Beutler: It sounds a little bit contradictory, but there’s strong ways to cave and then there’s weak ways to cave. And what we’ve seen is Democrats say, essentially, we tried to fight Donald Trump and it didn’t work, so we give up. That was Angus King’s line, essentially.
But if they had reached the same decision but from a different posture, it might not have appeared to everyone like surrender, right? If Jeanne Shaheen or Angus King, or ideally just Chuck Schumer, went to the mics and said: We have tried everything we can to make Republicans give you back your health care. They refuse to do so. The only way you’re going to get your health care back is to elect Democrats.
In the meantime, Americans need their government to be working for them. The problem with that is that Donald Trump can’t be trusted with a full-year budget. So what we’re going to do is we’re going to give him one month of budget authority. And if he doesn’t break the law, we’ll give him another month. And we’re going to keep him on a very short leash to keep him in line with the law. And if he and Russell Vought break the budget law even one more time, there will be no more Democratic votes for even a month of budget, of budget runway.
Then at least you’re setting the terms—you’re saying, Look, like they are completely irrational about health care and you’re going to pay for it and we’re sorry about that, vote for us next time.
In the meantime, we have to do something about the lawlessness and this is the only way we can do it.
Sargent: To sort of try to boil down the underlying principle that you’re articulating here. Everything needs to be run through the following prism: Are Democrats showing that they are using leverage and power to constrain Donald Trump, or are they not doing that? Does that sound right?
He is right. It was always going to be difficult to find a way out of this. Democrats only had one card: the filibuster. I was thinking that Trump might be making headway in getting the Republicans to pull the trigger but those Senators didn’t want to be in the position of having to pass all of Trump’s cockamamie ideas (like 50 year mortgages!!!) So the end game was never going to be obvious because other than that it depended upon Republicans crying about people’s suffering and they just don’t. They don’t even care about business suffering anymore.
Anyway, the way to “lose well” (an underrated political skill) was to do something like what Beutler spells out.
Maybe, in the end, it will work out that way, With the base apoplectic about the cave and the CR expiring in January maybe we’ll see something like this. Unfortunately, it’s also possible that we’ll see the eight Senators succumb to hurt feelings and double down. (We know Fetterman’s going to.) So who knows? But this is the type of strategic thinking that needs to happen going forward if the Democrats want to keep their base engaged and ready to fight next November.
Christian nationalists love Jesus. But they don’t need him when Donald Trump will gladly forgive their sins (and crimes).
Trump on Monday issued pardons to over 70 people involved in the White House scheme to overturn the results of the 2020 election Trump lost to Joe Biden. Yes, he has an ulterior motive. He’s signaling to them that they can try again in 2026 and he’ll keep them out of jail, at least on federal charges. Trump is signaling that he can somehow overrule state charges and convictions too. He talks a good game, but can he deliver? It doesn’t matter to him so long as his lackeys commit crimes in his name. They are disposable.
Recall that Trump pardoned nearly 1,600 January 6 insurrectionists on his first day in office. Including the Oath Keepers’ Stewart Rhodes. He has plans to relaunch his white supremacist group.
Are thee a sexual predator? Trump has your back there too, as Digby pointed out on Monday.
Jonathan Braun, the New York Times reported, is at least the 8th “convict to whom Mr. Trump granted clemency during his first term who has since been charged with a crime.” He received a 27-month sentence on Monday for “a range of criminal conduct — including physical and sexual assault.”
Trump is sending signals that Jeffrey Epstein’s partner in sex trafficking is headed for a Trump commutation. While Ghislaine Maxwell waits, MSNBC reports, she “is being waited on ‘hand and foot’ by the staff at her minimum security prison camp.”
USA Today this morning suggests that Trump is not done issuing pardons to his faithful foot soldiers for past sins in anticipation of his needing them to commit more. Trump pardon attorney Ed Martin indicates that beyond Monday’s pardons “There are many more Americans who Biden targeted. And we’re working to help them.”
Martin went even further in an extended interview Nov. 10 with former Trump advisor Steve Bannon on his “War Room” podcast.
Martin said that as pardon attorney and also as head of DOJ’s “weaponization working group,” he’s leading an extensive effort to identify a broader swath of people that Trump believes were wronged by either of the last two Democratic presidents.
Martin said that in a meeting in the Oval Office, the president told him to find people “that deserve a break,” including those “weaponized against us by Biden. And Obama, by the way.”
Those include?
Martin said the list goes beyond anyone who hasn’t already pardoned in connection with the Jan. 6 Capitol riot.
He also mentioned the “FACE Act, the pro-lifers,” in apparent reference to anyone charged under a 1994 federal law, the Freedom of Access to Clinic Entrances Act, which prohibits physically interfering with someone who is getting an abortion or reproductive health services or damaging a related facility.
In return, their Godfather will ask a favor. Count on it.
Update: Spell-checking the body doesn’t check the headlines. So it goes.
Rat presses bar to self-administer a jolt of pleasure.
Progressives sometimes talk about conservatives being driven primarily by their lizard brains, the most primitive parts governing “fight, flight, feeding, fear, freezing up, and fornication.” Donald Trump wears his on the outside. He has no ideology. The man is all appetite and instinct. Insulated since childhood by his father’s wealth, primitive instinct has served him better than it would a poor man with no impulse control.
So when Trump suddenly discovers “affordability” the way last year he introduced the press to the word “groceries,” he has not developed late-life empathy. He’s reacting to a threat.
Republicans’ dramatic losses to Democrats last week spooked Trump. Especially Zohran Mamdani’s mayoral win in New York City in a campaign won on lowering people’s cost of living. Suddenly Trump wants to address a problem he repeatedly claims to have solved.
Trump on affordability: It’s a con job. Costs are way down.
Politico suggests we watch what Trump does, not what he says. He claims that cost of living talk is a con job by Democrats. Yet he’s announced a set of actions aimed at lowering it:
He’s also suggested sending money to Americans directly to help them purchase health insurance and floated a proposal pushed by Federal Housing Finance Agency Director Bill Pulte to establish 50-year mortgages, which could lower homeowners’ monthly payments.
Together, the moves demonstrate a White House more concerned with pocketbook issues than the president is publicly willing to admit.
Economist Paul Krugman is disappointed as many are by the “tactical weakness” of a group of Senate Democrats cutting a deal to end the government shutdown. But he turns this morning to “a different kind of weakness on the part of Donald Trump and MAGA as a whole — namely, their innate cruelty.”
Krugman writes, “They have a visceral dislike for policies that do anything to help the less fortunate, and can’t even bring themselves to be cynical, to help Americans temporarily while they consolidate power.”
But that just may be what Trump’s spooked lizard brain is up to, short term, even while Republicans kill Affordable Care Act subsidies and dramatically jack up the cost of Americans’ health insurance.
Krugman suspects:
Drastically increasing health care costs at the beginning of 2026, causing millions to lose insurance, certainly looks like a massive political blunder. My guess is that it doesn’t reflect a considered strategy. Instead, Republicans just stumbled into this because nobody in a position of power within the party understood how the ACA works.
Trump’s lunatic idea for sending money directly to Americans for buying their own policies from insurance companies proves Krugman’s point. That’s like claiming individual workers will get a better deal negotiating salaries with employers than they would through collective bargaining. Republicans hate that too.
Sure, the ACA enjoys overwhelming public support, “74 percent overall, including half of Republicans,” but that’s no reason for conservatives not to kill it. It’s who they are, even if Trump recognizes on a primitive level that doing so threatens him.
The political moral is that the humiliating cave over the shutdown isn’t the end of the story. Democrats can and should keep hammering Trump and his party over their indifference to the suffering of ordinary Americans. They need to make sure both that Americans know who’s responsible for surging premiums now and that Trump’s One Big Beautiful Bill will lead to savage cuts in both Medicaid and food stamps after the midterms.
MAGA can’t help being cruel. It can’t even pretend to care about other people’s suffering. And Democrats should take full advantage of this pathology.
And some of the people in his circle are embracing that maximalist ethos when it comes to their visage, surgeons tell Axios.
What they’re saying: Washington is typically an understated town regarding plastic surgery; people want to look good, but don’t want it to be obvious they’ve had work done, says area plastic surgeon Troy Pittman, who works with a lot of Trump insiders.
But that’s no longer the case since Team Trump 2.0 rolled into town: “[Now] we’re seeing people who want to look like they had something done,” he says.
And while old-school Beltway-ers tend to be hush-hush about their tune-ups, the “Palm Beach crowd” is all-systems-go, says Pittman, whose MAGA-verse clients will often chat procedures and trade doctor recs.
Fillers are big with this crew — especially lips, says Pittman, as are Botox and Dysport.
The intrigue: D.C. plastic surgeon Anita Kulkarni has had to turn down an influx of newly arrived political insiders asking for “a more done look, like that Mar-a-Lago face.”
The aesthetic didn’t fit her practice’s typical understated vibe, and these people wanted extra fillers and injections on top of already treated faces, which can be dangerous, she says.
It’s a situation Kulkarni calls “filler blindness.” If you add more and more product to your face and are surrounded by people who do the same, “you lose sight of anatomic normalcy.”
It isn’t just the women:
Speaking of the men, they’re looking for procedures to appear “younger” and “more virile and masculine,” says Pittman, in line with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth’s rhetoric surrounding military fitness and appearances.
A felon whose sentence President Trump commuted in the final hours of his first term was sentenced to 27 months in prison on Monday after being accused of a range of criminal conduct — including physical and sexual assault — since Mr. Trump freed him.
The sentencing of the man, Jonathan Braun, who had a long history of violence and in 2011 pleaded guilty to drug trafficking and money laundering, demonstrates how Mr. Trump’s handling of pardons and commutations has allowed some convicts to return to criminality.
Mr. Braun’s family used a connection to Mr. Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, to obtain the commutation in January 2021. He is at least the eighth convict to whom Mr. Trump granted clemency during his first term who has since been charged with a crime. Several others pardoned more recently after being convicted of offenses committed during the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol have also run into trouble with the law.
Trump is murdering poverty stricken fishermen every single day claiming that they are unlawful combatants against the United States. This guy, however, is a convicted trafficker and a rapist but he was buddies with Jared and Ivanka so he’s all good.
“The deference and servility to Ms. Maxwell have reached such preposterous levels that one of the top officials at the facility has complained that he is ‘sick of having to be Maxwell’s bitch,’” according to a letter to Trump from Rep. Jamie Raskin of Maryland, the ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee.
In August, Maxwell, who is serving a 20-year sentence for helping Epstein prey sexually on children and young women, had an unusualinterview with the deputy attorney general, Todd Blanche, who once was Trump’s personal defense attorney. She told Blanche she never saw Trump behaving inappropriately.
After the interview, she was transferred from a low security prison in Florida to a minimum security federal prison camp in Bryan, Texas. The Federal Bureau of Prisons has not explained the transfer, which MSNBC and other outlets reported deviated from a policy that generally forbids sex offenders from serving in prison camps.
The Federal Bureau of Prisons has not explained the transfer, which MSNBC and other outlets reported deviated from a policy that generally forbids sex offenders from serving in prison camps. Days after her arrival, she said in emails to friends and relatives that she was much happier at the less restrictive facility.
Now Judiciary Democrats say they have obtained documents and whistleblower information that Maxwell is receiving special favors at the prison camp — benefits unavailable to other inmates.
Raskin’s letter said Maxwell has received customized meals personally delivered to her cell, after-hours time in a private exercise area and access to a service puppy. Raskin said Maxwell was also afforded private meetings with visitors arranged by the warden, complete with snacks. The guests were allowed to bring computers, which Raskin described as “an unprecedented action” that risked Maxwell having “unmonitored communications with the outside world.”
When the phone lines went down for other inmates at the camp, Raskin said, Maxwell had friends and relatives call prison employees, who then could help her speak to them. “These luxuries and amenities … mark Ms. Maxwell more as a guest at a Trump hotel than a federal prisoner and child sex offender,” Raskin wrote.
Sexual offenders are never allowed to be in such prisons but Maxwell is. And these favors are unprecedented. Apparently when anyone complains they are retaliated against.
I wonder how all this came about?
She’s reportedly working on her commutation. What are the odds that she gets it?
Trump: "We're gonna issue a dividend to our middle income people and lower income people of about $2,000, and we're gonna use the remaining tariffs to lower our debt."
Hassett: "We understand that people feel like there's an affordability problem, but we're closing the gap fast. And with these policies and potentially rebate checks, we might close the whole gap really really fast."
Gosh, I sure hope he doesn’t sign those checks with an auto pen…
I guess they aren’t worried about inflation actually spiking from this massive stimulus… but whatever. We’re living in the world of make-believe now.
By the way, the Congress has to pass this giveaway. I guess they probably will because the Democrats will be afraid to stop him from handing out the “stimi checks.”
Grocery prices. Gas prices. Prescription drug prices. Overall prices. Over just three days, Trump made false claims about all of them.
Trump was discussing the issue of “affordability” after Democrats won state and local elections Tuesday in part by campaigning on the cost of living. He argued that this theme was “a con job by the Democrats” given how successful he said he has been in lowering prices.
But Trump repeatedly used inaccurate statistics and assertions to make his case that Democrats were dishonest. Here is a fact check.
Prices are up during this Trump presidency
Over and over, Trump claimed overall prices have fallen since he returned to office in late January.
“Every price is down,” he said Thursday. “Everything is way down,” he said at another Thursday event. “Prices are down under the Trump administration, and they’re down substantially,” he said Friday, adding, “Everybody knows that it’s far less expensive under Trump than it was under Sleepy Joe Biden. And the prices are way down.”
None of that is true.
Prices are up during this administration. Average prices were 1.7% higher in September than they were in January, according to the most recent figures from the federal Consumer Price Index, and 3% higher than they were in September 2024. There has been inflation every month of the term, and far more products have gotten costlier than cheaper.
Inflation has accelerated to 3%
Trump claimed Friday: “We have almost no inflation. We’re down now to 2%.” He said at the same event: “Inflation is almost nonexistent.”
Those claims are slightly more accurate than Trump’s late-October claims that “we don’t have any inflation” and that “we’re down to 2%, even less than 2%.” But the new claims are still wrong.
Inflation not only very much continues to exist but has been accelerating since the spring. As of September, the year-over-year inflation rate had increased for five consecutive months.
The September rate, 3%, was the same as the rate in January, the month Trump returned to the White House. Inflation of 3% is simply not inflation of 2%. (Core inflation, which omits volatile food and energy prices, was also 3% in September.) And this “2%” claim wasn’t a one-time slip by Trump; he claimed in late October, “We’re down to 2%, even less than 2%.”
Grocery prices have increased, not decreased
Trump claimed on both Wednesday and Thursday that “groceries are way down.” But grocery prices are actually up. Average grocery prices rose 1.4% between January and September, Consumer Price Index figures show, and they rose 2.7% between September 2024 and September 2025. The 0.6% increase in average grocery prices from July 2025 to August 2025, meanwhile, was the biggest month-to-month spike in three years – and it was followed by a 0.3% increase from August to September.
Read on for the particulars about the following:
It isn’t just beef. Dozens of grocery products have gotten more expensive
Prescription drug prices can’t come down ‘1,200%’
Gas prices aren’t the lowest in two decades and aren’t close to $2 per gallon
Biden-era inflation was high, but Trump didn’t inherit the worst ever
Oil and gas prices are down, but not household energy prices
Everything he is telling his ecstatic cult members is a lie.Do they believe him? Yeah, mostly. But nobody else does.
It would be nice to know their reasoning on this so we could feel confident that they’ve decided that marriage equality isn’t on the chopping block, but this is good news nonetheless:
The Supreme Court on Monday rejected a call to overturn its landmark decision that legalized same-sex marriage nationwide. The justices, without comment, turned away an appeal from Kim Davis, the former Kentucky court clerk who refused to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples after the high court’s 2015 ruling in Obergefell v. Hodges.
Davis had been trying to get the court to overturn a lower-court order for her to pay $360,000 in damages and attorney’s fees to a couple denied a marriage license.
Her lawyers repeatedly invoked the words of Justice Clarence Thomas, who alone among the nine justices has called for erasing the same-sex marriage ruling. Thomas was among four dissenting justices in 2015. Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito are the other dissenters who are on the court today.
Roberts has been silent on the subject since he wrote a dissenting opinion in the case. Alito has continued to criticize the decision, but he said recently he was not advocating that it be overturned. Justice Amy Coney Barrett, who was not on the court in 2015, has said that there are times when the court should correct mistakes and overturn decisions, as it did in the 2022 case that ended a constitutional right to abortion.
Barrett has indicated that gay marriage might be an exception because people have come to depend on it when creating families. So that’s nice.
I still would not rest entirely easy on this. A lot depends on what happens in the next few years. If the authoritarian Christian Nationalists solidify their power and they are able to impose their culture war beliefs on the rest of us, this will almost certainly be on the chopping block. For now they’re concentrating on transgender hatred.
There are many takes on the shutdown out there and I honestly don’t have much to add. Tom’s piece below hits most of the highlights.
I felt that the Democrats were winning the shutdown because Trump was obviously rattled and his numbers were cratering. It certainly seemed worth it to me to keep him on the ropes. He’s unstable and the GOP is starting to fracture. Press the (rare) advantage. But what do I know?
As Nate Silver( who cannot be considered any kind of liberal) wrote:
Late last month, Trump’s numbers began to plummet, with his net approval rating falling from −7.5 on Oct. 17 to −13 three weeks later. It wasn’t a huge shift in absolute terms. But Trump has had a high popularity floor and a low ceiling. It was something real enough to contribute to Democrats absolutely crushing Republicans in a series of elections last Tuesday in New Jersey, Virginia and other states. Meanwhile, Trump was starting to feud with Congressional Republicans, urging them to “nuke” the filibuster when leadership was reluctant to do so.
[…]
What happened in late October? There are a handful of plausible explanations, but I think the evidence is reasonably clear. On Oct. 18, Agriculture Secretary Brooke Rollins warned voters that food stamps — more formally known as the Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program or SNAP — would run out of funding at the end of the month. This program is a huge deal, affecting roughly 42 million Americans. Although Rollins tried to blame Democrats, voters didn’t buy that at all — not when the Trump has been fighting court orders to continue to fund the program, and holding Great Gatsby-themed dinners at Mar-a-Lago.
Google searches tell the story here. Since the shutdown began, searches for terms related to the Affordable Care Act — Democrats’ ostensible rationale for withholding votes — has never been more than a blip on the radar. Conversely, searches related to SNAP benefits increased roughly tenfold over their baseline beginning in late October:
There have been other stories in the news, but none of them had the staying power of SNAP. The No Kings protests were a big deal — and the timing lines up interestingly with the drop in Trump’s numbers — but only for 48 hours. Some pundits have tried to pin the blame for Trump’s approval declineon the destruction of the East Wing for the construction of a new White House ballroom, but searches for the White House were also a short-lived story with a much lower peak than either SNAP or No Kings. Meanwhile, as the FAA has announced a reduction in flights, searches related to flight delays have increased considerably in relative terms. But they remain modest relative to other news stories and postdate Trump’s approval decline anyway.
The increase in food-stamp-related searches has been far more persistent, as you might expect for a program that affects so many families.
I suspect that had the Dems held fast for another week or two, the airline issues would have hit hard too. And people were blaming Trump and the Republicans. It may have gotten so bad that they relented on the ACA subsidies (which they are adamantly against because they think they have a chance to finally break Obamacare.) Instead, they will get a reprieve.
I know it’s difficult to go along with a plan that creates suffering for people. But really, what isn’t creating suffering right now? The culture under these sadists becomes more cruel every day, even brutal. It is to Republicans’ great advantage that they simply don’t care about that and their followers live in such an insulated media bubble that they have no understanding of the facts of the dynamics of their suffering. But people were starting to pay attention. Now we’ll be on to the next shiny object as usual.
Let’s just hope that the Democrats can at least take credit for getting the SNAP benefits extended through 2026. I haven’t seen much evidence today so far that they are doing that.
We can’t go back and undo the capitulation, but we can make sure Republicans pay a price for jacking up the cost of health care. Yell at any Democrat you want this week — I get why people are furious. I’m furious.
Now we need every American to know that Donald Trump and the Republicans are the ones who raised their premiums.
If we do that, they may have won the shutdown battle, but they will have lost the war.
They are going to try to end Obamacare and replace it with nonsense. But they’ll have to end the filibuster to do it because I can’t imagine even the Sell-out 8 going along with the GOP’s daft plan to send the subsidy money directly to people so they can pay their premiums directly to the insurance companies. It makes no sense, of course. Their out-of-pocket will be the same. But they are obviously convinced that people will be so dazzled at the thought of receiving cash that they’ll love Trump and the Republicans even more and won’t notice.
But then they don’t even really understand how insurance works. Here’s a Senator who is also a doctor:
Tell me you don’t understand risk pools without saying you don’t understand risk pools https://t.co/TcMNjAUQKP
It seems odd that a medical doctor wouldn’t know what “insurance” means but then he’s a Republican so …
Anyway, this battle over Obamacare isn’t over. Mike Johnson made it very clear that he would not allow a vote to come to the floor and it’s hard to see him doing that now. But the pain of these rising subsidies is going to hit tens of millions of people very soon and these officials will all be hearing from their constituents — most people who are on the program are on red states. And don’t forget that they stripped Medicaid as well, which won’t fully go into effect until after the mid-terms but it’s already being anticipated in many state budgets.
The suffering will be massive and the economy will take yet another hit. You don’t essentially seize huge amounts of money from individuals, families and an entire economic sector like health care and expect that it won’t have huge economic consequences.
The ride just got a lot bumpier and they ain’t done yet.
There are many reasons why Democrats won landslide victories in Tuesday’s off-year elections, not the least of which is that the party out of power usually wins in such circumstances. None of the polls showed Republicans poised to produce an upset. But none predicted that Democrats would receive such huge margins, or that the party would win down ballot in places where Republicans have long dominated. In other words, it was a much better result than Democrats had even hoped — and a much worse outcome for the GOP.
You could see how bad it was by observing President Donald Trump’s drawn features and low energy appearances throughout the week. He even seemed to doze off at one point in the middle of a presentation by Dr. Mehmet Oz, who runs Medicare and Medicaid, in the Oval Office. For some time now, Trump has appeared to be living in a bubble, convinced of his invincibility and so sure of his own instincts and impulses that he hasn’t been paying attention to what’s really happening.
So far, his second term has been a chaotic mess. Trump pursues revenge against his enemies and gives favors to his friends, and in every possible instance he creates opportunities for his family to profit. To the extent that he’s focused on the actual job of being president, it has mostly been on foreign policy, where he’s enjoying the pageantry and flattery he receives from foreign leaders; his immigration crackdown, which thrills his hardcore base; and his precious tariff regime. But as Tuesday’s election results show, all of that comes with a big political price.
Trump’s forays into foreign policy have been embarrassing at best. The good news for him is that, except for the Israel-Gaza peace deal — which he has himself portrayed as an opportunity to ethnically cleanse Gaza in order to build a resort — nobody is paying much attention. They are consumed with the other two issues which form the basis of the resistance to his agenda, as well as the electoral losses the GOP just suffered.
Voters are appalled by his authoritarian immigration agenda, particularly the Hispanic community, which had been trending more Republican for the last few cycles but is now showing signs of swinging sharply to Democrats. This is a big problem for the GOP. Republicans were so sure they had permanently captured the Latino vote that they began racially profiling and brutalizing immigrants in the streets of American cities — and believing Latinos would still turn out for GOP candidates. They gerrymandered five seats in Texas under that assumption, and now they might end up losing them, as well as other seats they weakened in the process.
Mostly, though, the American people are upset about the economy — specifically inflation and affordability, which every Democrat elected on Tuesday ran on in one way or another. Trump promised to fix the economy on day one, and clearly that has not happened. Voters are beginning to blame the president and his tariffs for making it worse.
His first reaction on the morning after the election was to blame the GOP losses on the shutdown — after he had pretty much ignored the issue since the government closed on Oct. 1. Then he demanded that the Senate nuke the filibuster to pass the rest of his unpopular agenda. Republican senators had been resistant to the so-called “nuclear option” before the elections, and after the party’s shocking losses they came back with a hard no.
Trump did have an unusual moment of clarity. “They have this new word called ‘affordability’ and [Republicans] don’t talk about it enough,” he said. “Democrats did.”
This was progress for the president; he seemed ready to admit that people were not happy with the economy. But that coherence only lasted a day. By Thursday, Trump was saying, “I don’t want to hear about affordability,” after a misleading Walmart statement said that Thanksgiving meals would be less expensive this year than last. (The company replaced brand name goods with lower quality options, while leaving out the pie, cranberry sauce, sweet potatoes, onions, cornbread and whipped cream. It’s a real bargain.)
Trump was on a roll from there, claiming that only the price of beef had gone up, disputing that any cost increases add up to much and defending his decision to withhold Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits. “Our country has to remain very liquid because problems, catastrophes, wars — it could be anything,” he said. “We have to remain liquid. We can’t give everything away.” (The U.S. controls its own currency.)
But the president got some other bad news. On Wednesday, the Supreme Court heard a challenge to his emergency use of tariffs, and most of the justices — even those appointed by the president himself — didn’t seem convinced. Trump, seeming to recognize a defeat could be in the offing, said that he’ll “have to develop a game two plan” and let it slip that average Americans “might be paying something.”
He tried to pivot to a national security argument, but it was so fatuous that it’s hard to believe anyone would buy it. “Look, I’m ending wars because of these tariffs,” he said. “Americans would have to fight in some of these wars.”
On Thursday, Challenger, Gray and Christmas, a firm that tracks workplace reductions, released a comprehensive report showing that layoffs surged to recessionary levels in October. The company calculated that 1.1 million jobs have been lost so far in 2025, resulting in the worst October for layoffs since 2003. With inflation still stubborn and people smarting from the higher prices induced by Trump’s tariffs, the economy is on shaky ground. And that’s before skyrocketing health care premiums and electricity prices start hitting this month.
Trump is set to have a serious crisis on his hands, and it doesn’t appear he has the slightest idea what to do about it, except what he usually does: Double down and blame someone else.
This week’s election results have shown Republican officials that voters are paying attention to what’s happening in Washington, D.C. — and they don’t like what they see. The gadflies and Trump fans who only come out to vote for him have not been converted to loyal party members, and many of the non-white and younger voters who gave him an edge in 2024 are fleeing to the Democrats.
The result? Trump has been pushed into early lame duck status.
He promised to lower prices and instead they are going up. He promised a thriving economy and the job market appears to be cratering. He vowed to deport gang members and criminals, and instead it’s his federal agents who are marauding through the streets. When asked if he thinks Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents have gone too far, Trump said they haven’t gone far enough, reiterating his commitment to a violently anti-immigrant program. There is no reason to believe he has any intention of changing course.
The president might get lucky; he has before. Maybe all of this will calm down, and by next November it will be morning in America. Republicans, though, would be foolish to count on that happening. Trump is causing massive trauma across this country and people are angry about it.
The sooner Republicans wake up and treat him like the rabid lame duck he is, the better off they — and the country — will be. The only question is whether they can muster the courage to do it.
President Donald Trump has pardoned his former personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani, his onetime chief of staff Mark Meadows and others accused of backing the Republican’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election.
The “full, complete, and unconditional” pardon applies only to federal crimes, and none of the dozens of Trump allies named in the proclamation were ever charged federally over the bid to subvert the election won by Democrat Joe Biden. It doesn’t impact state charges, though state prosecutions stemming from the 2020 election have hit a dead end or are just limping along.
Dozens? But wait! There’s more:
Among those also pardoned were Sidney Powell, an attorney who promoted baseless conspiracy theories about a stolen election, John Eastman, another lawyer who pushed a plan to keep Trump in power, and Jeffrey Clark, a former Justice Department official who championed Trump’s efforts to challenge his election loss. Also named were Republicans who acted as fake electors for Trump and were charged in state cases accusing them of submitting false certificates that confirmed they were legitimate electors despite Biden’s victory in those states.
Department of Justice’s Pardon Attorney, Ed Martin., posted the full list (4 pages) to FKA Twitter. Trump did not pardon himself … yet. Not until, if he lasts that long, he’s leaving office in January 2029.
Martin replies, “We are working on it!” CNN reports that Martin is working behind the scenes on a habeas petition that Peters filed in March. He’s “urged a federal judge to free her from state prison while she appeals her conviction. That matter is still pending, but a decision is expected this year.”
Peters was sentenced on October 2 on Colorado charges a Trump pardon cannot touch:
Former Mesa County Clerk and Recorder Tina Peters was sentenced to nine years in prison on Thursday for her role in a 2021 security breach in the elections office she was supposed to oversee.
Peters will spend the next six weeks to six months in the Mesa County Detention Facility before being transferred to the Colorado Department of Corrections, where she will serve her nine-year prison sentence.
The state judge in her case told Peters, “You are no hero…. You abused your position and you’re a charlatan.” That makes her a hero in Trump’s mind. Birds of a feather and all.
