next year, and I think he will, I think we'll keep the house and the senate. Probably gain seats in both. If that happens, I think he'll be rivaling the top three or four presidents in American history… We're going to pull away from the rest of the planet… pic.twitter.com/l20c08gkGZ
In the same cloud of outrage and optimism that has been wrapped around him all year, Gingrich took to the phones on the afternoon of Election Day still predicting that the President would be made to pay for his sins and that the Republicans would pick up six to 30 seats. But as the hours passed, the numbers just kept getting worse, and by 10 p.m. the Republicans were barely breaking even in the House. Then another seat looked vulnerable. Then seven more. Then, around 10:45, 13 seats. “At that point, we thought we lost the House,” one said later.
When the last returns came in, Gingrich had lost five seats–a setback not matched since 1822. “Well,” said Gingrich when it was all over, “we all misjudged this one.”
The next morning Gingrich held a gripe session by conference call, letting others vent about everything: the Republicans’ utter absence of a message, the Democrats’ lethally effective get-out-the-vote effort. “They were unbelievable,” one of the leaders said to Newt. “They kicked our ass on the ground.” Gingrich was mostly quiet. He listened. “He was in a state of shock,” says one participant.
It was different an hour later during the “listen only” conference call with members. This time Newt talked a lot, but he made no sense. He blamed the election on the unions, on black turnout driven by scare-tactic radio ads, on the fact that the Senate had failed to take up the House’s $80 billion tax cut, and of course on the media for hyping the Monica scandal and blotting out the Republican message. Said one member who listened in: “It was very lame and not credible. He just doesn’t get it. He’s the problem. I don’t see how you get over this bump in the road without getting rid of him.”
They got rid of him.
But sure. Listen to Newt, Republicans! He knows what he’s talking about.
For an administration leading an all-out assault on vaccines, Wednesday night’s primetime address by Donald Trump from the Diplomatic Reception Room of the White House was all about inoculation. After weeks of losing control of the political narrative — of refusing to release economic data, of alternately embracing and rejecting the term “affordability” — the president attempted to project dominance going into the 2026 midterms and tout what he deemed the successes of the Trump economy.
“One year ago our country was dead,” he said in the combative 18-minute speech. “We were absolutely dead. Our country was ready to fail — totally fail. Now we’re the hottest country anywhere in the world, and that’s said by every single leader that I’ve spoken to over the last five months.”
Trump rattled off a number of demonstrably false claims, including that “inflation is stopped” and prices are falling, while laying the blame for everything bad at the feet of Democrats and, you guessed it, former president Joe Biden.
In many ways, Trump is facing what stymied both Biden and Kamala Harris. One of the bigger mistakes both Democratic presidential candidates made during the 2024 election was to under-appreciate how much voters were reeling from the experience of inflation. When it peaked at 9.1% in 2022. Americans hadn’t experienced anything like that in 41 years. Coming as it did on the heels of the Covid-19 pandemic, the soaring prices and supply chain delays felt like a body blow. To make matters worse, the Biden administration tried to spin the country’s rapid recovery — to a much more normal rate of 2.5% — as a big win when the American people were still experiencing sticker shock at the grocery store.
The truth of the matter was that the Biden administration had done an admirable job of engineering what economists call a “soft landing” by taming inflation quickly without driving the economy into recession. An analysis of the final numbers released before the election showed a resilient economy that still faced some challenges but was, overall, on the road to recovery, so much so that the Economist famously featured a cover with the headline “The American Economy: The Envy of the World.”
Still, the economic vibes people felt were a real thing — and trying to gloss over voters’ concerns was a mistake. Now, over a year later, Donald Trump seems intent on making the same error, telling POLITICO’s Dasha Burns in a recent interview that he gives his economic performance in the past year an “A-plus-plus-plus-plus-plus.”
The administration has added the flourish of blame casting by saying that they inherited an economy that was the worst the world has ever seen. In their telling, the country was on its last legs, barely functioning. Only through the masterful economic stewardship of the best leader in history have we managed to turn things around and create the greatest economy the world has ever known.
In truth, the economy has been more or less frozen for the past year. Despite Trump’s claims that he inherited the worst inflation on record, consumer price index numbers were at 3% when he took office and have remained steady for much of the year. New figures released this morning showed a modest cooling to 2.7%. The job market is cooling substantially, with new statistics released this week showing that unemployment stands at 4.6%, the highest number since the 2022 peak. With the exception of the stock market, which is riding the sugar high of the artificial intelligence bubble, the economy has been more or less stagnant.
Despite Trump’s declarations Wednesday night that his tariffs have been the country’s salvation, his erratic actions have made it impossible to anticipate beyond the next week. Consumers are seeing spikes in commodities like beef and coffee, even as the president and his people insist everything is getting cheaper — yet another false claim. Everything seems paralyzed, as if we’re all waiting for the next shoe to drop.
That may be starting to happen. As the Atlantic’s Annie Lowrey reported recently, small businesses are being crushed by the president’s tariffs, and big business has pretty much run through its inventories (and their willingness to bear the burden.) That, coupled with the recently released dismal job numbers, means the state of things is starting to look demonstrably worse.
For Trump, who ran his 2024 campaign on promising to lower prices on “day one” and insisting that tariffs would solve every other problem by “bringing in” trillions of dollars, that’s a lethal problem. He’s never been able to understand that those trillions are paid by Americans, whether it’s American companies or consumers.
The president’s broken pledge explains why so much of the country is now even more upset than they were when Biden was in office. It’s bad enough to feel like you can’t easily make ends meet anymore. It’s worse when someone promises you to your face that they’ll fix that problem, and then tell you they’ve done it when they haven’t. That’s where Trump is today.
Naturally, the president cannot admit any of this is happening. He claims the Democrats have created an “affordability hoax” and falsely insists that polls show him with the highest approval rating ever. In fact, the latest Reuters/Ipsos poll released Tuesday showed that approval of Trump’s handling of the economy slipped from 36% to 33%, while those who said they disapprove increased from 52% to 58%. Last week’s AP/NORC poll had his economic approval rating all the way down to 31%. Once his strength, his handling of the economy is becoming his worst issue — and is undoubtedly the most important one.
According to POLITICO, Trump voters who backed Democrats in New Jersey and Virginia in November’s off-year elections were motivated by their angst over the cost of living. They were apparently not persuaded by Trump’s insistence that we are on the cusp of a new golden age which will manifest itself over the next six months or year.
Susie Wiles, the White House chief of staff who set off a political firestorm this week with a candid profile in Vanity Fair that featured unflattering quotes about Trump, apparently plans to have him out on the campaign trail all next year selling this new snake oil — that, as he insisted in Wednesday’s test-run, manufacturing and mining jobs are coming back, even as they remain in decline.
Vice President JD Vance is also getting in on the act to sell the administration’s economic policies. On Tuesday, he too told a crowd in Pennsylvania that he gives them an “A-plus-plus-plus.” He also spent a lot of time blaming others, first saying with his trademark snarl that “Democrats on affordability is like Charles Manson criticizing violent crime,” and then giving an extended riff about undocumented immigrants causing the housing crisis. When they are deported, he said, there will be more houses for good, real Americans to buy.
The vice president calls that claim “simple economics,” but it’s actually simple-minded drivel. As working-class people without much money or access to the capital needed to buy property, very few undocumented immigrants are able to own homes. They do, however, build a lot of houses, and between Trump’s deportations and tariffs on building materials, the housing crisis is likely going to become even worse, which is directly due to the president’s policies.
Like Trump, Vance is promising that everything’s going to be great in a few months. So is Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, who claims that “real affordability relief” is coming soon and it will be a “bountiful” 2026.
It all sounds just terrific. But coming from the party who won a year ago promising they would fix everything immediately, the promises ring just a little bit hollow.
At this point I have to assume that any Republican lawmaker who has the least bit of concern about winning in next November’s midterm elections — if they haven’t already announced their retirement — would love to be able to tell Trump, Vance, Bessent and others to stay home. Every time they open their mouths about the economy, their approval ratings go down. There is no way that these messengers can possibly be helpful to the GOP cause — and Trump’s primetime address was no exception.
For lack of anything pithier and more timely, I created a sign for yesterday’s rush-hour preach: “REMEMBER DECENCY? | YEAH, ME TOO.” (It was an oblique reference to the fallout from Donald Trump’s post on Rob Reiner’s murder.) “I do!” one woman shouted out her window. My most joyful responses seem to come from women.
Policy advocacy signs are too easily dismissed. “Fund Public Education,” “Defend Social Security,” and such, declare what policies the protester advocates and directs others to support as well. They’re forgotten in seconds. I prefer to ask commuters to think instead. If they have to ask, “What’s that about?’ then mission accomplished. Rather than tell them what I think, messages like “ARE YOUR GROCERIES CHEAPER?” invite them to engage the question. “YOUR LIFE SHOULDN’T BE THIS HARD” asks them to consider why and what might be done.
I’m thinking of this as highway deep canvassing. I don’t knock people’s doors. Their car doors come to me, week after week. We’re building a trust relationship over time in a world where it’s broken down.
Jo Carducci (JoJoFromJerz) ponders the wearing down of the spirit we’ve suffered. Post-Biden, she’s thinking about decency too:
We had a four year decency vacation. A real one. A stretch where the presidency wasn’t a daily exercise in humiliation, where moral rot wasn’t the organizing principle of the news cycle, where the person occupying the most symbolically powerful office in the country didn’t wake up every morning spoiling for a fight. Four years where restraint wasn’t remarkable, where empathy wasn’t radical, where leadership looked like adulthood. And then we were dropped right back into it, like the floor vanished beneath our feet and muscle memory took over before our minds could catch up.
What still stuns me is that even now, after everything, people still find themselves thinking there’s no way he’s that cruel, no way he’s that broken, no way he’d go that far, as if nearly a decade of evidence hasn’t already answered the question, as if we haven’t already learned, over and over, that his capacity for moral depravity has no bottom.
She recounts what a godawful excuse for a human Donald Trump is and how his followers excuse it. Then Jo segues into how Reiner’s work “was never about dominance, or conquest, or spectacle, or the hollow gratification of winning. It was about connection, about finding ourselves not as we wish we were, but as we actually are, messy and contradictory, tender and ridiculous, earnest and unsure, and locating dignity there without apology.”
I felt joyful yesterday asking commuters to remember what decency feels like with a sign that had only the faintest political angle to it. They had to make the connection. The guy who spun his finger at the side of his head in a “You’re a lunatic” sign just made me smile. For 75 minutes I felt like a character in one of Reiner’s movies.
‘Tis the season for the murderous Hans Gruber to steal $640 million in bearer bonds from the Nakatomi Corporation under the guise of being an international terrorist with an ideological agenda. Just in time for Christmas, the money-grubbing Gruber in the Oval Office is preparing for war with Venezuela under the guise of stopping illegal drug exports.
Criminal, murderous, and far less intelligent than Hans, the president of the United States Wednesday night delivered a jaw-dropping, ideological speech most notable for the red-alert pace of it. I haven’t spoken that fast since my first grade-school book report.
“Eleven months ago, I inherited a mess, and I’m fixing it,” Trump began. Nevertheless, whatever economic stress you feel, whatever grocery store sticker shock you experience, he didn’t do it, nobody saw him do it, you can’t prove anything.
America under Joe Biden, was “laughed at from all over the world. But they’re not laughing anymore,” Trump said, reprising one of his 40-year-old greatest-hit complaints. The world in fact “alternates between laughing and crying. Neither in a good way,” responded Ron Filipkowski.
“At times he seemed to be yelling,” reports The New York Times, “almost as if he didn’t believe he had to take the time to convince his audience of how well his first 11 months had gone.” The speech “included a long list of exaggerations and misleading statements” and no mention of consumers’ affordability concerns Trump has described as a Democratic “con job.”
Nor was there any mention by the “peace president” of his “armada” that’s “completely surrounded” Venezuela in preparation for the kind of “stupid war” Trump regularly condemns.
Mr. Trump argued he cut drug prices by 400, 500 or 600 percent, all mathematical impossibilities. He claimed that inflation had dropped significantly since he became president, without mentioning that in September, the last month for which the government has numbers, it had returned to 3 percent, exactly where it was on Mr. Biden’s last weeks in office. He argued that gasoline was now under $2.50 a gallon in much of the country; his own department of energy reports it was $2.90. And he claimed there were states where gas was $1.99; in fact, no state average gas price was that low, AAA reports.
The Associated Press calls the 18-minute speech by the president “politically charged.” Amid tanking approval ratings, Donald Trump sought “to pin the blame for economic challenges on Democrats while announcing he is sending a $1,776 bonus check to U.S. troops for Christmas.”
The check amount is a nod to next year’s 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. Per The Hill, “It wasn’t immediately clear what the source of funding would be, nor under what legal authority the payments could be made.” Maybe stolen bearer bonds?
But Trump’s frantic pace stole the show (NBC News):
He spoke at a faster clip than usual and for the most part appeared to stick to the prepared text. He rattled off the price of eggs, Thanksgiving turkeys and airline ticketsto amplify his argument that costs are dropping on his watch and to persuade the nation that former President Joe Biden left behind “a mess” that will take time and effort to fix.
On that score, voters need some convincing. A wave of recent polls has shown that Americans are distressed by the cost of living and unhappy with Trump’s efforts to steer the country toward prosperity.
It was a Gish gallop of lies that CNN’s Ana Navarro described as the “wah, wah, wah” teacher voice from Charlie Brown cartoons. CNN fact checker Daniel Dale, no stranger to rapid-fire debunking, had a go at Trump’s fictions and too little airtime to touch on them all. Here’s more.
BREAKING: CNN’s Daniel Dale fact checks the most outlandish lies in Trump’s speech. There’s so much that Trump yelled that wasn’t true that Dale can barely get through it all. Make sure everyone sees this and gets the facts. pic.twitter.com/vbqRIJ73pT
— Trump Lie Tracker (Commentary Account) (@MAGALieTracker) December 18, 2025
Trisha Hope, a self-described January 6 activist from Texas, tweets:
Trump is speaking so fast he seems panicked, I've never seen him like this, and I have attended 42 of his rallies.
— Trisha Hope – National Delegate-TX (@JustTheTweets17) December 18, 2025
Tom Nichols of The Atlantic saw it too, writing, “Americans saw a president drenched in panic as he tried to bully an entire nation into admitting he’s doing a great job.”
Trump is not falling from the 30th floor just yet, but we got a preview last night, and Christmas Eve is less than a week away.
“Getting land, oil rights, whatever we had. they took it away…We want it back. They took our oil rights. We had a lot of oil there. They threw our companies out. And we want it back.” pic.twitter.com/2G8oIC8HS5
That oil belongs to the Venezuelan people. It is their oil and their land, not ours. Trump is declaring war, using Vladimir Putin’s rationale for invading Ukraine.
Apparently this bellicose rhetoric is in reference to the nationalizing of the oil fields under Hugo Chavez. How this translates to them “taking our land and our oil” I don’t get. In fact, Chevron is still operating in Venezuela.
I suspect this is just a way to convince Trump to start killing lots of Latinos to give Miller a big thrill up the leg. That’s what he’s always been after.
The Trump administration is asking U.S. oil companies if they’re interested in returning to Venezuela once leader Nicolás Maduro is gone, three people familiar with the discussions told POLITICO.
And so far, the answer is a hard “no.”
The administration’s outreach to the industry, previously unreported, is the latest sign the White House is dreaming of a post-Maduro future for Venezuela — and how the world’s oil markets are both helping and hindering that goal.
The markets, glutted with supply and with prices at nearly five-year lows, are giving President Donald Trump an unusually free hand to tighten military pressure on the South American OPEC member, much the way they largely shrugged off U.S. and Israeli missile strikes on Iran in June. But those prices are also way too low to entice companies to take the risk of pouring huge investments into the crumbling Venezuelan oil facilities that former strongman Hugo Chávez seized decades ago, industry officials and analysts said.
The U.S. benchmark oil price was around $56 a barrel Wednesday afternoon, the lowest since January 2021. That means Trump has only limited reason to worry that an attack on Venezuela would send gasoline prices spiraling upward — but it also means U.S. oil companies have better investment options elsewhere.
It’s likely that the oil companies don’t see any good reason to try to do business in a country that’s going to be sabotaging its efforts at every turn. They understand even if Trump and his henchmen don’t that people are unlikely to be thrilled that the U.S. has invaded their country, talking about taking their oil and land and killing their people. It tends to be upsetting. .
Chevron spokesperson Bill Turenne directed all questions about the security situation in Venezuela to the appropriate authorities in the U.S. government. Chevron has been the sole major oil company to continue working in Venezuela, operating under a special license to produce oil in the country and export it to the United States.
“Chevron has operated in Venezuela for over a century, and we believe our presence continues to be a stabilizing force for the local economy, the region and U.S. energy security,” Turenne said in a statement. “Chevron’s operations in Venezuela continue in full compliance with laws and regulations applicable to its business, as well as the sanctions frameworks provided for by the U.S. government. Our top priority is the safety of our personnel, the communities in which we operate, the environment and the integrity of our joint venture assets.”
We’ll soon see whether he has the brass to actually do this. I suspect he will. It’s a classic wag the dog scenario in any case and he’s half out of his mind. Stay tuned.
Just a quick note today to say thanks once again for your generous support. It is truly a Christmas miracle and I am very grateful.
I want to give a shout out today to some of the podcasters and radio hosts whose shows I’ve had the privilege of contributing to all year (in some cases for many years.) I’m absolutely terrible about promoting this work and it’s very unfair to these great political analysts who have been kind enough to have me on.
For many years I’ve been appearing with Sam Seder on Majority Report and, back in the day, Ring of Fire. I come on casual Fridays once a month or so where we have a free wheeling take on the current atrocities and (and rare victories.) We’ve known each other a long time and remember where a lot of the political bodies are buried so it’s often an interesting conversation. I’ll be on this Friday to wrap up the year and I have no doubt it will be fun.
Likewise, I do The Bradcast with my fellow Angelenos Brad Friedman and Desi Doyen at least once a month and often more depending on the political crisis of the day. (There are a lot of them lately.) This past year I’ve been teaming up with my fellow OG blogger driftglass of the Professional Left Podcast for some good humor and analysis with Brad and Desi and it’s always a delight. We’re doing an hour on Thursday. (Check that link for ways to listen.)
I also appear with my old pal Nicole Sandler with some frequency. The two of us basically have a fabulous hour of political chit chat often just expressing our astonishment and how insane everything has become. I always enjoy it.
John Fugelsang at Sirius XM Progress invites me on for some late night chatter from time to time and it’s always a joy to talk to him. His show is one of my favorites.
Finally, I appear at least once a week with my good friend Michaelangelo Signorelli at Sirius XM Progress. He is one of the great mensches of the progressive left and it’s an honor to be one of his frequent guests. We also get together with his fellow Sirius XM Progress host Joe Sudbay, another class act, for a Friday afternoon roundup of everything that’s gone down in the past month. We all agree that it actually serves as a form of necessary therapy to compare notes to make sure we aren’t losing our minds. I’ll be on this Friday at 5est for our last session of the year. I can’t wait.
There are some others who call up from time to time and I’m almost always willing to talk to anyone who isn’t a right wing crank. (I’m not very good at that — I get too emotional.) I
Thanks to all of these wonderful friends for being so generous and promoting my work. I suspect many of my newer readers each year find me that way. And I promise to be a better person in 2026 and promote my appearances and their work in general. My bad for failing to do more of that.
If you’d like to leave a little something in the Christmas stocking, you know what to do. Thanks again for supporting what we do and being awake and aware of everything we need to do to try to salvage our democracy.
Were there moments that you missed? Anything that happened that’s on the cutting room floor?
I don’t think there’s anything I missed that I wish I’d gotten. I’ll give you a little anecdote: Stephen Miller was perhaps the most concerned about the portrait session. He asked me, “Should I smile or not smile?” and I said, “How would you want to be portrayed?” We agreed that we would do a bit of both. And then when we were finished, he comes up to metoshakemy hand and say goodbye.
And he says to me, “You know, you have a lot of power in the discretion you use to be kind to people.” And I looked at him and I said, “You know, you do, too.”
The new Quinnipiac Poll says that voters really hate the Democratic Party and think they’re worse than the Republicans on the economy and immigration but better on protecting democracy and health care. It’s hard to believe they’ve won all those races in the off-year elections. However, they really don’t like Trump and I suspect that’s the motivating force. They want to create some kind of block on his agenda which is extremely unpopular.
Here are some highlights:
POWER OF THE PRESIDENCY
When it comes to using the power of the presidency, 54 percent of voters think Donald Trump is going too far, 37 percent think he is handling it about right, and 7 percent think Trump isn’t going far enough in using the power of the presidency.
“Is the often described ‘most powerful person in the world’ wielding too much power? More than half of Americans believe President Trump has crossed that line,”added Malloy.
TRUMP JOB APPROVALS
Forty percent of voters approve of the way Donald Trump is handling his job as president, while 54 percent disapprove, unchanged from Quinnipiac University’s October 22 poll.
Voters were asked about Trump’s handling of eight issues:
the military: 46 percent approve, while 51 percent disapprove;
immigration issues: 44 percent approve, while 54 percent disapprove;
deportations: 42 percent approve, while 55 percent disapprove;
foreign policy: 41 percent approve, while 54 percent disapprove;
trade: 40 percent approve, while 55 percent disapprove;
the economy: 40 percent approve, while 57 percent disapprove;
the Russia – Ukraine war: 35 percent approve, while 55 percent disapprove;
health care: 34 percent approve, while 59 percent disapprove.
THE ECONOMY
Thirty-four percent of voters describe the state of the nation’s economy these days as either excellent (3 percent) or good (31 percent), while 65 percent describe it as either not so good (35 percent) or poor (30 percent), which is similar to Quinnipiac University’s September 24 poll.
Nearly half of voters (48 percent) think the nation’s economy is getting worse, 30 percent think it’s getting better, and 21 percent think it’s staying about the same.
BIDEN VS. TRUMP: THE ECONOMY
Asked who they think is more responsible for the current state of the economy: Joe Biden or Donald Trump, 57 percent of voters say Trump, 34 percent say Biden and 10 percent did not offer an opinion.
IMMIGRATION
A majority of voters (55 percent) think the Trump administration is being too harsh in its treatment of undocumented immigrants in the United States, 36 percent think the Trump administration is handling this about right, and 6 percent think the Trump administration is being too lenient in its treatment of undocumented immigrants in the United States.
Fifty-seven percent of voters say they would prefer giving most undocumented immigrants in the United States a pathway to legal status, while 35 percent say they would prefer deporting most undocumented immigrants in the United States.
BIRTHRIGHT CITIZENSHIP
Seven out of 10 voters (70 percent) think the Supreme Court should keep the 1898 ruling in place that under the U.S. Constitution anyone born in the United States is a U.S. citizen, regardless of their parents’ citizenship, while 24 percent think the Supreme Court should reverse the ruling.
TRUMP ADMINISTRATION OFFICIALS
Job approval ratings for four Trump administration officials:
Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr.: 39 percent approve, 53 percent disapprove, with 8 percent not offering an opinion;
Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth: 38 percent approve, 49 percent disapprove, with 14 percent not offering an opinion;
Director of the FBI Kash Patel: 35 percent approve, 51 percent disapprove, with 14 percent not offering an opinion;
United States Attorney General Pam Bondi: 31 percent approve, 51 percent disapprove, with 18 percent not offering an opinion.
Forty percent of voters are either very confident (17 percent) or somewhat confident (23 percent) in vaccine information cited by Robert F. Kennedy Jr., while 57 percent are either not so confident (10 percent) or not confident at all (47 percent).
Forty-five percent of voters are either very confident (25 percent) or somewhat confident (20 percent) in Pete Hegseth’s leadership of the U.S. military, while 47 percent are either not so confident (7 percent) or not confident at all (40 percent).
EPSTEIN FILES
Twenty-six percent of voters approve of the way the Trump administration is handling the Jeffrey Epstein files, while 65 percent disapprove and 9 percent did not offer an opinion.
SUSPECTED DRUG BOATS & VENEZUELA
Voters 53 – 42 percent oppose U.S. military attacks to kill suspected drug smugglers on boats in international waters.
Voters 63 – 25 percent oppose U.S. military action inside Venezuela.
RUSSIA – UKRAINE
When asked about the war between Russia and Ukraine, 48 percent of voters think Donald Trump is favoring Russia too much, 36 percent think he is striking about the right balance, and 3 percent think Trump is favoring Ukraine too much. Thirteen percent did not offer an opinion.
There are some more confusing stats showing that around 50-55% of people feel that the they are personally not having problems affording the cost of living which suggests that the same dynamic that was present in the Biden years is still at work: many Americans are doing ok themselves but perceive that other people are not. Trump took full advantage of that during the campaign. Now he has to deal with it himself.
This poll does not give anyone much hope about the Democratic Party since everyone, including Democrats, apparently hate their elected officials. But I suspect that’s reflexive at this point — they have looked weak in the face of the GOP onslaught and, let’s face it, Americans don’t like losers. I don’t think that means they won’t vote for them next November.
Negative partisanship is a powerful thing and people really hate Trump and they see the GOP as the party of Trump enablers, which is correct. The off-year elections show that while they may hate “the Democrats” write large, they are fine with the Democrat they are being asked to vote for — from Mamdani to Spanberger. I’m not worried about that.
The White House has installed a series of plaques under Trump’s new “Presidential Walk of Fame.” On Biden: “Sleepy Joe Biden was, by far, the worst President” On Obama: “One of the most divisive political figures in American History…creation of the Russia, Russia, Russia Hoax”
How long are they going to let this continue? The man is demented. And it’s very dangerous to the country and the world.
Between this and the Reiner post, I think it’s clear that we have reach a pivot point. He’s going down fast and we are in trouble. Apparently, no one can stop him (and that’s assuming anyone wants to. I suspect they all share his puerile mindset by now.)
Here’s today’s happy holiday message from the White House:
Jingle bells, jingle bells, Jingle all the way! Oh, what fun it is to ride on a free flight out of our country! 🎶✈️ pic.twitter.com/yUKePUQ2Sp
I don’t know what 12 year old they have hired to do those videos but they’re disgusting. But then everything they do is now on the level of the average 7th grade bully. Even the war we are about to start.
Trump is staging a prime time address tonight. The word is that it’s going to be one of his grotesque onanistic celebrations of himself so I think I’ll just watch the clips later. I suggest your do that too. If he announces the invasion of Venezuela I’ll let you know.
Try to enjoy this holiday season, folks despite all this. The government has gone mad but the country is still functioning and people are awake to what’s going on. We can survive this if we keep our heads and stick together.
In that Susie Wiles expose, Chris Whipple asked Marco Rubio about Putin’s intentions:
“There are offers on the table right now to basically stop this war at its current lines of contact, okay?” he said. “Which include substantial parts of Ukrainian territory, including Crimea, which they’ve controlled since 2014. And the Russians continue to turn it down. And so…you do start to wonder, well, maybe what this guy wants is the entire country.”
Ya think?
Wiles told Whipple that Trump has always believed Putin wants the whole thing. Considering his behavior toward Zelensky, it’s pretty clear he’s fine with that. Indeed, he’s probably happy to see it — he hates Ukraine because Rudy Giuliani told him that they were behind the strategy to expose his Russia ties.
Meanwhile, we have the Secretary of State sounding like the most naive man on the planet. I’m sure he knows exactly what Putin is after and it certainly appears that he too is fine with it.
Meanwhile, here is Putin this week:
If Ukraine refuses to engage in "substantive" talks, russia will achieve the liberation of "its historical lands" by force — Putin.
"The goals of the 'special military operation' will undoubtedly be achieved. We would prefer to do this and eliminate the root causes of the… pic.twitter.com/mPnqnZ5Bn8
