Nostr notes by The New Republic

Nostr event nevent1qqst26gv8pse9jnn2aegptfphm5nnfsz70ck2qcnpe4n7f8m7zrrqdczyzjjh2tqdtt595wtmwtqycw2pt5ztrjaqduznlahlyv5z9fe4qyqjql08ne

2026-04-13T16:39:51Z

The New Republic (nprofile…pyzj)

Donald Trump has deleted a post containing an AI image of himself as Jesus after backlash from his supporters and religious leaders. The Truth Social post showed an illustration of the president, in the style of art usually found in Bibles, dressed in white in a red shawl with light emanating from him while he healed a sick man in a bed wearing a hospital gown. In the picture, Trump is surrounded by men and women, all white, while the background is full of soldiers, fighter jets, a bald eagle, a waving American flag, and the Statue of Liberty.Shortly after deleting the image, he made a lame attempt to play dumb, saying that while he did initially post it, “I thought it was me as a doctor, and had to do with Red Cross as a Red Cross worker there which we support, and only the fake news could come up with that one.”Reporter: Did you post that picture of yourself depicted as Jesus Christ?Trump: It wasn't a depiction. I did post it and I thought it was me as a doctor. And had to do with red cross as a red cross worker, which we support and only the fake news could come up with that one. pic.twitter.com/7Y1u86GjkP— Acyn (@Acyn) April 13, 2026Various figures on the right, including evangelical Christians and right-wing media personalities, decried the picture as blasphemous. Sean Feucht, who has performed worship music at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate and the White House, called on the photo to be “deleted immediately.” Christian influencer Mandy Arthur posted on X that “we have made a mistake and accidently elected the Antichrist. Send help.”Anti-transgender activist Riley Gaines also chimed in, saying that “a little humility would serve [Trump] well” and “God shall not be mocked.” Conservative Christian commentator Megan Basham called the post “OUTRAGEOUS blasphemy” and called on Trump “to take this down immediately and ask for forgiveness from the American people and then from God.” Trump has not endeared himself to his Christian supporters in recent days, drawing ire from Catholics, Protestants, and Evangelicals alike. After a report emerged last week that his administration apparently threatened Pope Leo XIV in January, Trump doubled down on Sunday and attacked the pontiff further, calling him “WEAK on crime” and “terrible for foreign policy.”The pope deflected Trump’s comments on Monday, saying that he wasn’t afraid of the president and that he “will continue to speak out loudly against war, looking to promote peace, ⁠promoting dialogue and multilateral relationships among the states to look for just solutions to problems.”“Too many people are suffering in the world today. Too many innocent people ⁠are being killed. And I think someone has to stand up and say there’s a better way to do this,” the pope added. This post alienated Christians of all denominations, even the right-wing conservatives in his base. But Trump doesn’t seem to care, and has enjoyed being compared to Jesus before, most recently at an Easter lunch at the White House by his spiritual adviser Paula White-Cain. The president has never rushed to correct anyone praising him, no matter how excessive. This story has been updated.
https://newrepublic.com/post/208999/trump-deletes-ai-jesus-photo-maga-uproar

Nostr event nevent1qqs2urmk95ltqaxr8j43mx0lvl7f7qudsgwmv8wrpy2vlzn7umz4gaqzyzjjh2tqdtt595wtmwtqycw2pt5ztrjaqduznlahlyv5z9fe4qyqju8jdzq

2026-01-14T14:00:04Z

The New Republic (nprofile…pyzj)
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Donald Trump has stepped up his rhetoric on Greenland hours before Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Vice President JD Vance will meet its foreign minister along with Denmark’s at the White House.Early Wednesday morning, the president posted on his Truth Social account, “The United States needs Greenland for the purposes of National Security.“It is vital for the Golden Dome that we are building,” he added, referring to the massive boondoggle he seeks to build. “NATO should be leading the way for us to get it. IF WE DON’T, RUSSIA OR CHINA WILL, AND THAT IS NOT GOING TO HAPPEN!”The governments of Denmark and Greenland requested Wednesday’s meeting in an attempt to clarify Trump’s renewed push to seize the territory. NATO’s leading parties, Greenland’s political parties, and Denmark all oppose the move, but that has not dissuaded Trump, who is dead set on taking Greenland despite a complete lack of evidence that Russia or China have their own plans to conquer it. At a joint press conference on Tuesday, the premier of Greenland, Jens-Frederik Nielsen, said firmly that “if we have to choose between the USA and Denmark here and now, we choose Denmark. We choose NATO, the Kingdom of Denmark, and the EU.”But Trump’s statement shows that his mind is made up, raising tensions ahead of Wednesday afternoon’s meeting. It will be interesting to see how Rubio and Vance treat the visiting Danish and Greenlandic officials, especially considering Vance’s past experiences with foreign leaders.
https://newrepublic.com/post/205270/trump-greenland-threat-white-house-meeting

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2026-01-14T11:00:00Z

The New Republic (nprofile…pyzj)
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Not so long ago, the Arctic—a remote and thinly populated region stretching from Alaska to Siberia—seemed immune to the kind of conflicts that beset so many other parts of the world. Scholars even had a phrase for it: Arctic exceptionalism. Territorial disputes were virtually nonexistent. Until recently, Finland and Sweden still served as buffers between an expanding NATO alliance and the Russian federation, which takes up more than half of the Arctic coastline. Over the last couple of decades, the member states of the Arctic Council reached international agreements on polar bear conservation, commercial fishing in the Central Arctic Ocean, and the rights of Indigenous peoples. The Norwegian phrase “High North, low tension,” came to serve as a kind of mantra and point of pride. But that cooperative spirit is now a thing of the past. It has been replaced by an emerging era of competition over resources, particularly rare earth metals and control of shipping lanes, increasingly accessible as sea ice melts, and the potential for outright conflict as the United States, Russia, and China all seek to project power in the region. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 has fractured the Arctic Council and stripped it of much of the legitimacy and influence it once had. Since then, diplomatic relations between Russia and the so-called Arctic 7—Canada, Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, Sweden, and the U.S.—have deteriorated badly. Russia has officially banned all data sharing with its Western counterparts, and indefinitely suspended scientific collaboration with the U.S. and the EU. Meanwhile, China has declared itself a “near-Arctic state” and is leveraging Russia’s relative isolation on the world stage to advance its own vision of a polar Silk Road. And the U.S. has become the most openly belligerent actor in the region amid Donald Trump’s renewed threats to acquire Greenland, an autonomous territory that is still part of Denmark.As Mia Bennett and Klaus Dodds argue in Unfrozen: The Fight for the Future of the Arctic, the sense of shared responsibility that once defined the region has all but vanished. The focus is now on security and the military buildup that goes along with it, as well as resource extraction and territorial expansion, including claims to the lucrative metals believed to lie at the bottom of the Arctic Ocean. The effects of climate change and questions related to Indigenous sovereignty have largely been placed on the back burner. And even if some sort of agreement or ceasefire is reached in Ukraine, which at this stage seems unlikely, it will not as Bennett and Dodds write, “repair the now hard-wired distrust within the Arctic state community. The damage has been well and truly done.”The sense of shared responsibility that once defined the region has all but vanished. The focus is now on security, military buildup, and resource extraction.The plundering of resources in the Arctic is an old story, from furs and whale oil to metals and fossil fuels, and one that has often been wrapped in depictions of the region as an empty wasteland (most famously, perhaps, Alaska Senator Ted Stevens once held up a blank piece of paper to represent the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge’s coastal plain). Its fate today is inextricably tied to the whims of its two most powerful actors—the U.S. and Russia—whose current leaders are driven by a kind of nineteenth-century vision of hemispheric consolidation and expansion. But increasingly they must also contend with a third actor, a rapidly warming climate, which is, perversely, opening up new commercial opportunities on land and sea, even as it threatens to radically upend a way of life and natural order that has existed for thousands of years. Bennett, a geographer at the University of Washington, and Dodds, a professor of geopolitics at the University of London, have traveled widely across the Arctic for well over a decade, and the book benefits from a mix of on-the-ground reporting, much of which first appeared on Bennett’s blog, Cryopolitics, and an intimate grasp of the ecological and political changes reshaping the region.The Arctic is warming faster than anywhere else on earth. Sea ice is disappearing and, according to some projections, the Arctic Ocean could see its first ice-free summers as soon as 2030. Warming waters are destabilizing marine ecosystems—Alaska’s snow crab population was wiped out in 2022, likely a result of increasing temperatures—and salmon runs along the state’s major rivers have crashed. And as prized species such as pollock and cod migrate northward in search of colder waters, it is only a matter of time before the Central Arctic Ocean, currently protected by an international treaty, is opened to commercial exploitation.Back on land, permafrost is thawing, raising questions about the viability of northern settlements—about half of the Arctic’s four million people live in Russia—and the thousands of miles of oil and gas infrastructure that stretch across the tundra. Storms, fires, and landscape-scale ecological transformation threaten the subsistence-based way of life that continues to sustain northern communities (some villages in Alaska are in the process of being relocated at enormous cost). Aging pipelines and oil wells are also vulnerable, posing new risks to the environment and public health.The changes, however, have also been viewed as a commercial bonanza. In a 2019 speech in Finland, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo described the Arctic as a land of “abundance and opportunity,” with vast mineral stores and “fisheries galore.” Diminishing sea ice—rather than a cataclysm for local hunters and the species they depend on and a contributor to rising sea levels—was heralded as opening up a new golden age of trade and shipping.Diminishing sea ice—rather than a cataclysm for local hunters and a contributor to rising sea levels—was heralded as opening up a new golden age of trade and shipping.The United States has also continued to expand oil and gas development on Alaska’s North Slope, and the Trump administration recently announced that it would resume leasing and development in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, and vastly increase the acreage available in the National Petroleum Reserve. Russia is forging ahead with massive development projects along its Arctic coastline (Vostok and Yamal LNG, to name two) and banking on new shipping routes to send crude oil to Asia. Meanwhile, new frontiers are being pursued. In 2024, Norway—a pioneer in offshore oil and gas development in the far north—became the first country to approve exploration licenses for deep sea mining in the Arctic Ocean, though it subsequently imposed a year-long moratorium after pushback from environmental organizations and other EU nations. But the race is on. The U.S., Russia, Canada, Norway, and Denmark (via Greenland) have all made claims, some of which overlap, to the seabed territory beyond their exclusive economic zones. This would give these countries exclusive access to the minerals or fossil fuels at the bottom of the ocean. The search for rare earth metals and other highly prized minerals—copper, zinc, and titanium for example—needed to sustain our digital lives (and, incidentally, our advanced weaponry) also extends to land. Greenland, which is believed to possess enormous quantities of mineral wealth, has been coveted for this very reason, though very little mining is actually taking place there. In yet another ominous twist, cold climate locales are seen as an ideal place to build data centers, which are used to power the internet industrial complex and consume such vast amounts of energy that they are susceptible to overheating. Bennett and Dodds also speculate that the Arctic may be considered fertile ground for another risky endeavor: geoengineering. Scientists are already working on ways to deflect solar radiation from reaching the poles by injecting sulfur into the atmosphere and to preserve glaciers and sea ice. One experiment, advanced by a Silicon Valley nonprofit that has since folded, involved dispersing glass beads on the surface of a frozen lake in northern Alaska in the hope that it would reflect the sunlight. Ultimately, Bennett and Dodds see geoengineering as a sign of desperation—not to mention another colonial misadventure—and one that has the potential to do enormous damage. “In pursuit of a great refreeze,” the authors conclude, “capable actors may intervene in ways unimaginable just decades ago, destabilizing the environmental and international order alike.” Trump’s threats toward Greenland present a heavy-handed challenge to one of the more promising recent developments in Arctic politics: the assertion of Indigenous sovereignty as a potential counterweight to the zero-sum scramble for resources driven by the world’s superpowers. Greenland is more than 80 percent Inuit, and, over the last couple of decades, has sought to gain greater autonomy from Denmark, which ruled the island as a colony until 1953. Greenland manages its own domestic affairs, but relies on a block grant from the Danes to fund the government. Denmark also has control of foreign policy and security.Under this arrangement, Greenland’s government has banned offshore oil and gas leasing and, in 2021, stymied a massive rare-earth metals mine near the southern tip of the island because of concerns over environmental contamination. Even on matters of foreign policy, it is now widely assumed that Greenland should have a seat at the table. As Múte Egede, Greenland’s prime minister from 2021 to 2025, put it in a speech in 2022 in Nuuk, “You are welcome to have an opinion about geopolitics and Greenland, but decisions concerning Greenland must be made here. Nothing about us—without us.” Not surprisingly, Trump’s imperial designs on the country have not been warmly received there. In December 2024, before taking office, he began musing about his desire to acquire Greenland, a strategic landmass that has been at the center of U.S. policy in the Arctic since World War II. This proclamation was followed by a semiofficial visit to the island by Don Jr., during which YouTube influencers distributed $100 bills to random people in the capital, Nuuk. At the State of the Union address, Trump reiterated his intent to “get” Greenland to make its people rich and most of all to advance the cause of “international world security,” whatever that is. In March, JD Vance, along with his wife, Usha, and then-national security adviser Mike Waltz, traveled to the U.S. military base in far northwestern Greenland. Earlier plans to attend a dog sled race and visit some of the tourist sites in Nuuk were abandoned after it became clear that residents were planning to snub the vice president.And in the wake of the CIA’s ousting of Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro, Trump, his top aide Stephen Miller, and Vance have all doubled down on threats to use force to take over Greenland. Denmark’s prime minister has said any such action would spell the end of NATO, and Greenland’s leaders have flatly refused to entertain the possibility of becoming a vassal of the United States. In Trump’s eyes, according to reporting by Susan Glasser and Peter Baker, Greenland is a nice chunk of real estate with a lot of minerals and he’d like to add it to his portfolio.As Dodds and Bennett make clear, the fight for the future of the Arctic will be waged not only in Moscow and D.C., but also in Nuuk, Utqiagvik, Karasjok, and beyond. Greenland may only have a population of 56,000, but they’ve been waiting 300 years for independence. And if the U.S. hope was to drive a wedge between Greenland and Denmark, perhaps accelerating the push for independence, it seems to have failed. If anything, the two countries have forged closer ties since Trump started making noise about annexing the island. Which leaves us facing the very real possibility that Trump, who last Friday in a meeting in the White House with oil executives to discuss Venezuela said the U.S. would take Greenland “whether they like it or not,” will do the unthinkable.Even if diplomacy prevails, and some sort of trilateral agreement is reached (Secretary of State Marco Rubio is scheduled to meet with his Danish and Greenlandic counterparts this week), Trump’s scorched-earth approach has already done a great deal of damage. We need Greenland for national security and “world peace,” Trump has said. In reality, his actions have done more to destabilize the region than anything Russia or China could have dreamed of.
https://newrepublic.com/article/205166/trump-greenland-threats-plunder-arctic

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2026-01-09T17:31:23Z

The New Republic (nprofile…pyzj)
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The White House ballroom project is about to get even bigger.East Wing ballroom architect Shalom Baranes revealed new plans for the executive mansion Thursday, showcasing a previously unreported, one-story addition to the West Wing that he claimed would balance out the 90,000-square-foot development.The expansion, which would take place after the ballroom is completed, would “restore a sense of symmetry around the original central pavilion,” according to Baranes.Responding to questions from members of the National Capital Planning Commission, Baranes said that the potential West Wing project would affect the West Wing colonnade but not the building proper, reported ABC News. The architect did not offer a timetable for its completion, and did not say if the West Wing’s proposed growth would add to the redevelopment plan’s $400 million price tag. (The project was, initially, supposed to cost $200 million before Donald Trump decided to tack on extra construction.)Baranes also offered more details on the magnitude of Trump’s highly controversial ballroom, projecting that the new building will have 40-foot ceilings, be able to accommodate up to 1,000 seated guests, and would constitute just 22,000 square feet of the 90,000-square-foot development.Baranes took over the ballroom project after Trump fired the original architect in early December. Despite handpicking James McCrery II to lead the renovation, Trump soon began clashing with McCrery after he disagreed with Trump’s desired size for the new East Wing.A White House official that aided the presentation, Josh Fisher, said that the administration is also considering changes to Lafayette Square, which is located due north of the White House in the President’s Park.Will Scharf, a senior White House official on the NCPC, claimed that the myriad changes to the White House were necessary in order to bring it up to snuff with the residencies of other world leaders, comparing the symbol of democracy to the sprawling estates of King Charles of England.But Trump also has his eyes set on spending heaps of taxpayer money on other portions of Washington. The “Arc de Trump” is expected to be erected near the Arlington Bridge, opposite the Lincoln Memorial. It will be modeled after the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, the historic monument that commemorates those who fought and died for France during the country’s revolution and the Napoleonic Wars—though the president’s arc is, by its namesake, expected to honor just him.Trump also renovated Jackie Kennedy’s famous Rose Garden, mowing down flowers in order to literally pave paradise. He gutted the Lincoln bathroom, transforming it from Lyndon B. Johnson’s favorite office into a marble-slathered eyesore, and swapped the historic Palm Room’s lush green tones and tall ferns for white paint and framed photos of plants.Meanwhile, his administration is doing some demolition of their own, reportedly planning to destroy some 13 historic buildings on the grounds of former psychiatric hospital St. Elizabeths in order to expand facilities for the Department of Homeland Security.
https://newrepublic.com/post/205127/donald-trump-white-house-renovation-west-wing

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2025-12-26T17:08:54Z

The New Republic (nprofile…pyzj)
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A survivor of Jeffrey Epstein’s abuse torched President Donald Trump’s outrageous message on the alleged sex trafficker.Trump, who reportedly had an intimate friendship with Epstein, posted a special Christmas message Thursday addressed to “the many Sleazebags who loved Jeffrey Epstein, gave him bundles of money, went to his island, attended his parties, and thought he was the greatest guy on earth, only to ‘drop him like a dog’ when things got too HOT.” Trump congratulated himself for “dropping” the convicted sex offender “long before it was fashionable to do so.” But Marijke Chartouni, who has said she was sexually abused by Epstein when she was 20 years old, didn’t buy Trump’s attempt to distance himself from the convicted sex offender.“Every accusation is a confession. Cheers,” she wrote on X.asdflkj
https://newrepublic.com/post/204758/epstein-survivor-trump-every-accusation-confession

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2025-12-26T16:03:36Z

The New Republic (nprofile…pyzj)
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Indiana Senate Majority Floor Leader Chris Garten celebrated Christmas by posting AI-generated images of himself violently attacking Santa Claus in front of the Indiana Statehouse. “When you find out the North Pole is trying to bring more bureaucratic overreach & unfunded mandates down the chimney disguised as ‘Christmas cheer.’ Not on my watch. We The People run Indiana, not the bureaucrats,” the Republican state senator wrote on X early Christmas morning. “Take it back to the North Pole big guy. Merry Christmas, Hoosiers!”In one picture—clearly edited to make him look super muscly—Garten is seen riding bareback on a reindeer with his fist in the air, while supporters stand behind him holding signs rife with AI-induced spelling errors.In the others, he is kicking Santa Claus down the steps, punching him while holding him down on the ground, and descending into an elbow drop. From President Trump to failed New York gubernatorial candidate Andrew Cuomo, to Garten, so much of our leadership is obsessed with this useless, environmentally detrimental AI-slop. Nevermind the “beating bureaucrat Santa unconscious” message put forth in Garten’s post. Instances like these only further normalize a tool that is directly contributing to humanity’s cultural, psychological, and environmental decay.
https://newrepublic.com/post/204755/republican-lawmaker-brags-beat-up-santa-photos

Nostr event nevent1qqsq6ztklrh6wxdpzrad0ulw82f45y58esmed88vfpqjxshh6yywr8gzyzjjh2tqdtt595wtmwtqycw2pt5ztrjaqduznlahlyv5z9fe4qyqjnuvrc5

2025-12-24T11:00:00Z

The New Republic (nprofile…pyzj)
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For the last year, the nation has witnessed President Trump’s rapid physical and mental decline. The 79-year-old president has repeatedly lost track of his thoughts, his whereabouts, and even his grasp on the English language.The New Republic’s breaking news team has put together a list of the president’s most senile moments in his first year in office.1. Trump falls asleep in front of the cameras 🚨WOW. Here’s a montage of Donald Trump struggling to stay awake during his entire meeting. So I guess Trump is lying about having peak stamina? pic.twitter.com/MJSUH2GMkd— CALL TO ACTIVISM (@CalltoActivism) December 2, 2025Since taking office his second time around, Trump has fallen asleep roughly a dozen times in public. It happened during Cabinet meetings, in the middle of his own bombastic military parade, at the U.S. Open, while meeting foreign leaders, and even during the Pope’s funeral. But the trend suggests that Trump’s bad habit is getting even worse.The 79-year-old president has scorned reports about his health, insisting that he’s in “perfect” condition—a paragon of health—with excellent stamina for the job. He has even suggested that negative reports about his health could be tantamount to “treason.” Yet for all his bravado, he has routinely appeared with strange discolorations on his hands, has received MRI scans, spent hours at Walter Reed Medical Center, and, of course, keeps napping at some remarkably inopportune times.In December alone, Trump dozed off at least four times. The first was during a Cabinet meeting on December 2, in which the president was caught closing his eyes on several occasions, sometimes for minutes at a time. The second incident this month happened in the middle of a peace signing agreement between Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of Congo. Trump readily took credit for resolving the countries’ feud, but couldn’t manage to stay awake for its historic closure.The third time Trump was caught falling asleep on camera this month was during an announcement unveiling a multibillion dollar bailout package for America’s farmers. The much-needed relief must have been an awfully boring topic for the president, who was spotted sinking in his chair and jolting awake several times. However, the “very stable genius” did stay awake long enough to make a snarky comment about lawnmowers, which he said “you need about 185 IQ to turn on.”The anti-woke president struggled to stay awake a fourth time the week before Christmas, when he seemingly drifted in and out of consciousness moments after signing a historic order reclassifying marijuana.— Ellie Quinlan Houghtaling2. “It’s an old term but it means basically what you’re buying, food.” — Trump, on groceriesTrump is obsessed with the term "groceries," but does he even know what they are? pic.twitter.com/oFjhW9luvh— The Daily Show (@TheDailyShow) December 19, 2025Some old men love to golf, others like to fish. Trump, meanwhile, enjoys few hobbies more than goading the media, a muscle that he exercises relentlessly. But one of his recent standbys to snag a headline is so absurd that it has sparked wonder as to whether the president has literally anything in common with a normal person.Trump, a silver spoon nepo baby that received a “small loan of a million dollars” from his dad to start his business, has publicly expressed wonder and fixation over the word “groceries” for more than a year now. His apparent awe has raised more than a couple eyebrows; it’s also raised questions as to whether he’s ever walked into a grocery store.It began on the 2024 campaign trail, where the everyman wouldn’t just mention the high cost of groceries—he’d also rhapsodize about the word itself, frequently repeating the phrase “very simple word, groceries.” Eventually, it made its way into his vocabulary.“Who uses the word? I started using the word—the groceries,” Trump told Meet the Press with a completely straight face in December 2024.Since then, “groceries” has become something of an exotic fixture in Trump’s lexicon, a wondrous, alien find that he can take out of his Cabinet of Curiosities to wow his phenomenally rich associates like a 20th century explorer.“It’s such an old-fashioned term but a beautiful term: groceries,” Trump mused in April. “It sort of says a bag with different things in it.”But the grocery neurosis hasn’t stayed between Trump and his gang of sycophantic enablers. Instead, Trump has tried to share his fascination with world leaders, waxing poetic about “groceries” during a meeting with the United Arab Emirates in May while making himself look wildly out of touch in the process.“It’s an old term but it means basically what you’re buying, food, it’s a pretty accurate term but it’s an old-fashioned sound,” the very stable genius announced to our Middle East allies.— Ellie Quinlan Houghtaling3. “Nobody knows what magnets are.”Trump: Nobody knows what a magnet is. pic.twitter.com/4a1wp14zYF— Acyn (@Acyn) November 11, 2025Trump, who has obsessed about magnets for years, made a particularly wild claim last month: “Nobody knows what magnets are.”In an interview about the economy with Fox News’s Laura Ingraham, Trump suddenly began rambling about China and magnetic trains.“President Xi was willing to do the railroad things—that’s magnets,” he said. “Now, nobody knows what a magnet is. If you don’t have a magnet, you don’t make a car. You don’t make a computer, you don’t make televisions and radios and all the other things. You don’t make anything. It’s a 30-year effort to monopolize a very important thing. Now, within two years, we’ll have magnets, all the magnets we want, but we don’t—because of tariffs, I called, I said listen, you’re going to play the magnet, we’re going to play the tariff on you.” This wasn’t the first time Trump had waxed dramatic about magnets. In January 2024, he informed a crowd that magnets stop working if they get wet.“Magnets. Now all I know about magnets is this: give me a glass of water, let me drop it on the magnets, that’s the end of the magnets,” he babbled.— Tori Otten and Adrienne Mahsa Varkiani4. Sad Charlie Kirk died but look at my ballroomTrump on Charlie Kirk: "Oh, when I heard it? I was in the midst of building a great -- for 150 years they've wanted a ballroom at the White House, right? They have to use tents for President Xi when he comes over. If it rains, it's a wipeout. And so I was with the architects ...… pic.twitter.com/wBV5yz2nUC— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) September 12, 2025While describing his despair at learning that Charlie Kirk had been fatally shot in Utah, Trump took the opportunity to plug his $400 million White House ballroom while speaking on Fox & Friends in September.“I was in the midst of, you know, building a great—for 150 years they’ve wanted a ballroom at the White House, right? They don’t have a ballroom, they have to use tents on the lawn for President Xi when he comes over, if it rains it’s a wipe out, and so I was with architects that were design[ing]—it’s gonna be incredible,” Trump rambled.Later, the president changed the subject from Kirk to construction yet again while taking questions from reporters outside of the White House.Q: My condolences on the loss of your friend Charlie Kirk. How are you holding up?TRUMP: I think very good. And by the way, right there you see all the trucks. They just started construction of the new ballroom for the White House, which is something they've been trying to get… pic.twitter.com/Jrw4j2fnVZ— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) September 12, 2025“How are you holding up over the last three and a half days?” asked one reporter, who’d also wished him condolences for Kirk.“I think very good,” Trump replied. “And by the way, right there you see all the trucks, they just started construction of the new ballroom for the White House. Which is something they’ve been trying to get as you know for about 150 years, and it’s gonna be a beauty, it’ll be an absolutely magnificent structure.”— Edith Olmsted5. Trump reveals he thinks “medbeds” are realTrump tonight appears to have pushed the false "medbed" conspiracy theory, which has spread in the far-right internet over the years. https://t.co/L1MBPIU4ON pic.twitter.com/wWBQPDFbnb— Alex Kaplan (@AlKapDC) September 28, 2025As part of a late-night posting spree on Truth Social in September, Trump shared a video of himself announcing a “historic new health care system”—only to delete the post just 12 hours later because the video was a clearly computer-generated hoax.In the video, a phony Trump sat behind his desk in the Oval Office, claiming that every American would receive their own “medbed card” which would give them access to facilities “designed to restore every citizen to full health and strength.” Medbeds are part of a far-right conspiracy theory claiming that the so-called Deep State has access to futuristic medical pods that can cure any ailment.It’s entirely possible that the president posted the video by mistake, thinking it was a real news story—and apparently forgetting he never made such an announcement. Either that, or he was elevating a far-right conspiracy theory as a means of waving to his extremist supporters, or just trolling anyone who cares about the difference between truth and fiction.— Edith Olmsted6. “Da-da, da-da, da-da, bop, bop, bop”Trump: "One thing with Obama, I have zero respect for him, but he would bop down those stairs. I've never seen it. Da-da, da-da, da-da, bop, bop, bop." pic.twitter.com/PwYeBUIzsr— Spencer Hakimian (@SpencerHakimian) September 30, 2025At a September speech to troops in Quantico, Virginia, Trump went off on a tangent about his fear of tripping and falling on stairs—and admitted that former President Barack Obama was better at walking down them. “I’m very careful, you know, when I walk down stairs.... I walk very slowly. Nobody has to set a record. Just try not to fall because it doesn’t work out well. A few of our presidents have fallen, and it became a part of their legacy. We don’t want that.… You walk nice and easy. You’re not, you don’t have to set any record. Be cool. Be cool when you walk down,” Trump said, referring to how he scales the steps on Air Force One. But then, Trump brought up his old fixation with Obama and how he disliked the way the 44th president handled stairs better than him. “But don’t, don’t bop down the stairs. So one thing with Obama, I had zero respect for him as a president. But he would bop down those stairs, I’ve never seen, da-da, da-da, da-da, bop, bop, bop,” he continued, singing and doing a little jig. “He’d go down the stairs, wouldn’t hold on, I said it’s great, I don’t wanna do it. I guess I could do it, but eventually bad things are gonna happen, and it only takes once. But he did a lousy job as president.”Why Trump felt the need to tell a room full of the country’s highest-ranking military leaders about this is anyone’s guess, although it probably has to do with how much he hates Obama, and he’s probably more than a little jealous.— Hafiz Rashid7. Trump wanders off while meeting the Japanese prime ministerBro has no idea what is going on. This is crazy. pic.twitter.com/Q6qHSMe6uZ— Jim Stewartson, Antifascist 🇨🇦🇺🇦🏴☠️🇺🇸 (@jimstewartson) October 28, 2025 Trump’s visit to Japan in October began with a welcoming ceremony of that sort full of all the trappings and ceremony that he loves, but he was soon out of his element.As he walked into a room full of dignitaries and a Japanese military band, Trump seemed to forget where he was going, even leaving Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi behind while she respectfully acknowledged the troops assembled to meet them. Trump gets angry whenever media reports point to some kind of mental or physical decline. But it’s hard to argue with a video showing a 79-year-old person in a formal setting not knowing what he’s supposed to do and just walking away aimlessly.— Hafiz Rashid8. Trump goes for a stroll on the White House roofDonald Trump is on the roof of the White House screeching at reporters.If any one of us stood on our roofs yelling at people and making weird gestures, we’d be sent to the funny farm.25th this guy already. pic.twitter.com/4FSXb9T3jl— Art Candee 🍿🥤 (@ArtCandee) August 5, 2025On one sunny Tuesday afternoon in August, President Trump found himself on the White House roof. “Sir, why are you on the roof?” reporters asked. “Just taking a little walk. It’s good for your health,” Trump replied. Asked what he’s building “up there,” he made a vague gesture that clarified little, possibly in the shape of a dome, and said, “Something beautiful.”While this curious rooftop jaunt remained unexplained, it may have had something to do with the numerous architectural changes Trump has announced at the White House, including a $400 million ballroom and a Rose Garden renovation, both of which have drawn backlash for their extraordinary cost and their lack of reverence for the structural history of the White House.— Malcolm Ferguson9. “And then they said skedaddle!”Trump is ranting barely coherently to McDonald's franchise owners: "The one pilot said, 'skedaddle!' And that thing just turned on its side -- pppph. And it's so unbelievable. And that knocked out Iran nuclear capability." pic.twitter.com/zfwU90muzW— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) November 17, 2025“And then they said ‘skedaddle!’ The word skedaddle, and that went psshh like this,” Trump said at the McDonald’s Impact Summit, for some reason believing that this was the appropriate audience to discuss Israel’s military strikes on Iran. Pantomiming a plane dropping bombs, he continued on undeterred.“And I mean, it’s so unbelievable. And that knocked out Iran nuclear capability. And all of the Middle East became a different place. And now we have peace in the Middle East. And at the United Nations today they approved the board of peace.... I think it’ll be a board like no other, other than perhaps the McDonald’s board. You have a very good board.”— Adrienne Mahsa Varkiani10. “It is, TEPUBLICAN??? Or, TPUBLICAN???”We’ve all unfortunately grown accustomed to Trump’s incessant shitposting over the years. But occasionally there are moments that truly make you question if he’s sending his “truths” straight from his phone without a second look. His “tepublican” and “panican” musing was one of them. “There is a new word for a TRUMP REPUBLICAN, which is almost everyone (GREAT POLICY IS THE KEY!),” he said last month on Truth Social. “It is, TEPUBLICAN??? Or, TPUBLICAN???”While there is certainly an internal split between MAGA Republicans and traditional GOPers, both of these names pretty much suck. And they don’t instill any faith in his mental acuity either, especially given that the post came just one hour after an angry rant about how mentally and physically healthy he was.— Malcolm Ferguson11. “Everything’s computer”Trump: Wow… Everything’s computer pic.twitter.com/LjGoZD4Qk8— Acyn (@Acyn) March 11, 2025Trump’s short-lived stint as a proud Tesla owner kicked off with a bang when the president was stunned to see just how automated the electric vehicles are.While staging a weird Tesla commercial at the White House in March for his then-best buddy Elon Musk, Trump announced he intended to buy one of the cars.“I’m going to buy because number one, it’s a great product. It’s as good as it gets,” he told reporters. “And number two, because this man has devoted his energy and his life to doing this. I think he’s been treated very unfairly by a very small group of people.”Trump then revealed he had no intentions to drive his shiny new red car. “I haven’t driven a car in a long time,” he admitted. “I’m going to have it at the White House, and I’m going to let my staff use it, I’m going to let people at the place use it.”Upon getting in his car for the first time, Trump marveled at the interior and proclaimed, “Everything’s computer!”The love affair turned out to be fleeting. Amid his drawn-out breakup with Musk in June, Trump reportedly weighed selling the car that he never intended to drive in the first place.— Tori Otten
https://newrepublic.com/article/204740/trump-11-senile-moments-2025-year-review

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2025-12-23T16:44:42Z

The New Republic (nprofile…pyzj)
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No, JD Vance will not be our first “Chad” president. The vice president shared a series of photographs to X Monday showing himself valiantly running physical training drills with Navy Seals at Base Coronado, in California. Vance was photographed running down the beach, carrying a heavy log, climbing a large cargo net, and even rowing. Another set of photographs showed him speaking with officers, and posing for a photograph in front of a large American flag.“They took it easy on me and I still feel like I got hit by a freight train,” Vance wrote on X, recapping his 90-minute PT session. “So grateful to all of our warriors who keep us safe and keep the highest standards anywhere in the world!” Vance previously served a four-year stint in the public affairs section in the 2nd Marine Aircraft.Obviously, Vance’s critics were not impressed. “Cool, man—but when you’re done cosplaying, can you and your boss do something about housing and grocery prices? Thanks,” Mike Nellis, a Democratic strategist, wrote on X. “It’s the middle of the workday. While Americans are grinding to make Christmas work, the vice president is burning taxpayer dollars pretending to be a Navy SEAL,” Christopher Hale, a former Democratic congressional candidate, wrote on X. Even Vance couldn’t help but make fun of himself. He shared an edited version of the photograph that included his bloated, meme-ified face. “Fixed it,” he wrote on X. It’s not entirely clear what prompted Vance’s recent cosplaying adventure. Perhaps it has something to do with his recent presidential endorsement from Erika Kirk, a closely-held friend of the vice president. Or maybe it has something to do with his slipping poll numbers. A recent survey by AtlasIntel found that while Vance was still the leading pick to become the Republican nominee in 2028, a majority of Republicans no longer support him. Only 46.7 percent of respondents said they would pick Vance over other figures, down from 54.6 percent in a September poll. Meanwhile, a straw poll taken by Fox News at Turning Point USA’s Amerifest this past weekend found that 84.2 percent of respondents said they would like to see Vance as the Republican nominee in 2028, with Secretary of State Marco Rubio and Florida Governor Ron DeSantis trailing far behind him. In order to claim the full support of MAGA, it seems Vance may have decided it’s time to prove himself more than a sniveling debate kid.
https://newrepublic.com/post/204733/jd-vance-navy-seal-training-manosphere-poll-numbers

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2025-12-23T15:03:41Z

The New Republic (nprofile…pyzj)
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The government found a photograph of Donald Trump and Ghislaine Maxwell on Steve Bannon’s phone. So, why did they redact it?Buried in the latest trove of documents released by the Department of Justice Monday, one email appeared to be from a federal investigator who said they’d discovered something while digging through Bannon’s iPhone 7. “As I was going through the images from that phone, I found an image of Trump and Ghislaine Maxwell on Bannon’s phone,” the email stated, passing it forward “in case it was of any importance” to someone handling “both cases.”“Thanks very much for flagging—no need to do anything on this one,” the person responds.Despite the fact that the Epstein Files Transparency Act only required the Trump administration to redact identifiable information of survivors—something that the government failed to do—the photograph of Trump and Maxwell was redacted in its entirety in the DOJ’s release. The sender and recipients’ names have also all been redacted. So, what is it about this photograph in particular that warranted redaction? Over the course of his long friendship with Jeffrey Epstein, Trump was photographed several times with Maxwell. The two attended parties and fashion events, and even traveled together.It seems that Trump may be receiving some special treatment. In other photographs released as part of the government’s document dumps, former President Bill Clinton’s face remained visible while the faces of some other individuals were redacted. The DOJ even went so far as to release a statement to get ahead of the “untrue and sensationalist claims” about Trump contained in their own release. The batch of files released Monday contained multiple disturbing revelations, including one email that suggested Trump flew on Epstein’s jet “many more times than previously has been reported,” and Epstein’s apparent suicide note that mentioned Trump’s love of “young, nubile girls.”
https://newrepublic.com/post/204730/feds-discovered-steve-bannon-photo-trump-ghislane-maxwell

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2025-12-19T22:06:55Z

The New Republic (nprofile…pyzj)
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Surprise, surprise: President Donald Trump was in Jeffrey Epstein’s contact list. Buried in the massive trove of documents released by the Department of Justice Friday was Epstein’s 90-page contact book filled with names of high-profile celebrities—including Donald Trump and his family members. Contact information for “Trump, Donald,” now redacted, was kept separately from the information on how to reach Trump’s daughter Ivanka, his ex-wife Ivana, his brother Robert, and Robert’s wife Blaine. A handwritten note indicated the contact book was from Palm Beach, dated 2004-2005. There also appeared to be contact information for Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort, where Epstein reportedly scouted young women to abuse and traffic, and from where he was supposedly banned in October 2007. In an extensive list of hotels, there seems to be no listings between the Four Seasons Restaurant and Myers of Westwick—a sizable chunk of the alphabet that possibly could indicate a missing page. Trump reportedly recounted his sexual conquests to Epstein over the phone, while the alleged sex trafficker invited others to listenin.
https://newrepublic.com/post/204692/donald-trump-family-epstein-files-contact-book

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2025-12-19T13:59:01Z

The New Republic (nprofile…pyzj)
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Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem thinks that the diversity immigrant visa program, commonly known as the green card lottery, was responsible for the Brown University shooting and is pausing the program. Noem announced on X Thursday night that “[a]t President Trump’s direction, I am immediately directing USCIS to pause the DV1 program to ensure no more Americans are harmed by this disastrous program.”The suspect of the Brown University and MIT shootings was identified Thursday as Claudio Manuel Neves Valente. According to Noem, Valente, 48, was a Portuguese national and former Brown University student who entered the country through the program in 2017. He was found dead Thursday at a storage facility in New Hampshire, apparently having committed suicide. Targeting the entire visa program because of one crime is excessive, but fits into a Trump administration pattern of finding pretexts for drastic immigration restrictions. Much of it is based on racism, and comes from executive actions seeking to circumvent laws passed by Congress. Afghan immigrants, for example, are facing increased difficulty because of the shooting of two National Guard members last month. It seems the Trump administration is going to make the Brown University shooting all about immigration instead of focusing on the crime itself, showing that xenophobia is paramount in their concerns.
https://newrepublic.com/post/204633/noem-pauses-green-card-lottery-brown-university-shooting-suspect

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2025-12-18T19:05:38Z

The New Republic (nprofile…pyzj)
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Democrats on the House Oversight Committee released new photos from Jeffrey Epstein’s estate Thursday, and in some of them, handwritten lines from the book Lolita are visible on the bodies of unidentified girls or women. One of the photos shows “Lo-lee-ta: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate to tap, at three, on the teeth” written on someone’s collarbone, above her chest. A passage on a foot reads “She was Lo, plain Lo, in the morning, standing four feet ten in one sock.” “She was Lola in slacks” is visible on another person’s body, and a message written on someone’s neck reads “She was Dolly at school.” And visible, written vertically along a person’s back, is the line “She was Delores on the dotted line.The photos were released through a Dropbox account, and nothing in the upload indicates who the photos are of or when they were taken. Lolita, written in 1955 by Vladimir Nabakov, is about a professor who kidnaps and sexually abuses a 12-year-old girl, which seems on-the-nose for a convicted sex-offender and trafficker like Epstein. Other photos released Thursday include redacted passports from Ukraine, Czech Republic, and Russia, as well as new photos of New York Times columnist David Brooks. There are also additional photos of Noam Chomsky, Bill Gates, Sergey Brin, Woody Allen, and Bill Gates, following earlier releases of photos with them. This release comes just one day before the Trump administration is required to release its full archive of Epstein documents from its federal investigation into the billionaire sex trafficker. House Speaker Mike Johnson has sent legislators home a day early, probably to try and avoid negative attention. Regarding tomorrow’s release, however, there’s no telling how much of the files the White House will try to redact or keep hidden. View the latest batch of photos released by the House Oversight Democrats here.
https://newrepublic.com/post/204611/epstein-photos-lolita-girls-bodies

Nostr event nevent1qqsxascmyjqwdejgafyaysv7rmh27n4kam4m20ftswvtylrtvm5yt3gzyzjjh2tqdtt595wtmwtqycw2pt5ztrjaqduznlahlyv5z9fe4qyqjhavg5a

2025-12-12T15:59:41Z

The New Republic (nprofile…pyzj)
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The White House’s propaganda is getting sketchier.The official X account for the executive mansion released new figures about the economy Thursday, proclaiming that 91 percent of Americans noticed “gas prices were dropping.” The source of that information, however, was from a White House email survey.Meanwhile, practically every American has felt the ramifications of Donald Trump’s rattling economic policies. The Drudge Report, the most heavily trafficked conservative news aggregator, topped its site Friday with the headline: “POLL: ‘TIS THE SEASON FOR INFLATION.”The AP-NORC poll found that large shares of American shoppers are dipping into their savings to afford buying presents this holiday season, with half of polled Americans reporting that it’s harder than usual to afford the things they would typically try to buy.Roughly the same percentage of U.S.-based shoppers said they were cutting back on nonessentials or big purchases in order to afford their needs, according to the poll.The findings make sense: An analysis by the Groundwork Collective of popular holiday gifts found that prices skyrocketed by a whopping 26 percent this holiday season. The disparity between the White House’s messaging and what’s actually happening boils down to the president, who has repeatedly insisted without evidence that there is “no” inflation, that the word “groceries” is an “old fashioned” term, and that the issue of affordability is a “con job” and a “fake narrative” invented by Democrats to trick the public into not supporting him.“When will I get credit for having created, with No Inflation, perhaps the Greatest Economy in the History of our Country? When will people understand what is happening?” Trump whined Thursday on Truth Social. “When will Polls reflect the Greatness of America at this point in time, and how bad it was just one year ago?”Inflation has been accelerating since April, when Trump first announced his “liberation day” tariffs. Eight months later, practically everything on the U.S. market is more expensive than it used to be, as companies pass off the cost of the president’s tariffs onto consumers. Food and energy costs are up compared to figures from last year, according to data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Even American-made goods have taken a hit by the tariffs, since more often than not they are created with parts sourced from other areas of the world.But the commander-in-chief seems to be completely out of touch with that reality. In an interview earlier this week with Politico’s Dasha Burns, Trump remarked that he would rate the current state of the economy “A+++++.”
https://newrepublic.com/post/204347/white-house-trump-economy-poll

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2025-12-04T11:00:00Z

The New Republic (nprofile…pyzj)
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Gertrude Stein had no doubt that she was a genius. “I have been the creative literary mind of the century,” she once boasted. “Think of the Bible and Homer think of Shakespeare and think of me.” Some years earlier, she informed a baffled magazine editor who had rejected her writing that she was producing “the only important literature that has come out of America since Henry James.” She knew her work was unconventional—repetitive, hermetic, its apparent crudeness belying immense psychological and literary sophistication—but was supremely confident that, in time, it would be recognized as something of enduring cultural value. “For a very long time everybody refuses and then almost without a pause everybody accepts,” she observed in 1926 about the reception of avant-garde art. There was no question in her mind that her own contribution would eventually be accepted: She simply had to wait.But what do you do while you’re waiting around to become a classic? And how can you help the process along? Francesca Wade’s Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife is an attempt to answer that question. The book is a biography of Stein, but an oddly structured one, in which the subject dies about halfway through. “Biography, like detective fiction, tends to begin with a corpse,” Wade writes (a killer line), “but Stein well knew that a writer’s life does not end at death, if their work has the power to survive them.” Stein, she contends, was unusually concerned with her posthumous reputation: Having accepted that her work wasn’t destined to be appreciated in her lifetime, she put her faith in posterity. “Those who are creating the modern composition authentically are naturally only of importance when they are dead,” Stein once wrote. Accordingly, she spent a good portion of her life making arrangements for her afterlife.The first half of Wade’s book is a detailed but necessarily compressed account of Stein’s remarkable, if already well-chronicled, existence. In its second half, though, Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife becomes something trickier and more original: a narrative about literary scholarship, and the discomforts it can cause those left behind to tend a legacy. Stein—whose work was a mystery to so many and yet encoded facts about her personal life that would have been unspeakable during her lifetime—turns out to be the perfect case study for such an investigation.Stein was born in Allegheny, Pennsylvania, in 1874, the child of well-heeled second-generation German Jewish immigrants. When Gertrude was five, the family relocated to Oakland, California, where her father made his fortune investing in the nascent public transportation industry. (The adult Stein’s famous pronouncement on Oakland—“There is no there there”—is one of several Steinisms that has achieved proverbial status.) Gertrude, the youngest of five children, was called “Baby,” a nickname she retained for the rest of her life. She was cosseted and indulged by her parents and siblings, establishing a lifelong pattern of contented dependence on the ministrations of others. “It is better if you are the youngest girl in a family to have a brother two years older,” she wrote of her early bond with her brother Leo, “because that makes everything a pleasure to you, you go everywhere and do everything while he does it all for and with you which is a pleasant way to have everything happen to you.”Gertrude showed early signs of intellectual distinction—she was a strong student, and spent much of her free time at the public library consuming vast quantities of eighteenth-century literature—and in 1893 she was admitted to the Harvard Annex, soon to be renamed Radcliffe College. There she studied with the famed psychologist William James, who called her his “most brilliant woman student,” and began conducting research on automatic writing that presaged her later literary experiments with documenting consciousness. James encouraged her to attend medical school at Johns Hopkins, which she briefly did, but she soon grew bored and decided to join Leo in Europe, where he was pursuing a career as a painter. By the fall of 1903, Gertrude and Leo were living together in Paris on the rue de Fleurus, where they hosted a glittering salon that attracted avant-garde artists such as Paul Cézanne, Henri Matisse, and Pablo Picasso.Seeing the astonishing innovations in painting of the time encouraged Stein, who was already writing fiction, to experiment more radically in her own work. Cézanne, she later remembered, “gave me a new feeling about composition … it was not solely the realism of the characters but the realism of the composition which was the important thing.” Her formal breakthrough as a writer came in 1909 with Three Lives, a trio of novellas that adapted Cubist aesthetics to fictional portraiture, making a first, decisive break with literary realism. From there Stein was off and running, moving on to the exhaustive character analysis and intricate repetitions of The Making of Americans—a monumental novel charting the “History of a Family’s Progress” over the course of nearly a thousand pages—and the playful abstractions of Tender Buttons (“A shawl is a hat and hurt and a red balloon and an under coat and a sizer a sizer of talk”). More than a century on, these works are still bracingly strange, written according to an internal logic that is as implacable as it is inscrutable. And yet they are also, as Wade emphasizes, deeply pleasurable, if one gives oneself over to the experience: by turns funny, sexy, touching, and deeply bewildering. “The way to read Stein is to trust her,” Wade assures her reader early on. There’s no other way.Though Leo scorned her work—while she was writing The Making of Americans, he would pluck pages of the manuscript at random and mock them in front of their mutual friends—Stein soon found other true believers. One of them was the New York heiress Mabel Dodge, who, after reading a draft of The Making of Americans, was “convinced” that it was “the forerunner of a whole epoch of new form & expression.” She poured her energy into drumming up publicity for Stein—“I am working like a dog over you,” she wrote in 1913. Another early acolyte was the novelist Carl Van Vechten, who talked her up in smart literary circles and published one of the first critical articles on her work, “How to Read Gertrude Stein,” in 1914. He often wrote to Stein to tell her of her burgeoning reputation in her home country: “You are as famous in America as any historical character,” he reassured her in 1916.Stein and Alice B. Toklas became so closely entwined that Stein merged their names in the margin of one of her notebooks: “Gertice. Altrude.”Stein’s most important early supporter, however, was Alice B. Toklas, who first entered her life in 1907 and quickly became her secretary, muse, lover, and “wife.” (Though the two were not, of course, legally married, Stein consistently used this word to refer to Toklas in private.) A native of San Francisco who, like Stein, had grown up in a well-to-do Jewish family before immigrating to Paris to sample la vie bohème, Toklas was immediately taken with Stein. Recalling their first meeting in her 1963 memoir What Is Remembered, Toklas wrote that “it was Gertrude Stein who held my complete attention, as she did for all the many years I knew her until her death, and all these empty ones since then.” Toklas did everything for Stein—whom she called “Baby,” as her parents and siblings had—from typing up her manuscripts to cooking her meals to organizing her social life. Stein quickly became completely reliant on her; Van Vechten observed that Stein could not “cook an egg, or sew a button, or even place a postage stamp of the correct denomination on an envelope.” Toklas believed completely in Stein’s genius and did everything she could to cultivate and protect it, subsuming her ambitions into her partner’s without remainder. The two became so closely entwined that Stein merged their names in the margin of one of her notebooks: “Gertice. Altrude.”All of this rich biographical material is covered at a breakneck pace, because Wade’s primary concern, as her subtitle intimates, is not Stein’s life but her afterlife. By the time Stein died of stomach cancer in 1946, her campaign for literary immortality was still unfinished. She had had one unqualified commercial success—The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, a lively memoir, written in a more accessible prose style, which became an improbable bestseller in 1933—but was otherwise a cult figure, infamous for her eccentricity but hardly regarded as “the creative literary mind of the century.” She envied the acclaim that her male modernist peers, such as James Joyce and Ezra Pound, were beginning to receive, even as her own work seemed on the verge of slipping into oblivion. Her published books were little read and much derided; even more frustratingly for the prolific Stein, who regarded everything she wrote as worthy of attention, many of her texts had never been published at all.It was in the 1930s that Stein began preparing for her posthumous career. Via her friend Thornton Wilder, she learned that librarians at Yale University were beginning to assemble archival collections related to contemporary American literature, and that they were interested in acquiring her papers. Such acquisitions were then highly unusual: Modernism was just beginning to be canonized, and the notion that academic institutions would play a central role in shaping literary history was a relatively novel one. Building an entire archival collection around a still-living author, now a commonplace curatorial practice, was then entirely unheard of.Stein immediately saw the possibilities. “The idea of an archive fascinated Stein,” Wade writes. With “immortality” in mind, she made the decision to donate her papers to Yale. It meant she no longer had to worry if she could not find a publisher for some of her works during her lifetime:Through packing her texts into boxes, Stein was able to imagine a reality in which they would be received with pleasure, not derision: recovered, examined, celebrated … This was Stein’s chance to create a paper trail: to project a version of herself into the future.The latter half of Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife is largely the story of scholars following that paper trail and uncovering various aspects of Stein’s life and work by exploring her vast archive. One secret hiding in plain sight was Stein’s lesbianism. It must have been apparent to most interested observers that Stein and Toklas were more than bosom friends, but the fact was rarely acknowledged explicitly. Anyone who spent time digging in Stein’s archive, however, would quickly come upon evidence of her homosexuality, which she made no effort to conceal. Among the texts she donated to Yale were frankly erotic works like Lifting Belly (which has since become a classic of lesbian love poetry) and “As a Wife Has a Cow: A Love Story.” (“Cow,” Stein scholars soon worked out, was Stein and Toklas’s code word for “orgasm.”) She also sent along private notes to Toklas, using a panoply of whimsical pet names: “darling wife,” “birdie,” “boss,” “little ball,” “little Jew,” “Baby precious,” “Sweet selected sovereign of my soul.” Though Toklas was mortified by the inclusion of these personal documents and insisted that Stein must have donated them to Yale by accident, Wade thinks that “it was just as plausible that Stein wanted future readers to witness the fullness of the relationship, for her archive to anticipate a moment when lesbian sexuality would be more broadly accepted, even offer future lesbian readers a sense of their own history.”There was more than gossip at stake here. Stein’s sexuality, and the suppression of it, turned out to be crucial to the story of her literary development, as well as to the future of her reputation. One of the first major discoveries in Stein’s archive was an early autobiographical novel called Q.E.D., which told the story of the young Stein’s tormented love affair with a woman named May Bookstaver. The book, written in a much more conventional realist style than her later works, was subsequently reworked into Stein’s story “Melanctha,” the centerpiece of Three Lives, which transposed the characters from white lesbians to a black heterosexual couple. That story had been much praised, including by many black writers and intellectuals, as a nuanced portrait of “Negro psychology,” but before Stein’s death no one had suspected it had any kind of autobiographical basis. Wade speculates that Stein “saw a certain affinity between her own outsider status”—as a lesbian, and a Jew—“and that of the mixed-race Melanctha—that in changing the characters’ races, she had wanted to think through the experience of otherness without being immediately identifiable as the protagonist.”Whatever the case, when Q.E.D. was published in 1950 under the title Things as They Are, it brought Stein a whole new audience. Edmund Wilson reviewed the book for The New Yorker, calling it “a production of some literary merit and much psychological interest” and proposing that the inordinate difficulty of much of Stein’s mature work might be attributed to “the problem of writing about relationships between women of a kind that the standards of that era would not have allowed her to describe more explicitly.” Wilson’s review, Wade tells us, was “the first time that Stein’s work had been discussed in the context of her sexuality,” and it put her on the path to her eventual reclamation as a queer icon in the 1960s and ’70s. Shortly after the New Yorker review appeared, the small press that had published the novel began receiving orders “from practically every girls’ college in the country,” the publisher Milton Saul reported. “I have an unparalleled mailing list of lesbians by now.”Q.E.D. had other significant consequences for Stein’s oeuvre. She wrote the novel in 1903, while still in the throes of her youthful infatuation with May Bookstaver. Almost three decades later, in the summer of 1932, she came across the manuscript again. Toklas, who had not previously known of the Bookstaver affair, was gripped by jealousy, resentment, and insecurity. According to Wade, Stein embarked on The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas around this time “as a form of reparation”: Her intention was “to compose a work that would affirm her commitment to Toklas once and for all, uniting their names, publicly, for ever.”A further bizarre repercussion of Q.E.D., which demonstrates the intensity of Toklas’s feelings, was discovered by the scholar Ulla Dydo in the late 1970s. Examining the handwritten manuscripts of Stein’s long poem Stanzas in Meditation, composed around the time of Q.E.D.’s resurfacing, Dydo noticed that every instance of the word “may” had been struck out and replaced, often with words that made no grammatical or contextual sense: “may be they shall be spared,” for example, became “can they shall be spared.” Toklas, Dydo hypothesized, had been so madly jealous of May Bookstaver that she had forced Stein to eliminate May’s name from the text she was composing, even at the risk of disfiguring its meaning.Though Wade’s discussion of such scholarly intrigues is deft and will be fascinating to connoisseurs of literary history, it can’t be denied that Gertrude Stein: An Afterlife loses some narrative momentum in its second half. The decision to bifurcate the book into a conventional, if truncated, full-life biography followed by a posthumous reception history is a clever one, but the book inevitably suffers from the absence of Stein as charismatic main character. To some extent, Toklas fills the vacuum, becoming the narrative’s de facto protagonist. In Wade’s telling, she is indeed a compelling, albeit tragic, figure. After Stein’s death, she was utterly bereft. Her friend, the journalist Janet Flanner, called her “the most widowed woman I know.” “Without Baby,” Toklas wrote to another friend in 1948, “there is no direction to anything—it’s just milling around in the dark.”What purpose Toklas had she found in tending to Stein’s legacy: overseeing the posthumous publication of her unpublished writing, vetting would-be biographers and scholars, and, in Wade’s words, “cementing a narrative in which Stein was a saint, an angel, a genius.” She continued to dwell at the rue Christine, where she and Stein had settled in 1938; when visitors arrived, she would say, “Welcome to Gertrude Stein’s home.” “Some disconcerted visitors compared the apartment to a shrine, or a mausoleum,” Wade writes. “Toklas, distraught and hollow, seemed almost to fade into the furnishings.” “A more enslaved woman would be hard to find,” the writer Max White, who briefly worked with Toklas on her memoirs, reflected. “And when Gertrude was dead, she continued as the slave to a legend.”But without Toklas, would the legend of Stein have existed at all? Genius takes work, with only a small portion of that work done on the part of the genius herself. Without Toklas—and Mabel Dodge, and Carl Van Vechten, and Thornton Wilder, and dozens of other willing helpmeets—there would be no “Gertrude Stein”: Her achievement was the work of many hands.Almost 80 years after her death, it seems safe to call Stein’s strategy to secure her posthumous fame a success: She is now a canonical American author, central to the histories of modernism, of queer literature, and of twentieth-century culture writ large. If not quite at the level of Shakespeare or Homer, she is at least as famous as Joyce and Pound. “Stein didn’t believe in an afterlife,” Wade comments. “Her fervent desire for posthumous recognition was her bid for immortality.” Toklas wasn’t so sure: At the age of 80, she converted to Roman Catholicism, largely because she had become fixated on the idea of reuniting with Stein in heaven. Her belief in Stein’s genius was inextricable from her love, just as her life had been inextricable from her devotion. As Toklas put it in a letter to Van Vechten in 1958: “I am nothing but the memory of her.”
https://newrepublic.com/article/202766/gertrude-stein-afterlife-book-review

Nostr event nevent1qqsw0du6sv8990we0u3sj5h52y28fq4cn9mxq7u2kl6ny0mvwt4h4aqzyzjjh2tqdtt595wtmwtqycw2pt5ztrjaqduznlahlyv5z9fe4qyqjveqzrx

2025-12-01T11:00:00Z

The New Republic (nprofile…6kn7)
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When Americans think of the civil rights movement, we may think of the bridge in Selma or the boycott in Montgomery or the march on Washington, but if we remember a single image, it is likely Birmingham, 1963: the protesters battered by the propulsive spray of the fire hoses, the snarling German shepherds, the children in their high-tops and bobby socks, the policemen with their billy clubs aloft. Photos of these scenes shocked the nation. They are widely credited with securing the Alabama city’s swift agreement to desegregate and hastening the passage of the landmark Civil Rights Act the following year.The story these photos told was one of passive resistance: of protesters putting their bodies in the path of state violence without resorting to force. They remain at the center of the standard-issue narrative of the civil rights movement, that in the face of brutality and injustice, a dignified perseverance will ultimately prevail. Today, this version of the story has been told and retold by so many parties that it’s become completely severed from the spirit of the struggle: Republicans citing Martin Luther King Jr.’s “color blindness” to scorn affirmative action, liberals waxing poetic about nonviolence while shrinking from the provocations of more militant leaders, older Black politicians lecturing young people about the right way to protest. In this version, the FBI wishes MLK a happy birthday each year, pledging to “reaffirm our commitment to Dr. King’s legacy of fairness and equal justice for all.”A popular counternarrative to this story tends to pay most attention to the activist groups that embraced violent direct action: less ballot, more bullet. During the summer of 2020, as police abolitionism entered mainstream left discourse, the Black Panther Party’s open clashes with police and radical critique of the white power structure appeared far more applicable to the moment. Former BPP member Angela Davis, one of abolition’s earliest and most prominent theorists, appeared at protests and civil rights events and was interviewed widely, including for a special issue of Vanity Fair guest-edited by Ta-Nehisi Coates. (In popular culture, too, the BPP has received sympathetic portraits in recent years: Black Panther deputy chairman Fred Hampton was the hero of the Oscar-nominated 2021 movie Judas and the Black Messiah, which also shows him as a victim of the FBI’s war on Black activists.) In both versions of the story, though, Birmingham Public Safety Commissioner Bull Connor’s all-out attack on the crowd that May afternoon in 1963 is remembered as the main way law enforcement interacted with the early civil rights demonstrators—in the streets, suppressing protest with naked brutality, Jim Crow style.Joshua Clark Davis’s Police Against the Movement: The Sabotage of the Civil Rights Struggle and the Activists Who Fought Back excavates a more nuanced story. Instead of focusing on the most visible and well-known crackdowns, his account traces the police repression of Black Americans in its more insidious, day-to-day form, showing how civil rights activists identified that repression—and how they responded.At the center of his narrative are the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, or SNCC, and the Congress of Racial Equality, or CORE, the two more radical movement mainstays. By 1963, CORE had adapted its civil disobedience playbook, honed during the fight against segregation and disenfranchisement in the South, to demand an end to police violence across the North and West. Even before the Black Panther Party was founded in October 1966, both groups helped run community patrols to guard against white mob violence and monitor police abuses. The violence that SNCC’s and CORE’s organizers encountered in Birmingham and beyond led them to understand law enforcement not just as one brick in the wall of state-sponsored racist oppression but as something more like the keystone. Those dogs and hoses were a particularly blunt manifestation of official power, but not its only manifestation. Equally important, Davis shows how law enforcement across the country systematically surveilled, harassed, and repressed the movement—with local detectives on the front lines. The FBI’s infamous COINTELPRO operation targeting Black and antiwar radicals, he argues, can be better understood as “federalizing efforts that local police departments had already undertaken to disrupt the civil rights movement.”For Davis, the movement’s constitutive battle is not Birmingham but Albany, Georgia, or Danville, Virginia. Albany’s police chief, Laurie Pritchett, had read up on civil disobedience. When the desegregation campaign came to his city in 1962, he realized the freedom riders were foregoing bail as a tactic, and so he conspired to pay King’s bond, releasing him from jail and taking the wind out of the movement’s sails. His goal was to “out-nonviolent” the protesters, Pritchett told interviewers later. His canny approach won him national praise: The New York Times depicted him as an “outstanding example of the new breed of Southern policeman.”In the summer of 1963, after initially using the same playbook as in Birmingham, police in Danville switched course and began to fight back—“not with clubs and fire hoses but with mass arrests, felony indictments, and unrelenting surveillance,” Davis writes. They transferred detained activists to more conservative rural jurisdictions and constantly monitored local organizing; some town residents active in the struggle were kicked out of public housing or lost unemployment benefits. “Mass brutality was abandoned…. Less dramatic and more corrosive tactics were adopted,” the movement lawyer Len Holt recalled in his book An Act of Conscience.Davis has another term for this: “slow violence.” Slow violence is harassment, spying, infiltration, and undermining; it is the weaponization of the criminal justice system. Bit by bit by bit, it makes the already hard work of fighting for change too exhausting, too maddening, too costly, or too dangerous to continue. And it doesn’t photograph well.Davis opens his book with a scene that took place in 1933, but which registers as uncannily familiar: mourners gathering to remember yet another Black man killed by the cops. At the service, a young attorney named Benjamin Davis tells the assembled: “the funeral of Glover Davis, whose body lies down there, is the funeral of every Negro in this city unless the murderous brutality of the Atlanta police is stopped!”Benjamin Davis was a Communist. Facing serious state retaliation for his involvement with the International Labor Defense and activism against police violence, he fled to New York, where he would eventually become a City Council member representing Harlem. He consistently used his position to raise the issue of law enforcement misconduct, working with the nascent organization Civil Rights Congress and even using his office to put out a report called “Police Brutality: Lynching, Northern Style.” CRC, a Communist Party–affiliated group that grew out of the ILD, would go on to appeal to the United Nations to intervene in the U.S. government’s crimes against its Black citizens, submitting a formal report in 1951 entitled “We Charge Genocide.”Police Against the Movement brings “communists and socialists back into the history” of civil rights. Davis elevates less widely remembered figures like the “unmitigated radical” Fred Shuttlesworth, who clashed with King over strategy in Birmingham and was the lone voice of dissent when more cautious movement leaders persuaded a young John Lewis to edit the speech he would give at the March on Washington, softening the tone and excising his denunciation of Kennedy’s civil rights legislation proposal for its lack of protections against police brutality. The characters Davis sketches—their clear-sightedness, their defiance—are among the pleasures of this otherwise somber book. “I’m not crazy,” the Bronx chairman of CORE tells a judge who wants to remand him to Bellevue rather than standard pretrial detention. “I’m black.”Anti-communism provided the framework for later police surveillance and repression of Black activists. The NYPD first established a unit to combat political radicals and organized crime in 1904, which it sometimes referred to as the “Italian squad.” Cops in other cities followed suit: Chicago, Detroit, L.A. “Red squads,” as these operations came to be known, cropped up across the South, too. Bull Connor didn’t just crack skulls; he also presided over a formidable political policing unit that raided and arrested suspected reds, bolstered by municipal ordinances against criminal anarchy and radical literature. (In Birmingham, such an ordinance apparently included a ban on this publication.)As the civil rights movement flourished in the 1950s, red squads shifted focus. They dispatched detectives to observe protests and gather as much intelligence on the other attendees as they could. They developed informants in the community, and even sent in their own men. The scene was absolutely crawling with undercover cops; remarkably, a red squad officer was standing next to both King and Malcolm X at the moment of each man’s assassination.For police leaders, tarring activists as reds was also a rhetorical strategy. Black communities’ fury over yet another state killing couldn’t possibly be an organic reaction to intolerable circumstances—it had to be a Commie plot. Sometimes these allegations were thinly veiled: “Birmingham does not need outside agitators coming into our city and dabbling in our affairs,” Connor told reporters in 1958. Other times, they were quite explicit. Using scare quotes, a NYPD red squad memo on a 1964 uprising in Harlem and Bedford-Stuyvesant dismissed “the ‘police brutality’ theme” as just “a long-term expression of communist groups in America.” After officers brutally attacked and almost killed a Black truck driver playing dice with his wife and friends in 1952, officials even lobbied the Department of Justice to let the NYPD investigate civil rights complaints in-house, on the grounds that these investigations were fodder for bad-faith Communist denunciations of the department.Sometimes, slow violence and overt violence complemented one another. By 1966, Houston’s revamped red squad had an informant in the local chapter of SNCC who reported on gatherings and demonstrations at the historically Black Texas Southern University—where students were demanding, among other things, the disarmament of campus security guards. Soon, local police arrested a young student leader named Lee Otis Johnson and two of his comrades, hitting them with retaliatory charges like blocking access to public buildings. A month later, after students occupied the university and a police riot left one officer dead, very likely by friendly fire, 52 students were expelled, including every known member of Friends of SNCC. Even more disturbing, the local district attorney indicted five demonstrators, also SNCC members, for murder—not because anyone thought that one of these five men had pulled the trigger on the gun that killed the officer, but because, under a state anti-riot law, they could be held criminally liable regardless.“Police and city officials seemed content to leave the murder indictments hanging over the five men as long as possible,” Davis writes. In the year and a half it took for the first case to go to trial, all five were kicked out of school; at least two lost good federal jobs. Two more years after that, a judge dropped all felony charges against the five men. But their lives had been upended. So had Lee Otis Johnson’s. In 1968, just after King’s murder, he was arrested for felony marijuana distribution, tried, convicted, and sentenced—to 30 years in state prison. He had passed a joint to an undercover red squad officer.Police Against the Movement deftly shows how police departments neutralize movement demands and make even mandated changes work in their favor. No matter how many times they get struck, they mostly manage to reconstitute their power. For instance, a 1963 CORE memo on policing included a list of goals that members should push for in their respective cities: more Black officers, better cultural sensitivity training, and the creation of civilian review boards to evaluate accusations of misconduct. But wherever these reforms were enacted, police found ways to defy them, or to harness them for their own gain.New York’s red squad began to hire more Black detectives—people like NAACP member William DeFossett, who served as a liaison to the city’s activist groups and was treated as a “community pillar” by Black papers like The New York Amsterdam News. Yet all the while he was spying on the NAACP and the Nation of Islam: sending back detailed reports to his superiors on rallies and sensitive internal meetings alike, noting down members’ identities and license plate numbers. Or Raymond Wood, who infiltrated CORE’s Bronx chapter, wormed his way into more radical groups, and entrapped a few rightfully frustrated young men into an absurd plot to blow up the Statue of Liberty. Though the defendants were hardly key organizers in the fight to rein in police misconduct, the widely publicized trial allowed bad-faith critics to paint the rest of the movement with the same extremist brush.At a 1963 meeting of law enforcement leaders, the San Francisco chief of police boasted about his force’s requirements for racial relations training and counseled his counterparts to establish community relations departments. “But how different were community relations and intelligence work, really?” Davis asks. “While police promoted dialogue with activists as a recipe for improved relations, those communications also lay at the heart of efforts to collect intelligence on the movement.” These political policing units understood that knowledge was power. As James Baldwin wrote, sometime later: “A Black policeman could completely demolish you. He knew far more about you than a White policeman could.”The surveillance practices of local police have never faced a public reckoning the way the FBI’s spying did.Davis’s retelling is, of course, a narrative like any other, and in seeking to advance it he sometimes overstates his case. His contention that the surveillance practices of local police have never faced a public reckoning the way the FBI’s spying did is enough to make the case for his focus on local law enforcement. It is confusing, then, that he sometimes minimizes or obfuscates the central role the FBI did play in all this. For instance, his discussion of the reprisals Benjamin Davis faced mentions the NYPD red squad’s infiltration of the Communist Party around the same time, while neglecting to mention that the Harlem council member was investigated by the FBI and tried in federal court. Other consequential instances of law enforcement infiltration of Black activists are covered only glancingly because they don’t fit his focus on local police surveillance of CORE and SNCC members: Fred Hampton’s undoing was the work of an FBI informant, while one of the most consequential NYPD red squad targets was not SNCC or CORE but the local Black Panther Party chapter.It may be a pedantic distinction, but Davis tends to exclusively reach for the term “police violence” even when he is talking about, say, retaliatory prosecutions or judicial bias. U.S. courts and district attorneys’ offices are also weighted in favor of the status quo, but not in exactly the same way the police are; Davis draws from examples of both to bolster his thesis without pausing to tease out the distinctions. In seeking to cover civil rights battles and police repression throughout the South, North, and West over a period of nearly 20 years, he can spread himself thin, which may be one reason for some of these slippages. But his choice to give a broader overview is useful in another respect: It offers readers a clear blueprint for decoding the narratives and tactics that have, over the past five years, sprung up in response to the biggest mass uprising this country has ever seen.If the “outside agitators” charge levied by Bull Connor all those years ago sounds familiar, it’s because it’s exactly the sort of language bandied about by politicians during the 2020 protests following the murder of George Floyd, and again, more recently, during the Cop City fight in Atlanta. Really, there is no more fitting contemporary example of “slow violence” than the RICO case the state of Georgia brought against 61 individuals who protested the construction of a massive police training facility. This September, a judge finally tossed the racketeering charges, but the damage was already done: The case’s glacially slow dissolution over two and a half years following the initial mass arrests and detentions in March 2023 has cost its defendants work, disrupted their education, and provoked endless anguish and uncertainty.Without ever quite saying it explicitly, Police Against the Movement makes the stakes plain. The backlash against Black Lives Matter following 2020 should be understood not as the inevitable pendulum swing of public opinion but as a fierce and coordinated campaign waged by cops across the United States desperate to claw back power after modest losses: minor funding reallocations, a few officers held to account for killing civilians, the election of a handful of reform prosecutors. (Police departments were, of course, aided by their allies in real estate and big business, a bump in crime rates during the pandemic, and, notably, a credulous press that swallowed and regurgitated their narratives.) Why didn’t the millions of Americans who marched in 2020, who got kettled and arrested and beaten up by the cops, get anything they asked for on qualified immunity, on reevaluating municipal budgets, on alternatives to law enforcement? Why didn’t the civil rights movement achieve more of its demands on policing? Why, in other words, is it so hard to change anything about the police? Davis makes it blindingly clear: because they fight like hell to prevent it from happening—and the law is mostly on their side.
https://newrepublic.com/article/202810/police-infiltrated-civil-rights-groups-cointelpro

Nostr event nevent1qqsvvzegyrqydpenxqnxuryr574ff78xnjx8cjtsxrq5mhgke5an7nqzyzjjh2tqdtt595wtmwtqycw2pt5ztrjaqduznlahlyv5z9fe4qyqjglajsp

2025-11-29T11:47:41Z

The New Republic (nprofile…pyzj)

Scantily clad young women dancing in tall revolving martini glasses greeted the guests as they entered Mar-a-Lago. Models dressed as flappers with huge white feathers pretended spontaneous gaiety. On Halloween, nine months, 40 weeks, and three days into Donald Trump’s second administration, he celebrated the apex of his image as an almighty ruler by staging a dress-up Great Gatsby party for select club members, Cabinet officials, friends, and family, in a conspicuous display of his omnipotence and invulnerability.Trump serenely presided as the godhead at his party in homage to the roaring twenties of the twentieth century, as though he had revived its heyday. He certainly had not read F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel and comprehended its tragic plot or understood how those ’20s ended in the Great Crash. Historians of the future will mark October 31, 2025, the date of the Great Gatsby party, where Trump basked in glowing adulation, as his peak moment of obliviousness before the deluge.The federal government was in the thirtieth day of a shutdown that would last until November 13. Trump and the Republicans refused to extend subsidies for premiums under the Affordable Care Act, which would lead to astronomical increases, at least doubling for 22 million people, with millions struggling to pay and 4.2 million losing coverage entirely, according to the Congressional Budget Office. More than a million federal workers were missing their paychecks. With air traffic controllers working without pay, flights to 40 major airports were reduced by 10 percent. Perhaps most alarmingly, especially against the backdrop of a party celebrating 1920s excess, food benefits for 42 million people, including 16 million children, under the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, or SNAP, would be cut on November 1.Trump sat poolside like a sultan at Mar-a-Lago, idolized by his guests, exuding complacency. Seated at his table with Secretary of State Marco Rubio and the U.S. attorney from the District of Columbia Jeanine Pirro, the former Fox News talk-show host, wearing a gold headdress, Trump grinned approvingly at a guest dressed in an orange jumpsuit with the words “STATE PRISON” stenciled on the back, perhaps costumed as a migrant about to be deported. (A few days later, Pirro would lose the misdemeanor case she prosecuted before a D.C. jury against the “Sandwich Man,” who threw a wrapped Subway salami sandwich at an ICE agent as a protest gesture.)Trump believed there could be no consequences for whatever he wished to do—whether it was to send the military into American cities, impose tariffs on any country without regard to the Congress, grant pardons to political allies and those with the resources to buy into his family’s crypto business, indict his designated enemies, slash food stamps, increase health insurance premiums, enrich himself to the tune of an estimated $3.4 billion, according to a New Yorker investigation—or order his Department of Justice to suppress the Epstein files.The more Trump is praised, the greater he believes is his popularity. He trusts in his accolades as a science of alchemy. “I have the best Polling Numbers that I have ever received,” Trump tweeted on October 27. “I have the best numbers for any president in many years—any president.” At that moment he was 14 points underwater, with his disapproval at 55 percent and approval at 41, according to the CNN Poll of Polls. He was 20,000 leagues under the sea, but he posed like he was on the mountaintop.Four days after the Gatsby party, under a cloud of economic pessimism, chiefly darkened by the betrayal of his pledge to lower inflation on day one, the Democrats swept elections, on November 4, in a wholesale repudiation of Trump and his policies. Trump was more unpopular than he had ever been, even at the rock bottom of his first term, after he had lost the election of 2020 and organized and incited the January 6, 2021, insurrection. All of his gains from the 2024 election were wiped away—and more. It was his midterm election rejection a year before the midterms.Before Trump had departed Washington for his Gatsby party, he had left behind a White House transformed into a kitsch Byzantine palace, its makeover a symbol of his uninhibited power and his self-proclaimed “Golden Age.” He treated the White House as another of his properties that he redesigned as he wished, his Mar-a-Lago on the Potomac.With Trump, style follows dysfunction. Gold trim appliqués have been pasted everywhere, the Rose Garden paved over, renamed the Rose Garden Club with colored umbrellas covering tables for lobbyists and wealthy supplicants, an exact replication of Mar-a-Lago, and the East Wing torn down for his monstrous ballroom, to be paid for by corporations seeking his favor for government contracts and to avoid retribution. The symmetrical Federalist design of the White House’s two wings, originally intended to stand as a monument against monarchical pomposity and to reflect the balance of power required to sustain a republic, was being daily defiled. Large cursive gold script was painted on the outside door of the West Wing, which had been unobtrusively built by Theodore Roosevelt, who railed against “the malefactors of great wealth,” now ostentatiously reading: “The Oval Office.” The White House was to be Trump’s second show palace. His new ballroom would have twice the capacity of the one at Mar-a-Lago, for even bigger parties.Trump had been throwing parties at Mar-a-Lago since he bought the Marjorie Merriweather Post estate, built in the Gatsby era, in 1985. Some of those parties have become notorious, and a number of the parties featured his friend Jeffrey Epstein. But somehow that had been forgotten and forgiven until the week after the Gatsby party, which marked the moment when reality suddenly crashed through the gates. That was when the Democrats on the House Oversight Committee released a few tantalizing emails from the Epstein estate, followed by a torrent from the Republicans attempting damage control but only providing more shards of highly suggestive information.If there is a Gatsby in Trump’s story, it is the self-invented swindler and pedophile Jeffrey Epstein, though Gatsby seems like an innocent compared to Epstein. Epstein is now six years dead, but he used to be at the Mar-a-Lago festivities frequently. “I was Donald’s closest friend for ten years,” Epstein said. He and Donald lived just about a mile apart in Palm Beach, cavorting together in a blur of debauched scenes.Like Epstein, Jay Gatsby materialized as if out of thin air. He dressed like an aristocrat in clothes imported from London and spoke as though he had belonged to an exclusive club at an Ivy League college. He was alluring and shadowy. None of the partygoers knew that he made his money through organized crime. He was not Gatsby, his self-invention, but Jay Gatz, raised a Minnesota farm boy, who wished through his pretenses to persuade the wispy upper-class Daisy Buchanan, with whom he once had a fling, to somehow return to him. Gatsby ends up dead, his body floating in his pool, shot by a car repairman who mistakes him for his wife’s lover. Her actual paramour, who directs the killer to Gatsby, is Tom Buchanan, the brutish monied heir and lout, who rants about how lower races will replace white Americans, and Daisy’s husband. He is the closest counterpart in the novel to Trump.Gatsby’s parties were magical attractions for the bright young things who just came there. Fitzgerald: “In his blue gardens men and girls came and went like moths among the whisperings and the champagne and the stars.… Once there they were introduced by somebody who knew Gatsby, and after that they conducted themselves according to the rules of behavior associated with an amusement park.”Trump’s parties were never like Gatsby’s. The best-documented Trump party at Mar-a-Lago took place in November 1992, with the dancing, mini-skirted Buffalo Bills cheerleaders. In an NBC video that later emerged, Trump and Epstein’s closeness was on display. Trump pumps his fists up and down to the pulsating beat. He stands with several of the cheerleaders, grabbing one from behind and patting her rear. He jumps into a circle of dancers, pulling one against him. Epstein enters with Ghislaine Maxwell. Trump points and whispers in Epstein’s ear. “Look at her, back there,” Trump says. “She’s hot.” Trump bobs his head to the music and bites his lower lip. He says something that causes Epstein to double over with laughter. Trump claps his hands.When Trump first came to Palm Beach, he appeared at bikini contests in the area held by Hawaiian Tropic, the suntan lotion company. “He was kind of a regular with us,” Ron Rice, the firm’s owner, told The Boston Globe in 2016. “He’d call me up and say, ‘I’m having a big party. Bring your girls in.’ So I’d bring in a bunch of models.”There was also, on January 9, 1993, the American Dream Calendar Girls festival, featuring 28 models assembled at Mar-a-Lago, but whose only guests were Trump and Epstein. One of the models, Karen Mulder, described the event as “disgusting,” according to the Miami Herald. (Trump’s White House had no comment to the Herald.)Jill Harth was there as the event’s promoter. Later that evening, she claimed that Trump “forced plaintiff into a bedroom belonging to defendant’s daughter Ivanka (then 11 years old), wherein defendant forcibly kissed, fondled, and restrained plaintiff from leaving.” (Harth filed a lawsuit against Trump charging him with sexual misconduct but subsequently withdrew it in a general settlement that Trump made with her and her husband over his breach of contract involving the Calendar Girls event. Trump’s spokesperson replied in 2016: “Mr. Trump denies each and every statement made by Ms. Harth.” Harth told The Guardian: “They were trying to get me to say it never happened and I made it up. And I said I’m not doing that.”)Later, in 1993, Victoria’s Secret approached Trump about hosting a photo shoot of its elite supermodels, the “Angels,” at Mar-a-Lago. Epstein was closely entwined with the Victoria’s Secret owner, billionaire Les Wexner, who was his financial angel. Photos published in The Guardian showed Trump and Epstein at a Victoria’s Secret “Angels” party in New York in 1997, and a video captured them chatting and sitting in the front row at a Victoria’s Secret runway show in 1999.Trump was especially eager for one “Angel,” Frederique van der Wal, to pose in a bikini poolside at Mar-a-Lago. She had one condition, however. “The only thing,” she said, “that you can’t come.” She was already acquainted with Trump. All sorts of photos of Epstein with Trump have recently come to light, including at parties over the years at Mar-a-Lago. In 2000, they were captured at a Mar-a-Lago party posing as the cozy couples of Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell and Trump and Melania—with then-Prince Andrew photographed wandering back and forth.Andrew, as a consequence of his sordid relationship with Epstein as his international door-opener, has been demoted to the mere Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor. Trump aspires above all to be royalty. But if he were, at least if he were English royalty, which he wishes to be more than anything else, King Charles would have another crisis on his hands. Donald would lose his title (the Duke of Gatsby), the gilded residences, and be known forevermore as Donald Mountbatten-Windsor.While lines began forming at food pantries around the country, Trump’s Great Gatsby party was a cavalcade of the mummified hangers-on of 2025, not the bright young things of 1925. The thrill of the hunt, with Epstein chasing a lineup of models, was replaced with the procession of the nouveau MAGA royalty kissing the king’s ring. Washington plastic surgeons, who have worked on Trump-orbit clients, have dubbed their look “that Mar-a-Lago face.” One D.C. doctor told Axios that constant Botox and cosmetic alterations create a syndrome of “filler blindness,” where in a world of similarly over-treated changelings, “you lose sight of anatomic normalcy.” Trump’s guests sat in tables around the pool. Instead of Jay Gatsby’s lifeless body, two large metallic balls bobbed in the water. Trump could not have imagined that they were abstract representations of himself and Epstein, the remembrance of things past.In Palm Beach, less than a five-minute drive from Mar-a-Lago, at 1100 South Ocean Boulevard, lies an acre of land overlooking Lake Worth Lagoon, where there once stood a historic mansion, designed in the West Indies style, that belonged to Jeffrey Epstein. His estate sold it to a local developer, who razed it. He resold it to a venture capitalist who is building a new house in the Cape South African Dutch style. The address has been changed from 358 to 360 El Brillo Way, as if Epstein and whatever horrors he perpetrated there could be erased.For months now, more than 1,000 FBI agents have been working at the FBI’s Central Records Complex, instructed by Director Kash Patel to flag and redact Trump’s name from the voluminous Epstein files. “Trump” is being “blacked out,” according to Bloomberg News. The FBI refused to comment.Flying back from Palm Beach to Washington on November 14, aboard Air Force One, Catherine Lucey, a Bloomberg reporter, asked Trump, “If there’s nothing incriminating in the files, sir, why not …” Trump pointed his finger at her and said angrily, “Quiet. Quiet, piggy.” The party was over.“He had come a long way to this blue lawn,” wrote Fitzgerald about Gatsby, “and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him, somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night. Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us.… So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.”
https://newrepublic.com/article/203671/mar-a-lago-party-gatsby-trump

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2025-11-28T11:56:47Z

The New Republic (nprofile…pyzj)

Over the course of her decade-long career in media, Bari Weiss has really only told one story. Sure, she and The Free Press, the website she founded after publicly resigning from The New York Times in the summer of 2020, have covered a number of subjects: college campuses (too woke), trans people (too publicly accepted), Democrats (also too woke), Israel (too often the subject of free speech), and free speech (under attack from all sides). But Weiss’s big overarching narrative has always been about the media: that it is rotting from within due to the “new orthodoxy” of social justice. “Intellectual curiosity—let alone risk-taking,” Weiss wrote in her 2020 explanation of why she was resigning from the Times, “is now a liability.”At the time, the paper was regularly publishing columns by David Brooks and Brett Stephens, while its reporters often seemed to bend over backward to accommodate voices from an increasingly extreme Republican Party. But it hardly mattered. Weiss, despite producing a body of work that was frequently shoddy, reductive, and shallow—with rarely even a whiff of forbidden truth—consistently cast herself as one of the brave few willing to confront the “woke” mob and their pitchforks. This approach has proven lucrative. She gave the magazine she founded after leaving the Times what may be the least subtle name in media history—The Free Press—and built it in her image. Provocative, profoundly incurious, grindingly repetitive, it was, almost from its inception, a huge success. Earlier this year, she sold it to CBS for $150 million in a deal that made her the new editor in chief of CBS News, one of America’s most influential mainstream institutions. It’s easy to see why Larry and David Ellison, the Trump-friendly billionaires who purchased the network earlier this year, gravitated to Weiss. The Free Press’s editorial line flatters the powerful in myriad ways: It lambasts critics of Israel’s genocide in Gaza as ignorant, hateful fools; depicts activists as blue-haired dummies; it largely ignores economic issues, all while suggesting that America is in the grip of mass anti-white, pro-trans psychosis; it suggests that only Free Press employees (and their benefactors) see the real truth. If you are the type of person who thinks that The New York Times’s coverage of the aftermath of George Floyd’s death or the genocide in Gaza failed its readers was too “woke,” then you are a fool. You also probably subscribe to The Free Press. Now, Bari Weiss has real power at CBS. She’s using it to push a tepid, dull format that wore out its welcome years ago.There is, to be clear, a sinister element to Weiss’s presence at CBS News. She is at CBS to root out “wokeness”—not that anyone ever seems certain what this word means—and ensure that the network never again finds itself on the receiving end of a frivolous lawsuit from Donald Trump. Respected journalists have been pushed out, while Weiss waffles between hiring the doofus conservative pundit from CNN or one of Fox News’s interchangeable stooge “journalists.” She is currently running one of the most storied—and best—journalistic institutions into the ground. I assume she’s doing so for ideological reasons. But, watching a three-minute clip of Weiss discussing her purview at the network at Sunday’s Jewish Leadership Conference, it occurred to me that something else is also going on: Weiss understands the media like a TV pundit. That is hardly surprising, but is nevertheless very funny because she is a terrible media pundit. Bari Weiss says she wants to use her new perch at CBS News to “redraw the lines of what falls in the 40 yards of acceptable debate” in American political and cultural life. She says the aim is to sideline voices like Hasan Piker, Tucker Carlson and Nick Fuentes, and elevate… pic.twitter.com/hfbM4gOwcN— Drop Site (@DropSiteNews) November 25, 2025It’s worth watching the four-minute clip mainly for one reason: The full video is somehow even more embarrassing than the text suggests. It is, without a doubt, one of the single goofiest things about the media that I have ever encountered.For Weiss, the decline of the American media is best exemplified by the rise of Nick Fuentes (a Nazi), Andrew Tate (a virulent misogynist), and Hasan Piker (a leftist streamer who pushes universal health care while playing video games). For what it’s worth, she is sitting next to Ben Shapiro while she says all of this. None of these people, it should be no noted, regularly appear on CBS—or any other mainstream network. “Those people don’t actually represent our values, and they don’t think that they represent the values or the worldview of the vast majority of Americans,” Weiss says, growing more passionate. “This is an opportunity to speak for the 75 percent, for the people on the center-left and the center-right that still believe in equality of opportunity, that still believe passionately in the American project, that still believe in all of the things that everyone in this room believes in: liberty and freedom and individual responsibility and, on a basic level, the right to know what is exactly going on in the world. Not the world as propagandists and ideologues imagine it to be, but what’s actually going on in the world.” You wouldn’t know from this that there is a media ecosystem that exists outside of a handful of streamers. In fact, there actually is a media that, you know, speaks to people in the middle and aims to tell you exactly what’s going on in the world: It’s called CBS News. It existed long before Bari Weiss was put in charge.Still, Weiss insists that she and CBS are “getting back to” that way of doing things. How will she do that? First, Weiss says that “centrist news” operations have failed because they all feel like “force-feeding spinach down someone’s throat.” She then acknowledges that there’s no going back to the days of Walter Cronkite when one anchor could be trusted for tens of millions. No, Weiss has a different plan. I don’t think that it’s about pretending that you can go back to the view from nowhere, it’s about who’s in the room. It’s about redrawing the lines of what falls in … acceptable debate and acceptable American politics and culture. I don’t mean that in a censorious, gatekeeping way. I mean that about having people who are clearly on the center-left and on the center-right in conversation with each other.The example of a “center-left” and “center-right” discussion she cites? That’s right, it’s a Free Press–sponsored debate over gun control between former NRA head Dana Loesch and nightmare Thanksgiving guest Alan Dershowitz. What Weiss really wants is to have the power to unilaterally—or perhaps with the input of the Ellisons—determine what is “acceptable” in American politics and culture. The invocation of Loesch (a lobbyist who advocates for unrestricted access to firearms) and Dershowitz (a member of Jeffrey Epstein’s defense team) only makes it more ridiculous. These are bad people to hold up as paragons of the “acceptable”—and, regardless, both of them are already on television a lot. That leads to another problem that has nothing to do with principle: All Bari Weiss is doing in this excerpt is inventing cable news. She’s describing Crossfire. Cable news is built on the premise that it is a stage for people of rival beliefs and parties to shout at one another. Weiss is pleased that the participants in her Free Press debates “like each other” after their arguments, but that’s actually what a lot of people hate about cable news: that the pundits who shout at each other on TV drink cocktails together afterward. It’s hard to think of anything that reinforces the media’s clubby, elitist image more. In any case, if the choice is between Alan Dershowitz and Dana Loesch talking about gun control and watching a Twitch stream—literally any Twitch stream—I’ll watch someone else play video games. Weiss can stack as many platitudes on top of each other as she wants, but her vision for CBS News is “CNN, but somehow worse.” It’s easy to see how Weiss ended up here. For one thing, she’s a pundit who has no real interest in understanding the subjects she opines about. She’s built her entire career accusing mainstream outlets, most notably The New York Times, of being left-wing sleeper cells. Now that she’s been put in charge of a comparable institution, her “vision” is to run something fourth-rate and hackish and that, it goes without saying, pales in comparison to the work being done in the office she stormed out of in 2020, claiming that her colleagues were trying to silence her. Ironically, Weiss’s version of CBS wouldn’t just be worse, it would also appear to be significantly more restrictive. The big difference, after all, is that she won’t let anyone say anything bad about Israel. Weiss is putting people on notice that CBS News is growing more restrictive and less journalistically rigorous under her leadership. It’s also getting dumber and worse, which is to say, more like its new editor in chief.
https://newrepublic.com/article/203758/bari-weiss-cbs-news-strategy

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2025-11-28T11:56:47Z

The New Republic (nprofile…pyzj)

Here we are, Black Friday, officially Christmastime now. America is in a sour mood. Grocery prices are up, and so are energy prices. Donald Trump lies incessantly about both. The American people are onto him. They’re pessimistic about the future. The distrust goes way beyond the economy. Over these last few weeks, ever since the government shutdown, it’s finally begun to sink in on people that Trump and his entire administration are a bunch of raging ideologues or incompetents or both, peddling a fantasy version of their strength that people no longer buy. There’s no longer any doubt about it: The MAGA crack-up has begun. Look at a few things that have happened in just the last week:• Trump tried to sell Ukraine down the river to Putin. The howls of outrage were instant, loud, and bipartisan to some extent. The administration backpedaled. Or appeared to. But then, on Tuesday, we got the leaked transcript of the phone call between envoy Steve Witkoff and a top Putin aide in which Witkoff offered tips to the Kremlin to help sweet-talk Trump. (Remember: Our ally here is Ukraine!) The fact that something like this was leaked, whether by someone inside or outside the United States, is a clear sign that people aren’t afraid of this administration the way they might have been six months ago.• Trump, bumbling around on domestic policy because he knows nothing, desperately said he was considering extending the Obamacare coverage subsidies on Monday. Congressional Republicans were up in arms. It would actually be a sane thing to do, but it would never get through Congress, and he sounds ridiculous, considering that he just kept the government shut down for 43 days over this very issue.• Trump and Pentagon chief Pete Hegseth’s push to reinstate Senator Mark Kelly as an active-duty soldier (he’s 61!) so they can court-martial him is quickly turning into one of the leading disasters of this administration. There is no chance they’re going to convince a majority of Americans that a guy who flew 30-something combat missions is a disloyal American. Hegseth’s tweets chastising the Arizona senator for the state of his uniform only drew attention to Kelly’s heroism—and made the defense secretary seem ridiculous and the whole saga seem petty. Kelly and the other five Democrats who made that video advising troops not to follow illegal orders no doubt have surprised Trump & company by not taking this lying down. The revenge crusade is crashing and burning.• It was a disastrous week for Attorney General Pam Bondi as she stood there watching a federal judge dismiss the laughable indictments she directed against James Comey and Letitia James. And she stood up there, in perfect East German Communist Party circa 1957 fashion, repeating the assertion that everyone knows to be a lie, that Lindsey Halligan is “an excellent U.S. attorney.” • FBI Director Kash Patel somehow had a worse week than Bondi. He acknowledged that the Epstein files may never be released in full. He took more stick for spending taxpayer dollars providing his country-singer girlfriend with security and then exploded when he learned they ditched her right before she was set to sing the national anthem at an NRA convention in Georgia. They’re now openly leaking that Patel is on the way out. He’s been every bit as horrible as many people predicted he would be. • Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem was revealed by a Justice Department court filing to have personally ordered the continuation of those flights to Central America after a federal judge said they had to stop. This involved, you may recall, loading 261 people onto three planes and sending them to El Salvador, many to the notorious CECOT facility where they endured subhuman conditions. Noem, in other words, directly violated an order from a federal court. This is illegal. It could lead to contempt of court charges—and fines and even imprisonment.I could go on. RFK Jr.’s been on a pretty bad streak too. There was the Olivia Nuzzi stuff, which was titillating even if perhaps not of overwhelming public interest—except that it might indeed be a matter of public interest if Nuzzi is correct that the ex-junkie in charge of the nation’s health is still using drugs, which she writes he admitted to her. And before that, he took the country further into dangerous surreality on vaccines and autism. That’s pretty much the whole murderers’ row of Trump’s awful appointments (well, the top-tier ones). All except Tulsi Gabbard. Wonder what happened with her. Surely she did something stupid too. It just hasn’t been reported. (Actually, surprise surprise, she did do something pretty weird.)Everywhere you look, in other words, Trump and his people are wrecking the country. He doesn’t know what to do about the economy. Presidents don’t have a ton of power to lower prices in the first place, and people are now understanding that fact, and that Trump swindled them last year. He’s going to give Putin most of what he wants. His pursuit of his perceived political enemies is going to be massively unpopular and drive his numbers down into the mid-30s before too long if he keeps it up. And all these incompetent and corrupt henchpeople aren’t helping. The movement is collapsing.And this will embolden both Trump’s opponents and those he’s had in his gunsights. Seven months ago, law firms and universities were terrified of Trump. I bet not so much now. It’s been so inspiring and important to see citizens in Chicago and Evanston and so many other places rise up to oppose Trump and his masked agents in their roundups. It was gratifying to see Zohran Mamdani run circles around him, and Trump’s passive demeanor that day was telling. Even the Beltway Democrats, or some of them anyway, are showing some game.People may not hate incompetence. They may not hate corruption. And they may not hate extremism. But all three at once? It’s getting to be too much for people, and it’s a great way to close out the year.
https://newrepublic.com/article/203744/there-no-doubt-it-great-maga-crack-up-begun-trump

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2025-11-27T11:47:00Z

The New Republic (nprofile…pyzj)

The internet is going gaga for gay sheep of late. Or, more precisely, the wool from gay sheep.On November 13, the LGBTQ dating and sex app Grindr put on “I Wool Survive,” a runway fashion show in New York City that leaned all the way in. There was a swimmer wearing stars-and-stripes Speedos, a mechanic in black overalls unzipped south of his bellybutton, a football player in only a jockstrap and a crop-top jersey (number 69, of course), and an afterparty at The Eagle. All the pieces in this celebration of camp were hand-knitted by designer-to-the-stars Michael Schmidt out of wool sourced from Rainbow Wool, a German nonprofit that rescues from slaughter male rams who prefer the company of other male rams.The message was simple: Homosexuality exists throughout the animal kingdom and should be protected and celebrated there too. “It’s an animal rights story. And it’s a human rights story,” Schmidt told The New York Times. This feel-good narrative has gone viral, garnering glowing coverage from mainstream publications like the Times, The Washington Post, and Esquire; fashion and art outlets like Hyperallergic and Paper; and gay mainstays Out and Pink News, and blowing up across social media.But the tale of the rescued gay rams is not actually a feel-good story. It only looks that way because the public is largely unaware of how the sheep industry operates. Gay rams, who refuse to breed with ewes, aren’t the only animals the industry deems unprofitable to keep alive. It passes that same judgment on breeding ewes worn out from too many pregnancies and older sheep who don’t produce enough high-quality wool. Eventually, they all get sent for slaughter, just like most male sheep, the overwhelming majority of whom are castrated as lambs and slaughtered before their first birthday. If anything, the gay wool fashion show should make us think not about the good fortune of the few rescued rams but about how animal farming systematically, routinely, and often violently exploits the reproduction of all the animals it encounters.Sheep farming is among the smallest and least industrialized of major livestock industries, in part due to comparatively low demand for wool and mutton. Sheep, which need to graze for their entire lives, are also a bad fit for the factory farm and industrial feedlot system that dominates modern animal agriculture. There are about five million sheep in the United States and just over a million and half in Germany, where Rainbow Wool is based. Compare that to, respectively, 1.5 billion and 160 million chickens in the two countries at any given time. But this doesn’t make the basic logic of commercial sheep farming all that different from other forms of animal agriculture.In the U.S. and Europe, sheep are raised primarily for their meat, called “lamb” when it comes from animals slaughtered under 12 months. Farmers usually shear meat lambs prior to slaughter, while sheep from wool breeds are culled for “mutton” when their hair begins to turn brittle at around the age of 6. But animal agriculture doesn’t just require animal bodies and substances to be turned into consumer products, such as meat, wool, leather, and milk. Farmers must also exploit the animals’ reproductive processes to maintain and grow their flocks. Every ewe is a living factory for future generations of sheep, while ram sex work is more selective: Farmers only need one ram per flock, and can reliably mate a single ram with as many as four or five ewes every day. The other rams become what are called wethers. They are typically castrated a few weeks after birth to prevent unlicensed pregnancies, because they tend to be more docile than intact rams, and because of the alleged superiority of their meat. Regardless, castration, not breeding, is the typical ram destiny.This is what one of us—Gabriel, a professor of gender, sexuality, and feminist studies—has previously dubbed the “brutal, violent heteronormativity” of animal farming: It’s not that farmers are intentionally hostile to gay animals, but rather that all breeding livestock are ruled by the imperative to breed or die, reducing them to their reproductive potential. This is even more the case in the factory farming that dominates meat production and makes meat cheap. This model depends upon minutely controlling animal sex. Or, as the feminist philosopher Carol Adams argues more forcefully, meat and other animal products require sexual exploitation.Public discussions of agriculture mostly ignore the details of breeding. Most people, and certainly those who traffic in nostalgic celebrations of old-time farming, tend to present farming as a business in which humans merely harvest what natural reproduction gives us. But in industrial production systems, mating has to match the market’s schedule and standards. Nearly all dairy cattle, swine, and turkeys are bred through artificial insemination.The details may ruin your next pork chop. In most factory pig farms—as anthropologist Alex Blanchette’s work shows in uncomfortable detail—mostly male human breeding technicians sit on the backs of sows, pound their flanks, stroke their teats, and otherwise simulate the activities of boars during mating to prepare them for artificial insemination with semen from boars housed tens, hundreds, or thousands of miles away. Boar semen, in turn, is harvested using mechanical vaginas, but human technicians typically must stroke the boar to induce an erection before inserting his penis into the contraption.Such interventions in the sex lives of animals are so intrusive and ubiquitous that the laws criminalizing animal cruelty and human sexual abuse of animals—“bestiality” laws—had to be rewritten to include explicit exceptions for farmers.But even outside the cruel industrial system, most agricultural animals find their sexuality almost completely subordinated to the dictates of the market. Rams that do breed with ewes do so under close observation. Farmers carefully apply distinctly colored paints to each ram’s undercarriage so that they can track which rams are breeding which ewes. Rams that don’t spread their paint have no future. It is inapt to apply human identity categories like “gay,” founded on ideals of sexual autonomy and desire, to this system.One in 12 rams are gay, coverage of the Grindr and Rainbow Wool show has repeatedly asserted. But where does this estimate come from? Scholarly literature, cited in the New York Times article, purports to reveal “sexual partner preference” among farmed rams. In those studies, tested rams were prevented from mating for around a week, and then they were given the choice of two ewes and two rams restrained in a stanchion. Scientists recorded the results.It’s hard to know what, if anything, this experiment shows. Even for humans, the word gay is slippery. It is used interchangeably to describe three distinct things: behavior (sex acts), orientation (sexual desires), and identity (the “kind” of person one is, where sexuality is given special significance).You can’t ask rams about their identities, and we have no evidence that sheep ascribe any special significance to sex in the way humans often do. Calling rams gay risks either imputing human thoughts and feelings to sheep—what scholars call anthropomorphism—or distorting what people mean by gay. Gay usually doesn’t just describe sex acts; it also encompasses how gay people relate to institutions like marriage and kinship, and linked resources and rights.If we cannot sensibly talk about gay sheep identity, perhaps we can think about gay sheep behavior, which is what the cited studies examine. Same-sex sexual behavior is common among animals in the wild, including among wild sheep. It is also visible on farms, as observant farmers have been chronicling for ages.In the most influential study of the subject, “stimulus animals” (what they call the bottoms and a phrase that admittedly would look great on a cropped tee) were either those previously observed to be engaged in receptive sex with other rams, and therefore deemed suitable mounts, or those “test rams” that had already exhibited a preference to top other rams. The study designers assumed that once a ram had topped another ram it was suitable as a “stimulus animal.”But this is a big logical leap. Defining sexual preference exclusively in terms of “topping,” and not necessarily on willing partners, is taking phallocentrism to the extreme. That’s how farmers think about sheep sex, since they need to exploit it, but is that how researchers should think about it? What if no rams like being topped? Perhaps some rams who like to top ewes also like to be topped by other rams. Perhaps some rams would simply prefer not to top or be topped by anyone. We cannot know from the cited studies. If these rams are gay in the way most people mean it, we would need evidence of both topping and bottoming, and other things besides, options the studies fail to anticipate because they’re not actually designed to study sheep sexuality. They’re designed to exploit it. This is what the Rainbow Wool sweater hype ignores: Most of what we know about the sexual behavior and preferences of farmed animals comes from research distorted by questions about how to more efficiently extract profit from the loins and labors of livestock.If the idea of “gay” rams is so confused, are people wrong to want to save them? No. But that doesn’t mean Schmidt or Rainbow Wool are a very good vehicle for this work, either.Garnering support for farmed animals is difficult and expensive, particularly if one wants to do something more than just convince people to abstain from ordering lamb. As evidenced by the work of scholars like Elan Abrell, sanctuary farms—those that save animals from grim fates in farming and let them live out their lives as naturally as possible—take land, money, and hard work and have almost no conceivable way of turning a profit. In this sense, Rainbow Wool, in selling wool from the rescued animals so they pay their way—and, yes, helping support queer charities in Germany—is a way of commodifying animals as gently as possibly while saving them from the butcher’s blade. And selling products means advertising, like having high-visibility runway shows of gay fashions knitted from the wool of gay rams.Anthropomorphizing animals as “gay” may be a worthwhile first step in getting people to recognize the sexual exploitation that nearly all farmed animals endure. And in its own limited way, Rainbow Wool does this. Buying some fancy wool is hardly enough to address the harms of animal farming, but that doesn’t mean it’s worthless. When it comes to the politics of meat, people often pit individual action against transformative “systemic” change. In our forthcoming book, we argue that it’s wrong to treat individual and collective actions as either/or; we need both. Sometimes small incremental changes by individuals can help create new norms that lead to policy changes and eventual structural transformation.Schmidt may indeed be doing some good, but it’s not nearly good enough. In fact, the farm on which Rainbow Wool’s gay rams are housed is also a commercial sheep farm, where other sheep are sent to slaughter. “It is a great capitalist story framed about being about gayness,” Carol Adams explained to us over email, of the Grindr fashion show. But “it doesn’t challenge animal agriculture in terms of assumptions about the requirement that animals be productive; nor about making females pregnant, nor about wearing wool.” Neither Rainbow Wool nor Grindr responded by publication time to a request for comment for this piece.Consumers moved by the Grindr show could buy some Rainbow Wool wares, but they would do even better to send their money to a sanctuary farm with a broader perspective on animals and the industry that exploits them. And they would do better to educate themselves about how and why animal farming operates as it does, and what actions we can take, alone and together, to make it less harmful to the billions of animals it propels into lives of suffering and exploitation.
https://newrepublic.com/article/203626/gay-sheep-wool-sex

Nostr event nevent1qqsvhep6ulx2wyznwsfs3zdasswlmc87d0vrfle6durjxvv04s7hlgqzyzjjh2tqdtt595wtmwtqycw2pt5ztrjaqduznlahlyv5z9fe4qyqjf6exkc

2025-11-26T22:09:46Z

The New Republic (nprofile…pyzj)

The Supreme Court on Wednesday barred Donald Trump from firing the director of the U.S. Copyright Office for the time being. Shira Pulmutter will stay in her job, part of the Library of Congress, while the court rules on two related cases. Trump had made an emergency appeal to the court to get her removed immediately, which has worked in the past for the administration with other officials. This time, though, Perlmutter’s position has the word “Congress” in it, and she argued in court that this meant she was part of the legislative branch of government and thus couldn’t be fired from the executive branch. Perlmutter’s lawsuit also noted that Trump disagreed with a report she authored, in which she said that tech companies would likely have to pay licensing fees to access copyrighted materials for artificial intelligence models. “Today, the administration’s unlawful executive overreach was not greenlit by the U.S. Supreme Court,” said Skye Perryman, president and CEO of Democracy Forward, which represented Perlmutter. “We are pleased that the Court deferred the government’s motion to stay our court order in a case that is critically important for rule of law, the separation of powers, and the independence of the Library of Congress.”The other cases the court is reviewing involve Trump’s removals of Federal Trade Commissioner Rebecca Kelly Slaughter and Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook. Slaughter is challenging her firing, saying that Congress requires the president to show cause when firing members of independent agencies, but the court allowed Trump to remove Slaughter until the case is decided next month. Cook was allowed to remain in her position, and her case will be heard by the court in January. In May, a number of Trump appointees showed up at the Library of Congress with a letter from Trump claiming that they were now in charge, only to be rebuffed by library officials who filed a lawsuit. For now, the president has been rebuffed from his attempt to take control of an independent library. But with the conservative bent of the current Supreme Court, it may only be a speed bump.
https://newrepublic.com/post/203753/donald-trump-supreme-court-fire-copyright-official

Nostr event nevent1qqsx7xmantgpfpnrng9ruvy59qgpjf6sz4f4pzlp32trtza6kp7pkmczyzjjh2tqdtt595wtmwtqycw2pt5ztrjaqduznlahlyv5z9fe4qyqjcgms2g

2025-11-26T22:09:46Z

The New Republic (nprofile…pyzj)

A Democrat is on the brink of winning a special election in Tennessee’s deep-red 7th congressional district—leading GOP Republicans and even President Trump into a frantic last-minute attack. An Emerson College Polling/The Hill survey released Wednesday has Democrat Aftyn Behn nearly tied with Republican Matt Van Epps, 46 percent to 48 percent—with 2 percent voting elsewhere and 5 percent undecided. A victory here would continue an upward trend for Democrats on the local level, as Behn would be yet another Democrat to win on the state level this fall. Both Behn and Van Epps are vying to replace former Republican Representative Mark Green, who resigned from Congress in July.Van Epps is the Trump-endorsed former commissioner of the Tennessee Department of General Services and an Army helicopter pilot running on issues like “the woke left’s push for gender surgeries and mutilation on minors,” making sure America “never abandons” Israel, and “advancing President Trump’s America First agenda: keeping our borders secure, rebuilding our military strength, protecting American workers, and restoring the values that make our nation great.”Behn is a Tennessee state representative and former community organizer who is endorsed by the Knoxville Democratic Socialists of America. Her campaign has focused on a policy-minded, anti-corporate approach to the affordability crisis. 🚨NEW AD LAUNCH🚨 It’s my birthday, so we’re launching our final ad for the campaign called “Shake Up.” We’ve got 8 days to make history and to shake up Washington! Donate today to keep our ad on air through the election! https://t.co/5C413liQ0J pic.twitter.com/SmMFhr1ZM7— Aftyn Behn for Congress (@aftynfortn) November 24, 2025Behn’s surge has the right exhausting all efforts. Conservative super PACs have already spent $3.3 million against her. And the social media attacks have been constant. The RNC Research X page spent all day Wednesday posting and reposting weak shots at Behn, and sharing old screenshots of her saying things like “cops do not keep us safe.” “She gets more demonic with each video that resurfaces,” anti-transgender activist Riley Gaine commented on a recording of Behn very calmly explaining how she disapproves of religions being “at the core of everything we do in the legislature.” Trump also began his day Wednesday morning offering his support for Van Epps, and was perhaps the only person on the right not to bombard Behn. “I am asking all America First Patriots in Tennessee’s 7th Congressional District, who haven’t voted yet, to please GET OUT AND VOTE for MAGA Warrior Matt Van Epps, tomorrow, November 26th, the last day to vote early in person,” he wrote. “You can win this Election for Matt! PLEASE VOTE FOR MATT VAN EPPS, who has my Complete and Total Endorsement.” Polls close at 12 P.M. NOON in most of TN-07, and every vote counts. IF YOU ARE IN LINE BY 12 P.M., STAY IN LINE, AND THEY MUST LET YOU VOTE! TN-07: Early Voting ends November 26th, and Election Day is December 2nd. GET OUT AND VOTE FOR MATT VAN EPPS—HE WILL NEVER LET YOU DOWN!” It’s obvious that Republicans see this race as a five-alarm fire, especially as they come off one of their worst weeks to date, with Marjorie Taylor Greene predicting a midterm loss in 2026 and more resignations on her way out, and other Republicans complaining about feeling walked all over by the Trump administration.
https://newrepublic.com/post/203756/trump-panics-democrat-aftyn-behn-flip-house-seat-tennessee-special-election-poll

Nostr event nevent1qqsxh0myq702chw7ds2zue9g82t2kecmyuvzy6ek4nuxms2vpu48vtqzyzjjh2tqdtt595wtmwtqycw2pt5ztrjaqduznlahlyv5z9fe4qyqjutytua

2025-11-26T22:09:46Z

The New Republic (nprofile…pyzj)

Two National Guard members were shot just blocks away from the White House Wednesday, and although the identity and motive of the assailant is still unknown, MAGA Republicans are already blaming Democrats for the shooting. Right-wing commentators rushed to their social media accounts after the shooting to hurriedly (and baselessly) connect the violent incident to their political opposition.Benny Johnson was one of many who attempted to link the shooting to a group of Democratic lawmakers who’d published a video urging members of the U.S. military and intelligence community not to follow illegal orders.“Just a few days ago, six Democrats claimed President Trump was issuing ‘unlawful’ orders to the military and that troops must resist. Two National Guard Members were just targeted and shot in Washington DC.,” Johnson wrote on X. Eric Daugherty, a right-wing commentator, also attempted to connect those Democrats’ message to the violence in Washington. “They say Trump is using the military as his ‘personal gestapo,’” he wrote. “Two troops were shot today, right outside the White House. This should send shivers down the spine of every American.”Greg Price, another right-wing commentator, linked the shooting to one of the lawmakers in particular, Senator Elissa Slotkin. He wrote that she “went on TV last Sunday and claimed that National Guardsmen were going to start shooting at American civilians.”Crucially, those Democratic lawmakers hadn’t said anything about citizens taking up arms—or even protesting—against the government. They didn’t even mention Trump by name. They simply advised those who had sworn an oath to protect the U.S. Constitution to uphold the nation’s laws. Only Trump advocated for violence against the government, claiming that the Democratic lawmakers had committed sedition “punishable by death.”Additionally, Alexis Wilkins, the country singer girlfriend of FBI Director Kash Patel—who has proved increasingly expensive for taxpayers— decided to lend her salient political voice to the discussion surrounding the shooting.“While everyone on X is fighting, the left is still attacking people who wear the uniform and support this country simply for doing so. There are more important things in this world and far bigger enemies who actually hate us and do, in fact, want to kill us,” she wrote on X Wednesday, urging people to “pray.” So, thank you for that, Alexis.Last week, a federal judge ruled that the Pentagon had “exceeded the bounds of their authority” by ordering troops into the nation’s capital for “non-military, crime-deterrence missions.” But she stayed her decision until December 11 in order to give the Trump administration time to appeal the decision. Following the shooting Wednesday, Trump reportedly asked Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to deploy an additional 500 troops to the nation’s capital.The conditions of the two National Guardsmen was not immediately clear Wednesday afternoon, after West Virginia Governor Patrick Morrissey said he’d received “conflicting reports” about their health statuses. D.C. Metropolitan Police confirmed that one suspect had been taken into custody.This story has been updated.
https://newrepublic.com/post/203759/maga-blaming-democrats-two-national-guards-shot

Nostr event nevent1qqszvsj0d58ltny04guprxpthvxu26m20fs2lqqmh8cah8ufg4d36zczyzjjh2tqdtt595wtmwtqycw2pt5ztrjaqduznlahlyv5z9fe4qyqjsnvh0r

2025-11-26T22:09:46Z

The New Republic (nprofile…pyzj)

The bill mandating the Department of Justice to release the Jeffrey Epstein files has been signed into law, but certain parts may still never be seen by the public. That’s at least in part because the DOJ has been paying FBI agents nearly $1 million in overtime to work on the “Epstein Transparency Project” at a bureau facility in Winchester, Virginia. FBI Director Kash Patel has tasked nearly 1,000 agents on the project, which, according to internal reports, have also been referred to as the “Special Redaction Project.” Between March 17 and March 22, the bureau spent $851,344, according to a Bloomberg report, and agents racked up 4,737 hours of overtime pay between January and July looking through the DOJ’s evidence on Epstein. These included the investigation into Epstein’s 2019 prison death, as well as “search warrant execution photos,” “street surveillance video,” and aerial footage. The DOJ’s remaining, unreleased Epstein documents amount to nearly 100,000 pages, and Patel along with Attorney General Pam Bondi have told the FBI to flag every mention of Donald Trump. There are also 40 computers and electronic devices, 26 storage drives, more than 70 CDs and six recording devices collectively containing over 300 gigabytes of data. Physical evidence includes photographs, travel logs, employee lists, over $17,000 in cash, five massage tables, blueprints of Epstein’s island and Manhattan home, four busts of female body parts, a pair of women’s cowboy boots, one stuffed dog, a logbook of visitors to Epstein’s private island, and a list described as a “document with names,” which could be Epstein’s rumored client list. It’s no secret that Trump, backed by his allies in Congress, fought long and hard to delay the Epstein files release, only to relent last month when Representative Adelita Grijalva was sworn in and cast the last needed House vote to authorize the release. This project, ostensibly to protect the privacy of Epstein’s victims and people not involved in his crimes, could also be a way to prevent exposing Trump and his allies when evidence gets released.
https://newrepublic.com/post/203762/trump-fbi-redacted-epstein-files

Nostr event nevent1qqsqsus4l82a42dklecftxq0c7trslvpdnrjl29lde66e9vzjhc8sxgzyzjjh2tqdtt595wtmwtqycw2pt5ztrjaqduznlahlyv5z9fe4qyqjwuhqux

2025-11-26T22:09:46Z

The New Republic (nprofile…pyzj)

You can be forgiven for feeling confused about the newly politicized question of whether your Thanksgiving turkey is more expensive this year than last year. The Farm Bureau and President Donald Trump say it’s cheaper. The Agriculture Department says it’s pricier. Who’s right? The answer turns out to be complicated—because America’s turkey market is complicated. Let’s start by agreeing Trump to be a worthless source. He never gets numbers right. I sometimes wonder whether Trump suffers from dyscalculia because he mangles numbers even more than he mangles other types of facts. More likely, making up statistics is just Trump’s favorite way to lie. In speeches, Trump keeps citing the Agriculture Department as his source that turkey prices are down 33 percent, but the Agriculture Department hasn’t said anything like that.The Farm Bureau says a 16-pound turkey costs on average $21.50, and that’s down 16 percent from 2024. But that’s just frozen turkey. Frozen turkey is cheaper than fresh turkey in part because it can be stored for long periods without spoilage concerns. Also, fresh turkey has a certain snob appeal. The price of fresh turkey is up. Even the Farm Bureau, citing USDA projections, concedes it’s up this year by 38 cents per pound. The Agriculture Department’s weekly price estimates tell a slightly different story. Its estimate for last week showed higher prices for both frozen and fresh turkey compared to the same week last year. That makes sense when you remember that these weekly estimates show how much turkeys cost at the moment you’re buying them for Thanksgiving, not what they’re projected to cost on average throughout 2025. Higher demand dictates that turkeys will likely be more expensive Thanksgiving week than during the other 51 weeks of the year. And it turns out this year’s Thanksgiving price spike pushed turkeys higher than last year’s Thanksgiving price spike.It gets more complicated still, however, when you take into account that all the numbers I’ve been quoting thus far are wholesale prices. Retail prices tell a different story. At this time of year retailers treat turkeys as “loss leaders”; i.e., they sell them at a loss to get shoppers in the door. If China did this, Trump would be screaming bloody murder! But when monopolization is the culprit—Walmart alone commands 30 percent of grocery market share—Trump doesn’t give a damn. Writing for Axios, Kelly Tyko observes: “Many retailers are selling turkeys at or below cost to draw shoppers in for higher-margin items like wine, desserts and décor—a classic loss-leader strategy that works for big chains such as Walmart, Aldi and Kroger but squeezes smaller grocers.” Trump’s indifference to unchecked grocery monopolies may have lowered the price of your Thanksgiving turkey this year. Take a bow, Mr. President. But giant grocery retailers cut turkey prices before Thanksgiving so they can soak you for other stuff that you serve alongside it. So if you’re paying more, for instance, for dinner rolls or cubed stuffing mix, as The Austin American-Statesman reports, that’s Trump’s doing too. And to whatever extent the big players are successful at expanding market share, food prices—including turkey prices—will be correspondingly higher over the long term. Turkey production is also fairly concentrated, with the top four processing firms commanding a 56 percent market share in 2021. Market share for the top three—Butterball, Jennie-O Turkey Store, and Cargill Protein—has declined in recent years, but remains a robust 41.7 percent.What about Trump’s tariffs? Are those fouling up turkey imports? Not really. For one thing, the United States imports hardly any turkeys at all. The few we do import come from Canada, and as best I can make out, turkeys are not subjected to Trump’s Canada tariffs. So if you want to blame Trump for rising prices, you’re better off choosing a side dish. Any canned goods you serve at Thanksgiving, for instance, will be pricier thanks to Trump’s 50 percent tariff on steel and aluminum. Canned cream corn from Seneca Foods, the Century Foundation reports, is up 22.3 percent.One peculiarity of the American turkey economy is how very seasonal it is. Twenty-two percent of all turkeys consumed in the United States get eaten at Thanksgiving, and another 19 percent at Christmas and Easter. Overall, turkey’s popularity has fallen 25 percent since the mid-1990s, even as the turkeys themselves have nearly doubled in size since the 1960s. Pretty soon turkeys may be as scarce as cassette tapes.And such small portions! The Farm Bureau would like you to know that turkey represents a shrinking slice of the cost of Thanksgiving dinner, because the cost of side dishes is rising faster. This year, the Farm Bureau says, a 16-pound frozen turkey represents only 39 percent of the cost of a 10-person Thanksgiving dinner—the lowest portion since 2000. When you factor in that families increasingly prefer pork or beef for Thanksgiving dinner, and therefore at many tables there’s no 16-pound frozen turkey, that percentage is even lower.Myself, I like turkey year-round, usually on a sandwich with Swiss cheese, and if at all possible a dab of chopped liver. I will be cooking one this Thanksgiving, and I’d better wrap this up because I need to dry-brine.Before I go, though, please know that the Pilgrims are not believed by serious historians to have eaten turkey at the first Thanksgiving. The menu was venison, waterfowl, and, more than likely, eels, and the meal’s purpose was not to affirm multicultural brotherhood but for the European colonists to cement a military alliance with the Wampanoag tribe against the Wampanoag’s traditional enemy, the Naragansett tribe. Eventually the Pilgrims started breaking promises to the Wampanoag (big surprise), and the Wampanoag and Naragansett joined forces against them. King Philip, son of Massasoit, the Wampanoag chief who’d tucked in with the Pilgrims at that first feast, led the combined forces in what became known as King Philip’s War. It lasted three years and was extremely bloody. In the end, the Europeans won and King Philip got his head severed and placed atop a pike at Plymouth Plantation. But that’s not a great story to tell in the middle of a big dinner.
https://newrepublic.com/article/203723/trump-turkey-prices

Nostr event nevent1qqsgvtxty55c9nynhzhdk90e7g67h9ttwm9z6c8ak6vhz298em3a6vqzyzjjh2tqdtt595wtmwtqycw2pt5ztrjaqduznlahlyv5z9fe4qyqj0jm9sw

2025-11-26T21:22:46Z

The New Republic (nprofile…pyzj)

It seems that bulldozing the White House wasn’t enough for Donald Trump.The builder-in-chief declared his intention Wednesday to “fix” the 100-year-old Reflecting Pool on the National Mall in Washington. Fix what, exactly? Your guess is as good as ours.“Study it hard because you won’t be seeing this Biden filth and incompetence much longer!” Trump wrote in a post on Truth Social. This is just the latest ridiculous renovation project that has pulled Trump attention away from, well, actually governing. Trump is reportedly battling with his hand-picked architect, who has warned the new $300 million ballroom will dwarf the White House. In October, the president had completely razed the White House’s East Wing after promising just months earlier that his ballroom would not touch the existing structure. Trump plowed forward without prerequisite congressional approval, having conveniently begun demolition during the government shutdown.It’s still unlikely that Trump plans to seek permission before making any changes to the Reflecting Pool. Last month, Trump fired all six members of the Commission on Fine Arts, which is charged with advising the federal government on the art, design, and architectural development of Washington. An official said the members would be replaced by those who were “more aligned with President Trump’s ‘America First’ policies,” but a month later, the seats still remain empty.At the same time, Trump has redone the Oval Office in the gaudy gold style of Mar-a-Lago, added stupid signs and white marble bathrooms to the White House, paved over the Rose Garden, and even pitched an “Arc de Trump” monument.
https://newrepublic.com/post/203747/donald-trump-threatens-renovation-reflecting-pool

Nostr event nevent1qqsq6pt7kyhvkqe9xlzj5k2m4xk5t5fufgcamdnwpj8edta8fukk47czyzjjh2tqdtt595wtmwtqycw2pt5ztrjaqduznlahlyv5z9fe4qyqjph48q2

2025-11-26T21:22:46Z

The New Republic (nprofile…pyzj)

Former Trump White House strategist-turned-podcaster Steve Bannon is facing fire and fury from his listeners after new details emerged about his cozy relationship with child sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein.Bannon was a vocal proponent earlier this year for the release of the federal government’s Epstein files—before the extent of his relationship with Epstein became public knowledge, reported Media Matters Wednesday.Bannon assisted Epstein in navigating the political and legal quagmire that was the last year of his life. As part of that, Bannon conducted a series of interviews with Epstein between 2018 and early 2019, totalling about 15 hours of unreleased footage. The strategist was reportedly working on a pro-Epstein documentary up until the day of Epstein’s arrest, according to a trove of emails released by the House Oversight Committee two weeks ago.Since then, Bannon has gone quiet on the issue, allowing the high drama of the Epstein files to fall into the background of his noisy War Room podcast. But the silent treatment has not played well with his audience, who claim they were betrayed by the far-right conspiracist.“So Steve advising Epstein how to sugarcoat his depravities. I’ve been watching Steve for 6 hours per day since 2020, I’m so done with the ‘MAGA’ whisperer! Hypocrisy is not only Democrats disease!” wrote one user on X the day the emails were released.Another X user condemned Bannon as a “fat pedo lover.”Critics on Bannon’s Rumble page mocked him as “Epstein’s PR guy” and implored the far-right personality to “explain his relationship with Epstein.”“PLEASE RELEASE THE OTHER 15 HOURS OF EPSTEIN INTERVIEW YOU HAVE IT’LL SHOW WHO YOU REALLY ARE WHICH IS WHY YOU HAVEN’T RELEASED IT,” commented one Rumble user.Epstein, a New York socialite who orchestrated an international child sex trafficking ring to service the sick desires of the ultra wealthy, is believed to have abused hundreds of young girls. His network included an array of high profile, powerful individuals, including former Treasury Secretary and ex-Harvard University President Larry Summers, Victoria’s Secret chief executive Les Wexner, Wall Street titan Leon Black, British ex-Prince Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, and President Donald Trump.After months of dragging their feet, Republicans in both chambers of Congress passed a bill to release the investigation files related to Epstein and his potential associates. Trump signed the bill on November 19, starting a 30-day timer on the documents’ release.
https://newrepublic.com/post/203750/steve-bannon-fans-epstein-ties

Nostr event nevent1qqs2pmp7869dhrk5nakkp0appajn3wekzsx5nyqpll4p3x6jw60rn7czyzjjh2tqdtt595wtmwtqycw2pt5ztrjaqduznlahlyv5z9fe4qyqjpg0qj0

2025-11-26T19:53:46Z

The New Republic (nprofile…pyzj)

Donald Trump has already spent $70 million of taxpayer money on golfing in less than a year as president. If this pace keeps up, he will spend $300 million playing golf by the time his second term ends. HuffPost reports that the president on Wednesday made his sixteenth trip this year to his Mar-a-Lago estate and went golfing. Each trip carries a $3.4 million bill in travel and security costs. If Trump decides to go to Mar-a-Lago twice more before the end of the year, he will have spent a total of $75 million on golf, which, repeated each of the following three years, would result in $300 million spent on the trips.That’s nearly double the $151.5 million in tax dollars Trump spent golfing in his first term as president. Trump spent a third of 2017, his first year as president, hanging out at his private clubs. This time, Trump has also made nine trips to his golf club in Bedminster, New Jersey, spending $1.1 million on each trip. He also went to Aberdeen, Scotland, in July to promote a new golf course at his resort there, spending close to $10 million on the trip. The security costs Trump incurs on his Florida trips can get pretty high, with machine gun–mounted patrol boats manning the nearby Intracoastal Waterway and the Coast Guard patrolling in the vicinity in the Atlantic Ocean. Using Air Force One costs $273,063 per hour to fly to Palm Beach International Airport, meaning that one four-hour round trip to Mar-a-Lago costs the taxpayer $1.1 million. In 2016, before Trump was elected, he mocked President Obama’s work ethic, claiming that he was “worse than Carter” for how often he golfed. In the end, Obama only spent $85 million of taxpayer dollars in his eight years as president on golf. Meanwhile, Trump has not only eclipsed that in his nearly five years as president, he’s shaped his presidency around golf. He has promoted his golf business on the White House social platform and even decided to deploy the National Guard in Washington, D.C., because he hated seeing homeless people on his way to play golf. Last month, Trump took dirt from his White House demolition and sent it to a golf course he’s taking over in Washington. It’s a fitting act for his presidency: taking something from the taxpayer and putting it toward playing an expensive game that he appears to cheat at.
https://newrepublic.com/post/203739/trump-golf-tab-taxpayer-money

Nostr event nevent1qqsggxa89n30ppp2u8egfjv3waq3mhzuzzatxwhvnrjug84huetg55qzyzjjh2tqdtt595wtmwtqycw2pt5ztrjaqduznlahlyv5z9fe4qyqjtmwgg2

2025-11-26T19:53:46Z

The New Republic (nprofile…pyzj)

Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene is sick and tired of hearing her former MAGA allies complain about her early retirement.The Georgia lawmaker shocked her constituents just as much as the American public last week when she announced that she will be exiting her post early, capping a tumultuous tenure in Congress by January 5.The news came on the heels of a fierce battle between Greene and her political idol, Donald Trump, over the release of the Epstein files. Greene fought vehemently to make the documents public, eventually splitting with the president as he tried to convince Republican lawmakers to vote against the effort.Greene may be entirely washing her hands of the conservative ecosphere. Responding Wednesday to criticisms by her ex-allies over her decision to leave early, rather than at least complete her current term, Greene asked on X if she hadn’t “suffered enough” while they “post all day behind a screen.”“Do I have to stay until I’m assassinated like our friend Charlie Kirk. Will that be good enough for you then?” Greene wrote. “Shit posting on the internet all day isn’t fighting.”“Get off YOUR ass and run for Congress,” she continued. “I fought harder than anyone in the real arena, not social media. Put down your little pebbles and put your money where your mouth is.”But right-wing influencers weren’t moved.“This is pathetic,” responded Nick Fuentes, a known white supremacist and Hitler fan.Greene, who won her district in 2020 without the president’s endorsement, has publicly broken with Trump several times since his inauguration in January. She has differed from her “favorite president” on issues ranging from artificial intelligence to the government shutdown, was one of the few Republicans to describe Israel’s actions in Palestine as a “genocide,” and also has sparred with the White House over its handling of the Russia-Ukraine war.
https://newrepublic.com/post/203743/marjorie-taylor-greene-maga-backlash-resignation

Nostr event nevent1qqsfk6puw3d88zka60q8uat4u9ga22zqddqhl0p2hdyzx24naxt4xpszyzjjh2tqdtt595wtmwtqycw2pt5ztrjaqduznlahlyv5z9fe4qyqjkfxh4n

2025-11-26T19:06:56Z

The New Republic (nprofile…pyzj)

MAGA Republicans accused a Democrat running against Vivek Ramawamy for Ohio governor of posting an AI-generated video of the DOGE czar-for-a-day pitching a truly terrible policy idea. Too bad for them, because the video was actually real. Former Ohio Department of Health Director Dr. Amy Acton, a Democratic primary candidate for governor in Ohio, shared a clip on X Monday that showed Ramaswamy pitching an outrageous idea to lower the cost of childcare.“Make parenting more affordable by making school year-round and going to four o’clock instead of three o’clock, so you don’t have to pay for childcare,” Ramaswamy said in the video.That proposal was so blatantly bad that Republicans immediately started to accuse Acton of sharing a fake video. Far-right commentator Tim Pool claimed on his show Tuesday that the video Acton shared was AI and that the audio had been “replaced.” He aired an edited version of the video pulled from Ramaswamy’s social media that appeared not to include the Republican’s proposal to extend school hours. “If we are playing this game, we are done,” Pool said, arguing that Ramaswamy ought to sue his opponent. MAGA influencer Austin Padgett claimed in a post on X that the video was “probably the most successful example of a political deepfake I’ve seen so far.” And Gabe Guidarini, chairman of the Ohio College Republicans Federation, also railed against candidates sharing manipulated videos. “If you’re a candidate and you share AI-altered videos of another candidate and pass it off as reality, you should be fined a lot of money,” Guidarini wrote on X.But they couldn’t have been more wrong—as Acton noted in a reply to Guidarini. “Agreed. The bad news for Vivek Ramaswamy is that his plans for Ohio are so backwards, his own party is convinced they’re AI,” she wrote on X. “Spoiler alert: they’re not.”It turns out, the only one manipulating the video was Ramaswamy. The full video was originally posted to Ramaswamy’s social media accounts before being removed. Another version of the video was later reposted without the Republican’s plan to extend school hours, according to The Columbus Dispatch. Some MAGA accounts backed off their claims that Acton’s video was fake. “Never mind, this does not appear to be AI. It seems Vivek did post this, then reposted it with the year-round school part removed. However, he forgot to re-edit it on his Threads account (forgot that site existed),” America First Insights wrote on X. “Year round school is such ‘only GDP going up matters’ thinking.”
https://newrepublic.com/post/203721/vivek-ramaswamy-video-ohio-governor-ai-generated

Nostr event nevent1qqs8zpqk2kx4s56qn3avczv3yur8wsf6hkd6jvv74law30dcnu3gezczyzjjh2tqdtt595wtmwtqycw2pt5ztrjaqduznlahlyv5z9fe4qyqj4u9zzf

2025-11-26T19:06:56Z

The New Republic (nprofile…pyzj)

The president’s ballroom obsession has put him at odds with the project’s architect, who doesn’t see eye to eye with him on the ballroom’s proposed size.Donald Trump handpicked James McCrery II for the job. But several insiders that spoke with The Washington Post said that the two have not agreed on the scope of the project, with McCrery reportedly arguing that the 90,000-square-foot blueprint would overshadow the 55,000-square-foot White House mansion, violating basic architectural principles.A White House official acknowledged that the pair has disagreed but would not provide specifics.“As with any building, there is a conversation between the principal and the architect,” the unidentified official told the Post. “All parties are excited to execute on the president’s vision on what will be the greatest addition to the White House since the Oval Office.”After promising Americans in July that his ballroom proposal would “be near but not touching” the White House East Wing, Trump completely razed the FDR-era extension in October, plowing forward without prerequisite approval from the National Capital Planning Commission or the express permission of Congress. Conveniently, Trump started demolition during the government shutdown, when the NCPC was consequently closed.The Trump administration said that the 90,000-square-foot forthcoming event space will be capable of hosting 650 people, a 200-person bump from current maximum seatage at the White House East Wing. But real estate experts have since pointed out that the possibilities of that square footage should be much broader, considering a space of that size will be roughly equivalent to two football fields.The project’s price tag also inexplicably grew by 50 percent after Trump began tearing down the East Wing. What Trump had originally pitched as a $200 million project was instead referred to in late October as a $300 million development plan. The White House suggested that the project would be funded, in part, by some of the country’s wealthiest families and biggest corporations, including the likes of Apple, Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and Meta. Some major players in the defense industry with massive federal contracts have also forked over significant cash to develop the ballroom, including Lockheed Martin and Palantir, though it’s unclear what they might get out of a venue designed for dancing.The White House’s partial destruction is, ultimately, another illustration that the country’s constitutional system of checks and balances has eroded. The international real estate mogul’s desire to destroy the government—and with it, the architectural face of American democracy—has received practically zero pushback from his allies in Congress, who appear all too willing to sit back as Trump courts billionaires to fund his golden banquet hall.Administration officials close to the project told the Post that Trump has, at times, micromanaged his eponymously styled ballroom, spearheading frequent meetings about its design. Other reports indicate that he has become so fixated on his renovation project that he has literally wandered away from his presidential duties in order to admire its progress.
https://newrepublic.com/post/203732/donald-trump-fight-ballroom-architect-size

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2025-11-26T17:34:46Z

The New Republic (nprofile…pyzj)

House Democrats, led by Representative Jamie Raskin, are trying to force Republicans on the record against Ghislaine Maxwell. Raskin introduced a resolution Wednesday “expressing the opposition of the House of Representatives to any grant of commutation, clemency, or pardon to federal convicted child sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell, who refuses to take responsibility for her crimes.” Maxwell was the accomplice of convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. Over the past month, the House Oversight Committee has released several damning emails from Epstein’s estate detailing his and Maxwell’s network of contacts, including President Trump. The president has not ruled out commuting Maxwell’s 20-year prison sentence or even pardoning her. “Ghislaine Maxwell is the exact opposite of the kind of prisoner who deserves a pardon. She continues to lie about the crimes she committed and enabled, continues to disparage and denigrate the women who she victimized and continues to cover up for perhaps the worst global sex-trafficking conspiracy ever run out of the United States,” Raskin said in a statement.“Every Member should support this Resolution to send a clear and unequivocal message in advance to President Donald Trump before he makes a mockery of the pardon power once again,” Raskin added. “America opposes the grant of any get-out-of-jail-free card to the unrepentant, unremorseful liar and criminal who was an indispensable actor in a vicious billion-dollar international child sex trafficking ring.”Over the summer, Maxwell gave an interview to the Department of Justice claiming that she never saw Trump doing anything improper and that he wasn’t close to Epstein, which seems to be a lie. Shortly after that meeting with Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, Maxwell was transferred to a minimum security facility in Texas, where she has enjoyed a cushy life, getting perks such as secret meetings in the prison chapel, meal service in her cell, and unlimited toilet paper. Last week, Maxwell said she wouldn’t cooperate with a House Oversight Committee probe into Epstein and how the DOJ handled his case. Trump still might pardon her anyway, but Raskin and other Democrats are hoping to make sure that GOP representatives are on the record first.
https://newrepublic.com/post/203728/democratic-rep-raskin-resolution-ghislaine-maxwell-pardon

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2025-11-26T17:34:46Z

The New Republic (nprofile…pyzj)

Even military veterans and people not in public office are receiving death threats for standing up to Donald Trump’s unlawful commands.Days after the president called for the “death” of several Democratic lawmakers who reminded America’s service members to follow the rule of law, Richard Ojeda—a retired Army major running as a Democrat for North Carolina’s 9th congressional district—joined a choir of ex-military voices elevating their message. In a video statement, Ojeda urged members of America’s military and intelligence community to refuse unlawful orders issued by their commander in chief.“As a former leader who spent 24 years in service to this country, I think it’s important to remind everyone that we teach our soldiers … that if they are ever given an order that is unlawful, illegal, or immoral, it is their duty to refuse those orders,” Ojeda said in the video last week. “This isn’t rocket science.”It was apparently, however, fuel for Libs of Tiktok’s Chaya Raichik, who shared the clip with her 4.5 million followers on Twitter alongside an incendiary claim that Ojeda was urging America’s military to “REFUSE and DEFY orders from Trump.”That post made over a million impressions. It also put Ojeda in enough danger that he said he received a visit from the FBI, who warned him they had observed several threats for him to be “shot on sight.”But the death threats have done little more than inspire him to “invest in a decent gate.” Ojeda, a former West Virginia state senator, told The New Republic that he’s “not going to be bullied” from running for office, let alone stating the law.Ojeda cautioned that America’s service members aren’t safe from prosecution simply because they were following orders. Instead, he said that they could be the ones left holding the bag for carrying out Trump’s indiscretions long after he leaves office.“He is by far the most corrupt man to ever occupy the office, period,” Ojeda told TNR.In a Facebook post on Saturday, Ojeda noted he wasn’t fazed by the death threats. “I don’t want hardworking men and women in the U.S. military to end up prosecuted because the draft dodger in the White House ordered them to break the law,” he wrote.He pointed to the Trump administration’s recent wave of airstrikes against small boats in the Caribbean as a prime example. Pentagon officials have claimed that the boats were trafficking narcotics to the U.S. from Venezuela and Colombia, despite skipping out on any typical investigations or interdictions that would provide such evidence. The White House’s careless killing spree has so far killed at least 83 people aboard the tiny watercraft. It has also rallied tens of thousands of Venezuelans in favor of war against the United States.The attacks have been condemned by U.S. lawmakers on both sides of the aisle and foreign human rights advocates alike, including the United Nations’ human rights chief.It’s been a week since six Democratic members of the House and Senate—a coalition of veterans and former national security professionals—urged service members not to “give up the ship.” In a video statement posted to Facebook, the bloc repeated that America’s military and intelligence communities “can” and “must … refuse illegal orders.” They made no reference to disobeying Trump directly, only reminding people to uphold the Constitution.But that didn’t stop Trump from taking things personally. He responded to the video Thursday by warning that “their words cannot be allowed to stand. SEDITIOUS BEHAVIOR FROM TRAITORS!!! LOCK THEM UP???” He followed up on that Truth Social post an hour later by calling for their “DEATH.”Dissent under the Trump administration has become a tenuous game, with militant vigilante groups ready and willing to act on Trump’s behalf to silence his critics. Just in June, a Trump supporter allegedly assassinated Minnesota Democratic state Senator Melissa Hortman, her husband, and their dog, and allegedly attempted to assassinate Democratic state Senator John Hoffman. Ojeda is still just a primary candidate, far from actually holding public office, and yet his perceived slight to Trump has put him in enough danger that the FBI took notice.Weighing the volatile reaction he received from the American public for what should be an uncontroversial stance, Ojeda commented to TNR that Trump’s more outspoken opponents are probably facing even more heat.“With the temperature that’s going across this country, it wouldn’t surprise me if all elected officials aren’t catching flack from folks,” he said.
https://newrepublic.com/post/203719/donald-trump-maga-death-threats-candidate-democrats-message-troops

Nostr event nevent1qqsvw0a8uuu7jnucxg20dq8yu3qjte37rqhwx73v0uh7h9u0f2sw5mgzyzjjh2tqdtt595wtmwtqycw2pt5ztrjaqduznlahlyv5z9fe4qyqjged99m

2025-11-26T17:34:46Z

The New Republic (nprofile…pyzj)

Just one hour after angrily ranting about how he is in perfect physical and mental health, President Donald Trump was posting about how his supporters should be called “Tpublicans.”“There is a new word for a TRUMP REPUBLICAN, which is almost everyone (GREAT POLICY IS THE KEY!),” he mused Wednesday morning on Truth Social. “It is, TEPUBLICAN??? Or, TPUBLICAN???The president may want to go back to the drawing board here, as neither of these really roll off the tongue well.More importantly, posts like these don’t do much to instill faith in his mental acuity—especially the morning after a report from The New York Times that noted his slowed schedule compared to his first term, suggesting his age is impacting his ability to govern. The report also mentioned his moments of grogginess, his usual incoherent ramblings, and his more recent existential comments about his chances at getting into heaven.This set the president off, claiming that he had “never worked so hard” in his life, and that all those facts showed that the Times—which he again referred to as a “rag”—was lying. But his “Tepublican” posting doesn’t exactly bolster his case.
https://newrepublic.com/post/203726/trump-tpublican-tepublican

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2025-11-26T17:34:46Z

The New Republic (nprofile…pyzj)

A Georgia prosecutor has officially dropped the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO) case against President Donald Trump and his allies for interfering in the 2020 election. The RICO charges—filed by Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis in 2023—were connected to Trump’s alleged attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election, which he lost to Joe Biden. This is a significant victory for Trump and co., as this case was initially seen as a potential campaign killer for him. This is a developing story.
https://newrepublic.com/post/203730/georgia-kills-election-interference-case-trump-allies

Nostr event nevent1qqs0hx3vptq9tluzwald8zn9stycsn7vkgsff3ysedcmzk63e7fx02szyzjjh2tqdtt595wtmwtqycw2pt5ztrjaqduznlahlyv5z9fe4qyqj6dsmwp

2025-11-26T16:52:46Z

The New Republic (nprofile…pyzj)

On Tuesday, Donald Trump had to defend the contents of a leaked call between his envoy Steve Witkoff and Yuri Ushakov, a senior foreign policy adviser to Vladimir Putin.The call took place on October 14, days before Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy was due to meet Trump at the White House. On the call, Witkoff seemed to be coaching Ushakov on convincing language to use on Trump, and promising to give Russia Ukrainian land under a final peace deal.On Air Force One Tuesday evening, a reporter asked Trump if he had heard the “audio of Witkoff coaching the Russians on how to appeal to you.” Trump said no, and dismissed the call as “a standard thing.”“He’s gotta sell this to Ukraine, he’s gotta sell Ukraine to Russia.… That’s what a dealmaker does. You’ve gotta say, look, they want this, you’ve gotta convince them of this. You know, that’s a very standard form of negotiation. I haven’t heard it, but I heard it was standard negotiation, and I would imagine he’s saying the same thing to Ukraine,” Trump responded.Q: Have you heard this audio that Bloomberg has of Witkoff coaching the Russians on how to appeal to you?TRUMP: That's a standard thing. He's gotta sell this to Ukraine, he's gonna sell Ukraine to Russia. That's what a dealmaker does. I haven't heard it but I heard it was… pic.twitter.com/z8LjhAWDeE— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) November 26, 2025Another reporter asked Trump if he was worried Witkoff was too pro-Russian, alluding to the envoy’s chumminess with Ushakov on the call. Trump’s answer blew past that premise.“I think, look, ahh—this war could go on for years, and Russia’s got a lot more people, got a lot more soldiers. So I think if Ukraine can make a deal, it’s a good thing. Frankly, I think it’s great for both. But, Ukraine’s gotta—it’s a much smaller group of people. They’ve lost a lot of people, Russia’s lost a lot of people. But Russia has a much bigger pool of people,” Trump said.Q: You're not worried that Witkoff is too pro-Russian?TRUMP: Look, ahh -- this war could go on for years. Russia has got a lot more people. A lot more soldiers. So I think if Ukraine can make a deal it's a good thing. pic.twitter.com/xQilKRKQBA— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) November 26, 2025The released transcript of the call seems to show Witkoff effectively telling Russia how to sell the early peace deal draft to Trump, as if it was being proposed by Putin to the United States, with Witkoff suggesting Putin praise Trump as a “man of peace.”We know now that the initial deal was effectively drafted by Russia and contained what Secretary of State Marco Rubio describes as a “wish list” for the country, with no Ukrainian input at all. It turns out that Trump wasn’t even that involved himself.
https://newrepublic.com/post/203717/trump-defends-leaked-call-witkoff-putin-aide-russia-ukraine

Nostr event nevent1qqsta9gfhqkq93g9rx6gwmau3jdcxyqswxsj4ssja9tek9aqqczcdpszyzjjh2tqdtt595wtmwtqycw2pt5ztrjaqduznlahlyv5z9fe4qyqjy8l4yw

2025-11-26T16:52:46Z

The New Republic (nprofile…pyzj)

The mother of White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt’s nephew was reportedly swept up by Donald Trump’s sprawling deportation campaign. Bruna Caroline Ferreira was taken into custody in Massachusetts after she reportedly overstayed her visa by 26 years, a source told WMUR in a story published Tuesday. She is currently being held at the South Louisiana ICE Processing Center, according to the Department of Homeland Security. Leavitt’s nephew lives with his father, Michael Leavitt, and stepmother in New Hampshire. Speaking to WMUR, Michael Leavitt said that following the arrest a few weeks ago, he was primarily concerned for his son’s safety and well-being. DHS claimed that Ferreira, who is originally from Brazil, was required to leave the country in 1999 and that she had a prior arrest for battery. But Todd Pomerleau, Ferreira’s lawyer, insisted that she had remained in the country legally and was pursuing citizenship through DACA, and that she had no criminal record. “Bruna has no criminal record whatsoever. I don’t know where that is coming from. Show us the proof. There’s no charges out there. She’s not a criminal, illegal alien; we’re hearing that said about anyone who’s not a U.S. citizen,” Pomerleau told WMUR. Meanwhile, Karoline Leavitt, a fierce defender of Trump’s immigration crackdown, declined to comment to WMUR. The two women reportedly have not spoken in years.
https://newrepublic.com/post/203708/ice-arrest-karoline-leavitt-relative-mother-nephew

Nostr event nevent1qqsg5a6e6lmzwgnytrep853yw3kz0kckq2r4njmnhc4z2chn0r7qcnszyzjjh2tqdtt595wtmwtqycw2pt5ztrjaqduznlahlyv5z9fe4qyqj84esap

2025-11-26T16:52:46Z

The New Republic (nprofile…pyzj)

President Trump was sent into a Truth Social rage after The New York Times reported on what appears to be a serious drop in his energy compared to his first term, as he is attending fewer events and starting them much later. As the report highlighted, the Roll Call official presidential schedule database shows that in his first term, Trump arrived at scheduled events by 10:31 a.m. on average. Now he starts about 90 minutes later, at 12:08 p.m.. From January 20 to November 25 in his first term, Trump held 1,688 official events. This term, that number is at 1,029 by the same point, a 39 percent decrease. His days still end around 5 p.m. in each term.The Times also noted Trump’s apparent grogginess, his classic ramblings, and his existential musings about death. This report got the president posting bright and early Wednesday morning—nearly a full five hours before his typical scheduled event arrival. “The Creeps at the Failing New York Times are at it again … I settled 8 Wars, have 48 New Stock Market Highs, our Economy is Great, and our Country is RESPECTED AGAIN all over the World, respected like never before. The last Administration had the Highest Inflation in history - I have already brought that down to normal, and prices, including groceries, are coming down,” Trump wrote. “To do this requires a lot of Work and Energy, and I have never worked so hard in my life. Yet despite all of this the Radical Left Lunatics in the soon to fold New York Times did a hit piece on me that I am perhaps losing my Energy, despite facts that show the exact opposite.”Those “facts” are a bit murky.In 2020, Mr. Trump weighed in at 6’3, 244 pounds—a frame that used to be classified as obese. In 2025, his physician, Dr. Sean P. Barbabella had him down to 224 pounds, still overweight. Trump also reportedly loves red meat, McDonald’s, and candy.“President Trump exhibits excellent cognitive and physical health and is fully fit to execute the duties of the commander in chief and head of state,” Dr. Barbabella said in April. Others note that while he appears to be up and running at these events and Oval Office appearances, we really have no clue what goes on afterwards—or what happens when he goes into his golf clubs every weekend. “[Trump’s aides] show him as effective,” former White House Physician Dr. Jeffrey Kuhlman told the Times, “but every time he’s in the Oval Office, he’s sedentary.”While Kuhlman thinks it’s “commendable” that Trump uses the Air Force One stairs, “you don’t know what he does as soon as he walks in the door.”Political historian Matthew Dallek drew comparisons between how Trump and Biden’s teams have presented their health. “The people around him are similar to Biden’s aides,” he said. “They would talk as if we’re living in a little bit of a fantasy world. Trump, in that way, with the help of his aides and his doctors have created this fiction about his health to hide the hard, cold truth that he is 79 and one of the oldest people to ever occupy the Oval Office.”To Trump’s credit, he has completed more international trips than he did in his first term. And even at a lower rate, he is still (just ever so slightly) more active and alert than President Biden was. When taking his constant dialogue with the media and his near prolific social media posting into account, Trump is perhaps—for better or worse—the most accessible president of the century. But it’s unclear how much longer that can last. “They know this is wrong, as is almost every thing that they write about me, including election results, ALL PURPOSELY NEGATIVE. This cheap ‘RAG’ is truly an ‘ENEMY OF THE PEOPLE.’ The writer of the story, Katie Rogers, who is assigned to write only bad things about me, is a third rate reporter who is ugly, both inside and out,” Trump continued in his reaction post. “Despite all of this, I have my highest Poll Numbers, ever, and with record setting investment being made in America, they should only go up. There will be a day when I run low on Energy, it happens to everyone, but with a PERFECT PHYSICAL EXAM AND A COMPREHENSIVE COGNITIVE TEST (‘That was aced’) JUST RECENTLY TAKEN, it certainly is not now! GOD BLESS AMERICA & MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!!!”
https://newrepublic.com/post/203715/trump-fumes-nyt-story-physical-decline

Nostr event nevent1qqsqgms5fn7sz94wf6tja3w6ys4cnuvm2374ccjvrc8vzmr7mvs6mvszyzjjh2tqdtt595wtmwtqycw2pt5ztrjaqduznlahlyv5z9fe4qyqjk460ak

2025-11-26T14:33:56Z

The New Republic (nprofile…pyzj)

You can watch this episode of Right Now With Perry Bacon above or by following this show on YouTube or Substack. You can read a transcript here. Health care premiums are extremely high for many Americans after President Trump and congressional Republicans refused to extend enhanced Obamacare subsidies. That impasse builds the case for America moving to a Medicare for All system, says Abdul El-Sayed, who is running for the U.S. Senate in Michigan. He is one of the three prominent Democrats facing off in a primary. El-Sayed has been endorsed by Senator Bernie Sanders. In the latest edition of Right Now, El-Sayed argues that the health care crisis and other affordability issues are part of a larger systemic problem of out of control capitalism, with corporations turning industries into monopolies and unfairly keeping prices high. He says that voters in Michigan should recognize that he was calling the Israeli treatment of people in Gaza a genocide far earlier than other candidates in this race, showing his moral courage.
https://newrepublic.com/article/203693/affordability-crisis-really-billionaire-crisis

Nostr event nevent1qqsw6t4zstvvdu4u7tvtxqct0yu040yz2nes2p65uyrxwgc79ds3r7szyzjjh2tqdtt595wtmwtqycw2pt5ztrjaqduznlahlyv5z9fe4qyqjgtvykt

2025-11-26T13:04:56Z

The New Republic (nprofile…pyzj)

Since Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals Judge Duane Benton announced on October 24 that he would take senior status, thus creating a new vacancy for President Donald Trump to fill on a powerful federal appeals court, commentators have speculated about who would take his place. While there are several possibilities, a campaign pushing for one candidate in particular has recently spun up: Erin Hawley, a senior attorney at the Alliance Defending Freedom, or ADF, and the public face of some of the most consequential right-wing legal victories of the last decade. If Hawley is successful, the implications for the people living in the Eighth Circuit’s jurisdiction—stretching across Missouri, Arkansas, Iowa, Nebraska, Minnesota, and the Dakotas—will be profound.With the ultraconservative Supreme Court at her back, Hawley has been one of the most effective culture-war litigators in the country. She argued Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the decision that overturned Roe v. Wade and erased nearly 50 years of constitutional protection for abortion. She stood before the court again in 303 Creative v. Elenis, helping secure a ruling that carved out a broad First Amendment exemption to state civil rights laws protecting LGBTQ+ individuals from discrimination. Most recently, she represented Idaho in Moyle v. United States, contending that hospitals should not be required to provide emergency abortions even when a pregnant woman’s life or health hangs in the balance.For conservatives who believe the court should aggressively dismantle federal protections for reproductive freedom, LGBTQ+ rights, and the administrative state, Hawley is a near-perfect judicial nominee. For everyone else, especially those living in the Eighth Circuit, she represents an alarming escalation of the attack on their civil rights.To understand what Hawley might do with a lifetime appointment, one must understand the organization where she currently serves as senior counsel and vice president of Center for Life & Regulatory Practice. The Alliance Defending Freedom is now one of the most influential groups on the legal right. Over the past decade, ADF has built a pipeline that feeds handpicked cases into a Supreme Court increasingly receptive to its theory that religious liberty can function as a trump card over civil rights protections and public health regulations.ADF’s track record reads like a blueprint for a sweeping rollback of modern civil rights law. The group helped engineer the Masterpiece Cakeshop case, seeking to weaken state protections for LGBTQ+ people under the guise of religious freedom. It spearheaded litigation to restrict access to mifepristone in Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine v. FDA, which Hawley argued herself. It has challenged transgender students’ access to sports teams and bathrooms, defending red-state bans on trans participation in public life around the country.In these fights, Hawley has been a key player. She possesses not only the ideological commitments ADF values but also the institutional polish—Yale Law, Supreme Court clerkship, media savvy, and access to the highest echelons of the Republican Party through her husband, Senator Josh Hawley. Her rise has coincided with ADF’s strategic campaign to install movement-aligned lawyers in federal courts and take advantage of key courts’ personnel changes to advance its agenda. Trump has already appointed several ADF-affiliated judges, and a Hawley nomination to the Eighth Circuit would deepen that pipeline.What makes Hawley’s potential elevation so significant is the string of cases in which she delivered major conservative victories.As counsel representing Mississippi in Dobbs, Hawley successfully pressed the argument that the Constitution contains no right to abortion, an argument that had been rejected many times over in the previous decades, but with a 6–3 Republican majority, the court embraced it in full, leaving reproductive rights to the whims of state legislatures. The Eighth Circuit already contains some of the country’s strictest abortion bans. A judge who helped end Roe and leads ADF’s campaign against reproductive rights could shape the next wave of litigation over criminalization, interstate travel, and fetal personhood claims.In 303 Creative, Hawley argued that a web designer should be allowed to exclude LGBTQ+ customers despite a Colorado law prohibiting discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. Despite the fact that the designer had not even started her wedding web design business and no LGBTQ+ client had actually approached her to design their website, the Supreme Court somehow found that she had standing and created a major hole in civil rights protections. The ruling is now being invoked in cases across the country involving everything from wedding venues to health care providers. On the Eighth Circuit, where several states have limited or nonexistent LGBTQ+ protections, the decision could extend even further.In Moyle v. United States, Hawley argued that Idaho’s abortion ban should supersede federal Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act, or EMTALA, requirements. The Biden administration contended that EMTALA obligates hospitals to provide stabilizing care, which sometimes includes emergency abortion. Hawley’s position would allow states to prohibit those procedures even when a patient’s life is in danger. Although the Supreme Court ultimately dismissed the case as improvidently granted, the underlying question remains unresolved and is likely to return to the courts. A Judge Hawley would be poised to shape that new litigation.It is no surprise, then, that Hawley’s name has surfaced in conservative circles. The Eighth Circuit, already one of the most conservative appellate courts, would be the ideal platform for the movement’s next phase: dismantling federal regulatory authority, weakening protections for reproductive and LGBTQ+ rights, and expanding religious liberty exemptions so sweeping that they effectively supersede neutral laws. Far-right political influencers like the American Family Association’s Vice President Walker Wildmon are already calling for her nomination, and it has been reported that she is actively seeking it herself.Lower court judicial nominations often receive less scrutiny than Supreme Court fights, but they matter just as much—especially in the appellate courts, where the vast majority of federal appellate cases end. A judge can serve for decades, long after the president who appointed them leaves office. With her age, ideological alignment, and experience engineering high-stakes cultural battles, Hawley would likely serve as a conservative anchor on the Eighth Circuit for a generation.The conservative legal movement sees this as a feature, not a bug. But for the rest of the country, Hawley’s potential elevation offers a stark reminder that the Supreme Court is not the only battleground. The architects of the post-Roe order are looking for new platforms, and they are focused on courts across the country, especially with the Supreme Court already captured by the right.A Hawley judgeship would not simply reflect the right’s legal priorities. It would accelerate them. The lawyer who helped end the constitutional right to abortion could soon be shaping the future of reproductive rights, civil rights, and religious liberty across half a dozen states. And unless the public pays attention now, her confirmation may become yet another step in a project that began long before Dobbs and shows no sign of slowing down.
https://newrepublic.com/article/203494/erin-hawley-roe-circuit-judge

Nostr event nevent1qqsgwg57vwr7ye8xcwn7lthxuycaaawl7072pjrwvpauv8d4xff8jdszyzjjh2tqdtt595wtmwtqycw2pt5ztrjaqduznlahlyv5z9fe4qyqjwsfafr

2025-11-26T12:18:46Z

The New Republic (nprofile…pyzj)

This week, the White House leaked plans to extend Affordable Care Act subsidies for some of the millions of people who stand to lose out from their expiration. But that’s on ice after Republicans declared it a nonstarter. That could hurt them in the midterms, and oddly, it comes as President Trump just exploded in a wild tirade about the elections. He falsely ranted that Democrats will open our borders and unleash DEI and “transgender for everybody.” He urged the Indiana GOP to hurry up and gerrymander to stop Democrats before they “steal power back.” Meanwhile, Republicans tell Punchbowl News that they’re losing the House, that resignations are coming, and that “morale has never been lower.” But if so, why not renew ACA subsidies to try to save yourselves, Republicans? We talked to New Republic staff writer Monica Potts about her good new piece on the GOP predicament. We discuss the roots of the GOP’s anti-ACA hatred, why Republicans bank on election-rigging, and how it all explains GOP plutocratic politics in the Trump era. Listen to this episode here.
https://newrepublic.com/article/203705/trump-erupts-frantic-tirade-2026-gop-slips-fresh-panic

Nostr event nevent1qqs279jhh7a86avcf0rdp2sly8x3h8ak6fqqmsmqk37v5qkpfqsuxnqzyzjjh2tqdtt595wtmwtqycw2pt5ztrjaqduznlahlyv5z9fe4qyqjyacw3s

2025-11-26T00:59:55Z

The New Republic (nprofile…pyzj)

The following is a lightly edited transcript of the November 25 episode of the Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent. This week brings two major developments when it comes to President Trump’s corrupt weaponization of the justice system. First, a judge threw out the Justice Department’s prosecutions of two of Trump’s enemies, James Comey and Letitia James, ruling that Trump’s stooge prosecutor had been appointed unlawfully. Second, the Defense Department just announced that it’s investigating Senator Mark Kelly as clear retaliation for his participation in an explosive video which Democrats warned against following illegal orders. Trump erupted in fury at that video over the weekend. The through line here is that in both these cases the system is being corruptly used as a weapon of revenge and it appears that these schemes are blowing up in Trump’s face. So how heartened by this should we be? We’re talking all this over with one of our favorite legal analysts, Talking Points Memo Editor-at-Large David Kurtz. Always good to have you on, man.David Kurtz: Hey, Greg, good to be with you. Sargent: So the big news is that a federal judge just threw out the prosecutions of former FBI Director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James. The ruling found that Trump’s chosen prosecutor, Lindsey Halligan, was appointed illegally to the post of interim U.S. attorney for the Eastern District. David, can you walk us through this ruling? Kurtz: Yeah, so there were a bunch of problems with both of these prosecutions, all stemming from the fact that they’re politically motivated and driven by the White House and that we no longer have an independent justice department. But the threshold issue before they got to all the other problems with the prosecution was whether Lindsey Halligan had been properly appointed in the first place. And the judge looked at the statutory record, looked at the appointments clause in the constitution, looked at past history and practice and found it was clear that the Trump administration had exceeded its authority. Sargent: So I think it’s worth underscoring that this result flows directly from Trump’s corrupt effort to use the justice system against his enemies. The whole reason Trump had to rely on Lindsey Halligan to prosecute Comey and Letitia James is that career prosecutors were refusing to do so because the facts wouldn’t support it. So Trump had to rush in with this stooge prosecutor and now that’s what’s blowing up in his face. Can you explain that part of it to us, David? Kurtz: Yeah, so there’s two things going on here. One, it wasn’t just career prosecutors who thought there weren’t cases here, but it was his own picks, the interim U.S. attorney who was already in position and who was also Trump’s nominee for the permanent position. He refused to go along with it. Trump had him removed, put Lindsey Halligan in his place. So that’s part one.Part two is they were under the gun of the statute of limitations expiring on Comey’s alleged crimes. And so they only had a few days in which to rush her in, get her in front of the grand jury and get an indictment secured. And as we know from hearings last week in the Comey case, she kind of botched everything in front of the grand jury too, which it all goes to why you don’t want people with no prosecution experience, loyalists of the President, people who’ve personally been his personal attorney, worked in his White House, becoming the chief federal prosecutor in one of these districts.So it all goes back to, as you say, the corrupt intent from the get-go to use the Justice Department as a weapon and his clearly stated willingness to do whatever it takes to see these investigations become indictments so that he can use these for political purposes. Sargent: Right. We need to remind everybody that he actually openly and explicitly commanded his Attorney General to bring these prosecutions. I just want to underscore another element of what you said there because it seems important. This woman has no experience with these types of prosecutions. The whole thing has been a complete fiasco. But again, that’s because the people with experience wouldn’t do it. That’s the whole point, right?Kurtz: That’s right. She was an insurance lawyer for most of her legal career. She defended Trump a little bit in the criminal cases, but before this role had no experience. And so the judge today ruled that the indictments were void, that none of her acts as U.S. attorney were valid. And I should add that the Justice Department, Attorney General Pam Bondi in particular, took these great efforts to try to ratify what Halligan had done once this became an issue. So after the fact, I’m going to try to retroactively bless everything she did in a way that makes it copacetic. And the judge today rejected that as insufficient, incomplete, and beyond Bondi’s power to do.Sargent: Well, we heard from White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, who reacted by saying that James Comey shouldn’t be doing a victory lap because they’re going to appeal it. Listen to this. Karoline Leavitt (voiceover): We believe the attorney in this case, Lindsey Halligan, is not only extremely qualified for this position, but she was in fact legally appointed. And I know the Department of Justice will be appealing this in very short order. So maybe James Comey should pump the brakes on his victory lap. Sargent: So David, what happens now? They’re going to appeal it. How do you think that’s going to unfold? Kurtz: What comes next is interesting. So this is the third decision like this, slightly different facts in each case. But judges in New Jersey found that the U.S. attorney there was not properly appointed and the same thing happened in Nevada. I think each of these is going to likely go up on appeal and we’ll get a firmer sense from appeals courts whether the statutory scheme will withstand scrutiny and can be abused in the way that it’s been abused. Of all the things that we’ve seen, you can’t ever guess how these court decisions are going to come out. This one feels like this has been the practice for a long time. Everybody knows how this is supposed to work. Their proposal, as Judge Currie said today, would basically allow anyone to walk in and be a U.S. attorney and they get blessed after the fact by Bondi or let the President just continually, perpetually appoint interims and never have to get Senate approval or confirmation. So I don’t think that’s going to stand much scrutiny, but I hate to predict, and it depends on the panel, depends on the appeals court, et cetera.Sargent: Absolutely, though it just really looks like it’s running into the ground for Trump, at least for the time being. On another front, the Defense Department just announced that it’s investigating Senator Mark Kelly of Arizona over a video that he posted last week with five other Democrats. The video was very powerful. It informed members of the military and the intelligence services that they are not obliged to follow illegal orders. So Kelly is now being investigated with an eye toward a potential court-martial. But David, we had the Defense Secretary, Pete Hegseth, unleash this unhinged rant on Twitter claiming that Democrats had encouraged insubordination, which is nonsense. All it did is make it clear that this is only about retaliation. What do you make of all this, David?Kurtz: We’re so far off the rails on this, it’s hard to even know where to start. But let me start here. Pete Hegseth came into office, came to fame really in right-wing circles as someone who is deeply skeptical of war crimes, deeply skeptical of the legal restraints that had been placed on the military during the global war on terror. He saw them as being handcuffed in Afghanistan and in Iraq. So he comes to this with a strong bias against any sort of legal limitations on military conduct. So that’s the first thing.Second thing is, as soon as he becomes Defense Secretary, he cans two of the three top service judge advocate generals, the top lawyers in each service. One was already vacant. We can assume he would have fired that one too. Reporting has showed again and again he has tried to sideline military lawyers throughout the chain of command, again, as if the lawyers have been holding back the military from conduct that it would otherwise be able to engage in.Which I think ignores a third thing, if I can just finish up real quick, which is that the military has been trained for almost 50 years now, since the end of Vietnam War, in the limits of lawful orders and the obligation they have not to follow unlawful orders. This is part of their training, this is part of their culture. This is part of the ethos that has been baked into the military, or tried to be baked in the military, since things like My Lai during the Vietnam War.So to see us come full circle now to where you have the Defense Secretary actively attacking someone like Mark Kelly, threatening his status in the military, threatening his liberty over something as basic as just reminding folks that they don’t have an obligation to follow illegal orders is alarming. It really is alarming and kind of turns everything on its head, which I’m not sure that nonmilitary listeners will necessarily appreciate or understand.Sargent: Well, Donald Trump came in over the weekend and exploded in fury at these Democrats over this video. He said, “the traitors that told the military to disobey my orders should be in jail right now. It was sedition at the highest level.” Now that’s nonsense. What the Democrats actually said in the video is that officials are not obliged to obey illegal orders. They were just stating what, as you said before, has become convention for the military and for members of the military, something that they’re all supposed to know in their bones. And by the way, there’s lots and lots of evidence. We detailed it at TNR.com. You can go check that out, that Trump actually has been giving illegal orders, such as with the boat bombing in the Caribbean Sea. There are actually people inside the military have objected to the legality of that, at least one lawyer has. Yet you’ve got Trump raging all weekend about this, amplifying all these attacks on Dems. So here, tell him why you’re so alarmed, David. The investigation of Kelly is kind of another level of corrupt weaponizing of the law against a critic, right?Kurtz: It is. I think for our topic today, that’s exactly how it fits in—using either the civil justice system through the Justice Department or the military justice system through the Pentagon to retaliate against your enemies. It is the same brand of corruption, if you will. I think what makes this especially alarming is exactly what you said. The context of all of this—the reason they did the video, the reason the Democrats did the video—was because of what’s happening in the Caribbean and the Eastern Pacific with these lawless attacks that even conservative legal experts have not been able to come up with valid or legitimate defenses of as being lawful.And so you’ve had the combatant commander in that region retire very early from a term that would have lasted several more years. You’ve had, as you suggest, reports that lawyers within the chain of command—at least one—has raised objections. The other thing I would note is each time the Pentagon has denied that lawyers have raised exceptions, they’ve included some sort of wiggle language about lawyers who know about the operation or lawyers involved in the operation. So there’s a caveat that they are, I think, keeping the number of eyes who are evaluating this and assessing this very limited so that they can plausibly say that it’s been blessed.It is the world’s sole remaining superpower feeling like it can conduct itself without regard to law, without regard to anything Congress has done or failed to do. That is the most alarming because it is the pinnacle of executive power and the place where there’s often the least limits on it anyway—and they are bull-rushing their way through the limits that do exist.Sargent: Well, I just want to add to what you said there. The commander who was overseeing these bombings stepped down, as you mentioned. I want to add that there was no public explanation, either from him or from the Pentagon, explaining the resignation. And on top of that, we had Representative Adam Smith, who’s the ranking Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee, on this show here. And he told us that he was trying to get this Admiral Alvin Holsey, is his name. He was trying to get Holsey to sit down with the Committee to say whether he feared he was being given illegal orders. The Pentagon, he says, wouldn’t allow that, and Republicans on the House Armed Services Committee aren’t pushing for it. So it’s not as if we couldn’t get to the bottom of this if we wanted to. If we had a functional Congress, you would hear from this Admiral. You’d be able to ask him under oath, did you fear you were being given illegal orders, right?Kurtz: That’s right. And it is another area in which the Republican-controlled Congress has abdicated its constitutional obligations. And this comes, we should say out loud, as the largest U.S. troop deployment in the region since the Cuban missile crisis is underway. We have a carrier task force group there. We have considerable resources, the likes of which we haven’t seen in, what is that, 60 or 70 years now, Greg, and all of which is not really about the purported drug trafficking attacks that we’ve been engaged in, but are about trying to destabilize the regime of Venezuela’s president. And the Republican-controlled Congress seems content to let all of this happen without really having a say in the matter.Sargent: David, let me just throw out there on that, that when this is being debated, whether we’re going to war in Venezuela, it’s almost an afterthought that he doesn’t have the authority to do that. We don’t even discuss that anymore. The bombings themselves are clearly illegal. Congress hasn’t authorized those. But now he’s talking about an invasion of Venezuela, essentially, and nobody ever talks about the fact that that requires congressional authorization. So the whole Overton window has really swung in a pretty alarming way. Kurtz: Yeah, and it is in part because it is so consistent with how the Republican Congress has acted in other realms and so consistent with Trump’s own sort of predilection toward extreme exercise of executive power without regard to any of the guardrails. We’re in a bad spot on this. I mean, the ruling today from Judge Currie is a hopeful sign that there are some guardrails will hold. But we’ve seen so many not, and as I said, in the military realm and the national security realm, it’s particularly alarming.Sargent: Well, let’s step back a bit. It seems to me the big story here is that this sort of explicit and openly advertised corruption of the system is itself an essential feature of Trump slash MAGA politics. Trump’s appeal is that he’s making no bones about corrupting the system for these purposes, but it looks like that part is backfiring for him because it’s the ham-handed and deliberate nature of this that’s working against them. You mentioned the post-Vietnam period, I think in a very large sense. The ’60s and ’70s, the Watergate scandal, the Vietnam War travesties, all that stuff really led people to rethink Congress and rethink our system in really fundamental ways, leading to a bunch of norms and laws and rules that are supposed to be in place now, but on all these fronts, all that’s getting wiped away. What do you think of that, David?Kurtz: Yeah, I think that’s all right and all correct, but I think the thing I struggle with is that for Trump, so much of the appeal is in violating the norm, right? Kind of regardless of what it is. At some level, he doesn’t care whether Comey is indicted on this or that. He may not even particularly care whether Comey is convicted on this or that. What he wants to do is to punish him, right? And these are the tools that he has in place to punish him. I don’t think they really care about the particular punishment they met out to Democrats. I think Mark Kelly may be particularly right because he is a former military person, but there’s just ways in which the doing of it is the point. And whether it yields a particular outcome doesn’t really matter as long as they get to exact the punishment. And so when that’s your only standard, and nothing else really matters, then all sorts of values and norms and principles and whatnot are sacrificed at the altar of your retribution. And that’s what we’ve been looking at for.Sargent: Where do you think this all ends up? I think it’s pretty likely that these prosecutions end up failing. I also think it’s somewhat likely that we end up at war with no congressional authorization. Karoline Leavitt just said the bombings are going to continue. Those are going to continue. Those are deeply illegal. Are you optimistic or pessimistic about the big picture rule of law surviving into coming years?Kurtz: Look, I’m not great with predictions, but I am not optimistic that we’ve hit bottom yet. I don’t see a light at the end of this tunnel. I think there are many aspects of our civic society, our democratic traditions, and whatnot that are bound to persist at some level, but these threats and these attacks are real, they’re persistent, they’re doing real damage every day. And I think the path to getting back to where we were, it’s going to be long and difficult, and it’s going to take a real change sort of in our political culture, that there is a broad consensus that reemerges that these things are important. And right now, that’s under considerable distress.Sargent: Well, that’s what happened after Vietnam and after Watergate—it was a big shift in thinking, and it led to a bunch of reforms. Do you think that could happen again?Kurtz: I think it’s possible. I think that is our best hope, in fact, is that we end up with a backlash to this that, you know, gets you a sweeping victory in Congress at some point in an election not too far down the road, and that you have some of the sort of post-Watergate fervor, something along those lines, come into place. But these, the damages here, I think are far graver, have gone far faster than Watergate did, and much deeper into sort of the structure of our government. And so I think it’s going to take more than just sort of that Watergate class or the equivalent to bring us back to where we were before.Sargent: Folks, if you enjoyed this conversation, check out David Kurtz’s newsletter over at Talking Points Memo. He covers this stuff in granular detail, but also with an eye on the big picture. And the big picture is pretty damn ugly. David, always great to talk to you, even if it’s pretty grim right now. Kurtz: Yeah, thanks for having me, Greg. I appreciate it.
https://newrepublic.com/article/203683/transcript-trump-spiral-worsens-push-jail-foes-backfires-badly

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2025-11-25T22:41:45Z

The New Republic (nprofile…pyzj)

After a tumultuous year in which her city became ground zero for President Donald Trump’s draconian military crackdown on crime and immigration, D.C. Mayor Muriel Bowser has announced that she will not seek a second term. “It’s probably the hardest thing I’ve had to do to walk away from a job that I love. I believe I could win,” Bowser told NBC Washington’s Mark Seagraves on Tuesday. Bowser served as mayor of the nation’s capitol for over 10 years. “It has been the honor of my life to be your Mayor. Together, we have built a legacy of success of which I am intensely proud,” she said in a later statement posted on X. “With a grateful heart, I am announcing that I will not seek a fourth term. For the next 12 months, let’s run through the tape and keep winning for DC.”It has been the honor of my life to be your Mayor. Together, we have built a legacy of success of which I am intensely proud.With a grateful heart, I am announcing that I will not seek a fourth term.For the next 12 months, let's run through the tape and keep winning for DC. pic.twitter.com/q0wQWe0h2c— Muriel Bowser (@MurielBowser) November 25, 2025Reactions to Bowser’s announcement were mixed. “Thank you, Mayor. You led our city through tough times, delivered some huge wins, and consistently stood on the right side of public safety issues...including rejecting calls to defund the DC police,” one user wrote. “Wishing you the best as a private citizen.”“The city has been unfortunate to have you serve as corruptor in chief. Tens of thousands displaced, wealth inequality exploded, tenants rights decayed and ballot initiatives overturned,” said another. “You have done nothing for this city except spread elite bloat. My advice: resign early.”Bowser’s tenure has been defined by large deals with developers and businesses to build stadiums, as plans to address problems of housing, affordability, crime, and police brutality often fell short. From tearing up her already materially meaningless “Black Lives Matter Plaza” to caving to Trump’s federal takeover, Bowser left much to be desired. The next mayoral election will be in November 2026. “I’m not running because we’ve accomplished what we set out to accomplish,” Bowser said. “And it’s time. People don’t run for a fourth term.” This story has been updated.
https://newrepublic.com/post/203689/dc-mayor-muriel-bowser-announces-wont-run-again

Nostr event nevent1qqsgdxx9wpjxr7jjn6y9n7nmvxnnqweadfrgy7jtsake6h3r2m0qw0qzyzjjh2tqdtt595wtmwtqycw2pt5ztrjaqduznlahlyv5z9fe4qyqjl9nwcl

2025-11-25T22:41:45Z

The New Republic (nprofile…pyzj)

MAGA is furious at U.S. Attorney Pam Bondi and the Department of Justice over the entirely “avoidable” botched indictments of President Donald Trump’s political enemies. A federal judge on Monday dropped the criminal indictments against former FBI Director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James, deciding that the prosecutor who brought the charges in both cases—Lindsey Halligan—was not lawfully appointed. Now, Donald Trump’s fans are furious that the DOJ’s apparent screw-up may have cost the president his revenge.Fox News host Laura Ingraham appeared to blame justice officials for stupidly failing to follow procedure, quoting Trump’s former impeachment attorney David Schoen, who called the dismissal “avoidable” during an interview.“An avoidable BLUNDER—and DOJ knew it,” Ingraham wrote in a post on X Monday.Appearing on Ingraham’s show, Schoen had said: “Quite frankly, the Justice Department should have just put somebody in the room with Lindsey Halligan. It would have taken away all the arguments for dismissal.”Michael Flynn, Trump’s disgraced former national security adviser, called for Bondi to be replaced by Sidney Powell. “I’m certain others will have their opinions but mine is not an opinion, it is based on hard evidence,” he wrote on X Monday.“I’m sorry @AGPamBondi but this was completely avoidable,” Flynn wrote.This isn’t the first time that MAGA has taken aim at the head of Trump’s DOJ. In July, MAGA was left fuming after Bondi walked back claims that she’d set eyes on a list of Jeffrey Epstein’s clients, and in September, they were up in arms over her threats to crack down on free speech.Even those who don’t like Trump, but know how he operates, aren’t impressed by Bondi. Former Trump White House lawyer Ty Cobb said Monday that Bondi and Halligan “should be disbarred,” and called reports that the indictment had never been properly returned “shocking.”“You know, Bondi has twice submitted affirmations to this court about the propriety of Lindsay Halligan’s grand jury presentation,” Cobb said “She knew this. There’s no way she could not have known this. And that just means that she lied, or that she’s equally incompetent, but more likely that she lied.”Almost a day after the indictments were dismissed, it seems that the DOJ is continuing to sign criminal indictments with Halligan’s name in a flagrant violation of the federal judge’s order.
https://newrepublic.com/post/203686/maga-pam-bondi-failed-comey-indictment

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2025-11-25T22:41:45Z

The New Republic (nprofile…pyzj)

Democratic Representative Eric Swalwell is suing the Trump official who referred him to the Department of Justice alleging mortgage and tax fraud. Swallwell sued Bill Pulte, the director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia Tuesday for violating his privacy and First Amendment rights. Earlier this month, Pulte referred Swalwell to the DOJ, claiming that the California congressman may have made false or misleading statements in loan applications. In his lawsuit, Swalwell claims he is being targeted for his “political views and expression” and that Pulte improperly used information from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac in his referral letter to the DOJ. Swalwell alleges that Pulte invaded his privacy by digging into his financial records and violating the Privacy Act, calling his actions “a gross abuse of power that violated the law.”The lawsuit further claims that the same day Pulte sent the letter, detailed allegations against Swalwell showed up in news reports and right-wing social media accounts in what looked like a coordinated leak by Pulte and the FHFA. “Since Pulte took office in March 2025, FHFA has never issued a criminal referral to DOJ alleging mortgage fraud by anyone who supports President Trump but has referred four of President Trump’s political foes,” the lawsuit notes.The Trump administration has repeatedly attempted to use mortgage fraud to prosecute the president’s enemies. New York Attorney General Letita James, Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook, and Senator Adam Schiff have all been targeted with similar allegations. James’s case was thrown out on Monday after the prosecutor, Lindsey Halligan, was found to have been improperly appointed. Swalwell’s lawsuit now puts Pulte and Trump on the defensive, and may also help his own campaign for governor of California. Will it also thwart Trump’s attempts at revenge?
https://newrepublic.com/post/203692/bill-pulte-sued-breaking-law-help-trump-target-enemies

Nostr event nevent1qqsvtmsf8f8vzad5u3cd3evn6euey73tgnhsctgasrz706xa6a8z2qqzyzjjh2tqdtt595wtmwtqycw2pt5ztrjaqduznlahlyv5z9fe4qyqjc3amrw

2025-11-25T21:59:45Z

The New Republic (nprofile…pyzj)

Child trafficking arrests have hit their lowest point in five years since Homeland Security aggressively reoriented its attention toward immigration arrests.Fewer kids have been rescued from exploitation and trafficking this past year than at any point since the pandemic, reported The New York Times Tuesday.The number of indictments for child exploitation crimes fell by 28 percent compared to last year, according to the Times, which noted that agents that have historically participated in child exploitation investigations have resorted to working those cases in their personal time.Fewer victims have been assisted, as well. Homeland Security agents “identified or rescued roughly 300 fewer child victims, a 17 percent drop,” according to an internal report by Homeland Security Investigations.The data is a peek behind the curtain of the Trump administration’s anti-immigration agenda, which has apparently prioritized political results over pressing public safety concerns: for months, Attorney General Pam Bondi has impressed that the administration’s immigration sweeps would target violent criminals and child molesters—but the numbers show that hasn’t been true.The latest data report from ICE revealed that 40 percent of immigrants detained at the agency’s facilities have no criminal record at all. Meanwhile, actual child exploitation cases are apparently falling by the wayside.Although President Donald Trump has heaped endless praise on the federal deportation agency, ICE agents have reportedly never been so miserable, forced to primarily detain noncriminal immigrants in order to meet their quota: 3,000 arrests per day, per Homeland Security adviser Stephen Miller’s demands.The digits come at a particularly bad time for Trump, who is in the throes of a national fixation on the most damning scandal of his political career: his cozy relationship with child sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein.The White House axed 1,353 positions from the State Department in July, gutting parts of the agency that failed to align with MAGA values. Those included offices focused on promoting democracy, ending genocide, quelling political extremism, and combating human trafficking.The cuts reduced the Office to Monitor and Combat Trafficking in Persons to about 35 people—a third of its staffing levels from seven months prior, thanks in large part to State Secretary Marco Rubio’s plan and Elon Musk’s deferred resignation program. Those who were not laid off were informed that they would be reassigned and given a pay cut, Mother Jones reported at the time.
https://newrepublic.com/post/203674/donald-trump-immigration-ice-human-trafficking-arrests

Nostr event nevent1qqs83cu9qtgfx4m4msnvx60p8esfx3q3l7fkqru2se2xat3eu9vyn9szyzjjh2tqdtt595wtmwtqycw2pt5ztrjaqduznlahlyv5z9fe4qyqjwuxnxn

2025-11-25T21:59:45Z

The New Republic (nprofile…pyzj)

Donald Trump is already making light of his administration wrongfully deporting immigrants to a notorious prison in El Salvador.Speaking from the newly paved Rose Garden Tuesday, Trump delivered a ghastly joke while he passed out pardons to two turkeys, Gobble and Waddle.“Instead of pardons, some of my more enthusiastic staffers were already drafting the paperwork straight to the terrorist confinement center in El Salvador,” Trump said. “And even those birds don’t want to be there, you know what I mean.”Unlike his many other groan-worthy jokes, this one didn’t seem to elicit the slightest laugh from the White House audience.Earlier this year, the Trump administration deported 238 Venezuelans to El Salvador’s CECOT, which is notorious for human rights abuses, even though the vast majority of those immigrants did not have criminal records. Despite the administration’s claims that the deportees were brutal gang members and “the worst of the worst,” only 32 of the deportees had actually been convicted of crimes, most of which were minor offenses such as traffic violations. The Trump administration has continued to refer to CECOT as part of a barbaric propaganda campaign to scare immigrants. Since that scandal, Immigration and Customs Enforcement has only continued its trend of targeting immigrants who aren’t criminals. The latest disclosure from ICE revealed that 40 percent of immigrants detained at agency facilities had no criminal record at all.Trump also cracked multiple jokes about presidential pardons, saying former President Joe Biden had “used an autopen last year for the turkey’s pardon.”“So I have the official duty to determine, and I have determined, that last year’s turkey pardons are totally invalid,” Trump continued. He also claimed he’d wanted to call the birds Chuck and Nancy, after former House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer. “But then I realized I wouldn’t be pardoning them, I would never pardon those two people,” Trump said. It seems that Gobble and Waddle should count themselves lucky. They’re probably the first recipients of Trump’s presidential pardons who didn’t have to help make him rich.
https://newrepublic.com/post/203677/donald-trump-jokes-deporting-turkeys-el-salvador-megaprison

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2025-11-25T21:59:45Z

The New Republic (nprofile…pyzj)

Kash Patel’s days as FBI director may be numbered. MS NOW reported Tuesday that President Trump is considering firing the embattled director as his errors pile up. Three anonymous sources told MS NOW that Patel had drawn Trump’s ire for his presumptuous social media posts during ongoing cases, using a government jet for a date night with his 27-year-old girlfriend, and assigning a SWAT team for her security detail. Andrew Bailey, the FBI co–deputy director, is reportedly Trump’s top choice to replace Patel. The White House responded to the reports. “President Trump has assembled the most talented and impressive Administration in history and they are doing an excellent job carrying out the President’s agenda,” White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson said. “FBI Director Patel is a critical member of the President’s team and he is working tirelessly to restore integrity to the FBI.”  This isn’t the first time Patel’s FBI has witnessed rumors of internal upheaval. Just last month, Patel reportedly angered FBI leadership when he fired at least 30 bureau agents for being hostile to conservatism or Trump. And in October, he pissed off Trump and Justice Department officials by posting that the “FBI thwarted a potential terrorist attack” on Halloween, despite the fact that no charges had been filed and local police didn’t have any details. Back in July, deputy director and former MAGA podcaster Dan Bongino was so upset with how Patel and Attorney General Pam Bondi handled the release of the Epstein files—from Bondi claiming that she had them on her desk to her then claiming the case was closed—that he skipped work, no call no show. It seems clear that Patel is working on borrowed time. It shouldn’t come as any surprise that one of the most underqualified FBI leads in recent memory can’t seem to avoid these screw-ups.This story has been updated.
https://newrepublic.com/post/203673/trump-considers-firing-kash-patel-fbi-director

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2025-11-25T19:40:01Z

The New Republic (nprofile…pyzj)

A well-timed phone call from House Speaker Mike Johnson may have been the tipping point for the White House to call off releasing Donald Trump’s new health care plan.Ahead of the decision Monday, Johnson cautioned Trump officials against including a two-year extension to Affordable Care Act subsidies as part of the president’s so-called “Healthcare Price Cuts Act,” The Wall Street Journal reported.Johnson reportedly told White House officials that Republicans just couldn’t get behind extending subsidies, after the speaker had spent more than a month railing against Democrats’ bid to save the subsidies, which are set to expire at the end of the year. Should those tax credits permanently lapse, an estimated 5.1 million Americans will lose their health coverage by 2034.Johnson’s decision to throw a wrench in Trump’s rollout comes as insurance premiums are set to skyrocket starting in January, and premiums for individuals will increase by as much as double for millions of Americans.
https://newrepublic.com/post/203655/donald-trump-delayed-health-care-plan-mike-johnson

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2025-11-25T19:40:01Z

The New Republic (nprofile…pyzj)

Donald Trump has a health care plan. Or so we’ve been led to believe. The president was set to unveil it at the White House on Monday, but then postponed the event, after details of the plan leaked to the media and rank-and-file Republicans—who felt blindsided, having not been briefed—revolted.One provision in particular raised their ire: a two-year extension of the Obamacare subsidies that expire at year’s end, albeit with a few strings attached. Speaker Mike Johnson reportedly told Trump that the House GOP was opposed to the idea. “I wasn’t expecting the proposal to be Obamacare-lite,” a House Republican anonymously griped to MS NOW. “I don’t see how a proposal like this has any chance of getting majority Republican support. We need to be focused on health care, but extending Obamacare isn’t even serious.”According to White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt, Trump has not given up his proposal but the details are still in flux. We can be reasonably confident of this much, though: Trump is not going to do a clean extension of the expiring subsidies, as that was not even the case in the plan that he is now presumably watering down to satisfy House Republicans. And that means chaos is assured for Americans who are shopping for—or already have chosen—a 2026 plan in the Affordable Care Act marketplaces.“Every day that goes by, there are more people who are looking at their premiums and seeing them doubling, tripling, or more and deciding not to enroll,” said Gideon Lukens, a senior fellow and director of research at the Center on Budget Policy and Priorities. “So damage is being done every day.… There’s really only time to have a clean extension of the enhancements.”Reuters reported Monday that a slew of states are lagging in ACA plan enrollment compared to a year ago. “People are making really tough choices to figure out how they can stay covered or making the tough choice to drop,” Ingrid Ulrey, chief executive officer for Washington Health Benefit Exchange, told the outlet. She said 7,000 people in her state have dropped coverage since open enrollment began.Time is running out to avert a disaster. Congress is leaving town for Thanksgiving, and when it returns it will be in session for only three weeks. As part of the deal to reopen the government during the shutdown, Republicans promised Democrats a vote on a clean extension of the Obamacare subsidies—but even if they keep their promise, the vote is certain to fail, based on the reaction this week to Trump’s draft plan.There were a few caveats to his proposed extension, of course. One was a new income limit: Anyone making more than 700 percent of the federal poverty line would no longer be eligible for the subsidies. Under the enhanced subsidies, which were enacted in 2021, anyone who paid more than 8.5 percent of their income toward premium costs would qualify for a subsidy for the rest. In practice very few, if any, high earners hit that barrier, but Trump’s proposed cap could hit families right on the threshold.The plan would also require everyone to pay at least a little bit toward their premium. Republicans believe this solves the nonexistent problem of “phantom beneficiaries”: that people who sign up for insurance plans but never use their benefits are evidence of fraud. Such fraud would theoretically benefit brokers who sign up fake people for plans and earn a fee, or insurers who collect the premiums. But there’s no evidence that this type of fraud is widespread, and it’s common and expected for some people to not use their benefits over the course of the year.Even small premium payments of $10 to $20 a month could be tough for low-income families with extremely tight budgets, especially as grocery and energy bills continue to skyrocket. But an even bigger problem could be that requiring payments creates another barrier to signing up for and maintaining insurance coverage, making it less appealing to younger adults who might not see the benefit, even at a very low cost. And this makes the ACA plans worse for everybody.Before the enhanced subsidies were enacted, healthy people who made a little too much money to qualify for the subsidies, or whose subsidies didn’t cover enough of the cost, simply opted out of health insurance altogether. Meanwhile, people with more health problems stayed on insurance plans, which changed the risk pool and made those people more expensive to cover. And the more expensive health insurance becomes, the more people opt out: This is the “death spiral” that health care economists always warn about, and why the ACA originally came with an individual mandate that penalized people for not having health insurance. (The Republicans zeroed out the penalty during Trump’s first term.)MS Now reported that Trump’s plan would also include health savings accounts, or HSAs, for people who choose bronze-level plans on the health insurance marketplaces. Bronze plans have lower monthly premiums but higher annual deductibles, meaning that many recipients pay less each month but must pay more out of pocket when they need care. Employers offer similar types of plans to their employees.This is a retread of a long-simmering Republican idea that some senators have also proposed recently, and it isn’t a terrible one. Some people might choose to spend less each month and use tax-free savings accounts to save money in case something happens. It can be the best of both worlds: spending less each month while keeping a safety net if something terrible and unexpected happens, like a bad car accident. But it depends on how well designed the plan is.Vivian Ho, a health economist at Rice University, pointed out that such a plan might also work for people who have a chronic condition and know roughly how much their health care will cost every year. “An HSA would allow them to save the right amount and leave them with predictable bills while saving money on premiums,” she said.But HSAs are much more complicated than straightforward reductions in premium costs, and they require people to do more math and try to predict their future health care expenses. And if the government subsidies set aside for the HSAs aren’t as generous as the enhanced subsidies, they won’t be as helpful. They also don’t solve the death spiral problem, because these plans will still be most appealing to people who think they might need insurance over the next year.Piling more people into the risk pool makes coverage per individual cheaper and helps bring down overall costs. Republicans sometimes frame this as unfair, as healthy people subsidizing unhealthy people. But it can be thought of another way: If everyone buys insurance while they’re relatively young and healthy, they are subsidizing the older version of themselves that needs medical care, because almost everyone is likely to experience an accident or health problem at least at some point in their lifetime. This is the way insurance works, and why it exists. People are bad at planning for the worst-case scenario.The enhanced premium subsidies accomplished this because they lowered the upfront costs for insurance, changing the calculus for many people who had previously rolled the dice without insurance. Of course, the subsidies were a Covid-era patch for a deeply flawed health care system that is covered in patches. But they worked: By 2023, the U.S. had the lowest rate of uninsured Americans in history. And yet, unless Republicans pull off a highly unlikely legislative miracle, that may stand as the record low for many years to come.
https://newrepublic.com/article/203659/trump-health-care-plan-republicans-congress-hate

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2025-11-25T19:40:01Z

The New Republic (nprofile…pyzj)

Over the past decade, the overdose crisis has killed more than half a million people in the United States. As fentanyl has proliferated, more Americans have shared their own harrowing stories of surviving an overdose—or losing a loved one. From West Virginia to the Bronx, people of all ages and races have tragically had their lives cut short; amongst them, cherished icons like Prince, the rapper Mac Miller and actor Michael K. Williams. A crisis of this magnitude inevitably touches the lives of countless families and communities. This shared grief has helped to push forward public health solutions; the overdose reversal medication naloxone, as well as fentanyl test strips, are now available in many parts of the country. Barriers to addiction treatment have been reduced; federal policy changes now allow patients more flexibility through telehealth prescriptions and take-home dosages of methadone. Syringe service programs have expanded and the first overdose prevention centers (where overdoses can be reversed by trained staff) have opened in Providence, Rhode Island and New York City. These are all evidence-based strategies that are proven to prevent overdose deaths and reduce transmissions of infectious diseases, like HIV and hepatitis C. But things are changing, and not for the better. Over the last few years, images of unhoused people on street corners—some of them engaged in public drug use, others struggling with mental health issues—have provoked a backlash that has led political figures, Democrats and Republicans alike, to return to the policies of the crack down, sweeping encampments away and pushing people into jails. The current administration has decimated the Substance Abuse And Mental Health Services Administration, or SAMHSA, which awards hundreds of millions of dollars a year in grants for behavioral healthcare, addiction treatment, and overdose prevention activities. The administration has also changed priorities for housing funding, moving away from a housing-first model to a focus on mandatory drug treatment and work requirements. These actions threaten to make thousands more vulnerable Americans homeless. Public health initiatives to address the nation’s overdose crisis have thus become the victims of a culture war, seen as “enabling” disorder and crime.In this environment of competing narratives, what often gets obscured are the economic roots of the crisis. Like many public health issues, the suffering we witness is often the result of financial hardship—communities are left behind and individuals lack employment opportunities due to a combination of both global and local economic factors; plants close and union jobs are lost. Struggling to keep their head above water, people may use drugs or participate in the nation’s unregulated drug economy, thus getting caught up in an unforgiving cycle of addiction and financial hardship. Research has shown that there is a link between unemployment, opioid use, and overdose. Two studies conducted by researchers at UCLA, for instance, found a 40 percent higher chance of problematic opioid use amongst those who are unemployed compared to those who work 35-40 hours a week. As the U.S. loses manufacturing jobs, overdose rates in areas that have seen such losses tend to be higher. One study looked at the period from 1999-2015, in which the US lost two million jobs due to international trade. The study found that the loss of 1,000 trade related jobs in an area resulted in a 2.3 percent increase in overdose deaths—and when fentanyl was present in the area’s drug supply, it skyrocketed to 11.3 percent. A study funded by the Social Security Administration also found that increases in exposure to automation is responsible for 12 percent of the rise in overdoses from 1993 and 2007. Finally, a study published by The Journal of the American Medical Association found that overdose deaths spiked by 85 percent after closures of automobile assembly plants in the American South and Midwest, with the largest increases among non-Hispanic white men.It’s not just losing your job, but the type of job you work that puts people at high risk for overdose. Certain occupations have higher rates of overdose deaths than others according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. These include construction and heavy extraction industries, food preparation and service sectors, building and grounds maintenance, and transportation and moving. All of these job classes are either associated with lower wages or require a high amount of manual labor. One could turn to substance use to deal with the stress of losing a job, or they could begin using drugs to deal with the pain from an injury suffered at work. Increased drug use and overdose rates often occur after a disruptive event. On a national scale, the COVID-19 pandemic spiked overdose deaths to over 100,000 a year for three years. On the individual level, the loss of a job or being evicted can serve as disruptions. Research from the past two decades have shown evictions are associated with increased overdose deaths. One study looked at county level eviction rates and drug mortality rates from 2003-2016 and found that high levels of evictions were associated with increased mortality rates for six types of drugs, including opioids. A more recent study from our research team in Rhode Island showed that census tracts with the highest rates of eviction also had the highest rates of overdose, but when an eviction moratorium was implemented briefly during the pandemic, this relationship was no longer significant.Evictions also lead to homelessness, which is strongly linked with higher rates of overdose deaths. As we know, some unhoused people find shelter, community, and safety by living in an encampment and when these are cleared, it serves as a disruptive event by severing people from social ties and critical services—once again leading to increased overdose deaths. While poverty pushes people into conditions where overdose risk is heightened, it also pushes people to participate in the dangerous and unregulated drug market. Last year, the New York Times published a piece about Americans who smuggle fentanyl across ports of entry—among them included, a homeless man recruited from a Walmart parking lot, and a single mother of three kids facing eviction. The piece explains how cartels recruit from trailer parks and rehab facilities, among other places. Often, there is a false dichotomy between those who sell drugs and those who use drugs: in actuality, a significant number of people who sell drugs are also users. Whether someone is selling or using, once they are caught up in the criminal justice system, there are a litany of consequences which further perpetuate poverty and overdose risk. For instance, there is currently a federal ban on accessing SNAP if you have a drug-related felony, however, this can be waived by states. Employment and housing is also hard to secure with any criminal record, yet alone a drug-related conviction. All of this, coupled with a drug supply that is constantly changing, make recently incarcerated people one of the highest risk groups for overdose death, being over 40 times more likely to die compared to the rest of the population, a third of those deaths occurring within 24 hours of release. A lack of stable housing, unemployment, work-related injuries, and incarceration provide different and intersecting pathways through which overdose death can occur. This suffering is made worse through acts of corporate malfeasance. By now the country is well acquainted with how Purdue Pharma and other pharmaceutical companies deceptively marketed OxyContin and other potent opioids, often with the help of companies like McKinsey and Company. Thousands of people got addicted to opioids and ended up transitioning to heroin (and later fentanyl) when stricter prescription controls were implemented. But there is a broad constellation of lesser players adding fuel to the fire. When seeking treatment, people may be caught up in fraudulent treatment providers and rehabilitation centers that take their money and leave them without care. Meanwhile, legitimate opioid treatment providers are being gobbled up by private equity (they currently own a third of methadone clinics nationally), but with no real expansion of methadone treatment. When legislation was proposed last year to have methadone dispensed at pharmacies, for-profit and private equity-owned opioid treatment providers opposed the legislation, because it would create competition for their businesses.Overdose deaths have declined in the past two years in part due to the public health interventions that have been implemented over the past decade. But deaths remain stubbornly high and people still have frustrations over what they see on the street—the fact is these overdose prevention services are the last line of defense when the social safety net has failed. Outreach workers work hard to help keep people alive, but when there is no housing available, when treatment remains out of reach, and jobs are hard to come by, there will continue to be visible homelessness and drug use. Now, the situation could get dramatically worse. For the first time in decades, the financial position of coming generations could be worse than their predecessors. Research from counties in the Midwest has shown that declining intergenerational income mobility is associated with increases in overdose deaths. Unemployment is increasing every month, and the cost of living continues to go up. Rents continue to increase across the United States and wages are not keeping up with people’s costs. More and more Americans are working multiple low-paying jobs and experiencing homelessness. On top of all that, without Congressional intervention, many people will soon face an increase in their ACA-provided coverage and many others will be pushed out of Medicaid, which provides most of the coverage for opioid treatment in the U.S. Medicaid recipients have twice the risk of overdose death compared to the general population. With all of these crises piling up, addiction and overdose prevention services with shoestring budgets are under attack and are facing existential crisis with budget cuts and changing federal priorities. To really stem this crisis and improve public health, the country must pursue an aggressive campaign of economic justice. Studies consistently show that if people are paid good wages and can afford the necessities in life, if they aren’t worried about the costs of healthcare or about getting priced out of their neighborhood, then they will be able to thrive and be less likely to fall victim to an overdose or experience other health problems. While these next few years will prove to be challenging, there are some small steps that can be taken. Congress can finally pass bipartisan legislation to eliminate the SNAP drug felony ban, which some states have eliminated already. One study found that states that eliminated the ban had lower rates of alcohol and substance use disorder compared to states that did not. In terms of housing, localities can do much more. Past work has shown that eviction moratoriums did reduce overdose death rates (and conversely, lifting them increased deaths). Even though the Trump administration is abandoning Housing First policies, states and cities can invest in building affordable housing and providing rental assistance. To ensure people with criminal records are not discriminated against in housing and employment, cities can pass ordinances such as the ones in Atlanta and San Francisco. Atlanta’s ordinance makes being formerly incarcerated a protected class, while San Francisco has a fair chance ordinance that restricts consideration of criminal records in hiring decisions. To expand access to treatment, states can change their Medicaid policies to allow for the coverage of medications for opioid use disorder, or MOUD—which results in a 70-80 percent higher utilization of MOUD by people who use drugs compared to people in states without coverage. But perhaps most importantly, cities and states should pursue any policy that provides financial assistance. One study that examined the time period of 2014-2020 found that areas with higher unemployment benefit amounts had lower rates of overdose deaths; other studies have found similar results. Research looking at the time of the Great Recession found a 1.3 percent decrease in per capita prescription opioid use for every $10,000 increase in unemployment benefit levels. Clearly, providing people with economic support works. The United States can build on the progress made recently in reducing overdose deaths by addressing the root economic causes of such suffering; by embracing economic populism rather than scapegoating effective public health measures, policymakers can chart a better way forward. Even if the current political conditions at the federal level are unforgiving to these policy interests, this is nevertheless the time to be bold and imaginative wherever possible. After all, millions of lives hang in the balance.
https://newrepublic.com/article/203166/populist-approach-opioid-crisis-economy

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2025-11-25T18:11:51Z

The New Republic (nprofile…pyzj)

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is attacking the Scouts for not being nice enough to boys. Hegseth plans to cut all military ties with Scouting America, formerly known as the Boy Scouts, on the grounds that they are attacking “boy-friendly spaces,” being too “genderless,” pushing “gender confusion,” and adopting DEI, according to a draft memo to Congress reviewed by NPR. “The organization once endorsed by President Theodore Roosevelt no longer supports the future of American boys,” Hegseth wrote in the memo. “The Boy Scouts has been cratering itself for quite some time,” Hegseth said in a 2024 Fox interview. “This is an institution the left didn’t control. They didn’t want to improve it. They wanted to destroy it or dilute it into something that stood for nothing.”Under the proposal, Scouts will no longer receive medical and logistical support for their massive “National Jamboree” and will no longer be allowed to visit military bases. The proposal has not yet been sent to Congress, but would bring an end to 100 years of support from the U.S. government. “Scouting is and has always been a nonpartisan organization,” Scouting America said in a statement responding to the news. “Over more than a century, we’ve worked constructively with every U.S. presidential administration — Democratic and Republican — focusing on our common goal of building future leaders grounded in integrity, responsibility, and community service.”Retired Army Staff Sergeant Kenny Green—who has three children who are scouts— as caught off guard by Hegseth’s proposal. “It’s gonna be kind of harsh the way I say this.... It’s kind of like they don’t care about us more than they care about their perceived message. Scouting … It probably is not a perfect organization, but … I can’t even say how vast their benefits are, especially for military families.”From fat-shaming troops to complaining that soldiers have been emasculated, this is par for the course for the defense secretary.
https://newrepublic.com/post/203653/pete-hegseth-cut-ties-scouts

Nostr event nevent1qqs2hgtqw20qhjsxchq66uuapllmtpsfxwrcnk9ucqnuwnayfesfqaqzyzjjh2tqdtt595wtmwtqycw2pt5ztrjaqduznlahlyv5z9fe4qyqjvjfusg

2025-11-25T18:11:51Z

The New Republic (nprofile…pyzj)

The peace plan offered by the Trump administration to end the war between Russia and Ukraine appears to contain few, if any, concessions from Russia, an administration official admitted Tuesday. Maria Bartiromo interviewed U.S. Ambassador to NATO Matthew Whitaker on Fox Business Tuesday morning, and pointed out that General Jack Keane, former Army vice chief of staff, told her that Russian President Vladimir Putin “hasn’t given up one concession in all of these months that [we’ve] been negotiating.” Whitaker agreed and tried to spin what is obviously true by casting it as part of negotiations. “There is some truth to what the general says, but let’s remember that there’s no perfect answer to this situation,” Whitaker said, adding, “Neither side is going to get what they want. We don’t know until we have a deal that’s hammered out who’s giving up what.” Whitaker said that the Russians had a stronger position on the battlefield, and were making small gains every week, and that “unless Europe and the United States decided to take a different tack, this is where we end up, negotiating a peace deal from the reality.” “We can all live in what-if worlds, but we have to live in the real world,” Whitaker added. NATO Ambassador Matthew Whitaker admits "there's some truth" to the criticism that Putin hasn't made a single concession during negotiations pic.twitter.com/v0dGVasnkI— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) November 25, 2025The initial plan proposed by the U.S. was heavily weighted towards Russia, and even seemed to be translated from Russian based on the syntax and vocabulary used. Even Secretary of State Marco Rubio called it “the wish list of the Russians.” U.S. and Ukrainian negotiators have since modified the plan, but that’s not likely to go over well with Putin. Why did the Trump administration go public with Russia’s ideal solution instead of bringing Ukraine in on the process earlier? Now, while the deal may be acceptable to one side, it’s likely to fall through and prolong the fighting.
https://newrepublic.com/post/203654/trump-official-admits-putin-getting-way-ukraine-peace-plan

Nostr event nevent1qqs93cwd7zv42fjuuscpesv9fyr2ty42qf3jjt2maptmk7e9y40zpngzyzjjh2tqdtt595wtmwtqycw2pt5ztrjaqduznlahlyv5z9fe4qyqjhw522f

2025-11-25T18:11:51Z

The New Republic (nprofile…pyzj)

Earlier this month, you may recall, President Donald Trump angrily threatened to sue the British Broadcasting Corporation for $1 billion over its use of footage of his speech just before the January 6, 2021, insurrection. Unlike Trump’s other lawsuits against media companies, this threat wasn’t entirely baseless: The BBC ended up admitting that its edit of the footage did misleadingly create the “impression of a direct call for action,” and several executives resigned, citing a need to be “transparent” about what had happened. Trump celebrated their ouster.Now the BBC has overcorrected—albeit in the other direction. On Bluesky, historian Rutger Bregman just charged that the broadcaster cut a line from a BBC lecture he delivered, in which he described Trump as “the most openly corrupt president in American history.”Is it really now beyond the pale for the BBC to air an accurate description of Trump’s open and explicit corruption and to correctly situate it in the American historical context? The answer, unfortunately, appears to be yes.Asked for comment on Bregman’s charge, a spokesperson for the BBC emailed me this: “All of our programmes are required to comply with the BBC’s editorial guidelines, and we made the decision to remove one sentence from the lecture on legal advice.”Note the admission that this edit was done “on legal advice.” Translation: Trump’s threats worked precisely as intended.There is something deeply perverse in this outcome. Even if you grant Trump’s criticism of the edit of his January 6 speech—never mind that as the violence raged, Trump essentially sat on his hands for hours and arguably directed the mob to target his vice president—the answer to this can’t be to let Trump bully truth-telling into self-censoring silence. That’s plainly what happened here. This was one of the BBC’s Reith Lectures—a speech, not produced programming. In it, Bregman addressed the 2024 matchup between Joe Biden and Trump, and he posted a transcript that included the line he delivered, which was omitted from the on-air broadcast. I’ve bolded that bit:On one side we had an establishment propping up an elderly man in obvious mental decline. On the other we had a convicted reality star who now rules as the most openly corrupt president in American history. When it comes to staffing his administration, he is a modern day Caligula, the Roman emperor who wanted to make his horse a consul. He surrounds himself with loyalists, grifters, and sycophants.In its email to me, the BBC insisted that “the integrity” of Bregman’s arguments remains “central to the broadcast.” But perhaps due to Britain’s stricter libel laws, Trump’s threat apparently got the BBC to censor something that is obviously correct. Trump is the most corrupt president in U.S. history; it’s not even a close call, and the open flaunting of his corruption and self-dealing are an essential feature of his presidency on a near-daily basis. The MAGA movement plainly thrills on exactly this. Trump and MAGA just don’t want media sources that swing voters might believe to describe his behavior as “corruption”—or worse, “criminality.”It should go without saying that Trump’s threats and bullying—along with the corrupt uses of the power of the state as weapons against critics—are really about preventing the airing of truths that displease Trump. We just saw the Defense Department take the extraordinary step of launching an investigation into Democratic Senator Mark Kelly of Arizona over his participation in a video warning members of the military and intelligence services against following illegal orders.In that video, Kelly and the other Democratic participants didn’t even name Trump. As Kelly pointed out to Rachel Maddow, they were merely restating what’s in the Uniform Code of Military Justice, which prohibits the carrying out of unlawful orders. “This is not about the law,” Kelly said. “It’s about intimidation.”Indeed, as I’ve argued, there are strong grounds for believing that Trump actually has delivered illegal orders, most obviously with his bombings in the Caribbean Sea. It is that reality that Trump does not want to hear discussed. This week, Trump bizarrely tweeted out a picture of the plaque at West Point, thinking it supports his argument that those Democrats committed sedition. In fact, it describes it as a civilizational achievement that the U.S. military places loyalty to the Constitution and the law over loyalty to a “leader,” i.e., one man. Is there any feature of Trump’s presidency that’s more central than his demand for fealty to one man—himself—over the Constitution and the rule of law?What’s perhaps most galling about the BBC edit is that even if you disagree with the assertion that Trump is the “most openly corrupt president in American history,” it’s obviously legitimate grounds for intellectual inquiry and debate. The BBC’s annual Reith Lectures have for decades featured some of the leading intellectual figures of the day, beginning with Bertrand Russell just after World War II. They are a flagship achievement of public broadcasting. To omit this explicit mention of Trump’s world-historical corruption from one of those storied lectures is an unnerving new turn in the annals of elite capitulation.
https://newrepublic.com/article/203648/trump-bbc-fury-maga-edit

Nostr event nevent1qqsrzkqw3k2la9vsm9e7y6lxhkm7refdsmgeuad5tdnhy9ruulx3mdszyzjjh2tqdtt595wtmwtqycw2pt5ztrjaqduznlahlyv5z9fe4qyqjkea4ru

2025-11-25T18:11:51Z

The New Republic (nprofile…pyzj)

At least one Republican lawmaker was so outraged by the White House’s supposed Russia-Ukraine peace plan that he considered resigning from Congress then and there.The Trump administration unveiled a 28-point peace plan last week that catered to some of Russia’s most outrageous demands, such as requiring Ukraine to swear off NATO membership and to hand over Crimea and the eastern Donbas region. Those two details alone have reversed long-standing U.S. policy with regard to the area.Lawmakers on both sides of the aisle have balked at the arrangement, but Nebraska Representative Don Bacon was reportedly “so angry” at the idea that he thought about quitting the lower chamber altogether, he told Axios Monday night.Bacon has little to lose since he’s already on track to retire—he announced in June that he will not seek reelection in 2026, capping his 10-year career in Congress in early 2027.That’s given the 62-year-old some extra wiggle room to lament the Trump administration’s maneuverings, damning the rushed peace process as the “Witkoff Ukrainian surrender plan” after special envoy Steve Witkoff, who played a major role in crafting the deal.“In the end I have a commitment to our constituents to fulfill my term,” Bacon told Axios, noting that he “shared [his] anger” with House Speaker Mike Johnson but opted not to mention his resignation.Ukraine and its European partners were excluded from the plan’s drafting process, reported The Guardian. But there is some evidence that the plan may have come directly from the Kremlin: Several sentences in the document are passive and clunky in English but make more sense when translated into Russian. That could be the influence of Kirill Dmitriev, Russian President Vladimir Putin’s envoy, who worked on the project alongside Witkoff.Donald Trump has touted himself for months as a great peacemaker, pushing a narrative that he has—so far—solved eight foreign conflicts. Practically all of his war-solving braggadocio is “demonstrably untrue,” to the extent that several of the examples he often lists were never even at war. But despite repeated efforts, he has not made any headway on the Russia-Ukraine war.Trump has conceded quite a bit to Russia’s dictator, to no avail. This summer, Trump literally rolled out the red carpet for Putin in Alaska, marking Putin’s first return to U.S. soil in more than a decade. But after the theatrics were over, the two world leaders still failed to reach a consensus on how to end the bloodshed, with Trump losing his cool while Putin demanded that Ukraine cede even more territory to Russia.More than 13,300 civilians have been killed and 31,700 injured in Ukraine since Russia invaded in February 2022, according to a United Nations report from June.
https://newrepublic.com/post/203656/donald-trump-ukraine-peace-plan-republican-rep-bacon-quit

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2025-11-25T17:46:41Z

The New Republic (nprofile…6kn7)
//images.newrepublic.com/8612f7ab486ba9dc178846c54f8bb6e5300d44ca.png?w=1048
The Department of Government Efficiency is claiming that they are still operational despite reports that the agency has disbanded. In a post on X Monday night, the account called a Reuters article reporting that the agency “doesn’t exist” with eight months remaining on its charter “fake news.” “As usual, this is fake news from @Reuters,” the post read. “President Trump was given a mandate by the American people to modernize the federal government and reduce waste, fraud and abuse. Just last week, DOGE terminated 78 wasteful contracts and saved taxpayers $335M. We’ll be back in a few days with our regularly scheduled Friday update. 🇺🇸”DOGE has not posted since then, or offered any proof of the cuts. They also didn’t refute a key piece of information in the Reuters article: that DOGE is no longer a “centralized entity.” Its acting administrator, Amy Gleason, is now an official adviser to Robert F. Kennedy Jr. at the Department of Health and Human Services, even as she makes jokes on LinkedIn.Many of DOGE’s functions have been taken over by the Office of Personnel Management, and many of its employees have moved to other agencies within the government. So, what does the X post mean? Maybe DOGE is still a tool in the hands of Elon Musk and Russell Vought, or a scapegoat whenever the Trump administration wants to make massive cuts. Whatever the case, the massive damage DOGE caused to the federal bureaucracy will live on and probably continue for the rest of the Trump administration. Whether the name lives on is another story.
https://newrepublic.com/post/203665/doge-is-back-kills-shutdown-rumors

Nostr event nevent1qqs2sxk69tz29999uqzmq4cu5yxl06h8qd95amfh39lf6ye4t9u0alczyzjjh2tqdtt595wtmwtqycw2pt5ztrjaqduznlahlyv5z9fe4qyqjyr4mkg

2025-11-25T17:03:46Z

The New Republic (nprofile…pyzj)

Border Protection Commander Gregory Bovino made several wild attempts to dodge questions while testifying about his excessive use of force against protesters in Chicago.In a 223-page injunction ruling last week, U.S. District Judge Sara Ellis slammed Bovino over his “evasive” testimony, claiming that he’d only responded to questions with “cute” answers or by “outright lying.” A look at the transcript of Bovino’s testimony, newly released on Monday, revealed just how bad things got during his deposition.While discussing a video of him deploying chemical irritants on protesters in the Little Village neighborhood—that he admitted to having lied about—Bovino played dumb and became combative.“Is CS gas commonly known as tear gas?” asked the interviewer. “I don’t know, I—I don’t refer to it that way,” Bovino replied, though CS gas is one of the most commonly used tear gasses in the world. When asked whether he would admit to throwing a canister of tear gas on that particular day, in that particular location, Bovino said he would deny it. “You said canister—I threw two. That’s plural,” Bovino replied. As the interviewer attempted to rephrase the question, Bovino continued to argue over the semantics.Bovino had also previously claimed he had been hit in the head by a rock before deploying chemical irritants, but in his deposition said he’d been “mistaken.”“The white rock was thrown at me, but that was after I deployed less lethal means in chemical munitions. I was mixed up with several other objects in a very chaotic environment. And I confused that white rock with other objects that were thrown at me,” he said.Bovino repeatedly played dumb when asked about potential misconduct committed by federal agents under his command during “Operation Midway Blitz.”When asked about the details of a video of the ICE processing center in Broadview, a suburb of Chicago, that he said he’d watched in preparation for the deposition, Bovino said: “I can’t recall the details of that video that I looked at.” When further pressed he confirmed “there were figures in the video,” before again saying, “I can’t remember.”Later, when the interviewer asked whether Bovino was “responsible for ensuring that [CBP agents] complied with the law,” the CBP chief replied, “I’m responsible for them to do what now?”When asked about an incident where agents deployed tear gas in Irving Park as parents and children departed their homes for a Halloween parade, Bovino claimed that the actions of agents “were justified if that happened.” But he maintained that he did not review any video of the incident, speak with any agents involved, or recall reading any reports on the incident.
https://newrepublic.com/post/203650/cbp-customs-border-protection-gregory-bovino-testimony-chicago-protests

Nostr event nevent1qqsxvj2d0wl09d9peamdulcwtr9jcjvm9caa2d0sk2mfpzs0dt8ctkszyzjjh2tqdtt595wtmwtqycw2pt5ztrjaqduznlahlyv5z9fe4qyqjnnd03y

2025-11-25T17:03:46Z

The New Republic (nprofile…pyzj)

The Justice Department is still signing criminal indictments with Lindsey Halligan’s name—almost a day after a judge ruled that she was unlawfully appointed as interim U.S. attorney.Federal prosecutors were initially instructed to sign court filings in the name of Halligan’s first assistant, after U.S. District Judge Cameron Currie concluded Monday that Halligan had no authority to preside over the Eastern District of Virginia since she was never confirmed by the U.S. Senate. But just an hour later, internal emails instructed the department to continue using Halligan’s name, labelling Currie’s decision as “premature,” reported MSNOW’s Lisa Rubin.The move is a flagrant violation of Currie’s court order, which threw out Donald Trump’s cases against former FBI Director James Comey and New York Attorney General Letitia James.“Ms. Halligan has been unlawfully serving in that role since September 22, 2025,” Currie wrote in her opinion. “All actions flowing from Ms. Halligan’s defective appointment … constitute unlawful exercises of executive power and must be set aside.”Currie tossed the case “without prejudice,” giving Trump a potential pathway to try the cases again on the same charges should he legally replace Halligan. Trump handpicked Halligan—a former White House aide with no prior prosecutorial experience—to replace the last attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia. Halligan’s predecessor Erik Siebert had refused to prosecute Comey and James after he couldn’t find incriminating evidence against the pair.Halligan was sworn into the powerful position in September. Ignoring protocol, the Trump loyalist moved full steam ahead on prosecutions under the banner of Trump’s approval for months, despite the fact that she was never confirmed by the Senate.
https://newrepublic.com/post/203649/donald-trump-department-justice-ignoring-courts-lindsey-halligan

Nostr event nevent1qqsr77jaqpxj4xrnpgr7lgc2eju3d97r69fq6hvue4ayl563avrffsczyzjjh2tqdtt595wtmwtqycw2pt5ztrjaqduznlahlyv5z9fe4qyqjt07wnk

2025-11-25T17:03:46Z

The New Republic (nprofile…pyzj)

The GOP is finally being honest about why it’s itching for military intervention in Venezuela. Shocker—it wasn’t about the drugs, it was always about the oil. “I would love to see a change in government,” Fox News host Larry Kudlow said to Republican Representative Maria Salazar on Monday. “My wife’s from Nicaragua.… The dictators there rely on Venezuelan oil. But at the same time, a lot of Americans don’t want actual U.S. participation in regime change in Venezuela. They would much prefer the Venezuelans to do it on their own. Do you think the pressure that [Venezuelan President Nicolás] Maduro has received will force him to leave on his own?”“Maduro is not Fidel Castro, Maduro is not a brave boy.… He is on that very nefarious list of the terrorist organization, that the airspace above Venezuela has been closed off and the commercial airlines from the United States are not flying. He’s understanding that we’re about to go in,” Salazar replied.She then went on to outline the top three reasons for more U.S. intervention in the Latin American country. Reason number one? Oil. “Venezuela—for the American oil companies—will be a field day. Because it will be more than a trillion dollars in economic activity. American companies can go in and fix the whole oil rigs,” she said.Salazar continued. “We’re gonna be doing a favor to us, to our children, to our economy, to our oil companies, and to the Venezuelans.” Rep. Salazar on Venezuela: "We're about to go in ... we need to go in ... Venezuela for the American oil companies will be a field day" pic.twitter.com/S8c3hsDxEv— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) November 24, 2025Regardless of your issues with Maduro (and there are many), Salazar’s language here is undeniably imperialistic. It feels like it’s ripped straight from the banana republic era of Latin America, or the Bush era before the invasion of Iraq. Republicans and the Trump administration have made such a big show of bombing drug boats to save “thousands” of American lives, when they really just wanted an excuse to enact the intervention Salazar refers to. But now they’ve gone fully mask-off. “Wow, at least with Iraq they had the decency to try and convince the American public about weapons of mass destruction,” one X user wrote. “Now they are just straight up telling us what they really want and no one can stop them.”A regime change would not be some chill, bloodless agreement that sees Maduro willfully stepping aside and handing over all of his country’s most valuable resource. It would most likely be met with violence that would hurt the Venezuelans more than anyone else. “U.S. military action could trigger a crisis on the same order as happened in Iraq after the U.S. regime change effort there,” Caracas-based International Crisis Group senior analyst Phil Gunson told The New Republic. “If the U.S. does decapitate the government, the multiple armed actors could bring about a degree of anarchy. None of these different groups have any incentive to just lay down their arms. There have been several decades of accumulated resentments on various sides, and it’s not fanciful to imagine that there could be lynchings. There could be bombings or selective assassinations.”Salazar saying “us,” “our children,” and “our economy,” before she even mentions the citizens of the country she wants to invade so badly tells you everything you need to know about where U.S. priorities are.
https://newrepublic.com/post/203646/republican-rep-salazar-invade-venezuela-oil

Nostr event nevent1qqsrk7hgz5u8kx6zsxt99gl5gsqujlkffqqu349cvjvgl6qw2a762cszyzjjh2tqdtt595wtmwtqycw2pt5ztrjaqduznlahlyv5z9fe4qyqjnku9cj

2025-11-25T17:03:46Z

The New Republic (nprofile…pyzj)

Republican Senator Jim Justice and his wife didn’t pay his taxes, and now have to pay the IRS $5 million. On Monday, the Justice Department filed a lawsuit against Justice and his wife, Cathy, seeking $5,164,739.75 in unpaid federal income taxes as of August. The debt goes all the way back to 2009, and includes accrued interest and penalties. So Justice and his wife cut a deal to pay back the IRS.Justice served two terms as West Virginia’s governor, being elected as a Democrat in 2016 before switching parties the next year. After serving two terms, he was elected U.S. senator for West Virginia in 2024. He made hundreds of millions of dollars in profits from the sale of coal mines in 2009, vaulting him to the Forbes list of billionaires, which he stayed on until 2021. But during that time, Justice was racking up debt in the form of personally guaranteed bank loans, court judgments, and environmental liabilities. In 2016, The Washington Post reported that he had unpaid bills and fines to coal regulators and suppliers, and by January of this year, Forbes magazine reported that his liabilities had exceeded his assets. Last month, the IRS filed a tax lien against Justice and his wife, saying they owed more than $8 million. Justice claimed at the time that the charges were politically motivated. Now it seems he has to admit defeat.
https://newrepublic.com/post/203645/republican-senator-justice-sued-irs-dodge-taxes-millions

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2025-11-25T15:50:26Z

The New Republic (nprofile…pyzj)

Republican Representative Elise Stefanik is scrambling to recover her gubernatorial campaign’s messaging after President Donald Trump had a cozy meeting with her political foil New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani. Stefanik’s already botched bid to become governor of New York was thrown into flux Friday after a googly-eyed Trump shut down her wildly racist claim that Mamdani was a “jihadist.” Instead, he called the mayor-elect a “very rational person” and said he would feel safe living in New York City during Mamdani’s tenure. In an interview with News12 Monday, Stefanik doubled down anyway, saying that she and Trump would have to “agree to disagree.”“I stand by my statement. He is a jihadist,” Stefanik said of Mamdani. “This is an area where President Trump and I disagree. But what we all want to work toward is making New York more affordable and safe, and that’s where I have a very strong record and working relationship with the administration.”Amid a massive meltdown over the meeting, Laura Loomer, the self-described “proud Islamaphobe” with the president’s ear, noted that Trump had put Stefanik in a bad position. “Dems just need to run clips of the presser today to defeat Elise,” Loomer wrote on X Friday.Within a matter of minutes into the joint press conference with Mamdani, Trump managed to blow up Republicans’ talking points about the incoming mayor, which might have given them a leg-up in the upcoming midterm elections in 2026.
https://newrepublic.com/post/203643/elise-stefanik-campaign-donald-trump-zohran-mamdani

Nostr event nevent1qqst0v8cnlzddu6png2l7esvgtssltlxperkh8z6xdpvg474vhpda7gzyzjjh2tqdtt595wtmwtqycw2pt5ztrjaqduznlahlyv5z9fe4qyqjakueh4

2025-11-25T15:50:26Z

The New Republic (nprofile…pyzj)

Donald Trump is on a legal losing streak.The president’s defamation lawsuit against The Guardian fell apart Monday when a Florida judge granted motions to dismiss, crushing his latest attempt to peel money out of a media institution.The case was brought in 2023 by Trump Media & Technology Group (TMTG), the corporate owner of Trump’s social media platform Truth Social. They sued the British newspaper for defamation, arguing that it—as well as a local Florida daily that picked up the story—had published false statements about the financial machinations of the company.In a March 2023 article, The Guardian reported that TMTG had accepted “$8 million” in emergency loans from shadowy entities. That included a $2 million loan from Paxum Bank, as well as $6 million from a group known as E.S. Family Trust. The paper also noted at the time that one of the trustees of E.S. Family allegedly had ties to Russian President Vladimir Putin.At the time, prosecutors with the Southern District of New York were investigating whether the loans violated federal money laundering laws.“According to that report, one of the executives of TMTG floated the idea of returning the money given the lack of details and transparency about who was providing the loans. TMTG co-founder Will Wilkerson—who eventually became a whistleblower in the federal investigation—told SDNY that Chief Financial Officer Phillip Juhan was uncomfortable about the murky nature of the two entities,” reported Alternet.But merely reporting information is not enough to fulfill the legal prerequisite in a defamation case of “actual malice” against a public figure.Judge Hunter W. Carroll of Florida’s Twelfth Judicial Circuit granted an anti-SLAPP motion to The Guardian, a sign that the court interpreted the suit as a meritless attempt to silence criticism.Instead, The Guardian’s reporting “was based on multiple sources familiar with the investigation, review of internal TMTG communications, investigation of the entities who made the loans, and fruitless requests for further information from the Department of Justice, the investigators’ office, and outside counsel for TMTG,” Carroll wrote in his ruling.It was the third courtroom loss for Trump in just a handful of hours, following another decision in which a federal judge dropped the criminal indictments against former FBI Director James Comey (and by extension New York Attorney General Letitia James), deciding that the prosecutor who brought the charges in both cases—Lindsey Halligan—was not lawfully appointed.
https://newrepublic.com/post/203641/donald-trump-loss-guardian-defamation-james-comey

Nostr event nevent1qqs02mf84t6h996vx25y2f76rcjg8sv9e358pq74w2zvx3fff2vzs3szyzjjh2tqdtt595wtmwtqycw2pt5ztrjaqduznlahlyv5z9fe4qyqj62s7ev

2025-11-25T12:27:50Z

The New Republic (nprofile…pyzj)

It is typical for certain congressional hearings to garner the reputation of being media circuses. Often held in Washington by the various subcommittees of Congress, the congressional hearing is a tool for Congress to conduct fact-finding missions and investigate problems in American government. It is one of the few venues in which we get to watch our elected leaders publicly hold people to account.On rare occasions, however, the committee comes to the citizens. On Monday, November 24, Representative Robert Garcia, the ranking Democrat of the House Oversight Committee, along with Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass, Democratic members of the House Oversight Committee, and Los Angeles members of Congress, announced the first of several congressional field hearings in Los Angeles to examine the unlawful detention of U.S. citizens and immigrants by federal immigration agents.According to Sara Guerrero, press secretary to Garcia, “The hearing will bring together city leaders, immigration advocates, and federal officials, and will feature firsthand testimonies from individuals who have been impacted by federal immigration enforcement actions, including U.S. citizens who were wrongfully detained by ICE. The congressional hearing is scheduled to be held as indiscriminate raids continue in Los Angeles and across the country.”The hearings originated from an October 20 joint letter to Department of Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem penned by Garcia and Senator Richard Blumenthal. Written in response to ProPublica’s report of 170 cases of U.S. citizens detained by U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement, the letter promised investigative hearings into cases of abuses and racial profiling of U.S. citizens of Latino ancestry by agents of ICE and Border Patrol.The same day, Garcia and Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass announced at their first joint press conference that the city would host hearings to investigate DHS operations in California from the previous summer. Alongside the L.A. hearing, Blumenthal announced that the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations would hold parallel investigations. Throughout this run-up, Garcia has demonstrated a particularly masterful understanding of the media. (According to Politico, it was Garcia who, in September, publicized the notorious doodle of a nude woman by Donald Trump that he gifted to Jeffrey Epstein.)Garcia’s announcement offered a refreshing perspective on a Congress that has seemed to shirk its constitutional duties. Along with the Supreme Court, which has deferred to the policies of the Trump administration, Congress has done little to check the executive branch and reinforce the rule of law. Since Donald Trump took office in January, the Republican majority in Congress has gradually defaulted to the judgment of the Trump administration on the handling of government policy. In policies ranging from spending cuts for programs with preapproved budgets by Congress to tariff policy, the Trump administration has gone out of its way to bypass Congress. And, in the case of the shutdown, Senate Democrats dropped the ball in accepting a shaky promise from Senate Republicans to save Affordable Care Act tax credits.One way that Democrats in Congress can redeem themselves is by conducting investigative hearings—a part of the stated duties of Congress and a tool for rooting out corruption. At a time when the Trump administration has committed countless acts of political corruption, ranging from awarding contracts to friends to persecuting political opponents, Congress can use the investigative hearing strategically to raise awareness to policy failures of the administration. In the realm of immigration policy, the Republican majority in Congress has bowed toward the Trump administration’s mandate for mass deportations. In passing the Big “Beautiful” Bill, Congress earmarked $170.7 billion for the Department of Homeland Security’s immigration operations. Because Congress earmarked DHS’s pay bump via reconciliation instead of the regular appropriation process, the funds do not include directives on how the funds should be spent. As a result, congressional oversight of the funding is limited, and DHS has total discretion over the use of these funds. Several billions are earmarked for compensating local governments cooperating with ICE and Customs and Border Patrol in immigration operations.What will likely happen, then, is that DHS will employ contractors to conduct work, including the construction of detention facilities. Already, several major instances of contractors working with DHS on immigration projects have garnered media attention.On July 22, Bloomberg News reported that a relatively unknown building contractor in Virginia, Acquisition Logistics Company, received $1.26 billion in funding from the Trump administration to erect what it called “the biggest immigration detention center in the U.S.” at Fort Bliss, Texas. More recently, ProPublica reported that the Strategy Group, a public media company, has received a significant amount of DHS’s $200 million budget for ads. The Strategy Group has deep connections with Kristi Noem and staff members of the Department of Homeland Security, such as its CEO being married to DHS spokesperson Tricia McLaughlin, raising concern that these contracts violate ethical rules.The late Michigan Senator Carl Levin co-authored with Elise Bean, former chief counsel on the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations, a comprehensive study on the importance of congressional hearings for the Wayne Law Review in 2018. “If Congress wants to meet its Constitutional responsibility to provide checks and balances to the rest of government,” argued Levin and Bean, “it needs to screen nominations made by the president, examine federal agency actions, and evaluate the judiciary.… It needs to investigate.”Congressional investigations, while as old as Congress itself, became famous for spotlighting cases of political corruption. As Levin and Bean noted, the Teapot Dome corruption scandal put congressional investigations in the spotlight, when Senator Robert LaFollette led the charge of investigating the bribing of Secretary of Interior Albert Fall and Attorney General Harry Daugherty. The Teapot Dome scandal became famous not only for the spectacle of Albert Fall’s demise, but also because of the Supreme Court cases that legitimized the power of Congress to investigate. In 1924, the Supreme Court ruled in McGrain v. Mally Daugherty that Congress not only had the right to investigate its sister branches, it also had the power to call witnesses and obtain testimony. In this case, the court upheld the conviction of Mally Daugherty, the brother of Attorney General Harry Daugherty, for contempt of Congress for refusing to appear before the committee, writing, “The power of inquiry—with process to enforce it—it is an essential and appropriate auxiliary to the legislative function.” Likewise, in Sinclair v. United States, the Supreme Court ruled in 1929 that Harry Sinclair, the oil magnate who, alongside Thomas Doheny, bribed Fall for control of the Teapot Dome and Elk Hill oil leases, needed to testify before Congress and was justly held in contempt of Congress. Since the Teapot Dome scandal, the hearing has been Congress’s tool for investigating political corruption, being used to break open the Watergate scandal in 1973 and the Iran-Contra scandal of 1987.That doesn’t mean that congressional hearings have been universally productive; some are little more than empty spectacles for media consumption instead of a venue for investigative work. The McCarthy hearings of the 1950s and the work of the House Un-American Activities Committee, or HUAC, which skillfully manipulated the media to create a climate of paranoia, remain the textbook example of how hearings can devolve into political circuses. The late political scientist John C. Grabow wrote in his incisive study Congressional Investigations: Law and Practice that HUAC relied too much on the spectacle of persecuting individuals to produce any meaningful results. HUAC died with a whimper in 1975, yet the witch hunts it generated, along with the callous attacks on individual loyalty and character, are a legacy we live with today. In recent years, congressional hearings have developed a negative reputation among political scientists. David Dayen of The American Prospect pointed out in his 2021 article “Why congressional hearings are bad, and how they can be made great again” how congressional hearings over the past decade have become increasingly melodramatic while missing the opportunity to provide genuine change. From 1930 to 1990, as Dayen argues, several hearings by notable political figures from Harry Truman and Frank Church in the Senate to Henry Waxman in the House used the power of the hearing to tackle corporate power. “Though some used different techniques, these lawmakers were all dedicated to understanding problems in society, and spending as long as necessary to seek the truth. They generated original information that could inform public policy.”Now, according to Dayen, the role of the hearing has become less pertinent as members of Congress lose focus on their main purpose. In his view, “Few members have a coherent philosophy about the purpose of congressional hearings and oversight, so much so that when one of them offers a respectable response, it’s bracing.”Not all recent hearings, arguably, have been a loss. The April 2018 Senate hearings into Facebook’s relationship with Cambridge Analytica exposed to the public how the Silicon Valley titan unjustly sold the personal information of users. Although little change came about as a result of the inquiry, it raised further public awareness of the privacy issues associated with social media. But in general, many hearings have garnered attention from the press in cases when they devolve into shouting matches, as was the case when Senator Markwayne Mullin of Oklahoma challenged Teamsters Union leader Sean O’Brien to a fistfight mid-hearing, which was broken up by Senator Bernie Sanders.Congress has been active in the realm of oversight over ICE and CBP. On May 14, 2025, the House Appropriations Committee held hearings about budget requests by ICE during the 2025 fiscal year. Testifying before the committee, acting director Todd Lyons made his case for expanding ICE’s budget.Representative Lauren Underwood of Illinois used the hearings as an opportunity to question Lyons about attacks on members of Congress who attempted to inspect ICE detention centers, such as Senator Alex Padilla of California and Representative LaMonica McIver of New Jersey. Representative Underwood reminded Lyons that members of Congress have the right to conduct unannounced inspections of detention facilities, per the Appropriations Act of 2019. In response, Lyons simply stated he was aware of the directive in the Appropriations Act of 2019. Underwood also asked about seven deaths that occurred in ICE facilities and the lack of transparency. Lyons confirmed that nine individuals have died in the past year in ICE facilities.More controversial were the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Oversight hearings held on May 19. Those hearings garnered attention after the Department of Justice brought criminal charges against Representative LaMonica McIver for her presence at a May 9 protest outside the opening of the Delancey Hall detention facility in Newark. McIver, who attempted to inspect the facility, was charged by the Department of Justice with obstruction of federal agents. On November 13, a federal judge declined a request by McIver’s attorney to throw out the charges.For a city that has been in the political spotlight throughout the year, Los Angeles has witnessed a great deal. I asked Los Angeles Times columnist Gustavo Arellano about what the hearings will mean for the city: “The hearings won’t do much to stop the raids, sadly,” says Arellano, “but it’ll be an opportunity to at least enter into the historical record what is happening.” Most of all, says Arellano, the hearings underscore how the city has become the target of political attacks: “These hearings are coming in the wake of a Senate hearing on the Palisades fire run by GOP senators who are using the pain of survivors to hurl partisan attacks at California and L.A.’s blue leadership. You’ll hear the opposite at the immigration hearings today. Sadly, L.A. can’t recuperate in peace without partisanship infecting the grieving process.”In the long term, these hearings offer an excellent starting point for documenting the civil rights abuses by CBP and ICE agents during operations in Los Angeles. Having the hearing held at the site of immigration sweeps, instead of at the Capitol, would offer greater press coverage and encourage witnesses to testify. As several hearings have been held in Congress to discuss the conduct of ICE and CBP, holding hearings in the cities in question would offer a means for raising awareness among local communities. The Los Angeles hearings could also offer a blueprint for future forums in other cities affected by ICE and CBP sweeps, such as Chicago, which is now reeling from a monthlong operation in the city. Now, in Charlotte, the city’s community is on edge as the Border Patrol deploys agents to conduct sweeps through the city. The Charlotte Observer reported that at some schools, parents are conducting lookouts for immigration officials hoping to detain children.Offering hearings in different states would also offer opportunities to investigate operations in non-sanctuary states. One concern is the growing partnership between ICE agents and local law enforcement. The 287(g) program, which was enacted as part of the Illegal Immigration Reform and Immigrant Responsibility Act of 1996, allows for local law enforcement to enter into agreements with ICE. The partnership grants local law enforcement the power to detain individuals suspected of being undocumented, and has been pilloried by civil rights organizations such as the ACLU.In its 2022 report about the 287(g) program, the ACLU concluded that the program used “anti-immigrant hate as its selling point.” The First Trump administration aggressively expanded the program to hundreds of local sheriff and police departments, with agreements remaining under the Biden administration. The ACLU concluded that over 65 percent of 287(g) participating agencies had lengthy records of civil rights abuses, and 77 percent of partner agencies maintained inhumane detention facilities.The Trump administration has argued that a criminal element exists among undocumented immigrants. The rhetoric goes that if an undocumented immigrant crosses a border or port of entry illegally, they therefore must be capable of other criminal activity. As the ACLU rightly pointed out, the right’s labeling of undocumented immigrants as criminals engages in xenophobic fearmongering rather than sound law enforcement. Undocumented immigrants are not in violation of federal criminal law. And, as I reported previously, the Trump administration has stripped away the avenues by which immigrants and refugees can reside legally in the U.S., thus restricting new immigrants and criminalizing existing ones.For Democrats in Congress still reeling from the shutdown, Robert Garcia’s proposed hearings might be the refresher the party needs to boost its political fortunes, exercise its oversight muscles, and rediscover its passion for prosecuting Trump’s misdeeds. At a time when the courts have provided few constitutional guardrails for the Trump administration, a hearing or two may be the way to respond to civil rights abuses and corruption within the administration.
https://newrepublic.com/article/202092/ice-investigations-garcia-los-angeles

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2025-11-25T12:27:50Z

The New Republic (nprofile…pyzj)

Can one eulogize a federal agency that never existed? The question has the quality of a Zen riddle. But Reuters informs us that the phantasm known as the Department of Government Efficiency, a.k.a. DOGE, n’existe plus. “That doesn’t exist,” Office of Personnel Management, or OPM, Director Scott Kupor told Reuters’ Courney Rozen when Rozen inquired about DOGE’s status.In fact, DOGE never existed—not as a government agency, anyway. Only Congress can create a government agency. Trump took a White House office called the U.S. Digital Service, fired a bunch of its employees, and renamed it DOGE. It operated as part of the White House Office of Management and Budget, whose director Russell Vought (as I explained in June) called most of the shots.For an agency that never existed, DOGE did an impressive amount of damage. It shut down the U.S. Agency for International Development, eliminating or placing on administrative leave about 10,000 people. The consequence, according to the Boston University epidemiologist Brooke Nichols, was the death of about 640,000 people, of which about 430,000 were children. Here’s an efficiency statistic you won’t find on DOGE’s website: For every USAID worker fired, DOGE killed about 64 people. DOGE also effectively shut down the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau, or CFPB, an obvious nuisance to an administration run by oligarchs, laying off most of its 1700-person staff. Much of the heavy lifting here was done by Vought. President Donald Trump fired CFPB’s director Rohit Chopra and named Vought acting director. Now Vought is trying to shut off CFPB’s funding, using the argument that the Federal Reserve, which finances CFPB, cannot do so because it’s operating at a loss. Never mind that the Fed is having no difficulties exercising its other duties. As a result of DOGE’s and Vought’s effective shutdown of CFPB, Forbes’s Jeff Kauflin reported earlier this month, financial service companies are cutting budgets for consumer compliance; people with student loans are at greater risk that their payments won’t be recorded accurately; and the issuing of medical and retail credit cards that charge no interest up front—and heavy interest later—is on the rise. Raise your hand if you trust financial services companies not to screw consumers without regulatory oversight. DOGE’s supposed North Star was taxpayer savings, but by that yardstick it was a dismal failure. Elon Musk, the billionaire ketamine fancier who ran DOGE through May as a time-limited special government employee, predicted up front that he could cut “at least $2 trillion” from the $7 trillion budget. Then he said $1 trillion. Then he said $150 billion. Today DOGE claims $214 billion in savings, but even if we accept that at face value (probably unwise), that doesn’t take into account the $135 billion that Max Stier, president of the Partnership for Public Service, estimated DOGE’s disruptions cost the government in lost productivity, paid leave, and the re-hiring of workers fired mistakenly. Add in cuts to the Internal Revenue Service, which reduce rather than increase revenue, and DOGE’s cost rises to $458 billion. When you combine that with DOGE’s claim to have saved $214 billion, that nets out to an operating loss of $244 billion. Cutting waste, fraud and abuse is very expensive!OPM’s Kupor hit the roof after Rozen published her story saying DOGE had turned off the lights. Kupor posted very testily on X a non-denial denial—that is, a statement that purports to deny something but on closer examination does not. “The truth is,” Kupor wrote, “DOGE may not have a centralized leadership under [the U.S. DOGE Service]. But the principles of DOGE remain alive and well: de-regulation; eliminating fraud, waste, and abuse; re-shaping the federal workforce; making efficiency a first-class citizen; etc.” In other words: Yes, DOGE has been eliminated, and its functions transferred elsewhere, which is exactly what the Reuters piece said. Kupor’s fury at Reuters reflected apparent anxiety that if word got out that DOGE didn’t exist anymore, agency heads wouldn’t take DOGE-y directives from OPM very seriously. That’s a rational fear, because OPM has a history of not being taken seriously. Kupor’s X post linked to a memo he sent Friday requiring agency heads, in fulfillment of an October 15 executive order, to submit headcounts to OPM and to create a Strategic Hiring Committee. It’s a venerable Washington fallacy that you can’t eliminate superfluous bureaucracy without first creating some other superfluous bureaucracy to identify where the original superfluous bureaucracy resides. On that, at least, MAGA is in complete accord with the Deep State.DOGE closed its doors at least eight months ahead of schedule. President Donald Trump initially intended to keep the thing going until July 4, 2026. But even Trump, Rozen reported, “often talks about DOGE in the past tense.” DOGE’s home page is another giveaway. It lists under “Latest work” a computer consolidation project at the General Services Administration that DOGE announced more than three months ago. Musk departed in May. Amy Gleason, who, to shield Musk from legal accountability, was named DOGE’s acting administrator, has been working at the Health and Human Services Department since early March. Steve Davis, a Musk lieutenant who was running DOGE on a day-to-day basis, tried to keep doing so after Musk left but got pushed out by the White House in June.According to an excellent November 21 account by Sophia Cai and Daniel Lippman in Politico, the final death knell for DOGE came in late July when Mike Rigas, who’d served in a variety of high-level positions under Trump, was appointed acting administrator of the General Services Administration, or GSA. What power DOGE wielded derived from its having more or less taken over the GSA, which had been a weak host for an aggressive parasite. Rigas ended that. As of October, there were still 45 employees on DOGE’s payroll, but they’d lost their power. Now they’ve lost DOGE too, and are therefore significantly more superfluous than the workers they cut loose from government.
https://newrepublic.com/article/203638/doge-dead-rest-in-piss

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2025-11-25T12:27:50Z

The New Republic (nprofile…pyzj)

President Trump is constantly ignoring democratic norms and the rule of law here at home, from sending the National Guard to U.S cities to having prosecutors file charges against his political enemies. But right now, some of his most alarming, unhinged moves have a target abroad: Venezuela. The administration is making clear that it will use any means necessary, including military force, to remove longtime President Nicolás Maduro. These actions break both U.S. and international law—and those of us committed to democratic principles must strongly oppose Trump’s approach. I’m not here to defend Maduro, an autocrat who almost certainly lost the 2024 presidential election there but claimed victory and stayed in power. It was the policy of the Biden administration that Maduro should not be recognized as the leader of Venezuela. But the Trump administration has gone much further than Biden, starting a low-grade war against another nation with almost no buy-in from Congress, the American public, or the international community. The list of steps taken by Trump against Venezuela over the last three months is long and aggressive. The administration has launched almost two dozen military strikes against fishing boats in the Caribbean Sea and the Pacific Ocean since September, claiming (without evidence) that these boats are part of Venezuela-led effort to smuggle drugs to the United States. Asked in a recent interview if Maduro’s days in power are “numbered,” Trump said yes, a troubling echo of how George W. Bush discussed Saddam Hussein two decades ago. Several U.S. aircraft were flown near the Venezuelan coast last week, a tactic likely used to intimidate Maduro’s government. The administration this week formally designated Maduro and his allies in power as a terrorist group, making it easier to justify the use of military force against Venezuela. The administration has confirmed reports that the CIA will soon conduct operations inside Venezuela. These operations are technically supposed to be “covert,” but Trump’s team is essentially broadcasting this strategy to The New York Times and other new outlets. While Trump and his aides haven’t stated this openly, their policy certainly seems to be that either Maduro will give up power under U.S. pressure or the United States will remove him. All of this feels like the run-up to the Iraq War. I would never defend the Iraq War, but at least Congress, the broader American public, and the international community openly debated that policy before the U.S. invaded Iraq. Not here. This bellicose posture toward Venezuela is entirely driven by the administration with little consultation with anyone else. It’s true that presidents in both parties in recent decades have ignored the fact that it’s literally written in the Constitution that Congress, not the president, is supposed to formally declare when the United States is at war. But what Trump is doing has less accountability than, say, Barack Obama expanding the use of drone strikes in the post–September 11 period, when leaders in both parties and the American public were very committed to killing potential terrorists. In a recent CBS News poll, 76 percent of Americans, including 64 percent of Republicans, said that the administration needs to provide a clear rationale for its actions in Venezuela. Only 13 percent of Americans viewed Venezuela as a “major threat” to U.S. national security. And all of the misleading statements from the administration about Maduro undermine the campaign against him and also echo Iraq in some ways. As was the case with Saddam Hussein, there is plenty to oppose about Maduro without wrongly implying that he is sponsoring terrorism. Almost no one believes the Trump administration’s claim that randomly killing people on fishing boats is part of a smart way to combat drug smuggling. It is hard to imagine that the Trump administration sincerely cares about Maduro ignoring election results—that’s what Trump did himself in 2020. And the administration is very allied with Jair Bolsonaro of Brazil, who also attempted to stay in power after losing an election. “The Trump administration’s policy of destroying fishing boats allegedly carrying drugs and killing people without due process or providing any evidence constitutes a radical departure from the U.S.’s traditional approach in combating the maritime drug trade in Latin America,” says Michael Shifter, a professor in Georgetown University’s Center for Latin American Studies. What I suspect is really driving this policy is other factors that shouldn’t be shaping America’s foreign affairs. Trump seems to personally hate Maduro, dating back to his first term. Secretary of State Marco Rubio is aligned with the sizable anti-Maduro contingent in Florida from his time as a politician there. María Corina Machado, the leader of Venezuela’s opposition, has praised Trump since she won the Nobel Peace Prize in October. She would be a major force in a post-Maduro Venezuela, giving the Trump administration a much stronger foothold there. And if Trump successfully forces out Maduro, Machado would likely push hard for Trump to be awarded the peace prize, which he covets. No one should want Maduro to stay in power. But what we really shouldn’t want is Donald Trump, the autocrat who currently controls the most powerful military in the world, essentially choosing which other leaders get to stay in power and which ones don’t according to his own whims. American-led regime changes have a horrible track record. That record will only get worse if such regime changes are led by Donald J. Trump.
https://newrepublic.com/article/203612/trump-start-war-venezuela

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2025-11-25T12:27:50Z

The New Republic (nprofile…pyzj)

Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene has long been an exquisite paranoiac. In November, 2017, she posted a video to Facebook. “There’s a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to take this global cabal of Satan-worshiping pedophiles out,” she said on the now-deleted video, adding, “I think we have the president to do it.” Greene’s Satanic panic, and her faith in Trump, may have been misplaced. But her anxieties about a far-flung child-rape network were not too far off. Like the rest of us, Greene has been confronted by the sordid Jeffrey Epstein emails, which implicate in his abuse web a startling cadre of white, patriarchal elites, from anarcho-syndicalist Noam Chomsky to neoliberal Larry Summers to uber-nationalist Steve Bannon to Saudi authoritarian Mohammad bin Salman. At the same time, Trump, who Greene and many on the far right had hoped would destroy a child-rape network, seems to be one of them. “Of course he knew about the girls,” wrote Epstein about Trump in an email from December 2019. And so the resignation letter Greene dropped on Friday, a see-ya-never bombshell announcing she’s quitting Washington, is a rich text. For one, it prophesizes the collapse of the GOP into “Neocons, Big Pharma, Big Tech, Military Industrial War Complex, foreign leaders, and the elite donor class.” But its message is also simple. MAGA’s long-suffering trad wives, male and female, are no longer standing by their man.Instead, they’re protecting the kids.“I refuse to be a ‘battered wife’ hoping it all goes away and gets better,” Greene wrote. “Standing up for American women who were raped at 14, trafficked and used by rich powerful men, should not result in me being called a traitor and threatened by the president of the United States, whom I fought for.”In quitting Congress, Greene has thus slipped the moral knot that still seems to strangle many on the MAGA right. Sympathizers with QAnon, the woolly crusade against global pedophiles that seized the minds of fully one quarter of Republicans as recently as 2021, are confronted with the exposure of an actual global network of pedophiles. And Trump isn’t in the least preparing to bust it, because he’s mired in it. “There is no ‘plan to save the world’ or insane 4D chess game being played,” Greene wrote.Greene’s hasty exit may have surprised those casual observers who see her as nothing more than a shill for Trump. Online, it was another story. To the 4chan stans who’ve been chronicling the crash-out of MAGA for months—over Israel and Epstein—it was no surprise at all. For one, it’s not even the first time Greene has left a powerful institution for enabling child sexual abuse. Years ago, when Greene became a mother, she “realized,” according to her later statement about the Catholic Church, “that I could not trust the Church leadership to protect my children from pedophiles, and that they harbored monsters even in their own ranks.” She’s also been tilting away from MAGA and toward America First for quite some time. “Watch for ‘AFAO’ hats lol,” a TikTok friend texted me the second Greene’s letter dropped. “America First America Only” is Greene’s own slogan, and some of those who embrace it now disdain Trump’s movement as MIGA—Make Israel Great Again. “I’m definitely concerned about a foreign country’s influence on our own,” Greene told Megyn Kelly in August. The recent unmasking of top MAGA influencers as trolls in Russia, India, and Nigeria is surely doing little to appease her fear that MAGA has become a foreign op.The background here can seem opaque, so let’s keep it concise. With the murder of Charlie Kirk in September, an isolationist, antisemitic clique calling itself “America First” started to check out of MAGA, which they saw as too beholden to Israel and even obscurely involved in Kirk’s assassination. This group was composed largely of bellicose and antisemitic ethnostaters like Nick Fuentes, Candace Owens, and Tucker Carlson. These influencers make up in online authority what they lack in legislative power. In moving closer to them, Greene is also showing her frustration with the MAGA-controlled legislature. In her letter, she faults MAGA for disempowering Congress with the shutdown and the continued support for foreign wars, while her own right-wing domestic bills—which, to be clear, exist to smite social justice initiatives—sit “collecting dust.” Her paranoia, which has often served her well, clicked into high gear.Recently on “Breaking Point,” Bill Maher asked Greene what she thinks of the fact that many in Trump’s inner circle, including Kristi Noem and Stephen Miller, are now living on military bases. In a striking reaction shot, Greene absorbed the news with visible fear: “I’m one of those people they call a conspiracy theorist. When I hear something like that, I think, ‘What do they know that I don’t know?’” Read the resignation letter closely and it’s clear Greene is simply done with all of the men she sees as barbarous aristocrats, from American oligarchs to foreign leaders. “Corporate and global interests remain Washington’s sweethearts [and] Americans’ hard earned tax dollars always fund foreign wars, foreign aid, and foreign interests,” she wrote. “No matter which way the political pendulum swings, Republican or Democrat, nothing ever gets better for the common American man or woman.”That addition of “woman” may sound somewhat less than woke. But it’s surprisingly radical in her patriarchal party—and it’s key to understanding Greene’s break with MAGA. For all her superstitions and bigotry, Greene has become a heroine to the women Epstein trafficked, abused, and outmaneuvered as girls—the minors Epstein maintained Trump “knew about.” On November 18, the day after Trump had called Greene a “traitor” for insisting he come clean about his Epstein ties, she stood like a mama bear, maybe even an avenging angel, surrounded by a big group of those survivors. “I want to speak goodness and love and hope into the women standing behind me and all of the other survivors whose names you don’t even know but stand with these women,” she said. “They are survivors and they are strong and they are courageous and they are daughters of God.” Greene seemed more serene and expansive and even blessed than she ever has. She didn’t seem paranoid anymore, or the least bit afraid. Perhaps it’s because she’s already scouted out a new home with the marquee groypers, including their leader, Nick Fuentes. At the very least, she’s refusing to condemn Fuentes, and Fuentes, in return, is giving Greene flowers on X. So whatever comes after MAGA for Greene, there’s strong chance it will be worse.
https://newrepublic.com/article/203636/marjorie-taylor-greene-good-still-racist

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2025-11-25T12:27:50Z

The New Republic (nprofile…pyzj)

Any praise—even if it is equivocal—of Marjorie Taylor Greene requires a lengthy disclaimer, so let’s get this out of the way. She’s a bigot, a political extremist, and a conspiracy theorist. Even by the standards of Republicans who have entered politics after the rise of Donald Trump, the Georgia congresswoman is out there. She’s not like other politicians. She’s not like other people, for that matter. But Greene is, for once in her life, on to something. She see what her fellow Republicans either don’t see or aren’t willing to acknowledge: Trump’s second administration has already failed and will doom their party in upcoming elections. And she wants to get credit for being the first prominent elected Republican to say this out loud. Late on Friday, in a statement that took everyone by surprise, Greene announced that she would be resigning from Congress in January. Once one of Trump’s most vocal allies, she had been fighting an increasingly bitter war with him in recent months, attacking him on everything from health care to the Epstein files to foreign policy. Trump, she has argued, is betraying his movement, selling out his voters as his administration ignores rising costs, attempts to hide embarrassing secrets, and props up a failing government in Argentina and a murderous one in Israel. She hit these points again in her resignation letter. “[M]ost of the Establishment Republicans, who secretly hate [Trump] and who stabbed him in the back and never defended him against anything, have all been welcomed in after the election,” she wrote. “If I am cast aside by MAGA Inc and replaced by Neocons, Big Pharma, Big Tech, Military Industrial War Complex, foreign leaders, and the elite donor class that can’t even relate to real Americans, then many common Americans have been cast aside and replaced as well.” If Greene is surrendering, she’s not exactly admitting defeat either. Nor should she, now that Trump is a lame-duck president and the future of his MAGA movement is very much in doubt. It’s not too early to begin imagining—or in Greene’s case, positioning oneself for—a post-Trump politics on the right.Since the beginning of Trump’s political career in 2015, efforts to turn his appeal into a coherent political program have always been quixotic. Still, the new administration spent much of the year attempting to fuse Trump’s various whims—throwback economic populism in the form of tariffs; authoritarian repression of domestic critics; fascistic efforts to remove immigrants—with older conservative and right-wing aims, namely the promotion of big business and the destruction of the federal government. If there was a theory in the early stage of Trump’s term, it was that this hybrid administration could move so quickly and with such menace and authority that it could overcome its obvious weaknesses, the principal one being that this is not a particularly popular agenda. Trump was elected not because Americans were eager for a government built in his image but because prices were rising and Democrats had rendered themselves illegitimate by propping up a doddering octogenarian that a clear majority of voters had no faith in. Instead of fulfilling his actual mandate—to bring down prices—Trump and his vassals cloaked themselves in regal power and pretended as though they were infallible. The result has been a uniform disaster. The Trump administration is finally, half-heartedly turning to issues like health care and the cost of living, but it’s obviously too late. The president and his allies ignored the wellbeing of the nation while pursuing a set of policy goals that were irrelevant to the concerns of their voters, let alone the wider citizenry. They have done so while arrogantly and systematically attacking or alienating anyone who disagrees with them. Now, the party is on the verge of collapse. “More explosive early resignations are coming,” one House Republican told Punchbowl News about the mood within their caucus. “It’s a tinder box. Morale has never been lower. Mike Johnson will be stripped of his gavel and they will lose the majority before this term is out.”Greene, like many of her colleagues, realized that the administration was failing and, unlike nearly all of them, began to speak about it. “What am I saying that can be criticized?” Greene asked during the government shutdown in October. “I’m saying the cost of living is too high, health insurance premiums are destroying the middle class, and Republicans have no plan.” It’s hard to argue with any of that. Republicans really have no plan—a fact that was underscored Monday when the White House pushed back the unveiling of Trump’s health care plan. Greene has been loudly warning that the party is in serious trouble in the coming midterm elections, and she has been just as loud about why that is: Trump and his allies have failed to keep their promise to bring costs down. Greene isn’t just interested in the midterms, however. What’s clear is that she’s attempting to position herself for a political future after Trump is gone. Her criticisms of the administration’s support for Israel, which she has accused of genocide, reflect a public opinion shift that is already underway: Voters, even Republicans, are far more critical of Israel than they were only a few years ago. Greene’s decision to lambast the administration’s futile attempt to cover up the Epstein files—which likely include damaging information about Trump’s relationship to the convicted sex offender and alleged sex trafficker—again sets her up to argue that she held fast to principle when other Republicans seemed eager to aid the suppression of damaging truths. Perhaps above all else, Greene seems to be preparing for an argument that she can make after Trump’s administration has failed: Real Trumpism has never been tried. In recent weeks, Trump has spent far more of his time focused on congressional Republicans—attempting to save face over the release of the Epstein files and attacking other turncoats, notably the libertarian-minded Kentuckians Rand Paul and Thomas Massie—in an effort to shore up support. Republicans aren’t afraid of him like they were a few months ago, and they have no reason to be. Where Greene goes from here is anyone’s guess, but one thing is already clear. She knows that this administration has failed and that her party is on the brink of collapse. And she’s getting out before the roof caves in.
https://newrepublic.com/article/203633/marjorie-taylor-greene-resigns-maga-long-game

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2025-11-25T12:27:50Z

The New Republic (nprofile…pyzj)

You can watch this episode of Right Now With Perry Bacon above or by following this show on YouTube or Substack. You can read the transcript here. The Trump administration and the broader conservative movement is using anti-Black ideas and tropes to further their agenda, says Kimberlé Crenshaw, a renowned legal scholar perhaps best known for her work explaining the concept of intersectionality. A group Crenshaw leads, the African American Policy Forum, recently released a detailed report on the anti-Blackness of the Trump administration. In the latest edition of Right Now, Crenshaw goes into detail on that report. She also criticized the Democratic Party for not defending equity, diversity, and inclusion programs and other civil rights initiatives. She argued that the party should stop disavowing “identity politics” and instead recognize that the right is weaponizing race, gender, and other such matters and that Democrats need a more comprehensive response. She praised Zohran Mamdani for running a campaign that smartly connected racial and identity issues with economic ones.
https://newrepublic.com/article/203615/anti-blackness-isnt-part-trump-agenda-it-heart

Nostr event nevent1qqszec4qdg6s9du0p3d4tm5g2qurduan82uznh2h7spyaznps70qydszyzjjh2tqdtt595wtmwtqycw2pt5ztrjaqduznlahlyv5z9fe4qyqj7gzg58

2025-11-25T12:27:50Z

The New Republic (nprofile…pyzj)

We know too much about Olivia Nuzzi’s personal life. There’s her initial firing by New York magazine over an undisclosed affair with then-presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. around the time she published a profile of him; the public falling-out with her fiancé, political reporter Ryan Lizza—during which she filed and then dropped a protective order against him; a teenage relationship with a much older Keith Olbermann; a new book and New York Times profile claiming she threw away her career for love; recent allegations from Lizza claiming she slept with former South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford; and a song called “Jailbait,” apparently released under the name Livvy when she was 16, which a spokesperson says “was never meant to be taken seriously.” It’s all scintillating, and it’s all a distraction. The only thing you need to know about Olivia Nuzzi is that she used her position of power, as a journalist, to advise and elevate the world’s most prominent anti-vaccine activist to the most influential health position in the United States. The latest bombshell revelations about what they did or didn’t do together risk obscuring the important part of the story: The beliefs RFK Jr. espouses kill people. These beliefs have already killed people. As Secretary of the Department of Health and Human services, he now holds the well-being of millions of Americans in his hands. And Olivia Nuzzi is joking about it in The New York Times.“All I think about is how this woman was part of mainstreaming this guy,” Aparna Nair, professor at the Department of Health and Society at the University of Toronto, told me. RFK Jr. “will do profound damage on a global scale—that’s all that matters,” she said. The global health program at the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) was among the first to be cut under RFK Jr.’s tenure, and outbreaks of illnesses like Ebola, Marburg, and mpox are now expanding across countries and borders.As the public fixated on fresh Nuzzi scandals last week, RFK Jr. was instructing the CDC to add language on its website about the possibility of vaccines leading to autism. It’s the latest in his expanding focus on autistic individuals; he has also overseen the creation of a national autism research registry and blamed parents for taking Tylenol during pregnancy. “In elevating someone who has now become essentially the most powerful person in public health in the country and who is taking a wrecking ball to public health institutions, she has done untold damage,” Gavin Yamey, professor of global health at the Duke Global Health Institute, said of Nuzzi. “She certainly contributed to his rise.”“It’s not just about a violation of journalistic ethics. It’s so much bigger than that,” Nair agreed. As a historian of vaccination, Nair knows exactly how much work it took over decades to expand access and establish trust in the safety and necessity of vaccines—and now she’s watching as Kennedy undermines it all in the U.S. and around the world.The Nuzzi-RFK Jr. story reportedly began with her profile of him for New York magazine in 2023. RFK Jr. was then a candidate in the Democratic primary for the 2024 presidential race. Nuzzi wrote that he met her with “an unfriendly expression” and took her on a ride in a disgusting vehicle used to take his dogs on hikes. But from there, the story was largely positive. She positioned him as a “spoiler” candidate who could ruin the race for Biden and Trump, “turning the presidential election upside down.” She joked about his antivax views, referring to chickenpox vaccines as “more frightening” than nuclear war, and reported a small sliver of his anti-vaccine activity without getting into greater detail of his views and what they mean for America.“He’s one of the world’s most dangerous anti-vaccine activists and conspiracy theorists, and she made light of that and really downplayed it and defanged his extreme views,” Yamey said. “She allowed him to argue that he’d just simply been misunderstood.”In the following months, Nuzzi raised Kennedy’s profile as a dark horse candidate. In a roundtable for The New York Times in March 2024, she said, “we’re forgetting or purposefully ignoring something rather important about this election: It’s not a two-man race. It’s a three-man race.” She added, “The establishment press has been reluctant to cover Kennedy like a serious contender because they fear they will face criticism for ‘platforming an anti-vaxxer.’ But the establishment press doesn’t get to decide who voters take seriously.” Nuzzi also criticized Biden for not sitting for more interviews or making himself more available to the press. (Nuzzi did not respond to multiple requests for comment for this piece.)In the Biden years, it was harder for Nuzzi to get the juicy scoops she was accustomed to in Trumpworld, as she called it. One of her better-known pieces was a takedown of Biden based entirely on unnamed sources and her own sense that her lack of access to the president was related not to his notorious mistrust of the press—including Nuzzi, who had written negatively about him before—but because he was declining rapidly. The piece made waves and contributed to calls for Biden to leave the 2024 presidential race.Nuzzi’s “near-total obsession” with RFK Jr. drove all of her decisions from late 2023 through 2024, Lizza alleged in a recent Substack post. He claims that included “catch-and-kill operations on his behalf, the campaign strategy memos she wrote him, and other journalistic transgressions that have still not been disclosed.”Nuzzi’s advice on Kennedy’s presidential campaign was also mentioned in The New York Times’ recent profile of Nuzzi, timed to coincide with the release of her new book. The Times profile appears to be a gauzy, even romantic rehabilitation of her image. (It’s hard to imagine an experienced profiler like Nuzzi didn’t know what she was doing, from playing “Bang Bang (My Baby Shot Me Down)” in her convertible Mustang to leaving Dante and the Bible on her kitchen table for reporter Jacob Bernstein to notice.) There’s an implication that Nuzzi took a metaphorical bullet for Kennedy—he survived to get a top spot in the Trump administration, while she was banished to Malibu with the convertible and a coveted job offer to be Vanity Fair’s West Coast editor. “She flamed out and she faded away,” according to a long excerpt of Nuzzi’s forthcoming book in one of the most prestigious magazines in the country.The New York Times piece skates past Kennedy’s record as health secretary. “I don’t have any interest in offering punditry,” Nuzzi says. The only mention of vaccination comes when Nuzzi makes a joke, according to the author of the piece. When trying to explain her relationship with Kennedy, she says, “Maybe it was the vaccines.” With the worst measles outbreak in three decades still unfolding and the U.S. status of measles elimination under threat, while vaccine distrust rises, many people aren’t going to find that line very funny. “She seems to have absolutely no sense of what she has enabled, or she does not care, or both,” Nair said. “Deadly vaccine-preventable illnesses are returning. How can she not feel any sense of connection to that?” Yamey asked. “I’ve not seen any reflections or regrets or remorse.” In the book excerpt published by Vanity Fair, Nuzzi positions Kennedy as a disloyal lover and herself as a victim of schadenfreude—a female Icarus, as she writes, indicating she thinks her cancellation is more about her ambition than her actions. “I’m not interested in her incredibly bad writing,” Nair said. “Real people are going to become disabled, sick and die as a consequence of this.” And it could be years before we see the true scale of the damage, she said.But everyone is a character to Nuzzi, and everything is content: The devastating Los Angeles fires that destroyed some 13,000 homes and killed at least 31 people are an extended and convoluted metaphor for her personal life. In an obtuse metaphor (I think it’s a metaphor? It’s not clear.) about placing a loaded gun on her bedstand, she inexplicably talks about gun violence as a major cause of death in America. She takes a serious public health issue and reduces it to a clumsy metaphor (hopefully!) about a failed situationship. Through all of the coverage of Nuzzi and her entanglements, Kennedy is painted as a lothario, an irresistible bad boy, instead of the man who has overseen the termination of thousands of public health employees, slashed funding for state and local health departments, called vaccination a personal choice, and pushed bogus (and harmful) theories about the “cause” of autism.Nuzzi isn’t acting alone. These puff pieces, the platforms she’s still being given, the breathless updates on the latest rumors—all of these reinforce the principle Nuzzi seems to live by: What matters is the zinger, the juicy tidbit, the shocking reveal. Perhaps no one can be surprised that the subject of a scandal writes a book anymore. But offering her an editorship showed disregard for the damage she’s caused and the journalistic ethics she’s burned to the ground. The glamorous photo shoots, the breathless gossip on her sordid saga—they all function to rehabilitate the images and careers of people who have done harm. When a major publication repeats a joke about vaccines without mentioning, for instance, the two unvaccinated children who died of measles in the U.S. this year, they contribute to the rise of dangerous actors and they normalize those who helped them into power.Nuzzi seems to have made a career of mistaking juicy tidbits for the real story. We shouldn’t fall into the same trap.
https://newrepublic.com/article/203590/olivia-nuzzi-rfk-jr-lizza-vaccines

Nostr event nevent1qqstsm9a7j07jusypmnl3au8c5qvqlyw9j69m0j6x2k8f6lmqvvfuvszyzjjh2tqdtt595wtmwtqycw2pt5ztrjaqduznlahlyv5z9fe4qyqj28wm6f

2025-11-25T11:25:45Z

The New Republic (nprofile…pyzj)

This weekend, President Trump raged over a video from Democrats that warned against carrying out “illegal orders.” That led him to get his Defense Secretary to launch an investigation of one of those Democrats, Senator and former Navy captain Mark Kelly. But things kept spiraling downward for Trump when a judge tossed out his corrupt prosecutions of James Comey and Letitia James. The ruling—that his appointment of a stooge U.S. Attorney was illegal—shows that his slapdash targeting of enemies is what backfired. In all these stories, Trump is corruptly weaponizing the system to get revenge on enemies for corrupt purposes, and it’s running aground for him. We talked to David Kurtz, who covers legal issues for Talking Points Memo’s excellent Morning Memo newsletter. We discuss how Trump’s own corruption is blowing up in his face, how the failing prosecutions are connected to his vile effort to get revenge on Kelly, and why we’re going to need another post-Watergate-scale reform effort to salvage the system once all this is over. Listen to this episode here.
https://newrepublic.com/article/203630/raging-trump-spirals-push-jail-enemies-backfires-badly

Nostr event nevent1qqs23rmcuy8k3ww9fazu5327w4hvyxyt2x5ydk903zs9wjs9kdxva7gzyzjjh2tqdtt595wtmwtqycw2pt5ztrjaqduznlahlyv5z9fe4qyqjtspdl0

2025-11-24T23:05:24Z

The New Republic (nprofile…pyzj)

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt says “all orders” from President Trump are “lawful orders,” and troops have no right to question him.“All lawful—all orders—lawful orders are presumed to be legal by our service members. You can’t have a functioning military if there is disorder and chaos within the ranks,” Leavitt told reporters outside the White House on Monday. “And that’s what these Democrat members were encouraging. It’s very clear. And not a single one of them since they’ve been pressed by the media … can point to a single illegal order that this administration has given down because it does not exist.” “You can’t have a soldier out on the battlefield or conducting a classified order questioning whether that order is lawful or whether they should follow through,” Leavitt argued earlier, in a twisted reading of the Uniform Code of Military Justice.Leavitt: "All lawful -- all orders -- lawful orders are presumed to be legal by our service members." pic.twitter.com/7j6bX9ErqP— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) November 24, 2025Leavitt’s comments came as Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth weighs court martialing former astronaut, retired Naval officer, and now-Democratic Senator Mark Kelly for his role in a video that the right is claiming to be “seditious.” “This administration is pitting our uniformed military and intelligence community professionals against American citizens. Like us, you all swore an oath to protect and defend this Constitution. Right now, the threats to our Constitution aren’t just coming from abroad, but from right here at home,” Kelly said in the clip, along with Senator Elissa Slotkin and Representatives Jason Crow, Chris Deluzio, Maggie Goodlander, and Chrissy Houlahan—all former military or intelligence veterans. “Our laws are clear. You can refuse illegal orders.”Kelly later responded to threats from the Department of Defense. “In combat, I had a missile blow up next to my jet and flew through anti-aircraft fire to drop bombs on enemy targets. At NASA, I launched on a rocket, commanded the space shuttle, and was part of the recovery mission that brought home the bodies of my astronaut classmates who died on Columbia. I did all of this in service to this country that I love and has given me so much...I also saw the President’s posts saying I should be arrested, hanged, and put to death,” he wrote. “If this is meant to intimidate me and other members of Congress from doing our jobs and holding this administration accountable, it won’t work. I’ve given too much to this country to be silenced by bullies who care more about their own power than protecting the Constitution.”Unfortunately for the White House’s arguments, there have been illegal orders to the military from the Trump administration. Just last week, a federal judge ruled that his deployment of the National Guard into Washington, D.C., was illegal. But Leavitt is doing what she does best: mindlessly supporting and justifying everything the president does
https://newrepublic.com/post/203628/white-house-declares-trump-orders-military-legal

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2025-11-24T23:05:24Z

The New Republic (nprofile…pyzj)

Donald Trump was all set to unveil his health care plan to the public Monday but now plans to delay it after backlash from Republicans in Congress. The “Healthcare Price Cuts Act,” according to MS NOW, would have included a two-year extension to Affordable Care Act subsidies, which are due to expire next month and were a sticking point in government shutdown negotiations. It would also seek to end what the White House calls “surprise premium hikes,” and would require a small minimum premium payment, eliminating the $0 premium. Politico reports that the plan would have limited the subsidies to people whose incomes amount to 700 percent of the federal poverty line. But Republicans on Capitol Hill are not happy with the plan, with one of them anonymously telling MS NOW, “I wasn’t expecting the proposal to be Obamacare-lite. Absolutely not supportive of extending ACA subsidies.“I’ve talked to enough [Republicans] to know that people weren’t expecting this and aren’t happy about it,” added the member of Congress. “I don’t see how a proposal like this has any chance of getting majority Republican support. We need to be focused on health care, but extending Obamacare isn’t even serious.”The Trump administration seems to have put together the plan without input from its allies in Congress, with Republicans telling the news outlet that they didn’t know the proposal would extend ACA subsidies. The budget deal ending the government shutdown was rejected by all but eight Democrats in the Senate because it only included the promise of a vote on the subsidies, as opposed to an outright extension. Trump’s plan, if adopted, would mean Democrats getting at least a partial win on ACA subsidies, albeit with significant conditions. That’s apparently too much to swallow for the GOP, so it’s anyone’s guess whether Republicans will continue struggling to come up with their own health care plan 15 years after the Democrats.
https://newrepublic.com/post/203622/trump-delays-health-care-plan-revolt-republicans

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2025-11-24T23:05:24Z

The New Republic (nprofile…pyzj)

Are Americans supposed to think that the Trump administration canceling the release of economics reports is somehow a good sign for the economy?The Bureau of Economic Analysis announced Monday that it had officially canceled releasing the advance estimate on gross domestic product (GDP) for the third quarter of 2025. The Trump administration had previously delayed the release, which was initially slated for October 30, due to the government shutdown—but now it seems to have been abandoned altogether. Last week, the Labor Department called off releasing its monthly jobs report for October, and the Bureau of Labor Statistics scrapped its own report on inflation.White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt blamed the Democrats two weeks ago for such delays, saying the liberal party “may have permanently damaged the federal statistical system.” She hinted at further cancellations, saying that data from October “will be permanently impaired.”The Trump administration’s decision to get stingy with publishing economic data comes amid concerns that President Donald Trump’s policies aren’t all that good for the economy. Trump’s mass deportation scheme is estimated to reduce the GDP by between 4.2 to 6.8 percent, according to the American Immigration Council. Trump’s sweeping reciprocal tariffs are also expected to place a strain on GDP, according to the Tax Foundation. If Trump would like to argue against these assertions, then the government may want to start publishing some actual data.The BEA has also pushed the release of another report that tracks consumer earning, spending, and saving. That report will now be released on December 5. Three other reports on economic data from 2024 “will be rescheduled.”The Commerce Department previously published that the U.S. economy contracted 0.5 percent in the first quarter, and then grew at a rate of 3.8 in the second quarter, leaving GDP in the first half of the year with an annual growth rate of roughly 1.66 percent, according to Fox Business.
https://newrepublic.com/post/203619/donald-trump-cancels-release-gdp-economic-report

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2025-11-24T20:53:47Z

The New Republic (nprofile…pyzj)

Vice President JD Vance threw a fit Monday over Republicans criticizing President Donald Trump’s—or possibly, Vladimir Putin’s—latest scheme to give Russia everything it wants from Ukraine.Vance fumed on social media as Republicans voiced their concerns about the latest sprawling peace plan that was essentially a “wish list” of Russia’s longstanding demands, requiring Ukraine to give up territory, reduce the size of its armed forces, and agree not to use certain weapons. He took aim in particular at Senator Mitch McConnell who’d urged the Trump administration on Friday to “find new advisors,” warning that “Putin has spent the entire year trying to play President Trump for a fool.”Vance slammed the 84-year-old Republican, who is planning to retire in January. “This is a ridiculous attack on the president’s team, which has worked tirelessly to clean up the mess in Ukraine that Mitch—always eager to write blank checks to Biden’s foreign policy—left us,” Vance wrote on X. “I wonder if the three candidates to replace McConnell in Kentucky share his views here.”In another, longer post Monday, Vance criticized the “beltway GOP” for not caring enough about issues such as the cost of living, crime, or health care. “Our administration is working hard on addressing all of these problems. But you know what really fires up the beltway GOP? Not any of the above. Instead, the political class is really angry that the Trump administration may finally bring a four year conflict in Eastern Europe to a close,” Vance wrote.“I’m not even talking about the substance of their views. Much of what these people have said about the Ukraine war has been proven wrong, but whatever. We can agree to disagree. But the level of passion over this one issue when your own country has serious problems is bonkers,” he wrote. “It disgusts me. Show some passion for your own country.”While Vance has doubled down on the proposed Ukraine plan, it’s still not clear where it came from. Over the weekend, a group of GOP lawmakers claimed that Secretary of State Marco Rubio had admitted the outrageous plan—which appeared to be translated from Russian—wasn’t actually put forth by the United States. Two European diplomats told Axios that when they pressed the Trump administration for clarification, they were specifically told it was not a “Trump plan.” Shortly after, Rubio publicly claimed the plan was in fact “authored by the U.S.” but also seemed to downgrade the plan to simply a “framework.”
https://newrepublic.com/post/203607/jd-vance-mitch-mcconnell-donald-trump-ukraine-plan

Nostr event nevent1qqszmu478yv8gatj8g9dltw4gwv0evhw77fqzphthsxcyqckyq8wh0czyzjjh2tqdtt595wtmwtqycw2pt5ztrjaqduznlahlyv5z9fe4qyqjjpwj5c

2025-11-24T19:50:50Z

The New Republic (nprofile…pyzj)

Donald Trump’s revenge prosecutions against former FBI Director James Comey—and New York Attorney General Letitia James—have been thrown out of court. U.S. District Judge Cameron McGowan Currie ruled Monday that interim U.S. Attorney Lindsey Halligan, who had no prosecutorial experience prior to this role, was improperly appointed by the Trump administration, agreeing with Comey’s defense team. The ruling means that the federal indictments of Comey and James are dismissed. “Ms. Halligan has been unlawfully serving in that role since September 22, 2025,” Currie wrote in her opinion. “All actions flowing from Ms. Halligan’s defective appointment … constitute unlawful exercises of executive power and must be set aside.”The judge tossed the case “without prejudice,” meaning Trump could try and bring forward the cases again on the same charges. Halligan received her job after her predecessor, Erik Siebert, was pushed out of the role for refusing to prosecute Comey and James.Comey was facing charges of making a false statement to Congress and obstructing a congressional investigation, but even aside from Halligan’s appointment, the indictment was full of flaws, leading U.S. District Judge William Fitzpatrick to take the rare and unusual step of allowing Comey’s legal team to review grand jury materials. James was charged with mortgage fraud, but Trump officials appear to have obtained her records illegally, resulting in several Fannie Mae employees being fired simply for doing their jobs and trying to protect her personal information. Both cases seem to be clear examples of Trump targeting his political enemies, as Comey was on his bad side for investigating Trump’s alleged collusion with Russia during the 2016 presidential election, and James successfully prosecuted Trump for financial fraud in 2024. Will Trump try to bring back the charges and risk losing again, or has he learned his lesson? This story has been updated.
https://newrepublic.com/post/203602/federal-judge-kills-trump-revenge-case-james-comey

Nostr event nevent1qqspf2dm9xl34nnqzycxegpmxn4se2m0wf0ctee8xcft505kuf2sk0szyzjjh2tqdtt595wtmwtqycw2pt5ztrjaqduznlahlyv5z9fe4qyqj2jysjl

2025-11-24T19:50:50Z

The New Republic (nprofile…pyzj)

President Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth are looking to potentially court marshal Senator Mark Kelly for joining a video message with Democratic congressional veterans reminding soldiers that they can reject illegal orders. “The Department of War has received serious allegations of misconduct against Captain Mark Kelly, USN (Ret.). In accordance with the Uniform Code of Military Justice, 10 U.S.C. § 688, and other applicable regulations, a thorough review of these allegations has been initiated to determine further actions, which may include recall to active duty for court-martial proceedings or administrative measures,” Trump’s Defense Department wrote on X Monday. “The Department of War reminds all individuals that military retirees remain subject to the UCMJ for applicable offenses, and federal laws such as 18 U.S.C. § 2387 prohibit actions intended to interfere with the loyalty, morale, or good order and discipline of the armed forces,” the statement continued. “Any violations will be addressed through appropriate legal channels.... A servicemember’s personal philosophy does not justify or excuse the disobedience of an otherwise lawful order.”“The video made by the ‘Seditious Six’ was despicable, reckless, and false,” Hegseth later wrote on his personal X account. “Encouraging our warriors to ignore the orders of their Commanders undermines every aspect of ‘good order and discipline.’ Their foolish screed sows doubt and confusion — which only puts our warriors in danger.” This is an extreme response to a video that was very tame, measured, and rooted in the military’s own words. “This administration is pitting our uniformed military and intelligence community professionals against American citizens. Like us, you all swore an oath to protect and defend this Constitution. Right now, the threats to our Constitution aren’t just coming from abroad, but from right here at home,” Kelly, Senator Elissa Slotkin, and Representatives Jason Crow, Chris Deluzio, Maggie Goodlander, and Chrissy Houlahan—all former military or intelligence veterans—said in the clip. “Our laws are clear. You can refuse illegal orders.”Last week, Trump called for their executions for reciting this basic military creed. On Monday Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth added more fuel to the fire. This is purely retaliatory. Trump has used the military in an alarming way, pitting them against American citizens as he’s released them into the city streets. And while Kelly has yet to respond, the move has been met with disdain from those who agreed with Kelly’s original statement. “Court marshalled by the Department of Defense for saying what the UCMJ clearly states,’ one user wrote. “Political persecution at its finest.”“Mark Kelly said troops should not follow illegal orders. And you’re saying you’re not giving any illegal orders,” wrote another. “So what exactly is the issue with what Mark Kelly said?”Next steps for both Kelly and the Defense Department are still unclear at this point. We want to speak directly to members of the Military and the Intelligence Community.The American people need you to stand up for our laws and our Constitution.Don’t give up the ship. pic.twitter.com/N8lW0EpQ7r— Sen. Elissa Slotkin (@SenatorSlotkin) November 18, 2025
https://newrepublic.com/post/203605/hegseth-trump-revenge-democrats-message-troops-mark-kelly

Nostr event nevent1qqswu0j53yu2tq2a4jjwuf68ckx2gttpk0rxt54fs6yvyvy6p7gzggczyzjjh2tqdtt595wtmwtqycw2pt5ztrjaqduznlahlyv5z9fe4qyqj2ck4js

2025-11-24T18:36:50Z

The New Republic (nprofile…pyzj)

Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent thinks that people struggling with rising inflation should simply move from a blue state to a red state. “I can tell you.... You know the best way to bring your inflation rate down? Move from a blue state to a red state,” Bessent declared on MSNBC’s Meet the Press on Sunday. “Blue state inflation is half a percent higher, and that is because they don’t deregulate, they keep prices up. Energy is higher. What a baffling, tone-deaf statement. How would people already struggling with rising prices have the time or money to uproot their jobs, homes, and families to move to a state that has a few thousand more Republican voters? “Move to a red state where the general cost of living and quality of life is worse, pay is worse, you have fewer protections, less access to healthcare, are less safe, but hey, you’ll save half a penny per dollar on your groceries,” one X user replied. “Fucking ghoul.”“Great message. Tired of high grocery prices? Sell your home, find a new job, buy a new home, move somewhere else, start life over. Magic!” wrote another. “Now your grocery bill is $10 less.”This blue state vs. red state narrative that Bessent, the GOP, and even many Democrats push is so tired. There are poor, working-class Americans struggling to survive in “coastal elite” states like New York and California just like there are in the deep South and the Rust Belt. Bessent’s comments only further distract from the much larger issues of impending recession economic inequality. Bessent: "You know the best way to bring your inflation rate down? Move from a blue state to a red state. Blue state inflation is half a percent higher." pic.twitter.com/FVL9AMS2BE— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) November 23, 2025
https://newrepublic.com/post/203598/scott-bessent-advice-beating-inflation-red-blue-states

Nostr event nevent1qqsdtx9um8s93xzzmwdynxeurh52m4cmhmeytpvt6n29uph3kzgfthszyzjjh2tqdtt595wtmwtqycw2pt5ztrjaqduznlahlyv5z9fe4qyqj0t87y4

2025-11-24T18:36:50Z

The New Republic (nprofile…pyzj)

There’s no way anyone had this on their bingo cards: Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene says she’s had enough of childish antics. The former die-hard Donald Trump fan took a moment on Monday to call out her critics—who now include the president she’d once pledged her loyalty to—following her announcement that she would resign from Congress in January. “Everyone just runs their mouths but results are the only thing that matter to the American people. Smears, lies, attacks, and name calling is childish behavior, divisive, and bad for our country. Memes and red meat rants do nothing. Actions speak louder than words,” Green wrote on X. “Be quiet, be kind, be humble and fix the real problems that are crushing Americans. Not foreign country’s problems. Not the donor’s problems,” she wrote. “The American people’s problems that both political parties created and dumped on the American people.”Of course, the Republican firebrand has levied more than her fair share of outlandish lies and name-calling during her time in office. Her mention of “childish behavior” seems to be a reference to Trump’s post on Truth Social Saturday, in which he resorted to schoolyard taunts to address the resignation of “Marjorie ‘Traitor’ Brown,” claiming that the Georgia Republican “went BAD.”Trump had doubled down on the nickname Monday morning, praising a Fox & Friends segment that also bashed Greene—except he confused a prerecorded clip during the show for a live one.
https://newrepublic.com/post/203597/marjorie-taylor-greene-donald-trump-attacks

Nostr event nevent1qqspdx3c0xwcdl4wngw99v5tzeslg4vew4nzpvnewgxcah4armgdqfqzyzjjh2tqdtt595wtmwtqycw2pt5ztrjaqduznlahlyv5z9fe4qyqjkyjyrs

2025-11-24T17:32:56Z

The New Republic (nprofile…pyzj)

Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene’s abrupt resignation announcement has only revealed even more cracks in the GOP’s foundation. Punchbowl News reports that even more Republican representatives are considering resigning in the middle of their term due to what they see as the “arrogance of this White House.”“This entire White House team has treated ALL members like garbage. ALL. And Mike Johnson has let it happen because he wanted it to happen. That is the sentiment of nearly all—appropriators, authorizers, hawks, doves, rank and file. The arrogance of this White House team is off putting to members who are run roughshod and threatened,” one anonymous senior House Republican told Jake Sherman. “They don’t even allow little wins like announcing small grants or even responding from agencies. Not even the high profile, the regular rank and file random members are more upset than ever. Members know they are going into the minority after the midterms.”It’s unclear which Republicans are on the brink of resignation, but their feeling of disrespect—and their failure to win on various issues—have led many on the right to throw in the towel for 2026 as they expect the party to lose its already slim majority.“More explosive early resignations are coming. It’s a tinder box. Morale has never been lower,” the anonymous representative continued. “Mike Johnson will be stripped of his gavel and they will lose the majority before this term is out.”This should be a massive wake-up call for President Trump and GOP leadership. A sitting, high-ranking member is predicting that they will lose the House due to resignations before the midterms.Greene sounded off on these issues in her exit manifesto on Friday. She wrote:Almost one year into our majority, the legislature has been mostly sidelined.… During the longest shutdown in our nation’s history, I raged against my own Speaker and my own party for refusing to proactively work diligently to pass a plan to save American healthcare and protect Americans from outrageous overpriced and unaffordable health insurance policies. The House should have been in session working everyday to fix this disaster, but instead America was forced fed disgusting political drama once again from both sides of the aisle.My bills which reflect many of President Trump’s Executive Orders … just sit collecting dust.Many common Americans are no longer easily convinced by paid political propaganda spokespersons and consultants on TV and paid shills on social media.… They know how much credit card debt they have, they know how much their own bills have gone up over the past 5 years, they actually do their own grocery shopping and know food cost too much, their rent has increasingly gone up, they have been outbid by corporate asset managers too many times when they put in an offer to buy a house, they have been laid off after being forced to train their visa holding replacement, the college degree they were told to earn only left them in debt with no big six figure salary, they see more homeless people than ever on their own community streets, they can’t afford health insurance or practically any insurance, and they just aren’t stupid.
https://newrepublic.com/post/203596/house-republican-more-explosive-resignations-coming-marjorie-taylor-greene

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2025-11-24T16:30:46Z

The New Republic (nprofile…pyzj)

Secretary of State Marco Rubio reportedly revealed that President Donald Trump’s disastrous 28-point peace plan for Ukraine is really just Russia’s “wish list”—and not a U.S. plan at all. It suddenly makes so much more sense why the plan appeared to be translated from Russian!Last week, reports began to emerge of a sprawling peace plan that would require Ukraine to give up Donbas—an industrial region in the east sought by Russia—reduce the size of its armed forces, and agree not to use certain weapons, making it significantly harder for Ukraine to defend itself from Russian military incursion. Those concessions caused shock waves through Europe and Ukraine, as Trump demanded Kyiv respond by Thanksgiving. Original reports claimed that the plan was drafted as the result of a meeting between Trump’s special envoy Steve Witkoff and Russian envoy Kirill Dmitriev—but now, Secretary of State Marco Rubio is telling lawmakers that the United States had nothing to do with it at all. Speaking Saturday, independent Maine Senator Angus King said that Rubio had clarified the plan was “not the administration’s position, it is essentially the wish list of the Russians that is now being presented to the Europeans and to the Ukrainians.”Republican South Dakota Senator Mike Rounds said at the same press conference that Rubio had clearly distanced the U.S. from the proposal. “It is not our recommendation, it is not our peace plan. It is a proposal that was received. And as an intermediary, we have made arrangements to share it,” Rounds said. Two European diplomats told Axios that when they pressed the Trump administration for clarification, they were specifically told it was not a “Trump plan.” The implication of Rubio’s latest revelation seems to be that after months of negotiations, the United States is simply a mouthpiece for Russia’s unchanging desire for more territory and control.But some are calling B.S. on the backtracking—including those at the State Department. “This is blatantly false,” State Department spokesperson Tommy Pigott wrote on X Saturday. “As Secretary Rubio and the entire Administration has consistently maintained, this plan was authored by the United States, with input from both the Russians and Ukrainians.”Last week, Witkoff and Trump’s son-in-law Jared Kushner reportedly read the plan line by line to Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy. But now, U.S. officials have started to refer to the plan as merely a “framework.”This story has been updated.
https://newrepublic.com/post/203579/marco-rubio-donald-trump-ukraine-peace-plan-russia

Nostr event nevent1qqsvcsttmwkj4jul0gntfv2ygdw7uhg35sxs4d7vumlqjdh624l738szyzjjh2tqdtt595wtmwtqycw2pt5ztrjaqduznlahlyv5z9fe4qyqjnzu8mh

2025-11-24T16:30:46Z

The New Republic (nprofile…pyzj)

In a move that will only raise the prospect of conflict, the Trump administration has formally designated Venezuelan President Nicolás Maduro and his government allies as members of a foreign terrorist organization. The White House is targeting the “Cartel de los Soles,” which describes corrupt government officials, mostly within the Venezuelan military who have been linked to drug trafficking. The designation lets President Trump place more sanctions against Maduro, focusing on his assets and power structure. Officially, it doesn’t mention the use of military force, but it is likely to make military action easier. Trump has already sent aircraft carriers to the Caribbean Sea, part of a deployment of dozens of warships, as well as 15,000 troops to the region. The administration has been bombing boats in the waters around central America, north of Venezuela, which the government claims are transporting drugs to the U.S., with very weak legal justifications.The White House has also authorized covert CIA action in Venezuela and is pushing conspiracy theories that the country rigged the 2020 presidential election against Trump. All of this adds up to an open campaign of regime change against Venezuela, with Trump musing about airstrikes against Venezuelan military targets on land. While the stated purpose of all of these actions is fighting drug trafficking, Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent let slip last week that oil prices could drop “if something happens down in Venezuela.” Does Trump, who is infamous for taking rash action, plan to start a war in Venezuela for cheap oil and a boost to his flagging poll numbers?
https://newrepublic.com/post/203585/trump-declares-venezuela-maduro-terrorist

Nostr event nevent1qqstqjmsyp656peu3dqus2szew473nnajatj27j8wx8krntttrv0fxczyzjjh2tqdtt595wtmwtqycw2pt5ztrjaqduznlahlyv5z9fe4qyqj8zpvg8

2025-11-24T16:30:46Z

The New Republic (nprofile…pyzj)

President Trump is waging his own cultural crusade, begging billionaire Larry Ellison—whose son owns Paramount—to bring back iconic 80s and 90s action comedies like the Rush Hour franchise, according to Semafor. Trump’s affinity for Rush Hour isn’t just because it’s a funny, mostly politically incorrect movie that embodies the 1990s (or at least the first one is). He also has the loyalty and political support of multiple people involved. Rush Hour producer Arthur Sarkissian is also in charge of the production company that made The Man You Don’t Know, an incredibly pro-Trump documentary that focused on humanizing the president. Moreover, Trump has the support of the movie’s leading men, who have refused to publicly criticize him. “Just give him a chance to try to change America and change the world,” Jackie Chan said in 2016. “He’s a businessman.... I think he knows how to handle these types of things.” In 2018, his co-star Chris Tucker said he hope Trump “does good.’ The role of Ellison—and his son David—cannot be ignored. It’s been clear that the right wing, pro-Israel billionaires are waging a new culture war against algorithms that don’t fit their narrative. Bringing back these 80s and 90s anti-woke, machismo-filled films like Rush Hour is just a different point of attack for them. God only knows how badly they’ll butcher a remake if it ever comes out.
https://newrepublic.com/post/203587/trump-begs-bring-back-movie-rush-hour

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2025-11-24T16:30:46Z

The New Republic (nprofile…pyzj)

Scott Bessent’s latest baffling defense of President Donald Trump’s tariffs suggests the Treasury secretary doesn’t really understand how they work. During an interview on NBC News’s Meet the Press Sunday, host Kristen Welker pressed Bessent on Trump’s decision to scale back tariffs on certain products that had seen price increases, such as bananas and coffee. “Isn’t the fact that yo’’re rolling back tariffs an admission that ultimately they do drive up prices for consumers?” Welker asked. “Kristen, how much does your arm weigh?” Bessent asked. “That I do not know,” Welker said, laughing. “Exactly, but you know how much you weigh and you get on the scale every morning. Inflation is a composite number and we look at everything. We try to push down the things we can control,” Bessent replied. The implication of Bessent’s response is that Trump officials don’t really know how much anything contributes to inflation, highlighting the administration’s measure-once-cut-twice approach to governance. Trump has repeatedly claimed to have brought grocery prices down, despite consumers experiencing the biggest price jump in more than three years. He has also pushed claims he defeated Biden-era inflation, even though inflation has steadily increased for the last five months in a row. In reality, Trump’s tariffs and his crackdown on immigrants have significantly contributed to rising prices—and Americans are noticing. A recent poll found that only 26 percent of Americans approved of Trump’s work managing the cost of living, down from 29 percent earlier this month.
https://newrepublic.com/post/203592/donald-trump-treasury-secretary-scott-bessent-tariffs-weigh-arm

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2025-11-24T13:10:36Z

The New Republic (nprofile…pyzj)

The following is a lightly edited transcript of the November 24 episode of the Daily Blast podcast. Listen to it here.Greg Sargent: This is The Daily Blast from The New Republic, produced and presented by the DSR Network. I’m your host, Greg Sargent. Suddenly, a bunch of media outlets seem to have figured something out. President Donald Trump is really, really unpopular. There’s long been a tendency to ascribe to Trump something akin to magical political powers, but there’s been a palpable shift in the discourse, and we think that’s highly significant. In one example, Axios, which is generally friendly to Republicans, reported that everywhere Republicans look, they see big political trouble. Axios set its “red alert” time for Trump and the GOP. In another example, a leading polling analyst called Trump’s fortunes “atrocious” and “horrific.” We think Democrats should talk up Trump’s weaknesses a lot more and push the media to tell this story more as well. So today we’re scheming about all this with Salon’s Amanda Marcotte, one of our favorite observers of MAGA and media foibles alike. Amanda, good to have you on as always. Amanda Marcotte: Thank you so much for having me. Sargent: So let’s start by listening to the striking polling analysis from CNN’s Harry Enten. It’s a bit long, but it’s worth it. Listen to this. Harry Enten (voiceover): I would say this is probably the worst 10 day period for the president in the polls his entire second term. The numbers are just atrocious. What are we talking about here in terms of net approval rating? Well, take a look. These are all November polls. The best one of the group puts him at 14 points underwater. That’s the Marquette University Law School poll tied for the worst he’s ever had in that poll. Fox, 17 points underwater. Marist, 17 points underwater. The Reuters-Ipsos poll, 22 points underwater. And then taking the cake, the AP NORC poll, 26 points underwater. If you think this is bad, what is driving these horrific numbers for Donald Trump? Well, why don’t we take a look at independents? Trump’s not approving with independents. Back in January, he was close to even. He was at minus four points. Not great, but not terrible. Look at this number. 43 points underwater with independents in the most recent average of these polls. When you are 43 points underwater with independents, you know you’re doing terribly. You can’t win with this. If this holds for next year’s midterm election, wave adios amigos. Goodbye. See you later to that House Republican majority. Sargent: So that’s really something. To recap, Trump is underwater by anywhere from 14 to 26 points in all these polls. And in an average, he’s underwater by 43 points with independents. Amanda, I didn’t expect it to happen that quickly. Did you? Marcotte: No, I didn’t really expect it to be this quick. I expected he would lose a lot of popularity over time, I would like to wish I was smart enough to have seen that, but I kind of think it was hard to predict because, like, has this ever happened with any president? That they fall off a cliff so fast? Sargent: Part of the reason this is such a surprise to so many people, including reporters, is because there’s been this kind of built-in tendency to treat Trump as having something like magical powers. This has just been an enormous problem in the discourse, from my point of view, for a long time. It’s been almost shocking how bad the coverage has been in that regard. There’s always this tendency to treat Trump as if he has some sort of mystical grip on some sort of deeper American essence that we’re all missing. Now, I think that’s partly because, you know, coastal elites flagellate themselves and hate themselves and all that, and blame themselves for missing the Trump phenomenon. But still, it’s been really bad, hasn’t it?Marcotte: Yeah. And I think this is one place where I’ve always been annoyed with the mainstream media coverage of this. I agree with you that it’s coastal elites—people who maybe have never really lived amongst the middle of the flyover country of this kind. And so they assume there’s just some kind of thing that Donald Trump has, some magic that he’s working that is invisible to them with ‘ordinary people.’ But I’m from Texas. I grew up in rural Texas. Most of the people I grew up around are Republicans. And I just don’t think that it is like that. I think what has happened is a little bit more complicated than folks believe in the media. And I think that Donald Trump’s charisma is not nearly as strong as people assume it is. I feel—and have always felt—that one day he’s going to be embarrassing for these people, and they’re going to pretend like they were never big supporters of his. And right now it’s just like, I think they like the MAGA hat kind of even more than they like Donald Trump, per se.Sargent: Well, we are seeing a shift in the media coverage. Finally, the New York Times had a front page piece about how Republicans are now beginning to look beyond Trump. The piece noted that Trump just lost on the Jeffrey Epstein files, lost big in fact. It also noted that Republicans just got blown out in the recent elections and that even some Republicans are starting to say that the basic laws of midterm elections are kicking in against even the almighty Donald Trump. Amanda, so the corollary of what we’ve been saying is that there’s also this tendency in the discourse to treat Trump as immune to those types of rules and structural factors of politics, like the way midterm elections work against the party in power. But even that seems to be giving away now. What do you think of that? Marcotte: I wish people remembered what happened in 2018, right? Democrats had sweepingly huge election wins because not only did the rules of midterm elections apply, but Donald Trump motivates his opposition. I think we saw this pattern happen twice, where a lot of people just assumed he wasn’t going to win, so they didn’t turn out in 2016 or 2024 in the numbers that they should have. But now that he’s in office, people are freaking out and they’re mobilizing. We’re seeing this with the No Kings protests. We’re seeing a lot of reason—the people that are fighting back against ICE—we’re seeing a lot of reason for people to be like, oh shit, he’s the president again, I guess I better get off the couch. I think that’s kind of what we’re seeing here. And I will not be surprised if turnout is really high in the midterms. And that’s all before you even get into the fact that the elephant in the room is that Donald Trump is 79 years old, and he is not looking good these days. And I think that his ability to be a strongman leader of the MAGA cults kind of depends on him looking like someone who’s going to survive for the next few years. I think there’s a bet that increasingly few people are interested in taking.Sargent: Well, I will tell you, as part of this kind of media turn against Trump, it’s clear that a lot of MAGA figures are now questioning Trump’s strength and his ability to hold the movement together. And that’s its own sort of death knell. The Axios piece that I referenced earlier actually cited, “rising internal MAGA drama and division,” as part of their diagnosis for saying that this is a red alert moment for Trump and the Republican Party. The Axios piece was really surprising. It cited this Fox News poll which finds that more than three fourths of respondents view the economy negatively. And Axios, as I said earlier, said that there are signs of trouble everywhere for the GOP. Axios is pretty friendly to Republicans. They’re hardly a resistance flagship outlet at all. And so I think for the super savvy guys at Axios to be being this blunt is a clear tell of where they think the power is flowing. Marcotte: Yeah, on the issue front, I do think that the economy is really… I mean, even Trump has been persuaded, obviously, that he should be worried about the bad economic news because he’s trying to stick to talking points. He fails. But it’s clear that whoever sat him down and said, this affordability issue is going to hurt you, got through to him because he’s trying to use the word, even though, you know, affordability sounds as weird in his mouth as saying please or thank you. He’s just incapable of understanding that people struggle to afford things. Even though he’s been broke how many times. Because he’s rich guy broke so he still has money to pay for whatever he wants. But it’s interesting. I’m in New York right now and I walked by Zuccotti Park today and I just was reminded of Occupy Wall Street really vividly today and how much anger and energy it harnessed about the financial collapse and billionaires taking over and just sucking up all the wealth for themselves. And I kind of feel we’re in that moment again, another decade plus later. Sargent: Yeah, it does feel that way. I thought there was another interesting tale on some credit here to Democratic strategist Simon Rosenberg, who compiled a bunch of headlines showing that the media is turning on Trump or at least acknowledging how weak he is. One of the ones that he cited is this Politico piece, which I had missed, which is about how Democrats swept at the school board level and they called it a culture war backlash. Now that is a real rarity to hear from the mainstream media. think there’s this deeply embedded flaw in the discourse on this as well, which has been to interpret Trump and Trumpism and Trump’s victories as a sign that the culture in some very profound sense has moved to the right, has really rejected wokeness and all that now, so can you talk a little bit about that? I think we’re really seeing that that whole storyline was hype that it was mostly nonsense. Is that too optimistic? Marcotte: No, I think that’s exactly right. A couple years ago, I did some reporting in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, about a school board race there in 2023, I do believe. And what had happened was that Moms for Liberty had taken over their school board, and this group of parents had gotten together and formed their own organizing committee and were recruiting candidates to run from the left for that school board. And they swept in 2023. And then in this last election, that same county, that same school board that I reported on—the last remaining Republicans on the board lost in November. So this school district in Bucks County went from being all Republicans on the school board to, in the space of two years, all Democrats on the school board. All. And a lot of what was driving it when I was on the ground was a genuine belief that these people are bananas, these right-wing culture warriors are fringe characters that live in a fantasy land, and that what they consider wokeness is what normal people just consider the real world.Sargent: There in Bucks County, a sheriff lost his election in just in these recent contests against a challenger who deliberately and explicitly tried to make the race into a referendum on ICE and the ICE raids. And it was a solid victory for the challenger on this issue. That is something that you would think should shock the hell out of lot of pundits. Because one of the things we have constantly heard is that Trump has this kind of deep grasp on what the public really wants on immigration in particular. But what we’re actually seeing is that candidates can make their races about ICE and raise the salience of immigration and win. What do make of that? Marcotte: I am not surprised in the slightest. So I live in Philadelphia—that’s why it was easy for me to get to Bucks. And while Pennsylvania has not been in the news a lot for the ICE situation, it’s been really bad. I can tell you that. And I think that people across the state are outraged about it, because there has been a lot of immigration from Latin America to Pennsylvania, and they do all sorts of jobs like work in the food industry. They work in agriculture; there’s an Amazon packaging plant in Reading, Pennsylvania, that has a lot of immigrants working there. And these people are perceived widely as hardworking, honest neighbors, and nobody likes seeing your neighbors treated this way. It’s very distressing. And when I’m in Philly, every time anyone sees it—like, all anyone talks about are the ICE raids. Everyone’s terrified, everyone’s scared. It’s basically the gossip on the streets: how many ICE raids people have witnessed recently.Sargent: And ICE has become a real pariah agency. There’s been data that really shows that it’s approval or standing with the public has plunged precipitously. And there’s another dimension to this as well, which is that the ICE stuff is just tailor-made for social media. It spreads like crazy on social because these are super shareable videos. They’re incredibly dramatic. They have heroes and villains and the villains are wearing masks, literally. Marcotte: What’s funny is they designed these ICE raids to be filmable because in the sort of fascist mind of Donald Trump and Stephen Miller and all the people behind and Kristi Noem and all the people behind this, they thought it would be a show of force that would intimidate the population of this country into being like, they’re scary. They have masks. We have to be afraid. They want to scare us. They like being the villains. But, you know, I’m going to get all weepy now, but goddamn it, we’re Americans. Sargent: Yes, I think that’s important. Yeah, because the masked raids—especially wrapped up with the imagery of big armored vehicles on streets and, you know, kidnappings and snatchings off the street by anonymous-looking goons and stuff like that—really triggers some sort of anti-totalitarian instincts in people and just strikes them as intrinsically and powerfully anti-American in some very deep sense. And I think that’s what’s going on here as well. I’m glad you raised that point about the fascism of people like Stephen Miller, thinking that they could shock-and-awe their way to getting everyone to kind of accept this. But that whole idea has really backfired in the face in a big way.Marcotte: I think history will look back, and the thing that will be most striking is that while all these elite journalists and politicians and businessmen kissed the ring and bowed down and were afraid of Trump, people in their jammies and slippers—ordinary people—when they see ICE coming into their neighborhood, they confront them in the street. And the courage of ordinary people in this moment has been quite stunning, especially when you compare it to the elite in this country.Sargent: You know, those elites are being a little short-sighted. Do they really think MAGA is going to be in charge forever and ever and ever? Marcotte: No, in fact, I think the reason for a lot of this cowardice is exactly that. They think that Trump is not long for this world, that he will be out of power shortly either because he dies or because he’s too old really to run again. And they just think we’ll just kiss the ring for now and we will get through this and then things will go back to normal. I think that’s the calculus going on. Sargent: Very interesting. Well, to wrap this up: so we’ve got the media starting to admit that Trump doesn’t have a deep lock on the culture. He doesn’t have a mystical attachment or mystical connection with the American people’s real dislike of immigrants or whatever. We’re seeing some admissions in the media of that. But I think looking down the road, you can kind of see places where the media could revert to its old bad habits. Like, if Trump invades Venezuela—and it looks like a big possibility—all of a sudden we could be back in a situation where we’re getting media coverage of the ‘popular war president,’ or ‘Trump is very strong and Democrats don’t dare raise any objections to what he’s doing now,’ that sort of thing. How do you see this playing out? Do you think Trump continues spiraling downward kind of indefinitely, or are we going to get some unpleasant surprises where the media looks for ways to tell the story of a surprising turnaround for Trump on the economy or on his popularity? What do you think is going to happen?Marcotte: I think they’re going to want that narrative maybe, but I’m going to steal Dan Pfeiffer’s observation on Pod Save that like lame-duck presidents in their second term, when their polls start to fall, they never recover. That’s just how it is historically and traditionally. Trump is a uniquely toxic person who can’t help but make things worse, so I think that that’s going to happen again. I think this may be—he does have a floor because of stubborn Republicans being unwilling to admit they were wrong. But even then, I think there’s going to be a point where people really realize he is over, that he is a lame duck. And I think the part where people start pretending they never voted for him, or that they were tricked into voting for him, or they find some face-saving excuse for why this has happened— to get out of having responsibility and accountability for it—I think we could be seeing that happen to Trump the way that it happened to George W. Bush in his second term. You know, by the end of Bush’s second term, I couldn’t find a Republican who said they’d vote for him.Sargent: Well, Amanda Marcotte, that sounds like certainly a plausible possibility, and it would be the ultimate irony if the rule that holds in the face of the almighty Trump is that rule as well—that the lame duck who’s spiraling downwards can’t pull himself out of the spiral. Really good to talk to you, as always.Marcotte: Thank you, same.
https://newrepublic.com/article/203577/transcript-trump-weak-failing-media-finally-saying

Nostr event nevent1qqsf0cav38ze6f7968hu43whr9h0dde33frmrjhzvdkq47qsmdqcfwczyzjjh2tqdtt595wtmwtqycw2pt5ztrjaqduznlahlyv5z9fe4qyqjx446gx

2025-11-24T13:10:36Z

The New Republic (nprofile…pyzj)

From time to time, one of my old high-school friends who is MAGA posts something like the following on Facebook: “Hey, libtards, you keep saying Donald Trump is dumb, but if he’s so dumb, how come he got elected president twice, overcoming your relentlessly corrupt attempts to steal the 2016 and 2024 elections, and escaped your nefarious deep-state schemes to put him behind bars?” This is supposed to be some kind of killer put-down that leaves people like me stammering.The answer to how Trump has succeeded is really simple: He lies nonstop, and lying works. Sure, there are other factors in play—he tapped into and intensified a certain strain of profound proletarian resentment of liberal elites, and … well, that’s about it. But mostly, it’s the lies. Before I dig into this, let me define the word “lie” as I mean it here, since lies can take many different forms. The standard Trump lie is a simple blanket assertion of non-fact as fact. He does this many times a day. A notable if all-too-common example emerged last Saturday morning, when he “Truthed” (oh the layers of irony!) that he had “JUST GOTTEN THE HIGHEST POLL NUMBERS OF MY ‘POLITICAL CAREER.’” He sometimes veers into the deeper, more Goebbels-y lie of saying the exact opposite of the truth (Joe Biden stole the 2020 election), but most of his lies are of the more straightforward variety—up is down, black is white, the classics.We tell ourselves that we live in a free society with a Fourth Estate that calls out lies and holds liars accountable. And furthermore, we teach our children not to lie and warn them of consequences should they do so. In such a society, lying should not work. So why does it? It works on the public stage (private life is a different matter) because in that sphere, someone who lies all the time creates reality, or I should say “reality.” Think about it. Say four guys are sitting in a bar having a sports argument—talking about the upcoming college football playoffs, say. They begin by agreeing that Ohio State is the favorite because it is currently ranked number one in the polls, which it in fact is.But one of them says: No, Texas A&M is number one. The other three look at him like he’s insane. They reach for their phones, they tap, tap, tap, and they show him the rankings. But he keeps insisting. Those polls are fake. It’s Texas A&M. Everybody says so.The conversation stalls. The liar has “won” the argument. Not in the sense that he is factually correct; he is not. But he has won in two senses. First, he has shut down what might have been a rational, interesting, spirited debate that proceeded from shared factual premises. Second, he has forced the other three to waste time and mental energy debating a proposition that is not remotely up for debate, and in the process has succeeded in making himself the center of attention and controversy whom everyone else talks about.Well, you say, the other three could just ignore him, and in my example, it’s possible that they could. But now imagine that these four and their views are highly regarded by the other 100 patrons in the bar—that they direct the conversation, and the others listen to them and follow their lead. And imagine further that over the years, our Texas A&M acolyte has won the intense loyalty of 40 or 45 of the other patrons, such that they, too, adopt the position that the Aggies are in fact number one. Now, the entire bar is enmeshed in silly, pointless controversy.And finally, imagine one more thing. Imagine that our A&M partisan and his followers not only say of the Buckeye adherents that they are wrong. No! They accuse them of moral turpitude. They charge that believing that Ohio State is number one is a sign of confusion, weakness, depravity; un-Americanism, even. They do so with a singular conviction and vigor, enough that the 10 or 15 patrons in the bar who don’t follow college football at all and don’t know who’s really number one emerge genuinely confused and perhaps even inclined to believe them.That’s how lying in the public sphere succeeds. And, to reiterate, Trump tells many such lies a day. He talks to the press two or three times a day most days, which probably adds up to what, 45 minutes, an hour? Spitballing it at one lie every two minutes, which may well be low, that’s around 25 factual lies a day. (This is commonly referred to as a “gish gallop”—a torrent of lies that comes so relatively hot and heavy that the truth can’t find a purchase.)Who can keep up? No one can. I complain a lot about the mainstream media, and with good reason—they spent years repeating Trump’s incessant lies in the interest of “fairness” (and they still do it too much). But this is one aspect of their task that even I concede is well-nigh impossible. A news outlet would need a staff of at least, oh, 15 people to really keep assiduous track of all that lying. No one can do that these days. Besides which, it’s human nature when confronted with a flood of lies to just give up at some point. Run up the white flag. If someone is telling you the sky is green and the grass is blue, at first you’ll argue with him. Then you’ll walk him outside to show him. But when he continues to insist on it, you’ll give up.This and nothing else is the secret of Trump’s success. He wins by wearing honest people down. After 10,000 or 20,000 or 50,000 such lies, Trump has distorted “reality” wildly in his favor. And, crucially, he has an entire political party and multi-million dollar propaganda outlets repeating and reinforcing the lies. He, and they, have convinced about 40 percent of the country that Ohio State isn’t number one, metaphorically, and that you have to be a communist to think so. And they’ve cast enough doubt in the minds of about 10 percent of the country so that they don’t know what to think.But here’s the good news: I sense that this is finally changing.I wrote above that Trump has an entire political party behind him. Well, not quite—now that’s minus one. I’m not going to ladle praise on Marjorie Taylor Greene here, but I will give her this much: Whatever her motivations, she stood up to the guy. Ditto Tom Massie. Their actions are communicating to the MAGA base in a way no Democrat could that Trump is lying about Jeffrey Epstein in some way, shape, or form. The seed is thus planted in the collective MAGA mind that Trump might sometimes be full of beans.There are other encouraging signs that the lies may no longer be working. The more Trump keeps bragging about the greatest economy in the history of the mind of God, the more people will see him as a conman. How anybody was dumb enough to believe last year that he could lower prices is another question, but for present purposes, he can’t convince most people that they’re not seeing what they’re seeing when they go to the supermarket.America may also begin to see this week the all-too-real consequences of his foreign-policy lying. Trump has given Volodymyr Zelenskiy until Thursday to agree to the 28-point “peace” plan that he and his people drew up with the Kremlin that gives Ukraine almost nothing. If Zelenskiy hasn’t agreed by Thanksgiving, Trump says, he’s on his own. It’s a morally repugnant position for a president of the United States to take, and while I’m not naïve enough to expect that most Americans care passionately about Ukraine, they will grasp the fact that Trump has spent two years lying repeatedly about how easy negotiating peace in that conflict would be.Reality is finally starting to catch up with Trump. And so, to answer the MAGA crowd’s Facebook question more fully: He only looks smart because his lies have overwhelmed a political culture that didn’t know how to respond to them. If I were a Trump fan, I’d start worrying about what happens when that stops.
https://newrepublic.com/article/203574/trump-lies-media-voters-economy

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2025-11-24T11:56:49Z

The New Republic (nprofile…pyzj)

Suddenly, media outlets seem to have figured out that President Donald Trump is really, really unpopular. There’s been a palpable shift in the discourse: The New York Times reports that Republicans are quietly looking beyond Trump, suggesting he’s losing his grip on the party. Axios claims that it’s “red alert” time for Trump and the GOP. Politico describes how Republicans are getting routed in school board races, a sign that MAGA culture-warring has lost its sway and is even backfiring. And one CNN analyst offers a brutal reading of recent approval numbers on Trump, pronouncing them “atrocious.” We talked to Salon’s Amanda Marcotte, who regularly dissects MAGA and media foibles alike. We discuss why the political media smells blood, how deepening splits in MAGA show Trump’s weakness, what it means that the Trump-MAGA culture war and immigration raids are badly alienating ordinary voters, and how Trump is in a potentially irreversible tailspin. Listen to this episode here.
https://newrepublic.com/article/203559/trump-weak-failing-president-media-finally-saying

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2025-11-23T23:40:25Z

The New Republic (nprofile…pyzj)

Senator Mark Kelly, one of the Democratic lawmakers targeted by President Donald Trump for his role in a video advising military personnel to respect the constitution over the president’s orders, had some strong words for the president.“[The president] tries to intimidate Congress, he looks at government accountability as a nuisance,” Kelly said, speaking to CBS News’s Margaret Brennan on Face the Nation on Sunday. “The message he sent a couple days ago was, he declared that loyalty to the constitution was now punishable by death. Those are serious words, coming from the president of the United States. He’s trying to intimidate us. But Margaret, I’m not going to be intimidated.”Mark Kelly: "The message he sent a couple days ago was he declared that loyalty to the Constitution is now punishable by death. Those are serious words coming from the president. He's trying to intimidate us. But I'm not going to be intimidated." pic.twitter.com/snEpIbMHn4— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) November 23, 2025 “You’ve just heard Jason Crow, he’s not going to be intimidated either,” Kelly continued. “We both served our country, we swore an oath, all we said was we reiterated, what’s basically the rule of law, which is that members of the military should not, can not, follow illegal orders.”Kelly is a retired astronaut and Navy veteran, and the other Democrats in the video also had military or intelligence backgrounds. After the lawmakers released the video last week, the president posted several rage-filled rants about the video, saying that it was seditious, and “punishable by DEATH.”Almost all of them have received bomb threats after the president’s online attacks.On Friday, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez spoke to reporters about Trump’s language and violent rhetoric in the wake of the video.“It’s not just shocking, it’s not just offensive, it’s bizarre, it is erratic, it’s volatile. I think it indicates a mental state that we should all be questioning right now,” she said.She continued, saying that the lawmakers had “a very clear message to U.S. service members, which is that you do not have to obey an illegal order, and I think that’s an important message to reiterate, because this administration seems to be increasingly trying to go down that path.”AOC: The president’s remarks indicate a level of instability.It’s not just shocking, it’s not just offensive, it’s bizarre, it is erratic, it’s volatile.I think it indicates a mental state that we should all be questioning right now. pic.twitter.com/Fd9bnUSqYc— Acyn (@Acyn) November 23, 2025
https://newrepublic.com/post/203572/mark-kelly-aoc-rips-trump

Nostr event nevent1qqsxppasuunq5tfpxx0x0l3gydfggc9mdm5a9aqlkdnzhf60ytajtvgzyzjjh2tqdtt595wtmwtqycw2pt5ztrjaqduznlahlyv5z9fe4qyqj624pam

2025-11-23T22:34:55Z

The New Republic (nprofile…pyzj)

Breaking a year-long ceasefire between Israel and Hezbollah, Israel struck the suburbs of Beirut on Sunday, killing at least five people and wounding 28 others, according to the BBC and Lebanon’s health ministry. Israel says it killed a senior Hezbollah official, Haytham Tabtabai, in an attack aimed at discouraging the militant group from rearming. Hezbollah has not attacked Israel since the ceasefire began last November, according to the AP.In a statement, Lebanon’s President Joseph Aoun accused Israel of refusing to implement its side of the deal, post-ceasefire. He asked the international community to “intervene with strength and seriousness to stop the attacks on Lebanon and its people.”This is not the first time Israel has broken its ceasefire with Hezbollah, nor has the country kept its ceasefire agreement with Hamas.According to the Gaza Government Media office, Israel has violated the ceasefire with Gaza nearly 500 times in 44 days, killing hundreds of Palestinians, reported Al Jazeera.Yesterday in Gaza, Israel launched airstrikes that killed at least 24 people. One strike targeted a vehicle, killing 11 people and wounding over 20. Hospital director Mohamed Abu Selmiya told reporters that most of the victims were children. Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s office said that it launched the strikes after a Hamas fighter shot at Israeli soldiers in Israeli-occupied Gaza, none of whom were hurt. Earlier in the week, Israeli strikes killed at least 33 other Palestinians.Israel has mounted more and more attacks on Gaza and on Lebanon in recent weeks, despite ceasefire agreements. The intensified strikes come at the same time as the U.N. Security Council endorsed President Donald Trump’s peace plan for Gaza, which would create a “Board of Peace” to oversee the future of the region. But as Israel continues to kill civilians in Gaza and Lebanon, despite existing ceasefires, it’s hard to find hope that Trump’s new peace plan will do much of anything at all.
https://newrepublic.com/post/203573/israel-beirut-breaking-ceasefire

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2025-11-23T21:32:45Z

The New Republic (nprofile…pyzj)

FBI Director Kash Patel has come under fire for using taxpayer-funded resources like government planes and SWAT protection for personal reasons. When his girlfriend, country singer Alexis Wilkins, performed at an NRA convention, she had an FBI SWAT team as her bodyguards. The agents were members of a special unit trained to rescue hostages and penetrate barricaded buildings, according to The New York Times. Once the team had secured the convention center, they departed. But Patel didn’t like that. He reportedly lambasted the team’s commander for leaving Wilkins without protection while she chatted with fans on the convention floor.It’s only the latest incidence of Patel using taxpayer-funded resources for his own personal activities. He’s been treating specialized FBI agents like his and his girlfriend’s private security detail, as well as jet-setting across the globe on government planes, according to the Times.Former FBI agent Christopher O’Leary criticized Patel’s actions, telling the Times that his use of the private plane and SWAT agents for his girlfriend’s detail “are indicative of his lack of leadership experience, judgment and humility.”And Patel’s right-wing allies aren’t happy either: “Is she considered Kash’s spouse?” asked Grace Chong, an influencer who works for Steve Bannon, on X. “Is that why she’s getting protection because if not then why are we paying for this?”Patel claims that Wilkins is getting this level of protection because she’s received death threats. But that doesn’t explain his extensive travel—to see her, and for other personal and business-related reasons. An FBI spokesperson told The Wall Street Journal earlier this month that Patel had taken nearly a dozen personal trips since becoming FBI director in February, compared to former FBI Director Robert Mueller’s itinerary of 10 personal flights over a four-year period.
https://newrepublic.com/post/203570/kash-patel-taxpayer-money-girlfriend-travel

Nostr event nevent1qqs83n9ht9vv25kz0apw7ly7js6vgsl0ts7pty582u9hf25dq76v5rgzyzjjh2tqdtt595wtmwtqycw2pt5ztrjaqduznlahlyv5z9fe4qyqj09xcks

2025-11-23T20:19:55Z

The New Republic (nprofile…pyzj)

After his surprisingly warm meeting with President Donald Trump, NYC Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani reiterated that yes, he still believes Trump is a fascist. During an interview with NBC’s Meet the Press on Sunday, Kristen Welker pressed Mamdani about the recent event at the White House. By all accounts, the two had gotten along unexpectedly well, and the president had beamed at the press conference afterwards. Trump also posted several photos of the two together on his Truth Social account. The unexpectedly friendly vibes turned the meeting into somewhat of a public spectacle, and Welker referenced an exchange with a reporter that took place about Mamdani’s previous usage of the term fascist. She asked if he still believed that the president was one.“That’s something I’ve said in the past and I say it today,” Mamdani said.“Do you still believe President Trump is a threat to democracy?” Welker followed up later.“Everything that I’ve said in the past I continue to believe,” Mamdani said. “That’s the thing that I think is important about politics, is we don’t shy away from where we have disagreements, but we understand what brings us to that table.”Later in the interview, Welker tried again, raising a valid point.“I think that some of your supporters would be curious to know … you say you stand by your past statements, that yes he’s a threat to the democracy, how do you square working with someone who you still think is a threat to the democracy?”Welker: Do you think that President Trump is a fascist?Mamdani: That’s something that I’ve said in the past. I say it today.Welker: You’ve called him a despot. Do you still believe President Trump is a threat to the democracy?Mamdani: Everything that I’ve said in the past,… pic.twitter.com/Qa7H5ej9er— Acyn (@Acyn) November 23, 2025“I think working for the people of New York City demands that you work with everyone and anyone—and that you always look to find those areas of agreement while not overlooking the places of disagreement,” Mamdani said.The friendly meeting between two politicians who had insulted each other for months (Trump has called Mamdani “my little communist,” among other things) shocked and irritated Trump’s MAGA base, including far-right activist Laura Loomer, who denounced the event on social media. While Trump and Mamdani, who is a Democratic Socialist, disagree on nearly everything, the two seem to have bonded over affordability, and their shared love of New York City.
https://newrepublic.com/post/203567/nyc-zohran-mamdani-trump-fascist

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2025-11-23T18:12:45Z

The New Republic (nprofile…pyzj)

President Donald Trump’s rage has not cooled for the six Democrats who posted a video reminding military and intelligence personnel that their duty is to the Constitution, not to him. The president fired off two Truth Social posts late Saturday night in an all-caps rant about the issue, writing: “THE TRAITORS THAT TOLD THE MILITARY TO DISOBEY MY ORDERS SHOULD BE IN JAIL RIGHT NOW, NOT ROAMING THE FAKE NEWS NETWORKS TRYING TO EXPLAIN THAT WHAT THEY SAID WAS OK. IT WASN’T, AND NEVER WILL BE! IT WAS SEDITION AT THE HIGHEST LEVEL, AND SEDITION IS A MAJOR CRIME. THERE CAN BE NO OTHER INTERPRETATION OF WHAT THEY SAID!”Next, he posted, “MANY GREAT LEGAL SCHOLARS AGREE THAT THE DEMOCRAT TRAITORS THAT TOLD THE MILITARY TO DISOBEY MY ORDERS, AS PRESIDENT, HAVE COMMITTED A CRIME OF SERIOUS PROPORTION!”These are clearly the ramblings of a man who is totally OK, and who doesn’t worry at all that the things he tells the military to do—like, say, strike foreign boats in international waters, acts which have killed over 80 people so far—may be illegal. The president has been posting about this issue for several days now, and his ravings have consequences. MAGA influencers online are now calling for the so-called “Seditious Six” to be arrested. And on Friday, five out of the six Democrats who created the video received bomb threats to their homes or offices. No one was harmed, but Trump’s posts about the issue have been condemned by lawmakers on both sides of the aisle.
https://newrepublic.com/post/203565/trump-seditious-democrat-lawmakers-video

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2025-11-23T16:58:50Z

The New Republic (nprofile…pyzj)

Elon Musk’s latest feature on X has had some shocking and unintended consequences.Starting Friday, X users were able to use a new “about this account” feature to see what country accounts were based in. And for many “America First” posters, this revealed an inconvenient truth, as reported by The Daily Beast.For example, one account literally named “America First”—with 67,000 followers—seems to be based not in the U.S., but in Bangladesh. Another popular conservative account, MAGA Nation, with nearly 400,000 followers and a bio that reads, “Standing strong with President Trump 🇺🇸 | America First | Patriot Voice for We The People,” is apparently based in Eastern Europe.And an Ivanka News fanpage with 1 million followers that posts things like, “Does the spread of Islam on American soil concern you?” is based in Nigeria.Twitter users rounded up dozens of these accounts, sharing their disbelief. Some Democratic influencers rejoiced: Harry Sisson, a Gen-Z, pro-Biden creator, said, “This is easily one of the greatest days on this platform. Seeing all of these MAGA accounts get exposed as foreign actors trying to destroy the United States is a complete vindication of Democrats, like myself and many on here, who have been warning about this.” (Sisson also compiled his own list of foreign accounts.)There were some rumors that Musk had disabled the feature upon seeing so many of his biggest fans unmasked, but as of Sunday, it seems to still be intact.
https://newrepublic.com/post/203562/maga-trolls-elon-musk-x-new-feature

Nostr event nevent1qqs805j0q05c5u3k233dd7v0gv20s56j6653m5c2yu3eannszd7zzjszyzjjh2tqdtt595wtmwtqycw2pt5ztrjaqduznlahlyv5z9fe4qyqj9dg4w3

2025-11-23T16:58:50Z

The New Republic (nprofile…pyzj)

It was here for a bad time, not a long time: The U.S. Department of Government Efficiency, or DOGE, has been officially disbanded.The shady department led by tech billionaire Elon Musk that laid off scores of workers and gutted parts of the federal government has faded away into oblivion, according to an exclusive from Reuters.When Reuters journalists asked about the department, which set out to reduce government spending but fell short on its promises while creating chaos in the federal workforce, the Office of Personnel Management Director Scott Kupor said, “That doesn’t exist.”DOGE is no longer a “centralized entity,” he added.The Trump administration has been signaling the end of DOGE since the summer, according to the report, and the president generally talks about it in the past-tense. Many of DOGE’s staff have since found jobs elsewhere in the government, like Acting DOGE Administrator Amy Gleason, who is now an official advisor to RFK Jr. at the Department of Health and Human Services. DOGE’s legacy is both very stupid and very sad: it decimated the federal workforce, including Social Security personnel at local offices, and made it easier for hackers to access your data. The agency tore apart USAID, which resulted in hundreds of thousands of lives lost globally. And all this for projected savings—numbers which grew smaller and less ambitious every time Musk mentioned them. While DOGE may fade away into a fever dream of Trump’s first 100 days, its effects—and the suffering it inflicted—will be felt for a long time.
https://newrepublic.com/post/203564/donald-trump-doge-musk-doesnt-exist

Nostr event nevent1qqsyh0z5el6wgcr07vhaee52yf7jgpjk7xwe9xhxyv9984gt6rd78qgzyzjjh2tqdtt595wtmwtqycw2pt5ztrjaqduznlahlyv5z9fe4qyqjm8zt4p

2025-11-23T12:35:00Z

The New Republic (nprofile…pyzj)

You had to go through a metal detector to get to the Children’s Health Defense conference, held in Austin, Texas, on November 7–9, and conversation on the first morning buzzed about it. At the Make America Healthy Again symposium that convened the next week, Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and Vice President JD Vance played footsie with officials from Walmart, Google, and a slew of biotechnology firms. But in Austin, there were no administration heavyweights on the agenda. So, who could be at risk? Could it be Andrew Wakefield, the disgraced British doctor whose bogus research brought forth modern anti-vaccine conspiracies? Del Bigtree, perhaps, the Austin-based podcaster and filmmaker whose 2016 documentary featuring Wakefield positioned him as an equivalent expert when Covid panic exacerbated existing suspicions. Or maybe Russell Brand, uncontested as the most famous name on the schedule but temperamentally unlikely to take himself out of harm’s way. The morning of day two, I saw him walk out the lobby in leopard-print swim trunks and a hotel bathrobe and slippers.The gracious young woman who let me register as press did not seem to be hiding anything when she told me the security wasn’t in response to a specific threat to a specific person; just, you know, threats.No one should feel like they’re in danger; people are allowed to respond to vague unease in the way that makes sense for them. On the other side of the metal detectors that I went through was a booth selling pendants and bracelets to protect against EMF radiation (including items for pets).The fringy edges of the conference are vestiges of the movement’s origins. Today, Kennedy, CHD’s former president, runs the federal government’s most important public health agency. This is a movement that expects big things, and is increasingly getting them: Two weeks after attendees scattered, the studiously ignorant reactionaries Kennedy installed at the CDC replaced language on its website with anti-vaccine talking points, contrary to the long-settled research on whether vaccines cause autism. They don’t. But in the America shaped by Kennedy’s ascent, scientific consensus is no match for anecdote, and policy now emerges from the grief-stricken, the conspiratorial, and the increasingly vindictive.When the tanned, frizzy-haired woman at my table closed her eyes and gestured up, down, side, side, it was after we’d spent all morning bathed in the anti-vaccine movement’s newly explicit Christian coding (“God is an Anti-vaxxer,” as Del Bigtree put it). But when I tested my assumption by asking why she made the sign of the cross, she wrinkled her brow. “Oh no, it wasn’t that.”A blessing? I offered.No, she said—“a clearing.”The CHD conference was smaller than most political conferences I’ve covered—maybe a thousand people. No breakout panels, just a single main stage. Vendors circled the ballroom like satellites: back braces, nasal sprays, electromagnetic-radiation protectors, small-batch supplements. We sat at banquet tables, not in rows. My tablemates introduced themselves easily, candidly, accepting my role as a reporter with nothing more than a cheerful, “What do you think so far?” I tried to be honest. “It’s a lot to take in,” I’d say, and “I have questions.”As she dissolved connections, the speakers on the stage kept winding a certain thread tighter: “Republicans need to remember that MAHA moms are why Donald Trump won the 2024 election,” and, “We need collectively to give Bobby Kennedy, a very brave and smart man, the support he needs.” In order to pass the “truckloads of medical freedom bills” they want to, “we need to hold the House.” “Stick together,” urged Polly Tommey. “Don’t be deceived.”Mary Holland, CEO of CHD, put it almost regretfully: “This is a nonpartisan movement that has become partisan.”Humming under the current of celebration (briskly selling Make America Healthy Again hats, reminders that the president himself has a long history of intimating a connection between vaccines and autism) is a thread of insecurity, an acknowledgment that the union between a movement born out of environmental alarmism and another born out of political resentment requires constant mending and refocusing. The woman who brushed away the poisonous spiderweb was a bit of an outlier at my table on the first day. Next to me was a sparky retired former teacher from Nebraska who told me about the growing number of autistic children she’d see in her classes, echoing the suspicions that animate much of the movement. What could explain this explosion besides a change in the environment? On my other side, a man who introduced himself as a doctor from the Midwest. Our fifth was a female programmer. The conference was heavily dominated by women; most everyone (male and female) I met was a technical professional of some sort. It’s a big “do your own research” community, obviously, but the common thread ran deeper: When attendees were asked for those in the audience to stand up if they had a “vaccine-injured,” half rose to be counted.The last presentation of the morning was a tour of the anti-vaccine movement’s historical canon by physician Suzanne Humphries. This was, admittedly, difficult to follow; my notes are just full of “!!!!” over and over again. As best as I can recall, among the featured players was a 17-year-old female savant in biochemistry dragooned into research on an injectable cancer that the U.S. government planned to use to kill Castro. At some point in the winding narrative, the CIA had to silence our heroine’s boyfriend by framing him for the murder of the president. And then they had the boyfriend assassinated, after which they killed the boyfriend’s assassin by injecting him with the Castro-killing cancer. You know, as one does! (It was the only time at the conference that a member of the Kennedy clan showed up in the narrative, as a side player.) You might think it’s a long walk from these stories to the MMR vaccine being primarily responsible for autism and the belief that the Covid pandemic was a full-blown hoax, but Humphries has us covered, constantly circling back to the central spine of all anti-government conspiracies: If they could do this, they can do anything.Still, movements are sustained by hope, and, sure enough, a living monument to possibility was right there in the room. Introduced from the stage, that aforementioned precocious teenage researcher—Jocelyn Baker Vary—stood to a standing ovation, proof that the government couldn’t silence us all. The doctor at our table leaned over and confided he wanted to write a musical about her. (Incredibly, I later learned there is already such a musical. You can watch a song from Me & Lee, which had a one-day run off-Broadway in 2019.)When we broke for lunch, the would-be librettist stepped away. I asked the group what they thought of the Baker Vary story. There were some uncomfortable glances. They’d have to look into it some more.I’ve never been to a political conference that also served free buffets (maybe that was another reason for the security gates). With no one having to leave the area to scavenge for overpriced soggy sandwiches, the intimacy between attendees amplified—and the walls of the echo chamber closed tighter.I’ve also never been to a political conference that featured the kind of frank personal exchanges I participated in and overheard: People chatted about allergies and “gut issues,” an announcement asked for courtesy to be shown for the EMF-sensitive. Strangers shared home birth tips. I have been to home-schooling conventions where people are more reticent about what goes on behind closed doors. Maybe it’s the nature of vaccines, how they slip under the skin. Maybe it’s the grief. Maybe it’s the metal detectors.I asked my tablemates about a disconnect between the profound empathy I’d seen for the children they believe to have been harmed by a government program and the then-impending interruption of the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. Both the members of a couple from California who’d joined us shook their heads: “I’m against people going hungry,” the woman said. “It’s a problem politically.” But, her husband interrupted, “I understand most of them live off junk food, anyway.”I wanted to jump in to point out that junk food is better than no food at all, but the woman wanted to talk about a different injustice: Government-mandated vaccines “hurt Black boys the most.” They have the highest rates of autism in California, she claimed, citing a one-in-12 statistic I couldn’t trace later—though in April, RFK Jr. did announce that “one in 31 American children born in 2014 are disabled by autism” and that the number in California (among all races and genders) was one in 12.5.“They’re doing this to the poorest kids.” She added one thing I didn’t doubt was true, at least as of the moment: “If you have money, you can keep away from the vaccines.” Her daughter paid a physician to write exemptions, for example. I didn’t get a chance to explain that Kennedy’s CDC was creating an exciting new possibility for the poorest among us to join these exclusive unvaccinated ranks: When they remove vaccines from the federally mandated immunization schedule, neither Medicaid nor private insurance have to cover their cost. “These children will never be toilet-trained,” another bemoaned. I heard this a lot. (According to the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, most people with ASD are capable of independent toileting.)Why, though? Why make all these kids sick? Why risk all these deaths? “Big Pharma bought off the whole government.” But, obviously, that could never happen again.On day two, I sat next to a retired computer engineer from the Pacific Northwest and his wife, a nurse. He was chatty; curious about what I thought and checking in with me after almost every speaker. “Just trying to learn,” I told him. “That’s right,” he said. “That’s all we want, a free and fair hearing. It’s the censorship that bothers me.” Twenty-four hours earlier, I’d heard a speaker call for “orange jumpsuits” and criminal charges against the “architects” of the pandemic.During the EMF panel, my new friend tapped his radiation-blocking phone case and smiled. During the panel on “turbo-cancers,” he took a few notes but acknowledged my eye-roll when panelist Derek Guillory encouraged the crowd to look into “oxidized urine therapy.” Guillory had teased us just prior, “How weird do you want to get?” And went on to suggest fasting as long as possible: “At day 7, if you don’t have a spiritual experience you should come talk to me.”At a pause in the action, my tablemate offered out of nowhere that he thought the government shutdown was “suicide” for Republicans. “I don’t get why they’re doing it,” he said. I agreed, and he nodded, “I just don’t want you to think we’re all knuckle-dragging right-wingers,” he said.I told him I definitely didn’t think that. I did wonder who he had voted for.The last few speakers didn’t keep many people in their seats, so most attendees missed Intellectual Dark Web podcaster Brett Weinstein reporting back on the “elevator experiment” he does at conferences. (This is different from the ongoing elevator experiment where he doesn’t wear a mask.) When he rides up or down, he strikes up a conversation and weaves in that he’s there to discuss “medical freedom” or, if pressed, “vaccine skepticism.” Here in Austin, he admits that his numbers weren’t looking so good: Out of a handful of conversations, about half were people who immediately expressed some kind of negative reaction. A few were neutral. But, he said, there was one person who wholeheartedly endorsed their worldview. “It was the bellhop!” he exclaimed. Applause. Weinstein admits it’s an unscientific survey. But, he says, they’re convincing more people every day.It’s an accident that, for once, an anti-vaxxer’s unscientific investigation aligns with the truth. Statistically, there are still more parents vaccinating their children than refusing. More people who believe in vaccines than don’t.That fact has to be remembered before we give any anti-science a “hearing.” Hearings don’t level the playing field; they legitimize the premise. As “serial entrepreneur” Steve Kirsch bragged, “Today, I am a misinformation superspreader.”The problem with deeply sincere beliefs rooted in personal experience is that they are nearly impossible to uproot. I suspect some of the marquee speakers could be pried from their anti-vaccine beliefs with a large enough check. The woman I spoke to quit her pharmacist job and took out loans to start a blood bank for unvaccinated people to receive unvaccinated blood. God told her to do that, she said. What evidence could convince her otherwise?Beating back all of the public health policies this movement has already unraveled will require separating the compassion we may feel for people on a personal level from the ruthlessness that will be required to put our house back in order after this age of Trumpian Lysenkoism passes. Pro-science people have to let results speak for themselves. They always have. Sometimes those consequences just don’t speak as quickly or as loudly as we’d like. Anti-vaccine advocates can point to dead and injured children as often as they want. Under the Trump administration, we might have more of those on our side too.Right before the close of the weekend, the conference ringmasters invoked the “vaccine-injured” again, this time with a video montage. Sniffles echoed in the half-empty room. A woman at my table sobbed openly. I resisted the impulse to comfort her.
https://newrepublic.com/article/202901/kennedy-anti-vaxxers-public-health

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2025-11-22T23:08:39Z

The New Republic (nprofile…pyzj)

Five out of the six Democratic lawmakers who urged the military to “refuse illegal orders” from the Trump administration have received bomb threats, as of Saturday.The new threats come after President Donald Trump accused the Dems of “seditious behavior” that was “punishable by death” in a post on Truth Social earlier this week. Senator Elisa Slotkin, a Democrat from Michigan, received a bomb threat at her home on Friday. In a statement on X, a spokesperson for Slotkin said that she wasn’t home at the time, and that the police “searched the property and confirmed no one was in danger.”The offices of representatives Jason Crow, Chrissy Houlahan, and Chris Deluzio also received bomb threats, as well as Representative Maggie Goodlander’s local office in New Hampshire, according to Newsweek.Last week, these lawmakers—all former military or intelligence community members—made a video directed at current members of the military, urging them to refuse illegal orders. “We need you to stand up for our laws, our constitution, and who we are as Americans,” they say in the video.In response, Trump took to Truth Social in a rageful tirade. He retweeted a post saying, “Hang them, George Washington would.” The president has spoken out against violent rhetoric and accused Democrats of inciting deadly violence with words, especially after the Charlie Kirk shooting. But it seems like political violence just doesn’t count when it’s being encouraged by the president.
https://newrepublic.com/post/203557/dem-lawmakers-bomb-threats-trump-calls-execution

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2025-11-22T23:08:39Z

The New Republic (nprofile…pyzj)

Cop30, the U.N.’s annual climate summit that the U.S. failed to send a delegate to this year, nonetheless achieved something President Donald Trump would celebrate.Delegates in Brazil reported that they had reached a tentative deal on Saturday, and while some important concessions were made, the final agreement doesn’t include a path away from fossil fuels, the single largest driver of global warming and man-made climate change.More than 80 countries reportedly supported a roadmap to phase out the use of fossil fuels, but there wasn’t enough of a consensus to include it.In what sounded like an act of desperation, Cop30 President André Corrêa do Lago said he would create a roadmap himself, but it’s unclear what this would achieve, as it would lack the binding power of an international agreement. While the conference “delivered breakthroughs to triple adaptation finance, protect the world’s forests and elevate the voices of Indigenous people like never before,” the president and CEO of the World Resources Institute, Ani Dasgupta, said in a statement to ABC, “negotiators couldn’t agree to develop a roadmap to transition away from fossil fuels. More than 80 countries stood their ground for a fair and equitable shift off fossil fuels, but intense lobbying from a few petrostates weakened the deal.” President Trump withdrew the U.S. from the Paris Agreement and has been a forceful advocate for oil and gas and coal. He also decided it was a waste of time to send a delegation to Brazil for the climate conference. (California Governor Gavin Newsom, for his part, decided to show up anyway.)It’s unclear if an official U.S. delegation would have done more harm than good. But one thing is clear: an agreement that doesn’t propose a path away from international dependence on fossil fuels, as the climate worsens and the world literally burns around us, is almost completely pointless.
https://newrepublic.com/post/203554/trump-un-cop30-deal-fails-fossil-fuels

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2025-11-22T19:49:39Z

The New Republic (nprofile…pyzj)

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt went on Fox News to attempt to explain the sudden warmth between two political adversaries—but can chemistry ever, truly be explained? After President Donald Trump and New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani met at the White House on Friday, Trump appeared to fawn over Mamdani in front of the press. The president later posted several photos of the two together on his Truth Social account.MAGA world—and the much of the Internet—was shocked, as Trump and Mamdani have been insulting each other for months. Memes and media coverage mocking a beaming Trump, casting him as weak and easily fooled by the Democratic Socialist’s apparent abundance of charm, spread quickly.But Leavitt was having none of it.“It really proved that President Trump is willing to meet with anybody, to sit across the table, shake hands, look anybody in the eye,” Leavitt gushed. “Of course he wants New York to succeed, he wants all of Americans to succeed,” she continued. “The president wants this country to come together, and you saw that in full display in the Oval Office.” Never mind that mere days before, Trump had called for Democrats to be hanged for a video message urging the military to honor the Constitution over the president’s orders, a message which he called seditious.Fox News’ Sean Hannity pushed back on Leavitt’s glib narrative, pointing out that the two politicians had diametrically opposed views on most issues. “Where do you meet in the middle there?” he asked.“I think today’s meeting between the president and mayor elect was a good first step … but it doesn’t mean that President Trump is going to change his values,” Leavitt said. She went on to laud Trump for several (questionable) accomplishments on the economy. “Who knows? Maybe Mayor Mamdani will go back to New York, and maybe he learned a few things from President Trump today,” she said brightly—an extremely unlikely possibility. The president, for all his love of fealty in others, isn’t terribly consistent with his own affections. He did truly seem to be enamored with Mamdani, who he’s called “my little communist mayor” in the past. We’ll see how long the honeymoon phase lasts.
https://newrepublic.com/post/203550/trump-mamdani-meeting-karoline-leavitt

Nostr event nevent1qqs22t9njc5l2f79eh2mzvyqgnwtkn6tw3qkl92pmpmszm6a6jnszvqzyzjjh2tqdtt595wtmwtqycw2pt5ztrjaqduznlahlyv5z9fe4qyqjzt8utp

2025-11-22T19:49:39Z

The New Republic (nprofile…pyzj)

President Donald Trump took to Truth Social Saturday morning to share his thoughts on his former ally’s shocking resignation. “Marjorie ‘Traitor’ Brown, because of PLUMMETING Poll Numbers, and not wanting to face a Primary Challenger with a strong Trump Endorsement (where she would have no chance of winning!), has decided to call it ‘quits,’” he wrote, alleging that Greene was too cowardly to run without his backing. However, after that barrage of insults, he concluded the post on a positive note: “Nevertheless, I will always appreciate Marjorie, and thank her for her service to our Country!”Not many Republicans have weighed in yet on Greene’s exit, but one of Trump’s most loyal attack dogs has been predictably rabid: Laura Loomer.Starting by taking credit for MTG’s resignation (via the now-familiar “Loomered” post), the far-right personality has since accused Greene of getting paid to “screw Trump over ahead of 2026,” of wanting “Trump to chase her,” and of displaying “typical victim female energy.” Loomer and Greene had been feuding for months, partially stemming from Loomer’s unabashed support for Israel and Greene’s push to stop arming the country as it carries out a genocide. Loomer wasn’t coy about her glee at her political opponent’s resignation, posting, “Her life being made miserable this last week makes me happy. Traitor Greene is a terrible person. I get a lot of joy in watching my enemies fall.”On the other hand, Representative Thomas Massie posted a kind tribute to Greene. “I’m very sad for our country but so happy for my friend Marjorie. I’ll miss her tremendously,” he said. Massie was one of Greene’s only allies in the Republican party in attempting to release the Epstein files, and has similarly been targeted by the president for his efforts.
https://newrepublic.com/post/203551/trump-loomer-mock-marjorie-taylor-greene

Nostr event nevent1qqsyt6da8hn5yv3eewyyuvc207zte9fmr992ksfja2h7sze7klnje7szyzjjh2tqdtt595wtmwtqycw2pt5ztrjaqduznlahlyv5z9fe4qyqja0ajqc

2025-11-22T18:43:59Z

The New Republic (nprofile…pyzj)

The Trump administration repeatedly overlooked and pushed past lawyers who questioned the legality of its deadly strikes on alleged “drug” boats, according to a new report.On Saturday, The Washington Post released an investigation that sheds new light on the process behind the controversial attacks that have left more than 80 people dead and angered Americans across the political spectrum, including some of President Donald Trump’s base. According to government officials who were familiar with the situation, the administration initially planned for the CIA to conduct the strikes—but when CIA lawyers pushed back, they pivoted to using the U.S. military. The Trump administration’s justification for the lethal attacks is that the U.S. is engaged in an armed conflict with “designated terrorist organizations.”But many national security experts, both inside and outside of the administration, told the Post that this justification “does not stand up to facts.”What’s more, many of the lawyers who raised concerns or attempted to institute guardrails had either left the government, or had been reassigned or removed from their positions. The National Security Council’s full-time legal staff was completely gutted by this summer, including former Pentagon general counsel Paul Ney, who had raised concerns about the legality of the strikes, according to former officials. Meanwhile, over at the CIA, some people are worried about blowback from these covert operations, like with the Iran-Contra scandal of the 1980s.“The question is, is it legal just to kill the guy if he’s not threatening to kill you and you’re outside an armed conflict? There are people who are simply uncomfortable with the president just declaring we’re at war with drug traffickers,” one former senior official told the Post.The new report confirms what other top military lawyers have been saying: that Trump’s strikes against alleged drug boats could be considered extrajudicial killings.
https://newrepublic.com/post/203549/donald-trump-report-deadly-boat-strikes-illegal

Nostr event nevent1qqs8ch6xrl6dzky50r2ckyygl9dwkya3fy4qxmht59q8685e7j677rszyzjjh2tqdtt595wtmwtqycw2pt5ztrjaqduznlahlyv5z9fe4qyqjrml97s

2025-11-22T17:30:49Z

The New Republic (nprofile…pyzj)

Self-described “proud Islamophobe” Laura Loomer could barely conceal her rage about President Donald Trump’s meeting with NYC mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani Friday, which, by all appearances, went shockingly well.“Not condemning Trump,” Loomer disclaimed, before launching into her tirade. “However, I think we can all agree its a bad look to let a foreign born jihadist who said he wants to implement ANTI WHITE policies like taxing white people more money to stand behind the desk in the Oval Office.” It seems like Trump himself would disagree with Loomer’s characterization: In the meeting, when asked if he “thought he was standing next to a jihadist,” Trump said, “No, I don’t.” When a reporter asked whether Mamdani still believed the president was a fascist, Trump said,“You can just say yes. It’s easier than explaining it. I don’t mind,” while patting the mayor-elect on the arm. Loomer, who has repeatedly accused Mamdani of supporting terrorism, must have been watching this with smoke pouring out of her ears. “What are we doing?” Loomer asked multiple times in her post. “I’m stunned.” Later, she wrote, “I had to drink a bottle of ginger ale today after seeing Mamdani in the Oval Office because it physically nauseates me seeing Islamic jihadists infiltrate our government.” To be fair, you can’t blame Loomer for being surprised. No one expected President Trump, who recently referred to Mamdani as a communist and threatened to revoke New York City’s federal funding, to defend the politician from “gotcha” questions about taking a plane instead of a bus (“It’s a lot quicker,” Trump mused), or dismiss that time Mamdani called him a despot (“I’ve been called much worse,” Trump affirmed). Maybe next time she has the president’s ear, Loomer can ask for more ginger ale.
https://newrepublic.com/post/203548/laura-loomer-maga-zohran-mamdani-trump

Nostr event nevent1qqsyp9mw8wzf2wzfrl5cuk734tt7pdp6aj8cqhx22qdzamxcrl8wu8szyzjjh2tqdtt595wtmwtqycw2pt5ztrjaqduznlahlyv5z9fe4qyqj2zqvvs

2025-11-22T11:59:49Z

The New Republic (nprofile…pyzj)

This week, we all moved a couple steps closer to finally getting a peek at what’s been the year’s biggest political MacGuffin: the Epstein files. The long-delayed swearing in of Arizona Representative Adelita Grijalva allowed the pro-disclosure caucus in the House to finally hit the magic number of “yea” votes on their discharge petition ordering their release; opposition in the House essentially collapsed after that, and the Senate used its “deem and pass” power to ratify the lower house’s decision in advance. The bill now goes to President Trump’s desk. He is expected to sign it into law and then attempt to use the contents to wage merciless war on Democrats.All of this may come to nothing. There’s no reason to believe Trump’s Justice Department—which essentially operates as Trump’s own private legal counsel—will treat these materials with judiciousness. Frankly, you shouldn’t be surprised if they contain little in the way of smoking guns. Of Epstein’s culpability there can be no doubt; the rest is just suspicion. Conservatives have darkly warned their liberal counterparts: “Be careful what you wish for; what if this implicates a bunch of crusty old Democrats?” To which I say, “Don’t threaten me with a good time.” As I’ve watched the Epstein story unravel across the media—through the shouting of lawmakers and the flood of tawdry emails dumped in the press—I’ve not been able to ignore how it’s all one big pile of rot at the center of polite society. My TNR colleague, Matt Ford, expressed similar sentiments in a recent piece, confessing that the truly despairing thing about the Epstein affair was that the whole idea of civic virtue seems to have been murdered, and in its place, a culture of elite impunity has risen.For my part, I’m less worried about whether some Democratic Party luminary catches an Epstein stray and more concerned about whether Democrats bungle the opportunity to attack these corrupt arrangements and the presidential administration that has made them its North Star. This iron is, at the moment, particularly hot. A fresh Reuters/Ipsos poll released Wednesday found that Trump’s approval ratings had hit startling new lows, with respondents particularly “unhappy about his handling of the high cost of living and the investigation into the late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.”Epstein and the economy—these are the twin albatrosses around Trump’s neck. The question, however, is whether Democrats will have the stomach and the sense to exploit both avenues to Trump’s ruin. It may not seem like a problem, but Democrats seem pathologically averse to multitasking, which explains why they’re making the salience of grocery prices their priority to the exclusion of all other matters. So monomaniacal is this approach that at various times over the past year, Democratic lawmakers have called other concerns “distractions”—up to and including Trump’s rampaging paramilitary forces.Let’s give Democrats their due: Their affordability arguments passed electoral tests earlier this month. And the administration is spooked: Trump and his allies are attempting wan affordability arguments of their own. It’s been a while, but Democrats are suddenly calling the tune in Washington. That the Epstein matter has wounded Trump at the same time is a fortunate coincidence for Democrats seeking a skeleton key to unlock a larger argument about the harm Trump’s done to our republic: The ICE goons on our street, Trump’s White House teardown, the high cost of living, the administration’s various decisions to hurt people during the shutdown, all the weird ghouls occupying executive branch positions that once went to qualified civil servants, and the forever stench of oligarchic swampwater suffusing public life—all of these issues roiling the lives and livelihoods of ordinary people lie at the nexus of elite impunity.There are no distractions here, no options to weigh; this is all one single story—much like Epstein, powerful plutocratic interests have found their man in Trump, and together, they are driving the country to ruin for their own amusement and self-enrichment. Here’s how Ford captures it:At its core, Trumpism is a permission structure for evil. It is the abolition of ethical norms and the erasure of moral authority. It defies checks and balances, rejecting the notion that power can be abused or corrupted because it justifies itself. Trumpism is not really about immigration, or inflation, or trade, or draining the swamp, or building the wall—it is ultimately about the dark thrill of abusing those whom its adherents consider to be inferiors, either directly or by proxy.As I’ve noted before, Trumpism isn’t working, and people are growing angrier and angrier. According to the most recent NPR/PBS News Marist poll, Democrats have attained a 14-point lead over the GOP on the generic congressional ballot. The time to pummel these crooks is nigh, and they needn’t be precious about it. Think of it like this: Trumpism is the culmination of a crooked scheme that began nearly a half-century ago, in which the rich and powerful looted our wealth and tore up the civic fabric of this nation. Yes, like the Epstein affair suggests, it really is one big thieving cabal of plutocratic reprobates that has done us dirty. There is an opportunity now for Democrats with guts to crush these scumbags, and take back what they stole.This article first appeared in Power Mad, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by deputy editor Jason Linkins. Sign up here.
https://newrepublic.com/post/203455/epstein-trump-era-elite-impunity