“The darkness of this administration is beyond anything I’ve ever seen”
If you too feel like you’re taking crazy pills, here is food for thought this morning.
ICE is nothing like professional law enforcement, but roaming gangs of masked thugs with badges. That is if they actually display any. But you knew that. Listen for the eight seconds of silence in this clip below, starting at 1:18.
So this was a Internal affairs meeting & they were asked if when ICE follows a person & jumps out at a gas station masked & wont present ID & the police are called do they verify that they’re really ICE & the answer from the Police Chief was No! These men are able to be fakes! pic.twitter.com/fWgstEg8Fa
Dan Friedman on Thursday reported for Mother Jones on Eric Geressy, Pete Hegseth mentor and Pentagon adviser. In investigating Geressy’s security clearance and reading habits, Friedmand found himself quickly threatened by Jack Posobiec, the Pizzagate promoter and newly minted member of the Trumpified Pentagon press corps. (There’s some coordination there, you think?)
Rick Wilson tweets:
I did not have "Asian cuck porn" as the latest embarrassment to come from SECDRUNK Pete Hegseth's Pentagon, but here we are.
David French expected bad things from the second Trump administration. But not as awful as torture and summary executions. “The darkness of this administration is beyond anything I’ve ever seen.”
"This is the first administration in my lifetime where you say, it could be worse than my actual worst case scenario… The darkness of this administration is beyond anything I've ever seen."@DavidAFrench and @Timodc discuss Trump's second term. pic.twitter.com/KOuTUVMb4a
Donald Trump Sharpied the Epstein Files Transparency Act into law on Nov. 19 under a “photo lid.” No pictures, none of his usual showmanship. The law gave the government — his government — 30 days to release to the public the bulk of its Jeffrey Epstein investigation files. That deadline is one week away: Dec. 19. So, one more week for the government to craft a “the dog ate my homework” excuse for minimizing or else doctoring what it does release.
A lot has happened since then, USA Today notes. A U.S. District Court judge in Manhattan on Dec. 10 ordered the release of grand jury records of an investigation into Epstein. Another U.S. District Court judge in New York the day before ordered the release of grand jury materials related to Epstein aide and convicted child sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell.
It’s possible that not all of the documents will be released in the end, though. The law makes an exception for documents that “would jeopardize an active federal investigation or ongoing prosecution, provided that such withholding is narrowly tailored and temporary.”
The law also allows authorities to withhold records that violate victims’ privacy or contain sensitive material on child sexual abuse.
So there is reason to be skeptical about what we will see next week. Epstein survivors and a group of Democratic members of Congress have asked for an independent review of files to determine if any have been “tampered” with or concealed (CBS News):
In a letter Thursday to the Justice Department’s inspector general, Democrats on the Senate Judiciary Committee asked the internal watchdog to undertake a formal review to check for any “chain of custody” problems with the Epstein files.
Speaking with CBS News, representatives of some Epstein survivors have also asked for a third-party review to check if any record has been “scrubbed, softened, or quietly removed before the public sees it.”
[…]
Thursday’s letter from Senate Democrats — including Sen. Adam Schiff of California — pointed to allegations that Attorney General Pam Bondi and FBI Director Kash Patel ordered a massive review of Epstein-related records, “which resulted in around 1,000 FBI personnel working 24-hour shifts and required personnel to identify any mentions of President Trump.”
“To reassure the American public that any files released have not been tampered with or concealed, the chain of custody forms associated with records and evidence in the Epstein files must be accounted for, analyzed, and released,” the request read.
Trump signed the law under pressure from an overwhelming bipartisan vote in Congress. That doesn’t mean his lackeys will comply fully. A belligerently defiant Attorney General Pam Bondi has refused to answer questions about her performance put to her by a congressional committee. Anyone who witnessed that can believe that if the boss doesn’t want something in the files released, she will do his bidding. Any investigations she launched at Trump’s prompting may give her the pretext.
Daily Beast suggests Trump may be setting up FBI deputy director Dan Bongino “as the likely fall guy” for whatever gets redacted or retained. TBD.
“I signed the Epstein discharge petition,” Rep. Zoe Lofgren (D-Calif.) posted to Facebook (with image at top) on Sept. 3. “The heavily redacted files released last night, 97% of which were already in the public record, won’t suffice.”
Since the deadline is a Friday on the weekend before Christmas, expect any release late in the day so to draw as little attention as possible. Whatever (or whomever) Trump is trying to shield from public view, don’t get your hopes up for sunshine on Dec. 19.
I read today that older people are still backing Republicans by a small margin. They really ought to rethink that unless they’re looking forward to dying on a ventilator:
Children’s Health Defense this week filed a petition asking FDA commissioner Marty Makary to deem Moderna’s and Pfizer’s COVID vaccines “misbranded” and revoke their licenses due to a lack of “compliance with FDA regulations.”
Its argument is based on the vaccines’ conversion from emergency use early in the pandemic to full approval later on.In other administrations, the move would be an extreme long shot. But Kennedy’s personal ties to Children’s Health Defense may improve its prospects. [Kennedy founded the CDF]
Meanwhile:Last season’s COVID vaccine significantly reduced kids’ ER and urgent care visits, per new CDC data.
Trump told him to “go wild” and there’s every indication that’s exactly what he’s doing.
I can’t imagine they’ll let him do this because Trump still has a fleeting desire to take credit for the development of the vaccines and he’s also a geriatric who had COVID so there’s some awareness of how bad it can be, just like tens of millions of others. So maybe he won’t let Bobby do this.
I predict that if he does it, there will be a massive senior citizen backlash.
We’re watching huge swathes of our fellow humans be attacked in the streets, arrested and otherwise harassed by the federal government’s police force. The assault on DEI is a thinly veiled racist attack on people of color by a group of white men and the women who love them.
But maybe those white women should stop and think a little bit about that. Michelle Goldberg wrote about the rebellion among congressional GOP women that shows there is some chafing among the female enablers. Leopards are starting to nibble on their faces:
Recently several Republican congresswomen have been complaining, on and off the record, that their party’s leaders, especially Mike Johnson, the House speaker, don’t take them seriously. It started with Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, a onetime MAGA icon who is resigning next month. “They want women just to go along with whatever they’re doing and basically to stand there, smile and clap with approval, whereas they just have their good old boys club,” she said in September. It turns out she’s not alone in her frustration.
Last week, The Times reported on Republican women in Congress who say that Johnson “failed to listen to them or engage in direct conversations on major political and policy issues,” which they seemed to attribute to his highly patriarchal evangelical Christianity. (He recently said that women, unlike men, are unable to “compartmentalize” their thoughts.)
Media Matters has an excellent report on where the GOP is going with women’s rights and it is horrifying. We all know the Heritage Foundation has gone completely over the MAGA, white nationalist cliff. And it’s getting worse:
Heritage has now brought on Boise State University professor and anti-feminist crusader Scott Yenor to head up its B. Kenneth Simon Center for American Studies. As conservative pundit Henry Olsen notes at The Atlantic, the decision “poses serious questions about the institution’s beliefs concerning the equality of women in the workplace and perhaps even as citizens.”
New Heritage hire pushes birth control restrictions and rollbacks to the Civil Rights Act
Olsen runs through some of Yenor’s lowlights, including pushing for laws that would let businesses “support traditional family life by hiring only male heads of households, or by paying a family wage,” and his belief that “governments should be allowed to prepare men for leadership and responsible provision, while preparing women for domestic management and family care.”
Yenor has repeatedly attacked the Civil Rights Act — a distressingly commonphenomenon in conservative media — telling a Mother Jones reporter that the landmark 1964 law “made it impossible and, in fact, suspect to treat men and women differently.” Yenor’s opposition to the law extends to racist grievances too. A blog he co-wrote argues that “the 1964 Civil Rights act, and especially its administrative and jurisprudential offspring, have warped American law and culture and traded one set of racial preferences for another.”
Heritage’s decision to bring Yenor on has generated significant support from right-wing media, suggesting that he’s more of an opening salvo than a random misfire.
Fellow Heritage staffer Emma Waters wrote that it was a “huge win for @Heritage to have Scott on board, and I’m glad he’s here.” Her colleague Genevieve Wood reacted to The Atlantic article by writing: “The entire premise of this piece is invalid and disingenuous.” Anti-civil rights activist Chris Rufo argued: “Scott’s idea that private companies should be able to prioritize hiring married men with families is completely within the bounds of reasonable debate, and, in fact, it’s absurd that individuals cannot hire whomever they want in their own companies, with their own money.” (The Civil Rights Act prohibits employment discrimination based on sex and other characteristics.)
The campaign to roll back decades of material gains for women is coming from both the gutter sexists and the would-be high-brow elements of the conservative media world
Given Yenor’s recent output at Heritage — his author page currently hosts two pieces of writing — The Atlantic’s premise doesn’t seem invalid in the least. An October 29 blog headlined “RFK Should Grill the Pill” argues that Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. should consider imposing restrictions on hormonal contraceptives and that his seeming reluctance to do so is “to the detriment of women across the country.” Yenor and his co-author write that the “proliferation of the birth control pill since the 1960s has fostered a number of grave consequences for our society: hook-up culture, delayed marriage, and the destruction of the nuclear family.”
The blog is hardly the first time Heritage has gone after birth control. Roberts took aim at the pill in his own book, writing: “In the case of contraceptives, we are a society remade according to a research agenda set by the Party of Destruction.” As Media Matters previously reported, Heritage’s sprawling presidential transition effort, Project 2025, “suggests restoring Trump-era ‘religious and moral exemptions to the contraceptive mandate’ through the Affordable Care Act that would allow employers to deny coverage.” A separate Media Matters analysis found that at least 34 of Project 2025’s partner organizations “have spread misinformation about contraceptive methods or championed limiting access to contraception, largely on religious grounds.”
Myths about the supposed dangers of birth control have found purchase in social media and podcasts as well. By early 2024, right-wing influencers spreading misinformation about birth control on TikTok had racked up millions of views. Now, some elements of the Make America Healthy Again movement — which is closely associated with Kennedy — are turning against hormonal contraceptives, illustrated by prominent MAHA podcaster Alex Clark referring to birth control as “poison.” The rejection of safe and proven forms of health care extends to so-called tradwife influencers, who have advised young women to embrace not only a far-right definition of proper gender roles, but also “a general distrust of the government and modern medicine.” One prominent tradwife figure used social media to spread “anti-trans bigotry, opposition to sending women to college at 18, and disturbing messages like ‘any wife who denies her husband intimacy is acting against her marriage.’”
This is some real trad-wife nonsense:
Read on. Right-wing media figures are also urging women to leave the workforce. Aaaand they want to take away women’s right to vote.
It sounds ridiculous. But these people are extremists and they are accumulating power. If they could achieve even a small bit of this grotesque agenda, women will be much worse off.
It would be very foolish to assume this could never happen. They play a long game.
“I think instead of doing DOGE, I would have basically worked on my companies. And they wouldn’t have been burning the cars.”
I don’t know that people were burning cars. Nobody is for that. But there was a boycott on Teslas and his behavior sparked a consumer backlash against his product. Sales have been badly impacted by his involvement with Trump. There’s a lesson in that.
Sean Duffy: "People dress up like they're going to bed when they fly… We want to push people as we come into a really busy travel season, help people out, be in a good mood, dress up."pic.twitter.com/YT9ne8ylfh
— Feisty is proud to be a Democrat! (@FeistyLibLady) December 9, 2025
Dress in your good clothes and work up a sweat while you wait for your delayed flight. And when you are able to finally squeeze into a tiny seat like a sardine you can share your stench with your seatmates. That will totally improve the overall experience.
Airplane dress and airport exercise opportunities are the most important transportation issues facing us. Well, actually not. Philip Bump writes:
It remains the case that a good way to learn how people feel about things is to ask them. So you don’t have to simply assume, say, that people are hankering to work up a sweat before hopping onto a six-hour flight or that they think the central failure of the airline industry can be summarized as “sweatpants.” You can just contact a bunch of people over the phone and online and ask them to tell you what it is that they are concerned about.
Which is what YouGov did. And what they found is probably not surprising: The things that people find most annoying about flying are prices, delays and discomfort.
In fact, more than 6 in 10 Americans pointed to ticket prices as a major problem with flying. Half said the same of cramped seats, delays, hidden fees, and staffing shortages (which, of course, lead to delays). And waaaaaaaaaaay at the bottom of the list came “passengers dressing too casually,” which only 8 percent of respondents described as a major problem.
Nobody voted for what they’re selling.
I’m with this manosphere podcaster:
Tim Dillon: "Secretary Sean Duffy urges travelers to dress up and be in a good mood. Hey Sean, fuck you. Shut the fuck up. How about you get the planes in the fucking sky, you scumbag, and shut the fuck up?" pic.twitter.com/D7nkjecYac
Perhaps most worryingly for Trump, who’s become increasingly synonymous with his party, he’s slipped on issues that were major strengths. Just a few months ago, 53% of Americans approved of Trump’s handling of crime, but that’s fallen to 43% in the new poll. There’s been a similar decline on immigration, from 49% approval in March to 38% now.
The new poll starkly illustrates how Trump has struggled to hold onto political wins since his return to office. Even border security — an issue on which his approval remains relatively high — has declined slightly in recent months.
Here’s what passes for good news for Trump according to the AP: his approval rating is at 36% which is just down from 42% since March, and this signals that Republicans are still largely behind him.
Still:
Republicans are more unhappy with Trump’s performance on the economy than they were in the first few months of his term. About 7 in 10 Republicans, 69%, approve of how Trump is handling the economy in the December poll, a decline from 78% in March.
They note that many more Democrats abandoned Joe Biden at the same point in his presidency which should put to rest this notion that Dems are just as irrationally partisan at the Republicans.
50% give him high marks on “border security” but they disagree with his approach to immigration generally:
Jim Rollins, an 82-year-old independent in Macon, Georgia, said he believes that when it comes to closing the border, Trump has done “a good job,” but he hopes the administration will rethink its mass deportation efforts.
“Taking people out of kindergarten, and people going home for Thanksgiving, taking them off a plane. If they are criminals, sure,” said Rollins, who said he supported Trump in his first election but not since then. “But the percentages — based on the government’s own statistics — say that they’re not criminals. They just didn’t register, and maybe they sneaked across the border, and they’ve been here for 15 years.”
And this is more than just deportations. They’re closing off legal immigration and making it impossible for people to come here if they don’t have a million dollars which, according to Howard Lutnick, means they are better people. (Hah!) Now they’re even going to destroy the tourist industry with this new draconian visa application for all foreigners demanding DNA, all social media user names and social contacts going back five years and the names and addresses of virtually everyone they know. It’s more stringent than an FBI background check.
I can guarantee that if they actually start doing this nobody’s going to come here unless they absolutely have to. There are Disneylands all over the world. Nobody voted for that.
About 3 in 10 U.S. adults approve of how Trump is handling health care, down slightly from November. The new poll was conducted in early December, as Trump and Congress struggled to find a bipartisan deal for extending the Affordable Care Act subsidies that will expire at the end of this month.
That health care fight was also the source of the recent government shutdown. About one-third of U.S. adults, 35%, approve of how Trump is managing the federal government, down from 43% in March.
Keep him on the stump Susie Trump. People need to see him saying that they can believe him or their lyin’ eyes. The Democratic ads write themselves.
Trump said the other day at his rally that he wants more people from Norway or Denmark to come to American instead of all those shit hole countries.
Trump: I said, why is it we only take people from shithole countries, right? Why can’t we have people from Norway, Sweden, Denmark? But we always take people from Somalia — places that are filthy, dirty, and disgusting.pic.twitter.com/vHA9jJ6L6I
A Danish intelligence agency has for the first time described the US as a potential security risk, signaling a shift in the Nordic country’s view of its close ally amid geopolitical frictions over Greenland.
The Danish Defense Intelligence Service — one of the two key espionage agencies in the Nordic nation — said the US is increasingly prioritizing its own interests and “now using its economic and technological strength as a tool of power, also toward allies and partners,” according to its 2025 intelligence outlook published Wednesday.
It also highlighted the US’s growing interest in Greenland, a territory of the Danish kingdom, as a result of heightened great-power rivalry in the Arctic.
The annual threat assessment of DDIS follows Donald Trump’s repeated suggestions he’d want to take control of Greenland, triggering diplomatic tensions between Copenhagen and Washington. The US president has also not ruled out taking the Arctic island using military force.
“The United States uses economic power, including threats of high tariffs, to enforce its will, and no longer rules out the use of military force, even against allies,” the agency said.
They are not wrong.
I totally get why people might think that it’s time for a reassessment of the United States providing so much of the global security umbrella. The world has changed and America spends massive sums of money to provide it. But I don’t know that anyone signed on for the U.S. to become a global threat. But here we are.
I don’t think I need to remind anyone that we are still in the nuclear age and creating this kind of instability, because of some incompetent freak’s wet dreams of power is shaping up to be one of the world’s greatest blunders.
When Donald Trump announced his first presidential bid in 2015, he was known to most Americans as the star of NBC’s “The Apprentice” whose catchphrase was “you’re fired!” He loved to say it on the stump with his trademark snarl and jabbing finger. He apparently even tried (unsuccessfully) to trademark the phrase during the reality show’s heyday in the mid-2000s. But as it turned out, even though he was a businessman in real life, Trump was actually unable to fire people in person. He instead delegated the unpleasant task to one of his lackeys, or simply made it known that he wanted the person to quit.
Staffing of the White House during the president’s first term was famously a constant state of chaos; the list of resignations and dismissals was a mile long. But as before, Trump rarely faced the people he was firing. FBI Director James Comey — whom Trump is currently attempting to put in prison — learned of his termination in May 2017 while watching cable news on a business trip to California. Trump never spoke to Comey personally, but he did order that the former director couldn’t travel back to Washington, D.C., on the FBI plane, forcing Comey to take a commercial flight. Rex Tillerson, Trump’s first secretary of state, was informed that he was fired while in the bathroom. In 2017, White House chief of staff John Kelly was given the duty of firing communications director Anthony Scaramucci, adviser Steve Bannon and dozens of others, before being pushed out himself in December 2018.
The president’s second term has been different. Trump came into office with a new sense of what kind of people he wanted around him. He chose Cabinet officials and close advisers from the insufferable crowd of MAGA influencers, Fox News toadies and hardcore loyalists that have proved themselves to him over the course of the previous decade in the trenches. The Republican Senate majority was so cowed and docile that, with one notable exception — former GOP Florida Rep. Matt Gaetz’s nomination as attorney general — they confirmed even the most egregiously unqualified to the most important positions, people who just days before had been weekend talk show hosts or far-right podcasters.
There is no question in this administration what the requirements are: Tell Trump only what he wants to hear, slather him with praise at every opportunity and never, under any circumstances, disagree with anything he says.
So far this new approach has resulted in very little turnover. There have been a couple of instances where someone hasn’t worked out. But instead of firing them, he has taken to promoting people to different jobs. Michael Waltz, Trump’s first national security adviser, apparently wasn’t meshing well with the extremists in the Pentagon, so he was sent to New York as ambassador to the United Nations. The majority of Trump’s Cabinet officials and White House staff have survived quite well simply by willingly debasing themselves at every opportunity.
But as we approach the first anniversary of Trump’s second inauguration, rumblings of impending personnel changes are growing louder. Most are centered on Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who has produced the most scandals of any Trump appointee. His confirmation process was a trainwreck, with allegations of sexual assault, alcohol abuse and mismanagement of the only two small organizations he’d ever run. None of those issues were apparently deal breakers for his gig as a Fox News weekend host, but putting such a person in charge of the U.S. military made even some of the most radical GOP senators a bit queasy. They voted for him anyway, at least partially because he is popular with the MAGA base, and some were threatened with violence if they refused.
Hegseth’s tenure has been a real doozy. He’s spent most of his time carrying out an anti-woke crusade and barking about the new “warrior ethos” — even calling the senior brass to Washington to lecture them about it. But the scandals have been the biggest problem. First there was Signalgate, in which he shared classified war plans over a messaging application with senior national security staff — and Jeffrey Goldberg, editor of the Atlantic. Last week, the Pentagon’s inspector general issued a report on the matter that was highly critical of Hegseth. But, in typical Trumpian fashion, the secretary claimed it completely exonerated him. Then there is the matter of his leadership in conducting the murderous policy in the Caribbean Sea against so-called narco-terrorists from Venezuela, which has Hegseth dancing on the head of a pin, trying to bask in the machismo of people being blown to bits without taking responsibility for making it happen.
The scuttlebutt is that he has an enemy in Vice President JD Vance, who has positioned his college buddy, Secretary of the Army Dan Driscoll, to step into the job once Hegseth is shown the door. A Pentagon insider is even quoted as saying, “Whenever there’s an article that Hegseth is going to be fired, the next sentence is that Driscoll could replace him.” So far, Trump is sticking with Hegseth. But we know how far his loyalty goes. Driscoll is now deeply involved in the Ukraine talks, and Hegseth is looking over his shoulder.
Last week, the Bulwark broke the story, since confirmed by other outlets, that Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem is also on the chopping block. Some say that it’s because her consigliere, Corey Lewandowski, who rarely leaves her side and is said to be operating as co-secretary, has alienated everyone in the White House. The foreign junkets for Noem to show off her costumes and create footage for a potential presidential run in 2028 may not be a big hit either. Others claim it’s because Stephen Miller is unhappy that they haven’t been building grotesque immigrant camps more quickly. But the rumor is that Noem could be replaced by soon-to-be former Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin, which suggests that someone in the White House wants to put a more moderate face on the department rather than ratchet up the cruelty. Youngkin is not known as anyone’s idea of a firebrand.
The White House has denied all this, dismissing it as just more fake news. But Trump is in trouble, and when he’s in trouble he lashes out and blames anyone but himself, so we can expect to see the ax fall on quite a few heads over the next few months. Trump, though, won’t be the one to wield it. He’s much too cowardly to ever say “you’re fired!” to anyone’s face.
There are certainly serious matters to catch up on this morning, but the unseriousness ones are overwhelming them like an Executive Branch glioblastoma.
Federal prosecutors spent over a year working to extradite a Belarusian woman accused of smuggling more than $2 million in sensitive U.S. aviation equipment into Russia as it waged war on Ukraine.
But the case could fall apart because the defendant, Yana Leonova, is now at risk of being deported before going to trial.
Leonova faces a 10-count indictment from AG Pam Bondi’s Department of Justice for fraud, smuggling and money-laundering. Oh, and an immigration detainer from Secretary Kristi Noem’s Department of Homeland Security. ICE wants to deport Lenova to Belarus if she’s released from a D.C. jail. She was only approved for a two-week stay in the U.S.
A federal magistrate judge called the situation “Kafkaesque” at a hearing in U.S. District Court in D.C. on Monday, and said in a written order that Immigration and Customs Enforcement’s push to increase deportations on orders from President Donald Trump appeared to be wreaking havoc on a complex international prosecution that had been tied up for a year in extradition proceedings.
“Indeed, it is both preposterous and offensive for the government to bring someone into the United States against their will and then turn around and seek ICE detention because that person is here ‘illegally,’” U.S. Magistrate Judge Zia M. Faruqui said in the written order. “The government needs to decide what its priorities are: ginning up deportation stats or prosecuting alleged criminals.”
If Kafka were alive, he might be an advisor to the Trump White House.
AI is freaking me out. AI-generated fake stories and videos are flooding the Net. The boundaries between fact and fiction are dissolving like that cake left out in the rain.
View on Threads
You can’t trust any videos or stories posted from random accounts without backing up to see if they are as phony as Pete Hegseth.
Secretary Hegseth’s Department of Defense is all in on AI. And just in time for it to screw with him (The New Republic):
On Tuesday, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth unveiled his department’s new AI chatbot for military personnel, GenAI.mil. Almost immediately, the bot called a “hypothetical” situation where the government orders a strike on a suspected drug-smuggling boat and then double-taps said boat to kill the survivors, “unambiguously illegal.”
A military source who spoke to Straight Arrow News Wednesday pointed reporters to a Reddit thread that featured the alleged interaction with the bot. The source said that military personnel wasted no time in testing the bot’s capabilities.
“At least someone—or something?—in the Trump administration has moral clarity,” writes TNR’s Rachel Kahn.
But who the hell is Straight Arrow News and is that image from Reddit real? SAN claims an unnamed source gave a similar prompt to GenAI.mil and got the same response. The Pentagon Press Operations had no comment as of Tuesday, so AI has not take over there yet. They’re probably overwhelmed with trying to cover Hegseth’s ass over the murder of helpless survivors of his first missile attack on their boat.
