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It’s Come To This

Published by Tom Sullivan on November 20, 2025

“Can’t you just shoot them?”

Six Democratic lawmakers released a video on Tuesday that reminds soldiers of all ranks that they are obliged under their oaths not to carry out illegal orders (New York Times):

The stark message, posted on Tuesday, was organized by Senator Elissa Slotkin of Michigan, a former C.I.A. analyst who served multiple tours in Iraq. The lawmakers took turns reading a statement in which they cautioned that the “threats to our Constitution aren’t just coming from abroad, but from right here at home.”

“Our laws are clear,” said Senator Mark Kelly of Arizona, a Navy veteran and former astronaut. “You can refuse illegal orders.”

“You must refuse illegal orders,” added Representative Chris Deluzio of Pennsylvania, who also served in the Navy.

The Democratic lawmakers’ message did not focus on a specific order or scenario. “We know you are under enormous stress and pressure right now,” they said. “This administration is pitting our uniform military and intelligence community against American citizens.”

Slotkin raised concerns about illegal orders during a hearing this summer with now-Defense Secretary Hegseth about Trump’s desire to deploy active-duty troops to suppress protests in American cities.

She referenced the time in 2020 when then-President Donald Trump asked then-Defense Secretary Mark Esper and Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley if they could “just shoot” Black Lives Matter protesters. You know, “just shoot them in the legs or something?”

The two manly men looked at Trump with tears in their eyes and said, “Sir, no sir.” (Or something like that.) It would be criminal, they told the now-convicted criminal.

So before Trump’s second inauguration in January, his proposed defense secretary, Fox News Weekend alcoholic, Pete Hegseth, faced questioning about that episode in his Senate confirmation hearings.

Sen. Mazie Hirono (D-Hawaii) asked Hegseth, “Would you carry out such an order from President Trump?” Hegseth dissembled.

Since then, Trump has acted routinely outside the boundaries of his constitutional authorities with no pushback from the Republican-controlled Congress. He has declared a war against drug cartels for which he lacks the authority. He has called in missile strikes against small boats in the Caribbean, killing at least 82 since September 2, alleging without providing evidence, that they are carrying drugs to the U.S. This would ordinarily be a law enforcement responsibility involving Coast Guard interdiction, arrest and prosecution. Trump is ordering summary execution. It has these lawmakers concerned.

In an interview with The New York Times, Ms. Slotkin said that she had heard from active-duty troops who were concerned about the legality of strikes that have targeted people accused by the Trump administration of trafficking narcotics by sea. Some wondered whether they could be held personally liable for the deaths, she said.

Kelly raised similar concerns in an NBC interview.

Trump’s pet psychopath, Stephen Miller (rumored to be the person really running the Trump White House), is not pleased.

“Democrat lawmakers are now openly calling for insurrection,” Stephen Miller, President Trump’s deputy chief of staff, wrote on social media.

Martha MacCallum of Fox News questioned Rep. Jason Crow of Colorado (D), a former Army Ranger, about his part in the video. Crow pushed back. Hard.

CROW: Donald Trump has made a series of very disturbing comments and suggestions that would violate US law and put our military in terrible positions. We are standing by our troops–MacCALLUM: Who sign up every day as you did to carry out the orders of the commander in chief

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) 2025-11-19T21:13:11.689Z

Oregon state Rep. Dwayne Yunker (R), himself a veteran, pushed back, calling the video “a direct threat to our republic.” But he helped disseminate the Democrats’ message by including it in his tweet. Thanks, Dwayne.

A search of websites tackling this issue reveals this from a law office:

What are unlawful orders?

An unlawful order is a directive issued by someone in a position of authority that violates the law, a person’s rights, or ethical principles. Following such orders can have legal consequences for both the person giving the order and the one executing it. Here are some examples of unlawful orders:

A superior orders a soldier to engage in war crimes, such as:

  • Targeting civilians intentionally.
  • Torturing prisoners of war.
  • Looting or pillaging property.
  • A commanding officer orders personnel to suppress lawful protests in violation of First Amendment rights.
  • Violations of International Laws.

Some other examples may be an Abuse of Authority:

  • Misuse of resources: A public official orders employees to use government funds or equipment for personal gain.
  • Harassment or retaliation: A superior orders someone to engage in workplace bullying or to retaliate againsta whistleblower.

We’ll get to suppressing lawful protests in violation of First Amendment rights in the next post.

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The Umpire Strikes Back

Published by digby on November 19, 2025

Mother Jones’ Pema Levi and Ari Berman have a scathing report on the John Roberts era on the Supreme Court:

Twenty years ago, John Roberts promised that as chief justice of the Supreme Court, he would be like an umpire, calling balls and strikes. His promise charmed senators and the media, who believed that his predilection for executive power and long-held antipathy for civil rights could be moderated by this commitment to faithfully apply the law. The delusion was so powerful that for two decades, the media defaulted to portraying him as a moderate institutionalist, pointing to high-profile decisions—to uphold parts of the Affordable Care Act or striking down President Donald Trump’s attempt to ask about citizenship in the 2020 census—in which he broke from conservative orthodoxy.

But those decisions were always the exception. Today, as the Roberts court rewrites the Constitution in the image of Trumpian autocracy, it’s become clear that Roberts’ promise to be a neutral umpire was a lie. We are watching a rigged game, and Roberts set it up.

They go over all the familiar Supreme Court atrocities we’ve seen during this second term of the Trump presidency but they have news for us. It’s been happening all along:

Roberts has been embedding white-dominant authoritarianism into the country’s source code for two decades. It’s impossible to imagine today’s crisis without the Roberts court having first undermined the foundations of our democracy.

Democracies are built on the right to vote and choose representatives. The United States finally recognized this right for all people with the Voting Rights Act of 1965. But over the last five decades, Roberts has taken aim at the law, beginning as a young lawyer in President Ronald Reagan’s Justice Department fighting its reauthorization, when he claimed it would “lead to a quota system in all areas.” He lost that skirmish when Congress overwhelmingly voted to strengthen the VRA in 1982, but he won the larger battle decades later as chief justice, helping craft a string of rulings kneecapping the law, starting with his 2013 opinion in Shelby County v. Holder. The decision overruled Congress and freed states with histories of discrimination to change their voting rules, spurring the creation of 115 voter suppression laws in more than 30 states. Many were inspired by Trump’s election lies.

In 2019, Roberts toppled another pillar of democratic governance—if you don’t like a politician, you can vote them out—by writing in Rucho v. Common Cause that federal judges could not even review claims of partisan gerrymandering, deeming them “political questions beyond the reach of the federal courts.” In the decision, Roberts pinkie-swore that courts could still block “racial discrimination in districting,” but now the Supreme Court is on the verge of making that nearly impossible. After October’s oral arguments in a Louisiana redistricting case, observers expect Roberts and the GOP justices to declare that districts drawn to preserve representation for voters of color are either unconstitutional or subject to insurmountable barriers. It’s a decision that would turn the 14th and 15th Amendments—passed under Reconstruction to give formerly enslaved people citizenship and equal rights—on their heads, and turbocharge Trump’s gerrymandering push. Such redrawn maps could shift up to 19 seats to the GOP in 2026 and “really runs the threat of just creating permanent GOP control of Congress,” Doerfler warns.

That’s not all by a long shot. There’s Citizens United and presidential immunity for starters. The outright corruption alone is astonishing. And they reveal that Roberts had been laying the ground work for many years before he even joined the Court. He’s a stealth right wing operative whose pleasant persona has masked his radicalism for decades.

They conclude:

The question lingering over this mess is how it will end. The past may be instructive. “This is the third moment in the country’s history where court reform was a mainstream political topic,” Doerfler says. In 1857, the Supreme Court held in Dred Scott that Black people could not be citizens. The decision helped spur the Civil War and was overturned by the Reconstruction amendments, which ended slavery and aimed to extend political equality to the newly freed. When President Franklin Roosevelt’s administration fought the Depression, the Supreme Court struck down his initiatives, most notably attempts to regulate industrial policy and stabilize farming, as well as a minimum wage law. Ultimately, Roosevelt’s threat to pack the court cowed the justices, who permitted New Deal legislation like Social Security and labor laws to endure.

In the 1930s, the court itself changed. The justices chose to preserve the institution, with four retiring in quick succession, allowing Roosevelt to appoint new ones. But in the postbellum era, the opposite had occurred. Attempts to guarantee equality under the law and Constitution were rolled back by a Supreme Court that, by 1896’s Plessy v. Ferguson, officially gave Jim Crow the Constitution’s blessing.

Today’s court is on the same trajectory, bent on retrenching white political dominance. But it will go further. It will greenlight Trump’s corrupt, self-enriching behavior and unlawful power grabs. The majority will instinctively know that its fate is tied to the fate of Trump’s movement, and so it will protect it. The result will be a democracy in name only.

Under the Roberts court, it won’t be enough to rewrite the rules of the game. The umpires are the problem.

Scary stuff.

If you have the time best sure to read the whole thing about Roberts’ years before he was on the court. I knew some of it but not all. We should have seen this coming.

THIS Is A Witch Hunt

Published by digby on November 19, 2025

My God, this is horrible:

When Lauren Vaughn, a kindergarten assistant in South Carolina, saw reports that right-wing influencer Charlie Kirk had been shot at an event in Utah, she opened Facebook and typed out a quote from Kirk himself.

Gun deaths, Kirk said in 2023, were unfortunate but “worth it” if they preserved “the Second Amendment to protect our other God-given Rights.” Following the quote, Vaughn added: “Thoughts and prayers.”

Vaughn, a 37-year-old Christian who has taken missionary trips to Guatemala, said her call for prayer was sincere. She said she hoped reading Kirk’s words in the context of the shooting might prompt her friendsto rethink their opposition to gun control.

“Maybe now they’ll listen,” she recalled thinking.

A few days later, Vaughn lost her job. She was one of more than 600 Americans fired, suspended, placed under investigation or disciplined by employers for comments about Kirk’s September 10 assassination, according to a Reuters review of court records, public statements, local media reports and interviews with two dozen people who were fired or otherwise disciplined.

Meanwhile, Trump is defending the free speech of Hitler defender Tucker Carlson and Nazi, Nick Fuentes telling Axios, “you can’t tell him [Carlson] who to interview…if he wants to interview Nick Fuentes, I don’t know much about him, but if he wants to do it, get the word out. Let him, you know, people have to decide.” Gotta let the wingnuts say what they wanna say. They have a first amendment.

But they managed to get at least 600 ordinary people’s lives upended for saying something they deemed to be disrespectful toward a political activist who was murdered. I’m sure that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

We still have free speech in this country, never fear. For right wingers. Everyone else had better watch what they say.

What Did MBS Tell Trump?

Published by digby on November 19, 2025

Josh Marshall flagged that floor speech by Rep. Vindman:

Yesterday President Trump met in the Oval Office with Saudi Arabia’s de facto ruler Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) and, in the midst of defending him over the murder of Saudi journalist Jamal Khashoggi, said that MBS “knew nothing about it.” Last night Rep. Eugene Vindman (D-VA) went to the well of the House and gave a brief speech in which he said that the two most troubling presidential calls he had reviewed while serving on the National Security Council staff were the infamous one with President Zelenskyy and another heretofore unknown call with MBS. Vindman then goes on to imply that the call showed Trump not knew MBS ordered the murder but likely supported it. Vindman first posted the video on Twitter last night. This morning he posted the same video on Bluesky. But in the caption he writes in the post — as opposed to the video — he zeroes in specifically on Trump’s claim that MBS “knew nothing about it.”

Based on Vindman’s statement and what we already know about Trump generally and the U.S. intelligence community’s verdict on the murder, it seems clear that MBS admitted to ordering the murder — that he admitted it to Trump and that Trump was completely fine with it. He did everything he could to protect MBS after the fact. The last point is a matter of public record. It’s important to remember that for a time it seemed like a very open question whether MBS could remain as the de facto ruler of the country after the facts of Khashoggi’s murder emerged. Whether the U.S. and Europe really had the muscle to force that change, I don’t really know. But Trump did MBS a very, very big solid.

They are bros, no doubt about it:

The U.S. Intelligence community said unequivocally that MBS ordered the killing. Trump said at the time that MBS told him he didn’t do it and he believed him. That’s a contradiction and the American people have a right to know what was said between the two.

I’m not going to hold my breath that anyone will ever release it because they’ll cite national security concerns and that will be that. I suppose it’d always possible that Trump will do it himself, though. He did before and he’s very stupid.

Nonetheless, if the Democrats win the majority next year, they should pound the drum for him to do it. It’s very possible that there was a quid pro quo since that’s what he does. And I would not be surprised if it was one that benefited Trump personally. There’s so much money flowing into his and the rest of his family’s hands from Saudi Arabia that the whole thing needs to be thoroughly examined.

Geniuses In Charge

Published by digby on November 19, 2025

No Scott, they will spend it. Of course they will. And it will function as a stimulus, which it will be, and that will raise inflation even more. Normally that would precipitate a rise in interest rates to tame it but that would make Trump explode. So my guess is that they will wait to do this until Powell’s term is up next year and they can replace him with a toady. Trump thinks they should lower interest rates in the case of inflation because he’s a moron so if he can somehow get a majority of the Fed governors on board with that, it’s what he’ll do. (It remains to be seen if the Supremes will allow him to fire fed governors and if they do all bets are off.)

If they lower interest rates when inflation is rising we’re going to get a real snootfull of inflation. If they do raise interest rates and the tariffs stay in place with all the associated chaos, we’ll likely be looking at stagflation.

I’m sure everyone would like to get another stimie. I would too. But we’re not going to like the consequences.

I assume Bessent knows all that. But he seems to think that Trump is a genius who “knows things” that others don’t see we need to trust him.

In case you’re wondering why anyone with any sense of dignity would say such a thing, I think this explains it:

I’m not sure what he thinks Bessent is supposed to do about the Fed, but I’m sure Bessent obediently bent over and said “thank you sire, may I have another.”

The Sell-Out In Anchorage

Published by digby on November 19, 2025

Those of you who follow right wing political history are certainly familiar with their old lament about “the sell-out at Yalta” in which Roosevelt and Churchill allegedly old out to Stalin by allowing him to continue to occupy eastern Europe. It was bullshit of course. But it looks like Trump’s on his way to actually doing it:

The Trump administration has been secretly working in consultation with Russia to draft a new plan to end the war in Ukraine, U.S. and Russian officials tell Axios.

The 28-point U.S. plan is inspired by President Trump’s successful push for a deal in Gaza. A top Russian official told Axios he’s optimistic about the plan. It’s not yet clear how Ukraine and its European backers will feel about it.

The plan’s 28 points fall into four general buckets, sources tell Axios: peace in Ukraine, security guarantees, security in Europe, and future U.S. relations with Russia and Ukraine.

  • It’s unclear how the plan approaches contentious issues such as territorial control in eastern Ukraine — where Russian forces have been inching forward, but still control far less land than the Kremlin has demanded.

Behind the scenes: Trump’s envoy Steve Witkoff is leading the drafting of the plan and has discussed it extensively with Russian envoy Kirill Dmitriev, a U.S. official said.

  • Dmitriev, who runs Russia’s sovereign wealth fund and is also deeply involved in diplomacy over Ukraine, told Axios in an interview on Monday that he spent three days huddled with Witkoff and other members of Trump’s team when Dmitriev visited Miami from Oct. 24-26.
  • Dmitriev expressed optimism about the deal’s chances of success because, unlike past efforts, “we feel the Russian position is really being heard.”

Dmitriev told Axios the basic idea was to take the principles Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin agreed to in Alaska in August and produce a proposal “to address the Ukraine conflict, but also how to restore U.S.-Russia ties [and] address Russia’s security concerns.”

[…]

 Dmitriev said this effort was entirely unrelated to the U.K.-led push to draft a Gaza-style peace plan for Ukraine, which he said had no chance of success because it disregards Russia’s positions.

The Russian envoy said the U.S. side was now in the process of explaining the “benefits” of its current approach to the Ukrainians and the Europeans.

Sounds great. Give Russia what it wants and everything’s copacetic.

2026 Looms

Published by digby on November 19, 2025

Good morning,

The Democrats currently have a 14-point lead against the Republicans among registered voters nationally on the 2026 generic congressional ballot question. This has changed considerably. Since 2022, voters have divided about which party’s candidate they would support. Asked at the tail end of the nation’s longest government shutdown, a plurality of Americans say they place most of the blame for the shutdown on congressional Democrats. However, President Donald Trump and congressional Republicans do not walk away unscathed, with six in ten blaming either the President or the GOP in Congress.

  • A majority of registered voters nationally (55%) say they would support the Democratic candidate for Congress in their district, if the 2026 congressional elections were held today. 41% would support the Republican, and 3% would back another candidate. Among independents, the Democrats (61%) have a +33-point advantage over the Republicans (28%).
  • This is the first time in more than three years that Democrats have had a notable advantage on the congressional generic ballot question. When last asked in November of 2024, registered voters divided, 48% to 48%. The last time the Democrats had a noteworthy advantage on this question was in June of 2022 when the Democrats were +7 among registered voters.
  • 39% of Americans blame the Democrats in Congress for the government shutdown. 34% place responsibility on President Trump, and 26% blame congressional Republicans.
  • While 80% of Republicans blame congressional Democrats, 49% of Democrats blame President Trump. An additional 40% of Democrats point a finger at the Republicans in Congress. Among independents, 41% blame President Trump; 32% blame the Republicans in Congress, and 27% blame the congressional Democrats.
  • President Trump’s job approval rating among Americans is 39%, down slightly from 41% in September. 56% of Americans disapprove of the job the President is doing in office. This compares with 53%, previously.
  • 26% of Americans say they strongly approve of the job President Trump is doing while 48% strongly disapprove.

There’s more here.

I don’t think I need to comment other than to say that Trump’s king act may not be the hit he thinks it is.

Update — More bad news for Trumpie

 President Donald Trump’s approval rating fell to 38%, the lowest since his return to power, with Americans unhappy about his handling of the high cost of living and the investigation into the late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, a Reuters/Ipsos poll found.

The survey showed Trump’s overall approval has fallen two percentage points since a Reuters/Ipsos poll in early November.

Another Day, Another Lawsuit

Published by Tom Sullivan on November 19, 2025

Back to court to fight the GOP

https://bsky.app/profile/marcelias.bsky.social/post/3m5yidzryfk2b

Neither I nor Digby anticipated that I would be writing from ground zero in the voting rights war when I joined her in August 2014. Life’s little quirks.

The conservative Carolina Journal summarizes the case today:

A three-judge federal panel will consider this afternoon requests to block North Carolina’s new congressional map for the 2026 elections.

Two sets of plaintiffs are seeking an injunction against the map. Republican legislative leaders are defending the map.

Tied to Senate Bill 249, the map shifts counties between Congressional Districts 1 and 3. Legislative leaders say the changes are designed to help Republicans pick up District 1, a seat held now by Democratic Rep. Don Davis.

One group of plaintiffs led by the North Carolina NAACP and another working with Democratic operative Marc Elias’ law firm challenge the map as violating constitutional rights.

The NAACP’s latest court filing targets arguments from legislative lawyers.

Beyond that point, it’s Republican arguments for why disenfranchising Black voters is A-okay with them.

Just another day ending in “Y” in North Carolina.

* * * * *

Is this a private fight, or can anyone join?

No King’s One Million Rising movement 
50501 
May Day Strong
Freedom Over Fascism Toolkit
The Resistance Lab
Choose Democracy
Indivisible: A Guide to Democracy on the Brink 
You Have Power
Chop Wood, Carry Water
Thirty lonely but beautiful actions
Attending a Protest Surveillance Self-Defense

Donnie’s Very Bad Day

Published by Tom Sullivan on November 19, 2025

The GOP racially gerrymanders? No!

Feting a Saudi butcher, suggesting Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi had earned dismemberment, and calling a female reporter “piggy” are not the only items on Donald Trump’s lowlights reel from the last week.

His effort to shake up the 2026 congressional elections by asking (and getting) state-level allies to redraw district maps to favor Republicans mid-decade just came up TILT on Tuesday (Politico):

A panel of federal judges ruled against Texas’ redrawn congressional maps that offered Republicans a five-seat pickup opportunity, saying they likely created an illegal, race-based gerrymander. The ruling came as Indiana Republicans punted the White House’s redistricting push there to January’s regular session, amid local opposition.

Together, they represent roadblocks for the White House’s push to shore up a House majority through mid-decade redraws. Republicans began their rush to redraw the maps with the upper hand, but state-level backlash, Democrats’ big Election Day win for California’s redistricting measure and this court ruling have cut into that advantage, with just under a year until voters head to the polls in next year’s midterms.

Not to mention Trump’s epic Tuesday losses in the House (427-1) and Senate (unanimous consent; GOP senators did not want a recorded vote) on release of the Epstein files:

The bill forces the release within 30 days of all files and communications related to Epstein, as well as any information about the investigation into his death in federal prison. It would allow the Justice Department to redact information about Epstein’s victims or continuing federal investigations, but not information due to “embarrassment, reputational harm, or political sensitivity.”

The bill now lands on the Oval Office desk.

Trump does not dare veto the measure. Not with those vote margins and with 80 percent public approval of full disclosure. That doesn’t mean he, AG Pam Bondi, and FBI director Kash Patel won’t be casting about for “the dog ate my homework” excuses for drawing out the Epstein coverup. Don’t expect to see full disclosure anytime soon.

Team Trump Plans to Keep Ratf*cking the Epstein Files

Getting back to the 160-page Texas ruling authored by Judge Jeffrey V. Brown, a conservative Donald Trump nominee, Mark Joseph Stern explains (Slate):

Remarkably, Brown found that it was Trump’s own Department of Justice that had injected race into the plot as part of its “hamfisted” effort to cook up a pretext for new maps. And he laid out a gobsmacking amount of smoking-gun evidence that all points in the direction of unlawful racism. The Texas Legislature, Brown noted, could simply have drawn a straightforward partisan gerrymander that benefited Republicans without regard to race. Instead, it colluded with the DOJ to reengineer congressional districts by skin color—the one thing that even this Supreme Court does not allow.

But it was a letter sent July 7 by Harmeet Dhillon, the head of the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division, that set the stage for Brown’s ruling. She claimed that existing Texas districts were unconstitutionally racist and risked federal action if not redrawn.

Brown, explains Stern:

… largely blames Dhillon and her deputies at the DOJ for bungling the whole gambit. Partisan gerrymandering, he noted, is permissible under the U.S. Constitution. And “to be sure, politics played a role” in the creation of this map. But Texas Republicans repeatedly disclaimed that they were, first and foremost, attempting to comply with Dhillon’s demands. And her primary demand was that they re-sort voters along racial lines.

Why? That is the baffling question that Brown spent much of his opinion trying to resolve. Here is what appears to have happened: Texas Republicans wanted a pretext they could use as a fig leaf to pretend that their gerrymander was not purely partisan. Dhillon was well positioned to concoct one, since she could threaten to sue the state if it didn’t follow through on Trump’s demands. Her solution was to seize upon a recent ruling by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit, Petteway v. Galveston County, which held that the Voting Rights Act does not require states to draw multiracial “coalition” districts. (In other words, Texas does not have to combine two minority groups to create one majority-minority district.) Petteway merely relieved states of the obligation to draw coalition districts. In her letter, though, Dhillon twisted the ruling into a prohibition against these districts. Because Texas currently has a number of them, she wrote, the state’s congressional map was unconstitutional and had to be retooled.

But Dhillon’s letter was so full of factual, legal, and typographical errors that, following its illogic, Stern summarizes, “Republicans targeted Texas’ nonwhite voters with almost surgical precision. [North Carolina knows something about surgical precision.] They left majority-white districts largely intact, even those that leaned Democratic. But they obliterated majority-minority “coalition” districts through the classic technique of a brazen racial gerrymander.”

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton said he would appeal the ruling to the Supreme Court and seek a stay. Voting Rights Act adversaries on the Roberts court may sympathize with Trump’s effort. But, Stern suggests, “Tuesday’s decision is not rooted in the VRA; it is, rather, based on the simple principle that the Constitution does not permit invidious racial discrimination in congressional elections.”

The question now is whether SCOTUS is prepared to stand by that principle despite Texas having broken the law to steal an additional 5 congressional seats.

“Donald Trump and Greg Abbott played with fire, got burned — and democracy won,” California Gov. Gavin Newsom said in a statement on X Tuesday. “This ruling is a win for Texas and for every American who fights for free and fair elections.”

Meanwhile, at the White House:

* * * * *

Is this a private fight, or can anyone join?

No King’s One Million Rising movement 
50501 
May Day Strong
Freedom Over Fascism Toolkit
The Resistance Lab
Choose Democracy
Indivisible: A Guide to Democracy on the Brink 
You Have Power
Chop Wood, Carry Water
Thirty lonely but beautiful actions
Attending a Protest Surveillance Self-Defense

His Capitulation Won’t Help Him

Published by digby on November 18, 2025

60% of Republicans think Trump is full of shit on the Epstein files. And since his own DOJ is now charged with releasing the files (assuming he signs the bill, which he says he will do) a good many people will assume it’s a shame — because Trump has spent the last few months covering it up. This is never going to fully go away — and Trump knows it.

He knew how this was going to go when they asked him if he’s release the JFK, MLK and Epstein files all in the same breath. Those conspiracy theories never go away.

And it’s happening at the same time as this: